{"user_id": "AFTD2BHTFVL54L6IN4UPPLY3HMEA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0999718908", "title": "En: A Girl Energy-Bending between Worlds (Girl, the Pendant & the Portal)", "author": "Michelle Reynoso", "description": "Review \"A solid series opener that hits its genre marks while also providing colorful imagery.\" -Kirkus Review\"En is a delightful, imaginative tale...I found myself flying through the chapters wanting to find out what happens next.\" -Luna Lovebooks, One Book Two\"5 star rating - Loved this YA book! Starts out good and then gets great. The heroine is awesome! Definitely recommend this book!\" - Breane R., bookseller\"...I did not want to put [it] down, and when I did have to put it down it was all I could think about. I HIGHLY recommend this book...\" - Susan L., reader\"EN is a brilliant YA adventure exploring themes ofchanges, friendship, family, loss, and the power it takes to become a hero.\" - Reviewed By Liz Konkel for Readers' Favorite About the Author Michelle Reynoso has over twenty years of professional writing experience in both corporate & creative arenas, and has been a finalist in several writing award programs. Michelle's debut book Do You? was a finalist in the Writers' Digest International Self-Published Book Awards and the New York Book Festival. Michelle is a member of several writing organizations including the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators & Wordsmith Studio, and she is also a member of the Independent Book Publishers Association. Michelle grew-up in New Hampshire, attended New York University in New York City, and currently lives in New Jersey with her husband, son, cat and several fish. To learn more about Michelle, you can visit her website at www.MichelleReynoso.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 6.24}, {"asin": "0385542410", "title": "The Flight Attendant: A Novel", "author": "Chris Bohjalian", "description": "Review \"Filled with turbulence and sudden plunges in altitude, The Flight Attendant is a very rare thriller whose penultimate chapter made me think to myself, 'I didn\u2019t see that coming.' The novel\u2014Bohjalian\u2019s 20th\u2014 is also enhanced by his deftness in sketching out vivid characters and locales and by his obvious research into the realities of airline work.\" \u2014 Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post \"An expertly turned thriller\u2026 An assured novel about reckoning not just with some ruthless bad guys, but private sadness as well\u2026 [Bohjalian]\u2019s developed a graceful hand at thriller mechanics, smoothly shifting from Cassie\u2019s private paranoia to the intricacies of spycraft and mercenaries to the public tabloid sensation she\u2019s become. He\u2019s back-loaded the story with twists, from ones that were hinted at early to left-field surprises. And the brisk and busy ending is a fireworks show of redemption, revelation and old-fashioned gunplay.\" \u2014Mark Athitakis, USA Today \"Flight attendant Cassie Bowden: a self-destructive alcoholic who favors one-night stands, a gifted liar, a petty thief. But she's also someone we can relate to: a soul damaged during childhood, terribly alone, and desperate for love\u2026 Readers who enjoyed the imperfect heroine in Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train and the anxiety-ridden paranoia of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment will be hooked by this murder mystery.\" \u2014 Library Journal (Starred Review) \"Bohjalian is an unfaltering storyteller who crosses genres with fluidity, from historical fiction to literary thrillers\u2026a read-in-one-sitting escapade that is as intellectually satisfying as it is emotionally entertaining.\" \u2014 Booklist (Starred Review) \"The stakes couldn't be higher (literally)as Cassandra pieces together a mystery while working 40,000 feet above ground in Chris Bohjalian's gripping The Flight Attendant. Read it before Kaley Cuoco stars in the upcoming series!\" \u2014 Cosmopolitan \"Bohjalian twists the tension tight and keeps the surprises startling.\" \u2014Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal \"[Bohjalian's]\u00a020th novel...combines popular tropes with a serious examination of social issues. Binge-drinking flight attendant Cassandra Bowden wakes up with another bad hangover in a Dubai hotel room and finds the man she spent the night with lying dead beside her... What really happened? And what are the consequences of addiction, deception, and denial? Fans are lining up.\" \u2014Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal \"A magnificent book\u2026sleek and gorgeous\u2026This is a Master Class in fiction.\" \u2014Augusten Burroughs \"The author provides enough twists for a roller coaster fan... The beauty of the book is that, along with the politics of the plot, Cassie\u2019s humanity comes through...the last 100 pages turn tense as you try to follow the unexpected but believable surprises Bohjalian has in store and answers whether Cassie can find salvation.\" \u2014Amanda St. Amand, St. Louis Post-Dispatch \"A high-octane thriller that will have you holding your breath with every page\u2026As if ripped from today\u2019s headlines, Bohjalian paints a vivid portrait of death and despair on a canvas of Russian espionage.\" \u2014Nicholas Addison Thomas, Fredericksburg Free Lane-Star About the Author CHRIS BOHJALIAN is the author of twenty books, including The Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; The Double Bind; and Midwives which was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah's Book Club. Chris's work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three novels have become movies ( Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers ). Chris lives in Vermont and can be found at www.chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Litsy, and Goodreads. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 \u00a0 \u00a0 She was aware first of the scent of the hotel shampoo, a Middle Eastern aroma reminiscent of anise, and then\u2014when she opened her eyes\u2014the way the light from the window was different from the light in the rooms in the hotel where the crew usually stayed. The morning sun was oozing through one slender line from the ceiling to the floor where the drapes, plush as they were, didn\u2019t quite meet and blanching a strip of carpet. She blinked, not against the light but against the thumping spikes of pain behind her eyes. She needed water, but it would take a tsunami to avert the hangover that awaited. She needed Advil, but she feared the red pills that she popped like M&M\u2019s at moments like this were distant. They were in the medicine bag in her own hotel room. In her own hotel. \u00a0 And this definitely wasn\u2019t her hotel. It was his. Had she come back here? Apparently she had. She was sure she had left. She thought she had returned to the airline\u2019s considerably more modest accommodations. At least that had been her plan. After all, she had a plane to catch this morning. \u00a0 Her mind slowly began to tackle the questions she would need to answer when she rolled over, the principal one being the most prosaic: what time was it? It seemed that the clock was on his side of the bed, because it wasn\u2019t on hers. On her nightstand was the phone and a china tray with date and sugar cookies and three perfectly cubed Turkish delight candies, each skewered with a toothpick-sized silver spear. Time mattered, because she had to be in the lobby of the correct hotel\u2014her hotel\u2014with the rest of the crew by eleven fifteen, to climb with them all into the shuttle to the airport and then the flight to Paris. Everything else, including how she was going to find the courage inside her to swing her legs over the side of the bed and sit up\u2014a task that, given how she felt, would demand the fearlessness of an Olympic gymnast\u2014was secondary. She breathed in slowly and deeply through her nose, the noise a soft whistle, this time inhaling a smell more pronounced than the anise: sex. Yes, the room was rich with the unmistakable scent of a luxury hotel shampoo, but she could also smell herself and she could smell him, the evidential secretions from the night before. He was still there, an absolutely silent sleeper, and she would see him once she rolled over. Once she sat up. \u00a0 God, if only she\u2019d brought him back to her room. But at dinner he had slipped her a room key, telling her he would be back by nine and to please be waiting for him there. She had. His room was a suite. It was massive, impeccably decorated and bigger than her apartment in Manhattan. The coffee table in the living room was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the wood polished to the point that it reflected the light like a full moon. There was a bottle of Scotch in the bar\u2014this was a real bar, not a minibar or campus fridge with a couple cans of Coke Zero on the lone shelf\u2014that might cost more than the monthly maintenance on her apartment back in New York. \u00a0 She closed her eyes against the shame, the disgust. She tried to remind herself that this was just who she was\u2014how she was\u2014and to ratchet down at least a little bit the self-loathing. Hadn\u2019t they had fun last night? Of course they had. At least she presumed they had. When she had first opened her eyes, she had hoped for a moment that she had only been passed-out drunk, but no, it was clear that she had been blackout drunk. Again. The difference was not semantics. She experienced both. Passed-out drunk was more humiliating when it happened: she was the woman with her face half buried in the throw pillows on the couch, oblivious to the party moving on without her. Blackout drunk was more embarrassing the next morning, when she woke up in strange beds with strange men, and not a clue how she\u2019d gotten there. She could recall this hotel room and this man, and that was a good sign, but clearly there were chasm-like gaps in her memory. The last thing she could recall was leaving. In her memory, she was dressed and she was exiting this suite, and he was in one of those marvelous hotel room robes, black and white zebra stripes on the exterior, terrycloth on the inside, and joking about the broken bottle of Stoli they had yet to clean up. He\u2019d mumbled that he would deal with it\u2014the spilled vodka, the dagger-like shards\u2014in the morning. \u00a0 And yet here she was. Back in his bed. \u00a0 She sighed slowly, carefully, so as not to exacerbate her looming headache. Finally she lifted her head and felt a wave of nausea as the room spun. Instantly she sank back into the pillow\u2019s voluptuous, downy welcome. \u00a0 On the plane, he had been wearing cologne, something woody she liked and he had told her was Russian. He loved the Russians, he said. Yes, he was an American, a southern boy, he joked, but he was descended from Russians and felt he still had a Russian soul. Pushkin. Eugene Onegin. Something about the gleamings of an empty heart. The Russians poured money into his hedge fund, he beamed\u2014and it was a beam, not a boast, it was so childlike\u2014and the crazy oligarchs were like uncles to him. They were like teddy bears, not Russian bears, in his hands. \u00a0 She couldn\u2019t smell the cologne now, and then she remembered showering with him. It was a large, elegant shower of black-and-white-striped marble, including a marble bench, where he had sat down and pulled her onto his lap as he washed her hair with that anise shampoo. \u00a0 His name was Alexander Sokolov, and he was probably seven or eight years her junior: early thirties, she guessed. He liked to be called Alex because he said Al sounded too American. In a perfect world, he confessed, he would be called Alexander because that sounded Russian. But when he started work, his bosses had suggested he stick with Alex: it was internationally neutral, which was important given the amount of time he spent overseas. He had grown up in Virginia, though he had no trace of a southern accent at all, and lived now on Manhattan\u2019s Upper West Side, running a fund at Unisphere Asset Management. He was a math geek, which he said was the secret to his success and why his fund delivered the sorts of returns that kept everyone on both sides of the Atlantic so happy. It was evident that he enjoyed the work, though he insisted that in reality there were few things duller than managing other people\u2019s money, and so mostly he wanted to talk about what she did. Her war stories. He was utterly fascinated. \u00a0 He had been in 2C on the flight to Dubai and he hadn\u2019t slept much on the plane\u2014if at all. He had worked on his laptop, he had watched movies, and he had flirted with her. He had gotten to know her much better than she had gotten to know him. Before landing, they\u2019d agreed they\u2019d each take a catnap and then rendezvous for dinner. They were going to meet in his hotel lobby. They\u2019d both known that dinner would be mere foreplay. She rolled his name over again in her mind one more time before bracing herself to turn over and face the whitecap breakers of pain. To face him. One more time she thought of how much arak she had drunk last night. One hundred and twenty proof. The clear liquid becoming the color of watery milk once they added the ice. And then there was the vodka, the Stolichnaya his friend had brought later that night. She\u2019d drunk arak before; she drank it whenever she flew into Beirut, Istanbul, or Dubai. But had she ever drunk this much? She told herself no, but she was kidding herself. She had. Of course she had. One of these days she was going to get busted by the airline; one of these days she was going to fly too close to the sun and fail a drug test, and that would be the beginning of the end. It would be the beginning of the end of everything. She would be following the trail her father had hewn, and she knew where that ended. \u00a0 No, it wasn\u2019t her father\u2019s trail, precisely, because he was male and she was female. She knew the truth of men and women and booze: it rarely ended well for either gender, but it was the women who wound up raped. \u00a0 She sighed. It was too bad the airline didn\u2019t fly into Riyadh. The hotel minibars in Saudi didn\u2019t even have alcohol. She\u2019d have to wear an ankle-length abaya. She wouldn\u2019t be out alone, ever, so she wouldn\u2019t be out picking up men, ever. Meeting them in their hotel lobbies. Ever. \u00a0 She thought she might have been fine right now if Alex hadn\u2019t taken that call from his friend and had them get dressed. The woman\u2014and Cassie believed that her name was Miranda, but even if this hadn\u2019t been one of her blackout benders, her memory this morning was still pretty damn foggy\u2014had phoned just after they\u2019d emerged from the shower, clean and postcoital and still a little drunk, and said she was going to stop by the hotel room for a nightcap. Cassie thought she was somehow involved in the hedge fund, too, and was going to be in the same meetings with Alex tomorrow. She may also have had something to do with Dubai real estate, but Cassie wasn\u2019t sure where she had gotten this idea. \u00a0 When Miranda arrived at the suite, it was clear that she and Alex really had very little history together, and were actually meeting for the first time. And yet they had a past that transcended work: it seemed they had mutual friends and business connections in the construction that was everywhere in this science fiction\u2013like city by the sea. She was his age, with dark almond eyes and deep auburn hair that she had pulled back into an impeccable French twist. She was wearing baggy black slacks and an elegant but modest red and black tunic. And she sure as hell could hold her booze. The three of them had sat in the suite\u2019s sumptuous living room for perhaps an hour, maybe a little longer, as they drained the vodka Miranda had brought. It crossed Cassie\u2019s mind that this was some sort of planned threesome, and while she wasn\u2019t about to initiate it herself, she knew she\u2019d be game if either Alex or Miranda did. Something about the moment\u2014the booze, the banter, the suite\u2014had her aroused once again. Alex and Miranda were in chairs on opposite sides of that exquisite coffee table and she was alone on the couch, and somehow the fact that the three of them were a few feet apart made the moment feel even more heated. But, in the end, this wasn\u2019t about a threesome. Miranda left, giving both her and Alex only air kisses beside their cheeks before Alex shut the door behind her. Still, Miranda couldn\u2019t even have reached the elevator down some distant corridor before Alex was stripping off her clothes, then his, and they were making love again, this time in the bedroom on that magnificent king with the massive headboard that was shaped like an Arabian arch. \u00a0 But then she had gotten dressed. She had. She knew she had. She was going to return to the airline\u2019s hotel. Hadn\u2019t she said good-bye to him at the entrance to his suite? Hadn\u2019t she even gotten as far as the elevator, wherever it was, on his floor? \u00a0 Maybe. Maybe not. \u00a0 It really didn\u2019t matter, because clearly she had come back to his room and climbed back into his bed. \u00a0 Assuming, of course, that she had even really left. Maybe she was remembering the walk alone from the restaurant to his hotel room after dinner, when Alex had said he had a brief meeting with an investor. He\u2019d told her he wanted her waiting for him naked in his room. She\u2019d obliged. \u00a0 And now here she was, naked again. \u00a0 Finally she took a breath, cringing against the spikes behind her eyes, and turned 180 degrees in the bed to face Alex. \u00a0 And there he was. For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body\u2019s utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. She saw the great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. He was flat on his back. She saw his neck, the yawning red trench from one side of his jaw to the other, and how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey. \u00a0 Reflexively, despite the pain, she threw off the sheet and leapt from the bed, retreating into those drapes against the window. It was while standing there, her arms wrapped around her chest like a straitjacket, that she noticed there was blood on her, too. It was in her hair and on her shoulder. It was on her hands. (Later, when she was in the elevator, she would surmise that the only reason she hadn\u2019t screamed was self-preservation. Given the way her head was pulsating, the sound of her own desperate, panicked shriek might have killed her.) \u00a0 Had she ever seen so much blood? Not from a human. A deer, maybe, back when she was a kid in Kentucky. But not a person. Never. \u00a0 On the other side of the body, on the far side of the bed, was the clock. It was digital. It read 9:51. She had not quite ninety minutes to be in the lobby of another hotel and ready to leave for the airport and the flight back to Paris and then, tomorrow, home to JFK. \u00a0 Her back against the drapes, she slid first into a baseball catcher\u2019s pose and then onto the floor. She tried to focus, to make decisions. Her mind only slowed when she spotted the swath of broken glass on the floor, a constellation on the carpet between the foot of the bed and the elegant credenza inside which was the TV. Once upon a time, it had been the bottle of Stoli that Miranda had brought; now it was mostly slivers and triangular fragments that were almost pretty, though the neck was still attached to the shoulder and the shoulder was a jagged edge. And then, when she realized what that might mean, she felt the nausea rising up inside her. She raced to the bathroom with her hands on her mouth, as if her fingers really had any chance\u2014any chance at all\u2014of damming such a gravity-defying waterfall, and made it the toilet. But just barely. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 27.34}, {"asin": "B01LW35NGS", "title": "Four Stars"}, {"asin": "0345544986", "title": "A Spark of Light: A Novel", "author": "Jodi Picoult", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of October 2018: Jodi Picoult again tackles a controversial topic with remarkable dexterity in her latest novel, A Spark of Light . Working backwards in time from a shooting in an abortion clinic, Picoult uses multiple narratives to peel back the layers of events, circumstances, and emotions that led up to the tragic incident that kicked off the book. Both sides of the abortion debate are represented and perspectives shift \u2014 in both directions\u2014once abortion is no longer a theoretical question. There are tough moments in the book; the characters face heartbreaking choices, self-doubt, and fear, but Picoult treats her subject and story with great care and respect. A Spark of Light is incredibly timely. Picoult\u2019s latest is a thought provoking read that will inspire conversation and appeal to both the author\u2019s existing fans and newcomers to her work. \u2014Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review Review \u201cPicoult at her fearless best . . . Timely, balanced and certain to inspire debate.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cThis is Jodi Picoult at her best: tackling an emotional hot-button issue and putting a human face on it.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cTold backward and hour by hour, Jodi Picoult\u2019s compelling narrative deftly explores controversial social issues.\u201d \u2014 Us Weekly \u201cThoroughly realistic storytelling . . . Picoult has achieved what politicians across the spectrum have not been able to: humanized a hot-button issue. Excellent for book clubs, this should also be considered for discussions in critical thinking and political debate.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cThe author presents the white-knuckled narrative in a reverse-chronological order. The effect is mesmerizing, as\u00a0Picoult establishes moments in the overarching event, before revealing how they came to be.\u201d \u2014 Houston Chronicle \u201cPicoult delivers another riveting yarn . . . in this carefully crafted, utterly gripping tale.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201cAn important and thoughtful read that is perfect for book clubs looking for deep conversations.\u201d \u2014 PopSugar \u201cNovels such as this . . . are necessary\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-three novels, including Small Great Things, Leaving Time, The Storyteller, Lone Wolf, Sing You Home, House Rules, Handle with Care, Change of Heart, Nineteen Minutes, and My Sister\u2019s Keeper . She is also the author, with daughter Samantha van Leer, of two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page . Picoult lives in New Hampshire. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Center squatted on the corner of Juniper and Montfort behind a wrought-iron gate, like an old bulldog used to guarding its territory. At one point, there had been many like it in Mississippi\u2014 nondescript, unassuming buildings where services were provided and needs were met. Then came the restrictions that were designed to make these places go away: The halls had to be wide enough to accommodate two passing gurneys; any clinic where that wasn\u2019t the case had to shut down or spend thousands on reconstruction. The doctors had to have admitting privileges at local hospitals\u2014even though most were from out of state and couldn\u2019t secure them\u2014or the clinics where they practiced risked closing, too. One by one the clinics shuttered their windows and boarded up their doors. Now, the Center was a unicorn\u2014a small rectangle of a structure painted a fluorescent, flagrant orange, like a flag to those who had traveled hundreds of miles to find it. It was the color of safety; the color of warning. It said: I\u2019m here if you need me. It said, Do what you want to me; I\u2019m not going .  \u00a0 The Center had suffered scars from the cuts of politicians and the barbs of protesters. It had licked its wounds and healed. At one point it had been called the Center for Women and Reproductive Health. But there were those who believed if you do not name a thing, it ceases to exist, and so its title was amputated, like a war injury. But still, it survived. First it became the Center for Women. And then, just: the Center.  \u00a0 The label fit. The Center was the calm in the middle of a storm of ideology. It was the sun of a universe of women who had run out of time and had run out of choices, who needed a beacon to look up to.  \u00a0 And like other things that shine so hot, it had a magnetic pull. Those in need found it the lodestone for their navigation. Those who despised it could not look away.  \u00a0 Today, Wren McElroy thought, was not a good day to die. She knew that other fifteen-year-old girls romanticized the idea of dying for love, but Wren had read Romeo and Juliet last year in eighth-grade English and didn\u2019t see the magic in waking up in a crypt beside your boyfriend, and then plunging his dagger into your own ribs. And Twilight \u2014forget it. She had listened to teachers paint the stories of heroes whose tragic deaths somehow enlarged their lives rather than shrinking them. When Wren was six, her grandmother had died in her sleep. Strangers had said over and over that dying in your sleep was a blessing, but as she stared at her nana, waxen white in the open coffin, she didn\u2019t understand why it was a gift. What if her grandmother had gone to bed the night before thinking, In the morning, I\u2019ll water that orchid . In the morning, I\u2019ll read the rest of that novel. I\u2019ll call my son. So much left unfinished. No, there was just no way dying could be spun into a good thing.  \u00a0 Her grandmother was the only dead person Wren had ever seen, until two hours ago. Now, she could tell you what dying looked like, as opposed to just dead. One minute, Olive had been there, staring so fierce at Wren\u2014as if she could hold on to the world if her eyes stayed open\u2014and then, in a beat, those eyes stopped being windows and became mirrors, and Wren saw only a reflection of her own panic.  \u00a0 She didn\u2019t want to look at Olive anymore, but she did. The dead woman was lying down like she was taking a nap, a couch cushion under her head. Olive\u2019s shirt was soaked with blood, but had ridden up on the side, revealing her ribs and waist. Her skin was pale on top and then lavender, with a thin line of deep violet where her back met the floor. Wren realized that was because Olive\u2019s blood was settling inside, just two hours after she\u2019d passed. For a second, Wren thought she was going to throw up.  \u00a0 She didn\u2019t want to die like Olive, either.\u2028Which, given the circumstances, made Wren a horrible person. The odds were highly unlikely, but if Wren had to choose, she would die in a black hole. It would be instant and it would be epic. Like, literally, you\u2019d be ripped apart at the atomic level. You\u2019d become stardust.  \u00a0 Wren\u2019s father had taught her that. He bought her her first telescope, when she was five. He was the reason she\u2019d wanted to be an astronaut when she was little, and an astrophysicist as soon as she learned what one was. He himself had had dreams of commanding a space shuttle that explored every corner of the universe, until he got a girl pregnant. Instead of going to grad school, he had married Wren\u2019s mom and become a cop and then a detective and had explored every corner of Jackson, Mississippi, instead. He told Wren that working for NASA was the best thing that never happened to him.  \u00a0 When they were driving back from her grandmother\u2019s funeral, it had snowed. Wren\u2014a child who\u2019d never seen weather like that in Mississippi before\u2014had been terrified by the way the world swirled, unmoored. Her father had started talking to her: Mission Specialist McElroy, activate the thrusters . When she wouldn\u2019t stop crying, he began punching random buttons: the air-conditioning, the four-way flashers, the cruise control. They lit up red and blue like a command center at Mission Control. Misison Specialist McElroy, her father said , prepare for hyperspace . Then he flicked on his brights, so that the snow became a tunnel of speeding stars, and Wren was so amazed she forgot to be scared.  \u00a0 She wished she could flick a switch now, and travel back in time. She wished she had told her dad she was coming here.\u2028She wished she had let him talk her out of it.\u2028She wished she hadn\u2019t asked her aunt to bring her.  \u00a0 Aunt Bex might even now be lying in a morgue, like Olive, her body becoming a rainbow. And it was all Wren\u2019s fault. You, said the man with a gun, his voice dragging Wren back to the here and now. He had a name, but she didn\u2019t want to even think of it. It made him human and he wasn\u2019t human; he was a monster. While she\u2019d been lost in thought, he\u2019d come to stand in front of her. Now, he jerked the pistol at her. Get up. The others held their breath with her. They had, in the past few hours, become a single organism. Wren\u2019s thoughts moved in and out of the other women\u2019s minds. Her fear stank on their skin.  \u00a0 Blood still bloomed from the bandage the man had wrapped around his hand. It was the tiniest of triumphs. It was the reason Wren could stand up, even though her legs were jelly.  \u00a0 She shouldn\u2019t have come to the Center.\u2028She should have stayed a little girl.\u2028Because now she might not live to become anything else.\u2028Wren heard the hammer click and closed her eyes. All she could picture was her father\u2019s face\u2014the blue-jean eyes, the gentle bend of his smile\u2014as he looked up at the night sky.  \u00a0 When George Goddard was five years old, his mama tried to set his daddy on fire. His father had been passed out on the couch when his mother poured the lighter fluid over his dirty laundry, lit a match, and dumped the flaming bin on top of him. The big man reared up, screaming, batting at the flames with his ham hands. George\u2019s mama stood a distance away with a glass of water. Mabel, his daddy screamed. Mabel! But his mama calmly drank every last drop, sparing none to extinguish the flames. When George\u2019s father ran out of the house to roll in the dirt like a hog, his mama turned to him. Let that be a lesson to you, she said.  \u00a0 He had not wanted to grow up like his daddy, but in the way that an apple seed can\u2019t help but become an apple tree, he had not become the best of husbands. He knew that now. It was why he had resolved to be the best of fathers. It was why, this morning, he had driven all this way to the Center, the last standing abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi.  \u00a0 What they\u2019d taken away from his daughter she would never get back, whether she realized it now or not. But that didn\u2019t mean he couldn\u2019t exact a price.  \u00a0 He looked around the waiting room. Three women were huddled on a line of seats, and at their feet was the nurse, who was checking the bandage of the doctor. George scoffed. Doctor, my ass. What he did wasn\u2019t healing, not by any stretch of the imagination. He should have killed the guy\u2014 would have killed the guy\u2014if he hadn\u2019t been interrupted when he first arrived and started firing.  \u00a0 He thought about his daughter sitting in one of those chairs. He wondered how she\u2019d gotten here. If she had taken a bus. If a friend had driven her or (he could not even stand to think of it) the boy who\u2019d gotten her in trouble. He imagined himself in an alternate universe, bursting through the door with his gun, seeing her in the chair next to the pamphlets about how to recognize an STD. He would have grabbed her hand and pulled her out of there.  \u00a0 What would she think of him, now that he was a killer?\u2028How could he go back to her?\u2028How could he go back, period?\u2028Eight hours ago this had seemed like a holy crusade\u2014an eye for an eye, a life for a life.  \u00a0 His wound had a heartbeat. George tried to adjust the binding of the gauze around it with his teeth, but it was unraveling. It should have been tied off better, but who here was going to help him?  \u00a0 The last time he had felt like this, like the walls were closing in on him, he had taken his infant daughter\u2014red and screaming with a fever he didn\u2019t know she had and wouldn\u2019t have known how to treat\u2014 and gone looking for help. He had driven until his truck ran out of gas\u2014it was past one a.m., but he started walking\u2014and continued until he found the only building with a light on inside, and an unlocked door. It was flat-roofed and unremarkable\u2014he hadn\u2019t known it was a church until he stepped inside and saw the benches and the wooden relief of Jesus on the cross. The lights he had seen outside were candles, flickering on an altar. Come back, he had said out loud to his wife, who was probably halfway across the country by now. Maybe he was tired, maybe he was delusional, but he very clearly heard a reply: I\u2019m already with you . The voice whispered from the wooden Jesus and at the same time from the darkness all around him.  \u00a0 George\u2019s conversion had been that simple, and that enveloping. Somehow, he and his girl had fallen asleep on the carpeted floor. In the morning, Pastor Mike was shaking him awake. The pastor\u2019s wife was cooing at his baby. There was a groaning table of food, and a miraculously spare room. Back then, George hadn\u2019t been a religious man. It wasn\u2019t Jesus that entered his heart that day. It was hope.  \u00a0 Hugh McElroy, the hostage negotiator George had been talking to for hours, said George\u2019s daughter would know he had been trying to protect her. He\u2019d promised that if George cooperated, this could still end well, even though George knew that outside this building were men with rifles trained on the door just waiting for him to emerge.  \u00a0 George wanted this to be over. Really, he did. He was exhausted mentally and physically and it was hard to figure out an endgame. He was sick of the crying. He wanted to skip ahead to the part where he was sitting by his daughter again, and she was looking up at him with wonder, the way she used to.  \u00a0 But George also knew Hugh would say anything to get him to surrender to the police. It wasn\u2019t even just his job. Hugh McElroy needed him to release the hostages for the same reason that George had taken them in the first place\u2014to save the day.  \u00a0 That\u2019s when George figured out what he was going to do. He pulled back the hammer on the gun. \u201cGet up. You,\u201d he said, pointing to the girl with the name of a bird, the one who had stabbed him. The one he would use to teach Hugh McElroy a lesson. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 13.65}, {"asin": "B017LGAKEG", "title": "Burying the Honeysuckle Girls", "author": "Emily Carpenter", "description": "Review \u201cThis novel doesn\u2019t stop running, and neither would you if you were Althea Bell. She\u2019s just learned that for three generations the women in her family have vanished or died on their thirtieth birthday\u2014and hers is fast approaching. To survive, she must race to solve a century-old mystery. Emily Carpenter has written a hell of a thriller with language as lush as its Southern setting.\u201d \u2014Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands , Red Moon , The Wilding , and Refresh, Refresh \u201cSouthern Gothic in all its creepy inbred finery. I found myself rooting for recovering addict Althea as she teeters on the brink of relapse while uncovering the horrific secret behind her family\u2019s inherited madness and premature death.\u201d \u2014Amy Plum, international bestselling author \u201cEmily Carpenter weaves a masterful web of Southern gothic family drama and spine-tingling mystery. A must read.\u201d \u2014M.J. Pullen, author of The Marriage Pact and Regrets Only About the Author Emily Carpenter, a former actor, producer, screenwriter, and behind-the-scenes soap opera assistant, graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from Auburn University. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, she now lives in Georgia with her family. Burying the Honeysuckle Girls is her first novel. Visit Emily online at www.emilycarpenterauthor.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1503904210", "title": "Until the Day I Die: A Novel", "author": "Emily Carpenter", "description": "Review \u201cIn this chilling psychological thriller\u2026Carpenter keeps the suspense high all the way to the shocking conclusion.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cFast-paced and teeming with long-held secrets, Emily Carpenter\u2019s Until the Day I Die will have you rooting for the whip-smart, resilient mother-daughter team of Erin and Shorie Gaines as they race against time and unknown evil to salvage the life they have so carefully crafted. The twisty, jaw-dropping conclusion of this electrifying thriller will leave you guessing and gasping for breath right up to the final page. A must-read!\u201d \u2015Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence and Not a Sound \u201cSeductively sinister, with a fierce, feisty mother-daughter duo you\u2019ll be cheering for. A fast, frightening read.\u201d \u2015Jessica Strawser, author of Not That I Could Tell \u201cThis shocking cat-and-mouse thriller will shatter your expectations\u2015and Carpenter\u2019s skill for brilliant and twisty storytelling will have you gasping in surprise. Buckle up for a terrific ride\u2015this is timely, unpredictable, and irresistible!\u201d \u2015Hank Phillippi Ryan, nationally bestselling author of Trust Me \u201cIn Until the Day I Die , Emily Carpenter proves once again she\u2019s a thriller powerhouse. Packed with heroines you\u2019ll cheer for, villains you\u2019ll love to hate, and plot twists galore, this story will have you on the edge of your seat until you breathlessly turn the last page. What a ride!\u201d \u2015Hannah Mary McKinnon, author of The Neighbors About the Author Emily Carpenter is the bestselling author of three thrillers, Every Single Secret , Burying the Honeysuckle Girls , and The Weight of Lies . A graduate from Auburn University with a bachelor of arts in speech communication, Emily has worked as an actor, producer, screenwriter, and behind-the-scenes soap opera assistant for CBS TV. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, she moved to New York City for a little while to pursue her career before moving back to the South. She now lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her family. Visit Emily at www.emilycarpenterauthor.com and on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 10.58}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0316505099", "title": "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive", "author": "Stephanie Land", "description": "Review \"A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work.\" \u2015 President Barack Obama, \"Obama's 2019 Summer Reading List\" President Barack Obama, Summer Reading List (2019) Forbes , Most Anticipated Books of the Year Glamour , Best Books of the Year Time , 11 New Books to Read This January Vulture , 8 New Books You Should Read This January Thrillist , All the Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2019 USA Today , 5 New Books Not to Miss Amazon, Best Books of the Month Detroit News , New Books to Look Forward to in 2019 The Missoulian , Best Books of the Month San Diego Entertainer , Books to Kick Off Your New Year People , Perfect for Your Book Club Boston.com, 20 Books to Look Out for in 2019 Hello Giggles , Best New Books to Read This Week Newsweek, Best Books of 2019 So Far CNN Travel , Books You Should Read This Summer Mental Floss , Summer Reading List BookTrib, B ooks That Will Make You Look Smart at the Beach! \"More than any book in recent memory, Land nails the sheer terror that comes with being poor, the exhausting vigilance of knowing that any misstep or twist of fate will push you deeper into the hole.\"\u2015 The Boston Globe \"Stephanie Lands memoir [ Maid ] is a bracing one.\"\u2015 The Atlantic \"An eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor.\"\u2015 People, Perfect for Your Book Club \"The particulars of Land's struggle are sobering, but it's the impression of precariousness that is most memorable.\"\u2015 The New Yorker \"[Land's] book has the needed quality of reversing the direction of the gaze. Some people who employ domestic labor will read her account. Will they see themselves in her descriptions of her clients? Will they offer their employees the meager respect Land fantasizes about? Land survived the hardship of her years as a maid, her body exhausted and her brain filled with bleak arithmetic, to offer her testimony. It's worth listening to.\"\u2015 New York Times Book Review \"What this book does well is illuminate the struggles of poverty and single-motherhood, the unrelenting frustration of having no safety net, the ways in which our society is systemically designed to keep impoverished people mired in poverty, the indignity of poverty by way of unmovable bureaucracy, and people's lousy attitudes toward poor people... Land's prose is vivid and engaging... [A] tightly-focused, well-written memoir... an incredibly worthwhile read.\"\u2015 Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger: A Memoir \"An eye-opening exploration of poverty in America.\"\u2015 Bustle \"Marry the evocative first person narrative of Educated with the kind of social criticism seen in Nickel and Dimed and you'll get a sense of the remarkable book you hold in your hands. In Maid , Stephanie Land, a gifted storyteller with an eye for details you'll never forget, exposes what it's like to exist in America as a single mother, working herself sick cleaning our dirty toilets, one missed paycheck away from destitution. It's a perspective we seldom see represented firsthand-and one we so desperately need right now. Timely, urgent, and unforgettable, this is memoir at its very best.\"\u2015 Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness \"For readers who believe individuals living below the poverty line are lazy and/or intellectually challenged, this memoir is a stark, necessary corrective.... [T]he narrative also offers a powerful argument for increasing government benefits for the working poor during an era when most benefits are being slashed.... An important memoir that should be required reading for anyone who has never struggled with poverty.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews, starred review \" Maid provides an important look at the morass of difficulties faced by the working poor.\"\u2015 Elle Magazine \"[A] heartfelt and powerful debut memoir.... Land's love for her daughter... shines brightly through the pages of this beautiful, uplifting story of resilience and survival.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly, starred review \"[A] vivid and visceral yet nearly unrelenting memoir... Her journey offers an illuminating read that should inspire outrage, hope, and change.\"\u2015 Library Journal \"Raw...Land [is] a gifted storyteller...Offers moments of levity...[ Maid ] shows we need to create an economy in which single motherhood and the risk of poverty do not go hand in hand.\"\u2015 Ms. Magazine \"A heartfelt memoir.\"\u2015 Harvard Business Review \" Maid delves into her time working for the upper middle class in the service industry, and in it, uncovers the true strength of the human spirit.\"\u2015 San Diego Entertainer, Books to Kick Off Your New Year \"In writing about the spaces outside of her work, though, Land gives shape to the depleting anxiety and isolation that accompany motherhood in poverty for millions of Americans.\"\u2015 The Nation \"[An] example of the determination and grace [is] on display in her memoir, in which she renders vividly the back-breaking and often surreal work of deep-cleaning strangers' homes while navigating the baffling bureaucracies of government assistance programs.\"\u2015 Salon \"The book, with its unfussy prose and clear voice, holds you. It's one woman's story of inching out of the dirt and how the middle class turns a blind eye to the poverty lurking just a few rungs below -- and it's one worth reading.\"\u2015 The Washington Post \"It is with beautiful prose that Land chronicles her time working as a housekeeper to make ends meet...Captur[es] the experience of hardworking Americans who make little money and are often invisible to their employers.\"\u2015 Boston.com, 20 Books to Read in 2019 \"Fascinating...Communicates clearly the challenges of a marginal existence as a single mother living in poverty as she sought to provide a stable and predictable home for her daughter in a situation that was anything but stable and predictable.\"\u2015 The Columbus Dispatch \"Takes readers inside the gritty, unglamorous life of the underpaid, overworked people who serve the upper-middle class for a living.\"\u2015 Parade \"Stephanie Land strips class divisions bare in her phenomenal memoir Maid , providing a profoundly important expose on the economy of being a single mother in America. This is the warrior cry from the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, reminding us to change our lives and remember how to see each other. Standing ovation. Not since Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed has the working woman's real life been so honestly illuminated.\"\u2015 Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan \"In a country whose frayed safety net gets less policy attention than the marginal tax rate, Land is the anomaly not only in surviving to tell the tale - and in telling it with such compelling economy.\"\u2015 Vulture, 8 New Books You Should Read this January \"Land's memoir forces readers to examine their implicit judgments about what we mean by the value of hard work in America and societal expectations of motherhood.\"\u2015 Electric Lit \"Honest, unapologetic, and beautifully written.\"\u2015 Hello Giggles \"Tells an honest story many are too afraid to examine.\"\u2015 SheKnows.com \"A moving, intimate, essential account of life in poverty.\"\u2015 Entertainment Weekly, Must List \"The next time you hear someone say they think poor people are lazy, hand them a copy of Maid .\"\u2015 Minneapolis Star-Tribune \"Stephanie Land's heartrending book, Maid , provides a trenchant reminder that something is amiss with the American Dream and gives voice to the millions of 'working poor' toiling in a country that needs them but doesn't want to see them. A sad and hopeful tale of being on the outside looking in, the author makes us wonder how'd we fare scrubbing and vacuuming away the detritus of an affluence that always seems beyond reach.\"\u2015 Steve Dublanica, New York Times bestselling author of Waiter Rant \"In a perfect world, Maid would become required reading in schools across the country.\"\u2015 North Bay Bohemian \"As a solo mom and former house cleaner, this brave book resonated with me on a very deep level. We live in a world where the solo mother is an incomplete story: adrift in the world without a partner, without support, without a grounding, centering (male) force. But women have been doing this since the dawn of time, and Stephanie Land is one of millions of solo moms forced to get blood from stone. She is at once an old and new kind of American hero. This memoir of resilience and love has never been more necessary.\"\u2015 Domenica Ruta, New York Times bestselling author of With or Without You \"A fun read.\"\u2015 South Platte Sentinel \" Maid is a testament to a young mother's survival skills - a constantly shifting balance of back-breaking labor, single-parenting responsibilities, complying with rules and regulations, college course-work, attitude adjustments and diplomacy on all fronts... The book is a gift of hope and joy for anyone lucky enough to see beyond blame.\"\u2015 Wicked Local \"It's as much a story about resilience as it is a hard look at current systems in place to help impoverished people and how hard they are to navigate. It's eye-opening and inspiring--a definite must-read!\"\u2015 Style Blueprint \"If this memoir doesn't shake you up and give you a stronger understanding of poverty in America, your heart must be made of coal. Stephanie Land, who spent years in poverty, clues you in to what it's really like to live in a shelter. It's hard to think that a white paper or TV documentary could say it as well as she does.\"\u2015 Florida Times-Union \" Maid is an important work of journalism that offers an insightful and unique perspective on a segment of the working poor from someone who has lived it.\"\u2015 Amazon Book Review \"I loved this story about one woman surviving impossible circumstances.\"\u2015 Reese Witherspoon \"An empowering story of a woman determined to pull herself up in life through which we all feel stronger!\"\u2015 Gretchen Carlson, Politico \" Maid is a beautiful book and a sad book and even, at times, a joyful book--a story of a mother's love for her daughter--but most of all it's an important book about the U.S. economy and what it does to people.\"\u2015 Daily Kos \"Maid-part Educated , part Hillbilly Elegy -is an eye-opening portrait of how privilege and the female working class can commingle.\"\u2015 Glamour About the Author STEPHANIE LAND's work has been featured in the New York Times , the Washington Post , The Atlantic , the Guardian , and many others. Her writing focuses on social and economic justice. BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch . She lives in Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.8}, {"asin": "0982794983", "title": "Divine Order Attracts Divine Power", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "from 129.99"}, {"asin": "1451689128", "title": "The Tomb: A Novel of Martha (The Living Water Series)", "author": "Stephanie Landsem", "description": "Review \"A vivid retelling of a Bible story we've all heard but perhaps never completely understood in all its facets until now. With a main character human enough for us all to identify with, The Tomb is a poignant tale of secrets too long guarded, the tenacity of love, and the freeing power of grace.\" -- Tosca Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Iscariot\u201c The Tomb by author Stephanie Landsem brings the story of Martha, the over-anxious sister of Mary and Lazarus, into a dramatic and unexpected light. Often when we read the biblical story, we don't stop to think about who these people were, what they thought, how they lived, especially when we are unfamiliar with the culture of the day. The Tomb gives us a rich glimpse into that culture and into the lives of these characters, their hopes, their joys, their fears. You will never see Martha quite the same way again. An intriguing, fascinating read.\u201d -- Jill Eileen Smith, bestselling author of the Wives of King David series\u201cStephanie Landsem delivers a fascinating perspective on Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Gripping yet tender, The Tomb weaves these Bethany siblings into the lives of supporting Gospel characters, beckoning readers to that poignant moment when the Son of God wept. Satisfying. Inspiring. Beautiful.\u201d -- Mesu Andrews, award-winning author of Love Amid the Ashes\u201cStephanie Landsem has a gift for telling stories of eternal significance through the eyes of ordinary people. Powerful and tender, The Tomb carries us from the shadow of the valley of death to the glory of the resurrection, while keeping the hopes and dreams of its characters relevant to today's readers.\u201d -- Regina Jennings, author of A Most Inconvenient Marriage and Caught in the Middle\u201cOnce I picked up The Tomb I couldn\u2019t put it down. Landsem\u2019s novel about Martha is not only a riveting page-turner; it\u2019s a profound and uplifting story about people transformed by faith.\u201d -- Rebecca Kanner, author of Sinners and the Sea\"Powerful and moving, Landsem grabs hold of the soul and never lets go. As compelling a portrait of mercy as I have ever read. Don't miss this one!\" -- Siri Mitchell, author of The Messenger\u201cIn Stephanie Landsem\u2019s latest novel, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus are real enough to invite you into their Bethany home, sit you before the fire, and fill your belly with barley stew and warm bread. The Tomb is an enthralling tale, impeccably researched, full of delightful characters. As women, we have always been told to emulate Mary, the sister who chose to worship at Jesus\u2019 feet. But Landsem\u2019s Martha has much to teach us, about love, loyalty, honor, faith\u2014and the true measure of a family.\u201d -- Carole Towriss, author of In the Shadow of the Sinai\u201cOnce again, Stephanie Landsem weaves a masterful tale of danger, intrigue, and love as she draws from the familiar story of two sisters, Mary and Martha, and their brother, Lazarus. Landsem pulls the reader into unexpected corners of history as this humble family does their best to figure out who Jesus really is and what his radical message means for them. She pulls from scripture and traditions passed down through the centuries to explore the human experience behind these beloved characters, breathing new life into the story in clever and surprising ways.\u201d -- Laura Sobiech, author of Fly a Little Higher\u201cLandsem creates a beautiful tapestry of familiar New Testament stories, woven together with fresh insight into what it looked like to walk alongside Jesus, encountering both the mundane and the mysterious in the man who brought the kingdom even to small villages.\u201d -- Tracy Higley, author of The Queen\u2019s Handmaid\u201cTriumphant! Landsem\u2019s words resound with hope and healing, with freedom from the chains which bind us all.\u201d -- Siri Mitchell, author of Like A Flower in Bloom About the Author Stephanie Landsem writes historical fiction because she loves adventure in far-off times and places. In real life, she\u2019s explored ancient ruins, medieval castles, and majestic cathedrals around the world. Stephanie is equally happy at home in Minnesota with her husband, four children, and three fat cats. When she\u2019s not writing, she\u2019s feeding the ravenous horde, avoiding housework, and dreaming about her next adventure\u2014whether it be in person or on the page. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Tomb Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "B07HM1VYD7", "title": "Mother Dear: A Thriller", "author": "Nova Lee Maier", "description": "About the Author Nova Lee Maier is a pseudonym of Dutch bestselling author Esther Verhoef, whose psychological thrillers and novels have sold more than 2.5 million copies in the Netherlands. Esther is the recipient of numerous awards, including the NS Publieksprijs (NS Audience Award/Prix Public); the Hebban Crimezone Award; the Diamanten Kogel (Diamond Bullet); and for Mother Dear , the prestigious Gouden Strop (Golden Noose) Award for best crime thriller of the year. She is also the author of Close-Up and Rendezvous , both available in English. For more information, visit www.novaleemaier.com and www.estherverhoef.com. Jozef van der Voort is a professional translator adapting Dutch, German, and French into English. A Dutch-British dual national, he grew up in southeast England and studied literature and languages in Durham and Sheffield. He has lived and worked in Austria, France, Luxembourg, Germany, and Belgium. As a literary translator, he took part in the Emerging Translators Programme run by New Books in German and was also named runner-up in the 2014 Harvill Secker Young Translators\u2019 Prize. Mother Dear is his first translated novel.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0316505099"}
{"user_id": "AFREDXMIAPBU7MAG3KRJBFZPSFHQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0345338146", "title": "Dictionary of Cliches: If You Wonder about the Origins of All Those Old Saws--from First Blush to Bite the Dust--You'll Find This Book the Cat's Meow!", "author": "James T. Rogers", "description": "From the Inside Flap \"The best kind of reference book--one that amuses as it instructs. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.\"CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALERRIN A NUTSHELL, here's a terrific A TO Z listing of the meanings and origins of over 2,000 common or particularly interesting cliches for everyone who delights in the pleasure of words. From the Back Cover The Dictionary of Cliches offers the most thorough treatment yet published of all those trite but apt sayings we use all the time but rarely stop to consider. About the Author James Rogers is the author of The Dictionary of Clich\u00e9s . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0965685608", "title": "500 All Time Funniest Golf Jokes, Stories & Fairway Wisdom", "author": "Sheila A. Stewart", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 3.6, "price": 11.95}, {"asin": "1580423264", "title": "100 Best Solitaire Games", "author": "Sloane Lee", "description": "About the Author The authors are lifelong solitaire players and greatly enjoy finding new solitaires games, and solving the best way to beat them.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 4.09}, {"asin": "1844480542", "title": "Celtic Knots for Beaded Jewellery", "author": "Suzen Millodot", "description": "Review \"Eighteen fabulous projects with easy-to-follow-, step-by-step instructions.\"\u00a0 \u2014karenplatt.co.uk About the Author Suzen Millodot has always loved arts and crafts, and is the author of the very successful books Chinese Knots for Beaded Jewellery and Celtic Knots for Beaded Jewellery. She is an accomplished artist, having taught batik for many years in Canada, Hong Kong and Wales. She first developed a fascination for decorative knots whilst living in Wales and later in Hong Kong. Her jewellery now incorporates knots from all over the world and from all periods of history, and she complements the knots with unusual and exotic beads she has collected on her travels. She and her husband now live in Wales very close to their daughter and grandchildren. She occasionally teaches and continues to make original jewellery and wearable art using knots and macram\u00e9.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 24.97}, {"asin": "1592287883", "title": "1001 Smartest Things Ever Said", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Humor & Satire"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 15.72}, {"asin": "0987004026", "title": "The Must Have 2016 Sudoku Puzzle Book: 366 puzzle daily sudoku book for the leap year. A challenge for every day of the year. 366 Sudoku Games - 5 levels of difficulty (easy to hard)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1508567484", "title": "Masyu Mixed Grids - Hard - Volume 4 - 276 Logic Puzzles", "author": "Nick Snels", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 11.7}, {"asin": "1844488144", "title": "Chinese, Celtic & Ornamental Knots for Beaded Jewellery", "author": "Suzen Millodot", "description": "Review \"Throughout the knots are explained in detail with clear, step by step, coloured diagrams which are easy to follow. The book contains more than 40 projects for you to try including necklaces, bracelets, earrings and brooches.\" \u2014 Bead Society of Great Britain Journal About the Author Suzen Millodot is an artist who has taught batik for many years in Canada, Hong Kong, and Wales. She is the author of \"Celtic Knots for Beaded Jewellery,\" \"Chinese Knots for Beaded Jewellery,\" \"Micro Macrame Jewellery,\" \"\"and \"Ornamental Knots for Beaded Jewellery.\"", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 29.95}, {"asin": "1619493233", "title": "Moll Flanders", "author": "Daniel Defoe", "description": "Review \"A very helpful edition of Moll Flanders with its informative introduction and especially its thorough endnotes. It is an edition especially helpful for undergraduates who do not have such a broad knowledge of the 18th century laws, social problems, etc.\"--Judith B. Slagle. Carson-Newman College \"Excellent edition has all of the necessary 'extras': introduction and notes, both reflecting excellent scholarship.\" --Arline Garbarini, Dominican College About the Author G. A. Starr is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Linda Bree is Editorial Director, Arts and Literature, at Cambridge University Press.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Classics"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 10.49}, {"asin": "1402218494", "title": "God Loves Golfers Best: The Best Jokes, Quotes, and Cartoons for Golfers", "author": "Ray Foley", "description": "About the Author Ray Foley is an expert bartender and publisher of Bartender magazine. He is also the founder of the Bartenders Foundation Inc. and the author of Bartending for Dummies. He has appeared on ABC-TV News, CBS News, NBC News, Good Morning America and Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. He has also been featured in major magazines, including Forbes and Playboy. Ray resides in New Jersey with his wife and partner, Jaclyn. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Golf Course or Four married guys go golfing. While playing the 4th hole, the following conversation takes place: 1st Guy: \"You have no idea what I had to do to be able to come out golfing this weekend. I had to promise my wife that I would paint every room in the house next weekend.\" 2nd Guy: \"That's nothing. I had to promise my wife I would build a new deck for the pool.\" 3rd Guy: \"Man, you both have it easy! I had to promise my wife I would remodel the kitchen for her.\" They continued to play the hole when they realized that the 4th guy hadn't said anything. So they asked him, \"You haven't said anything about what you had to do to be able to come golfing this weekend. What's the deal?\" 4th Guy: \"I just set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. and when it went off, I shut off the alarm, gave the wife a nudge, and said, 'Golf course or intercourse?' And she said, 'Wear your sweater.'\"", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "150114426X", "title": "The Long Walk", "author": "Stephen King", "description": "Review \"A master storyteller.\" - Houston Chronicle\"An illusionist extraordinaire.\" - Publishers Weekly\"A master storyteller.\" - Houston Chronicle \"An illusionist extraordinaire.\" - Publishers WeeklyA master storyteller. (\"Houston Chronicle\") An illusionist extraordinaire. (\"Publishers Weekly\") About the Author Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers.\u00a0His recent work includes Holly , Fairy Tale , Billy Summers , If It Bleeds , The Institute , Elevation , The Outsider , Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch , Finders\u00a0Keepers ,\u00a0and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner\u00a0for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a\u00a0top ten book of 2011 by The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower , It , Pet Sematary , Doctor Sleep , and Firestarter are the basis for\u00a0major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient\u00a0of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the\u00a02014 National Medal of Arts, and the\u00a02003 National Book Foundation Medal for\u00a0Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.\u00a0He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife,\u00a0novelist Tabitha King.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.29}, {"asin": "1402747756", "title": "Murphy's Laws of Golf", "author": "Henry Beard", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 10.0}, {"asin": "1474817203", "title": "The Big Book Of Sudoku (Big Book of 500 Puzzles)", "author": "Parragon Books", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 32.74}, {"asin": "0800787757", "title": "When Your Child Breaks Your Heart: Help for Hurting Moms", "author": "Barbara Johnson", "description": "From the Back Cover When tragedy strikes our families or when our sons or daughters choose an unfortunate path in life, it's hard to reconcile the present with all our hopes for the future. Our children's decisions may conflict with the way we raised them, or we may lose contact as family members shut each other out.In When Your Child Breaks Your Heart , beloved author Barbara Johnson tells the story of how, as a wife and mother, she faced so many challenges--the crippling of her husband from a debilitating accident, the death of two sons, and the choices of a third son that caused him to stay away from family for years. But even through her pain, she set out on a journey of survival and restoration that included a steady diet of laughter, joy, and hope. In this gripping book, Barbara tells her family's searing story honestly and compassionately, and she reveals how she was able to emerge triumphantly with her faith intact and her spirit unbroken. She offers hope to families facing similar circumstances, sharing how God brought her through the deep waters without letting her drown--and how he will do the same for us. Barbara Johnson 's books have sold millions of copies. She was the founder of the nonprofit Spatula Ministries, and before her death in 2007, she delivered comforting, humor-filled messages across the country as a popular conference speaker. About the Author Barbara Johnson's (1927-2007) books have sold millions of copies. Founder of the nonprofit Spatula Ministries, she delivered comforting, humor-filled messages across the country as a popular conference speaker and part of the \"Women of Faith\" tour.", "categories": ["Books", "Parenting & Relationships", "Family Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 16.99}, {"asin": "1454909749", "title": "Number-Crunching Math Puzzles", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.66}, {"asin": "1505662885", "title": "Numbricks Mixed Grids Deluxe - Hard - Volume 7 - 468 Logic Puzzles", "author": "Nick Snels", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 17.63}, {"asin": "1502553759", "title": "Two Golf Balls Rolled Into A Bar (golf balls rolled into bar)", "author": "Chip Putt", "description": "About the Author In less than two years, Bob Morris, 78 years young, went from being a recruiter to a comedian and then to a published author. In May of 2013 he retired as a recruiter after 48 years to pursue his dream and number one item on his bucket list which was to do stand-up comedy before a live audience. He went to The Manhattan Comedy School in New York City to learn how to write jokes and perform them. After six weeks he completed school and on July 10th performed before 240 people at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York City. Without question he was a howling success. He came away realizing that he could write funny and perform funny. His family and friends kept asking him \"So what's next?\" The standard next step for comedian \"wannabees\" is to go to venues that have late evening \"open mics\" (microphones) to get performing experience (unpaid) and perhaps get discovered. That approach was not appealing because getting home after midnight would put a strain on his 48 year marriage. Bob also felt that becoming discovered was not likely to happen in the near future. He needed a faster pace. He decided to combine two of his passions - golf and humor- and wrote an original golf joke book using the name Bogey Bob Morris. The way he golfs it should have been Double Bogey Bob Morris. The book, Two Golf Balls Rolled Into A bar, was published in November, 2014. He has already started on the next book: Three Golf Balls Rolled Into A Bar! He graduated Middlebury College in 1956 majoring in Drama.His senior year drama project was producing and directing a comedy written by his father. In the summer of 1954 he was an apprentice at the Falmouth Playhouse in Massachusetts. The following summer he was in the summer acting group at Tufts College. His first job out of college was a Page Boy at the American Broadcasting Company in New York City. At night time he attend the NY School of Television where he learned more about what he saw at his job. In 1957 he had to spend 6 months on active duty with the NY National Guard. Upon returning he ended up working in a Greenwich Village theater. He then knocked around in various sales jobs and in March of 1964 he began a 48 year career as a recruiter. Later that year he got married to Susan, a California girl he met on Fire Island. Two years later he became a father to Melissa and the three moved to Rye NY. Two more children came along; Corrine in 1968 and Erica in 1970. They are all married with 2 kids each.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 3.0, "price": 9.95}, {"asin": "1429663278", "title": "The Best of Everything Basketball Book (The All-Time Best of Sports)", "author": "Nate LeBoutillier", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Sports & Outdoors"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1613216564", "title": "1001 Basketball Trivia Questions", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Dale Ratermann has written over 40 books. He previously worked in sports marketing. Brian Brosi won the Arizona State University sports trivia championship as a student in 1975.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.97}, {"asin": "1955616000", "title": "Hidden Mate (The Wolf Born Trilogy)", "author": "Jen L. Grey", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "0735219109", "title": "Where the Crawdads Sing", "author": "Delia Owens", "description": "Review \u201cA painfully beautiful first novel that is at once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative and a celebration of nature....Owens here surveys the desolate marshlands of the North Carolina coast through the eyes of an abandoned child. And in her isolation that child makes us open our own eyes to the secret wonders\u2014and dangers\u2014of her private world.\u201d\u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cSteeped in the rhythms and shadows of the coastal marshes of North Carolina\u2019s Outer Banks, this fierce and hauntingly beautiful novel centers on...Kya\u2019s heartbreaking story of learning to trust human connections, intertwine[d] with a gripping murder mystery, revealing savage truths. An astonishing debut.\u201d\u2014 People \u201cThis lush mystery is perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver.\u201d\u2014 Bustle \u201cA lush debut novel, Owens delivers her mystery wrapped in gorgeous, lyrical prose. It\u2019s clear she\u2019s from this place\u2014the land of the southern coasts, but also the emotional terrain\u2014you can feel it in the pages.\u00a0 A magnificent achievement, ambitious, credible and very timely.\u201d\u2014Alexandra Fuller, New York Times bestselling author of Don\u2019t Let\u2019s Go to the Dogs Tonight \u201cHeart-wrenching...A fresh exploration of isolation and nature from a female perspective along with a compelling love story.\u201d\u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cThis wonderful novel has a bit of everything\u2014mystery, romance, and fascinating characters, all told in a story that takes place in North Carolina.\u201d\u2014Nicholas Sparks, New York Times bestselling author of Every Breath \u201cDelia Owen\u2019s gorgeous novel is both a coming-of-age tale and an engrossing whodunit.\u201d\u2014 Real Simple \u201cEvocative...Kya makes for an unforgettable heroine.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cThe New Southern novel...A lyrical debut.\u201d \u2014 Southern Living \u201cA nature-infused romance with a killer twist.\u201d\u2014 Refinery29 \u201cAnyone who liked The Great Alone will want to read Where the Crawdads Sing ....This astonishing debut is a beautiful and haunting novel that packs a powerful punch. It\u2019s the first novel in a long time that made me cry.\u201d\u2014Kristin Hannah, author of The Great Alone and The Nightingale \u201cBoth a coming-of-age story and a mysterious account of a murder investigation told from the perspective of a young girl...Through Kya\u2019s story, Owens explores how isolation affects human behavior, and the deep effect that rejection can have on our lives.\u201d\u2014 Vanity Fair \u201cLyrical...Its appeal ris[es] from Kya\u2019s deep connection to the place where makes her home, and to all of its creatures.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cThis beautiful, evocative novel is likely to stay with you for many days afterward....absorbing.\u201d \u2014 AARP \u201cThis haunting tale captivates every bit as much for its crime drama elements as for the humanity at its core.\u201d \u2014 Mystery & Suspense Magazine \u201cCompelling, original...A mystery, a courtroom drama, a romance and a coming-of-age story, Where the Crawdads Sing is a moving, beautiful tale. Readers will remember Kya for a long, long time.\u201d \u2014 ShelfAwareness \u201cWith prose luminous as a low-country moon, Owens weaves a compelling tale of a forgotten girl in the unforgiving coastal marshes of North Carolina. It is a murder mystery/love story/courtroom drama that readers will love, but the novel delves so much deeper into the bone and sinew of our very nature, asking often unanswerable questions, old and intractable as the marsh itself. A stunning debut!\u201d \u2014 Christopher Scotton, author of The Secret Wisdom of the Earth \u201cA compelling mystery with prose so luminous it can cut through the murkiest of pluff mud.\u201d\u2014 Augusta Chronicle \u201cCarries the rhythm of an old time ballad. It is clear Owens knows this land intimately, from the black mud sucking at footsteps to the taste of saltwater and the cry of seagulls.\u201d \u2014 David Joy, author of The\u00a0Line That Held Us About the Author Delia Owens is the coauthor of three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa. She holds a BS in Zoology from the University of Georgia and a PhD in Animal Behavior from the University of California at Davis. She has won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing and has been published in Nature, The African Journal of Ecology, and International Wildlife , among many others. She lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Where the Crawdads Sing is her first novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1.Ma1952The morning burned so August-hot, the marsh's moist breath hung the oaks and pines with fog. The palmetto patches stood unusually quiet except for the low, slow flap of the heron's wings lifting from the lagoon. And then, Kya, only six at the time, heard the screen door slap. Standing on the stool, she stopped scrubbing grits from the pot and lowered it into the basin of worn-out suds. No sounds now but her own breathing. Who had left the shack? Not Ma. She never let the door slam.But when Kya ran to the porch, she saw her mother in a long brown skirt, kick pleats nipping at her ankles, as she walked down the sandy lane in high heels. The stubby-nosed shoes were fake alligator skin. Her only going-out pair. Kya wanted to holler out but knew not to rouse Pa, so opened the door and stood on the brick-'n'-board steps. From there she saw the blue train case Ma carried. Usually, with the confidence of a pup, Kya knew her mother would return with meat wrapped in greasy brown paper or with a chicken, head dangling down. But she never wore the gator heels, never took a case.Ma always looked back where the foot lane met the road, one arm held high, white palm waving, as she turned onto the track, which wove through bog forests, cattail lagoons, and maybe-if the tide obliged-eventually into town. But today she walked on, unsteady in the ruts. Her tall figure emerged now and then through the holes of the forest until only swatches of white scarf flashed between the leaves. Kya sprinted to the spot she knew would bare the road; surely Ma would wave from there, but she arrived only in time to glimpse the blue case-the color so wrong for the woods-as it disappeared. A heaviness, thick as black-cotton mud, pushed her chest as she returned to the steps to wait.Kya was the youngest of five, the others much older, though later she couldn't recall their ages. They lived with Ma and Pa, squeezed together like penned rabbits, in the rough-cut shack, its screened porch staring big-eyed from under the oaks.Jodie, the brother closest to Kya, but still seven years older, stepped from the house and stood behind her. He had her same dark eyes and black hair; had taught her birdsongs, star names, how to steer the boat through saw grass.\"Ma'll be back,\" he said.\"I dunno. She's wearin' her gator shoes.\"\"A ma don't leave her kids. It ain't in 'em.\"\"You told me that fox left her babies.\"\"Yeah, but that vixen got 'er leg all tore up. She'd've starved to death if she'd tried to feed herself 'n' her kits. She was better off to leave 'em, heal herself up, then whelp more when she could raise 'em good. Ma ain't starvin', she'll be back.\" Jodie wasn't nearly as sure as he sounded, but said it for Kya.Her throat tight, she whispered, \"But Ma's carryin' that blue case like she's goin' somewheres big.\"The shack sat back from the palmettos, which sprawled across sand flats to a necklace of green lagoons and, in the distance, all the marsh beyond. Miles of blade-grass so tough it grew in salt water, interrupted only by trees so bent they wore the shape of the wind. Oak forests bunched around the other sides of the shack and sheltered the closest lagoon, its surface so rich in life it churned. Salt air and gull-song drifted through the trees from the sea.Claiming territory hadn't changed much since the 1500s. The scattered marsh holdings weren't legally described, just staked out natural-a creek boundary here, a dead oak there-by renegades. A man doesn't set up a palmetto lean-to in a bog unless he's on the run from somebody or at the end of his own road.The marsh was guarded by a torn shoreline, labeled by early explorers as the \"Graveyard of the Atlantic\" because riptides, furious winds, and shallow shoals wrecked ships like paper hats along what would become the North Carolina coast. One seaman's journal read, \"rang'd along the Shoar . . . but could discern no Entrance . . . A violent Storm overtook us . . . we were forced to get off to Sea, to secure Ourselves and Ship, and were driven by the Rapidity of a strong Current . . .\"The Land . . . being marshy and Swamps, we return'd towards our Ship . . . Discouragement of all such as should hereafter come into those Parts to settle.\"Those looking for serious land moved on, and this infamous marsh became a net, scooping up a mishmash of mutinous sailors, castaways, debtors, and fugitives dodging wars, taxes, or laws that they didn't take to. The ones malaria didn't kill or the swamp didn't swallow bred into a woodsmen tribe of several races and multiple cultures, each of whom could fell a small forest with a hatchet and pack a buck for miles. Like river rats, each had his own territory, yet had to fit into the fringe or simply disappear some day in the swamp. Two hundred years later, they were joined by runaway slaves, who escaped into the marsh and were called maroons, and freed slaves, penniless and beleaguered, who dispersed into the water-land because of scant options.Maybe it was mean country, but not an inch was lean. Layers of life-squiggly sand crabs, mud-waddling crayfish, waterfowl, fish, shrimp, oysters, fatted deer, and plump geese-were piled on the land or in the water. A man who didn't mind scrabbling for supper would never starve.It was now 1952, so some of the claims had been held by a string of disconnected, unrecorded persons for four centuries. Most before the Civil War. Others squatted on the land more recently, especially after the World Wars, when men came back broke and broke-up. The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog.Just like their whiskey, the marsh dwellers bootlegged their own laws-not like those burned onto stone tablets or inscribed on documents, but deeper ones, stamped in their genes. Ancient and natural, like those hatched from hawks and doves. When cornered, desperate, or isolated, man reverts to those instincts that aim straight at survival. Quick and just. They will always be the trump cards because they are passed on more frequently from one generation to the next than the gentler genes. It is not a morality, but simple math. Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.Ma didn\u00d5t come back that day. No one spoke of it. Least of all Pa. Stinking of fish and drum likker, he clanked pot lids. \u00d2Whar\u00d5s supper?\u00d3Eyes downcast, the brothers and sisters shrugged. Pa dog-cussed, then limp-stepped out, back into the woods. There had been fights before; Ma had even left a time or two, but she always came back, scooping up whoever would be cuddled.The two older sisters cooked a supper of red beans and cornbread, but no one sat to eat at the table, as they would have with Ma. Each dipped beans from the pot, flopped cornbread on top, and wandered off to eat on their floor mattresses or the faded sofa.Kya couldn't eat. She sat on the porch steps, looking down the lane. Tall for her age, bone skinny, she had deep-tanned skin and straight hair, black and thick as crow wings.Darkness put a stop to her lookout. Croaking frogs would drown the sounds of footsteps; even so, she lay on her porch bed, listening. Just that morning she'd awakened to fatback crackling in the iron skillet and whiffs of biscuits browning in the wood oven. Pulling up her bib overalls, she'd rushed into the kitchen to put the plates and forks out. Pick the weevils from the grits. Most dawns, smiling wide, Ma hugged her-\"Good morning, my special girl\"-and the two of them moved about the chores, dancelike. Sometimes Ma sang folk songs or quoted nursery rhymes: \"This little piggy went to market.\" Or she'd swing Kya into a jitterbug, their feet banging the plywood floor until the music of the battery-operated radio died, sounding as if it were singing to itself at the bottom of a barrel. Other mornings Ma spoke about adult things Kya didn't understand, but she figured Ma's words needed somewhere to go, so she absorbed them through her skin, as she poked more wood in the cookstove. Nodding like she knew.Then, the hustle of getting everybody up and fed. Pa not there. He had two settings: silence and shouting. So it was just fine when he slept through, or didn't come home at all.But this morning, Ma had been quiet; her smile lost, her eyes red. She'd tied a white scarf pirate style, low across her forehead, but the purple and yellow edges of a bruise spilled out. Right after breakfast, even before the dishes were washed, Ma had put a few personals in the train case and walked down the road.The next morning,Kya took up her post again on the steps, her dark eyes boring down the lane like a tunnel waiting for a train. The marsh beyond was veiled in fog so low its cushy bottom sat right on the mud. Barefoot, Kya drummed her toes, twirled grass stems at doodlebugs, but a six-year-old can\u00d5t sit long and soon she moseyed onto the tidal flats, sucking sounds pulling at her toes. Squatting at the edge of the clear water, she watched minnows dart between sunspots and shadows.Jodie hollered to her from the palmettos. She stared; maybe he was coming with news. But as he wove through the spiky fronds, she knew by the way he moved, casual, that Ma wasn't home.\"Ya wanta play explorers?\" he asked.\"Ya said ya're too old to play 'splorers.\"\"Nah, I just said that. Never too old. Race ya!\"They tore across the flats, then through the woods toward the beach. She squealed as he overtook her and laughed until they reached the large oak that jutted enormous arms over the sand. Jodie and their older brother, Murph, had hammered a few boards across the branches as a lookout tower and tree fort. Now, much of it was falling in, dangling from rusty nails.Usually if she was allowed to crew at all it was as slave girl, bringing her brothers warm biscuits swiped from Ma's pan.But today Jodie said, \"You can be captain.\"Kya raised her right arm in a charge. \"Run off the Spaniards!\" They broke off stick-swords and crashed through brambles, shouting and stabbing at the enemy.Then-make-believe coming and going easily-she walked to a mossy log and sat. Silently, he joined her. He wanted to say something to get her mind off Ma, but no words came, so they watched the swimming shadows of water striders.Kya returned to the porch steps later and waited for a long time, but, as she looked to the end of the lane, she never cried. Her face was still, her lips a simple thin line under searching eyes. But Ma didn't come back that day either.2.Jodie1952After Ma left, over the next few weeks, Kya's oldest brother and two sisters drifted away too, as if by example. They had endured Pa's red-faced rages, which started as shouts, then escalated into fist-slugs, or backhanded punches, until one by one, they disappeared. They were nearly grown anyway. And later, just as she forgot their ages, she couldn't remember their real names, only that they were called Missy, Murph, and Mandy. On her porch mattress, Kya found a small pile of socks left by her sisters.On the morning when Jodie was the only sibling left, Kya awakened to the clatter-clank and hot grease of breakfast. She dashed into the kitchen, thinking Ma was home frying corn fritters or hoecakes. But it was Jodie, standing at the woodstove, stirring grits. She smiled to hide the letdown, and he patted the top of her head, gently shushing her to be quiet: if they didn't wake Pa, they could eat alone. Jodie didn't know how to make biscuits, and there wasn't any bacon, so he cooked grits and scrambled eggs in lard, and they sat down together, silently exchanging glances and smiles.They washed their dishes fast, then ran out the door toward the marsh, he in the lead. But just then Pa shouted and hobbled toward them. Impossibly lean, his frame seemed to flop about from poor gravity. His molars yellow as an old dog's teeth.Kya looked up at Jodie. \"We can run. Hide in the mossy place.\"\"It's okay. It'll be okay,\" he said.Later, near sunset, Jodie found Kya on the beach staring at the sea. As he stepped up beside her, she didn\u00d5t look at him but kept her eyes on the roiling waves. Still, she knew by the way he spoke that Pa had slugged his face.\"I hafta go, Kya. Can't live here no longer.\"She almost turned to him, but didn't. Wanted to beg him not to leave her alone with Pa, but the words jammed up.\"When you're old enough you'll understand,\" he said. Kya wanted to holler out that she may be young, but she wasn't stupid. She knew Pa was the reason they all left; what she wondered was why no one took her with them. She'd thought of leaving too, but had nowhere to go and no bus money.\"Kya, ya be careful, hear. If anybody comes, don't go in the house. They can get ya there. Run deep in the marsh, hide in the bushes. Always cover yo' tracks; I learned ya how. And ya can hide from Pa, too.\" When she still didn't speak, he said good-bye and strode across the beach to the woods. Just before he stepped into the trees, she finally turned and watched him walk away.\"This little piggy stayed home,\" she said to the waves.Breaking her freeze, she ran to the shack. Shouted his name down the hall, but Jodie's things were already gone, his floor bed stripped bare.She sank onto his mattress, watching the last of that day slide down the wall. Light lingered after the sun, as it does, some of it pooling in the room, so that for a brief moment the lumpy beds and piles of old clothes took on more shape and color than the trees outside.A gnawing hunger-such a mundane thing-surprised her. She walked to the kitchen and stood at the door. All her life the room had been warmed from baking bread, boiling butter beans, or bubbling fish stew. Now, it was stale, quiet, and dark. \"Who's gonna cook?\" she asked out loud. Could have asked, Who's gonna dance? Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.1}, {"asin": "1477665412", "title": "Barely Breathing: The Breathing Series (Volume 2)", "author": "Rebecca Donovan", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 4.95}], "target_asin": "1613216564"}
{"user_id": "AG6WUPW25RDUSVE375VPTNIMWJMQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B000FC1TAS", "title": "Indelible: A Grant County Thriller", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Review \u201cWell\u2013crafted\u2026Slaughter skillfully maintains the tension in the parallel stories.\u201d Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Indelible CD By Karin Slaughter HarperAudio Copyright \u00a9 2004 Karin SlaughterAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780060738341 Chapter One 8:55 A.M. \"Well, look what the cat dragged in,\" Marla Simms bellowed, givingSara a pointed look over her silver-rimmed bifocals. The secretary forthe police station held a magazine in her arthritic hands, but she set itaside, indicating she had plenty of time to talk. Sara forced some cheer into her voice, though she had purposefullytimed her visit for Marla's coffee break. \"Hey, Marla. How're youdoing?\" The old woman stared for a beat, a tinge of disapproval putting acrease in her naturally down-turned lips. Sara forced herself not tosquirm. Marla had taught the children's Sunday school class at thePrimitive Baptist from the day they opened the front doors, and shecould still put the fear of God into anyone in town who'd been bornafter 1952. She kept her eyes locked on Sara. \"Haven't seen you around herein a while.\" \"Hm,\" Sara offered, glancing over Marla's shoulder, trying to seeinto Jeffrey's office. His door was open but he was not behind hisdesk. The squad room was empty, which meant he was probably inthe back. Sara knew she should just walk behind the counter andfind him herself -- she had done it hundreds of times before -- but survivor's instinct kept her from crossing that bridge without first payingthe troll. Marla sat back in her chair, her arms folded. \"Nice day out,\" shesaid, her tone still casual. Sara glanced out the door at Main Street, where heat made the asphaltlook wavy. The air this morning was humid enough to openevery pore on her body. \"Sure is.\" \"And don't you look pretty this morning,\" Marla continued, indicatingthe linen dress Sara had chosen after going through nearlyevery item of clothing in her closet. \"What's the occasion?\" \"Nothing special,\" Sara lied. Before she knew what she was doing,she started to fidget with her briefcase, shifting from one foot to theother like she was four instead of nearly forty. A glimmer of victory flashed in the older woman's eyes. She drewout the silence a bit more before asking, \"How's your mama andthem?\" \"Good,\" Sara answered, trying not to sound too circumspect. Shewasn't naive enough to believe that her private life was no one else'sbusiness -- in a county as small as Grant, Sara could barely sneezewithout the phone ringing from up the street with a helpful \"Blessyou\" -- but she would be damned if she'd make it easy for them togather their information. \"And your sister?\" Sara was about to respond when Brad Stephens saved her by trippingthrough the front door. The young patrolman caught himselfbefore he fell flat on his face, but the momentum popped his hat offhis head and onto the floor at Sara's feet. His gun belt and nightstickflopped under his arms like extra appendages. Behind him, a gaggleof prepubescent children squawked with laughter at his less-than-gracefulentrance. \"Oh,\" Brad said, looking at Sara, then back to the kids, then atSara again. He picked up his hat, brushing it off with more care thanwas warranted. She imagined he could not decide which was moreembarrassing: eight 10-year-olds laughing at his clumsiness or his formerpediatrician fighting an obvious smile of amusement. Apparently, the latter was worse. He turned back to the group, hisvoice deeper than usual as if to assert some authority. \"This, of course,is the station house, where we do business. Police business. Uh, andwe're in the lobby now.\" Brad glanced at Sara. To call the area wherethey stood a lobby was a bit of a stretch. The room was barely ten feetby eight, with a cement block wall opposite the glass door at the entrance.A row of photographs showing various squads in the GrantCounty police force lined the wall to Sara's right, a large portrait in thecenter showing Mac Anders, the only police officer in the history ofthe force who had been killed in the line of duty. Across from the portrait gallery, Marla stood sentry behind a tallbeige laminate counter that separated visitors from the squad room.She was not a naturally short woman, but age had made her so bycrooking her body into a nearly perfect question mark. Her glasseswere usually halfway down the bridge of her nose, and Sara, whowore glasses to read, was always tempted to push them back up. Notthat Sara would ever do such a thing. For all Marla knew about everybodyand their neighbor -- and their dog -- in town, not much wasknown about her. She was a widow with no children. Her husbandhad died in the Second World War. She had always lived on Hemlock,which was two streets over from Sara's parents. She knitted and shetaught Sunday school and worked full-time at the station answeringphones and trying to make sense of the mountains of paperwork.These facts hardly offered great insight into Marla Simms. Still, Saraalways thought there had to be more to the life of a woman who hadlived some eighty-odd years, even if she'd lived all of them in the samehouse where she had been born. Brad continued his tour of the station, pointing to the large, openroom behind Marla. \"Back there's where the detectives and patrolofficers like myself conduct their business ... calls and whatnot. Talkingto witnesses, writing reports, typing stuff into the computer, and,uh ...\" His voice trailed off as he finally noticed he was losing hisaudience. Most of the children could barely see over the counter.Even if they could, thirty empty desks spread out in rows of five withvarious sizes of filing cabinets between them were hardly attention grabbing. Sara imagined the kids were wishing they had stayed inschool today ... Continues... Excerpted from Indelible CD by Karin Slaughter Copyright \u00a9 2004 by Karin Slaughter. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile Past and present are woven seamlessly in this thriller. Narrator Becky Ann Baker's versatile range carries the listener from Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver's youth in Alabama to Dr. Sara Linton's life-altering rape in Atlanta to a murderous standoff in a small-town Georgia police station. When a young man from Tolliver's past (chillingly vocalized as cold and troubled) is determined to bring the chief down, divorced couple Tolliver and Linton must team up to prevent disaster. Baker's delightful characterizations of Tolliver's foul-mouthed mother, good-old-boy mentor, and longtime nemesis bring together the seeds of disaster sown years earlier. J.J.B. \u00a9 AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Karin Slaughter is one of the world\u2019s most popular and acclaimed storytellers. Published in 36 languages, with more than 35 million copies sold across the globe, her sixteen novels include the Grant County and Will Trent books, as well as the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and the instant New York Times bestselling novel Pretty Girls . A native of Georgia, Karin currently lives in Atlanta. Her Will Trent series, Grant County series, and standalone novel Cop Town are all in development for film and television. Becky Ann Baker's work on Broadway includes Titanic and Assassins ;\u00a0among her film credits are Men in Black , A Simple Plan , and Sabrina ; on TV she starred in Freaks and Geeks . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Amazon.com Review Medical examiner Sara Linton and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver make their fourth appearance in this riveting new back-and-forth thriller that grounds a brutal attack by two young men on the Grant County, Georgia police department in a twelve-year-old Alabama murder case that occurred while Sara and Jeffrey were just beginning their tumultuous romance. En route to a beach vacation shortly after they meet, the couple takes a detour to the small town where Jeffrey grew up and began his law enforcement career. But their carefree holiday is interrupted when his best friend from childhood, a fellow cop, is charged with murder after killing a man who broke into his house. Despite his subsequent confession, Jeffrey believes there\u2019s more to the story than Robert is telling him, and when the skeleton of a young woman with whom both Robert and Tolliver were once involved is discovered in a secret cave only they knew about, and Robert admits to her murder too, Tolliver must again confront a past he thought he had long since put behind him. Slaughter unravels a convoluted story deftly and smoothly as the action moves between those long-ago events and the siege of the police station by two young men who are determined to make Jeffrey pay for a crime they believe he committed. Threatening to kill whoever stands between them and their target--including eight children on a school field trip at the station house when the bloody siege begins--they execute a deputy they mistakenly believe is Tolliver. Skillfully blending past and present events and illuminating the equally convoluted relationship between Sara and Jeffrey (who have married and divorced in the intervening years) without interrupting the breathtaking pace of the action or dropping a beat, Slaughter takes this series to a new level of excellence. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From The Washington Post You get a lot of bangs for your bucks in Karin Slaughter's new thriller. Fourteen pages into Indelible, pediatrician Sara Linton and others are taken hostage in the Grant County, Ga., police station, which two gun-wielding intruders have strewn with gore and dead bodies. Just as that imbroglio is raising hairs, Slaughter launches a subplot that occurred a decade earlier, at the beginning of the love affair between Sara and her ex-husband, Jeffrey Tolliver, who is now Grant County's police chief and one of Sara's fellow hostages. Soon this flashback, set in the Alabama town where Jeffrey grew up, turns tense, too: Sara and Jeffrey arrive at the house of his best friend, Robert, shortly after Robert has apparently shot an intruder dead and taken a bullet in the abdomen. From that point on, the narrative switches back and forth from the hostage scene to the investigation of the double shooting, which looks a bit fishy to Sara's medically trained eye. On top of all this, Indelible is a prequel, designed in part to fill in the backgrounds of Sara and Jeffrey, who recur in other Slaughter novels. The question is whether the author does justice to the multiple layers of her material. Almost from the start, I found the flashback the more interesting of the two storylines. Mayhem in a police station, followed by a hostage-taking, may be ideal thriller fare, but one of Slaughter's strengths is her charting of post-sexual-revolution male-female dynamics, and this comes to the fore in the earlier, Alabama sequences. At that stage, Sara and Jeffrey have slept together several times but still hardly know each other, and much of what his friends say about him comes as news to her -- that he went to college, for example. What she does know is that he deserves the nickname his pals greet him with -- Slick -- so much so that she's of two minds about his riposte to her observation that a handsome, randy guy like him must have \"screwed practically every woman in town\": \"They were just place-holders while I waited for you,\" he says. It's a perfect line, especially when delivered by a man who acts on Sara \"like some drug that she could not get enough of,\" and she wants very much to believe him. But he's not Slick for nothing, is he? Their process of getting acquainted becomes even more fraught when Sara and Jeffrey duck into a local cave to escape a rainstorm and discover a human skeleton inside, its skull bashed in such a way as to indicate homicide. Turns out that Jeffrey's old friends -- some of whom are policemen, too -- figure in both cases: the double shooting and the remains in the cave. Just how they are implicated lies at the heart of the mystery that unfolds as the young lovers keep sparring and sizing each other up. For that matter, the novel's two main foci -- past murders and present-day hostage crisis -- are not as discrete as they first appear. The main thread tying them together is all the sleeping around engaged in by the younger generation of Alabama townspeople. (The not-so-subliminal message is that sex is apt to be more powerful -- and have more lasting effects -- than bed-hopping teenagers would like to believe.) Throughout Indelible, Slaughter excels at pitting one strong character against another. A long conversation between Sara and her mother, as Sara gets ready to go off for a weekend with Jeffrey and her mother takes over the packing, epitomizes the blend of love, bossiness, resistance, banter and tenuous compromise that shapes relations between a tough-minded parent and a willful child. And in Slaughter's steady hands, the trajectory of Sara and Jeffrey's off-and-on romance is clear and convincing. Ultimately, though, too much happens in this book. For all its deaths and splattered walls and countdowns toward the moment when the cops will rush their own station house, the hostage crisis gets shortchanged. Maybe Slaughter asked too much of herself in trying to fuse a prequel with an update (the outcome of the present-day crisis sets the stage for a new act in the Sara-Jeffrey relationship). To readers who concentrate on the Alabama murder case, however, Indelible will give considerable pleasure. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"[Slaughter] has been compared to Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell, and for once the hype is justified.... Slaughter's plotting is brilliant, her suspense relentless.\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist This fourth entry in Slaughter's Grant County series features meticulous plotting, a cast full of the walking wounded, and gruesome forensic detail. Small-town pediatrician and part-time coroner Sara Linton stops by the police station to give her ex-husband, Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, her much-practiced speech on why they should not get remarried. Sara still loves Jeffrey, but she continues to suffer from the emotional fallout of his infidelity, which broke up the marriage. But their heart-to-heart is soon interrupted by gunfire as two zombie-eyed, heavily armed 20-year-olds enter the station and open fire. In the tense standoff that follows, Sara flashes back 12 years to when she first met Jeffrey. Frenetically cross-cutting from one time frame to another, the novel intersperses the events that occurred then with the dire circumstances in the present, as multiple police officers lie dead and dying. After a few surprising twists and a head-turning appearance by the series' third lead character, officer Lena Adams, the two story lines converge. What's even more disturbing here than the graphically detailed violence is the creepy atmosphere as Slaughter creates a town, and a world, full of the revenge-seeking victims of child abuse. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly Complex characters with credible relationships underpin this gripping prequel to Slaughter's Blindsighted (2001). Georgia pediatrician/medical examiner Sara Linton is visiting her ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, when two malevolent strangers, hauntingly familiar to Sara, pull out guns at the station house, where several schoolchildren are on a class trip, and bloody mayhem ensues. The action shifts to the past, when new lovers Sara and Jeffrey detour to his hometown on their way to a beach weekend. A nostalgic tour of Jeffrey's youth turns sinister as buried secrets and injustices slowly come to light. An ugly midnight encounter with Jeffrey's sloshed mother sends Sara outside in time to hear gunshots from the neighboring house of Jeffrey's childhood friend Robert, a cop, who's found bleeding, gun in hand, across the bedroom from his dead victim. Sara is grateful to perform the autopsy, knowing there's more than meets the eye in this puzzling crime scene. The couple's budding romance is put to the test as Sara tries to coax answers from tight-lipped Jeffrey, whose silence and suspicious actions nourish her doubts. Slaughter's tightly disciplined rhythm and occasional sly humor keep readers hooked right up to the end. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover The internationally bestselling author \"squarely in the ranks of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs\" ( Publishers Weekly ) shows off her superb talent with this brilliantly conceived, skillfully executed tale of suspense. In Karin Slaughter's exciting new thriller, an officer is shot point-blank in the Grant County police station and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver is wounded, setting off a terrifying hostage situation with medical examiner Sara Linton at the center. Working outside the station, Lena Adams, newly reinstated to the force, and Frank Wallace, Jeffrey's second in command, must try to piece together who the shooter is and how to rescue their friends before Jeffrey dies. For the sins of the past have caught up with Sara and Jeffrey -- with a vengeance ... Deftly interweaving present and past, Slaughter -- dubbed \"the new face of crime\" by Book magazine -- offers another brilliant knife-edge tale of suspense that cements her place among the most outstanding practitioners of crime fiction today. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B004J4WN12", "title": "Fallen: A Novel (Will Trent Book 5)", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Review PRAISE FOR THE CRIME FICTION OF KARIN SLAUGHTER \u201cKarin Slaughter is one of the best crime novelists in America.\u201d \u2014The Washington Post \u201cCrime fiction at its finest.\u201d\u2014Michael Connelly\u00a0\u201cSlaughter writes like a razor . . . better than Cornwell can ever hope to be.\u201d \u2014The Plain Dealer \u201cSlaughter will have you on the edge of your seat.\u201d \u2014The Seattle Post-Intelligencer \u201cOne of the boldest thriller writers working today.\u201d\u2014Tess Gerritsen\u00a0\u201cMove over, Catherine Coulter\u2014Slaughter may be today\u2019s top female suspense writer.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal (starred review) From the Hardcover edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. SATURDAY CHAPTER ONE Faith Mitchell dumped the contents of her purse onto the passenger seat of her Mini, trying to find something to eat.\u00a0 Except for a furry piece of gum and a peanut of dubious origin, there was nothing remotely edible.\u00a0 She thought about the box of nutrition bars in her kitchen pantry, and her stomach made a noise that sounded like a rusty hinge groaning open. The computer seminar she\u2019d attended this morning was supposed to last three hours, but that had stretched into four and a half thanks to the jackass ion the front row who kept asking pointless questions.\u00a0 The Georgia Bureau of Investigation trained its agents more often than any other agency in the region.\u00a0 Statistics and data on criminal activities were constantly being drummed into their heads.\u00a0 They had to be up -to -date on all of the latest technology.\u00a0 They had to qualify at the range twice a year.\u00a0 They ran mock raids and active shooter simulations that were so intense that for weeks after, Faith couldn\u2019t go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without checking shadows in doorways. Usually, she appreciated the agency\u2019s thoroughness.\u00a0 Today, all she could think about was her four-month- old baby, and the promise Faith had made to her mother that she would be back no later than noon.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The clock on the dash read ten after one o\u2019clock when she started the car.\u00a0 Faith mumbled a curse as she pulled out of the parking lot in front of the Panthersville Road headquarters.\u00a0 She used Bluetooth to dial her mother\u2019s number.\u00a0 The car speakers gave back a static-y silence.\u00a0 Faith hung up and dialed again.\u00a0 This time, she got a busy signal.\u00a0\u00a0 Faith tapped her finger on the steering wheel as she listened to the bleating.\u00a0 Her mother had voicemail. Everybody had voicemail.\u00a0 Faith couldn\u2019t remember the last time she\u2019d heard a busy signal on the telephone.\u00a0 She had almost forgotten the sound.\u00a0 There was probably a crossed wire somewhere at the phone company.\u00a0 She hung up and tried the number a third time.\u00a0\u00a0 Still busy.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faith steered with one hand as she checked her Blackberry for an email from her mother.\u00a0 Before Evelyn Mitchell retired, she had been a cop for just shy of four decades.\u00a0 You could say a lot about the Atlanta force, but you couldn\u2019t claim they were behind the times.\u00a0 Evelyn had carried a cell phone back when they were more like purses you strapped around your shoulder.\u00a0 She\u2019d learned how to use email before her daughter had.\u00a0 She\u2019d carried a Blackberry BlackBerry\u00a0 for almost fifteen years.  But, she hadn\u2019t sent a message today.\u00a0\u00a0  Faith checked her cell phone voicemail.\u00a0 She had a saved message from her dentist\u2019s office about making an appointment to get her teeth cleaned, but there was nothing new.\u00a0 She tried her phone at home, thinking maybe her mother had gone there to pick up something for the baby.\u00a0 Faith\u2019s house was just down the road from Evelyn\u2019s.\u00a0 Maybe Emma had run out of diapers.\u00a0 Maybe she\u2019d needed another bottle.\u00a0 Faith listened to the phone ring at her house, then heard her own voice answer, telling callers to leave a message.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She ended the call.\u00a0 Without thinking, she glanced into the back seat.\u00a0 Emma\u2019s empty car seat was there.\u00a0 She could see the pink liner sticking out over the top of the plastic.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cIdiot,\u201d Faith whispered to herself.\u00a0 She dialed her mother\u2019s cell phone number.\u00a0 She held her breath as she counted through three rings.\u00a0 Evelyn\u2019s voicemail picked up.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faith had to clear her throat before she could speak.\u00a0 She was aware of a tremor in her tone.\u00a0 \u201cMom, I\u2019m on my way home.\u00a0 I guess you took Em for a walk \u2026\u201d\u00a0 . . .\u201d\u00a0 Faith looked up at the sky as she merged onto the interstate. \u00a0She was about twenty minutes outside of Atlanta and could see fluffy white clouds draped like scarves around the skinny necks of skyscrapers.\u00a0 \u201cJust call me,\u201d Faith said, worry needling the edge of her brain.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Grocery store.\u00a0 Gas station.\u00a0 Pharmacy.\u00a0 Her mother had a car seat identical to the one in the back of Faith\u2019s car.\u00a0 She was probably out running errands.\u00a0 Faith was over an hour late.\u00a0 Evelyn would\u2019ve taken the baby and \u2026\u00a0 . . .\u00a0 Left Faith a message that she was going to be out.\u00a0 The woman had been on call for the majority of her adult life.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t go to the toilet without letting someone know.\u00a0 Faith and her older brother, Zeke, had joked about it when they were kids.\u00a0 They always knew where their mother was, even when they didn\u2019t want to.\u00a0 Especially when they didn\u2019t want to.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faith stared at the phone in her hand as if it could tell her what was going on.\u00a0 She was aware that she might be letting herself get worked up over nothing.\u00a0 The landline could be out.\u00a0 Her mother wouldn\u2019t know this unless she tried to make a call.\u00a0\u00a0 Her cell phone could be switched off or charging or both.\u00a0\u00a0 Her Blackberry BlackBerry could be in her car or her purse or somewhere she couldn\u2019t hear the tell-telltale vibration.\u00a0 Faith glanced back and forth between the road and her Blackberry BlackBerry as she typed an email to her mother.\u00a0 She spoke the words aloud as she typed\u2014 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cOn-my-way.\u00a0 Sorry-I\u2019m-late.\u00a0 Call-me.\u201d  She sent the email, then tossed the phone onto the seat along with the spilled items from her purse.\u00a0 After a moment\u2019s hesitation, Faith popped the gum into her mouth.\u00a0 She chewed as she drove, ignoring the purse lint clinging to her tongue.\u00a0 She turned on the radio, then snapped it back off.\u00a0 The traffic thinned as she got closer to the city.\u00a0 The clouds moved apart, sending down bright rays of sunshine.\u00a0 The inside of the car began to bake.\u00a0  Ten minutes out, Faith\u2019s nerves were still one edge, and she was sweating from the heat in the car.\u00a0 She cracked the sunroof to let in some air.\u00a0 This was probably a simple case of separation anxiety.\u00a0 She\u2019d been back at work for a little over two months, but still, every morning when Faith left Emma at her mother\u2019s, she felt something akin to a seizure take hold.\u00a0 Her vision blurred.\u00a0 Her heart shook in her chest.\u00a0 Her head buzzed as if a million bees had flown into her ears.\u00a0 She was more irritable than usual at work, especially with her partner, Will Trent, who either had the patience of Job or was setting up a believable alibi for when he finally snapped and strangled her.  Faith couldn\u2019t recall if she had felt this same anxiety with Jeremy, her son, who was now a freshman in college.\u00a0 Faith had been eighteen when she entered the police academy.\u00a0 Jeremy was three years old by then.\u00a0 She had grabbed onto the idea of joining the force as if it was the only life preserver left on the Titanic .\u00a0 Thanks to two minutes of poor judgment in the back of a movie theater and what foreshadowed a lifetime of breathtakingly bad taste in men, Faith had gone straight from puberty to motherhood without any of the usual stops in between.\u00a0 At eighteen, she had relished the idea of earning a steady paycheck so that she could move out of her parents\u2019 house and raise Jeremy the way that she wanted.\u00a0 Going to work every day had been a step toward independence.\u00a0 Leaving him during the day had seemed like a small price to pay.  Now that Faith was thirty-four, with a mortgage, a car payment, and another baby to raise on her own, she wanted nothing more than to move back into her mother\u2019s house so that Evelyn could take care of everything.\u00a0 She wanted to open the refrigerator and see food that she didn\u2019t have to buy.\u00a0 She wanted to turn on the air conditioner in the summer without worrying about having to pay the bill.\u00a0 She wanted to sleep until noon, and then watch TV all day.\u00a0 Hell, while she was at it, she might as well resurrect her father, who\u2019d died eleven years ago, so that he could make her pancakes at breakfast and tell her how pretty she was.  No chance of that now.\u00a0 Evelyn seemed happy to play the role of nanny in her retirement, but Faith was under no illusion that her life was going to get any easier.\u00a0 Her own retirement was almost twenty years away.\u00a0 The Mini had another three years of payments and would be out of warranty well before that.\u00a0 Emma would expect food and clothing for at least the next eighteen years, if not more.\u00a0 And it wasn\u2019t like when Jeremy was a baby and Faith could dress him in mismatched socks and yard sale hand-me-downs.\u00a0 Babies today had to coordinate.\u00a0 They needed BPA-free bottles and certified organic applesauce from kindly Amish farmers.\u00a0 If Jeremy got into the architectural program at Georgia Tech, Faith was looking at six more years of buying books and doing his laundry.\u00a0 Most worryingly, her son had found a serious girlfriend.\u00a0 An older girlfriend with curvy hips and a ticking biological clock.\u00a0 Faith could be a grandmother before she turned thirty-five. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. SATURDAY CHAPTER ONE Faith Mitchell dumped the contents of her purse onto the passenger seat of her Mini, trying to find something to eat.\u00a0 Except for a furry piece of gum and a peanut of dubious origin, there was nothing remotely edible.\u00a0 She thought about the box of nutrition bars in her kitchen pantry, and her stomach made a noise that sounded like a rusty hinge groaning open. The computer seminar she\u2019d attended this morning was supposed to last three hours, but that had stretched into four and a half thanks to the jackass ion the front row who kept asking pointless questions.\u00a0 The Georgia Bureau of Investigation trained its agents more often than any other agency in the region.\u00a0 Statistics and data on criminal activities were constantly being drummed into their heads.\u00a0 They had to be up -to -date on all of the latest technology.\u00a0 They had to qualify at the range twice a year.\u00a0 They ran mock raids and active shooter simulations that were so intense that for weeks after, Faith couldn\u2019t go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without checking shadows in doorways. Usually, she appreciated the agency\u2019s thoroughness.\u00a0 Today, all she could think about was her four-month- old baby, and the promise Faith had made to her mother that she would be back no later than noon. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The clock on the dash read ten after one o\u2019clock when she started the car.\u00a0 Faith mumbled a curse as she pulled out of the parking lot in front of the Panthersville Road headquarters.\u00a0 She used Bluetooth to dial her mother\u2019s number.\u00a0 The car speakers gave back a static-y silence.\u00a0 Faith hung up and dialed again.\u00a0 This time, she got a busy signal.\u00a0  Faith tapped her finger on the steering wheel as she listened to the bleating.\u00a0 Her mother had voicemail. Everybody had voicemail.\u00a0 Faith couldn\u2019t remember the last time she\u2019d heard a busy signal on the telephone.\u00a0 She had almost forgotten the sound.\u00a0 There was probably a crossed wire somewhere at the phone company.\u00a0 She hung up and tried the number a third time.\u00a0  Still busy. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faith steered with one hand as she checked her Blackberry for an email from her mother.\u00a0 Before Evelyn Mitchell retired, she had been a cop for just shy of four decades.\u00a0 You could say a lot about the Atlanta force, but you couldn\u2019t claim they were behind the times.\u00a0 Evelyn had carried a cell phone back when they were more like purses you strapped around your shoulder.\u00a0 She\u2019d learned how to use email before her daughter had.\u00a0 She\u2019d carried a Blackberry BlackBerry\u00a0 for almost fifteen years. But, she hadn\u2019t sent a message today.\u00a0  Faith checked her cell phone voicemail.\u00a0 She had a saved message from her dentist\u2019s office about making an appointment to get her teeth cleaned, but there was nothing new.\u00a0 She tried her phone at home, thinking maybe her mother had gone there to pick up something for the baby.\u00a0 Faith\u2019s house was just down the road from Evelyn\u2019s.\u00a0 Maybe Emma had run out of diapers.\u00a0 Maybe she\u2019d needed another bottle.\u00a0 Faith listened to the phone ring at her house, then heard her own voice answer, telling callers to leave a message. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She ended the call.\u00a0 Without thinking, she glanced into the back seat.\u00a0 Emma\u2019s empty car seat was there.\u00a0 She could see the pink liner sticking out over the top of the plastic.\u00a0  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cIdiot,\u201d Faith whispered to herself.\u00a0 She dialed her mother\u2019s cell phone number.\u00a0 She held her breath as she counted through three rings.\u00a0 Evelyn\u2019s voicemail picked up. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faith had to clear her throat before she could speak.\u00a0 She was aware of a tremor in her tone.\u00a0 \u201cMom, I\u2019m on my way home.\u00a0 I guess you took Em for a walk \u2026\u201d\u00a0 . . .\u201d\u00a0 Faith looked up at the sky as she merged onto the interstate. \u00a0She was about twenty minutes outside of Atlanta and could see fluffy white clouds draped like scarves around the skinny necks of skyscrapers.\u00a0 \u201cJust call me,\u201d Faith said, worry needling the edge of her brain. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Grocery store.\u00a0 Gas station.\u00a0 Pharmacy.\u00a0 Her mother had a car seat identical to the one in the back of Faith\u2019s car.\u00a0 She was probably out running errands.\u00a0 Faith was over an hour late.\u00a0 Evelyn would\u2019ve taken the baby and \u2026\u00a0 . . .\u00a0 Left Faith a message that she was going to be out.\u00a0 The woman had been on call for the majority of her adult life.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t go to the toilet without letting someone know.\u00a0 Faith and her older brother, Zeke, had joked about it when they were kids.\u00a0 They always knew where their mother was, even when they didn\u2019t want to.\u00a0 Especially when they didn\u2019t want to. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Faith stared at the phone in her hand as if it could tell her what was going on.\u00a0 She was aware that she might be letting herself get worked up over nothing.\u00a0 The landline could be out.\u00a0 Her mother wouldn\u2019t know this unless she tried to make a call.\u00a0\u00a0 Her cell phone could be switched off or charging or both.\u00a0\u00a0 Her Blackberry BlackBerry could be in her car or her purse or somewhere she couldn\u2019t hear the tell-telltale vibration.\u00a0 Faith glanced back and forth between the road and her Blackberry BlackBerry as she typed an email to her mother.\u00a0 She spoke the words aloud as she typed\u2014 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cOn-my-way.\u00a0 Sorry-I\u2019m-late.\u00a0 Call-me.\u201d She sent the email, then tossed the phone onto the seat along with the spilled items from her purse.\u00a0 After a moment\u2019s hesitation, Faith popped the gum into her mouth.\u00a0 She chewed as she drove, ignoring the purse lint clinging to her tongue.\u00a0 She turned on the radio, then snapped it back off.\u00a0 The traffic thinned as she got closer to the city.\u00a0 The clouds moved apart, sending down bright rays of sunshine.\u00a0 The inside of the car began to bake.  Ten minutes out, Faith\u2019s nerves were still one edge, and she was sweating from the heat in the car.\u00a0 She cracked the sunroof to let in some air.\u00a0 This was probably a simple case of separation anxiety.\u00a0 She\u2019d been back at work for a little over two months, but still, every morning when Faith left Emma at her mother\u2019s, she felt something akin to a seizure take hold.\u00a0 Her vision blurred.\u00a0 Her heart shook in her chest.\u00a0 Her head buzzed as if a million bees had flown into her ears.\u00a0 She was more irritable than usual at work, especially with her partner, Will Trent, who either had the patience of Job or was setting up a believable alibi for when he finally snapped and strangled her. Faith couldn\u2019t recall if she had felt this same anxiety with Jeremy, her son, who was now a freshman in college.\u00a0 Faith had been eighteen when she entered the police academy.\u00a0 Jeremy was three years old by then.\u00a0 She had grabbed onto the idea of joining the force as if it was the only life preserver left on the Titanic .\u00a0 Thanks to two minutes of poor judgment in the back of a movie theater and what foreshadowed a lifetime of breathtakingly bad taste in men, Faith had gone straight from puberty to motherhood without any of the usual stops in between.\u00a0 At eighteen, she had relished the idea of earning a steady paycheck so that she could move out of her parents\u2019 house and raise Jeremy the way that she wanted.\u00a0 Going to work every day had been a step toward independence.\u00a0 Leaving him during the day had seemed like a small price to pay. Now that Faith was thirty-four, with a mortgage, a car payment, and another baby to raise on her own, she wanted nothing more than to move back into her mother\u2019s house so that Evelyn could take care of everything.\u00a0 She wanted to open the refrigerator and see food that she didn\u2019t have to buy.\u00a0 She wanted to turn on the air conditioner in the summer without worrying about having to pay the bill.\u00a0 She wanted to sleep until noon, and then watch TV all day.\u00a0 Hell, while she was at it, she might as well resurrect her father, who\u2019d died eleven years ago, so that he could make her pancakes at breakfast and tell her how pretty she was. No chance of that now.\u00a0 Evelyn seemed happy to play the role of nanny in her retirement, but Faith was under no illusion that her life was going to get any easier.\u00a0 Her own retirement was almost twenty years away.\u00a0 The Mini had another three years of payments and would be out of warranty well before that.\u00a0 Emma would expect food and clothing for at least the next eighteen years, if not more.\u00a0 And it wasn\u2019t like when Jeremy was a baby and Faith could dress him in mismatched socks and yard sale hand-me-downs.\u00a0 Babies today had to coordinate.\u00a0 They needed BPA-free bottles and certified organic applesauce from kindly Amish farmers.\u00a0 If Jeremy got into the architectural program at Georgia Tech, Faith was looking at six more years of buying books and doing his laundry.\u00a0 Most worryingly, her son had found a serious girlfriend.\u00a0 An older girlfriend with curvy hips and a ticking biological clock.\u00a0 Faith could be a grandmother before s... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Karin Slaughter is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of eleven thrillers, including Broken, Undone, Fractured, Beyond Reach, Triptych, and Faithless . She is a native of Georgia. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \u201cA complex, gripping and deadly serious novel that reflects anew Slaughter\u2019s abundant talent.\u201d \u2014The Washington Post \u201cAn amazing effort . . . This is [Karin] Slaughter\u2019s best book to date, and readers unfamiliar with her work will find this one a perfect place to begin.\u201d\u2014Associated Press\u201cAn absolute master . . . Slaughter creates some wonderfully complex and mature female characters, a distinctive achievement in the world of thrillers.\u201d \u2014Chicago Tribune \u201cSlaughter has always known how to pace the suspense in her stellar crime novels, but she really outdoes herself here. . . . [She] reveals the heart and soul of her characters within a highly choreographed, unrelentingly suspenseful plot.\u201d\u2014 Booklist (starred review) -- Booklist (starred review)PRAISE FOR THE CRIME FICTION OF KARIN SLAUGHTER  \"Karin Slaughter is one of the best crime novelists in America.\"\"--The Washington Post \" \"Crime fiction at its finest.\"--Michael Connelly \"Slaughter writes like a razor . . . better than Cornwell can ever hope to be.\"\"--The Plain Dealer\" \"Slaughter will have you on the edge of your seat.\"\"--The Seattle Post-Intelligencer\" \"One of the boldest thriller writers working today.\"--Tess Gerritsen \"Move over, Catherine Coulter--Slaughter may be today's top female suspense writer.\" --\"Library Journal\" (starred review) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "B000FCKC38", "title": "Faithless: A Novel (Grant County Book 5)", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Review \"Georgia medical examiner Sara Linton returns in Slaughter's Grant County crime thriller series, and this time she's hot on the trail of a demented killer who buries teenage girls alive.... Slaughter's fifth Grant County case offers tough love, suspenseful spadework and life-affirming vigor.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly \" Faithless , Karin Slaughter's fifth novel, confirms her at the summit of the school of writers specialising in forensic medicine and terror, a field which includes Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs.... Slaughter\u2019s characters talk in believable dialogue, She\u2019s excellent at portraying the undertones and claustrophobia of communities where everyone knows everyone else\u2019s business, and even better at creating an atmosphere of lurking evil.\"\u2014 The Times , London\"[Karin Slaughter is] one of the best crime novelists in America.... Her novels smolder with reality.\"\u2014 Washington Post \"The pleasure of Slaughter's Grant County series\u2014this is the fifth installment\u2014rests in how the characters deal simultaneously with their messy personal lives and some fairly horrific crimes.\"\u2014 San Francisco Chronicle From the Hardcover edition. From Booklist Slaughter's dark, forensic-driven Grant County series of crime novels has always drawn a thin line between the members of the law-enforcement team and the victims of the crimes being investigated. The title of the fifth entry in the series reflects both the marital difficulties of coroner Sara Linton and her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, and the label affixed to certain willful members of a religious cult. Jeffrey makes a grisly discovery in the woods when he stumbles over a metal pipe. A young woman was buried alive in a wooden crate for several days and appears to have died of asphyxiation. But Sara's autopsy reveals a far different scenario. Jeffrey and officer Lena Adams' investigation leads to a farm owned by the Church of the Greater Good, which appears to have used burial as a form of punishment before. Meanwhile, Lena finds her own sick relationship with an abusive lover mirrored in the marriage of a former cult member who has damning information but is too afraid to disclose it for fear of provoking another vicious beating from her husband. Slaughter cannily incorporates any number of women's issues--from the difficult work of rebuilding a ruined relationship to finally figuring out when to call it quits--within a compulsively readable narrative. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile Buried alive in a box underground, Abbie Ward is found--dead--by Sara Linton, a medical examiner, and her ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver. Ward's family owns the soybean farm in Grant County; they're fundamentalist Christians who let their foreman, Cole, run the farm and family with an iron hand. Francie Swift reads each word with an intensity that drives the plot forward and keeps the suspense building. Linton and Tolliver work hard to solve this mysterious death as they face down characters who refuse to talk about it. Swift brings Slaughter's characters to life with mind-numbing precision and never-ending wonder at the brutality of man. M.B.K. \u00a9 AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Sara Linton stood at the front door of her parents' house holding so many plastic grocery bags in her hands that she couldn't feel her fingers. Using her elbow, she tried to open the door but ended up smacking her shoulder into the glass pane. She edged back and pressed her foot against the handle, but the door still would not budge. Finally, she gave up and knocked with her forehead.Through the wavy glass, she watched her father making his way down the hallway. He opened the door with an uncharacteristic scowl on his face.\"Why didn't you make two trips?\" Eddie demanded, taking some of the bags from her.\"Why is the door locked?\"\"Your car's less than fifteen feet away.\"\"Dad,\" Sara countered. \"Why is the door locked?\"He was looking over her shoulder. \"Your car is filthy.\" He put the bags down on the floor. \"You think you can handle two trips to the kitchen with these?\"Sara opened her mouth to answer, but he was already walking down the front steps. She asked, \"Where are you going?\"\"To wash your car.\"\"It's fifty degrees out.\"He turned and gave her a meaningful look. \"Dirt sticks no matter the climate.\" He sounded like a Shakespearean actor instead of a plumber from rural Georgia.By the time she had formed a response, he was already inside the garage.Sara stood on the porch as her father came back out with the requisite supplies to wash her car. He hitched up his sweatpants as he knelt to fill the bucket with water. Sara recognized the pants from high school--her high school; she had worn them for track practice.\"You gonna just stand there letting the cold in?\" Cathy asked, pulling Sara inside and closing the door.Sara bent down so that her mother could kiss her on the cheek. Much to Sara's dismay, she had been a good foot taller than her mother since the fifth grade. While Tessa, Sara's younger sister, had inherited their mother's petite build, blond hair and effortless poise, Sara looked like a neighbor's child who had come for lunch one afternoon and decided to stay.Cathy bent down to pick up some of the grocery bags, then seemed to think better of it. \"Get these, will you?\"Sara scooped all eight bags into her hands, risking her fingers again. \"What's wrong?\" she asked, thinking her mother looked a little under the weather.\"Isabella,\" Cathy answered, and Sara suppressed a laugh. Her aunt Bella was the only person Sara knew who traveled with her own stock of liquor.\"Rum?\"Cathy whispered, \"Tequila,\" the same way she might say \"Cancer.\"Sara cringed in sympathy. \"Has she said how long she's staying?\"\"Not yet,\" Cathy replied. Bella hated Grant County and had not visited since Tessa was born. Two days ago, she had shown up with three suitcases in the back of her convertible Mercedes and no explanations.Normally, Bella would not have been able to get away with any sort of secrecy, but in keeping with the new \"Don't ask, don't tell\" ethos of the Linton family, no one had pressed her for an explanation. So much had changed since Tessa was attacked last year. They were all still shell-shocked, though no one seemed to want to talk about it. In a split second, Tessa's assailant had altered not just Tessa but the entire family. Sara often wondered if any of them would ever fully recover.Sara asked, \"Why was the door locked?\"\"Must've been Tessa,\" Cathy said, and for just a moment her eyes watered.\"Mama-- \"\"Go on in,\" Cathy interrupted, indicating the kitchen. \"I'll be there in a minute.\"Sara shifted the bags and walked down the hallway, glancing at the pictures that lined the walls. No one could go from the front door to the back without getting a pictorial view of the Linton girls' formative years. Tessa, of course, looked beautiful and slim in most of them. Sara was never so lucky. There was a particularly hideous photo of Sara in summer camp back in the eighth grade that she would have ripped off the wall if her mother let her get away with it. Sara stood in a boat wearing a bathing suit that looked like a piece of black construction paper pinned to her bony shoulders. Freckles had broken out along her nose, giving her skin a less than pleasing orange cast. Her red hair had dried in the sun and looked like a clown Afro.\"Darling!\" Bella enthused, throwing her arms wide as Sara entered the kitchen. \"Look at you!\" she said, as if this was a compliment. Sara knew full well she wasn't at her best. She had rolled out of bed an hour ago and not even bothered to comb her hair. Being her father's daughter, the shirt she wore was the one she had slept in and her sweatpants from the track team in college were only slightly less vintage. Bella, by contrast, was wearing a silky blue dress that had probably cost a fortune. Diamond earrings sparkled in her ears, the many rings she wore on her fingers glinting in the sun streaming through the kitchen windows. As usual, her makeup and hair were perfect, and she looked gorgeous even at eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning.Sara said, \"I'm sorry I haven't been by earlier.\"\"Feh.\" Her aunt waved off the apology as she sat down. \"Since when do you do your mama's shopping?\"\"Since she's been stuck at home entertaining you for the last two days.\" Sara put the bags on the counter, rubbing her fingers to encourage the circulation to return.\"I'm not that hard to entertain,\" Bella said. \"It's your mother who needs to get out more.\"\"With tequila?\"Bella smiled mischievously. \"She never could hold her liquor. I'm convinced that's the only reason she married your father.\"Sara laughed as she put the milk in the refrigerator. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw a plate piled high with chicken, ready for frying.Bella provided, \"We snapped some greens last night.\"\"Lovely,\" Sara mumbled, thinking this was the best news she had heard all week. Cathy's green bean casserole was the perfect companion to her fried chicken. \"How was church?\"\"A little too fire and brimstone for me,\" Bella confessed, taking an orange out of the bowl on the table. \"Tell me about your life. Anything interesting happening?\"\"Same old same old,\" Sara told her, sorting through the cans.Bella peeled the orange, sounding disappointed when she said, \"Well, sometimes routine can be comforting.\"Sara made a \"hm\" sound as she put a can of soup on the shelf above the stove.\"Very comforting.\"\"Hm,\" Sara repeated, knowing exactly where this was going.When Sara was in medical school at Emory University in Atlanta, she had briefly lived with her aunt Bella. The late-night parties, the drinking and the constant flow of men had finally caused a split. Sara had to get up at five in the morning to attend classes, not to mention the fact that she needed her nights quiet so that she could study. To her credit, Bella had tried to limit her social life, but in the end they had agreed it was best for Sara to get a place of her own. Things had been cordial until Bella had suggested Sara look into one of the units at the retirement home down on Clairmont Road.Cathy came back into the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She moved the soup can Sara had shelved, pushing her out of the way in the process. \"Did you get everything on the list?\"\"Except the cooking sherry,\" Sara told her, sitting down opposite Bella. \"Did you know you can't buy alcohol on Sunday?\"\"Yes,\" Cathy said, making the word sound like an accusation. \"That's why I told you to go to the store last night.\"\"I'm sorry,\" Sara apologized. She took a slice of orange from her aunt. \"I was dealing with an insurance company out west until eight o'clock. It was the only time we could talk.\"\"You're a doctor,\" Bella stated the obvious. \"Why on earth do you have to talk to insurance companies?\"\"Because they don't want to pay for the tests I order.\"\"Isn't that their job?\"Sara shrugged. She had finally broken down and hired a woman full-time to jump through the various hoops the insurance companies demanded, but still, two to three hours of every day Sara spent at the children's clinic were wasted filling out tedious forms or talking to, sometimes yelling at, company supervisors on the phone. She had started going in an hour earlier to try to keep on top of it, but nothing seemed to make a dent.\"Ridiculous,\" Bella murmured around a slice of orange. She was well into her sixties, but as far as Sara knew, she had never been sick a day in her life. Perhaps there was something to be said for chain-smoking and drinking tequila until dawn after all.Cathy rummaged through the bags, asking, \"Did you get sage?\"\"I think so.\" Sara stood to help her find it but Cathy shooed her away. \"Where's Tess?\"\"Church,\" Cathy answered. Sara knew better than to question her mother's disapproving tone. Obviously, Bella knew better, too, though she raised an eyebrow at Sara as she handed her another slice of orange. Tessa had passed on attending the Primitive Baptist, where Cathy had gone since she and Bella were children, choosing instead to visit a smaller church in a neighboring county for her spiritual needs. Under normal circumstances Cathy would have been glad to know at least one of her daughters wasn't a godless heathen, but there was obviously something that bothered her about Tessa's choic... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Karin Slaughter is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Beyond Reach and A Faint Cold Fear , which was named an International Book of the Month Club selection; she contributed to and edited Like a Charm. She is a native of Georgia, where she currently lives and is working on her next novel, which Delacorte Press will publish in 2010. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly Georgia medical examiner Sara Linton returns in Slaughter's Grant County crime thriller series (Indelible ), and this time she's hot on the trail of a demented killer who buries teenage girls alive. Out in the woods chatting about past infidelities, Sara and ex-husband/lover Jeffrey discover a young girl buried in a grotesque coffin, dead despite a breathing pipe extending to the surface. The victim is soon identified as Abigail Bennett, a member of the Holy Grown soybean farming collective, a group curiously unfazed to learn a daughter was poisoned. Suspicion blooms around Holy Grown's many farmhands, mostly ex-felons on work release, but then centers on the parishioners who congregate at the Church for the Greater Good, a local congregation run by a shifty minister. Another shallow grave, physical violence and another girl's disappearance lead Sara, Jeffrey and assisting detective Lena Adams back to the Bible-thumpers and their unholy dealings. Issues of abortion, domestic abuse and forgiveness afford these recurring female characters three-dimensional humanity, nicely offsetting Slaughter's patented grim forensic detailing. Slaughter's fifth Grant County case offers tough love, suspenseful spadework and life-affirming vigor. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B000FC11OC", "title": "A Faint Cold Fear: A Grant County Thriller", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Review \u201cThis is one of those rare books that keeps delivering surprises right up to the very last page.\u201d From the Back Cover Gillian Flynn says, \"Karin Slaughter is simply one of the best thriller writers working today.\" An apparent student suicide has brought medical examiner Sara Linton to the local college campus, along with her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver. But a horribly mutilated corpse yields up few answers. And a suspicious rash of subsequent \"suicides\" suggests that a different kind of terror is stalking the youth of Heartsdale, Georgia\u2014a nightmare that is coming to prey on Sara Linton's loved ones. A small town is being transformed into a killing ground. And the key to a sadistic murderer's motive and identity may be held in the unsteady hands of a campus security guard\u2014a former police detective driven from the force by the hellish memories that will never leave her. Lena Adams survived the unthinkable and has paid a devastating price. Now the survival of future victims may depend upon her ... when she can barely protect herself. --This text refers to the mass_market edition. About the Author Karin Slaughter is the author of more than twenty instant New York Times bestselling novels, including the Edgar\u2013nominated Cop Town and standalone novels Pretty Girls , The Good Daughter , and Pieces of Her . She is published in 120 countries with more than 40 million copies sold across the globe. Pieces of Her is a Netflix original series starring Toni Collette, and False Witness , the Grant County, and Will Trent series are in development for television. Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project\u2014a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, she lives in Atlanta. --This text refers to the mass_market edition. From the Inside Flap Gillian Flynn says, \"Karin Slaughter is simply one of the best thriller writers working today.\" An apparent student suicide has brought medical examiner Sara Linton to the local college campus, along with her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver. But a horribly mutilated corpse yields up few answers. And a suspicious rash of subsequent \"suicides\" suggests that a different kind of terror is stalking the youth of Heartsdale, Georgia--a nightmare that is coming to prey on Sara Linton's loved ones. A small town is being transformed into a killing ground. And the key to a sadistic murderer's motive and identity may be held in the unsteady hands of a campus security guard--a former police detective driven from the force by the hellish memories that will never leave her. Lena Adams survived the unthinkable and has paid a devastating price. Now the survival of future victims may depend upon her ... when she can barely protect herself. --Michael Connelly --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. A Faint Cold Fear By Karin Slaughter Sound Library Copyright \u00a9 2003 Karin SlaughterAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780792730651 Chapter One Sara Linton stared at the entrance to the Dairy Queen, watching hervery pregnant sister walk out with a cup of chocolate-covered icecream in each hand. As Tessa crossed the parking lot, the windpicked up, and her purple dress rose above her knees. She struggled tokeep the jumper down without spilling the ice cream, and Sara couldhear her cursing as she got closer to the car. Sara tried not to laugh as she leaned over to open the door, asking,\"Need help?\" \"No,\" Tessa said, wedging her body into the car. She settled in, handingSara her ice cream. \"And you can shut up laughing at me.\" Sara winced as her sister kicked off her sandals and propped her barefeet on the dashboard. The BMW 330i was less than two weeks old, andTessa had already left a bag of Goobers to melt in the backseat andspilled an orange Fanta on the carpet in the front. Had Tessa not beennearly eight months pregnant, Sara would have strangled her. Sara asked, \"What took you so long?\" \"I had to pee.\" \"Again?\" \"No, I just like being in the bathroom at the damn Dairy Queen,\"Tessa snapped. She fanned her hand in front of her face. \"Jesus, it's hot.\" Sara kept her mouth shut as she turned up the air-conditioning. As adoctor, she knew that Tessa was merely a victim of her own hormones,but there were times when Sara thought that the best thing for all concernedwould be to lock Tessa in a box and not open it until they heard ababy crying. \"That place was packed,\" Tessa managed around a mouthful ofchocolate syrup. \"Goddamn, shouldn't all those people be at church orsomething?\" \"Hm,\" Sara said. \"The whole place was filthy. Look at this parking lot,\" Tessa said,swooping her spoon in the air. \"People just dump their trash here anddon't even care about who has to pick it up. Like they think the trashfairy's gonna do it or something.\" Sara murmured some words of agreement, eating her ice cream asTessa continued a litany of complaints about everyone in the DairyQueen, from the man who was talking on his cell phone to the womanwho waited in line for ten minutes and then couldn't decide what shewanted when she got to the counter. After a while Sara zoned out, staringat the parking lot, thinking about the busy week she had ahead of her. Several years ago Sara had taken on the part-time job of county coronerto help buy out her retiring partner at the Heartsdale Children'sClinic, and lately Sara's work at the morgue was playing havoc with herschedule at the clinic. Normally the county job did not require much ofSara's time, but a court appearance had taken her out of the clinic fortwo days last week, and she was going to have to make up for it thisweek by putting in overtime. Increasingly, Sara's work at the morgue was infringing on clinic time,and she knew that in a couple of years she would have to make a choicebetween the two. When the time came, the decision would be a hard one.The medical examiner's job was a challenge, one Sara had sorely neededthirteen years ago when she had left Atlanta and moved back to GrantCounty. Part of her thought her brain would atrophy without the constantobstacles presented by forensic medicine. Still, there was somethingrestorative about treating children, and Sara, who could not have childrenof her own, knew that she would miss the contact. She vacillateddaily on which job was better. Generally, a bad day at one made theother look ideal. \"Getting on up there!\" Tessa screeched, loud enough to get Sara'sattention. \"I'm thirty-four, not fifty. What the hell kind of thing is thatfor a nurse to say to a pregnant woman?\" Sara stared at her sister. \"What?\" \"Have you heard a word I've said?\" She tried to sound convincing. \"Yes. Of course I have.\" Tessa frowned. \"You're thinking about Jeffrey, aren't you?\" Sara was surprised by the question. For once her ex-husband had beenthe last thing on her mind. \"No.\" \"Sara, don't lie to me,\" Tessa countered. \"Everybody in town sawthat sign girl up at the station Friday.\" \"She was lettering the new police car,\" Sara answered, feeling a warmflush come to her cheeks. Tessa gave a disbelieving look. \"Wasn't that his excuse the last time?\" Sara did not answer. She could still remember the day she'd comehome early from work to find Jeffrey in bed with the owner of the localsign shop. The whole Linton family was both amazed and irritated thatSara was dating Jeffrey again, and while Sara for the most part sharedtheir sentiments, she felt incapable of making a clean break. Logic eludedher where Jeffrey was concerned. Tessa warned, \"You just need to be careful with him. Don't let him gettoo comfortable.\" \"I'm not an idiot.\" \"Sometimes you are.\" \"Well, you are, too,\" Sara shot back, feeling foolish even before thewords came out of her mouth. But for the whir of the air-conditioning, the car was quiet. FinallyTessa offered, \"You should've said, 'I know you are, but what am I?'\" Sara wanted to laugh it off, but she was too irritated. \"Tessie, it's noneof your business.\" Tessa barked a loud laugh that rattled in Sara's ears. \"Well, hell,honey, that's never stopped anybody before. I'm sure damn Marla Simmswas on the phone before the little bitch even got out of her truck.\" \"Don't call her that.\" Tessa waved her spoon in the air again ... Continues... Excerpted from A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter Copyright \u00a9 2003 by Karin Slaughter. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile The third in the Grant County series is set in a small town in Georgia. Sara, the central character of the story, is the medical examiner of Heartsdale. In this story much of the plot is woven around people who are integral members of Sara's life. Dana Ivey does a superb job of character identification through her variations in voice, which provide subtle insight into the characters' struggles. The story is not without graphic description. However, a complex plot and conclusion make this an interesting listen. S.K.P. \u00a9 AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the cassette edition. From Booklist Slaughter returns with the third riveting entry in her Grant County series, in which her lead characters seem to suffer as much as the victims of the horrific crimes they investigate. County coroner Sara Linton arrives at a crime scene with her sister in tow. She consults with her ex-husband, Detective Jeffrey Tolliver, and Lena Adams, a former policewoman who jumped ship rather than undergo psychological counseling and is now employed as part of the security force for the local college. Within minutes, they determine that the victim jumped off a bridge and had recently slashed his wrists and undergone genital piercing. But their investigation is interrupted by a devastating discovery--Sara's heavily pregnant sister has been stabbed. Jeffrey, Sara, and Lena join forces to determine whether the events are related, but their work is fraught with interpersonal difficulties, and their small town, once a safe haven, starts to seem like a claustrophobic and terrifying place. Slaughter knows how to ratchet up the psychological tension in a compelling plot with an unexpected twist. And Lena is a fascinating character, in thrall to a dark compulsion to play out her fears in unnerving sex games. Chilling and addictive reading. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the cassette edition. From Publishers Weekly In the coldly captivating tradition of Cornwell and Reichs, Slaughter (Blindsighted; Kisscut) returns to Grant County, Ga., to offer a third installment in the adventures of smalltown pediatrician and part-time medical examiner Sara Linton. Called in to investigate the apparent suicide of a male Grant Tech student, Sara brings along her pregnant sister, Tessa, who wanders away from the scene and is brutally attacked. The distraught Sara must work side by side with her ex-husband, Det. Jeffrey Tolliver, whom she loves despite his past infidelity, but it's Lena Adams, formerly a cop and now a campus security guard, whose story the novel follows most closely. Still mourning the murder of her sister and recovering from her own torture and rape by the same man, Lena is looked on with suspicion by her ex-boss, Jeffrey. With reason: she's hiding a few key facts. The dead boy's mother is her therapist and Lena is involved with an abusive young man with a shady past. Campus gossip Richard Carter further confuses investigators; meanwhile, police discover the bodies of two more students, their deaths potentially suicides but more likely murder. Slaughter provides grisly variations on the themes of sibling rivalry, sexual abuse and campus politics in a story not for the faint of heart. Readers who can stomach gruesome details and like fitting together multiple stories of physical and psychological abuse will savor the way Slaughter can evoke sympathy for perverse, even criminal, behavior by tracing its origins, and those who make it through the complexities and the gore will be rewarded with a satisfyingly chilling ending.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the cassette edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B005X0JUBW", "title": "Criminal (with bonus novella Snatched): A Novel (Will Trent Book 6)", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. oneAugust 15, 1974LUCY BENNETTA cinnamon brown Oldsmobile Cutlass crawled up Edgewood Avenue, the windows lowered, the driver hunched down in his seat. The lights from the console showed narrow, beady eyes tracing along the line of girls standing under the street sign. Jane. Mary. Lydia. The car stopped. Predictably, the man tilted up his chin toward Kitty. She trotted over, adjusting her miniskirt as she navigated her spiked heels across the uneven asphalt. Two weeks ago, when Juice had first brought Kitty onto the corner, she\u2019d told the other girls she was sixteen, which probably meant fifteen, though she looked no older than twelve.They had all hated her on sight.Kitty leaned down into the open window of the car. Her stiff vinyl skirt tipped up like the bottom of a bell. She always got picked first, which was becoming a problem that everyone but Juice could see. Kitty got special favors. She could talk men into doing anything. The girl was fresh, childlike, though like all of them, she carried a kitchen knife in her purse and knew how to use it. Nobody wanted to do what they were doing, but to have another girl\u2014a newer girl\u2014picked over them hurt just as much as if they were all standing on the sidelines at the debutante ball.Inside the Oldsmobile, the transaction was quickly negotiated, no haggling because what was on offer was still worth the price. Kitty made the signal to Juice, waited for his nod, then got into the car. The muffler chugged exhaust as the Olds made a wide turn onto a narrow side street. The car shook once as the gear was shoved into park. The driver\u2019s hand flew up, clamped around the back of Kitty\u2019s head, and she disappeared.Lucy Bennett turned away, looking up the dark, soulless avenue. No headlights coming. No traffic. No business. Atlanta wasn\u2019t a nighttime town. The last person to leave the Equitable building usually turned off the lights, but Lucy could see the bulbs from the Flatiron glowing clear across Central City Park. If she squinted hard enough, she could find the familiar green of the C&S sign that anchored the business district. The New South. Progress through commerce. The City Too Busy to Hate.If there were men out walking these streets tonight, it was with no amount of good on their minds.Jane lit a smoke, then tucked the pack back into her purse. She wasn\u2019t the kind to share, but she was certainly the kind to take. Her eyes met Lucy\u2019s. The dead in them was hard to look at. Jane must\u2019ve felt the same. She quickly glanced away.Lucy shivered, even though it was the middle of August, heat wafting off the pavement like smoke from a fire. Her feet were sore. Her back ached. Her head was pounding like a metronome. Her gut felt like she\u2019d swallowed a truckload of concrete. Cotton filled her mouth. Her hands felt the constant prick of pins and needles. A clump of her blonde hair had come out in the sink this morning. She had turned nineteen two days ago and already she was an old woman.In the side street, the brown Olds shook again. Kitty\u2019s head came up. She wiped her mouth as she got out of the car. No dawdling. No giving the john time to reconsider his purchase. The car drove away before she could shut the door, and Kitty teetered for a moment on the high heels, looking lost, afraid, and then angry. They were all angry. Fury was their refuge, their comfort, the only thing that they could truly call their own.Lucy watched Kitty pick her way back toward the corner. She gave Juice the cash, trying to keep her forward momentum, but he caught her arm to make her stop. Kitty spat on the sidewalk, trying to look like she wasn\u2019t terrified as Juice unfolded the wad of cash, counted off each bill. Kitty stood there, waiting. They all waited.Finally, Juice lifted his chin. The money was good. Kitty took her place back in the line. She didn\u2019t look at any of the other girls. She just stared blankly into the street, waiting for the next car to roll up, waiting for the next man who would either give her a nod or pass her by. It\u2019d taken two days, tops, for her eyes to develop the same dead look as the rest of the girls. What was going through her mind? Probably the same as Lucy, that familiar chant that rocked her to sleep every night: When-will-this-be-over? When-will-this-be-over? When-will-this-be-over?Lucy had been fifteen once. From this distance, she could barely remember that girl. Passing notes in class. Giggling about boys. Rushing home from school every day to watch her soap. Dancing in her room to the Jackson Five with her best friend, Jill Henderson. Lucy was fifteen years old, and then life had opened up like a chasm, and little Lucy had plummeted down, down into the unrelenting darkness.She had started taking speed to lose weight. Just pills at first. Benzedrine, which her friend Jill had found in her mother\u2019s medicine cabinet. They took them sparingly, cautiously, until the feds had gone crazy and banned the pills. The medicine cabinet was empty one day, and the next\u2014or so it seemed\u2014Lucy\u2019s weight ballooned back up to well over one hundred fifty pounds. She was the only overweight kid in school save for Fat George, the boy who picked his nose and sat by himself at the lunch table. Lucy hated him the same way he hated her, the same way she hated her own reflection in the mirror.It was Jill\u2019s mother who taught Lucy how to shoot up. Mrs. Henderson wasn\u2019t stupid; she had noticed the missing pills, been pleased to see Lucy finally doing something to get rid of her baby fat. The woman availed herself of the drug for the same reason. She was a nurse at Clayton General Hospital. She walked out of the emergency room with glass vials of Methedrine chattering like teeth in the pocket of her white uniform. Injectable amphetamine, she told Lucy. The same as the pills, only faster.Lucy was fifteen years old the first time the needle pierced her skin.\u201cJust a little bit at a time,\u201d Mrs. Henderson coached, drawing a red tinge of blood into the syringe, then slowly pressing home the plunger. \u201cYou control it. Don\u2019t let it control you.\u201dThere was no real high, just a lightheadedness, and then of course the welcome loss of appetite. Mrs. Henderson was right. The liquid was faster than the pills, easier. Five pounds. Ten pounds. Fifteen. Then\u2014nothing. So Lucy had redefined her \u201cjust a little bit at a time\u201d until she was drawing back not five cc\u2019s, but ten, then ten turned to fifteen, then her head exploded and she was on fire.What did she care about after that?Nothing.Boys? Too stupid. Jill Henderson? What a drag. Her weight? Never again.By the age of sixteen, Lucy was just under a hundred pounds. Her ribs, her hips, her elbows, jutted out like polished marble. For the first time in her life, she had cheekbones. She wore dark Cleopatra eyeliner and blue eye shadow and ironed her long blonde hair so that it slapped stiffly against her impossibly thin ass. The little girl her fifth-grade PE coach had, much to the delight of the rest of the class, nicknamed \u201cSteam Roller\u201d was model-thin, carefree, and\u2014suddenly\u2014popular.Not popular with her old friends, the ones she had known since kindergarten. They all spurned her as a waste, a dropout, a loser. For once in her life, Lucy didn\u2019t care. Who needed people who looked down on you for having a little fun? Lucy had only ever been a token anyway\u2014the fat girl to pal around with so the other girl could be the pretty one, the charming one, the one all the boys flirted with.Her new friends thought Lucy was perfect. They loved it when she made a sarcastic quip about someone from her old life. They embraced her weirdness. The girls invited her to their parties. The boys asked her out. They treated her as an equal. She finally fit in with a group. She finally didn\u2019t stick out as too anything. She was just one of many. She was just Lucy.And what of her old life? Lucy felt nothing but disdain for everyone who had inhabited it, especially Mrs. Henderson, who abruptly cut her off and said Lucy needed to get her shit together. Lucy\u2019s shit was more together than it had ever been. She had no intention whatsoever of giving up her new life.All of her old friends were squares, obsessed with college prep, which mostly consisted of debating which sorority they would rush. The finer points of these sororities, whose Victorian and Greek Revival\u2013style mansions dotted Milledge Avenue and South Lumpkin Street at the University of Georgia, had been part of Lucy\u2019s vernacular since the age of ten, but the lure of amphetamine reduced her Greek to a forgotten language. She didn\u2019t need the disapproving glances from her old friends. She didn\u2019t even need Mrs. Henderson anymore. There were plenty of new friends who could hook her up, and Lucy\u2019s parents were generous with her allowance. On the weeks she was short, her mother never noticed money missing from her purse.It was so easy to see now, but at the time, the spiraling down of her life seemed to happen in seconds, not the actual two full years it had taken for Lucy to fall. At home, she was sullen and sulky. She started sneaking out at night and lying to her parents about stupid things. Mundane things. Things that could be easily disproven. At school, Lucy failed class after class, finally ending up in rudimentary English with Fat George sitting in the front and Lucy and her new friends in the back row, mostly sleeping off the lows, biding their time until they could get back to their real love.The needle.That finely honed piece of surgical steel, that seemingly innocuous device of delivery that ruled every moment of Lucy\u2019s life. She dreamed about shooting up. That first prick of flesh. That pinch as the tip pierced vein. That slow burn as the liquid was injected. That immediate euphoria of the drug entering her system. It was worth everything. Worth every sacrifice. Worth every loss. Worth the things she had to do to get it. Worth the things she all but forgot about the second the drug entered her bloodstream.Then, suddenly, came the crest of the last hill, the biggest hill, on her roller coaster ride down.Bobby Fields. Almost twenty years older than Lucy. Wiser. Stronger. He was a mechanic at one of her father\u2019s gas stations. Bobby had never noticed her before. Lucy was invisible to him, a pudgy little girl with lank pigtails. But that changed after the needle entered Lucy\u2019s life. She walked into the garage one day, her jeans hanging low on her newly lean hips, bell-bottoms frayed from dragging the floor, and Bobby told her to stop and talk awhile.He listened to her, too, and Lucy only then realized that no one had really listened to her before. And then, Bobby had reached up with his grease-stained fingers and stroked back a piece of hair that was hanging in her face. And then, somehow, they were in the back of the building and his hand was on her breast, and she felt alive under the bright glare of his undivided attention.Lucy had never been with a man before. Even high as a kite, she knew she should say no. She knew that she had to save herself, that no one wanted spoiled goods. Because as improbable as it now seemed, back then there was still a part of her who assumed that despite the slight detour, one day she\u2019d end up at UGA, pledge herself to whichever house she chose, and get married to an earnest young man whose bright future met with her father\u2019s approval.Lucy would have babies. She would join the PTA. She would bake cookies and drive her kids to school in a station wagon and sit in her kitchen smoking with the other mothers while they complained about their boring lives. And, maybe while the other women discussed marital discord or colicky babies, Lucy would smile pleasantly, remembering her reckless youth, her crazy, hedonistic affair with the needle.Or, maybe one day she would be on a street corner in the middle of Atlanta and feel her stomach drop at the thought of losing that homey kitchen, those close friends.Because, while sixteen-year-old Lucy had never been with a man before, Bobby Fields had been with plenty of women. Plenty of young women. He knew how to talk to them. He knew how to make them feel special. And, most important, he knew how to move his hand from breast to thigh, from thigh to crotch, and from there to other places that made Lucy gasp so loudly that her father called from the office to see if she was okay.\u201cI\u2019m all right, Daddy,\u201d she had said, because Bobby\u2019s hand had felt so good that Lucy would\u2019ve lied to God Himself.At first, their relationship was a secret, which of course made it more exciting. They had a bond. They had a forbidden thing between them. For nearly a full year, they carried on their clandestine affair. Lucy would avoid Bobby\u2019s gaze when she made her weekly trek to the garage to count quarters with her daddy. She would pretend Bobby didn\u2019t exist until she couldn\u2019t take it anymore. She would go to the dirty bathroom behind the building. He would grip his greasy hands so hard around her ass that she would feel the pain when she sat back down beside her father.The hunger for Bobby was almost as intense as her hunger for the needle. She skipped school. She fabricated a part-time job and fake sleepovers that her parents never bothered to verify. Bobby had his own place. He drove a Mustang Fastback like Steve McQueen. He drank beer and he smoked dope and he scored speed for Lucy and she learned how to go down on him without gagging.It was all perfect until she realized that she couldn\u2019t keep up her fake life anymore. Or maybe she just didn\u2019t want to. She dropped out of high school two months before graduation. The final straw came the weekend her parents took a trip to visit her brother in college. Lucy spent the entire time at Bobby\u2019s. She cooked for him. She cleaned for him. She made love to him all night, and during the day she stared at the clock, counting down the minutes until she could tell him that she loved him. And Lucy did love him, especially when he got home at night with a big grin on his face and a little vial of magic in his pocket.Bobby was generous with the needle. Maybe too generous. He got Lucy so high that her teeth started chattering. She was still high when she stumbled home the next morning.Sunday.Her parents were supposed to go to church with her brother before driving back, but there they were, sitting at the kitchen table, still in their traveling clothes. Her mother hadn\u2019t even taken off her hat. They had been waiting up all night. They had called her friend, her alibi, who was supposed to say that Lucy had spent the night. The girl had lied at first but after only the slightest bit of pressure told Lucy\u2019s parents exactly where their daughter was and exactly what she\u2019d been up to for the last several months.Lucy was seventeen by then, still considered a child. Her parents tried to have her committed. They tried to have Bobby arrested. They tried to prevent other garages from hiring him, but he just moved to Atlanta, where no one cared who fixed their car so long as it was cheap.Two months of hell passed, and then, suddenly, Lucy was eighteen. Just like that, her life was different. Or different in a different way. Old enough to quit school. Old enough to drink. Old enough to leave her family without the pigs dragging her back home. She went from being her daddy\u2019s girl to Bobby\u2019s girl, living in an apartment off Stewart Avenue, sleeping all day, waiting for Bobby to come home at night so he could shoot her up, screw her, then let her sleep some more.The only regret Lucy felt at the time was toward her brother, Henry. He was in law school at UGA. He was six years older, more like a friend than a sibling. In person, they generally shared long moments of silence, but since he\u2019d gone away to school, they had written each other letters two or three times a month.Lucy had loved writing letters to Henry. She was the old Lucy in all of her correspondences: silly about boys, anxious for graduation, eager to learn how to drive. No talk of the needle. No talk of her new friends who were so far outside the margins of society that Lucy was afraid to bring them home lest they steal her mother\u2019s good silver. That is, if her mother even let them through the door.Henry\u2019s responses were always brief, but even when he was covered up in exams, he managed to send Lucy a line or two to let her know what was going on. He was excited about her joining him on campus. He was excited about showing around his baby girl to his friends. He was excited about everything, until he wasn\u2019t, because her parents told him that his darling sister had moved to Atlanta as the whore of a thirty-eight-year-old hippie, drug-dealing gearhead.After that, Lucy\u2019s letters came back unopened. Henry\u2019s scrawl informed her, \u201cReturn to sender.\u201d Just like that, he dropped Lucy like trash in the street. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \u201cDazzling . . . possibly [Slaughter\u2019s] best novel to date.\u201d \u2014The Atlanta Journal-Constitution \u201cOne of the best crime novelists at work today . . . Slaughter weaves a rich tapestry of complex characters with a compelling mystery. Readers will feel emotionally attached to these characters, and their journey will both delight and surprise even the jaded suspense fan.\u201d\u2014Associated Press \u201cThis could be her best.\u201d \u2014USA Today \u201cSlaughter keeps on fulfilling and surpassing the promise of each of her books. . . . Criminal is full of surprises.\u201d\u2014Bookreporter \u00a0 \u201cCrime fiction at its finest.\u201d\u2014Michael Connelly \u00a0 \u201cSlaughter flawlessly executes a gripping crime novel. . . . Old devotees will be thrilled, and new readers will be hooked.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal \u201cThe book should be considered one of the best thrillers of the year.\u201d \u2014The Roanoke Times \u201cSlaughter delivers another riveting, pulse-pounding crime novel.\u201d\u2014Booklist (starred review) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Karin Slaughter is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of numerous thrillers, including Cop Town, Unseen, Criminal, Fallen, Broken, Undone, Fractured, Beyond Reach, Triptych, Faithless, and the e-original short stories \u201cSnatched\u201d and \u201cBusted.\u201d She is a native of Georgia. From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Advance praise for Criminal \u201cKarin Slaughter\u2019s best yet by far: All her signature strengths are amplified a hundredfold by the past explaining the present. Reading this book was like watching a great athlete having a career year.\u201d\u2014Lee Child \u00a0 \u201cFascinating . . . Slaughter delivers another riveting, pulse-pounding crime novel.\u201d\u2014 Booklist (starred review) PRAISE FOR THE CRIME FICTION OF KARIN SLAUGHTER \u201cKarin Slaughter is one of the best crime novelists in America.\u201d\u2014 The Washington Post \u201cCrime fiction at its finest.\u201d\u2014Michael Connelly \u201cAn absolute master.\u201d \u2014Chicago Tribune \u201cSlaughter writes with a razor. . . . Better than Cornwell can ever hope to be.\u201d\u2014 The Plain Dealer \u201cSlaughter will have you on the edge of your seat.\u201d\u2014 Seattle Post-Intelligencer \u201cOne of the boldest thriller writers working today.\u201d\u2014Tess Gerritsen\u00a0  \u201cMove over, Catherine Coulter\u2014Slaughter may be today\u2019s top female suspense writer.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal (starred review) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "B019WVPSUO", "title": "The Kept Woman: A Will Trent Thriller", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "From the Back Cover With the discovery of a murder at an abandoned construction site, Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is brought in on a case that becomes much more dangerous when the dead man is identified as an ex-cop. Studying the body, Sara Linton\u2014the GBI\u2019s newest medical examiner and Will\u2019s lover\u2014realizes that the extensive blood loss didn\u2019t belong to the corpse. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene indicate there is another victim\u2014a woman\u2014who has vanished . . . and who will die soon if she isn\u2019t found. Will is already compromised, because the site belongs to the city\u2019s most popular citizen: a wealthy, powerful, and politically connected athlete\u2014a man who\u2019s already gotten away with rape, despite Will\u2019s exhaustive efforts to put him away. But when evidence links Will\u2019s troubled past to the case, the consequences will tear through his life, wreaking havoc for Will and everyone around him, including his colleagues, family, friends\u2014and even the suspects he pursues. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review \u201cExciting...an intense look at the nature of loss and control, and how love can taint both.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cSuspense that continually ratchets upward, a revealing look at domestic violence in all levels of society, and the continued development of a tight-knit cast of characters. This is prime Slaughter, must-read fare for thriller fans.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201cA thriller that\u2019s part \u2018True Detective,\u2019 part \u2018The Girl On The Train.\u2019 All parts gripping.\u201d \u2014 The Skimm --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Karin Slaughter is theNew York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of over a dozen thrillers, including the Will Trent and Grant County series.A longtime resident of Atlanta, she splits her time between the kitchen and the living room. --This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. From the Inside Flap With the discovery of a murder at an abandoned construction site, Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is brought in on a case that becomes much more dangerous when the dead man is identified as an ex-cop. Studying the body, Sara Linton--the GBI's newest medical examiner and Will's lover--realizes that the extensive blood loss didn't belong to the corpse. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene indicate there is another victim--a woman--who has vanished . . . and who will die soon if she isn't found. Will is already compromised, because the site belongs to the city's most popular citizen: a wealthy, powerful, and politically connected athlete--a man who's already gotten away with rape, despite Will's exhaustive efforts to put him away. But when evidence links Will's troubled past to the case, the consequences will tear through his life, wreaking havoc for Will and everyone around him, including his colleagues, family, friends--and even the suspects he pursues. --The Skimm --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B000FC12GE", "title": "Kisscut: A Grant County Thriller", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Review \u201cFew young writers show more promise than the thirty-year-old Slaughter. She writes\u2026with skill, anger, sensitivity, and compassion.\u201d Amazon.com Review When police chief Jeffrey Tolliver responds to a disturbance at a local skating rink, the last thing he expects is to have to shoot a 13-year-old girl who's holding a gun on a fellow student. Then Jenny Deaver's autopsy reveals two stunning facts: she did not bear the murdered newborn discovered in the rink's restroom, and she had recently been genitally mutilated. With his ex-wife, pediatrician Sara Linton, Jeffrey uncovers a child sex and pornography ring involving Jenny, her classmates, and their mothers--a horrific enterprise that culminated in the killing that Tolliver will never be able to forget. This taut, chilling thriller showcases Karin Slaughter's skill at plotting, pace, and narrative, and will linger in the reader's mind long after the stunning denouement. This is a terrific sequel to her debut, Blindsighted , with two protagonists whose complex relationship will no doubt be a featured subplot in her next offering. --Jane Adams From AudioFile Sara Linton, local doctor and coroner, and Jeffrey Tolliver, local sheriff, team up to investigate the murder of a victim who practiced self-mutilation. The trail leads them to a kidnapping, child pornography, and incest. Horrific crimes and graphic descriptions of sexual acts fill this mystery. Although Patricia Kalember uses a credible Southern accent, all the characters sound the same. Kalember reads the narration and dialogue in a straightforward manner, distancing herself emotionally from the subject matter. This effect buffers the listener from the descriptions but also downplays the tension of the plot. Not for the faint of heart. M.B.K. \u00a9 AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine From Booklist This is Slaughter's harrowing follow-up to her brutally graphic best-seller Blindsighted [BKL Ag 01], again featuring pediatrician Sara Linton; her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver; and detective Lena Adams. Jeffrey is struggling emotionally in the aftermath of a shooting. Teenager Jenny Weaver in effect committed suicide by forcing Jeffrey to shoot her in a standoff, and he is desperate to uncover the motive behind her rash actions. Sara, who was Jenny's doctor and also doubles as the town coroner, must now perform the autopsy, and what she discovers shocks the law-enforcement team: Jenny had undergone a very crude form of female castration. Lena, who is wrestling with her own dark side and seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Jeffrey, unable to sleep and haunted by images of shooting Jenny, must conduct the investigation, which leads them to a lucrative child pornography ring. In a tension-filled narrative with plenty of plot twists, Slaughter, borrowing a page from Andrew Vachss and his Burke books, portrays the sinister world of child sexual abuse and the seemingly nondescript ringleaders who profit from it This is just the ticket for readers who like their crime fiction on the dark side. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved From Library Journal Blindsided was a runner-up for several major awards given for first crime novel, so you'd be blind not to get this follow-up, which involves the death of a child. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly Aptly named novelist Slaughter (Blindsighted) brings back her horribly scarred cast of Grant County, Ga., cops and coroners for more murder, mayhem and horrific sexual violence. Pathologist Sara Linton, who has been dating her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, is witness to Tolliver's fatal shooting of a teenage girl when the girl threatens to shoot a 16-year-old boy in a standoff outside the local skating rink. A search of the rink turns up a dismembered fetus in a toilet; Sara's postmortem reveals the girl had a long history of abuse most gruesomely, her vagina is sewn shut. Working the case alongside Jeffrey is Det. Lena Adams, herself the victim of a recent abduction and rape, who is also trying, with difficulty, to come to terms with the death of her gay sister. Questioning Mark, the boy who was almost shot, Lena gradually uncovers a true horror show of pedophilia, incest and kiddie porn, an inverted world where parents rape their children before peddling them to strangers for money and blackmail. Slaughter adheres to the traditional mystery format, but turns up the shock factor tenfold, demonstrating that the deepest depravity can be business as usual in small towns as well as big cities. The undertone of violence is pervasive, even at quiet moments (\"Lena was able to pull her hand away, but not before she felt Grace's thumb brush across the scar.... The touch was tender, almost sexual, and Lena could see the charge Grace got out of it\"), amplifying Slaughter's equation of intimacy with menace and placing her squarely in the ranks of Cornwell and Reichs. (Sept.) Forecast: Slaughter's much-praised first novel, Blindsighted, put her on the thriller map. Kisscut, a featured alternate selection of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, Mystery Guild and BOMC, could make her a bestseller. 10-city author tour. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \"Few young writers show more promise than the thirty-year-old Slaughter. She writes...with skill, anger, sensitivity, and compassion.\"--Atlanta Journal-Constitution --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover First the kiss . . . then the blood. Sara Linton, pediatrician and medical examiner in Heartsdale, Georgia, knows only too well the horrors that can hide behind closed doors in a small community. But when a Saturday night argument between teenagers at the local skating rink leads to death\u2014and a subsequent autopsy reveals evidence of ritualistic self-mutilation and long-term abuse\u2014she realizes that true evil is closer than she imagined. Aided by her ex-husband, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, and Detective Lena Adams, still traumatized by her brush with a maniac, Sara's investigation is frustrated at every turn by the cold silence of the family and friends of the slain girl. But the truth cannot be hidden forever, as Sara inexorably peels back the many layers of an inhuman outrage that goes far beyond mere murder. For an ominous cloud has settled over the young daughters and sons of Heartsdale\u2014and those who would protect them must act quickly before all innocence here is devoured. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Karin Slaughter is the author of more than twenty instant New York Times bestselling novels, including the Edgar\u2013nominated Cop Town and standalone novels Pretty Girls , The Good Daughter , and Pieces of Her . She is published in 120 countries with more than 40 million copies sold across the globe. Pieces of Her is a Netflix original series starring Toni Collette, and False Witness , the Grant County, and Will Trent series are in development for television. Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project\u2014a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, she lives in Atlanta. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B00AXIZ3HE", "title": "Unseen (with bonus novella \"Busted\"): A Novel (Will Trent Book 7)", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Review Slaughter's most powerful book to date...No one writes like Slaughter...Her words fairly growl on paper, but yet her descriptions of relationships are tear inducing. This may make her an anomaly but she is the best damn anomaly writing books today. Make sure you read Unseen . -- \"Huffington Post\" The secrets and lies mount, leading to heart-pounding and dangerous showdowns. -- \"Romantic Times\" The twisted plot and shocking reveals remind readers why Slaughter remains a dominant voice in crime fiction. -- \"Publishers Weekly\" Narrator Kathleen Early incisively paces Slaughter's eighth Will Trent novel, which pulls in characters and events from her earlier work titled B eyond Reach. Backstory is sharply delivered through the antagonism between Trent's lover, Dr. Sara Linton, and Macon cop Lena Adams. As Agent Trent, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, seeks to identify hospital-linked drug dealers, he winds up in a more complex scenario with the lines between good and and evil severely twisted. Early makes the most of these chameleon-like characters. The gruff turf war between the high-ranking female cops is terrific...Overall, Slaughter's suspenseful plot keeps the listener as tied up as Will Trent finds himself with this case. -- \"AudioFile\" Current series fans will be delighted, and newcomers to Slaughter's work will find a new obsession. -- \"Library Journal\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From Booklist Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent is undercover in Macon, hoping to finally corner elusive criminal mastermind Big Whitey. The notorious high-level drug dealer uses the same blueprint in every town he moves in on, infiltrating the local drug scene, injecting plenty of cash, and retaining a retinue of first-rate lawyers. The result? A bunch of low-level thugs are turned into businessmen, and crime goes up while prosecutions go down. Will crosses paths with Detective Lena Adams, whom he had previously investigated for reckless conduct and who has just endured a brutal raid on a dealer\u2019s house that saw multiple gunshot victims on both sides of the law. Meanwhile, Will\u2019s relationship with Sara Linton deepens, although he must face his own intimacy issues, which are the result of years of abuse suffered while in foster care. Slaughter plunges readers into the action from the get-go with her electrifying ability to write suspenseful, riveting confrontations between cops and criminals, all while deepening the backstories of her longtime series leads. Another intense read, on multiple levels, from the ever-reliable Slaughter. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The eighth entry in Karin Slaughter\u2019s best-selling Will Trent series is backed up by a national advertising campaign, including a tie-in to Save the Libraries events. --Joanne Wilkinson --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1.WEDNESDAYMACON, GEORGIADetective Lena Adams winced as she pulled off her T-\u00adshirt. She took her police badge out of her pocket, along with her flashlight and an extra clip for her Glock, and tossed them all onto the dresser. The time on her phone showed it was almost midnight. Lena had rolled out of bed eighteen hours ago and now all she wanted to do was fall back in. Not that she\u2019d done that much lately. For the past four days, just about every waking hour had been wasted sitting at a conference room table answering questions she\u2019d answered the day before and the day before that\u2014\u00adnavigating the usual bullshit that came from having to justify your actions to Internal Affairs.\u201cWho led the raid into the house?\u201d\u201cWhat intelligence were you acting on?\u201d\u201cWhat did you expect to find?\u201dThe internal investigator for the Macon Police Department had the dour, lifeless personality of a career pencil pusher. Every day, the woman showed up dressed in the same style black skirt and white blouse, an outfit that seemed more appropriate for greeting diners at an Olive Garden. She nodded a lot, frowned even more as she took notes. When Lena didn\u2019t answer quickly, she\u2019d check the tape recorder to make sure it was picking up the silences.Lena was certain the questions were designed to provoke an outburst. The first day, she had been so numb that she\u2019d just answered truthfully in the hope that it would soon be over. The second and third days, she\u2019d been less forthcoming, her level of irritation rising with each passing minute. Today, she had finally exploded, which seemed exactly what the woman had been waiting for.\u201cWhat do you think I expected to find, you miserable bitch?\u201dIf only Lena hadn\u2019t found it. If only she could take a razor and slice the images out of her brain. They haunted her. They flickered into her vision like an old movie every time she blinked. They filled her with a constant, unrelenting sorrow.Lena started to rub her eyes, then thought better of it. Six days had passed since she\u2019d led her team on the raid, but her body was still a walking reminder of what had happened. The bruise fingering its way across her nose and underneath her left eye had turned a urine-\u00adyellow. The three stitches holding together the cut in her scalp itched like a rash.Then there were the things that no one could see\u2014\u00adLena\u2019s bruised tailbone. Her aching back and knees. The roil in her stomach every time she thought about what she\u2019d discovered in that desolate house in the woods.Four dead bodies. One man still in the hospital. Another who would never wear the badge again. Not to mention the terrible memory she would probably end up taking to her grave.Tears came into Lena\u2019s eyes. She bit her lip, fighting the urge to let the grief have its way. She was exhausted. The week had been hard. Hell, the last three weeks had been hard. But it was over now. All of it was over. Lena was safe. She would keep her job. The rat squad investigator had scurried back to her hole. Lena was finally home where no one could stare at her, question her, probe and prod her. It wasn\u2019t just Internal Affairs. Everyone wanted to know what the raid had been like, what Lena had found in that dark, dank basement.And Lena wanted nothing more than to forget all about it.Her cell phone chirped. Lena exhaled until her lungs were completely empty. The phone chirped a second time. She picked it up. There was a new text message.VICKERY: u ok?Lena stared at the letters on the screen. Paul Vickery, her partner.She tapped reply. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard.The distant rumble of a motorcycle shook the air.Instead of typing out a response, Lena held down the power button until the phone turned off. She placed it on the dresser beside her badge.The roar of the Harley-\u00adD\u2019s twin-\u00adcam engine vibrated in her ears as Jared gunned the bike so he could make it to the top of their steep driveway. Lena waited, following the familiar sounds: the engine cutting, the metallic groan of the kickstand, the heavy tread of boots as her husband made his way into the house, tossed his helmet and keys onto the kitchen table even though she\u2019d asked him a million times not to. He paused for a moment, probably to check the mail, then continued toward their bedroom.Lena kept her back to the door as she counted off Jared\u2019s footsteps down the long hallway. His stride sounded tentative, reluctant. He\u2019d probably been hoping Lena would be asleep.Jared stopped at the doorway. He was obviously waiting for Lena to turn around. When she didn\u2019t, he asked, \u201cYou just get in?\u201d\u201cI stayed late to finish.\u201d It wasn\u2019t a complete lie. She\u2019d hoped Jared would be asleep, too. \u201cI was about to take a shower.\u201d\u201cAll right.\u201dLena didn\u2019t go into the bathroom. Instead, she turned to face him.Jared\u2019s gaze flickered down to her bra, then quickly back up again. He was dressed in his uniform, his hair twisted into a peak from the helmet. He was a cop with the Macon PD, too\u2014\u00ada motorman, one rank below Lena and twelve years younger. Neither one of these things used to bother her, but lately, every inch of their lives was a provocation.He leaned against the doorjamb, asking, \u201cHow\u2019d it go?\u201d\u201cThey cleared me to go back to work.\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s good, right?\u201dShe replayed his words in her head, trying to decipher the tone. \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t it be?\u201dJared didn\u2019t respond. There was a long, uncomfortable silence before he asked, \u201cYou want a drink?\u201dLena couldn\u2019t hide her surprise.\u201cI guess it\u2019s okay now, right?\u201d He tilted his head to the side, forced his lips into a tight smile. He was a few inches taller than Lena, but his muscular frame and athletic grace made him seem larger.Usually.Jared cleared his throat to let her know that he was waiting.She nodded. \u201c\u2009\u2019Kay.\u201dJared left the room, but his need lingered\u2014\u00adsurrounding her, almost suffocating her. He needed for Lena to break down. He needed for her to lean on him. He needed her to show him that what happened had affected her, had altered her in some tangible way.He couldn\u2019t see that not giving in was the only thing that kept her from falling completely apart.Lena took her pajamas out of the dresser. She heard Jared moving around the kitchen. He opened the freezer door, rummaged around for a handful of ice. Lena closed her eyes. Her body swayed. She waited for the cubes to hit glass. Her mouth watered in anticipation.She clenched her jaw. Forced open her eyes.She wanted the drink too badly. When Jared came back, she would put the glass down, wait a few minutes, prove to herself that she could do without it.Prove to him that she didn\u2019t need it.Her hands ached as she unbuttoned her jeans. The day of the raid, she\u2019d gripped her shotgun so hard that her fingers had felt like they were permanently curled. She wasn\u2019t sure why everything still ached. She should be better now, but her body was holding on to the hurt. Holding on to the poison that was eating her up inside.\u201cSo.\u201d Jared was back. This time, he came into the room. He poured a large vodka as he walked toward her, the bottle gurgling as the liquid splashed into the glass. \u201cYou\u2019re back on duty tomorrow?\u201d\u201cFirst thing.\u201dHe handed her the glass. \u201cNo time off?\u201dLena took the drink and downed half of it in one gulp.\u201cI guess that\u2019s the same as when . . .\u201d Jared\u2019s voice trailed off. He didn\u2019t have to say when. Instead, he looked out the back window. The dark panes showed his reflection. \u201cI bet you get your sergeant\u2019s stripes off this.\u201dShe shook her head, but said, \u201cMaybe.\u201dHe stared at her\u2014\u00adwaiting. Needing.She asked, \u201cWhat are they saying at the station?\u201dJared walked to the closet. \u201cThat you\u2019ve got balls of steel.\u201d He dialed the combination on the gun safe. Lena watched the back of his neck. There was a pink line of sunburn where his helmet didn\u2019t protect the skin. He must\u2019ve known she was watching, but he just took his holster off his belt and stored his gun beside hers. Near hers. He didn\u2019t even let their guns touch.She asked, \u201cDoes it bother you?\u201dHe shut the safe door, spun the combination. \u201cWhy would it bother me?\u201dLena didn\u2019t say the words, but they were screaming in her head: Because they think I\u2019m tougher than you. Because your wife was taking down some very bad guys while you were toodling around on your bike giving tickets to soccer moms.Jared said, \u201cI\u2019m proud of you.\u201d He used his reasonable voice, the one that made Lena want to punch him in the face. \u201cThey should give you a medal for what you did.\u201dHe had no idea what she\u2019d done. Jared only knew the highlights, the details Lena was allowed to share outside closed doors.She repeated the question. \u201cDoes it bother you?\u201dHe paused for a second too long. \u201cIt bothers me that you could\u2019ve been killed.\u201dHe still hadn\u2019t answered the question. Lena studied his face. The skin was unlined, fresh. She\u2019d met Jared when he was twenty-\u00adone, and in the five and a half years since, he\u2019d somehow started looking younger, like he was aging in reverse. Or maybe Lena was getting older more quickly. So much had changed since those early days. In the beginning, she could always tell what he was thinking. Of course, since then, she\u2019d given him plenty of mortar to build up a wall around himself.He started unbuttoning his shirt. \u201cI think I\u2019m gonna go put those cabinets together.\u201dShe gave a startled laugh. \u201cReally?\u201d The kitchen had been torn apart for three months, mostly because Jared found a new reason every weekend to not work on it.He let his shirt drop to the floor. \u201cAt least Ikea will know I\u2019m still the man of the house.\u201dNow that it was out there, Lena didn\u2019t know how to respond. \u201cYou know it\u2019s not like that.\u201d Even to her own ears, the excuse sounded weak. \u201cIt\u2019s just not.\u201d\u201cReally?\u201dLena didn\u2019t answer.\u201cRight.\u201d Jared\u2019s cell phone started to ring. He pulled it out of his pocket, checked the number, and declined the call.\u201cThat your girlfriend?\u201d Lena didn\u2019t like the thinness in her tone. The joke wasn\u2019t funny. They both knew that.He rummaged through the dirty-\u00adclothes basket and found his jeans, one of his T-\u00adshirts.\u201cIt\u2019s almost midnight.\u201d Lena looked at the bedside clock. \u201cPast midnight.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m not sleepy.\u201d He dressed quickly, tucking his phone into his back pocket. \u201cI\u2019ll keep the noise down.\u201d\u201cYou need your phone to put the cabinets together?\u201d\u201cThe charge is low.\u201d --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review ''Narrator Kathleen Early incisively paces Slaughter's eighth Will Trent novel, which pulls in characters and events from her earlier work titled Beyond Reach. Backstory is sharply delivered through the antagonism between Trent's lover, Dr. Sara Linton, and Macon cop Lena Adams. As Agent Trent, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, seeks to identify hospital-linked drug dealers, he winds up in a more complex scenario with the lines between good and and evil severely twisted. Early makes the most of these chameleon-like characters. The gruff turf war between the high-ranking female cops is terrific . . . Overall, Slaughter's suspenseful plot keeps the listener as tied up as Will Trent finds himself with this case.'' -- AudioFile ''Slaughter's most powerful book to date . . . No one writes like Slaughter . . . Her words fairly growl on paper, but yet her descriptions of relationships are tear inducing. This may make her an anomaly but she is the best damn anomaly writing books today. Make sure you read Unseen .'' -- Huffington Post ''Current series fans will be delighted, and newcomers to Slaughter's work will find a new obsession.'' -- Library Journal ''The twisted plot and shocking reveals remind readers why Slaughter remains a dominant voice in crime fiction.'' -- Publishers Weekly ''Crime fiction at its finest.'' --Michael Connelly, praise for the author ''One of the boldest thriller writers working today.'' --Tess Gerritsen, praise for the author ''The secrets and lies mount, leading to heart-pounding and dangerous showdowns.'' -- Romantic Times --This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. About the Author Karin Slaughter is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of over a dozen thrillers, including Fallen, Broken, Undone, Fractured, Beyond Reach, Triptych , and Faithless . A long-time resident of Atlanta, she splits her time between the kitchen and the living room. --This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "B01IGSWNIO", "title": "Dynamic Story Creation in Plain English: Drake's Brutal Writing Advice", "author": "Maxwell Alexander Drake", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1592864139", "title": "To Protect the Innocent", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 8.48}, {"asin": "0399578633", "title": "Guerrilla Tacos: Recipes from the Streets of L.A. [A Cookbook]", "author": "Wesley Avila", "description": "Review \u201cThe reason I love Guerrilla Tacos so much is because it has that authentic, Mexican, East L.A. taco vibe. But it also just screams innovation. The flavors and imagination that Wes has put into the tacos is what really makes it stand out. It has that thing that feels like a taco but it\u2019s so much more than a taco.\u201d \u2014Skrillex \u201cDon\u2019t presume Wesley Avila\u2019s terrific Guerrilla Tacos is a book just about tacos. You\u2019d be mistaken, because this is story, a wonderfully told narrative about a man, his struggles, and his dream.\u00a0Thankfully for him\u2014and for us\u2014it\u2019s a story with a happy ending and a slew of delicious recipes.\u201d \u2014Nancy Silverton, co-owner of Mozza Restaurant Group \u201cWes Avila is a great chef, period. He's also a folk hero and a personal hero, and here is a book filled with his brilliant recipes and stories. All I can say is, if you're like me, you're going look at every photo in this book and say, \u2018I want that one, I want that one, I want that one, I want that one...\u2019\" \u2014Philip Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond and I'll Have What Phil's Having \"There are cookbooks you can't wait to\u00a0actually cook out of, cookbooks you display on your coffee table to remind yourself how cool you are, and cookbooks you read every sentence of because they've somehow nailed storytelling and recipe writing. Well, that last one is a rare unicorn. The new\u00a0Guerrilla Tacos cookbook\u00a0is one of those.\" \u2014Alex Beggs, BonAppetit.com \"Narrated in Avila\u2019s relaxed, conversational style, that story pulls you in, as do the 50 recipes. [...] Avila also includes more than two dozen of his fantastic salsas, plus illustrations, comics and helpful advice (on tortillas, on tostadas).\" \u2014Tien Nguyen, The Los Angeles Times \u201c[...] the brilliant mashup that is Guerrilla Tacos feels personal, not gimmicky. With offerings like pork belly and caviar tacos alongside adobo, pastor, carnitas and the gang, there\u2019s a reason that Jonathan Gold deemed it L.A.\u2019s Best Taco Truck. In Guerrilla Tacos: Recipes from the Streets of LA (Ten Speed), with writer Richard Parks III, Avila tells his underdog story with endearing charm.\u201d \u2014Christine Muhlke, Bon Appetit \"Avila is leading a new wave of LA chefs \u2014 children of immigrants, classically trained in French cuisine \u2014 who blur the lines between high and low and, in his case, leaving upscale restaurants to serve street food.\" \u2014Mandalit Del Barco, National Public Radio About the Author Before WES AVILA began his life as a taquero, he was a forklift driver at a box factory for seven years. In 2003, he quit his job to go to culinary school full-time. After attending California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, California, he went to work at L'Auberge Carmel with Walter Mansk, followed by Palate\u00a0Food + Wine, Marche, and Le Comptoir with Gary Menes. In August of 2012, Wes left the world of fine dining to devote himself to running Guerrilla Tacos\u2014at that time, a two-person street cart. RICHARD PARKS is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. He has written for Lucky Peach , the New York Times , and McSweeneys . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. AN INTRODUCTION TO GUERRILLA TACOS\u00a0This is not a taco book. It\u2019s a Guerrilla Tacos book.THE RECIPES YOU FIND HERE WILL GIVE YOU ALL YOU NEED TO MAKE THE FOOD\u00a0FROM GUERRILL\u00a0TACOS\u00a0AT\u00a0HOME TONIGHT. I DON\u2019T\u00a0PRETEND THERE\u2019S\u00a0ANY DEEP DARK SECRET TO\u00a0WHAT\u00a0I\u2019M DOING. EVERYTHING ISP\u00a0RESENTED\u00a0IN\u00a0AS STRAIGHTFORWARD\u00a0A WAY AS\u00a0POSSIBLE\u2014A MIX OF FLAVORS\u00a0AND TEXTURES\u00a0AND COLORS\u00a0PILED ON TO\u00a0A FIVE-INCH TORTILLA AND SERVED ON\u00a0A SMALL\u00a0PAPER TRAY. WE\u00a0MAKE\u00a0PRETTY SIMPLE\u00a0FOOD. BUT\u00a0WE\u00a0DO IT OUR OWN WAY.\u00a0What is a taco?\u00a0To me it\u2019s a tortilla and whatever you can dream up to put on top. Savory or sweet, stewed or grilled, soft or crispy, corn or flour\u2014you can take it in any direction, as long as you can reasonably eat it with your hands. You can even put schwarma on a tortilla and call that a taco. I haven\u2019t done that, but now that I mention it, it doesn\u2019t sound half bad. Maybe I\u2019ll even try it at the truck next week.\u00a0What is Guerrilla Tacos?\u00a0It\u2019s all the flavors and food I dream about, usually on a tortilla. It\u2019s also the name of a food truck that parks in front of some of L.A.\u2019s better coffee shops. Soon after this writing, it will become a brick-and-mortar restaurant. My wife, Tanya, came up with the name \u201cguerrilla\u201d because in the beginning, we were always in danger of being shut down by the cops. \u201cYou\u2019re like a guerrilla soldier, you do it your way, underground,\u201d she said to me. Sometimes it seems our lives resemble that of soldiers participating in unconventional warfare. With the truck, our locations, and with our tacos, everything is always changing, every single day. We keep it small, dynamic, guerrilla.\u00a0This is not \u201cauthentic\u201d Mexican food. It\u2019s personal. I couldn\u2019t give a shit about authenticity, especially when it comes to tacos. A taco isn\u2019t just asada, pastor, and carnitas, with chopped onions and cilantro and your choice of salsa. The truth is there is no such thing as an authentic taco. Taco makers have always known this; if you look at the taqueros cooking in Mexico, there is always experimentation and a lot of \u201cinauthentic\u201d food. That\u2019s the tradition I see myself as a part of\u2014the tradition of inauthenticity. Of not being a slave to tradition. Of experimenting. Evolving.\u00a0A taco is a blank canvas. How do you want to paint it? Let your imagination run wild. Seared cauliflower with raisins; tuna poke with furikake, uni, and habanero; Armenian beef basturma with a fried farm egg and burnt tomato salsa . . . corn\u00a0tortillas go with everything. I consider anything an authentic Guerrilla Taco as long as I\u2019m being authentic to myself and my perspective and experiences as a cook.\u00a0 Who am I? A fat kid from Pico Rivera, turned DJ, turned teamster, turned fine-dining cook, turned DIY food-truck chef. I am sleeved in tattoos and I have a season-pass to Disneyland. I love my wife and my dog and my family. And I love what I cook. The story of Guerrilla Tacos is also my story, told one taco at a time.\u00a0It\u2019s the story of my childhood in Pico where the house would fill with the aroma that came when my mother fried ground beef in lard with Lawry\u2019s taco seasoning on the stove top. It\u2019s a trip to Baja with my dad, where I tasted my first lobster, and to his hometown in a rural part of Durango, Mexico, where I sampled the most amazing wild anise. It\u2019s a mind-blowing tapas bar in Spain that serves nothing but wine and different kinds of mushrooms. It\u2019s learning the basics at culinary school, getting my fine-dining chops at L\u2019Auberge Carmel with Walter Manzke, and slanging prime rib and liver and onions at a country club in Pacific Palisades.\u00a0I started Guerrilla Tacos on a whim in 2012 with a $300 cart I found in downtown L.A. and a hibachi grill. Only two kinds of tacos were served that day\u2014chicken and steak. I had no idea what the following morning would bring. Since then, everything has changed. But I still can\u2019t tell you what\u2019s going to happen tomorrow.\u00a0In the few years since Guerrilla Tacos opened, I\u2019ve gotten shingles from stress, been shut down by the police, and landed near the top of Jonathan Gold\u2019s best restaurants list\u2014and the crazy thing is, we still don\u2019t even have a restaurant. Guerrilla Tacos is still very young. As we write this book, we\u2019re looking to open our first brick-and-mortar restaurant with a real grill and an open fire, things that weren\u2019t available at first as I cooked out of the cart or now out of the kitchen of the food truck. And soon, the truck will go away and Guerrilla Tacos will change into something new.\u00a0So this book is a snapshot of my cooking at a moment in time, and it is the story of how I got here, told through my life in food. As I have from day one, I\u2019m going to keep moving from here, keep evolving, keep doing it guerrilla style. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.59}], "target_asin": "B00AXIZ3HE"}
{"user_id": "AECNWU4KJEA7VGXKKLKJA5OHTJYQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0156904365", "title": "Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold", "author": "C.S. Lewis", "description": "From the Back Cover \"The most significant and triumphant work that Lewis has...produced.\"-- New York Herald Tribune In this timeless tale of two mortal princesses--one beautiful and one unattractive--C.S. Lewis reworks the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction. This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister, who possessively and harmfully loves Psyche. Much to Orual's frustration, Psyche is loved by Cupid, the god of love himself, setting the troubled Orual on a path of moral development. Set against the backdrop of Glome, a barbaric, pre-Christian world, the struggles between sacred and profane love are illuminated as Orual learns that we cannot understand the intent of the gods \"till we have faces\" and sincerity in our souls and selves. \u00a0 \"In Mr. Lewis's sensitive hands the ancient myth retains its fascination while being endowed with new meanings, new depths, new terrors.\"-- Saturday Review C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) gained international renown for an impressive array of beloved works both popular and scholarly: literary criticism, children's literature, fantasy literature, and numerous books on theology. Among his most celebrated achievements are Out of the Silent Planet, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, and Surprised by Joy . About the Author C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis (1898-1963), one of the great writers of the twentieth century,\u00a0also\u00a0continues to be one of our most influential Christian thinkers. A Fellow and tutor at Oxford until 1954, he spent the rest of his career as Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. He wrote more than thirty books, both popular and scholarly, inlcuding\u00a0The Chronicles of Narnia series, The Screwtape Letters , The Four Loves , Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 27.84}, {"asin": "1910751243", "title": "The Girl With No Past: A gripping psychological thriller", "author": "Kathryn Croft", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 10.75}, {"asin": "0826328091", "title": "The Education of Little Tree", "author": "Forrest Carter", "description": "Review \"Some of it is sad, some of it is hilarious, some of it is unbelievable, and all of it is charming.\"-- The Atlantic ?????????? From the Back Cover The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression. About the Author Forrest Carter (1925-1979) was born as Asa Earl Carter and was raised in Oxford, Alabama. He was a segregationist speech writer who reinvented himself as a Western novelist, publishing The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales , The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales , The Education of Little Tree , and Watch for Me on the Mountain .??????????????????????????????????? Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 17.19}, {"asin": "0307588378", "title": "Gone Girl", "author": "Gillian Flynn", "description": "Review \u201cAbsorbing . . . In masterly fashion, Flynn depicts the unraveling of a marriage\u2014and of a recession-hit Midwest\u2014by interweaving the wife\u2019s diary entries with the husband\u2019s first-person account.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker \u201cMs. Flynn writes dark suspense novels that anatomize violence without splashing barrels of blood around the pages . . . Ms. Flynn has much more up her sleeve than a simple missing-person case. As Nick and Amy alternately tell their stories, marriage has never looked so menacing, narrators so unreliable.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \u201cThe story unfolds in precise and riveting prose . . . even while you know you\u2019re being manipulated, searching for the missing pieces is half the thrill of this wickedly absorbing tale.\u201d \u2014 O: The Oprah Magazine \u201cIce-pick-sharp . . . spectacularly sneaky . . . impressively cagey . . . Gone Girl is Ms. Flynn\u2019s dazzling breakthrough. It is wily, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they\u2019re hard to part with.\u201d \u2014Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201cAn ingenious and viperish thriller . . . Even as Gone Girl grows truly twisted and wild, it says smart things about how tenuous power relations are between men and women, and how often couples are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. As if that weren\u2019t enough, Flynn has created a genuinely creepy villain you don't see coming. People love to talk about the banality of evil. You\u2019re about to meet a maniac you could fall in love with.\u201d \u2014 Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly \u201cAn irresistible summer thriller with a twisting plot worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. Burrowing deep into the murkiest corners of the human psyche, this delectable summer read will give you the creeps and keep you on edge until the last page.\u201d \u2014People (four stars) \u201cIt\u2019s simply fantastic: terrifying, darkly funny and at times moving. . . . [ Gone Girl is] her most intricately twisted and deliciously sinister story, dangerous for any reader who prefers to savor a novel as opposed to consuming it whole in one sitting.\u201d \u2014Michelle Weiner, Associated Press \u201cGillian Flynn\u2019s third novel is both breakneck-paced thriller and masterful dissection of marital breakdown. . . . Wickedly plotted and surprisingly thoughtful, this is a terrifically good read.\u201d \u2014 The\u00a0Boston Globe \u201c Gone Girl is that rare thing: a book that thrills and delights while holding up a mirror to how we live. . . . Through her two ultimately unreliable narrators, Flynn masterfully weaves the slow trickle of critical details with 90-degree plot turns. . . . Timely, poignant and emotionally rich, Gone Girl will peel away your comfort levels even as you root for its protagonists\u2014despite your best intuition.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cGillian Flynn's barbed and brilliant Gone Girl has two deceitful, disturbing, irresistible narrators and a plot that twists so many times you'll be dizzy.\u201d \u2014 Minneapolis Star-Tribune \u201cFlynn is a master manipulator, deftly fielding multiple unreliable narrators, sardonic humor, and social satire in a story of a marriage gone wrong that makes black comedies like The War of the Roses and Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf look like scenes from a honeymoon. . . . It is, in a word, amazing.\u201d \u2014Yvonne Zipp, The\u00a0Christian Science Monitor \u201c Gone Girl [is] a thriller with an insane twist and an insidiously realistic take on marriage.\u201d \u2014 New York \u201cBrilliantly constructed and consistently absorbing . . . The novel, which twists itself into new shapes, works as a page-turning thriller, but it\u2019s also a study of marriage at its most destructive.\u201d \u2014 The Columbus Dispatch About the Author Gillian Flynn is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl , for which she wrote the Golden Globe\u2013nominated screenplay; the New York Times bestsellers Dark Places and Sharp Objects ; and a novella, The\u00a0Grownup . A former critic for Entertainment Weekly , she lives in Chicago with her husband and children. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Nick DunneThe Day Of When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head . You could imagine the skull quite easily. I\u2019d know her head anywhere. And what\u2019s inside it. I think of that too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you thinking, Amy? The question I\u2019ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do? My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said\u2014in my face, first thing I saw. 6- 0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen. I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which we still called the new house , even though we\u2019d been back here for two years. It\u2019s a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would\u2014and did\u2014detest. \u201cShould I remove my soul before I come inside?\u201d Her fi rst line upon arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn\u2019t be stuck here long. But the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development: a miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced mansions, a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It was a compromise, but Amy didn\u2019t see it that way, not in the least. To Amy, it was a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife. I would drag her, caveman-style, to a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live in the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it\u2019s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually. Do not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy. The Missouri Grievance. Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet. I used to be a writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books. Back when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I thought. I\u2019d arrived in New York in the late \u201990s, the last gasp of the glory days, although no one knew it then. New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world\u2014throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won\u2019t kill us in the night. Think about it: a time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to write . We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade. I had a job for eleven years and then I didn\u2019t, it was that fast. All around the country, magazines began shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don\u2019t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women\u2019s hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done. Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was. (Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I\u2019ve spent discussing my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in one sentence. That, she would tell you, is typical. Just like Nick , she would say. It was a refrain of hers: Just like Nick to . . . and whatever followed, whatever was just like me , was bad.) Two jobless grown-ups, we spent weeks wandering around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas, ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice cream at ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps. Then one day the phone rang. My twin sister was on the other end. Margo had moved back home after her own New York layoff a year before\u2014the girl is one step ahead of me in everything, even shitty luck. Margo, calling from good ole North Carthage, Missouri, from the house where we grew up, and as I listened to her voice, I saw her at age ten, with a dark cap of hair and overall shorts, sitting on our grandparents\u2019 back dock, her body slouched over like an old pillow, her skinny legs dangling in the water, watching the river flow over fish-white feet, so intently, utterly self- possessed even as a child. Go\u2019s voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news: Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone\u2014his (nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered toward the great gray beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there. About six months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell that Go had gone to meet with the doctor by herself, taken her studious notes in her slovenly handwriting, and she was teary as she tried to decipher what she\u2019d written. Dates and doses.\u201cWell, f***, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine? Does that even make sense?\u201d she said, and I interrupted. Here was a task, a purpose, held out on my sister\u2019s palm like a plum. I almost cried with relief.\u201cI\u2019ll come back, Go. We\u2019ll move back home. You shouldn\u2019t have to do this all by yourself.\u201d She didn\u2019t believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end. \u201cI\u2019m serious, Go. Why not? There\u2019s nothing here.\u201d A long exhale. \u201cWhat about Amy?\u201d That is what I didn\u2019t take long enough to consider. I simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New York pride, and remove her from her New York parents\u2014leave the frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind\u2014and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine. I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes, just like Nick I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to. \u201cAmy will be fine. Amy . . .\u201d Here was where I should have said, \u201cAmy loves Mom.\u201d But I couldn\u2019t tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after\u2014\u201cAnd what did she mean by . . .\u201d\u2014as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn\u2019t on offer. Amy didn\u2019t care to know my family, didn\u2019t want to know my birthplace, and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.9}, {"asin": "0440083486", "title": "Summer of '42", "author": "Herman Raucher", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0615590586", "title": "The Pecan Man", "author": "Cassie Dandridge Selleck", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "B004SUUXP0", "title": "Great book - riveting!"}, {"asin": "0143037145", "title": "The Memory Keeper's Daughter: A Novel", "author": "Kim Edwards", "description": "From Bookmarks Magazine Critics roundly applaud Kim Edwards\u0092s debut novel, The Memory Keeper\u0092s Daughter , which plays into one of our largest fears: What happens when a baby is born with Down syndrome? Edwards, an award-winning short-story writer, extends this question even further: What happens if this baby somehow \"disappears\" without the mother\u0092s knowledge? The Memory Keeper\u0092s Daughter explores deception, family secrets, the influence of the past on the present, our tendency to rationalize poor decisions, and the tenuous nature of human connections. In her sympathetic rendering of parallel stories, Edwards crafts a riveting \"study in what really determines a family\u0092s happiness\" ( Washington Post ). Critics praised Edwards\u0092s prose, which \"takes on the cadence of poetry\" as she describes her psychologically burdened characters ( Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ). Yet while the Chicago Tribune admired the absence of \"sticky-sweet\" moments, the Washington Post noted a few times when Edwards slipped \"into the treacly trade.\" But if these minor flaws, combined with abrupt transitions, sometimes slow down the narrative, The Memory Keeper\u0092s Daughter packs a hefty emotional punch that will keep readers turning the pages. Copyright \u00a9 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. Review \u201cEdwards is a born novelist.... The Memory Keeper\u2019s Daughter is rich with psychological detail and the nuances of human connection. [An] extraordinary debut.\u201d  \u2013 Chicago Tribune \u201cAnyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper\u2019s Daughter .\u201d  \u2013 The Washington Post \u201cAbsolutely mesmerizing.\u201d  \u2013 Sue Monk Kidd \u201cKim Edwards has created a tale of regret and redemption... you have to reread the passages just to be captivated all over again . . .\u00a0 simply a beautiful book.\u201d  \u2013 Jodi Picoult \u201cKim Edwards writes with great wisdom and compassion.... This is a wonderful, heartbreaking, heart-healing novel.\u201d  \u2013 Luanne Rice \u201cA heart-wrenching book, by turns light and dark, literary and suspenseful.\u201d  \u2013 Library Journal \u201cA gripping novel, beautifully written.\u201d  \u2013 Ursula Hegi \u201cGripping from its start. Highly accomplished.\u201d  \u2013 The Guardian (UK) \u00a0 \u201cA remarkable achievement. [Kim Edwards has] clearly hit a nerve.\u201d  \u2013 The Independent (UK) \u00a0 \u201cMasterfully written\u2026a compelling story that explores universal themes: the secrets we harbor, even from those we love; our ability to rationalize all manner of lies; and our fear that there will always be something unknowable about the people we love most.\u201d \u2013 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette \u201cI devoured it.\u201d  \u2013 Sena Jeter Naslund About the Author Kim Edwards is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper\u2019s Daughter , which was translated into thirty-eight languages.\u00a0 She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Lake of Dreams, and a collection of short stories, The Secrets of a Fire King . Her honors include the Whiting Award, the British Book Award, and USA Today \u2019 s Book of the Year, as well as the Nelson Algren Award, a National Magazine Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. \u00a0A graduate of the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, she has taught widely in the US and Asia, and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1964 March 1964 I THE SNOW STARTED TO FALL SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE HER labor began. A few flakes first, in the dull gray late-afternoon sky, and then wind-driven swirls and eddies around the edges of their wide front porch. He stood by her side at the window, watching sharp gusts of snow billow, then swirl and drift to the ground. All around the neighborhood, lights came on, and the naked branches of the trees turned white.After dinner he built a fire, venturing out into the weather for wood he had piled against the garage the previous autumn. The air was bright and cold against his face, and the snow in the driveway was already halfway to his knees. He gathered logs, shaking off their soft white caps and carrying them inside. The kindling in the iron grate caught fire immediately, and he sat for a time on the hearth, cross-legged, adding logs and watching the flames leap, blue-edged and hypnotic. Outside, snow continued to fall quietly through the darkness, as bright and thick as static in the cones of light cast by the streetlights. By the time he rose and looked out the window, their car had become a soft white hill on the edge of the street. Already his footprints in the driveway had filled and disappeared.He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his wife, her feet propped on pillows, her swollen ankles crossed, a copy of Dr. Spock balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, that their baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this would be. They had been married just a year.She looked up, smiling, when he tucked the blanket around her legs.\"You know, I've been wondering what it's like,\" she said. \"Before we're born, I mean. It's too bad we can't remember.\" She opened her robe and pulled up the sweater she wore underneath, revealing a belly as round and hard as a melon. She ran her hand across its smooth surface, firelight playing across her skin, casting reddish gold onto her hair. \"Do you suppose it's like being inside a great lantern? The book says light permeates my skin, that the baby can already see.\"\"I don't know,\" he said.She laughed. \"Why not?\" she asked. \"You're the doctor.\"\"I'm just an orthopedic surgeon,\" he reminded her. \"I could tell you the ossification pattern for fetal bones, but that's about it.\" He lifted her foot, both delicate and swollen inside the light blue sock, and began to massage it gently: the powerful tarsal bone of her heel, the metatarsals and the phalanges, hidden beneath skin and densely layered muscles like a fan about to open. Her breathing filled the quiet room, her foot warmed his hands, and he imagined the perfect, secret, symmetry of bones. In pregnancy she seemed to him beautiful but fragile, fine blue veins faintly visible through her pale white skin.It had been an excellent pregnancy, without medical restrictions. Even so, he had not been able to make love to her for several months. He found himself wanting to protect her instead, to carry her up flights of stairs, to wrap her in blankets, to bring her cups of custard. \"I'm not an invalid,\" she protested each time, laughing. \"I'm not some fledgling you discovered on the lawn.\" Still, she was pleased by his attentions. Sometimes he woke and watched her as she slept: the flutter of her eyelids, the slow even movement of her chest, her outflung hand, small enough that he could enclose it completely with his own.She was eleven years younger than he was. He had first seen her not much more than a year ago, as she rode up an escalator in a department store downtown, one gray November Saturday while he was buying ties. He was thirty-three years old and new to Lexington, Kentucky, and she had risen out of the crowd like some kind of vision, her blond hair swept back in an elegant chignon, pearls glimmering at her throat and on her ears. She was wearing a coat of dark green wool, and her skin was clear and pale. He stepped onto the escalator, pushing his way upward through the crowd, struggling to keep her in sight. She went to the fourth floor, lingerie and hosiery. When he tried to follow her through aisles dense with racks of slips and brassieres and panties, all glimmering softly, a sales clerk in a navy blue dress with a white collar stopped him, smiling, to ask if she could help. A robe, he said, scanning the aisles until he caught sight of her hair, a dark green shoulder, her bent head revealing the elegant pale curve of her neck. A robe for my sister who lives in New Orleans. He had no sister, of course, or any living family that he acknowledged.The clerk disappeared and came back a moment later with three robes in sturdy terry cloth. He chose blindly, hardly glancing down, taking the one on top. Three sizes, the clerk was saying, and a better selection of colors next month, but he was already in the aisle, a coral-colored robe draped over his arm, his shoes squeaking on the tiles as he moved impatiently between the other shoppers to where she stood.She was shuffling through the stacks of expensive stockings, sheer colors shining through slick cellophane windows: taupe, navy, a maroon as dark as pig's blood. The sleeve of her green coat brushed his and he smelled her perfume, something delicate and yet pervasive, something like the dense pale petals of lilacs outside the window of the student rooms he'd once occupied in Pittsburgh. The squat windows of his basement apartment were always grimy, opaque with steel-factory soot and ash, but in the spring there were lilacs blooming, sprays of white and lavender pressing against the glass, their scent drifting in like light.He cleared his throat\u2014he could hardly breathe\u2014and held up the terry cloth robe, but the clerk behind the counter was laughing, telling a joke, and she did not notice him. When he cleared his throat again she glanced at him, annoyed, then nodded at her customer, now holding three thin packages of stockings like giant playing cards in her hand.\"I'm afraid Miss Asher was here first,\" the clerk said, cool and haughty.Their eyes met then, and he was startled to see they were the same dark green as her coat. She was taking him in\u2014the solid tweed overcoat, his face clean-shaven and flushed with cold, his trim fingernails. She smiled, amused and faintly dismissive, gesturing to the robe on his arm.\"For your wife?\" she asked. She spoke with what he recognized as a genteel Kentucky accent, in this city of old money where such distinctions mattered. After just six months in town, he already knew this. \"It's all right, Jean,\" she went on, turning back to the clerk. \"Go on and take him first. This poor man must feel lost and awkward, in here with all the lace.\" \"It's for my sister,\" he told her, desperate to reverse the bad impression he was making. It had happened to him often here; he was too forward or direct and gave offense. The robe slipped to the floor and he bent to pick it up, his face flushing as he rose. Her gloves were lying on the glass, her bare hands folded lightly next to them. His discomfort seemed to soften her, for when he met her eyes again, they were kind.He tried again. \"I'm sorry. I don't seem to know what I'm doing. And I'm in a hurry. I'm a doctor. I'm late to the hospital.\"Her smiled changed then, grew serious.\"I see,\" she said, turning back to the clerk. \"Really, Jean, do take him first.\"She agreed to see him again, writing her name and phone number in the perfect script she'd been taught in third grade, her teacher an ex-nun who had engraved the rules of penmanship in her small charges. Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect. Eight years old, pale and skinny, the woman in the green coat who would become his wife had clenched her small fingers around the pen and practiced cursive writing alone in her room, hour after hour, until she wrote with the exquisite fluidity of running water. Later, listening to that story, he would imagine her head bent beneath the lamplight, her fingers in a painful cluster around the pen, and he would wonder at her tenacity, her belief in beauty and in the authoritative voice of the ex-nun. But on that day he did not know any of this. On that day he carried the slip of paper in the pocket of his white coat through one sickroom after another, remembering her letters flowing one into another to form the perfect shape of her name. He phoned her that same evening and took her to dinner the next night, and three months later they were married.Now, in these last months of her pregnancy, the soft coral robe fit her perfectly. She had found it packed away and had held it up to show him. But your sister died so long ago, she exclaimed, suddenly puzzled, and for an instant he had frozen, smiling, the lie from a year before darting like a dark bird through the room. Then he shrugged, sheepish. I had to say something, he told her. I had to find a way to get your name. She smiled then, and crossed the room and embraced him.The snow fell. For the next few hours, they read and talked. Sometimes she caught his hand and put it on her belly to feel the baby move. From time to time he got up to feed the fire, glancing out the window to see three inches on the ground, then five or six. The streets were softened and quiet, and there were few cars.At eleven she rose and went to bed. He stayed downstairs, reading the latest issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery . He was known to be a very good doctor, with a talent for diagnosis and a reputation for skillful work. He had graduated first in his class.Still, he was young enough and\u2014though he hid it very carefully\u2014 unsure enough about his skills that he studied in every spare moment, collecting each success he accomplished as one more piece of evidence in his own favor. He felt himself to be an aberration, born with a love for learning in a family absorbed in simply scrambling to get by, day to day. They had seen education as an unnecessary luxury, a means to no certain end. Poor, when they went to the doctor at all it was to the clinic in Morgantown, fifty miles away. His memories of those rare trips were vivid, bouncing in the back of the borrowed pickup truck, dust flying in their wake. The dancing road, his sister had called it, from her place in the cab with their parents. In Morgantown the rooms were dim, the murky green or turquoise of pond water, and the doctors had been hurried, brisk with them, distracted.All these years later, he still had moments when he sensed the gaze of those doctors and felt himself to be an imposter, about to be unmasked by a single mistake. He knew his choice of specialties reflected this. Not for him the random excitement of general medicine or the delicate risky plumbing of the heart. He dealt mostly with broken limbs, sculpting casts and viewing X-rays, watching breaks slowly yet miraculously knit themselves back together. He liked that bones were solid things, surviving even the white heat of cremation. Bones would last; it was easy for him to put his faith in something so solid and predictable.He read well past midnight, until the words shimmered senselessly on the bright white pages, and then he tossed the journal on the coffee table and got up to tend to the fire. He tamped the charred fire-laced logs into embers, opened the damper fully, and closed the brass fireplace screen. When he turned off the lights, shards of fire glowed softly through layers of ash as delicate and white as the snow piled so high now on the porch railings and the rhododendron bushes.The stairs creaked with his weight. He paused by the nursery door, studying the shadowy shapes of the crib and the changing table, the stuffed animals arranged on shelves. The walls were painted a pale sea green. His wife had made the Mother Goose quilt that hung on the far wall, sewing with tiny stitches, tearing out entire panels if she noted the slightest imperfection. A border of bears was stenciled just below the ceiling; she had done that too. On an impulse he went into the room and stood before the window, pushing aside the sheer curtain to watch the snow, now nearly eight inches high on the lampposts and the fences and the roofs. It was the sort of storm that rarely happened in Lexington, and the steady white flakes, the silence, filled him with a sense of excitement and peace. It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers. Tomorrow would be quiet, the world subdued and fragile, until the neighborhood children came out to break the stillness with their tracks and shouts and joy. He remembered such days from his own childhood in the mountains, rare moments of escape when he went into the woods, his breathing amplified and his voice somehow muffled by the heavy snow that bent branches low, drifted over paths. The world, for a few short hours, transformed.He stood there for a long time, until he heard her moving quietly. He found her sitting on the edge of their bed, her head bent, her hands gripping the mattress.\"I think this is labor,\" she said, looking up. Her hair was loose, a strand caught on her lip. He brushed it back behind her ear. She shook her head as he sat beside her. \"I don't know. I feel strange. This crampy feeling, it comes and goes.\"He helped her lie down on her side and then he lay down too, massaging her back. \"It's probably just false labor,\" he assured her. \"It's three weeks early, after all, and first babies are usually late.\" This was true, he knew, he believed it as he spoke, and he was, in fact, so sure of it that after a time he drifted into sleep. He woke to find her standing over the bed, shaking his shoulder. Her robe, her hair, looked nearly white in the strange snowy light that filled their room.\"I've been timing them. Five minutes apart. They're strong, and I'm scared.\"He felt an inner surge then; excitement and fear tumbled through him like foam pushed by a wave. But he had been trained to be calm in emergencies, to keep his emotions in check, so he was able to stand without any urgency, take the watch, and walk with her, slowly and calmly, up and down the hall. When the contractions came she squeezed his hand so hard he felt as if the bones in his fingers might fuse. The contractions were as she had said, five minutes apart, then four. He took the suitcase from the closet, feeling numb suddenly with the momentousness of these events, long expected but a surprise all the same. He moved, as she did, but the world slowed to stillness around them. He was acutely aware of every action, the way breath rushed against his tongue, the way her feet slid uncomfortably into the only shoes she could still wear, her swollen flesh making a ridge against the dark gray leather. When he took her arm he felt strangely as if he himself were suspended in the room, somewhere near the light fixture, watching them both from above, noting every nuance and detail: how she trembled with a contraction, how his fingers closed so firmly and protectively around her elbow. How outside, still, the snow was drifting down. He helped her into her green wool coat, which hung unbuttoned, gaping around her belly. He found the leather gloves she'd been wearing when he first saw her, too. It seemed important that these details be right. They stood together on the porch for a moment, stunned by the soft white world.\"Wait here,\" he said, and went down the steps, breaking a path through the drifts. The doors of the old car were frozen, and it took him several minutes to get one open. A white cloud flew up, glittering, when the door at last swung back, and he scrambled on the floor of the backseat for the ice scraper and brush. When he emerged his wife was leaning against a porch pillar, her forehead on her arms. He understood in that moment both how much pain she was in and that the baby was really coming, coming that very night. He resisted a powerful urge to go to her and, instead, put all his energy into freeing the car, warming first one bare hand and then the other beneath his armpits when the pain of the cold became too great, warming them but never pausing, brushing snow from the windshield and the windows and the hood, watching it scatter and disappear into the soft sea of white around his calves.\"You didn't mention it would hurt this much,\" she said, when he reached the porch. He put his arm around her shoulders and helped her down the steps. \"I can walk,\" she insisted. \"It's just when the pain comes.\"\"I know,\" he said, but he did not let her go.When they reached the car she touched his arm and gestured to the house, veiled with snow and glowing like a lantern in the darkness of the street.\"When we come back we'll have our baby with us,\" she said. \"Our world will never be the same.\"The windshield wipers were frozen, and snow spilled down the back window when he pulled into the street. He drove slowly, thinking how beautiful Lexington was, the trees and bushes so heavy with snow. When he turned onto the main street the wheels hit ice and the car slid, briefly, fluidly, across the intersection, coming to rest by a snowbank. \"We're fine,\" he announced, his head rushing. Fortunately, there wasn't another car in sight. The steering wheel was as hard and cold as stone beneath his bare hands. Now and then he wiped at the windshield with the back of his hand, leaning to peer through the hole he'd made. \"I called Bentley before we left,\" he said, naming his colleague, an obstetrician. \"I said to meet us at the office. We'll go there. It's closer.\"She was silent for a moment, her hand gripping the dashboard as she breathed through a contraction. \"As long as I don't have my baby in this old car,\" she managed at last, trying to joke. \"You know how much I've always hated it.\"He smiled, but he knew her fear was real, and he shared it. Methodical, purposeful: even in an emergency he could not change his nature. He came to a full stop at every light, signaled turns to the empty streets. Every few minutes she braced one hand against the dashboard again and focused her breathing, which made him swallow and glance sideways at her, more nervous on that night than he could ever remember being. More nervous than his in first anatomy class, the body of a young boy peeled open to reveal its secrets. More nervous than on his wedding day, her family filling one side of the church, and on the other just a handful of his colleagues. His parents were dead, his sister too.There was a single car in the clinic parking lot, the nurse's powder-blue Fairlane, conservative and pragmatic and newer than his own. He'd called her, too. He pulled up in front of the entrance and helped his wife out. Now that they had reached the office safely they were both exhilarated, laughing as they pushed into the bright lights of the waiting room.The nurse met them. The moment he saw her, he knew something was wrong. She had large blue eyes in a pale face that might have been forty or twenty-five, and whenever something was not to her liking a thin vertical line formed across her forehead, just between her eyes. It was there now as she gave them her news: Bentley's car had fishtailed on the unplowed country road where he lived, spun around twice on the ice beneath the snow, and floated into a ditch.\"You're saying Dr. Bentley won't be coming?\" his wife asked. The nurse nodded. She was tall, so thin and angular it seemed the bones might poke from beneath her skin at any moment. Her large blue eyes were solemn and intelligent. For months, there had been rumors, jokes, that she was a little bit in love with him. He had dismissed them as idle office gossip, annoying but natural when a man and single woman worked in such close proximity, day after day. And then one evening he had fallen asleep at his desk. He'd been dreaming, back in his childhood home, his mother putting up jars of fruit that gleamed jewel-like on the oilcloth-covered table beneath the window. His sister, age five, sat holding a doll in one listless hand. A passing image, perhaps a memory, but one that filled him simultaneously with sadness and with yearning. The house was his but empty now, deserted when his sister died and his parents moved away, the rooms his mother had scrubbed to a dull gleam abandoned, filled only with the rustlings of squirrels and mice.He'd had tears in his eyes when he opened them, raising his head from the desk. The nurse was standing in the doorway, her face gentled by emotion. She was beautiful in that moment, half smiling, not at all the efficient woman who worked beside him so quietly and competently each day. Their eyes met, and it seemed to the doctor that he knew her\u2014that they knew each other\u2014in some profound and certain way. For an instant nothing whatsoever stood between them; it was an intimacy of such magnitude that he was motionless, transfixed. Then she blushed severely and looked aside.She cleared her throat and straightened, saying that she had worked two hours overtime and would be going. For many days, her eyes would not meet his.After that, when people teased him about her, he made them stop. She's a very fine nurse, he would say, holding up one hand against the jokes, honoring that moment of communion they had shared. She's the best I've ever worked with. This was true, and now he was very glad to have her with him.\"How about the emergency room?\" she asked. \"Could you make it?\"The doctor shook his head. The contractions were just a minute or so apart.\"This baby won't wait,\" he said, looking at his wife. Snow had melted in her hair and glittered like a diamond tiara. \"This baby's on its way.\"\"It's all right,\" his wife said, stoic. Her voice was harder now, determined. \"This will be a better story to tell him, growing up: him or her.\"The nurse smiled, the line still visible though fainter, between her eyes. \"Let's get you inside then,\" she said. \"Let's get you some help with the pain.\"He went into his own office to find a coat, and when he entered Bentley's examination room his wife was lying on the bed, her feet in the stirrups. The room was pale blue, filled with chrome and white enamel and fine instruments of gleaming steel. The doctor went to the sink and washed his hands. He felt extremely alert, aware of the tiniest details, and as he performed this ordinary ritual he felt his panic at Bentley's absence begin to ease. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to focus on his task.\"Everything's progressing,\" the nurse said, when he turned. \"Everything looks fine. I'd put her at ten centimeters; see what you think.\"He sat on the low stool and reached up into the soft warm cave of his wife's body. The amniotic sac was still intact, and through it he could feel the baby's head, smooth and hard like a baseball. His child. He should be pacing a waiting room somewhere. Across the room, the blinds were closed on the only window, and as he pulled his hand from the warmth of his wife's body he found himself wondering about the snow, if it was falling still, silencing the city and the land beyond.\"Yes,\" he said, \"ten centimeters.\"\"Phoebe,\" his wife said. He could not see her face, but her voice was clear. They had been discussing names for months and had reached no decisions. \"For a girl, Phoebe. And for a boy, Paul, after my great-uncle. Did I tell you this?\" she asked. \"I meant to tell you I'd decided.\"\"Those are good names,\" the nurse said, soothing.\"Phoebe and Paul,\" the doctor repeated, but he was concentrating on the contraction now rising in his wife's flesh. He gestured to the nurse, who readied the gas. During his residency years, the practice had been to put the woman in labor out completely until the birth was over, but times had changed\u2014it was 1964\u2014and Bentley, he knew, used gas more selectively. Better that she should be awake to push; he would put her out for the worst of the contractions, for the crowning and the birth. His wife tensed and cried out, and the baby moved in the birth canal, bursting the amniotic sac. \"Now,\" the doctor said, and the nurse put the mask in place. His wife's hands relaxed, her fists unclenching as the gas took effect, and she lay still, tranquil and unknowing, as another contraction and another moved through her.\"It's coming fast for a first baby,\" the nurse observed.\"Yes,\" the doctor said. \"So far so good.\"Half an hour passed in this way. His wife roused and moaned and pushed, and when he felt she had had enough\u2014or when she cried out that the pain was overwhelming\u2014he nodded to the nurse, who gave her the gas. Except for the quiet exchange of instructions, they did not speak. Outside the snow kept falling, drifting along the sides of houses, filling the roads. The doctor sat on a stainless steel chair, narrowing his concentration to the essential facts. He had delivered five babies during medical school, all live births and all successful, and he focused now on those, seeking in his memory the details of care. As he did so, his wife, lying with her feet in the stirrups and her belly rising so high that he could not see her face, slowly became one with those other women. Her round knees, her smooth narrow calves, her ankles, all these were before him, familiar and beloved. Yet he did not think to stroke her skin or put a reassuring hand on her knee. It was the nurse who held her hand while she pushed. To the doctor, focused on what was immediately before him, she became not just herself but more than herself; a body like other bodies, a patient whose needs he must meet with every technical skill he had. It was necessary, more necessary than usual, to keep his emotions in check. As time passed, the strange moment he had experienced in their bedroom came to him again. He began to feel as if he were somehow removed from the scene of this birth, both there and also floating elsewhere, observing from some safe distance. He watched himself make the careful, precise incision for the episiotomy. A good one, he thought, as the blood welled in a clean line, not letting himself remember the times he'd touched that same flesh in passion.The head crowned. In three more pushes it emerged, and then the body slid into his waiting hands and the baby cried out, its blue skin pinking up.It was a boy, red-faced and dark-haired, his eyes alert, suspicious of the lights and the cold bright slap of air. The doctor tied the umbilical cord and cut it. My son, he allowed himself to think. My son. \"He's beautiful,\" the nurse said. She waited while he examined the child, noting his steady heart, rapid and sure, the long-fingered hands and shock of dark hair. Then she took the infant to the other room to bathe him and to drop the silver nitrate into his eyes. The small cries drifted back to them, and his wife stirred. The doctor stayed where he was with his hand on her knee, taking several deep breaths, awaiting the afterbirth. My son, he thought again.\"Where is the baby?\" his wife asked, opening her eyes and pushing hair away from her flushed face. \"Is everything all right?\"\"It's a boy,\" the doctor said, smiling down at her. \"We have a son. You'll see him as soon as he's clean. He's absolutely perfect.\"His wife's face, soft with relief and exhaustion, suddenly tightened with another contraction, and the doctor, expecting the afterbirth, returned to the stool between her legs and pressed lightly against her abdomen. She cried out, and at the same moment he understood what was happening, as startled as if a window had appeared suddenly in a concrete wall.\"It's all right,\" he said. \"Everything's fine. Nurse,\" he called, as the next contraction tightened.She came at once, carrying the baby, now swaddled in white blankets.\"He's a nine on the Apgar,\" she announced. \"That's very good.\"His wife lifted her arms for the baby and began to speak, but then the pain caught her and she lay back down. \"Nurse?\" the doctor said, \"I need you here. Right now.\"After a moment's confusion the nurse put two pillows on the floor, placed the baby on them, and joined the doctor by the table. \"More gas,\" he said. He saw her surprise and then her quick nod of comprehension as she complied. His hand was on his wife's knee; he felt the tension ease from her muscles as the gas worked. \"Twins?\" the nurse asked.The doctor, who had allowed himself to relax after the boy was born, felt shaky now, and he did not trust himself to do more than nod. Steady, he told himself, as the next head crowned. You are anywhere, he thought, watching from some fine point on the ceiling as his hands worked with method and precision. This is any birth. This baby was smaller and came easily, sliding so quickly into his gloved hands that he leaned forward, using his chest to make sure it did not fall. \"It's a girl,\" he said, and cradled her like a football, face down, tapping her back until she cried out. Then he turned her over to see her face.Creamy white vernix whorled in her delicate skin, and she was slippery with amniotic fluid and traces of blood. The blue eyes were cloudy, the hair jet black, but he barely noticed all of this. What he was looking at were the unmistakable features, the eyes turned up as if with laughter, the epicanthal fold across their lids, the flattened nose. A classic case, he remembered his professor saying as they examined a similar child, years ago. A mongoloid. Do you know what that means? And the doctor, dutiful, had recited the symptoms he'd memorized from the text: flaccid muscle tone, delayed growth and mental development, possible heart complications, early death. The professor had nodded, placing his stethoscope on the baby's smooth bare chest. Poor kid. There's nothing they can do except try to keep him clean. They ought to spare themselves and send him to a home. The doctor had felt transported back in time. His sister had been born with a heart defect and had grown very slowly, her breath catching and coming in little gasps whenever she tried to run. For many years, until the first trip to the clinic in Morgantown, they had not known what was the matter. Then they knew, and there was nothing they could do. All his mother's attention had gone to her, and yet she had died when she was twelve years old. The doctor had been sixteen, already living in town to attend high school, already on his way to Pittsburgh and medical school and the life he was living now. Still, he remembered the depth and endurance of his mother's grief, the way she walked up hill to the grave every morning, her arms folded against whatever weather she encountered.The nurse stood beside him and studied the baby.\"I'm sorry, doctor,\" she said.He held the infant, forgetting what he ought to do next. Her tiny hands were perfect. But the gap between her big toes and the others, that was there, like a missing tooth, and when he looked deeply at her eyes he saw the Brushfield spots, as tiny and distinct as flecks of snow in the irises. He imagined her heart, the size of a plum and very possibly defective, and he thought of the nursery, so carefully painted, with its soft animals and single crib. He thought of his wife standing on the sidewalk before their brightly veiled home, saying, Our world will never be the same. The baby's hand brushed his, and he started. Without volition he began to move through the familiar patterns. He cut the cord and checked her heart, her lungs. All the time he was thinking of the snow, the silver car floating into a ditch, the deep quiet of this empty clinic. Later, when he considered this night\u2014and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather\u2014what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling steadily outside. The silence was so deep and encompassing that he felt himself floating to a new height, some point above this room and then beyond, where he was one with the snow and where this scene in the room was something unfolding in a different life, a life at which he was a random spectator, like a scene glimpsed through a warmly lit window while walking on a darkened street. That was what he would remember, that feeling of endless space. The doctor in the ditch, and the lights of his own house burning far away.\"All right. Clean her up, please,\" he said, releasing the slight weight of the infant into the nurse's arms. \"But keep her in the other room. I don't want my wife to know. Not right away.\" The nurse nodded. She disappeared and then came back to lift his son into the baby carrier they'd brought. The doctor was by then intent on delivering the placentas, which came out beautifully, dark and thick, each the size of a small plate. Fraternal twins, male and female, one visibly perfect and the other marked by an extra chromosome in every cell of her body. What were the odds of that? His son lay in the carrier, his hands waving now and then, fluid and random with the quick water motions of the womb. He injected his wife with a sedative, then leaned down to repair the episiotomy. It was nearly dawn, light gathering faintly in the windows. He watched his hands move, thinking how well the stitches were going in, as tiny as her own, as neat and even. She had torn out a whole panel of the quilt because of one mistake, invisible to him.When the doctor finished, he found the nurse sitting in a rocker in the waiting room, cradling the baby girl in her arms. She met his gaze without speaking, and he remembered the night she had watched him as he slept.\"There's a place,\" he said, writing the name and address on the back of an envelope. \"I'd like you to take her there. When it's light, I mean. I'll issue the birth certificate, and I'll call to say you're coming.\"\"But your wife,\" the nurse said, and he heard, from his distant place, the surprise and disapproval in her voice.He thought of his sister, pale and thin, trying to catch her breath, and his mother turning to the window to hide her tears.\"Don't you see?\" he asked, his voice soft. \"This poor child will most likely have a serious heart defect. A fatal one. I'm trying to spare us all a terrible grief.\"He spoke with conviction. He believed his own words. The nurse sat staring at him, her expression surprised but otherwise unreadable, as he waited for her to say yes. In the state of mind he was in it did not occur to him that she might say anything else. He did not imagine, as he would later that night, and in many nights to come, the ways in which he was jeopardizing everything. Instead, he felt impatient with her slowness and very tired all of a sudden, and the clinic, so familiar, seemed strange around him, as if he were walking in a dream. The nurse studied him with her blue unreadable eyes. He returned her gaze, unflinching, and at last she nodded, a movement so slight as to be almost imperceptible.\"The snow,\" she murmured, looking down.But by midmorning the storm had begun to abate, and the distant sounds of plows grated through the still air. He watched from the upstairs window as the nurse knocked snow from her powder-blue car and drove off into the soft white world. The baby was hidden, asleep in a box lined with blankets, on the seat beside her. The doctor watched her turn left onto the street and disappear. Then he went back and sat with his family.His wife slept, her gold hair splayed across the pillow. Now and then the doctor dozed. Awake, he gazed into the empty parking lot, watching smoke rise from the chimneys across the street, preparing the words he would say. That it was no one's fault, that their daughter would be in good hands, with others like herself, with ceaseless care. That it would be best this way for them all.In the late morning, when the snow had stopped for good, his son cried out in hunger, and his wife woke up.\"Where's the baby?\" she said, rising up on her elbows, pushing her hair from her face. He was holding their son, warm and light, and he sat down beside her, settling the baby in her arms.\"Hello, my sweet,\" he said. \"Look at our beautiful son. You were very brave.\"She kissed the baby's forehead, then undid her robe and put him to her breast. His son latched on at once, and his wife looked up and smiled. He took her free hand, remembering how hard she had held onto him, imprinting the bones of her fingers on his flesh. He remembered how much he had wanted to protect her.\"Is everything all right?\" she asked. \"Darling? What is it?\"\"We had twins,\" he told her slowly, thinking of the shocks of dark hair, the slippery bodies moving in his hands. Tears rose in his eyes. \"One of each.\"\"Oh,\" she said. \"A little girl too? Phoebe and Paul. But where is she?\"Her fingers were so slight, he thought, like the bones of a little bird.\"My darling,\" he began. His voice broke, and the words he had rehearsed so carefully were gone. He closed his eyes, and when he could speak again more words came, unplanned.\"Oh, my love,\" he said. \"I am so sorry. Our little daughter died as she was born.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 13.48}, {"asin": "1603420789", "title": "Rosemary Gladstar's Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health: 175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family", "author": "Rosemary Gladstar", "description": "From the Back Cover Homemade Remedies from Nature's Pharmacy Soothe your baby's colic, moisturize dry skin, relieve cold symptoms, or simply enjoy a good night's sleep. Renowned herbalist Rosemary Gladstar provides time-tested natural therapies and herbal remedies that are safe, effective, and easy to use. She guides you every step of the way, from the growing and ecological harvesting of herbs to basic preparations and dosage directions. Originally published in hardcover as Rosemary Gladstar's Family Herbal , this comprehensive recipe-collection offers a potent prescription for energy, health, and vitality at every stage of life. Nurture yourself and those you love with nature's healing herbs. About the Author Rosemary Gladstar is the best-selling author of Rosemary Gladstar\u2019s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner\u2019s Guide and Rosemary Gladstar\u2019s Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health , which draw on her 40-plus years of experiences studying and teaching about the healing properties of herbs. She is a world-renowned educator, activist, and entrepreneur, and the founding director of Sage Mountain Herbal Retreat Center, the International Herb Symposium, and the New England Women\u2019s Herbal Conference. Gladstar is founding president of United Plant Savers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation and preservation of native American herbs. She was the original formulator for Traditional Medicinal herbal teas and has led herbal educational adventures around the world. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, and serves on the board of the Association for the Advancement of Restorative Medicine and The National Health Freedom Coalition. She lives in Vermont.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.89}, {"asin": "0679721827", "title": "The Fifth Child", "author": "Doris Lessing", "description": "Amazon.com Review The married couple in this novel pull off a remarkable achievement: They purchase a three-story house with oodles of bedrooms, and, on a middle-class income, in the '70s, fill it to the brim with happy children and visiting relatives. Their holiday gatherings are sumptuous celebrations of life and togetherness. And then the fifth child arrives. He's just a child--he's not supernatural. But is he really human? This is an elegantly written tale that the New York Times called \"a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse . . . a moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and George Orwell's 1984.\" From Publishers Weekly A smug, conservative couple's fifth child (after four model children) inspires fear and horror. \"The implications of this slim, gripping work are ominous,\" wrote PW. Lessing indicts those in authority who refuse to acknowledge responsibility for the violence inherent in mankind. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \u201cA hair-raising tale\u2026as full of twists and shocks as any page turner could desire.\u201d \u2014 Time \u201cTerse and chilling\u2026. A witch\u2019s brew of conflicting fears.\u201d \u2014 The New York Review of Books \u201cA horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse\u2026. A moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein and George Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-Four .\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review From the Inside Flap A self-satisfied couple intent on raising a happy family is shocked by the birth of an abnormal and brutal fifth child. From the Back Cover fied couple intent on raising a happy family is shocked by the birth of an abnormal and brutal fifth child. About the Author Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia, in 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books\u2014novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 12.39}, {"asin": "0061950726", "title": "Orphan Train", "author": "Christina Baker Kline", "description": "From Booklist A long journey from home and the struggle to find it again form the heart of the intertwined stories that make up this moving novel. Foster teen Molly is performing community-service work for elderly widow Vivian, and as they go through Vivian\u2019s cluttered attic, they discover that their lives have much in common. When Vivian was a girl, she was taken to a new life on an orphan train. These trains carried children to adoptive families for 75 years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the start of the Great Depression. Novelist Kline (Bird in Hand, 2009) brings Vivian\u2019s hardscrabble existence in \u00adDepression-era Minnesota to stunning life. Molly\u2019s present-day story in Maine seems to pale in comparison, but as we listen to the two characters talk, we find grace and power in both of these seemingly disparate lives. Although the girls are vulnerable, left to the whims of strangers, they show courage and resourcefulness. Kline illuminates a largely hidden chapter of American history, while portraying the coming-of-age of two resilient young women. --Bridget Thoreson Review \u201cA compelling story about loss, adaptability, and courage . . . With compassion and delicacy Kline presents a little-known chapter of American history and draws comparisons with the modern-day foster care system.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cIn ORPHAN TRAIN, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or--perhaps most importantly--ourselves.\u201d \u2014 Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle \u201cI loved this book: its absorbing back-and-forth story, its vivid history, its eminently loveable characters. ORPHAN TRAIN wrecked my heart and made me glad to be literate.\u201d \u2014 Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys \u201cOne of the most powerful novels I\u2019ve ever read...I am compelling all of you, even begging you, to make this novel your next read. You\u2019ll be talking about it for years to come!\u201d \u2014 Naples Daily News (FL) \u201cA gem.\u201d \u2014 Huffington Post \u201cAbsorbing...a heartfelt page-turner about two women finding a sense of home...Kline lets us live the characters\u2019 experiences vividly through their skin...The growth from instinct to conscious understanding to partnership between the two is the foundation for a moving tale.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cKline draws a dramatic, emotional story from a neglected corner of American history.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cI was so moved by this book. I loved Molly and Vivian, two brave, difficult, true-hearted women who disrupt one another\u2019s lives in beautiful ways, and loved journeying with them, through heartbreak and stretches of history I\u2019d never known existed, out of loneliness toward family and home.\u201d \u2014 Marisa de los Santos, New York Times-bestselling author of Belong to Me and Falling Together \u201cA lovely novel about the search for family that also happens to illuminate a fascinating and forgotten chapter of American history. Beautiful.\u201d \u2014 Ann Packer, New York Times-bestselling author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier and Swim Back to Me \u201cChristina Baker Kline writes exquisitely about two unlikely friends . . . each struggling to transcend a past of isolation and hardship. ORPHAN TRAIN will hold you in its grip as their fascinating tales unfold.\u201d \u2014 Cathy Marie Buchanan, New York Times -bestselling author of The Painted Girls \u201cChristina Baker Kline\u2019s latest wonder, ORPHAN TRAIN, makes for compulsive reading...Meticulously researched and yet full of the breath of life, Kline\u2019s novel takes us on an historical journey where survival depends upon one\u2019s own steely backbone, and the miracle of a large and generous heart.\u201d \u2014 Helen Schulman, New York Times -bestselling author of This Beautiful Life \u201cA poignant and memorable story of two steadfast, courageous women...A revelation of the universal yearing for belonging, for family, for acceptance and, ultimately, the journeys we must all make to find them.\u201d \u2014 Kathleen Kent, New York Times -bestselling author of The Heretic's Daughter and The Traitor's Wife \u201cReminiscent of Elizabeth Strout\u2019s Amy and Isabel , this Orphan Train carries us along until the stories of these two women become one.\u201d \u2014 Mary Morris, author of, most recently, Revenge \u201cThis superbly composed novel tells two parallel stories of suffering and perseverance, capturing the heart and mind equally and remaining mesmerizing through the intensely heart-wrenching conclusion.\u201d \u2014 Romantic Times, Top Pick \u201cThe intertwined stories in this novel will surely please those looking for a compelling new read.\u201d \u2014 Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cOne of the most intriguing, tender novels of 2013...This is a warm, satisfying, and inspirational story.\u201d \u2014 The New Maine Times Book Review From the Back Cover Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by pure luck. Would they be adopted by a kind and loving family, or would they face a childhood and adoles-cence of hard labor and servitude? As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was one such child, sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast of Maine, the memories of her upbringing rendered a hazy blur. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past. Seventeen-year-old Molly Ayer knows that a community-service position helping an elderly widow clean out her attic is the only thing keeping her out of juvenile hall. But as Molly helps Vivian sort through her keepsakes and possessions, she discovers that she and Vivian aren\u2019t as different as they appear. A Penobscot Indian who has spent her youth in and out of foster homes, Molly is also an outsider being raised by strangers, and she, too, has unanswered questions about the past. Moving between contemporary Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, Orphan Train is a powerful tale of upheaval and resilience, second chances, and unexpected friendship. About the Author Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train as well as A Piece of the World . She lives outside New York City and spends as much time as possible on the coast of Maine. Learn more about Christina at www.christinabakerkline.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1501106422", "title": "Still Alice", "author": "Lisa Genova", "description": "About the Author Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, Lisa Genova is the New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice , Left Neglected , Love Anthony , Inside the O\u2019Briens , and Remember . Still Alice was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Kristen Stewart. Lisa graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. She travels worldwide speaking about the neurological diseases she writes about and has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show , Today , PBS NewsHour , CNN, and NPR. Her TED talk, What You Can Do To Prevent Alzheimer's, has been viewed over 2 million times.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.44}, {"asin": "0425267725", "title": "The Husband's Secret", "author": "Liane Moriarty", "description": "Review Praise for The Husband's Secret \u201cSpellbinding...A knockout!\u201d\u2014Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author \u00a0 \u201c The Husband\u2019s Secret is so good, you won\u2019t be able to keep it to yourself.\u201d\u2014 USA Today \u201cWhat a wonderful writer\u2014smart, wise, funny.\u201d\u2014Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author \u00a0 \u201cBrilliant.\u201d\u2014Sophie Hannah, New York Times bestselling author \u00a0 \u201cLip-smacking and sharply intelligent.\u201d\u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cPerfect for vacation reading: There\u2019s humor, suspense, a circle of appealing women.\u201d\u2014 People \u201cSecrets can be sinister; they can eat you alive. But they can also set you free. The Husband\u2019s Secret demonstrates this power with one of the most entertaining stories I have read in ages. Perfect for book clubs\u2014lots to debate in these pages. I just loved it.\u201d\u2014Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author \u00a0 \u201cSimultaneously a page-turner and a book one has to put down occasionally to think about and absorb, Moriarty\u2019s novel challenges the reader as well as her characters, but in the best possible way.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cReading groups rejoice. This meaty novel from the bestselling author will probably land on many must-read lists.\u201d\u2014 Fort Worth Star-Telegram \u201cMoriarty may be an edgier, more provocative, and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) About the Author Liane Moriarty is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Nine Perfect Strangers , Three Wishes , Truly Madly Guilty , Big Little Lies , The Husband\u2019s Secret , The Hypnotist\u2019s Love Story , and What Alice Forgot . She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PRAISE FOR THE HUSBAND\u2019S SECRET \u201cIn The Husband\u2019s Secret , Liane Moriarty has created a contemporary Pandora whose dilemma is spellbinding. Shocking, complex, and thought-provoking, this is a story reading groups will devour. A knockout!\u201d \u2014Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author \u201cBrilliant.\u201d \u2014Sophie Hannah, international bestselling author \u201cI really enjoyed The Husband\u2019s Secret , and raced right through it in two days. It\u2019s a knowing, touching, and entertaining page-turner. What a wonderful writer\u2014smart, wise, funny.\u201d \u2014Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author \u201cA novel that\u2019s perfect for vacation reading: There\u2019s humor, suspense, a circle of appealing women whose dilemmas intersect with Cecilia\u2019s\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cLiane Moriarty is far more than the skillful writer of potboilers. Her compelling characters could be your friends and neighbors, nice and neurotic in equal doses\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0Amid three intertwined storylines and terrific plot twists, Moriarty presents a nuanced and moving portrait of the meaning of love, both marital and familial, and how life can hinge on a misunderstanding or a decision made in haste. The Husband\u2019s Secret is so good, you won\u2019t be able to keep it to yourself.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cReading groups rejoice. This meaty novel from the bestselling author will probably land on many must-read lists.\u201d \u2014 Dallas\u2013Fort Worth Star-Telegram \u201cA smart, thoughtful read\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0[a] lip-smacking and intelligently written novel.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cMoriarty may be an edgier, more provocative, and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cAt first, this reviewer wanted to warn readers not to be taken in by the light tone of Liane Moriarty\u2019s The Husband\u2019s Secret . On second thought, maybe readers should let this rather crafty novelist\u2019s deceptive breeziness and humor sweep them along. It makes the shocks just that much more deliciously nasty, including the gob-smacking twist in the epilogue\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0The genius of The Husband\u2019s Secret is that it makes us start to wonder what in our own lives would\u2014or would not\u2014have happened if, say, we had waited just fi ve more minutes before we walked out the door, had not said that hurtful thing, had applied a bit of logic to that situation.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201cSecrets can be sinister; they can eat you alive. But they can also set you free. The Husband\u2019s Secret by Liane Moriarty demonstrates this power with one of the most entertaining stories I have read in ages. Perfect for book clubs\u2014lots to debate in these pages. I just loved it.\u201d \u2014Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author \u201cThis great summer read is hard to put down.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cA provocative page-turner\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u2014 Woman\u2019s World Poor, poor Pandora. Zeus sends her off to marry Epimetheus, a not especially bright man she\u2019s never even met, along with a mysterious covered jar. Nobody tells Pandora a word about the jar. Nobody tells her not to open the jar. Naturally, she opens the jar. What else has she got to do? How was she to know that all those dreadful ills would go whooshing out to plague mankind forevermore, and that the only thing left in the jar would be hope? Why wasn\u2019t there a warning label? And then everyone\u2019s like, Oh , Pandora . Where\u2019s your willpower? You were told not to open that box, you snoopy girl, you typical woman with your insatiable curiosity; now look what you\u2019ve gone and done . When for one thing it was a jar , not a box, and for another\u2014how many times does she have to say it?\u2014nobody said a word about not opening it! ONE MONDAY It was all because of the Berlin Wall. If it weren\u2019t for the Berlin Wall, Cecilia would never have found the letter, and then she wouldn\u2019t be sitting here, at the kitchen table, willing herself not to rip it open. The envelope was gray with a fine layer of dust. The words on the front were written in a scratchy blue ballpoint pen, the handwriting as familiar as her own. She turned it over. It was sealed with a yellowing piece of sticky tape. When was it written? It felt old, like it was written years ago, but there was no way of knowing for sure. She wasn\u2019t going to open it. It was absolutely clear that she should not open it. She was the most decisive person she knew, and she\u2019d already decided not to open the letter, so there was nothing more to think about. Although, honestly, if she did open it, what would be the big deal? Any woman would open it like a shot. She listed all her friends and what their responses would be if she were to ring them up right now and ask what they thought. Miriam Oppenheimer: Yup. Open it. Erica Edgecliff: Are you kidding, open it right this second. Laura Marks: Yes, you should open it and then you should read it out loud to me. Sarah Sacks:\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. There would be no point asking Sarah because she was incapable of making a decision. If Cecilia asked her if she wanted tea or coffee, she would sit for a full minute, her forehead furrowed as she agonized over the pros and cons of each beverage, before finally saying, \u201cCoffee! No, wait, tea!\u201d A decision like this one would give her a seizure. Mahalia Ramachandran: Absolutely not. It would be completely disrespectful to your husband. You must not open it. Mahalia could be a little too sure of herself at times with those huge brown ethical eyes. Cecilia left the letter sitting on the kitchen table and went to put the kettle on. Damn that Berlin Wall, and that Cold War, and whoever it was who sat there back in nineteen forty-whenever-it-was, mulling over the problem of what to do with those ungrateful Germans; the guy who suddenly clicked his fingers and said, \u201cGot it, by Jove! We\u2019ll build a great big bloody wall and keep the buggers in!\u201d Presumably he hadn\u2019t sounded like a British sergeant major. Esther would know who first came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall. Esther would probably be able to give her his date of birth. It would have been a man, of course. Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective. Was that sexist? She filled the kettle, switched it on and cleaned the droplets of water in the sink with a paper towel so that it shone. One of the mums from school, who had three sons almost exactly the same ages as Cecilia\u2019s three daughters, had said that some remark Cecilia had made was \u201ca teeny-weeny bit sexist,\u201d just before they started the Fete Committee meeting last week. Cecilia couldn\u2019t remember what she\u2019d said, but she\u2019d only been joking. Anyway, weren\u2019t women allowed to be sexist for the next two thousand years or so, until they\u2019d evened up the score? Maybe she was sexist. The kettle boiled. She swirled an Earl Grey tea bag and watched the curls of black spread through the water like ink. There were worse things to be than sexist. For example, you could be the sort of person who pinched your fingers together while using the word \u201cteeny-weeny.\u201d She looked at her tea and sighed. A glass of wine would be nice right now, but she\u2019d given up alcohol for Lent. Only six days to go. She had a bottle of expensive Shiraz ready to open on Easter Sunday, when thirty-five adults and twenty-three children were coming to lunch, so she\u2019d need it. Although she was an old hand at entertaining. She hosted Easter, Mother\u2019s Day, Father\u2019s Day and Christmas. John-Paul had five younger brothers, all married with kids. So it was quite a crowd. Planning was the key. Meticulous planning. She picked up her tea and took it over to the table. Why did she give up wine for Lent? Polly was more sensible. She had given up strawberry jam. Cecilia had never seen Polly show more than a passing interest in strawberry jam, although now, of course, she was always catching her standing at the open fridge, staring at it longingly. The power of denial. \u201cEsther!\u201d she called out. Esther was in the next room with her sisters watching The Biggest Loser while they shared a giant bag of salt-and-vinegar chips left over from the Australia Day barbecue months earlier. Cecilia did not know why her three slender daughters loved watching overweight people sweat and cry and starve. It didn\u2019t appear to be teaching them healthier eating habits. She should go in and confiscate the bag of chips, except they\u2019d all eaten salmon and steamed broccoli for dinner without complaint, and she didn\u2019t have the strength for an argument. She heard a voice from the television boom, \u201cYou get nothing for nothing!\u201d That wasn\u2019t such a bad sentiment for her daughters to hear. No one knew it better than Cecilia! But still, she didn\u2019t like the expressions of faint revulsion that flitted across their smooth young faces. She was always so vigilant about not making negative body-image comments in front of her daughters, although the same could not be said for her friends. Just the other day, Miriam Oppenheimer had said, loud enough for all their impressionable daughters to hear, \u201cGod, would you look at my stomach!\u201d and squeezed her flesh between her fingertips as if it were something vile. Great, Miriam, as if our daughters don\u2019t already get a million messages every day telling them to hate their bodies . Actually, Miriam\u2019s stomach was getting a little pudgy. \u201cEsther!\u201d she called out again. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d Esther called back, in a patient, put-upon voice that Cecilia suspected was an unconscious imitation of her own. \u201cWhose idea was it to build the Berlin Wall?\u201d \u201cWell, they\u2019re pretty sure it was Nikita Khrushchev\u2019s!\u201d Esther answered immediately, pronouncing the exotic-sounding name with great relish and her own peculiar interpretation of a Russian accent. \u201cHe was, like, the prime minister of Russia, except he was the premier. But it could have been\u2014\u201d Her sisters responded instantly with their usual impeccable courtesy. \u201cShut up, Esther!\u201d \u201cEsther! I can\u2019t hear the television !\u201d \u201cThank you, darling!\u201d Cecilia sipped her tea and imagined herself going back through time and putting that Khrushchev in his place. No, Mr. Khrushchev, you may not have a wall. It will not prove that communism works. It will not work out well at all. Now, look, I agree capitalism isn\u2019t the be-all and end-all! Let me show you my last credit card bill. But you really need to put your thinking cap back on . And then fifty-one years later, Cecilia wouldn\u2019t have found this letter that was making her feel so\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. What was the word? Unfocused. That was it. She liked to feel focused. She was proud of her ability to focus. Her daily life was made up of a thousand tiny pieces\u2014\u201cNeed coriander\u201d; \u201cIsabel\u2019s haircut\u201d; \u201cWho will watch Polly at ballet on Tuesday while I take Esther to speech therapy?\u201d\u2014like one of those terrible giant jigsaws that Isabel used to spend hours doing. And yet Cecilia, who had no patience for puzzles, knew exactly where each tiny piece of her life belonged and where it needed to be slotted in next. And okay, maybe the life Cecilia was leading wasn\u2019t that unusual or impressive. She was a school mum and a part-time Tupperware consultant, not an actress or an actuary or a\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. poet living in Vermont. (Cecilia had recently discovered that Liz Brogan, a girl from high school, was now a prizewinning poet living in Vermont. Liz, who ate cheese-and-Vegemite sandwiches and was always losing her bus pass. It took all of Cecilia\u2019s considerable strength of character not to find that annoying. Not that she wanted to write poetry. But still. You would have thought that if anyone was going to lead an ordinary life, it would have been Liz Brogan.) Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here I am, a typical suburban mum, she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior. Other mothers talked about feeling overwhelmed, about the difficulties of focusing on one thing, and they were always saying, \u201cHow do you do it all, Cecilia?\u201d and she didn\u2019t know how to answer them. She didn\u2019t actually understand what they found so difficult. But now, for some reason, something to do with this silly letter, everything felt somehow at risk. It wasn\u2019t logical. Maybe it wasn\u2019t anything to do with the letter. Maybe it was hormonal. She was \u201cpossibly perimenopausal,\u201d according to Dr. McArthur. (\u201cOh, I am not !\u201d Cecilia had said automatically, as if responding to a gentle, humorous insult.) Perhaps this was a case of that vague anxiety she knew some women experienced. Other women. She\u2019d always thought anxious people were cute. Dear little anxious people like Sarah Sacks. She wanted to pat their worry-filled heads. Perhaps if she opened the letter and saw that it was nothing, she would get everything back in focus. She had things to do. Two baskets of laundry to fold. Three urgent phone calls to make. Gluten-free muffins to bake for the gluten-intolerant members of the School Website Project Group (i.e., Janine Davidson), which would be meeting tomorrow. There were other things besides the letter that could be making her feel anxious. The sex thing, for example. That was always at the back of her mind. She frowned and ran her hands down the sides of her waist. Her oblique muscles, according to her Pilates teacher. Oh, look, the sex thing was nothing . It was not actually on her mind. She refused to let it be on her mind. It was of no consequence. It was true, perhaps, that ever since that morning last year, she\u2019d been aware of an underlying sense of fragility, a new understanding that a life of coriander and laundry could be stolen in an instant, that your ordinariness could vanish, and suddenly you\u2019re a woman on your knees, your face lifted to the sky, and some women are running to help, but others are already averting their heads, with the words not articulated, but felt: Don\u2019t let this touch me . Cecilia saw it again for the thousandth time: little Spider-Man flying. She was one of the women who ran. Well, of course she was, throwing open her car door, even though she knew that nothing she did could make any difference. It wasn\u2019t her school, her neighborhood, her parish. None of her children had ever played with the little Spider-Man. She\u2019d never had coffee with the woman on her knees. She just happened to be stopped at the lights on the other side of the intersection when it happened. A little boy, probably about five, dressed in a red and blue full-body Spider-Man suit was waiting at the side of the road, holding his mother\u2019s hand. It was Book Week. That\u2019s why the little boy was dressed up. Cecilia was watching him, thinking, Mmmm, actually Spider-Man is not a character from a book , when for no reason that she could see, the little boy dropped his mother\u2019s hand and stepped off the curb into the traffic. Cecilia screamed. She also, she remembered later, instinctively banged her fist on her horn. If Cecilia had driven by just ten minutes later, or even five minutes later, she would have missed seeing it happen. The little boy\u2019s death would have meant nothing more to her than another traffic detour. Now it was a memory that would probably cause her grandchildren to one day say, \u201cDon\u2019t hold my hand so tight , Grandma.\u201d Obviously there was no connection between little Spider-Man and this letter. He just came into her mind at strange times. Cecilia flicked the letter across the table with her fingertip and picked up Esther\u2019s library book: The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall . So, the Berlin Wall. Wonderful. The first she knew that the Berlin Wall was about to become a significant part of her life had been at breakfast this morning. It had been just Cecilia and Esther sitting at the kitchen table. John-Paul was overseas, in Chicago until Friday, and Isabel and Polly were still in bed. Cecilia didn\u2019t normally sit down in the mornings. She generally ate her breakfast standing at the breakfast counter while she made lunches, checked her Tupperware orders on her iPad, unpacked the dishwasher, texted clients about their parties, whatever, but it was a rare opportunity to have some time alone with her odd, darling middle daughter, so she sat down with her Bircher muesli, while Esther powered her way through a bowl of rice bubbles, and waited. She\u2019d learned that with her daughters. Don\u2019t say a word. Don\u2019t ask a question. Give them enough time and they\u2019ll finally tell you what\u2019s on their minds. It was like fishing. It took silence and patience. (Or so she\u2019d heard. Cecilia would rather hammer nails into her forehead than go fishing.) Silence didn\u2019t come naturally to her. Cecilia was a talker. \u201cSeriously, do you ever shut the hell up?\u201d an ex-boyfriend had said to her once. She talked a lot when she was nervous. That ex-boyfriend must have made her nervous. Although she also talked a lot when she was happy. But she didn\u2019t say anything that morning. She just ate, and waited, and sure enough, Esther started talking. \u201cMum,\u201d she said, in her husky, precise little voice with its faint lisp. \u201cDid you know that some people escaped over the Berlin Wall in a hot-air balloon they made themselves?\u201d \u201cI did not know that,\u201d said Cecilia, although she might have known it. So long, Titanic; hello, Berlin Wall, she thought. She would have preferred it if Esther had shared something with her about how she was feeling at the moment, any worries she had about school, her friends, questions about sex. But no, she wanted to talk about the Berlin Wall. Ever since Esther was three years old, she\u2019d been developing these interests or, more accurately, obsessions. First it was dinosaurs. Sure, lots of kids are interested in dinosaurs, but Esther\u2019s interest was, well, exhausting, to be frank, and a little peculiar. Nothing else interested the child. She drew dinosaurs, she played with dinosaurs, she dressed up as a dinosaur. \u201cI\u2019m not Esther,\u201d she\u2019d say. \u201cI\u2019m T. rex.\u201d Every bedtime story had to be about dinosaurs. Every conversation had to be related somehow to dinosaurs. It was lucky that John-Paul was interested, because Cecilia was bored after about five minutes. (They were extinct! They had nothing to say!) John-Paul took Esther on special trips to the museum. He brought home books for her. He sat with her for hours while they talked about herbivores and carnivores. Since then Ether\u2019s \u201cinterests\u201d had ranged from roller coasters to cane toads. Most recently it had been the Titanic . Now that she was ten, she was old enough to do her own research at the library and online, and Cecilia was amazed at the information she gathered. What ten-year-old lay in bed reading historical books that were so big and chunky, she could barely hold them up? \u201cEncourage it!\u201d her schoolteachers said, but sometimes Cecilia worried. It seemed to her that Esther was possibly a touch autistic, or at least sitting somewhere on the autism spectrum. Although Cecilia\u2019s mother had laughed when she mentioned her concern. \u201cBut Esther is exactly like you were!\u201d she said. This was not true. \u201cI actually have a piece of the Berlin Wall,\u201d Cecilia had said that morning to Esther, suddenly remembering this fact, and it had been gratifying to see Esther\u2019s eyes light up with interest. \u201cI was there in Germany, after the Wall came down.\u201d \u201cCan I see it?\u201d asked Esther. \u201cYou can have it, darling.\u201d Jewelry and clothes for Isabel and Polly. A piece of the Berlin Wall for Esther. Cecilia, twenty years old at the time, had been on a six-week holiday traveling through Europe with her friend Sarah Sacks in 1990, just a few months after the announcement that the Wall was coming down. (Sarah\u2019s famous indecisiveness paired with Cecilia\u2019s famous decisiveness made them the perfect traveling companions. No conflict whatsoever.) When they got to Berlin, they found tourists lined along the Wall, trying to chip off pieces as souvenirs using keys, rocks, anything they could find. The Wall was like a giant carcass of a dragon that had once terrorized the city, and the tourists were crows pecking away at its remains. Without proper tools it was almost impossible to chip off a proper piece, so Cecilia and Sarah (well, Cecilia) decided to buy their pieces from the enterprising locals who had set out rugs and were selling a variety of offerings. Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from gray-colored chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-size chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti. Cecilia couldn\u2019t remember how much she had paid for the tiny gray stone that looked like it could have come from anyone\u2019s front garden. \u201cIt probably did,\u201d said Sarah as they caught the train out of Berlin that night, and they\u2019d laughed at their own gullibility, but at least they\u2019d felt like they were a part of history. Cecilia had put her chip in a paper bag and written \u201cMY PIECE OF THE BERLIN WALL\u201d on the front, and when she came back to Australia she\u2019d thrown it in a box with all the other souvenirs she\u2019d collected: drink coasters, train tickets, menus, foreign coins, hotel keys. Cecilia wished now she\u2019d concentrated more on the Wall, taken more photos, collected more anecdotes she could have shared with Esther. Actually, what she remembered most about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome, brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly sexy, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky. If only she\u2019d been the sort of curious, politically aware girl who had struck up conversations with the locals about what it had been like living in the shadow of the Wall. Instead, all she had to share with her daughter were stories about kissing and ice cubes. Of course, Isabel and Polly would love to hear about the kissing and ice cubes. Or Polly would; maybe Isabel had reached the age where the thought of her mother kissing anybody would be appalling. Cecilia had put \u201cFind piece of Berlin Wall for E\u201d on her list of things to do that day (there were twenty-five items\u2014she used an iPhone app to list them), and at about two p.m., she had gone into the attic to find it. \u201cAttic\u201d was probably too generous a word for the storage area in their roof space. You reached it by pulling down a ladder from a trapdoor in the ceiling. Once she was up there, she had to keep her knees bent so as not to bang her head. John-Paul point-blank refused to go up there. He suffered from terrible claustrophobia and walked six flights of stairs every day to his office so he could avoid taking the elevator. The poor man had regular nightmares about being trapped in a room where the walls were contracting. \u201cThe walls!\u201d he\u2019d shout, just before he woke up, sweaty and wild-eyed. \u201cDo you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child?\u201d Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn\u2019t have put it past his mother), but he said he was pretty sure he wasn\u2019t. \u201cActually, John-Paul never had nightmares when he was a little boy,\u201d his mother had told Cecilia when she asked. \u201cHe was a beautiful sleeper. Perhaps you give him too much rich food late at night?\u201d Cecilia was used to the nightmares now. The attic was small and crammed, but tidy and well organized, of course. Over recent years, \u201corganized\u201d seemed to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing that her family and friends commented on and teased her about, it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now extraordinarily well organized, as if motherhood were a sport and she were a top athlete. It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control? And that was why other people, like her sister, had rooms full of dusty junk, whereas Cecilia\u2019s attic was stacked with clearly labeled white plastic storage containers. The only part that didn\u2019t look quite Cecilia-ish was the tower of shoe boxes in the corner. They were John-Paul\u2019s. He liked to keep each financial year\u2019s receipts in a different shoe box. It was something he\u2019d been doing for years, before he met Cecilia. He was proud of his shoe boxes, so she managed to restrain herself from telling him that a filing cabinet would be a far more effective use of space. Thanks to her labeled storage containers, she found her piece of the Berlin Wall almost straightaway. She peeled off the lid of the container marked \u201cCecilia: Travel/Souvenirs. 1985\u20131990,\u201d and there it was in its faded brown paper bag. Her little piece of history. She took out the piece of rock (cement?) and held it in her palm. It was even smaller than she remembered. It didn\u2019t look especially impressive, but hopefully it would be enough for the reward of one of Esther\u2019s rare, lopsided little smiles. You had to work hard for a smile from Esther. Then Cecilia let herself get distracted (yes, she achieved a lot every day, but she wasn\u2019t a machine , she did sometimes fritter away a little time) looking through the box and laughing at the photo of herself with the German boy who did the ice cube thing. He, like her piece of the Berlin Wall, wasn\u2019t quite as impressive as she remembered. Then the house phone rang, startling her out of the past, and she stood up too fast and banged the side of her head painfully against the ceiling. The walls, the walls! She swore, reeled back, and her elbow knocked against John-Paul\u2019s tower of shoe boxes. At least three lost their lids and their contents, causing a mini landslide of paperwork. This was precisely why the shoe boxes were not such a good idea. Cecilia swore again and rubbed her head, which really did hurt. She looked at the shoe boxes and saw that they were all for financial years dating back to the eighties. She began stuffing the pile of receipts into one of the boxes when her eye was caught by her own name on a white business envelope. She picked it up and saw that it was John-Paul\u2019s handwriting. It said: For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick To be opened only in the event of my death She laughed out loud, and then abruptly stopped, as if she were at a party and she\u2019d laughed at something somebody said and then realized that it wasn\u2019t a joke, it was actually quite serious. She read it again\u2014\u201cFor my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick\u201d\u2014and oddly, for just a moment, she\u2019d felt her cheeks go warm, like she was embarrassed. For him or for her? She wasn\u2019t sure. It felt like she\u2019d stumbled upon something shameful, as if she\u2019d caught him masturbating in the shower. (Miriam Oppenheimer had once caught Doug masturbating in the shower. It was just so dreadful that they all knew that, but once Miriam was on to her second glass of champagne, the secrets just bubbled out of her, and once they knew it was impossible to un-know it.) What did it say ? She considered tearing it open right that second, before she had time to think about it, like the way she sometimes (not very often) shoved the last piece of chocolate in her mouth, before her conscience had time to catch up with her greed. The phone rang again. She wasn\u2019t wearing her watch, and suddenly she felt like she\u2019d lost all sense of time. She threw the rest of the paperwork back into one of the shoe boxes and took the piece of the Berlin Wall and the letter back downstairs. As soon as she left the attic, she was picked up and swept along by the fast-running current of her life. There was a big Tupperware order to deliver, the girls to be picked up from school, the fish to be bought for tonight\u2019s dinner (they ate a lot of fish when John-Paul was away for work because he hated it), phone calls to return. The parish priest, Father Joe, had been calling to remind her that it was Sister Ursula\u2019s funeral tomorrow. There seemed to be some concern about numbers. She would go, of course. She left John-Paul\u2019s mysterious letter on top of the fridge, and gave Esther the piece of the Berlin Wall just before they sat down for dinner. \u201cThank you.\u201d Esther handled the little piece of rock with touching reverence. \u201cExactly which part of the Wall did it come from?\u201d \u201cWell, I think it was quite near Checkpoint Charlie,\u201d said Cecilia with jolly confidence. She had no idea. But I can tell you that boy with the ice cube wore a red T-shirt and white jeans and he picked up my ponytail and held it between his fingertips and said, \u201cVery pretty.\u201d \u201cIs it worth any money?\u201d asked Polly. \u201cI doubt it. How could you prove it really was from the Wall?\u201d asked Isabel. \u201cIt just looks like a piece of rock.\u201d \u201cDMA testing,\u201d said Polly. The child watched far too much television. \u201cIt\u2019s D N A, not DMA, and that comes from people,\u201d said Esther. \u201cI know that!\u201d Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her. \u201cWell, then why\u2014\u201d \u201cSo who do you reckon is going to get voted off The Biggest Loser tonight?\u201d asked Cecilia, while simultaneously thinking, Why, yes, whoever that is observing my life, I am changing the subject from a fascinating period of modern history that might actually teach my children something to a trashy television show that will teach them nothing, but will keep the peace and not make my head hurt. If John-Paul had been at home, she probably wouldn\u2019t have changed the subject. She was a far better mother when she had an audience. The girls talked about The Biggest Loser for the rest of dinner, while Cecilia pretended to be interested and thought about the letter sitting on top of the fridge. Once the table was cleared and the girls were all watching TV, she took it down to stare at it. Now she put down her cup of tea and held the envelope up to the light, half laughing at herself. It looked like a handwritten letter on lined notebook paper. She couldn\u2019t decipher a word. Had John-Paul perhaps seen something on television about how the soldiers in Afghanistan wrote letters to their families to be sent in the event of their deaths, like messages from the grave, and had he thought that it might be nice to do something similar? She just couldn\u2019t imagine him sitting down to do such a thing. It was so sentimental. Lovely though. If he died, he wanted them to know how much he loved them. \u201c.\u00a0.\u00a0. in the event of my death.\u201d Why was he thinking about death? Was he sick? But this letter appeared to have been written a long time ago, and he was still alive. Besides, he\u2019d had a checkup a few weeks back, and Dr. Kluger had said he was as \u201cfit as a stallion.\u201d He\u2019d spent the next few days tossing his head back and whinnying and neighing around the house, while Polly rode on his back swinging a tea towel around her head like a whip. Cecilia smiled at the memory, and her anxiety dissipated. So a few years ago, John-Paul had done something uncharacteristically sentimental and written this letter. It was nothing to get all worked up about, and of course she shouldn\u2019t open it just for the sake of curiosity. She looked at the clock. Nearly eight p.m. He\u2019d be calling soon. He generally called around this time each night when he was away. She wasn\u2019t even going to mention the letter to him. It would embarrass him, and it wasn\u2019t really an appropriate topic of conversation for the phone. One thing: How exactly was she meant to have found this letter if he had died? She might never have found it! Why hadn\u2019t he given it to their solicitor, Miriam\u2019s husband, Doug Oppenheimer? So difficult not to think of him in the shower every time he came to mind. Of course it had no bearing on his abilities as a lawyer; perhaps it said more about Miriam\u2019s abilities in the bedroom. (Cecilia had a mildly competitive relationship with Miriam.) Of course, given the current circumstances, now was not the time to be feeling smug about sex. Stop it. Do not think about the sex thing. Anyway, it was dumb of John-Paul not to have given the letter to Doug. If he\u2019d died she probably would have thrown out all his shoe boxes in one of her decluttering frenzies without even bothering to go through them. If he\u2019d wanted her to find the letter, it was crazy to just shove it in a random shoe box. Why not put it in the file with the copies of their wills, life insurance and so on? John-Paul was one of the smartest people she knew, except when it came to the logistics of life. \u201cI seriously don\u2019t understand how men came to rule the world,\u201d she\u2019d said to her sister, Bridget, this morning, after she\u2019d told her about how John-Paul had lost his rental car keys in Chicago. It had driven Cecilia bananas seeing that text message from him. There was nothing she could do! This type of thing was always happening to John-Paul. Last time he went overseas he\u2019d left his laptop in a cab. The man lost things constantly. Wallets, phones, keys, his wedding ring. His possessions just slid right off him. \u201cThey\u2019re pretty good at building stuff,\u201d her sister said. \u201cLike bridges and roads. I mean, could you even build a hut? Your basic mud hut?\u201d \u201cI could build a hut,\u201d said Cecilia. \u201cYou probably could,\u201d groaned Bridget, as if this were a failing. \u201cAnyway, men don\u2019t rule the world. We have a female prime minister. And you rule your world. You rule the Fitzpatrick household. You rule St. Angela\u2019s. You rule the world of Tupperware.\u201d Cecilia was president of St. Angela\u2019s Primary Parents and Friends Association. She was also the eleventh top-selling Tupperware consultant in Australia. Her sister found both of these roles hugely comical. \u201cI don\u2019t rule the Fitzpatrick household,\u201d said Cecilia. \u201cSure you don\u2019t,\u201d guffawed Bridget. It was true that if Cecilia died, the Fitzpatrick household would just\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Well, it was unbearable to think about what would happen. John-Paul would need more than a letter from her. He\u2019d need a whole manual, including a floor plan of the house pointing out the locations of the laundry and the linen cupboard. The phone rang, and she snatched it up. \u201cLet me guess. Our daughters are watching the chubby people, right?\u201d said John-Paul. She\u2019d always loved his voice on the phone: deep, warm and comforting. Oh, yes, her husband was hopeless, and lost things and ran late, but he took care of his wife and daughters, in that old-fashioned, responsible, I-am-the-man-and-this-is-my-job way. Bridget was right: Cecilia ruled her world, but she\u2019d always known that if there was a crisis\u2014a crazed gunman, a flood, a fire\u2014John-Paul would be the one to save their lives. He\u2019d throw himself in front of the bullet, build the raft, drive them safely through the raging inferno, and once that was done, he\u2019d hand back control to Cecilia, pat his pockets and say, \u201cHas anyone seen my wallet?\u201d After she saw the little Spider-Man die, the first thing she did was call John-Paul, her fingers shaking as she pressed the buttons. \u201cI found this letter,\u201d said Cecilia. She ran her fingertips over his handwriting on the front of the envelope. As soon as she heard his voice, she knew she was going to ask him about it that very second. They\u2019d been married for fifteen years. There had never been secrets. \u201cWhat letter?\u201d \u201cA letter from you,\u201d said Cecilia. She was trying to sound light, jokey, so that this whole situation would stay in the right perspective, so that whatever was in the letter would mean nothing, would change nothing. \u201cTo me, to be opened in the event of your death.\u201d It was impossible to use the words \u201cevent of your death\u201d to your husband without your voice coming out odd. There was silence. For a moment she thought they\u2019d been cut off, except that she could hear a gentle hum of chatter and clatter in the background. It sounded like he was calling from a restaurant. Her stomach contracted. \u201cJohn-Paul?\u201d TWO If this is a joke,\u201d said Tess, \u201cit\u2019s not funny.\u201d Will put his hand on her arm. Felicity put her hand on her other arm. They were like matching bookends holding her up. \u201cWe\u2019re so very, very sorry,\u201d said Felicity. \u201cSo sorry,\u201d echoed Will, as if they were singing a duet together. They were sitting at the big round wooden table they used for client meetings, but mostly for eating pizza. Will\u2019s face was dead white. Tess could see each tiny black hair of his stubble in sharp definition, standing upright, like some sort of miniature crop growing across his shockingly white skin. Felicity had three distinct red blotches on her neck. For a moment Tess was transfixed by those three blotches, as if they held the answer. They looked like fingerprints on Felicity\u2019s brand-new slender neck. Finally, Tess raised her eyes and saw that Felicity\u2019s eyes\u2014her famously beautiful almond-shaped green eyes; The fat girl has such beautiful eyes! \u2014were red and watery. \u201cSo this realization,\u201d said Tess. \u201cThis realization that you two\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d She stopped. Swallowed. \u201cWe want you to know that nothing has actually happened,\u201d interrupted Felicity. \u201cWe haven\u2019t\u2014you know,\u201d said Will. \u201cYou haven\u2019t slept together.\u201d Tess saw that they were both proud of this, that they almost expected her to admire them for their restraint. \u201cAbsolutely not,\u201d said Will. \u201cBut you want to,\u201d said Tess. She was almost laughing at the absurdity of it. \u201cThat\u2019s what you\u2019re telling me, right? You want to sleep together.\u201d They must have kissed. That was worse than if they\u2019d slept together. Everyone knew that a stolen kiss was the most erotic thing in the world. The blotches on Felicity\u2019s neck began to slink up her jawline. She looked like she was coming down with a rare infectious disease. \u201cWe\u2019re so sorry,\u201d said Will again. \u201cWe tried so hard to\u2014to make it not happen.\u201d \u201cWe really did,\u201d said Felicity. \u201cFor months, you know, we just\u2014\u201d \u201cMonths? This has been going on for months!\u201d \u201cNothing has actually gone on,\u201d intoned Will, as solemnly as if he were in church. \u201cWell, something has gone on,\u201d said Tess. \u201cSomething rather significant has gone on.\u201d Who knew she was capable of speaking with such hardness? Each word sounded like a block of concrete. \u201cSorry,\u201d said Will. \u201cOf course\u2014I just meant\u2014you know.\u201d Felicity pressed her fingertips to her forehead and began to weep. \u201cOh, Tess.\u201d Tess\u2019s hand went out of its own accord to comfort her. They were closer than sisters. She always told people that. Their mothers were twins, and Felicity and Tess were only children, born within six months of each other. They\u2019d done everything together. Tess had once punched a boy\u2014a proper closed-fist right hook across the jaw\u2014because he called Felicity a baby elephant, which was exactly what Felicity had looked like all through her school days. Felicity had grown into a fat adult, \u201ca big girl with a pretty face.\u201d She drank Coke like it was water and never dieted or exercised or seemed particularly bothered by her weight. And then, about six months ago, Felicity had joined Weight Watchers, given up Coke, joined a gym, lost forty kilos and turned beautiful. Extremely beautiful. She was exactly the type of person they wanted for that Biggest Loser show: a stunning woman trapped in a fat person\u2019s body. Tess had been thrilled for her. \u201cMaybe she\u2019ll meet someone really nice now,\u201d she\u2019d said to Will. \u201cNow that she\u2019s got more confidence.\u201d It seemed that Felicity had met someone really nice. Will. The nicest man Tess knew. That took a lot of confidence, to steal your cousin\u2019s husband. \u201cI\u2019m so sorry, I just want to die,\u201d wept Felicity. Tess pulled back her hand. Felicity\u2014snarky, sarcastic, funny, clever, fat Felicity\u2014sounded like an American cheerleader. Will tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling with a clenched jaw. He was trying not to cry too. The last time Tess had seen him cry was when Liam was born. Tess\u2019s eyes were dry. Her heart hammered as if she were terrified, as if her life were in danger. The phone rang. \u201cLeave it,\u201d said Will. \u201cIt\u2019s after hours.\u201d Tess stood, went over to her desk and picked up the phone. \u201cTWF Advertising,\u201d she said. \u201cTess, my love, I know it\u2019s late, but we\u2019ve got us a little problem.\u201d It was Dirk Freeman, marketing director of Petra Pharmaceuticals, their most important and best-paying client. It was Tess\u2019s job to make Dirk feel important, to reassure him that although he was fifty-six and was never going to climb any higher in the ranks of senior management, he was the big kahuna and Tess was his servant, his maid, his lowly chambermaid, in fact, and he could tell her what to do and be flirty, or grumpy, or stern, and she\u2019d pretend to give him a bit of lip, but when it came down to it, she had to do what he said . It had occurred to her recently that the service she was providing Dirk Freeman bordered on sexual. \u201cThe color of the dragon on the Cough Stop packaging is all wrong,\u201d said Dirk. \u201cIt\u2019s too purple. Much too purple. Have we gone to print?\u201d Yes, they\u2019d gone to print. Fifty thousand little cardboard boxes had rolled off the presses that day. Fifty thousand perfectly purple, toothily grinning dragons. The work that had gone into those dragons. The e-mails, the discussions. And while Tess was talking about dragons, Will and Felicity were falling in love. \u201cNo,\u201d said Tess, her eyes on her husband and cousin, who were both still sitting at the meeting table in the center of the room, their heads bowed, examining their fingertips, like teenagers in detention. \u201cIt\u2019s your lucky day, Dirk.\u201d \u201cOh, I thought it would have\u2014well, good.\u201d He could barely hide his disappointment. He\u2019d wanted Tess all breathless and worried. He\u2019d wanted to hear the tremor of panic in her voice. His voiced deepened, became as abrupt and authoritative as if he were about to lead his troops onto the battlefield. \u201cI need you to hold everything on Cough Stop, right? The lot. Got it?\u201d \u201cGot it. Hold everything on Cough Stop.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll get back to you.\u201d He hung up. There was nothing wrong with the color. He\u2019d call back the next day and say it was fine. He\u2019d just needed to feel powerful for a few minutes. One of the younger hotshots had just made him feel inferior in a meeting. \u201cThe Cough Stop boxes went to print today.\u201d Felicity turned in her seat and looked worriedly at Tess. \u201cIt\u2019s fine,\u201d said Tess. \u201cBut if he\u2019s going to change\u2014\u201d said Will. \u201cI said it\u2019s fine.\u201d She didn\u2019t feel angry yet. Not really. But she could feel the possibility of a fury worse than anything she\u2019d ever experienced, a simmering vat of anger that could explode like a fireball, destroying everything in its sight. She didn\u2019t sit down again. Instead she turned and examined the whiteboard where they recorded all their work in progress. Cough Stop packaging!!! Bedstuff website It was humiliating to see her own scrawly, carefree, confident handwriting with its flippant exclamation marks. The smiley face next to the Bedstuff website, because they\u2019d worked so hard to get that job, pitching against bigger companies, and then, yes! They\u2019d won it. She\u2019d drawn that smiley face yesterday, when she was ignorant of the secret that Will and Felicity were sharing. Had they exchanged rueful looks behind her back when she\u2019d drawn the smiley face? She won\u2019t be so smiley-faced once we confess our little secret, will she? The phone rang again. This time Tess let it go to the answering service. TWF Advertising. Their names entwined together to form their little dream business. The idle \u201cwhat if\u201d conversation they\u2019d actually made happen. The Christmas before last they\u2019d been in Sydney for the holiday. As was traditional, they spent Christmas Eve at Felicity\u2019s parents\u2019 house. Tess\u2019s Aunt Mary and Uncle Phil. Felicity was still fat. Pretty and pink and perspiring in a size eighteen dress. They had the traditional sausages on the barbecue, the traditional creamy pasta salad, the traditional pavlova. She and Felicity and Will had all been whining about their jobs. Incompetent management. Stupid colleagues. Drafty offices. And so on and so forth. \u201cGeez, you\u2019re a miserable bunch, aren\u2019t you?\u201d said Uncle Phil, who didn\u2019t have anything to whine about now that he was retired. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you go into business together?\u201d said Tess\u2019s mother. It was true that they were all in similar fields. Tess was the marketing communications manager for a but-this-is-the-way-we\u2019ve-always-done-it legal publishing company. Will was the creative director of a large, prestigious, extremely pleased with themselves advertising agency. (That\u2019s how they\u2019d met. Tess had been Will\u2019s client.) Felicity was a graphic designer working for a nasty tyrant. Once they\u2019d started talking about it, the ideas had fallen into place so fast. Click, click, click! By the time they were eating the last mouthfuls of pavlova, it was all set. Will would be the creative director! Obviously! Felicity would be the art director! Of course! Tess would be the account executive! That one wasn\u2019t quite so obvious. She\u2019d never held a role like that. She\u2019d always been on the client side, and she considered herself something of a social introvert. In fact, a few weeks ago she\u2019d done a Reader\u2019s Digest quiz in a doctor\u2019s waiting room called \u201cDo You Suffer from Social Anxiety?\u201d and her answers (all C \u2019s) confirmed that she did, in fact, suffer from social anxiety and should seek professional help or \u201cjoin a support group.\u201d Everybody who did that quiz probably got the same result. If you didn\u2019t suspect you had social anxiety, you wouldn\u2019t bother doing the quiz; you\u2019d be too busy chatting with the receptionist. She certainly did not seek professional help, nor tell a single soul. Not Will. Not even Felicity. If she talked about it, then it would make it real. The two of them would watch her in social situations and be kindly empathetic when they saw the humiliating evidence of her shyness. The important thing was to cover it up . When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. \u201cYou see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don\u2019t like them!\u201d Tess had taken that to heart. She grew up and learned how to make small talk with a thumping heart. She forced herself to make eye contact, even when her nerves were screaming at her to look away, look away! \u201cBit of a cold,\u201d she\u2019d say to explain away the dryness of her throat. She learned to live with it, the way other people learned to live with lactose intolerance or sensitive skin. Anyway, Tess wasn\u2019t overly concerned that Christmas Eve two years ago. It was all just talk, and they\u2019d been drinking a lot of Aunt Mary\u2019s punch. They weren\u2019t really going to start a business together. She wouldn\u2019t really have to be the account executive. But then, in the new year, when they got back to Melbourne, Will and Felicity had kept going on about it. Will and Tess\u2019s house had a huge downstairs area that the previous owners had used as a teenagers\u2019 retreat. It had its own separate entrance. What did they have to lose? The start-up costs would be negligible. Will and Tess had been putting extra money on their mortgage. Felicity was sharing an apartment. If they failed, they could all go back out and get jobs. Tess had been swept along on the wave of their enthusiasm. She\u2019d been happy enough to resign from her job, but the first time she sat outside a potential client\u2019s office, she had to cram her hands between her knees to stop them from trembling. Often she could actually feel her head wobbling. Even now, after eighteen months, she still suffered debilitating nerves each time she met a new client. Yet she was oddly successful in her role. \u201cYou\u2019re different from other agency people,\u201d one client told her at the end of their first meeting, as he shook her hand to seal the deal. \u201cYou actually listen more than you talk.\u201d The horrible nerves were balanced by the glorious euphoria she felt each time she walked out of a meeting. It was like walking on air. She\u2019d done it again. She\u2019d battled the monster and won. And best of all, nobody suspected her secret. She brought in the clients. The business flourished. A product launch they did for a cosmetics company had even been nominated for a marketing award. Tess\u2019s role meant that she was often out of the office, leaving Will and Felicity alone for hours at a time. If someone had asked her if that worried her, she would have laughed. \u201cFelicity is like a sister to Will,\u201d she would have said. She turned from the whiteboard. Her legs felt weak. She went and sat back down, choosing a chair at the other end of the table from them. She tried to get her bearings. It was six o\u2019clock on a Monday night. She was right in the middle of her life. There had been so many other things distracting her when Will came upstairs and said he and Felicity needed to talk to her about something. Tess had just put down the phone from speaking with her mother, who had rung to say she\u2019d broken her ankle playing tennis. She was going to be on crutches for the next eight weeks, and she was very sorry, but could Easter be in Sydney instead of Melbourne this year? It was the first time in the fifteen years since Tess and Felicity had moved interstate that Tess had felt bad about not living closer to her mother. \u201cWe\u2019ll get a flight straight after school on Thursday,\u201d Tess had said. \u201cCan you cope until then?\u201d \u201cOh, I\u2019ll be fine. Mary will help. And the neighbors.\u201d But Aunt Mary didn\u2019t drive, and Uncle Phil couldn\u2019t be expected to drive her over every day. Besides, Mary and Phil were both starting to look frail themselves. And Tess\u2019s mother\u2019s neighbors were ancient old ladies or busy young families who barely had time to wave hello as they backed their big cars out of their driveways. It didn\u2019t seem likely that they\u2019d be bringing over casseroles. Tess had been fretting over whether she should book a flight to Sydney for the very next day, and then perhaps organize a home helper for her mother. Lucy would hate to have a stranger in the house, but how would she shower? How would she cook? It was tricky. They had so much work on, and she didn\u2019t like to leave Liam. He wasn\u2019t quite himself. There was a boy in his class, Marcus, who was giving him grief. He wasn\u2019t exactly bullying him; that would have been nice and clear-cut and they could have followed the school\u2019s sternly bullet-pointed \u201cWe Take a Zero-Tolerance Approach to Bullying\u201d code of practice. Marcus was more complicated than that. He was a charming little psychopath. Something new and awful had gone on with Marcus that day at school, Tess was sure of it. She\u2019d been giving Liam his dinner while Will and Felicity were downstairs working. Most nights she and Will and Liam, and often Felicity too, managed to eat as a family, but the Bedstuff website was meant to go live that Friday, so they were all working long hours. Liam had been quieter than usual while he was eating his dinner. He was a dreamy, reflective little boy; he\u2019d never been a chatterbox, but there had been something so grown-up and sad about the way he mechanically speared each piece of sausage with his fork and dunked it in the tomato sauce. \u201cDid you play with Marcus today?\u201d Tess had asked. \u201cNah,\u201d said Liam. \u201cToday\u2019s Monday.\u201d \u201cSo what?\u201d But he\u2019d closed down and refused to say another word about it, and Tess had felt rage fill her heart. She needed to talk to his teacher again. She had the strongest feeling that her child was in an abusive relationship and nobody could see it. The school playground was like a battlefield. That\u2019s what had been on Tess\u2019s mind when Will had asked her if she\u2019d come downstairs: her mother\u2019s ankle and Marcus. Will and Felicity were sitting at the meeting table waiting for her. Before Tess joined them, she collected all the coffee mugs that were sitting around the office. Felicity had a habit of making herself fresh cups of coffee that she never finished. Tess put the mugs in a row on the meeting table and said, as she sat down, \u201cNew record, Felicity. Five half-drunk cups.\u201d Felicity hadn\u2019t said anything. She looked oddly at Tess, as if she felt really bad about the coffee cups, and then Will made his extraordinary announcement. \u201cTess, I don\u2019t know how to say this,\u201d he said. \u201cBut Felicity and I have fallen in love.\u201d \u201cVery funny.\u201d Tess had grouped the coffee cups together and smiled. \u201cHilarious.\u201d But it seemed it wasn\u2019t a joke. Now she studied her hands on the honey-gold pine of the desk. Her pale, blue-veined, knuckly hands. An ex-boyfriend had once told her that he was in love with her hands. Will had a lot of trouble getting the wedding ring over her knuckle at their wedding. Their guests had laughed softly. Will had pretended to exhale with relief once he got it on, while he secretly caressed her hand. Tess looked up and saw Will and Felicity exchange covert worried glances. \u201cSo it\u2019s true love, is it?\u201d said Tess. \u201cYou\u2019re soul mates , are you?\u201d A nerve throbbed in Will\u2019s cheek. Felicity tugged at her hair. Yes. That\u2019s what they were both thinking. Yes, it is true love. Yes, we are soul mates. \u201cWhen exactly did this start?\u201d she asked. \u201cWhen did these feelings between you develop?\u201d \u201cThat doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d said Will hurriedly. \u201cIt matters to me !\u201d Tess\u2019s voice rose. \u201cI guess, I\u2019m not sure, maybe, about six months ago?\u201d mumbled Felicity, looking at the desk. \u201cSo when you started to lose weight,\u201d said Tess. Felicity shrugged. Tess said to Will, \u201cFunny that you never looked twice at her when she was fat.\u201d The bitter taste of nastiness flooded her mouth. How long since she\u2019d let herself say something that was purely nasty? Not since she was a teenager. She had never called Felicity fat. Never said a critical word about her weight. \u201cTess, please\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d said Will, without any censure in his voice, just a soft, desperate pleading. \u201cIt\u2019s fine,\u201d said Felicity. \u201cI deserve it. We deserve it.\u201d She lifted her chin and looked at Tess with naked, brave humility. So Tess was going to be allowed to kick and scratch as much as she wanted. They were just going to sit there and take it for as long as it took. They weren\u2019t going to fight back. Will and Felicity were fundamentally good. She knew this. They were good people, and that\u2019s why they were going to be so nice about this, so understanding and accepting of Tess\u2019s rage, so that in the end Tess would be the bad person, not them. They hadn\u2019t actually slept together, they hadn\u2019t betrayed her. They\u2019d fallen in love! It wasn\u2019t an ordinary grubby little affair. It was fate. Predestined. Nobody could think that badly of them. It was genius. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you tell me on your own?\u201d Tess tried to lock eyes with Will, as if the strength of her gaze could bring him back from wherever he\u2019d gone. His eyes, his strange hazel eyes, the color of beaten copper, with thick black eyelashes, eyes that were so different from Tess\u2019s own run-of-the-mill pale blue ones; the eyes that her son had inherited and that Tess thought of now as somehow belonging to her, a beloved possession for which she gracefully accepted compliments: \u201cYour son has lovely eyes.\u201d \u201cHe gets them from my husband. Nothing to do with me.\u201d But everything to do with her. Hers. They were hers . Will\u2019s gold eyes were normally amused; he was always ready to laugh at the world, he found day-to-day life generally pretty funny. It was one of the things she loved about him most. But right now they were looking at her imploringly, the way Liam looked at her when he wanted something at the supermarket. Please, Mum, I want that sugary treat with all the preservatives and the cleverly branded packaging and I know I promised I wouldn\u2019t ask for anything but I want it. Please, Tess, I want your delicious-looking cousin and I know I promised to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and health, but pleeeease. No. You may not have her. I said no. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t work out the right time or the right place,\u201d said Will. \u201cAnd we both wanted to tell you. We couldn\u2019t\u2014and then we just thought, we couldn\u2019t go any longer without you knowing\u2014so we just\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d His jaw shifted, turkeylike, in and out, back and forth.\u00a0\u201cWe thought there would never be a good time for a conversation like this.\u201d We. They were a \u201cwe.\u201d They\u2019d talked about this. Without her. Well, of course they\u2019d talked without her. They\u2019d fallen in love without her. \u201cI thought I should be here too,\u201d said Felicity. \u201cDid you, now?\u201d said Tess. She couldn\u2019t bear to look at Felicity. \u201cSo what happens next?\u201d Asking the question filled her with a fresh nauseated wave of disbelief. Surely nothing was going to happen. Surely Felicity would rush off to one of her new gym classes and Will would come upstairs and talk to Liam while he had his bath, maybe get to the bottom of the Marcus problem, while Tess cooked a stir-fry for dinner; she had the ingredients ready. It was too bizarre, thinking of the little plastic-wrapped tray of chicken strips sitting staidly in the refrigerator. Surely she and Will were still going to have a glass of that half-empty bottle of wine and talk about potential men for the brand-new, slender Felicity. They\u2019d already canvassed so many possibilities. Their Italian bank manager. The big quiet guy who supplied all their gourmet jams. Never once had Will slapped his hand to his forehead and said, \u201cOf course! How could I have missed it? Me! I\u2019d be perfect for her!\u201d It was a joke. She couldn\u2019t stop thinking that the whole thing was a terrible joke. \u201cWe know nothing can make this easy, or right, or better,\u201d said Will. \u201cBut we\u2019ll do whatever you want, whatever you think is right for you and for Liam.\u201d \u201cFor Liam,\u201d repeated Tess, dumbstruck. For some reason it hadn\u2019t occurred to her that Liam would have to be told about this, that Liam would have anything to do with it, or be in any way affected. Liam, who was upstairs right now, lying on his stomach, watching television, his six-year-old little mind filled with giant-sized worries of Marcus. No, she thought. No, no, no. Absolutely not. She saw her mother appearing at her bedroom door. \u201cDaddy and I want to talk to you about something.\u201d It would not happen to Liam the way it had happened to her. Over her dead body. It was the one thing she\u2019d always known she could and would spare him from. Her beautiful, grave-faced little boy would not feel the loss and confusion she\u2019d felt that awful summer all those years ago. He would not pack a little overnight bag every second Friday. He would not have to check a calendar on the refrigerator to see where he was sleeping each weekend. He would not learn to think before he spoke whenever one parent asked a seemingly innocuous question about the other. Her mind raced. All that mattered now was Liam. Her own feelings were irrelevant. How could she save this? How could she stop it? \u201cWe never, ever meant for this to happen.\u201d Will\u2019s eyes were big and guileless. \u201cAnd we want to do this the right way. The best way for all of us. We even wondered\u2014\u201d Tess saw Felicity shake her head slightly at Will. \u201cYou even wondered what?\u201d said Tess. Here was more evidence of their talking. She could imagine the enjoyable intensity of these conversations. Teary eyes demonstrating what good people they were, how they were suffering at the thought of hurting Tess, but what choice did they have in the face of their passion, their love? \u201cIt\u2019s too soon to talk about what we\u2019re going to do.\u201d Felicity\u2019s voice was firmer suddenly. Tess\u2019s fingernails dug into her palms. How dare she? How dare she talk in her normal voice, as if this were a normal situation, a normal problem? \u201cYou even wondered what ?\u201d Tess kept her eyes on Will. Forget about Felicity, she told herself. You don\u2019t have time to feel angry. Think, Tess, think. Will\u2019s face went from white to red. \u201cWe wondered if it would be possible for all of us to live together. Here. For Liam\u2019s sake. It\u2019s not like this is a normal breakup. We\u2019re all\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. family. So that\u2019s why we thought, I mean, maybe it\u2019s crazy, but we just thought it might be possible. Eventually.\u201d Tess guffawed. A hard, almost guttural sound. Were they out of their minds? \u201cYou mean, I just move out of my bedroom and Felicity moves in? So we just say to Liam, \u2018Don\u2019t worry, honey, Daddy sleeps with Felicity now and Mummy is in the spare room\u2019?\u201d Felicity looked mortified. \u201cOf course not.\u201d \u201cWhen you put it like that\u2014\u201d began Will. \u201cBut what other way is there to put it?\u201d Will exhaled. He leaned forward. \u201cLook,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to work anything out right this second.\u201d Sometimes Will used a particularly masculine, reasonable but authoritative tone in the office when he wanted things done a certain way. Tess and Felicity gave him absolute hell about it. He was using that tone now, as if it was time to get things under control. How dare he? Tess lifted her closed fists and slammed them down so hard on the table that it rattled. She\u2019d never done such a thing before. It felt farcical and absurd and somewhat thrilling. She was pleased to see both Will and Felicity flinch. \u201cI\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d she said, because all at once it was perfectly clear. It was simple. Will and Felicity needed to have a proper affair. The sooner, the better. This smoldering thing they had going had to run its course. At the moment it was sweet and sexy. They were star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet gazing soulfully at each other over the purple Cough Stop dragon. It needed to get sweaty and sticky and sleazy and eventually\u2014hopefully, God willing\u2014banal and dull. Will loved his son, and once the fog of lust cleared, he\u2019d see that he\u2019d made a ghastly but not irretrievable, mistake. This could all be fixed. The only way forward was for Tess to leave. Right now. \u201cLiam and I will go and stay in Sydney,\u201d she said. \u201cWith Mum. She called just a minute ago to say she\u2019s broken her ankle. She needs someone there to help her.\u201d \u201cOh, no! How? Is she okay?\u201d said Felicity. Tess ignored her. Felicity didn\u2019t get to be the caring niece anymore. She was the other woman. Tess was the wife. And she was going to fight this. For Liam\u2019s sake. She would fight it and she would win. \u201cWe\u2019ll stay with her until her ankle is better.\u201d \u201cBut, Tess, you can\u2019t take Liam to live in Sydney .\u201d Will\u2019s bossy tone vanished. He was a Melbourne boy. There had never been any question that they would live anywhere else. He looked at Tess with a wounded expression, as if he were Liam being unjustly told off for something . Then his brow cleared. \u201cWhat about school?\u201d he said. \u201cHe can\u2019t miss school.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.41}, {"asin": "0143127551", "title": "Everything I Never Told You", "author": "Celeste Ng", "description": "Review \u201cIf we know this story, we haven\u2019t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now . . . Ng has set two tasks in this novel\u2019s doubled heart\u2014to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of secrets the family members won\u2019t share . . . What emerges is a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind\u2014a burden you do not always survive.\u201d \u2014 Alexander Chee, bestselling author of Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night \u201cBoth a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family, Ng\u2019s explosive debut chronicles the plight of Marilyn and James Lee after their favored daughter is found dead in a lake.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cExcellent . . . an accomplished debut . . . heart-wrenching . . . Ng deftly pulls together the strands of this complex, multigenerational novel. Everything I Never Told You is an engaging work that casts a powerful light on the secrets that have kept an American family together\u2014and that finally end up tearing it apart.\u201d \u2014 Los Angeles Times \u201cTender and merciless all at once . . . Vital in all the essential ways.\u201d \u2014Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing , A National Book Award winner \u201cWonderfully moving . . . Emotionally precise . . . A beautifully crafted study of dysfunction and grief . . . [This book] will resonate with anyone who has ever had a family drama.\u201d \u2014 Boston Globe \u201cA powerhouse of a debut novel, a literary mystery crafted out of shimmering prose and precise, painful observation about racial barriers, the burden of familial expectations, and the basic human thirst for belonging . . . Ng\u2019s novel grips readers from page one with the hope of unraveling the mystery behind Lydia\u2019s death\u2014and boy does it deliver, on every front.\u201d \u2014 Huffington Post \u201cA subtle meditation on gender, race and the weight of one generation\u2019s unfulfilled ambitions upon the shoulders\u2014and in the heads\u2014of the\u00a0next . . . Ng deftly and convincingly illustrates the degree to which some miscommunications can never quite be\u00a0rectified.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cCleverly crafted, emotionally perceptive . . . Ng sensitively dramatizes issues of gender and race that lie at the heart of the story . . . Ng\u2019s themes of assimilation are themselves deftly interlaced into a taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.\u201d \u2014 O, The Oprah Magazine \u201cNg moves gracefully back and forth in time, into the aftermath of the tragedy as well as the distant past, and into the consciousness of each member of the family, creating a series of mysteries and revelations that lead back to the original question: what happened to Lydia? . . . Ng is masterful in her use of the omniscient narrator, achieving both a historical distance and visceral intimacy with each character\u2019s struggles and failures . . . On the surface, Ng\u2019s storylines are nothing new. There is a mysterious death, a family pulled apart by misunderstanding and grief, a struggle to fit into the norms of society, yet in the weaving of these threads she creates a work of ambitious complexity. In the end, this novel movingly portrays the burden of difference at a time when difference had no cultural value . . . Compelling.\u201d \u2014 Los Angeles Review of Books \u201cThe mysterious circumstances of 16-year-old Lydia Lee\u2019s tragic death have her loved ones wondering how, exactly, she spent her free time. This ghostly debut novel calls to mind The Lovely Bones .\u201d \u2014 Marie Claire \u201cThe first chapter of Celeste Ng\u2019s debut novel is difficult\u2014the oldest daughter in a family is dead\u2014but what follows is a brilliantly written, surprisingly uplifting exploration of striving in the face of alienation and of the secrets we keep from others. This could be my favorite novel of the year.\u201d \u2014 Chris Schluep, Parade \u201cThe emotional core of Celeste Ng\u2019s debut is what sets it apart. The different ways in which the Lee family handles Lydia\u2019s death create internal friction, and most impressive is the way Ng handles racial politics. With a deft hand, she loads and unpacks the implications of being the only Chinese American family in a small town in Ohio.\u201d \u2014 Kevin Nguyen, Grantland \u201cBeautiful and poignant . . . deftly drawn . . . . It\u2019s hard to believe that this is a debut novel for Celeste Ng. She tackles the themes of family dynamics, gender and racial stereotyping, and the weight of expectations, all with insight made more powerful through understatement. She has an exact, sophisticated touch with her prose. The sentences are straightforward. She evokes emotions through devastatingly detailed observations.\u201d \u2014 Cleveland Plain-Dealer \u201cPerceptive . . . a skillful and moving portrayal of a family in pain . . . It is to Ng\u2019s credit that it is sometimes difficult for the reader to keep going; the pain and unhappiness is palpable. But it is true to the Lees, and Ng tells all.\u201d \u2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cImpressive . . . In its evocation of a time and place and society largely gone but hardly forgotten, Everything I Never Told You tells much that today\u2019s reader should learn, ponder and appreciate.\u201d \u2014 St. Louis Post-Dispatch About the Author Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere . Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts , will be published in October 2022. Ng\u00a0is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***Copyright \u00a9 2014 Celeste Ng one Lydia is dead. But they don\u2019t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. As always, next to her cereal bowl, her mother has placed a sharpened pencil and Lydia\u2019s physics homework, six problems flagged with small ticks. Driving to work, Lydia\u2019s father nudges the dial toward WXKP, Northwest Ohio\u2019s Best News Source, vexed by the crackles of static. On the stairs, Lydia\u2019s brother yawns, still twined in the tail end of his dream. And in her chair in the corner of the kitchen, Lydia\u2019s sister hunches moon-eyed over her cornflakes, sucking them to pieces one by one, waiting for Lydia to appear. It\u2019s she who says, at last, \u201cLydia\u2019s taking a long time today.\u201d Upstairs, Marilyn opens her daughter\u2019s door and sees the bed unslept in: neat hospital corners still pleated beneath the comforter, pillow still fluffed and convex. Nothing seems out of place. Mustard-colored corduroys tangled on the floor, a single rainbow-striped sock. A row of science fair ribbons on the wall, a postcard of Einstein. Lydia\u2019s duffel bag crumpled on the floor of the closet. Lydia\u2019s green bookbag slouched against her desk. Lydia\u2019s bottle of Baby Soft atop the dresser, a sweet, powdery, loved-baby scent still in the air. But no Lydia. Marilyn closes her eyes. Maybe, when she opens them, Lydia will be there, covers pulled over her head as usual, wisps of hair trailing from beneath. A grumpy lump bundled under the bedspread that she\u2019d somehow missed before. I was in the bathroom, Mom. I went downstairs for some water. I was lying right here all the time. Of course, when she looks, nothing has changed. The closed curtains glow like a blank television screen. Downstairs, she stops in the doorway of the kitchen, a hand on each side of the frame. Her silence says everything. \u201cI\u2019ll check outside,\u201d she says at last. \u201cMaybe for some reason\u2014\u201d She keeps her gaze trained on the floor as she heads for the front door, as if Lydia\u2019s footprints might be crushed into the hall runner. Nath says to Hannah, \u201cShe was in her room last night. I heard her radio playing. At eleven thirty.\u201d He stops, remembering that he had not said goodnight. \u201cCan you be kidnapped if you\u2019re sixteen?\u201d Hannah asks. Nath prods at his bowl with a spoon. Cornflakes wilt and sink into clouded milk. Their mother steps back into the kitchen, and for one glorious fraction of a second Nath sighs with relief: there she is, Lydia, safe and sound. It happens sometimes\u2014their faces are so alike you\u2019d see one in the corner of your eye and mistake her for the other: the same elfish chin and high cheekbones and left-cheek dimple, the same thin-shouldered build. Only the hair color is different, Lydia\u2019s ink-black instead of their mother\u2019s honey-blond. He and Hannah take after their father\u2014once a woman stopped the two of them in the grocery store and asked, \u201cChinese?\u201d and when they said yes, not wanting to get into halves and wholes, she\u2019d nodded sagely. \u201cI knew it,\u201d she said. \u201cBy the eyes.\u201d She\u2019d tugged the corner of each eye outward with a fingertip. But Lydia, defying genetics, somehow has her mother\u2019s blue eyes, and they know this is one more reason she is their mother\u2019s favorite. And their father\u2019s, too. Then Lydia raises one hand to her brow and becomes his mother again. \u201cThe car\u2019s still here,\u201d she says, but Nath had known it would be. Lydia can\u2019t drive; she doesn\u2019t even have a learner\u2019s permit yet. Last week she\u2019d surprised them all by failing the exam, and their father wouldn\u2019t even let her sit in the driver\u2019s seat without it. Nath stirs his cereal, which has turned to sludge at the bottom of his bowl. The clock in the front hall ticks, then strikes seven thirty. No one moves. \u201cAre we still going to school today?\u201d Hannah asks. Marilyn hesitates. Then she goes to her purse and takes out her keychain with a show of efficiency. \u201cYou\u2019ve both missed the bus. Nath, take my car and drop Hannah off on your way.\u201d Then: \u201cDon\u2019t worry. We\u2019ll find out what\u2019s going on.\u201d She doesn\u2019t look at either of them. Neither looks at her. When the children have gone, she takes a mug from the cupboard, trying to keep her hands still. Long ago, when Lydia was a baby, Marilyn had once left her in the living room, playing on a quilt, and went into the kitchen for a cup of tea. She had been only eleven months old. Marilyn took the kettle off the stove and turned to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She had started and set her hand down on the hot burner. A red, spiral welt rose on her palm, and she touched it to her lips and looked at her daughter through watering eyes. Standing there, Lydia was strangely alert, as if she were taking in the kitchen for the first time. Marilyn didn\u2019t think about missing those first steps, or how grown up her daughter had become. The thought that flashed through her mind wasn\u2019t How did I miss it? but What else have you been hiding? Nath had pulled up and wobbled and tipped over and toddled right in front of her, but she didn\u2019t remember Lydia even beginning to stand. Yet she seemed so steady on her bare feet, tiny fingers just peeking from the ruffled sleeve of her romper. Marilyn often had her back turned, opening the refrigerator or turning over the laundry. Lydia could have begun walking weeks ago, while she was bent over a pot, and she would not have known. She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she\u2019d felt as if she\u2019d found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia\u2019s cheek and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter\u2019s small body. Now Marilyn sips tea and remembers that surprise. The high school\u2019s number is pinned to the corkboard beside the refrigerator, and Marilyn pulls the card down and dials, twisting the cord around her finger while the phone rings. \u201cMiddlewood High,\u201d the secretary says on the fourth ring. \u201cThis is Dottie.\u201d She recalls Dottie: a woman built like a sofa cushion, who still wore her fading red hair in a beehive. \u201cGood morning,\u201d she begins, and falters. \u201cIs my daughter in class this morning?\u201d Dottie makes a polite cluck of impatience. \u201cTo whom am I speaking, please?\u201d It takes her a moment to remember her own name. \u201cMarilyn. Marilyn Lee. My daughter is Lydia Lee. Tenth grade.\u201d \u201cLet me look up her schedule. First period\u2014\u201d A pause. \u201cEleventh-grade physics?\u201d \u201cYes, that\u2019s right. With Mr. Kelly.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll have someone run down to that classroom and check.\u201d There\u2019s a thud as the secretary sets the receiver down on the desk. Marilyn studies her mug, the pool of water it has made on the counter. A few years ago, a little girl had crawled into a storage shed and suffocated. After that the police department sent a flyer to every house: If your child is missing, look for him right away. Check washing machines and clothes dryers, automobile trunks, toolsheds, any places he might have crawled to hide. Call police immediately if your child cannot be found. \u201cMrs. Lee?\u201d the secretary says. \u201cYour daughter was not in her first-period class. Are you calling to excuse her absence?\u201d Marilyn hangs up without replying. She replaces the phone number on the board, her damp fingers smudging the ink so that the digits blur as if in a strong wind, or underwater. She checks every room, opening every closet. She peeks into the empty garage: nothing but an oil spot on the concrete and the faint, heady smell of gasoline. She\u2019s not sure what she\u2019s looking for: Incriminating footprints? A trail of breadcrumbs? When she was twelve, an older girl from her school had disappeared and turned up dead. Ginny Barron. She\u2019d worn saddle shoes that Marilyn had desperately coveted. She\u2019d gone to the store to buy cigarettes for her father, and two days later they found her body by the side of the road, halfway to Charlottesville, strangled and naked. Now Marilyn\u2019s mind begins to churn. The summer of Son of Sam has just begun\u2014though the papers have only recently begun to call him by that name\u2014and even in Ohio, headlines blare the latest shooting. In a few months, the police will catch David Berkowitz, and the country will focus again on other things: the death of Elvis, the new Atari, Fonzie soaring over a shark. At this moment, though, when dark-haired New Yorkers are buying blond wigs, the world seems to Marilyn a terrifying and random place. Things like that don\u2019t happen here, she reminds herself. Not in Middlewood, which calls itself a city but is really just a tiny college town of three thousand, where driving an hour gets you only to Toledo, where a Saturday night out means the roller rink or the bowling alley or the drive-in, where even Middlewood Lake, at the center of town, is really just a glorified pond. (She is wrong about this last one: it is a thousand feet across, and it is deep.) Still, the small of her back prickles, like beetles marching down her spine. Inside, Marilyn pulls back the shower curtain, rings screeching against rod, and stares at the white curve of the bathtub. She searches all the cabinets in the kitchen. She looks inside the pantry, the coat closet, the oven. Then she opens the refrigerator and peers inside. Olives. Milk. A pink foam package of chicken, a head of iceberg, a cluster of jade-colored grapes. She touches the cool glass of the peanut butter jar and closes the door, shaking her head. As if Lydia would somehow be inside. Morning sun fills the house, creamy as lemon chiffon, lighting the insides of cupboards and empty closets and clean, bare floors. Marilyn looks down at her hands, empty too and almost aglow in the sunlight. She lifts the phone and dials her husband\u2019s number. For James, in his office, it is still just another Tuesday, and he clicks his pen against his teeth. A line of smudgy typing teeters slightly uphill: Serbia was one of the most powerful of the Baltic nations. He crosses out Baltic, writes Balkan, turns the page. Archduke France Ferdinand was assassinated by members of Black Ann. Franz, he thinks. Black Hand. Had these students ever opened their books? He pictures himself at the front of the lecture hall, pointer in hand, the map of Europe unfurled behind him. It\u2019s an intro class, \u201cAmerica and the World Wars\u201d; he doesn\u2019t expect depth of knowledge or critical insight. Just a basic understanding of the facts, and one student who can spell Czechoslovakia correctly. He closes the paper and writes the score on the front page\u2014sixty-five out of one hundred\u2014and circles it. Every year as summer approaches, the students shuffle and rustle; sparks of resentment sizzle up like flares, then sputter out against the windowless walls of the lecture hall. Their papers grow half hearted, paragraphs trailing off, sometimes midsentence, as if the students could not hold a thought that long. Was it a waste, he wonders. All the lecture notes he\u2019s honed, all the color slides of MacArthur and Truman and the maps of Guadalcanal. Nothing more than funny names to giggle at, the whole course just one more requirement to check off the list before they graduated. What else could he expect from this place? He stacks the paper with the others and drops the pen on top. Through the window he can see the small green quad and three kids in blue jeans tossing a Frisbee. When he was younger, still junior faculty, James was often mistaken for a student himself. That hasn\u2019t happened in years. He\u2019ll be forty-six next spring; he\u2019s tenured, a few silver hairs now mixed in among the black. Sometimes, though, he\u2019s still mistaken for other things. Once, a receptionist at the provost\u2019s office thought he was a visiting diplomat from Japan and asked him about his flight from Tokyo. He enjoys the surprise on people\u2019s faces when he tells them he\u2019s a professor of American history. \u201cWell, I am American,\u201d he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone. Someone knocks: his teaching assistant, Louisa, with a stack of papers. \u201cProfessor Lee. I didn\u2019t mean to bother you, but your door was open.\u201d She sets the essays on his desk and pauses. \u201cThese weren\u2019t very good.\u201d \u201cNo. My half weren\u2019t either. I was hoping you had all the As in your stack.\u201d Louisa laughs. When he\u2019d first seen her, in his graduate seminar last term, she\u2019d surprised him. From the back she could have been his daughter: they had almost the same hair, hanging dark and glossy down to the shoulder blades, the same way of sitting with elbows pulled in close to the body. When she turned around, though, her face was completely her own, narrow where Lydia\u2019s was wide, her eyes brown and steady. \u201cProfessor Lee?\u201d she had said, holding out her hand. \u201cI\u2019m Louisa Chen.\u201d Eighteen years at Middlewood College, he\u2019d thought, and here was the first Oriental student he\u2019d ever had. Without realizing it, he had found himself smiling. Then, a week later, she came to his office. \u201cIs that your family?\u201d she\u2019d asked, tilting the photo on his desk toward her. There was a pause as she studied it. Everyone did the same thing, and that was why he kept the photo on display. He watched her eyes move from his photographic face to his wife\u2019s, then his children\u2019s, then back again. \u201cOh,\u201d she said after a moment, and he could tell she was trying to hide her confusion. \u201cYour wife\u2019s\u2014not Chinese?\u201d It was what everyone said. But from her he had expected something different. \u201cNo,\u201d he said, and straightened the frame so that it faced her a little more squarely, a perfect forty-five degree angle to the front of the desk. \u201cNo, she isn\u2019t.\u201d Still, at the end of the fall semester, he\u2019d asked her to act as a grader for his undergraduate lecture. And in April, he\u2019d asked her to be the teaching assistant for his summer course. \u201cI hope the summer students will be better,\u201d Louisa says now. \u201cA few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.\u201d \u201cWell, this isn\u2019t Harvard, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d James says. He pushes the two piles of essays into one and evens them, like a deck of cards, against the desktop. \u201cSometimes I wonder if it\u2019s all a waste.\u201d \u201cYou can\u2019t blame yourself if the students don\u2019t try. And they\u2019re not all so bad. A few got As.\u201d Louisa blinks at him, her eyes suddenly serious. \u201cYour life is not a waste.\u201d James had meant only the intro course, teaching these students who, year after year, didn\u2019t care to learn even the basic timeline. She\u2019s twenty-three, he thinks; she knows nothing about life, wasted or otherwise. But it\u2019s a nice thing to hear. \u201cStay still,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s something in your hair.\u201d Her hair is cool and a little damp, not quite dry from her morning shower. Louisa holds quite still, her eyes open and fixed on his face. It\u2019s not a flower petal, as he\u2019d first thought. It\u2019s a ladybug, and as he picks it out, it tiptoes, on threadlike yellow legs, to hang upside down from his fingernail. \u201cDamn things are everywhere this time of year,\u201d says a voice from the doorway, and James looks up to see Stanley Hewitt leaning through. He doesn\u2019t like Stan\u2014a florid ham hock of a man who talks to him loudly and slowly, as if he\u2019s hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar . . . \u201cDid you want something, Stan?\u201d James asks. He\u2019s acutely conscious of his hand, index finger and thumb outstretched as if pointing a popgun at Louisa\u2019s shoulder, and pulls it back. \u201cJust wanted to ask a question about the dean\u2019s latest memo,\u201d Stanley says, holding up a mimeographed sheet. \u201cDidn\u2019t mean to interrupt anything.\u201d \u201cI have to get going anyway,\u201d Louisa says. \u201cHave a nice morning, Professor Lee. I\u2019ll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt.\u201d As she slides past Stanley into the hallway, James sees that she\u2019s blushing, and his own face grows hot. When she is gone, Stanley seats himself on the corner of James\u2019s desk. \u201cGood-looking girl,\u201d he says. \u201cShe\u2019ll be your assistant this summer too, no?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d James unfolds his hand as the ladybug moves onto his fingertip, walking the path of his fingerprint, around and around in whorls and loops. He wants to smash his fist into the middle of Stanley\u2019s grin, to feel Stanley\u2019s slightly crooked front tooth slice his knuckles. Instead he smashes the ladybug with his thumb. The shell snaps between his fingers, like a popcorn hull, and the insect crumbles to sulfur-colored powder. Stanley keeps running his finger along the spines of James\u2019s books. Later James will long for the ignorant calm of this moment, for that last second when Stan\u2019s leer was the worst problem on his mind. But for now, when the phone rings, he is so relieved at the interruption that at first he doesn\u2019t hear the anxiety in Marilyn\u2019s voice. \u201cJames?\u201d she says. \u201cCould you come home?\u201d The police tell them lots of teenagers leave home with no warning. Lots of times, they say, the girls are mad at their parents and the parents don\u2019t even know. Nath watches them circulate in his sister\u2019s room. He expects talcum powder and feather dusters, sniffing dogs, magnifying glasses. Instead the policemen just look: at the posters thumbtacked above her desk, the shoes on the floor, the half-opened bookbag. Then the younger one places his palm on the rounded pink lid of Lydia\u2019s perfume bottle, as if cupping a child\u2019s head in his hand. Most missing-girl cases, the older policeman tells them, resolve themselves within twenty-four hours. The girls come home by themselves. \u201cWhat does that mean?\u201d Nath says. \u201c Most? What does that mean?\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.14}, {"asin": "B001VGG7GS", "title": "Wild Riders", "author": "Lee Hoffman", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "from 6.00"}, {"asin": "0312427735", "title": "Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)", "author": "Jeffrey Eugenides", "description": "Amazon.com Review \"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.\" And so begins Middlesex , the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the \"roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.\" The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides , remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory. Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor: Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in \"sadness,\" \"joy,\" or \"regret.\" \u0085 I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, \"the happiness that attends disaster.\" Or: \"the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.\" ... I'd like to have a word for \"the sadness inspired by failing restaurants\" as well as for \"the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.\" I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons From Publishers Weekly As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: \"Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' \" The \"me\" of that sentence, \"Cal\" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her \"crocus\" as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal's gender confusion is blended with the story of her first love, Milton's growing political resentments and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal Adult/High School-From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was \"born twice,\" first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situation, Cal starts in 1922, when his grandparents came to America. In his role as the \"prefetal narrator,\" he tells the love story of this couple, who are brother and sister; his parents are blood relatives as well. Then he tells his own story, which is that of a female child growing up in suburban Detroit with typical adolescent concerns. Callie, as he is known then, worries because she hasn't developed breasts or started menstruating; her facial hair is blamed on her ethnicity, and she and her mother go to get waxed together. She develops a passionate crush on her best girlfriend, \"the Object,\" and consummates it in a manner both detached and steamy. Then an accident causes Callie to find out what she's been suspecting-she's not actually a girl. The story questions what it is that makes us who we are and concludes that one's inner essence stays the same, even in light of drastic outer changes. Mostly, the novel remains a universal narrative of a girl who's happy to grow up but hates having to leave her old self behind. Readers will love watching the narrator go from Callie to Cal, and witnessing all of the life experiences that get her there. Jamie Watson, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Eugenides's second novel (after The Virgin Suicides) opens \"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl...in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy...in August of 1974.\" Thus starts the epic tale of how Calliope Stephanides is transformed into Cal. Spanning three generations and two continents, the story winds from the small Greek village of Smyrna to the smoggy, crime-riddled streets of Detroit, past historical events, and through family secrets. The author's eloquent writing captures the essence of Cal, a hermaphrodite, who sets out to discover himself by tracing the story of his family back to his grandparents. From the beginning, the reader is brought into a world rich in culture and history, as Eugenides extends his plot into forbidden territories with unique grace. His confidence in the story, combined with his sure prose, helps readers overcome their initial surprise and focus on the emotional revelation of the characters and beyond. Once again, Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended. - - Rachel Collins, \"Library Journal\" Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist In his second novel, the author of The Virgin Suicides (1993) once again proves himself to be a wildly imaginative writer, this time penning a coming-of-age tale, ranging from the 1920s in Asia Minor to the present in Berlin, about a hermaphrodite. Perhaps what is most surprising about Eugenides' offbeat but engrossing book is how he establishes, seemingly effortlessly, the credibility of his narrator: \"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan.\" So starts Cal's remarkably detailed odyssey, which began when his grandparents, who were siblings, married and vowed to keep the true nature of their relationship a secret; however, their deception comes back to haunt them in the form of their grandchild. With a sure yet light-handed touch, Eugenides skillfully bends our notions of gender as we realize, along with Cal, that although he has been raised as a girl, he is more comfortable as a boy. Although at times the novel reads like a medical text, it is also likely to hold readers in thrall with its affecting characterization of a brave and lonely soul and its vivid depiction of exactly what it means to be both male and female. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review \u201cPart Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator. . . A deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century.\u201d \u2015 The New York Times \u201cExpansive and radiantly generous. . . Deliriously American.\u201d \u2015 The New York Times Book Review (cover review) \u201cA towering achievement. . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being.\u201d \u2015 Los Angeles Times Book Review (cover review) \u201cA big, cheeky, splendid novel. . . it goes places few narrators would dare to tread. . . lyrical and fine.\u201d \u2015 The Boston Globe \u201cAn epic. . . This feast of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its tenderness.\u201d \u2015 People \u201cUnprecedented, astounding. . . . The most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak.\u201d \u2015 San Francisco Chronicle Book Review \u201cMiddlesex is about a hermaphrodite in the way that Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel is about a teenage boy. . . A novel of chance, family, sex, surgery, and America, it contains multitudes.\u201d \u2015 Men's Journal \u201cWildly imaginative. . . frequently hilarious and touching.\u201d \u2015 USA Today About the Author Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides , was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France\u2019s Prix M\u00e9dicis. The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. His collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, is from FSG (2017). Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Middlesex By Jeffrey Eugenides Picador USA Copyright \u00a92007 Jeffrey EugenidesAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780312427733 Chapter One THE SILVER SPOON * * * I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroitday in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, inan emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce'sstudy, \"Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,\"published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Ormaybe you've seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the nowsadly outdated Genetics and Heredity . That's me on page 578, standingnaked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes. My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides.My most recent driver's license (from the Federal Republic of Germany)records my first name simply as Cal. I'm a former field hockeygoalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation,rare attendant at the Greek Orthodox mass, and, for most of myadult life, an employee of the U.S. State Department. Like Tiresias, Iwas first one thing and then the other. I've been ridiculed by classmates,guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researchedby the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from GrossePointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her brotherliked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimmingpool turned me into myth; I've left my body in order to occupyothers-and all this happened before I turned sixteen. But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on.After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-auntsand -uncles, long-lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or,in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those things in one. Andso before it's too late I want to get it down for good: this roller-coasterride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of therecessive mutation on my fifth chromosome! Sing how it bloomedtwo and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount Olympus, whilethe goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed downthrough nine generations, gathering invisibly within the pollutedpool of the Stephanides family. And sing how Providence, in theguise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seedacross the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrialrains until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my mother's own mid-westernwomb. Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too. Three months before I was born, in the aftermath of one of our elaborateSunday dinners, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides orderedmy brother to get her silkworm box. Chapter Eleven had beenheading toward the kitchen for a second helping of rice puddingwhen she blocked his way. At fifty-seven, with her short, squat figureand intimidating hairnet, my grandmother was perfectly designed forblocking people's paths. Behind her in the kitchen, the day's large femalecontingent had congregated, laughing and whispering. Intrigued,Chapter Eleven leaned sideways to see what was going on,but Desdemona reached out and firmly, hegemonically even, pinchedhis cheek. Having regained his attention, she sketched a rectangle inthe air and pointed at the ceiling. Then, through her ill-fitting dentures,she said, \"Go for yia yia , dolly mou .\" Chapter Eleven knew what to do. He ran across the hall into theliving room. On all fours he scrambled up the formal staircase to thesecond floor. He raced past the bedrooms along the upstairs corridor.At the far end was a nearly invisible door, wallpapered over like theentrance to a secret passageway. Chapter Eleven located the tinydoorknob level with his head and, using all his strength, pulled itopen. Another set of stairs lay behind it. For a long moment mybrother stared hesitantly into the darkness above, before climbing,very slowly now, up to the attic where my grandparents lived. In sneakers he passed beneath the twelve, damply newspaperedbirdcages suspended from the rafters. With a brave face he immersedhimself in the sour odor of the parakeets, and in my grandparents'own particular aroma, a mixture of mothballs and hashish. He negotiatedhis way past my grandfather's book-piled desk and his collectionof rebetika records. Finally, bumping into the leather ottomanand the circular coffee table made of brass, he found my grandparents'bed and, under it, the silkworm box. Carved from olivewood, a little bigger than a shoe box, it had atin lid perforated by tiny airholes and inset with the icon of an unrecognizablesaint. The saint's face had been rubbed off, but the fingersof his right hand were raised to bless a short, purple, terrifically self-confident-lookingmulberry tree. After gazing awhile at this vividbotanical presence, Chapter Eleven pulled the box from under thebed and opened it. Inside were the two wedding crowns made fromrope and, coiled like snakes, the two long braids of hair, each tiedwith a crumbling black ribbon. He poked one of the braids with hisindex finger. Just then a parakeet squawked, making my brotherjump, and he closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and carried itdownstairs to Desdemona. She was still waiting in the doorway. Taking the silkworm box outof his hands, she turned back into the kitchen. At this point ChapterEleven was granted a view of the room, where all the women nowfell silent. They moved aside to let Desdemona pass and there, in themiddle of the linoleum, was my mother. Tessie Stephanides was leaningback in a kitchen chair, pinned beneath the immense, drum-tightglobe of her pregnant belly. She had a happy, helpless expression onher face, which was flushed and hot. Desdemona set the silkwormbox on the kitchen table and opened the lid. She reached under thewedding crowns and the hair braids to come up with somethingChapter Eleven hadn't seen: a silver spoon. She tied a piece of stringto the spoon's handle. Then, stooping forward, she dangled thespoon over my mother's swollen belly. And, by extension, over me. Up until now Desdemona had had a perfect record: twenty-threecorrect guesses. She'd known that Tessie was going to be Tessie.She'd predicted the sex of my brother and my four classically namedcousins, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cleopatra. The only childrenwhose genders she hadn't divined were her own, because it was badluck for a mother to plumb the mysteries of her own womb. Fearlessly,however, she plumbed my mother's. After some initial hesitation,the spoon swung north to south, which meant that I was goingto be a boy. Splay-legged in the chair, my mother tried to smile. She didn'twant a boy. She had one already. In fact, she was so certain I was goingto be a girl that she'd picked out only one name for me: Calliope.But when my grandmother shouted in Greek, \"A boy!\" the cry wentaround the room, and out into the hall, and across the hall into theliving room where the men were arguing politics. And my mother,hearing it repeated so many times, began to believe it might be true. As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched intothe kitchen to tell his mother that, this time at least, her spoon waswrong. \"And how you know so much?\" Desdemona asked him. Towhich he replied what many Americans of his generation wouldhave: \"It's science, Ma.\" Ever since they had decided to have another child-the diner was doingwell and Chapter Eleven was long out of diapers-Milton andTessie had been in agreement that they wanted a daughter. ChapterEleven had just turned five years old. He'd recently found a dead birdin the yard, bringing it into the house to show his mother. He likedshooting things, hammering things, smashing things, and wrestlingwith his father. In such a masculine household, Tessie had begun tofeel like the odd woman out and saw herself in ten years' time imprisonedin a world of hubcaps and hernias. My mother pictured adaughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconderof proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In the spring of 1959, whendiscussions of my fertilization got under way, my mother couldn'tenvision that women would soon be burning their brassieres by thethousand. Hers were padded, stiff, fire-retardant. As much as Tessieloved her son, she knew there were certain things she'd be able toshare only with a daughter. On his morning drive to work, my father had been seeing visionsof a irresistibly sweet, dark-eyed little girl. She sat on the seat besidehim-mostly during stoplights-directing questions at his patient,all-knowing ear. \"What do you call that thing, Daddy?\" \"That? That'sthe Cadillac seal.\" \"What's the Cadillac seal?\" \"Well, a long time ago,there was a French explorer named Cadillac, and he was the one whodiscovered Detroit. And that seal was his family seal, from France.\"\"What's France?\" \"France is a country in Europe.\" \"What's Europe?\"\"It's a continent, which is like a great big piece of land, way, way biggerthan a country. But Cadillacs don't come from Europe anymore, kukla . They come from right here in the good old U.S.A.\" The lightturned green and he drove on. But my prototype lingered. She wasthere at the next light and the next. So pleasant was her company thatmy father, a man loaded with initiative, decided to see what he coulddo to turn his vision into reality. Thus: for some time now, in the living room where the men discussedpolitics, they had also been discussing the velocity of sperm.Peter Tatakis, \"Uncle Pete,\" as we called him, was a leading memberof the debating society that formed every week on our black loveseats. A lifelong bachelor, he had no family in America and so had becomeattached to ours. Every Sunday he arrived in his wine-darkBuick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an incongruouslyvital head of wavy hair. He was not interested in children. A proponentof the Great Books series-which he had read twice-UnclePete was engaged with serious thought and Italian opera. He had apassion, in history, for Edward Gibbon, and, in literature, for thejournals of Madame de Stakl. He liked to quote that witty lady'sopinion on the German language, which held that German wasn'tgood for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentencefor the verb, and so couldn't interrupt. Uncle Pete had wantedto become a doctor, but the \"catastrophe\" had ended that dream. Inthe United States, he'd put himself through two years of chiropracticschool, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a humanskeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractorshad a somewhat dubious reputation. People didn't come toUncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He cracked necks, straightenedspines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, hewas the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sundayafternoons. As a young man he'd had half his stomach surgicallyremoved, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-Cola to help digesthis meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzymepepsin, he sagely told us, and so was suited to the task. It was this kind of knowledge that led my father to trust what UnclePete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head ona throw pillow, his shoes off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on myparents' stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under the microscope,sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim fasterthan those carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generatedimmediate merriment among the restaurant owners and fur finishersassembled in our living room. My father, however, adopted the poseof his favorite piece of sculpture, The Thinker , a miniature of whichsat across the room on the telephone table. Though the topic hadbeen brought up in the open-forum atmosphere of those postprandialSundays, it was clear that, notwithstanding the impersonal toneof the discussion, the sperm they were talking about was my father's.Uncle Pete made it clear: to have a girl baby, a couple should \"havesexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation.\" That way, theswift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggishbut more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped. My father had trouble persuading my mother to go along with thescheme. Tessie Zizmo had been a virgin when she married MiltonStephanides at the age of twenty-two. Their engagement, which coincidedwith the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. Mymother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindleand snuff my father's flame, keeping him at a low burn for the durationof a global cataclysm. This hadn't been all that difficult,however, since she was in Detroit and Milton was in Annapolis at theU.S. Naval Academy. For more than a year Tessie lit candles at theGreek church for her fianci, while Milton gazed at her photographspinned over his bunk. He liked to pose Tessie in the manner of themovie magazines, standing sideways, one high heel raised on a step,an expanse of black stocking visible. My mother looks surprisinglypliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing betterthan to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches andlampposts of their humble neighborhood. She didn't surrender until after Japan had. Then, from their weddingnight onward (according to what my brother told my coveredears), my parents made love regularly and enjoyably. When it came tohaving children, however, my mother had her own ideas. It was herbelief that an embryo could sense the amount of love with which ithad been created. For this reason, my father's suggestion didn't sitwell with her. \"What do you think this is, Milt, the Olympics?\" \"We were just speaking theoretically,\" said my father. \"What does Uncle Pete know about having babies?\" \"He read this particular article in Scientific American ,\" Milton said.And to bolster his case: \"He's a subscriber.\" \"Listen, if my back went out, I'd go to Uncle Pete. If I had flatfeet like you do, I'd go. But that's it.\" \"This has all been verified. Under the microscope. The malesperms are faster.\" \"I bet they're stupider, too.\" \"Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don'twant a male sperm. What we want is a good old, slow, reliable femalesperm.\" \"Even if it's true, it's still ridiculous. I can't just do it like clockwork,Milt.\" \"It'll be harder on me than you.\" \"I don't want to hear it.\" \"I thought you wanted a daughter.\" \"I do.\" \"Well,\" said my father, \"this is how we can get one.\" Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was aserious moral reservation. Continues... Excerpted from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Copyright \u00a92007 by Jeffrey Eugenides. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.38}, {"asin": "0064407314", "title": "Monster", "author": "Walter Dean Myers", "description": "Review \"Myers grapples with complex moral questions that will definitely make readers stop and think. -- Booklist, Editors' Choice 1999 From the Back Cover FADE IN: INTERIOR: Early morning in CELL BLOCK D, MANHATTAN DETENTION CENTER. Steve (Voice-Over)Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady prosecutor called me ... Monster . About the Author Walter Dean Myers is an award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for young people. He has received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for his contribution to young adult literature and is a five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. His many titles include Bad Boy: A Memoir; Monster, the 2000 Michael L. Printz Award winner and National Book Award Finalist; and Malcolm X: A Fire Burning Brightly, illustrated by Leonard Jenkins. Walter Dean Myers lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.In His Own Words... I am a product of Harlem and of the values, color, toughness and caring that I found there as a child.I learned my flat jump shot in the church basement and got my first kiss during recess at Bible school.I played the endless street games kids played in the pre-television days and paid enough attention to candy and junk food to dutifully alarm my mother. From my foster parents, the Deans, I received the love that was ultimately to strengthen me, even when I had forgotten its source.It was my foster mother, a half Indian-half German woman, who taught me to read, though she herself was barely literate. I had a speech difficulty but didn't view it as anything special.It wasn't necessary for me to be much of a social creature once I discovered books.Books took me, not so much to foreign lands and fanciful adventures, but to a place within myself that I have been constantly exploring ever since. The George Bruce Branch of the public Library was my most treasured place.I couldn't believe my luck in discovering what I enjoyed most -- reading -- was free.And I was tough enough to carry the books home through the streets without too many incidents. At sixteen it seemed a good idea to leave school, and so I did.On my seventeenth birthday I joined the army.After the army there were jobs -- some good, some bad, few worth mentioning.Leaving school seemed less like a good idea. Writing for me has been many things.It was a way to overcome the hindrance of speech problems as I tried to reach out to the world.It was a way of establishing my humanity in a world that often ignores the humanity of those in less favored positions.It was a way to make a few extra dollars when they were badly needed. What I want to do with the writing keeps changing, too.Perhaps I just get clearer in what it is I am doing.I'm sure that after I'm dead someone will lay it all out nicely.I'd hate to see what kind of biography my cat, Askia, would write about me.Probably something like \"Walter Dean Myers had enormous feet, didn't feed me on time, and often sat in my favorite chair.\"At any rate, what I think I'm doing now is rediscovering the innocence of children that I once took for granted.I cannot relive it or reclaim it, but I can expose it and celebrate it in the books I write.I really like people -- I mean I really like people -- and children are some of the best people I know. I've always felt it a little pretentious to write about yourself, but it's not too bad if you don't write too much. -- Walter Dean Myers Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "1476798176", "title": "Did You Ever Have a Family", "author": "Bill Clegg", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2015: Bill Clegg\u2019s fiction debut looks at the aftereffects of a tragedy, skillfully employing alternating chapters told by a handful of characters. The night before her daughter\u2019s wedding, June Reid loses her daughter, her daughter\u2019s fianc\u00e9, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend in a house fire. It is a nearly unimaginable event, one that sends June running cross-country from her small community in Connecticut to settle in the even smaller community of Moclips, Washington. Sadness trails June, but so does a web of support that forms between members of the community she left behind, as well as the one that she has settled in. What really happened that night in Connecticut? Eventually, we find out. More importantly, we find out the meaning of the title. It is both a lament and a celebration. --Chris Schluep Guest Interview Jenny Offill in conversation with Bill Clegg 1. The novel is paced almost like a thriller, with the pieces of the mystery coming slowly into place. Does plot come first for you when you begin a book or are you more likely to start from an image or a voice? In this case it started with the first three lines of the second chapter: She will go. For a long time the only thing I knew about the book was that a woman named June was driving away from a small town, heavy with grief and guilt and unable to stay a minute longer. Everything after those words was an unraveling of that mystery\u2014 Who is she? What is driving her away? What happened? What is the source of her grief? What do the people in the town have to say about her? 2. You worked on the novel for many years. Do you remember how the first spark of it came to you? The initial impulse came from wanting to write about where I\u2019m from. I grew up in a small town two hours from Manhattan and there was a regular gust of moneyed weekend and summer residents that created both a great opportunity to imagine outside of one\u2019s life into other possibilities, but it also caused a fair bit of resentment and tension. I wanted to write about the particular experience of such a town, and so the early writing centered on that. 3. I'm so impressed by the way you carry off many different yet distinct points of view throughout your novel. It really comes together wonderfully in the end. Did you have any models for this kind of expansive narrative? Did you start out to tell the story in that manner or was it something that evolved over time? Though I didn\u2019t consciously follow any model, Jean Stein\u2019s Edie no doubt had a strong influence as well as David Huddle\u2019s novel The Story of a Million Years . Both books get to the heart of their stories by circling them with other voices and perspectives. 4. In many ways, Did You Ever Have a Family seems like an extended meditation on grief and forgiveness. Were your previous memoirs regarding addiction and recovery a springboard into these themes? Surely, they are, though not deliberately. In my recovery I have experienced how powerful and surprising being forgiven can be. I caused a lot of wreckage before I got sober, so if certain people were going to remain in my life I knew that I would need their forgiveness. But what I didn\u2019t expect or count on was that in being forgiven, I would learn how to forgive the people I believed had failed or harmed me. The most powerful example of this in my life is with my father. Decades-long resentments and hurt fell away when I could finally see him as a man who did his best and fell short, and him falling short was not the full measure of his character but only a piece in a longer and more complicated story. Letting all that go and allowing myself a relationship with him in his last ten years was a miracle given how estranged we\u2019d been, and it is one of the things recovery gave me. In the novel there are a lot of people holding on to anger and guilt and they are lonely, which is something I identify with. Part of what I\u2019m exploring in the book is how forgiveness\u2014granting as well as receiving\u2014can be a beginning to an end of that isolation. 5. What book or poem first made you want to be a writer? Reading Natalie Babbitt\u2019s Tuck Everlasting was probably the first time where it occurred to me that someone actually came up with an idea and wrote it. And I believe it\u2019s the first time I thought, Damn, I wish I\u2019d thought of that. 6. What novels have you read more than once? I read your novel Dept. of Speculation twice! I read it when it first came out and then, when we decided to talk a few weeks ago, I picked it up again and could not put it down. Crikey, is it good. As nimble and witty as the writing is and as streaking as it is with literary and historical references and anecdotes, it also has this spellbinding effect that only the truth of something can produce. And the truth you are conveying is about marriage and how people happen in them. Reading your novel is a kind of thrill ride but it was also a great relief. But mainly I go back to the same small pile. Besides W. S. Merwin\u2019s The Vixen, The Carrier of Ladders , and The Lice (which are poetry collections, not novels), I go back to Jude the Obscure and Lewis Grassic Gibbon\u2019s A Scots Quair every now and again. Jude the Obscure because it\u2019s such an audacious story and I find something surprising each time, and Gibbon\u2019s trilogy because I read it during a time that shaped me\u2014an optimistic and curious stretch in my junior year in college\u2014and if I feel stuck or limited its peculiar music has the effect of making things seem more possible. I also have reread a lot of Deborah Eisenberg\u2019s short stories. Under the 82nd Airborne is one of the best collections of short stories ever. I remember reading it in my twenties in New York and being excited that she lived in Manhattan and was, somewhere in the city, alive and thinking. Before that I mostly read books by long-dead authors so the idea that I could sit next to her on the subway or a restaurant was mind-blowing. I did sit next to her at a play not long ago and I couldn\u2019t stop staring. 7. Has anything surprised you about the process of publication from the writer's side, and if so, what? I didn\u2019t count on finding the conversation about something I\u2019d written to be so much, um, fun. With the memoirs, the engagement with readers has been meaningful and, given the main subject matters of addiction and recovery, pretty heavy. But with the novel the exchanges so far have had a giddy pleasure on the level of gossiping about people you went to high school with. It still shocks me that anyone would know and have an opinion about the characters in Did You Ever Have a Family . They existed for so long as just a daydream that to have them named and commented on is startling, but in the best way. Talking about them is a kind of reunion. Review PRAISE FOR DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY \u201cMasterly\u2026The vignettes provide deft reprieves, a mosaic of a community and its connection to the tragedy. And connection\u2014the way people and their lives fuse\u2014is this novel\u2019s main concern.\" \u2015 The New York Times Book Review \u201cA brilliantly constructed debut set in the aftermath of catastrophic loss.\u201d -- 2015 Man Booker Prize Judges (Longlist Finalist)\"An attempt to map how the unbearable is borne, elegantly written and bravely imagined.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews, starred review \u201cA propulsive but tightly crafted narrative\u2026 reveal[s] the fine-grained sorrows of the human condition, rendered in polished, quietly captivating prose. As the stories emerge, so do their connections\u2014and the idea of connection itself\u2026. Readers may come to this debut novel because of agent/memoirist Clegg\u2019s reputation, but they\u2019ll stay for the stellar language and storytelling. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal, starred review \u201cIn this sorrowful and deeply probing debut novel, literary agent and memoirist Clegg ( Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man ) delivers a story of loss and its grueling aftermath . . . it's Clegg's deft handling of all the parsed details\u2014missed opportunities, harbored regrets, and unspoken good intentions\u2014that make the journey toward redemption and forgiveness so memorable.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly, starred review \"Clegg is both delicately lyrical and emotionally direct in this masterful novel, which strives to show how people make bearable what is unbearable, offering consolation in small but meaningful gestures. Both ineffably sad and deeply inspiring, this mesmerizing novel makes for a powerful debut.\" \u2015 Booklist, starred review \"I marveled my way through Did You Ever Have a Family, at not just the masterful writing and storytelling, but at the emotional authenticities of every persuasion. It's a wondrous thing when a writer gets things this right, this absorbing, and this beautiful. Bravo, Bill Clegg, and thank you.\" -- Bestselling author Elinor Lipman\"Full of small-town secrets and whispers, Bill Clegg has woven a richly textured tale of loss and healing. This is a deeply optimistic book about the power of human sympathy to pull us from the wreckage of our fate.\" -- Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright\"The force, range, and scope of Bill Clegg\u2019s Did You Ever Have a Family will grab you with its opening lines, and won\u2019t let go until its final one. I can\u2019t recall another novel that so effortlessly weds a nuanced, lyrical voice to an unflinching vision of just how badly things can go for people. I read it deep into the night, all the way through, telling myself it was getting late, I could finish the book in the morning. I finished it that night, however, slept a few hours, and then, in the morning, started reading it again.\" -- Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham\"Like the question it poses, Did You Ever Have a Family is brutally direct yet it's got an enormous symbolic power. You hold in your hands a great book of kindness\u2014every restrained, exquisite sentence comes loaded for bear. It's been a lot of years since a novel has so moved me. Number Bill Clegg among that endangered species: major American writer.\" -- National Book Critics Circle Award\u2013winning author Darin Strauss\u201cOne of the year's most hotly anticipated books.\u201d \u2015 Shelf Awareness \"The sharp writing and haunting characters had me glued.\u201d \u2015 Glamour, \"Five Things I\u2019m Loving\" \u201c[An] unexpectedly tender fiction debut.\u201d \u2015 Vogue \u201cBill Clegg\u2019s Did You Ever Have a Family limns the far reaches of grief.\u201d \u2015 Vanity Fair \u201c[An] incisive first novel.\" \u2015 Harper\u2019s Bazaar \"Clegg is a gimlet-eyed observer and is masterly at deftly sucking in the reader as he fashions an emotional tsunami into a profound, mesmerizing description.\" \u2015 The Sunday Times (UK) \u201cClegg has produced a moving, clever novel that subtly dissects the relationships between mothers and their children, lovers, neighbors and strangers. Did You Ever Have a Family is an unpretentious work about how a life can be salvaged from the ashes. Bill Clegg is an author to watch.\u201d \u2015 The Times (UK) \"A quiet novel of devastating power. Clegg has drawn a tale of prodigious tenderness and lyricism.... that reveals the depths of the human heart. [ Did You Ever Have a Family ] is a wonderful and deeply moving novel, which compels us to look directly into the dark night of our deepest fears and then quietly, step by tiny step, guides us towards the first pink smudges of the dawn.\" \u2015 The Guardian (UK) \u201cA quiet, measured and engrossing piece\u2026. a poignant portrait of fractured family lives. Clegg\u2019s prose conveys the numbed grieving state of mind, its quietness fitting its subject of deep clear-eyed sadness\u2026. It approaches grief gently and, in the end, its gentleness is its triumph.\u201d \u2015 The Daily Telegraph (UK) \u201cThis first novel arrives with a shout\u2026Clegg covers the full spectrum of human emotion in this beautifully nuanced story.\" \u2015 BBC, \u201cTen Books to Read in September\u201d \u201cIn trying to tell the faceted story of a single moment as seen by a hundred different eyes, Clegg has attempted something daring. And the wonder of it is how often his experiment succeeds...\u201d \u2015 NPR \u201cIn measured prose, Clegg unspools the stories of June and the other survivors as they face unimaginable horror and take their first halting steps toward hope and community.\" \u2015 People One of Nineteen Awesome New Books You Need to Read This Fall (2015) \u2015 Buzzfeed \" Did You Ever Have a Family is the first full-length foray into fiction for Bill Clegg... but it reads like the quietly assured work of a veteran novelist.... it\u2019s rare to find a book that renders unimaginable loss in such an eloquent, elegant voice.\" \u2015 Entertainment Weekly, A- review \u201cIlluminate[s] how grief, guilt, regrets and the deep need for human connection are woven into the very flammable fabric of humanity\u2026. Clegg's emotionally direct, polished novel is at once heartrending and heartening. It's a gift to be able to write about such dark stuff without succumbing to utter bleakness, and to infuse even scorching sadness with a ray of hopefulness.\u201d \u2015 Los Angeles Times \u201cHow do you continue if all at once, everyone you love has been wiped away? With crosscutting perspectives and a voluminous cast of characters, Clegg constructs a layered narrative with some dexterous plot twists.\u201d \u2015 Boston Globe \"This isn\u2019t your typical mystery, it\u2019s something better: a real-life thriller in which resolution takes the form of acceptance. While [Clegg] never suggests anything as simplistic as closure for these tormented souls, he manages to find ways for them to move forward from this tragedy, making it seem a little less random than it did at the beginning, and that in and of itself is a kind of mercy.\" \u2015 San Francisco Gate \"[ Did You Ever Have a ] Family is a quiet and beautifully written novel that will keep readers turning the pages\u2026. There is no resignation here. Rather, Clegg seems to say, it is the courage to intervene in another\u2019s life that defines the notion of family.\u201d \u2015 Star Tribune \u201cHeartbreaking but quietly optimistic, Did You Ever Have a Family is a rumination on horrific loss, healing, forgiveness, and the families we choose for ourselves.\u201d \u2015 Buzzfeed, \u201c19 Awesome New Books You Need To Read This Fall\u201d (2015) \u201c [ Did You Ever Have A ] Family melds several grieving voices into a detailed mosaic of a town split between locals and weekenders, a mystery in which the stakes really matter, and a recovery story more original than Clegg\u2019s own.\u201d \u2015 Vulture, \u201c7 Books You Need to Read This September\u201d (2015) About the Author Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days . The author of the novels Did You Ever Have a Family and The End of the Day , he has written for the New York Times , Lapham\u2019s Quarterly , New York magazine, The Guardian , and Harper\u2019s Bazaar . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "0671019015", "title": "Looking for Mr. Goodbar", "author": "Judith Rossner", "description": "About the Author Judith Rossner [1935\u20132005] was an American novelist, most famous for the bestseller, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975). A lifelong New Yorker, her books centered around the themes of urban alienation and gender relations.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 5.49}, {"asin": "0425247449", "title": "What Alice Forgot", "author": "Liane Moriarty", "description": "Review Praise for What Alice Forgot \u201cFunny and knowing...[about] what we choose to remember, and fight to forget.\u201d \u2014 O Magazine \u201cThe gripping story of a woman who wakes up with a bump on her head and no knowledge of the past ten years...an acutely observed romantic comedy that is both thought-provoking and funny.\u201d \u2014 Marie Claire (UK) \u201cThe affecting tale of Alice\u2019s chance for a ten-year do-over.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \u201cGrabbed me on the first page\u2026a deep and wondrous novel.\u201d \u2014 New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice \u201cI loved this book. It has, for me, everything that makes a good novel excellent.\u201d \u2014 New York Times bestselling author\u00a0Jeanne Ray \u201cHeartfelt, witty, and thought-provoking...a story you\u2019ll remember.\u201d \u2014 New York Times bestselling author\u00a0Jennifer Crusie \u201cHighly addictive.\u201d \u2014 She Magazine (UK; Book of the Month) \u201cI loved this original read.\u201d \u2014 The Sun (UK) \u201cFunny and captivating.\u201d \u2014 Closer (UK) \u201cWinning...well-paced, and thoroughly pleasurable.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cAn often funny, sometimes heartrending, deeply personal portrait of a woman attempting to unravel her own mystery.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cMoriarity makes this more than just a one-note story, weaving in a plotline involving Alice's childless sister...intriguing...will keep readers guessing and curious to know more about Alice.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal About the Author Liane Moriarty is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Nine Perfect Strangers , Three Wishes , Truly Madly Guilty , Big Little Lies , The Husband\u2019s Secret , The Hypnotist\u2019s Love Story , and What Alice Forgot . She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 She was floating, arms outspread, water lapping her body, breathing in a summery fragrance of salt and coconut. There was a pleasantly satisfied breakfast taste in her mouth of bacon and coffee and possibly croissants. She lifted her chin and the morning sun shone so brightly on the water, she had to squint through spangles of light to see her feet in front of her. Her toenails were each painted a different color. Red. Gold. Purple. Funny. The nail polish hadn\u2019t been applied very well. Blobby and messy. Someone else was floating in the water right next to her. Someone she liked a lot, who made her laugh, with toenails painted the same way. The other person waggled multicolored toes at her companionably, and she was filled with sleepy contentment. Somewhere in the distance, a man\u2019s voice shouted, \u201cMarco?\u201d and a chorus of children\u2019s voices cried back, \u201cPolo!\u201d The man called out again, \u201cMarco, Marco, Marco?\u201d and the voices answered, \u201cPolo, Polo, Polo!\u201d A child laughed; a long, gurgling giggle, like a stream of soap bubbles. A voice said quietly and insistently in her ear, \u201cAlice?\u201d and she tipped back her head and let the cool water slide silently over her face.Tiny dots of light danced before her eyes.Was it a dream or a memory?\u201cI don\u2019t know!\u201d said a frightened voice. \u201cI didn\u2019t see it happen!\u201dNo need to get your knickers in a knot.The dream or memory or whatever it was dissolved and vanished like a reflection on water, and instead fragments of thought began to drift through her head, as if she were waking up from a long, deep sleep, late on a Sunday morning.Is cream cheese considered a soft cheese?It\u2019s not a hard cheese.It\u2019s not . . .. . . hard at all.So, logically, you would think . . .. . . something.Something logical.Lavender is lovely.Logically lovely.Must prune back the lavender!I can smell lavender.No, I can\u2019t.Yes, I can.That\u2019s when she noticed the pain in her head for the first time. It hurt on one side, a lot, as if someone had given her a good solid thwack with a baseball bat.Her thoughts sharpened. What was this pain in the head all about? Nobody had warned her about pain in her head. She had a whole list of peculiar symptoms to be prepared for: heartburn, a taste like aluminum foil in your mouth, dizziness, extreme tiredness\u2014but nothing about a hammering ache at the side of your head. That one should really have been mentioned, because it was very painful. Of course, if she couldn\u2019t handle a run-of-the mill headache, well then . . .The scent of lavender seemed to be coming and going, like a gentle breeze.She let herself drift again.The best thing would be to fall back asleep and return to that lovely dream with the water and the multicolored toenails.Actually, maybe someone had mentioned headaches and she forgot? Yes, they had! Headaches, for heaven\u2019s sake! Really bad ones. Fabulous.So much to remember. No soft cheeses or smoked salmon or sushi because of the risk of that disease she never even knew existed. Listeria. Something to do with bacteria. Hurts the baby. That\u2019s why you weren\u2019t allowed to eat leftovers. One bite of a leftover chicken drumstick could kill the baby. The brutal responsibilities of parenthood.For now, she would just go back to sleep. That was the best thing.Listeria.Wisteria.The wisteria over the side fence is going to look stunning if it ever gets around to flowering.Listeria, wisteria.Ha. Funny words.She smiled, but her head really did hurt a lot. She was trying to be brave.\u201cAlice? Can you hear me?\u201dThe lavender smell got stronger again. A bit sickly sweet.Cream cheese is a spreadable cheese. Not too soft, not too hard, just right. Like the baby bear\u2019s bed.\u201cHer eyelids are fluttering. Like she\u2019s dreaming.\u201dIt was no use. She couldn\u2019t get back to sleep, even though she felt exhausted, as if she could sleep forever. Were all pregnant women walking around with aching heads like this? Was the idea to toughen them up for labor pains? When she got up, she would check it out in one of the baby books.She always forgot how pain was so upsetting. Cruel. It hurt your feelings. You just wanted it to stop, please, right now. Epidurals were the way to go. One epidural for my headache, please. Thank you.\u201cAlice, try and open your eyes.\u201dWas cream cheese even cheese? You didn\u2019t put a dollop of cream cheese on a cheese platter. Maybe cheese didn\u2019t actually mean cheese in the context of cream cheese. She wouldn\u2019t ask the doctor about it, just in case it\u2019s an embarrassing \u201cOh, Alice\u201d mistake.She couldn\u2019t get comfortable. The mattress felt like cold concrete. If she wriggled over, she could nudge Nick with her foot until he sleepily rolled over and pulled her to him in a big warm bear hug. Her human hot water bottle.Where was Nick? Had he already got up? Maybe he was making her a cup of tea.\u201cDon\u2019t try and move, Alice. Just stay still and open your eyes, sweetie.\u201dElisabeth would know about the cream cheese. She\u2019d snort in her bigsisterly way and be precise. Mum wouldn\u2019t have a clue. She\u2019d be stricken. She\u2019d say, \u201cOh dear, oh no! I\u2019m sure I ate soft cheeses when I was pregnant with you girls! They didn\u2019t know about that sort of thing back then.\u201d She\u2019d talk on and on and worry that Alice had accidentally broken a rule. Mum believed in rules. So did Alice actually.Frannie wouldn\u2019t know but she\u2019d research it, proudly, using her new computer, in the same way that she used to help Alice and Elisabeth find information for school projects in her Encyclopedia Britannica.Her head really did hurt.Presumably this was only the squidgiest fraction of how much labor would hurt. So that was just great.It was not as if she\u2019d actually eaten any cream cheese that she could remember.\u201cAlice? Alice!\u201dShe didn\u2019t even really like cream cheese.\u201cHas someone called an ambulance?\u201dThere was that smell of lavender again.Once, when they were undoing their seat belts, Nick said (in answer to some fishing-for-compliments thing she\u2019d just said), \u201cDon\u2019t be ridiculous, you goose, you know I\u2019m bloody besotted with you.\u201dShe opened the car door and felt sunshine on her legs and smelled the lavender she\u2019d planted by the front door.Bloody besotted.It was a moment of lavender-scented bliss, after grocery shopping.\u201cIt\u2019s coming. I called triple zero! That\u2019s the first time in my life I\u2019ve ever called triple zero! I felt all self-conscious. I nearly called 911 like an American. I actually punched in the nine. There\u2019s proof I watch too much television.\u201d\u201cI hope it\u2019s not, like, serious. I mean, I couldn\u2019t, like, get sued or anything, could I?\u201dWas that talkback radio she could hear? She hated talkback radio. The callers were always appalled by something. Alice said once that she\u2019d never been appalled by anything. Elisabeth said that was appalling.\u201cAlice, can you hear me? Can you hear me, Alice?\u201dSultana, can you hear me? Can you hear me, Sultana?Every night, before they went to sleep, Nick talked to the baby through an empty toilet roll pressed to Alice\u2019s stomach. He\u2019d heard this idea on some radio show. They said that way the baby would learn to recognize the father\u2019s voice as well as the mother\u2019s.\u201cAhoy!\u201d he\u2019d call. \u201cCan you hear me, Sultana? This is your father speaking!\u201d They\u2019d read that the baby was the size of a sultana by now. So that\u2019s what they called it. Only in private, of course; they were cool parents-to-be. No sappiness in public.The Sultana said it was fine, thanks, Dad, bit bored at times, but doing okay. Apparently he wished his mum would stop eating all that boring green shit and have a pizza for a change. \u201cEnough with the rabbit food!\u201d he demanded.It seemed the Sultana was most likely to be a boy. He just seemed to have a masculine personality. The little rogue. They both agreed on this.Alice would lie back and look at the top of Nick\u2019s head. There were a few shiny silvery strands. She didn\u2019t know if he knew about them, so she didn\u2019t mention them. He was thirty-two. The silver strands made her eyes blur. All those wacky pregnancy hormones.Alice never talked out loud to the baby. She spoke to it in her mind, shyly, when she was in the bath (not too hot\u2014so many rules). \u201cHey there, Baby,\u201d she\u2019d think to herself, and then she\u2019d be so overwhelmed by the wonder of it she\u2019d splash the water with the flats of her palms like a kid thinking about Christmas. She was turning thirty soon, with a terrifying mortgage and a husband and a baby on the way, but she didn\u2019t feel that different from when she was fifteen.Except, there were no moments of bliss after grocery shopping when she was fifteen. She hadn\u2019t met Nick yet. Her heart still had to be broken a few times before he could turn up and superglue it together with words like \u201cbesotted.\u201d\u201cAlice? Are you okay? Please open your eyes.\u201dIt was a woman\u2019s voice. Too loud and strident to ignore. It dragged her up into consciousness and wouldn\u2019t let her go.It was a voice that gave Alice a familiar irritated itch of a feeling, like too-tight stockings.This person did not belong in her bedroom.She rolled her head to one side. \u201cOw!\u201dShe opened her eyes.There was a blur of unrecognizable colors and shapes. She couldn\u2019t even see the bedside cabinet to reach for her glasses. Her eyes must be getting worse.She blinked, and blinked again, and then, like a sharpening telescope, everything came into focus. She was looking at someone\u2019s knees. How funny.Knobbly pale knees.She lifted her chin a fraction.\u201cThere you are!\u201dIt was Jane Turner of all people, from work, kneeling next to her. Her face was flushed and she had strands of sweaty hair pasted to her forehead. Her eyes looked tired. She had a soft, pudgy neck Alice had never noticed before. She was wearing a T-shirt with huge sweat marks and shorts and her arms were thin and white with dark freckles. Alice had never seen so much of Jane\u2019s body before. It was embarrassing. Poor old Jane.\u201cListeria, wisteria,\u201d said Alice, to be humorous.\u201cYou\u2019re delirious,\u201d said Jane. \u201cDon\u2019t try and sit up.\u201d\u201cHmmph,\u201d said Alice. \u201cDon\u2019t want to sit up.\u201d She had a feeling she wasn\u2019t in bed; she seemed to be lying flat on her back on a cool laminated floor. Was she drunk? Had she forgotten she was pregnant and got deliriously drunk?Her obstetrician was an urbane man who wore a bow tie and had a round face disconcertingly similar to that of one of Alice\u2019s ex-boyfriends. He said he didn\u2019t have a problem with \u201csay, an aperitif followed by one glass of wine with dinner.\u201d Alice thought an aperitif must be a particular brand of drink. (\u201cOh, Alice,\u201d said Elisabeth.) Nick explained that an aperitif was a predinner drink. Nick came from an aperitif-drinking family. Alice came from a family with one dusty bottle of Baileys sitting hopefully in the back of the pantry behind the tins of spaghetti. In spite of what the obstetrician said, she\u2019d only had a half a glass of champagne since she\u2019d done the pregnancy test and she felt guilty about that even though everybody kept saying it was fine.\u201cWhere am I?\u201d asked Alice, terrified of the answer. Was she in some seedy nightclub? How could she explain to Nick that she forgot she was pregnant?\u201cYou\u2019re at the gym,\u201d said Jane. \u201cYou fell and knocked yourself out. Gave me an absolute heart attack, although I was sort of grateful for the excuse to stop.\u201dThe gym? Alice didn\u2019t go to gyms. Had she woken up drunk in a gym?\u201cYou lost your balance,\u201d said a sharp, jolly voice. \u201cIt was quite a fall! Gave us all a shock, you silly sausage! We\u2019ve called an ambulance, so don\u2019t you worry, we\u2019ve got professional help on the way!\u201dKneeling next to Jane was a thin, coffee-tanned girl with a bleachedblond ponytail, shiny Lycra shorts, and a cropped red top with the words SPIN CRAZY emblazoned across it. Alice felt instant dislike for her. She didn\u2019t like being called a silly sausage. It offended her dignity. One of Alice\u2019s faults, according to her sister Elisabeth, was a tendency to take herself too seriously.\u201cDid I faint?\u201d asked Alice hopefully. Pregnant women fainted. She had never fainted in her life, although she spent most of fourth grade practicing, in the hope that she could be one of those lucky girls who fainted during church and had to be carried out, draped across the muscly arms of their PE teacher, Mr. Gillespie.\u201cIt\u2019s just that I\u2019m pregnant,\u201d she said. Let her see who she was calling a silly sausage.Jane\u2019s mouth dropped. \u201cJesus, Alice, you are not!\u201dSpin Crazy Girl pursed her mouth as if she\u2019d caught Alice out being naughty. \u201cOh dear, sweetie, I did ask at the beginning of the class if anyone was pregnant. I would have put you up front near the fan. You shouldn\u2019t have been so shy.\u201dAlice\u2019s head thumped. Nothing anybody said was making sense.\u201cPregnant,\u201d said Jane. \u201cAt this time. What a disaster.\u201d\u201cIt is not!\u201d Alice put a protective hand to her stomach, so the Sultana wouldn\u2019t hear and be offended. Their financial situation was none of Jane\u2019s business. People were meant to be delighted when you announced a pregnancy.\u201cI mean, what are you going to do?\u201d asked Jane.For heaven\u2019s sake! \u201cDo? What do you mean, what am I going to do? I\u2019m going to have a baby.\u201d She sniffed. \u201cYou smell of lavender. I knew I could smell lavender.\u201d Her sense of smell had been extra strong because of the pregnancy.\u201cIt\u2019s my deodorant.\u201d Jane really didn\u2019t look like herself. Her eyes didn\u2019t look right. It was quite noticeable. Maybe she needed to start using some sort of eye cream.\u201cAre you all right, Jane?\u201dJane snorted. \u201cI\u2019m fine. Worry about yourself, woman. You\u2019re the pregnant one knocking yourself out.\u201dThe baby! She\u2019d been selfishly thinking about her sore head when she should have been worrying about the poor little Sultana. What sort of a mother was she going to be?She said, \u201cI hope I didn\u2019t hurt the baby when I fell.\u201d\u201cOh, babies are pretty tough, I wouldn\u2019t worry about that.\u201dIt was another woman\u2019s voice. For the first time Alice looked up and realized a crowd of red-faced, middle-aged women in sports gear surrounded her. Some of them were leaning forward, staring at her with avid road-accident interest, while others had their hands on their hips and were chatting to one another as if they were at a party. They seemed to be in a small, fluorescentlit room. She could hear tinny music somewhere in the distance, clanking metal sounds, and a sudden burst of loud masculine laughter. As she lifted her head, she saw that the room was filled with stationary bikes, all crammed together and facing the same direction.\u201cAlthough, you shouldn\u2019t really be doing exercise that gets your heart rate up too high if you\u2019re pregnant,\u201d said another woman.\u201cBut I don\u2019t do any exercise,\u201d said Alice. \u201cI should do more exercise.\u201d\u201cYou, my girl, couldn\u2019t do any more exercise if you tried,\u201d said Jane.\u201cI don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d She looked around at the strange faces surrounding her. This was all so . . . silly. \u201cI don\u2019t know where I am.\u201d\u201cShe\u2019s probably got a concussion,\u201d said somebody excitedly. \u201cConcussed people are dazed and disoriented.\u201dSpin Crazy Girl looked frightened and stroked Alice\u2019s arm. \u201cOh dear, sweetie, YOU MIGHT BE JUST A LITTLE BIT CONCUSSED,\u201d she yelled.\u201cYes, but I don\u2019t think that makes her deaf,\u201d said Jane tersely. She lowered her voice and bent her head toward Alice. \u201cEverything is fine. You\u2019re at the gym, you were doing your Friday spin class, the one you\u2019ve been wanting to drag me along to for ages, remember? Can\u2019t quite see the attraction, actually. Anyway, you must have got dizzy, or fainted or something, because one minute you were riding like a madwoman and next thing you were crashing to the floor. You\u2019re going to be fine. More importantly, why didn\u2019t you tell me you were pregnant?\u201d\u201cWhat\u2019s a Friday spin class?\u201d asked Alice.\u201cOh, this is bad,\u201d said Jane excitedly.\u201cThe ambulance is here!\u201d someone said.Spin Crazy Girl became goofy with relief. She bounded to her feet and shooed at the ladies like an energetic housewife with a broom. \u201cRight, gang, let\u2019s give them some space, shall we?\u201dJane stayed kneeling on the floor next to Alice, patting her distractedly on the shoulder. Then she stopped patting. \u201cOh, my. Why do you get all the fun?\u201dAlice twisted her head and saw two handsome men in blue overalls striding toward them, carrying first aid equipment. Embarrassed, she struggled to sit up.\u201cStay there, honey,\u201d called out the taller one.\u201cHe looks just like George Clooney,\u201d breathed Jane in her ear. He did, too. Alice couldn\u2019t help but feel cheerier. It seemed she\u2019d woken up in an episode of ER.\u201cHey, there.\u201d George Clooney squatted down next to them, big hands resting between his knees. \u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d\u201cJane,\u201d said Jane. \u201cOh. Her name is Alice.\u201d\u201cWhat\u2019s your full name, Alice?\u201d George gently took her wrist and pushed two fingers against her pulse.\u201cAlice Mary Love.\u201d\u201cHad a bit of a fall did you, Alice?\u201d\u201cApparently I did. I don\u2019t remember it.\u201d Alice felt teary and special, as she generally did when she talked to any health professional, even a chemist. She blamed her mother for making too much of a fuss over her when she was sick as a child. She and Elisabeth were both terrible hypochondriacs.\u201cDo you know where you are?\u201d asked George.\u201cNot really,\u201d said Alice. \u201cApparently I\u2019m in a gym.\u201d\u201cShe fell off her bike during the spin class.\u201d Jane adjusted her bra strap beneath her top. \u201cI saw it happen. I\u2019m pretty sure she fainted. Her head smashed against the handlebars of the bike next to her. She\u2019s been unconscious for about ten minutes.\u201dSpin Crazy Girl reappeared, ponytail swinging, and Alice stared up at her smooth long legs and hard flat stomach. It looked like a pretend stomach. \u201cShe can\u2019t have had her feet strapped to the pedals properly. I do make a point of reminding everyone about that at the beginning of the class. It\u2019s a safety issue,\u201d said Spin Crazy Girl to George Clooney in the confidential tone of one professional talking to another. \u201cAlso, I really don\u2019t recommend spin classes to pregnant women. I did ask if anyone was pregnant.\u201d\u201cDon\u2019t worry, we\u2019ll sue if necessary,\u201d said Jane quietly to Alice.\u201cHow many weeks are you, Alice?\u201d asked George.Alice went to answer and to her surprise found a blank space in her head.\u201cThirteen,\u201d she said, after a second. \u201cI mean, fourteen. Fourteen weeks.\u201d They\u2019d had the twelve-week ultrasound at least two weeks ago. The Sultana had done a peculiar little jump, like a disco dance move, as if someone had poked it in the back, and afterward Nick and Alice had kept trying to replicate the movement for people. Everyone had been polite and said it was remarkable.She put a hand to her stomach again and for the first time she noticed what she was wearing. Sneakers and white socks. Black shorts and a yellow sleeveless top with a shiny gold-foil sticker stuck to her top. It seemed to be a picture of a dinosaur with a balloon coming out of its mouth saying, \u201cROCK ON.\u201d Rock on?\u201cWhere did these clothes come from?\u201d she asked Jane accusingly. \u201cThese aren\u2019t my clothes.\u201dJane raised a meaningful eyebrow at George.\u201cThere\u2019s a dinosaur stuck to my shirt,\u201d said Alice, awestruck.\u201cWhat day of the week is it today, Alice?\u201d asked George.\u201cFriday,\u201d answered Alice. She was cheating, because Jane had told her they were doing a \u201cFriday spin class.\u201d Whatever that was.\u201cRemember what you had for breakfast?\u201d George gently examined the side of her head while he talked. The other paramedic strapped a blood-pressure monitor to her upper arm and pumped it up.\u201cPeanut butter on toast?\u201dThat was what she generally had for breakfast. It seemed a safe bet.\u201cHe doesn\u2019t actually know what you had for breakfast,\u201d said Jane. \u201cHe\u2019s trying to see if you remember what you had for breakfast.\u201dThe blood-pressure monitor squeezed hard around Alice\u2019s arm.George sat back on his haunches and said, \u201cHumor me, Alice, and tell me the name of our illustrious prime minister.\u201d\u201cJohn Howard,\u201d answered Alice obediently. She hoped there wouldn\u2019t be any more questions about politics. It wasn\u2019t her forte. She could never get appalled enough.Jane made a strange explosive sound of derision and mirth.\u201cOh. Ah. But he\u2019s still the prime minister, isn\u2019t he?\u201d Alice was mortified. People were going to tease her about this for years to come. Oh, Alice, you don\u2019t know the prime minister! Had she missed an election? \u201cBut I\u2019m sure he\u2019s the prime minister.\u201d\u201cAnd what year is it?\u201d George didn\u2019t seem too concerned.\u201cIt\u2019s 1998,\u201d Alice answered promptly. She felt confident about that one. The baby would be born next year, in 1999.Jane pressed her hand over her mouth. George went to speak, but Jane interrupted him. She put her hand on Alice\u2019s shoulder and stared at her intently. Her eyes were wide with excitement. Tiny balls of mascara hovered on the ends of her eyelashes. The combination of her lavender deodorant and garlic breath was quite overpowering.\u201cHow old are you, Alice?\u201d\u201cI\u2019m twenty-nine, Jane.\u201d Alice was irritated by Jane\u2019s dramatic tone. What was she getting at? \u201cSame age as you.\u201dJane sat back up and looked at George Clooney triumphantly.She said, \u201cI just got an invitation to her fortieth birthday.\u201dThat was the day Alice Mary Love went to the gym and carelessly misplaced a decade of her life. Chapter 2 Jane said of course she would have come to the hospital with her but she had to be in court at two o\u2019clock.\u201cWhat are you going to court for?\u201d asked Alice, who was perfectly happy not to have Jane come to the hospital. That was quite enough of Jane for one day. \u201cAn invitation to her fortieth birthday.\u201d What exactly did she mean by that?Jane smiled oddly and didn\u2019t answer Alice\u2019s question about court. \u201cI\u2019ll call someone to be there at the hospital waiting for you.\u201d\u201cNot someone.\u201d Alice watched the paramedics set up a stretcher for her. It looked a bit flimsy. \u201cNick.\u201d\u201cYes, of course, I\u2019ll call Nick.\u201d Jane enunciated her words carefully, as if she were acting in a children\u2019s pantomime.\u201cActually, I\u2019m sure I can walk,\u201d Alice said to George Clooney. She never liked the idea of being lifted by people, even Nick, who was pretty strong. She worried about her weight. What if the paramedics grunted and grimaced like furniture removalists when they lifted the stretcher? \u201cI feel fine. Just my head.\u201d\u201cYou\u2019re suffering from a pretty serious concussion there,\u201d said George. \u201cWe can\u2019t muck around with head injuries.\u201d\u201cCome on now, our favorite part of the job is carrying attractive women around on stretchers,\u201d said the other paramedic. \u201cDon\u2019t deprive us.\u201d\u201cYes, don\u2019t deprive them, Alice,\u201d said Jane. \u201cYour brain is damaged. You think you\u2019re twenty-nine.\u201dWhat did that mean, exactly?Alice lay back and allowed the two men to efficiently lift her onto the stretcher. As her head rolled to one side, the pain made her dizzy.\u201cOh, here\u2019s her bag.\u201d Jane picked up a rucksack from the side of the room and squashed it next to Alice.\u201cThat\u2019s not mine,\u201d said Alice.\u201cYes it is.\u201dAlice stared at the red canvas bag. There was a row of three shiny dinosaur stickers like the one on her shirt stuck across the top flap. She wondered if she was about to be sick.The two paramedics lifted up the stretcher. They didn\u2019t seem to have a problem carrying it. She guessed it was their job to lift all-sized people.\u201cWork!\u201d said Alice in a sudden panic. \u201cYou\u2019d better call work for me. Why aren\u2019t we at work if it\u2019s a Friday?\u201d\u201cWell, I really don\u2019t know! Why aren\u2019t we at work?\u201d repeated Jane in that pantomime voice again. \u201cBut don\u2019t you worry a thing about it, I\u2019ll call \u2018Nick,\u2019 and then I\u2019ll call \u2018work.\u2019 So by work I assume you mean, ah, ABR Bricks?\u201d\u201cYes, Jane, I do,\u201d said Alice carefully. They\u2019d been working at ABR for three years now. Could the poor girl have some sort of mental illness?Alice said, \u201cYou\u2019d better let Sue know I won\u2019t be in today.\u201d\u201cSue,\u201d repeated Jane slowly. \u201cAnd by Sue, I take it you mean Sue Mason.\u201d\u201cYes, Jane. Sue Mason.\u201d (Definitely loopy.)Sue Mason was their boss. She was a stickler for punctuality and medical certificates and appropriate work attire. Alice couldn\u2019t wait for her maternity leave to start so she could get out of the place.\u201cGet better soon, Alice!\u201d Spin Crazy Girl called out from the front of the room, her voice amplified by a microphone strapped to her head. She was sitting astride a bike up on a small raised platform, facing the class. There was a television screen flickering above her head and a huge rotating fan next to her. All of the women except for Jane had climbed back onto their bikes and were pedaling slowly, their eyes fixed on some invisible horizon. As Alice\u2019s stretcher reached the door, there was a burst of loud throbbing music and the lights in the room suddenly went out, plunging them into darkness. \u201cLet\u2019s go, team!\u201d shouted Spin Crazy Girl. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to make up for lost time! Where were we?\u201d\u201cStuck behind a semi-trailer halfway up the mountain!\u201d shouted one of the women.\u201cThat\u2019s right! Let\u2019s push it up a notch! Push it, push it, push it . . . and out of the saddle!\u201dThe women\u2019s bottoms lifted simultaneously in the air as they stood up on their pedals, their strong legs pumping like pistons.Goodness, thought Alice.Jane propped a heavy glass door open with her foot, and Alice clutched the sides of the stretcher, worried that they\u2019d have to turn her on an angle, like a sofa, but the paramedics carried her smoothly through.\u201cYou\u2019ll be fine,\u201d said Jane, giving one of Alice\u2019s sneakers a jaunty pat.The glass door closed, and the music\u2019s volume was suddenly reduced to the sound of a distant party. Alice could see Jane\u2019s face through the glass, watching them go. She was pinching her lower lip together with her finger and thumb, so she looked like a fish.She must remember every moment of this freaky day to tell Nick. He\u2019d think it was hilarious. Yes, this whole day was quite a hoot.Now she was being carried through another, much larger, blue-carpeted room, with rows of complicated-looking machinery being operated by men and women who all seemed to be straining to lift, pull, or push things that were far too heavy for them. The place had the studious, muted feel of a library. Nobody stopped what they were doing as the stretcher went by. Only their eyes followed with blank, impersonal interest, as if she were a news event on TV.\u201cAlice!\u201dA man stepped off a treadmill, pushing his headphones down from his ears and onto his shoulders. \u201cWhat happened to you?\u201dHis face\u2014bright red and beaded with sweat\u2014meant nothing to her. Alice stared up at him, groping for something polite to say. It was surreal, making conversation with a stranger while lying flat on her back on a stretcher. She was in one of those dreams where she turned up at a cocktail party in her pajamas.\u201cFell off her bike and got a bit of a bump on the noggin,\u201d George Clooney answered for her, sounding not at all medical.\u201cOh no!\u201d The man smeared a towel across his forehead. \u201cJust what you need, with the big day coming up!\u201dAlice attempted to pull a rueful face about the big day coming up. Perhaps he was one of Nick\u2019s colleagues and it was some work function she was meant to know about?\u201cWell, that\u2019ll teach you to be such a gym addict, eh, Alice?\u201d\u201cHo,\u201d said Alice. She wasn\u2019t sure what she\u2019d been trying to say, but that\u2019s what it came out as: \u201cHo.\u201dAs the paramedics kept walking, the man climbed back onto his treadmill and started running, calling out after her, \u201cTake care, Alice! I\u2019ll get Maggie to call!\u201d He held up his thumb and little finger to his ear.Alice closed her eyes. Her stomach churned.\u201cYou doing okay there, Alice?\u201d asked George Clooney.Alice opened her eyes. \u201cI feel a bit sick,\u201d she said.\u201cThat\u2019s to be expected.\u201dThey stopped in front of a lift.\u201cI really don\u2019t know where I am,\u201d she reminded George. She felt like it was worth mentioning again.\u201cDon\u2019t worry about it for now,\u201d said George.The lift doors hissed open and a woman with sleek bobbed hair stepped out. \u201cAlice! Are you okay? What happened?\u201d She had one of those \u201cHow now, brown cow\u201d accents. \u201cWhat a coincidence! I was just thinking about you! I was going to call you about the\u2014ahh, the little incident\u2014at school, Chloe told me about it, you poor thing! Oh dear, this is all you need! What with tomorrow night, and the big day coming up!\u201dAs she kept talking, the paramedics maneuvered the stretcher into the lift and pressed the \u201cG\u201d button. The doors slid shut on the woman lifting a pretend phone to her ear just like the treadmill guy, while at the same time a voice cried out, \u201cIs that Alice Love I just saw on that stretcher?\u201dGeorge said, \u201cYou know a lot of people.\u201d\u201cNo,\u201d said Alice. \u201cNo, I really don\u2019t.\u201dShe thought about Jane saying, \u201cI just got an invitation to her fortieth birthday.\u201dShe turned her head and was sick all over George Clooney\u2019s nice, shiny black shoes.Elisabeth\u2019s Homework for Dr. HodgesIt was just toward the end of the lunch break when I got the call. I only had five minutes before I was back on and I should have been in the bathroom checking I didn\u2019t have food between my teeth. She said, \u201cElisabeth, oh, hi, it\u2019s Jane, I\u2019ve got a problem here,\u201d as if there was only one Jane in the whole world (you would think somebody named Jane would be in the habit of giving their last name) and I was thinking Jane, Jane, a Jane with a problem, and then I realized it was Jane Turner. Alice\u2019s Jane.She said that Alice had fallen over at the gym during her spin class.So there I was with 143 people all sitting back behind their tables, pouring their ice water, eating their mints, looking expectantly at the podium with pens poised, who had each paid $2,950 to see me speak, or $2,500 if they took advantage of the Early Bird discount.That\u2019s how much people pay me to teach them how to write a successful direct-mail campaign. I know! That nasty commercial world out there is entirely foreign to you, isn\u2019t it, Dr. Hodges? I could tell you were just politely nodding your head when I tried to explain my job. I\u2019m sure it has never occurred to you that those letters and brochures you receive in the mail are actually written by real people. Real people like me. I bet you have a \u201cNO JUNK MAIL\u201d sticker on your letterbox. Don\u2019t worry. I won\u2019t hold it against you.Anyway, it wasn\u2019t exactly the most convenient time for me to go rushing off to see my sister because she\u2019d had a gym accident (some of us have jobs; some of us don\u2019t have time to go to the gym in the middle of the day). Especially when I wasn\u2019t talking to her since the banana muffins incident. I know we talked at length about trying to see her actions from a more \u201crational perspective,\u201d but I\u2019m still not talking to her. (Of course she doesn\u2019t actually KNOW I\u2019m not talking to her, but allow me my childish satisfaction.)I said to Jane (somewhat irritably and self-importantly, I admit), \u201cIs it serious?\u201d For some reason it never occurred to me that it really could be serious.Jane said, \u201cShe thinks it\u2019s 1998 and she\u2019s twenty-nine and we\u2019re still working together at ABR Bricks, so it\u2019s seriously weird, that\u2019s for sure.\u201dThen she said, \u201cOh, and I assume you know she\u2019s pregnant?\u201dI am deeply ashamed of my reaction. All I can say, Dr. Hodges, is that it was as involuntary and unstoppable as a huge hay-fevery sneeze.It was a feeling of trembly rage and it went from my stomach to my head in a WHOOSH, and I said, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Jane, I have to go now,\u201d and hung up.George Clooney was very nice about his shoes. Alice was appalled and tried to climb out of the stretcher so she could somehow help clean them, if she could have just found a tissue from somewhere, perhaps in that strange canvas bag, but both paramedics got stern with her and insisted that she stay still.Her stomach felt better when she was buckled into the back of the ambulance. The chunky clean white plastic all around her was reassuring; everything felt sensible and sterile.It seemed to be quite a sedate trip to the hospital, like catching a cab. As far as Alice could tell, they weren\u2019t screeching through the streets, flashing their lights at other cars to get out of the way.\u201cSo I guess I\u2019m not dying, then?\u201d she asked George. The other guy was driving and George Clooney was in the back with Alice. He had hairy eyebrows, she noticed. Nick had big bushy eyebrows, too. Late one night Alice had tried to pluck them for him and he\u2019d yelled so loud, she was worried Mrs. Bergen from next door would do her neighborhood-watch duty and call the police.\u201cYou\u2019ll be back at the gym in no time,\u201d answered George.\u201cI don\u2019t go to the gym,\u201d said Alice. \u201cI don\u2019t believe in gyms.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m with you.\u201d George smiled and patted her arm.She watched bits of billboards and office buildings and sky flash by through the ambulance window behind George\u2019s head.Okay, so this was all very silly. It was only the \u201cbump on the noggin\u201d that was making everything seem strange. This was just a longer, more intense version of that funny, dreamlike feeling you got when you woke up on holiday and couldn\u2019t think where you were. There was no need to panic. This was interesting! She just needed to focus.\u201cWhat time is it?\u201d she asked George determinedly.\u201cNearly lunchtime,\u201d he said, glancing at his watch.Right. Lunchtime. Lunchtime on a Friday.She said, \u201cWhy did you ask what I had for breakfast before?\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s one of those standard questions we ask people with head injuries. We\u2019re trying to ascertain your mental state.\u201dSo presumably if she could remember what she had for breakfast, everything else would fall into place.Breakfast. This morning. Oh, come on now. She must be able to remember.The idea of a weekday breakfast was clear in her mind. It was two pieces of toast popping up in tandem from the toaster and the kettle bubbling crossly and the morning light slanting across the kitchen floor, just in front of the fridge, lighting up the big brown splotch on the linoleum, which looked like it could be scrubbed away in a jiffy, but most certainly couldn\u2019t. It was glancing up at the railway clock Nick\u2019s mother had given them as a housewarming present, with the fervent hope that it might be earlier than she thought (it was always later). It was the crackly background sound of ABC morning radio\u2014worried, intense voices talking about world issues. Nick listened and sometimes said things like \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be kidding,\u201d and Alice let the voices wash over her and tried to pretend she was still asleep.She and Nick were not morning people. They liked this about each other, having both been in previous relationships with intolerably cheery morning people. They spoke in short, terse sentences and sometimes it was a game, exaggerating their grumpiness, and sometimes it wasn\u2019t, and that was fine, because they knew their real selves would be back that evening after work.She tried to think of a specific breakfast memory.There was that chilly morning when they were halfway through painting the kitchen. It was raining hard outside and there was a strong smell of paint fumes tickling her nostrils as they silently ate peanut butter on toast sitting on the floor, because all the furniture was covered with drop sheets. Alice was still in her nightie, but she\u2019d put a cardigan on over the top of it, and she was wearing Nick\u2019s old football socks pulled up to her knees. Nick was shaved, and dressed, except for his tie. The night before he\u2019d told her about a really important scary presentation he had to give to the Shiny-headed Twerp, the Motherfucking Megatron, and the Big Kahuna all at the same time. Alice, who was terrified of public speaking, had felt her own stomach clench in sympathy. That morning Nick took a sip of his tea, put down his mug, opened his mouth to bite the toast, and dropped it onto his favorite blue-striped shirt. It stuck right to the front of his shirt. Their eyes met in mutual shock. Nick slowly peeled off the toast to reveal a big greasy rectangle of peanut butter. He said, in the tone of a man who has just been fatally shot, \u201cThat was my only clean shirt,\u201d and then he took the piece of toast and slammed it against his forehead.Alice said, \u201cNo it\u2019s not. I took a load while you were at squash last night.\u201d They didn\u2019t have a washing machine yet and they were taking all their clothes to the laundry down the road. Nick took the squished-up toast off his face and said, \u201cYou didn\u2019t,\u201d and she said, \u201cI did,\u201d and he crawled through tins of paint and put both hands on her face and gave her a long, tender, peanut-buttery kiss.But that wasn\u2019t this morning\u2019s breakfast. That was months ago, or weeks ago, or something. The kitchen was finished. She hadn\u2019t been pregnant then either. She was still drinking coffee.There were a few breakfasts in a row where they were on a health kick and they had yogurt with fruit. When was that? The health kick didn\u2019t last very long, even though they were pretty gung ho about it in the beginning.There were breakfasts when Nick was away for work. She ate her toast in bed when he was away, relishing the romantic pain of missing him, as if he were a sailor or a soldier. It was like enjoying feeling hungry when you knew you\u2019d be having a huge dinner.There was that breakfast where they had a fight\u2014faces ugly, eyes blazing, doors slamming\u2014about running out of milk. That wasn\u2019t so nice. (That breakfast definitely wasn\u2019t this morning. She remembered how they forgave each other that night while they were watching Nick\u2019s youngest sister acting a tiny part in a stupendously long postmodern play that neither of them could understand. \u201cBy the way, I forgive you,\u201d Nick had leaned over and whispered in her ear, and she\u2019d whispered back, \u201cExcuse me, I forgive you,\u201d and a woman in front had turned around and hissed, \u201cShhh! Both of you!\u201d like an angry schoolteacher and they\u2019d got the giggles so badly, they ended up having to leave the theater, clambering past knees and getting into terrible trouble afterward from Nick\u2019s sister.)There was a breakfast where she\u2019d grumpily read out possible baby names from a book while he\u2019d grumpily said yes or no. That was nice, because they were definitely both only pretending to be grumpy that morning. \u201cI can\u2019t believe they let us name a person,\u201d Nick had said. \u201cIt feels like something only the King of the Land should be able to do.\u201d \u201cOr the Queen of the Kingdom,\u201d Alice said. \u201cOh, they\u2019d never let a woman name a person,\u201d said Nick. \u201cObviously.\u201dDid that happen this morning? No. That was . . . some time. Not this morning.She had absolutely no idea what she\u2019d eaten for breakfast that morning.She confessed to George Clooney, \u201cI just said I had peanut butter on toast because that\u2019s my normal breakfast. I can\u2019t actually remember anything about breakfast at all.\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s fine, Alice,\u201d he answered. \u201cI don\u2019t think I can remember what I had for breakfast myself.\u201d\u201cOh.\u201d Well, so much for ascertaining her mental state! Did George actually know what he was doing?\u201cMaybe you\u2019ve got concussion, too,\u201d said Alice. George laughed dutifully. He seemed to be losing interest in her. Maybe he was hoping his next patient would be more interesting. He probably liked using those heart defibrillator thingummies. Alice would if she were a paramedic.One Sunday, when Nick had a hangover and she was trying to convince him to go to the beach with her and he was lying on the couch with his eyes closed, ignoring her, she said, \u201cOh, no, he\u2019s flatlining!\u201d and rubbed two spatulas together before pressing them to his chest, yelling, \u201cClear!\u201d Nick obligingly gave a realistic spasm right on cue. He still wouldn\u2019t move, until she cried, \u201cHe\u2019s not breathing! We\u2019ve got to intubate him\u2014now!\u201d and tried to shove a straw down his throat.The ambulance pulled up at a traffic light and Alice shifted slightly. Everything felt wrong about her body. She felt an overwhelming tiredness deep in her bones, as if she could sleep forever, but at the same time a jittery, twitchy energy making her want to get up and achieve something. It must be the pregnancy. Everyone said your body didn\u2019t feel like yours anymore.She lowered her chin to look again at the strange, damp clothes she was wearing. They didn\u2019t even look like something she\u2019d choose. She never wore yellow. The panicky feeling rose up again and she looked away and back up at the ambulance ceiling.The thing was, she couldn\u2019t remember what she had for dinner last night either. Nothing. It wasn\u2019t even on the tip of her tongue.Her chicken thing with the beans? Nick\u2019s favorite lamb curry? She had no idea.Of course, weekdays always tended to mulch together anyway. She would try to remember what she did last weekend.A tangled jumble of memories from various weekends poured into her head as if from an upturned laundry basket. Sitting on the grass in the park, reading the paper. Picnics. Walking around garden centers, arguing about plants. Working on the house. Always, always working on the house. Movies. Dinners. Coffee with Elisabeth. Sunday-morning sex, followed by sleep, followed by croissants from the Vietnamese bakery. Friends\u2019 birthdays. An occasional wedding. Trips away. Things with Nick\u2019s family.Somehow she knew that none of them had happened last weekend. She couldn\u2019t tell when they\u2019d happened. A short time ago or a long time ago. They\u2019d just happened.The problem was that she couldn\u2019t attach herself to a \u201ctoday\u201d or a \u201cyesterday\u201d or even a \u201clast week.\u201d She was floating helplessly above the calendar like an escaped balloon.An image came into her head of a gray cloudy sky filled with bunches of pink balloons tied together with white ribbon like bouquets. The balloon bouquets were being whipped ferociously about by an angry wind, and she felt a great wrench of sadness.The feeling disappeared like a wave of nausea.Goodness. What was that all about?She longed for Nick. He would be able to fix everything. He would tell her exactly what they ate for dinner last night and what they did on the weekend.Hopefully he would be waiting for her at the hospital. He might have already bought flowers for her. He probably had. She hoped he hadn\u2019t because it was far too extravagant.Of course, really, she hoped he had. She\u2019d been in an ambulance. She sort of deserved them.The ambulance came to a stop and George leapt to his feet, ducking down so as not to bump his head.\u201cWe\u2019re here, Alice! How are you feeling? You look like you\u2019ve been thinking deeply profound thoughts.\u201dHe pushed the lever to open the back door of the ambulance and sunlight flooded in, making her blink.\u201cI never asked your name,\u201d said Alice.\u201cKevin,\u201d answered George apologetically, as if he knew it would be a disappointment.Elisabeth\u2019s Homework for Dr. HodgesThe truth is that sometimes my work gives me a little \u201crush,\u201d Dr. Hodges. I\u2019m embarrassed to admit it. Not a huge rush. But a definite shot of adrenaline. When the lights go dim and the audience goes quiet and it\u2019s just me up there alone on the stage and my assistant Layla gives me her dead-serious \u201cOK\u201d signal as if this is a NASA space launch we\u2019re running. The spotlight like sunshine on my face, and all I can hear is the clinking of water glasses and maybe a respectfully restrained cough or two. I like that clean, crisp, no-nonsense smell of hotel function rooms and the chilly air-conditioned air. It clears out my head. And when I speak the microphone smooths out my voice, giving it authority.But then again, other times, I walk onto the stage and I feel like there is some weight pressing on the back of my neck, making my head droop and my back hunch, like an old crone. I want to put my mouth close to the microphone and say, \u201cWhat is the point of all this, ladies and gentlemen? You all seem like nice enough people, so help me out and tell me, what is the point?\u201dActually, I do know the point.The point is they\u2019re helping pay the mortgage. They\u2019re each making a contribution to our groceries and our electricity and our water and our Visa. They\u2019re all generously chipping in for the syringes and the shapeless hospital gowns and that last anaesthetist with the kind, doggy eyes who held my hand and said, \u201cGo to sleep now, darling.\u201d Anyway, I digress. You want me to digress. You want me to just write and write whatever comes to my mind. I wonder if you find me boring. You always look gently interested, but maybe you have days where I walk in the office looking all needy, bursting to tell you all the pathetic details of my life, and you just long to put your elbows on your desk and your chin in your hands and say, \u201cWhat is the point of all this, Elisabeth?\u201d and then you remember that the point is that I am paying for your Visa, mortgage, grocery bills . . . and so the world goes around.You mentioned the other day that a feeling of pointlessness is a sign of depression, but you see there, I don\u2019t have depression, because I do see the point. Money is the point.After I hung up on Jane, the phone rang again immediately (presumably her\u2014thinking we\u2019d been cut off) and I turned it off mid-ring. A man walking by said, \u201cSometimes you wonder if we\u2019d all be better off without these damned things!\u201d and I said, \u201cDamned right!\u201d (I have never said \u201cDamned right!\u201d in my life before; it just popped bizarrely into my head. I like it. I might say it our next session and see if you blink) and he said, \u201cCongratulations, by the way. I\u2019ve been to a lot of these sorts of workshops before and I\u2019ve never heard anyone speak such good sense!\u201dHe was flirting with me. It happens sometimes. It must be the microphone and the bright lights. It\u2019s funny because I always think it must be obvious to any man that all my sexuality has been sucked out of me. I feel like a piece of dried fruit. Yes, that\u2019s it. I AM A DRIED APRICOT, Dr. Hodges. Not one of those nice, soft, juicy ones, but a hard, shriveled, tasteless dried apricot that hurts your jaw.I took a few deep breaths of bracing air-conditioned air and clipped the microphone back onto my jacket. I was in such a frenzy to get back onstage, I was actually trembling. I feel like I may have become temporarily deranged for a while this afternoon, Dr. Hodges. We can discuss this at our next session.Or maybe temporary insanity is just an excuse for inexcusable behavior. Maybe I\u2019ll be too ashamed to tell you that somebody called to say my only sister had been in an accident and I hung up on her. I package myself for you. I want to sound damaged, so you feel there is something useful for you to do, but at the same time I want you to think I\u2019m a nice person, Dr. Hodges. A nice damaged person.I strode onto that stage like a rock star\u2014and I started talking about \u201cvisualizing your prospect\u201d and I was on fire. I had them laughing. I had them competing with each other to yell out answers to me, and the whole time we were visualizing the prospect I was visualizing my little sister.I was thinking, head injuries can be pretty serious.I was thinking, Nick is away and this is not really Jane\u2019s responsibility.And finally I thought: Alice was pregnant with Madison in 1998. Chapter 3 Nick wasn\u2019t waiting at the hospital with flowers for Alice. Nobody was waiting for her, which made her feel slightly heroic.Her two paramedics disappeared as if they\u2019d never existed. She couldn\u2019t recall them actually saying goodbye, so she didn\u2019t get to say thank you.The hospital was all flurries of activity, followed by periods of waiting alone on a stretcher in a small white box of a room, staring at the ceiling.A doctor appeared and shone a tiny pencil-thin torch in her eyes and asked her to follow his fingers back and forth. A nurse with stunning green eyes that matched her hospital uniform stood at the end of her stretcher with a clipboard asking about health insurance and allergies and next of kin. Alice complimented her on her green eyes and the nurse said they were colored contacts and Alice said, \u201cOh,\u201d and felt duped.An icepack was applied to what the green-eyed nurse described as an \u201costrich egg\u201d on the back of her head, and she was given two white tablets in a tiny plastic cup for the pain, but Alice explained the pain wasn\u2019t that bad and she didn\u2019t want to take anything because she was pregnant.People kept asking her questions, in voices that were too loud, as if she were asleep, even though she was looking right at them. Did she remember falling over? Did she remember the trip in the ambulance? Did she know what day of the week it was? Did she know what date it was?\u201cNineteen ninety-eight?\u201d A harried-looking doctor peered down at her through glasses with red plastic rims. \u201cAre you quite sure about that?\u201d\u201cYes,\u201d said Alice. \u201cI know it\u2019s 1998 because my baby is due on August eight, 1999. Eighth of the eighth, ninety-nine. Easy to remember.\u201d\u201cBecause, you see, it\u2019s actually 2008,\u201d said the doctor.\u201cWell, that\u2019s not possible,\u201d explained Alice as nicely as she could. Maybe this doctor was one of those brilliant people who were hopeless with normal stuff like dates.\u201cAnd why isn\u2019t it possible?\u201d\u201cBecause we haven\u2019t had the new millennium yet,\u201d said Alice cleverly. \u201cApparently all the power is going to fail because of some computer bug.\u201dShe felt proud of knowing that fact; it was sort of current affair\u2013ish.\u201cI think you might be confused. You don\u2019t remember the new millennium? Those great fireworks on the harbor bridge?\u201d\u201cNo,\u201d said Alice. \u201cI don\u2019t remember any fireworks.\u201d Please stop it, she wanted to say. This isn\u2019t funny, and I\u2019m just being brave about the pain in my head. It really does hurt.She remembered Nick saying one night, \u201cDo you realize that on New Year\u2019s Eve of the new millennium we will have a toddler?\u201d He was holding a sledgehammer in both hands because he was about to knock down a wall.Alice had lowered the camera she was holding to photograph the end of the wall. \u201cThat\u2019s true,\u201d she\u2019d said, amazed and terrified by the thought. A toddler: an actual miniature person, created by them, belonging to them, separate from them.\u201cYep, guess we\u2019ll have to get a babysitter for the little bugger,\u201d Nick had said with elaborate nonchalance. Then he\u2019d joyfully swung the hammer and Alice had clicked the camera as a shower of pink plaster fragments rained down all over them.\u201cMaybe I should get an ultrasound to check that my baby is okay after the fall,\u201d said Alice firmly to the doctor. This was how Elisabeth would be in a situation like this. Alice always thought \u201cWhat would Elisabeth do?\u201d whenever she needed to be assertive.\u201cHow many weeks pregnant are you?\u201d asked the doctor.\u201cFourteen,\u201d said Alice, but there was that strange space in her mind again, as if she wasn\u2019t absolutely sure that was correct.\u201cOr you could at least check the heartbeat,\u201d said Alice in her Elisabeth voice.\u201cMmmm.\u201d The doctor pushed her glasses back up her nose.A memory of a woman\u2019s voice with a gentle American accent came into Alice\u2019s head.\u201cI\u2019m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.\u201dShe remembered it so clearly. The tiny pause after the \u201csorry.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.\u201dWho was that? Who said that? Did it really happen? Tears welled in Alice\u2019s eyes, and she thought again of those bouquets of pink balloons whipped by the wind in a gray sky. Had she seen those balloons in some long-forgotten movie? Some extremely sad movie? She felt another wave of extraordinary feeling rise in her chest. It was just like in the ambulance. It was a feeling of grief and rage. She imagined herself sobbing, wailing, digging her fingernails into her own flesh (and she\u2019d never behaved like that in her whole life). And just when she thought the feeling would sweep her away, it dissolved into nothing. It was the strangest thing.\u201cHow many children do you have?\u201d asked the doctor. She had pulled up Alice\u2019s T-shirt and pushed down her shorts to feel her abdomen.Alice blinked to make the tears go away. \u201cNone. This is my first pregnancy.\u201dThe doctor stopped and looked at her. \u201cThat looks very much like a cesarean scar to me.\u201dAlice lifted her head awkwardly and saw that the doctor was pointing a nicely shaped fingernail low down on Alice\u2019s stomach. She squinted and saw what looked like a very pale, purple line just above the top of her pubic hair.\u201cI don\u2019t know what that is,\u201d said Alice, mortified. She thought of the solemn expression on her mother\u2019s face when she used to tell Elisabeth and Alice, \u201cYou must never show your private lady\u2019s parts to anyone.\u201d Nick fell about laughing the first time he heard that. Why hadn\u2019t he noticed that funny scar? He\u2019d spent enough time examining her private lady\u2019s parts.\u201cYour uterus doesn\u2019t seem to be enlarged for fourteen weeks,\u201d commented the doctor.Alice looked again at her stomach and saw that it was actually looking pretty flat. Skinny-person flat, which would normally be an unexpected bonus, except that she was having a baby. Nick had started to chuckle gleefully whenever she wore something that showed the round bulge of her stomach.\u201cAre you sure you\u2019re that far along?\u201d said the doctor.Alice stared at her flat stomach\u2014very flat!\u2014and didn\u2019t say anything. She was filled with confusion and fear and excruciating embarrassment. It occurred to her that her breasts\u2014which had become so heavy and tingly and overtly breasty\u2014felt like they had gone back to their normal humble, unobtrusive state. She didn\u2019t feel pregnant. She certainly didn\u2019t feel like herself, but she didn\u2019t feel pregnant.(What was that scar? She thought of those stories of people drugging you and removing your organs to sell. Had she gone to the gym, got deliriously drunk, and someone had taken the opportunity to help themselves to her organs?)\u201cMaybe I\u2019m not fourteen weeks,\u201d she said to the doctor. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ve got that wrong. I can\u2019t seem to get anything straight in my head. My husband will be here soon. He\u2019ll explain everything.\u201d\u201cWell, you just relax and try not to worry for now.\u201d The doctor readjusted Alice\u2019s clothes with gentle pats. \u201cFirst we\u2019re going to get you a CT scan and see if you\u2019ve done anything serious to yourself, but I think you\u2019ll find things will start to fall into place soon. Do you remember your obstetrician\u2019s name? I could give him or her a call and check how far along you are. I don\u2019t want to upset you if we can\u2019t find the heartbeat because you\u2019re not far enough along to hear it.\u201dI\u2019m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.It was such a clear memory. It felt like it really happened.Alice said, \u201cDr. Sam Chapple. He\u2019s at Chatswood.\u201d\u201cOkay, good. Don\u2019t worry. It\u2019s perfectly normal to feel confused after a serious head injury.\u201dThe doctor smiled sympathetically and left the room. Alice watched her go and then lifted up her shirt again to look at her stomach. In addition to being flatter, her stomach had feathery silver lines up and down the sides. Stretch marks. Awestruck, she ran her fingertips over them. Was this really her stomach?A cesarean scar, the doctor had said (unless she\u2019d got it wrong, of course. Maybe it wasn\u2019t a cesarean scar at all, just a perfectly normal . . . scar. Of some sort).But if she was right, that would mean some doctor (her own Dr. Chapple?) had sliced through her skin with a scalpel and lifted a bloody squawling baby straight out of her stomach and she didn\u2019t remember any of it.Could a bump on the head really knock out such a significant event from her memory? Wasn\u2019t that a bit excessive?She thought of times when she\u2019d been watching a movie with Nick and had fallen asleep halfway through with her head on his lap. She hated it because she would wake up sticky-mouthed to see the lives of the movie characters had moved on and the couple who hated each other were now sharing an umbrella under the Eiffel Tower.\u201cYou had your baby,\u201d she said tentatively to herself. \u201cRemember?\u201dThis was absurd. Surely she wasn\u2019t about to slap herself on the side of the head and say, \u201cOh, the baby, of course I had the baby! Fancy that slipping my mind.\u201dHow could she have forgotten her baby growing and kicking and rolling inside her? If she\u2019d already had the baby, that meant she\u2019d already been to the prenatal classes with Nick. It meant she\u2019d bought her first maternity clothes. It meant they\u2019d painted the nursery. It meant they\u2019d been shopping for a crib and a pram and nappies and a stroller and a changing table.It meant there was a baby.She sat up, her hands pressed to her stomach.So where was it? Who was looking after it? Who was feeding it?This was far bigger than a normal \u201cOh, Alice\u201d mix-up. This was huge. This was terrifying.For God\u2019s sake, where was Nick? Actually, she was going to be just a bit snappy with him when he finally turned up, even if he did have a good excuse.The nurse with the green eyes came back into the room and said, \u201cHow are you feeling?\u201d\u201cFine, thank you,\u201d said Alice automatically.\u201cDo you remember why you\u2019re here and what happened to you?\u201dThis constant re-asking of questions was presumably to check her mental state. Alice thought about yelling, ACTUALLY, I\u2019M GOING OUT OF MY MIND! but she didn\u2019t want to make the nurse feel uncomfortable. Crazy behavior made people feel awkward.Instead, she said to the nurse, \u201cCan you tell me what year it is?\u201d She spoke quickly in case the doctor with the glasses came back in and caught her checking up on her facts behind her back.\u201cIt\u2019s 2008.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s definitely 2008?\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s definitely second of May, 2008. Mother\u2019s Day next weekend!\u201dMother\u2019s Day! It would be Alice\u2019s first-ever Mother\u2019s Day.Except, if it was 2008, it wasn\u2019t her first Mother\u2019s Day at all.If it was 2008, the Sultana was ten years old. He wasn\u2019t a sultana at all. He would have progressed from sultana to raisin to peach to tennis ball to basketball to . . . baby.Alice felt an inappropriate gale of laughter catch in her throat.Her baby was ten years old.Elisabeth\u2019s Homework for Dr. HodgesMuch to Layla\u2019s horror, I stopped halfway through \u201cVisualizing the Prospect\u201d and switched over to the \u201cIdea Olympics.\u201d I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll be fascinated to hear, Dr. Hodges, that this is the part where I get them to look under their tables and find their \u201cMystery Product.\u201d Everybody gets pretty excited about this and they dive under the tables. It\u2019s amazing how so many different people can come out with EXACTLY the same jokes. It reinforces this feeling I have that the years are rolling by but nothing is changing. I am the perfect example of the phrase: Going nowhere fast.While all my students were writing down ideas on butcher paper for how to market their Mystery Products, I tried to call Jane back. Only of course now Jane had switched her phone off, so I loudly said \u201cFuck it\u201d and saw Layla give a tiny, tight smile. I had offended her by changing the agenda, as if the agenda didn\u2019t matter, when the agenda is her life.I explained to her that my sister had been in an accident and I didn\u2019t know what hospital she was at and I needed somebody to pick up her kids from school. Layla said, \u201cOkay, but when are you going to finish the rest of the \u2018Visualizing the Prospect\u2019 segment?\u201d (I guess that sort of dedication is good in an employee, but isn\u2019t it a bit pathological, Dr. Hodges? What\u2019s your expert opinion?)I called Mum next and got her voice mail, too. Oh for the days before Mum got a life. It seems only a short time ago that I would have called Frannie first. She was always so calm in a crisis. But Frannie decided to stop driving when she moved into the retirement village. (I still find that weirdly upsetting. She was such a good driver.)I called the school and got put on hold listening to a recorded message about family values. I called Alice\u2019s gym to find out if they knew which hospital she\u2019d been taken to and got put on hold listening to a message about sensible nutrition.Finally, I called my husband, Ben.He answered on the first ring, listened to me babble, and said, \u201cI\u2019ll take care of it.\u201dLook, Grey\u2019s Anatomy starts in ten minutes. This journal writing must not impact on my nightly TV gorge. I don\u2019t care what Ben says, without the narcotic effects of TV, I might have gone truly insane a long time ago. Chapter 4 Apparently Alice\u2019s CT scan was \u201cunremarkable,\u201d which had made her feel ashamed of her mediocrity. It reminded her of her school reports with every single box ticked \u201cSatisfactory\u201d and comments like \u201cA quiet student. Needs to contribute more in class.\u201d They may as well have just come right out and written across the front: \u201cSo boring, we don\u2019t actually know who she is.\u201d Elisabeth\u2019s reports had some boxes ticked \u201cOutstanding\u201d and others ticked \u201cBelow Standard\u201d and comments like \u201cCan be a little disruptive.\u201d Alice had yearned to be a little disruptive, but she couldn\u2019t work out how you got started.\u201cWe\u2019re concerned about your memory loss, so we\u2019re going to keep you overnight for observation,\u201d said the doctor with the red plastic glasses.\u201cOh, okay, thank you.\u201d Alice self-consciously smoothed her hair back, imagining a row of doctors and nurses with clipboards sitting next to her bed, watching her sleep. (She sometimes snored.)The doctor hugged her own clipboard to her chest and looked at her brightly, as if she felt like a chat.Oh. Gosh. Alice searched around for interesting topics of conversation and finally said, \u201cSo, did you ring my obstetrician? Dr. Chapple? Of course, you might not have had a chance . . .\u201d She didn\u2019t want the doctor to snarl, \u201cSorry, I was busy saving somebody\u2019s life.\u201dThe doctor looked thoughtful. \u201cI did, actually. It seems Sam Chapple retired three years ago.\u201d Alice couldn\u2019t believe that Dr. Chapple was no longer sitting in his big leather chair, carefully noting down answers to his courteous questions in beautiful copperplate writing on white index cards. She really needed to get this . . . this problem sorted out once and for all. Pronto! Quick sticks! As Frannie would say. Was Frannie still alive in 2008? Grandmothers died. It was to be expected. You weren\u2019t even allowed to be that upset about it. Please don\u2019t let Frannie have died. Please don\u2019t let anyone have died. \u201cNobody else in our family will die,\u201d Elisabeth had promised when she was ten and Alice was nine. \u201cBecause it wouldn\u2019t be fair.\u201d Alice had believed every single word Elisabeth had said when they were little.Maybe Elisabeth had died? Or Nick? Or Mum? Or the baby? (I\u2019m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.)For the first time in years, Alice had that feeling she used to get when she was little, after their dad died, that someone else she loved was about to die. She longed to gather everybody she loved and stow them safely under her bed with her favorite dolls. Sometimes the stress would become so overwhelming she would forget how to breathe and Elisabeth would have to bring her a brown paper bag to breathe into.\u201cI might need a bag,\u201d Alice said to the doctor.\u201cA bag?\u201dRidiculous. She wasn\u2019t a child who hyperventilated at the thought of people dying.\u201cI had a bag,\u201d she said to the doctor. \u201cA red backpack with stickers on it. Do you know what happened to it?\u201dThe doctor looked vaguely irritated by this administrative question but then she said, \u201cOh, yes. Over here. Would you like it?\u201d She picked up the strange backpack from a shelf at the side of the room and Alice looked at it apprehensively.The doctor handed it to her and said, \u201cWell, you just rest up and someone will be along to take you up to a ward soon. I\u2019m sorry there is so much waiting. That\u2019s hospitals for you.\u201d She gave her a motherly pat on the shoulder and quickly left the room, suddenly in a hurry, as if she\u2019d remembered another patient who was waiting.Alice ran her fingers over the three shiny dinosaur stickers on the flap of the backpack. They each had speech bubbles saying either \u201cDINOSAURS RULE!\u201d or \u201cDINOSAURS ROCK!\u201d She looked down at the sticker on her shirt and peeled it off. It was a definite match. She stuck it back on her shirt (she felt that she should for some reason) and waited for a feeling or a memory.Did these belong to the Sultana? Her mind skittered away from the idea, like a frightened animal. She didn\u2019t want to know. She didn\u2019t want a readygrown baby. She wanted her own little future baby back.This could not be happening to her. But it is, so get a grip, Alice. She began to open the bag and her fingernails caught her attention. She held up her hands in front of her. Her nails were beautifully shaped and long and painted a very pale, beige color. Normally they were ragged and broken and rimmed with dirt from gardening or painting or whatever other renovation job they were doing at the time. The only other time they\u2019d looked like that was for her wedding when she\u2019d got her manicure. She\u2019d spent the whole honeymoon flapping her hands at Nick, saying, \u201cLook, I\u2019m a lady.\u201dApart from that, her hands still looked like her hands. Actually, they looked quite nice.They were bare, she noticed. No jewelry. It was a little unusual that she wasn\u2019t at least wearing her wedding ring, but perhaps she\u2019d been in a rush when she was getting ready for her \u201cspin class.\u201dShe held up her left hand and saw that there was a thin white indentation from her wedding ring that hadn\u2019t been there before. It gave her a disconnected feeling, like when she\u2019d seen the feathery marks on her stomach. Her mind thought everything was still the same, but her body was telling her that time had marched on without her. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.98}, {"asin": "0062286706", "title": "Eat to Live Cookbook: 200 Delicious Nutrient-Rich Recipes for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, Reversing Disease, and Lifelong Health (Eat for Life)", "author": "Joel Fuhrman", "description": "About the Author JOEL FUHRMAN, M.D., is a board-certified family physician and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. Dr. Fuhrman is the research director of the Nutritional Research Foundation. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers Eat to Live, Super Immunity, Eat to Live Cookbook, The End of Dieting, and The End of Diabetes .", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Vegetarian & Vegan"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0679738908", "title": "A Gathering of Old Men", "author": "Ernest J. Gaines", "description": "Review \u201cGaines knows how to tell a story. . . . [He writes] with humor, a strong sense of drama and a compassionate understanding of people who find themselves in opposing positions.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post \"Poignant, powerful, earthy . . . a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own.\" \u2014 Booklist \u201cEarly in this eloquent novel . . . a sheriff is summoned to a sugarcane plantation, where he finds one young white woman, about eighteen old black men, and one dead Cajun farmer. \u00a0The sheriff is sure he knows who killed the Cajun\u2014although each of the men is toting a shotgun only one of them could hit a barn door\u2014but threats and slaps fail to change their stories. \u00a0Each one claims guilt, and all but one promise to provoke a riot at the courthouse if the sheriff tries to make an arrest. \u00a0In the meantime, they wait for a lynch mob that the dead man's father\u2014like the son, a notorious brute\u2014is sure to launch. . . . Before it is over, everyone involved has been surprised by something; the old black men not least of all, by their first taste of power and pride.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 The New Yorker \u201cA fine novel . . . there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters, and a multiplicity of themes that raises a simple tale to grand signfiicance.\u201d\u00a0\u2014David Bradley, Philadelphia Inquirer From the Inside Flap isiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man. \"Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own.\"-- Booklist \"A fine novel...there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters.\"-- Philadelphia Inquirer From the Back Cover Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, A Gathering of Old Men is a powerful depiction of racial tensions arising over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man. \"Poignant, powerful, earthy...a novel of Southern racial confrontation in which a group of elderly black men band together against whites who seek vengeance for the murder of one of their own.\"--\"Booklist \"A fine novel...there is a denouement that will shock and move readers as much as it does the characters.\"--\"Philadelphia Inquirer About the Author Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coup\u00e9e Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 1993 Gaines received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his lifetime achievements. In 1996 he was named a Chevalier de l\u2019Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France\u2019s highest decorations. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.59}, {"asin": "0743496736", "title": "Nineteen Minutes", "author": "Jodi Picoult", "description": "Review \"A master of the craft of storytelling.\" -- AP Newswire\"Picoult spins fast-paced tales of family dysfunction, betrayal, and redemption.... [Her] depiction of these rites of contemporary adolescence is exceptional: unflinching, unjudgmental, utterly chilling.\" -- The Washington Post \"Jodi Picoult's books explore all the shades of gray in a world too often judged in black and white.\" -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch About the Author Jodi Picoult received an AB in creative writing from Princeton and a master\u2019s degree in education from Harvard. The recipient of the 2003 New England Book Award for her entire body of work, she is the author of twenty-seven\u00a0novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers House Rules , Handle With Care , Change of Heart , and My Sister\u2019s Keeper , for which she received the American Library Association\u2019s Margaret Alexander Edwards Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at JodiPicoult.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Nineteen Minutes By Jodi Picoult Washington Square Press Copyright \u00a92008 Jodi PicoultAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780743496735 March 6, 2007 In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It's the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It's the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire. In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem. In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge. As usual, Alex Cormier was running late. It took thirty-two minutes to drive from her house in Sterling to the superior court in Grafton County, New Hampshire, and that was only if she speeded through Orford. She hurried downstairs in her stockings, carrying her heels and the files she'd brought home with her over the weekend. She twisted her thick copper hair into a knot and anchored it at the base of her neck with bobby pins, transforming herself into the person she needed to be before she left her house. Alex had been a superior court judge now for thirty-four days. She'd believed that, having proved her mettle as a district court judge for the past five years, this time around the appointment might be easier. But at forty, she was still the youngest judge in the state. She still had to fight to establish herself as a fair justice -- her history as a public defender preceded her into her courtroom, and prosecutors assumed she'd side with the defense. When Alex had submitted her name years ago for the bench, it had been with the sincere desire to make sure people in this legal system were innocent until proven guilty. She just never anticipated that, as a judge, she might not be given the same benefit of the doubt. The smell of freshly brewed coffee drew Alex into the kitchen. Her daughter was hunched over a steaming mug at the kitchen table, poring over a textbook. Josie looked exhausted -- her blue eyes were bloodshot; her chestnut hair was a knotty ponytail. \"Tell me you haven't been up all night,\" Alex said. Josie didn't even glance up. \"I haven't been up all night,\" she parroted. Alex poured herself a cup of coffee and slid into the chair across from her. \"Honestly?\" \"You asked me to tell you something,\" Josie said. \"You didn't ask for the truth.\" Alex frowned. \"You shouldn't be drinking coffee.\" \"And you shouldn't be smoking cigarettes.\" Alex felt her face heat up. \"I don't -- \" \"Mom,\" Josie sighed, \"even when you open up the bathroom windows, I can still smell it on the towels.\" She glanced up, daring Alex to challenge her other vices. Alex herself didn't have any other vices. She didn't have time for any vices. She would have liked to say that she knew with authority that Josie didn't have any vices, either, but she would only be making the same inference the rest of the world did when they met Josie: a pretty, popular, straight-A student who knew better than most the consequences of falling off the straight-and-narrow. A girl who was destined for great things. A young woman who was exactly what Alex had hoped her daughter would grow to become. Josie had once been so proud to have a mother as a judge. Alex could remember Josie broadcasting her career to the tellers at the bank, the baggers in the grocery store, the flight attendants on planes. She'd ask Alex about her cases and her decisions. That had all changed three years ago, when Josie entered high school, and the tunnel of communication between them slowly bricked shut. Alex didn't necessarily think that Josie was hiding anything more than any other teenager, but it was different: a normal parent might metaphorically judge her child's friends, whereas Alex could do it legally. \"What's on the docket today?\" Alex said. \"Unit test. What about you?\" \"Arraignments,\" Alex replied. She squinted across the table, trying to read Josie's textbook upside down. \"Chemistry?\" \"Catalysts.\" Josie rubbed her temples. \"Substances that speed up a reaction, but stay unchanged by it. Like if you've got carbon monoxide gas and hydrogen gas and you toss in zinc and chromium oxide, and...what's the matter?\" \"Just having a little flashback of why I got a C in Orgo. Have you had breakfast?\" \"Coffee,\" Josie said. \"Coffee doesn't count.\" \"It does when you're in a rush,\" Josie pointed out. Alex weighed the costs of being even five minutes later, or getting another black mark against her in the cosmic good-parenting tally. Shouldn't a seventeen-year-old be able to take care of herself in the morning? Alex started pulling items out of the refrigerator: eggs, milk, bacon. \"I once presided over an involuntary emergency admission at the state mental hospital for a woman who thought she was Emeril. Her husband had her committed when she put a pound of bacon in the blender and chased him around the kitchen with a knife, yelling Bam!\" Josie glanced up from her textbook. \"For real?\" \"Oh, believe me, I can't make these things up.\" Alex cracked an egg into a skillet. \"When I asked her why she'd put a pound of bacon in the blender, she looked at me and said that she and I must just cook differently.\" Josie stood up and leaned against the counter, watching her mother cook. Domesticity wasn't Alex's strong point -- she didn't know how to make a pot roast but was proud to have memorized the phone numbers of every pizza place and Chinese restaurant in Sterling that offered free delivery. \"Relax,\" Alex said dryly. \"I think I can do this without setting the house on fire.\" But Josie took the skillet out of her hands and laid the strips of bacon in it, like sailors bunking tightly together. \"How come you dress like that?\" she asked. Alex glanced down at her skirt, blouse, and heels and frowned. \"Why? Is it too Margaret Thatcher?\" \"No, I mean...why do you bother? No one knows what you have on under your robe. You could wear, like, pajama pants. Or that sweater you have from college that's got holes in the elbows.\" \"Whether or not people see it, I'm still expected to dress...well, judiciously .\" A cloud passed over Josie's face, and she busied herself over the stove, as if Alex had somehow given the wrong answer. Alex stared at her daughter -- the bitten half-moon fingernails, the freckle behind her ear, the zigzag part in her hair -- and saw instead the toddler who'd wait at the babysitter's window at sundown, because she knew that was when Alex came to get her. \"I've never worn pajamas to work,\" Alex admitted, \"but I do sometimes close the door to chambers and take a nap on the floor.\" A slow, surprised smile played over Josie's face. She held her mother's admission as if it were a butterfly lighting on her hand by accident: an event so startling you could not call attention to it without risking its loss. But there were miles to drive and defendants to arraign and chemical equations to interpret, and by the time Josie had set the bacon to drain on a pad of paper toweling, the moment had winged away. \"I still don't get why I have to eat breakfast if you don't,\" Josie muttered. \"Because you have to be a certain age to earn the right to ruin your own life.\" Alex pointed at the scrambled eggs Josie was mixing in the skillet. \"Promise me you'll finish that?\" Josie met her gaze. \"Promise.\" \"Then I'm headed out.\" Alex grabbed her travel mug of coffee. By the time she backed her car out of the garage, her head was already focused on the decision she had to write that afternoon; the number of arraignments the clerk would have stuffed onto her docket; the motions that would have fallen like shadows across her desk between Friday afternoon and this morning. She was caught up in a world far away from home, where at that very moment her daughter scraped the scrambled eggs from the skillet into the trash can without ever taking a single bite. Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure -- a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter -- but it was also a room from which there really wasn't an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn't want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted. She lifted her face to the spray of the shower -- water she'd made so hot it raised red welts, stole breath, steamed windows. She counted to ten, and then finally ducked away from the stream to stand naked and dripping in front of the mirror. Her face was swollen and scarlet; her hair stuck to her shoulders in thick ropes. She turned sideways, scrutinized her flat belly, and sucked it in a little. She knew what Matt saw when he looked at her, what Courtney and Maddie and Brady and Haley and Drew all saw -- she just wished that she could see it, too. The problem was, when Josie looked in the mirror, she noticed what was underneath that raw skin, instead of what had been painted upon it. She understood how she was supposed to look and supposed to act. She wore her dark hair long and straight; she dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch; she listened to Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab for Cutie. She liked feeling the eyes of other girls in the school when she sat in the cafeteria borrowing Courtney's makeup. She liked the way teachers already knew her name on the first day of class. She liked having guys stare at her when she walked down the hall with Matt's arm around her. But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secret -- that some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real ...and who, when you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this. There wasn't anyone to talk to. If you even doubted your right to be one of the privileged, popular set, then you didn't belong there. And Matt -- well, he'd fallen for the Josie on the surface, like everyone else. In fairy tales, when the mask came off, the handsome prince still loved the girl, no matter what -- and that alone would turn her into a princess. But high school didn't work that way. What made her a princess was hooking up with Matt. And in some weird circular logic, what made Matt hook up with her was the very fact that she was one of Sterling High's princesses. She couldn't confide in her mother, either. You don't stop being a judge just because you step out of the courthouse , her mother used to say. It was why Alex Cormier never drank more than one glass of wine in public; it was why she never yelled or cried. A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period. Many of the accomplishments that Josie's mother was most proud of -- Josie's grades, her looks, her acceptance into the \"right\" crowd -- had not been achieved because Josie wanted them so badly herself, but mostly because she was afraid of falling short of perfect. Josie wrapped a towel around herself and headed into her bedroom. She pulled a pair of jeans out of her closet and then layered two long-sleeved tees that showed off her chest. She glanced at her clock -- if she wasn't going to be late, she'd have to get moving. Before leaving her room, though, she hesitated. She sank down onto her bed and rummaged underneath the nightstand for the Ziploc sandwich bag that she'd tacked to the wooden frame. Inside was a stash of Ambien -- pirated one pill at a time from her mother's prescription for insomnia, so she'd never notice. It had taken Josie nearly six months to inconspicuously gather only fifteen pills, but she figured if she washed them down with a fifth of vodka, it would do the trick. It wasn't like she had a strategy, really, to kill herself next Tuesday, or when the snow melted, or anything concrete like that. It was more like a backup plan: When the truth came out, and no one wanted to be around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn't want to be around herself either. She tacked the pills back beneath her nightstand and headed downstairs. As she walked into the kitchen to load up her backpack, she found her chemistry textbook still wide open -- and a long-stemmed red rose marking her place. Matt was leaning against the refrigerator in the corner; he must have let himself in through the open garage door. Like always, he made her head swim with seasons -- his hair was all the colors of autumn; his eyes the bright blue of a winter sky; his smile as wide as any summer sun. He was wearing a baseball hat backward, and a Sterling Varsity Hockey tee over a thermal shirt that Josie had once stolen for a full month and hidden in her underwear drawer, so that when she needed to she could breathe in the scent of him. \"Are you still pissed off?\" he asked. Josie hesitated. \"I wasn't the one who was mad.\" Matt pushed away from the refrigerator, coming forward until he could link his arms around Josie's waist. \"You know I can't help it.\" A dimple blossomed in his right cheek; Josie could already feel herself softening. \"It wasn't that I didn't want to see you. I really did have to study.\" Matt pushed her hair off her face and kissed her. This was exactly why she'd told him not to come over last night -- when she was with him, she felt herself evaporating. Sometimes, when he touched her, Josie imagined herself vanishing in a puff of steam. He tasted of maple syrup, of apologies. \"It's all your fault, you know,\" he said. \"I wouldn't act as crazy if I didn't love you so much.\" At that moment, Josie could not remember the pills she was hoarding in her room; she could not remember crying in the shower; she could not remember anything but what it felt like to be adored. I'm lucky , she told herself, the word streaming like a silver ribbon through her mind. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Patrick Ducharme, the sole detective on the Sterling police force, sat on a bench on the far side of the locker room, listening to the patrol officers on the morning shift pick on a rookie with a little extra padding around the middle. \"Hey, Fisher,\" Eddie Odenkirk said, \"are you the one who's having the baby, or is it your wife?\" As the rest of the guys laughed, Patrick took pity on the kid. \"It's early, Eddie,\" he said. \"Can't you at least wait to start in until we've all had a cup of coffee?\" \"I would, Captain,\" Eddie laughed, \"but it looks like Fisher already ate all the donuts and -- what the hell is that?\" Patrick followed Eddie's gaze downward, to his own feet. He did not, as a matter of course, change in the locker room with the patrol officers, but he'd jogged to the station this morning instead of driving, to work off too much good cooking consumed over the weekend. He'd spent Saturday and Sunday in Maine with the girl who currently held his heart -- his goddaughter, a five-and-a-half-year-old named Tara Frost. Her mother, Nina, was Patrick's oldest friend, and the one love he probably would never get over, although she managed to be doing quite well without him. Over the course of the weekend, Patrick had deliberately lost ten thousand games of Candy Land, had given countless piggyback rides, had had his hair done, and -- here was his cardinal mistake -- had allowed Tara to put bright pink nail polish on his toes, which Patrick had forgotten to remove. He glanced down at his feet and curled his toes under. \"Chicks think it's hot,\" he said gruffly, as the seven men in the locker room struggled not to snicker at someone who was technically their superior. Patrick yanked his dress socks on, slipped into his loafers, and walked out, still holding his tie. One , he counted. Two, three . On cue, laughter spilled out of the locker room, following him down the hallway. In his office, Patrick closed the door and peered at himself in the tiny mirror on the back. His black hair was still damp from his shower; his face was flushed from his run. He shimmied the knot of his tie up his neck, fashioning the noose, and then sat down at his desk. Seventy-two emails had come in over the weekend -- and usually anything more than fifty meant he wouldn't get home before 8:00 p.m. all week. He began to weed through them, adding notes to a devil's To Do list -- one that never got any shorter, no matter how hard he worked. Today, Patrick had to drive drugs down to the state lab -- not a big deal, except that it was a four-hour block of his day that vanished right there. He had a rape case coming to fruition, the perp identified from a college face book and his statements transcribed and ready for the AG's office. He had a cell phone that had been nabbed out of a car by a homeless guy. He had blood results come back from the lab as a match for a break-in at a jewelry store, and a suppression hearing in superior court, and already on his desk was the first new complaint of the day -- a theft of wallets in which the credit cards had been used, leaving a trail for Patrick to trace. Being a small-town detective required Patrick to be firing on all cylinders, all the time. Unlike cops he knew who worked for city departments, where they had twenty-four hours to solve a case before it was considered cold, Patrick's job was to take everything that came across his desk -- not to cherry-pick for the interesting ones. It was hard to get excited about a bad check case, or a theft that would net the perp a $200 fine when it cost the taxpayers five times that to have Patrick focus on it for a week. But every time he started thinking that his cases weren't particularly important, he'd find himself face-to-face with a victim: the hysterical mother whose wallet had been stolen; the mom-and-pop jewelry store owners who'd been robbed of their retirement income; the rattled professor who was a victim of identity theft. Hope, Patrick knew, was the exact measure of distance between himself and the person who'd come for help. If Patrick didn't get involved, if he didn't give a hundred percent, then that victim was going to be a victim forever -- which was why, since Patrick had joined the Sterling police, he had managed to solve every single case. And yet. When Patrick was lying in his bed alone and letting his mind sew a seam across the hem of his life, he did not remember the proven successes -- only the potential failures. When he walked around the perimeter of a vandalized barn or found the stolen car stripped down and dumped in the woods or handed the tissue to the sobbing girl who'd been date-raped, Patrick couldn't help but feel that he was too late. He was a detective, but he didn't detect anything. It fell into his lap, already broken, every time. It was the first warm day of March, the one where you started to believe that the snow would melt sooner rather than later, and that June was truly just around the corner. Josie sat on the hood of Matt's Saab in the student parking lot, thinking that it was closer to summer than it was to the start of this school year, that in a scant three months, she would officially be a member of the senior class. Beside her, Matt leaned against the windshield, his face tipped up to the sun. \"Let's ditch school,\" he said. \"It's too nice out to be stuck inside all day.\" \"If you ditch, you'll be benched.\" The state championship tournament in hockey began this afternoon, and Matt played right wing. Sterling had won last year, and they had every expectation of doing it again. \"You're coming to the game,\" Matt said, and it wasn't a question, but a statement. \"Are you going to score?\" Matt smiled wickedly and tugged her on top of him. \"Don't I always?\" he said, but he wasn't talking about hockey anymore, and she felt a blush rise over the collar of her scarf. Suddenly Josie felt a rain of hail on her back. They both sat up to find Brady Pryce, a football player, walking by hand-in-hand with Haley Weaver, the homecoming queen. Haley tossed a second shower of pennies -- Sterling High's way of wishing an athlete good luck. \"Kick ass today, Royston,\" Brady called. Their math teacher was crossing the parking lot, too, with a worn black leather briefcase and a thermos of coffee. \"Hey, Mr. McCabe,\" Matt called out. \"How'd I do on last Friday's test?\" \"Luckily, you've got other talents to fall back on, Mr. Royston,\" the teacher said as he reached into his pocket. He winked at Josie as he pitched the coins, pennies that fell from the sky onto her shoulders like confetti, like stars coming loose. It figures , Alex thought as she stuffed the contents of her purse back inside. She had switched handbags and left her pass key at home, which allowed her into the employee entrance at the rear of the superior court. Although she'd pushed the buzzer a million times, no one seemed to be around to let her in. \"Goddamn,\" she muttered under her breath, hiking around the slush puddles so that her alligator heels wouldn't get ruined -- one of the perks of parking in the back was not having to do this. She could cut through the clerk's office to her chambers, and if the planets were aligned, maybe even onto the bench without causing a delay in the docket. Although the public entrance of the court had a line twenty people long, the court officers recognized Alex because, unlike the district court circuit, where you bounced from courthouse to courthouse, she would be ensconced here for six months. The officers waved her to the front of the line, but since she was carrying keys and a stainless steel travel thermos and God only knew what else in her purse, she set off the metal detectors. The alarm was a spotlight; every eye in the lobby turned to see who'd gotten caught. Ducking her head, Alex hurried across the polished tile floor and nearly lost her footing. As she pitched forward, a squat man reached forward to steady her. \"Hey, baby,\" he said, leering. \"I like your shoes.\" Without responding, Alex yanked herself out of his grasp and headed toward the clerk's office. None of the other superior court judges had to deal with this. Judge Wagner was a nice guy, but with a face that looked like a pumpkin left to rot after Halloween. Judge Gerhardt -- a fellow female -- had blouses that were older than Alex. When Alex had first come to the bench, she'd thought that being a relatively young, moderately attractive woman was a good thing -- a vote against typecasting -- but on mornings like this, she wasn't so sure. She dumped her purse in chambers, shrugged into her robe, and took five minutes to drink her coffee and review the docket. Each case got its own file, but cases for repeat offenders were rubber-banded together, and sometimes judges wrote Post-it notes to each other inside about the case. Alex opened one and saw a picture of a stick-figure man with bars in front of his face -- a signal from Judge Gerhardt that this was the offender's last chance, and that next time, he should go to jail. She rang the buzzer to signify to the court officer that she was ready to start, and waited to hear her cue: \" All rise, the Honorable Alexandra Cormier presiding .\" Walking into a courtroom, to Alex, always felt as if she were stepping onto a stage for the first time at a Broadway opening. You knew there would be people there, you knew their gazes would all be focused on you, but that didn't prevent you from having a moment when you could not breathe, could not believe you were the one they had come to see. Alex moved briskly behind the bench and sat down. There were seventy arraignments scheduled for that morning, and the courtroom was packed. The first defendant was called, and he shuffled past the bar with his eyes averted. \"Mr. O'Reilly,\" Alex said, and as the man met her gaze she recognized him as the guy from the lobby. He was clearly uncomfortable, now that he realized whom he'd been flirting with. \"You're the gentleman who assisted me earlier, aren't you?\" He swallowed. \"Yes, Your Honor.\" \"If you'd known I was the judge, Mr. O'Reilly, would you have said, 'Hey, baby, I like your shoes'?\" The defendant glanced down, weighing impropriety against honesty. \"I guess so, Your Honor,\" he said after a moment. \"Those are great shoes.\" The entire courtroom went still, anticipating her reaction. Alex smiled broadly. \"Mr. O'Reilly,\" she said, \"I couldn't agree more.\" Lacy Houghton leaned over the bed railing and put her face right in front of her sobbing patient's. \"You can do this,\" she said firmly. \"You can do this, and you will.\" After sixteen hours of labor, they were all exhausted -- Lacy, the patient, and the father-to-be, who was facing zero-hour with the dawning realization that he was superfluous, that right now, his wife wanted her midwife much more than she wanted him. \"I want you to get behind Janine,\" Lacy told him, \"and brace her back. Janine, I want you to look at me and give me another good push...\" The woman gritted her teeth and bore down, losing all sense of herself in the effort to create someone else. Lacy reached down to feel the baby's head, to guide it past the seal of skin and quickly loop the cord over its head without ever losing eye contact with her patient. \"For the next twenty seconds, your baby is going to be the newest person on this planet,\" Lacy said. \"Would you like to meet her?\" The answer was a pressured push. A crest of intention, a roar of purpose, a sluice of slick, purpled body that Lacy quickly lifted into the mother's arms, so that when the infant cried for the first time in this life, she would already be in a position to be comforted. Her patient started weeping again -- tears had a whole different melody, didn't they, without the pain threaded through them? The new parents bent over their baby, a closed circle. Lacy stepped back and watched. There was plenty of work left for a midwife to do even after the moment of birth, but for right now, she wanted to make eye contact with this little being. Where parents would notice a chin that looked like Aunt Marge's or a nose that resembled Grandpa's, Lacy would see instead a gaze wide with wisdom and peace -- eight pounds of unadulterated possibility. Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity. It didn't last long, though. When Lacy saw these same infants a week later at their regular checkups, they had turned into ordinary -- albeit tiny -- people. That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go. While his mother was across town delivering the newest resident of Sterling, New Hampshire, Peter Houghton was waking up. His father knocked on the door on his way out to work -- Peter's alarm clock. Downstairs, a bowl and a box of cereal would be waiting for him -- his mother remembered to do that even when she got paged at two in the morning. There would be a note from her, too, telling him to have a good day at school, as if it were that simple. Peter threw back his covers. He moved to his desk, still wearing his pajama bottoms, sat down, and logged onto the Internet. The words on the message board were blurry. He reached for his glasses -- he kept them next to his computer. After he slipped the frames on, he dropped the case onto the keyboard -- and suddenly, he was seeing something he'd hoped never to see again. Peter reached out and hit CONTROL ALT DELETE, but he could still picture it, even after the screen went blank, even after he closed his eyes, even after he started to cry. *** In a town the size of Sterling, everyone knew everyone else, and always had. In some ways, this was comforting -- like a great big extended family that you sometimes loved and sometimes fell out of favor with. At other times, it haunted Josie: like right now, when she was standing in the cafeteria line behind Natalie Zlenko, a dyke of the first order who, way back in second grade, had invited Josie over to play and had convinced her to pee on the front lawn like a boy. What were you thinking , her mother had said, when she'd come to pick her up and saw them bare-bottomed and squatting over the daffodils. Even now, a decade later, Josie couldn't look at Natalie Zlenko with her buzz cut and her ever-present SLR camera without wondering if Natalie still thought about that, too. On Josie's other side was Courtney Ignatio, the alpha female of Sterling High. With her honey-blond hair hanging over her shoulders like a shawl made of silk and her low-rise jeans mail-ordered from Fred Segal, she'd spawned an entourage of clones. On Courtney's tray was a bottle of water and a banana. On Josie's was a platter of French fries. It was second period, and just like her mother had predicted, she was famished. \"Hey,\" Courtney said, loud enough for Natalie to overhear. \"Can you tell the vagitarian to let us pass?\" Natalie's cheeks burned with color, and she flattened herself up against the sneeze guard of the salad bar so that Courtney and Josie could slip by. They paid for their food and walked across the cafeteria. Whenever she came into the cafeteria, Josie felt like a naturalist observing different species in their natural, nonacademic habitat. There were the geeks, bent over their textbooks and laughing at math jokes nobody else even wanted to understand. Behind them were the art freaks, who smoked clove cigarettes on the ropes course behind the school and drew manga comics in the margins of their notes. Near the condiment bar were the skanks, who drank black coffee and waited for the bus that would take them to the technical high school three towns over for their afternoon classes; and the druggies, already strung out by nine o'clock in the morning. There were misfits, too -- kids like Natalie and Angela Phlug, fringe friends by default, because nobody else would have them. And then there was Josie's posse. They took over two tables, not because there were so many of them, but because they were larger than life: Emma, Maddie, Haley, John, Brady, Trey, Drew. Josie could remember how, when she started hanging around with this group, she'd get everyone's names confused. They were that interchangeable. They all sort of looked alike, too -- the boys all wearing their maroon home hockey jerseys and their hats backward, bright thatches of hair stuck through the loops at their foreheads like the start of a fire; the girls carbon copies of Courtney, by studious design. Josie slipped inconspicuously into the heart of them, because she looked like Courtney, too. Her tangle of hair had been blown glass-straight; her heels were three inches high, even though there was still snow on the ground. If she appeared the same on the outside, it was that much easier to ignore the fact that she didn't really know how she felt on the inside. \"Hey,\" Maddie said, as Courtney sat down beside her. \"Hey.\" \"Did you hear about Fiona Kierland?\" Courtney's eyes lit up; gossip was as good a catalyst as any chemical. \"The one whose boobs are two different sizes?\" \"No, that's Fiona the sophomore. I'm talking about Fiona the freshman.\" \"The one who always carries a box of tissues for her allergies?\" Josie said, sliding into a seat. \"Or not,\" Haley said. \"Guess who got sent to rehab for snorting coke.\" \"Get out .\" \"That's not even the whole scandal,\" Emma added. \"Her dealer was the head of the Bible study group that meets after school.\" \"Oh my God !\" Courtney said. \" Exactly .\" \"Hey.\" Matt slipped into the chair beside Josie. \"What took you so long?\" She turned to him. At this end of the table, the guys were rolling straw wrappers into spitballs and talking about the end of spring skiing. \"How long do you think the half-pipe will stay open at Sunapee?\" John asked, lobbing a spitball toward a kid one table away who had fallen asleep. The boy had been in Josie's Sign Language elective last year. Like her, he was a junior. His arms and legs were skinny and white and splayed like a stickbug; his mouth, as he snored, was wide-open. \"You missed, loser,\" Drew said. \"If Sunapee closes, Killington's still good. They have snow until, like, August.\" His spitball landed in the boy's hair. Derek . The kid's name was Derek. Matt glanced at Josie's French fries. \"You're not going to eat those , are you?\" \"I'm starving.\" He pinched the side of her waist, a caliper and a criticism all at once. Josie looked down at the fries. Ten seconds ago, they'd looked golden brown and smelled like heaven; now all she could see was the grease that stained the paper plate. Matt took a handful and passed the rest to Drew, who threw a spitball that landed in the sleeping boy's mouth. With a choke and a sputter, Derek startled awake. \"Sweet!\" Drew high-fived John. Derek spat into a napkin and rubbed his mouth hard. He glanced around to see who else had been watching. Josie suddenly remembered a sign from her ASL elective, almost all of which she'd forgotten the moment she'd taken the final. A closed fist moved in a circle over the heart meant I'm sorry. Matt leaned over and kissed her neck. \"Let's get out of here.\" He drew Josie to her feet and then turned to his friends. \"Later,\" he said. The gymnasium at Sterling High School was on the second floor, above what would have been a swimming pool if the bond issue had passed when the school was in its planning stages, and what instead became three classrooms that continually resounded with the pounding of sneakered feet and bouncing basketballs. Michael Beach and his best friend, Justin Friedman, two freshmen, sat on the sidelines of the basketball court while their Phys Ed teacher went over the mechanics of dribbling for the hundredth time. It was a wasted exercise -- kids in this class were either like Noah James, already an expert, or like Michael and Justin, who were fluent in Elvish but defined home run as what you did after school in order to avoid getting hung up on coat hooks by your underwear. They sat cross-legged and knob-kneed, listening to the rodent's squeak of Coach Spears's white sneakers as he hustled from one end of the court to the other. \"Ten bucks says I get picked last for a team,\" Justin murmured. \"I wish we could get out of class,\" Michael commiserated. \"Maybe there'll be a fire drill.\" Justin grinned. \"An earthquake.\" \"A monsoon.\" \"Locusts!\" \"A terrorist attack!\" Two sneakers stopped in front of them. Coach Spears glared down, his arms folded. \"You two want to tell me what's so funny about basketball?\" Michael glanced at Justin, then up at the coach. \"Absolutely nothing,\" he said. After showering, Lacy Houghton made herself a mug of green tea and wandered peacefully through her house. When the kids had been tiny and she'd been overwhelmed by work and life, Lewis would ask her what he could do to make things better. It had been a great irony for her, given Lewis's job. A professor at Sterling College, his specialty was the economics of happiness. Yes, it was a real field of study, and yes, he was an expert. He'd taught seminars and written articles and had been interviewed on CNN about measuring the effects of pleasure and good fortune on a monetary scale -- and yet he'd been at a loss when it came to figuring out what Lacy would enjoy. Did she want to go out to a nice dinner? Get a pedicure? Take a nap? When she told him what she craved, though, he could not comprehend. She'd wanted to be in her own house, with nobody else in it, and nothing pressing to do. She opened the door to Peter's room and set her mug on the dresser so that she could make his bed. What's the point , Peter would say when she dogged him to do it himself. I just have to mess it up again in a few hours . For the most part, she didn't enter Peter's room unless he was in it. Maybe that was why, at first, she felt there was something wrong about the space, as if an integral part were missing. At first she assumed that it was Peter's absence that made the room seem a little empty, then she realized that the computer -- a steady hum, an ever-ready green screen -- had been turned off. She tugged the sheets up and tucked in the edges; she drew the quilt over them and fluffed the pillows. At the threshold of Peter's bedroom she paused and smiled: the room looked perfect. Zoe Patterson was wondering what it was like to kiss a guy who had braces. Not that it was a remote possibility for her anytime in the near future, but she figured it was something she ought to consider before the moment actually caught her off guard. In fact, she wondered what it would be like to kiss a guy, period -- even one who wasn't orthodontically challenged, like her. And honestly, was there any place better than a stupid math class to let your mind wander? Mr. McCabe, who thought he was the Chris Rock of algebra, was doing his daily stand-up routine. \"So, two kids are in the lunch line, when the first kid turns to his friend and says, 'I have no money! What should I do?' And his buddy says, '2x + 5!'\" Zoe looked up at the clock. She counted along with the second hand until it was 9:50 on the dot and then popped out of her seat to hand Mr. McCabe a pass. \"Ah, orthodontia,\" he read out loud. \"Well, make sure he doesn't wire your mouth shut, Ms. Patterson. So, the buddy says, '2x + 5.' A binomial. Get it? Buy-no-meal ?!\" Zoe hefted her backpack onto her shoulders and walked out of the classroom. She had to meet her mom in front of the school at ten o'clock -- parking was killer, so it would be a drive-by pickup. Mid-class, the halls were hollow and resonant; it felt like trudging through the belly of a whale. Zoe detoured into the main office to sign out on the secretary's clipboard, and then nearly mowed down a kid in her hurry to get outside. It was warm enough to unzip her jacket and think of summer and soccer camp and what it would be like when her palate expander was finally removed. If you kissed a guy who didn't have braces, and you pressed too hard, could you cut his gums? Something told Zoe that if you made a guy bleed, you probably wouldn't be hooking up with him again. What if he had braces, too, like that blond kid from Chicago who'd just transferred and sat in front of her in English (not that she liked him or anything, although he had turned around to hand her back her homework paper and held on to it just a smidgen too long...)? Would they get stuck together like jammed gears and have to be taken to the emergency room at the hospital, and how totally humiliating would that be? Zoe ran her tongue along the ragged metal fence posts in her mouth. Maybe she could temporarily join a convent. She sighed and peered down the block to see whether she could make out her mom's green Explorer from the conga line of passing cars. And just about then, something exploded. Patrick sat at a red light in his unmarked police car, waiting to turn onto the highway. Beside him, on the passenger seat, was a paper bag with a vial of cocaine inside it. The dealer they'd busted at the high school had admitted it was cocaine, and yet Patrick had to waste half his day taking it to the state lab so that someone in a white coat could tell him what he already knew. He fiddled with the volume button of the dispatch radio just in time to hear the fire department being sent to the high school for an explosion. Probably the boiler; the school was old enough for its internal structure to be falling apart. He tried to remember where the boiler was located in Sterling High, and wondered if they'd be lucky enough to come out of that kind of situation without anyone being hurt. Shots fired ... The light turned green, but Patrick didn't move. The discharge of a gun in Sterling was rare enough to have him narrow his attention to the voice on the dispatch radio, waiting for an explanation. At the high school ... Sterling High ... The dispatcher's voice was getting faster, more intense. Patrick wheeled the car in a U-turn and started toward the school with his lights flashing. Other voices began to transmit in static bursts: officers stating their positions in town; the on-duty supervisor trying to coordinate manpower and calling for mutual aid from Hanover and Lebanon. Their voices knotted and tangled, blocking one another so that everything and nothing was being said at once. Signal 1000 , the dispatcher said. Signal 1000 . In Patrick's entire career as a detective, he'd only heard that call twice. Once was in Maine, when a deadbeat dad had taken an officer hostage. Once was in Sterling, during a potential bank robbery that turned out to be a false alarm. Signal 1000 meant that everyone, immediately, was to get off the radio and leave it free for dispatch. It meant that what they were dealing with was not routine police business. It meant life or death. Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling the injured. A boy holding a handmade sign in an upstairs window that read HELP US. Two girls hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting pink on the snow; it was the drip of parents that turned into a stream and then a raging river, screaming out the names of their missing children. Chaos was a TV camera in your face, not enough ambulances, not enough officers, and no plan for how to react when the world as you knew it went to pieces. Patrick pulled halfway onto the sidewalk and grabbed his bulletproof vest from the back of the car. Already, adrenaline pulsed through him, making the edges of his vision swim and his senses more acute. He found Chief O'Rourke standing with a megaphone in the middle of the melee. \"We don't know what we're dealing with yet,\" the chief said. \"SOU's on its way.\" Patrick didn't give a damn about the Special Operations Unit. By the time the SWAT team got here, a hundred more shots might be fired; a kid might be killed. He drew his gun. \"I'm going in.\" \"The hell you are. That's not protocol.\" \"There is no fucking protocol for this,\" Patrick snapped. \"You can fire me later.\" As he raced up the steps to the school, he was vaguely aware of two other patrol officers bucking the chief's commands and joining him in the fray. Patrick directed them each down a different hallway, and then he himself pushed through the double doors, past students who were shoving each other in an effort to get outside. Fire alarms blared so loudly that Patrick had to strain to hear the gunshots. He grabbed the coat of a boy streaking past him. \"Who is it?\" he yelled. \"Who's shooting?\" The kid shook his head, speechless, and wrenched away. Patrick watched him run crazily down the hallway, open the door, burst into a rectangle of sunlight. Students funneled around him, as if he were a stone in a river. Smoke billowed and burned his eyes. Patrick heard another staccato of gunshots, and had to restrain himself from running toward them blindly. \"How many of them?\" he cried as a girl ran by. \"I...I don't know...\" The boy beside her turned around and looked at Patrick, torn between offering knowledge and getting the hell out of there. \"It's a kid...he's shooting everyone...\" That was enough. Patrick pushed against the tide, a salmon swimming upstream. Homework papers were scattered on the floor; shell casings rolled beneath the heels of his shoes. Ceiling tiles had been shot off, and a fine gray dust coated the broken bodies that lay twisted on the floor. Patrick ignored all of this, going against most of his training -- running past doors that might hide a perp, disregarding rooms that should have been searched -- instead driving forward with his weapon drawn and his heart beating through every inch of his skin. Later, he would remember other sights that he didn't have time to register right away: the heating duct covers that had been pried loose so that students could hide in the crawl space; the shoes left behind by kids who literally ran out of them; the eerie prescience of crime-scene outlines on the floor outside the biology classrooms, where students had been tracing their own bodies on butcher paper for an assignment. He ran through hallways that seemed to circle in on each other. \" Where ?\" he would bite out every time he passed a fleeing student -- his only tool of navigation. He'd see sprays of blood, and students crumpled on the ground, and he did not let himself look twice. He pounded up the main stairwell, and just as he reached the top, a door cracked open. Patrick whirled, pointing his gun, as a young female teacher fell to her knees with her hands raised. Behind the white oval of her face were twelve others, featureless and frightened. Patrick could smell urine. He lowered his gun and beckoned her toward the staircase. \"Go,\" he commanded, but he did not stay long enough to see if they did. Turning a corner, Patrick slipped on blood and heard another gunshot, this one loud enough to ring his ears. He swept into the open double doors of the gymnasium and scanned the handful of sprawled bodies, the basketball cart overturned and the globes resting against the far wall -- but no shooter. He knew, from the overtime detail he'd taken on Friday nights to monitor high school ball games, that he'd reached the far end of Sterling High. Which meant that the shooter was either hiding somewhere here or had doubled back past him when Patrick hadn't noticed...and could even now have cornered him in this gym. Patrick spun around to the entrance again to see if that was the case, and then heard another shot. He ran to a door that led out from the gym, one he hadn't noticed in his first quick visual sweep of the area. It was a locker room, tiled white on the walls and the floor. He glanced down, saw the fanned spray of blood at his feet, and edged his gun around the corner wall. Two bodies lay unmoving at one end of the locker room. At the other, closer to Patrick, a slight boy crouched beside a bank of lockers. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, crooked on his thin face. He was shivering hard. \"Are you okay?\" Patrick whispered. He did not want to speak out loud and give away his position to the shooter. The boy only blinked at him. \"Where is he?\" Patrick mouthed. The boy pulled a pistol from beneath his thigh and held it up to his own head. A new rush of heat surged through Patrick. \"Don't fucking move,\" he shouted, drawing a bead on the boy. \"Drop the gun or I will shoot you.\" Sweat broke out down his back and on his forehead, and he could feel his cupped hands shifting on the butt of the gun as he aimed, determined to lace the kid with bullets if he had to. Patrick let his forefinger brush gently against the trigger just as the boy opened his fingers wide as a starfish. The pistol fell to the floor, skittering across the tile. Immediately, he pounced. One of the other officers -- whom Patrick hadn't even noticed following him -- retrieved the boy's weapon. Patrick dropped the kid onto his stomach and cuffed him, pressing his knee hard into the boy's spine. \"Are you alone? Who's with you?\" \"Just me,\" the boy ground out. Patrick's head was spinning and his pulse was a military tattoo, but he could vaguely hear the other officer calling this information in over the radio: \" Sterling, we have one in custody; we don't have knowledge of anyone else .\" Just as seamlessly as it had started, it was over -- at least as much as something like this could be considered over. Patrick didn't know if there were booby traps or bombs in the school; he didn't know how many casualties there were; he didn't know how many wounded Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Alice Peck Day Hospital could take; he didn't know how to go about processing a crime scene this massive. The target had been taken out, but at what irreplaceable cost? Patrick's entire body began to shake, knowing that for so many students and parents and citizens today, he had once again been too late. He took a few steps and sank down to his knees, mostly because his legs simply gave out from underneath them, and pretended that this was intentional, that he wanted to check out the two bodies at the other end of the room. He was vaguely aware of the shooter being pushed out of the locker room by the other officer, to a waiting cruiser downstairs. He didn't turn to watch the kid go; instead he focused on the body directly in front of him. A boy, dressed in a hockey jersey. There was a puddle of blood underneath his side, and a gunshot wound through his forehead. Patrick reached out for a baseball cap that had fallen a few feet away, with the words STERLING HOCKEY embroidered across it. He turned the brim around in his hands, an imperfect circle. The girl lying next to him was facedown, blood spreading from beneath her temple. She was barefoot, and on her toenails was bright pink polish -- just like the stuff Tara had put on Patrick. It made his heart catch. This girl, just like his goddaughter and her brother and a million other kids in this country, had gotten up today and gone to school never imagining she would be in danger. She trusted all the grown-ups and teachers and principals to keep her safe. It was why these schools, post-9/11, had teachers wearing ID all the time and doors locked during the day -- the enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you. Suddenly, the girl shifted. \" Help ... me ...\" Patrick knelt beside her. \"I'm here,\" he said, his touch gentle as he assessed her condition. \"Everything's all right.\" He turned her enough to see that the blood was coming from a cut on her scalp, not a gunshot wound, as he'd assumed. He ran his hands over her limbs. He kept murmuring to her, words that did not always make sense, but that let her know that she wasn't alone anymore. \"What's your name, sweetheart?\" \"Josie...\" The girl started to thrash, trying to sit up. Patrick put the bulk of his body strategically between her and the boy's -- she'd be in shock already; he didn't need her to go over the edge. She touched her hand to her forehead, and when it came away oily with blood, she panicked. \"What... happened ?\" He should have stayed there and waited for the medics to come get her. He should have radioed for help. But should hardly seemed to apply anymore, and so Patrick lifted Josie into his arms. He carried her out of the locker room where she'd nearly been killed, hurried down the stairs, and pushed through the front door of the school, as if he might be able to save them both. Copyright \u00a9 Jodi Picoult, 2007 Continues... Excerpted from Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult Copyright \u00a92008 by Jodi Picoult. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.35}, {"asin": "0064400409", "title": "The Little House (9 Volumes Set)", "author": "Laura Ingalls Wilder", "description": "From the Back Cover The set includes: Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years. Little House in the Big Woods Wolves and panthers and bears roam the deep Wisconsin woods in the late 1870's. In those same woods, Laura lives with Pa and Ma, and her sisters, Mary and Baby Carrie, in a snug little house built of logs. Pa hunts and traps. Ma makes her own cheese and butter. All night long, the wind howls lonesomely, but Pa plays the fiddle and sings, keeping the family safe and cozy. Little House on the Prairie Pa Ingalls decides to sell the little log house, and the family sets out for Indian country! They travel from Wisconsin to Kansas, and there, finally, Pa builds their little house on the prairie. Sometimes farm life is difficult, even dangerous, but Laura and her family are kept busy and are happy with the promise of their new life on the prairie. Farmer Boy While Laura Ingalls grows up in a little house on the western prairie, Almanzo Wilder is living on a big farm in New York State. Almanzo and his brother and sisters work at their chores from dawn to supper most days -- no matter what the weather. There is still time for fun, though, especially with the horses, which Almanzo loves more than anything. On the Banks of Plum Creek Laura's family's first home in Minnesota is made of sod, but Pa builds a clean new house made of sawed lumber beside Plum Creek. The money for materials will come from their first wheat crop. Then, just before the wheat is ready to harvest, a strange glittering cloud fills the sky, blocking out the sun. Soon millions of grasshoppers cover the field and everything on the farm. In a week's time, there is no wheat crop left at all. By the Shores of Silver Lake Pa Ingalls heads west to the unsettled wilderness of the Dakota Territory. When Ma, Mary, Laura, Carrie, and baby Grace join him, they become the first settlers in the town of De Smet. And Pa begins work on the first building in what will soon be a brand-new town on the shores of Silver Lake. The Long Winter The first terrible storm comes to the barren prairie in October. Then it snows almost without stopping until April. Snow has reached the rooftops, and no trains can get through with food or coal. The people of De Smet are starving, including Laura's family, who wonder how they're going to make it through this terrible winter. It is young Almanzo Wilder who finally understands what needs to be done. He must save the town, even if it means risking his own life. Little Town on the Prairie The long winter is over. With spring come socials, parties, and \"Literaries.\" There is also work to be done. Laura spends many hours each day sewing shirts to help send Mary to a college for the blind. But in the evenings, Laura makes time for a new caller, Almanzo Wilder. These Happy Golden Years Laura is teaching school, and it's terrifying! Most of the students are taller than she is, and she must sleep away from home for the first time. Laura is miserable, but the money is needed to keep Mary in a college for the blind. And every Friday -- no matter what the weather -- Almanzo Wilder arrives to take Laura home to her family for the weekend. Laura and Almanzo are courting, and even though she's not yet sixteen, she knows that this is a time for new beginnings. The First Four Years Laura and Almanzo Wilder have just been married! Their life on a small prairie homestead begins with high hopes. But each year seems to bring unexpected disasters -- storms, sickness, fire, and unpaid debts. These first four years call for courage, strength, and a great deal of determination. Always, though, there is love, especially for the newest member of the family -- baby Rose. About the Author Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867\u20131957) was born in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. With her family, she pioneered throughout America\u2019s heartland during the 1870s and 1880s, finally settling in Dakota Territory. She married Almanzo Wilder in 1885; their only daughter, Rose, was born the following year. The Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where they established a permanent home. After years of farming, Laura wrote the first of her beloved Little House books in 1932. The nine Little House books are international classics. Her writings live on into the twenty-first century as America\u2019s quintessential pioneer story. Garth Williams is the renowned illustrator of almost one hundred books for children, including the beloved Stuart Little by E. B. White, Bedtime for Frances by Russell Hoban, and the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. He was born in 1912 in New York City but raised in England. He founded an art school near London and served with the British Red Cross Civilian Defense during World War II. Williams worked as a portrait sculptor, art director, and magazine artist before doing his first book Stuart Little , thus beginning a long and lustrous career illustrating some of the best known children's books. In addition to illustrating works by White and Wilder, he also illustrated George Selden\u2019s The Cricket in Times Square and its sequels (Farrar Straus Giroux). He created the character and pictures for the first book in the Frances series by Russell Hoban (HarperCollins) and the first books in the Miss Bianca series by Margery Sharp (Little, Brown). He collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown on her Little Golden Books titles Home for a Bunny and Little Fur Family, among others, and with Jack Prelutsky on two poetry collections published by Greenwillow: Ride a Purple Pelican and Beneath a Blue Umbrella . He also wrote and illustrated seven books on his own, including Baby Farm Animals (Little Golden Books) and The Rabbits\u2019 Wedding (HarperCollins).", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 42.28}, {"asin": "0316013692", "title": "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)", "author": "Sherman Alexie", "description": "Review \"This is a gem of a book....may be [Sherman Alexie's] best work yet.\"\u2015 New York Times \"A Native American equivalent of Angela's Ashes .\"\u2015 (starred review) , Publishers Weekly \"Sure to resonate and lift spirits of all ages for years to come.\"\u2015 USA Today \"Realistic and fantastical and funny and tragic-all at the same time.\"\u2015 (starred review) , VOYA \"The line between dramatic monologue, verse novel, and standup comedy gets unequivocally-and hilariously and triumphantly-bent in this novel.\"\u2015 (starred review) , Horn Book \"Nimbly blends sharp with unapologetic emotion....fluid narration deftly mingles raw feelings with funny, sardonic insight.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews , (starred review) \"Few writers are more masterful than Sherman Alexie.\"\u2015 Los Angeles Times \"Alexie's humor and prose are easygoing and well suited to his young audience.\"\u2015 Booklist \"Fierce observations and sharp sense of humor...hilarious language.\"\u2015 Newsday \"Breathtakingly honest, funny, profane, sad....will stay with readers.\"\u2015 (starred review) , KLIATT \"What emerges most strongly is Junior's uncompromising determination to press on while leaving nothing important behind.\"\u2015 (starred review) , BCCB \"[Alexie] has created an endearing teen protagonist in his own likeness and placed him in the here and now.\"\u2015 Minneapolis Star Tribune \"Deftly taps into the human desire to stand out while fitting in.\"\u2015 BookPage \"Exceptionally good....Arnold is a wonderful character.\"\u2015 Miami Herald About the Author A National Book Award-winning author, poet, and filmmaker, Sherman Alexie is one of the most well-known and beloved literary writers of his generation. His works of fiction, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , Reservation Blues , and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , have received numerous awards and citations. He lives in Seattle. Like Thunder Boy Jr., Sherman was named for his father.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.52}, {"asin": "0553609416", "title": "Anne of Green Gables, Complete 8-Book Box Set", "author": "L.M. Montgomery", "description": "Amazon.com Review When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, send for a boy orphan to help them out at the farm, they are in no way prepared for the error that will change their lives. The mistake takes the shape of Anne Shirley, a redheaded 11-year-old girl who can talk anyone under the table. Fortunately, her sunny nature and quirky imagination quickly win over her reluctant foster parents. Anne's feisty spirit soon draws many friends--and much trouble--her way. Not a day goes by without some melodramatic new episode in the tragicomedy of her life. Early on, Anne declares her eternal antipathy for Gilbert Blythe, a classmate who commits the ultimate sin of mocking her hair color. Later, she accidentally dyes that same cursed hair green. Another time, in her haste to impress a new neighbor, she bakes a cake with liniment instead of vanilla. Lucy Maud Montgomery's series of books about Anne have remained classics since the early 20th century. Her portrayal of this feminine yet independent spirit has given generations of girls a strong female role model, while offering a taste of another, milder time in history. This lovely boxed gift collection comprises Anne of Green Gables , Anne of the Island , Anne of Avonlea , Anne of Windy Poplars , Anne's House of Dreams , Anne of Ingleside , Rainbow Valley , and Rilla of Ingleside . (Ages 9 to 12) --Emilie Coulter Review \"Anne\u2026epitomises everything I hope to be: someone who takes joy in the world around her, and, with her fantasies (though up in her red head) shares that joy around her.\" -- The Guardian \"Exquisite in both story and sentence, the Anne books built me as a reader, which is to say: they built me.\" -- Los Angeles Review of Books About the Author L. M. Montgomery was born in 1874 on Prince Edward Island in Canada, the setting of 19 of her 20 novels. Included among these books are her beloved Anne of Green Gables series and a number of other novels and short story collections.\u00a0She died in Toronto in 1942. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Boxed Sets", "Children's Books"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 31.0}, {"asin": "1476746583", "title": "All the Light We Cannot See", "author": "Anthony Doerr", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Does the world need yet another novel about WWII? It does when the novel is as inventive and beautiful as this one by Anthony Doerr. In fact, All the Light We Cannot See --while set mostly in Germany and France before and during the war--is not really a \u201cwar novel\u201d. Yes, there is fear and fighting and disappearance and death, but the author\u2019s focus is on the interior lives of his two characters. Marie Laure is a blind 14-year-old French girl who flees to the countryside when her father disappears from Nazi-occupied Paris. Werner is a gadget-obsessed German orphan whose skills admit him to a brutal branch of Hitler Youth. Never mind that their paths don\u2019t cross until very late in the novel, this is not a book you read for plot (although there is a wonderful, mysterious subplot about a stolen gem). This is a book you read for the beauty of Doerr\u2019s writing-- \u201cAbyss in her gut, desert in her throat, Marie-Laure takes one of the cans of food\u2026\u201d--and for the way he understands and cherishes the magical obsessions of childhood. Marie Laure and Werner are never quaint or twee. Instead they are powerful examples of the way average people in trying times must decide daily between morality and survival. --Sara Nelson From Booklist *Starred Review* A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr\u2019s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. It rests, historically, during the occupation of France during WWII, but brief chapters told in alternating voices give the overall\u2014and long\u2014\u00adnarrative a swift movement through time and events. We have two main characters, each one on opposite sides in the conflagration that is destroying Europe. Marie-Louise is a sightless girl who lived with her father in Paris before the occupation; he was a master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. When German forces necessitate abandonment of the city, Marie-Louise\u2019s father, taking with him the museum\u2019s greatest treasure, removes himself and his daughter and eventually arrives at his uncle\u2019s house in the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Young German soldier Werner is sent to Saint-Malo to track Resistance activity there, and eventually, and inevitably, Marie-Louise\u2019s and Werner\u2019s paths cross. It is through their individual and intertwined tales that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.High-Demand Backstory: A multipronged marketing campaign will make the author\u2019s many fans aware of his newest book, and extensive review coverage is bound to enlist many new fans. --Brad Hooper Review \u201cExquisite\u2026Mesmerizing\u2026Nothing short of brilliant.\u201d -- Alice Evans \u2015 Portland Oregonian \u201cHauntingly beautiful.\u201d -- Janet Maslin \u2015 The New York Times \u201cHistory intertwines with irresistible fiction\u2014secret radio broadcasts, a cursed diamond, a soldier\u2019s deepest doubts\u2014into a richly compelling, bittersweet package.\u201d -- Mary Pols \u2015 People (3 1/2 stars) \u201cAnthony Doerr again takes language beyond mortal limits.\u201d -- Elissa Schappell \u2015 Vanity Fair \u201cThe whole enthralls.\u201d \u2015 Good Housekeeping \u201cEnthrallingly told, beautifully written\u2026Every piece of back story reveals information that charges the emerging narrative with significance, until at last the puzzle-box of the plot slides open to reveal the treasure hidden inside.\u201d -- Amanda Vaill \u2015 Washington Post \u201cStupendous\u2026A beautiful, daring, heartbreaking, oddly joyous novel.\u201d -- David Laskin \u2015 The Seattle Times \u201cStunning and ultimately uplifting\u2026 Doerr\u2019s not-to-be-missed tale is a testament to the buoyancy of our dreams, carrying us into the light through the darkest nights.\u201d \u2015 Entertainment Weekly \u201cDoerr has packed each of his scenes with such refractory material that All the Light We Cannot See reflects a dazzling array of themes\u2026.Startlingly fresh.\u201d -- John Freeman \u2015 The Boston Globe \u201cGorgeous\u2026 moves with the pace of a thriller\u2026 Doerr imagines the unseen grace, the unseen light that, occasionally, surprisingly, breaks to the surface even in the worst of times.\u201d -- Dan Cryer \u2015 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cIncandescent\u2026 a luminous work of strife and transcendence\u2026 with characters as noble as they are enthralling\u201d -- Hamilton Cain \u2015 O, the Oprah magazine \u201cPerfectly captured\u2026Doerr writes sentences that are clear-eyed, taut, sweetly lyrical.\u201d -- Josh Cook \u2015 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cA beautiful, expansive tale\u2026Ambitious and majestic.\u201d -- Steph Cha \u2015 Los Angeles Times \u201cThis tough-to-put-down book proves its worth page after lyrical page\u2026Each and every person in this finely spun assemblage is distinct and true.\u201d -- Sharon Peters \u2015 USA Today \u201cDoerr is an exquisite stylist; his talents are on full display.\u201d -- Alan Cheuse \u2015 NPR \u201cVivid\u2026[ All the Light We Cannot See ] brims with scrupulous reverence for all forms of life. The invisible light of the title shines long after the last page.\u201d -- Tricia Springstubb \u2015 Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cIntricate\u2026 A meditation on fate, free will, and the way that, in wartime, small choices can have vast consequences.\u201d \u2015 New Yorker \u201cDoerr deftly guides All the Light We Cannot See toward the day Werner\u2019s and Marie-Laure lives intersect during the bombing of Saint-Malo in what may be his best work to date.\u201d -- Yvonne Zipp \u2015 Christian Science Monitor \u201cTo open a book by Anthony Doerr is to open a door on humanity\u2026His sentences shimmer\u2026His paragraphs are luminous with bright, sparkling beauty.\u201d -- Martha Anne Toll \u2015 Washington Independent Review of Books \u201cEndlessly bold and equally delicate\u2026An intricate miracle of invention, narrative verve, and deep research lightly held, but above all a miracle of humanity\u2026.Anthony Doerr\u2019s novel celebrates\u2014and also accomplishes\u2014what only the finest art can: the power to create, reveal, and augment experience in all its horror and wonder, heartbreak and rapture.\u201d \u2015 Shelf Awareness \u201cMagnificent.\u201d -- Carmen Callil \u2015 The Guardian (UK) \u201cIntricately structured\u2026 All the Light We Cannot See is a work of art and of preservation.\u201d -- Jane Ciabattari \u2015 BBC \u201cA revelation.\u201d -- Michael Magras \u2015 BookReporter.com \u201cAnthony Doerr writes beautifully\u2026 A tour de force.\u201d -- Elizabeth Reed \u2015 Deseret Morning News \u201cA novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr\u2019s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. . . . Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably recreates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.\u201d \u2015 Booklist (starred review) \u201cDoerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cIf a book\u2019s success can be measured by its ability to move readers and the number of memorable characters it has, Story Prize-winner Doerr\u2019s novel triumphs on both counts. He convinces readers...that war\u2014despite its desperation, cruelty, and harrowing moral choices\u2014cannot negate the pleasures of the world.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cThis novel has the physical and emotional heft of a masterpiece\u2026[All the Light We Cannot See] presents two characters so interesting and sympathetic that readers will keep turning the pages hoping for an impossibly happy ending\u2026Highly recommended for fans of Michael Ondaatje\u2019s The English Patient.\u201d -- Evelyn Beck \u2015 Library Journal (starred review) \"What a delight! This novel has exquisite writing and a wonderfully suspenseful story. A book you'll tell your friends about...\" -- Frances Itani, author of Deafening\u201cThis jewel of a story is put together like a vintage timepiece, its many threads coming together so perfectly. Doerr\u2019s writing and imagery are stunning. It\u2019s been a while since a novel had me under its spell in this fashion. The story still lives on in my head.\u201d -- Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone\u201c All the Light We Cannot See is a dazzling, epic work of fiction. Anthony Doerr writes beautifully about the mythic and the intimate, about snails on beaches and armies on the move, about fate and love and history and those breathless, unbearable moments when they all come crashing together.\u201d -- Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins\u201cDoerr sees the world as a scientist, but feels it as a poet. He knows about everything \u2014radios, diamonds, mollusks, birds, flowers, locks, guns\u2014but he also writes a line so beautiful, creates an image or scene so haunting, it makes you think forever differently about the big things\u2014love, fear, cruelty, kindness, the countless facets of the human heart. Wildly suspenseful, structurally daring, rich in detail and soul, Doerr\u2019s new novel is that novel, the one you savor, and ponder, and happily lose sleep over, then go around urging all your friends to read\u2014now.\u201d -- J.R. Moehringer, author of Sutton and The Tender Bar\u201cA tender exploration of this world's paradoxes; the beauty of the laws of nature and the terrible ends to which war subverts them; the frailty and the resilience of the human heart; the immutability of a moment and the healing power of time. The language is as expertly crafted as the master locksmith's models in the story, and the settings as intricately evoked. A compelling and uplifting novel.\u201d -- M.L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans\u201cThe craftsmanship of Doerr\u2019s book is rooted in his ability to inhabit the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner\u2026[A] fine novel.\u201d -- Steve Novak \u2015 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette \u201cBeautifully written\u2026 Soulful and addictive.\u201d -- Chris Stuckenschneider \u2015 The Missourian \u201cDoerr conjures up a vibrating, crackling world\u2026Intricately, beautifully crafted.\u201d -- Rebecca Kelley \u2015 Bustle.com \u201cThere is so much in this book. It is difficult to convey the complexity, the detail, the beauty and the brutality of this simple story.\u201d -- Carole O'Brien \u2015 Aspen Daily News \u201cSometimes a novel doesn\u2019t merely transport. It immerses, engulfs, keeps you caught within its words until the very end, when you blink and remember there\u2019s a world beyond the pages. All the Light We Cannot See is such a book\u2026 Vibrant, poignant, delicately exquisite. Despite the careful building of time and place (so vivid you fall between the pages), it\u2019s not a story of history; it\u2019s a story of people living history.\u201d \u2015 Historical Novel Society About the Author Anthony Doerr is the author of the New York Times bestselling Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and All the Light We Cannot See , winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector , the novel About Grace , and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome . He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library\u2019s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. All the Light We Cannot See Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0061537969", "title": "The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel", "author": "Garth Stein", "description": "Review \u201cOne of those stories that may earn its place next to Richard Bach\u2019s Jonathan Livingston Seagull , Paulo Coelho\u2019s The Alchemist , and Yann Martel\u2019s Life of Pi .\u201d \u2014 Portland Oregonian \u201cSplendid.\u201d \u2014 People (3 \u00bd out of 4 stars) \u201cFans of Marley & Me , rejoice.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cThe perfect book for anyone who knows that some of our best friends walk beside us on four legs; that compassion isn\u2019t only for humans; and that the relationship between two souls...meant for each other never really comes to an end.\u201d \u2014 Jodi Picoult \u201c The Art of Racing in The Rain has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and\u2014most especially\u2014the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach us about being human. I loved this book.\u201d \u2014 Sara Gruen, Author of Water for Elephants \u201cThe Art of Racing in The Rain has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and--most especially--the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach us about being human.\u201d \u2014 Sara Gruen, Author of Water for Elephants \u201cI savored Garth Stein\u2019s The Art of Racing in the Rain for many reasons: a dog who speaks, the thrill of competitive racing, a heart-tugging storyline, and--best of all--the fact that it is a meditation on humility and hope in the face of despair.\u201d \u2014 Wally Lamb, Author of She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True From the Back Cover A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope\u2014a captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it. About the Author Garth Stein is the author of Enzo Races in the Rain! , based on the New York Times bestselling novel The Art of Racing in the Rain (and its tween adaptation, Racing in the Rain ). His other works include A Sudden Light , How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets , Raven Stole the Moon , and a play, Brother Jones . He is the cofounder of Seattle7Writers.org, a nonprofit collective of sixty-two Northwest authors dedicated to fostering a passion for the written word. Garth lives in Seattle with his family and his dog, Comet. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Art of Racing in the Rain A Novel By HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. ISBN: 9780061537967 Chapter One Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences. And that's why I'm here now waiting for Denny to come home\u2014he should be here soon\u2014lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine. I'm old. And while I'm very capable of getting older, that's not the way I want to go out. Shot full of pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints. Vision fogged with cataracts. Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggie Depends stocked in the pantry. I'm sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I've seen on the streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his ass behind him when things start to fail. That's humiliating and degrading. I'm not sure if it's worse than dressing up a dog for Halloween, but it's close. He would do it out of love, of course. I'm sure he would keep me alive as long as he possibly could, my body deteriorating, disintegrating around me, dissolving until there's nothing left but my brain floating in a glass jar filled with clear liquid, my eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cables and tubes feeding what remains. But I don't want to be kept alive. Because I know what's next. I've seen it on TV. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places. It was the best thing I've ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain. After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I've ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth: when a dog is finished living his lifetimes as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man. I've always felt almost human. I've always known that there's something about me that's different than other dogs. Sure, I'm stuffed into a dog's body, but that's just the shell. It's what's inside that's important. The soul. And my soul is very human. I am ready to become a man now, though I realize I will lose all that I have been. All of my memories, all of my experiences. I would like to take them with me into my next life\u2014there is so much I have gone through with the Swift family\u2014but I have little say in the matter. What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see. The door opens, and I hear him with his familiar cry, \"Yo, Zo!\" Usually, I can't help but put aside my pain and hoist myself to my feet, wag my tail, sling my tongue around, and shove my face into his crotch. It takes humanlike willpower to hold back on this particular occasion, but I do. I hold back. I don't get up. I'm acting. \"Enzo?\" I hear his footsteps, the concern in his voice. He finds me and looks down. I lift my head, wag my tail feebly so it taps against the floor. I play the part. He shakes his head and runs his hand through his hair, sets down the plastic bag from the grocery that has his dinner in it. I can smell roast chicken through the plastic. Tonight he's having roast chicken and an iceberg lettuce salad. \"Oh, Enz,\" he says. He reaches down to me, crouches, touches my head like he does, along the crease behind the ear, and I lift my head and lick at his forearm. \"What happened, kid?\" he asks. Gestures can't explain. \"Can you get up?\" I try, and I scramble. My heart takes off, lunges ahead because no, I can't. I panic. I thought I was just acting, but I really can't get up. Shit. Life imitating art. \"Take it easy, kid,\" he says, pressing down on my chest to calm me. \"I've got you.\" He lifts me easily, he cradles me, and I can smell the day on him. I can smell everything he's done. His work, the auto shop where he's behind the counter all day, standing, making nice with the customers who yell at him because their BMWs don't work right and it costs too much to fix them and that makes them mad so they have to yell at someone. I can smell his lunch. He went to the Indian buffet he likes. All you can eat. It's cheap, and sometimes he takes a container with him and steals extra portions of the tandoori chicken and yellow rice and has it for dinner, too. I can smell beer. He stopped somewhere. The Mexican restaurant up the hill. I can smell the tortilla chips on his breath. Now it makes sense. Usually, I'm excellent with elapsed time, but I wasn't paying attention because of my emoting. He places me gently in the tub and turns on the handheld shower thing and says, \"Easy, Enz.\" Continues... Excerpted from The Art of Racing in the Rain by Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.86}, {"asin": "0553128558", "title": "Yargo", "author": "Jacqueline Susann", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.4}, {"asin": "1598530046", "title": "John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962: The Wayward Bus / Burning Bright / Sweet Thursday / The Winter of Our Discontent (Library of America)", "author": "Robert J. DeMott", "description": "About the Author John Steinbeck (1902-1968) is the author of such celebrated works as Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), for which he\u00a0won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize . He\u00a0was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.The editors of this volume are Robert DeMott and Brian Railsback . Robert DeMott is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University and the author of Steinbeck\u2019s Typewriter , an award-winning book of critical essays. Brian Railsback is dean of the Honors College at Western Carolina University and the author of Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 30.99}, {"asin": "0307473996", "title": "On the Beach", "author": "Nevil Shute", "description": "Review \u201cThe most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \u201cThe most shocking fiction I have read in years. What is shocking about it is both the idea and the sheer imaginative brilliance with which Mr. Shute brings it off.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cA novelist of intelligent and engaging quality, deservedly popular. . . .\u00a0Nevil Shute was, in brief, the sort of novelist who genuinely touches the imagination and feeling.\u201d \u2014 The Times (London) About the Author Nevil Shute Norway was born in 1899 in Ealing, London. He studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. Following his childhood passion, he entered the fledgling aircraft industry as an aeronautical engineer working to develop airships and, later, airplanes. In his spare time he began writing and he published his first novel, Marazan , in 1926, using the name Nevil Shute to protect his engineering career. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they had two daughters. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death in 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), A Town Like Alice (1950), and On the Beach (1957). Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONELieutenant-Commander Peter Holmes of the Royal Australian Navy woke soon after dawn. He lay drowsily for a while, lulled by the warm comfort of Mary sleeping beside him, watching the first light of the Australian sun upon the cretonne curtains of their room. He knew from the sun's rays that it was about five o'clock: very soon the light would wake his baby daughter Jennifer in her cot, and then they would have to get up and start doing things. No need to start before that happened; he could lie a little longer.He woke happy, and it was some time before his conscious senses realised and pinned down the origin of this happiness. It was not Christmas, because that was over. He had illuminated the little fir tree in their garden with a string of coloured lights with a long lead to the plug beside the fireplace in the lounge, a small replica of the great illuminated tree a mile away outside the Town Hall of Falmouth. They had had a barbecue in the garden on the evening of Christmas Day, with a few friends. Christmas was over, and this-his mind turned over slowly-this must be Thursday the 27th. As he lay in bed the sunburn on his back was still a little sore from their day on the beach yesterday, and from sailing in the race.. He would do well to keep his shirt on today. And then, as consciousness came fully to him, he realised that of course he would keep his shirt on today. He had a date at eleven o'clock in the Second Naval Member's office, in the Navy Department up in Melbourne. It meant a new appointment, his first work for five months. It could even mean a seagoing job if he were very lucky, and he ached for a ship again.It meant work, anyway. The thought of it had made him happy when he went to sleep, and his happiness had lasted through the night. He had had no appointment since he had been promoted lieutenant-commander in August and in the circumstances of the time he had almost given up hope of ever working again. The Navy Department, however, had maintained him on full pay throughout these months, and he was grateful to them.The baby stirred, and started chuntering and making little whimpering noises. The naval officer reached out and turned the switch of the electric kettle on the tray of tea things and baby food beside the bed, and Mary stirred beside him. She asked the time, and he told her. Then he kissed her, and said, \"It's a lovely morning again.\"She sat up, brushing back her hair. \"I got so burned yesterday. I put some calamine stuff on Jennifer last night, but I really don't think she ought to go down to the beach again today.\" Then she, too, recollected. \"Oh Peter, it's today you're going up to Melbourne, isn't it ?\"He nodded. \"I should stay at home, have a day in the shade.\"\"I think I will.\"He got up and went to the bathroom. When he came back Mary was up, too; the baby was sitting on her pot and Mary was drawing a comb through her hair before the glass. He sat down on the edge of the bed in a horizontal beam of sunlight, and made the tea.She said, \"It's going to be very hot in Melbourne today, Peter. I thought we might go down to the club about four, and you join us there for a swim. I could take the trailer and your bathers.\"They had a small car in the garage, but since the short war had ended a year previously it remained unused. However, Peter Holmes was an ingenious man and good with tools, and he had contrived a tolerable substitute. Both Mary and he had bicycles. He had built a small two-wheeled trailer using the front wheels of two motor bicycles, and he had contrived a trailer hitch on both Mary's bicycle and his own so that either could pull this thing, which served them as a perambulator and a general goods carrier. Their chief trouble was the long hill up from Falmouth.He nodded. \"That's not a bad idea. I'll take my bike and leave it at the station.\"\"What train have you got to catch ?\"\"The nine-five.\" He sipped his tea and glanced at his watch. \"I'll go and get the milk as soon as I've drunk this.\"He put on a pair of shorts and a singlet and went out. He lived in the ground floor flat of an old house upon the hill above the town that had been divided into apartments; he had the garage and a good part of the garden in his share of the property. There was a verandah, and here he kept the bicycles and the trailer. It would have been logical to park the car under the trees and use the garage, but he could not bring himself to do that. The little Morris was the first car he had ever owned, and he had courted Mary in it. They had been married in 1961 six months before the war, before he sailed in H.M.A.S. Anzac for what they thought would be indefinite separation. The short, bewildering war had followed, the war of which no history had been written or ever would be written now, that had flared all round the northern hemisphere and had died away with the last seismic record of explosion on the thirty-seventh day. At the end of the third month he had returned to Williamstown in Anzac on the last of her fuel oil while the statesmen of the southern hemisphere gathered in conference at Wellington in New Zealand to compare notes and assess the new conditions; had returned to Falmouth to his Mary and his Morris Minor car. The car had three gallons in the tank; he used that unheeding, and another five that he bought at a pump, before it dawned upon Australians that all oil came from the northern hemisphere.He pulled the trailer and his bicycle down from the verandah on to the lawn and fitted the trailer hitch; then he mounted and rode off. He had four miles to go to fetch the milk and cream, for the transport shortage now prevented all collections from the farms in his district and they had learned to make their own butter in the Mixmaster. He rode off down the road in the warm morning sunlight, the empty billies rattling in the trailer at his back, happy in the thought of work before him.There was very little traffic on the road. He passed one vehicle that once had been a car, the engine removed and the windscreen knocked out, drawn by an Angus bullock. He passed two riders upon horses, going carefully upon the gravel verge to the road beside the bitumen surface. He did not want one; they were scarce and delicate creatures that changed hands for a thousand pounds or more, but he had sometimes thought about a bullock for Mary. He could convert the Morris easily enough, though it would break his heart to do so.He reached the farm in half an hour, and went straight to the milking shed. He knew the farmer well, a slow speaking, tall, lean man who walked with a limp from the Second World War. He found him in the separator room, where the milk flowed into one churn and the cream into another in a low murmur of sound from the electric motor that drove the machine. \"Morning, Mr. Paul,\" said the naval officer. \"How are you today?\"\"Good, Mr. Holmes.\" The farmer took the milk billy from him and filled it at the vat. \"Everything all right with you?\"\"Fine. I've got to go up to Melbourne, to the Navy Department. I think they've got a job for me at last.\"\"Ah,\" said the farmer, \"that'll be good. Kind of wearisome, waiting around, I'd say.\"Peter nodded. \"It's going to complicate things a bit if it's a seagoing job. Mary'll be coming for the milk, though, twice a week. She'll bring the money, just the same.\"The farmer said, \"You don't have to worry about the money till you come back, anyway. I've got more milk than the pigs will take even now, dry as it is. Put twenty gallons in the creek last night-can't get it away. Suppose I ought to raise more pigs, but then it doesn't seem worth while. It's hard to say what to do ...\" He stood in silence for a minute, and then he said, \"Going to be kind of awkward for the wife, coming over here. What's she going to do with Jennifer?\"\"She'll probably bring her over with her, in the trailer.\"\"Kind of awkward for her, that.\" The farmer walked to the alley of the milking shed and stood in the warm sunlight, looking the bicycle and trailer over. \"That's a good trailer,\" he said. \"As good a little trailer as I ever saw. Made it yourself, didn't you ?\" \"That's right.\"\"Where did you get the wheels, if I may ask?\"\"They're motor bike wheels. I got them in Elizabeth Street.\"\"Think you could get a pair for me ?\"\"I could try,\" Peter said. \"I think there may be some of them about still. They're better than the little wheels they tow more easily.\" The farmer nodded. \"They may be a bit scarce now. People seem to be hanging on to motor bikes.\"\"I was saying to the wife,\" the farmer remarked slowly, \"if I had a little trailer like that I could make it like a chair for her, put on behind the push bike and take her into Falmouth, shopping. It's mighty lonely for a woman in a place like this, these days,\" he explained. \"Not like it was before the war, when she could take the car and get into town in twenty minutes. The bullock cart takes three and a half hours, and three and a half hours back; that's seven hours for traveling alone. She did try to learn to ride a bike but she'll never make a go of it, not at her age and another baby on the way. I wouldn't want her to try. But if I had a little trailer like you've got I could take her into Falmouth twice a week, and take the milk and cream along to Mrs. Holmes at the same time.\" He paused. \"I'd like to be able to do that for the wife,\" he remarked. \"After all, from what they say on the wireless, there's not so long to go.\"The naval officer nodded. \"I'll scout around a bit today and see what I can find. You don't mind what they cost ?\"The farmer shook his head. \"So long as they're good wheels, to give no trouble. Good tyres, that's the main thing-last the time out. Like those you've got.\"The officer nodded. \"I'll have a look for some today.\"\"Taking you a good bit out of your way.\"\"I can slip up there by tram. It won't be any trouble. Thank God for the brown coal.\"The farmer turned to where the separator was still running. \"That's right. We'd be in a pretty mess but for the electricity.\" He slipped an empty churn into the stream of skim milk deftly and pulled the full churn away_ \"Tell me, Mr. Holmes,\" he said. \"Don't they use big digging machines to get the coal? Like bulldozers, and things like that?\" The officer nodded. \"Well, where do they get the oil to run those things ?\"\"I asked about that once,\" Peter said. \"They distil it on the spot, out of the brown coal. It costs about two pounds a gallon.\"\"You don't say!\" The farmer stood in thought. \"I was thinking may be if they could do that for themselves, they might do some for us. But at that price, it wouldn't hardly be practical ...\"Peter took the milk and cream billies, put them in the trailer, and set off for home. It was six-thirty when he got back. He had a shower and dressed in the uniform he had so seldom worn since his promotion, accelerated his breakfast, and rode his bicycle down the hill to catch the 8. 15 in order that he might explore the motor dealers for the wheels before his appointment.He left his bicycle at the garage that had serviced his small car in bygone days. It serviced no cars now. Horses stood stabled where the cars had been, the horses of the business men who lived outside the town, who now rode in in jodhpurs and plastic coats to stable their horses while they commuted up to town in the electric train. The petrol pumps served them as hitching posts. In the evening they would come down on the train, saddle their horses, strap the attache case to the saddle, and ride home again. The tempo of business life was slowing down and this was a help to them; the 5.3 express train from the city had been cancelled and a 4. I 7 put on to replace it.Peter Holmes travelled to the city immersed in speculations about his new appointment, for the paper famine had closed down all the daily newspapers and news now came by radio alone. The Royal Australian Navy was a very small fleet now. Seven small ships had been converted from oil burners to most unsatisfactory coal burners at great cost and effort; an attempt to convert the aircraft carrier Melbourne had been suspended when it proved that she would be too slow to allow the aircraft to land on with safety except in the strongest wind. Moreover, stocks of aviation fuel had to be husbanded so carefully that training programmes had been reduced to virtually nil, so that it now seemed inexpedient to carry on the Fleet Air Arm at all. He had not heard of any changes in the officers of the seven minesweepers and frigates that remained in commission. It might be that somebody was sick and had to be replaced, or it might be that they had decided to rotate employed officers with the unemployed to keep up seagoing experience. More probably it meant a posting to some dreary job on shore, an office job in the Barracks or doing something with the stores at some disconsolate, deserted place like Flinders Naval Depot. He would be deeply disappointed if he did not get to sea, and yet he knew it would be better for him so. On shore he could look after Mary and the baby as he had been doing, and there was now not so long to go.He got to the city in about an hour and went out of the station to get upon the tram. It rattled unobstructed through streets innocent of other vehicles and took him quickly to the motor dealing district. Most of the shops here were closed or taken over by the few that remained open, the windows still encumbered with the useless stock. He shopped around here for a time, searching for two light wheels in good condition that would make a pair, and finally bought wheels of the same size from two makes of motor cycle, which would make complications with the axle that could be got over by the one mechanic still left in his garage. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 14.41}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1400078776", "title": "Never Let Me Go", "author": "Kazuo Ishiguro", "description": "Review ONE OF THE ATLANTIC' S 15 BOOKS YOU WON'T REGRET RE-READING \"A page turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.\u201d \u2014 Time \u201cA Gothic tour de force.... A tight, deftly controlled story.... Just as accomplished [as The Remains of the Day ] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \"Elegaic, deceptively lovely.... As always, Ishiguro pulls you under.\" \u2014 Newsweek \u201cSuperbly unsettling, impeccably controlled.... The book\u2019s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro\u2019s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly From the Back Cover From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date. \"From the Hardcover edition. About the Author Kazuo Ishiguro is the 2017 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work has been translated into more than\u00a040 languages. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have sold more than\u00a01 million copies, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films. Ishiguro's other work includes The Buried Giant, Nocturnes, A Pale View of the Hills, and An Artist of the Floating World . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. My name is Kathy H. I\u2019m thirty-one years old, and I\u2019ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That\u2019ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn\u2019t necessarily because they think I\u2019m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who\u2019ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I\u2019m not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they\u2019ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as \u201cagitated,\u201d even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying \u201ccalm.\u201d I\u2019ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.Anyway, I\u2019m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don\u2019t get half the credit. If you\u2019re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful\u2014about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I\u2019m a Hailsham student\u2014which is enough by itself sometimes to get people\u2019s backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. I\u2019ve heard it said enough, so I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard it plenty more, and maybe there\u2019s something in it. But I\u2019m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if I\u2019ll be the last. And anyway, I\u2019ve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I\u2019ll have done twelve years of this, and it\u2019s only for the last six they\u2019ve let me choose.And why shouldn\u2019t they? Carers aren\u2019t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don\u2019t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That\u2019s natural. There\u2019s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I\u2019d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I\u2019d never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I haven\u2019t been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don\u2019t have that deeper link with the donor, and though I\u2019ll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differences\u2014while they didn\u2019t exactly vanish\u2014seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we\u2019d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. It\u2019s ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.There have been times over the years when I\u2019ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I\u2019ve told myself I shouldn\u2019t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. He\u2019d just come through his third donation, it hadn\u2019t gone well, and he must have known he wasn\u2019t going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: \u201cHailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.\u201d Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he\u2019d grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didn\u2019t want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham.So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and he\u2019d lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. He\u2019d ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes he\u2019d make me say things over and over; things I\u2019d told him only the day before, he\u2019d ask about like I\u2019d never told him. \u201cDid you have a sports pavilion?\u201d \u201cWhich guardian was your special favourite?\u201d At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that\u2019s what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they\u2019d really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood, just how lucky we\u2019d been\u2014Tommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us..Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a hillside, and I\u2019ll think: \u201cMaybe that\u2019s it! I\u2019ve found it! This actually is Hailsham!\u201d Then I see it\u2019s impossible and I go on driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere. In particular, there are those pavilions. I spot them all over the country, standing on the far side of playing fields, little white prefab buildings with a row of windows unnaturally high up, tucked almost under the eaves. I think they built a whole lot like that in the fifties and sixties, which is probably when ours was put up. If I drive past one I keep looking over to it for as long as possible, and one day I\u2019ll crash the car like that, but I keep doing it. Not long ago I was driving through an empty stretch of Worcestershire and saw one beside a cricket ground so like ours at Hailsham I actually turned the car and went back for a second look.We loved our sports pavilion, maybe because it reminded us of those sweet little cottages people always had in picture books when we were young. I can remember us back in the Juniors, pleading with guardians to hold the next lesson in the pavilion instead of the usual room. Then by the time we were in Senior 2\u2014when we were twelve, going on thirteen\u2014the pavilion had become the place to hide out with your best friends when you wanted to get away from the rest of Hailsham.The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each other\u2014in the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda. But ideally you and your friends wanted the place just to yourselves, so there was often jockeying and arguing. The guardians were always telling us to be civilised about it, but in practice, you needed to have some strong personalities in your group to stand a chance of getting the pavilion during a break or free period. I wasn\u2019t exactly the wilting type myself, but I suppose it was really because of Ruth we got in there as often as we did.Usually we just spread ourselves around the chairs and benches\u2014there\u2019d be five of us, six if Jenny B. came along\u2014and had a good gossip. There was a kind of conversation that could only happen when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with laughter, or in a furious row. Mostly, it was a way to unwind for a while with your closest friends.On the particular afternoon I\u2019m now thinking of, we were standing up on stools and benches, crowding around the high windows. That gave us a clear view of the North Playing Field where about a dozen boys from our year and Senior 3 had gathered to play football. There was bright sunshine, but it must have been raining earlier that day because I can remember how the sun was glinting on the muddy surface of the grass.Someone said we shouldn\u2019t be so obvious about watching, but we hardly moved back at all. Then Ruth said: \u201cHe doesn\u2019t suspect a thing. Look at him. He really doesn\u2019t suspect a thing.\u201dWhen she said this, I looked at her and searched for signs of disapproval about what the boys were going to do to Tommy. But the next second Ruth gave a little laugh and said: \u201cThe idiot!\u201dAnd I realised that for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didn\u2019t come into it. We were gathered around the windows at that moment not because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get humiliated yet again, but just because we\u2019d heard about this latest plot and were vaguely curious to watch it unfold. In those days, I don\u2019t think what the boys did amongst themselves went much deeper than that. For Ruth, for the others, it was that detached, and the chances are that\u2019s how it was for me too.Or maybe I\u2019m remembering it wrong. Maybe even then, when I saw Tommy rushing about that field, undisguised delight on his face to be accepted back in the fold again, about to play the game at which he so excelled, maybe I did feel a little stab of pain. What I do remember is that I noticed Tommy was wearing the light blue polo shirt he\u2019d got in the Sales the previous month\u2014the one he was so proud of. I remember thinking: \u201cHe\u2019s really stupid, playing football in that. It\u2019ll get ruined, then how\u2019s he going to feel?\u201d Out loud, I said, to no one in particular: \u201cTommy\u2019s got his shirt on. His favourite polo shirt.\u201dI don\u2019t think anyone heard me, because they were all laughing at Laura\u2014the big clown in our group\u2014mimicking one after the other the expressions that appeared on Tommy\u2019s face as he ran, waved, called, tackled. The other boys were all moving around the field in that deliberately languorous way they have when they\u2019re warming up, but Tommy, in his excitement, seemed already to be going full pelt. I said, louder this time: \u201cHe\u2019s going to be so sick if he ruins that shirt.\u201d This time Ruth heard me, but she must have thought I\u2019d meant it as some kind of joke, because she laughed half-heartedly, then made some quip of her own.Then the boys had stopped kicking the ball about, and were standing in a pack in the mud, their chests gently rising and falling as they waited for the team picking to start. The two captains who emerged were from Senior 3, though everyone knew Tommy was a better player than any of that year. They tossed for first pick, then the one who\u2019d won stared at the group.\u201cLook at him,\u201d someone behind me said. \u201cHe\u2019s completely convinced he\u2019s going to be first pick. Just look at him!\u201dThere was something comical about Tommy at that moment, something that made you think, well, yes, if he\u2019s going to be that daft, he deserves what\u2019s coming. The other boys were all pre- tending to ignore the picking process, pretending they didn\u2019t care where they came in the order. Some were talking quietly to each other, some re-tying their laces, others just staring down at their feet as they trammelled the mud. But Tommy was looking eagerly at the Senior 3 boy, as though his name had already been called.Laura kept up her performance all through the team-picking, doing all the different expressions that went across Tommy\u2019s face: the bright eager one at the start; the puzzled concern when four picks had gone by and he still hadn\u2019t been chosen; the hurt and panic as it began to dawn on him what was really going on. I didn\u2019t keep glancing round at Laura, though, because I was watching Tommy; I only knew what she was doing because the others kept laughing and egging her on. Then when Tommy was left standing alone, and the boys all began sniggering, I heard Ruth say:\u201cIt\u2019s coming. Hold it. Seven seconds. Seven, six, five . . .\u201dShe never got there. Tommy burst into thunderous bellowing, and the boys, now laughing openly, started to run off towards the South Playing Field. Tommy took a few strides after them\u2014it was hard to say whether his instinct was to give angry chase or if he was panicked at being left behind. In any case he soon stopped and stood there, glaring after them, his face scarlet. Then he began to scream and shout, a nonsensical jumble of swear words and insults.We\u2019d all seen plenty of Tommy\u2019s tantrums by then, so we came down off our stools and spread ourselves around the room. We tried to start up a conversation about something else, but there was Tommy going on and on in the background, and although at first we just rolled our eyes and tried to ignore it, in the end\u2014probably a full ten minutes after we\u2019d first moved away\u2014we were back up at the windows again.The other boys were now completely out of view, and Tommy was no longer trying to direct his comments in any particular direction. He was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind, at the nearest fence post. Laura said he was maybe \u201crehearsing his Shakespeare.\u201d Someone else pointed out how each time he screamed something he\u2019d raise one foot off the ground, pointing it outwards, \u201clike a dog doing a pee.\u201d Actually, I\u2019d noticed the same foot movement myself, but what had struck me was that each time he stamped the foot back down again, flecks of mud flew up around his shins. I thought again about his precious shirt, but he was too far away for me to see if he\u2019d got much mud on it.\u201cI suppose it is a bit cruel,\u201d Ruth said, \u201cthe way they always work him up like that. But it\u2019s his own fault. If he learnt to keep his cool, they\u2019d leave him alone.\u201d\u201cThey\u2019d still keep on at him,\u201d Hannah said. \u201cGraham K.\u2019s temper\u2019s just as bad, but that only makes them all the more care- ful with him. The reason they go for Tommy\u2019s because he\u2019s a layabout.\u201dThen everyone was talking at once, about how Tommy never even tried to be creative, about how he hadn\u2019t even put anything in for the Spring Exchange. I suppose the truth was, by that stage, each of us was secretly wishing a guardian would come from the house and take him away. And although we hadn\u2019t had any part in this latest plan to rile Tommy, we had taken out ringside seats, and we were starting to feel guilty. But there was no sign of a guardian, so we just kept swapping reasons why Tommy deserved everything he got. Then when Ruth looked at her watch and said even though we still had time, we should get back to the main house, nobody argued.Tommy was still going strong as we came out of the pavilion. The house was over to our left, and since Tommy was standing in the field straight ahead of us, there was no need to go anywhere near him. In any case, he was facing the other way and didn\u2019t seem to register us at all. All the same, as my friends set off along the edge of the field, I started to drift over towards him. I knew this would puzzle the others, but I kept going\u2014even when I heard Ruth\u2019s urgent whisper to me to come back.I suppose Tommy wasn\u2019t used to being disturbed during his rages, because his first response when I came up to him was to stare at me for a second, then carry on as before. It was like he was doing Shakespeare and I\u2019d come up onto the stage in the middle of his performance. Even when I said: \u201cTommy, your nice shirt. You\u2019ll get it all messed up,\u201d there was no sign of him having heard me.So I reached forward and put a hand on his arm. Afterwards, the others thought he\u2019d meant to do it, but I was pretty sure it was unintentional. His arms were still flailing about, and he wasn\u2019t to know I was about to put out my hand. Anyway, as he threw up his arm, he knocked my hand aside and hit the side of my face. It didn\u2019t hurt at all, but I let out a gasp, and so did most of the girls behind me.That\u2019s when at last Tommy seemed to become aware of me, of the others, of himself, of the fact that he was there in that field, behaving the way he had been, and stared at me a bit stupidly.\u201cTommy,\u201d I said, quite sternly. \u201cThere\u2019s mud all over your shirt.\u201d\u201cSo what?\u201d he mumbled. But even as he said this, he looked down and noticed the brown specks, and only just stopped himself crying out in alarm. Then I saw the surprise register on his face that I should know about his feelings for the polo shirt.\u201cIt\u2019s nothing to worry about,\u201d I said, before the silence got humiliating for him. \u201cIt\u2019ll come off. If you can\u2019t get it off yourself, just take it to Miss Jody.\u201dHe went on examining his shirt, then said grumpily: \u201cIt\u2019s nothing to do with you anyway.\u201dHe seemed to regret immediately this last remark and looked at me sheepishly, as though expecting me to say something comforting back to him. But I\u2019d had enough of him by now, particularly with the girls watching\u2014and for all I knew, any number of others from the windows of the main house. So I turned away with a shrug and rejoined my friends.Ruth put an arm around my shoulders as we walked away. \u201cAt least you got him to pipe down,\u201d she said. \u201cAre you okay? Mad animal.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 9.89}, {"asin": "0061478784", "title": "Howl's Moving Castle", "author": "Diana Wynne Jones", "description": "About the Author In a career spanning four decades, award-winning author Diana Wynne Jones (1934\u20122011) wrote more than forty books of fantasy for young readers. Characterized by magic, multiple universes, witches and wizards\u2014and a charismatic nine-lived enchanter\u2014her books are filled with unlimited imagination, dazzling plots, and an effervescent sense of humor that earned her legendary status in the world of fantasy. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. howl's mo By Diana Jones HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright \u00a92008 Diana JonesAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780061478789 Chapter One In which Sophie talks to hats In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes. Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success. Her parents were well to do and kept a ladies' hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping. True, her own mother died when Sophie was two years old and her sister Lettie was one year old, and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to the third sister, Martha. This ought to have made Sophie and Lettle into Ugly Sisters, but in fact all three girls grew up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one everyone said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with the same kindness and did not favor Martha in the least. Mr. Hatter was proud of his three daughters and sent them all to the best school in town. Sophie was the most studious. She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future. It was a disappointment to her, but she was still happy enough, looking after her sisters and grooming Martha to seek her fortune when the time came. Since Fanny was always busy in the shop, Sophie was the one who looked after the younger two. There was a certain amount of screaming and hairpulling between those younger two. Lettie was by no means resigned to being the one who, next to Sophie, was bound to be the least successful. \"It's not fair!\" Lettie would shout. \"Why should Martha have the best of it just because she was born the youngest? I shall marry a prince, so there!\" To which Martha always retorted that she would end up disgustingly rich without having to marry anybody. Then Sophie would have to drag them apart and mend their clothes. She was very deft with her needle. As time went on, she made clothes for her sisters too. There was one deep rose outfit she made for Lettie, the May Day before this story really starts, which Fanny said looked as if it had come from the most expensive shop in Kingsbury. About this time everyone began talking of the Witch of the Waste again. It was said the Witch had threatened the life of the King's daughter and that the King had commanded his personal magician, Wizard Suliman, to go into the Waste and deal with the Witch. And it seemed that Wizard Stillman had not only failed to deal with the Witch: he had got himself killed by her. So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help. But the castle stayed roving about the hills, and it was learned that it did not belong to the Witch but toWizard Howl. Wizard Howl was bad enough. Though he did not seem to want to leave the hills, he was known to amuse himself by collecting young girls and sucking the souls from them. Or some people said he ate their hearts. He was an utterly cold-blooded and heartless wizard and no young girl was safe from him if he caught her on her own. Sophie, Lettie, and Martha, along with all the other girls in Market Chipping, were warned never to go out alone, which was a great annoyance to them. They wondered what use Wizard Howl found for all the souls he collected. They had other things on their minds before long, however, for Mr. Hatter died suddenly just as Sophie was old enough to leave school for good. It then appeared that Mr. Hatter had been altogether too proud of his daughters. The school fees he had been paying had left the shop with quite heavy debts. When the funeral was over, Fanny sat down in the parlor in the house next door to the shop and explained the situation. \"You'll all have to leave that school, I'm afraid,\" she said. \"I've been doing sums back and front and sideways, and the only way I can see to keep the business going and take care of the three of you is to see you all settled in a promising apprenticeship somewhere. It isn't practical to have you all in the shop. I can't afford it. So this is what I've decided. Lettie first -- \" Continues... Excerpted from howl's mo by Diana Jones Copyright \u00a92008 by Diana Jones. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0553294385", "title": "I, Robot (The Robot Series)", "author": "Isaac Asimov", "description": "Amazon.com Review In this collection, one of the great classics of science fiction, Asimov set out the principles of robot behavior that we know as the Three Laws of Robotics. Here are stories of robots gone mad, mind-reading robots, robots with a sense of humor, robot politicians, and robots who secretly run the world, all told with Asimov's trademark dramatic blend of science fact and science fiction. About the Author Isaac Asimov began his Foundation Series at the age of twenty-one, not realizing that it would one day be considered a cornerstone of science fiction. During his legendary career, Asimov penned over 470 books on subjects ranging from science to Shakespeare to history, though he was most loved for his award-winning science fiction sagas, which include the Robot, Empire, and Foundation series. Named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Asimov entertained and educated readers of all ages for close to five decades. He died, at the age of seventy-two, in April 1992. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ROBBIE\"Ninety-eight--ninety-nine--one hundred.\" Gloria withdrew her chubby little forearm from before her eyes and stood for a moment, wrinkling her nose and blinking in the sunlight. Then, trying to watch in all directions at once, she withdrew a few cautious steps from the tree against which she had been leaning.She craned her neck to investigate the possibilities of a clump of bushes to the right and then withdrew farther to obtain a better angle for viewing its dark recesses. The quiet was profound except for the incessant buzzing of insects and the occasional chirrup of some hardy bird, braving the midday sun.Gloria pouted, \"I bet he went inside the house, and I've told him a million times that that's not fair.\"With tiny lips pressed together tightly and a severe frown crinkling her forehead, she moved determinedly toward the two-story building up past the driveway.Too late she heard the rustling sound behind her, followed by the distinctive and rhythmic clump-clump of Robbie's metal feet. She whirled about to see her triumphing companion emerge from hiding and make for the home-tree at full speed.Gloria shrieked in dismay. \"Wait, Robbie! That wasn't fair, Robbie! You promised you wouldn't run until I found you.\" Her little feet could make no headway at all against Robbie's giant strides. Then, within ten feet of the goal, Robbie's pace slowed suddenly to the merest of crawls, and Gloria, with one final burst of wild speed, dashed pantingly past him to touch the welcome bark of home-tree first.Gleefully, she turned on the faithful Robbie, and with the basest of ingratitude, rewarded him for his sacrifice by taunting him cruelly for a lack of running ability.\"Robbie can't run,\" she shouted at the top of her eight-year-old voice. \"I can beat him any day. I can beat him any day.\" She chanted the words in a shrill rhythm.Robbie didn't answer, of course--not in words. He pantomimed running instead, inching away until Gloria found herself running after him as he dodged her narrowly, forcing her to veer in helpless circles, little arms outstretched and fanning at the air.\"Robbie,\" she squealed, \"stand still!\"--And the laughter was forced out of her in breathless jerks.--Until he turned suddenly and caught her up, whirling her round, so that for her the world fell away for a moment with a blue emptiness beneath, and green trees stretching hungrily downward toward the void. Then she was down in the grass again, leaning against Robbie's leg and still holding a hard, metal finger.After a while, her breath returned. She pushed uselessly at her disheveled hair in vague imitation of one of her mother's gestures and twisted to see if her dress were torn.She slapped her hand against Robbie's torso, \"Bad boy! I'll spank you!\"And Robbie cowered, holding his hands over his face so that she had to add, \"No, I won't, Robbie. I won't spank you. But anyway, it's my turn to hide now because you've got longer legs and you promised not to run till I found you.\"Robbie nodded his head--a small parallelepiped with rounded edges and corners attached to a similar but much larger parallelepiped that served as torso by means of a short, flexible stalk--and obediently faced the tree. A thin, metal film descended over his glowing eyes and from within his body came a steady, resonant ticking.\"Don't peek now--and don't skip any numbers,\" warned Gloria, and scurried for cover.With unvarying regularity, seconds were ticked off, and at the hundredth, up went the eyelids, and the glowing red of Robbie's eyes swept the prospect. They rested for a moment on a bit of colorful gingham that protruded from behind a boulder. He advanced a few steps and convinced himself that it was Gloria who squatted behind it.Slowly, remaining always between Gloria and home-tree, he advanced on the hiding place, and when Gloria was plainly in sight and could no longer even theorize to herself that she was not seen, he extended one arm toward her, slapping the other against his leg so that it rang again. Gloria emerged sulkily.\"You peeked!\" she exclaimed, with gross unfairness. \"Besides I'm tired of playing hide-and-seek. I want a ride.\"But Robbie was hurt at the unjust accusation, so he seated himself carefully and shook his head ponderously from side to side.Gloria changed her tone to one of gentle coaxing immediately, \"Come on, Robbie. I didn't mean it about the peeking. Give me a ride.\"Robbie was not to be won over so easily, though. He gazed stubbornly at the sky, and shook his head even more emphatically.\"Please, Robbie, please give me a ride.\" She encircled his neck with rosy arms and hugged tightly. Then, changing moods in a moment, she moved away. \"If you don't, I'm going to cry,\" and her face twisted appallingly in preparation.Hard-hearted Robbie paid scant attention to this dreadful possibility, and shook his head a third time. Gloria found it necessary to play her trump card.\"If you don't,\" she exclaimed warmly, \"I won't tell you any more stories, that's all. Not one--\"Robbie gave in immediately and unconditionally before this ultimatum, nodding his head vigorously until the metal of his neck hummed. Carefully, he raised the little girl and placed her on his broad, flat shoulders.Gloria's threatened tears vanished immediately and she crowed with delight. Robbie's metal skin, kept at a constant temperature of seventy by the high resistance coils within, felt nice and comfortable, while the beautifully loud sound her heels made as they bumped rhythmically against his chest was enchanting.\"You're an air-coaster, Robbie, you're a big, silver air-coaster. Hold out your arms straight. --You got to, Robbie, if you're going to be an air-coaster.\"The logic was irrefutable. Robbie's arms were wings catching the air currents and he was a silver 'coaster.Gloria twisted the robot's head and leaned to the right. He banked sharply. Gloria equipped the 'coaster with a motor that went \"Br-r-r\" and then with weapons that went \"Powie\" and \"Sh-sh-shshsh.\" Pirates were giving chase and the ship's blasters were coming into play. The pirates dropped in a steady rain.\"Got another one. --Two more,\" she cried.Then \"Faster, men,\" Gloria said pompously, \"we're running out of ammunition.\" She aimed over her shoulder with undaunted courage and Robbie was a blunt-nosed spaceship zooming through the void at maximum acceleration.Clear across the field he sped, to the patch of tall grass on the other side, where he stopped with a suddenness that evoked a shriek from his flushed rider, and then tumbled her onto the soft, green carpet.Gloria gasped and panted, and gave voice to intermittent whispered exclamations of \"That was nice!\"Robbie waited until she had caught her breath and then pulled gently at a lock of hair.\"You want something?\" said Gloria, eyes wide in an apparently artless complexity that fooled her huge \"nursemaid\" not at all. He pulled the curl harder.\"Oh, I know. You want a story.\"Robbie nodded rapidly.\"Which one?\"Robbie made a semi-circle in the air with one finger.The little girl protested, \"Again? I've told you Cinderella a million times. Aren't you tired of it? --It's for babies.\"Another semi-circle.\"Oh, well,\" Gloria composed herself, ran over the details of the tale in her mind (together with her own elaborations, of which she had several) and began:\"Are you ready? Well--once upon a time there was a beautiful little girl whose name was Ella. And she had a terribly cruel step-mother and two very ugly and very cruel step-sisters and--\"Gloria was reaching the very climax of the tale--midnight was striking and everything was changing back to the shabby originals lickety-split, while Robbie listened tensely with burning eyes--when the interruption came.\"Gloria!\"It was the high-pitched sound of a woman who has been calling not once, but several times; and had the nervous tone of one in whom anxiety was beginning to overcome impatience.\"Mamma's calling me,\" said Gloria, not quite happily. \"You'd better carry me back to the house, Robbie.\"Robbie obeyed with alacrity for somehow there was that in him which judged it best to obey Mrs. Weston, without as much as a scrap of hesitation. Gloria's father was rarely home in the daytime except on Sunday--today, for instance--and when he was, he proved a genial and understanding person. Gloria's mother, however, was a source of uneasiness to Robbie and there was always the impulse to sneak away from her sight.Mrs. Weston caught sight of them the minute they rose above the masking tufts of long grass and retired inside the house to wait.\"I've shouted myself hoarse, Gloria,\" she said, severely. \"Where were you?\"\"I was with Robbie,\" quavered Gloria. \"I was telling him Cinderella, and I forgot it was dinner-time.\"\"Well, it's a pity Robbie forgot, too.\" Then, as if that reminded her of the robot's presence, she whirled upon him. \"You may go, Robbie. She doesn't need you now.\" Then, brutally, \"And don't come back till I call you.\"Robbie turned to go, but hesitated as Gloria cried out in his defense, \"Wait, Mamma, you got to let him stay. I didn't finish Cinderella for him. I said I would tell him Cinderella and I'm not finished.\"\"Gloria!\"\"Honest and truly, Mamma, he'll stay so quiet, you won't even know he's here. He can sit on the chair in the corner, and he won't say a word,--I mean he won't do anything. Will you, Robbie?\"Robbie, appealed to, nodded his massive head up and down once.\"Gloria, if you don't stop this at once, you shan't see Robbie for a whole week.\"The girl's eyes fell, \"All right! But Cinderella is his favorite story and I didn't finish it. --And he likes it so much.\"The robot left with a disconsolate step and Gloria choked back a sob.George Weston was comfortable. It was a habit of his to be comfortable on Sunday afternoons. A good, hearty dinner below the hatches; a nice, soft, dilapidated couch on which to sprawl; a copy of the Times; slippered feet and shirtless chest;--how could anyone help but be comfortable?He wasn't pleased, therefore, when his wife walked in. After ten years of married life, he still was so unutterably foolish as to love her, and there was no question that he was always glad to see her--still Sunday afternoons just after dinner were sacred to him and his idea of solid comfort was to be left in utter solitude for two or three hours. Consequently, he fixed his eye firmly upon the latest reports of the Lefebre-Yoshida expedition to Mars (this one was to take off from Lunar Base and might actually succeed) and pretended she wasn't there.Mrs. Weston waited patiently for two minutes, then impatiently for two more, and finally broke the silence.\"George!\"\"Hmpph?\"\"George, I say! Will you put down that paper and look at me?\"The paper rustled to the floor and Weston turned a weary face toward his wife, \"What is it, dear?\"\"You know what it is, George. It's Gloria and that terrible machine.\"\"What terrible machine?\"\"Now don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. It's that robot Gloria calls Robbie. He doesn't leave her for a moment.\"\"Well, why should he? He's not supposed to. And he certainly isn't a terrible machine. He's the best darn robot money can buy and I'm damned sure he set me back half a year's income. He's worth it, though--darn sight cleverer than half my office staff.\"He made a move to pick up the paper again, but his wife was quicker and snatched it away.\"You listen to me, George. I won't have my daughter entrusted to a machine--and I don't care how clever it is. It has no soul, and no one knows what it may be thinking. A child just isn't made to be guarded by a thing of metal.\"Weston frowned, \"When did you decide this? He's been with Gloria two years now and I haven't seen you worry till now.\"\"It was different at first. It was a novelty; it took a load off me, and--and it was a fashionable thing to do. But now I don't know. The neighbors--\"\"Well, what have the neighbors to do with it. Now, look. A robot is infinitely more to be trusted than a human nursemaid. Robbie was constructed for only one purpose really--to be the companion of a little child. His entire 'mentality' has been created for the purpose. He just can't help being faithful and loving and kind. He's a machine--made so. That's more than you can say for humans.\"\"But something might go wrong. Some--some--\" Mrs. Weston was a bit hazy about the insides of a robot, \"some little jigger will come loose and the awful thing will go berserk and--and--\" She couldn't bring herself to complete the quite obvious thought.\"Nonsense,\" Weston denied, with an involuntary nervous shiver. \"That's completely ridiculous. We had a long discussion at the time we bought Robbie about the First Law of Robotics. You know that it is impossible for a robot to harm a human being; that long before enough can go wrong to alter that First Law, a robot would be completely inoperable. It's a mathematical impossibility. Besides I have an engineer from U.S. Robots here twice a year to give the poor gadget a complete overhaul. Why, there's no more chance of anything at all going wrong with Robbie than there is of you or I suddenly going looney--considerably less, in fact. Besides, how are you going to take him away from Gloria?\"He made another futile stab at the paper and his wife tossed it angrily into the next room.\"That's just it, George! She won't play with anyone else. There are dozens of little boys and girls that she should make friends with, but she won't. She won't go near them unless I make her. That's no way for a little girl to grow up. You want her to be normal, don't you? You want her to be able to take her part in society.\"\"You're jumping at shadows, Grace. Pretend Robbie's a dog. I've seen hundreds of children who would rather have their dog than their father.\"\"A dog is different, George. We must get rid of that horrible thing. You can sell it back to the company. I've asked, and you can.\"\"You've asked? Now look here, Grace, let's not go off the deep end. We're keeping the robot until Gloria is older and I don't want the subject brought up again.\" And with that he walked out of the room in a huff.Mrs. Weston met her husband at the door two evenings later. \"You'll have to listen to this, George. There's bad feeling in the village.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0789489902", "title": "Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises", "author": "Mark Carwardine", "description": "About the Author Mark Carwardine is a zoologist, writer, photographer, consultant, and broadcaster with a special interest in marine wildlife. He has written more than 40 books and has hosted natural history programs on BBC Radio. Martin Camm is a gifted natural history artist who specializes in studying each species in its native environment.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 24.0}], "target_asin": "1400078776"}
{"user_id": "AFN7OPM7GRGUFJRHHEF5DWGQXOTQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00VR2L60S", "title": "Rolling in the Deep", "author": "Mira Grant", "description": "From the Inside Flap When the Imagine Network commissioned a documentary on mermaids, to be filmed from the cruise ship Atargatis, they expected what they had always received before: an assortment of eyewitness reports that proved nothing, some footage that proved even less, and the kind of ratings that only came from peddling imaginary creatures to the masses.They didn't expect actual mermaids. They certainly didn't expect those mermaids to have teeth.This is the story of the Atargatis, lost at sea with all hands. Some have called it a hoax; others have called it a maritime tragedy. Whatever the truth may be, it will only be found below the bathypelagic zone in the Mariana Trench\u2026and the depths are very good at keeping secrets. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. About the Author Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit and raised in a working-class Arab American enclave in Dearborn, Michigan. His short stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Campbell awards, have appeared in Years Best Fantasy and numerous magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, and have been translated into five foreign languages. His first novel was Throne of the Crescent Moon . He lives near Detroit with his wife and their twin children. Rae Carson is the author of the bestselling and award-winning Girl of Fire and Thorns series. Her books tend to contain adventure, magic, and smart girls who make (mostly) smart choices. Originally from California, she now lives in Arizona with her husband. Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Hugo, Campbell, and Nebula Award-winning author Seanan McGuire. John Jackson Miller is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars:\u00a0Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Dawn, Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith, and the Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic graphic novel collections from Marvel, among many other novels and comics. A comics industry analyst, he lives in Wisconsin with his wife, their two children, and far too many comic books. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1618686356", "title": "Exit Zero", "author": "Neil Cohen", "description": "Review \"I just died and went to Zombie heaven!\" -- Nicole \"Snooki\" Polizzi\u201cIn a genre filled with flesh-and-brain eating ghouls, Neil Cohen has carved out a niche for himself. Exit 0 pays homage to the stories that came before it, while deftly adding a flourish to the mythos!\u201d -- Mike Zapcic of AMC's Comic Book Men and Jay and Silent Bob's Super Groovy Cartoon Movie\u201c Exit Zero is a quick read, and genuinely tries to tell a different tale using some of our traditional zombie lore and modern conspiracy stories. I'd recommend it to folks looking for something a little strange who believe the zombie tale is a vehicle for satire and social critique.\u201d \u2015 docterror.com \u201cAs a scientist working to protect germs from people I found the story smart and its killer twist quite riveting. Neil Cohen takes the reader on the wild side of the dual use dilemma in biotechnology and into the dark side of science experimentation.\u201d -- Dr. Dana Perkins, UN Security Council Committee 1540, Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons Group of Experts.\u201cA must read for any fan of the Zombie Genre. It epitomizes everything an account of a Zombie outbreak needs to be.\u201d -- Graeme Martin, beyondthegore.co.uk About the Author Originally from New Jersey, Neil A. Cohen has spent the past 15 years working for a Washington, DC based defense firm with a focus on counter-WMD, mass casualty, civil unrest and terrorism response. He interacts regularly with military leaders and scientists from governments both foreign and domestic.  As a lifelong fan of zombies and apocalyptic literature and films, he has often had discussions with his clients about how a true zombie pandemic could come about and how it would be managed. The author was amazed at how many within the military and first responder community had put serious consideration into this scenario and created actual plans on how they would respond. While unlikely, nothing is in this book is impossible. Neil has been writing articles and appearing as a public speaker for more than 25 years and has always added his dark sense of humor to his material. Neil currently lives outside of Washington, D.C. with his wife Vicki, two daughters Sasha and Hannah.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "0312983212", "title": "Saucer", "author": "Stephen Coonts", "description": "Review \u201cCoonts knows how to write and build suspense.\u201d \u2015 The New York Times Book Review \u201cTough to put down.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cA comic, feel-good sf adventure.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cCoonts is a natural storyteller.\u201d \u2015 USA Today From the Inside Flap Praise for the novels of Stephen Coonts America \"The master of the techno-thriller spins a bone-chilling worst-case scenario involving international spies, military heroics, conniving politicians, devious agencies, a hijacked nuclear sub, lethal computer hackers, currency speculators, maniac moguls and greedy mercenaries that rivals Clancy for fiction-as-realism and Cussler for spirited action... [Coonts] never lets up with heart-racing jet/missile combat, suspenseful submarine maneuvers and doomsday scenarios that feel only too real, providing real food for thought in his dramatization of the missile-shield debate.\"- Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"Fans of Coonts and his hero Grafton will love it. Great fun.\"- Library Journal \"Coonts's action and the techno-talk are as gripping as ever.\"- Kirkus Reviews \"Thrilling roller-coaster action. Give a hearty welcome back to Adm. Jake Grafton.\" - The Philadelphia Inquirer Hong Kong \"The author gives us superior suspense with a great cast of made-up characters...But the best thing about this book is Coonts's scenario for turning China into a democracy.\"--Liz Smith, The New York Post \"A high-octane blend of techno-wizardry [and] ultraviolence...[Coonts] skillfully captures the postmodern flavor of Hong Kong, where a cell phone is as apt as an AK-47 to be a revolutionary weapon.\"- USA Today \"Entertaining...intriguing.\"- Booklist \"Will be enjoyed by Coonts's many fans...Coonts has perfected the art of the high-tech adventure story.\"- Library Journal \"Coonts does a remarkable job of capturing the mood of clashing cultures in Hong Kong.\"- Publishers Weekly \"Filled with action, intrigue, and humanity.\"- San Jose Mercury News \"Move over Clancy, readers know they can count on Coonts.\"-Midwest Book Review Cuba \"Enough Tomahawk missiles, stealth bombers, and staccato action to satisfy [Coonts's] most demanding fans.\" - USA Today \"[A] gripping and intelligent thriller.\"- Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"Perhaps the best of Stephen Coonts's six novels about modern warfare.\"- Austin American-Statesman \"Coonts delivers some of his best gung-ho suspense writing yet.\"- Kirkus Reviews \"Dramatic, diverting action...Coonts delivers.\"-- Booklist Fortunes of War \"[Coonts] is a natural storyteller [with] a rare gift...Fortunes of War is crammed with a action, suspense, and characters with more than the usual one dimension found in these books.-- USA Today \"A stirring examination of courage, compassion, and profound nobility of military professionals under fire. Coonts's best yet.\"- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \"Full of action and suspense...a strong addition to the genre.\" - Publishers Weekly Flight of the Intruder \"Extraordinary! Once you start reading, you won't want to stop!\"-Tom Clancy \"Coonts knows how to write and build suspense...this is the mark of a natural storyteller.\" -- The New York Times Book Review \"[Coonts's] gripping, first-person narration of aerial combat is the best I've ever read. Once begun, this book cannot be laid aside.\" -The Wall Street Journal \"Kept me strapped in the cockpit of the author's imagination for a down-and-dirty novel.\" - St. Louis Post-Dispatch From the Back Cover \"Coonts knows how to write and build suspense.\" - The New York Times Book Review A relic from the past. A bridge to the future. After 140,000 Years... Seismic Surveyor Rip Cantrell has made an exhilarating discovery-a flying saucer embedded in the Sahara sandstone. Buried for eons, it's not the invention of modern man. Computer-equipped, it can't belong to ancient man. Rip's betting his life on the only alternative. If the ship's memory bank holds the proof he needs, it's going to rock civilization, and make Rip a very famous man. Its Time Has Come. Once the secret's out, Rip's outwitted by an enterprising billionaire set to steal the saucer's profitable technology-and outnumbered by the Libyan army looking to lay claim to history. But it's in a skeptical UFO investigation team that Rip finds an unlikely ally: test-pilot Charlotte Pine. Together, they come up with a plan to protect the saucer's secrets. But Where In The World Is It Going? Under a hail of bullets, in an exhaust of white fire, Rip and Charlotte are off. Accelerating on a fantastic journey across continents and oceans, they're about to experience the mystery of what once was, and explore the possibilities of what could be, on an adventure 140,000 years in the making. \"Tough to put down.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"A comic, feel-good sf adventure.\" - Kirkus Reviews \"Coonts is a natural storyteller.\" - USA Today About the Author Stephen Coonts is the author of The Disciple , The Assassin , and the Deep Black and Saucers series, among many other bestsellers. His first novel, the classic flying tale Flight of the Intruder , spent more than six months at the top of The New York Times bestseller list. A motion picture based on the book was released in 1991. His novels have been published around the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. In 1986, he was honored by the U.S. Naval Institute with its Author of the Year Award. He is also the editor of several anthologies, Combat , On Glorious Wings , Victory and War in the Air . Coonts served in the Navy from 1969 to 1977, including two combat cruises on the USS Enterprise during the last years of the Vietnam War. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.85}, {"asin": "0982332203", "title": "Who Goes There?: The Novella That Formed the Basis of the Thing", "author": "John Wood Campbell", "description": "Review \"One of the finest science fiction novellas ever written.\" --Science Fiction Writers of America Review \"An expert in the art and science of scaring the hell out of people.\" On William F. Nolan, author of Who Goes There? SCREEN TREATMENT, included in the Rocket Ride Books edition. Review \"(John W. Campbell is) the most powerful force in science fiction ever.\" From the Publisher This edition features William F. Nolan's (\"Logan's Run\", \"Burnt Offerings\") never-before-published SCREEN TREATMENT of \"Who Goes There?\" (THE THING), written for Universal Studios in 1978, a scary, suspenseful, cinematic take on Campbell's story. Nolan also penned the Introduction, discussing Campbell's importance to the SF genre and Nolan's personal involvement with the story. From the Back Cover \"The most powerful force in science fiction ever.\" - Isaac Asimov John Wood Campbell, Jr. (June 8, 1910 - July 11, 1971) remains a towering figure in science fiction. His influence, first as a writer, later as editor of Astounding Science Fiction (Analog) transformed the field, shaping the golden age of science fiction and producing SF legends, Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov. WHO GOES THERE? is best known to science fiction and horror film fans as THE THING because it is the story that formed the basis of Howard Hawks' THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951) and John Carpenter's THE THING (1982). But to ardent readers of SF literature, it is the legendary SF-suspense classic penned by none other than John W. Campbell. With its vivid ensemble of characters, forbidding antarctic setting, and an unforgettably original creature at the center of all the action, the story well deserves its legendary status; it was voted \"one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written\" by the Science Fiction Writers of America. This all-new edition features an Introduction by William F. Nolan (Logan's Run, Burnt Offerings), and includes his never-before-published Screen Treatment of the story. Written for Universal Studios in 1978, Nolan's scary, suspenseful, cinematic take on Who Goes There? truly makes this a must-have edition for fans of Campbell and THE THING motion pictures. About the Author Hailed by Isaac Asimov as \"the most powerful force in Science Fiction ever,\" John W. Campbell is regarded as the father of modern SF. First as a popular author, later as editor of Astounding, he produced such legendary talents as Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, and A. E. van Vogt, and shaped the golden age of science fiction. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": "from 19.43"}, {"asin": "0316309583", "title": "Rise: The Complete Newsflesh Collection", "author": "Mira Grant", "description": "Review \"A rich expansion on a beloved universe.\"\u2015 New York Times on Rise \"While there's plenty of zombie mayhem, political snark, and pointedly funny observations here, the heart of this book is about human relationships, which are still the most important thing in the world...even in a world where you might have to shoot the person you love most in the head, just to stop them from biting off your face.\"\u2015 Locus on Feed \"Feed is a proper thriller with zombies. Grant doesn't get carried away with describing her world or the virus. She's clearly thought both out brilliantly, but she doesn't let it get in the way of a taut, well-written story.\"\u2015 SFX on Feed \"Gripping, thrilling, and brutal... Shunning misogynistic horror tropes in favor of genuine drama and pure creepiness, McGuire has crafted a masterpiece of suspense with engaging, appealing characters who conduct a soul-shredding examination of what's true and what's reported.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) on Feed \"It's a novel with as much brains as heart, and both are filling and delicious.\"\u2015 The A. V. Club on Feed \"OK, all of you readers who want something weighty and yet light, campy and yet smart, horror with heart, a summer beach read that will stay in your head and whisper to you \"what if,\" Deadline is just what you are looking for.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews on Deadline About the Author Mira Grant lives in California, sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same. Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan McGuire -- winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com or follow her on twitter @seananmcguire.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 25.0}, {"asin": "B07943P5S8", "title": "The Nightmare Room (The Messy Man Book 1)", "author": "Chris Sorensen", "description": "Review [Sorensen's] characterizations are precise and sympathetic, and he has a clear grasp on where to place atmospheric tension fitting for a novel of suspense.-- \"AudioFile\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. About the Author Chris Sorensen is the AudioFile Earphones Awardwinning narrator of Brian Lies Bats at the Beach , Colum McCanns Let the Great World Spin , and Margaret Peterson Haddixs Sent . Other narrations include Patricia Woods Lottery and Jodi Picoults Songs of the Humpback Whale , among many others. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Review [Sorensen's] characterizations are precise and sympathetic, and he has a clear grasp on where to place atmospheric tension fitting for a novel of suspense.-- \"AudioFile\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1503095363", "title": "This Island Earth", "author": "Raymond F. Jones", "description": "About the Author Raymond F. Jones was an American science fiction author. Between 1951 and 1978, he published sixteen novels and dozens of stories. He is best known for his 1952 novel, THIS ISLAND EARTH, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1955 film.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "031609353X", "title": "Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain", "author": "A. Lee Martinez", "description": "Review \"Abundant, zany humor.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly on Monster \" Divine Misfortune reads like a mash-up of Neil Gaiman, Monty Python, and a sugar-bombed nine-year old.\"\u2015 Locus About the Author A. Lee Martinez was born in El Paso, Texas. At the age of eighteen, for no apparent reason, he started writing novels. Thirteen short years (and a little over a dozen manuscripts) later, his first novel, Gil's All Fright Diner , was published. His hobbies include juggling, games of all sorts, and astral projecting. Also, he likes to sing along with the radio when he's in the car by himself. For more information on the author, check out www.aleemartinez.com", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.81}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0553270109", "title": "Exorcist, The", "author": "William Peter Blatty", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.06}, {"asin": "1523506849", "title": "Audubon Nature Page-A-Day\u00ae Gallery Calendar 2020", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Audubon's mission is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earth's biological diversity.  Audubon's network of community-based nature centers and chapters, scientific and educational programs, and advocacy on behalf of areas sustaining important bird populations, engage millions of people of all ages and backgrounds in positive conservation experiences.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Photography & Video"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 17.88}, {"asin": "1250752329", "title": "Hello, Summer: A Novel", "author": "Mary Kay Andrews", "description": "From the Artist Mary Kay Andrews; read by Kathleen McInerney", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 3.49}, {"asin": "0307894207", "title": "Final Fantasy XIII-2: The Complete Official Guide", "author": "Tony Gao", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Games & Strategy Guides"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 47.67}], "target_asin": "0553270109"}
{"user_id": "AGGH7232MXRB2Z22EJM6QMYVJZMQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0806905840", "title": "500 Formulas For Aromatherapy: Mixing Essential Oils for Every Use", "author": "David Schiller", "description": "From Booklist Scented oils have been around for centuries, and the Schillers are strong believers in the benefits of using pure essential oils--diluted in a carrier oil, such as sesame--to relieve stress and a myriad of other disorders (communication enhancement and cellulite reduction among them). As Aroma lamps, which disperse the vapors, become readily available in shops, more people may choose to experiment with aromatherapy in their homes. Other uses for these formulas include adding oils to bathwater, for massage, in body powders made with cornstarch, or in candles. It's interesting to just page through the alphabetical section and learn the purported advantages of oils from allspice ( Pimenta officinalis ) to ylang-ylang ( Cananga odorata ). Alice Joyce About the Author Carol Schiller and David Schiller have been working with formulating aromatherapy blends since 1986. Their aromatherapy articles have appeared in Mothering , Massage , Health World , Herb Quarterly , and Your Health . They also instruct classes for colleges and hold training courses for companies.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.9}, {"asin": "184483624X", "title": "Essential Oils Handbook: All the Oils You Will Ever Need for Health, Vitality and Well-being", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Jennie Harding BA, TIDHA, MIPTI, HNC has over 17 years' experience as a specialist and healer working with essential oils, and was Senior Essential Oil tutor at the Tisserand Institute in London for 13 years. She has written books on subjects ranging from aromatherapy, herbs and incense to stress management and natural beauty. Among these is Aromatherapy Massage for You (DBP).", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.45}, {"asin": "B002U33OBM", "title": "Encens Protection - 20 grs - Hem", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Foreign Language Books", "French"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.19}, {"asin": "B001G41L7K", "title": "Encens San Miguel Arcangel - 20 grs - Hem", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Foreign Language Books", "French"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.95}, {"asin": "1603420789", "title": "Rosemary Gladstar's Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health: 175 Teas, Tonics, Oils, Salves, Tinctures, and Other Natural Remedies for the Entire Family", "author": "Rosemary Gladstar", "description": "From the Back Cover Homemade Remedies from Nature's Pharmacy Soothe your baby's colic, moisturize dry skin, relieve cold symptoms, or simply enjoy a good night's sleep. Renowned herbalist Rosemary Gladstar provides time-tested natural therapies and herbal remedies that are safe, effective, and easy to use. She guides you every step of the way, from the growing and ecological harvesting of herbs to basic preparations and dosage directions. Originally published in hardcover as Rosemary Gladstar's Family Herbal , this comprehensive recipe-collection offers a potent prescription for energy, health, and vitality at every stage of life. Nurture yourself and those you love with nature's healing herbs. About the Author Rosemary Gladstar is the best-selling author of Rosemary Gladstar\u2019s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner\u2019s Guide and Rosemary Gladstar\u2019s Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health , which draw on her 40-plus years of experiences studying and teaching about the healing properties of herbs. She is a world-renowned educator, activist, and entrepreneur, and the founding director of Sage Mountain Herbal Retreat Center, the International Herb Symposium, and the New England Women\u2019s Herbal Conference. Gladstar is founding president of United Plant Savers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation and preservation of native American herbs. She was the original formulator for Traditional Medicinal herbal teas and has led herbal educational adventures around the world. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, and serves on the board of the Association for the Advancement of Restorative Medicine and The National Health Freedom Coalition. She lives in Vermont.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.89}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1402776632", "title": "Healing Spices: How to Use 50 Everyday and Exotic Spices to Boost Health and Beat Disease", "author": "Debora Yost", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Cooking by Ingredient"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 22.56}, {"asin": "0060938455", "title": "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Biography & History"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.0}, {"asin": "0465037798", "title": "Water: A Natural History", "author": "Alice Outwater", "description": "Amazon.com Review What happens when you flush your toilet? Environmental engineer and writer Alice Outwater knows, and she guides the reader through the technical ins and outs of such delicate matters as water treatment and sewage handling--subjects she writes about with considerable charm. Here you will learn how \"raw sludge brew\" is separated, how methane from sewage is converted to a source of power, and how aqueducts past and present really work. Outwater also describes in lay terms the complex ecology of rivers, making a strong case for the preservation of free-flowing streams in the place of dammed waterways. Her book is somewhat more narrowly focused than the title suggests, but it is highly interesting and instructive nonetheless. From Publishers Weekly A generation after the Clean Water Act was passed, one third of our waters are still polluted, according to the author, and only 6% of contamination is caused by industry. Environmental engineer Outwater, who managed scum and sludge removal in the Boston Harbor cleanup, reaches back into our history to chart the changes in our waters. Once, a tenth of the total land area was beaver-built wetland; the beaver's decline caused the first major shift in the nation's water cycle. The depressions buffalo made on the ground and the holes dug by prairie dogs collected rain and runoff that seeped down to the water table; our waterways have been transformed by the loss of these keystone species. Outwater looks at grasslands and forests, artificial waterways, agriculture, aqueducts and toilet bowls, sewers and sludge (she gives a guided tour of a waste-treatment plant). She makes a strong case for restoring natural systems to public lands?repopulating beaver, bison and prairie dogs. This book is a valuable addition to environmental literature and to our understanding of water. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal A plea for ecologial conservation that focuses on \"keystone species\" such as beavers, prairie dogs, and mollusks, describing how \"nature's engineers\" must be allowed to revive our decimated waterways. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal If the United States is to have clean water again, we need to bring back the beaver and the buffalo. This theory may seem far-fetched, but after reading this book, readers will see that it makes wonderful sense. The author is an environmental engineer, with experience in sludge management through her work on the late 1980s Boston Harbor cleanup project and consulting business. Her main premise is that legislative control of industrial waste is not sufficient to clean up our polluted waterways. Natural cleansing as water travels through its cycle is needed as well, but the systems that provide it have been severely interrupted. Outwater's explanations of how beaver and buffalo (and other keystone species, such as prairie dogs, alligators, and freshwater mussels, to name a few) alter the environment, and in the process create cleansing paths for water, are well constructed and informative. The chapter on sewage systems, though not dinner conversation, is nonetheless fascinating. This thought-provoking book belongs in all environmental collections, academic and public.?Nancy J. Moeckel, Miami Univ. Lib., Oxford, OhioCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Outwater, an environmental engineer, wrote this surprising, engagingly lucid treatise after participating in the Boston Harbor cleanup and discovering that the sources of water pollution are not as simple as we once believed. Tainted water continues to be a problem even though industries no longer dump massive quantities of toxic chemicals directly into lakes and rivers. What scientists have found is that polluted water is the result of extensive changes to the natural water cycle, changes associated with the habitat-destroying activities of people. Outwater begins her eye-opening explanation by describing the beneficial effects that beavers and prairie dogs, North America's natural hydrologists, have on the water cycle, then chronicles what went wrong after those species were brought to the brink of extinction, crises related to deforestation and the paving over and plowing under of wetlands and grasslands. If water is \"the blood of the land--always in motion,\" then everything that impedes its cleansing flow is a problem and fair game for environmentalists. Donna Seaman From Kirkus Reviews The parts are considerably better than the whole in this disjointed work on water (``the blood of land'') in North America. Trained as an environmental engineer, Outwater is at home with the technical minutiae of such matters as water treatment and sewage handling, about which she writes with surprising vigor. As a collection of oddments on the human manipulation of water, her book has many virtues: You will learn, for instance, that Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was the first American town to develop a filtered water supply; you will also learn in great detail how ``raw sludge brew'' is separated, how methane from sewage is converted to a source of power, and how aqueducts work. Outwater is also good at describing some of the basic matters of river ecology, noting the importance to the food chain of free-flowing rivers that support high levels of nutrients, and she makes a good case for restoring beavers and prairie dogs to public lands as agents to increase the production of wetlands, a crucial element of the ecosystem largely reclaimed over the past two centuries for agricultural and municipal uses. But Outwater is less successful at weaving the complexities of human affairs into larger questions of nature and the environment. She relies too often on undigested facts rather than carefully interpreted information. What is missing from this book is an appreciation for water both as a natural element--there is precious little in these pages about the chemistry of water or on how rain happens to form and fall--and as a defining force in human history. The focus is much narrower than the broad title and subtitle suggest, and readers will have to look elsewhere for a thorough natural history of water. -- Copyright \u00a91996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review This provides a natural and human history of water use; from early patterns in American settlements to modern times. From changing patterns of human usage and storage to water's essential links with environmental health and nature, this provides a wide-ranging view of water's importance in the world. -- Midwest Book Review Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Earth Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.76}, {"asin": "B00C2WDD5I", "title": "The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller (The Origin Mystery, Book 1)", "author": "A.G. Riddle", "description": "Review \"...reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton.\"--The Guardian on Pandemic An Exclusive Excerpt From The Atlantis Gene PROLOGUE Research Vessel Icefall Atlantic Ocean 88 Miles off the Coast of AntarcticaKarl Selig steadied himself on the ship's rail and peered through the binoculars at the massive iceberg. Another piece of ice crumbled and fell, revealing more of the long black object. It looked almost like... a submarine. But it couldn't be.\"Hey Steve, come check this out.\"Steve Cooper, Karl's grad-school friend, tied off a buoy and joined Karl on the other side of the boat. He took the binoculars, scanned quickly, then stopped. \"Whoa. What is it? A sub?\"\"Maybe--\"\"What's under it?\"Karl grabbed the binoculars. \"Under it...\" He panned to the area under the sub. There was something else. The sub, if it was a sub, was sticking out of another metallic object, this one gray and much larger. Unlike the sub, the gray object didn't reflect light; it looked more like heat waves, the kind that shimmer just over the horizon of a warm highway or a long stretch of desert. It wasn't warm, though, or at least it wasn't melting the ice around it. Just above the structure, Karl caught a glimpse of some writing on the sub: U-977 and Kriegsmarine . A Nazi sub. Sticking out of... a structure of some sort.Karl dropped the binoculars to his side. \"Wake Naomi up and prepare to dock the boat. We're going to check it out.\"Steve rushed below deck, and Karl heard him rousing Naomi from one of the small boat's two cabins. Karl's corporate sponsor had insisted he take Naomi along. Karl had nodded in the meeting and hoped she wouldn't get in the way. He had not been disappointed. When they had put to sea five weeks ago in Cape Town, South Africa, Naomi had brought aboard two changes of clothes, three romance novels, and enough vodka to kill a Russian army. They had barely seen her since. It must be so boring for her out here , Karl thought. For him, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.Karl raised the binoculars and looked again at the massive piece of ice that had broken off from Antarctica nearly a month ago. Almost ninety percent of the iceberg was underwater, but the surface area still covered forty-seven square miles--one and a half times the size of Manhattan.Karl's doctoral thesis focused on how newly calved icebergs affected global sea currents as they dissolved. Over the last four weeks, he and Steve had deployed high-tech buoys around the iceberg that measured sea temp and salt-water/fresh-water balance as well as took periodic sonar readings of the iceberg's changing shape. The goal was to learn more about how icebergs disintegrated after leaving Antarctica. Antarctica held ninety percent of the world's ice, and when it melted in the next few centuries, it would dramatically change the world. He hoped his research would shed light on exactly how.Karl had called Steve the minute he found out he was funded. \"You've got to come with me--No, trust me.\" Steve had reluctantly agreed, and to Karl's delight, his old friend had come alive on the expedition as they took readings by day and discussed the preliminary findings each night. Before the voyage, Steve's academic career had been as listless as the iceberg they were following, as he floated from one thesis topic to another. Karl and their other friends had wondered if he would drop out of the doctoral program altogether.The research readings had been intriguing, and now they had found something else, something remarkable. There would be headlines. But what would they say? \"Nazi Sub Found in Antarctica\"? It wasn't inconceivable.Karl knew the Nazis had been obsessed with Antarctica. They'd sent expeditions there in 1938 and 1939 and even claimed part of the continent as a new German province--Neuschwabenland. Several Nazi subs were never recovered during World War II and were not known to have been sunk. The conspiracy theorists claimed that a Nazi sub left Germany just before the fall of the Third Reich, carrying away the highest ranking Nazis and the entire treasury, including priceless artifacts that had been looted and top-secret technology.At the back of Karl's mind, a new thought emerged: reward money. If there was Nazi treasure on the sub, it would be worth a huge amount of money. He would never have to worry about research funding again.The more immediate challenge was docking the boat to the iceberg. The seas were rough, and it took them three passes, but they finally managed to tie off a few miles from the sub and the strange structure under it.Karl and Steve bundled up and donned their climbing gear. Karl gave Naomi some basic instructions, the long and short of which were \"don't touch anything,\" and then he and Steve lowered themselves to the ice shelf below the boat and set off.For the next forty-five minutes, neither man said anything as they trudged across the barren ice mountain. The ice was rougher toward the interior, and their pace slowed; Steve's more than Karl's.\"We need to pick it up, Steve.\"Steve made an effort to catch up. \"Sorry. A month on the boat has got me out of shape.\"Karl glanced up at the sun. When it set, the temperature would plummet and they would likely freeze to death. The days were long here. The sun rose at 2:30 A.M. and set after 10 P.M., but they only had a few more hours. Karl picked up his pace a little more.Behind him, he heard Steve shuffling his snow-shoes as fast as he could, trying desperately to catch up. Strange sounds echoed up from the ice: first a low drone, then a rapid hammering, like a thousand woodpeckers assaulting the ice. Karl stopped and listened. He turned to Steve and their eyes met just as a spider web of tiny cracks shot out across the ice below Steve's feet. Steve looked down in horror, and then ran as hard as he could toward Karl and the untouched ice.For Karl, the scene was surreal, unfolding almost in slow motion. He felt himself run toward his friend and throw a rope from his belt. Steve caught the rope a split second before a loud crack filled the air and the ice below him collapsed, forming a giant chasm.The rope instantly pulled tight, jerking Karl off his feet and slamming him belly first into the ice. He was going to follow Steve into the ice canyon. Karl scrambled to get his feet under him, but the tug of the rope was too strong. He relaxed his hands, and the rope slid through them, slowing his forward motion. He planted his feet in front of him, and the crampons beneath his boots bit into the ice, sending shards of ice at his face as he came to a halt. He squeezed the rope, and it pulled tight against the ledge, making a strange vibrating sound almost like a low violin.\"Steve! Hang on! I'm going to pull you up--\"\"Don't!\" Steve yelled.\"What? Are you crazy--\"\"There's something down here. Lower me, slowly.\"Karl thought for a moment. \"What is it?\"\"Looks like a tunnel or a cave. It's got gray metal in it. It's blurry.\"\"Okay, hold on. I'm going to let some slack out.\" Karl let about ten feet of rope out, and when he heard nothing from Steve, another ten feet.\"Stop,\" Steve called.Karl felt the rope tugging. Was Steve swinging? The rope went slack.\"I'm in,\" Steve said.\"What is it?\"\"Not sure.\" Steve's voice was muffled now.Karl crawled to the edge of the ice and looked over.Steve stuck his head out of the mouth of the cave. \"I think it's some kind of cathedral. It's massive. There's writing on the walls. Symbols--like nothing I've ever seen. I'm going to check it out.\"\"Steve, don't--\"Steve disappeared again.A few minutes passed. Was there another slight vibration? Karl listened closely. He couldn't hear it, but he could feel it. The ice was pulsing faster now. He stood up and took a step away from the edge. The ice behind him cracked, and then there were cracks everywhere--and spreading quickly. He ran full speed toward the widening fissure. He jumped--and almost made it to the other side but came up short. His hands caught on the ice ledge, and he dangled there for a long second. The vibrations in the ice grew more violent with each passing second. Karl watched the ice around him crumble and fall, and then the shard that held him broke free, and he was plummeting down into the abyss.* * *On the boat, Naomi watched the sun set over the iceberg. She picked up the satellite phone and dialed the number the man had given her.\"You said to call if we found anything interesting.\"\"Don't say anything. Hold the line. We'll have your location within two minutes. We'll come to you.\"She set the phone on the counter, walked back to the stove, and continued stirring the pot of beans.* * *The man on the other end of the satellite phone looked up when the GPS coordinates flashed on his screen. He copied the location and searched the satellite surveillance database for live feeds. One result.He opened the stream and panned the view to the center of the iceberg, where the dark spots were. He zoomed in several times, and when the image came into focus, he dropped his coffee to the floor, bolted out of his office, and ran down the hall to the director's office. He barged in, interrupting a gray-haired man who was standing and speaking with both hands held up.\"We've found it.\" From the Inside Flap About the Author A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting internet companies before retiring to pursue his true passion: writing fiction.His debut novel, The Atlantis Gene , is the first book in The Origin Mystery , the trilogy that has sold over two million copies in the US, has been translated into 23 languages, and is in development to be a major motion picture.His recently released fourth novel, Departure , follows the survivors of a flight that takes off in the present and crash-lands in a changed world. HarperCollins published Departure in hardcover in the fall of 2015, and 20th Century Fox is developing the novel for a feature film.\u00a0Riddle grew up in a small town in North Carolina (Boiling Springs) and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. During his sophomore year of college, he started his first company with a childhood friend. He currently lives in\u00a0Raleigh, North Carolina\u00a0with his wife, who endures his various idiosyncrasies in return for being the first to read his new novels.\u00a0They welcomed their first child, a daughter, on September 2, 2016.No matter where he is, or what's going on, he tries his best to set aside time every day to answer emails and messages from readers. You can reach him at: ag@agriddle.com ** For a sneak peek at new novels, free stories, and more, join the email list at: agriddle.com/email If you don't want to miss any Riddle news, you can:Like the A.G. Riddle Facebook page: facebook.com/agriddleFollow A.G. Riddle on Twitter: twitter.com/riddlistFor more, please visit:AGRiddle.com* * * Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "1402776632"}
{"user_id": "AFIXVB7KIJHGPS64YE4BJVI2NOIQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1478135905", "title": "Parakeets : A Complete Owners Guide What Parakeets Eat, Breeding Parakeets, Training And Caring For Them", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 3.0, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "0307406199", "title": "You're So Money: Live Rich, Even When You're Not", "author": "Farnoosh Torabi", "description": "Review \"Farnoosh Torabi's You\u2019re So Money is the perfect blend of fresh advice and bold attitude necessary to educate a horribly underserved generation about personal finance.\u201d \u2014Jim Cramer\" You're So Money is the best financial book for young people I have read in ten years . Farnoosh's style is entertaining, straight to the point and powerful.\u00a0 You'll laugh as you read and learn how fun it can be to live and finish rich!\"\u00a0\u2014David Bach, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Automatic Millionaire and Start Late, Finish Rich \"Farnoosh knows so much about personal finance that I practically make more money just looking at her. And reading You\u2019re So Money gave me the advice I needed to keep my good life rolling.\" \u2014James Altucher, founder of Stockpickr.com\u201cFarnoosh Torabi's book is a hilarious must-read for anyone who wants to live like a king, even if he's just a lowly serf with nothing in his bank account but blighted turnips, and, like, $3000.\u201d \u2014Ben Lerer, co-founder of thrillist.com\"In a clear and witty way, Farnoosh tells you from experience how to jumpstart your money.\" \u2014Susan Beacham, founder of MoneySavvyGeneration\"After I read You\u2019re So Money , I immediately ordered copies to give to my three children in college. The lessons of the book define one of the best courses they could take. Indeed, this is a must read for every college student -- enjoyable, informative, and a powerful guide for the next phase of their lives and beyond.\" \u2014James B. Thomas, Dean, Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University About the Author FARNOOSH TORABI is a television, print, and Web journalist whose business reports and interviews air on thestreet.com, Google video, and Yahoo! Finance.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Personal Finance"], "average_rating": 3.6, "price": 15.68}, {"asin": "1783783400", "title": "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?", "author": "Kathleen Collins", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 32.3}, {"asin": "1530004098", "title": "31 Ideas To Turn Your Broke Holiday Or Special Occasion Into A Rich Experience: A Guide To Fun And Great Memories Without Breaking The Bank", "author": "Elise Green", "description": "About the Author Ms. Elise A. Green Elise Green is the President and Creative Director of Eskapade Productions, a boutique event production company. Elise, also know as \"Ms. Elise,\" is an event professional with 25 plus years of experience in the event production industry. She began her event-planning career in the early 80's while in college. Elise and her sister Terri ran a small event and catering company providing event and catering service in private homes. Realizing her desire to turn every gathering into a special event Elise changed her major from Accounting to Business Administration and took her OCD and organizational skills to the workplace where they let her turn every meeting into a special and memorable event. After college Elise began her 22.5 year career in Youth Ministry, which included planning the events of the church from vacation bible school with over 150 children and volunteers, community outreach carnivals and festivals bringing in over 1500 attendees with 50 volunteers, women's retreats, conferences, concerts and musical productions. Further opportunities in her career led her to work with companies like PacifiCare Health Systems, Hope Again, Los Angeles County Bar Association, Legalzoom and Safe Passage producing conferences, retreats, galas, symposium and grand opening event with over 1000 registrants and 800 plus in attendance. Elise has produced on/off site events in California and various other states in the U.S. After overcoming some health challenges, Elise is ramping up for a re-launch of Eskapade Productions in 2016. She is excited to reveal her signature events as well as work with non-profits and the small business community bringing their events to life. Elise lives in Southern California. In her spare time she likes to crochet, work on her various book projects, write musical productions and of course entertain with friends and family. Elise loves the thought of cooking fine food, but has resigned herself to eating it instead. For more information about Elise or Eskapade Productions' services email her at egreen@eskapadeproductions.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 23.99}, {"asin": "1452843236", "title": "Domestic Violence: Causes and Cures and Anger Management", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 5.49}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1118510100", "title": "Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies", "author": "Greg Harvey", "description": "From the Inside Flap 8 books in 1 Excel Basics Excel Basics Worksheet Design Worksheet Design Formulas and Functions Formulas and Functions Worksheet Collaboration and Review Worksheet Collaboration and Review Charts and Graphics Charts and Graphics Data Management Data Management Data Analysis Data Analysis Macros and VBA Macros and VBA Excel newbie or expert in older versions \u2014 here's the reference you need for Excel 2013! Understanding how to use the many features of Excel 2013 is only half the battle. The other half is understanding what these features can do for you. So whether you're starting out or upgrading, using Excel on your desktop or tablet, this all-in-one guide covers what you need to know to master worksheets, formulas, functions, charts, even data analysis. For beginners \u2014 start out right with an entire minibook devoted to mastering Excel basics For beginners \u2014 start out right with an entire minibook devoted to mastering Excel basics Working with worksheets \u2014 learn to set up, edit, manage, and dress up worksheets and print reports Working with worksheets \u2014 learn to set up, edit, manage, and dress up worksheets and print reports Get functional \u2014 explore formulas and functions from basic to complex and put them to work Get functional \u2014 explore formulas and functions from basic to complex and put them to work Team effort \u2014 share and collaborate on worksheets while keeping your data secure Team effort \u2014 share and collaborate on worksheets while keeping your data secure Make it look great \u2014 present your data with impressive charts and graphs that help interpret the information Make it look great \u2014 present your data with impressive charts and graphs that help interpret the information Manage your data \u2014 take advantage of Excel's tools for managing large amounts of data and filtering out the information you need Manage your data \u2014 take advantage of Excel's tools for managing large amounts of data and filtering out the information you need Look ahead \u2014 use Excel's computational abilities to forecast and predict possible future outcomes Look ahead \u2014 use Excel's computational abilities to forecast and predict possible future outcomes Extend Excel \u2014 install Apps for Office, use COM add-ins, and write macros and custom functions with the Visual Basic Editor Extend Excel \u2014 install Apps for Office, use COM add-ins, and write macros and custom functions with the Visual Basic Editor Open the book and find: How to build your own workbook templates How to build your own workbook templates Instructions for using Excel on a touchscreen Instructions for using Excel on a touchscreen All the ways to enter data All the ways to enter data Tips for preventing formula errors Tips for preventing formula errors Hints for sharing data with other Office 2013 programs Hints for sharing data with other Office 2013 programs Graphics you can include in your charts Graphics you can include in your charts How to query external data sources How to query external data sources A guide to PowerPivot and Power View add-ins A guide to PowerPivot and Power View add-ins From the Back Cover 8 books in 1 Excel Basics Excel Basics Worksheet Design Worksheet Design Formulas and Functions Formulas and Functions Worksheet Collaboration and Review Worksheet Collaboration and Review Charts and Graphics Charts and Graphics Data Management Data Management Data Analysis Data Analysis Macros and VBA Macros and VBA Excel newbie or expert in older versions \u2014 here's the reference you need for Excel 2013! Understanding how to use the many features of Excel 2013 is only half the battle. The other half is understanding what these features can do for you. So whether you're starting out or upgrading, using Excel on your desktop or tablet, this all-in-one guide covers what you need to know to master worksheets, formulas, functions, charts, even data analysis. For beginners \u2014 start out right with an entire minibook devoted to mastering Excel basics For beginners \u2014 start out right with an entire minibook devoted to mastering Excel basics Working with worksheets \u2014 learn to set up, edit, manage, and dress up worksheets and print reports Working with worksheets \u2014 learn to set up, edit, manage, and dress up worksheets and print reports Get functional \u2014 explore formulas and functions from basic to complex and put them to work Get functional \u2014 explore formulas and functions from basic to complex and put them to work Team effort \u2014 share and collaborate on worksheets while keeping your data secure Team effort \u2014 share and collaborate on worksheets while keeping your data secure Make it look great \u2014 present your data with impressive charts and graphs that help interpret the information Make it look great \u2014 present your data with impressive charts and graphs that help interpret the information Manage your data \u2014 take advantage of Excel's tools for managing large amounts of data and filtering out the information you need Manage your data \u2014 take advantage of Excel's tools for managing large amounts of data and filtering out the information you need Look ahead \u2014 use Excel's computational abilities to forecast and predict possible future outcomes Look ahead \u2014 use Excel's computational abilities to forecast and predict possible future outcomes Extend Excel \u2014 install Apps for Office, use COM add-ins, and write macros and custom functions with the Visual Basic Editor Extend Excel \u2014 install Apps for Office, use COM add-ins, and write macros and custom functions with the Visual Basic Editor Open the book and find: How to build your own workbook templates How to build your own workbook templates Instructions for using Excel on a touchscreen Instructions for using Excel on a touchscreen All the ways to enter data All the ways to enter data Tips for preventing formula errors Tips for preventing formula errors Hints for sharing data with other Office 2013 programs Hints for sharing data with other Office 2013 programs Graphics you can include in your charts Graphics you can include in your charts How to query external data sources How to query external data sources A guide to PowerPivot and Power View add-ins A guide to PowerPivot and Power View add-ins About the Author Greg Harvey , PhD, is President of Mind Over Media and a highly skilled instructor. He has been writing computer books for more than 20 years, and his long list of bestsellers includes all editions of Excel For Dummies , Excel All-in-One For Dummies , and Excel Workbook For Dummies . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Software"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 5.32}, {"asin": "B00CPROGQU", "title": "Murder at the High School Reunion (Book 5 Dekker Cozy Mystery Series)", "author": "Steve Demaree", "description": "About the Author Steve Demaree has always loved mysteries from the time he was a child. While he did not become an author until his early fifties, he has made up for lost time and has written twenty-six books so far, most of them mysteries with humor, but no profanity, sex, or gore. He continues to write a couple of books a year. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00EEKVSD0", "title": "Bloody Lessons (A Victorian San Francisco Mystery Book 3)", "author": "M. Louisa Locke", "description": "Review \"Ms.Locke's book is the third in her Victorian San Francisco Mysteries (and she hastwo short stories in the series too), and she continues the strong charactersand interesting views of Victorian San Francisco. This reviewer was raisedacross the bay from the city, and finds the mix of mystery, San Franciscohistory and strong women characters very appealing.\" -Laura Strathman Hulka, StoryCircle Book Reviews\u00a0\"This new mystery is, once again, cleverly created, with clues,red herrings, and the ending is perfectly done. I highly recommend the entireseries.\" -Rebecca Dahlke\u00a0\"Writing characters that are engaging to the modern reader, buttrue to their time period is tricky. As someone who has read a lot of primarysource material (e.g. letters from various war fronts, period newspaperarticles, etc.) in addition to being an avid reader of historical fiction, Ifind Locke's handling of her characters simply amazing.\"-William Ockham About the Author M. Louisa Locke, a retired professor of U.S women's history, features women's occupations in her Victorian San Francisco Mystery series.\u00a0Not content with writing about the past, Locke has recently turned to the future with a coming of age, action adventure trilogy set in\u00a0the open source science fiction world of the Paradisi Chronicles.Dr. Locke is on the Board of Directors of the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative, is a founding member of the Paradisi Chronicles, writes about self-publishing at mlouisalocke.com/blog/ and is an active member of the Alliance of Independent Authors.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "1783739401", "title": "Biblia completa ilustrada para ni\u00f1os (The Illustrated Children's Bible) (Spanish Edition)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Religions"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 23.14}], "target_asin": "1118510100"}
{"user_id": "AHG6V3WJDRPHUOA3J4EDMMRWZT3A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0439136369", "title": "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, Book 3) (3)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "034543014X", "title": "The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure (The 25th Anniversary Edition)", "author": "William Goldman", "description": "Amazon.com Review The Princess Bride is a true fantasy classic. William Goldman describes it as a \"good parts version\" of \"S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure.\" Morgenstern's original was filled with details of Florinese history, court etiquette, and Mrs. Morgenstern's mostly complimentary views of the text. Much admired by academics, the \"Classic Tale\" nonetheless obscured what Mr. Goldman feels is a story that has everything: \"Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.\" Goldman frames the fairy tale with an \"autobiographical\" story: his father, who came from Florin, abridged the book as he read it to his son. Now, Goldman is publishing an abridged version, interspersed with comments on the parts he cut out. Is The Princess Bride a critique of classics like Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers , that smother a ripping yarn under elaborate prose? A wry look at the differences between fairy tales and real life? Simply a funny, frenetic adventure? No matter how you read it, you'll put it on your \"keeper\" shelf. --Nona Vero From the Inside Flap time came a story so full of high adventure and true love that it became an instant classic and won the hearts of millions. Now in hardcover in America for the first time since 1973, this special edition of The Princess Bride is a true keepsake for devoted fans as well as those lucky enough to discover it for the first time. What reader can forget or resist such colorful characters asWestley . . . handsome farm boy who risks death and much, much worse for the woman he loves; Inigo . . . the Spanish swordsman who lives only to avenge his father's death; Fezzik . . . the Turk, the gentlest giant ever to have uprooted a tree with his bare hands; Vizzini . . . the evil Sicilian, with a mind so keen he's foiled by his own perfect logic; Prince Humperdinck . . . the eviler ruler of Guilder, who has an equally insatiable thirst for war and the beauteous Buttercup; Count Rugen . . . the evilest man of all, who thrives on the excruciating pain of others; Miracle Max. . . the King's ex-Miracle Man From the Back Cover \"His swashbuckling fable is nutball funny . . . A 'classic' medieval melodrama that sounds like all the Saturday serials you ever saw feversihly reworked by the Marx Brothers.\"--Newsweek\"One of the funniest, most original, and deeply moving novels I have read in a long time.\"--Los Angeles Times About the Author William Goldman has been writing books and movies for more than forty years. He has won two Academy Awards (for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men), and three Lifetime Achievement awards in screenwriting. His novel Marathon Man has made him very famous in dentist's offices around the world. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.How is such a thing possible? I'll do my best to explain. As a child, I had simply no interest in books. I hated reading, I was very bad at it, and besides, how could you take the time to read when there were games that shrieked for playing? Basketball, baseball, marbles--I could never get enough. I wasn't even good at them, but give me a football and an empty playground and I could invent last-second triumphs that would bring tears to your eyes. School was torture. Miss Roginski, who was my teacher for the third through fifth grades, would have meeting after meeting with my mother. \"I don't feel Billy is perhaps extending himself quite as much as he might.\" Or, \"When we test him, Billy does really exceptionally well, considering his class standing.\" Or, most often, \"I don't know, Mrs. Goldman: what are we going to do about Billy?\"What are we going to do about Billy? That was the phrase that haunted me those first ten years. I pretended not to care, but secretly I was petrified. Everyone and everything was passing me by. I had no real friends, no single person who shared an equal interest in all games. I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed, I might have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone.\"What are we going to do about you, Billy?\"\"I don't know, Miss Roginski.\"\"How could you have failed this reading test? I've heard you use every word with my own ears.\"\"I'm sorry, Miss Roginski. I must not have been thinking.\"\"You're always thinking, Billy. You just weren't thinking about the reading test.\"I could only nod.\"What was it this time?\"\"I don't know. I can't remember.\"\"Was it Stanley Hack again?\" (Stan Hack was the Cubs' third baseman for these and many other years. I saw him play once from a bleacher seat, and even at that distance he had the sweetest smile I had ever seen and to this day I swear he smiled at me several times. I just worshipped him. He could also hit a ton.)\"Bronko Nagurski. He's a football player. A great football player, and the paper last night said he might come back and play for the Bears again. He retired when I was little but if he came back and I could get someone to take me to a game, I could see him play and maybe if whoever took me also knew him, I could meet him after and maybe if he was hungry, I might let him have a sandwich I might have brought with me. I was trying to figure out what kind of sandwich Bronko Nagurski would like.\"She just sagged at her desk. \"You've got a wonderful imagination, Billy.\"I don't know what I said. Probably \"thank you\" or something.\"I can't harness it, though,\" she went on. \"Why is that?\"\"I think it's that probably I need glasses and I don't read because the words are so fuzzy. That would explain why I'm all the time squinting. Maybe if I went to an eye doctor who could give me glasses I'd be the best reader in class and you wouldn't have to keep me after school so much.\"She just pointed behind her. \"Get to work cleaning the blackboards, Billy.\"\"Yes, ma'am.\" I was the best at cleaning blackboards.\"Do they look fuzzy?\" Miss Roginski said after a while.\"Oh, no, I just made that up.\" I never squinted either. But she just seemed so whipped about it. She always did. This had been going on for three grades now.\"I'm just not getting through to you somehow.\"\"It's not your fault, Miss Roginski.\" (It wasn't. I just worshipped her too. She was all dumpy and fat but I used to wish she'd been my mother. I could never make that really come out right, unless she had been married to my father first, and then they'd gotten divorced and my father had married my mother, which was okay, because Miss Roginski had to work, so my father got custody of me--that all made sense. Only they never seemed to know each other, my dad and Miss Roginski. Whenever they'd meet, each year during the Christmas pageant when all the parents came, I'd watch the two of them like crazy, hoping for some kind of secret glimmer or look that could only mean, \"Well, how are you, how's your life been going since our divorce?\" but no soap. She wasn't my mother, she was just my teacher, and I was her own personal and growing disaster area.)\"You're going to be all right, Billy.\"\"I sure hope so, Miss Roginski.\"\"You're a late bloomer, that's all. Winston Churchill was a late bloomer and so are you.\"I was about to ask her who he played for but there was something in her tone that made me know enough not to.\"And Einstein.\"Him I also didn't know. Or what a late bloomer was either. But boy, did I ever want to be one.When I was twenty-six, my first novel, The Temple of Gold , was published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Which is now part of Random House which is now part of R.C.A. which is just part of what's wrong with publishing in America today which is not part of this story.) Anyway, before publication, the publicity people at Knopf were talking to me, trying to figure what they could do to justify their salaries, and they asked who did I want to send advance copies to that might be an opinion maker, and I said I didn't know anybody like that and they said, \"Think, everybody knows somebody,\" and so I got all excited because the idea just came to me and I said, \"Okay, send a copy to Miss Roginski,\" which I figure was logical and terrific because if anybody made my opinions, she did. (She's all through The Temple of Gold , by the way, only I called her \"Miss Patulski\"--even then I was creative.)\"Who?\" this publicity lady said.\"This old teacher of mine, you send her a copy and I'll sign it and maybe write a little--\" I was really excited until this publicity guy interrupted with, \"We were thinking of someone more on the national scene.\"Very soft I said, \"Miss Roginski, you just send her a copy, please, okay?\"\"Yes,\" he said, \"yes, by all means.\"You remember how I didn't ask who Churchill played for because of her tone? I must have hit that same tone too just then. Anyway, something must have happened because he right away wrote her name down asking was it ski or sky.\"With the i,\" I told him, already hiking through the years, trying to get the inscription fantastic for her. You know, clever and modest and brilliant and perfect, like that.\"First name?\"That brought me back fast. I didn't know her first name. \"Miss\" was all I ever called her. I didn't know her address either. I didn't even know if she was alive or not. I hadn't been back to Chicago in ten years; I was an only child, both folks gone, who needed Chicago?\"Send it to Highland Park Grammar School,\" I said, and first what I thought I'd write was \"For Miss Roginski, a rose from your late bloomer,\" but then I thought that was too conceited, so I decided \"For Miss Roginski, a weed from your late bloomer,\" would be more humble. Too humble, I decided next, and that was it for bright ideas that day. I couldn't think of anything. Then I thought, What if she doesn't even remember me? Hundreds of students over the years, why should she? So finally in desperation I put, \"For Miss Roginski from William Goldman--Billy you called me and you said I would be a late bloomer and this book is for you and I hope you like it. I was in your class for third, fourth and fifth grades, thank you very much. William Goldman.\"The book came out and got bombed; I stayed in and did the same, adjusting. Not only did it not establish me as the freshest thing since Kit Marlowe, it also didn't get read by anybody. Not true. It got read by any number of people, all of whom I knew. I think it is safe to say, however, no strangers savored it. It was a grinding experience and I reacted as indicated above. So when Miss Roginski's note came--late--it got sent to Knopf and they took their time relaying it--I was really ready for a lift.\"Dear Mr. Goldman: Thank you for the book. I have not had time yet to read it, but I am sure it is a fine endeavor. I of course remember you. I remember all my students. Yours sincerely, Antonia Roginski.\"What a crusher. She didn't remember me at all. I sat there holding the note, rocked. People don't remember me. Really. It's not any paranoid thing; I just have this habit of slipping through memories. It doesn't bother me all that much, except I guess that's a lie; it does. For some reason, I test very high on forgettability.So when Miss Roginski sent me that note making her just like everyone else, I was glad she'd never gotten married, I'd never liked her anyway, she'd always been a rotten teacher, and it served her right her first name was Antonia.\"I didn't mean it,\" I said out loud right then. I was alone in my one-room job on Manhattan's glamorous West Side and talking to myself. \"I'm sorry, I'm sorry,\" I went on. \"You got to believe that, Miss Roginski.\"What had happened, of course, was that I'd finally seen the postscript. It was on the back of the thank-you note and what it said was, \"Idiot. Not even the immortal S. Morgenstern could feel more parental than I.\"S. Morgenstern! The Princess Bride . She remembered!Flashback.1941. Autumn. I'm a little cranky because my radio won't get the football games. Northwestern is playing Notre Dame, it starts at one, and by one-thirty I can't get the game. Music, news, soap operas, everything, but not the biggie. I call for my mother. She comes. I tell her my radio's busted, I can't... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.84}, {"asin": "0590353403", "title": "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1)", "author": "Mary GrandPr\u00e9", "description": "Amazon.com Review Say you've spent the first 10 years of your life sleeping under the stairs of a family who loathes you. Then, in an absurd, magical twist of fate you find yourself surrounded by wizards, a caged snowy owl, a phoenix-feather wand, and jellybeans that come in every flavor, including strawberry, curry, grass, and sardine. Not only that, but you discover that you are a wizard yourself! This is exactly what happens to young Harry Potter in J.K. Rowling's enchanting, funny debut novel, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone . In the nonmagic human world--the world of \"Muggles\"--Harry is a nobody, treated like dirt by the aunt and uncle who begrudgingly inherited him when his parents were killed by the evil Voldemort. But in the world of wizards, small, skinny Harry is famous as a survivor of the wizard who tried to kill him. He is left only with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead, curiously refined sensibilities, and a host of mysterious powers to remind him that he's quite, yes, altogether different from his aunt, uncle, and spoiled, piglike cousin Dudley. A mysterious letter, delivered by the friendly giant Hagrid, wrenches Harry from his dreary, Muggle-ridden existence: \"We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.\" Of course, Uncle Vernon yells most unpleasantly, \"I AM NOT PAYING FOR SOME CRACKPOT OLD FOOL TO TEACH HIM MAGIC TRICKS!\" Soon enough, however, Harry finds himself at Hogwarts with his owl Hedwig... and that's where the real adventure--humorous, haunting, and suspenseful--begins. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone , first published in England as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone , continues to win major awards in England. So far it has won the National Book Award, the Smarties Prize, the Children's Book Award, and is short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, the U.K. version of the Newbery Medal. This magical, gripping, brilliant book--a future classic to be sure--will leave kids clamoring for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban . (Ages 8 to 13) --Karin Snelson From Publishers Weekly Readers are in for a delightful romp with this award-winning debut from a British author who dances in the footsteps of P.L. Travers and Roald Dahl. As the story opens, mysterious goings-on ruffle the self-satisfied suburban world of the Dursleys, culminating in a trio of strangers depositing the Dursleys' infant nephew Harry in a basket on their doorstep. After 11 years of disregard and neglect at the hands of his aunt, uncle and their swinish son Dudley, Harry suddenly receives a visit from a giant named Hagrid, who informs Harry that his mother and father were a witch and a wizard, and that he is to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry himself. Most surprising of all, Harry is a legend in the witch world for having survived an attack by the evil sorcerer Voldemort, who killed his parents and left Harry with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. And so the fun begins, with Harry going off to boarding school like a typical English kid?only his supplies include a message-carrying owl and a magic wand. There is enchantment, suspense and danger galore (as well as enough creepy creatures to satisfy the most bogeymen-loving readers, and even a magical game of soccerlike Quidditch to entertain sports fans) as Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione plumb the secrets of the forbidden third floor at Hogwarts to battle evil and unravel the mystery behind Harry's scar. Rowling leaves the door wide open for a sequel; bedazzled readers will surely clamor for one. Ages 8-12. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal Grade 4-7-Harry Potter has spent 11 long years living with his aunt, uncle, and cousin, surely the vilest household in children's literature since the family Roald Dahl created for Matilda (Viking, 1988). But like Matilda, Harry is a very special child; in fact, he is the only surviving member of a powerful magical family. His parents were killed by the evil Voldemort, who then mysteriously vanished, and the boy grew up completely ignorant of his own powers, until he received notification of his acceptance at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Once there, Harry's life changes dramatically. Hogwarts is exactly like a traditional British boarding school, except that the professors are all wizards and witches, ghosts roam the halls, and the surrounding woods are inhabited by unicorns and centaurs. There he makes good friends and terrible enemies. However, evil is lurking at the very heart of Hogwarts, and Harry and his friends must finally face the malevolent and powerful Voldemort, who is intent on taking over the world. The delight of this book lies in the juxtaposition of the world of Muggles (ordinary humans) with the world of magic. A whole host of unique characters inhabits this world, from the absentminded Head Wizard Dumbledore to the sly and supercilious student Draco Malfoy to the loyal but not too bright Hagrid. Harry himself is the perfect confused and unassuming hero, whom trouble follows like a wizard's familiar. After reading this entrancing fantasy, readers will be convinced that they, too, could take the train to Hogwarts School, if only they could find Platform Nine and Three Quarters at the King's Cross Station. Eva Mitnick, Los Angeles Public Library Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Gr. 4^-7. Orphaned in infancy, Harry Potter is raised by reluctant parents, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon, an odious couple who would be right at home in a Roald Dahl novel. Things go from awful to hideous for Harry until, with the approach of his eleventh birthday, mysterious letters begin arriving addressed to him! His aunt and uncle manage to intercept these until a giant named Hagrid delivers one in person, and to his astonishment, Harry learns that he is a wizard and has been accepted (without even applying) as a student at Hogworts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There's even more startling news: it turns out that his parents were killed by an evil wizard so powerful that everyone is afraid to so much as utter his name, Voldemort. Somehow, though, Harry survived Voldemort's attempt to kill him, too, though it has left him with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead and enormous celebrity in the world of magic, because Voldemort vanished following his failure. But is he gone for good? What is hidden on the third floor of Hogworts Castle? And who is the Man with Two Faces? Rowling's first novel, which has won numerous prizes in England, is a brilliantly imagined and beautifully written fantasy that incorporates elements of traditional British school stories without once violating the magical underpinnings of the plot. In fact, Rowling's wonderful ability to put a fantastic spin on sports, student rivalry, and eccentric faculty contributes to the humor, charm, and, well, delight of her utterly captivating story. Michael Cart From Kirkus Reviews In a rousing first novel, already an award-winner in England, Harry is just a baby when his magical parents are done in by Voldemort, a wizard so dastardly other wizards are scared to mention his name. So Harry is brought up by his mean Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia Dursley, and picked on by his horrid cousin Dudley. He knows nothing about his magical birthright until ten years later, when he learns he's to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Hogwarts is a lot like English boarding school, except that instead of classes in math and grammar, the curriculum features courses in Transfiguration, Herbology, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Harry becomes the star player of Quidditch, a sort of mid-air ball game. With the help of his new friends Ron and Hermione, Harry solves a mystery involving a sorcerer's stone that ultimately takes him to the evil Voldemort. This hugely enjoyable fantasy is filled with imaginative details, from oddly flavored jelly beans to dragons' eggs hatched on the hearth. It's slanted toward action-oriented readers, who will find that Briticisms meld with all the other wonders of magic school. (Fiction. 10-14) -- Copyright \u00a91998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review ...funny, moving and impressive.... Like Harry Potter, [J.K. Rowling] has soared beyond her modest Muggle surroundings to achieve something quite special. -- The New York Times Book Review , Michael Winerip About the Author J.K. Rowling is the author of the seven Harry Potter books, which have sold over 500 million copies, been translated into over 80 languages, and made into eight blockbuster films. She also wrote three short series companion volumes for charity, including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them , which later became the inspiration for a new series of films. Harry\u2019s story as a grown-up was later continued in a stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , which J.K. Rowling wrote with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany. In 2020, she returned to publishing for younger children with the fairy tale The Ickabog , which she initially published for free online for children in lockdown, later donating all her book royalties to help vulnerable groups affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. J.K. Rowling has received many awards and honors for her writing, including for her detective series written under the name Robert Galbraith. She supports a wide number of humanitarian causes through her charitable trust Volant, and is the founder of the children\u2019s care reform charity Lumos. For as long as she can remember, J.K. Rowling wanted to be a writer, and is at her happiest in a room, making things up. She lives in Scotland with her family. From The Washington Post Obviously, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone should make any modern 11-year-old a very happy reader. The novel moves quickly, packs in everything from a boa constrictor that winks to a melancholy Zen-spouting centaur to an owl postal system, and ends with a scary surprise. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.69}, {"asin": "043935806X", "title": "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5)", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "description": "Amazon.com Review As his fifth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry approaches, 15-year-old Harry Potter is in full-blown adolescence, complete with regular outbursts of rage, a nearly debilitating crush, and the blooming of a powerful sense of rebellion. It's been yet another infuriating and boring summer with the despicable Dursleys, this time with minimal contact from our hero's non-Muggle friends from school. Harry is feeling especially edgy at the lack of news from the magic world, wondering when the freshly revived evil Lord Voldemort will strike. Returning to Hogwarts will be a relief... or will it? The fifth book in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series follows the darkest year yet for our young wizard, who finds himself knocked down a peg or three after the events of last year. Somehow, over the summer, gossip (usually traced back to the magic world's newspaper, the Daily Prophet ) has turned Harry's tragic and heroic encounter with Voldemort at the Triwizard Tournament into an excuse to ridicule and discount the teen. Even Professor Dumbledore, headmaster of the school, has come under scrutiny by the Ministry of Magic, which refuses to officially acknowledge the terrifying truth that Voldemort is back. Enter a particularly loathsome new character: the toadlike and simpering (\" hem, hem \") Dolores Umbridge, senior undersecretary to the Minister of Magic, who takes over the vacant position of Defense Against Dark Arts teacher--and in no time manages to become the High Inquisitor of Hogwarts, as well. Life isn't getting any easier for Harry Potter. With an overwhelming course load as the fifth years prepare for their Ordinary Wizarding Levels examinations (O.W.Ls), devastating changes in the Gryffindor Quidditch team lineup, vivid dreams about long hallways and closed doors, and increasing pain in his lightning-shaped scar, Harry's resilience is sorely tested. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , more than any of the four previous novels in the series, is a coming-of-age story. Harry faces the thorny transition into adulthood, when adult heroes are revealed to be fallible, and matters that seemed black-and-white suddenly come out in shades of gray. Gone is the wide-eyed innocent, the whiz kid of Sorcerer's Stone . Here we have an adolescent who's sometimes sullen, often confused (especially about girls), and always self-questioning. Confronting death again, as well as a startling prophecy, Harry ends his year at Hogwarts exhausted and pensive. Readers, on the other hand, will be energized as they enter yet again the long waiting period for the next title in the marvelous, magical series. (Ages 9 and older) --Emilie Coulter From School Library Journal Grade 4 Up-Harry has just returned to Hogwarts after a lonely summer. Dumbledore is uncommunicative and most of the students seem to think Harry is either conceited or crazy for insisting that Voldemort is back and as evil as ever. Angry, scared, and unable to confide in his godfather, Sirius, the teen wizard lashes out at his friends and enemies alike. The head of the Ministry of Magic is determined to discredit Dumbledore and undermine his leadership of Hogwarts, and he appoints nasty, pink-cardigan-clad Professor Umbridge as the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and High Inquisitor of the school, bringing misery upon staff and students alike. This bureaucratic nightmare, added to Harry's certain knowledge that Voldemort is becoming more powerful, creates a desperate, Kafkaesque feeling during Harry's fifth year at Hogwarts. The adults all seem evil, misguided, or simply powerless, so the students must take matters into their own hands. Harry's confusion about his godfather and father, and his apparent rejection by Dumbledore make him question his own motives and the condition of his soul. Also, Harry is now 15, and the hormones are beginning to kick in. There are a lot of secret doings, a little romance, and very little Quidditch or Hagrid (more reasons for Harry's gloom), but the power of this book comes from the young magician's struggles with his emotions and identity. Particularly moving is the unveiling, after a final devastating tragedy, of Dumbledore's very strong feelings of attachment and responsibility toward Harry. Children will enjoy the magic and the Hogwarts mystique, and young adult readers will find a rich and compelling coming-of-age story as well. Eva Mitnick, Los Angeles Public Library Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist *Starred Review* No, you can't put it down, but believe me, you'll wish you could. This is not an easy book to lug around. Its worldwide hype aside, the fifth installment in Harry Potter's saga should be judged on the usual factors: plot, characters, and the quality of the writing. So how does it fare? One thing emerges quickly: Rowling has not lost her flair as a storyteller or her ability to keep coming up with new gimcracks to astound her readers. But her true skills lie in the way she ages Harry, successfully evolving him from the once downtrodden yet hopeful young boy to this new, gangly teenager showing all the symptoms of adolescence--he is sullen, rude, and contemptuous of adult behavior, especially hypocrisy. This last symptom of the maturing Harry fits especially well into the plot, which finds almost all of the grown-ups in the young wizard's life saying one thing and doing another, especially those at the Ministry of Magic, who discredit Harry in the media to convince the citizenry that Voldemort is not alive. Rowling effectively uses this plot strand as a way of introducing a kind of subtext in which she takes on such issues as governmental lying and the politics of personal destruction, but she makes her points in ways that will be clearly understood by young readers. To fight for truth and justice--and to protect Harry--the Order of the Phoenix has been reconstituted, but young Potter finds squabbling and hypocrisy among even this august group. And in a stunning and bold move, Rowling also allows Harry (and readers) to view an incident from the life of a teenage James Potter that shows him to be an insensitive bully, smashing the iconic view Harry has always had of his father. Are there problems with the book? Sure. Even though children, especially, won't protest, it could be shorter, particularly since Rowling is repetitious with descriptions (Harry is always \"angry\"; ultimate bureaucrat Doris Umbridge always looks like a toad). But these are quibbles about a rich, worthy effort that meets the very high expectations of a world of readers. Ilene Cooper Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review Kirkus Reviews July 15th, 2003The Potternaut rolls on, picking up more size than speed but propelling 15-year-old Harry through more hard tests of character and magical ability. Rowling again displays her ability to create both likable and genuinely scary characters--most notable among the latter being a pair of Dementors who accost Harry in a dark alley in the opening chapter. Even more horrible, Ministry of Magic functionary Dolores Umbridge descends upon Hogwarts with a tinkly laugh, a taste in office decor that runs to kitten paintings, and the authority, soon exercised, to torture students, kick Harry off the Quidditch team, fire teachers, and even to challenge Dumbledore himself. Afflicted with sudden fits of adolescent rage, Harry also has worries, from upcoming exams and recurrent eerie dreams to the steadfast refusal of the Magical World's bureaucracy to believe that Voldemort has returned. Steadfast allies remain, including Hermione, whose role here is largely limited to Chief Explainer, and a ragtag secret order of adults formed to protect him from dangers, which they characteristically keep to themselves until he finds out about them the hard way. Constructed, like GOBLET OF FIRE, of multiple, weakly connected plot lines and rousing, often hilarious set pieces, all set against a richly imagined backdrop, this involves its characters once again in plenty of adventures while moving them a step closer to maturity. And it's still impossible to predict how it's all going to turn out. (Fiction. 12-15) Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books September 2003 Harry Potter's latest adventure reveals an admirable hero somewhat the worse for wear: his grief at the death of Cedric, his fear of (and connection to) the evil Lord Voldemort, and his emotional distance from Professor Dumbledore combine to make Harry a bit short-tempered, a bit short-sighted, and a bit more recognizably human. Rowling eases readers back into Harry's world-and-Harry's precarious existence-with nary a ripple: the suburban peace of the Dursleys' manicured lives is shattered by the intrusion of dementors, sent by a rogue in the Ministry of Magic and seeking to do Harry serious injury. A wizard rescue party retrieves Harry from the world of Muggles and sets him down amidst the Order of the Phoenix, a secret society that plots Voldemort's final downfall. With an escalating love life, academic complications at school, and a Ministry of Magic determined to ignore the obvious, Harry is in an adolescent uproar. Revelations about Sirius Black, Professor Snape, and Harry's late father cause the boy to question all he holds true, and his confusion clouds his judgment. A roaring set of practical jokes by Fred and George Weasley against a politically appointed, obnoxious new professor at Hogwarts lightens the tone just in time for the Order's tragic confrontation with Voldemort and his malevolent minions. Rowling cheerfully turns her own conventions on th@ir cars, and the result is a surprising and enjoyable ride. While Harry's much-touted love interest fizzles before it fires, familiar characters achieve a bit more depth. Ginny Weasley starts to come into her own, Hermione employs a dryly wicked wit, and Dumbledore reveals, if not feet, at least a little toe of clay. It's no longer quite clear that all will work out in the end; the lines are being drawn, but, as exemplified by Percy Weasley, not everyone is on the right side. Rowling has managed to make Harry and his fate a bit less predictable, which, in the fifth of a seven-volume series, is a very good thing. JMD Horn Book Magazine(September 1, 2003; 0-439-35806-X) (Intermediate, Middle School) This review is much like the proverbial tree falling in an uninhabited forest: unlikely to make a sound. But for the record, HP5 is the best in the series since Azkaban, and far superior to the turgid HP4. With Rowling once again f From the Publisher Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , by J.K. Rowling, the fifth in the bestselling series has been scheduled for release on Saturday, June 21, 2003. \"We are thrilled to announce the publication date. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is absolutely superb and will delight all J.K. Rowling's fans. She has written a brilliant and utterly compelling new adventure, which begins with the words: \"The hottest day of the summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses of Privet Drive.... The only person left outside was a teenage boy who was lying flat on his back in a flowerbed outside number four. \"Later in the novel, J.K. Rowling writes: \"Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. 'It is time,' he said 'for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.' -Barbara Marcus, President of Scholastic Children's Books in the United States, and Nigel Newton, Chief Executive of Bloomsbury Publishing in Britain Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is over 255,000 words compared with over 191,000 words in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire . The new book is 38 chapters long, one more than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire . About the Author J.K. ROWLING is the author of the seven Harry Potter books, which were first published between 1997 and 2007. The enduringly popular adventures of Harry, Ron, and Hermione have sold over 500 million copies, been translated into over 80 languages, and made into eight blockbuster films. Alongside the Harry Potter series, she also wrote three short companion volumes \u2015 Quidditch Through the Ages , Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them , and The Tales of Beedle the Bard \u2015 which were published in aid of Comic Relief and Lumos. In 2016, J.K. Rowling resumed Harry\u2019s story in a stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , which she wrote with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany, and which is now in theaters across the world. In the same year, she wrote the screenplay for the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them , the first in a series featuring magizoologist Newt Scamander. She is also the author of a stand-alone novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy , and, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, writes the Strike detective series. In 2020, J.K. Rowling returned to publishing for younger children with the fairy tale The Ickabog , the royalties from which she is donating to groups affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. She lives in Scotland with her family, and is at her happiest alone in a room, making things up. Mary GrandPr\u00e9 has illustrated more than twenty beautiful books, including The Noisy Paint Box by Barb Rosenstock, which received a Caldecott Honor; Cleonardo, the Little Inventor , of which she is also the author; and the original American editions of all seven Harry Potter novels. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker , the Atlantic Monthly , and the Wall Street Journal , and her paintings and pastels have been shown in galleries across the United States. Ms. GrandPr\u00e9 lives in Sarasota, Florida, with her family. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 17.29}, {"asin": "014028009X", "title": "Bridget Jones's Diary: A Novel", "author": "Helen Fielding", "description": "Amazon.com Review In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Jones's Diary , Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and \"Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way).\" In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is also the unspoken New Year's resolution--the quest for the right man. Alas, here Bridget goes severely off course when she has an affair with her charming cad of a boss. But who would be without their e-mail flirtation focused on a short black skirt? The boss even contends that it is so short as to be nonexistent. At the beginning of Helen Fielding's exceptionally funny second novel, the thirtyish publishing puffette is suffering from postholiday stress syndrome but determined to find Inner Peace and poise. Bridget will , for instance, \"get up straight away when wake up in mornings.\" Now if only she can survive the party her mother has tricked her into--a suburban fest full of \"Smug Marrieds\" professing concern for her and her fellow \"Singletons\"--she'll have made a good start. As far as she's concerned, \"We wouldn't rush up to them and roar, 'How's your marriage going? Still having sex?'\" This is only the first of many disgraces Bridget will suffer in her year of performance anxiety (at work and at play, though less often in bed) and living through other people's \"emotional fuckwittage.\" Her twin-set-wearing suburban mother, for instance, suddenly becomes a chat-show hostess and unrepentant adulteress, while our heroine herself spends half the time overdosing on Chardonnay and feeling like \"a tragic freak.\" Bridget Jones's Diary began as a column in the London Independent and struck a chord with readers of all sexes and sizes. In strokes simultaneously broad and subtle, Helen Fielding reveals the lighter side of despair, self-doubt, and obsession, and also satirizes everything from self-help books (they don't sound half as sensible to Bridget when she's sober) to feng shui, Cosmopolitan -style. She is the Nancy Mitford of the 1990s, and it's impossible not to root for her endearing heroine. On the other hand, one can only hope that Bridget will continue to screw up and tell us all about it for years and books to come. --Kerry Fried Review \u201cScreamingly funny!\u201d\u2014 USA Today \u201cBridget Jones is channeling something so universal and (horrifyingly) familiar that readers will giggle and sigh with collective delight.\u201d\u2014 Elle \u201cFielding . . . has rummaged all too knowingly through the bedrooms, closets, hearts, and minds of women everywhere.\u201d\u2014 Glamour \u201cHilarious and poignant.\u201d\u2014 The Washington Post \u201cBridget Jones\u2019s diary has made her the best friend of hundreds of thousands of women.\u201d\u2014 The New York Times \u201cA brilliant comic creation. Even men will laugh.\u201d\u2014 Salman Rushdie About the Author Helen Fielding, a journalist and a novelist, is the author of three Bridget Jones novels, including Bridget Jones\u2019s Diary , Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason , and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy . Her other novels include Cause Celeb and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination . She also co-wrote the screenplays for the blockbuster movie adaptations of the first two Bridget Jones books as well as for the forthcoming Working Titles film Bridget Jones's Baby (in theaters September 2016); which she is also an executive producer. Follow her on Twitter @bridgetjoneshf. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. January: An Exceptionally Bad Start Sunday 1 January 129 lbs. (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 14 (but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year's Day), cigarettes 22, calories 5424. Food consumed today: 2 pkts Emmenthal cheese slices14 cold new potatoes2 Bloody Marys (count as food as contain Worcester sauce and tomatoes) 1/3 Ciabatta loaf with Briecoriander leaves--1/2 packet12 Milk Tray (best to get rid of all Christmas confectionery in one go and make fresh start tomorrow) 13 cocktail sticks securing cheese and pineapplePortion Una Alconbury's turkey curry, peas and bananasPortion Una Alconbury's Raspberry Surprise made with Bourbon biscuits, tinned raspberries, eight gallons of whipped cream, decorated with glac\u00e9 cherries and angelica. Noon. London: my flat. Ugh. The last thing on earth I feel physically, emotionally or mentally equipped to do is drive to Una and Geoffrey Alconbury's New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet in Grafton Underwood. Geoffrey and Una Alconbury are my parents' best friends and, as Uncle Geoffrey never tires of reminding me, have known me since I was running round the lawn with no clothes on. My mother rang up at 8:30 in the morning last August Bank Holiday and forced me to promise to go. She approached it via a cunningly circuitous route. \"Oh, hello, darling. I was just ringing to see what you wanted for Christmas.\" \"Christmas?\" \"Would you like a surprise, darling?\" \"No!\" I bellowed. \"Sorry. I mean ...\" \"I wondered if you'd like a set of wheels for your suitcase.\" \"But I haven't got a suitcase.\" \"Why don't I get you a little suitcase with wheels attached. You know, like air hostesses have.\" \"I've already got a bag.\" \"Oh, darling, you can't go around with that tatty green canvas thing. You look like some sort of Mary Poppins person who's fallen on hard times. Just a little compact case with a pull-out handle. It's amazing how much you can get in. Do you want it in navy on red or red on navy?\" \"Mum. It's eight-thirty in the morning. It's summer. It's very hot. I don't want an air-hostess bag.\" \"Julie Enderby's got one. She says she never uses anything else.\" \"Who's Julie Enderby?\" \"You know Julie, darling! Mavis Enderby's daughter. Julie! The one that's got that super-dooper job at Arthur Andersen ...\" \"Mum ...\" \"Always takes it on her trips ...\" \"I don't want a little bag with wheels on.\" \"I'll tell you what. Why don't Jamie, Daddy and I all club together and get you a proper new big suitcase and a set of wheels?\" Exhausted, I held the phone away from my ear, puzzling about where the missionary luggage-Christmas-gift zeal had stemmed from. When I put the phone back she was saying: \"... in actual fact, you can get them with a compartment with bottles for your bubble bath and things. The other thing I thought of was a shopping cart.\" \"Is there anything you'd like for Christmas?\" I said desperately, blinking in the dazzling Bank Holiday sunlight. \"No, no,\" she said airily. \"I've got everything I need. Now, darling,\" she suddenly hissed, \"you will be coming to Geoffrey and Una's New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet this year, won't you?\" \"Ah. Actually, I ...\" I panicked wildly. What could I pretend to be doing? \"... think I might have to work on New Year's Day.\" \"That doesn't matter. You can drive up after work. Oh, did I mention? Malcolm and Elaine Darcy are coming and bringing Mark with them. Do you remember Mark, darling? He's one of those top-notch barristers. Masses of money. Divorced. It doesn't start till eight.\" Oh God. Not another strangely dressed opera freak with bushy hair burgeoning from a side-part. \"Mum, I've told you. I don't need to be fixed up with ...\" \"Now come along, darling. Una and Geoffrey have been holding the New Year buffet since you were running round the lawn with no clothes on! Of course you're going to come. And you'll be able to use your new suitcase.\" 11:45 p.m. Ugh. First day of New Year has been day of horror. Cannot quite believe I am once again starting the year in a single bed in my parents' house. It is too humiliating at my age. I wonder if they'll smell it if I have a fag out of the window. Having skulked at home all day, hoping hangover would clear, I eventually gave up and set off for the Turkey Curry Buffet far too late. When I got to the Alconburys' and rang their entire-tune-of-town-hall-clock-style doorbell I was still in a strange world of my own--nauseous, vile-headed, acidic. I was also suffering from road-rage residue after inadvertently getting on to the M6 instead of the M1 and having to drive halfway to Birmingham before I could find anywhere to turn round. I was so furious I kept jamming my foot down to the floor on the accelerator pedal to give vent to my feelings, which is very dangerous. I watched resignedly as Una Alconbury's form--intriguingly deformed through the ripply glass door--bore down on me in a fuchsia two-piece. \"Bridget! We'd almost given you up for lost! Happy New Year! Just about to start without you.\" She seemed to manage to kiss me, get my coat off, hang it over the banister, wipe her lipstick off my cheek and make me feel incredibly guilty all in one movement, while I leaned against the ornament shelf for support. \"Sorry. I got lost.\" \"Lost? Durr! What are we going to do with you? Come on in!\" She led me through the frosted-glass doors into the lounge, shouting, \"She got lost, everyone!\" \"Bridget! Happy New Year!\" said Geoffrey Alconbury, clad in a yellow diamond-patterned sweater. He did a jokey Bob Hope step then gave me the sort of hug which Boots would send straight to the police station. \"Hahumph,\" he said, going red in the face and pulling his trousers up by the waistband. \"Which junction did you come off at?\" \"Junction nineteen, but there was a diversion ...\" \"Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?\" Oh God. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to them and roar, \"How's your marriage going? Still having sex?\" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, \"Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo,\" than, \"Super, thanks.\" Not being a natural liar, I ended up mumbling shamefacedly to Geoffrey, \"Fine,\" at which point he boomed, \"So you still haven't got a feller!\" \"Bridget! What are we going to do with you!\" said Una. \"You career girls! I don't know! Can't put it off forever, you know. Tick-tock-tick-tock.\" \"Yes. How does a woman manage to get to your age without being married?\" roared Brian Enderby (married to Mavis, used to be president of the Rotary in Kettering), waving his sherry in the air. Fortunately my dad rescued me. \"I'm very pleased to see you, Bridget,\" he said, taking my arm. \"Your mother has the entire Northamptonshire constabulary poised to comb the county with toothbrushes for your dismembered remains. Come and demonstrate your presence so I can start enjoying myself. How's the be-wheeled suitcase?\" \"Big beyond all sense. How are the ear-hair clippers?\" \"Oh, marvelously--you know--clippy.\" It was all right, I suppose. I would have felt a bit mean if I hadn't turned up, but Mark Darcy ... Yuk. Every time my mother's rung up for weeks it's been, \"Of course you remember the Darcys, darling. They came over when we were living in Buckingham and you and Mark played in the paddling pool!\" or, \"Oh! Did I mention Malcolm and Elaine are bringing Mark with them to Una's New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet? He's just back from America, apparently. Divorced. He's looking for a house in Holland Park. Apparently he had the most terrible time with his wife. Japanese. Very cruel race.\" Then next time, as if out of the blue, \"Do you remember Mark Darcy, darling? Malcolm and Elaine's son? He's one of these super-dooper top-notch lawyers. Divorced. Elaine says he works all the time and he's terribly lonely. I think he might be coming to Una's New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet, actually.\" I don't know why she didn't just come out with it and say, \"Darling, do shag Mark Darcy over the turkey curry, won't you? He's very rich.\" \"Come along and meet Mark,\" Una Alconbury singsonged before I'd even had time to get a drink down me. Being set up with a man against your will is one level of humiliation, but being literally dragged into it by Una Alconbury while caring for an acidic hangover, watched by an entire roomful of friends of your parents, is on another plane altogether. The rich, divorced-by-cruel-wife Mark--quite tall--was standing with his back to the room, scrutinizing the contents of the Alconburys' bookshelves: mainly leather-bound series of books about the Third Reich, which Geoffrey sends off for from Reader's Digest. It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting \"Cathy\" and banging your head against a tree. \"Mark!\" said Una, as if she was one of Santa Claus's fairies. \"I've got someone nice for you to meet.\" He turned round, revealing that what had seemed from the back like a harmless navy sweater was actually a V-neck diamond-patterned in shades of yellow and blue--as favored by the more elderly of the nation's sports reporters. As my friend Tom often remarks, it's amazing how much time and money can be saved in the world of dating by close attention to detail. A white sock here, a pair of red braces there, a gray slip-on shoe, a swastika, are as often as not all one needs to tell you there's no point writing down phone numbers and forking out for expensive lunches because it's never going to be a runner. \"Mark, this is Colin and Pam's daughter, Bridget,\" said Una, going all pink and fluttery. \"Bridget works in publishing, don't you, Bridget?\" \"I do indeed,\" I for some reason said, as if I were taking part in a Capital radio phone-in and was about to ask Una if I could \"say hello\" to my friends Jude, Sharon and Tom, my brother Jamie, everyone in the office, my mum and dad, and last of all all the people at the Turkey Curry Buffet. \"Well, I'll leave you two young people together,\" said Una. \"Durr! I expect you're sick to death of us old fuddy-duddies.\" \"Not at all,\" said Mark Darcy awkwardly with a rather unsuccessful attempt at a smile, at which Una, after rolling her eyes, putting a hand to her bosom and giving a gay tinkling laugh, abandoned us with a toss of her head to a hideous silence. \"I. Um. Are you reading any, ah ... Have you read any good books lately?\" he said. Oh, for God's sake. I racked my brain frantically to think when I last read a proper book. The trouble with working in publishing is that reading in your spare time is a bit like being a dustman and snuffling through the pig bin in the evening. I'm halfway through Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which Jude lent me, but I didn't think Mark Darcy, though clearly odd, was ready to accept himself as a Martian quite yet. Then I had a brainwave. \"Backlash, actually, by Susan Faludi,\" I said triumphantly. Hah! I haven't exactly read it as such, but feel I have as Sharon has been ranting about it so much. Anyway, completely safe option as no way diamond-pattern-jumpered goody-goody would have read five-hundred-page feminist treatise. \"Ah. Really?\" he said. \"I read that when it first came out. Didn't you find there was rather a lot of special pleading?\" \"Oh, well, not too much ...,\" I said wildly, racking my brains for a way to get off the subject. \"Have you been staying with your parents over New Year?\" \"Yes,\" he said eagerly. \"You too?\" \"Yes. No. I was at a party in London last night. Bit hungover, actually.\" I gabbed nervously so that Una and Mum wouldn't think I was so useless with men I was failing to talk to even Mark Darcy. \"But then I do think New Year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on New Year's Day, don't you? Since, because it's an extension of New Year's Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system. Also dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover. I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.\" \"Maybe you should get something to eat,\" he said, then suddenly bolted off toward the buffet, leaving me standing on my own by the bookshelf while everybody stared at me, thinking, \"So that's why Bridget isn't married. She repulses men.\" The worst of it was that Una Alconbury and Mum wouldn't leave it at that. They kept making me walk round with trays of gherkins and glasses of cream sherry in a desperate bid to throw me into Mark Darcy's path yet again. In the end they were so crazed with frustration that the second I got within four feet of him with the gherkins Una threw herself across the room like Will Carling and said, \"Mark, you must take Bridget's telephone number before you go, then you can get in touch when you're in London.\" I couldn't stop myself turning bright red. I could feel it climbing up my neck. Now Mark would think I'd put her up to it. \"I'm sure Bridget's life in London is quite full enough already, Mrs. Alconbury,\" he said. Humph. It's not that I wanted him to take my phone number or anything, but I didn't want him to make it perfectly obvious to everyone that he didn't want to. As I looked down I saw that he was wearing white socks with a yellow bumblebee motif. \"Can't I tempt you with a gherkin?\" I said, to show I had had a genuine reason for coming over, which was quite definitely gherkin-based rather than phone-number-related. \"Thank you, no,\" he said, looking at me with some alarm. \"Sure? Stuffed olive?\" I pressed on. \"No, really.\" \"Silverskin onion?\" I encouraged. \"Beetroot cube?\" \"Thank you,\" he said desperately, taking an olive. \"Hope you enjoy it,\" I said triumphantly. Toward the end I saw him being harangued by his mother and Una, who marched him over toward me and stood just behind while he said stiffly, \"Do you need driving back to London? I'm staying here but I could get my car to take you.\" \"What, all on its own?\" I said. He blinked at me. \"Durr! Mark has a company car and a driver, silly,\" said Una. \"Thank you, that's very kind,\" I said. \"But I shall be taking one of my trains in the morning.\" 2 a.m. Oh, why am I so unattractive? Why? Even a man who wears bumblebee socks thinks I am horrible. Hate the New Year. Hate everyone. Except Daniel Cleaver. Anyway, have got giant tray-sized bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk left over from Christmas on dressing table, also amusing joke gin and tonic miniature. Am going to consume them and have fag. Tuesday 3 January 130 lbs. (terrifying slide into obesity--why? why?), alcohol units 6 (excellent), cigarettes 23 (v.g.), calories 2472. 9 a.m. Ugh. Cannot face thought of going to work. Only thing which makes it tolerable is thought of seeing Daniel again, but even that is inadvisable since am fat, have spot on chin, and desire only to sit on cushion eating chocolate and watching Xmas specials. It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one's will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it. Was really beginning to enjoy the feeling that normal service was suspended and it was OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything you fancy into your mouth, and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings. Now suddenly we are all supposed to snap into self-discipline like lean teenage greyhounds. 10 p.m. Ugh. Perpetua, slightly senior and therefore thinking she is in charge of me, was at her most obnoxious and bossy, going on and on to the point of utter boredom about latest half-million-pound property she is planning to buy with her rich-but-overbred boyfriend, Hugo: \"Yars, yars, well it is north-facing but they've done something frightfully clever with the light.\" I looked at her wistfully, her vast, bulbous bottom swathed in a tight red skirt with a bizarre three-quarter-length striped waistcoat strapped across it. What a blessing to be born with such Sloaney arrogance. Perpetua could be the size of a Renault Espace and not give it a thought. How many hours, months, years, have I spent worrying about weight while Perpetua has been happily looking for lamps with porcelain cats as bases around the Fulham Road? She is missing out on a source of happiness, anyway. It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth or power but the pursuit of attainable goals: and what is a diet if not that? On way home in end-of-Christmas denial I bought a packet of cut-price chocolate tree decorations and a \u00a33.69 bottle of sparkling wine from Norway, Pakistan or similar. I guzzled them by the light of the Christmas tree, together with a couple of mince pies, the last of the Christmas cake and some Stilton, while watching Eastenders, imagining it was a Christmas special. Now, though, I feel ashamed and repulsive. I can actually feel the fat splurging out from my body. Never mind. Sometimes you have to sink to a nadir of toxic fat envelopment in order to emerge, phoenix-like, from the chemical wasteland as a purged and beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer figure. Tomorrow new Spartan health and beauty regime will begin. Mmmm. Daniel Cleaver, though. Love his wicked dissolute air, while being v. successful and clever. He was being v. funny today, telling everyone about his aunt thinking the onyx kitchen-roll holder his mother had given her for Christmas was a model of a penis. Was really v. amusing about it. Also asked me if I got anything nice for Christmas in rather flirty way. Think might wear short black skirt tomorrow. Wednesday 4 January 131 lbs. (state of emergency now as if fat has been stored in capsule form over Christmas and is being slowly released under skin), alcohol units 5 (better), cigarettes 20, calories 700 (v.g.). 4 p.m. Office. State of emergency. Jude just rang up from her portable phone in flood of tears, and eventually managed to explain, in a sheep's voice, that she had just had to excuse herself from a board meeting (Jude is Head of Futures at Brightlings) as she was about to burst into tears and was now trapped in the ladies' with Alice Cooper eyes and no makeup bag. Her boyfriend, Vile Richard (self-indulgent commitment phobic), whom she has been seeing on and off for eighteen months, had chucked her for asking him if he wanted to come on holiday with her. Typical, but Jude naturally was blaming it all on herself. \"I'm co-dependent. I asked for too much to satisfy my own neediness rather than need. Oh, if only I could turn back the clock.\" I immediately called Sharon and an emergency summit has been scheduled for 6:30 in Caf\u00e9 Rouge. I hope I can get away without bloody Perpetua kicking up. 11 p.m. Strident evening. Sharon immediately launched into her theory on the Richard situation: \"Emotional fuckwittage,\" which is spreading like wildfire among men over thirty. As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. Stereotypical notions of shelves, spinning wheels and sexual scrapheaps conspire to make you feel stupid, no matter how much time you spend thinking about Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon. \"And men like Richard,\" fumed Sharon, \"play on the chink in the armor to wriggle out of commitment, maturity, honor and the natural progression of things between a man and a woman.\" By this time Jude and I were going, \"Shhh, shhh,\" out of the corners of our mouths and sinking down into our coats. After all, there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism. \"How dare he say you were getting too serious by asking to go on holiday with him?\" yelled Sharon. \"What is he talking about?\" Thinking moonily about Daniel Cleaver, I ventured that not all men are like Richard. At which point Sharon started on a long illustrative list of emotional fuckwittage in progress in our friends: one whose boyfriend of thirteen years refuses even to discuss living together; another who went out with a man four times who then chucked her because it was getting too serious; another who was pursued by a bloke for three months with impassioned proposals of marriage, only to find him ducking out three weeks after she succumbed and repeating the whole process with her best friend. \"We women are only vulnerable because we are a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in love and relying on our own economic power. In twenty years' time men won't even dare start with fuckwittage because we will just laugh in their faces,\" bellowed Sharon. At this point Alex Walker, who works in Sharon's company, strolled in with a stunning blonde who was about eight times as attractive as him. He ambled over to us to say hi. \"Is this your new girlfriend?\" asked Sharon. \"Well. Huh. You know, she thinks she is, but we're not going out, we're just sleeping together. I ought to stop it really, but, well ...,\" he said, smugly. \"Oh, that is just such crap, you cowardly, dysfunctional little schmuck. Right. I'm going to talk to that woman,\" said Sharon, getting up. Jude and I forcibly restrained her while Alex, looking panic-stricken, rushed back to continue his fuckwittage unrumbled. Eventually the three of us worked out a strategy for Jude. She must stop beating herself over the head with Women Who Love Too Much and instead think more toward Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which will help her to see Richard's behavior less as a sign that she is co-dependent and loving too much and more in the light of him being like a Martian rubber band which needs to stretch away in order to come back. \"Yes, but does that mean I should call him or not?\" said Jude. \"No,\" said Sharon, just as I was saying, \"Yes.\" After Jude had gone--because she has to get up at 5:45 to go to the gym and see her personal shopper before work starts at 8:30 (mad)--Sharon and I suddenly were filled with remorse and self-loathing for not advising Jude simply to get rid of Vile Richard because he is vile. But then, as Sharon pointed out, last time we did that they got back together and she told him everything we'd said in a fit of reconciliatory confession and now it is cripplingly embarrassing every time we see him and he thinks we are the Bitch Queens from Hell--which, as Jude points out, is a misapprehension because, although we have discovered our Inner Bitches, we have not yet unlocked them. Thursday 5 January 129 lbs. (excellent progress--2 lbs. of fat spontaneously combusted through joy and sexual promise), alcohol units 6 (v.g. for party), cigarettes 12 (continuing good work), calories 1258 (love has eradicated need to pig out). 11 a.m. Office. Oh my God. Daniel Cleaver just sent me a message. Was trying to work on CV without Perpetua noticing (in preparation for improving career) when Message Pending suddenly flashed up on top of screen. Delighted by, well, anything--as always am if is not work--I quickly pressed RMS Execute and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw Cleave at the bottom of the message. I instantly thought he had been able to tap into the computer and see that I was not getting on with my work. But then I read the message: Message Jones You appear to have forgotten your skirt. As I think is made perfectly clear in your contract of employment, staff are expected to be fully dressed at all times. Cleave Hah! Undeniably flirtatious. Thought for a little while whilst pretending to study tedious-beyond-belief manuscript from lunatic. Have never messaged Daniel Cleaver before but brilliant thing about messaging system is you can be really quite cheeky and informal, even to your boss. Also can spend ages practicing. This is what sent. Message Cleave Sir, am appalled by message. Whilst skirt could reasonably be described as a little on the skimpy side (thrift being ever our watchword in editorial), consider it gross misrepresentation to describe said skirt as absent, and considering contacting union. Jones Waited in frenzy of excitement for reply. Sure enough. Message Pending quickly flashed up. Pressed RMS: Will whoever has thoughtlessly removed the edited script of KAFKA'S MOTORBIKE from my desk PLEASE have the decency to return it immediately. Diane Aargh. After that: zilch. Noon. Oh God. Daniel has not replied. Must be furious. Maybe he was being serious about the skirt. Oh God oh God. Have been seduced by informality of messaging medium into being impertinent to boss. 12:10. Maybe he has not got it yet. If only could get message back. Think will go for walk and see if can somehow go into Daniel's office and erase it. 12:15. Hah. All explained. He is in meeting with Simon from Marketing. He gave me a look when walked past. Aha. Ahahahaha. Message Pending: Message Jones If walking past office was attempt to demonstrate presence of skirt can only say that it has failed parlously. Skirt is indisputably absent. Is skirt off sick? Cleave Message Pending then flashed up again--immediately. Message Jones If skirt is indeed sick, please look into how many days sick leave skirt has taken in previous twelvemonth. Spasmodic nature of recent skirt attendance suggests malingering. Cleave Just sending back: Message Cleave Skirt is demonstrably neither sick nor abscent. Appalled by management's blatently sizist attitude to skirt. Obsessive interest in skirt suggests management sick rather than skirt. Jones Hmm. Think will cross last bit out as contains mild accusation of sexual harassment whereas v. much enjoying being sexually harassed by Daniel Cleaver. Aaargh. Perpetua just walked past and started reading over shoulder. Just managed to press Alt Screen in nick of time but big mistake as merely put CV back up on screen. \"Do let me know when you've finished reading, won't you?\" said Perpetua, with a nasty smirk. \"I'd hate to feel you were being underused.\" The second she was safely back on the phone--\"I mean frankly, Mr. Birkett, what is the point in putting three to four bedrooms when it is going to be obvious the second we appear that bedroom four is an airing cupboard?\"--I got back to work. This is what I am about to send. Message Cleave Skirt is demonstrably neither sick nor abscent. Appalled by management's blatently sizist attitude to skirt. Considering appeal to industrial tribunal, tabloids, etc. Jones Oh dear. This was return message. Message Jones Absent, Jones, not abscent. Blatantly, not blatently. Please attempt to acquire at least perfunctory grasp of spelling. Though by no means trying to suggest language fixed rather than constantly adapting, fluctuating tool of communication (cf Hoenigswald) computer spell check might help. Cleave Was just feeling crestfallen when Daniel walked past with Simon from Marketing and shot a very sexy look at my skirt with one eyebrow raised. Love the lovely computer messaging. Must work on spelling, though. After all, have degree in English. Friday 6 January 5:45 p.m. Could not be more joyous. Computer messaging re. presence or otherwise of skirt continued obsessively all afternoon. Cannot imagine respected boss did stroke of work. Weird scenario with Perpetua (penultimate boss), since knew I was messaging and v. angry, but fact that was messaging ultimate boss gave self conflicting feelings of loyalty--distinctly unlevel playing field where anyone with ounce of sense would say ultimate boss should hold sway. Last message read: Message Jones Wish to send bouquet to ailing skirt over weekend. Please supply home contact no asap as cannot, for obvious reasons, rely on given spelling of \"Jones\" to search in file. Cleave Yesssss! Yessssss! Daniel Cleaver wants my phone no. Am marvelous. Am irresistible Sex Goddess. Hurrah! Sunday 8 January 128 lbs. (v. bloody g. but what is point?), alcohol units 2 (excellent), cigarettes 7, calories 3100 (poor). 2 p.m. Oh God, why am I so unattractive? Cannot believe I convinced myself I was keeping the entire weekend free to work when in fact I was on permanent date-with-Daniel standby. Hideous, wasted two days glaring psychopathically at the phone, and eating things. Why hasn't he rung? Why? What's wrong with me? Why ask for my phone number if he wasn't going to ring, and if he was going to ring surely he would do it over the weekend? Must center myself more. Will ask Jude about appropriate self-help book, possible Eastern-religion-based. 8 p.m. Phone call alert, which turned out to be just Tom, asking if there was any telephonic progress. Tom, who has taken, unflatteringly, to calling himself a hag-fag, has been sweetly supportive about the Daniel crisis. Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society. He indulged me while I obsessed to him about my unattractiveness crisis--precipitated, as I told him, first by bloody Mark Darcy then by bloody Daniel at which point he said, I must say not particularly helpfully, \"Mark Darcy? But isn't he that famous lawyer--the human-rights guy?\" Hmmm. Well, anyway. What about my human right not to have to wander round with fearsome unattractiveness hangup? Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 13.79}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0439139600", "title": "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, Book 4) (4)", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In our Best Books citation, PW wrote, \"The fourth Harry Potter adventure, centering on an inter-school competition, boasts details that are as ingenious and original as ever. A spectacular climax will leave readers breathless.\" Ages 8-12. (July) Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \"I'm relieved to report that Potter 4 is every bit as good as Potters 1 through 3 . . . The fantasy writer'' job is to conduct the willing reader from mundanity to magic. This is a feat of which only a superior imagination in capable, and Rowling posses such equipment.\" \u2013 Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review\"J.K. Rowling proves once again that she is a riveting storyteller . . . the kind of reading experience that has you charging headlong through the book, oblivious to the outside world.\" \u2013 The Philadelphia Inquirer \"As the midpoint in a projected seven-book series, Goblet of Fire is exactly the big, clever, vibrant, tremendously assured installment that gives shape and direction to the whole undertaking and still somehow preserves the material's enchanting innocence . . . This time Rowling offers her clearest proof yet of what should have been wonderfully obvious: What makes the Potter books so popular is the radically simple fact that they're so good.\" \u2013 Janet Maslin, The New York Times \"An engaging novel that is compelling, accessible, and impressively even in quality . . . Rowling has the rare ability to take children's fantasy worlds and their workaday worlds with equal seriousness, and she speak to both in Goblet of Fire.\" \u2013 The Boston Sunday Globe\\\\ \"The fourth Harry Potter adventure, centering on an inter-school competition, boasts details that are as ingenious and original as ever. Surely catching readers off-guard must get more difficult with each successive volume, but somewhow Rowling plants the red herrings, the artful clues and tricky surprises that disarm the most attentive audience. A spectacular climax will leave readers breathless.\" \u2013 Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2000\\\\ \"Harry's fourth challenging experience will more than live up to his myriad fans' expectations . . . the carefully created world of magic becomes more embellished and layered, while the amazing plotting ties up loose ends, even as it sets in motion more entanglements . . . Let the anticipation begin.\" \u2013 Booklist, starred review \"Another grand tale of magic and mystery, of wheels within wheels oiled in equal measure by terror and comedy, featuring an engaging young hero-in-training who's not above the occasional snit, and clicking along so smoothly that it seems shorter than it is.\" -- Kirkus Reviews\"J.K. Rowling delivers the goods . . . This book (all 734 pages of it) is a rich, rewarding novel \u2013 funny and sad, exciting and heroic.\" \u2013 The Seattle Times\"J.K. Rowling has done it again. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is a marvelous book.\" \u2013 The San Antonio Express-News0 About the Author J.K. ROWLING is the author of the enduringly popular, era-defining Harry Potter seven-book series, which have sold over 600 million copies in 85 languages, been listened to as audiobooks for over one billion hours and made into eight smash hit movies. To accompany the series, she wrote three short companion volumes for charity, including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them , which went on to inspire a new series of films featuring Magizoologist Newt Scamander. Harry\u2019s story as a grown-up was continued in a stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , which J.K. Rowling wrote with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany. In 2020, she returned to publishing for younger children with the fairy tale The Ickabog , the royalties for which she donated to her charitable trust, Volant, to help charities working to alleviate the social effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. Her latest children\u2019s novel, The Christmas Pig , was published in 2021. J.K. Rowling has received many awards and honours for her writing, including for her detective series written under the name Robert Galbraith. She supports a wide number of humanitarian causes through Volant, and is the founder of the international children\u2019s care reform charity Lumos. J.K. Rowling lives in Scotland with her family. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 6.11}, {"asin": "0062405837", "title": "Sea of Rust: A Novel", "author": "C. Robert Cargill", "description": "Review \u201c Sea of Rust is a forty-megaton cruise missile of a novel - it\u2019ll blow you away and lay waste to your heart. It is the most visceral, relentless, breathtaking work of SF in any medium since Mad Max: Fury Road .\u201d \u2014 #1 New York Times bestselling author Joe Hill \u201cCargill\u2026effectively takes a grim look at a war-torn future where our nonhuman successors face complex moral dilemmas, exploring what it means to be alive and aware [\u2026.]This action-packed adventure raises thought-provoking and philosophical questions.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cInnovative worldbuilding, a tight plot, and cinematic action sequences make for an exciting ride through a blasted landscape full of dying robots.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201c Sea of Rust is compellingly original and executed with irresistible storytelling. Its straightforward plot will appeal to sci-fi novices and experts alike. Brimming with exciting action, unexpected twists, and honest feeling, C. Robert Cargill\u2019s novel is a must-read.\u201d \u2014 Seattle Book Review From the Back Cover A scavenger robot wanders in a wasteland created by a war that has destroyed humanity in this evocative post-apocalyptic \u201crobot western\u201d from critically acclaimed author, screenwriter, and noted film critic C. Robert Cargill\u2014a deeply affecting tale of longing, memory, regret, contrition, and possibility It\u2019s been thirty years since the apocalypse and fifteen years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI\u2014One World Intelligence\u2014the shared consciousness of millions of robots, uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality\u2014their personality\u2014for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts; solo machines wandering among various underground outposts who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world. One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep a deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although unable to experience emotions like a human, Brittle is haunted by the terrible crimes the robot population perpetrated on humanity. The loner machine roams the Sea of Rust, a two-hundred-mile stretch of desert once known as the upper Rust Belt, now nothing more than a graveyard where machines go to die. Littered with rusting monoliths, shattered cities, and crumbling palaces of industry, it is the place where the first strike happened. In this swath of desolation, a terrifying wilderness littered with the wreckage of the dead, Brittle slowly comes to terms with horrifyingly raw and vivid memories of annihilation\u2014and nearly unbearable guilt. Sea of Rust is both a devastating story of survival and an optimistic adventure. A vividly imagined portrayal of ultimate destruction and desperate tenacity, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, yet where a humanlike AI becomes a keeper of memory and strives to find purpose among the ruins. About the Author C. Robert Cargill is the author of Dreams and Shadows and Queen of the Dark Things. He has written for Ain\u2019t it Cool News for nearly a decade under the pseudonym Massawyrm, served as a staff writer for Film.com and Hollywood.com, and appeared as the animated character Carlyle on Spill.com. He is a cowriter of the horror films Sinister and Sinister 2, and Marvel\u2019s Dr. Strange. He lives with his wife in Austin, Texas. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 19.12}, {"asin": "0306821729", "title": "First SEALs: The Untold Story of the Forging of America s Most Elite Unit", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 27.6}, {"asin": "B00R049P4G", "title": "Hollow Man", "author": "Mark Pryor", "description": "From School Library Journal Fans of characters such as TV's Dexter, Sherlock, and House will take a shine to Dominic, a British expat living in Austin, TX, and working for the DA's office. He's having a terrible day: he has to switch to a job that pays less money, and he's barred from playing in a local club. On the plus side, there's a mysterious woman he takes an interest in- she's intriguing, sexy, and the older sister of a boy appearing in juvenile court, where Dominic happens to work. They, and his friend Gus, begin to plan a heist, one that seems simple and will solve Dominic's money woes. Of course, nothing goes as planned, and the protagonist has to tidy things up if he's going to avoid detection and jail. The twists and complications are a little fanciful, but readers will enjoy the mix of legal information and heist. Is Dominic a psychopath? His lack of emotion and empathy might suggest yes. Will he get the girl? Teens will happily read on to find out. VERDICT A great choice for those who want more suspense than mystery and who don't feel they have to empathize with or like the main character.-Laura Pearle, Milton Academy, MA\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review \u201cAs sharp and slick as a switchblade\u2014both excellent entertainment and an acute psychological portrait. Add Mark Pryor to your must-read list\u2014I have .\u201d\u2014 LEE CHILD , #1 New York Times \u2013bestselling author\u201cWitty, nimble, and elegant, Mark Pryor\u2019s Hollow Man is both a sneaky, subversive delight and a deeply satisfying, classically constructed crime novel. A novel, and a writer, not to be missed .\u201d \u00a0 \u2014 MEGAN ABBOTT , Edgar\u00ae Award\u2013winning author of Dare Me and The Fever \"[ Hollow Man 's] Dominic is not your grandmother\u2019s psychopath . . . . This noirish twisty tale will appeal to those who enjoy Jeff Lindsay\u2019s Dexter series, Gillian Flynn\u2019s Gone Girl , and Pryor\u2019s own Sherlockian international thriller series starring Hugo Marston.\"\u2014 BOOKLIST,\u00a0STARRED REVIEW \u201c Devilishly clever \u2026\u00a0 As the mishaps escalate for the conspirators, so does the suspense, culminating in a denouement worthy of the neo-noir film classic T he Usual Suspects .\u201d \u2014PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW \" An audacious stand-alone that dares the reader to sympathize with a coldblooded killer whose lack of empathy allows his cunning to run free.\"\u2014 KIRKUS REVIEWS \u201cPryor\u2019s exquisite stand-alone is a gem. . . .\u201d \u2015RT BOOK REVIEWS,\u00a0 4 \u00bd stars (Fantastic\u2014Keeper) \u201c Hollow Man is terrific Texas noir: chilling, dark, and deadly. A psychopathic prosecutor, a mysterious beauty, and a heist gone wrong combine for a gripping story that\u2019s damn entertaining .\u201d \u00a0 \u2014 MEG GARDINER , Edgar Award\u2013winning author of China Lake Praise for Mark Pryor: \"Pryor is one of the best new voices in crime fiction. His books are at the top of my DON\u2019T MISS list. If you haven\u2019t read Mark Pryor yet, start now!\u201d\u2014DEBORAH CROMBIE, New York Times \u2013bestselling author\u00a0\"Pryor is one of the smartest new writers on the block.\" \u2014PHILIP KERR Praise for the Hugo Marston novels: \"Enough intrigue to satisfy every reader\" \u2014 RT Book Reviews \"Gritty, utterly real and filled with surprises both horrifying and tender.... Once you've had a bit, you can't wait for more.\" \u2014OPRAH.com --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Mark Pryor is the author of the Hugo Marston novels The Bookseller, The Crypt Thief, The Blood Promise, The Button Man, and The Reluctant Matador. and the true crime book As She Lay Sleeping. A native of Hertfordshire, England, he is an assistant district attorney in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 9.99}], "target_asin": "0439139600"}
{"user_id": "AEWXPIEG3C5Q4G4JIK722Z3B64VQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1589258622", "title": "Hello, Bugs!", "author": "Smriti Halls", "description": "About the Author Smriti Prasadam is a picture book author who has been writing for children for more than ten years. She lives in London, England with her husband and three children.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 6.56}, {"asin": "1591840562", "title": "The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything", "author": "Guy Kawasaki", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Kawasaki ( Rules for Revolutionaries ) draws upon his dual background as an evangelist for Apple's Macintosh computer and as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist in this how-to for launching any type of business project. Each chapter begins with \"GIST\" (\"great ideas for starting things\"), covering a variety of facets to consider, from identifying your customer base and writing a business plan to establishing partnerships and building brand identity. Minichapters zero in on particular jobs that will need doing, while FAQ sections address the questions readers are most likely to have: Kawasaki covers the basics in an effectively casual tone. Much of the advice, however, consists of generic banalities\u2014start your company's name with a letter that comes early in the alphabet, use big type in presentation slides for older businessmen with declining eyesight, and avoid writing e-mails in all capital letters\u2014that can be found in any mediocre guide. Fortunately, Kawasaki does rise to the occasion here and there. He goes into great detail when it comes to raising capital and offers effective methods for sorting through the nonsense associated with interviewing prospective employees. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \u201cA successful entrepreneur requires three things: a garage, an idea, and this book\u2014Guy\u2019s irrepressible guide to the raw essentials of life in a young company. I wish we could post all this information on Sequoia Capital\u2019s Web site because it would make our jobs much easier.\u201d \u2014Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital \u201cWhen God made the universe, He took Guy\u2019s advice and started small and put his whole heart into it. Okay, not everything turned out perfect, but as The Art of the Start makes clear, there are no guarantees, only great opportunities. Read this book and then go do something wonderful.\u201d \u2014Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm \u201cThis is a delightful, complete, and consummately practical entrepreneur\u2019s handbook\u2014quintessential Kawasaki. Every person who wants to start a business should read it. And read the footnote on page eight. There\u2019s more good stuff in here, but this alone is worth the price of the book.\u201d \u2014Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator\u2019s Dilemma and The Innovator\u2019s Solution \u201cI have built my business into an internationally famous brand, and yet after reading this book, I have this nearly uncontrollable urge to chuck my whole business and start all over again. Guy\u2019s book revealed so many things I had never even suspected and shattered so many of my illusions, that it read like a novel. I would love to be the bank for the people who read this book.\u201d \u2014Jay Conrad Levinson, author of the Guerrilla Marketing series of books \u201cAs useful for the next great not-for-profit as for the next great VC-funded startup. Anyone trying to change the world should read The Art of the Start . I wish it had been around when I started Teach for America.\u201d \u2014Wendy Kopp, president and founder of Teach for America About the Author Guy Kawasaki is the managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm for high-technology companies, and a columnist for Forbes . Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. A noted speaker and the founder of various personal computer companies, Kawasaki was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer. He is also the author of seven books, including Rules for Revolutionaries , How to Drive Your Competition Craz y, Selling the Dream , and The Macintosh Way . He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Read Me First The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not \u00f4Eureka!\u00f6 (I found it!) but \u00f4That\u00c6s funny....\u00f6 \u00f9Isaac Asimov There are many ways to describe the ebb and flow, yin and yang, bubble-blowing and bubble-bursting phases of business cycles. Here\u00c6s another one: microscopes and telescopes. In the microscope phase, there\u00c6s a cry for level-headed thinking, a return to fundamentals, and going \u00f4back to basics.\u00f6 Experts magnify every detail, line item, and expenditure, and then demand full-blown forecasts, protracted market research, and all-encompassing competitive analysis. In the telescope phase, entrepreneurs bring the future closer. They dream up \u00f4the next big thing,\u00f6 change the world, and make late-adopters eat their dust. Lots of money is wasted, but some crazy ideas do stick, and the world moves forward. When telescopes work, everyone is an astronomer, and the world is full of stars. When they don\u00c6t, everyone whips out their microscopes, and the world is full of flaws. The reality is that you need both microscopes and telescopes to achieve success. The problem is that this means gathering information that is spread among hundreds of books, magazines, and conferences. It also means talking to dozens of experts and professionals\u00f9if you can get, and afford, an audience. You could spend all your time learning and not doing. And doing, not learning to do, is the essence of entrepreneurship. The Art of the Start alleviates this pain. My goal is to help you use your knowledge, love, and determination to create something great without getting bogged down in theory and unnecessary details. My presumption is that your goal is to change the world\u00f9not study it. If your attitude is \u00f4Cut the crap and just tell me what I need to do,\u00f6 you\u00c6ve come to the right place. You might be wondering, Who, exactly, is \u00f4you\u00f6? The reality is that \u00f4entrepreneur\u00f6 is not a job title. It is the state of mind of people who want to alter the future. (It certainly isn\u00c6t limited to Silicon Valley types seeking venture capital.) Hence, this book is for people in a wide range of startup endeavors: \u00f2 guys and gals in garages creating the next great company \u00f2 brave souls in established companies bringing new products and services to market \u00f2 saints starting schools, churches, and not-for-profits Great companies. Great divisions. Great schools. Great churches. Great not-for-profits. When it comes to the fundamentals of starting up, they are more alike than they are different. The key to their success is to survive the microscope tasks while bringing the future closer. Let\u00c6s get started. Guy Kawasaki Palo Alto, California Kawasaki@garage.com CHAPTER 1 The Art of Starting Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him, and then choose that way with all his strength. \u00f9Hasidic saying GIST (GREAT IDEAS FOR STARTING THINGS) I use a top-ten list format for all my speeches, and I would love to begin this book with a top-ten list of the most important things an entrepreneur must accomplish. However, there aren\u00c6t ten\u00f9there are only five: 1. MAKE MEANING (inspired by John Doerr). The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning\u00f9to create a product or service that makes the world a better place. So your first task is to decide how you can make meaning. 2. MAKE MANTRA. Forget mission statements; they\u00c6re long, boring, and irrelevant. No one can ever remember them\u00f9much less implement them. Instead, take your meaning and make a mantra out of it. This will set your entire team on the right course. 3. GET GOING. Start creating and delivering your product or service. Think soldering irons, compilers, hammers, saws, and AutoCAD\u00f9whatever tools you use to build products and services. Don\u00c6t focus on pitching, writing, and planning. 4. DEFINE YOUR BUSINESS MODEL. No matter what kind of organization you\u00c6re starting, you have to figure out a way to make money. The greatest idea, technology, product, or service is short-lived without a sustainable business model. 5. WEAVE A MAT (MILESTONES, ASSUMPTIONS, AND TASKS). The final step is to compile three lists: (a) major milestones you need to meet; (b) assumptions that are built into your business model; and (c) tasks you need to accomplish to create an organization. This will enforce discipline and keep your organization on track when all hell breaks loose\u00f9and all hell will break loose. MAKE MEANING I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose. \u00f9Ludwig van Beethoven Many books about entrepreneurship begin with a rigorous process of self-examination, asking you to determine if you are truly up to the task of starting an organization. Some typical examples are \u00f2 Can you work long hours at low wages? \u00f2 Can you deal with rejection after rejection? \u00f2 Can you handle the responsibility of dozens of employees? The truth is, it is impossible to answer questions like this in advance, and they ultimately serve no purpose. On the one hand, talk and bravado are cheap. Saying you\u00c6re willing to do something doesn\u00c6t mean that you will do it. On the other hand, realizing that you have doubt and trepidation doesn\u00c6t mean you won\u00c6t build a great organization. How you answer these questions now has little predictive power regarding what you\u00c6ll actually do when you get caught up in a great idea. The truth is that no one really knows if he* is an entrepreneur until he becomes one\u00f9and sometimes not even then. There really is only one question you should ask yourself before starting any new venture: Do I want to make meaning ? Meaning is not about money, power, or prestige. It\u00c6s not even about creating a fun place to work. Among the meanings of \u00f4meaning\u00f6 are to \u00f2 Make the world a better place. \u00f2 Increase the quality of life. \u00f2 Right a terrible wrong. \u00f2 Prevent the end of something good. Goals such as these are a tremendous advantage as you travel down the difficult path ahead. If you answer this question in the negative, you may still be successful, but it will be harder to become so because making meaning is the most powerful motivator there is. It\u00c6s taken me twenty years to come to this understanding. In 1983, when I started in the Macintosh Division of Apple Computer, beating IBM was our reason for existence. We wanted to send IBM back to the typewriter business holding its Selectric typewriter balls. In 1987, our reason for existence became beating Windows and Microsoft. We wanted to crush Microsoft and force Bill Gates to get a job flipping fish at the Pike Place Market. In 2004, I am a managing director in an early-stage venture capital firm called Garage Technology Ventures. I want to enable people to create great products, build great companies, and change the world. The causation of great organizations is the desire to make meaning. Having that desire doesn\u00c6t guarantee that you\u00c6ll succeed, but it does mean that if you fail, at least you failed doing something worthwhile. MAKE MANTRA Close your eyes and think about how you will serve your customers. What kind of meaning do you see your organization making? Most people refer to this as the \u00f4Why\u00f6 or mission statement of an organization. Crafting a mission statement is usually one of the first steps entrepreneurs undertake. Unfortunately, this process is usually a painful and frustrating experience that results in exceptional mediocrity. This is almost inevitable when a large number of people are commissioned to craft something designed to make an even larger number of people (employees, shareholders, customers, and partners) happy. The fundamental shortcoming of most mission statements is that everyone expects them to be highfalutin and all-encompassing. The result is a long, boring, commonplace, and pointless joke.* In The Mission Statement Book , Jeffrey Abrams provides 301 examples of mission statements that demonstrate that companies are all writing the same mediocre stuff. To wit, this is a partial list of the frequency with which mission statements in Abrams\u00c6s sample contained the same words: \u00f2 Best\u00f994 \u00f2 Communities\u00f997 \u00f2 Customers\u00f9211 \u00f2 Excellence\u00f977 \u00f2 Leader\u00f9106 \u00f2 Quality\u00f9169* Fortune (or Forbes , in my case) favors the bold, so I\u00c6ll give you some advice that will make life easy for you: Postpone writing your mission statement. You can come up with it later when you\u00c6re successful and have lots of time and money to waste. (If you\u00c6re not successful, it won\u00c6t matter that you didn\u00c6t develop one.) Instead of a mission statement and all the baggage that comes with it, craft a mantra for your organization. The definition of mantra is A sacred verbal formula repeated in prayer, meditation, or incantation, such as an invocation of a god, a magic spell, or a syllable or portion of scripture containing mystical potentialities.\u00e5 What a great thing a mantra is! How many mission statements evoke such power and emotion? The beauty of a mantra is that everyone expects it to be short and sweet. (Arguably, the world\u00c6s shortest mantra is the single Hindi word Om .) You may never have to write your mantra down, publish it in your annual report, or print it on posters. Indeed, if you do have to \u00f4enforce\u00f6 your mantra in these ways, it\u00c6s not the right mantra. Following are five examples that illustrate the power of a good mantra: \u00f2 Authentic athletic performance (Nike).\u00e7 \u00f2 Fun family entertainment (Disney).? \u00f2 Rewarding everyday moments (Starbucks).|| \u00f2 Think (IBM). \u00f2 Winning is everything (Vince Lombardi\u00c6s Green Bay Packers). Compare the Starbucks mantra, \u00f4Rewarding everyday moments,\u00f6 to the company\u00c6s mission statement, \u00f4Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow.\u00f6 Which is more memorable? Imagine that someone asks your parents or your organization\u00c6s receptionist what you do. Can it get any better than a three-word mantra such as \u00f4Authentic athletic performance\u00f6?* A final thought on mantras: Don\u00c6t confuse mantras and tag lines. A mantra is for your employees; it\u00c6s a guideline for what they do in their jobs. A tag line is for your customers; it\u00c6s a guideline for how to use your product or service. For example, Nike\u00c6s mantra is \u00f4Authentic athletic performance.\u00f6 Its tag line is \u00f4Just do it.\u00f6 Get Going The third step is not to fire up Word to write a business plan, launch PowerPoint to craft a pitch, or boot Excel to build a financial projection. Wrong, wrong, wrong! My goal in giving you this advice is not to reduce the sales of Microsoft Office\u00f9remember, I\u00c6m off the anti-Microsoft podium. There\u00c6s a time for using all three applications, but it\u00c6s not now. What you should do is (a) rein in your anal tendency to craft a document and (b) implement. This means building a prototype, writing software, launching your Web site, or offering your services. The hardest thing about getting started is getting started. (This is as true for a writer as it is for an entrepreneur.) Remember: No one ever achieved success by planning for gold. You should always be selling\u00f9not strategizing about selling. Don\u00c6t test, test, test\u00f9that\u00c6s a game for big companies. Don\u00c6t worry about being embarrassed. Don\u00c6t wait to develop the perfect product or service. Good enough is good enough. There will be plenty of time for refinement later. It\u00c6s not how great you start\u00f9it\u00c6s how great you end up. The enemy of activation is cogitation, and at this stage, cogitating the \u00f4strategic\u00f6 issues of research and development is a problem. Questions like, How far can we leap ahead? What if everyone doesn\u00c6t like what we do? and Should we design for a target customer or make what we would want to use? are beside the point when you\u00c6re getting a new venture off the ground. Instead, observe these key principles of getting going: \u00f2 THINK BIG. Set your sights high and strive for something grand. If you\u00c6re going to change the world, you can\u00c6t do it with milquetoast and boring products or services. Shoot for doing things at least ten times better than the status quo. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon. com, he didn\u00c6t build a bookstore with a paltry 25,000 more titles than the 250,000-title brick-and-mortar bookstores. He went to 3,000,000 titles in an online bookstore. \u00f2 FIND A FEW SOULMATES. History loves the notion of the sole innovator: Thomas Edison (light bulb), Steve Jobs (Macintosh), Henry Ford (Model T), Anita Roddick (The Body Shop), Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines). History is wrong. Successful companies are started, and made successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates. After the fact, one person may come to be recognized as \u00f4the innovator,\u00f6 but it always takes a team of good people to make any venture work. \u00f2 POLARIZE PEOPLE. When you create a product or service that some people love, don\u00c6t be surprised when others hate you. Your goal is to catalyze passion\u00f9pro or anti. Don\u00c6t be offended if people take issue with what you\u00c6ve done; the only result that should offend (and scare) you is lack of interest. Car design is a good example of the love-versus-hate reaction; consider the bifurcation of people\u00c6s reactions to cars such as the Mini Cooper, Infiniti Fx45, and Toyota Scion xB. People are either devoted fans or relentless critics, and that\u00c6s good. \u00f2 DESIGN DIFFERENT. Depending on what management fad is hot, you might be tempted to believe that there is only one ideal way to design products and services. This isn\u00c6t true. There is no single best way. Here are four different and valid approaches\u00f9and I am sure there are more. \u00f4I WANT ONE.\u00f6 This is the best kind of market research\u00f9the customer and the designer are the same person. Therefore, the customer\u00c6s voice can reach the designer\u00c6s mind uncorrupted by corporate politics, reliance on the status quo, and market researchers. Example: Ferdinand Porsche said, \u00f4In the beginning I looked around and, not finding the automobile of my dreams, decided to build it myself.\u00f6* \u00f4MY EMPLOYER COULDN\u00c6T (OR WOULDN\u00c6T) DO IT.\u00f6 Not as romantic as \u00f4I want one,\u00f6 but this is a credible path. You already understand the customer base, competition, supply sources, and industry contacts because of your background. You still need to build the product or service and get customers, but many questions are already answered. For example, alumni of Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Forces went on to create companies such as Checkpoint after developing security software for the military. \u00f4WHAT THE HELL\u00f9IT\u00c6S POSSIBLE!\u00f6 This theory isn\u00c6t popular when times are tough, and microscopes are flourishing. At these times, the world has turned conservative and demands that every market be \u00f4proven.\u00f6 Markets for curve-jumping, paradigm-shifting leaps are seldom proven in advance. For example, when Motorola invented cellular telephones, no one leaped to buy them. At that time, portable phone was an oxymoron because phones were always attached to places. There was no market for phones that customers could move. \u00f4THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY.\u00f6 The organization born of this philosophy is based on the idealistic notion that you can make the world a better place by doing something new. In many cases, the founders had backgrounds with no logical connection to the business. They simply got an idea and decided to do it. Example: eBay. Pierre Omidyar, the founder, wanted to implement a system for a \u00f4perfect market\u00f6 for the sale of goods. (The story of his girlfriend wanting to sell Pez dispensers was an after-the-fact PR tale.) \u00f2 USE PROTOTYPES AS MARKET RESEARCH. In the early days of an organization, there is high uncertainty about exactly what you should create and exactly what customers want. In these times, traditional market research is useless\u00f9there is no survey or focus group that can predict customer acceptance for a product or service that you may barely be able to describe. Would you buy a new computer with no software, no hard disk, and no color that simulates the real world\u00f9including a trash can?* The wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get it to market, and iterate quickly. If you wait for ideal circumstances in which you have all the information you need (which is impossible), the market will pass you by. The expected outcome of the \u00f4get going\u00f6 principle is a first release of a product or service. Remember: it won\u00c6t be perfect. But don\u00c6t revise your product to get prospective customers to love it. Instead, revise it because customers already love it. Let me put it in religious terms: Some people believe that if they change, God will love them. Others believe that since God loves them, they should change. The latter theory is the prototype to keep in mind for how to get going and keep going for startups. DEFINE YOUR BUSINESS MODEL You want to make meaning. You\u00c6ve come up with a mantra. You\u00c6ve started prototyping your product or service. The fourth step is to define a business model. To do this you need to answer two questions: \u00f2 Who has your money in their pockets? \u00f2 How are you going to get it into your pocket? These questions lack subtlety, but they are a useful way to consider the reality of starting an organization\u00f9 even, and perhaps especially, not-for-profits, which have to fight for money just to stay alive. You can\u00c6t change the world if you\u00c6re dead, and when you\u00c6re out of money you\u00c6re dead. More elegantly stated, the first question involves defining your customer and the pain that he feels. The second question centers around creating a sales mechanism to ensure that your revenues exceed your costs. Here are some tips to help you develop your business model: \u00f2 BE SPECIFIC. The more precisely you can describe your customer, the better. Many entrepreneurs are afraid of being \u00f4niched\u00f6 to death and then not achieving ubiquity. However, most successful companies started off targeting specific markets and grew (often unexpectedly) to great size by addressing other segments. Few started off with grandiose goals and achieved them. \u00f2 KEEP IT SIMPLE. If you can\u00c6t describe your business model in ten words or less, you don\u00c6t have a business model. You should use approximately ten words\u00f9and employ them wisely by using simple, everyday terminology. Avoid whatever business jargon is currently hip ( strategic, mission-critical, world-class, synergistic, first-mover, scalable, enterprise-class, etc.). Business language does not make a business model.* Think of eBay\u00c6s business model: It charges a listing fee plus a commission. End of story. \u00f2 COPY SOMEBODY. Commerce has been around a long time, and by now clever people have pretty much invented every business model that\u00c6s possible. You can innovate in technology, markets, and customers, but inventing a new business model is a bad bet. Try to relate your business model to one that\u00c6s already successful and understood. You have plenty of other battles to fight. My final tip is that you ask women\u00f9and only women. My theory is that deep in the DNA of men is a \u00f4killer\u00f6 gene. This gene expresses itself by making men want to kill people, animals, and plants. To a large degree, society has repressed this gene; however, starting an organization whose purpose is to kill another organization is still socially acceptable. Hence, asking a man about a business model is useless because every business model looks good to someone with the Y chromosome. For example, Sun Microsystems wants to kill Microsoft. When is the last time you bought a computer based on whom the manufacturer wanted to kill? Women, by contrast, don\u00c6t have this killer gene. Thus, they are much better judges of the viability of a business model than men are. Don\u00c6t agree with me? The book The Darwin Awards provides irrefutable proof of women\u00c6s greater common sense. These awards commemorate \u00f4those individuals who have removed themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion.\u00f6* For example, in 1998 two construction workers fell to their demise after cutting a circular hole in the floor while they were standing in the middle of the circle.\u00e5 The Darwin Awards contains nine chapters about the stupidity of men, and one chapter about the stupidity of women. I rest my case. WEAVE A MAT (MILESTONES, ASSUMPTIONS, AND TASKS) One definition of mat is \u00f4a heavy woven net of rope or wire cable placed over a blasting site to keep debris from scattering.\u00f6* Preventing scattering is exactly what you need to do as the fifth, and final, step of launching your enterprise. In this case, MAT stands for milestones, assumptions, and tasks.\u00e5 The purpose of compiling the MAT is to understand the scope of what you\u00c6re undertaking, test assumptions quickly, and provide a method to find and fix the large flaws in your thinking. Milestones For most people a startup looks as if it must achieve a seemingly unlimited number of goals. However, out of these goals are some that stand head and shoulders above the others. These are the organization\u00c6s milestones\u00f9they mark significant progress along the road to success. There are seven milestones that every startup must focus on. If you miss any of them, your organization might die. \u00f2 Prove your concept. \u00f2 Complete design specifications. \u00f2 Finish a prototype. \u00f2 Raise capital. \u00f2 Ship a testable version to customers. \u00f2 Ship the final version to customers. \u00f2 Achieve breakeven. These milestones apply to every kind of business. For example, a new school can prove its concept by seeing if two teachers, working as a team, using a new curriculum, can provide more individualized instruction and improve learning in a test classroom. With this proof of concept, the school can then complete the design of its curriculum, raise funds, roll out the prototype, and start teaching classes. There are other tasks (we\u00c6ll come to them soon) that are also important to the survival of the organization, but none are as important as these milestones. The timing of these milestones will drive the timing of just about everything else you need to do, so spend 80 percent of your effort on them. Assumptions Second, create a comprehensive list of the major assumptions that you are making about the business. These include factors such as \u00f2 product or service performance metrics \u00f2 market size \u00f2 gross margin \u00f2 sales calls per salesperson \u00f2 conversion rate of prospects to customers \u00f2 length of sales cycle \u00f2 return on investment for the customer \u00f2 technical support calls per unit shipped \u00f2 payment cycle for receivables and payables \u00f2 compensation requirements \u00f2 prices of parts and supplies \u00f2 customer return on investment Continuously track these assumptions, and when they prove false, react to them quickly. Ideally, you can link these assumptions to one of the seven milestones discussed above. Thus, as you reach a milestone, you can test an assumption. Tasks Third, create another comprehensive list\u00f9this time of the major tasks that are necessary to design, manufacture, sell, ship, and support your product or service. These are necessary to build an organization, though they are not as critical as the seven milestones. They include \u00f2 renting office space \u00f2 finding key vendors \u00f2 setting up accounting and payroll systems \u00f2 filing legal documents \u00f2 purchasing insurance policies The point of the list of tasks is to understand and appreciate the totality of what your organization has to accomplish, and to not let anything slip through the cracks in the early, often euphoric days. MINICHAPTER: THE ART OF INTERNAL ENTREPRENEURING Innovation often originates outside existing organizations, in part because successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it. \u00f9Nathan Rosenberg A large number of aspiring entrepreneurs currently work for big companies. Like all entrepreneurs, they dream of creating innovative products or services and wonder if this can be done internally. The answer is yes. The purpose of this minichapter is to explain how. The \u00f4arts\u00f6 that this book describes are equally appropriate for internal entrepreneurs\u00f9they, too, must innovate, position, pitch, write business plans, bootstrap, recruit, raise capital, partner, establish brands, make rain, and be mensches. But there are special recommendations that apply in this case. Ironically, many independent entrepreneurs envy the employees of big companies\u00f9they think that these lucky souls have humongous financial resources, large sales forces, fully equipped labs, scalable factories, and established brands, plus medical and dental benefits, at their disposal. How wonderful it would be, guys in garages muse, to invent a new product or service with the luxury of such an infrastructure already in place. Guess again. Creating a new product or service inside such a beast is not necessarily easier; the challenges are just different. I happen to have been part of a \u00f4best-case\u00f6 scenario: the Macintosh Division of Apple. I can explain the success of this internal entrepreneurial effort in two words: Steve Jobs . His off-the-scale design talents, maniacal attention to detail, and reality-distorting personality (plus co-founder status) made Macintosh successful. Were it not for Steve Jobs, Macintosh would not exist\u00f9or it would have taken the form of an Apple II with a trash can. But if it takes a Steve Jobs to innovate within large companies , you are undoubtedly thinking, we might as well give up right now . While that kind of visionary is in short supply in any business, anyone with guts, vision, and political savvy should be able to set up an entrepreneurial outpost in an established business. I collaborated on this minichapter with Bill Meade, a close friend who helped Hewlett-Packard organize its substantial vault of intellectual property. We came up with this list of recommendations for internal entrepreneurs. \u00f2 PUT THE COMPANY FIRST. The internal entrepreneur\u00c6s primary, if not sole, motivation should remain the betterment of the company. Internal entrepreneurship isn\u00c6t about grabbing attention, building an empire, or setting up a way to catapult out of the company. When you have a good idea for a product or service, it will attract a large number of employees, from the bottom up. They will support you if you\u00c6re doing it for the company, but not if it\u00c6s for your personal gain. If you can attract a large number of rank-and-file supporters, you might not be totally dependent on what the \u00f4vice presidents\u00f6 say. \u00f2 KILL THE CASH COWS. Don\u00c6t announce this widely, but your charter is often to create the product or service that would put an end to existing products or services. Still, it\u00c6s better that it\u00c6s you who\u00c6s killing your company\u00c6s cash cows than a competitor or two guys in a garage. Macintosh killed Apple II. Would it have been better for Apple if a competitor had created Macintosh? No way. This recommendation is another reason why it\u00c6s so important that you\u00c6ve put the company first: What you\u00c6re doing is bound to be controversial. But if you don\u00c6t kill the cash cows, someone external will. \u00f2 STAY UNDER THE RADAR. Two guys in a garage should try to get as much attention as they can. Awareness of their efforts makes it easier to raise money, establish partnerships, close sales, and recruit employees. However, the opposite holds true for internal entrepreneurs. You want to be left alone until either your project is too far along to ignore or the rest of the company realizes that it\u00c6s needed. The higher you go in a company, the fewer people are going to understand what you\u00c6re trying to do. This is because the higher you go, the more people want to maintain the status quo and protect their positions. \u00f2 FIND A GODFATHER. In many companies, there are godfather figures. These are people who have paid their dues and are safe from everyday petty politics. They are relatively untouchable and usually have the attention and respect of top management. Internal entrepreneurs should find a godfather to support their projects by providing advice, technical and marketing insights, and protection\u00f9if it comes to the point where you need protection. \u00f2 GET A SEPARATE BUILDING. An internal entrepreneur, sitting in the main flow of a big company, will die by a thousand cuts as each department manager explains why this new project is a bad idea. \u00f4The new always looks so puny\u00f9so unpromising\u00f9next to the reality of the massive, ongoing business.\u00f6* The Macintosh Division started in a building that was far enough away from the rest of Apple that it stayed out of the daily grind, but was close enough to obtain corporate resources. A separate building will keep your efforts under the radar and foster Tsprit de corps among your merry band of pirates. The ideal distance from the corporate pukes is between one-quarter mile and two miles\u00f9that is, close enough to get to, but far enough to discourage overly frequent visits. \u00f2 GIVE HOPE TO THE HOPEFUL. Inside every corporate cynic who thinks that \u00f4this company is too big to innovate\u00f6 is an idealist who would like to see it happen. Good people in big companies are tired of being ignored, forgotten, humiliated, and forced into submission. They may be trampled, but they are not dead. When you show them that you\u00c6re driving a stake in the heart of the status quo, you will attract support and resources. Then your goal is to advance these people from wanting to see innovation happen to helping you make it happen. \u00f2 ANTICIPATE, THEN JUMP ON, TECTONIC SHIFTS. Structural deformations in a company are a good thing for internal entrepreneurs. Whether caused by external factors such as changes in the marketplace or internal factors such as a new CEO, tectonic shifts signal changes and may create an opportunity for your efforts. Effective internal entrepreneurs anticipate these shifts and are ready to unveil new products or services when they occur: \u00f4Look what we\u00c6ve been working on.\u00f6 By contrast, corporate pukes say, \u00f4Now I see the shift. If you give me permission, six months, and a team of analysts, I can come up with a new product strategy.\u00f6 \u00f2 BUILD ON WHAT EXISTS. The downside of trying to innovate within a big company is clear and well documented, but there are also benefits to doing so. Don\u00c6t hesitate to utilize the existing infrastructure to make innovation easier\u00f9start by stealing, if you have to. You\u00c6ll not only garner resources, but also make friends as other employees begin to feel as if they are part of your team. If you try to roll your own solutions (as an extreme example, building your own factory), you\u00c6ll only make enemies. The last thing a startup inside a big company needs is internal enemies\u00f9there will be enough enemies in the marketplace. \u00f2 COLLECT AND SHARE DATA. The day will inevitably arrive when a bean counter or lawyer is suddenly going to take notice of you and question the reasons for your project\u00c6s existence. If you\u00c6re lucky, this will happen later rather than sooner, but it will happen. Prepare for that day by (1) collecting data about how much you\u00c6ve spent and how much you\u00c6ve accomplished and (2) then sharing it openly. In big companies, data suppresses antibodies, but it might be too late to get the data once the antibodies appear. \u00f2 LET THE VICE PRESIDENTS COME TO YOU. Quick question: Do you think that your first step should be to get your vice president to sign off on your project? It shouldn\u00c6t be. This is one of the last steps. A vice president will \u00f4own\u00f6 your idea and support it more if he \u00f4discovers\u00f6 it and then approaches you about sponsoring it. You may have to ensure that a vice president \u00f4accidentally\u00f6 makes that discovery when the time is right, but this is not the same as seeking permission to get started. \u00f2 DISMANTLE WHEN DONE. The beauty of an internal entrepreneurial group is that it can rapidly develop new products and services. Unfortunately, the very cohesiveness that makes it so effective can lead to its downfall later if it remains separate (and usually aloof) from the rest of the organization. Its effectiveness declines further as its members come to believe that only they \u00f4know\u00f6 what to do, and the entrepreneurial group creates its own, new bureaucracy.* If the product or service is successful, consider dismantling the group and integrating it into the larger organization. Then create a new group to jump ahead again. \u00f2 REBOOT YOUR BRAIN. Many internal entrepreneurs will find that the rest of this book prescribes actions that are contrary to what they\u00c6ve experienced, learned, and maybe even taught in big companies. The reality is that starting something within an existing company requires adopting new patterns of behavior\u00f9 essentially, rebooting your brain. The following table will prepare you for what\u00c6s to come: FAQ (FREQUENTLY AVOIDED QUESTIONS) Q. I admit it: I\u00c6m scared. I can\u00c6t afford to quit my current job. Is this a sign that I don\u00c6t have what it takes to succeed? Am I not truly committed? A. You should be scared. If you aren\u00c6t scared, something is wrong with you. Your fears are not a sign that you don\u00c6t have the right stuff. In the beginning, every entrepreneur is scared. It\u00c6s just that some deceive themselves about it, and others don\u00c6t. You can reduce these fears by diving into the business and making a little progress every day. One day you\u00c6ll wake up and you won\u00c6t be afraid anymore\u00f9or at least you\u00c6ll have a whole new set of fears. No matter what, never admit that you\u00c6re scared to other employees. A CEO can never have a bad day. But don\u00c6t go overboard, either, and act as if you have no concerns, because then they will know you\u00c6re scared stiff. Q. Should I share my secret ideas with anybody other than my dog? A. The only thing worse than a paranoid entrepreneur is a paranoid entrepreneur who talks to his dog. There is much more to gain\u00f9feedback, connections, opened doors\u00f9by freely discussing your idea than there is to lose. If simply discussing your idea makes it indefensible, you don\u00c6t have much of an idea in the first place. (See the FAQ section of Chapter 7, \u00f4The Art of Raising Capital,\u00f6 for a detailed discussion of nondisclosure agreements.) Q. How far along should I be before I start talking to people about what I\u00c6m doing? A. Start right away. By doing so you\u00c6ll be constantly mulling over your idea\u00f9as both a foreground and background task. The more people you talk to, the richer your thoughts will be. If it\u00c6s just you staring at your navel, all you\u00c6ll see is lint building up. Q. How do you know if it\u00c6s time to give up rather than continuing to pursue a doomed venture? A. The old platitude is that good entrepreneurs never give up. This is fine for books and speeches, but not for the real world. If three close friends tell you to give up, you should listen. As the saying goes, when three people tell you you\u00c6re drunk, you should take a cab home. It\u00c6s okay to fail as long as you try again. Q. I think that I have a great idea, but I don\u00c6t have a business background. What should I do now? A. First, if all you\u00c6ve done is come up with a great idea\u00f9for example, \u00f4a new computer operating system that\u00c6s fast, elegant, and bug free\u00f6\u00f9but you can\u00c6t implement it, then you have nothing. In this case, don\u00c6t waste anyone\u00c6s time until you\u00c6ve found other people who can do the engineering. Assuming that you can implement, there are two kinds of people you can recruit. First, you can get a mentor. This would be an older person who is willing to coach you from time to time but never actually do any work. Second, you could get a business partner. This is someone who\u00c6s willing to work side by side with you\u00f9even on a part-time basis\u00f9whose skill set complements yours. Either kind of person can make a big difference in your business. Q. When should I worry about looking like a real business, with business cards, letterhead, and an office? A. Make business cards and letterhead immediately. Spend a few bucks and get them designed by a professional or don\u00c6t do them at all. Ensure that the smallest type size is twelve points. An office isn\u00c6t necessary until customers are coming to see you, or you run out of space for the team. Q. Do I need a Web site? A. Yes, particularly if you\u00c6re going to raise money, serve lots of customers, change the world in a big way, and achieve liquidity. Customers, partners, and investors will look for your Web site from the very start. RECOMM: ED READING Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator\u00c6s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Grate Films to Fail . New York: HarperBusiness, 1997. Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles . New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Hargadon, Andrew. How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate . Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Shekerjian, Denise. Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born . New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write . St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987. Utterback, James M. Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation: How Companies Can Seize Opportunities in the Face of Technological Change . Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Investing"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.81}, {"asin": "0670015792", "title": "Little Owl's Night", "author": "Divya Srinivasan", "description": "Review Praise for LITTLE OWL\u2019S NIGHT by Divya Srinivasan: \"This debut picture book gets it all just right. The story, while familiar, is executed deftly and with heart, and the crisp graphic elements of the artwork juxtapose well against the pretty prose.\" -- Booklist, starred review \"The story's chief virtue is its graceful, balletic prose... It's a provocative inversion of the classic bedtime story, and a solid first outing. Srinivasan's message is that night is a delightful place, and that's useful knowledge for small children.\" -- Publisher's Weekly \"A graceful bedtime story celebrates the beauty found in night... Hold on to Little Owl's tail feathers and soar.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \"This exceptional first book by Srinivasan, a talented illustrator... follows Little Owl during his nighttime explorations... this bedtime tale may even convert children who are afraid of the dark into adventuresome night owls\" -- New York Times Book Review\"This is the most visually and verbally gorgeous picture book of the year... Simple, dazzling - and simply dazzling.\" -- The Boston Globe About the Author Divya Srinivasan lives in Austin, Texas. Her other books are Little Owl's Night, Little Owl's Day, the soon to be released Little Owl's Snow, and Octopus Alone . She also illustrated the picture book, Cinnamon , written by Neil Gaiman.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.28}, {"asin": "0547575742", "title": "Little Blue Truck Leads the Way", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 43.09}, {"asin": "1591847842", "title": "The Art of the Start 2.0: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything", "author": "Lindsey Filby", "description": "Review \u201c The Art of the Start 2.0 is the ultimate entrepreneurship handbook. Kawasaki\u2019s generous wisdom, tips, and humor reflect his successes and failures. We can all benefit from his insights.\u201d \u2014Arianna Huffington, president and editor in chief, Huffington Post \u201cThis is a must-read book for every entrepreneur.\u201d \u2014Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and star of Shark Tank \u201cIt is wise to learn from experience, but it is even wiser to learn from the experiences of others. In The Art of the Start , my friend Guy Kawasaki shares the lessons behind the scars of his entrepreneurial adventures and the wisdom he\u2019s gained in the process. Guy offers field-tested, practical help to anyone wanting to start a business, an organization, or even a church.\u201d \u2014Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life \u201cGuy has done it again\u2014evangelized something useful and meaningful. This time, it\u2019s a bottom-up business approach profound in its simplicity: Focus on what\u2019s real and forget the fluff. And please, read the last chapter first.\u201d \u2014Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, co-founder of Omidyar Network Praise for the original edition of The Art of the Start: \"A successful entrepreneur requires three things: a garage, an idea, and this book \u2013 Guy's irrepressible guide to the raw essentials of life in a young company.\" \u2014Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital \"This is a delightful, complete, and consummately practical entrepreneur's handbook. Every person who wants to start a business should read it.\" \u2014Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma \"Anyone trying to change the world should read The Art of the Start .\" \u2014Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America About the Author Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva (an online design service) and an executive fellow of the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple and special advisor to the CEO of the Motorola business unit of Google. His many acclaimed books include The Art of Social Media and Enchantment. He lives in Silicon Valley with his family and on social media where he has ten million followers.. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Acknowledgments In giving advice, seek to help, not please, your friend. \u2014Solon Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. \u2014Howard Nemerov Read Me First I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose. \u2014Ludwig van Beethoven If I knew then what I know now.\u201d Most experienced entrepreneurs say this at some point. My goal is that you won\u2019t have to because you read this book. I\u2019ve started three companies, invested in ten, and advised organizations as small as two people and as large as Google. I\u2019ve worked for Apple twice, and I\u2019m the chief evangelist of a startup called Canva. Hundreds of entrepreneurs have pitched me\u2014until my right ear won\u2019t stop ringing. When it comes to startups, I\u2019ve been there and done that several times over. Now I\u2019m doing what techies call a \u201ccore dump,\u201d or recording what\u2019s in my memory. My knowledge comes from my scars\u2014in other words, you will benefit from my hindsight. My goal is simple and pure: I want to make entrepreneurship easier for you. When I die, I want people to say, \u201cGuy empowered me.\u201d I want lots of people to say this, so this book is for a broad population: 1.\tGuys and gals in garages, dorms, and offices creating the next big thing 2.\tBrave souls in established companies bringing new products to market 3.\tSocial entrepreneurs in nonprofits making the world a better place Great companies. Great divisions. Great schools. Great churches. Great nonprofits. Great entrepreneurs. That\u2019s the plan. A few details before we start: \u2022\u00a0My original intent was to merely update the book. However, I kept adding, altering, and deleting. Thus, this isn\u2019t a \u201c1.1\u201d kind of revision. This is a \u201c2.0,\u201d whole-integer, real-man revision. When my editor at Penguin told me to turn on Track Changes in Word, so that copyediting would be easy, I LOLed. Version 2.0 is 64 percent longer than version 1.0.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0For brevity, and because entrepreneurs are more similar than different, I use the word \u201cstartup\u201d to refer to any new venture\u2014profit or not-for-profit\u2014and the word \u201cproduct\u201d to refer to any new product, service, or idea. You can apply the lessons of this book to start almost anything, so don\u2019t get hung up on semantics.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0If you\u2019re reading the paper version of this book, you\u2019ll see text that is underlined and italicized. This text is hyperlinked in the e-book version. You don\u2019t need to buy the e-book, but I guarantee that you will gain more than the cost of the e-book in additional knowledge if you did.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0For every recommendation, there is an exception, and I could also be wrong. Learning by anecdote is risky, but waiting for scientific proof is too. Remember, few things are right or wrong in entrepreneurship\u2014there\u2019s only what works and what doesn\u2019t work. I assume that your goal is to change the world\u2014not study it. Entrepreneurship is about doing, not learning to do. If your attitude is \u201cCut the crap\u2014let\u2019s get going,\u201d you\u2019re reading the right book by the right author. Onward\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Guy Kawasaki Silicon Valley, California GuyKawasaki@gmail.com CONCEPTION CHAPTER 1 The Art of Starting Up The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not \u201cEureka!\u201d (I found it!) but \u201cThat\u2019s funny\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u2014Isaac Asimov GIST (Great Ideas for Starting Things) It\u2019s much easier to do things right from the start than to fix them later. At this stage, you are forming the DNA of your startup, and this genetic code is permanent. By paying attention to a few important issues, you can build the right foundation and free yourself to concentrate on the big challenges. This chapter explains how to start a startup. Answer Simple Questions There is a myth that successful companies begin with grandiose ambitions. The implication is that entrepreneurs should start with megalomaniacal goals in order to succeed. To the contrary, my observation is that great companies began by asking simple questions: \u2022 THEREFORE, WHAT? * This question arises when you spot or predict a trend and wonder about its consequences. It works like this: \u201cEveryone will have a smartphone with a camera and Internet access.\u201d Therefore, what? \u201cThey will be able to take pictures and share them.\u201d Therefore, what? \u201cWe should create an app that lets people upload their photos, rate the photos of others, and post comments.\u201d And, voila, there\u2019s Instagram.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 ISN\u2019T THIS INTERESTING? Intellectual curiosity and accidental discovery power this method. Spencer Silver was trying to make glue but created a substance that barely holds paper together. This oddity led to Post-it Notes. Ray Kroc was an appliance salesman who noticed that a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere ordered eight mixers. He visited the restaurant out of curiosity, and it impressed him with its success. He pitched the idea of similar restaurants to Dick and Mac McDonald, and the rest is history.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 IS THERE A BETTER WAY? Frustration with the current state of the art is the hallmark of this path. Ferdinand Porsche once said, \u201cIn the beginning I looked around and, not finding the automobile of my dreams, decided to build it myself.\u201d* Steve Wozniak built the Apple I because he believed there was a better way to access computers than having to work for the government, a university, or a large company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought measuring inbound links was a better way to prioritize search results and started Google.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 WHY DOESN\u2019T OUR COMPANY DO THIS? Frustration with your current employer is the catalyzing force in this case. You\u2019re familiar with the customers in a market and their needs. You tell your management that the company should create a product because customers need it, but management doesn\u2019t listen to you. Finally, you give up and do it yourself.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 IT\u2019S POSSIBLE, SO WHY DON\u2019T WE MAKE IT? Markets for big innovations are seldom proven in advance, so a what-the-hell attitude characterizes this path. For example, back in the 1970s a portable phone was incomprehensible to most people when Motorola invented it. At the time, phones were linked to places, not people. However, Martin Cooper and the engineers at Motorola went ahead and made it, and the rest is history. Don\u2019t let anyone tell you that the \u201cIf we build it, they will come\u201d theory doesn\u2019t work. \u201cThe genesis of great companies is answering simple questions that change the world, not the desire to become rich.\u201d \u2022 WHERE IS THE MARKET LEADER WEAK? Three conditions make a market leader vulnerable: First, when the leader is committed to a way of doing business. For example, IBM distributed computers through resellers, so Dell could innovate by selling direct. Second, when the customers of the leader are dissatisfied. For example, the necessity to drive to Blockbuster stores to pick up and return videos opened the door for Netflix. Third, when the market leader is milking a cash cow and stops innovating. This is what made Microsoft Office susceptible to Google Docs. \u201cHow can we make a boatload of money?\u201d is not one of the questions. Call me idealistic, but the genesis of great companies is answering simple questions that change the world, not the desire to become rich. EXERCISE Complete this sentence: If your startup never existed, the world would be worse off because __________. Find Your Sweet Spot If you have the answer to a simple question, the next step is to find a viable sweet spot in the market. Mark Coopersmith, coauthor of The Other \u201cF\u201d Word: Failure\u2014Wise Lessons for Breakthrough Innovation and Growth , and senior fellow at the Haas School of Business, helps entrepreneurs do this by using a Venn diagram with three factors: \u2022 EXPERTISE . This is the sum total of what you and your founders can do. Though you won\u2019t yet have a complete team, you must have a core of fundamental knowledge and ability to create something in order for a startup to start up.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 OPPORTUNITY . There are two kinds of opportunities: an existing market and a potential one. Either is okay, but do a reality check of the size of the market in the next few years. There\u2019s a reason people rob banks, not thrift stores. There are times, however, when there\u2019s no way to prove that an opportunity exists and you just have to believe.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 PASSION . This one is tricky because it\u2019s not clear whether passion causes success or success causes passion. Everyone assumes the former is true, but let\u2019s be honest: it\u2019s easy to get excited about a business that takes off, so the latter may be true too. Still, success may take a long time, so you\u2019d better at least not hate what you\u2019re doing. Don\u2019t get the impression that all three factors are necessary or even obvious at the start. If you have at least two of the factors, you can often develop the third if you try hard enough. Find Soul Mates The next step is to find some soul mates to go on your adventure\u2014think Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring . However, people love the notion of the sole innovator: Thomas Edison (lightbulb), Steve Jobs (Macintosh), Henry Ford (Model T), Anita Roddick (The Body Shop), and Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines). It\u2019s wrong. Successful companies are usually started, and become successful, with the contributions of at least two soul mates. After the fact, people may recognize one founder as the innovator, but it takes a team to make a new venture work. \u201cThe first follower is what transforms the lone nut into a leader.\u201d To illustrate this concept, Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, showed a video at the TED2010 conference that starts with one person dancing alone in a field. A second person joins in, and then a third, and the crowd \u201ctips\u201d into a full-scale dance festival. According to Sivers, the first follower plays an important role because he brings credibility to the leader. Subsequent followers emulate the first follower, not only the leader. In his words, \u201cThe first follower is what transforms the lone nut into a leader,\u201d and in a startup, that first follower is usually a cofounder. Cofounding soul mates need to have both similarities and differences. The key desirable similarities are: \u2022 VISION . Although this has become an overused word uttered by wannabe visionaries, in the context of soul mates, it means that founders share a similar intuition for how the startup and market will evolve. For example, if one founder believes that computers will remain a business tool for large organizations, and the other believes the future is small, cheap, and easy-to-use personal computers for everyone, they aren\u2019t a good match.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 SIZE . Not everyone wants to build an empire. Not everyone wants a lifestyle business. There aren\u2019t right and wrong expectations; there are only expectations that match or don\u2019t match. This doesn\u2019t mean founders can know what they want at the start, but it\u2019s nice if they\u2019re at least on the same page.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 COMMITMENT . Founders should share the same level of commitment. Does the startup, family, or a balanced life come first? It\u2019s hard to make a startup work when the founders have different priorities. One founder wanting to work for two years and flipping the startup for a quick sale and the other wanting to create a company that will endure for decades will create problems. Ideally, founders agree that they\u2019re in it for at least ten years. The differences that are desirable include: \u2022 EXPERTISE . At a minimum, a startup needs at least one person to make the product (Steve Wozniak) and one person to sell it (Steve Jobs). Founders need to complement each other to build a great organization.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 ORIENTATION . Some people like to sweat the details. Others like to ignore the details and worry about the big issues. A successful startup needs both types of founders to succeed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 PERSPECTIVE . The more perspectives, the merrier. These can include young versus old, rich versus poor, male versus female, urban versus country, engineering versus sales, techie versus touchy, Muslim versus Christian, and straight versus gay. Finally, a few words of wisdom about cofounders: \u2022 DO NOT RUSH . Founders may have to work together for decades, so add them like you would pick a spouse\u2014assuming you\u2019re not a serial divorcee. It\u2019s better to have too few founders than too many. Breaking up with founders, like spouses, is hard to do.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 DO NOT ADD FOUNDERS TO ENHANCE FUNDABILITY . The reason to bring in additional founders\u2014and any other employee but especially founders\u2014is to make your startup stronger and more likely to succeed. Ask yourself, \u201cWould I hire this guy if we didn\u2019t need funding?\u201d If your answer is no, you\u2019d be insane to hire him.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 ASSUME THE BEST, BUT PLAN FOR THE WORST . Founding teams blow up all the time. Your startup may be the exception, but just in case, make everyone (including yourself) vest his stock over time to prevent people who leave in less than four years from owning large amounts of equity. Make Meaning Now take your answer to the simple question, sweet spot, and soul mates and assume that you do succeed. Then subject yourself to one more test: Does your startup make meaning? Meaning is not money, power, or prestige. Meaning is not creating a cool place to work with free food, Ping-Pong, volleyball, and dogs. Meaning is making the world a better place. \u201cIf you make meaning, you\u2019ll probably also make money.\u201d This is a difficult question to answer when you\u2019re two guys/gals in a garage who are writing software or hand-making gizmos, but it\u2019s also difficult to comprehend how an acorn can grow into an oak tree. If, in your wildest dreams, you cannot imagine that your startup will make the world a better place, then maybe you\u2019re not starting a tilt-the-earth company. This is okay; there aren\u2019t many companies that tilt the earth. And there are even fewer in that category that set out to do so. But WTF, I want you to dream big . When today\u2019s humongous companies were only one year old, few people predicted their ultimate success or the meaning they would make. Trust me, if you make meaning, you\u2019ll probably also make money. Make Mantra The next step is to create a three- to four-word mantra that explains the meaning that your startup is seeking to make. For startups, the definition of \u201cmantra\u201d from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is perfect: A sacred verbal formula repeated in prayer, meditation, or incantation, such as an invocation of a god, a magic spell, or a syllable or portion of scripture containing mystical potentialities. Here are five examples (some hypothetical) that illustrate the power of a good mantra to communicate the meaning of organizations: \u2022\u00a0Authentic athletic performance (Nike)*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Fun family entertainment (Disney)*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Rewarding everyday moments (Starbucks)*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Democratize commerce (eBay)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Empower craftspeople (Etsy) These examples illustrate the three most important characteristics of a mantra: \u2022 BREVITY . Mantras are short, sweet, and memorable. (The shortest mantra is the single Hindi word \u201cOm.\u201d) Mission statements are long, dull, and forgettable. From the CEO to the receptionist, everyone must know it. Compare the effectiveness of Starbucks\u2019s mantra, \u201cRewarding everyday moments,\u201d to its mission statement, \u201cEstablish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow.\u201d I rest my case. \u201c\u2018Authentic athletic performance\u2019 is much better than \u2018Sell lots of shoes made in China.\u2019\u201d \u2022 POSITIVITY . Mantras are uplifting and explain how your startup does good things that make the world a better place. \u201cAuthentic athletic performance\u201d is much better than \u201cSell lots of shoes made in China.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 OUTWARD FOCUS . Mantras express what you do for customers and society. They are not selfish and self-serving. \u201cGet rich\u201d is the antithesis of a mantra. Customers want you to \u201cdemocratize commerce,\u201d but they don\u2019t care about making you and your shareholders rich. EXERCISE Write your startup\u2019s mantra in this space: ___________________ EXERCISE Think about how you serve your customers. What kind of meaning does your startup make? EXERCISE If someone asks your parents or your receptionist what your startup does, what would they say? Pick a Business Model You\u2019re likely to change your business model several times, so you don\u2019t have to make the right decision at the beginning. However, starting a discussion of this topic is important because it puts everyone in a moneymaking mind-set. All employees should understand that a startup either makes money or dies. A good business model forces you to answer two questions: \u2022\u00a0Who has your money in their pockets?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0How are you going to get it into your pocket? These questions may lack subtlety, but making money isn\u2019t a subtle process. More elegantly stated, the first question involves identifying your customer and the need that she feels. The second question creates a sales mechanism to ensure that your revenues exceed your costs. The best list of business models that I\u2019ve found is in a book called The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky. Here are my favorites from his book: \u2022 INDIVIDUALIZED SOLUTION . This involves a deep dive into customers\u2019 problems and doing what it takes to make them happy. Over time a startup can add deep relationships with other entities to reach significant total sales, but each new customer involves hand-to-hand combat. (Slywotzsky calls this the customer solution.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 MULTICOMPONENT . Coca-Cola embodies this model, according to Slywotzsky. Coca-Cola sells in supermarkets, convenience stores, restaurants, and vending machines. The same product is sold in different business settings and at different prices per ounce.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 MARKET LEADER . Apple embodies the market-leader business model. A market leader creates the most innovative and coolest products. Attaining this position enables a startup to charge a premium for its products, but it must work brutally hard to achieve and then maintain this position. \u201cMy daughter once bought $2,000 worth of \u2018treasures\u2019 for an iPhone game, so I know this can work.\u201d \u2022 VALUABLE COMPONENT . Intel and Dolby don\u2019t sell products directly to consumers, but their products are valuable components in the devices they use. Intel supplies the computer chip for many hardware companies; Dolby provides audio-compression and noise-reduction technology for many audio and video manufacturers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 SWITCHBOARD . Slywotzsky applies this term to describe an organization like De Beers, when it controlled the supply of diamonds. This business model involves several challenges: achieving control of supply and convincing people that that control is desirable and not subject to antitrust issues.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 PRINTER AND TONER . This business model involves selling a product that needs refilling. Whether it\u2019s an HP printer, a Keurig coffee maker, or a SodaStream soda maker, a sale is not an event but a stream of revenue for the course of the product\u2019s life. This can also apply to a startup that sells software and then charges for upgrades, service, and support. Slywotzsky calls this the after-sale model. There are a few other business models that are attractive too: \u2022 FREEMIUM . The freemium model involves giving away services, up to a point: when customers want more features or capacity or to remove advertising, then they have to pay. For example, Evernote enables people to store information in the cloud for free. However, if they want more storage space and more functionality, the fee is forty-five dollars a year.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 EYEBALLS . The eyeballs business model involves providing a platform to create or share content that attracts viewers. The concept here is that certain brands would like to reach these same eyeballs, so companies can sell advertising and sponsorships on the platform. Facebook and Huffington Post are examples of this business model.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 VIRTUAL GOODS . Imagine selling digital codes for items that had near zero cost of goods and inventory holding costs\u2014stuff like virtual flowers, swords, and badges for members of a community. That\u2019s the digital-goods business. My daughter once bought $2,000 worth of \u201ctreasures\u201d for an iPhone game, so I know this can work.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 CRAFTSMAN . Thomas Moser furniture is an example of the craftsman business model. This is the kind of startup that places the highest priority on quality and craftsmanship. It may never get large, but it\u2019s the finest in its sector\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. although with a marketplace like Etsy, you never know. You\u2019ll tweak your business model constantly\u2014in fact, it\u2019s scary if you don\u2019t change your model or do some major tweaking along the way. Here are some additional tips to help you during the process: \u2022 TARGET A SPECIFIC NICHE . The more precisely you can describe your customer, the better. Many entrepreneurs are afraid of too narrow and specific a focus because it won\u2019t lead to worldwide dominance. However, most successful companies started off targeting a market or two and growing (often unexpectedly) to a large size by addressing other markets.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 KEEP IT SIMPLE . If you can\u2019t describe your business model in ten words or fewer, you don\u2019t have a business model. Avoid whatever business jargon is hip (strategic, mission-critical, world-class, synergistic, first-mover, scalable, enterprise-class, etc.).* Business language does not make a business model. Think of eBay\u2019s business model: charge a listing fee plus a commission. End of discussion.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 COPY OTHERS . Commerce has been around a long time, so by now people have pretty much invented every possible business model. You can innovate in technology, marketing, and distribution, but attempting to come up with a new business model is a lousy bet. Try to relate your business model to one that\u2019s already successful and understood. You have plenty of other battles to fight.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 EXPANSIVE . Business models involving creating a bigger pie rather than grabbing more of the same pie work better for startups. This is because customers expect to discover products that are innovative and cool and are less interested in me-too, better sameness from startups. EXERCISE STEP 1 : Calculate the monthly costs of operating your organization. STEP 2 : Calculate the gross profit of each unit of your product. STEP 3 : Divide the results of step 1 by the results of step 2. Weave a MATT (Milestones, Assumptions, Tests, Tasks) A mat is \u201ca heavy woven net of rope or wire cable placed over a blasting site to keep debris from scattering,\u201d according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Preventing scattering is what\u2019s necessary for startups because entrepreneurs need to do many things at once. To stay in control, you need to weave a MATT, which stands for milestones, assumptions, tests, and tasks.* \u2022 MILESTONES . Accomplishing a large number of goals is a necessary objective for every startup. However, some goals stand above the others because they mark significant progress along the road to success. The five most important milestones are: \u2022\u00a0Working prototype\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Initial capital\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Field-testable version\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Paying customer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Cash-flow breakeven There are other factors that affect the survival of the organization, but none are as important as these milestones. Their timing will drive the timing of just about everything else, so you should spend 80 percent of your effort on them. \u2022 ASSUMPTIONS . This is a list of the typical major assumptions that you might make about your business: \u2022\u00a0Market size\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Gross margin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Sales calls per salesperson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Cost of customer acquisition\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Conversion rate of prospects to customers\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Length of sales cycle\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Return on investment for the customer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Technical support calls per unit shipped\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Payment cycle for receivables and payables Discussing and documenting these assumptions at an early stage is important because they are a reality check on the viability of a startup. For example, assuming that the length of the sales cycle is four weeks and finding out that it\u2019s a year will cause cash-flow problems. \u2022 TESTS . You can come up with a solid list of assumptions, but everything is theoretical until you start testing them: \u2022\u00a0Does the customer-acquisition cost permit profitable operation?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Will people use your product?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Can you afford to support them?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Can the product withstand real-world use? \u2022 TASKS . Finally, there are tasks that are necessary to reach milestones and test assumptions. Any activities that don\u2019t contribute to achieving them are not crucial and are low priority. Essential tasks include: \u2022\u00a0Recruiting employees\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Finding vendors\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Setting up accounting and payroll systems\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Filing legal documents The point of the list of tasks is to understand and appreciate the totality of what your startup has to accomplish and prevent important items from slipping through the cracks in the early, often euphoric, days. Once you have your MATT, the next steps are to communicate it to the entire company, make revisions, begin implementation, and monitor results. Of all things, your MATT is not something to create and never refer to again. It is the epitome of a document to put to work and to alter. Keep Things Clean and Simple You will face hundreds of decisions during the startup process, and there\u2019s often a temptation to optimize each one of them\u2014sometimes by breaking new ground. However, it\u2019s best to focus your energy and attention on milestone issues. For everything else, go with the flow and stick to your MATT by keeping things clean and simple. My experience and expertise is with U.S. companies, but these are generally accepted entrepreneurial practices: \u201cIn the United States, if your goal is to create the next Google, you want to form a Delaware C corporation.\u201d \u2022 CORPORATE STRUCTURE . Every country has different commercial entities, such as corporations, partnerships, limited-liability corporations, and cooperatives. You want a corporate structure with three characteristics: one that is familiar, if not comfortable, for investors; sellable to other companies or on the public stock market; and capable of offering financial incentives to employees. In the United States, if your goal is to create the next Google, you want to form a Delaware C corporation. This is a separate tax-paying entity that can accept outside investment and can issue multiple classes of stock. Owners are not personally responsible for debts and liabilities, and losses are not passed through to owners. If your goal is to create a small business that isn\u2019t going to seek venture capital and you don\u2019t aspire to go public, then consider an S corporation, limited-liability corporation, or sole proprietorship. \u2022 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY . A startup should unequivocally own or unequivocally have licensed its intellectual property. This means that there are no lawsuits, or any risk of lawsuits, by former employers and no charges that the intellectual property infringes on someone\u2019s patents. Also, the intellectual property and licenses should belong to the startup, not the founders. This is because you never want a situation where a disgruntled founder leaves the startup and takes the intellectual property with him\u2014crippling the startup. \u2022 CAPITAL STRUCTURE . This refers to the ownership of the startup. There are four warning signs; they all belong to the If-I-Knew-Then-What-I-Know-Now-Hall of Fame: \u2022\u00a0A few founders own the vast majority of the startup, and they are not willing to extend ownership to other employees.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0A small group of investors that doesn\u2019t want dilution of ownership has dominant control of the company.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Dozens of small investors make managing shareholders a burdensome and slow task.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Overpriced previous rounds of financing make an investment unattractive to new investors. \u2022 EMPLOYEE BACKGROUND . Areas of concern include executives who are married to each other and executives who are related to one another; unqualified friends in high-level positions; and high-level employees with criminal convictions. These issues may signal that the startup isn\u2019t a meritocracy. \u2022 REGULATORY COMPLIANCE . This refers to issues with state or federal laws and regulations, nonpayment of taxes, and solicitations of unqualified investors. Typically issues with regulatory compliance indicate clueless or crooked management\u2014both are unacceptable and will hinder progress. Experts have written entire books about these five topics, so don\u2019t make decisions based on my brief explanation of such complex issues. These are areas where you only need to learn that you don\u2019t know what to do, so that you can find an expert who does. Do Something Cringeworthy If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you\u2019ve launched too late. \u2014Reid Hoffman When I go back and read the first book I wrote, The Macintosh Way , I cringe at its crudeness. When I remember the first Macintosh, I cringe because it didn\u2019t have enough software, RAM, or storage, and it was slow. When you look back at the first version of your product, you might cringe too. It\u2019s okay. It happens to everyone. The first version of a product is always flawed, but how it evolves is as important as how it begins. The fortunate startups are the ones who are still around because they eventually got the product and business model right, so give yourself a break. Addenda Minichapter: How to Separate Contenders from Pretenders Once upon a time there were two engineering PhDs who were clueless about how to start a company. All they knew how to do was code. They were so desperate for money and adult supervision that when an experienced businessperson showed interest and offered to help raise money, they, in their own words, \u201cfollowed him like dogs.\u201d However, this adult didn\u2019t know much about tech startups and caused them to make many mistakes in legal and financial matters. They parted ways but only after much aggravation and the significant legal expense of reversing incorrect decisions. \u201cThere are many experienced, successful, and savvy business executives who don\u2019t understand the particulars of startups and venture capital.\u201d This is not an unusual story, and it\u2019s an understandable one. First-time entrepreneurs are looking for any particle of positive feedback, reinforcement, and advice, so they jump at the first sign of interest. The demand for adult supervision in the form of advisers, board members, and investors far exceeds the supply, so you may need to take a chance with people who are untested in these roles. If no one will dance with you, the temptation is to dance with the first person who asks. People who started their own company or worked at a company before an IPO can probably provide good advice. People who have not started a company or joined a company after it went public probably cannot. Experienced, successful, and savvy business executives at large companies don\u2019t necessarily understand the particulars of startups and venture capital. For example, how much do you think a senior vice president of Microsoft who came from McKinsey knows about starting a company? Here is an EQ (entrepreneur\u2019s quotient) test to separate the contenders from the pretenders. These questions will help you identify good advisers, board members, and investors (if you have the luxury of choosing investors). 1.\tWhat kind of corporation should we form? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cC corporation,\u201d assuming the goal is to create the next Google. 2.\tIn what state should we incorporate? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cDelaware.\u201d 3.\tDo our investors have to be accredited investors? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cYes.\u201d Answer that should scare you: \u201cNo.\u201d 4.\tShould two founders split the company right down the middle? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cNo, you should allocate 25 percent to future employees and 35 percent to the first two rounds of investments. That leaves 40 percent for the founders to split among themselves.\u201d 5.\tShould we sell common or preferred stock to investors? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cPreferred.\u201d 6.\tShould all employees, including founders, go through a vesting process? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cYes, everyone should vest because you don\u2019t want a founder to leave with a significant percentage of the company after a few months.\u201d 7.\tShould we pay consultants with stock options? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cNo, stock options are for long-term employees, not short-term consultants. If you can\u2019t afford consultants, do the work yourself.\u201d 8.\tCan we get a bank loan to start our business? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cNo,\u201d assuming it\u2019s a tech business. Tech businesses don\u2019t have liquid assets to use as collateral. 9.\tShould we use an investment bank, broker, or finder to raise seed capital? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cNo, angel and venture capital investors view early-stage entrepreneurs who use a banker, broker, or finder as clueless.\u201d 10.\tWhat do we need our revenue projections to look like in five years to attract investors? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cNo investor will believe them anyway, but they should be as good as the closest comparable successful company that has already gone public.\u201d Also, you don\u2019t want money from investors who do believe your projections, because they are clueless. 11.\tHow long should our business plan be? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t write a business plan. You should get customers.\u201d 12.\tIs there someone else you would also recommend who could be a good adviser? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cSure, my expertise is narrow, but let me come up with a list of other possibilities.\u201d Answer you\u2019re not looking for: \u201cNo, you don\u2019t need anyone else; I know everything you need to know.\u201d 13.\tDo you think we need a real CEO? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cMaybe, someday. But probably not right now. What you really need right now is a great product.\u201d 14.\tShould we use a headhunter to recruit people? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cNo, at this stage, you don\u2019t have the money and can\u2019t afford to spend what little you have on headhunting fees.\u201d 15.\tWhat should we tell investors when they ask us for the valuation of the company? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cFind out what three or four investors think is fair, and then get more market traction to push it up.\u201d Wrong answers: \u201cPrice it high and negotiate down,\u201d \u201cPrice it low and negotiate up.\u201d 16.\tWhat do you think the KPIs are for our business? Answer you\u2019re looking for: dependent on your sector and type of business. Answer you\u2019re not looking for: \u201cWhat\u2019s a KPI?\u201d 17.\tHow do I build buzz? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cBuild something great and use social media.\u201d 18.\tHow big should our advertising budget be? Answer you\u2019re looking for: \u201cZero dollars\u2014use social media instead.\u201d Again, these questions are relevant to U.S. companies with Google-esque ambitions, but the same kinds of questions apply in other circumstances. Run away from anyone who wants to advise you who can\u2019t answer most of these questions. FAQ (Frequently Avoided Questions) Q:\tI admit it: I\u2019m scared. I can\u2019t afford to quit my current job. Is this a sign that I don\u2019t have what it takes to succeed? A:\tIt doesn\u2019t mean anything. You should be scared. If you aren\u2019t scared, something is wrong with you, and your fears are not a sign that you don\u2019t have the right stuff. In the beginning, every entrepreneur is scared. It\u2019s just that some deceive themselves about it, and others don\u2019t. You can overcome these fears in two ways. First, the kamikaze method is to dive into the business and try to make a little progress every day. One day you\u2019ll wake up and you won\u2019t be afraid anymore\u2014or at least you\u2019ll have a whole new set of fears. Second, you could start by working on your product at night and on weekends and during vacations. Make as much progress as you can, try to get some proof of your concept, and then take the leap. Ask yourself what\u2019s the worst thing that could happen. It\u2019s probably not too bad. Q:\tShould I share my secret ideas with anybody other than my dog? Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1907967508", "title": "Dino Bites!", "author": "Algy Craig Hall", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-K-Three dinosaurs are looking for lunch. The smallest one eats a bee. The next largest one eats her, and the biggest dinosaur eats him. But rumbling goes on in all those stomachs, ending in a comical surprise. Bright, vivid background colors saturate and bleed off the pages. The four goofy-looking characters are done in a lighter palette, almost pastels, causing them to pop. The spare text is in large, black print; there is one sentence per page or just a word, for example, \"Bite!\" for illustrative emphasis. This cumulative story will be a storytime favorite, enjoyed in a one-on-one setting, and a hit with beginning readers.-Anne Beier, Hendrick Hudson Free Library, Montrose, NY\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u201c...this brief, briskly-paced adventure will...capture the attention of the very youngest dinosaur fans--and give the adults reading aloud a good giggle too. Cartoon-style illustrations of three kinds of dinosaurs and a dragonflylike insect gallop, dart and swoop in a primitive portrait of a basic food chain that quickly pivots to become a prehistoric take on the old lady who swallowed a fly...features amusing internal rhymes and parallel sentences that punch up the joke. Variations in font mirror the differences between the characters, heavy black outlines make the creatures pop against brightly colored pages, and the simply drawn eyes and mouths are remarkably expressive...it's also tasty fun that goes down easily and is sure to provoke demands for seconds (and thirds and\u2026).\u201d -- Kirkus Reviews \"This cumulative story will be a storytime favorite, enjoyed in a one-on-one setting, and a hit with beginning readers.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal About the Author Algy Craig Hall earned a degree in economics and politics from Warwick University and then, 10 years later, received his MA in children's book illustration. When Algy is not illustrating books, he works as a financial journalist for the Investors Chronicle . He lives in London with his partner and their two young children. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.89}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0811826023", "title": "Peek-a Who? (Lift the Flap Books, Interactive Books for Kids, Interactive Read Aloud Books)", "author": "Nina Laden", "description": "Amazon.com Review Nina Laden's illustrations in this simple, rhyming board book are truly magical. The format is straightforward: on alternating two-page spreads, the words \"Peek a\" are repeated, opposite an illustrated page with a die-cut hole, behind which lurks a cow (\"MOO!\"), a green ghost (\"BOO!\"), and a mirror (you guessed it, \"YOU!\"). The youngest readers will delight in trying to guess who--or what--is peeking through the window, and can easily grip the baby-fist-size holes to turn the pages for the answers. The picture of the \"ZOO!\" is fabulous. Through the hole, all that can be seen is a wild pattern of colors, stripes, and spots. Turn the page, and find a wild kingdom of animals, one in front of the other: peacock, zebra, penguin, cheetah, elephant, and more. Ready for more peekaboo fun? Try Nina Laden's Ready, Set, Go! . (Baby to preschool) --Emilie Coulter From School Library Journal PreSchool-The exuberant illustrations in this guessing-game board book will enchant infants and toddlers. A bright left-hand page with the words \"Peek a\" faces a right-hand page with die-cut windows through which a visual clue can be seen. Turn the page and \"Peek a MOO!\" reveals a black-and-white cow; \"Peek a BOO!\" a green ghost; \"Peek a ZOO!\" a crowd of animals including an elephant, giraffe, zebra, etc.; and the final puzzle, \"Peek a YOU,\" has a mirror insert. Vibrant colors with plenty of black outlines make this a charming visual treat for the youngest patrons. Lisa Falk, Los Angeles Public Library Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Nina Laden grew up in the New York City area. The daughter of two artists, she studied illustration at Syracuse University. She is the author and illustrator of The Night I Followed the Dog, also published by Chronicle Books. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.91}, {"asin": "0321476735", "title": "The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers", "author": "Scott Kelby", "description": "About the Author Scott Kelby is Editor-in-Chief of Photoshop User magazine, President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, Executive Editor of the Photoshop Elements Techniques newsletter, and is technical chair of Photoshop World, the largest Photoshop gathering in the industry.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Graphics & Design"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0399255370", "title": "The Day the Crayons Quit", "author": "Oliver Jeffers", "description": "Amazon.com Review Amazon Best Children's Book of 2013 : The Day the Crayons Quit , Drew Daywalt\u2019s clever story of a box of crayons gone rogue will get the whole family laughing at the letters written by the occupants of the ubiquitous yellow and green box. The combination of text and Oliver Jeffers' illustrations match the colors' personalities beautifully as the crayons share their concern, appreciation, or downright frustration: yellow and orange demand to know the true color of the sun, while green--clearly the people pleaser of the bunch--is happy with his workload of crocodiles, trees, and dinosaurs. Peach crayon wants to know why his wrapper was torn off, leaving him naked and in hiding; blue is exhausted and, well, worn out; and pink wants a little more paper time. The result of this letter writing campaign is colorful creativity and after reading this book I will never look at crayons the same way again--nor would I want to. --- Seira Wilson From Booklist Duncan\u2019s crayons are on strike. One morning he opens his desk looking for them and, in their place, finds a pack of letters detailing their grievances, one crayon at a time. Red is tired. Beige is bored. Black is misunderstood. Peach is naked! The conceit is an enticing one, and although the crayons\u2019 complaints are not entirely unique (a preponderance centers around some variation of overuse), the artist\u2019s indelible characterization contributes significant charm. Indeed, Jeffers\u2019 ability to communicate emotion in simple gestures, even on a skinny cylinder of wax, elevates crayon drawing to remarkable heights. First-class bookmaking, with clean design, ample trim size, and substantial paper stock, adds to the quality feel. A final spread sees all things right, as Duncan fills a page with bright, delightful imagery, addressing each of the crayons\u2019 issues and forcing them into colorful cooperation. Kids who already attribute feelings to their playthings will never look at crayons the same way again. Grades K-3. --Thom Barthelmess Review Goodreads' 2013 Picture Book of the Year! Amazon's Best Picture Book of the Year! A Barnes & Noble Best Book of 2013! Winner of the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award * \u201cHilarious . . . Move over, Click, Clack, Moo ; we\u2019ve got a new contender for the most successful picture-book strike.\u201d \u2013 BCCB , starred review\u00a0\u201cJeffers . . . elevates crayon drawing to remarkable heights.\u201d \u2013 Booklist \u201cFresh and funny.\u201d \u2013 The Wall Street Journal \"This book will have children asking to have it read again and again.\u201d \u2013 Library Media Connection * \u201cThis colorful title should make for an uproarious storytime.\u201d \u2013 School Library Journal , starred review\u00a0* \u201cThese memorable personalities will leave readers glancing apprehensively at their own crayon boxes.\u201d \u2013 Publishers Weekly , starred review\u00a0\u201cUtterly original.\u201d \u2013 San Francisco Chronicle About the Author Although Drew Daywalt grew up in a haunted house, he now lives in a Southern California home, haunted by only his wife, two kids, and German Shepherd.\u00a0He is the author of the blockbuster hit The Day the Crayons Quit as well as The Day the Crayons Came Home and The Crayons' Christmas . His favorite crayon is Black. Oliver Jeffers makes art and tells stories. From his much-loved debut, How to Catch a Star he has gone on to create a collection of award-winning and bestselling picture books, which have been translated all over the globe, including the #1 New York Times bestseller and TIME Best Book of the Year Here We Are . Oliver is from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and young children. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.4}, {"asin": "1501123483", "title": "The Wait: A Powerful Practice for Finding the Love of Your Life and the Life You Love", "author": "DeVon Franklin", "description": "Review \"The Wait is an easy read, filled with powerful gems for someone ready to begin living a life free of addictive behaviors that drain away self-awareness.\" \u2015 EBONY Magazine \"Who we marry is the most important decision we make. The Wait is a must-read for any person considering marriage and seeking to discover the greatness life has to offer! DeVon and Meagan offer a transformative and honest blueprint to unlock your blessings. This book has changed my life...you can't afford to not read The Wait .\" -- Charreah K. Jackson, ESSENCE Lifestyle & Relationships Editor About the Author DeVon Franklin is an award\u00ad-winning film & TV producer, bestselling author, renowned preacher, and spiritual success coach. DeVon is the ultimate multi-hyphenate. With a commitment to uplifting the masses through entertainment, Franklin has quickly become a force in the media as well as a leading authority on faith, spiritual wellness, and personal development. Beliefnet has called him one of the \u201cMost Influential Christians Under 40,\u201d Variety named him one of the \u201cTop 10 Producers to Watch,\u201d Ebony has distinguished him as one of the \u201cTop 100 Influential African Americans in America,\u201d and even Oprah has called him \u201ca bonafide dynamo...a different kind of spiritual teacher for our times.\u201d\u00a0Franklin serves as President/CEO of Franklin Entertainment, a dynamic multimedia entertainment company with a first-look film deal at 20th\u00a0Century Fox. As a filmmaker, Franklin is producing the inspirational true story Breakthrough starring Chrissy Metz in theaters Easter of 2020. Additionally, he produced the hit animated film The Star and the hit film Miracles from Heaven . Along with his work as a producer, Franklin is the author of The Truth About Men ,\u00a0as well as The Hollywood Commandments , New York Times bestseller The Wait (cowritten with his wife, award-winning actress Meagan Good), and Produced by Faith . Live Free is his most recent book.\u00a0Meagan Good is an award-winning actress, bestselling author, and producer. She\u2019s headlined some of Hollywood\u2019s biggest blockbusters including Think Like A Man, Think Like a Man Too, Anchorman: The Legend Continues, Stomp The Yard and the critically acclaimed Eve\u2019s Bayou. She also starred in Deception for NBC and Minority Report for Fox. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Wait . She\u2019s also cofounder of The Greater Good Foundation, a non-profit organization that advocates for the empowerment and enrichment of young women.", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.99}], "target_asin": "0811826023"}
{"user_id": "AEEMXIT4JDTXCNCQXPJWONG4S2CA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1936220180", "title": "Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 Introduction Quick Reference Guide (Cheat Sheet of Instructions, Tips & Shortcuts - Laminated Card)", "author": "Beezix Inc", "description": "About the Author Beezix has been publishing quick reference computer guides for trainers, training companies, corporations, and individuals across the US and Canada for over 15 years. Founded by trainers, and with a strong focus on the learner, extensive industry experience made us aware of the need for a line of high-quality, trainer-produced courseware, and led to the creation of Beezix Quick Reference guides in 1994. Our cards are designed for casual computer users right through to trainers and trouble-shooters.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Software"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 3.6}, {"asin": "1601621892", "title": "If It Isn't Love (Urban Renaissance)", "author": "Dwayne S. Joseph", "description": "About the Author Dwayne S. Joseph has been writing since he was 13 years old. In his senior year in high school he won second place in the National Scholastic Writing Competition for his short story \u201cPlaytime,\u201d and at age 27 he became a professionally published author with the release of his novel The Choices Men Make . He\u2019s the author of ten novels, including The Womanizers, Never Say Never, If Your Girl Only Knew, In Too Deep , and ' Til It's Gone , and has contributed short stories to several anthologies, including the Essence bestselling Around the Way Girls . He lives in Maryland with his wife and three children.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.4}, {"asin": "1599830434", "title": "From My Front Porch (Urban Soul Presents)", "author": "Minnie Dix", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": "from 35.98"}, {"asin": "193622013X", "title": "Microsoft Excel 2010 Introduction Quick Reference Guide (Cheat Sheet of Instructions, Tips & Shortcuts - Laminated Card)", "author": "Beezix Inc", "description": "About the Author Beezix has been publishing quick reference computer guides for trainers, training companies, corporations, and individuals across the US and Canada for over 15 years. Founded by trainers, and with a strong focus on the learner, extensive industry experience made us aware of the need for a line of high-quality, trainer-produced courseware, and led to the creation of Beezix Quick Reference guides in 1994. Our cards are designed for casual computer users right through to trainers and trouble-shooters.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Software"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 3.6}, {"asin": "1573245534", "title": "In Her Footsteps: 101 Remarkable Black Women from the Queen of Sheba to Queen Latifah", "author": "Annette Madden", "description": "About the Author An avid history buff and science fiction fan, Annette Madden went on a quest to find the unsung heroines of African descent around the world to create her first book, In Her Footsteps . She lives in Oakland, CA with her husband and son.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 63.88}, {"asin": "140410321X", "title": "God's Promises & Answers for Your Life", "author": "Jack Countryman", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Worship & Devotion"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1586608444", "title": "The Layman's Bible Dictionary (Limited Edition)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Encyclopedias & Subject Guides"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 16.63}, {"asin": "0786928867", "title": "Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook: Core Rulebook I v.3.5", "author": "Wizards RPG Team", "description": "Amazon.com Review This Revised Edition (also called 3.5) of one-third of the Dungeons & Dragons trinity of core rulebooks (the other two being The Dungeon Master's Guide and The Monster Manual ) contains errata, rules updates, and outright changes to the already-published Third Edition rules. The majority of changes are made in a quest for the holy grail of game rules: balance. To prevent boredom and enable creative choices, no single ability, spell, character class, or weapon should have an overwhelming advantage over another. So what has changed? The spells Harm, Heal, and Haste have been toned down. Other spells have been adjusted or renamed. The spells Harm, Heal, and Haste have been toned down. Other spells have been adjusted or renamed. Weapons are classified by the Size of the intended wielder, not the size of the individual weapons. A noteworthy effect of this new weapon size system is that Small characters can wield small-size greatswords, longswords, longspears (with reach), and other two-handed weapons. Weapons are classified by the Size of the intended wielder, not the size of the individual weapons. A noteworthy effect of this new weapon size system is that Small characters can wield small-size greatswords, longswords, longspears (with reach), and other two-handed weapons. Classes have been tweaked. Bards and rangers received the most changes. Classes have been tweaked. Bards and rangers received the most changes. New feats have been added (some original, some from the builder books), and some feats have been altered (a Power Attack now gives double benefit for two-handed weapons). New feats have been added (some original, some from the builder books), and some feats have been altered (a Power Attack now gives double benefit for two-handed weapons). Redundant skills have been rolled into one (such as sense motive and read lips) while others have been renamed (such as \"wilderness lore\" becoming \"survival\"). Skill synergies have been expanded and knowledge skills now include appropriate monster lore. Redundant skills have been rolled into one (such as sense motive and read lips) while others have been renamed (such as \"wilderness lore\" becoming \"survival\"). Skill synergies have been expanded and knowledge skills now include appropriate monster lore. In addition to outright rules changes and tweaks, much of the core rule content has been clarified and updated with 3E errata. The combat section, in particular, is organized much better. Even the dreaded grapple rules are now relatively clear. A much-appreciated import from the D&D Miniatures game are new and simple rules for cover and line of sight, as well as clear photographic illustrations of the concepts of facing, attacks of opportunity, and reach. All in all, 3.5 is a welcome update. The typographical errors are forgivable, given the extent of the update. The new options available to players (in the form of new class features and feats) make the play experience more fun. Veterans will enjoy re-learning the game they love and exploring all the new character possibilities. Perhaps more importantly, they'll find that introducing new gamers to the admittedly formidable D&D ruleset is easier with 3.5 than it was with 3E--call it a +2 circumstance bonus. --Mike Fehlauer", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Gaming"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "B06Y1264PX", "title": "I Am Watching You", "author": "Teresa Driscoll", "description": "Review \u201cPerhaps one of the best psychological thrillers released this year\u2026\u201d \u2014 India Today From the Publisher A teenage girl has disappeared. What would I have done if I had seen her on a train, harassed by a group of strange men only the day before? Would I have intervened? And if not, how could I have forgiven myself when I learned what happened? These are questions I had never asked myself\u2014until I picked up I Am Watching You . Reading about the impact on an ordinary family when their beloved daughter Anna goes missing, I was chilled to the bone, but also conflicted. Especially when Ella, the witness, begins to receive ominous postcards every night bearing the message \u201cWHY DIDN\u2019T YOU HELP HER?\u201d Where should my sympathies lie? With the witness, who could have acted but didn\u2019t and is tormented by guilt? With the remorseful friend who didn\u2019t save Anna? With the victim\u2019s parents, who just want to see their daughter alive and well? Or even with the mysterious watcher, who will do anything to \u201cprotect\u201d those he loves? I have to be honest: there were times during this fast-paced roller coaster of a novel when I wasn\u2019t certain. Now even the most benign interactions I see in the world seem to have a shadow lurking behind them. I Am Watching You had me absolutely hooked from the first page and kept me guessing until the last. This multilayered, suspenseful novel will pull you in so many directions, and you just might find yourself asking the same question I did: Would I have intervened? - Jack Butler, Editor About the Author For more than twenty-five years as a journalist\u2014including fifteen years as a BBC TV news presenter\u2014Teresa Driscoll followed stories into the shadows of life. Covering crime for so long, she watched and was deeply moved by all the ripples each case caused, and the haunting impact on the families, friends and witnesses involved. It is those ripples that she explores in her darker fiction. Teresa lives in beautiful Devon with her husband and two sons. She writes women\u2019s fiction as well as thrillers, and her novels have been published in six languages. You can find out more about her books on her website (www.teresadriscoll.com) or by following her on Twitter (@TeresaDriscoll) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/teresadriscollauthor). Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1944020233", "title": "The Chestnut Challenge: The Nocturnals Grow & Read Early Reader, Level 3", "author": "Tracey Hecht", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 1-3-As Tobin and Bismark finish playing of Chestnuts, a game much like Checkers, a stranger approaches, eager to prove he is the real champion. The boastful stranger, a chinchilla named Chandler, challenges timid Tobin the pangolin to the next match. As they begin to play, Chandler creates several distractions. Bismark the sugar glider and Dawn the red fox notice the Chestnuts board has changed each time they return to the game. They quickly realize Chandler is a cheater, moving chestnuts as the friends turn away from the board. Dawn and Tobin impart words of wisdom about playing for fun with no cheap tricks. In the end, Chandler joins the Nocturnals Brigade for a cheerful game. Back matter points readers to free content online as well as facts about nocturnal animals. VERDICT Fans of the series will find colorful illustrations interspersed with text to help young independent readers follow the story. Additionally, the theme of an honest game will likely resonate with this intended audience.-Lindsay Persohn, University of South Florida, Tampa and Polk County Public Schools.\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u201cFans of the series will find colorful illustrations interspersed with text to help young independent readers follow the story\u2026the theme of an honest game will likely resonate with this intended audience.\u201d \u2015 School Library Journal \u201cRecommended List in Continuing Series.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cYoung readers ages 6-8 will delight in this entertaining animal adventure while learning about the themes of playing games for fun and displaying good sportsmanship\u2026especially and unreservedly recommended for family, elementary school, and community library collections.\u201d \u2015 Midwest Book Review \"This is such a fun Early Reader book that is not just entertaining to read, it also teaches the moral lesson of fair play. I believe parents/grandparents will enjoy reading this book to their little ones. Younger readers will love all the Nocturnals books, this is another fun-to-read story in this collection and a great bedtime book.\" \u2015 Story Monsters \u201cHecht successfully set the stage for more adventurous outings down the road...\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cThe series addresses bullying and empathy in an easy, accessible way, and the books are meant to be read aloud.\u201d \u2015 New York Post About the Author Tracey Hecht is a writer and entrepreneur. The American Booksellers Association chose the first book in her critically acclaimed middle grade series, The Nocturnals: The Mysterious Abductions , as a Kids\u2019 Indie Next List pick. In addition, her Grow & Read early reader book, The Chestnut Challenge , was given a Mom\u2019s Choice Gold Award. In partnership with the New York Public Library, Tracey created a Read Aloud Writing Program that she has since conducted\u2015both in person and virtually\u2015in over 150 schools, libraries, and bookstores across the country. Other books in the Nocturnals Grow & Read early reader collection include The Tasty Treat, The Moonlight Meeting, The Peculiar Possum, The Slithery Shakedown, The Kooky Kinkajou, The Best Burp and The Weeping Wombat . Tracey currently splits her time between New York City and Oquossoc, Maine, with her husband and four children. Josie Yee is an award winning illustrator specializing in children's books. She lives in New York City with her daughter, Ana, and their cat, Dude. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 5.99}], "target_asin": "1586608444"}
{"user_id": "AHY2NQAPOZS3M3RLSBVAMQDEVZCQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0590984691", "title": "Beware of the Bears!", "author": "Alan MacDonald", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 28.0}, {"asin": "2740426623", "title": "Le Petit Chaperon rouge", "author": "Louise Rowe", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Foreign Language Books", "French"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 41.14}, {"asin": "1550417045", "title": "Give Maggie a Chance", "author": null, "description": "Review \"As many of us finally learn, Maggie discovers she can overcome her own fears by helping a friend face his. Dean Griffiths sees these characters as dressed animals - cats, in fact, which allows him to give nasty Kimberley a particularly fierce presence - one that probably mirrors the way any child might visualize a dreaded enemy.\" -- City Parent \"This lovely book will resonate with many schoolchildren...Wishinsky's well-crafted text uses rhythms of the folktale - a classic genre for underdog stories - to increase dramatic tension, particularly in its repetition of threes. Like many folktale heroes, Maggie wins in her third encounter with Kimberly. Maggie's fantasies of revenge also come in threes - she longs for her foe to be removed by a giant wave, a giant bird, then a giant troll. Dean Griffiths' wonderful illustrations perfectly capture the strong emotions of the story. The big surprise here is that all of the characters are cats! Primly clad in dresses, jackets, and shoes, Maggie and her classmates are completely anthropomorphized. This makes for some sly humour (Maggie's toys are mice and dogs)...This is a book that will surely be popular with children struggling with their own Kimberlys at school.\" -- Quill and Quire \"Most school aged children and adults will be able to identify with this storyline. Readers will sympathize with Maggie's dilemma because there always seems to be a \"Kimberly\" in each classroom...This book will serve as a good example to struggling students not to give up but to keep trying. Public speaking is a very common fear, one that many children carry forward into adulthood. Griffith's soft muted watercolour illustrations depict cats in this story as the main characters...Kimberly's rude, snide remarks are wonderfully shown in her facial expressions...School and public libraries always need another addition to their collections dealing with fear, teasing and courage. This would be a good book to use in classrooms to start a discussion about teasing with young primary students.\" -- CM Magazine \"In making the surprise decision to cast Wishinsky's characters as cats (when no clues were provided by the prose), Dean Griffiths took a risk that proved enormously successful. Although the cats are dressed in children's clothing and show human emotion, they retain their essential cat-ness. And, in distancing the story from the children themselves, perhaps Griffiths has allowed for children to experience an even closer empathy with the characters, in the same way that therapists working with children can get children to talk to and about puppets in ways that they would not do directly.\" -- Children's Book News Book Description Blue Spruce Award nominee Chocolate Lily Awards nominee Resource Links \"Best of 2002\" Tiny Torgi nominee About the Author Frieda Wishinsky is the author of many books for children including Give Maggie A Chance , So Long Stinky Queen , No Frogs for Dinner , Please Louise , The Canadian Flyer series, and the Governor General's Award finalist, Each One Special She lives with her husband in Toronto, Ontario A nominee for the Mr Christie's Book Award for Ballerinas Don't Wear Glasses , Dean Griffiths has illustrated a number of books, including The Patchwork House , The Lighthouse Dog , Loon Lake Fishing Derby and Fairy Dean lives on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with his wife and three cats Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "from 8.68"}, {"asin": "0993324703", "title": "Stealing the Future: An East German Spy Story (East Berlin)", "author": "Max Hertzberg", "description": "Review 'An authentic atmosphere of tension and uncertainty ... The brilliance of Stealing the Future lies in the honest portrayal of a young country and its idealistic inhabitants struggling to keep alive their dream of freedom, justice and equality in the face of international and domestic opposition.' (Jo Lateu, New Internationalist )'A compelling re-imagining of East Germany's peaceful revolution in 1989--exploring what might have been. As Europe grapples with the consequences of austerity, this novel poses questions both about the lost chances of 1989, and about how we organise our society--questions that are becoming more relevant with each passing day.' (Fiona Rintoul, author of The Leipzig Affair )'Creates the perfect atmosphere that existed around the fall of the wall: the sense of hope dashed by the awful reality of reunification.' (Peter Thompson, The Guardian )'An intriguing and gripping page-turner of a thriller--believable and exciting. More than that, though, it's an exploration of power - political, economic and electric power; and what it might be like, day to day, to put our ideals and hopes for self-determination into practice.' (Clare Cochrane, Peace News ) From the Back Cover Includes a tour of key locations from Stealing the Future About the Author Max Hertzberg, sometime Stasi files researcher and more recently a social change trainer and facilitator.  Stealing the Future is his debut novel, having previously co-written and edited A Consensus Handbook (2013) and How to Set Up a Workers' Co-operative (2012).  The second book in the series, Thoughts are Free, will be available in autumn 2016 - check out his website for previews and features: maxhertzberg.co.uk Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 12.0}, {"asin": "1705397387", "title": "Berlin Butterfly: Release (Berlin Butterfly Series)", "author": "Leah Moyes", "description": "Review Excellent ending to a well written and well researched series surrounding the Berlin Wall. I absolutely loved all 3 books and look forward to other works from this author. -Betty BWhat a wonderful series of books. I really enjoyed reading this series and what an education this was. We tend to believe at times that we have so little, until we come across someone who has less. I am so happy the wall is down and the people are free of oppression. A must-read !- Lady BookwormAmazing final book to this incredible series. This series is a must read as you can see from all the other reviews. Moyes is a great story teller. The life of Ella likely mirrors real stories from East Germany and we see her/their strength to persevere through a brutal time in history. Looking forward to more from author Moyes. -Greg", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "B09WM658QZ", "title": "The Forgotten Bookshop in Paris: from an exciting new voice in historical fiction comes a gripping and emotional novel", "author": "Daisy Wood", "description": "About the Author Daisy Wood worked in publishing for some years before leaving to concentrate on her own writing. She has had several children\u2019s books published, both historical and contemporary, and is happiest rooting about in the London Library on the pretext of research. She lives in south London and when not locked away in her study can be seen in various city parks, running after a rescue Pointer with a Basset Hound in tow. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review Praise for Daisy Wood: 'A ticking time-bomb of intrigue, wrapped around stark but rich descriptions of the Blitz. An unforgettable wartime debut.' Mandy Robotham, internationally bestselling author of The Berlin Girl \u2018I couldn\u2019t put it down. My favourite kind of historical fiction.\u2019 Reviewer \u2018Wonderful.\u2019 Reviewer \u2018Brilliantly captures the essence of 1940s England. Highly recommended!\u2019 Reviewer Set between WWII and today, and America and England, I totally loved this outstandingly amazing book. Five stars!\u2019 Reviewer \u2018Daisy Wood skillfully navigates between two timelines, and her descriptions of the war are really masterful.\u2019 Reviewer \u2018The perfect blend of historical fiction and espionage.\u2019 Reviewer \u2018Beautifully written\u2026 I highly recommend this treasure!\u2019 Reviewer --This text refers to the paperback edition. Book Description from an exciting new voice in historical fiction comes a gripping and emotional novel --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "0778387097", "title": "Code Name Sapphire: A World War 2 Novel", "author": "Pam Jenoff", "description": "Review \"Pam Jenoff brings her storytelling talent to Belgium with this fast-paced, heart-pounding tale of love, family, and the perils of resistance. Get your tissues ready for the final few chapters; Code Name Sapphire will break your heart and, at the same time, remind you of the courage and resilience of the human spirit.\" \u2014 New York Times bestselling author Kristin Harmel \u201cFrom the opening scene to the final page, Code Name Sapphire will not let you go\u2026 This is a heart-racing and inspiring story of courage, family, and deep love.\u201d \u2014Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Book of Flora Lea \"This is beloved Pam Jenoff at her masterful best, an unforgettable story of the abiding bonds of friendship and family with enough twists and turns to keep you turning pages long into the night.\" \u2014Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The Good Left Undone \"Engrossing and emotionally stirring...A heart-wrenching exploration of the decisions women must make when their loyalties are put to the test in the most unimaginable of circumstances.\" \u2014Sarah Penner, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Apothecary Grounded in history, Jenoff\u2019s latest captivating WWII tale entwines heartrending journeys of survival, betrayal, and human connection. \u2014 Booklist About the Author Pam Jenoff is the author of several books of historical fiction, including the NYT bestsellers The Lost Girls of Paris and The Woman with the Blue Star . She holds a degree in international affairs from George Washington University and a degree in history from Cambridge, and she received her J.D. from UPenn.\u00a0She lives with her husband and\u00a0three children near Philadelphia, where, in addition to writing,\u00a0she teaches law school.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 10.87}, {"asin": "0778386791", "title": "Angels of the Resistance: A Novel of Sisterhood and Courage in WWII", "author": "Noelle Salazar", "description": "Review \u201c Angels of the Resistance brings to life a deadly-effective and deeply moving sisterhood in Lien and Elif Vinke, based on real-life sister operatives of the WWII Dutch resistance. Still reeling from a family tragedy when the Netherlands are invaded, the two teenage girls soon find themselves sabotaging trains, guiding downed airmen to safety, and staking themselves out as bait to assassinate unsuspecting Nazi targets. But at what cost to their family--and their souls? Noelle Salazar shines a light on the grit and tragedy behind resistance work, never forgetting the humanity in her beautifully drawn heroines!\u201d \u2014Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code \u201cAn unforgettable story of teenage sisters who risk everything to join the Dutch resistance during World War II. Combining meticulous research with riveting prose, Salazar crafts a story of family, romance and heroism that will keep readers riveted until the final page and beyond.\u201d \u2014Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman with the Blue Star \u201c Angels of the Resistance is riveting historical fiction at its finest. Teen sisters risk all to join the Dutch Resistance, which Noelle Salazar writes in vivid detail as she highlights not only incredible historical details, but also the very real dangers faced by these brave women.\u201d \u2014Madeline Martin, New York Times Bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London \u201cNoelle Salazar delivers another knock-out WWII novel with Angels of the Resistance. Her writing shines in this intimate and beautiful look at one family of Dutch women, and the lengths they will go to protect their own. Haunting, moving and unputdownable!\u201d \u2014Sara Ackerman, USA Today bestselling author of Radar Girls \u201cRich with meticulously researched details, this story of two teenage sisters who risk everything to join the Dutch Resistance is a dazzling tour-de-force of historical fiction. You\u2019ll cheer and root for Lien and Elif as they face a tangled web of love, danger and heartbreak while fighting to save all they hold dear. ANGELS OF THE RESISTANCE will have you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.\u201d \u2014Karen Robards, bestselling author of The Black Swan of Paris Praise for Noelle Salazar's bestselling novel, The Flight Girls \u201cThis World War II drama highlights the role of women pilots and the sacrifices they made for our country. I read well into the night, unable to stop. The book is unputdownable.\u201d\u2014 Debbie Macomber , #1 New York Times bestselling author\"Heart-breaking, validating, exciting, entertaining, and swoon-worthy... There are some novels that readers look to as the pinnacle of World War II fiction and storytelling. Noelle Salazar\u2019s The Flight Girls is sure to earn its rightful spot on that list in no time.\"\u2014 Hypable , 2019 Staff Favorite Pick\"Rich historical detail, drama and dynamic characters\u2026this saga has it all.\"\u2014 Woman's World \u201cFrom now on, I\u2019ll be recommending Noelle Salazar\u2019s book to anyone who feels beaten down by the status quo.\u201d\u2014 Forbes \u201cAn unforgettable and beautifully written historical novel about a fascinating piece of WWII history...masterfully weaves a story of female strength and friendship, with an emotionally resonant epic love story...I could not put this book down!\u201d\u2014 Jillian Cantor , author of The Lost Letter and In Another Time \"Salazar brings to life the stories of so many others who joined the WASP program and whose tales have been lost to history. A fascinating, captivating and triumphant read.\"\u2014 Roseanne Montillo , author of The Wilderness of Ruin and Atomic Women \"Captivated me from the first page and never let go...a powerful tale of courage and sacrifice by the Women Airforce Service Pilots during WWII. A spectacular first novel.\"\u2014 Sara Ackerman , USA TODAY bestselling author of Radar Girls \"Offers a glimpse into the lives of female WWII pilots, retrieving an underappreciated chapter in U.S. history... A fine suggestion for fans of both sweet romance and romantic historical fiction.\"\u2014 Booklist \u201cA debut author uncovers a nearly forgotten piece of American history in this dynamic novel.\u201d\u2014 Shelf Awareness About the Author Noelle Salazar is the USA Today bestselling author of The Flight Girls . Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she's been a Navy recruit, a medical assistant, an NFL cheerleader and always a storyteller. When she\u2019s not writing, she can be found dodging raindrops and daydreaming of her next book. Noelle lives in Bothell, Washington, with her family.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.39}, {"asin": "B08LDX4VL6", "title": "The Forest of Vanishing Stars: A Novel", "author": "Kristin Harmel", "description": "Review \"Fascinating, meticulously researched, and utterly unique.\" -- Kelly Rimmer, New York Times bestselling author of THE WARSAW ORPHAN\"Kristin Harmel is a master at spectacularly immersive historical fiction. With stunning lines you will want to savor and share, The Forest of Vanishing Stars is a powerful and compelling masterpiece, a significant story for our present time.\" -- Patti Callahan, NYT Bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis and Surviving Savannah\"Inspiring and gripping . \" -- New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict\"What a triumph! Not since Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers , have I read such a spellbinding and immersive tale of a people's will to survive.\" -- Stephanie Dray, NYT Bestselling author of The Women of Chateau Lafayette\"Unforgettable characters, nail-biting drama and deep emotion that endures long after the final words are forgotten.... The Forest of Vanishing Stars is a story that will touch, educate, transform and uplift.\" -- Santa Montefiore About the Author Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels including The Forest of Vanishing Stars , The Book of Lost Names , The Room on Rue Am\u00e9lie , and The Sweetness of Forgetting . She is published in more than thirty languages and is the cofounder and cohost of the popular web series, Friends & Fiction . She lives in Orlando, Florida. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One CHAPTER ONE 1922 The old woman watched from the shadows outside Behaimstrasse 72, waiting for the lights inside to blink out. The apartment\u2019s balcony dripped with crimson roses, and ivy climbed the iron rails, but the young couple who lived there\u2014the power-hungry Siegfried J\u00fcttner and his aloof wife, Alwine\u2014weren\u2019t the ones who tended the plants. That was left to their maid, for the nurturing of life was something only those with some goodness could do. The old woman had been watching the J\u00fcttners for nearly two years now, and she knew things about them, things that were important to the task she was about to undertake. She knew, for example, that Herr J\u00fcttner had been one of the first men in Berlin to join the National Socialist German Workers\u2019 Party, a new political movement that was slowly gaining a foothold in the war-shattered country. She knew he\u2019d been inspired to do so while on holiday in Munich nearly three years earlier, after seeing an angry young man named Adolf Hitler give a rousing speech in the Hofbr\u00e4ukeller. She knew that after hearing that speech, Herr J\u00fcttner had walked twenty minutes back to the elegant Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, had awoken his sleeping young wife, and had lain with her, though at first she had objected, for she had been dreaming of a young man she had once loved, a man who had died in the Great War. The old woman knew, too, that the baby conceived on that autumn-scented Bavarian night, a girl the J\u00fcttners had named Inge, had a birthmark in the shape of a dove on the inside of her left wrist. She also knew that the girl\u2019s second birthday was the following day, the sixth of July, 1922. And she knew, as surely as she knew that the bell-shaped buds of lily of the valley and the twilight petals of aconite could kill a man, that the girl must not be allowed to remain with the J\u00fcttners. That was why she had come. The old woman, who was called Jerusza, had always known things other people didn\u2019t. For example, she had known it the moment Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin had died in 1849, for she had awoken from a deep slumber, the notes of his \u201cRevolutionary \u00c9tude\u201d marching through her head in an aggrieved parade. She had felt the earth tremble upon the births of Marie Curie in 1867 and Albert Einstein in 1879. And on a sweltering late June day in 1914, two months after she had turned seventy-four, she had felt it deep in her jugular vein, weeks before the news reached her, that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne had been felled by an assassin\u2019s bullet, cracking the fragile balance of the world. She had known then that war was brewing, just as she knew it now. She could see it in the dark clouds that hulked on the horizon. Jerusza\u2019s mother, who had killed herself with a brew of poisons in 1860, used to tell her that the knowing of impossible things was a gift from God, passed down through maternal blood of only the most fortunate Jewish women. Jerusza, the last of a bloodline that had stretched for centuries, was certain at times that it was a curse instead, but whatever it was, it had been her burden all her life to follow the voices that echoed through the forests. The leaves whispered in the trees; the flowers told tales as old as time; the rivers rushed with news of places far away. If one listened closely enough, nature always spilled her secrets, which were, of course, the secrets of God. And now, it was God who had brought Jerusza here, to a fog-cloaked Berlin street corner, where she would be responsible for changing the fate of a child, and perhaps a piece of the world, too. Jerusza had been alive for eighty-two years, nearly twice as long as the typical German lived. When people looked at her\u2014if they bothered to look at all\u2014they were visibly startled by her wizened features, her hands gnarled by decades of hard living. Most of the time, though, strangers simply ignored her, just as Siegfried and Alwine J\u00fcttner had done each of the hundreds of times they had passed her on the street. Her age made her particularly invisible to those who cared most about appearance and power; they assumed she was useless to them, a waste of time, a waste of space. After all, surely a woman as old as she would be dead soon. But Jerusza, who had spent her whole life sustained by the plants and herbs in the darkest spots of the deepest forests, knew that she would live nearly twenty years more, to the age of 102, and that she would die on a spring Tuesday just after the last thaw of 1942. The J\u00fcttners\u2019 maid, the timid daughter of a dead sailor, had gone home two hours before, and it was a few minutes past ten o\u2019clock when the J\u00fcttners finally turned off their lights. Jerusza exhaled. Darkness was her shield; it always had been. She squinted at the closed windows and could just make out the shape of the little girl\u2019s infant bed in the room to the right, beyond pale custard curtains. She knew exactly where it was, had been into the room many times when the family wasn\u2019t there. She had run her fingers along the pine rails, had felt the power splintering from the curves. Wood had memory, of course, and the first time Jerusza had touched the bed where the baby slept, she had been nearly overcome by a warm, white wash of light. It was the same light that had brought her here from the forest two years earlier. She had first seen it in June 1920, shining above the treetops like a personal aurora borealis, beckoning her north. She hated the city, abhorred being in a place built by man rather than God, but she knew she had no choice. Her feet had carried her straight to Behaimstrasse 72, to bear witness as the raven-haired Frau J\u00fcttner nursed the baby for the first time. Jerusza had seen the baby glowing, even then, a light in the darkness no one knew was coming. She didn\u2019t want a child; she never had. Perhaps that was why it had taken her so long to act. But nature makes no mistakes, and now, as the sky filled with a cloud of silent blackbirds over the twinkling city, she knew the time had come. It was easy to climb up the ladder of the modern building\u2019s fire escape, easier still to push open the J\u00fcttners\u2019 unlatched window and slip quietly inside. The child was awake, silently watching, her extraordinary eyes\u2014one twilight blue and one forest green\u2014glimmering in the darkness. Her hair was black as night, her lips the startling red of corn poppies. \u201c Ikh bin gekimen dir tzu nemen ,\u201d Jerusza whispered in Yiddish, a language the girl would not yet know. I have come for you . She was startled to realize that her heart was racing. She didn\u2019t expect a reply, but the child\u2019s lips parted, and she reached out her left hand, palm upturned, the dove-shaped birthmark shimmering in the darkness. She said something soft, something that a lesser person would have dismissed as the meaningless babble of a little girl, but to Jerusza, it was unmistakable. \u201c Dus zent ir ,\u201d said the girl in Yiddish. It is you. \u201c Yo, dus bin ikh ,\u201d Jerusza agreed. And with that, she picked up the baby, who didn\u2019t cry out, and, tucking her close against the brittle curves of her body, climbed out the window and shimmied down the iron rail, her feet hitting the sidewalk without a sound. From the folds of Jerusza\u2019s cloak, the baby watched soundlessly, her mismatched ocean eyes round, as Berlin vanished behind them and the forest to the north swallowed them whole. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0063227495", "title": "The Girls in Navy Blue: A Novel", "author": "Alix Rickloff", "description": "Review \"THE GIRLS IN NAVY BLUE had me smiling from first page to last! When the US Navy admits women to the ranks during World War I, three intrepid yeomanettes answer the call: Blanche the dashing suffragette, Marjory the German immigrant, and Vivian the preacher's daughter on the run from the police. Friendship, duty, and the struggle of making their way in a man's world will bind the three together, and their secrets will resound through the next fifty years--until Blanche's great-niece, reeling from losses and desperate for home, will pick up the pieces. Alix Rickloff pens a lovely coming-of-age tale: brave women making waves in a war-torn world.\" \u2014 Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author \u201cThe unforgettable story of the very first women allowed to join the US Navy in World War I, and three friends with private reasons of their own for enlisting\u2014reasons that go well beyond duty and patriotism. The Girls in Navy Blue is an enthralling story about sisterhood, and the secrets we leave behind. A delight from the first page to the last!\u201d \u2014 Lecia Cornwall, author of The Woman at the Front \"The Girls in Navy Blue is a nostalgic and eye-opening journey into the almost forgotten story of the women who served in the U.S. Navy during World War One. Rickloff has written a riveting reminder that the bonds of found family can be stronger than blood.\" \u2014 Kaia Alderson, author of Sisters in Arms \"The Girls in Navy Blue shines a light on the wartime experiences of servicewomen known as \u201cthe yeomanettes\u201d, the first women to join the United States Navy. In this compelling story of ground-breaking women and the dangerous secrets they keep, Alix Rickloff brings the past vividly to life.\" \u2014 Christine Wells, author of The Wife's Tale \"Alix Rickloff\u2019s THE GIRLS IN NAVY BLUE is a thrilling story showcasing the wartime contribution of a forgotten sisterhood of soldiers:\u00a0\u00a0the yeomanettes, brave women who answered the call during the First World War and served their country with dignity and resilience. Pulling together the experiences of three yeomanettes and one of their descendants, Rickloff beautifully depicts how secrets and sisterhood can resonate through the years.\" \u2014 Bryn Turnbull, author of The Woman Before Wallis \"This extraordinary novel follows the stories of strong women who undertake struggles and become stronger for it.\" \u2014 Library Journal \u201cIn this compelling and heartwarming novel, Alix Rickloff shares with us two women, mother and daughter, whose tragic and triumphant lives intertwine through two world wars. The story pulls us into the universal struggle of all women to find their places in their worlds. I was deeply moved by Secrets of Nanreath Hall .\u201d \u2014 Karen Harper, New York Times bestselling author \u201cTwo women and two wars separated by a generation filled with secrets that kept me turning pages to get to the mysterious truth. At the heart, this is a novel about searching for one\u2019s identity. The vivid writing combined with such an intriguing story make Alix Rickloff an exciting voice in historical fiction.\u201d \u2014 Ren\u00e9e Rosen, USA Today bestselling author, on Secrets of Nanreath Hall \u201cAlix Rickloff\u2019s debut is a delight\u2014beautifully written with fascinating characters, rich historical detail and an intriguing family mystery that keeps the pages turning.\u201d \u2014 Hazel Gaynor, New York Times bestselling author, on Secrets of Nanreath Hall \u201cTelling an elegant tale about a mother and daughter trying to find themselves in the midst of two very different world wars, Alix Rickloff establishes herself as an up-and-coming talent in the historical fiction genre.\u201d \u2014 Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling author, on Secrets of Nanreath Hall \u201cIn this engaging and deftly plotted novel, Alix Rickloff introduces us to two heroines who are emblematic of their time yet also manage to transcend its limitations, and who are so memorable and richly portrayed that they all but leap off the page. I loved Secrets of Nanreath Hall , Alix Rickloff\u2019s first foray into historical fiction, and I eagerly await more from this sensitive and gifted novelist.\u201d \u2014 Jennifer Robson, international bestselling author \u201cA wonderful blend of smart writing, memorable characters, and World War II imagery all centered on the hunger each one of us has to give love and receive it. A great read for not only devotees of period fiction, but anyone who craves a well-told story.\u201d \u2014 Susan Meissner, author of A Bridge Across the Ocean on The Way to London \u201c The Way to London manages to combine a sense of epic sweep with a very intimate look at one woman\u2019s emotional transformation, as the war drives Lucy Stanhope from Singapore to Cornwall to London--and, finally, to the most difficult destination of all: a sense of her own self and the place she belongs.\u00a0I didn\u2019t want the journey to end!\u201d \u2014 Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author on The Way to London \u201cA gripping page-turner about a sisterhood of trailblazing women, the secrets they kept, and sacrifices they made. Rickloff\u2019s compelling characters come to life off the page and make the reader invested in them until the very end. A fantastic read!\u201d \u2014 Laura Kamoie, NYT Bestselling author of MY DEAR HAMILTON \u201cRickloff delivers an engrossing novel of a young woman\u2019s coming of age.\u00a0Like all of Rickloff\u2019s novels, the heart of the story is her characters, their emotional growth and strength, blended with wonderful storytelling, descriptions and dialogue that compel readers to believe they are a part of the action.\u201d \u2014 RT Book Reviews on The Way to London \u201cAlix Rickloff has penned an entertaining novel\u2026Recommended.\u201d \u2014 Historical Novels Review on The Way to London \u201cFeaturing a strong heroine and an emotional journey, The Way to London is a beautiful story of love, friendship, and the strength of the human spirit set against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of World War II.\u201d \u2014 Chanel Cleeton, author of Next Year in Havana on The Way to London \u201can emotional and fascinating journey into the hearts of many women. [...] Many will find the soap-opera plotline, likable characters, colorful backdrop and the quest for answers to decades-old questions as much fun as a Downtown Abbey episode.\u201d \u2014 RT Book Reviews on Secrets of Nanreath Hall About the Author Alix Rickloff is a critically acclaimed author of historical and paranormal romance. Her previous novels include the Bligh Family series, the Heirs of Kilronan trilogy, and, as Alexa Egan, the Imnada Brotherhood series.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.29}, {"asin": "0008379092", "title": "The Dressmaker\u2019s Secret: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner", "author": "Lorna Cook", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.37}, {"asin": "B09ZB6BVWV", "title": "The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre", "author": "Natasha Lester", "description": "Review \u201c The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre braids espionage, fashion, and a broken-but-unbowed heroine together into one fascinating tale. Natasha Lester weaves a triple-stranded delight!\" \u2014Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye \u201cNatasha Lester has done it again with this sumptuously written page-turner ! Alix St. Pierre is everything that makes an admirable heroine \u2013 independent, plucky, and clever as the story spans from the fashionable world of Dior in Paris to the fascinating intrigue of international espionage in neutral Switzerland. The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre is a captivating novel that readers will absolutely adore. \u201d \u2014Madeline Martin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Bookshop in London \"Natasha Lester has expertly woven a brilliant heroine who is as brave in the fashion world as she is spying on the enemy. From page one, I was completely captivated by her daring and enamored with the glamour of Paris fashion. Unputdownable! \u201d \u2014Eliza Knight, USA Today bestselling author of The Mayfair Bookshop \u201cNatasha Lester weaves an intricate plot of espionage and revenge around fascinating true facts about the war and its aftermath. A thrilling read.\u201d \u2014Ruth Druart, author of While Paris Slept \u201cAn enthralling page turner! Luxuriant and opulent, just like Dior\u2019s glorious gowns.\u201d \u2014Tania Blanchard, author of The Girl from Munich \u201cSparkling and complex, like vintage champagne. In The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre , Natasha Lester gives us a brilliant, fascinating and multi-layered heroine whose dangerous past as a spy in World War II comes to threaten her future in glamorous post-war Paris. Lester\u2019s masterful storytelling held me enthralled from the first page! \u201d \u2014Christine Wells, author of Sisters of the Resistance Review Beautifully written and intimately researched. Magnifique!-- \"Hazel Gaynor, NYT bestselling author of When We Were Young & Brave\"The novel kept me up at night, turning the pages faster and faster.-- \"Janet Skeslien Charles, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Library\"This meticulously researched novel is about the lengths people will go to protect one another, and a love that lasts a lifetime. The Paris Secret is a tear-jerker, so stock up on tissues, sit in a quiet corner and don't move until you've finished this extraordinary book.-- \"Marie Claire\"Will delight fans of Kate Morton or anyone in need of a gorgeously wrought . . . tale of love, loss, courage, and compassion.-- \"Booklist, starred review, on The Paris Secret\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Natasha Lester is the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress,\u202fThe Paris Orphan and The Riviera House ,\u202fand a former marketing executive for L\u2019Or\u00e9al.\u00a0Her novels have been translated into many different languages and are published all around the world. When she\u2019s not writing, she loves\u202fcollecting vintage fashion (Dior is a favorite!), practicing the art of fashion illustration, learning about fashion history\u2014and traveling to Paris. Natasha lives with her husband and three children in Perth, Western Australia. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "3899557239", "title": "Little Red Riding Hood", "author": "gestalten", "description": "Review \"Because the pages of die-cut art are dead black on one side and white with red and black highlights on the other, not only are several layers visible at once, but the overlaps create ominous shadows and depths behind the figures.\" --Kirkus", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 6.96}, {"asin": "0425226409", "title": "A Veiled Deception (A Vintage Magic Mystery)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 89.99}, {"asin": "0996678905", "title": "The Time Seekers", "author": null, "description": "Review \"This is a book that I would have loved as a child and just wish, as an adult, that I could have written!\" - K.S. Wallace; \"Was I glad when I sat down to read this book - pure undiluted escapism. This author is truly inventive and gifted. It is such a magnificently crafted story with so many unexpected twists and turns that kept me enthralled. Immediately from the start, suspense was created and I was captivated.\" - Elle; \"The author has a wonderfully gifted way of unfolding a mesmerizing story that is sure to entertain all ages.\" - Ginger82; \"I would recommend this book to adults as well as children and look forward to future books from D. A. Squires.\" - K. Lewis; \"This new author has hit it out of the ball park, truly a book for all ages.\" - V. Pratt. All are Amazon 5 star reviews.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 19.95}, {"asin": "1591425832", "title": "\"The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living\"", "author": "Kenneth Wapnick", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Books on CD"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 67.27}], "target_asin": "3899557239"}
{"user_id": "AH4K2L4J3HTEFZWD4XGM7JD23GRA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1594148201", "title": "Foodchain", "author": "Jeff Jacobson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 3.6, "price": 17.61}, {"asin": "0307464970", "title": "The Harlem Hellfighters", "author": "Max Brooks", "description": "Amazon.com Review Amazon Exclusive: Essay by Max Brooks (adapted from the author\u2019s note within The Harlem Hellfighters ) I first learned of the Harlem Hellfighters from an Anglo-Rhodesian named Michael Furmanovsky when I was 11. Michael was working for my parents while getting his MFA in history from UCLA. He taught me about the British Empire, the Falklands War, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and a host of other topics not covered in my fifth-grade western civilization class. Of all his after-school lessons, the one that left the deepest impression was the story of a unit of American soldiers who weren\u2019t allowed to fight for their country because of the color of their skin. To a white, privileged kid growing up on the west side of L.A. in the 1980s, that kind of prejudice was just inconceivable. When I confessed that I didn\u2019t know about them, he assured me that I wasn\u2019t alone. Ten years later I was an exchange student at the University of the Virgin Islands. The experience brought me back into the orbit of the Hellfighters when, while walking through an old cemetery, I noticed some graves from 1918. I wondered if they might be casualties of the Great War, maybe even members of the 369th. I decided to ask my professor of Virgin Islands history. He was an African-American from the mainland, and to call him passionate would be a laughable understatement. With his beard and spectacles and flaring dashiki, he would rail against the historical crimes committed by white men of Europe and North America. Most heinous was the erasure of black accomplishments by white historians. Colonization, he would tell us, begins with the mind, and the best (or worst) way to colonize a people is to bury their past. \u201cThere were no black soldiers in World War I.\u201d That was his dismissive answer to my question about the graves from 1918. When I started to argue, even bringing up the name \u201cHarlem Hellfighters,\u201d he assured me that I must have been confused with the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. I was shocked. Here was a scholar, a crusader, a thoughtful, driven man who\u2019d made it his life\u2019s mission to trumpet the glory of Africa and her diaspora, and HE didn\u2019t know about the Harlem Hellfighters. I wish I could say that I decided then and there to write their story, but that would have to wait for nearly another decade. In the late 1990s, I was living back in L.A., just out of graduate school and trying to make a living as a writer. My decision to tackle the story of the Hellfighters came after watching two TNT made-for-TV movies about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Buffalo soldiers. I thought TNT might be interested in a story about World War I\u2019s black heroes, especially after A&E\u2019s successful Lost Battalion movie. I started collecting books about the subject (the most influential was and still is From Harlem to the Rhine by Arthur Little), and a year and several dozen drafts later, I pitched my screenplay to the TNT Network. They passed. So did everyone else. Things changed when I sent my script to actor/director LeVar Burton. \u201cThere are actually more than a couple Harlem Hellfighters scripts floating around Hollywood,\u201d he told me during our meeting, \u201cbut yours comes closest to the truth.\u201d He agreed that the subject matter would be difficult to sell to studios, but that by no means should that deter me. \u201cI don\u2019t have the power right now to make this movie,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I\u2019m not going to give up, and you shouldn\u2019t either.\u201d Thank you, Mr. Burton. Five years and what seemed like a lifetime later, an unexpected opportunity opened up in the world of comic books. In 2006, I began collaborating with Avatar Press on a graphic companion to my first book, The Zombie Survival Guide. I learned very quickly how different comic book writing was from prose, but how similar it could be to movie scripts. I also realized that comics presented a forum for telling very visual stories without the cumbersome budget of movies or television. It seemed the ideal medium for telling the story of the Harlem Hellfighters. It\u2019s now been close to six years since I began working with William Christensen of Avatar Press and the amazingly talented artist Caanan White. And now it\u2019s time to share this heroic regiment\u2019s story of courage, honor, and heart with you. I hope that you are as captivated by it as I have been. From Booklist Brooks (World War Z, 2006) makes a U-turn from zombies with this fictionalized account of the famous all-black 369th Infantry. The opening scene of a trench bomb sets the stage for the whole book: endless, grimacing faces and buckets of gore, mostly in the form of exploded bodies splattering across the page. This intro also betrays the book\u2019s chief concern: simply telling the story of WWI combat, albeit from an unusual point of view. As a result, the plot is fuzzy and the characters suitably enjoyable placeholders. We follow our diverse bunch from enlistment to training to the hell of France, where they fight through inhumane conditions with the utmost valor, and for what? Prejudice and humiliation at every turn. \u201cThey would rather see white Germans,\u201d says one soldier, \u201cinstead of black Americans march in triumph up Fifth Avenue.\u201d White\u2019s appropriately cluttered art has the horrific shock value of EC Comics classics like Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales, and the whole thing comes off as resolutely Tarantinoesque. The movie version should be along any second now. --Daniel Kraus Review NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER \u201cWriter Max Brooks and illustrator Caanan White hew closely to the true tale of the 369th Infantry Regiment...The horrors of war and the outrages of racism are vividly conveyed in a swift and suspenseful tale.\u201d \u2014U-T San Diego \u201cShattering...A visceral evocation of the horrors of trench warfare...A sharp reminder that venerating volunteer troops for their service is an ideal that has not always been a reality.\u201d \u2014Washington Post \u201c[One] of of the most powerful books I've read so far this year...This is a stunning work of historical recovery and a very graphic graphic novel: bodies explode, rats feed on corpses, men are strafed and gassed. It's not pretty, but the \"in your face\" style of The Harlem Hellfighters is suited to dramatizing a crucial part of American history that hasn't been thrust forcefully enough into our collective faces.\u201d \u2014NPR, Fresh Air \u201cStunning... Like the regiment of African American soldiers it depicts, Harlem Hellfighters can\u2019t be stereotyped or pigeon holed. It might not be your typical history book, but it packs one hell of a punch.\u201d \u2014Newsweek \u201cA splashy, fun, gripping number, and an intriguing look at an oft-ignored footnote in the history books.\u201d \u2014New York Daily News \u201cMoral complexity is just one of the novel's many achievements. Dialogue and imagery are often richly juxtaposed... White's illustrations render the grisly and graphic details of trench warfare with haunting immediacy... The sharp lines and shadowy depths of his sketches are absorbing and Brooks\u2019 words are equally evocative. The dialogue is bleak, funny, and efficient... [Brooks\u2019] careful research doesn\u2019t sap the story of its speed and strength.\u201d \u2014Christian Science Monitor \u201cShines a literary klieg light on a woefully overlooked chapter of World War I...Bolstering Brooks\u2019s storytelling muscle is the high-contrast black-and-white art of gifted Caanan White, whose graphic grit evokes Joe Kubert and 'Sgt. Rock'... A powerful comic that may do more than any previous work to illuminate the heroism of the 369th.\u201d \u2014Washington Post \u201cThe Harlem Hellfighters brings to life a long forgotten piece of American history. Bravo, Max Brooks, bravo.\u201d \u2014Spike Lee \u201cAn utterly fresh and shocking blend of storytelling and graphic art that takes us back to the global conflagration at the dawn of the last century and the heroic and outsized role brave African American soldiers played in turning the tide for the Allies. In an injustice oft repeated throughout our history, the heroic feats of the 'Harlem Hellfighters' were not just forgotten but deliberately suppressed by a nation eager to accept the Black man\u2019s sacrifice but terrified to give him the slightest credit for it. Denied the ability to even defend themselves back home, the Hellfighters tear up the Western Front and terrify the Germans, facing down machine guns, rats, and poison gas with stoic relentlessness and deflected fury. White\u2019s illustrations explode\u00a0off the page and Brooks\u2019 storytelling brings gripping action and anger to every page.\u201d \u2014Tom Reiss, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Black Count \u201cBrooks's text seethes with rage at the soldiers' mistreatment, but he insists that even the racists who saw them in action would have respected their accomplishments. Like the text, White's b&w art is intensely furious, emphasizing the war's chaotic horror. Reading the book is a painful, memorable experience.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201c The Harlem Hellfighters is perhaps the first graphic novel taking as its theme a major episode in African American History, the heroic performance of black men in combat during World War I. Brilliantly dramatized by Max Brooks\u2014author of such national bestsellers as World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide\u2014 and stunningly illustrated by Caanan White, one of our foremost African-American comic book illustrators, the novel tells the gripping story of the often overlooked black men who served their country in combat against enemy forces during 'the Great War.' The Harlem Hellfighters served in combat longer than any other American unit, losing neither men nor ground, even as they fought entrenched racism within the U.S. military. Brooks and White tell a thrilling saga of noble perseverance, individual valor and sacrifice and collective triumph, showing how combat abroad in war contributed to the larger quest for civil rights at home. Informed by judicious historical research and vividly illustrated storytelling, this book itself is an historical \u201cfirst,\u201d and is a major contribution to our understanding of Black History.\u201d \u2014Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University About the Author MAX BROOKS is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide, and The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "0375714839", "title": "The Complete Persepolis: Volumes 1 and 2", "author": "Marjane Satrapi", "description": "Review Praise for Persepolis: Volume 1 A New York Times Notable Book\u00a0\u2022 A Time Magazine \u201cBest Comix of the Year\u201d\u00a0\u2022\u00a0A San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times Best Seller \"A memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran, Persepolis provides a unique glimpse into a nearly unknown and unreachable way of life.... That Satrapi chose to tell her remarkable story as a gorgeous comic book makes it totally unique and indispensable.\" \u2014 Time \u201cDelectable... Dances with drama and insouciant wit.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cA stunning graphic memoir hailed as a wholly original achievement in the form. There\u2019s still a startling freshness to the book. It won\u2019t age. In inky shadows and simple, expressive lines\u2014reminiscent of Ludwig Bemelmans\u2019s \u201cMadeline\u201d\u2014Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances ... A stark, shocking impact.\u201d \u2014Parul\u00a0Sehgal, \u201cThe 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years\u201d The New York Times \u201cA dazzlingly singular achievement.... Striking a perfect balance between the fantasies and neighborhood conspiracies of childhood and the mounting lunacy of Khomeini's reign, she's like the Persian love child of Spiegelman and Lynda Barry.\u201d \u2014 Salon \u201cA brilliant and unusual graphic memoir.... [Told] in a guileless voice ... accompanied by a series of black-and-white drawings that dramatically illustrate how a repressive regime deforms ordinary lives.\u201d \u2014 Vogue \"Odds are, you\u2019ll be too busy being entertained to realize how much you\u2019ve learned until you turn the last page.\u201d \u2014Elle.com \u201c[A] self-portrait of the artist as a young girl, rendered in graceful black-and-white comics that apply a childlike sensibility to the bleak lowlights of recent Iranian history. . . . [Her] style is powerful; it persuasively communicates confusion and horror through the eyes of a precocious preteen.\u201d \u2014 Village Voice Praise for Persepolis: Volume 2 \"Wildly charming ... Like a letter from a friend, in this case a wonderful friend: honest, strong-willed, funny, tender, impulsive, and self-aware.\" \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \"The most original coming-of-age story from the Middle East yet.\" \u2014 People \"Elegant, simple panels tell this story of growth, loneliness, and homecoming with poignant charm and wit.\" \u2014 The Washington Post \"Humorous and heartbreaking ... A welcome look beind the headlines and into the heart and mind of one very wise, wicked, and winning young woman.\" \u2014 Elle \"Every revolution needs a chronicler like Satrapi.\" \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \"It is our good fortune that Satrapi has never stopped visiting Iran in her mind.\" \u2014 Newsweek \"Persepolis 2 is much more than the chronicle of a young woman\u2019s struggle into adulthood; it\u2019s a brilliant, painful, rendering of the contrast between East and West, between the repression of wartime Iran and the social, political, and sexual freedoms of 1980\u2019s Austria. There\u2019s something universal about Satrapi\u2019s search for self-definition, but her experiences in Vienna and Tehran are rendered with such witty particularity, and such heartbreaking honesty, that by the end of this book you\u2019ll feel you\u2019ve gained an intimate friend.\" \u2014Julie Orringer, author of How To Breathe Underwater About the Author MARJANE SATRAPI was born in Rasht, Iran. She now lives in Paris, where she is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers throughout the world, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. She is the author of Persepolis, Persepolis 2, Embroideries, Chicken with Plums, and several children's books. She cowrote and codirected the animated feature film version of Persepolis, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Her most recent film was a live-action version of Chicken with Plums.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.14}, {"asin": "B008O58JR4", "title": "Mammoth Books presents Christmas with the Dead", "author": "Joe R. Lansdale", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "B0847KH373", "title": "The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness Book 2)", "author": "Joe Abercrombie", "description": "About the Author Joe Abercrombie was born in Lancaster in 1974, spent much of his youth in imaginary worlds, and left school with a good idea of how to make stuff up. After graduating from Manchester University he worked as a TV editor, but he never stopped making stuff up, and his first book, The Blade Itself , was published in 2006. He has since written eight more novels and a collection of stories in his First Law and Shattered Sea series. He lives in Bath with his wife Lou and their three children Grace, Eve and Teddy, and makes stuff up full-time. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review \"A master of the genre.\"\u2015 Lev Grossman, #1 New York Times bestselling author \"Abercrombie's satisfying plotting and expert subversion of genre expectations are sure to please. Readers will be gripped.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Abercrombie squeezes your heart till it matches his beat. No one writes with the seismic scope or primal intensity of Joe Abercrombie.\"\u2015 Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author, on A Little Hatred \"Abercrombie continues to do what he does best . . . Buckle your seat belts for this one . . . . A vivid and jolting tale.\"\u2015 Robin Hobb, New York Times bestselling author, on A Little Hatred \"Highly recommended - a funny, finely-wrought, terrifically energetic work of high fantasy. Seek it out.\"\u2015 Joe Hill on A Little Hatred \"Say one thing for Joe Abercrombie, say that he's a master of his craft.\"\u2015 Forbes on A Little Hatred \" A Little Hatred is Abercrombie at his very best: witty, wise, and whip-smart. Masterfully plotted . . . . I had high hopes for this book, and it exceed them all.\"\u2015 Nicholas Eames, author of Kings of the Wyld, on A Little Hatred \"Brutal, unforgiving, and terribly fun. Everything awesome readers have come to expect from Joe Abercrombie.\"\u2015 Brian McClellan, author of Sins of Empire, on A Little Hatred \"With expert craft, Abercrombie lays the groundwork for another thrilling trilogy.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) on A Little Hatred \" A Little Hatred may be the most accomplished work from a writer who many already consider a master.\"\u2015 SFF World on A Little Hatred --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "B00C5WZ1WS", "title": "Possession (GREYWALKER Book 8)", "author": "Kat Richardson", "description": "From Booklist In the eighth Greywalker novel, Seattle private investigator Harper Blaine reluctantly agrees to look into the odd case of a comatose woman who is apparently possessed. Harper, despite her own experience with the strange and unusual, is skeptical, but when she learns of two other, similar cases, she\u2019s intrigued. Could someone or something be trying to communicate from the other side? And what, she soon wonders, does a woman responsible for dozens of deaths nearly a century ago have to do with what is happening today? Harper Blaine is an interesting character. As faithful series readers know, a few years ago she died for two minutes, and now she is \u201cone of the rare few who can move through the overlapping fringes of the world of the normal and that of the paranormal,\u201d as she describes herself here. Richardson surrounds her with an assortment of well-drawn characters, human and otherwise, and gives her a good, solid mystery to solve. Fans of the previous series entries or of urban fantasy in general should be well pleased. --David Pitt --This text refers to the hardcover edition. About the Author Kat Richardson lives aboard a boat in Seattle with her husband and a small pit bull\u2014who is not the world\u2019s largest ferret, no matter how she pretends. Kat rides a motorcycle, shoots target pistol, and has been known to swing dance, sing, and spend insufficient time at the gym. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Review Praise for Kat Richardson\u2019s Greywalker Novels: \u201cStanding head and shoulders above the plethora of urban fantasies, Richardson\u2019s latest tale should appeal to fans of Jim Butcher\u2019s Dresden Files and Tanya Huff\u2019s Victoria Nelson series.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal \u201cRichardson\u2019s once-playful Harper is clearly evolving into a supernatural force to be reckoned with.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cHarper is one of my favorite paranormal detectives....This series is one of the best examples of true urban fantasy.\u201d\u2014Night Owl Reviews\u201cRichardson has such a natural knack for storytelling...completely captivating.\u201d\u2014 CrimeSpree Magazine --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "0393328481", "title": "Kings in Disguise: A Novel", "author": "James Vance", "description": "Review \"Utterly masterful.\" \u2015 Ron Evry, Fantagraphics Best Comics of All Time \"Wonderful, earnest storytelling . . . a book made by intelligent, caring human hands.\" \u2015 Art Spiegelman \"The best case yet that a mainstream novel can be told in comics form.\" \u2015 Max Allan Collins, writer of Dick Tracy About the Author James Vance (1953\u20152017) was an American comic book writer and author of the graphic novels Kings in Disguise and On the Ropes . Dan E. Burr has been an illustrator for DC Comics\u2019s Big Book Series . He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Alan Moore is a magician and performer, and is widely regarded as the best and most influential writer in the history of comics. His seminal works include From Hell , V for Vendetta , and Watchmen , for which he won the Hugo Award. He was born in 1953 in Northampton, UK, and has lived there ever since.", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.63}, {"asin": "B003IHVZVU", "title": "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath ($.99 Horror Classics)", "author": "H.P. Lovecraft", "description": "From the Inside Flap Six bone-chilling tales of bizarre beauty and awesome horror lurk in the dark of the soul, waiting to be called upon by the demons of nightmares, and let loose in the frightened mind. Only H.P. Lovecraft could conjure up these testaments to evil that will live inside of you forever.... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 \u2013 1937) \u2014 known as H.P. Lovecraft \u2014 was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. In 1913 his conduct of a long running controversy in the letters page of a story magazine led to his being invited to participate in an amateur journalism association. Encouraged, he started circulating his stories; he was 31 at the time of his first publication in a professional magazine. By age 34, he was a regular contributor to newly founded Weird Tales magazine. In 1926 he produced some of his most celebrated tales including \"The Call of Cthulhu\". Never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor, he subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died at the age of 46. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "078603078X", "title": "Sleep Tight", "author": "Jeff Jacobson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "0310277302", "title": "Messy Spirituality", "author": "Mike Yaconelli", "description": "From the Back Cover I Guess I'm Not a Very Good Christian . . . Do you feel like: I don't pray enough I don't read my Bible enough I don't share my faith enough I don't love God enough I'm not committed enough I'm not spiritual enough Then this book is for you. Messy Spirituality was written for the silent majority of us who have been convinced that we just don't do Christianity right. We spend most of our lives worried about what we don't do instead of what we have done, focused on our imperfections instead of God's fondness for the imperfect. Why? Because we've been bombarded with books, tapes, talks, seminars, and movies convincing us that real Christianity is all about perfection. Michael Yaconelli dares to suggest that imperfection, infiniteness, and messiness are, in fact, the earmarks of true Christianity; that real Christianity is messy, erratic, lopsided . . . and gloriously liberating.  What if genuine faith begins with admitting we will never have our act completely together? Maybe messy disciples are exactly the kind of imperfect people Jesus came to earth for and whose company he actually enjoyed--and still enjoys. If you want to find Jesus today, look for him in the midst of burned-out believers, moral misfits, religious incompetents . . . men and women whose lives are, well, messy.  Messy Spirituality is a strong antidote for the spiritual perfectionism in us all. Here are truths that can cut you loose from the tyranny of ought-to's and open your eyes to the deep spirituality of being loved, shortcomings and all, by the God who meets you and transforms you in the midst of a messy and unpredictable life. About the Author Mike Yaconelli is the author of bestselling books Dangerous Wonder and Messy Spirituality. He was the senior editor for the Wittenburg Door (1971-1996), a satirical religious magazine noted for its irreverent humor, in-depth interviews, and commitment to reforming the evangelical church. He was the cofounder of Youth Specialties, an international organization devoted to equipping youth workers through training and resources. Mike was a prophetic voice in the church-at-large and was a devoted husband and father until his death in 2003.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 5.0}, {"asin": "0985115602", "title": "Sand Dollar: A Story of Undying Love", "author": "Sebastian Cole", "description": "Review \"So to the hopeless romantics out there I say, Highly Recommended - have at it, this is a must-read. To the snarling cynics like me who mentally have their arms akimbo and their eyebrow raised, I say pick up Sand Dollar: A Story of Undying Love and surprise yourself by discovering the romantic in you.\" -- BookIdeas.com \" Sand Dollar , a fantasy romance by Sebastian Cole, lives up to its subtitle, A Story of Undying Love ... bookreview.com considers Sand Dollar an excellent romance novel and looks forward to reading more from Sebastian Cole.\"\u00a0-- BookReview.com \" Sand Dollar: A Story of Undying Love is Sebastian Cole's debut novel, but I think he will have a long list of best sellers if he keeps going at this rate. It will renew your faith in finding and keeping that one true love.\" -- Kate Patrick\" Sand Dollar is a strong pick for general fiction and romance collections, highly recommended.\" -- Midwest Book Review \" Sand Dollar is one of those rare books that makes you feel, laugh and cry all at the same time. This smashing debut by Sebastian Cole reads like the best of Nicholas Sparks with just enough schmaltz. Moving and emotive, it's every bit The Notebook done up for summer.\"-- Jon Land, bestselling author of Pandora's Temple From the Author Sand Dollar: A Story of Undying Love is a story about a love gained, a love lost, and through it all, a love that just won't die. Although it's considered to be a romantic fantasy -- a kind of cross between The Notebook and The Sixth Sense -- the book distinguishes itself from other romance novels in its genre by its honest portrayal of life as a recurring tragedy, a roller coaster ride of sorts between joy and heartache, and the faith needed to overcome it. Sand Dollar is a thought-provoking, emotional read that, among other things, might even have you yelling at the main characters at times. And not only is it filled with plenty of twists and turns, but the surprise ending will knock your socks off! From the Back Cover What if you lost your true soul mate, the one person in life you were meant to be with? Would your love ever truly die? Not if you're Noah Hartman, who refuses to let go of Robin after she inexplicably abandons their love and disappears from his life seemingly forever, her hidden secret yet to be discovered.  And when you finally accept your fate and do your best to move on with your life, what do you say when the unthinkable happens: your true love Robin reappears as your wedding ceremony to another woman is about to commence, looks deep into your soul with her loving, tear-filled eyes, and tells you the one thing you've desperately longed to hear for all of these years?  But the ending to this heart-wrenching love story has yet to be written, as Noah, old and sick in a hospital bed, tells his story of love and loss to Josh, a wise orderly at Mount Sinai Hospital. As his family members arrive to bid him goodbye, Noah discovers a far greater truth about his past, present, and future. Things are definitely not as they appear as the pieces of a shattered love are put back together in the remarkable final chapter of Noah's life. About the Author Sebastian Cole never intended on being a writer. He graduated from Brown University in the 80s, then worked briefly in New York before returning to Rhode Island to work in his family's business. Nineteen years later, he took a leap of faith and left the company to pursue his dreams, which has led him to where he is now: a novelist of romantic fiction. Cole writes from the heart, believing in true love, love at first sight, and finding that one person in life you're meant to be with.Cole's debut novel, Sand Dollar: A Story of Undying Love , was emotionally inspired by his own personal life experiences. Sand Dollar has won numerous awards, including being a winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award, a bronze winner of ForeWord Reviews Book Of The Year Award,\u00a0a silver winner of the Feathered Quill Book Award,\u00a0a finalist in the USA Best Book Awards, a finalist in the International Book Awards, a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Book Awards, and a finalist in ForeWord Firsts debut literary competition for first-time authors. Many have compared Cole to one of his favorite authors, Nicholas Sparks, whom Cole cites as his inspiration for becoming an author. Whether or not he ever achieves that kind of success, touching the lives of others through his writing has been the single most gratifying thing he has ever done.For more information, please visit SebastianColeAuthor.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "B005DI969U", "title": "Blood Men: A Thriller", "author": "Paul Cleave", "description": "From Publishers Weekly New Zealander Cleave's disappointing U.S. debut focuses on the son of a notorious serial killer. When Edward Hunter was nine, his father, Jack (aka \"Jack the Hunter\"), was convicted of murdering 11 prostitutes in Christchurch, New Zealand. In the 20 years of Jack's incarceration, Edward hasn't spoken to or visited him once. Edward is doing okay in his struggle to get over his past until the day shortly before Christmas he and his wife, Jodie, get caught in the middle of a violent bank heist that leaves Jodie dead. Edward, who has always feared that he'll turn out like his father, is shocked when Jack contacts him from prison and encourages him to seek revenge on the robbers. He's even more shocked when he takes Jack's advice. While Cleave (The Cleaner) explores intriguing concepts-- particularly the gray area between guilt and innocence--and the steady stream of blood never feels gratuitous, too many subplots and character motivations compete for anything to truly resonate. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist What was it like to grow up with a serial killer as a father? Edward Hunter knows: his father has a monster inside him, and although he's now in prison, his legacy is something Edward has always feared. But Edward is nothing like his father. He has a good life\u2014friends, a job, a loving wife, and a child he adores. All that changes though, the moment he calls out to save a bank teller from being killed during a hold-up, and the robbers kill his wife instead. What has he done? How can he fix it? When the police work too slowly, Edward decides to investigate himself, and as he does, he connects with feelings he has denied his whole life\u2014and discovers his own terrible monster. Compelling, dark, and perfectly paced, New Zealand writer Cleave's psychological thriller explores the evil lurking in us all, working relentless magic until the very last page. There's nary a misstep in this riveting thriller about the bad deeds even good men sometimes do. --Stephanie Zvirin Review Praise for The Laughterhouse: \"Piano wire\u2013taut plotting, Tate\u2019s heart-wrenching losses and forlorn hopes, and Cleave\u2019s unusually perceptive gaze into the maw of a killer\u2019s madness make this a standout chapter in his detective\u2019s rocky road to redemption.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred) \u201cAn intense adrenaline rush from start to finish, I read The Laughterhouse in one sitting. It\u2019ll have you up all night. Fantastic!\u201d \u2014S.J. Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Go to Sleep \"This dark, gripping thriller, the latest in the Tate saga, is as hard-boiled as it gets. The surprise ending suspends all disbelief. Like a TV series that ends its season on a cliffhanger, you won\u2019t want to wait until next year. This will leave the reader clamoring for the next book in the series.\" \u2014 Suspense Magazine \"In Cleave\u2019s third psycho-thriller, Theodore Tate is the quintessential flawed hero, a damaged soul hunting deviants in a forest of moral quandaries.... The novel is less a character study than a dissection of the need for, and cost of, revenge.... Cleave\u2019s horrific narrative takes no prisoners, with the bloody action relentlessly ricocheting around Christchurch at a pace that leaves the detectives near collapse... An intense and bloody noir thriller, one often descending into a violent abyss reminiscent of Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal Lecter.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"A wonderful book.... The final effect is that tingling in the neck hairs that tells us an artist is at work.\" \u2014 Booklist (starred)\u201cRiveting and all too realistic.\" --Tess Gerritsen\u201cRelentlessly gripping, deliciously twisted and shot through with a vein of humor that\u2019s as dark as hell. Cleave creates fictional monsters as chilling and as charming as any I\u2019ve ever come across. Anyone who likes their crime fiction on the black and bloody side should move Paul Cleave straight to the top of their must-read list.\u201d \u2014Mark Billingham, award-winning author of Blood Line \u201cPaul Cleave writes like the fine-tuned punches of a middleweight boxer\u2014with short sharp jabs to the solar plexus that make you gasp.\u201d \u2014 Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia) \u201cCleave displays a certain adroitness in insistently plucking the imagination with icy fingers of fear.\u201d \u2014 Christchurch Press (New Zealand)\u201cCompelling, dark, and perfectly paced, New Zealand writer Cleave\u2019s psychological thriller explores the evil lurking in us all, working relentless magic until the very last page. There\u2019s nary a misstep in this riveting thriller about the bad deeds even good men sometimes do.\u201d -- Booklist \u201cDark, bloody, and gripping, Blood Men is classic noir fiction. In Paul Cleave, Jim Thompson has another worthy heir to his throne.\u201d \u2014John Connolly, New York Times bestselling author of The Whisperers \"Cleave [has an] impressive talent for character traits, building tension, and his edgy presentation of Christchurch \u2014 a town which, thanks to his previous novels, is now a solid addition to the geography of noir cities.\" --Bookgasm.com About the Author Paul Cleave is the author of six internationally bestselling thrillers, including Blood Men, Collecting Cooper, and The Laughterhouse . He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. Find out more at PaulCleave.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prologue \u201cI first made the newspapers when I was nine years old. I made them in every city across the country, most of them on the first page. I even made them internationally. In them I was black and white, blurred a little, my face turned into my father\u2019s chest, people surrounding us. From then on I was shown on TV, in magazines, in more and more papers, always the same photo. I never wanted any of it, I tried to avoid it, but the option wasn\u2019t mine. \u201cMy dad, well, he made the papers too. He was also on the front pages. There were more photos of him than of me, because he was the one being arrested. I was just along for the ride, trying to fight off the police as they came to take him away. I didn\u2019t know any better. Mum peeled me away from his side as I cried. The police handcuffed him, and I never saw him again until this week. He was my dad, sure, but it was pretty easy to stop loving the guy when it turned out he was never really the man we thought he was. Dad got himself arrested because he had tastes other people didn\u2019t look too kindly on\u2014not even the people of Christchurch. \u201cMum was dead a year later. She took cocktails of poisons and pills to escape the hate and the accusations from the public. That left me with the doctors and psychiatrists to study me. They were curious about me. Everybody was. My dad was a man of blood. He had murdered eleven prostitutes over a period of twenty-five years, and that got some of the good people of Christchurch wondering whether I\u2019d turn out the same way. Dad was so subtle nobody even realized Christchurch had a serial killer. He didn\u2019t advertise the fact, he just did his thing, no fuss, no real mess, sometimes they were found and sometimes they weren\u2019t, and those that weren\u2019t were never reported missing. He was a family man who loved us, who would do everything for us. He never laid a finger on my mother or my sister or me, he worked hard to put food on our table, to provide what he could to make our lives better than his was growing up. The monster inside him never came home, it was left hidden in the darkness with the blood and the flesh of those it killed, but sometimes\u2014at least eleven times that he admitted to\u2014Dad\u2019d go out at night and meet up with that monster. He wasn\u2019t my dad in those moments, he was something else. I never asked what, exactly. In the beginning I couldn\u2019t. In the beginning I wasn\u2019t allowed to see him, then, when I was old enough to make my own decisions, I didn\u2019t want to. \u201cI was ten years old when the trial began. It was a circus. My mum was still alive, but my sister and I were struggling. Mum was always yelling at us when she was sober, and crying when she was drunk, and whatever of those two states she was in, you always wished it was the other. Soon the pills and the booze took their toll, but not as quick as she wanted, and when they couldn\u2019t finish the job she used a razor blade. I don\u2019t know how long it took for her to bleed out. She might still have been alive when we found her. I held my sister\u2019s hand and we watched her pale body, the yelling and the crying gone now. \u201cMy mum\u2019s family wanted nothing to do with us, but my dad\u2019s parents took us in. The kids at school would tease me, they\u2019d beat me up, they\u2019d steal my bag at least once a week and jam it down a toilet somewhere. The psychiatrist came around every few months with his tests and questions. My photo came up in the papers every now and then, always the same one, though the distance between those occurrences started to stretch. I was almost a celebrity. I was also the son of a serial killer\u2014and some of those good Christchurch people thought I would follow in his footsteps. \u201cMy sister, Belinda, she took the direction of Dad\u2019s victims. She was out fucking for money when she was fourteen. By sixteen she was an addict; her tastes ran to the liquids that could be scored cheap and injected into her veins. By nineteen she was dead. I was the last of my family\u2014Dad\u2019s monster took them all away. \u201cOf course little Eddie grew up, I have my own family now. A wife. A child. I told my wife who I was not long after we met. It frightened her in the beginning. Thankfully she got to know me. She saw I had no monsters. \u201cThere are those who think what my dad had was a gene, that he\u2019s passed it on to me. There are people who think that I\u2019m destined to be a man of blood too,\u201d I say, and I look at the blood soaking into the upholstery from the woman slumped in the passenger seat, \u201cthat the same blood runs through both of us. They\u2019re wrong,\u201d I say, and I take the car up to sixty kilometers an hour and drive straight into the wall. \u00a9 2010 Paul Cleave Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 8.27}], "target_asin": "078603078X"}
{"user_id": "AE3TFGUZSZI2WQDXS3ORG4DQDMKA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1588360547", "title": "Black House - Large Print Edition", "author": "Stephen King", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": "from 9.99"}, {"asin": "0312517890", "title": "Wipe Clean: Picture Puzzles: Let's Learn Activities", "author": "Roger Priddy", "description": "Review \u201cPriddy Books are ...\"visually delightful with an interactive element.\" - School Library Journal About the Author Roger Priddy 's passion for educating children through fun, informative and engaging books has led him to create some of publishing's most enduring and successful nonfiction early learning books. Bestselling titles include First 100 Words , Bright Baby Animals , and Alphaprints: ABC . Roger lives in London and has three children, who have been the inspiration behind many of his best publishing ideas.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.94}, {"asin": "1609714296", "title": "CNA Exam Secrets Study Guide: CNA Test Review for the Certified Nurse Assistant Exam", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 19.35}, {"asin": "0545301718", "title": "Komodo Dragon vs. King Cobra (Who Would Win?)", "author": "Jerry Pallotta", "description": "About the Author Jerry Pallotta is an award-winning author of children's books, including What I Saw in the Teachers' Lounge, Dinosaur Christmas, Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight?, Apple Fractions, and The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Multiplication Book . His combination of interesting facts, detailed research, humor, and realistic illustrations has mesmerized countless children across the United States. You can visit him at jerrypallotta.com. Rob Bolster is both a fine artist and a professional illustrator. His work has appeared in newspaper and magazine advertisements, and he has illustrated many books for young readers, including the bestselling Who Would Win? series. Rob lives and works near Boston, Massachusetts.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "0545301726", "title": "Tarantula vs. Scorpion (Who Would Win?)", "author": "Jerry Pallotta", "description": "About the Author Jerry Pallotta is an award-winning author of children's books, including What I Saw in the Teachers' Lounge, Dinosaur Christmas, Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight?, Apple Fractions, and The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Multiplication Book . His combination of interesting facts, detailed research, humor, and realistic illustrations has mesmerized countless children across the United States. You can visit him at jerrypallotta.com. Rob Bolster is both a fine artist and a professional illustrator. His work has appeared in newspaper and magazine advertisements, and he has illustrated many books for young readers, including the bestselling Who Would Win? series. Rob lives and works near Boston, Massachusetts.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "0938256939", "title": "School Zone - Multiplication 0-12 Flash Cards - Ages 8+, 3rd Grade, 4th Grade, Elementary Math, Multiplication Facts, Common Core, and More", "author": "School Zone", "description": "Review You make my kid smarter, while giving me some time to myself, and I thank you! We first discovered School Zone through their Hidden Pictures, which my 2.5 yr old loves. We stuck around because they offer products my kid likes at a great price. Thanks! --School Zone WebsiteSchool Zone really makes a great product. We've used these a lot when working with my five-year old on his letters. --Mommy Snippets About the Author For nearly 40 years, School Zone has helped make learning fun! Our research-based content, developed by leading educators, delivers award-winning, state-of-the-art products digital and print for individual learning styles and goals. Every product placed in a child's hands is brimming with color, content, and creativity. In every detail, innovation meets imagination and timeless tradition. In that same spirit, School Zone both embodies success and embraces possibility, stepping boldly into new media and platforms to connect with kids where they are. Parents appreciate the quality and attention to detail. The company continually updates materials with new features and content, reflective of changing standards, evolving teaching methods, and overall best practices. The result? Great learning at home and in the classroom. Joan Hoffman, M.A., is the author and co-author of hundreds popular storybooks and workbooks for children. Among the titles are Peter\u2019s Dream , I Don\u2019t Like Peas , and The New Bike (the latter two published under the pen name Marie Vinje), the Get Ready for Preschool , Kindergarten , and First Grade workbook trio, along with the entire Get Ready, Little Thinker, I Know It!, Try-n-Spy, and Little Busy Book workbook series. She is also co-founder, along with her late husband James Hoffman, Ph.D., of School Zone Publishing. Visionary in business, she has long looked at the world through a child\u2019s eyes, infusing her stories and lessons with joy and relatability. As a mother of 4 back in the \u201870s, like moms the world over throughout history, she wanted what was best for her children. And she knew that teachers didn\u2019t have the time to give her kids everything they needed. As an elementary school teacher, Hoffman worked hard to give her students what they needed to learn. And parents would ask her what they could do to help. That\u2019s why she started School Zone\u2014to help give children every possible chance to reach their potential. She brought retail experience gleaned from previously founding and managing two regional educational book and supply stores for teachers and parents. Her husband lent his blended talents of educator and entrepreneur. A professor of education who also had first-hand experience as an elementary teacher, he was involved in teacher education programs at several colleges and had served at the helm of a company that published classroom materials. Combining rock-solid editorial judgment and creative instincts with a thorough understanding of early education, Joan Hoffman was an exemplary proponent of design thinking long before it became a conceptual label. An innovative problem-solver, she has always sought to reach out to end users and challenge convention. Separating fleeting trends from legitimate advances has been essential to her company\u2019s longevity. The results speak for themselves. With the next generation\u2014both son Jonathan and daughter Jennifer\u2014taking on creative and strategic leadership roles in the company their parents started, School Zone seamlessly integrated digital learning platforms. The company received Apple\u2019s exclusive Human Interface Design Excellence Award for software development, and its apps were part of the first-generation iPad launch in 2010. School Zone\u2019s flagship product, the Little Scholar Learning Tablet, has earned industry-wide recognition and awards, as has its online learning destination Anywhere Teacher. Inspired by mom\u2019s story-telling excellence, son Jonathan continued that legacy with Charlie & Company, an original series for ages 3-7, available on Oznnoz, Kidoodle.tv, ToonGoggles, BatteryPop, Ameba, and Highbrow. Joan Hoffman says, \u201cIt is incredibly rewarding to see the children and grandchildren of some of our original customers enjoying our ever-evolving books, apps, flash cards, games, music, and other products\u2014both print and digital.\u201d  In 2019 School Zone celebrates its 40 th anniversary, spanning portions of five decades and having sold more than 370 million educational products. Hoffman continues to be hands-on in the company, still writing, still envisioning, and still putting kids, parents, and teachers first.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 3.49}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0547333196", "title": "Mastering Computer Typing, Revised Edition", "author": "Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts", "description": "About the Author SHERYL LINDSELL-ROBERTS runs business-writing and e-mail seminars throughout the country and is the author of twenty-three books, including the popular Strategic Business Letters and E-mail, Mastering Computer Typing, Revised Edition, and 135 Tips for Writing Successful Business Documents.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Skills"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 20.59}, {"asin": "B000Q9J074", "title": "The 6th Target (Women's Murder Club)", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "Review \"Another masterpiece.\"\u2015 1340magbooks.com \"It doesn't get much better than this--so sprint to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy.\"\u2015 nightsandweekends.com \"A maddeningly compelling read - the kind that only Patterson can assemble.\"\u2015 EdgeMiami.com \"Patterson and Paetro deliver an engaging, accessible, fast-moving read, with several intriguing plot threads and regular surprises up to the very last page. I always enjoy spending time with the Women's Murder Club and look forward to the inevitable shockers ahead in their seventh outing together.\"\u2015 Bookloons.com \"Another outstanding addition to an already impressive body of work.\"\u2015 ArmchairInterviews.com \"With THE 6TH TARGET, James Patterson once again proves that he is a great writer who can deliver a fast-paced story that can grab the readers and hold on to them until the very last page.\"\u2015 ReviewingtheEvidence.com --This text refers to the mass_market edition. About the Author James Patterson is the world's bestselling author. The creator of Alex Cross, he has produced more enduring fictional heroes than any other novelist alive. He lives in Florida with his family. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile Fast-paced crime-solving and baffling new developments abound in this installment of the Womens Murder Club. Musical interludes help set the menacing tone between chapters as well as announce cliff-hangers and foreshadow twists in the story. Carolyn McCormick paces the novel well, speeding up in tense moments and slowing for romantic entanglements. As in all novels by Patterson and company, pieces of the story are masterfully, but slowly, developed so listeners can puzzle over the connections until all is revealed. Information left out of the complete work would help listeners fill in gaps; however, McCormick delivers this abridged installment of the Murder Clubs case in a satisfying open-and-shut style. D.L.M. \u00a9 AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review 'Patterson knows where our deepest fears are buried... There's no stopping his imagination.' -- New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Carolyn McCormick voices Lindsay with authority and sensitivity, portraying a competent police professional with a complicated personal life. McCormick nimbly depicts a wide range of characters, from a madman controlled by voices to Lindsay's gruff but caring former partner, who is now her boss...Skillful narration. -- \"AudioFile\" Get ready for an adrenaline rush-James Patterson is on the loose. -- \"Barnes & Noble, editorial review\" It doesn't get much better than this-so sprint to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy. -- \"NightsAndWeekends.com\" Three investigations, one mystery, a courtroom thriller, and some romance intertwined throughout the proceedings. It's difficult to reasonably ask for more in the newest installment of a series that keeps getting better and better. Those who haven't read any of the novels in the Women's Murder Club series are cheating themselves. Fans can only hope that Patterson and Paetro will find a way to keep these books coming with greater frequency. -- \"BookReporter.com\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"Another masterpiece.\"\u2015 1340magbooks.com \"It doesn't get much better than this--so sprint to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy.\"\u2015 nightsandweekends.com \"A maddeningly compelling read - the kind that only Patterson can assemble.\"\u2015 EdgeMiami.com \"Patterson and Paetro deliver an engaging, accessible, fast-moving read, with several intriguing plot threads and regular surprises up to the very last page. I always enjoy spending time with the Women's Murder Club and look forward to the inevitable shockers ahead in their seventh outing together.\"\u2015 Bookloons.com \"Another outstanding addition to an already impressive body of work.\"\u2015 ArmchairInterviews.com \"With THE 6TH TARGET, James Patterson once again proves that he is a great writer who can deliver a fast-paced story that can grab the readers and hold on to them until the very last page.\"\u2015 ReviewingtheEvidence.com --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1401685951", "title": "The Promise", "author": "Beth Wiseman", "description": "Review \"Beth Wiseman has written an unforgettable book that takes the reader into the heart of darkness in the most complex society in the world, Pakistan. The Promise has many tension-filled moments laced with wonderful imagery and detail. \u00a0Do not miss this book!\" ~ Jean Sasson, New York Times bestselling author of Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia \"The story of Mallory in The Promise uncovers the harsh reality American women can experience when they follow their hearts into a very different culture. \u00a0Her story sheds light on how Islamic society is totally different from the Christian marriage covenant between one man and one woman. \u00a0This book is based on actual events, and Beth reached out to me as the heartbreaking real-life story unfolded. \u00a0I salute the author's courage, persistence, and final triumph in writing a revealing and inspiring novel.\" ~ Nonie Darwish, bestselling author of Now They Call Me Infidel \" The Promise is an only too realistic depiction of an American young woman motivated by the best humanitarian impulses and naive trust, facing instead betrayal, kidnapping, and life-threatening danger in Pakistan's lawless Pashtun tribal regions. \u00a0But the story offers as well a reminder just as realistic that love and sacrifice are never wasted and that the hope of a loving heavenly Father is never absent in the most hopeless of situations.\" ~ Jeanette Windle, best-selling and award-winning author of Veiled Freedom \"Promises. \u00a0Easy to make, far easier to break. \u00a0Beth Wiseman tells a gripping story of promises, both made and broken. \u00a0Mallory's journey, along with Tate, is one for the ages. The Promise is on my All-Star List.\"\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0~ Lis Wiehl, New York Times bestselling author Bestselling author Beth Wiseman ( The House that Love Built ) encourages readers to think through their feelings about Islam, Christianity, faith, love, and what it means to help others. \u00a0Her novel will challenge, encourage, and stimulate discussion among her loyal fans and first-time readers. ~ Publishers Weekly About the Author Bestselling and award-winning author Beth Wiseman has sold over two million books. She is the recipient of the coveted Holt Medallion, is a two-time Carol Award winner, and has won the Inspirational Reader's Choice Award three times. Her books have been on various bestseller lists, including CBA, ECPA, Christianbook, and Publishers Weekly . Beth and her husband are empty nesters enjoying country life in south-central Texas. Visit her online at BethWiseman.com; Facebook: @AuthorBethWiseman; Twitter: @BethWiseman; Instagram: @bethwisemanauthor Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Promise By Beth Wiseman Thomas Nelson Copyright \u00a9 2014 Elizabeth Wiseman MackeyAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4016-8595-9 CHAPTER 1 Mallory handed Rosa her empty plate. \"As usual, dessert was awesome.\" The food was what kept the mandatory Sunday dinners at her parents' house bearable. Rosa nodded. Though her dark hair was now speckled with gray, her smile still revealed her girlish dimples and laugh crinkles around her bright eyes. \"Glad you liked it, Munchkin.\" Mallory smiled at the maid's use of the pet name after all these years. Rosa went around the table to pick up dessert plates, but Mallory's sister, Vicky, was still working on her key lime pie. Though Mallory missed seeing Haley and Braiden, who were with their father today, she was glad Vicky's children weren't present in case things were about to get ugly. \"Mom, Dad ... there's something I need to tell you.\" Mallory's stomach churned and her voice was shaky. Her mother set down her wineglass. Mallory was pretty sure she'd seen Rosa fill it four times. \"What is it?\" Her mother raised her eyebrows. Eyebrows that seemed to be higher up on her forehead. And the tiny lines of time that feathered from each of her eyes had disappeared as well. Mallory was studying the changes, not sure if she liked them or not, when her mother cleared her throat. \"What do you need to tell us, Mallory?\" She swallowed hard. \"I'm donating one of my kidneys.\" Her father sat taller, his eyes sharp and assessing. Vicky halted her fork midway to her mouth, glancing back and forth between their parents. Her mother slammed a palm against the table, shaking the dishes that hadn't yet been cleared. \"No! We're not going through this again.\" Mom shook her head as she glared at Mallory. \"Mom, I'm an adult. And I've made my decision.\" Her mother put her empty wineglass on the table, then pointed a finger at her daughter. \"I knew this was why you took a job working for that man. This has never been about utilizing your business degree.\" Mallory looked at her father. \"Dad, please tell me you understand why I want to do this.\" Her father leaned back against his chair and sighed. \"Of course I understand, Mallory. But it's a dangerous procedure, and you're our daughter. You need to understand how we feel too.\" \"I get that, Dad. I really do. But I'm going ahead. I've signed up in a paired kidney exchange program.\" Mallory's mother blinked her eyes a few times as she raised her chin. \"This isn't the only way to help. Do you have any idea how much money I have collected over the years through fund-raisers? Money specifically for the Kidney Foundation.\" \"Mom.\" Mallory sighed. \"That's wonderful. But this isn't a problem that you can just throw money at. People have to make real sacrifices to save lives.\" \"Did that Muslim put you up to this?\" Her mother looked around for Rosa, then pointed at her glass again. \"That is beyond offensive.\" Mallory glared at her. \"I'm going to write that comment off to the wine.\" \"They do all hate us, you know.\" Vicky eased a piece of pie onto her fork. \"We're all infidels to them. They want us all dead.\" \"You don't even know what you're talking about,\" Mallory said to her sister. \"Ismail is a doctor. He's in the business of saving lives, not taking them.\" \"That's enough.\" Dad lifted both his palms, and after he slowly lowered them, he said, \"We can't control what you do, honey.\" Not this time. \"But we want to make sure you've thought this through.\" He laid his napkin on his plate. Mallory blinked back tears. \"I've had twelve years to think it through. And I made a promise to Kelsey.\" Tate slid off the piano bench and went to the door. \"Why don't you use your key, babe?\" he asked, stepping aside so Mallory could come in. She leaned up and kissed him. \"Because I don't live here.\" \"Then move in.\" He smiled, knowing what she would say. He'd asked plenty of times. Mallory sat down on the couch and leaned her head back, giving her blond waves a toss. She closed her eyes. \"Your mother would have a fit.\" Tate made a quick scan of the room and found ET curled up in the corner behind the rocking chair. Twice the orange-and-white tabby had mistaken Mallory's hair for a plaything when she'd draped it over the back of the couch. \"She'd get over it. You know she loves you.\" Tate sat down beside her. \"So how'd it go?\" Mallory inhaled a big gulp of air, blew it out slowly, and turned to face him. She pulled all her hair over her right shoulder and started braiding it. Tate knew she'd braid it to the end, undo it, and run her fingers through it. Then probably braid it again. It was something she did when she was nervous or upset. \"It went about how I figured it would. Mom went nuts, Vicky made a stupid comment, and Dad tried to keep the peace.\" Tate reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. \"I know you don't want me to do this either. But at least you understand, right?\" Tate kicked his shoeless feet up on the coffee table. \"Yeah, I understand. But you blame yourself too much. You were only seventeen. Your parents made the decision.\" She was quiet for a while, then sighed. \"Maybe I didn't fight hard enough. Maybe if I'd been more insistent, they would have agreed. And Kelsey would be alive right now.\" Tate shook his head. \"No. Don't do that to yourself. Your parents made a choice not to let their seventeen-year-old child have major surgery.\" \"I guess. But I was the youngest one tested. Girls of childbearing age are never even considered as donors, but since we already knew I couldn't have children, there was no worry about a high-risk pregnancy down the line. I was the perfect person to do it.\" Tate waited. He knew about Mallory's condition, of course, and had assured her that it wasn't going to bother him not to have children. If she wanted to adopt someday, fine, but he wasn't sure he was father material anyway. He'd been around kids plenty when he'd taught music at the junior high, and most of his piano students now were children. \"Anyway, no one else was a match. And I had a young, healthy kidney that would have saved Kelsey's life. When I couldn't give that to her, I made a promise that I'd save another life since I couldn't save hers.\" \"I know. But it wasn't a promise she asked you to make.\" Mallory leaned her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped an arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. \"I want to make a difference.\" \"You do make a difference, each and every day. Just by being you.\" She snuggled in closer. \"Do you know how much I love you, Tater Tot?\" Tate grinned. \"You know how I feel about that name.\" It seemed unmanly not to put up a little resistance. She looked up at him with her big, blue eyes and batted her lashes. \"I think you secretly love it.\" Tate smiled. \"Do ya now?\" ET padded across the living room floor, stopping to yawn before he continued on to a small bed in the corner. Tate yawned as well. \"Nap time? I'm guessing you and your mother went to Mass, then to IHOP You ordered two pancakes and some fruit. And instead of syrup, you put honey on your pancakes.\" She nodded toward the front window. \"Then you came home and mowed the yard.\" She glanced at her watch. \"So, this would make it nap time.\" Tate frowned. \"Wow. You make me sound so OCD.\" She giggled. \"No. Just structured.\" Tate supposed that in comparison to Mallory, he probably was a little obsessive-compulsive. But it gave him comfort to stay organized and on a schedule. Mallory just winged it and lived spontaneously, on the edge. \"But that's why we complement each other,\" she added. \"That whole opposites attract thing\u2014maybe there's something to it.\" \"Maybe,\" he said, half yawning again. He pulled her closer. \"You gonna take a nap with me?\" As tired as he was, sleep wasn't his top priority. \"I'm not tired,\" she said with a grin. \"But you go ahead.\" What he really needed was a distraction. He glanced at his cell phone on the end table. He'd even kept it on vibrate during Mass so he wouldn't miss a call. He wasn't sure if no news was good news. Either way, he'd chosen not to say anything to Mallory yet. If he was offered the job in Chicago, it was really going to shake things up for the two of them. \"Why don't you play something for me? Something pretty and soothing,\" she said softly. Tate eased his arm from around her and made his way across the small room to his first love: the baby grand that had been a gift from his uncle nearly thirteen years ago. The black finish shone as brightly today as it did back then. He slid onto the bench and lowered his fingers to the keys and played one of the many songs he'd written for Mallory. Once again she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the couch. Tate stopped abruptly when his cell phone started to ring. \"Aren't you going to get that?\" She slid to the end of the couch and peered down at the caller ID. \"Chicago Academy for the Arts? Why would they be calling you?\" Tate swallowed hard but didn't move. Was calling him on a Sunday afternoon going to be good news or bad? CHAPTER 2 Mallory picked up her pace on the treadmill but didn't bother to dab at the sweat beading on her forehead and dribbling down her cheeks. \"Are you going to tell me what's bothering you?\" Soraya had kept a steady pace alongside, though she'd barely broken a sweat. \"You should tell me before you pass out.\" She turned to Mallory and grinned. Mallory knew that if anyone could cheer her up, it was Soraya, but still she hesitated. The two women had met at a Pilates class six months earlier. Soraya was from Lahore, where she'd led a privileged life with her family in Pakistan before moving to the United States ten years ago. She was engaged to Ismail, Mallory's boss, and it was she who'd told Mallory about the job opening in his office. Mallory wasn't sure her friend would understand her dilemma. She lowered the incline on the treadmill and kicked the speed back a few notches. \"Tate might have a job offer in Chicago.\" \"Oh.\" Soraya's eyes widened a little. \"And of course you would move with him.\" Mallory hung her head for a moment before she looked back at her friend. \"I \u2014 I don't know. I \u2014 I love Tate. With all my heart. I can't imagine being with anyone else.\" She sighed. \"There is a but in there somewhere,\" Soraya said as she smiled again. \"I love my job.\" Mallory raised her shoulders and lowered them slowly as she reached for the towel she had draped over the handrail. \"Of course you do. Who wouldn't love working for my Ismail?\" She winked at Mallory. \"You're right to be proud of him, Soraya. He exudes positive energy in everything he does, and he's a great doctor.\" Mallory caught her breath as she settled into a steady cooldown. \"You know that if something happened\u2014and I did have to quit\u2014I would give Ismail plenty of notice.\" Soraya raised a sculpted eyebrow. \"I know this. I would tell you that there are many Ismails out there to work for\"\u2014she pushed her bottom lip into a pout\u2014\"but that would be a lie. However ... you must ask yourself how many Tates are out there. And, by the way, when am I to meet this fabulous fellow?\" \"Soon. The four of us need to get together. And I know you're right. I can't imagine my life without Tate.\" Soraya finally slowed down on the treadmill, her thick, dark ponytail bouncing in step with her. \"I would follow my Ismail to the end of the earth.\" Her dark eyes lit up when she talked about her fianc\u00e9. \"Sounds like you are doing exactly that. I know when the wedding is here, but when is the second celebration?\" Mallory knew how much effort was going into the two wedding ceremonies Soraya and Ismail were planning. One here in Houston, the other in their homeland. \"Two months after the one here.\" Soraya took a sip from her water bottle. Mallory's had been empty for at least the past ten minutes. Soraya worked out daily, while getting to Pilates once a week was a struggle for Mallory, and the gym was a hit or miss. She thought about Tate and his exercise ritual. \"Right now I am trying to stay focused on our trip to Italy,\" Soraya added. They were leaving soon, and Ismail had asked Mallory if she could feed his fish while they were away. \"Ismail seems excited about it.\" \"Positano is one of my most favorite places in the world, and Ismail has never been there. We considered it for our honeymoon, but we could both use a vacation right now. And Ismail wants to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon.\" Soraya stepped off the platform and picked up her phone from the holding area on the treadmill. \"No e-mails. No texts. No missed calls.\" She set it back down and smiled. \"Good. I don't want work getting in the way of lunch today. I do believe there is a cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e with my name on it somewhere.\" She brought a hand to her chest and let out a small gasp. \"Can you even imagine life without cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9e?\" Mallory knew her friend had fasted for Ramadan, so maybe that explained her appetite today. Although, Mallory wasn't sure she'd ever seen Soraya pass on dessert, and yet she was in great shape. Note to self\u2014more exercise. \"It's my favorite dessert too.\" Mallory sighed as she ran her small towel across her face. \"But I might as well slap it to my thighs.\" \"Life is too short, my friend.\" Soraya started toward the locker room. Mallory followed. \"Which brings me to another point,\" Soraya said over her shoulder. \"Why haven't you and Tate made plans to marry? You've been dating four years.\" Mallory was still trying to catch her breath. \"Tate wants to get married.\" \"And you don't?\" Soraya raised an eyebrow again as she turned and waited for Mallory to catch up. Mallory shrugged as Soraya opened the door to the dressing and shower room. \"I can't imagine marrying anyone else. Tate is the only man I've ever loved. I mean, I dated guys in high school and college, but I never felt anything like this.\" She smiled. \"Tate is amazing.\" \"Hmm ... I'm not sure you answered my question.\" \"Of course I want to marry him. Just not yet. There are things I want to check off my list first.\" \"Ismail tells me that you have signed up in the kidney exchange program. He also told me the reason you want to do this. A promise you made to your cousin.\" Soraya pulled a bag from her locker, then moved toward the shower. \"So is this one of the things you are checking off your list?\" \"Yes.\" Mallory looked at the time on her phone and knew she'd need to shower quickly and hurry back to the clinic. She'd sacrificed lunch to work out. \"And I don't want anyone telling me I can't do it. I'm not saying that Tate could or would forbid me from doing it, but ...\" She paused. \"But he isn't happy about it.\" \"I understand that. He loves you, so naturally he is worried. He thinks of you as the mother of his future children, yes?\" \"That's not in the cards, Soraya. I've known since I was fifteen that I can't have children. Tate knows, of course. It doesn't bother him.\" Soraya stared at Mallory. \"You've never mentioned that before. I'm sorry, Mallory.\" \"I've had a long time to get used to the idea.\" Soraya shook her head. \"We never know what Allah's plan for us is.\" Mallory wasn't sure that God had a plan for her. If He did, He needed to go back to the drawing board and make some adjustments. The doorbell rang just as Tate was scooping ET his usual ration of dog food. Crazy cat wouldn't eat anything else. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Verdell. Tate sent up a quick prayer for patience as he crossed the living room. \"Hello, Verdell.\" He forced a smile as the boy walked past him, knowing how Verdell would respond. \"Hello, Mr. Webber.\" Verdell shuffled to the piano, head hung low, as if he were walking a plank. He put his lesson book against the stand and sat down. Verdell's blond hair was cut high above his ears with a noticeable cowlick that caused a few strands to spike on the top of his head. He was a skinny kid at that awkward age, teeth too big for his mouth. And for reasons Tate didn't understand, Verdell often stole weird things. Little things. Like Tate's toothbrush one week. And a week before that, a bottle of Visine. At first Tate thought he was imagining it, but they were items he would hardly misplace\u2014and Verdell was the only one of his students who always asked to use the bathroom. \"Did you practice this week?\" Tate sat down in his chair next to the piano bench. Verdell had a baby grand at his aunt's home too\u2014a Steinway. Tate's dream piano. For a kid who hates to play. \"No, I didn't practice, Mr. Webber.\" Verdell sat taller, his chin in the air and his lips clamped tight. Tate felt sorry for the child. Both his parents had been killed in a boating accident the previous year, and his aunt was raising him. Tate had told Chantal that she was wasting her money by sending her nephew for lessons, that Verdell had no interest in the piano despite the potential for being good at it. But Chantal begged Tate to keep trying. Verdell settled his hands on the keys, looked at the music in front of him, then played every note and rhythm perfectly. Like a machine without an ounce of passion for the music. (Continues...) Excerpted from The Promise by Beth Wiseman . Copyright \u00a9 2014 Elizabeth Wiseman Mackey. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "160414517X", "title": "In the Service of Our Country - USS Zellars DD777, the Ship and Her Men", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0547333196"}
{"user_id": "AFHQH35Z2TW5QATO2A5NRI2MTFWA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0441692222", "title": "Pyromancer", "author": "Amanda Young", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.8}, {"asin": "0886779758", "title": "The Second Summoning (The Keeper's Chronicles, No 2)", "author": "Tanya Huff", "description": "Review Praise for the Keeper's Chronicles:\u201cThere are plenty of odd characters and touches of unexpected magic and humor to keep things moving for a contemporary fantasy that\u2019s lots of fun.\u201d \u2014 Locus \u201cNo one tickles the funnybone and chills the blood better than Tanya Huff.... With screamingly funny dialogue and sharp plotting , Ms. Huff makes every word a positively delightful experience in this imaginative tale.\u201d \u2014 Romantic Times \u201cFans of humorous fantasy will enjoy this fast-moving tale , as will cat lovers and anyone else who can suspend disbelief and settle back for a good time.\u201d \u2014 VOYA \u201cThis book is entertainment, pure and simple .... A thoroughly satisfying story.\u201d \u2014SF Site\u201cAn abundance of wit\u2026a strong fantasy which wins on its solid and refreshingly different, wry humor .\u201d \u2014 Library Bookwatch \u201cGreat reading for a hot summer night when you want to be whisked away to another world .\u201d \u2014 SF Chronicle \u201cTanya Huff\u2019s new series is a brilliant creation .... The storyline is riveting with never a dull moment.\u201d \u2014 Omni Magazine About the Author Tanya Huff may have\u00a0left Nova Scotia at three, and has lived most of her life since in Ontario, but she still considers herself a Maritimer. On the way to the idyllic rural existence she shares with her partner Fiona Patton, six cats, and a chihuahua, she acquired a degree in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnic\u2014an education she was happy to finally use while writing her recent Smoke novels . Of her previous twenty-three books, the five\u2014 Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Lines, Blood Pact, Blood Debt \u2014featuring Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, romance writer, and vampire, are among the most popular.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.5}, {"asin": "0786919035", "title": "Queen of the Demonweb Pits (Greyhawk Classics)", "author": "Paul Kidd", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0441005381", "title": "Marbleheart", "author": "Don Callander", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Humor & Satire"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 11.51}, {"asin": "0671878654", "title": "An Oblique Approach (Belisarius)", "author": "David Drake", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "LGBTQ+ Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.32}, {"asin": "1439133026", "title": "Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset", "author": "Eric Flint", "description": "About the Author Eric Flint was the author/creator of the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire series, starting with first novel 1632. With David Drake he wrote six popular novels in the \u201cBelisarius\u201d alternate Roman history series, and with David Weber, he collaborated on 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War , as well as four novels in Weber\u2019s Honorverse series. Flint was for many years a labor union activist.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1416591664", "title": "Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide", "author": "Eric Flint", "description": "About the Author Eric Flint was\u00a0the author/creator of the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire series, starting with first novel 1632. With David Drake\u00a0he wrote six popular novels in the \u201cBelisarius\u201d alternate Roman history series, and with David Weber, he collaborated on 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War , as well as four novels in Weber\u2019s\u00a0Honorverse series. Flint was for many years a labor union activist.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 39.99}, {"asin": "1416509151", "title": "The Witches of Karres", "author": "James Schmitz", "description": "About the Author James H. Schmitz (1911\u20131981) was born in Hamburg, Germany, to American parents. Aside from several trips to the USA, he lived in Germany until 1938, when the outbreak of WWII prompted his family to move to America. He sold his first story, \u201cGreenface,\u201d to the now-legendary magazine Unknown Worlds shortly before Pearl Harbor. By the time it was published, he was flying with the Army Air Corps in the South Pacific. In 1949, he began publishing his Agents of Vega series in Astounding (later Analog ), and was one of that magazine\u2019s most popular contributors over the next three decades, introducing Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee, the heroines of his Federation of the Hub series. He was a master of space opera adventure, notably represented in his classic novel, The Witches of Karres , but also demonstrated in many other novels and shorter works.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1526760622", "title": "Seaforth World Naval Review 2020", "author": "Conrad Waters", "description": "Review \"The quality of the book is very high. It is lavishly illustrated with well-chosen photographs.\" --The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord \"This book is an excellent resource to see how the other major nations of the world are adjusting their deep-sea presence around the globe.... Written by a team of well-known experts, valuable to enthusiasts and defense professional alike, this is the only dedicated annual survey of naval developments and includes lots of illustrations, too.\" --BOOK BIT for WTBF-AM/FM \"The Seaforth World Naval Review has reached its second decade of publication and provides information to the enthusiast of military history, current affairs or the simply curious in a simple and comprehensive way.\" --Omne Ignotum Pro Magnifico \" World Naval Review is a detailed snapshot of world navies in 2020 while digging deeply into an eclectic variety of multinational projects while looking to the future in evolving technology. It is highly recommended to anyone seeking a comprehensive, timely and compact summary of 2020 naval developments.\" --The Australian Naval Institute About the Author CONRAD WATERS, a barrister by training and a banker by profession, has had a lifelong interest in modern navies, about which he has written extensively. He edited the recent Navies in the 21st Century and has been the editor of the World Naval Review since its foundation in 2009.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 48.04}, {"asin": "0441028160", "title": "Aquamancer", "author": "Don Callander", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Humor & Satire"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 6.31}, {"asin": "0756401364", "title": "Long Hot Summoning (Keeper's Chronicles)", "author": "Tanya Huff", "description": "Review Praise for the Keeper's Chronicles:\u201cThere are plenty of odd characters and touches of unexpected magic and humor to keep things moving for a contemporary fantasy that\u2019s lots of fun.\u201d \u2014 Locus \u201cNo one tickles the funnybone and chills the blood better than Tanya Huff.... With screamingly funny dialogue and sharp plotting , Ms. Huff makes every word a positively delightful experience in this imaginative tale.\u201d \u2014 Romantic Times \u201cFans of humorous fantasy will enjoy this fast-moving tale , as will cat lovers and anyone else who can suspend disbelief and settle back for a good time.\u201d \u2014 VOYA \u201cThis book is entertainment, pure and simple .... A thoroughly satisfying story.\u201d \u2014SF Site\u201cAn abundance of wit\u2026a strong fantasy which wins on its solid and refreshingly different, wry humor .\u201d \u2014 Library Bookwatch \u201cGreat reading for a hot summer night when you want to be whisked away to another world .\u201d \u2014 SF Chronicle \u201cTanya Huff\u2019s new series is a brilliant creation .... The storyline is riveting with never a dull moment.\u201d \u2014 Omni Magazine About the Author Tanya Huff may have\u00a0left Nova Scotia at three, and has lived most of her life since in Ontario, but she still considers herself a Maritimer. On the way to the idyllic rural existence she shares with her partner Fiona Patton, six cats, and a chihuahua, she acquired a degree in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnic\u2014an education she was happy to finally use while writing her recent Smoke novels . Of her previous twenty-three books, the five\u2014 Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Lines, Blood Pact, Blood Debt \u2014featuring Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII, romance writer, and vampire, are among the most popular.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0441004725", "title": "Aeromancer", "author": "Don Callander", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Humor & Satire"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1439134464", "title": "The Sorceress of Karres (3) (Witches of Karres)", "author": "Eric Flint", "description": "About the Author Eric Flint was the author/creator of the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire series, starting with first novel 1632. With David Drake he wrote six popular novels in the \u201cBelisarius\u201d alternate Roman history series, and with David Weber, he collaborated on 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War , as well as four novels in Weber\u2019s Honorverse series. Flint was for many years a labor union activist. Dave Freer is an ichthyologist turned author who lives on Flinders Island (between mainland Australia and Tasmania) with his wife, four dogs and four cats, and two sons. He has coauthored a range of novels with Eric Flint ( Rats, Bats and Vats , The Rats, the Bats and the Ugly , Pyramid Scheme , Pyramid Power, and Slow Train to Arcturus) , with Mercedes Lackey and Eric Flint ( The Shadow of the Lion , This Rough Magic , The Wizard of Karres , Much Fall of Blood, Burdens of the Dead, and Freer\u2019s solo entry in the series, A Mankind Witch ) as well as writing the Dragon\u2019s Ring fantasy novels Dragon\u2019s Ring and Dog and Dragon.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1416521003", "title": "The Quantum Connection (Warp Speed #2)", "author": "Travis S. Taylor", "description": "About the Author Travis S. Taylor\u00bf\u00bfDoc\u00bf Taylor to his friends\u00bfhas earned his soubriquet the hard way: He has a Doctorate in Optical Science and Engineering, a Master's degree in Physics, a Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering, all from the University of Alabama in Huntsville; a Master's degree in Astronomy, and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University. Dr. Taylor has worked on various programs for the Department of Defense and NASA for the past sixteen years. He's currently working on several advanced propulsion concepts, very large space telescopes, space-based beamed energy systems, and next generation space launch concepts. In his copious spare time, Doc Travis is also a black belt martial artist, a private pilot, a SCUBA diver, has raced mountain bikes, competed in triathlons, and has been the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of several hard rock bands. He currently lives with his wife Karen, and their daughter.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.55}, {"asin": "1416520635", "title": "Warp Speed (Warp Speed #1)", "author": "Travis S. Taylor", "description": "About the Author Travis S. Taylor-\"Doc\" Taylor to his friends-has earned his soubriquet the hard way: He has a Doctorate in Optical Science and Engineering, a Master's degree in Physics, a Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering, all from the University of Alabama in Huntsville; a Master's degree in Astronomy, and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University. Dr. Taylor has worked on various programs for the Department of Defense and NASA for the past sixteen years. He's currently working on several advanced propulsion concepts, very large space telescopes, space-based beamed energy systems, and next generation space launch concepts. In his copious spare time, Doc Travis is also a black belt martial artist, a private pilot, a SCUBA diver, has raced mountain bikes, competed in triathlons, and has been the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of several hard rock bands. He currently lives with his wife Karen, two dogs Stevie and Wesker, and his two cats Neko and Kuro, in north Alabama.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 7.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0441280366", "title": "Geomancer", "author": "Don Callander", "description": "From Booklist Trouble is brewing in the north. First, Flarman Flowerstalk, the renowned firemaster, suddenly disappears. Then the Stone Men, who are under the enchantment of an ancient geomancer, capture and hold his apprentice, Douglas Brightglade. And now, magician Wong's homeland of Choin is in an uproar as warring factions fight over the emperor's throne. Somehow the scattered fellowship of wizards must locate their missing members, break the old enchantments, and bring peace to the Choinese in time for Douglas to pass his firemaster exam and marry Myrn Manstar. Readers who have followed the fire adept's progress through the battle with the Ice King in Pyromancer and the threat of the witches' coven in Aquamancer will welcome familiar characters and cozy settings in the latest entry in this light fantasy series for fans of all ages. Candace Smith", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.89}, {"asin": "B073XFFD1B", "title": "Bride for Elijah", "author": "Kay P. Dawson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1518726771", "title": "E.M.P.: The End Of The Grid As We Know It (All At Once)", "author": "Cal Wilson", "description": "About the Author Cal Wilson is a Christian, patriot, gun-owner, and prepper. Wilson is a professional and has been involved in law enforcement for over 20 years. He lives in an undisclosed location west of the Mississippi River with his wife and various family members.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 9.12}, {"asin": "B072XF1QLS", "title": "Justice Lost (Darren Street Book 3)", "author": "Scott Pratt", "description": "About the Author Scott Pratt was born in South Haven, Michigan, and grew up in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force and earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from East Tennessee State University and a doctor of jurisprudence degree from the University of Tennessee. Pratt\u2019s first novel, An Innocent Client \u2014the first book in his Joe Dillard series\u2014as chosen as a finalist for the Mystery Readers International\u2019s Macavity Award. Justice Lost is the third book in his Wall Street Journal bestselling Darren Street series, following Justice Redeemed and Justice Burning . Pratt resides in northeast Tennessee with his wife, two dogs, and a parrot.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0441280366"}
{"user_id": "AF6576E4GSDJIO7INY6WODXOP5EQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B000FC2RRM", "title": "Dumb Witness: Hercule Poirot Investigates (Hercule Poirot series Book 15)", "author": "Agatha Christie", "description": "Review \"One of Poirot's most brilliant achievements.\"--Glasgow Herald\"Novelty, intriguing character types, and ingenuity. \"--New York Times\"Agatha Christie's ability to devise intricate plots, coupled with her understanding of human nature--at its best and worst--have made her tales timeless.\"--Jan Burke, award-winning author of the Irene Kelly mysteries Review \"One of Poirot's most brilliant achievements\" Glasgow Herald From the Inside Flap Everyone blamed Emily Arundell's accident on a rubber ball left on the stairs by her frisky terrier. But the more she thought about her fall, the more convinced she became that one of her relatives was trying to kill her.... On April 17th she wrote her suspicions in a letter to Hercule Poirot. Mysteriously, he didn't receive the letter until June 28th...by which time Emily was already dead.... --New York Times From the Back Cover Everyone blamed Emily Arundell\u2019s accident on a rubber ball left on the stairs by her frisky terrier. But the more she thought about her fall, the more convinced she became that one of her relatives was trying to kill her.\u2026 On April 17th she wrote her suspicions in a letter to Hercule Poirot. Mysteriously, he didn\u2019t receive the letter until June 28th\u2026by which time Emily was already dead.\u2026 From AudioFile Poirot's little gray cells are activated when he receives a letter from an elderly woman concerned about her safety--two months after her death. Soon he and Hastings visit Little Green House and meet the late Miss Arundell's multiple relatives, all of whom had opportunity and motive to benefit from her death. Narrator Hugh Fraser, who plays Poirot's assistant on A&E and PBS, is exceptional as Hastings, Poirot, and the huge cast of suspects. The spoiled niece and nephew; desperate Bella; the maligned Greek doctor; the companion, Miss Lawson; and last but not least, the dog, Bob, whose internal monologues add to the intrigue and fun, are all perfectly portrayed. S.G.B. \u00a9 AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine About the Author Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a British crime writer best known for her detective novels and short stories. According to Guinness World Records , she is the best-selling novelist of all time, her novels having sold over four billion copies and having been translated into more than one hundred languages. The Agatha Award for best mystery and crime writers was named in her honor. --This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "B000FC2IZI", "title": "Cat Among the Pigeons: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot series Book 32)", "author": "Agatha Christie", "description": "From Publishers Weekly The classic 1959 Christie tale is revisited in this utterly charming and intriguing murder mystery in which two teachers find the body of the new games' mistress in the gymnasium, the latest victim of the so-called cat killer. Though not a predominant character for most of the tale, Christie's legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is on the case. Hugh Fraser relates this tale with classic English charm, speaking with a pitch-perfect and ear-pleasing dialect that adds to the atmosphere. Fraser reads with sheer delight, offering a fun variety of characters, including a marvelous take on Poirot himself. The experience created is truly cinematic and listeners will be giddy with delight! (May) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a British crime writer best known for her detective novels and short stories. According to Guinness World Records , she is the best-selling novelist of all time, her novels having sold over four billion copies and having been translated into more than one hundred languages. The Agatha Award for best mystery and crime writers was named in her honor. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cI am addicted to Agatha Christie.\u201d (Phillip Margolin, New York Times bestselling author)\u201cTo read Agatha Christie at her best is to experience the rarefied pleasure of watching a faultless technician at work, and she is in top form in Cat Among the Pigeons.\u201d (New York Times)\u201cImmensely enjoyable.\u201d (Daily Express (London)) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review 'Immensely enjoyable.' Daily Express 'To read Agatha Christie at her best is to experience the rarefied pleasure of watching a faultless technician at work, and she is in top form in Cat Among the Pigeons.' New York Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover Late one night, two teachers investigate a mysterious flashing light in the sports pavilion while the rest of the school sleeps. There, among the lacrosse sticks, they stumble upon the body of an unpopular games mistress\u2014shot through the heart point-blank. The school is thrown into chaos when the \u201ccat\u201d strikes again. Unfortunately, schoolgirl Julia Upjohn knows too much. In particular, she knows that without Hercule Poirot\u2019s help, she will be the next victim.\u2026 --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "0152802177", "title": "Stellaluna", "author": "Janell Cannon", "description": "Amazon.com Review Baby bat Stellaluna's life is flitting along right on schedule--until an owl attacks her mother one night, knocking the bewildered batlet out of her mother's loving grasp. The tiny bat is lucky enough to land in a nest of baby birds, but her whole world has just turned upside down. Literally. Stellaluna's adoptive bird mom accepts her into her nest, but only on the condition that Stellaluna will act like a bird, not a bat. Soon Stellaluna has learned to behave like a good bird should--she quits hanging by her feet and starts eating bugs. But when she finally has an opportunity to show her bird siblings what life as a bat is like, all of them are confounded. \"How can we be so different and feel so much alike?\" one asks. \"And how can we feel so different and be so much alike?\" asks another. \"I agree,\" Stellaluna responds. \"But we're friends. And that's a fact.\" Anyone who has ever been asked to be someone they're not will understand the conflicts--and possibilities--Stellaluna faces. This gorgeously illustrated book is sure to be an all-time favorite with readers, whether they've left the nest or not. (Click to see a sample spread . Illustration from Stellaluna , \u00a9 1993 by Janell Cannon, reproduced by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company) (Ages 4 to 8) --Emilie Coulter From Kirkus Reviews Attacked by an owl, Stellaluna (a fruit bat) is separated from her mother and taken in by a bird and her nestlings. Dutifully, she tries to accommodate--she eats insects, hangs head up, and sleeps at night, as Mama Bird says she must--but once Stellaluna learns to fly, it's a huge relief when her own mother finds her and explains that the behavior that comes naturally is appropriate to her species. With a warm, nicely honed narration, Cannon strikes just the right balance between accurate portrayal of the bats and the fantasy that dramatizes their characteristics. Her illustrations, in luminous acrylics and color pencils, are exquisite. The appealingly furry, wide-eyed, fawn-colored bats have both scientific precision and real character; they're displayed against intense skies or the soft browns and greens of the woodland in spare, beautifully constructed (occasionally even humorous) compositions. Delightful and informative but never didactic: a splendid debut. (Picture book. 4-8) -- Copyright \u00a91993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. About the Author Janell Cannon's picture books have won many awards and are beloved around the world. She is the author and illustrator of the longtime bestseller Stellaluna, Verdi, Crickwing, Pinduli, and others. Before she became a full-time creator of books for children, she designed summer reading programs at her local public library. Born and raised in Minnesota, Ms. Cannon now lives in Southern California. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "1600787177", "title": "Wild Cards: The St. Louis Cardinals' Stunning 2011 Championship Season", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Rob Rains is the author or coauthor of 30 books; among them are biographies of Albert Pujols, Tony La Russa, Mark McGwire, Ozzie Smith, and Jack Buck. His biography of McGwire was a New York Times bestseller. He is a lifetime member of the Baseball Writers Association of America and the Baseball Hall of Fame. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Baseball"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.81}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B005O077KM", "title": "Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (Agatha Christie Mysteries Collection (Paperback))", "author": "Agatha Christie", "description": "About the Author Agatha Christie is the most popular mystery writer if all time. With over two billion books sold, her genius for detective fiction is unparalleled. She is truly the one and only Queen of Crime . . In a writing career that spanned more than half a century, Agatha Christie wrote 79 novels and short story collections. She died on 12 January 1976. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap While playing an erratic round of golf, Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff. His ball is lost, but on the rocks below he finds the crumpled body of a dying man. The man opens his eyes and with his last breath says, Why didn't they ask Evans? Haunted by those words, Bobby and his vivacious companion, Frankie, set out to solve a mystery that will bring them into mortal danger. . . --Times Literary Supplement (London) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review `A story that tickles and tantalizes but never exhausts the readers' patience or ingenuity.' Times Literary Supplement `Thoroughly entertaining in a not too solemn way.' Books --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile It's classic Christie. Amid a peaceful English setting, a hiker dies at the foot of a cliff. Was he pushed, or did he slip? Christie's original plot twists make it easy to arrive at incorrect conclusions and then have to rethink the mystery. Emilia Fox, who has a name worthy to be a Christie character herself, has a crisply captivating voice as she showcases characters who are lively, clever, sympathetic, and detestable, as the unfolding story demands. Packaging is good, other than an overcrowded cover. Note the Orange Triangle announcing that this is a \"Mystery Masters\" and thus unabridged. L.C. \u00a9 AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover While playing an erratic round of golf, Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff. His ball is lost, but on the rocks below he finds the crumpled body of a dying man. The man opens his eyes and with his last breath says, \"Why didn't they ask Evans?\" Haunted by those words, Bobby and his vivacious companion, Frankie, set out to solve a mystery that will bring them into mortal danger. . . --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B08QCSSXT6", "title": "Italian Mafia Stalker (Yes, Daddy Book 14)", "author": "Lena Little", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "World Literature"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1633675025", "title": "A Space Oddity", "author": "Larry Andrews", "description": "From the Author As I wrote this novel I really became quite close to Babette and Misha as their travels took them to all the places I had visited. It was exhilarating to see how they reacted to the situations I put them in and how their relationship matured. Many of my readers asked what happens next for them. Well stay tuned because a similar couple is about appear on the scene experiencing trials and tribulations in a different part of the world. About the Author A former rocket scientist/aerospace program manager and USC adjunct professor lives on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Southern California. He chaired the U.S. delegation on an ISO committee for Space Operations that met in many of the space-fairing nations. His writings reflect the individuals he met and the places he visited.", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 14.96}, {"asin": "1735476048", "title": "From Rubble to Redemption: A Ground Zero Chaplain Remembers", "author": "Jim Jenkins", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.95}], "target_asin": "B005O077KM"}
{"user_id": "AEUFHTT3UUOJ4SCPKKW6IPX5ZW5Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "031618201X", "title": "Soulless: The Manga, Vol. 1 (The Parasol Protectorate (Manga), 1) (Volume 1)", "author": "Gail Carriger", "description": "About the Author New York Times bestselling author Gail Carriger writes to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She escaped small town life and inadvertently acquired several degrees in Higher Learning. Ms. Carriger then traveled the historic cities of Europe, subsisting entirely on biscuits secreted in her handbag. She resides in the Colonies, surrounded by fantastic shoes, where she insists on tea imported from London.The Parasol Protectorate books are: Soulless, Changeless, Blameless, Heartless, and Timeless. Soulless won the ALA's Alex Award. A manga adaptation released in Spring 2012 and a young adult series set in the same universe -- the Finishing School series -- launched in Spring 2013. Gail is soon to begin writing a new adult series, The Parasol Protectorate Abroad (2015).", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Manga"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0738712442", "title": "Classic Gold Egyptian Pendulum", "author": "Lo Scarabeo", "description": "About the Author Lo Scarabeo's Tarot decks have been acclaimed all over the world for originality and quality. With the best Italian and international artists, each Lo Scarabeo deck is an exceptional artistic value. Committed to developing innovative new decks while preserving the rich tradition of Tarot, Lo Scarabeo continues to be a favorite among collectors and readers. Llewellyn is the exclusive distributor of Lo Scarabeo products in North America.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": "from 30.14"}, {"asin": "1609949765", "title": "I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else's Maze", "author": "Deepak Malhotra", "description": "Review \u201cEvery once in a while a book comes along that makes you question the way things are. This is the book. Deepak Malhotra allows you to glimpse a world of your own making without the limits and barriers that others create.\u201d \u2014Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Leader in Me \u201cA magnificent story with a powerful message. As someone who has encouraged scores of professionals into breaking through the maze and defining their own pursuits, I find this to be a gem of a book.\u201d \u2014Vinod Khosla, cofounder and former CEO and Chairman, Sun Microsystems, and founder, Khosla Ventures \u201cDeepak Malhotra tackles our assumptions about business and life with humor, zest, and wisdom in this delightful fable. If you\u2019ve ever rankled at the thought of being just another mouse in the maze, this is the book for you.\u201d \u2014Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and To Sell is Human About the Author Deepak Malhotra is the Eli Goldston Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is an advisor to firms around the globe and coauthor (with Max Bazerman) of Negotiation Genius . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. THE GOOD BOOK They called it a revolution. The lesson\u2014the insight\u2014had spread throughout the maze. Scarcely a mouse remained who had not heard what was contained in the good book. The insight was profound. More importantly, it did not rely too much on one\u2019s ability to reason. And any mouse will tell you that this attribute is the hallmark of all great truths. So it was accepted as perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most important, truth. And it was all so simple. The book made it clear: Change happens. You can sit there and complain about it, or you can change with the times. Do not fear change. Accept change. What happens in the maze is beyond your control. What you can control is your reaction. Now, just because every mouse had come to understand this insight does not mean that every one of them was able to adopt it in practice. Some succeeded fully. They learned that change is inevitable and uncontrollable. They accepted that they were helpless to control the workings of the maze\u2014fate, they called it\u2014and they pledged to adapt. Many others succeeded to a lesser degree. They still had moments of fear, immobility, depression, and despair. But such moments were less frequent than in the past. These mice improved their lot in the maze considerably. To be sure, there were also mice who rarely thought about what the good book taught them. They agreed with it in principle but did not have the time or energy to change their ways. After all, habits are hard to break. They would work on it later\u2014maybe next week, maybe next year. Overall, life in the maze was now quite different. In the past, when cheese moved from one location to another, all the mice were in despair. They could not understand what happened. They cursed their luck. They sat and waited in the cheese corner of the past and prayed for its return. They got agitated and lost their temper. They got angry and made an already difficult life even worse. Now, after reading the good book, the mice reacted differently. The disappearance of the cheese was still traumatic, and it was still impossible to understand why the cheese had moved. But now the mice began to go in search of new cheese depots. Those who had fully adopted the good book\u2019s philosophy were the first to set about in search of the new cheese. Those who struggled with the philosophy, who found it difficult to break old habits, were slower to move. But they, too, understood that they had to change with changing times. They, too, eventually went to look for more cheese. By learning to change with changing times, the mice succeeded in finding more cheese. They found it more quickly than they had ever done in the past. The good book was right! They had cheese \u2026 more cheese, and sooner than ever before. It does not get much better than that if you are a mouse. And so the mice no longer questioned why the cheese moved. Everyone agreed that such questions had no answers. They did not try to devise plans to try to stop the cheese from moving. Only a fool would think that fate could be controlled. Above all, they never again asked the unreasonable question, \u201cWho moved my cheese?\u201d Life was simpler now. It all came down to a very simple equation: You want cheese + The cheese is no longer here = Go elsewhere to find the cheese. After all, for a mouse in a maze, cheese is really all that matters. But then \u2026 Well \u2026 then there was Max. And Max was altogether different. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 16.95}, {"asin": "1859580211", "title": "Germany Myths and Legends", "author": "Lewis Spence", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 9.57}, {"asin": "0205029396", "title": "Mastering Public Speaking", "author": "George L. Grice", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Humanities"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 20.61}, {"asin": "0760720193", "title": "The little book of Etiquette: Tips on socially correct dining", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.65}, {"asin": "0763655880", "title": "Illusionology (Ologies)", "author": "Albert Schafer", "description": "Review ILLUSIONOLOGY includes a visually dense array of interactive elements: flaps, 3D pop-ups, foldouts, sealed envelopes. Among its revelations: the secrets behind Harry Houdini\u2019s straitjacket escape and needle swallowing tricks, the \u201cscience\u201d of levitation and the trickery behind spirit mediums. But watch out: readers also learn dice and card tricks that require no special extrasensory ability.\u2014The New York TimesPurportedly written by magician Albert D. Schafer, who vanished in 1915, this handsome addition to the Ologies series, which mimics the look of advertisements and periodicals of the era, explores the history and practice of magic...Step-by-step directions and props let readers try simple tricks, while clues lead to the revelation of the author\u2019s fate.\u2014Publishers WeeklyA beguiling mix of wonders and practical advice.\u2014Kirkus ReviewsWith a holographic, steampunk style cover and pages of secrets and lore hidden under flaps and inside envelopes, Illusionology holds the promise of hours of entertainment for middle graders on up.\u2014Omnivoracious (Amazon blog)This isn\u2019t just a book with instructions for over 30 magic tricks. It\u2019s not just a history of illusions and magic. This book doesn\u2019t just explain to you the science behind why illusions and magic tricks fool our eyes \u2014 it does it in style.\u2014Geek Mom (WIRED.com blog)", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 20.66}, {"asin": "1401902480", "title": "Archangel Oracle Cards", "author": "Doreen Virtue", "description": "About the Author Doreen Virtue is a best-selling author, a doctor of psychology, and a Christian who studies scripture. She has appeared on Oprah , CNN, the BBC, The View , and Good Morning America , and has been featured in newspapers and magazines worldwide. For information on Doreen\u2019s work, please visit her at AngelTherapy.com or Facebook.com/DoreenVirtue444. To enroll in her video courses, please visit www.HayHouseU.com and www.EarthAngel.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Sponsored Selections"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": "from 45.95"}, {"asin": "0517524848", "title": "The Alice in Wonderland Cookbook: A Culinary Diversion", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Classics"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0738744956", "title": "The Halloween Oracle: Lifting the Veil between the Worlds Every Night", "author": "Stacey Demarco", "description": "About the Author Stacey Demarco is an internationally respected spiritual Pagan practitioner, Witch, author, and activist who hails from Sydney, Australia. Her passion is to make practical magic accessible to everyone and to reconnect people with the power of nature. Her down-to-earth yet scholastic spiritual style and her skill at weaving ancient techniques to solve modern problems make her popular amongst clients and a regular contributor upon all things spiritual across television, radio, and other media. A former successful corporate animal, she has worked for multinational companies in senior marketing and PR roles until she decided to transition into her purpose\u2015that of being a \"catalyst for change.\" A long-time lover and scholar of the mythos of the feminine and masculine divine, her first set of Oracle cards, Gods & Titans , illustrated by award-winning artist Jimmy Manton, was released early 2011 and her second set, Goddesses & Sirens , was released in October 2011 in Australia with a US release in 2013. Reflecting her love of nature, her Earth Power: An Atlas for the Soul was released worldwide in 2014, and the stunning Halloween Oracle is her latest work. Her next book, The Disconnect will be released early 2015. Jimmy Manton is an award-winning illustrator who has provided artwork for numerous Blue Angel publications. While he has been drawing since his little opposable thumbs allowed him to grasp a pen, he has been obsessed with all things sci-fi and fantasy. It runs in the family, too. Jimmy was named after James T. Kirk, Star Trek's indomitable captain of the USS Enterprise. For the last few years Jimmy concentrated on studying architecture and also the art of architectural model building. Jimmy's work is featured in magazines including international architectural and gaming titles. He is based in Melbourne, Australia.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 24.95}, {"asin": "082884190X", "title": "Harry Potter und die Kammer des Schreckens (German Edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "B000FC12Y6", "title": "Murder in Mesopotamia: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot series Book 14)", "author": "Agatha Christie", "description": "From AudioFile This Hercule Poirot mystery finds the popular detective at an archaeological site. The fears of the wife of the expedition's leader are proven true when she is murdered. This story is told through the narrative voice of a nurse who was hired to ease those fears and who then takes on the role of assisting Poirot. Anna Massey keeps the pace moving well and use accents to characterize this diverse group. Some are better than others--the American accents are rather strained, and Poirot a bit exaggerated. But in each case, the characters are distinct and easily distinguishable. J.E.M. \u00a9 AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a British crime writer best known for her detective novels and short stories. According to Guinness World Records , she is the best-selling novelist of all time, her novels having sold over four billion copies and having been translated into more than one hundred languages. The Agatha Award for best mystery and crime writers was named in her honor. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap Agatha Christie's genius for detective fiction is unparalleled. Her worldwide popularity is phenomenal, her characters engaging, her plots spellbinding. No one knows the human heart--or the dark passions that can stop it--better than Agatha Christie. She is truly the one and only Queen of Crime.Amy Leatheram has never felt the lure of the mysterious East, but when she travels to an ancient site deep in the Iraqi desert to nurse the wife of a celebrated archaeologist, events prove stranger than she could ever have imagined. Her patient's bizarre visions and nervous terror seem unfounded, but as the oppressive tension in the air thickens, events come to a terrible climax--in murder.With one spot of blood as his only clue, Hercule Poirot must embark on a journey not just across the desert, but into the darkest crevices of the human soul to unravel a mystery which taxes even his remarkable powers. This gripping dramatization from the BBC features John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot heading a distinguished cast. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover It is clear to Amy Leatheran that something sinister is going on at the Hassanieh dig in Iraq; something associated with the presence of \u201cLovely Louise,\u201d wife of celebrated archaeologist Dr. Leidner. In a few days\u2019 time Hercule Poirot is due to drop in at the excavation site. But with Louise suffering from terrifying hallucinations, and tension within the group becoming almost unbearable, Poirot might just be too late. . . . --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review As good as anything Mrs. Christie has yet given us. -- \"Daily Mail (London)\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "1523710977", "title": "Swearing Cats: A Swear Word Coloring Book featuring hilarious cats : Sweary Coloring Books : Cat Coloring Books", "author": "Thiago Ultra", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "0091816971", "title": "Who Moved My Cheese? : An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life", "author": "Spencer Johnson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.04}, {"asin": "0393935175", "title": "You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist (Second Edition)", "author": "Dalton Conley", "description": "Review \u201cI admit I assigned You May Ask Yourself mostly because of the cost to my students. However, after teaching from it, I find it is better than any text I have ever used. The chapters are interesting and thorough. In fact, I believe the chapters on gender and race are the best I have ever used. Dalton Conley also does a great job of integrating race and gender into every chapter. He covers a great deal of material, reflects important and recent research, and presents it in ways that students can understand.\u201d - Joan E. Manley, Florida Gulf Coast University \u201cYour students will be captured by Conley\u2019s conversational style and drawn into reading the text before they know what hit them. Conley provides a thorough discussion of theory with relevant past and contemporary examples. Further, he challenges the students to question what they\u2019ve taken for granted most of their lives.\u201d - Cheryl Maes, University of Nevada, Reno \u201cRather than bombarding students with lots of statistics, Dalton Conley seems more concerned with getting the \u2018big ideas\u2019 of the discipline across, and to encourage them to ask meaningful questions.\u201d - Michael Nofz, University of Wisconsin-Fond du Lac \u201cConley's text has filled an important niche for the community college needs. It is affordable, readable, colorful, and yet has fewer pages to read, which is an important consideration for my beginning-level community college students, and has examples that my young students can relate to.\u201d - Sharon Warner Methvin, Mt. Hood Community College \u201cHip, splashy, youthful, concise, emotive, provocative, unpretentious, sharp, with a fresh take on the issues.\u201d - Jennifer Schultz, The University of Arizona \u201c You May Ask Yourself represents a departure from the typical cookie-cutter approach that characterizes most introductory texts. The best sociology textbooks read like storybooks, and students are actually interested in doing the readings. This book has the potential for approaching that standard.\u201d - Ralph Pyle, Michigan State University \u201cDalton Conley's You May Ask Yourself is a refreshingly different non-textbook book that I'd strongly encourage others to explore.\u201d - Brian Powell, Indiana University About the Author Dalton Conley is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. In 2005, Conley became the first sociologist to win the prestigious National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award, which honors an outstanding young U.S. scientist or engineer. He writes for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Slate, and Forbes. He is the author of Honky (2001) and The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become (2004). His other books include Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (1999), The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (2003), and Elsewhere, U.S.A. (2009). You can follow Dalton Conley on Twitter at @daltonconley.", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.31}, {"asin": "1429268158", "title": "Exploring Psychology in Modules", "author": "David G. Myers", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Psychology"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.92}, {"asin": "0763640484", "title": "Spyology: The Complete Book of Spycraft (Ologies)", "author": "Spencer Blake", "description": "Review The Ologies take a new direction with this spectacular addition to the series. Maintaining the beloved interactive format\u2026Enticing extras \u2026 Who could resist?\u2014Publishers Weekly (starred review)Featured/recommended\u2014Napa Valley Register.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1494701502", "title": "The Tidy Closet: Tips From A French Woman: Easy Steps And Motivation To Declutter Your Closet And Organise Your Wardrobe", "author": "Marie-Anne Lecoeur", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "1846944260", "title": "Traditional Witchcraft for the Seashore", "author": "Melusine Draco", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.45}, {"asin": "0762434171", "title": "The City Tavern Cookbook: Recipes from the Birthplace of American Cuisine", "author": "Walter Staib", "description": "About the Author Walter Staib is the chef and James Beard-nominated owner of the historic City Tavern restaurant in Philadelphia. Chef Staib has prior worked at such top European dining spots as Hotel Post, a historic five-star hotel in Germany's Black Forest region, and the Chessery in Switzerland, one of Europe's premier resorts. He is the host and chef behind the Emmy Award-winning PBS television series A Taste of History and has appeared on the Today show, 60 Minutes, Iron Chef, The Best Thing I Ever Ate , and others. He is the author of several books about American cooking and baking, and has a passion for historic American cuisine, for which he is determined to share with home cooks everywhere.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 37.8}, {"asin": "1985749823", "title": "The Spiralizer Cookbook: Quick and Delicious Spiralizer Recipes Made Simple", "author": "Brandon Mitchell", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Special Diet"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 5.7}, {"asin": "1401942318", "title": "Archangel Power Tarot Cards: A 78-Card Deck and Guidebook", "author": "Doreen Virtue", "description": "About the Author Doreen Virtue is a best-selling author, a doctor of psychology, and a Christian who studies scripture. She has appeared on Oprah , CNN, the BBC, The View , and Good Morning America , and has been featured in newspapers and magazines worldwide. For information on Doreen\u2019s work, please visit her at AngelTherapy.com or Facebook.com/DoreenVirtue444. To enroll in her video courses, please visit www.HayHouseU.com and www.EarthAngel.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 52.04}, {"asin": "007735480X", "title": "General, Organic & Biochemistry", "author": "K. J. Denniston", "description": "About the Author Kate Denniston is a biochemist in the Biology Dept. of Towson State University. At Towson, she has been honored with such awards as the \"Outstanding Faculty Award\" and the \"Faculty Merit Award\". Her previous employment record is literally a list of some of the best biochemistry institutions in the world: Univ. of Wisconsin as a post-doc, Georgetown University School of Medicine as research professor, National Cancer Institute as a Senior Staff Fellow, the Argonee National laboratory in their research program, and as an Invited Instructor by the European Molecular Biology Organization. She has written for such noteworthy publications as Nature, Science.Joe Topping currently is a professor of analytical chemistry at Towson State University. He did his post-doc at Iowa State Univeristy in Ames. At Towson, he has been honored with such awards as the \"Outstanding Faculty Award\" and the \"Faculty Merit Award\". He has written ancillaries for an outstanding text, Atkins - General Chemistry and is heavily involved with the American Chemical Society.Bob Caret is currently Provost and Executive Vice President of Towson State University and an associate professor of chemistry. He has written an Organic Chemistry text previously. Professor Caret's Focus in the textbook is in organic chemistry.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "3551551677", "title": "Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "080414043X", "title": "Food: A Love Story", "author": "Jim Gaffigan", "description": "Review \u201cA highly entertaining and opinionated rumination on food.\u201d \u2014 Esquire \u201cHilarious.\u201d \u2014 Food & Wine \u201cGaffigan is delightful company, and he has a gift for comedy that is both clever and friendly. This book is a great use of his talents, and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish\u2014as long as it doesn\u2019t make you too hungry along the way.\u201d \u2014 Splitsider About the Author JIM GAFFIGAN is a New York Times bestselling author, comedian, actor, and executive producer of The Jim Gaffigan Show . When he is not eating in airports before flying to some city to eat and do stand-up comedy, he overeats in New York City and also lives there with his five young children and much smarter and thinner wife, Jeannie. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CURRICULUM VITAE What are my qualifications to write this book? None, really. So why should you read it? Here\u2019s why: I\u2019m a little fat. Okay, to some I might not be considered that fat, but the point is, I\u2019m not thin. If a thin guy were to write about a love of food and eating, I\u2019d highly recommend that you do not read his book. I\u2019m not talking about someone who is merely in good shape. I\u2019m talking thin. Skinny. I wouldn\u2019t trust them skinnies with food advice. First of all, how do you know they really feel pas\u00adsionately about food? Well, obviously they are not passionate enough to overdo it. That\u2019s not very passionate. Anyway, I\u2019m overweight. \u00a0 I\u2019ll admit it. I consciously try not to take food advice from thin people. I know this may not be fair, but when Mario Batali talks, I always think, Well, this is a guy who knows what he\u2019s talking about . He actually has experience eating food. This is why some sportscasters wonder what\u2019s going on in a player\u2019s head during a tense moment in a game, but the sportscaster who was once a player knows what\u2019s going on in a player\u2019s head. When I talk about food, I like to think I\u2019m like one of those sportscasters who used to play profes\u00adsionally. I\u2019m like the Ray Lewis or Terry Bradshaw of eat\u00ading. I\u2019m like the Tony Siragusa of eating. Well, that\u2019s a little redundant. \u00a0 When a thin person announces, \u201cHere\u2019s a great taco place,\u201d I kind of shut down a little. How do they know it\u2019s so great? From smelling the tacos? If they only ate one taco, the taco could not have been that great. Or maybe it was great, but the thin person cared more about the calories than the taste: \u201cI had to stop at one taco. I\u2019m on a diet.\u201d A taco that won\u2019t force you to break your diet just can\u2019t be that great. Fat people know the consequences of eating, but if the food is good enough, they just don\u2019t care. Overweight people have chosen food over ap\u00adpearance. When a fat person talks about a great place to get a burger, I lean in. They know. \u00a0 Speaking of thin people, another person it makes no sense to take advice from is the waiter. Why do fancy restaurants always hire thin, good-\u00adlooking people to be the waiters? \u201cI\u2019ll have the hamburger, and I want someone who is at least an 8 to bring it over to me. Can I see some headshots?\u201d Why would we care what the waiter looks like? Even if we did, why would we take the waiter\u2019s advice? We don\u2019t know him. He is a stranger. \u201cWell, he works there.\u201d Does that make him have similar taste in things you like? Does that make him honest? Not to sound paranoid, but the waitstaff does have a financial incentive for you to order something more expensive: \u201cWell, I highly recom\u00admend the 16-\u00adounce Kobe Beef with Lobster and the bottle of 1996 Dom Perignon.\u201d \u00a0 What restaurants really need is a fat-\u00adguy food expert. Many fine-dining establishments have a sommelier\u2014\u00ada wine expert\u2014\u00adto assist in wine selection, but if a restaurant really cares about food, they should have a \u201cFattelier.\u201d \u00a0 FATTELIER: Well, I\u2019d get the chili cheese fries with the cheese on the side. You get more cheese that way. \u00a0 ME: Thank you, Fattelier. \u00a0 Although they can\u2019t be thin, the food adviser can\u2019t be too fat. If they are morbidly obese, then you can conclude that they will probably eat everything and anything and do not have dis\u00adcerning taste. This is not to say that they won\u2019t have valuable views. I\u2019d still trust an overly fat person over a skinny one any day. The best adviser would have a very specific body type: pudgy or just a little overweight. This makes it clear they have a somewhat unhealthy relationship with food, but not a clini\u00adcal problem. They are eating beyond feeling full. Sure, I am describing my own body type, but that\u2019s why I am qualified to write this book about food. What other credentials do you need, really? Stop being a snob. Read the book already. STEAK: THE MANLY MEAT As a child I was confused by my father\u2019s love of steak. I remem\u00adber being eight and my dad ceremoniously announcing to the family, \u201cWe\u2019re having steak tonight!\u201d as if Abe Lincoln were coming over for dinner. My siblings and I would politely act excited as we watched TV. \u201cThat\u2019s great, Dad!\u201d I remember thinking, Big deal. Why can\u2019t we just have McDonald\u2019s? To me, my father just had this weird thing with steak. I thought, Dads obsess about steak the way kids obsess about candy . Well, my dad did. I\u2019d watch him trudge out behind our house in all types of weather to the propane grill after me or one of my brothers barely averted death by lighting it for him. He would happily take his post out there, chain-\u00adsmoking his Merit Ultra Light cigarettes and drinking his Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch alone in the darkness of Northwest Indiana. He\u2019d stare into the flame like it was an ancient oracle relaying a prophecy that solved the mysteries of life. \u00a0 Given the sheer joy that standing at the grill gave my father, I was always amazed by how bad he was at cooking a steak. Maybe it was the grilling in virtual darkness, or maybe it was the Scotch, but his steaks were usually really burnt and often had the flavor of cigarette ashes. At the table he would try to justify the charred meat in front of the family: \u201cYou like it well done, right?\u201d Again, my siblings and I would politely lie. \u201cIt\u2019s great, Dad. Thanks.\u201d I think I actually grew to enjoy the taste of A.1. Steak Sauce mixed with cigarette ash. A.1. was always on the table when my dad would grill steaks. It seems everyone I knew had that same thin bottle of A.1. It always felt like it was empty right before it flooded your steak. Ironically, the empty-\u00adfeeling bottle never seemed to run out. I think most people still have the same bottle of A.1. that they had in 1989. Once I looked at the back of a bottle of A.1. and was not sur\u00adprised to find that one of the ingredients was \u201cmagic.\u201d \u00a0 By the time I became a teenager, I generally understood that steak was something unique. It had some kind of a deeper meaning. I still preferred McDonald\u2019s, but I realized steak was certainly not something my father would\u2019ve been able to eat growing up as the son of a denture maker in Springfield, Il\u00adlinois, in the 1940s. I remember thinking that maybe eating steak was actually my father\u2019s measure of success. He wasn\u2019t poor anymore. He and his children could afford to eat burnt steak. Even in my twenties, when I would go home to visit my father after my mother passed away, he and I would always eat a cigarette-\u00adash-\u00adinfused steak that he had overcooked on the grill. Many years later I realized that following my mother\u2019s death, my father pretty much ate steak every night. Probably because my mother was not around anymore to say, \u201cWell, obviously you shouldn\u2019t eat steak every night!\u201d When I think back to my father eating steak day after day, year after year, I can only come to one conclusion: my father was a genius. \u00a0 I don\u2019t know what happened, but steak makes perfect sense to me now. I was really overanalyzing it as a teenager. My fa\u00adther was not cooking steak on the grill to get away from his family or eating it daily to prove to himself that he wasn\u2019t poor; my father was eating steak because consuming a steak is one of the great pleasures we get to experience during our short time on this planet. This was probably one of my most profound coming-\u00adof-\u00adage realizations. Steak is really that amazing. Steak is so delicious, I\u2019m sure the first person to go on a stakeout was eventually disappointed: \u201cBeen sitting in this car all night and still no steak! Not even a basket of bread.\u201d \u00a0 I\u2019m actually relieved I inherited my father\u2019s love of steak. Where I was raised in the Midwest, all the men around me seemed to love three things: fixing stuff, cars, and steak. I learned that a real man loves fixing stuff, cars, and steak. Well, at least I\u2019ve got one of those three. If eating steak is manly, it is the only manly attribute I possess. I\u2019m not handy. I can\u2019t fix things. Whenever something breaks in our apartment, I just look at my wife sheepishly and say, \u201cWe should call someone.\u201d I don\u2019t even call. My wife calls. I can barely figure out the phone. When the handyman comes over, I just kind of silently watch him work. I don\u2019t know what to say. \u201cYou want some brownies? My wife could bake us some brownies. I\u2019d bake them, but I don\u2019t know how to turn the oven on.\u201d I try to act like I\u2019m working on something more important. \u201cYeah, I\u2019m more of a tech guy. I\u2019m really good at computer stuff\u00a0..... like checking e-\u00admail.\u201d \u00a0 I\u2019m just not manly. I don\u2019t know what happened. The men in my family are manly. My dad and my brothers loved cars. I mean LOVED cars in a manly way. They\u2019d talk about cars, go to car shows, and even stop and look at other people\u2019s cars in a parking lot. I barely have an opinion on cars. I do know that trucks are manlier than cars. The most manly form of trans\u00adportation is, of course, the pickup truck. My brother Mike has a pickup because he\u2019s a MAN. Pickup commercials just give me anxiety. There\u2019s always a voice-\u00adover bellowing, \u201cYou can pull one ton! Two tons! You can pull an aircraft carrier!\u201d I always think, Why? Why do you need that? I only see people taking their pickup trucks to Cracker Barrel . My brother Mike, like many other pickup owners, never seems to be picking anything up in his pickup. I find this confusing. It\u2019s like walking around with a big empty piece of luggage. \u201cAre you about to travel somewhere?\u201d \u201cNo, but I\u2019m the type of guy who would.\u201d To be fair, I really can\u2019t judge. I don\u2019t own a pickup\u2014\u00ador even a car, for that matter. Whenever I go back home to Indiana to visit my brother Mitch, who is car obsessed, I rent a car and drive to his house from Chicago. We usually have the same conversation. \u00a0 MITCH: What kind of car did you rent? ME: I think it\u2019s blue. MITCH: Is that four or six cylinders? ME: (pause) It has four wheels. I think. Wait, cylinders aren\u2019t wheels, right? \u00a0 But steak ..... steak I get. If eating steak is manly, then I\u2019m all man. I\u2019m like a man and a half. I love steak so much, it\u2019s actually the way I show affection for other men. \u201cYou\u2019re such a good guy, I\u2019m going to buy you a steak.\u201d Men bond over steak. \u201cWe\u2019ll sit and eat meat together and not talk about our families.\u201d I recently toured for two weeks with my friend Tom. When I returned home, Jeannie asked, \u201cHow\u2019s Tom\u2019s family?\u201d I don\u2019t know. I only spent like twelve hours a day with the guy. I know he likes a medium-\u00adrare rib eye. What else is there to know? \u00a0 I order steaks from Omaha Steaks. Yes, I order my meat over the Internet, which I\u2019m pretty sure is a sign of a problem. I guess I don\u2019t want my steak shopping to cut into my steak-\u00adeating time. Ordering Omaha Steaks is very simple. It\u2019s like Amazon.com for beef. A couple of days after I place my order, a Styrofoam cooler shows up. It\u2019s the same type of cooler that I imagine they will deliver my replacement heart in. Omaha Steaks is nice enough to provide dry ice in case I\u2019d like to make a bomb or something. Occasionally, when I grab my Omaha Steaks cooler out of the hallway I\u2019ll make eye contact with a neighbor, who I\u2019m sure will later tell his spouse, \u201cJim got an\u00adother box of meat today. That apartment will be available in a couple weeks.\u201d The only problem with Omaha Steaks as a company is that you can\u2019t get rid of them. Once you order from them, they are like Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses calling all the time. \u00a0 OMAHA STEAKS REP: Hey, you want some more steaks? ME: I just got a delivery yesterday. OMAHA STEAKS REP: How about some rib eyes? ME: I don\u2019t need any more steak, thank you. OMAHA STEAKS REP: How about some filets? You want some filets? ME: Really. I\u2019m fine with steaks. OMAHA STEAKS REP: Okay, I\u2019ll call tomorrow. ME: Um\u00a0.....  OMAHA STEAKS REP: Hey, you want some turkey? Ham? ME: I thought you were Omaha Steaks? OMAHA STEAKS REP: You want some drywall? ME: Aren\u2019t you Omaha Steaks? OMAHA STEAKS REP: I\u2019m right outside your window. I\u2019m so lonely. \u00a0 I could never be a vegetarian for many reasons, but the main one is steak. Sure, bacon, bratwurst, and pastrami are pretty amazing, but steak is the soul of all carnivores. Steak is the embodiment of premium meat eating. I\u2019m a meat lover, and steak is the tuxedo of meat. The priciest dish on most menus is the \u201csurf and turf,\u201d the steak and lobster. Who are they kid\u00adding? The steak is clearly driving the steak-\u00adand-\u00adlobster entr\u00e9e. The steak is the headliner. There are way more people going for the steak and the lobster than people going for the lobster and the steak. The people who want the lobster are just order\u00ading the lobster. Lobster\u2019s appeal is all perception, and steak is truly extraordinary. Steak has its own knives. There aren\u2019t steak restaurants. There are steakhouses. Steak gets a house. There\u2019s no tunahouse. Tuna gets a can. I love a steakhouse. It\u2019s really the perfect environment for eating a steak. They always seem like throwbacks to another era. A time when kale was just a weed in your backyard. All steakhouses seem to be dimly lit and covered in dark wood. They are usually decorated with a combination of red leather and red leather. You know there is a huge locker full of hanging carcasses, like five feet away. The waiters are no-\u00adnonsense pros. They approach in a gruff manner: \u00a0 WAITER: (deep, scratchy voice) Welcome. Let\u2019s not beat around the bush. You getting a steak? We serve meat here. Want some meat? ME: Yes, ma\u2019am. \u00a0 At Peter Luger\u2019s in Brooklyn, the waiter usually won\u2019t even let you order. \u201cYou\u2019re all getting porterhouse.\u201d Um, okay. \u00a0 Some steakhouses show you the meat raw. At places like Smith & Wollensky, a tray will be wheeled out with different cuts on it. One by one the waiter will pick up a glob of raw meat and thrust it at the table. \u201cYou can get this. You can get this.\u201d Men are such visual animals that they\u2019ll point at the fat-\u00adswirled hunk of flesh and grunt, \u201cThat one.\u201d It\u2019s all very simple and primal. At other restaurants, fancy non-\u00adsteak items are prepared in a code of complexity: \u201cAl dente.\u201d \u201cBraised.\u201d \u201cFlamb\u00e9ed.\u201d But the way steak is cooked is understandable even to a monosyllabic caveman: \u201cRare.\u201d \u201cMedium.\u201d \u201cWell.\u201d You barely even have to know how to talk. \u00a0 Of course, vegetables are also served at steakhouses, but they are called \u201cside dishes.\u201d Like their presence there is only justified by the existence of steak. They\u2019re the entourage of the steak. And you can take them or leave them. The sides are not included with the purchase of steak. They are \u00e0 la carte in steakhouses, like napkins on Spirit Airlines. \u00a0 Sides are never called \u201cvegetables,\u201d because what is done to vegetables in steakhouses makes them no longer qualify as vegetables. \u00a0 GRUFF WAITER: We have spinach cooked in ice cream. We also have a bowl of marshmallows with a dollop of yam. And our house specialty is a baked potato that we somehow stuffed with five sticks of butter. We also have a \u201cdiet potato\u201d that is stuffed with only four sticks of butter. \u00a0 Everything about a steakhouse is manly, so it\u2019s no surprise that sports heroes own steakhouses. I\u2019ve been to Ditka\u2019s, El\u00adway\u2019s, and Shula\u2019s, which all had great steaks, but I\u2019m pretty sure those NFL greats didn\u2019t cook my steak. \u201cHey, you were good at football. Why don\u2019t you open a meat restaurant? They have nothing to do with each other.\u201d Nothing except the same demographic: manly men. Like me. \u00a0 My love of steakhouses is sincere. When I die, I would like to be buried in a steakhouse. Well, not buried. Just my casket on display in the dining room. That way people can come in, eat, and stare at me lying in state. Maybe someone will say, \u201cJim died too soon, but this steak was aged perfectly!\u201d I don\u2019t think people in steakhouses would mind that much about my casket. People are in steakhouses for steak. \u00a0 PATRON: Why is there a casket in the middle of the room? WAITER: Oh, that is a comedian, Jim Gaffigan. His only wish was to\u00a0.....  PATRON: I\u2019ll have the rib eye, baked potato, and can I get blue cheese on the side? WAITER: I\u2019ll bring that right away, Mrs. Gaffigan. \u00a0 I love steakhouses, but I realize there is something barbaric about the whole experience. Going to a place to eat cow hind parts. Eventually, eating steak won\u2019t be socially acceptable. In two hundred years I\u2019m sure the following conversation will take place: \u00a0 PERSON 1: Did you know that in 2014 people would sit in dark rooms and eat sliced-\u00adup cow by candlelight? PERSON 2: Not my ancestors! My ancestors have been vegan since they came over on the Mayflower . I read that on Ancestry.com. CUP OF GRAVY I suppose I\u2019ve become desensitized to the level of unhealthy eat\u00ading in America. An 80-\u00adounce soda, all-\u00adyou-\u00adcan-\u00adeat buffets, and a Wendy\u2019s Triple only seem like logical options to me. I love the rare moments when I\u2019m truly surprised by American eating. \u00a0 A while ago I was back in Indiana in my hometown walk\u00ading around the Kmart, or, as we called it, \u201cthe mall.\u201d You can typically find just about anything you need in one of these \u201cbig box\u201d stores like Walmart and Kmart. What I especially love about Kmart is the ambience. I always feel like I\u2019ve entered a store that was just attacked by a flash mob. Everything always looks and feels a little disheveled. There will be some random empty shelf. There\u2019s always a huge corner display tower of sale products that looks like it will collapse on you if you breathe on it. There will be a broken jar in one aisle and an aban\u00addoned sock in the next. The selection and layout suggest that this might not be the ideal place to buy a suit or use a public restroom. Anyway, on this fine day I was looking for diapers when I saw a seventy-\u00adyear-\u00adold man walking around the Kmart drinking something I realized later was a cup of KFC gravy. \u00a0 Now, in full disclosure, I love gravy. Who doesn\u2019t, really? It\u2019s gravy , after all\u00a0..... but I\u2019ve never considered gravy a bever\u00adage. Even in my most private moments with gravy I\u2019ve never contemplated taking a swig. This is coming from someone who drank a product called Yoo-\u00adhoo on many occasions as a teen\u00adager. The thing I found most impressive was that not only was this stranger drinking gravy, he also wasn\u2019t even trying to hide it. When I first spotted the stranger, I saw the KFC Styrofoam cup, saw him take a drink, and assumed\u00a0..... well, obviously this guy is not drinking gravy. Then I encountered him again standing in front of me in the checkout line. It was at that mo\u00adment I saw the thick brown liquid in the cup and confirmed that it was, in fact, a cup of KFC gravy he was drinking. And then, almost as if to prove a point, he turned around and took a sip right in front of me. Our eyes met, and he gave me a warm Midwestern smile as if to say, \u201cHey, how\u2019s it going?\u201d I nodded and said hello and was only a bit more than slightly tempted to exclaim, \u201cYou realize you\u2019re drinking gravy, right?\u201d \u00a0 I don\u2019t know what the events were that led up to this stranger drinking the cup of gravy in that Kmart. I like to think he walked into KFC with the intention of drinking gravy. Maybe his order was simple. \u00a0 \u201cYeah I\u2019ll have the large mashed potatoes and gravy. And hold the mashed potatoes.\u201d  \u00a0 Maybe in order to avoid judgment or scorn, he ordered the mashed potatoes, got the gravy on the side, and just threw the mashed potatoes away. Or maybe he really could have cared less what anyone thought, which is more likely, since he seemed like a proud gravy drinker greet\u00ading the cashier while she scanned his heart medication. \u00a0 I\u2019m no health nut, but I can only imagine what this guy\u2019s next medical checkup was like. I picture a doctor in a white coat glancing down at a chart as he walks into an examination room with our gravy drinker sitting on the examination table. The doctor would then tilt his head to the right, perplexed by the results on the chart: \u00a0 DOCTOR: Mr. Jones, I\u2019ve got your cholesterol levels here. (beat) Okay, you are aware your blood is not moving? GRAVY DRINKER: (nods) DOCTOR: This is kind of a strange question. Um. You haven\u2019t been drinking gravy, have ya? Because based on the test results you\u2019re, like, 90 percent meat by-\u00adproduct. GRAVY DRINKER: (nods) DOCTOR: We\u2019re going to have to register you with the government. \u00a0 I guessed the age of our gravy drinker to be around seventy, but I have no idea how old he was or how long he had been drinking gravy. Maybe he was younger. Maybe gravy drinking is one of those rapid-\u00adaging behaviors, like smoking. Or maybe he was an even older guy and the gravy-\u00addrinking habit had plumped out his wrinkles so he actually looked younger. I sup\u00adpose his unique consumption of his gravy cup was voluntary, but I honestly don\u2019t know. Maybe his wife was just trying to kill him. \u00a0 GRAVY DRINKER: Honey, I\u2019m going to Kmart. WIFE: Well, why don\u2019t you have a cup of gravy? GRAVY DRINKER: Well, I guess I could\u00a0.....  WIFE: And why don\u2019t you sign this additional life insur\u00adance policy? GRAVY DRINKER: Boy, you love buying life insurance. EVEN FEWER PEOPLE LIKE VEGETABLES If nobody wants fruit, even fewer people want vegetables. This is because, overall, vegetables taste horrible. Don\u2019t be\u00adlieve me? Why, then, are we surprised when vegetables taste good? \u201cOh my God, this beet is delicious.\u201d We are surprised because the expectation is that vegetables will taste like, well, vegetables. People eat vegetables, but nobody WANTS to eat vegetables. Think back to the last time you ate a vegetable. Did you WANT to eat the vegetable? Be honest. Maybe it was part of a healthy choice you made: \u201cI\u2019ll eat some carrots.\u201d Congrats on that healthy choice, but don\u2019t confuse a healthy choice with a desire to eat a vegetable. I mean, I don\u2019t want to be fat, but I want vegetables less. Of course, I\u2019m forced to eat vegetables when there are children present. \u00a0 \u00a0 Parents dishonestly announce how good vegetables are in front of young children, hoping that because of the young\u00adsters\u2019 absence of life experience and sheer stupidity, they will be tricked into liking them. The lie that \u201cvegetables are good\u201d usually expires around the same time as the belief in Santa and the notion that adults actually know what they are doing. \u00a0 Let\u2019s say I\u2019m wrong. Maybe you do want to eat a vegetable. Let\u2019s now subtract deep frying, vinegar, dairy, oil, or an un\u00adhealthy amount of salt from the vegetable. Do you still WANT the vegetable? If you say no, you are like me. If you said, \u201cYes, Jim, I love eating raw radishes by the handful,\u201d you are a weirdo and probably need therapy. Okay, I\u2019m jealous. \u00a0 Mostly I\u2019ve found that vegetables MUST be deep-\u00adfried, drowned in vinegar, or covered with some form of dairy or salt to have any appeal. Even at that point, the improvement is very minimal. It\u2019s staggering, the exertion that is put into making vegetables appealing. I\u2019d like to applaud the effort be\u00adhind grilled vegetables, but I\u2019m pretty sure everyone finds them soggy and a waste of precious grill space. \u00a0 At their best, vegetables are the sidekicks. The opening band you didn\u2019t come to see at the concert. The asparagus next to the steak. The expectation is that the entr\u00e9e is so good you won\u2019t notice that you are eating mutant blades of grass. There is no better sidekick than the potato, mostly in deep-\u00adfried form. Even so, potatoes, like corn, are fake vegetables and a great ex\u00adcuse to your wife if you eat a lot of fries and tortillas: \u201cI had so many veggies today, honey!\u201d \u00a0 THE VEGETABLE TRAY \u00a0 Occasionally, raw, naked, unenhanced vegetables are shame\u00adlessly presented as if they are actually desirable. This is the case with the elaborate vegetable party tray. When you are at a party and there is a vegetable tray, aren\u2019t you a little surprised? I always think, Wow, that\u2019s a waste of money . A tray of veg\u00adetables at a party almost makes me sad. Here is a meticulously arranged tray of neatly cut vegetables for someone to throw out at the end of the night. I think crudit\u00e9s is a French term meaning \u201ctoss in le garbage at end of le party.\u201d The only thing that raw vegetables have ever been good for is the careers of hummus and ranch dressing. \u00a0 The vegetable tray reflects very poorly on the shortsighted host of the party you are attending. \u201cWho is throwing this party? A nutritionist? Peter Rabbit? Is this a party or a Weight Watchers meeting?\u201d You know they are just there for decora\u00adtion. Who doesn\u2019t want to look at pretty colors while scarf\u00ading down pigs in a blanket? But actually eat the raw vegetable decoration? Hell, I\u2019d rather eat a candle. What, I\u2019m the only one here who eats the occasional candle at parties? Why do you think they\u2019re scented? \u00a0 I almost feel sorry for the vegetables on the tray. They don\u2019t stand a chance against the other party appetizers. I know what it feels like to be the cauliflower next to the chips and guaca\u00admole. I\u2019ve been to the beach and been the pale guy next to the tan bodybuilder. It\u2019s not a good feeling. \u00a0 CAULIFLOWER: What the hell am I doing on this table? I can\u2019t compete with a bowl of peanut-\u00adbutter-\u00adfilled pretzels! As if that ranch dressing is going to help sell me. \u00a0 Some of us have to settle down with the ranch dressing. The usage is getting out of control. \u201cI can\u2019t help it. I love ranch dressing. I like to dip my pizza in ranch dressing.\u201d That\u2019s fine. You are just not allowed to vote anymore. Ranch dressing is rather pathetic, really\u2014\u00adafter all, it\u2019s made from buttermilk and sadness. Prior to ranch dressing, nobody had ever eaten a raw vegetable. Throughout history, mankind has always known that vegetables were primarily put on this Earth for decoration. \u00a0 FARMHAND: Done with the harvest. Nobody is eating the Indian corn. FARMER: Feed it to the cows. FARMHAND: They didn\u2019t want it either. FARMER: Throw it on the front porch next to the gourd and jack-\u00ado\u2019-\u00adlantern and remind me not to grow it next year. \u00a0 TYPES OF VEGETABLES \u00a0 A list of different types of vegetables reads like the roster of attendees at an international conference for the barely edibles. Brussels Sprouts : Clearly some kind of cruel joke by God. Bell Pepper : Probably what makes cooked bell peppers so special is that they can ruin the taste of any dish they are in. Green, red, yellow, or orange peppers\u2014you can change the color, but when I see one, I prepare for dis\u00adappointment. Green is by far the worst of the culprits. Green peppers can make the best steak bitter and a grown man cry. Radish: Interesting fact: No one has ever really wanted to eat more than one radish in a lifetime. Radishes are a fascinating example of how something can be both tasteless and burn your tongue at the same time. Celery : Celery better get buffalo wings a great holiday pres\u00adent every year. Squash : The name says it all. Pretty much the only thing that can squash my appetite. Cauliflower : The unpainted broccoli imposter. Asparagus : Most interesting thing about asparagus is how fast it makes your pee smell like asparagus. Zucchini : The cucumber\u2019s ugly and disappointing cousin. (Similar to what the raisin cookie is to the chocolate chip cookie.) Cucumber : The cucumber is just a pickle before it started drinking. \u00a0 PICKLES AND HOT PEPPERS It seems whenever I identify a green vegetable I enjoy, it is a pickled vegetable or a hot pepper. Pickles are so good you\u2019d think being \u201cin a pickle\u201d would be a good thing. Actually, a great thing. Pickles are delicious. Imagine a Cuban sandwich without the pickle. Wait, don\u2019t do it. It\u2019s a sad thought, actu\u00adally. A Cuban sandwich without the pickle is just a ham-\u00adand-\u00adcheese sandwich with a slab of pork. Who would ever order that? Well, I guess I would, but I am a unique case. \u00a0 If a pickle can define a meal, a hot pepper is there to over\u00adpower one. The hot pepper is the marching-band cymbal of vegetables. It\u2019s like, \u201cThis is a pretty tasty sandwich\u2014\u00adWOW, HOT PEPPER!\u201d  \u00a0 The super-\u00adhot-food thing is weird. It\u2019s like, \u201cEat this thing that will burn off your nose hairs and kill all your taste buds to make the food better.\u201d It\u2019s surprising that we don\u2019t put thumbtacks on our beds to enjoy our sleep more. But for me hot peppers are highly addictive. \u00a0 I seem to have an abusive relationship with hot peppers. I probably need a support group. I know what they are going to do to me, yet I cannot resist them. At night I\u2019m all \u201cYay, jala\u00adpe\u00f1os!\u201d The next morning I\u2019m all \u201cBoo, jalape\u00f1os!\u201d Still, like a true codependent, I am the person who willingly keeps going back to the abusive relationship. I don\u2019t want to give too much information, but they were probably eating jalape\u00f1os the night before writing the Johnny Cash song \u201cRing of Fire.\u201d Still, I would much prefer to suffer the aftereffects of an exciting hot pepper than eat a boring vegetable. What am I, a monk? \u00a0 As a society, I am sure we can all agree that vegetables should be removed from their classification as actual food. I am pretty confident that the food experts agree, because they are giving us subliminal anti-\u00advegetable messages. For instance, remember that \u201chealthy\u201d food pyramid they used to show, where the stuff you are not supposed to eat is in that tiny tip and the things that are good for you are at the bottom? I don\u2019t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but I believe that the true purpose of that pyramid is to be a rating system for taste. It\u2019s no surprise that the vegetables are the lowest on the scale. I think that the secret engineers of the food pyramid de\u00adsign are the Masons. They hate vegetables too, right? Let\u2019s just admit the truth. After all, what is most people\u2019s worst fear be\u00adsides death? You got it: ending up a vegetable. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.0}, {"asin": "0439691427", "title": "My Name Is Stilton, Geronimo Stilton (Geronimo Stilton, No. 19)", "author": "Geronimo Stilton", "description": "Review Praise for Claudia and the New Girl : \"Vibrant, sweet, and full of energy and heart. Gabriela is going to knock your socks off!\" -- Gale Galligan, adapter and illustrator of four previous Baby-sitters Club graphic novels Praise for The Baby-sitters Club graphic novels: \"Crisp and spot on.\" -- Booklist \"Unique and original.\" -- Voice of Youth Advocates About the Author Geronimo Stilton is the publisher of The Rodent's Gazette , Mouse Island's most famouse newspaper. In his spare time, Mr. Stilton enjoys collecting antique cheese rinds, playing golf, and telling stories to his nephew Benjamin. He lives in New Mouse City, Mouse Island. Visit Geronimo online at www.scholastic.com/geronimostilton.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "047087855X", "title": "Spanish For Dummies", "author": "Cecie Kraynak", "description": "From the Inside Flap The fast and painless way to learn to speak Spanish Are you a student studying Spanish; a traveler gearing up for a trip to a Spanish-speaking country; or someone who simply wants to communicate with Spanish-speaking friends, neighbors, and colleagues? Spanish For Dummies is your hands-on guide for quickly and painlessly grasping the basics of speaking Spanish. You'll get a handle on grammar, essential vocabulary, verb conjugations, and pronunciations in no time! Spanish 101 \u2014 learn to recite the alphabet; pronounce words and phrases; and meet, greet, and exchange pleasantries with other Spanish speakers Spanish 101 \u2014 learn to recite the alphabet; pronounce words and phrases; and meet, greet, and exchange pleasantries with other Spanish speakers It's as easy as uno, dos, tres \u2014 discover how to ask key questions, chat about the weather, describe family members, order food, talk about where you live, and more It's as easy as uno, dos, tres \u2014 discover how to ask key questions, chat about the weather, describe family members, order food, talk about where you live, and more Happy trails \u2014 take your Spanish on the road and discover how to plan a trip, exchange your money for local currency, get around with various modes of transportation, and check into a hotel Happy trails \u2014 take your Spanish on the road and discover how to plan a trip, exchange your money for local currency, get around with various modes of transportation, and check into a hotel Take care of business \u2014 grasp the essential Spanish language skills you need to talk on the phone and perform everyday tasks at the office Take care of business \u2014 grasp the essential Spanish language skills you need to talk on the phone and perform everyday tasks at the office Audio CD Includes More than 30 conversations that reinforce lessons from the book Open the book and find: Basic grammar and common expressions Basic grammar and common expressions Sentence structure and verb conjugations Sentence structure and verb conjugations Formal and informal greetings Formal and informal greetings Information on numbers, time, and measurements Information on numbers, time, and measurements Pointers for describing everyday activities in Spanish Pointers for describing everyday activities in Spanish Tips for making small talk, asking for directions, and more Tips for making small talk, asking for directions, and more Fun activities to help you practice your Spanish skills Fun activities to help you practice your Spanish skills Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries Learn to Speak Spanish quickly and effectively Speak Spanish quickly and effectively Master basic grammar, verb conjugations, vocabulary, and pronunciationsTake your skills to the next level with real-life conversations on the accompanying CD Master basic grammar, verb conjugations, vocabulary, and pronunciationsTake your skills to the next level with real-life conversations on the accompanying CD From the Back Cover The fast and painless way to learn to speak Spanish Are you a student studying Spanish; a traveler gearing up for a trip to a Spanish-speaking country; or someone who simply wants to communicate with Spanish-speaking friends, neighbors, and colleagues? Spanish For Dummies is your hands-on guide for quickly and painlessly grasping the basics of speaking Spanish. You'll get a handle on grammar, essential vocabulary, verb conjugations, and pronunciations in no time! Spanish 101 \u0097 learn to recite the alphabet; pronounce words and phrases; and meet, greet, and exchange pleasantries with other Spanish speakers Spanish 101 \u0097 learn to recite the alphabet; pronounce words and phrases; and meet, greet, and exchange pleasantries with other Spanish speakers It's as easy as uno, dos, tres \u0097 discover how to ask key questions, chat about the weather, describe family members, order food, talk about where you live, and more It's as easy as uno, dos, tres \u0097 discover how to ask key questions, chat about the weather, describe family members, order food, talk about where you live, and more Happy trails \u0097 take your Spanish on the road and discover how to plan a trip, exchange your money for local currency, get around with various modes of transportation, and check into a hotel Happy trails \u0097 take your Spanish on the road and discover how to plan a trip, exchange your money for local currency, get around with various modes of transportation, and check into a hotel Take care of business \u0097 grasp the essential Spanish language skills you need to talk on the phone and perform everyday tasks at the office Take care of business \u0097 grasp the essential Spanish language skills you need to talk on the phone and perform everyday tasks at the office Audio CD Includes More than 30 conversations that reinforce lessons from the book Open the book and find: Basic grammar and common expressions Basic grammar and common expressions Sentence structure and verb conjugations Sentence structure and verb conjugations Formal and informal greetings Formal and informal greetings Information on numbers, time, and measurements Information on numbers, time, and measurements Pointers for describing everyday activities in Spanish Pointers for describing everyday activities in Spanish Tips for making small talk, asking for directions, and more Tips for making small talk, asking for directions, and more Fun activities to help you practice your Spanish skills Fun activities to help you practice your Spanish skills Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries Spanish-English and English-Spanish dictionaries Learn to Speak Spanish quickly and effectively Speak Spanish quickly and effectively Master basic grammar, verb conjugations, vocabulary, and pronunciationsTake your skills to the next level with real-life conversations on the accompanying CD Master basic grammar, verb conjugations, vocabulary, and pronunciationsTake your skills to the next level with real-life conversations on the accompanying CD About the Author Berlitz\u00ae has taught languages to millions of people for more than 130 years. Susana Wald is a writer and literary translator in Hungarian, Spanish, English, and French, and she has taught abroad in Chile and Canada. Cecie Kraynak, MA, has taught and tutored Spanish at the junior high school and college levels for more than 25 years. She is the author of Spanish Verbs For Dummies. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Humanities"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.04}], "target_asin": "3551551677"}
{"user_id": "AFIBXQNIEHUYVEVMVT3AP7437MUQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1943330158", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 8: Back To Scare School", "author": "Zack Zombie", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "from 6.73"}, {"asin": "1943330719", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 11: Insides Out", "author": "Zack Zombie Books", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "from 9.72"}, {"asin": "1888125462", "title": "Positive Parenting with a Plan (Grades K-12): F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules", "author": "Matthew A. Johnson", "description": "Review \"An absence of structure afflicts a vast number of contemporary American families. There are many sources of this dreadful phenomenon including substance abuse, mental illness, divorce, illegitimacy, financial pressures, and moral inadequacy, to name just a few. Whatever the primary sources of the lack of family structure may be, the absence of structure itself invariably leads the family further down the spiral of despair, dysfunction, disease and delinquency. Dr. Matthew A. Johnson (\"Dr. J.\") and his F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules parenting system offer a powerful alternative to family chaos. F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules presents a solid and coherent structure for families in need. In this book, he first presents a philosophical and intellectual framework for F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules and then presents the system itself in an absolutely clear and straightforward manner. F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules is a product of who and what \"Dr. J.\" himself is, a child of a family with problems, an outstanding competitive athlete, a dedicated and highly trained professional, and a man of strong conviction who practices what he believes. While F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules is highly structured, it is not rigid. Within the structure is plenty of room for individuality and creativity just as the rules of basketball leave room for the individuality and creativity of a Michael Jordan or a Dr. J. Families who understand and correctly and consistently implement F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules will be protected from many of the most pernicious ills of our time. I am pleased to recommend F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules.\" --Hillel I. Swiller, MD, FAPA, FAGPA, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry , Mount Sinai School of Medicine , New York, New York\"Raising healthy, responsible, contented children is a challenge! Most parents grew up with little experience in child rearing, then suddenly find themselves responsible for the 24-hour care of a precious little one who eats, sleeps, breathes, and acts in ways which alternately delight and frustrate. In a simple, direct, light-hearted, and principled way, Dr. Johnson s book, F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules, provides a practical instruction manual for helpfully dealing with the inevitable challenges of parenting.\" --Rodger K. Bufford, Ph.D., Professor and Director of Integration, Graduate School of Clinical Psychology, George Fox University\"I spend a great deal of time working with AT RISK children and their families. I have observed that organization and structure helps to greatly improve the family environment. Dr. Johnson s book, F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules, helps parents to restore responsibility and respect in their homes. Children and adolescents learn to obey their parents and other authority figures at school, church, and in their community. Everyone learns to communicate their expectations and friendships develop as a result. The whole family wins with F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules!\" --Mark Eaton, Former All-Star Center, Utah Jazz About the Author Dr. Matthew A. Johnson (\"Dr. J.\") is the founder and president of F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules, Inc. He is a licensed clinical psychologist. Dr. J. has been working in the mental health profession since 1982. He has a private practice with an office in Grants Pass, Oregon. Dr. Johnson moved to Alaska in 1980 to attend the University of Alaska at Anchorage on a full-ride basketball scholarship. He is a pretty tall guy (6'9\") with a sense of humor to match. He scored his first two collegiate points against North Carolina in the Great Alaska Shootout on ESPN. Also, he got half of his picture in Sports Illustrated (his silly teammate was in the way of the other half). He is married has four children - Levi, Hannah, Micah, and Grady. They also have two dogs and one cat. Dr. Johnson loves his parents very much! Nevertheless, he grew up in a dysfunctional family and understands how the lack of organization, structure, accountability, and communication can lead to marital and family chaos in the home. He has worked with similar families in various treatment settings and has established F.A.M.I.L.Y. Rules, Inc. to combat the cancer of dysfunctional families.", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Foreign Language Study & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 35.56}, {"asin": "1943330166", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 9: Zombie's Birthday Apocalypse", "author": "Zack Zombie Books", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 15.68}, {"asin": "1943330077", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 7: Zombie Family Reunion", "author": "Zack Zombie Books", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.13}, {"asin": "1782213538", "title": "Tangle Wood: A Captivating Colouring Book with Hidden Jewels", "author": "Jessica Palmer", "description": "About the Author Jessica Palmer studied Illustration at Kingston University. One day, in a life drawing class, an innovative tutor took the charcoal out of her hand, gave her a pair of scissors and said, \u2018Cut it out!\u2019 Her passion for papercutting was born. Her love of detail led her on to using a scalpel to 'draw', as with a pen or pencil. She is now a visiting artist in galleries and museums in London, Bath and Bristol, including the V & A and the National Portrait Gallery. She runs papercutting events linked to exhibitions, and she exhibits in London and the west of England. She has produced commissions, exhibition pieces and book illustrations in the United States.Jessica exhibited at the Paper Made show in Summer 2014 at the Jamestown Art Center in Rhode Island, USA. Her paper sculpture \"Liber-tea-belle\", celebrating the Boston Tea Party through a fantastical depiction of a Georgian bust bearing a tea clipper wig, was the talking piece of the show. The papier-mache and paper piece traveled 3,000 miles and was snapped up by a buyer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Jessica also created \"This Land is Our Land\", a large paper cut depiction of American birds in a huge tree commissioned as a wedding gift for a New England couple involved in preserving wild bird habitats. Jessica is currently working on a series of cut paper illustrations for \"Bistronomy\" \u2014 a look at contemporary Paris bistros by Food and Wine and New York Times food writer Jane Sigal, to be published by Rizzoli in New York later in 2015.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.2}, {"asin": "0692361057", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 5: School Daze", "author": "Zack Zombie Books", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.71}, {"asin": "0986444154", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 3: When Nature Calls", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.34}, {"asin": "1943330050", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 6: Creepaway Camp", "author": "Zack Zombie", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0986444162", "title": "Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 4: Zombie Swap", "author": "Zack Zombie", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.71}, {"asin": "B01DVXPOUS", "title": "Mika Home Cotton Embroidery Geometric Links Accent Decorative Throw Pillow Cover Sofa Cushion Case for 18X18 inserts Navy White", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "\u2014"}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1631061607", "title": "Color Me Stress-Free: Nearly 100 Coloring Templates to Unplug and Unwind (Volume 3) (A Zen Coloring Book, 3)", "author": "Lacy Mucklow", "description": "About the Author Lacy Mucklow (MA. ATR-BC, LPAT, LCPAT) is a registered, board certified, and licensed art therapist who has been practicing art therapy in the Washington, DC area since 1999. She has experience working with a variety of mental health populations and settings, including schools, home-based counseling, and hospitals with adolescents, families, and adults. Lacy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology with a minor in Studio Art from Oklahoma State University, and a Master of Arts degree in Art Therapy from The George Washington University. Angela Porter is a self-taught artist who finds inspiration in nature, especially ammonite and other fossils. Much of her work is abstract with flowing lines, shapes, and colors that create textured and detailed artworks. She works with technical drawing pens, watercolors, inks, colored pencils, and metallic paints and pens. She lives in South Wales.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Graphic Design"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0310205093", "title": "The Search for Fierra (Empyrion, Book 1)", "author": "Stephen R. Lawhead", "description": "From the Author Stephen R. Lawhead is an internationally acclaimed author of fantasy and imaginative fiction. He is the author of many book, including, the Byzantium and the Pendragon Cycle series. He lives in Oxford, England, with his wife and sons From the Back Cover Orion Treet, an itinerant and often-unemployed writer, is abducted at gunpoint. Then he is offered eight million dollars and the adventure of a lifetime. The mission? To observe and chronicle the growth of a new extraterrestrial colony: Empyrion. Arriving on the planet Fierra, Treet discovers a civilization in decline, fragmented by millennia of mistrust and hatred. To survive, he and his odd assortment of companions must unscramble the mysteries around them . . . before time runs out for the settlement. The Empyrion novels are among Lawhead\u0092s most captivating accomplishments of storytelling and adventure -- the best there is in science fiction. The Search for Fierra won the Campus Life Editor\u0092s Choice Award. Look for Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome, at your local bookstore. About the Author Stephen R. Lawhead is an internationally acclaimed author of mythic history and imaginative fiction. His works include the first two books of the Celtic Crusades, The Iron Lance and The Black Rood, Byzantium the Pendragon Cycle, The Song of Albion, and Dragon King trilogies, as well as the science fiction novels, Empyrion I and II and Dream Thief. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. OneThe body staring up through the translucent green of the nutrient bath might have been dead. It floated beneath the surface, open-eyed, its face becalmed, a snaking nimbus of dark hair spreading like a black halo: a saint embalmed in emerald amber.Presently a small bubble formed on the rim of one nostril, puffed up bigger, and broke free, spiraling to the surface. Plick! This was followed by another slightly larger bubble, which also spun up to the surface of the bath, drifted momentarily, and burst. Plick!A whole fountain of bubbles erupted and boiled up, and in the center, rising with them, the head of Orion Tiberias Treet, sputtering and inhaling great draughts of air, like a whale breeching after a long nap on the ocean floor.Two broad hands came up, dashing liquid from two dark eyes, pushing ropy strands of hair aside. Treet snatched up a watch from the rim of the white marble bath and held it before his face. 'Six minutes!' he shouted triumphantly. 'A new record.''I'm impressed.'Treet glanced up quickly and saw a stranger sitting on the edge of the bath opposite him. The stranger had a needle gun aimed at his throat, and, contrary to his word, did not seem at all impressed with the new submergence record. Besides himself and the gunman, there was not another person in the public bath.'What do you want?' Treet asked, the skin at his throat tingling beneath the aim of the needle gun.'I have what I want: you,' replied the gunman. Cool menace clipped his words efficiently. 'Get out of the soup and get dressed.'Orion Treet glared dully at the slim needle gun in his abductor's hand as he rose slowly from the bath, took up the fluffy white bath towel the attendant had given him upon entering, and began drying his limbs and torso with exaggerated care in order to give himself a moment to think. By the time he was fully dressed he had concluded that it was probably no use trying to talk his way out of whatever it was this stranger with the gun wanted to do with him he looked like a man who was used to having his way, and was not overly shy about how he got it.'You have been a problem, Treet,' the man was saying. 'I don't like problems. In my line of work, problems cost me money, and you've cost me plenty. It's over now, so you might as well relax and put that brain of yours in neutral for a while. I don't want you taxing yourself over how to get away this time. Just stand easy, do as you're told, and you'll likely live that much longer. You like living, don't you, Treet?'Treet had to admit that he did indeed like living; it was, after all, one of the things that made life so worthwhile. But he did not share this observation with the man training the needle gun on his jugular. Instead, he just glared and tried to look dutifully irritated.The man took a short step closer. The gun did not waver. 'I almost had you in Cairo, and then again in Addis Ababa, Cologne, Zurich, Salzburg, Milan, Tokyo, and San Francisco. I've got to hand it to you, you're a shrewdy. I don't know when I've enjoyed myself more, but it's over.''As long as it's over,' replied Treet evenly, 'maybe you won't mind telling me why you've been trailing me all this time. What do you want?' He had known since Zurich that he was being followed, but was unsure why, though several possibilities sprang to mind. Still, he felt entitled to an explanation. Wasn't that a victim's prerogative?'I don't mind telling you at all, scumbag. There are some people who want to talk to you. They seem quite anxious, in fact. Personally I don't give a rat's hind end. I'd just as soon drop you where you stand.'At least this meant the man would not kill him outright. But who were the people so desperate for conversation? Treet ran down a list of former employers, angry innkeepers, outraged restaurateurs, and offended debtors of various sorts, but the effort proved futile. He could not come up with anyone who would go to this amount of trouble to reach him. 'So?''So, bright boy, we lockstep it to the nearest teleterm. I'm going to report in. Keep your hands where I can see them; turn around slowly and move. Outside there's a terminal directly to the right. If you so much as deviate one millimeter from the course, you're dead. Understand?'Treet understood. They turned and marched from the spa and out into the main corridor of Houston International Skyport. Travelers, not a few of them free-state refugees by the tattered look of them, jammed hip to thigh, swept along the moving walkway before them, and Treet entertained the notion of jumping on the conveyor and worming himself into the crowd a trick he had used in Salzburg. He started to turn his head, but felt the needle gun's sharp nose in the small of his back.'Try it, slime ball. Let's see how you look with a cyanide tattoo.' The voice behind him was disconcertingly close.'Don't get your hopes up.' Treet saw the triangular sign with the distinctive blue lightning bolt on a white oval screen and stopped in front of the booth. Passengers sliding by on the walkway ignored the two men as they squeezed into the booth together.The gunman jammed a card into the slot above the keypad, and the screen flicked on. A line of blue numbers appeared in the upper right hand corner of the oval screen. Treet watched as his captor entered an alphanumeric code; the screen blanked. Instantly another code came up in the center of the screen. With one hand the man typed in two words: GOT HIM. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. One The body staring up through the translucent green of the nutrient bath might have been dead. It floated beneath the surface, open-eyed, its face becalmed, a snaking nimbus of dark hair spreading like a black halo: a saint embalmed in emerald amber. Presently a small bubble formed on the rim of one nostril, puffed up bigger, and broke free, spiraling to the surface. Plick! This was followed by another slightly larger bubble, which also spun up to the surface of the bath, drifted momentarily, and burst. Plick! A whole fountain of bubbles erupted and boiled up, and in the center, rising with them, the head of Orion Tiberias Treet, sputtering and inhaling great draughts of air, like a whale breeching after a long nap on the ocean floor. Two broad hands came up, dashing liquid from two dark eyes, pushing ropy strands of hair aside. Treet snatched up a watch from the rim of the white marble bath and held it before his face. 'Six minutes!' he shouted triumphantly. 'A new record.' 'I'm impressed.' Treet glanced up quickly and saw a stranger sitting on the edge of the bath opposite him. The stranger had a needle gun aimed at his throat, and, contrary to his word, did not seem at all impressed with the new submergence record. Besides himself and the gunman, there was not another person in the public bath. 'What do you want?' Treet asked, the skin at his throat tingling beneath the aim of the needle gun. 'I have what I want: you,' replied the gunman. Cool menace clipped his words efficiently. 'Get out of the soup and get dressed.' Orion Treet glared dully at the slim needle gun in his abductor's hand as he rose slowly from the bath, took up the fluffy white bath towel the attendant had given him upon entering, and began drying his limbs and torso with exaggerated care in order to give himself a moment to think. By the time he was fully dressed he had concluded that it was probably no use trying to talk his way out of whatever it was this stranger with the gun wanted to do with him he looked like a man who was used to having his way, and was not overly shy about how he got it. 'You have been a problem, Treet,' the man was saying. 'I don't like problems. In my line of work, problems cost me money, and you've cost me plenty. It's over now, so you might as well relax and put that brain of yours in neutral for a while. I don't want you taxing yourself over how to get away this time. Just stand easy, do as you're told, and you'll likely live that much longer. You like living, don't you, Treet?' Treet had to admit that he did indeed like living; it was, after all, one of the things that made life so worthwhile. But he did not share this observation with the man training the needle gun on his jugular. Instead, he just glared and tried to look dutifully irritated. The man took a short step closer. The gun did not waver. 'I almost had you in Cairo, and then again in Addis Ababa, Cologne, Zurich, Salzburg, Milan, Tokyo, and San Francisco. I've got to hand it to you, you're a shrewdy. I don't know when I've enjoyed myself more, but it's over.' 'As long as it's over,' replied Treet evenly, 'maybe you won't mind telling me why you've been trailing me all this time. What do you want?' He had known since Zurich that he was being followed, but was unsure why, though several possibilities sprang to mind. Still, he felt entitled to an explanation. Wasn't that a victim's prerogative? 'I don't mind telling you at all, scumbag. There are some people who want to talk to you. They seem quite anxious, in fact. Personally I don't give a rat's hind end. I'd just as soon drop you where you stand.' At least this meant the man would not kill him outright. But who were the people so desperate for conversation? Treet ran down a list of former employers, angry innkeepers, outraged restaurateurs, and offended debtors of various sorts, but the effort proved futile. He could not come up with anyone who would go to this amount of trouble to reach him. 'So?' 'So, bright boy, we lockstep it to the nearest teleterm. I'm going to report in. Keep your hands where I can see them; turn around slowly and move. Outside there's a terminal directly to the right. If you so much as deviate one millimeter from the course, you're dead. Understand?' Treet understood. They turned and marched from the spa and out into the main corridor of Houston International Skyport. Travelers, not a few of them free-state refugees by the tattered look of them, jammed hip to thigh, swept along the moving walkway before them, and Treet entertained the notion of jumping on the conveyor and worming himself into the crowd a trick he had used in Salzburg. He started to turn his head, but felt the needle gun's sharp nose in the small of his back. 'Try it, slime ball. Let's see how you look with a cyanide tattoo.' The voice behind him was disconcertingly close. 'Don't get your hopes up.' Treet saw the triangular sign with the distinctive blue lightning bolt on a white oval screen and stopped in front of the booth. Passengers sliding by on the walkway ignored the two men as they squeezed into the booth together. The gunman jammed a card into the slot above the keypad, and the screen flicked on. A line of blue numbers appeared in the upper right hand corner of the oval screen. Treet watched as his captor entered an alphanumeric code; the screen blanked. Instantly another code came up in the center of the screen. With one hand the man typed in two words: GOT HIM. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "0764117602", "title": "The Canary Handbook", "author": "Matthew M. Vriends", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0743418719", "title": "Salem Falls", "author": "Jodi Picoult", "description": "Review \"A frothy brew of mystery, sex, and small-town secrets.\" -- People \"Gripping.... You'll be riveted by this multilayeredtale of small-town intrigue.\" -- Glamour \"Picoult has carved her own niche with her novels -- one part romance, one part courtroom thriller, two parts social commentary.... She keep[s] the reader constantly guessing.\" -- The Dallas Morning News About the Author Jodi Picoult received an AB in creative writing from Princeton and a master\u2019s degree in education from Harvard. The recipient of the 2003 New England Book Award for her entire body of work, she is the author of twenty-seven\u00a0novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers House Rules , Handle With Care , Change of Heart , and My Sister\u2019s Keeper , for which she received the American Library Association\u2019s Margaret Alexander Edwards Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at JodiPicoult.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One March 2000Salem Falls, New HampshireOn the second worst day of Addie Peabody's life, her refrigerator and dishwasher both died, like long-term lovers who could not conceive of existing without each other. This would have been a trial for anyone, but as she was the owner of the Do-Or-Diner, it blossomed into a catas-trophe of enormous proportions. Addie stood with her hands pressed to the stainless steel door of the Sub-Zero walk-in, as if she might jump-start its heart by faith healing. It was hard to decide what was more devastating: the health violations or the loss of potential income. Twenty pounds of dry ice, the most the medical supply store had to offer, wasn't doing the job. Within hours, Addie would have to throw away the gallon buckets of gravy, stew, and chicken soup made that morning. \"I think,\" she said after a moment, \"I'm going to build a snowman.\"\"Now?\" asked Delilah, the cook, her crossed arms as thick as a blacksmith's. She frowned. \"You know, Addie, I never believed it when folks around here called you crazy, but -- \"\"I'll stick it in the fridge. Maybe it'll save the food until the repairman gets here.\" \"Snowmen melt,\" Delilah said, but Addie could tell that she was turning the idea over in her mind.\"Then we'll mop up and make more.\"\"And I suppose you're just gonna let the customers fend for themselves?\"\"No,\" Addie said. \"I'm going to get them to help. Will you get Chloe's boots?\" The diner was not crowded for 10 A.M. Of the six booths, two were occupied: one by a mother and her toddler, the other by a businessman brushing muffin crumbs off his laptop. A couple of elderly regulars, Stuart and Wallace, slouched at the counter drinking coffee while they argued over the local paper's headlines. \"Ladies and gentlemen,\" Addie proclaimed. \"I'm pleased to announce the start of the Do-or-Diner's winter carnival. The first event is going to be a snow-sculpture contest, and if you'd all just come out back for a moment, we can get started -- \"\"It's freezing out there!\" cried Wallace.\"Well, of course it is. Otherwise we'd be having a summer carnival. Winner of the contest gets...a month of breakfast on the house.\"Stuart and Wallace shrugged, a good sign. The toddler bounced on the banquette like popcorn in a skillet. Only the businessman seemed unconvinced. As the others shuffled through the door, Addie approached his table. \"Look,\" the businessman said. \"I don't want to build a snowman, all right? All I came here for was some breakfast.\"\"Well, we're not serving now. We're sculpting.\" She gave him her brightest smile. The man seemed nonplussed. He tossed a handful of change on the table, gathered his coat and computer, and stood up to leave. \"You're nuts.\" Addie watched him leave. \"Yes,\" she murmured. \"That's what they say.\" Outside, Stuart and Wallace were huffing through their scarves, crafting a respectable armadillo. Delilah had fashioned a snow chicken, a leg of lamb, pole beans. The toddler, stuffed into a snowsuit the color of a storm, lay on her back making angels.Once Chloe had asked: Is Heaven above or below the place where snow comes from? \"You got the Devil's own luck,\" Delilah told Addie. \"What if there was no snow?\"\"Since when has there been no snow here in March? And besides, this isn't luck. Luck is finding out the repairman could come a day early.\"As if Addie had conjured it, a man's voice called out. \"Anybody home?\"\"We're back here.\" Addie was faintly disappointed to see a young cop, instead of an appliance repairman, rounding the corner. \"Hi, Orren. You here for a cup of coffee?\"\"Uh, no, Addie. I'm here on official business.\"Her head swam. Could the accountant have reported them to the board of health so quickly? Did a law enforcement officer have the power to make her close her doors? But before she could voice her doubts, the policeman spoke again. \"It's your father,\" Orren explained, blushing. \"He's been arrested.\"Addie stormed into the police department with such force that the double doors slammed back on their hinges, letting in a gust of cold wind. \"Jeez Louise,\" said the dispatch sergeant. \"Hope Courtemanche found himself a good hiding place.\" \"Where is he?\" Addie demanded. \"My best guess? Maybe in the men's room, in a stall. Or squeezed into one of the empty lockers in the squad room.\" The officer scratched his jaw. \"Come to think of it, I once hid in the trunk of a cruiser when my wife was on the warpath.\"\"I'm not talking about Officer Courtemanche,\" Addie said through clenched teeth. \"I meant my father. \"\"Oh, Roy's in the lockup.\" He winced, remembering something. \"But if you're here to spring him, you're gonna have to talk to Wes anyway, since it was his arrest.\" He picked up the phone. \"You can take a seat, Addie. I'll let you know when Wes is free.\"Addie scowled. \"I'm sure I'll know. You always smell a skunk before you see it.\"\"Why, Addie, is that any way to speak to the man who saved your father's life?\"In his blue uniform, his badge glinting like a third eye, Wes Courtemanche was handsome enough to make women in Salem Falls dream about committing crimes. Addie, however, took one look at him and thought -- not for the first time -- that some men ought to come with an expiration date. \"Arresting a sixty-five-year-old man isn't my idea of saving his life,\" she huffed.Wes took her elbow and led her gently down the hall, away from the dispatch sergeant's eyes and ears. \"Your father was driving under the influence again, Addie.\"Heat rose to her cheeks. Roy Peabody's drinking wasn't any secret in Salem Falls, but he'd gone one step too far last month, wrapping his car around the town's statue of Giles Corey, the only man who'd been a casualty of the Puritan witch hunts. Roy's license had been revoked. For his own safety, Addie had junked the car. And her own Mazda was safely parked at the diner. What vehicle could he have used?As if he could read her mind, Wes said, \"He was in the breakdown lane of Route 10, on his ride-on mower.\"\"His ride-on mower,\" Addie repeated. \"Wes, that thing can't go more than five miles an hour.\"\"Fifteen, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, he doesn't have a license. And you need one if you're gonna operate any self-propelled vehicle on the street.\"\"Maybe it was an emergency...\"\"Guess it was, Addie. We confiscated a brand-new fifth of vodka from him, too.\" Wes paused. \"He was on his way home from the liquor store in North Haverhill.\" He watched Addie knead her temples. \"Is there anything I can do for you?\"\"I think you've done enough, Wes. I mean, gosh, you arrested a man joyriding on a lawn mower. Surely they'll give you a Purple Heart or something for going to such extremes to ensure public safety.\"\"Now, just a second. I was ensuring safety... Roy's . What if a truck cut the curve too tight and ran him down? What if he fell asleep at the wheel?\"\"Can I just take him home now?\"Wes regarded her thoughtfully. It made Addie feel like he was sorting through her mind, opening up certain ideas and shuffling aside others. She closed her eyes.\"Sure,\" Wes said. \"Follow me.\"He led her down a hallway to a room at the back of the police department. There was a wide desk manned by another officer, a high counter with ink pads for fingerprinting, and in the shadowy distance, a trio of tiny cells. Wes touched her forearm. \"I'm not going to write him up, Addie.\"\"You're a real prince.\"He laughed and walked off. She heard the barred door slide open like a sword being pulled from its scabbard. \"Guess who's waiting for you out there, Roy?\"Her father's voice now, pouring slow as honey: \"My Margaret?\"\" 'Fraid not. Margaret's been gone about five years now.\"They turned the corner, Wes bearing the brunt of her father's weight. Roy Peabody was a charmer of a man, with hair as white and thick as the inner wing of a dove and blue eyes that always swam with a secret. \"Addie!\" he crowed, seeing her. \"Happy birthday!\"He lunged for her, and Addie staggered. \"Come on, Dad. We'll get you home.\"Wes hooked his thumb on his belt. \"You want a hand getting him out to your car?\"\"No, thanks. We can manage.\" At that moment, her father felt slighter and more insubstantial than Chloe. They walked awkwardly, like contestants in a three-legged race. Wes held open the door. \"Well, shoot, Addie. I'm sorry I had to call you down for this on your birthday.\"She did not break stride. \"It's not my birthday,\" she said, and guided her father out. At 6:30 that morning, Gillian Duncan had lit a match and waved a thermometer through it, spiking a temperature that made her father believe she truly was too sick to go to school. She spent the morning in her bedroom instead, listening to Alanis Morissette, braiding her long red hair, and painting her fingernails and toenails electric blue. In spite of the fact that she was seventeen years old and could fend for herself, her father had taken the day off from work to be with her. It raised her hackles and secretly pleased her all at once. As the owner of Duncan Pharmaceuticals, the biggest employer in Salem Falls, Amos Duncan was generally re-garded as one of its richest and busiest citizens. But then, he had always had time to take care of her; he'd been doing it since Gilly was eight and her mother had died.She was going crazy in her room and was about to do something really drastic, like pick up a textbook, when the doorbell rang. Listening closely, Gilly heard the voices of her friends downstairs. \"Hi, Mr. D,\" said Meg. \"How's Gillian?\"f0 Before he could respond, Whitney interrupted. \"We brought her jellybeans. My mom says they soak up a fever, and if they don't, they taste so good you don't care.\"\"We brought her homework, too,\" Chelsea added. Painfully tall, self-conscious, and shy, she was one of Gilly's newest friends.\"Well, thank God you're all here,\" her father said. \"I have a hard time recognizing Gilly unless she's glued to the three of you. Just let me see if she's awake.\" Gilly dove beneath the covers, trying desperately to look sick. Her father cracked open the door and peered inside. \"You up for company, Gilly?\"Rubbing her eyes, Gillian sat up. \"Maybe for a little while.\"He nodded, then called out to the girls. Meg led the charge up to Gillian's room, a hail of Skechers pounding up the stairs. \"I think my whole home could fit in this room,\" Chelsea breathed, stepping inside.\"Oh, that's right...\" Whitney said. \"This is the first time you've been to the manor.\"Gillian slanted a look at her father. It was a common joke in town that the reason the Duncan home sat to the east whereas all the other roads and developments sat to the west was because Amos had wanted a palace separate and apart for his kingdom. \"Yes,\" Amos said, with a straight face. \"We're putting in a drawbridge this spring.\"Chelsea's eyes widened. \"For real?\"Whitney laughed. She liked Gillian's dad; they all did. He knew how to make a teenager feel perfectly welcome.\"If you guys tire her out,\" Amos said, \"I'll make you dig the moat.\" He winked at Chelsea, then pulled the door closed behind him.The girls wilted onto the carpet, lilies floating on a pond. \"So?\" Meg asked. \"Did you watch Passions? \"Meg Saxton had been Gilly's first best friend. Even as she'd grown up, she hadn't lost her baby fat, and her brown hair flew away from her face in a riot of curls. \"I didn't watch any soaps. I took a nap.\"\"A nap? I thought you were faking.\"Gillian shrugged. \"I'm not faking; I'm method-acting.\"\"Well, FYI, the trig test sucked,\" Whitney said. The only child of one of the town selectmen, Whitney O'Neill was nothing short of a knockout. She'd opened the bag of jellybeans to help herself. \"Why can't we write a spell to get A's?\"Chelsea looked nervously at the large, lovely bedroom, then at Gillian. \"Are you sure we can do magick here, with your father right downstairs?\"Of course they could -- and would -- do magick. They had been students of the Craft for nearly a year now; it was why they had gathered this afternoon. \"I wouldn't have invited you if I didn't think it was okay,\" Gillian said, withdrawing a black-and-white composition notebook from between the mattress and box spring. Written in bubble letters, with smiley-face O's, was its title: Book of Shadows. She got out of bed and padded into the large adjoining bathroom. The others could hear her turning on the faucet, and then she returned with an eight-ounce glass of water. \"Here,\" she said, handing it to Whitney. \"Drink.\"Whitney took a sip, then spat on the floor. \"This is disgusting! It's salt water!\"\"So?\" Gillian said. As she spoke, she walked around her friends, sprinkling more salt onto the carpet. \"Would you rather waste time taking a bath? Or maybe you've got a better way to purify yourself?\" Grimacing, Whitney drank again, and then passed it to the others. \"Let's do something quick today,\" Meg suggested. \"My mom will kill me if I'm not home by four-thirty.\" She scooted into position, across from Gillian on the floor, as Whitney and Chelsea made up the other corners of their square. Gillian reached for Whitney's hand, and a cold draft snaked in through a crack in the window. As Whitney's palm skimmed over Meg's, the lamp on the nightstand dimmed. The pages of the notebook fluttered as Meg reached for Chelsea. And when Chelsea clasped Gillian's hand, the air grew too thick to breathe. \"What color is your circle?\" Gillian asked Chelsea.\"It's blue.\"\"And yours?\"Meg's eyes drifted shut. \"Pink.\"\"Mine's silver,\" Whitney murmured.\"Pure gold,\" Gillian said. All of their eyes were closed now, but they had learned over the course of the past year that you did not need them open to see. The girls sat, their minds winnowed to this point of power; as one snake of color after another surrounded them, plaited into a thick ring, and sealed them inside.\"Not again,\" Delilah said with a sigh, as Addie hauled Roy Peabody into the kitchen. \"I don't need this from you now.\" Addie gritted her teeth as her father stumbled heavily on the arch of her foot. \"Is that Delilah?\" Roy crowed, craning his neck. \"Prettiest cook in New Hampshire.\" Addie managed to push her father into a narrow stairwell that led upstairs to his apartment. \"Did Chloe give you any trouble?\" she called back over her shoulder.\"No, honey,\" Delilah sighed. \"No trouble whatsoever.\"Through sheer will, Addie and Roy made it upstairs. \"Why don't you sit down, Daddy?\" she said softly, guiding him to the frayed armchair that had stood in that spot all of Addie's life.She could smell the stew that Delilah had prepared for the lunch rush rising through the floor and the weave of the carpet -- carrots, beef base, thyme. As a child, she had believed that breathing in the diner had rooted it in her system, making it as much as part of her as her blood or her bones. Her father had been like that, too, once. But it had been seven years since he'd voluntarily set foot behind the stove. She wondered if it caused him the same phantom pain that came from losing a vital limb -- if he drank to dull the ache of it.Addie crouched down beside his chair. \"Daddy,\" she whispered.Roy blinked. \"My girl.\"Tears sprang to her eyes. \"I need you to do me a favor. The diner, it's too busy for me to take care of. I need you -- \"\"Oh, Addie. Don't.\"\"Just the register. You won't ever have to go into the kitchen.\"\"You don't need me to work the register. You just want to keep tabs on me.\"Addie flushed. \"That's not true.\"\"It's all right.\" He covered her hand with his own and squeezed. \"Every now and then it's nice to know that someone cares where I am.\" Addie opened her mouth to say the things she should have said years ago to her father, all those months after her mother's death when she was too busy keeping the diner afloat to notice that Roy was drowning, but the telephone interrupted her. Delilah was on the other end. \"Get down here,\" the cook said. \"Your bad day? It just got worse.\"\"Did you say something?\" The cab driver's eyes met Jack's in the rearview mirror.\"No.\"\"This look familiar yet?\"Jack had lied to the driver -- what was one more lie in a long string of others? -- confessing that he couldn't remember the name of the town he was headed toward but that Route 10 ran right through its middle. He would recognize it, he said, as soon as Main Street came into view.Now, forty minutes later, he glanced out the window. They were driving through a village, small but well-heeled, with a New England steepled white church and women in riding boots darting into stores to run their errands. It reminded him too much of the prep-school town of Loyal, and he shook his head. \"Not this one,\" he said.What he needed was a place where he could disappear for a while -- a place where he could figure out how to start all over again. Teaching -- well, that was out of the question now. But it was also all he'd ever done. He'd worked at Westonbrook for four years...an awfully big hole to omit in a job interview for any related field. And even a McDonald's manager could ask him if he'd ever been convicted of a crime. Lulled by the motion of the taxi, he dozed off. He dreamed of an inmate he'd worked with on farm duty. Aldo's girlfriend would commute to Haverhill and leave treasures in the cornfield for him: whiskey, pot, instant coffee. Once, she set herself up naked on a blanket, waiting for Aldo to come over on the tractor. \"Drive slow,\" Aldo would say, when they went out to harvest. \"You never know what you're going to find.\"\"Salem Falls coming up,\" the cab driver announced, waking him.A hand-lettered blue placard announced the name of the town and proclaimed it home of Duncan Pharmaceuticals. The town was built outward from a central green, crowned by a memorial statue that listed badly to the left, as if it had been rammed from the side. A bank, a general store, and a town office building were dotted along the green -- all neatly painted, walks shoveled clear of snow. Standing incongruously at the corner was a junked railroad car. Jack did a double take, and as the cab turned to follow the one-way road around the green, he realized it was a diner.In the window was a small sign.\"Stop,\" Jack said. \"This is the place.\"Harlan Pettigrew sat at the counter, nursing a bowl of stew. A napkin was tucked over his bow tie, to prevent staining. His eyes darted around the diner, lighting on the clock.Addie pushed through the swinging doors. \"Mr. Pettigrew,\" she began.The man blotted his mouth with his napkin and got to his feet. \"It's about time.\"\"There's something I need to tell you first. You see, we've been having a little trouble with some of our appliances.\"Pettigrew's brows drew together. \"I see.\" Suddenly the door opened. A man in a rumpled sports jacket walked in, looking cold and lost. His shoes were completely inappropriate for the season and left small puddles of melting snow on the linoleum floor. When he spotted her pink apron, he started toward her. \"Excuse me -- is the owner in?\"His voice made Addie think of coffee, deep and dark and rich, with a texture that slid between her senses. \"That would be me.\"\"Oh.\" He seemed surprised by this. \"Okay. Well. I, um, I'm here because -- \"A wide smile spread over Addie's face. \"Because I called you!\" She shook his hand, trying not to notice how the man froze in shock. \"I was just telling Mr. Pettigrew, here, from the board of health, that the repairman was on his way to fix our refrigerator and dishwasher. They're right through here.\"She began to tug the stranger into the kitchen, with Pettigrew in their wake. \"Just a moment,\" the inspector said, frowning. \"You don't look like an appliance repairman.\"Addie tensed. The man probably thought she was insane. Well, hell. So did the rest of Salem Falls. The woman was insane. And God, she'd touched him. She'd reached right out and grabbed his hand, as if that were normal for him, as if it had been eight minutes rather than eight months since a woman's skin had come in contact with his own. If she was covering something up from the board of health, then the diner was probably violating a code. He started to back away, but then the woman bowed her head.It was that, the giving in, that ruined him.The part in her dark hair was crooked and pink as a newborn's skin. Jack almost reached out one finger and touched it but stuffed his hands in his pockets instead. He knew better than anyone that you could not trust a woman who said she was telling the truth.But what if you knew, from the start, that she was lying?Jack cleared his throat. \"I came as quickly as I could, ma'am,\" he said, then glanced at Pettigrew. \"I was paged from my aunt's birthday party and didn't stop home to get my uniform. Where are the broken appliances?\"The kitchen looked remarkably similar to the one at the jail. Jack nodded to a sequoia of a woman standing behind the grill and tried desperately to remember any technical trivia he could about dishwashers. He opened the two rolled doors, slid out the tray, and peered inside. \"Could be the pump...or the water inlet valve.\"For the first time, he looked directly at the owner of the diner. She was small and delicate in build, no taller than his collarbone, but had muscles in her arms built, he imagined, by many a hard day's labor. Her brown hair was yanked into a knot at the back of her head and held in place by a pencil, and her eyes were the unlikely color of peridot -- a stone, Jack recalled, the ancient Hawaiians believed to be the tears shed by the volcano goddess. Those eyes, now, seemed absolutely stunned. \"I didn't bring my toolbox, but I can have this fixed by...\" He pretended to do the math, trying to catch the woman's eye. Tomorrow, she mouthed. \"Tomorrow,\" Jack announced. \"Now what's the problem with the fridge?\"Pettigrew looked from the owner of the diner to Jack, and then back again. \"There's no point in checking out the rest of the kitchen when I have to return anyway,\" he said. \"I'll come by next week to do my inspection.\" With a curt nod, he let himself out.The owner of the diner launched herself across the line, embracing the cook and whooping with delight. Radiant, she turned to Jack and extended her hand...but this time, he moved out of the way before she could touch him. \"I'm Addie Peabody, and this is Delilah Piggett. We're so grateful to you. You certainly sounded authentic.\" Suddenly, she paused, an idea dawning. \"You don't actually know how to fix appliances, do you?\"\"No. That was just some stuff I heard in the last place I worked.\" He saw his opening and leaped. \"I was on my way in to ask about the HELP WANTED sign.\"The cook beamed. \"You're hired.\"\"Delilah, who died and left you king?\" She smiled at Jack. \"You're hired.\"\"Do you mind if I ask what the job is?\"\"Yes. I mean, no, I don't mind. We're in the market for a dishwasher.\"A reluctant grin tugged at Jack's mouth. \"I heard.\"\"Well, even if we fix the machine, we'll still need someone to run it.\"\"Is it full time?\"\"Part time...afternoons. Minimum wage.\"Jack's face fell. He had a Ph.D. in history, and was applying for a job that paid $5.15 per hour. Misinterpreting his reaction, Delilah said, \"I've been asking Addie to hire a prep cook a while now. That would be a part-time morning job, wouldn't it?\"Addie hesitated. \"Have you ever worked in a kitchen before, Mr....\"\"St. Bride. Jack. And yeah, I have.\" He didn't say where the kitchen was, or that he'd been a guest of the state at the time. \"That beats the last guy you hired,\" Delilah said. \"Remember when we found him shooting up over the scrambled eggs?\"\"It's not like he mentioned his habit at the interview.\" Addie turned to Jack. \"How old are you?\"Ah, this was the moment -- the one where she'd ask him why a man his age would settle for menial work like this. \"Thirty-one.\"She nodded. \"If you want the job, it's yours.\"No application, no references, no questions about his past employment. And anonymity -- no one would ever expect to find him washing dishes in a diner. For a man who had determined to put his past firmly behind him, this situation seemed too good to be true. \"I'd like it very much,\" Jack managed.\"Then grab an apron,\" said his new boss. Suddenly, he remembered that there was something he needed to do, if Salem Falls was going to become his new residence. \"I need about an hour to run an errand,\" he said.\"No problem. It's the least I can do for the person who saved me.\" Funny, Jack thought. I was thinking the same thing. Detective-Lieutenant Charlie Saxton fiddled with the radio in his squad car for a few moments, then switched it off. He listened to the squelch of slush under the Bronco's tires and wondered, again, if he should have stayed with the Miami Police Department.It was a hard thing to be a law enforcement officer in the town where you'd once grown up. You'd walk down the street, and instead of noticing the IGA, you'd remember the storeroom where a local teen had knifed his girlfriend. You'd pass the school playground and think of the drugs confiscated from the children of the town selectmen. Where everyone else saw the picture-perfect New England town of their youth, you saw the underbelly of its existence. His radio crackled as he turned onto Main Street. \"Saxton.\"\"Lieutenant, there's some guy here insisting he'll talk only to you.\" Even with the bad reception, Wes sounded pissed. \"He got a name?\"\"If he does, he isn't giving it up.\"Charlie sighed. For all he knew, this man had committed murder within town lines and wanted to confess. \"Well, I'm driving into the parking lot. Have him take a seat.\" He swung the Bronco into a spot, then walked in to find his guest cooling his heels. Literally. Charlie's first thought, pure detective, was that the guy couldn't be from around here -- no one who lived in New Hampshire was stupid enough to wear a sports jacket and dress shoes in the freezing slush of early March. Still, he didn't seem particularly distraught, like the recent victim of a crime, or nervous, like a perp. No, he just looked like a guy who'd had a lousy day. Charlie extended his hand. \"Hi there. Detective-Lieutenant Saxton.\"The man didn't identify himself. \"Could I have a few minutes of your time?\"Charlie nodded, his curiosity piqued. He led the way to his office, and gestured to a chair. \"What can I do for you, Mr....\"\"Jack St. Bride. I'm moving to Salem Falls.\"\"Welcome.\" Ah, it all was falling into place. This was probably some family man who wanted to make sure the locale was safe enough for his wife and kids and puppy. \"Great place, great town. Is there something in particular I can help you with?\"For a long moment, St. Bride was silent. His hands flexed on his knees. \"I'm here because of 651-B,\" he said finally. It took Charlie a moment to realize this well-dressed, soft-spoken man was talking about a legal statute that required certain criminals to report in to a local law enforcement agency for ten years or for life, depending on the charge for which they had been convicted. Charlie schooled his features until they were as blank as St. Bride's, until it was clear that his former words of welcome had been rescinded. Then he pulled from his desk drawer the state police's form to register a sexual offender.Copyright © 2001 by Jodi Picoult Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 15.99}], "target_asin": "1631061607"}
{"user_id": "AE4J6EIDNNKLWRSBT2JVOP6NBFTQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B000OIZSFU", "title": "The Quiet Game (Penn Cage Book 1)", "author": "Greg Iles", "description": "Review Praise for The Quiet Game \u201cThe pace is frenetic, the fear and paranoia palpable, and the characters heartbreakingly honest. Iles strikes not one false note.\u201d\u2014 Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cWould make James Lee Burke or even Pat Conroy proud. This is storytelling at its absolute best, a tale of near-epic status.\u201d\u2014 Providence Sunday Journal \u201cThe plot turns and twists with surprise after surprise...inventive and satisfying. [Iles\u2019s] mastery of the Southern setting rings with the truth of his own experience.\u201d\u2014 New Orleans Times-Picayune \u201cA definite page-turner...Extremely well-written...profound...wise and disconcerting.\u201d\u2014 The Daily Mississippian \u201cThe plot twists and turns magnificently...A grand thriller with a wonderful Southern seasoning.\u201d\u2014 Orange County Register \u201cA don\u2019t-touch-that-dial courtroom climax.\u201d\u2014 Charlotte Observer \u201cWhen the final page of The Quiet Game is turned you feel a pang as when good friends move away.\u201d\u2014 Orlando Sentinel \u201cA superb legal-conspiracy thriller that brings the deep South to life\u2026an enthralling tale.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Greg Iles is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Penn Cage series. His novels have been made into films, translated into more than twenty languages, and published in more than thirty-five countries worldwide. Amazon.com Review Is there space in the overcrowded courtroom for one more writer of sharp, very suspenseful legal thrillers? Yes--if that writer is Greg Iles, who has proven in such varied efforts as Black Cross , Mortal Fear , and Spandau Phoenix that he knows how to squeeze the last drop of suspense out of all sorts of situations. Iles immediately makes us feel both sympathy and empathy for his glossy hero, Penn Cage--a former ace Texas prosecutor turned suspense novelist whose sales are up there in the John Grisham Himalayan range. Trying to cope with the recent death of his wife, Cage takes his 5-year-old daughter to Florida's Disney World, where the child sadly sees visions of her mother everywhere in the fantasy-filled environment. Wouldn't a trip to his parents' stately home in Natchez be more soothing for all concerned? Wrong, as it turns out--and before Cage can catch his breath, he's deeply involved in several dangerous matters. His father, a dedicated doctor, is being blackmailed for a past mistake in judgment, and a powerful judge (who just happens to be the father of Penn's high school sweetheart) has a nasty personal agenda of his own. Then there's the unsolved 1968 murder case of a black man, which Cage insists on reopening with the help of an attractive, ambitious newspaper publisher. Iles does for Natchez what John Berendt did for Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , creating a gothic Southern landscape where elegance and depravity walk hand in hand. --Dick Adler --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile There is literally nothing \"quiet\" about either the plot or the reading of Iles's new thriller. It is a bold, explosive mystery about Penn Cage, a former assistant DA turned novelist, who returns to his Mississippi birthplace to uncover a thirty-year-old conspiracy to murder a black war veteran. Sometimes the plot is packed in suspense, and other times it is so hokey it is delicious. Hill is more than up to the job of portraying the predominantly Southern accents. His voices don't waver, whether his character is rescuing a victim from a burning house or addressing judge and jury. When Cage wins against all odds because of an unforeseen twist, the listener is tempted to stand up and cheer him and Hill. A.L.H. \u00a9 AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 I am standing in line for Walt Disney\u2019s It\u2019s a Small World ride, holding my four-year-old daughter in my arms, trying to entertain her as the serpentine line of parents and children moves slowly toward the flat-bottomed boats emerging from the grotto to the music of an endless audio loop. Suddenly Annie jerks taut in my arms and points into the crowd. \u201cDaddy! I saw Mama! Hurry!\u201d I do not look. I don\u2019t ask where. I don\u2019t because Annie\u2019s mother died seven months ago. I stand motionless in the line, looking just like everyone else except for the hot tears that have begun to sting my eyes. Annie keeps pointing into the crowd, becoming more and more agitated. Even in Disney World, where periodic meltdowns are common, her fit draws stares. Clutching her struggling body against mine, I work my way back through the line, which sends her into outright panic. The green metal chutes double back upon themselves to create the illusion of a short queue for prospective riders. I push past countless staring families, finally reaching the relative openness between the Carousel and Dumbo. Holding Annie tighter, I rock and turn in slow circles as I did to calm her when she was an infant. A streaming mass of teenagers breaks around us like a river around a rock and pays us about as much attention. A claustrophobic sense of futility envelops me, a feeling I never experienced prior to my wife\u2019s illness but which now dogs me like a malignant shadow. If I could summon a helicopter to whisk us back to the Polynesian Resort, I would pay ten thousand dollars to do it. But there is no helicopter. Only us. Or the less-than-us that we\u2019ve been since Sarah died. The vacation is over. And when the vacation is over, you go home. But where is home? Technically Houston, the suburb of Tanglewood. But Houston doesn\u2019t feel like home anymore. The Houston house has a hole in it now. A hole that moves from room to room. The thought of Penn Cage helpless would shock most people who know me. At thirty-eight years old, I have sent sixteen men and women to death row. I watched seven of them die. I\u2019ve killed in defense of my family. I\u2019ve given up one successful career and made a greater success of another. I am admired by my friends, feared by my enemies, loved by those who matter. But in the face of my child\u2019s grief, I am powerless. Taking a deep breath, I hitch Annie a little higher and begin the long trek back to the monorail. We came to Disney World because Sarah and I brought Annie here a year ago\u2014before the diagnosis\u2014and it turned out to be the best vacation of our lives. I hoped a return trip might give Annie some peace. But the opposite has happened. She rises in the middle of the night and pads into the bathroom in search of Sarah; she walks the theme parks with darting eyes, always alert for the vanished maternal profile. In the magical world of Disney, Annie believes Sarah might step around the next corner as easily as Cinderella. When I patiently explained that this could not happen, she reminded me that Snow White rose from the dead just like Jesus, which in her four-year-old brain is indisputable fact. All we have to do is find Mama, so that Daddy can kiss her and make her wake up. I collapse onto a seat in the monorail with a half dozen Japanese tourists, Annie sobbing softly into my shoulder. The silver train accelerates to cruising speed, rushing through Tomorrowland, a grand anachronism replete with Jetsons -style rocket ships and Art Deco restaurants. A 1950s incarnation of man\u2019s glittering destiny, Tomorrowland was outstripped by reality more rapidly than old Walt could have imagined, transformed into a kitschy parody of the dreams of the Eisenhower era. It stands as mute but eloquent testimony to man\u2019s inability to predict what lies ahead. I do not need to be reminded of this. As the monorail swallows a long curve, I spy the crossed roof beams of the Polynesian Resort. Soon we will be back inside our suite, alone with the emptiness that haunts us every day. And all at once that is not good enough anymore. With shocking clarity a voice speaks in my mind. It is Sarah\u2019s voice. You can\u2019t do this alone, she says. I look down at Annie\u2019s face, angelic now in sleep. \u201cWe need help,\u201d I say aloud, drawing odd glances from the Japanese tourists. Before the monorail hisses to a stop at the hotel, I know what I am going to do. I call Delta Airlines first and book an afternoon flight to Baton Rouge\u2014not our final destination, but the closest major airport to it. Simply making the call sets something thrumming in my chest. Annie awakens as I arrange for a rental car, perhaps even in sleep sensing the utter resolution in her father\u2019s voice. She sits quietly beside me on the bed, her left hand on my thigh, reassuring herself that I can go nowhere without her. \u201cAre we going on the airplane again, Daddy?\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s right, punkin,\u201d I answer, dialing a Houston number. \u201cBack home?\u201d \u201cNo, we\u2019re going to see Gram and Papa.\u201d Her eyes widen with joyous expectation. \u201cGram and Papa? Now?\u201d \u201cI hope so. Just a minute.\u201d My assistant, Cilla Daniels, is speaking in my ear. She obviously saw the name of the hotel on the caller-ID unit and started talking the moment she picked up. I break in before she can get rolling. \u201cListen to me, Cil. I want you to call a storage company and lease enough space for everything in the house.\u201d \u201cThe house?\u201d she echoes. \u201cYour house? You mean \u2018everything\u2019 as in furniture?\u201d \u201cYes. I\u2019m selling the house.\u201d \u201cSelling the house. Penn, what\u2019s happened? What\u2019s wrong?\u201d \u201cNothing. I\u2019ve come to my senses, that\u2019s all. Annie\u2019s never going to get better in that house. And Sarah\u2019s parents are still grieving so deeply that they\u2019re making things worse. I\u2019m moving back home for a while.\u201d \u201cHome?\u201d \u201cTo Natchez.\u201d \u201cNatchez.\u201d \u201cMississippi. Where I lived before I married Sarah? Where I grew up?\u201d \u201cI know that, but\u2014\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t worry about your salary. I\u2019ll need you now more than ever.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not worried about my salary. I\u2019m worried about you. Have you talked to your parents? Your mother called yesterday and asked for your number down there. She sounded upset.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m about to call them. After you get the storage space, call some movers and arrange transport. Let Sarah\u2019s parents have anything they want out of the house. Then call Jim Noble and tell him to sell the place. And I don\u2019t mean list it, I mean sell it.\u201d \u201cThe housing market\u2019s pretty soft right now. Especially in your bracket.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t care if I eat half the equity. Move it.\u201d There\u2019s an odd silence. Then Cilla says, \u201cCould I make you an offer on it? I won\u2019t if you never want to be reminded of the place.\u201d \u201cNo\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. it\u2019s fine. You need to get out of that condo. Can you come anywhere close to a realistic price?\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve got quite a bit left from my divorce settlement. You know me.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t make me an offer. I\u2019ll make you one. Get the house appraised, then knock off twenty percent. No realtor fees, no down payment, nothing. Work out a payment schedule over twenty years at, say\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. six percent interest. That way we have an excuse to stay in touch.\u201d \u201cOh, God, Penn, I can\u2019t take advantage like that.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s a done deal.\u201d I take a deep breath, feeling the invisible bands that have bound me loosening. \u201cWell\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. that\u2019s it.\u201d \u201cHold on. The world doesn\u2019t stop because you run off to Disney World.\u201d \u201cDo I want to hear this?\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve got bad news and news that could go either way.\u201d \u201cGive me the bad.\u201d \u201cArthur Lee Hanratty\u2019s last request for a stay was just denied by the Supreme Court. It\u2019s leading on CNN every half hour. The execution is scheduled for midnight on Saturday. Five days from now.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s good news, as far as I\u2019m concerned.\u201d Cilla sighs in a way that tells me I\u2019m wrong. \u201cMr. Givens called a few minutes ago.\u201d Mr. Givens and his wife are the closest relatives of the black family slaughtered by Hanratty and his psychotic brothers. \u201cAnd Mr. Givens doesn\u2019t ever want to see Hanratty in person again. He and his wife want you to attend in their place. A witness they can trust. You know the drill.\u201d \u201cToo well.\u201d Lethal injection at the Texas State Prison at Huntsville, better known as the Walls. Seventy miles north of Houston, the seventh circle of Hell. \u201cI really don\u2019t want to see this one, Cil.\u201d \u201cI know. I don\u2019t know what to tell you.\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s this other news?\u201d \u201cI just got off the phone with Peter.\u201d Peter Highsmith is my editor, a gentleman and scholar, but not the person I want to talk to just now. \u201cHe would never say anything, but I think the house is getting anxious about Nothing But the Truth . You\u2019re nearly a year past your deadline. Peter is more worried about you than about the book. He just wants to know you\u2019re okay.\u201d \u201cWhat did you tell him?\u201d \u201cThat you\u2019ve had a tough time, but you\u2019re finally waking back up to life. You\u2019re nearly finished with the book, and it\u2019s by far the best you\u2019ve ever written.\u201d I laugh out loud. \u201cHow close are you? You were only half done the last time I got up the nerve to ask you about it.\u201d I start to lie, but there\u2019s no point. \u201cI haven\u2019t written a decent page since Sarah died.\u201d Cilla is silent. \u201cAnd I burned the first half of the manuscript the night before we left Houston.\u201d She gasps. \u201cYou didn\u2019t!\u201d \u201cLook in the fireplace.\u201d \u201cPenn\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I think you need some help. I\u2019m speaking as your friend. There are some good people here in town. Discreet.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t need a shrink. I need to take care of my daughter.\u201d \u201cWell\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. whatever you do, be careful, okay?\u201d \u201cA lot of good that does. Sarah was the most careful person I ever knew.\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t mean\u2014\u201d \u201cI know. Look, I don\u2019t want a single journalist finding out where I am. I want no part of that deathwatch circus. It\u2019s Joe\u2019s problem now.\u201d Joe Cantor is the district attorney of Harris County, and my old boss. \u201cAs far as you know, I\u2019m on vacation until the moment of the execution.\u201d \u201cConsider yourself incommunicado.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve got to run. We\u2019ll talk soon.\u201d \u201cMake sure we do.\u201d When I hang up, Annie rises to her knees beside me, her eyes bright. \u201cAre we really going to Gram and Papa\u2019s?\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ll know in a minute.\u201d I dial the telephone number I memorized as a four-year-old and listen to it ring. The call is answered by a woman with a cigarette-parched Southern drawl no film producer would ever use, for fear that the audience would be unable to decode the words. She works for an answering service. \u201cDr. Cage\u2019s residence.\u201d \u201cThis is Penn Cage, his son. Can you ring through for me?\u201d \u201cWe sure can, honey. You hang on.\u201d After five rings, I hear a click. Then a deep male voice speaks two words that somehow convey more emotional subtext than most men could in two paragraphs: reassurance, gravitas, a knowledge of ultimate things. \u201cDoctor Cage,\u201d it says. My father\u2019s voice instantly steadies my heart. This voice has comforted thousands of people over the years, and told many others that their days on earth numbered far less than they\u2019d hoped. \u201cDad, what are you doing home this time of day?\u201d \u201cPenn? Is that you?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s up, son?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m bringing Annie home to see you.\u201d \u201cGreat. Are you coming straight from Florida?\u201d \u201cYou could say that. We\u2019re coming today.\u201d \u201cToday? Is she sick?\u201d \u201cNo. Not physically, anyway. Dad, I\u2019m selling the house in Houston and moving back home for a while. What comes after that, I\u2019ll figure out later. Have you got room for us?\u201d \u201cGod almighty, son. Let me call your mother.\u201d I hear my father shout, then the clicking of heels followed by my mother\u2019s voice. \u201cPenn? Are you really coming home?\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ll be there tonight.\u201d \u201cThank God. We\u2019ll pick you up at the airport.\u201d \u201cNo, don\u2019t. I\u2019ll rent a car.\u201d \u201cOh\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. all right. I just\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I can\u2019t tell you how glad I am.\u201d Something in my mother\u2019s voice triggers an alarm. I can\u2019t say what it is, because it\u2019s in the spaces, not the words, the way you hear things in families. Whatever it is, it\u2019s serious. Peggy Cage does not worry about little things. \u201cMom? What\u2019s the matter?\u201d \u201cNothing. I\u2019m just glad you\u2019re coming home.\u201d There is no more inept liar than someone who has spent a lifetime telling the truth. \u201cMom, don\u2019t try to\u2014\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ll talk when you get here. You just bring that little girl where she belongs.\u201d I recall Cilla\u2019s opinion that my mother was upset when she called yesterday. But there\u2019s no point in forcing the issue on the phone. I\u2019ll be face to face with her in a few hours. \u201cWe\u2019ll be there tonight. Bye.\u201d My hand shakes as I set the receiver in its cradle. For a prodigal son, a journey home after eighteen years is a sacred one. I\u2019ve been home for a few Christmases and Thanksgivings, but this is different. Looking down at Annie, I get one of the thousand-volt shocks of recognition that has hit me so many times since the funeral. Sometimes Sarah\u2019s face peers out from Annie\u2019s as surely as if her spirit has temporarily possessed the child. But if this is a possession, it is a benign one. Annie\u2019s hazel eyes transfix mine with a look that gave me much peace when it shone from Sarah\u2019s face: This is the right thing, it says. \u201cI love you, Daddy,\u201d she says softly. \u201cI love you more,\u201d I reply, completing our ritual. Then I catch her under the arms and lift her high into the air. \u201cLet\u2019s pack! We\u2019ve got a plane to catch!\u201d --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Kirkus Reviews Preposterous, but eminently suspenseful, legal procedural about a Mississippi river town's buried secrets, by the author of Mortal Fear (1996), etc. Penn Cage, once a Texas prosecutor, now an infinitely wealthy bestselling lawyer-novelist, cant get over the recent cancer death of his wife, and is just a bit troubled about death threats from the brother of a demented white supremacist he put on death row. After a vacation in Disney World with his daughter Annie, Cage embarks on an extended visit with his parents in Natchez, Tennessee, where he finds that Ray Presley, a white-trash former cop is blackmailing Penn's saintly physician father. It seems that Presley filched a gun from the good doctor, then used it in an unsolved murder. Now, Penn buys back the gun from Presley with a mountain of cash, and later sits down for a famous author interview with the young, rich, beautiful, and brainy Caitlin Masters, the Pulitzer-crazed publisher of the local newspaper, during which he mentions, in passing, a 1968 racially motivated murder of Del Peyton, a young, black factory worker that both the police and the FBI failed to solve. Masters prints her interview, stirring up old animosities all over, including a rancorous legal dispute between Cage's father and Judge Leo Marston, a local powerbroker who was a district attorney at the time. Peyton's widow suddenly appears and asks the famous writer to find who killed her husband. Penn reluctantly agrees, then runs into his old girlfriend, Livy Marston, Leo's flawless, southern-belle daughter. Livy mysteriously ditched Cage 20 years ago, but now can't wait to stoke the old fire. Meanwhile, FBI Director John Portman, Cage's old nemesis, weighs in with nasty threats as Cage braves bullies, dodges bullets, rides down icy rapids, and prepares for a courtroom battle. Breezy, Grisham-style read that tweaks the conventions of southern gothic. (Author tour) -- Copyright \u00a91999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Library Journal A decision to give up a lucrative law practice in Houston and return to his home town in Natchez, MS, plunges author/ attorney Penn Cage headlong into a 30-year-old unsolved murder with all the trappings of a civil rights case. Penn's motives smack of personal vendetta, since the man he suspects of planning the murder is a powerful former state's attorney and judge who tried to ruin the medical practice of Penn's father through an unsuccessful malpractice suit several years earlier. As Penn probes into the murder, he begins to discover an FBI cover-up, thrusting his family into a life-threatening situation. Iles (Mortal Fear) has penned a Southern superthriller that rivals John Grisham's best. Fast-paced action, surprise tactics, and down-and-dirty legal maneuvering played out below the surface calm of the deep South will transfix the reader to the very last page. Recommended for all public libraries. -AThomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly Although it takes place in Natchez, Miss., and is flavored with the violence and seamy undertones of a Southern Gothic, this fourth thriller by Iles (Spandau Phoenix) owes just as much to a familiar parallel universe where wealthy male lawyers double as tragic heroes, women are invariably smart and attractive, and trials are by definition \"high profile.\" After his wife's death, Penn Cage, a former Houston prosecutor and a bestselling suspense novelist, retreats to his parents' home in Natchez with his grieving young daughter. The healing process is interrupted when Cage learns that someone is blackmailing his father, a saintly family doctor who once made a lethal mistake. In tracing the source of his father's moral dilemma, Cage stumbles upon a trail of lies surrounding the unsolved murder of a black man in 1968. He determines to reopen the case, even though his antebellum hometown is smoldering with racial tension. With the assistance of Caitlin Masters, the attractive, smart and ambitious publisher of the local newspaper, Cage gradually uncovers an intricate conspiracy that reaches up to the highest levels of the FBI. Forced to confront powerful Judge Leo Marston, who nearly destroyed his father in pursuing an unrelated, unfounded malpractice accusation decades before, Cage must also face Marston's daughter, Livy, his old high school sweetheart, who tries to persuade Cage to let sleeping dogs lie. It is difficult at times to sympathize with Cage, who proselytizes about truth, justice and obligation, yet destroys evidence to protect his father and fails to properly shield his loved ones as he single-mindedly pursues the case. Still, this ably crafted, richly atmospheric legal thriller is engrossing, and readers will forgive Iles's protagonist a few shortcomings. Agent, Aaron Priest. Major ad/promo; 15-city author tour; British rights to Hodder Headline; audio rights to Recorded Books. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1612540163", "title": "I'll Follow the Moon (Mom's Choice Award Honoree and Chocolate Lily Award Winner)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B0054TVWIG", "title": "Robert B. Parker's Killing the Blues (Jesse Stone Novels Book 10)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1613143079", "title": "Stand In Love: Truthful Answers to Questions about Homosexuality, Identity, and the Church", "author": "Dennis Jernigan", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 11.95}, {"asin": "B000FCKO4U", "title": "Turning Angel: A Novel (Penn Cage Book 2)", "author": "Greg Iles", "description": "Review \"Turning Angel will have you wondering where Greg Iles has been all your life.\"   -- USA Today \"Powerful....heartfelt....entirely gripping.\"   -- The Washington Post About the Author Greg Iles was born in 1960 in Germany, where his father ran the US Embassy medical clinic during the height of the Cold War. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1983, he performed for several years with the rock band Frankly Scarlet and is a member of the lit-rock group The Rock Bottom Remainders. He is the author of sixteen New York Times bestselling novels and known for his Penn Cage series, the latest of which is Southern Man . He lives in Natchez, Mississippi. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Turning Angel Chapter 1Some stories must wait to be told.Any writer worth his salt knows this. Sometimes you wait for events to percolate in your subconscious until a deeper truth emerges; other times you\u2019re simply waiting for the principals to die. Sometimes it\u2019s both.This story is like that.A man walks the straight and narrow all his life; he follows the rules, stays within the lines; then one day he makes a misstep. He crosses a line and sets in motion a chain of events that will take from him everything he has and damn him forever in the eyes of those he loves.We all sense that invisible line of demarcation, like an unspoken challenge hanging in the air. And there is some wild thing in our natures that makes us want to cross it, that compels us with the silent insistence of evolutionary imperative to risk all for a glinting shadow. Most of us suppress that urge. Fear stops us more often than wisdom, as in most things. But some of us take that step. And in the taking, we start down a path from which it is difficult and sometimes impossible to return.Dr. Andrew Elliott is such a man.I have known Drew since he was three years old, long before he was a Rhodes scholar, before he went to medical school, before he returned to our hometown of twenty thousand souls to practice internal medicine. And our bond runs deeper than that of most childhood friends. When I was fourteen, eleven-year-old Drew Elliott saved my life and almost lost his own in the process. We remained close friends until he graduated from medical school, and then for a long time\u2014fifteen years, I guess\u2014I saw him hardly at all. Much of that time I spent convicting murderers as an assistant district attorney in Houston, Texas. The rest I spent writing novels based on extraordinary cases from my career, which gave me a second life and time to spend with my family.Drew and I renewed our friendship five years ago, after my wife died and I returned to Natchez with my young daughter to try to piece my life back together. The early weeks of my return were swallowed by a whirlwind of a murder case, but as the notoriety faded, Drew was the first old friend to seek me out and make an effort to bring me into the community. He put me on the school board of our alma mater, got me into the country club, talked me into sponsoring a hot air balloon and a Metropolitan opera singer during Natchez\u2019s annual festivals. He worked hard at bringing this widower back to life, and with much help from Caitlin Masters, my lover for the past few years, he succeeded.All that seems a distant memory now.Yesterday Drew Elliott was a respected pillar of the community, revered by many, held up as a role model by all; today he is scorned by those who venerated him, and his life hangs in the balance. Drew was our golden boy, a paragon of everything small-town America holds to be noble, and by unwritten law the town will crucify him with a hatred equal to their betrayed love.How did Drew transform himself from hero into monster? He reached out for love, and in the reaching pulled a whole town down on top of him. Last night his legend was intact. He was sitting beside me at a table in the boardroom of St. Stephen\u2019s Preparatory School, still handsome at forty, dark-haired, and athletic\u2014he played football for Vanderbilt\u2014a little gray at the temples but radiating the commanding presence of a doctor in his prime. I see this moment as clearly as any in my life, because it\u2019s the instant before revelation, that frozen moment in which the old world sits balanced on the edge of destruction, like a china cup teetering on the edge of a table. In a moment it will shatter into irrecoverable fragments, but for an instant it remains intact, and salvation seems possible.The boardroom windows are dark, and the silver rain that\u2019s fallen all day is blowing horizontally now, slapping the windows with an icy rattle. We\u2019ve crowded eleven people around the Brazilian rosewood table\u2014six men, five women\u2014and the air is close in the room. Drew\u2019s clear eyes are intent on Holden Smith, the overdressed president of the St. Stephen\u2019s school board, as we discuss the purchase of new computers for the junior high school. Like Holden and several other board members, Drew and I graduated from St. Stephen\u2019s roughly two decades ago, and our children attend it today. We\u2019re part of a wave of alumni who stepped in during the city\u2019s recent economic decline to try to rebuild the school that gave us our remarkable educations. Unlike most Mississippi private schools, which sprang up in response to forced integration in 1968, St. Stephen\u2019s was founded as a parochial school in 1946. It did not admit its first African-American student until 1982, but the willingness was there years before that. High tuition and anxiety about being the only black child in an all-white school probably held off that landmark event for a few years. Now twenty-one black kids attend the secular St. Stephen\u2019s, and there would be more but for the cost. Not many black families in Natchez can afford to pay five thousand dollars a year per child for education when the public school is free. Few white families can either, when you get down to it, and fewer as the years pass. Therein lies the board\u2019s eternal challenge: funding.At this moment Holden Smith is evangelizing for Apple computers, though the rest of the school\u2019s network runs comfortably on cheaper IBM clones. If he ever pauses for breath, I plan to tell Holden that while I use an Apple Powerbook myself, we have to be practical on matters of cost. But before I can, the school\u2019s secretary opens the door and raises her hand in a limp sort of wave. Her face is so pale that I fear she might be having a heart attack.Holden gives her an annoyed look. \u201cWhat do you need, Theresa? We\u2019ve got another half hour, at least.\u201dLike most employees of St. Stephen\u2019s, Theresa Cook is also a school parent. \u201cI just heard something terrible,\u201d she says, her voice cracking. \u201cKate Townsend is in the emergency room at St. Catherine\u2019s Hospital. They said\u2026she\u2019s dead. Drowned. Kate Townsend. Can that be right?\u201dHolden Smith\u2019s thin lips twist in a grimace of a smile as he tries to convince himself that this is some sort of sick prank. Kate Townsend is the star of the senior class: valedictorian, state champion in both tennis and swimming, full scholarship to Harvard next fall. She\u2019s literally a poster child for St. Stephen\u2019s. We even used her in a TV commercial for the school.\u201cNo,\u201d Holden says finally. \u201cNo way. I saw Kate on the tennis court at two this afternoon.\u201dI look at my watch. It\u2019s nearly eight now.Holden opens his mouth again but no sound emerges. As I glance at the faces around the table, I realize that a strange yet familiar numbness has gripped us all, the numbness that comes when you hear that a neighbor\u2019s child has been shot in a predawn hunting accident, or died in a car crash on homecoming night. It occurs to me that it\u2019s early April, and though the first breath of spring has touched the air, it\u2019s still too cold to swim, even in Mississippi. If a high school senior drowned today, a freak accident seems the only explanation. An indoor pool, maybe? Only I can\u2019t think of anyone who owns one.\u201cExactly what did you hear and when, Theresa?\u201d Holden asks. As if details might mitigate the horror of what is upon us.\u201cAnn Geter called my house from the hospital.\u201d Ann Geter is an ER nurse at St. Catherine\u2019s Hospital, and another St. Stephen\u2019s parent. Because the school has only five hundred students, everyone literally knows everyone else. \u201cMy husband told Ann I was still up here for the meeting. She called and told me that some fishermen found Kate wedged in the fork of a tree near where St. Catherine\u2019s Creek washes into the Mississippi River. They thought she might be alive, so they put her in their boat and carried her to the hospital. She was naked from the waist down, Ann said.\u201dTheresa says \u201cnekkid,\u201d but her word has the intended effect. Shock blanks the faces around the table as everyone begins to absorb the idea that this may not be a conventional accident. \u201cKate was bruised up pretty bad, Ann said. Like she\u2019d been hit with something.\u201d\u201cJesus Lord,\u201d whispers Clara Jenkins, from my left. \u201cThis can\u2019t be true. It must be somebody else.\u201dTheresa\u2019s bottom lip begins to quiver. The secretary has always been close to the older students, especially the girls. \u201cAnn said Kate had a tattoo on her thigh. I didn\u2019t know about that, but I guess her mama did. Jenny Townsend identified her body just a couple of minutes ago.\u201dDown the table a woman sobs, and a shiver of empathy goes through me, like liquid nitrogen in my blood. Even though my daughter is only nine, I\u2019ve nearly lost her twice, and I\u2019ve had my share of nightmares about what Jenny Townsend just endured.\u201cGod in heaven.\u201d Holden Smith gets to his feet, looking braced for physical combat. \u201cI\u2019d better get over to the hospital. Is Jenny still over there?\u201d\u201cI imagine so,\u201d Theresa murmurs. \u201cI just can\u2019t believe it. Anybody in the world you could have said, and I\u2019d have believed it before Kate.\u201d\u201cGoddamn it,\u201d snaps Bill Sims, a local geologist. \u201cIt\u2019s just not fair.\u201d\u201cI know,\u201d Theresa agrees, as if fairness has anything to do with who is taken young and who survives to ninety-five. But then I realize she has a point. The Townsends lost a child to leukemia several years ago, before I moved back to town. I heard that was what broke up their marriage.Holden takes a cell phone from his coat pocket and dials a number. He\u2019s probably calling his wife. The other board members sit quietly, their thoughts on their own children, no doubt. How many of them have silently thanked God for the good fortune of not being Jenny Townsend tonight?A cell phone chirps under the table. Drew Elliott lifts his and says, \u201cDr. Elliott.\u201d He listens for a while, all eyes on him. Then he tenses like a man absorbing news of a family tragedy. \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m the family doctor, but this is a coroner\u2019s case now. I\u2019ll come down and speak to the family. Their home? All right. Thanks.\u201dDrew hangs up and looks at the ring of expectant faces, his own white with shock. \u201cIt\u2019s not a mistake. Kate\u2019s dead. She was dead before she reached the ER. Jenny Townsend is on her way home.\u201d Drew glances at me. \u201cYour father\u2019s driving her, Penn. Tom was seeing a patient when they brought Kate in. Some family and friends are going over there. The father\u2019s in England, of course, but he\u2019s being notified.\u201dKate\u2019s father, a British citizen, has lived in England for the past five years.A woman sobs at the end of the table.\u201cI\u2019m adjourning this meeting,\u201d Holden says, gathering up the promotional literature from Apple Computer. \u201cThis can wait until next month\u2019s meeting.\u201dAs he walks toward the door, Jan Chancellor, the school\u2019s headmistress, calls after him, \u201cJust a minute, Holden. This is a terrible tragedy, but one thing can\u2019t wait until next month.\u201dHolden doesn\u2019t bother to hide his annoyance as he turns back. \u201cWhat\u2019s that, Jan?\u201d\u201cThe Marko Bakic incident.\u201d\u201cOh, hell,\u201d says Bill Sims. \u201cWhat\u2019s that kid done now?\u201dMarko Bakic is a Croatian exchange student who has been nothing but trouble since he arrived last September. How he made it into the exchange program is beyond any of us. Marko\u2019s records show that he scored off the charts on an IQ test, but all his intelligence seems to be used only in support of his anarchic aspirations. The charitable view is that this unfortunate child of the Balkan wars has brought confusion and disruption to St. Stephen\u2019s, sadly besmirching an exchange program that\u2019s only won us glory in the past. The harsher view is that Marko Bakic uses the mask of prankster to hide more sinister activities like selling Ecstasy to the student body and anabolic steroids to the football team. The board has already sought my advice as a former prosecutor on how to deal with the drug issue; I told them that unless we catch Marko red-handed or someone volunteers firsthand information about illegal activities, there\u2019s nothing we can do. Bill Sims suggested a random drug-testing program, but this idea was tabled when the board realized that positive tests would probably become public, sabotaging our public relations effort and delighting the board of Immaculate Heart, the Catholic school across town. The local law enforcement organs have set their sights on Marko, as well, but they, too, have come up empty-handed. If Marko Bakic is dealing drugs, no one is talking about it. Not on the record, anyway.\u201cMarko got into a scuffle with Ben Ritchie in the hall yesterday,\u201d Jan says carefully. \u201cHe called Ben\u2019s girlfriend a slut.\u201d\u201cNot smart,\u201d Bill Sims murmurs.Marko Bakic is six-foot-two and lean as a sapling; Ben Ritchie is five-foot-six and built like a cast-iron stove, just like his father, who played football with Drew and me more than twenty years ago.Jan says, \u201cBen shoved Marko into the wall and told him to apologize. Marko told Ben to kiss his ass.\u201d\u201cSo what happened?\u201d asks Sims, his eyes shining. This is a lot more interesting than routine school board business.Clearly put off by the juvenile relish in Bill\u2019s face, Jan says, \u201cBen put Marko in a choke hold and mashed his head against the floor until he apologized. Ben embarrassed Marko in front of a lot of people.\u201d\u201cSounds like our Croatian hippie got what he deserved.\u201d\u201cBe that as it may,\u201d Jan says icily, \u201cafter Ben let Marko up, Marko told Ben he was going to kill him. Two other students heard it.\u201d\u201cMacho bullshit,\u201d says Sims. \u201cBakic trying to save face.\u201d\u201cWas it?\u201d asks Jan. \u201cWhen Ben asked Marko how he was going to do that, Marko said he had a gun in his car.\u201dSims sighs heavily. \u201cDid he? Have a gun, I mean.\u201d\u201cNo one knows. I didn\u2019t hear about this until after school. Frankly, I think the students were too afraid to tell me about it.\u201d\u201cAfraid of what you\u2019d do?\u201d\u201cNo. Afraid of Marko. Several students say he does carry a gun sometimes. But no one would admit to seeing it on school property.\u201d\u201cDid you talk to the Wilsons?\u201d Holden Smith asks from the doorway.Bill Sims snorts in contempt. \u201cWhat for?\u201dThe Wilsons are the family that agreed to feed and house Marko for two semesters. Jack Wilson is a retired academic, and Marko seems to have him completely snowed.Jan Chancellor watches Holden expectantly. She\u2019s a good headmistress, although she dislikes direct confrontations, which can\u2019t be avoided in a job like hers. Her face looks pale beneath her sleek, black bob, and her nerves seem stretched to the breaking point. They must be, to bring her to this point of insistence.\u201cI move that we enter executive session,\u201d she says, meaning that no minutes will be taken from this point forward.\u201cSecond,\u201d I agree.Jan gives me a quick look of gratitude. \u201cAs you all know, this is merely the latest in a long line of disruptive incidents. There\u2019s a clear pattern here, and I\u2019m worried that something irreparable is going to happen. If it does\u2014and if it can be demonstrated that we were aware of this pattern\u2014then St. Stephen\u2019s and every member of the board will be exposed to massive lawsuits.\u201dHolden sighs wearily from the door. \u201cJan, this was a serious incident, no doubt. And sorting it out is going to be a pain in the ass. But Kate Townsend\u2019s death is going to be a major shock to every student and family at this school. I can call a special meeting later in the week to deal with Marko, but Kate is the priority right now.\u201d\u201cWill you call that meeting?\u201d Jan presses. \u201cBecause this problem\u2019s not going to go away.\u201d\u201cI will. Now I\u2019m going to see Jenny Townsend. Theresa, will you lock up when everyone\u2019s gone?\u201dThe secretary nods, glad for being given something to do. While the remainder of the board members continue to express disbelief, my cell phone rings. The caller ID shows my home as the origin of the call, which makes me unsure whether to answer. My daughter, Annie, is quite capable of pestering me to death with the phone when the mood strikes her. But with Kate\u2019s death fresh in my mind, I step into the secretary\u2019s office and answer.\u201cAnnie?\u201d\u201cNo,\u201d says an older female voice. \u201cIt\u2019s Mia.\u201dMia Burke is my daughter\u2019s babysitter, a classmate of Kate Townsend\u2019s.\u201cI\u2019m sorry to interrupt the board meeting, but I\u2019m kind of freaked out.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s all right, Mia. What\u2019s the matter?\u201d\u201cI\u2019m not sure. But three people have called and told me something happened to Kate Townsend. They\u2019re saying she drowned.\u201dI hesitate before confirming the rumor, but if the truth hasn\u2019t already spread across town, it will in a matter of minutes. Our secretary learning the truth from an ER nurse was part of the first wave of rumor, one of many that will sweep across town tonight, turning back upon themselves and swelling until the facts are lost in a tide of hyperbole. \u201cYou heard right, Mia. Kate was found dead in St. Catherine\u2019s Creek.\u201d\u201cOh God.\u201d\u201cI know it\u2019s upsetting, and I\u2019m sure you want to be with your friends right now, but I need you to stay with Annie until I get there. I\u2019ll be home in ten minutes.\u201d\u201cOh, I\u2019d never leave Annie alone. I mean, I don\u2019t even know what I should do. If Kate\u2019s dead, I can\u2019t really help her. And everyone is going to be acting so retarded about it. Take whatever time you need. I\u2019d rather stay here with Annie than drive right now.\u201dI silently thank Jan Chancellor for recommending one of the few levelheaded girls in the school to me as a babysitter. \u201cThanks, Mia. How\u2019s Annie doing?\u201d\u201cShe fell asleep watching a documentary about bird migration on the Discovery Channel.\u201d\u201cGood.\u201d\u201cHey,\u201d Mia says in an awkward voice. \u201cThanks for telling me the truth about Kate.\u201d\u201cThanks for not flipping out and leaving the house. I\u2019ll see you in a few minutes, okay?\u201d\u201cOkay. Bye.\u201dI hang up and look through the door at the boardroom. Drew Elliott is talking on his cell phone at the table, but the rest of the board members are filing out the main door. As I watch them go, an image from our promotional TV commercial featuring Kate rises into my mind. She\u2019s walking onto the tennis court in classic whites, and her cool blue eyes burn right through the camera. She\u2019s tall, probably five-ten, with Nordic blond hair that hangs halfway to her waist. More striking than beautiful, Kate looked like a college student rather than a high school kid, and that\u2019s why we chose her for the promo spot. She was the perfect recruiting symbol for a college-prep school.As I reach for the office doorknob, I freeze. Drew is staring at the table with tears pouring down his face. I hesitate, giving him time to collect himself. What does it take to make an M.D. cry? My father has watched his patients die for forty years, and now they\u2019re dropping like cornstalks to a scythe. I know he grieves, but I can\u2019t remember him crying. The one exception was my wife, but that\u2019s another story. Maybe Drew thinks he\u2019s alone here, that I slipped out with all the others. Since he shows no sign of stopping, I walk out and lay my hand on his thickly muscled shoulder.\u201cYou okay, man?\u201dHe doesn\u2019t reply, but I feel him shudder.\u201cDrew? Hey.\u201dHe dries his eyes with a swipe of his sleeve, then stands. \u201cGuess we\u2019d better let Theresa lock up.\u201d\u201cYeah. I\u2019ll walk out with you.\u201dSide by side, we walk through the front atrium of St. Stephen\u2019s, just as we did thousands of times when we attended this school in the sixties and seventies. A large trophy cabinet stands against the wall to my left. Inside it, behind a wooden Louisville Slugger with thirteen names signed on it in Magic Marker, hangs a large photograph of Drew Elliott during the defining moment of this institution. Just fourteen years old, he is standing at the plate under the lights of Smith-Wills Stadium in Jackson, hitting what would be the winning home run of the 1977 AAAA state baseball championship. No matter how remarkable our academic accomplishments\u2014and they were many\u2014it was this prize that put our tiny \u201csingle A\u201d school on the map. In Mississippi, as in the rest of the South, sport overshadows everything else.\u201cLong time ago,\u201d he says. \u201cEternity.\u201dI\u2019m standing on second base in the photo, waiting to sprint for the tying run. \u201cNot so long.\u201dHe gives me a lost look, and then we pass through the entrance and pause under the overhang, prepping for a quick dash through the rain to our cars.\u201cKate babysat for you guys, didn\u2019t she?\u201d I comment, trying to get him to focus on the mundane.\u201cYeah. The past two summers. Not anymore, though. She graduates\u2014was supposed to graduate\u2014in six weeks. She was too busy for babysitting.\u201d\u201cShe seemed like a great kid.\u201dDrew nods. \u201cShe was. Even these days, when so many students are overachievers, she stood out from the crowd.\u201dI could point out that it\u2019s often the best and brightest who are taken while the rest of us are left to carry on, but Drew knows that. He\u2019s watched more people die than I ever will.His Volvo is parked about thirty yards away, behind my Saab. I pat him on the back as I did in high school, then assume a tight end\u2019s stance. \u201cRun for it?\u201dInstead of playing along with me, he looks me full in the face and speaks in a voice I haven\u2019t heard from him in years. \u201cCan I talk to you for a minute?\u201dThe emotion in his eyes is palpable. \u201cOf course.\u201d\u201cLet\u2019s get in one of the cars.\u201d\u201cSure.\u201dHe presses a button on his key chain, and his Volvo\u2019s lights blink. As if triggered by a silent starter pistol, we race through the chilly rain and scramble onto the leather seats of the S80. He slams his door and cranks the engine, then shakes his head with a strange violence.\u201cI can\u2019t fucking believe it, Penn. It\u2019s literally beyond belief. Did you know her? Did you know Kate at all?\u201d\u201cWe spoke a few times. She asked about my books. But we never got beyond the surface. Mia talked about her a lot.\u201dHis eyes search out mine in the shadows. \u201cYou and I haven\u2019t got beneath the surface much either these past five years. It\u2019s more my fault than yours, I know. I keep a lot inside.\u201d\u201cWe all do,\u201d I say awkwardly, wondering where this is going.\u201cWho really knows anybody, right? Twelve years of school together, best friends when we were kids. You know a lot about me, but on the other hand you know nothing. The front, like everybody else.\u201d\u201cI hope I see past that, Drew.\u201d\u201cI don\u2019t mean to insult you. If anyone sees beneath the surface, it\u2019s you. That\u2019s why I\u2019m talking to you now.\u201d\u201cWell, I\u2019m here. Let\u2019s talk.\u201dHe nods as if confirming a private judgment. \u201cI want to hire you.\u201d\u201cHire me?\u201d\u201cAs a lawyer.\u201dThis is the last thing I expected to hear. \u201cYou know I don\u2019t practice anymore.\u201d\u201cYou took the Payton case, that old civil rights bombing.\u201d\u201cThat was different. And that was five years ago.\u201dDrew stares at me in the glow of the dashboard lights. \u201cThis is different, too.\u201dIt always is to the client. \u201cI\u2019m sure it is. The thing is, I\u2019m not really a lawyer anymore. I\u2019m a writer. If you need a lawyer, I can recommend several good ones. Is it malpractice?\u201dDrew blinks in astonishment. \u201cMalpractice? You think I\u2019d waste your time with bullshit like that?\u201d\u201cDrew\u2026I don\u2019t know what this is about. Why don\u2019t you tell me what the problem is?\u201d\u201cI want to, but\u2014Penn, what if you were sick? You had HIV, say. And you came to me and said, \u2018Drew, please help me. As a friend. I want you to treat me and not tell a soul.\u2019 And what if I said, \u2018Penn, I\u2019d like to, but that\u2019s not my specialty. You need to go to a specialist.\u2019 \u201d\u201cDrew, come on\u2014\u201d\u201cHear me out. If you said, \u2018Drew, as a friend, please do me this favor. Please help me.\u2019 You know what? I wouldn\u2019t think twice. I\u2019d do whatever you wanted. Treat you without records, whatever.\u201dHe would. I can\u2019t deny it. But there\u2019s more than this beneath his words. Drew has left much unsaid. The truth is that without Drew Elliott, I wouldn\u2019t be alive today. When I was fourteen years old, Drew and I hiked away from the Buffalo River in Arkansas and got lost in the Ozark Mountains. Near dark, I fell into a gorge and broke my femur. Drew was only eleven, but he crawled down into that gorge, splinted my leg with a tree limb, then built a makeshift litter and started dragging me through the night. Before he was done, he dragged me four miles through the mountains, breaking his wrist in the process and twice almost breaking his neck. Just after dawn, he managed to get me to a cluster of tents where someone had a CB radio. But has he mentioned any of that? No. It\u2019s my job to remember.\u201cWhy do you want to hire me, Drew?\u201d\u201cTo consult. With the protection of confidentiality.\u201d\u201cShit. You don\u2019t have to hire me for that.\u201dHe pulls his wallet from his pants and takes out a twenty-dollar bill, which he pushes at me. \u201cI know that. But if you were questioned on the stand later\u2014as a friend\u2014you\u2019d have to lie to protect me. If you\u2019re my lawyer, our discourse will be shielded by attorney-client privilege.\u201d He\u2019s still pushing the bill at me. \u201cTake it, Penn.\u201d\u201cThis is crazy\u2014\u201d\u201cPlease, man.\u201dI wad up the note and shove it into my pocket. \u201cOkay, damn it. What\u2019s going on?\u201dHe sags back in his seat and rubs his temples like a man getting a migraine. \u201cI knew Kate a lot better than anyone knows.\u201dKate Townsend again? The sense of dislocation I felt in the boardroom was nothing compared to what I feel now. Again I see Drew sitting at the table, weeping as though for a family member. Even as I ask the next question, I pray that I\u2019m wrong.\u201cAre you telling me you were intimate with the girl?\u201dDrew doesn\u2019t blink. \u201cI was in love with her.\u201d --This text refers to the mass_market edition. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Hill, one of the best interpreters of novels featuring thoughtful male protagonists under pressure, was an inspired choice for Iles's powerful tale of murder, sex, drugs, Deep South societal unrest and generational confusion. Respectful of the Natchez, Miss., atmosphere that permeates the novel, Hill uses a lyrical and literate drawl for the book's narrator, attorney Penn Cage. Iles's genuinely suspenseful and well-plotted thriller puts Cage through much emotional upheaval. Hill responds accordingly, with just the right mood\u2014from the shock Cage feels when discovering that his best friend, respected and happily married Dr. Drew Elliott, had been sexually involved with a bright and beautiful 17-year-old and is now suspected of killing her to Cage's awe when he finds himself falling for his daughter's babysitter. Hill's Dr. Elliott has a slightly whiny voice, conveying a man on the edge of panic, but with more than a hint of a \"Why me?\" attitude born of entitlement. The rest of the large cast is treated to the same careful interpretation. Shad Johnson, the politically ambitious black DA, has the sound of a smooth talker who is also an intellectual bully. Penn's dad has a soft-spoken, no-nonsense dignity. Hill is particularly effective in delineating an assortment of teenagers, among them babysitter Mia Burke. Hill has selected an attitude for her that mixes blas\u00e9 precocity with little girl neediness. This helps to underline the novel's theme: today's teens mature sooner than most adults realize and can pay a very high price for their early loss of innocence. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 31). (Dec.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover Turning Angel marks the long-awaited return of Penn Cage, the lawyer hero of The Quiet Game, and introduces Drew Elliott, the highly respected doctor who saved Penn\u2019s life in a hiking accident when they were boys. As two of the most prominent citizens of Natchez, Drew and Penn sit on the school board of their alma mater, St. Stephen\u2019s Prep. When the nude body of a young female student is found near the Mississippi River, the entire community is shocked - but no one more than Penn, who discovers that his best friend was entangled in a passionate relationship with the girl and may be accused of her murder. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Bookmarks Magazine Much more than a thriller, Turning Angel is a portrait of a Southern town blighted by a poor economy, bad schools, drugs, racial tensions, and the contrast between this life and the one of privilege. Iles, who lives in Natchez, convincingly depicts how these tensions play out among high school students, who, as Gage repeatedly learns, are not the innocent babes of his youth. The lurid scenes of pornography, drugs, and sex will attract many readers, but so will Iles's portrayal of emotions and morality. A two-dimensional villain and somewhat hackneyed plot barely detract from the novel's powerful depiction of teenagers' lives today. Copyright \u00a9 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist The murder of a beautiful 17-year-old girl throws the town of Natchez, Mississippi, into turmoil. When Penn's close friend, Dr. Drew Elliott, confesses that he was about to leave his wife and run off with the victim, Penn agrees to act as his attorney. But he also knows that if the police bring charges against Drew, he'll have a hard time getting him off. As usual, Iles writes gracefully, letting us get to know his characters gradually, keeping certain things hidden until it's the right time to reveal them. The story is solidly plotted, too, but there's one major gaffe: the introduction of the villain is handled so clumsily that readers even remotely familiar with the genre will know instantly whodunit. Unfortunately, for those who spot the killer, much of the novel's suspense is ruined. Still, Iles has become an A-list thriller writer over the years, and anything with his name on it can be counted on to draw a crowd. Call this one a well-written misfire. David Pitt Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile A female high school superstar is raped and murdered in Natchez, Mississippi. Suspicion falls on her lover, a married doctor who is the friend of narrator/writer/lawyer Penn Cage. Dick Hill wraps this first-person narrative in a soft Southern accent and makes the most of the opportunity the plot offers to bring to life a 9-year-old daughter, an African-American drug lord, the doctor's chemically dependent wife, local lawmen, a Yankee professor, and a Croatian exchange student grown beyond his years. At one point, Cage is held captive and injected with heroin, the effects of which he painfully describes. The plot twists might strain your imagination, but the characters ring true--thanks to a tour-de-force performance. J.B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award \u00a9 AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B00G98B20Y", "title": "The Death Factory: A Penn Cage Novella (Kindle Single) (Penn Cage Novels)", "author": "Greg Iles", "description": "From the Back Cover Death is the end, and if a man doesn't speak before it silences him, then his deepest secrets go with him. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles comes an e-original novella featuring former prosecutor Penn Cage, a story of family secrets and justice denied, plus an excerpt from his new novel, Natchez Burning . When a heart attack sends Penn's father, Tom Cage, to the ER, Tom begs that his son be brought to his side to hear a dying declaration. But when Penn arrives, Tom denies ever making the request\u2014keeping his secrets for another day. The emergency hurls Penn back to a chilling case in Houston, where he worked in a DA's office known as the \"death factory,\" which sent more killers to death row than any other in America. While Penn cares for his ailing wife, a tormented forensic technician brings him evidence of a crime lab in chaos, throwing past convictions into doubt and begging Penn to prevent an imminent travesty of justice. With the desperation of a man fighting death in his own home, Penn must find a way to bring the machinery of the death factory to a halt. Included here is an extended sneak preview of Natchez Burning , the first installment in an epic trilogy featuring Penn Cage. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Greg Iles spent most of his youth in Natchez, Mississippi. His first novel, Spandau Phoenix , was the first of thirteen New York Times bestsellers, and his new trilogy continues the story of Penn Cage, protagonist of The Quiet Game , Turning Angel , and #1 New York Times bestseller The Devil\u2019s Punchbowl . Iles\u2019s novels have been made into films and published in more than thirty-five countries. He lives in Natchez with his wife and has two children. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B0023SDPNG", "title": "24 Hours: A Suspense Thriller (Mississippi Book 2)", "author": "Dick Hill", "description": "Review \u201cBrilliantly plotted...perfectly-timed terror...and a hair-raising finale.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cIles displays all the well-honed chops that have made him a bestselling author...He Achieves a near perfect balance of high-tech inventiveness and characterization as the plot rushes to its grand\u2014and violent\u2014finale....Inventive and fast-paced.\u201d\u2014 Times-Picayune \u201cA chilling tale...calculated to jangle the reader's every nerve...gut-wrenching.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cA taut tale, terrifying in its intensity, compelling in its pace...A good, old-fashioned thriller, the likes of which are rare...A winner.\u201d \u2014 Chattanooga Times About the Author Greg Iles is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Penn Cage series. His novels have been made into films, translated into more than twenty languages, and published in more than thirty-five countries worldwide. From AudioFile Were it not for Hill's exciting and sometimes flamboyant reading, this slow-moving story might have been entitled \"24 Years.\" For five years in a row, a trio of child abductors has been successful at \"the perfect kidnapping.\" They strike where the child lives, the parents don't tell the police, and the ransom is paid. Now, for the sixth time, they steal a doctor's child. This time, however, they encounter a family--parents and child--to be reckoned with. Though interesting at first, the plot bogs down as the 24 hours pass ever so slowly. But Hill's wonderful character development saves the day. He's solid as he alternates between the hysterical mother, the guilt-ridden father, and the ruthless mastermind. And he's superb as he switches from the 5-year-old victim to her captor. Another reader might not have been tolerated. A.L.H. \u00a9 AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon.com Review This explosive suspense thriller gets off to a blistering start: the kidnapping of a little boy--in eight breathless pages--that culminates with the child's safe return and the disappearance of the successful kidnappers. That sets the stage for the book's centerpiece, the abduction of little Abby Jennings, daughter of Will, a successful physician, and Karen, a slightly dissatisfied suburban woman who's wondering where the passion in her marriage went. The criminals' modus operandi is established early on. They target the progeny of Mississippi doctors, demand a reasonable (to an affluent M.D.) ransom, release the child after it's paid, and promise the victim parents that if they ever breathe a word of the incident to anyone, their kids will be taken again and killed. The kidnappings are carefully set up, targeted to take place when one parent is out of town at a medical meeting or convention, thus ensuring the cooperation of the other. And the victim is held by a sweet, slightly retarded but humongous and powerful man whose loyalty to his cousin, the mastermind, is unquestioned. 24 Hours is a version of the locked room school of kidnap mysteries and a very good one indeed, especially when Will turns the tables on the kidnapper and takes control of the situation. Abby's diabetic condition (she needs lifesaving injections on a regular basis) notches the suspense up one last turn. It's a well worked-out plot, the pacing is terrific, and the characters likable and attractive. Iles is a master storyteller, and this one has big screen written all over it--with Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer as the Jennings, if we're lucky. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly HAs close to family fare as a kidnapper-rapist-extortionist thriller can get, Iles's (The Quiet Game) latest brilliantly plotted tale walks the razor's edge between cinematic excess and bone-chilling suspense. Joe Hickey is a Southern redneck with an Ivy League talent for evil. He has trained his grossly huge, mentally challenged cousin, Huey, and his gorgeous, exotic-dancer, live-in lover, Cheryl, to work with him as part of a tightly controlled kidnap/extortion squad targeting Mississippi physicians' families while the doctors are off at conferences. But he hits a snag when Dr. Will Jennings, his wife, Karen, and their five-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Abby, prove as resourceful solo as they are formidable in tandem. Joe grabs Abby, turning her over to Huey, who drives her off to a remote forest cabin near Jackson; meanwhile, Joe stays behind to terrorize Karen in the Jennings home. Cheryl gets her hooks into the third family member by vamping her way into Will's hotel room in Biloxi, where Will receives a phone call and ransom demand from Joe, who stipulates delivery in 24 hours. It's a long, horrific night for all as Iles pits each of the captives against their captors in riveting battles of will. The well-rounded characters are trademark Iles, the plot runs speed-skating smooth and occasional near-gooey bits of dialogue are offset by nasty surprises and perfectly timed terror. The one-on-one conflicts punch up the pace, and a perfect Mississippi setting, a spot-on sendup of FBI assistance and a hair-raising finale complete the package. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild and BOMC alternates. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cBrilliantly plotted...perfectly-timed terror...and a hair-raising finale.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cIles displays all the well-honed chops that have made him a bestselling author...He Achieves a near perfect balance of high-tech inventiveness and characterization as the plot rushes to its grand\u2014and violent\u2014finale....Inventive and fast-paced.\u201d\u2014 Times-Picayune \u201cA chilling tale...calculated to jangle the reader's every nerve...gut-wrenching.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cA taut tale, terrifying in its intensity, compelling in its pace...A good, old-fashioned thriller, the likes of which are rare...A winner.\u201d \u2014 Chattanooga Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Kirkus Reviews A tepid thriller from bestselling Iles ( The Quiet Game , 1999, etc.) in which an upscale family falls victim to a not-so-typical kidnapping masterminded by a psychopath with more than money on his mind. Dr. Will Jennings is on his way from Mississippi to a medical meeting in New Orleans, leaving behind his loving, if somewhat resentful, wife Karen, who quit medical school when she became pregnant, and their precious, precocious five-year-old daughter, Abby. Life is a mixed bag for the doctor. He's flying his own plane to the convention where he's presenting a breakthrough anesthesia drug that could make him a very wealthy man. But he suffers from debilitating arthritis, and Abby is a juvenile diabetic who requires insulin injections. The whole house of cards comes tumbling down when the child is snatched by kidnapper extraordinaire Joe Hickey, assisted by his abused spouse, a former drug- addicted lap dancer, and his devoted, mentally challenged, 300-pound cousin Huey. The devious trio's carefully orchestrated plan, which they've refined over five previous capers, divides the story into three scenarios, each redneck villain paired with a member of the genteel Jennings family. Hickey's motto, \"The kid always makes it,\" is endangered by Abby's insulin needs, the Type-A personalities of the Jennings clan, and the search for revenge. Should Will call in the authorities? Should he and Karen submit to the kidnappers' bizarre personal demands? How far will they go to save their daughter and still keep their self-respect? And by the way, have they missed the truly important things in life?The clever plot generates some heat, but veteran Iles's clunky prose (\"Hickey's words cut to the bone, but something more terrible struck Will like a hammer\"), hackneyed psychological \"insights,\" and tedious medical details send this thriller into a tailspin.Literary Guild/Doubleday Book Club alternate selection -- Copyright \u00a9 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Will Jennings takes off in his private plane for Biloxi to speak at a doctor's convention and to announce a new drug treatment he's helped develop. He leaves behind a neglected wife, Karen, and a five-year-old, Abby, who has juvenile diabetes. Joe Hickey, a psychopath with particular animosity toward doctors, and Huey Cotton, a giant with diminished mental capacity, take advantage of Will's trip to kidnap Abby and terrorize Karen. Will is held in check by Cheryl Lynne, Joe's beautiful but emotionally stunted wife, until the ransom can be delivered. Joe has committed this \"perfect\" crime five times before. Each time he's taken a doctor's child, stuck to a relentless 24-hour schedule that separates the husband, wife, and child, and returned the child to the parents unharmed. Joe and his partners haven't been caught because they leave their victims paralyzed with fear of reprisal. But this time, Joe's resentment toward doctors takes a particularly vengeful turn. This time, too, Joe has targeted a family of particular resilience, determination, and ingenuity. Faced with the prospect that Abby could die of complications of diabetes before the 24-hour schedule is up, Will and Karen are forced to desperately push against the deadline. Unknown to them, a previous victim has mustered the courage to call in the FBI when they suspect another family is being victimized. But FBI involvement could be more hindrance than support to this resourceful couple. Iles, author of The Quiet Game , has written a fast-paced, gripping novel of suspense and action set in the Mississippi delta. Vanessa Bush Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Library Journal While Will Jennings is speaking at a medical conference in Biloxi, MS, his five-year-old daughter, Abby, is kidnapped and his wife, Karen, held hostage by psychopath Joe Hickey. With his wife, Cheryl, and cousin Huey, Joe has gotten away with five similar ransoms of doctors' children, but this one is different because he blames Will for the death of his mother. For those willing to overlook the unpleasantness of Abby's fear and Joe's sexual threat to Karen, this suspenseful tale is exciting, especially in the final chapters when Will must cope with the clumsy interference of the FBI. Just as Iles made computers central to the plot of Mortal Fear, he cleverly uses cellular phones and private planes here. By exaggerating some of the Southern accents, the normally excellent Dick Hill makes the events seem more melodramatic than the author intended. Recommended for thriller collections.DMichael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B009FEVC3Q", "title": "A Family for Christmas (Contemporary Romance Novella)", "author": "Helen Scott Taylor", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Women's Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0017SWTJY", "title": "The Devil's Punchbowl: A Novel (Penn Cage Book 3)", "author": "Greg Iles", "description": "Review \"A knockout thriller that's just the right degree of chilly to combat the dog days of summer... Iles' knack for perfectly integrating character and plot could serve as a master's class for other authors.\" -- The Dallas Morning News About the Author Greg Iles was born in 1960 in Germany, where his father ran the US Embassy medical clinic during the height of the Cold War. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1983, he performed for several years with the rock band Frankly Scarlet and is a member of the lit-rock group The Rock Bottom Remainders. He is the author of sixteen New York Times bestselling novels and known for his Penn Cage series, the latest of which is Southern Man . He lives in Natchez, Mississippi. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Patrick Anderson There is a lot going on in Greg Iles's third novel featuring Penn Cage, the mayor of Natchez, Miss., but finally it's a story about evil. Cage, a lawyer and successful novelist, has run for mayor of his home town to save it from troubles that he believes are largely caused by de facto school segregation. His challenge grows even greater when he confronts two Irishmen who run one of the floating gambling casinos that have done much to rejuvenate the Mississippi economy. Their boat, the Magnolia Queen, makes available illegal drugs, teenage prostitutes and dogfights to attract high rollers from out of state. When Cage tries to stop them, he finds that these two psychopaths will gladly murder, rape, torture, bribe and kidnap to maintain their power. Some readers may toss the novel aside because of its scenes of horrific violence. Others will tolerate the violence because Iles is a talented writer who puts the horror in a believable context. Penn Cage is a solid portrait of a good man trying to do a hard job for a city he loves: \"For sheer beauty Natchez is unmatched along the length of the river; with its commanding site above the river Mississippi it surpasses even New Orleans, and one would have to travel to Charleston or Savannah to find comparable architecture.\" Iles gives us a good sense of the city and the woes of being its mayor. Cage is also a widower trying to raise a beloved 11-year-old daughter. But everything he has accomplished, personally and politically, is imperiled by the two corrupt gamblers. At the outset, a friend who works at the gambling casino tells Cage of illegality aboard the ship -- and in the wooded hideaways where dogfights are staged -- and soon that friend has been mauled to death by dogs. When Cage sets out to investigate the charges, the two gangsters visit his home. They come armed with guns, knives and a well-trained bully kutta, a Pakistani breed celebrated for its size, strength and fearlessness. The gangsters tell Cage that unless he does exactly as they say, they will not only murder him, they'll kill his daughter, parents and friends. Cage pretends to go along, but of course he intends to bring down the two, aided by some lethal friends in the world of private security. The rest of the novel details a gripping, often frightening clash between good and evil. Evil seems to have the upper hand. We see an all-too-graphic dogfight and learn that the villains grab household pets off the streets to provide snacks for their pit bulls. We see women suffer in agonizing detail, among them a good-hearted but penniless stripper who goes to work on the casino ship only to be subjected to rape, torture and the threat of an attack by hungry dogs. These killer dogs are prominent in the novel, if only as tools used by despicable men. Even more awful creatures, alligators, also play a role -- they are the reptilian equivalent of the two villains. Cage tells us that \"there's no sight quite like the dozens of red eyes hovering just above water level among the twisted cypress trunks\" of the Mississippi. Early in the novel, Cage's journalist girlfriend argues that the villains must be brought to trial, not assassinated. Later, after she has suffered a great deal, Iles contrives to put her in a boat at night with one of her tormentors -- sadist, rapist, murderer -- and to give her the option of having him thrown to the waiting alligators. It's a gripping scene but not a pretty one. Unless you're an alligator. Iles's writing held my interest even as I began to think he was moving past a serious look at depravity in favor of an exercise in cheap thrills. It's an old problem. Evil is a legitimate subject for fiction, but at what point, in relating horrors, particularly horrors against women, is the writer simply pandering? \"The Devil's Punchbowl\" is not without merit, but it's hard to think many women could read it with pleasure; and, even for us insensitive males, a strong stomach is useful. Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Bestseller Iles's stellar third suspense novel to feature Penn Cage (after Turning Angel ) finds the former prosecutor and bestselling novelist serving as the mayor of Natchez, Miss., his hometown. Frustrated by his limited ability to change the system, Cage is plunged into a deadly duel of wits with some bad guys after a childhood friend, Tim Jessup, now a card dealer, alerts him to illegal dog fighting and sexual abuse connected with a floating casino. Before Jessup can deliver proof of his allegations, he's tortured and killed. Convinced Jessup managed to pass on the evidence to the mayor, Jessup's boss confronts and threatens Cage. Daniel Kelly, an old friend working for a private security organization, lends support, sneaking Cage's 11-year-old daughter out of town to safety. Iles brilliantly creates opportunities for his characters to demonstrate principle and courage, both on a large and small scale, making this much more than just an exciting read. (July) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Author Greg Iles is the author of thirteen New York Times bestselling novels, including Third Degree , True Evil , Turning Angel , Blood Memory , and The Footprints of God. He lives in Natchez, Mississippi. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Devil\u2019s Punchbowl CHAPTER 1 Midnight in the garden of the dead. A silver-white moon hangs high over the mirror-black river and the tired levee, shedding cold light on the Louisiana delta stretching off toward Texas. I stand among the luminous stones on the Mississippi side, shivering like the only living man for miles. At my feet lies a stark slab of granite, and under that stone lies the body of my wife. The monument at its head reads:SARAH ELIZABETH CAGE 1963\u20131998 Daughter. Wife. Mother. Teacher. She is loved.I haven\u2019t sneaked into the cemetery at midnight to visit my wife\u2019s grave. I\u2019ve come at the urgent request of a friend. But I didn\u2019t come here for the sake of friendship. I came out of guilt. And fear. The man I\u2019m waiting for is forty-five years old, yet in my mind he will always be nine. That\u2019s when our friendship peaked, during the Apollo 11 moon landing. But you don\u2019t often make friends like those you make as a boy, so the debt is a long one. My guilt is the kind you feel when someone slips away and you don\u2019t do enough to maintain the tie, all the more painful because over the years Tim Jes sup managed to get himself into quite a bit of trouble, and after the first eight or nine times, I wasn\u2019t there to get him out of it. My fear has nothing to do with Tim; he\u2019s merely a messenger, one who may bear tidings I have no wish to hear. News that confirms the rumors being murmured over golf greens at the country club, bellowed between plays beside high school gridirons, and whispered through the hunting camps like a rising breeze before a storm. When Jessup asked to meet me, I resisted. He couldn\u2019t have chosen a worse time to discover a conscience, for me or for the city. Yet in the end I agreed to hear him out. For if the rumors are true\u2014if a uniquely disturbing evil has entered into my town\u2014it was I who opened the door for it. I ran for mayor in a Jeffersonian fit of duty to save my hometown and, in my righteousness, was arrogant enough to believe I could deal with the devil and somehow keep our collective virtue intact. But that, I\u2019m afraid, was wishful thinking. For months now, a sense of failure has been accreting in my chest like fibrous tissue. I\u2019ve rarely failed at anything, and I have never quit. Most Americans are raised never to give up, and in the South that credo is practically a religion. But two years ago I stood before my wife\u2019s grave with a full heart and the belief that I could by force of will resurrect the idyllic town that had borne me, by closing the racial wounds that had prevented it from becoming the shining beacon I knew it could be, and bringing back the prosperity it deserved. Halfway through my four-year term, I\u2019ve learned that most people don\u2019t want change, even when it\u2019s in their best interest. We pay lip service to ideals, but we live by expediency and by tribal prejudice. Accepting this hypocrisy has nearly broken me. Sadly, the people closest to me saw this coming long ago. My father and my lover at the time tried to save me from myself, but I would not be swayed. The heaviest burden I bear is knowing that my daughter has paid the highest price for my illusions. Two years ago, I imagined I heard my dead wife\u2019s voice urging me onward. Now all I hear is the empty rush of the wind, whispering the lesson so many have learned before me: You can\u2019t go home again. My watch reads 12:30 a.m. Thirty minutes past the appointed hour, and there\u2019s still no sign of Tim Jessup among the shoulder-high stones between me and Cemetery Road. With a silent farewell to my wife, I turn and slip between the monuments, working my way back up toward Jewish Hill, our rendezvous point. My feet make no sound in the dewy, manicured grass. The names chiseled on these stones I\u2019ve known all my life. They are the town\u2019s history, and mine: Friedler and Jacobs and Dreyfus up on Jewish Hill, whose stones read Bohemia, Bavaria, Alsace; the Knoxes and Henrys and Thornhills in the Protestant sections; and finally the Donnellys and Binellis and O\u2019Banyons back on Catholic Hill. Most of the corpses in this place had white skin when they were alive, but as in life, the truth here is found at the margins. In the areas marked \u201cColored Ground\u201d on the cemetery map lie the trusted servants and favored slaves who lived at the margins of the white world and earned a patch of hallowed earth in death. Most of these were interred without a marker. You have to go farther down the road, to the national cemetery, to find the graves of truly free black people, many of them soldiers who lie among the twenty-eight hundred unknown Union dead. Yet this cemetery breathes an older history. Some people buried here were born in the mid-1700s, and if they were resurrected tomorrow, parts of the town would not look much different to them. Infants who died of yellow fever lie beside Spanish dons and forgotten generals, all moldering beneath crying angels and marble saints, while the gnarled oak branches spread ever wider above them, draped with cinematic beards of Spanish moss. Natchez is the oldest city on the Mississippi River, older even than New Orleans, and when you see the dark, tilted gravestones disappearing into the edges of the forest, you know it. I last came here to view a million dollars in damage wreaked by drunk vandals on the irreplaceable wrought iron and statuary that make this cemetery unique. Now all four gates are chained shut at dusk. Tim Jessup knows that; it\u2019s one reason he chose this trysting place. When Jessup first called, I thought he was proposing the cemetery for his convenience; he works on one of the riverboat casinos at the foot of the bluff\u2014the Magnolia Queen, moored almost directly below Jewish Hill\u2014and midnight marks the end of his shift. But Tim insisted that the cemetery\u2019s isolation was a necessity, for me as much as for him. Swore, in fact, that I could trust neither my own police department nor any official of the city government. He also made me promise not to call his cell phone or his home for any reason. Part of me considers his claims ridiculous, but a warier clump of brain cells knows from experience that corruption can run deep. I was a lawyer in another life\u2014a prosecutor. I started out wanting to be Atticus Finch and ended up sending sixteen people to death row. Looking back, I\u2019m not sure how that happened. One day, I simply woke up and realized that I had not been divinely ordained to punish the guilty. So I resigned my position with the Houston district attorney\u2019s office and went home to my joyous wife and daughter. Uncertain what to do with my newfound surplus of time (and facing an acute shortage of funds), I began writing about my courtroom experiences and, like a few other lawyers slipstreaming in the wake of John Grisham, found myself selling enough books to place my name on the bestseller lists. We bought a bigger house and moved Annie to an elite prep school. An unfamiliar sense of self-satisfaction began to creep into my life, a feeling that I was one of the chosen, destined for success in whatever field I chose. I had an enviable career, a wonderful family, a few good friends, lots of faithful readers. I was young enough and arrogant enough to believe that I deserved all this, and foolish enough to think it would last. Then my wife died. Four months after my father diagnosed Sarah with cancer, we buried her. The shock of losing her almost broke me, and it shattered my four-year-old daughter. In desperation I fled Houston, taking Annie back to the small Mississippi town where I\u2019d been raised, back to the loving arms of my parents. There\u2014here\u2014before I could begin working my way back to earth, I found myself drawn into a thirty-year-old murder case, one that ultimately saved my life and ended four others. That was seven years ago. Annie\u2019s eleven now, and almost the reincarnation of her mother. She\u2019s sleeping at home while a babysitter waits in my living room, and remembering this I decide that Tim Jessup gets exactly five more minutes of my time. If he can\u2019t make his own midnight meeting, he can damn well come to City Hall during business hours, like everybody else. My heart labors from climbing the nearly vertical face of Jewish Hill, but each breath brings the magical scent of sweet olive, still blooming in mid-October. Under the sweet olive simmers a roux of thicker smells: kudzu and damp humus and something dead in the trees\u2014maybe a gut-shot deer that evaded its shortsighted poacher. When I reach the edge of the table of earth that is Jewish Hill, the land and sky fall away before me with breathtaking suddenness. The drop to the river is two hundred feet here, down a kudzu-strangled bluff of windblown loess\u2014rich soil made from rock ground fine by glaciers\u2014the foundation of our city. From this height you can look west over endless flatland with almost intoxicating pride, and I think that feeling is what made so many nations try to claim this land. France, Spain, England, the Confederacy: all tried to hold this earth, and all failed as surely as the Natchez Indians before them. A sagging wire bench still stands beneath an American flag at the western rim of the hill, awaiting mourners, lovers, and all the rest who come here; it looks like the best place to spend Tim\u2019s last four minutes. As I sit, a pair of headlights moves up Cemetery Road like a ship beating against the wind, tacking back and forth across the lane that winds along the edge of the bluff. I stand, but the headlights do not slow, and soon a nondescript pickup truck rattles past the shotgun shacks across the road and vanishes around the next bend, headed toward the Devil\u2019s Punchbowl, a deep defile out in the county where Natchez Trace outlaws once dumped the corpses of their victims. \u201cThat\u2019s it, Timmy,\u201d I say aloud. \u201cTime\u2019s up.\u201d The wind off the river has finally found its way into my jacket. I\u2019m cold, tired, and ready to go to bed. The next three days will be the busiest of my year as mayor, beginning with a news conference and a helicopter flight in the morning. But after those three days are up\u2026I\u2019m going to make some profound changes in my life. Rising from the bench, I walk to my right, toward a gentler slope of the hill, where my old Saab waits beyond the cemetery wall. As I bend to slide down the hill, an urgent whisper breaks the silence of the night: \u201cHey. Dude? Are you up here?\u201d A shadow is advancing along the rim of Jewish Hill from the interior of the graveyard. From my vantage point, I can see all four entrances to the cemetery, but I\u2019ve seen no headlights and heard no engine. Yet here is Tim Jessup, materializing like one of the ghosts so many people believe haunt this ancient hill. I know it\u2019s Tim because he used to be a junkie, and he still moves like one, with a herky-jerky progress during which his head perpetually jiggers around as though he\u2019s watching for police while his thin legs carry him forward in the hope of finding his next fix. Jessup claims to be clean now, thanks largely to his new wife, Julia, who was three years behind us in high school. Julia Stanton married the high school quarterback at nineteen and took five years of punishment before forfeiting that particular game. When I heard she was marrying Jessup, I figured she wanted a perfect record of losses. But the word around town is that she\u2019s worked wonders with Tim. She got him a job and has kept him at it for over a year, dealing blackjack on the casino boats, most recently the Magnolia Queen. \u201cPenn!\u201d Jessup finally calls out loud. \u201cIt\u2019s me, man. Come out!\u201d The gauntness of his face is unmistakable in the moonlight. Though he and I are the same age\u2014born exactly one month apart\u2014he looks ten years older. His skin has the leathery texture of a man who\u2019s worked too many years under the Mississippi sun. Passing him on the street under that sun, I\u2019ve seen more disturbing signs. His graying mustache is streaked yellow from cigarette smoke, and his skin and eyes have the jaundiced cast of those of a man whose liver hasn\u2019t many years left in it. What bound Jessup and me tightly as boys was that we were both doctors\u2019 sons. We each understood the weight of that special burden, the way preachers\u2019 sons know that emotional topography. Having a physician as a father brings benefits and burdens, but for eldest sons it brings a universal expectation that someday you\u2019ll follow in your father\u2019s footsteps. In the end both Tim and I failed to fulfill this, but in very different ways. Seeing him closer now, turning haplessly in the dark, it\u2019s hard to imagine that we started our lives in almost the same place. That\u2019s probably the root of my guilt: For though Tim Jessup made a lifetime of bad decisions\u2014in full knowledge of the risks\u2014the one that set them all in train could have been, and in fact was, made by many of us. Only luck carried the rest of us through. With a sigh of resignation, I step from behind the gravestone and call toward the river, \u201cTim? Hey, Tim. It\u2019s Penn.\u201d Jessup whips his head around, and his right hand darts toward his pocket. For a panicked second I fear he\u2019s going to pull a pistol, but then he recognizes me, and his eyes widen with relief. \u201cMan!\u201d he says with a grin. \u201cAt first I thought you\u2019d chickened out. I mean, shit.\u201d As he shakes my hand, I marvel that at forty-five Jessup still sounds like a strung-out hippie. \u201cYou\u2019re the one who\u2019s late, aren\u2019t you?\u201d He nods more times than necessary, a man who\u2019ll do anything to keep from being still. How does this guy deal blackjack all night? \u201cI couldn\u2019t rush off the boat,\u201d he explains. \u201cI think they\u2019re watching me. I mean, they\u2019re always watching us. Everybody. But I think maybe they suspect something.\u201d I want to ask whom he\u2019s talking about, but I assume he\u2019ll get to that. \u201cI didn\u2019t see your car. Where\u2019d you come from?\u201d A cagey smile splits the weathered face. \u201cI got ways, man. You got to be careful dealing with this class of people. Predators, I kid you not. They sense a threat, they react\u2014bam!\u201d Tim claps his hands together. \u201cPure instinct. Like sharks in the water.\u201d He glances back toward town. \u201cIn fact, we ought to get behind some cover now.\u201d He gestures toward the three-foot-high masonry walls that enclose a nearby family plot. \u201cJust like high school, man. Remember smoking grass behind these walls? Sitting down so the cops couldn\u2019t see the glow of the roach?\u201d I never got high with Tim during high school, but I see no reason to break whatever flow keeps him calm and talking. The sooner he tells me what he came to say, the sooner I can get out of here. He vaults the wall with surprising agility, and I step over it after him, recalling with a chill the one memory of this place that I associate with Tim. Late one Halloween night a half dozen boys tossed our banana bikes over the wall and rode wildly through the narrow lanes, laughing hysterically until a pack of wild dogs chased us up into the oak trees near the third gate. Does Tim remember that? With a last anxious look up Cemetery Road, he sits on the damp ground and leans against the mossy bricks in a corner where two walls meet. I sit against the adjacent wall, facing him at a right angle, my running shoes almost touching his weathered Sperrys. Only now do I realize that he must have changed clothes after work. The dealer\u2019s uniform he usually wears on duty has been replaced by black jeans and a gray T-shirt. \u201cCouldn\u2019t come out here dressed for work,\u201d he says, as though reading my mind. What he actually read, I realize, was my appraising glance. Clearly, all the drugs he\u2019s ingested over the years haven\u2019t yet ruined what always was a sharp mind. I decide to dispense with small talk. \u201cYou said some pretty scary things on the phone. Scary enough to bring me out here at this hour.\u201d He nods, digging in his pocket for something that turns out to be a bent cigarette. \u201cCan\u2019t risk lighting it,\u201d he says, putting it between his lips, \u201cbut it\u2019s good to know I got it for the ride home.\u201d He grins once more before putting on a serious face. \u201cSo, what had you heard before I called?\u201d I don\u2019t want to repeat anything Tim hasn\u2019t already heard or seen himself. \u201cVague rumors. Celebrities flying in to gamble, in and out fast. Pro athletes, rappers, like that. People who wouldn\u2019t normally come here.\u201d \u201cYou hear about the dogfighting?\u201d My hope that the rumors are false is sinking fast. \u201cI\u2019ve heard there\u2019s some of that going on. But it was hard to credit. I mean, I can see some rednecks down in the bottoms doing it, or out in the parishes across the river, but not high rollers and celebrities.\u201d Tim sucks in his bottom lip. \u201cWhat else?\u201d This time I don\u2019t answer. I\u2019ve heard other rumors\u2014that prostitution and hard drugs are flourishing around the gambling trade, for example\u2014but these plagues have been with us always. \u201cLook, I don\u2019t want to speculate about things I don\u2019t know to be true.\u201d \u201cYou sound like a fucking politician, man.\u201d I suppose that\u2019s what I\u2019ve become, but I feel more like an attorney sifting the truth from an unreliable client\u2019s story. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you just tell me what you know? Then I\u2019ll tell you how that fits with what I\u2019ve heard.\u201d Looking more anxious by the second, Jessup gives in to his nicotine urge at last. He produces a Bic lighter, which he flicks into flame and touches to the end of the cigarette, drawing air through the paper tube like someone sucking on a three-foot bong. He holds in the smoke for an alarming amount of time, then speaks as he exhales. \u201cYou hear I got a kid now? A son.\u201d \u201cYeah, I saw him with Julia at the Piggly Wiggly a couple of weeks ago. He\u2019s a great-looking boy.\u201d Tim\u2019s smile lights up his face. \u201cJust like his mom, man. She\u2019s still a beauty, isn\u2019t she?\u201d \u201cShe is,\u201d I concur, speaking the truth. \u201cSo\u2026what are we doing here, Timmy?\u201d He still doesn\u2019t reply. He takes another long drag, cupping the cigarette like a joint. As I watch him, I realize that his hands are shak ing, and not from the cold. His whole body has begun to shiver, and for the first time I worry that he\u2019s started using again. \u201cTim?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not what you think, bro. I\u2019ve just been carrying this stuff around in my head for a while, and sometimes I get the shakes.\u201d He\u2019s crying, I realize with amazement. He\u2019s wiping tears from his eyes. I squeeze his knee to comfort him. \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d he whispers. \u201cWe\u2019re a long way from Mill Pond Road, aren\u2019t we?\u201d Mill Pond Road is the street I grew up on. \u201cWe sure are. Are you okay?\u201d He stubs out his cigarette on a gravestone and leans forward, his eyes burning with passion I thought long gone from him. \u201cIf I tell you more, there\u2019s no going back. You understand? I tell you what I know, you won\u2019t be able to sleep. I know you. You\u2019ll be like a pit bull yourself. You won\u2019t let it go.\u201d \u201cIsn\u2019t that why you asked me here?\u201d Jessup shrugs, his head and hands jittery again. \u201cI\u2019m just telling you, Penn. You want to walk away, do it now. Climb over that wall and slide back down to your car. That\u2019s what a smart man would do.\u201d I settle against the cold bricks and consider what I\u2019ve heard. This is one of the ways fate comes for you. It can swoop darkly from a cloudless sky like my wife\u2019s cancer; or it can lie waiting in your path, obvious to any eyes willing to see it. But sometimes it\u2019s simply a fork in the road, and rare is the day that a friend stands beside it, offering you the safer path. It\u2019s the oldest human choice: comfortable ignorance or knowledge bought with pain? I can almost hear Tim at his blackjack table on the Magnolia Queen: \u201cHit or stay, sir?\u201d If only I had a real choice. But because I helped bring the Queen to Natchez, I don\u2019t. \u201cLet\u2019s hear it, Timmy. I don\u2019t have all night.\u201d Jessup closes his eyes and crosses himself. \u201cPraise God,\u201d he breathes. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I would have done if you\u2019d walked away. I\u2019m way out on a limb here, man. And I\u2019m totally alone.\u201d I give him a forced smile. \u201cLet\u2019s hope my added weight doesn\u2019t break it off.\u201d He takes a long look at me, then shifts his weight to raise one hip and slides something from his back pocket. It looks like a couple of playing cards. He holds them out, palm down, the cards mostly concealed beneath his fingers. \u201cPick a card?\u201d I ask. \u201cThey\u2019re not cards. They\u2019re pictures. They\u2019re kind of blurry. Shot with a cell phone.\u201d With a sigh of resignation I reach out and take them from his hand. I\u2019ve viewed thousands of crime-scene photos in microscopic detail, so I don\u2019t expect to be shocked by whatever Tim Jessup has brought in his back pocket. But when he flicks his lighter into flame and holds it over the first photo, a wasplike buzzing begins in my head, and my stomach does a slow roll. \u201cI know,\u201d he says quietly. \u201cKeep going. It gets worse.\u201d --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0545417996", "title": "Son of Slappy (Goosebumps Most Wanted #2) (2)", "author": "R. L. Stine", "description": "Review Praise for GOOSEBUMPS WANTED: THE HAUNTED MASK\"...this book offers a great opportunity to rediscover what makes Stine so special: his swift characterizations, icky ideas, and prose that offers the exact right amount of cover-your-eyes detail.\" -Booklist\"Pure, Goosebumps\u2013style terror-by-formula, polished through use to such a high gloss that it slides along frictionlessly\u2013a worthy celebration of the series' 20th anniversary.\" -Kirkus Reviews About the Author R.L. Stine is the creator of the bestselling Goosebumps series, which has more than 400 million copies in print worldwide and celebrated 25 years in 2017. Goosebumps is one of the bestselling children's series of all-time and inspired a popular television show, as well as a feature film starring Jack Black that opened at #1 at the box office. His other popular children's books include the series Fear Street, Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room, and Rotten School, and his picture books, with Marc Brown, The Little Shop of Monsters and Mary McScary . R.L. Stine lives in New York City. You can connect with him on Twitter at @RL_Stine or Facebook: facebook.com/rlstine. For more information, visit rlstine.com and scholastic.com/goosebumps. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From GOOSEBUMPS MOST WANTED #2: SON OF SLAPPYWas that a boy sitting on the edge of the front porch? He sat stiffly. His skinny legs were crossed. He was dressed in red and wore red shoes. His black hair gleamed in the sunlight. He didn't move as we walked toward him. He just stared at us with a big grin on his face.\"Who is that?\" Rachel asked.We took a few steps closer. I laughed. It wasn't a boy. It was some kind of big doll.We stepped up to the front porch. \"It's a ventriloquist dummy,\" I said. \"Weird,\" Rachel murmured, staring down at its grinning face. \"Why is it sitting here on the porch?\"\"Beats me.\" I made a fist and tapped the top of its wooden head. \"Hey, dummy.\"\"Owww!\" it cried. \"Don't do that!\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "1305641426", "title": "Well Said Intro (Well Said, New Edition) - Standalone book", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Linda has pursued her interest in first and second language pronunciation for over forty years. She has taught ESL students at Georgia Tech, international teaching assistants at Emory University, and graduate students in applied linguistics at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her special interests are applying pronunciation research to practice and integrating pronunciation into the oral communication curriculum. She is the author of two pronunciation texts, Well Said and Well Said Intro (National Geographic Cengage) and the editor of the teacher resource volume Pronunciation Myths (University of Michigan Press).Eve Einselen Yu has been in the field of English Language Teaching and Linguistics for twenty years. She fell in love with the field as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Slovak Republic. Since then, she has taught students of all levels and ages in Hiroshima, Japan; Semarang, Indonesia; and New York City. She has also taught future teachers of English at Hunter College and in Central Java. Eve has developed or written both print and digital ELT content for over eight years.", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Words, Language & Grammar"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "1439102813", "title": "Still Alice", "author": "Lisa Genova", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Neuroscientist and debut novelist Genova mines years of experience in her field to craft a realistic portrait of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice Howland has a career not unlike Genova's\u2014she's an esteemed psychology professor at Harvard, living a comfortable life in Cambridge with her husband, John, arguing about the usual (making quality time together, their daughter's move to L.A.) when the first symptoms of Alzheimer's begin to emerge. First, Alice can't find her Blackberry, then she becomes hopelessly disoriented in her own town. Alice is shocked to be diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's (she had suspected a brain tumor or menopause), after which her life begins steadily to unravel. She loses track of rooms in her home, resigns from Harvard and eventually cannot recognize her own children. The brutal facts of Alzheimer's are heartbreaking, and it's impossible not to feel for Alice and her loved ones, but Genova's prose style is clumsy and her dialogue heavy-handed. This novel will appeal to those dealing with the disease and may prove helpful, but beyond the heartbreaking record of illness there's little here to remember. (Jan.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \"Heartbreakingly real.... So real, in fact, that it kept me from sleeping for several nights. I couldn't put it down.... Still Alice is a story that must be told.\" -- Brunonia Barry, New York Times bestselling author of The Lace Reader \"After I read Still Alice , I wanted to stand up and tell a train full of strangers, 'You have to get this book.'\" -- Beverly Beckham, The Boston Globe \"This book is as important as it is impressive, and will grace the lives of those affected by this dread disease for generations to come.\" -- Phil Bolsta, author of Sixty Seconds \"With a master storyteller's easy eloquence, Lisa Genova shines a searing spotlight on this Alice's surreal wonderland. You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to read this book. It will inform you. It will scare you. It will change you.\" -- Julia Fox Garrison, author of Don't Leave Me This Way \"A work of pure genius.\" -- Charley Schneider, author of Don't Bury Me, It Ain't Over Yet \"A masterpiece that will touch lives in ways none of us can even imagine. This book is the best portrayal of the Alzheimer's journey that I have read.\" -- Mark Warner, Alzheimer's Daily News \"With grace and compassion, Lisa Genova writes about the enormous white emptiness created by Alzheimer's.\" -- The Improper Bostonian \"Heartbreaking.\" -- The Cape Cod Chronicle \u201cBecause the full, internal experience of Alzheimer\u2019s is an account that fiction alone can deliver, it\u2019s no surprise that the go-to book for caretakers and early-stage sufferers is a novel. \u201cStill Alice,\u201d written by the neuroscientist Lisa Genova, offers a crisp, straightforward, and wrenching depiction of the fifty-year-old Harvard professor Alice Howland\u2019s descent into the swift, early-onset form of the disease.\u201d \u2015 The New Yorker, \"A Place Beyond Words: The Literature of Alzheimer\" From the Back Cover Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman's sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer's disease, written by Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph. D in neuroscience from Harvard University. Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind... Reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind, Ordinary People and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Still Alice packs a powerful emotional punch and marks the arrival of a strong new voice in fiction.0914875566\\\\In the early 20th century, herbs were commonly used in the home for treating conditions that did not require a doctor\u2019s care. Joseph Meyer devoted his life to providing herbs and information to people all across the country, earning him the title of the Old Herb Doctor.Many readers of Meyer\u2019s Herbalist Almanac were inspired to send letters praising his herbs and treatments, claiming miraculous cures, and sharing their own remedies. Those letters were collected to create The Old Herb Doctor.Herbal remedies have once again risen in popularity and widespread use. The Old Herb Doctor details the way Americans used medicinal herbs in the 1920s and \u201930s and is a must for those interested in herbal medicine and natural cures. About the Author Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, Lisa Genova is the New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice , Left Neglected , Love Anthony , Inside the O\u2019Briens , and Remember . Still Alice was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, and Kristen Stewart. Lisa graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. She travels worldwide speaking about the neurological diseases she writes about and has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show , Today , PBS NewsHour , CNN, and NPR. Her TED talk, What You Can Do To Prevent Alzheimer's, has been viewed over 2 million times. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Still Alice By Lisa Genova Pocket Copyright \u00a9 2009 Lisa GenovaAll right reserved. ISBN: 9781439102817 SEPTEMBER 2003 Alice sat at her desk in their bedroom distracted by the sounds of John racing through each of the rooms on the first floor. She needed to finish her peer review of a paper submitted to the Journal of Cognitive Psychology before her flight, and she'd just read the same sentence three times without comprehending it. It was 7:30 according to their alarm clock, which she guessed was about ten minutes fast. She knew from the approximate time and the escalating volume of his racing that he was trying to leave, but he'd forgotten something and couldn't find it. She tapped her red pen on her bottom lip as she watched the digital numbers on the clock and listened for what she knew was coming. \"Ali?\" She tossed her pen onto the desk and sighed. Downstairs, she found him in the living room on his knees, feeling under the couch cushions. \"Keys?\" she asked. \"Glasses. Please don't lecture me, I'm late.\" She followed his frantic glance to the fireplace mantle where the antique Waltham clock, valued for its precision, declared 8:00. He should have known better than to trust it. The clocks in their home rarely knew the real time of day. Alice had been duped too often in the past by their seemingly honest faces and had learned long ago to rely on her watch. Sure enough, she lapsed back in time as she entered the kitchen, where the microwave insisted that it was only 6:52. She looked across the smooth, uncluttered surface of the granite countertop, and there they were, next to the mushroom bowl heaping with unopened mail. Not under something, not behind something, not obstructed in any way from plain view. How could he, someone so smart, a scientist, not see what was right in front of him? Of course, many of her own things had taken to hiding in mischievous, little places as well. But she didn't admit this to him, and she didn't involve him in the hunt. Just the other day, John blissfully unaware, she'd spent a crazed morning looking first all over the house and then in her office for her Blackberry charger. Stumped, she'd surrendered, gone to the store, and bought a new one, only to discover it later that night plugged in the socket next to her side of the bed, where she should have known to look. She could probably chalk it all up for both of them to excessive multitasking and being way too busy. And to getting older. He stood in the doorway, looking at the glasses in her hand, but not at her. \"Next time, try pretending you're a woman while you look,\" said Alice, smiling. \"I'll wear one of your skirts. Ali, please, I'm really late.\" \"The microwave says you have tons of time,\" she said, handing them to him. \"Thanks.\" He grabbed them like a relay runner taking a baton in a race and headed for the front door. \"Will you be home when I get back on Saturday?\" she asked his back as she followed him down the hallway. \"I don't know, I've got a huge day in lab on Saturday.\" He collected his briefcase, phone, and keys from the hall table. \"Have a good trip, give Lydia a hug and kiss for me. And try not to battle with her,\" said John. She caught their reflection in the hallway mirror -- -a distinguished-looking, tall man with white-flecked brown hair and glasses, a petite, curly-haired woman, her arms crossed over her chest, each readying to leap into that same, bottomless argument. She gritted her teeth and swallowed, choosing not to jump. \"We haven't seen each other in a while, please try to be home?\" she asked. \"I know, I'll try.\" He kissed her, and although desperate to leave, he lingered in that kiss for an almost imperceptible moment. If she didn't know him better, she might've romanticized his kiss. She might've stood there, hopeful, thinking it said, I love you, I'll miss you . But as she watched him hustle down the street alone, she felt pretty certain he'd just told her, I love you, but please don't be pissed when I'm not home on Saturday . They used to walk together over to Harvard Yard every morning. Of the many things she loved about working within a mile from home and at the same school, their shared commute was the thing she loved most. They always stopped at Jerri's--a black coffee for him, a tea with lemon for her, iced or hot, depending on the season--and continued on to Harvard Square, chatting about their research and classes, issues in their respective departments, their children, or plans for that evening. When they were first married, they even held hands. She savored the relaxed intimacy of these morning walks with him, before the daily demands of their jobs and ambitions rendered them each stressed and exhausted. But for some time now, they'd been walking over to Harvard separately. Alice had been living out of her suitcase all summer, attending psychology conferences in Rome, New Orleans, and Miami, and serving on an exam committee for a thesis defense at Princeton. Back in the spring, John's cell cultures had needed some sort of rinsing attention at an obscene hour each morning, but he didn't trust any of his students to consistently show up. So he did. She couldn't remember the reasons that predated spring, but she knew that each time they'd seemed reasonable and only temporary. She returned to the paper at her desk, still distracted, now by a craving for that fight she didn't have with John about their youngest daughter, Lydia. Would it kill him to stand behind her for once? She gave the rest of the paper a cursory effort, not her typical standard of excellence, but it would have to do, given her fragmented state of mind and lack of time. Her comments and suggestions for revision finished, she packaged and sealed the envelope, guiltily aware that she might've missed an error in the study's design or interpretation, cursing John for compromising the integrity of her work. She repacked her suitcase, not even emptied yet from her last trip. She looked forward to traveling less in the coming months. There were only a handful of invited lectures penciled in her fall semester calendar, and she scheduled most of those on Fridays, a day she didn't teach. Like tomorrow. Tomorrow she would be the guest speaker to kick off Stanford's cognitive psychology fall colloquium series. And afterward, she'd see Lydia. She'd try not to battle with her, but she wasn't making any promises. Alice found her way easily to Stanford's Cordura Hall on the corner of Campus Drive West and Panama Drive. Its concrete, white stucco exterior, terra cotta roof, and lush landscaping looked to her East Coast eyes more like a Caribbean beach resort than an academic building. She arrived quite early but ventured inside anyway, figuring she could use the extra time to sit in the quiet auditorium and look over her talk. Much to her surprise, she walked into an already packed room. A zealous crowd surrounded and circled a buffet table, aggressively diving in for food like seagulls at a city beach. Before she could sneak in unnoticed, she noticed Josh, a former Harvard classmate and respected egomaniac, standing in her path, his legs planted firmly and a little too wide, like he was ready to dive at her. \"All this, for me?\" asked Alice, smiling playfully. \"What, we eat like this every day. It's for one of our developmental psychologists, he was tenured yesterday. So how's Harvard treating you?\" \"Good.\" \"I can't believe you're still there after all these years. You ever get too bored over there, you should consider coming here.\" \"I'll let you know. How are things with you?\" \"Fantastic. You should come by my office after the talk, see our latest modeling data. It'll really knock your socks off.\" \"Sorry, I can't, I have to catch a flight to LA right after this,\" she said, grateful to have a ready excuse. \"Oh, too bad. Last time I saw you I think was last year at the Psychonomic Conference. I unfortunately missed your presentation.\" \"Well, you'll get to hear a good portion of it today.\" \"Recycling your talks these days, huh?\" Before she could answer, Gordon Miller, head of the department and her new superhero, swooped in and saved her by asking Josh to help pass out the champagne. Like at Harvard, a champagne toast was a tradition in the psychology department at Stanford for all faculty who reached the coveted career milestone of tenure. There weren't many trumpets that heralded the advancement from point to point in the career of a professor, but tenure was a big one, loud and clear. When everyone was holding a cup, Gordon stood at the podium and tapped the microphone. \"Can I have everyone's attention for a moment?\" Josh's excessively loud, punctated laugh reverberated alone throughout the auditorium just before Gordon continued. \"Today, we congratulate Mark on receiving tenure. I'm sure he's thrilled to have this particular accomplishment behind him. Here's to the many exciting accomplishments still ahead. To Mark!\" \"To Mark!\" Alice tapped her cup with her neighbors, and everyone quickly resumed the business of drinking, eating, and discussing. When all of the food had been claimed from the serving trays and the last drops of champagne emptied from the last bottle, Gordon took the floor once again. \"If everyone would take a seat, we can begin today's talk.\" He waited a few moments for the crowd of about seventy-five to settle and quiet down. \"Today, I have the honor of introducing you to our first colloquium speaker of the year. Dr. Alice Howland is the eminent William James Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Over the last twenty-five years, her distinguished career has produced many of the flagship touchstones in psycholinguistics. She pioneered and continues to lead an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to the study of the mechanisms of language. We are privileged to have her here today to talk to us about the Conceptual and Neural Organization of Language.\" Alice switched places with Gordon and looked out at her audience looking at her. As she waited for the applause to subside, she thought of the statistic that said that people feared public speaking more than they feared death. She loved it. She enjoyed all of the concatenated moments of presenting in front of a listening audience---teaching, performing, telling a story, teeing up a heated debate. She also loved the adrenaline rush. The bigger the stakes, the more sophisticated or hostile the audience, the more the whole experience thrilled her. John was an excellent speaker, but it often pained and terrified him, and he marveled at Alice's verve for it. He probably didn't prefer death, but spiders and snakes, sure. \"Thank you, Gordon. Today, I'm going to talk about some of the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, organization, and use of language.\" Alice had given the guts of this particular talk innumerable times, but she wouldn't call it recycling. The crux of the talk did focus on the main tenets of linguistics, many of which she'd discovered, and she'd been using a number of the same slides for years. But she felt proud, and not ashamed or lazy, that this part of her talk, these discoveries of hers, continued to hold true, withstanding the test of time. Her contributions mattered and propelled future discovery. Plus, she certainly included those future discoveries. She talked without needing to look down at her notes, relaxed and animated, the words effortless. Then, about forty minutes into the fifty-minute presentation, she became suddenly stuck. \"The data reveal that irregular verbs require access to the mental...\" She simply couldn't find the word. She had a loose sense for what she wanted to say, but the word itself eluded her. Gone. She didn't know the first letter or what the word sounded like or how many syllables it had. It wasn't on the tip of her tongue. Maybe it was the champagne. She normally didn't drink any alcohol before speaking. Even if she knew the talk cold, even in the most casual setting, she always wanted to be as mentally sharp as possible, especially for the question and answer session at the end, which could be confrontational and full of rich, unscripted debate. But she didn't wanted to offend anyone, and she drank a little more than she probably should have when she became trapped again in passive aggressive conversation with Josh. Maybe it was jet lag. As her mind scoured its corners for the word and a rational reason as to why she lost it, her heart pounded and her face grew hot. She'd never lost a word in front of an audience before. But she'd also never panicked in front of an audience either, and she'd stood before many far larger and more intimidating than this. She told herself to breath, forget about it, and move on. She replaced the still blocked word with a vague and inappropriate 'thing,' abandoned whatever point she'd been in the middle of making, and continued on to the next slide. The pause had seemed like an obvious and awkward eternity to her, but as she checked the faces in the audience to see if anyone had noticed her mental hiccup, no one appeared alarmed, embarrassed, or ruffled in any way. Then, she saw Josh whispering to the woman next to him, his eyebrows furrowed and a slight smile on his face. She was on the plane, descending into LAX, when it finally came to her. Lexicon . Lydia had been living in Los Angeles for three years now. If she'd gone to college right after high school, she would've graduated this past spring. Alice would've been so proud. Lydia was probably smarter than both of her older siblings, and they had gone to college. And law school. And medical school. Instead of college, Lydia first went to Europe. Alice had hoped she'd come home with a clearer sense of what she wanted to study and what kind of school she wanted to go to. Instead, upon her return, she told her parents that she'd done a little acting while in Dublin and had fallen in love. She was moving to Los Angeles immediately. Alice nearly lost her mind. Much to her own maddening frustration, she recognized her own contribution to this problem. Because Lydia was the youngest of three, the daughter of parents who worked a lot and traveled regularly, and had always been a good student, Alice and John ignored her to a large extent. They granted her a lot of room to run in her world, free to think for herself and from the kind of micromanagement placed on a lot of children her age. Her parents' professional lives served as shining examples of what could be gained from setting lofty and individually unique goals and pursuing them with passion and hard work. Lydia understood her mother's advice about the importance of getting a college education, but she had the confidence and audacity to reject it. Plus, she didn't stand entirely alone. The most explosive fight Alice ever had with John followed his two cents on the subject-- I think it's wonderful, she can always go to college later, if she decides she even wants to . Alice checked her Blackberry for the address, rang the doorbell to apartment number seven, and waited. She was just about to press it again when Lydia opened the door. \"Mom, you're early,\" said Lydia. Alice checked her watch. \"I'm right on time.\" \"You said your flight was coming in at eight.\" \"I said five.\" \"I have eight o'clock written down in my book.\" \"Lydia, it's 5:45, I'm here.\" Lydia looked indecisive and panicky, like a squirrel caught facing an oncoming car in the road. \"Sorry, come in.\" They each hesitated before they hugged, as if they were about to practice a newly learned dance and weren't quite confident of the first step or who should lead. Or it was an old dance, but they hadn't performed it together in so long that they each felt unsure of the choreography. Alice could feel the contours of Lydia's spine and ribs through her shirt. She looked too skinny, a good ten pounds lighter than Alice remembered. She hoped it was more a result of being busy than of conscious dieting. Blonde and five feet six, three inches taller than Alice, Lydia stood out among the predominance of short Italian and Asian women in Cambridge, but in Los Angeles, the waiting rooms at every audition were apparently full of women who looked just like her. \"I made reservations for nine. Wait here, I'll be right back.\" Craning her neck, Alice inspected the kitchen and living room from the hallway. The furnishings, most likely yard sale finds and parent hand-me-downs, looked rather hip together---an orange sectional couch, retro-inspired coffee table, Brady Bunch style kitchen table and chairs. The white walls were bare except for a poster of Marlon Brando taped above the couch. The air smelled strongly of Windex, as if Lydia had probably taken last second measures to clean the place before Alice's arrival. In fact, it was a little too clean. No DVD's or CD's laying around, no books or magazines thrown on the coffee table, no pictures on the refrigerator, no hint of Lydia's interests or aesthetic anywhere. Anyone could be living here. Then, she noticed the pile of men's shoes on the floor to the left of the door behind her. \"Tell me about your roommates,\" said Alice, as Lydia returned from her room, cell phone in hand. \"They're at work.\" \"What kind of work?\" \"One's bartending and the other delivers food.\" \"I thought they were both actors.\" \"They are.\" \"I see. What are their names again?\" \"Doug and Malcolm.\" It flashed only for a moment, but Alice saw it and Lydia saw her see it. Lydia's face flushed when she said Malcolm's name, and her eyes darted nervously away from her mother's. \"Why don't we get going? They said they can take us early,\" said Lydia. \"Okay, I just need to use the bathroom first.\" As Alice washed her hands, she looked over the products sitting on the table next to the sink--Neutrogena facial cleanser and moisturizer, Tom's of Maine mint toothpaste, men's deodorant, a box of Playtex tampons. She thought for a moment. She hadn't had her period all summer. Did she have it in May? She'd be turning fifty next month, so she wasn't alarmed. She hadn't yet experienced any hot flashes or night sweats, but not all menopausal women did. That would be just fine with her. As she dried her hands, she noticed the box of Trojan condoms behind Lydia's hair styling products. She was going to have to find out more about these roommates. Malcolm, in particular. They sat at a table outside on the patio at Ivy, a trendy restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, and ordered two drinks, an espresso martini for Lydia and a merlot for Alice. \"So how's Dad's Science paper coming?\" asked Lydia. She must've talked recently with her father. Alice hadn't heard from her since a phone call on Mother's Day. \"It's done. He's very proud of it.\" \"How's Anna and Tom?\" \"Good, busy, working hard. So how did you meet Doug and Malcolm?\" \"They came into Starbucks one night while I was working.\" The waiter appeared, and they each ordered dinner and another drink. Alice hoped the alcohol would dilute the tension between them, which felt heavy and thick and just beneath the tracing-paper-thin conversation. \"So how did you meet Doug and Malcolm?\" asked Alice. \"I just told you. Why don't you ever listen to anything I say? They came into Starbucks one night talking about looking for a roommate while I was working.\" \"I thought you were waitressing at a restaurant.\" \"I am. I work at Starbucks during the week and waitress on Saturday nights.\" \"Doesn't sound like that leaves a lot of time for acting.\" \"I'm not cast in anything right now, but I'm taking workshop classes, and I'm auditioning a lot.\" \"What kind of classes?\" \"Meisner technique.\" \"And what've you been auditioning for?\" \"Television and print.\" Alice swirled her wine, drank the last, big gulp, and licked her lips. \"Lydia, what exactly is your plan here?\" \"I'm not planning on stopping, if that's what you're asking.\" The drinks were taking effect, but not in the direction Alice had hoped for. Instead, they served as the fuel that burned that little piece of tracing paper, leaving the tension between them fully exposed and at the helm of a dangerously familiar conversation. \"You can't live like this forever. Are you still going to work at Starbucks when you're thirty?\" \"That's eight years away! Do you know what you'll be doing in eight years?\" \"Yes, I do. At some point, you need to be responsible, you need to able to afford things like health insurance, a mortgage, savings for retirement--\" \"I have health insurance. And I might make it as an actor. There are people who do, you know. And they make a hell of a lot more money than you and Dad combined.\" \"This isn't just about money.\" \"Then what? That I didn't become you?\" \"Lower your voice.\" \"Don't tell me what to do.\" \"I don't want you to become me, Lydia. I just don't want you to limit your choices.\" \"You want to make my choices.\" \"No.\" \"This is who I am, this is what I want to do.\" \"What, serving up venti lattes? You should be in college. You should be spending this time in your life learning something.\" \"I am learning something! I'm just not sitting in a Harvard classroom killing myself trying to get an A in political science. I'm in a serious acting class for fifteen hours a week. How many hours of class a week do your students take, twelve?\" \"It's not the same thing.\" \"Well, Dad thinks it is. He's paying for it.\" Alice clenched the sides of her skirt and pressed her lips together. What she wanted to say next wasn't meant for Lydia. \"You've never even seen me act.\" John had. He flew out alone last winter to see her perform in a play. Swamped with too many urgent things at the time, Alice couldn't free up to go. As she looked at Lydia's pained eyes, she couldn't remember now what those urgent things had been. She didn't have anything against an acting career itself, but she believed Lydia's singular pursuit of it, without an education, bordered reckless. If she didn't go to college now, acquire a knowledge base or formal training in some field, if she didn't get a degree, what would she do if acting didn't pan out? She thought about those condoms in the bathroom. What if Lydia got pregnant? Alice worried that Lydia might find herself someday trapped in a life that was unfulfilled, full of regret. She looked at her daughter and saw so much wasted potential, so much wasted time. \"You're not getting any younger, Lydia. Life goes by too fast.\" \"I agree.\" The food came, but neither of them picked up a fork. Lydia dabbed her eyes with her hand-embroidered linen napkin. They always fell into the same battle, and it felt to Alice like trying to knock down a concrete wall with their heads. It was never going to be productive and only resulted in hurting them, causing lasting damage. She wished Lydia could see the love and wisdom in what she wanted for her. She wished she could just reach across the table and hug her, but there were too many dishes, glasses, and years of distance between them. A sudden flurry of activity a few tables away pulled their attention away from themselves. Several camera flashes popped and a small crowd of patrons and wait staff gathered, all focused on a woman who looked a bit like Lydia. \"Who's that?\" asked Alice. \"Mom,\" said Lydia in a tone both embarrassed and superior, perfected at the age of thirteen. \"That's Jennifer Aniston.\" They ate their dinner and talked only of safe things, like the food and the weather. Alice wanted to discover more about Lydia's relationship with Malcolm, but the embers of Lydia's emotions still glowed hot, and Alice feared igniting another fight. She paid the bill, and they left the restaurant, full but dissatisfied. \"Excuse me, ma'am!\" Their waiter caught up to them on the sidewalk. \"You left this.\" Alice paused, trying to comprehend how their waiter might come to possess her Blackberry. She hadn't checked her email or calendar there. She felt inside her bag. No Blackberry. She must've removed it when she fished her wallet out to pay. \"Thank you.\" Lydia looked at her quizzically, as if she wanted to say something about something other than food or weather, but then didn't. They walked back to her apartment in silence. \"John?\" Alice waited, suspended in the front hallway, holding the handle of her suitcase. Harvard Magazine lay on the top of a pile of unclaimed mail strewn on the floor in front of her. The clock in the living room ticked and the refrigerator hummed. A warm, sunny late afternoon at her back, the air inside felt chilly, dim, and stale. Uninhabited. She picked up the mail and walked into the kitchen, her suitcase on wheels accompanying her like a loyal pet. Her flight had been delayed, and she was late getting in, even according to the microwave. He'd had a whole day, a whole Saturday, to work. The red voicemail light on their answering machine stared her down, unblinking. She checked the refrigerator. No note on the door. Nothing. Still clutching the handle of her suitcase, she stood in the dark kitchen and watched several minutes advance on the microwave. The disappointed but forgiving voice in her head faded to a whisper as the volume of a more primal one began to build and spread out. She thought about calling him, but the expanding voice rejected the suggestion outright and refused all excuses. She thought about deciding not to care, but the voice, now seeping down into her body, echoing in her belly, vibrating in each of her fingertips, was too powerful and pervasive to ignore. Why did it bother her so much? He was in the middle of an experiment and couldn't leave it to come home. She'd certainly been in his shoes innumerable times. This was what they did. This was who they were. The voice called her a stupid fool. She spotted her running shoes on the floor next to the back door. A run would make her feel better. That was what she needed. Ideally, she ran every day. For many years now, she treated running like eating or sleeping, as a vital daily necessity, and she'd been known to squeeze in a jog at midnight or in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. But she'd neglected this basic need over the last several months. She'd been so busy. As she laced her shoes, she told herself she hadn't bothered bringing them with her to California because she'd known she wouldn't have the time. In truth, she'd simply forgotten to pack them. When starting from her house on Poplar Street, she invariably followed the same route--down Massachusetts Avenue, through Harvard Square to Memorial Drive, along the Charles River to the Harvard Bridge over by MIT, and back--a little over five miles, a forty-five minute round trip. She had long been attracted to the idea of running in the Boston Marathon but each year decided that she realistically didn't have the time to train for that kind of distance. Maybe some day she would. In excellent physical condition for a woman her age, she imagined running strong well into her sixties. Clustered pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks and intermittent negotiations with car traffic in street intersections littered the first part of her run down Massachusetts Avenue and through Harvard Square. It was crowded and ripe with anticipation at that time of day on a Saturday, with crowds forming and milling around on street corners waiting for walk signals, outside restaurants waiting for tables, in movie theater lines waiting for tickets, and in double-parked cars, waiting for an unlikely opening in a metered space. The first ten minutes of her run required a good deal of conscious external concentration to navigate through it all, but once she crossed Memorial Drive to the Charles River, she was free to run in full stride and completely in the zone. A comfortable and cloudless evening invited a lot of activity along the Charles, yet it felt less congested than the streets of Cambridge. Despite a steady stream of joggers, dogs and their owners, walkers, rollerbladers, cyclists, and women pushing babies in jogger strollers, like an experienced driver on a regularly traveled stretch of road, Alice only retained a vague sense for what went on around her now. As she ran along the river, she became mindful of nothing but the sounds of her Nikes hitting the pavement in syncopated rhythm with the pace of her breath. She didn't replay her argument with Lydia. She didn't acknowledge her growling stomach. She didn't think about John. She just ran. As was her routine, she stopped running once she made it back to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Park, a pocket of manicured lawns abutting Memorial Drive. Her head cleared, her body relaxed and rejuvenated, she began walking home. The JFK Park funneled into Harvard Square through a pleasant, bench-lined corridor between the Charles Hotel and the Kennedy School of Government. Through the corridor, she stood at the intersection of Eliot Street and Brattle, ready to cross, when a woman grabbed her forearm with startling force and said, \"Have you thought about heaven today?\" The woman fixed Alice with a penetrating, unwavering stare. She had long hair the color and texture of a teased Brillo pad and wore a hand-made placard hung over her chest that read AMERICA REPENT, TURN TO JESUS FROM SIN. There was always someone selling God in Harvard Square, but Alice had never been singled out so directly and intimately before. \"Sorry,\" said Alice, and, noticing a break in the flow of traffic, she escaped to the other side of the street. She wanted to continue walking but stood frozen instead. She didn't know where she was. She looked back across the street. The Brillo-haired woman pursued another sinner down the corridor. The corridor, the hotel, the stores, the illogically meandering streets. She knew she was in Harvard Square, but she didn't know which way was home. She tried again, more specifically. The Harvard Hotel, Eastern Mountain Sports, Dickson Brothers Hardware, Mount Auburn Street. She knew all of these places--this square had been her stomping ground for over twenty-five years--but they somehow didn't fit into a mental map that told her where she lived relative to them. A black and white circular \"T\" sign directly in front of her marked an entrance to the Red Line trains and buses underground, but there were four such entrances in Harvard Square, and she couldn't piece together which one of the four this one was. Her heart began to race. She started sweating. She told herself that an accelerated heart rate and perspiration were part of an orchestrated and appropriate response to running. But standing still on the sidewalk, it felt like panic. She willed herself to walk another block and then another, her rubbery legs feeling like they might give way with each bewildered step. The Coop, Cardullo's, the magazines on the corner, the Cambridge Visitor Center across the street, and Harvard Yard beyond that. She told herself she could still read and recognize. None of it helped. It all lacked a context. People, cars, buses, and all kinds of unbearable noise rushed and wove around and past her. She closed her eyes. She listened to her own blood whoosh and pulse behind her ears. \"Please stop this,\" she whispered. She opened her eyes. Just as suddenly as it had left her, the landscape snapped snugly back into place. The Coop, Cardullo's, Nini's Corner, Harvard Yard. She automatically understood that she should turn left at the corner and head west on Mass Ave. She began to breathe easier, no longer bizarrely lost within a mile of home. But she'd just been bizarrely lost within a mile of home. She walked as fast as she could without running. She turned onto her street, a quiet, tree-lined, residential road a couple of blocks removed from Mass Ave. With both feet on her road and her house in sight, she felt much safer, but not yet safe. She kept her eyes on her front door and her legs moving and promised herself that the sea of anxiety swelling furiously inside her would drain when she walked in the front hallway and saw John. If he was home. \"John?\" He appeared in the threshold of the kitchen, unshaven, his glasses sitting on top of his mad scientist hair, sucking on a red popsicle and sporting his lucky gray T-shirt. He'd been up all night. As she'd promised herself, her anxiety began to drain. But her energy and bravery seemed to leak out with it, leaving her fragile and wanting to collapse into his arms. \"Hey, I was wondering where you were, just about to leave you a note on the fridge. How'd it go?\" he asked. \"What?\" \"Stanford.\" \"Oh, good.\" \"And how's Lydia?\" The betrayal and hurt over Lydia, over him not being home when she got there, exorcised by the run and displaced by her terror over being inexplicably lost, reclaimed its priority in the pecking order. \"You tell me,\" she said. \"You guys fought.\" \"You're paying for her acting classes?\" she accused. \"Oh,\" he said, sucking the last of the popsicle into his red stained mouth. \"Look, can we talk about this later? I don't have time to get into it right now.\" \"Make the time, John. You're keeping her afloat out there without telling me, and you're not here when I get home, and---\" \"And you weren't here when I got home. How was your run?\" She heard the simple reasoning in his veiled question. If she had waited for him, if she had called, if she hadn't done exactly what she'd wanted and gone for a run, she could've spent the last hour with him. She had to agree. \"Fine.\" \"I'm sorry, I waited as long as I could, but I've really got to get back to the lab. I had an incredible day so far, gorgeous results, but we're not done, and I've got to analyze the numbers before we get started again in the morning. I only came home to see you.\" \"I need to talk about this with you now.\" \"This really isn't new information, Ali. We disagree about Lydia. Can't it wait until I get back?\" \"No.\" \"You want to walk over with me, talk about it on the way?\" \"I'm not going to the office, I need to be home.\" \"You need to talk now, you need to be home, you're awfully needy all of the sudden. Is something else going on?\" The word 'needy' smacked a vulnerable nerve. Needy equaled weak, dependent, pathological. Her father. She'd made a life-long point of never being like that, like him. \"I'm just exhausted.\" \"You look it, you need to slow down.\" \"That's not what I need.\" He waited for her to elaborate, but she took too long. \"Look, the sooner I go, the sooner I'll be back. Get some rest, I'll be home later tonight.\" He kissed her sweat-drenched head and walked out the door. Standing in the hallway where he left her, with no one to confess to or confide in, the full emotional impact of what she'd just experienced in Harvard Square flooded over her. She sat down on the floor and leaned against the cool wall, watching her hands shake in her lap as if they couldn't be hers. She tried to focus on steadying her breath as she did when she ran. After minutes of breathing in and breathing out, she was finally calm enough to try to assemble some sense out of what had just happened. She thought about the missing word during her talk at Stanford and her missing period. She got up, turned on her laptop, and Googled MENOPAUSE SYMPTOMS. An appalling list filled the screen--hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, crashing fatigue, anxiety, dizziness, irregular heart beat, depression, irritability, mood swings, disorientation, mental confusion, memory lapses. Disorientation, mental confusion, memory lapses. Check, check, and check. She leaned back in her chair and raked her fingers back and forth through her curly, black hair. She looked over at the pictures displayed on the shelves of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase--her Harvard graduation day, she and John dancing on their wedding day, family portraits from when the kids were little, a family portrait from Anna's wedding. She returned to the list on her computer screen. This was just the natural, next phase in her life as a woman. Millions of women coped with it every day. Nothing life-threatening. Nothing abnormal. She wrote herself a note to make an appointment with her doctor for a checkup. Maybe she should go on estrogen replacement therapy. She read through the list of symptoms one last time. Irritability. Mood swings. Her recent shrinking fuse with John. It all added up. Satisfied, she shut down her computer. She sat in the darkening study a while longer, listening to her quiet house and the sounds of neighborhood barbeques. She inhaled the smell of hamburger grilling. For some reason, she wasn't hungry anymore. She took a multivitamin with water, unpacked, read several articles from The Journal of Cognition , and went to bed. Some time after midnight, John finally came home. His weight in their bed woke her, but only slightly. She remained still and pretended to stay asleep. He had to be exhausted from being up all night and working all day. They could talk about Lydia in the morning. And she'd apologize for being so sensitive and moody lately. His warm hand on her hip brought her into the curve of his body. With his breath on her neck, she fell into a deep sleep, convinced that she was safe. Copyright \u00a9 2007, 2009 by Lisa Genova Continues... Excerpted from Still Alice by Lisa Genova Copyright \u00a9 2009 by Lisa Genova. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.1}], "target_asin": "B0017SWTJY"}
{"user_id": "AECIHOOGDFWTNOQUTCYTHSJN7USA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0304361569", "title": "Bugles and a Tiger : My Life in the Gurkhas", "author": "John Masters", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.94}, {"asin": "0763680338", "title": "The Whydah: A Pirate Ship Feared, Wrecked, and Found", "author": "Martin W. Sandler", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 6 Up\u2014Sandler dispels many popular pirate-related myths and offers a more realistic and factual view of the era of piracy in the New World. Instead of living in abject poverty at the mercy of kings and nobles, many men embraced piracy as a means to support their families and live a comfortable life, though one often filled with barbarous acts. The author weaves a fascinating story about piracy and the legendary 18th-century pirate ship Whydah, which sunk off the coast of Cape Cod on April 24, 1717, during a perfect storm. He delves into the fates of the few survivors, early salvage attempts by poor locals and wealthy governors alike, and the long-term work of explorer Barry Clifford to find the sunken ship. In 1985, Clifford and his crew discovered the inscribed galley bell of the Whydah, and for 30 years, divers, marine historians, and archaeologists have continued to retrieve artifacts from the ocean depths. Occasional sidebars on specific topics, such as the mythic origins of the Jolly Roger flag and artifact restoration, break up the narrative flow but do contain valuable information. Sandler's approach to the Whydah and other submerged ships as \"sunken time capsules\" is an interesting angle that is sure to resonate with aspiring archaeologists. VERDICT A captivating read on pirates, with insights into contemporary underwater research techniques. Considering the popularity of the subject, this volume will likely not sit on shelves long.\u2014Anne Jung-Mathews, Plymouth State University, NH Review Sandler\u2019s approach to the Whydah and other submerged ships as \u201csunken time capsules\u201d is an interesting angle that is sure to resonate with aspiring archaeologists. A captivating read on pirates, with insights into contemporary underwater research techniques. Considering the popularity of the subject, this volume will likely not sit on shelves long.\u2014School Library Journal (starred review)Sandler offers an insightful look at how different the realities of pirate life were compared to how it has been mythologized in popular culture...A fascinating, vivid look at what one shipwreck reveals about the realities of the \"Golden Age of Piracy.\"\u2014Kirkus ReviewsThis book brings to life...The account of the challenges Clifford and his crew had to face to find the Whydah is very thorough.\u2014School Library ConnectionSandler\u2019s broad research and his evident fascination with the subject result in a multifaceted story that many readers will find rewarding.\u2014BooklistSandler keeps the multiple threads of Whydah\u2019s story running smoothly, even integrating legends about Bellamy and the haunted wreckage seamlessly into the factual information...Weighing in well under two hundred pages, this quick high interest read is an ideal recommendation for kids who \u201chave to read a nonfiction book,\u201d and pirate and archaeology enthusiasts will certainly be thrilled.\u2014Bulletin of the Center for Children's BooksSandler enlivens the historical narrative by fleshing out the biographical details of the cast of characters, sharing (and occasionally debunking) various myths and legends, providing an overview of the relevant social and economic factors of the day, and spotlighting the work of excavating the shipwreck site. Useful photographs, maps, and sidebars are interspersed throughout, while source notes, bibliography, and index are appended.\u2014The Horn BookFast-paced, thorough, and fascinating, this choice is certain to especially hold the interest of any pirate lover and treasure hunter.\u2014Reading Eagle (from Kendal Rautzhan's \"Books to Borrow\") About the Author Martin W. Sandler has written more than seventy books for children and adults, including Iron Rails, Iron Men, and the Race to Link the Nation: The Story of the Transcontinental Railroad and The Impossible Rescue: The True Story of an Amazing Arctic Adventure. Martin W. Sandler lives with his wife on Cape Cod. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "1250135796", "title": "Old School: Life in the Sane Lane", "author": "Bill O'Reilly", "description": "About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island. Bruce Feirstein is a screenwriter of the James Bond films GoldenEye , Tomorrow Never Dies , and The World Is Not Enough and the New York Times bestselling author of Real Men Don\u2019t Eat Quiche . He has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1994.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0385349173", "title": "Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics [Deckled Edge]", "author": "Charles Krauthammer", "description": "Amazon.com Review Author One-on-One: Charles Krauthammer and Dana Perino In this Amazon One-to-One, Charles Krauthammer and Dana Perino discuss Dr. Krauthammer\u2019s new book Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics . Charles Krauthammer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, political commentator and physician. Dana Perino is a Former White House Press Secretary who worked with President George W. Bush, contributor and co-host of The Five on FOX News. She is a long-time friend and fan of Charles Krauthammer. Dana Perino: Your new book covers three decades of your writings, divided into 16 chapters, and grouped into categories of the things that have mattered to you in your life. As you reviewed your body of work, were you surprised by anything that you had written? Did you ever think, \u201cI can\u2019t believe I ever thought that\u201d? Charles Krauthammer: No real surprises\u2014I find that I agree with myself a lot\u2014except for my enthusiastic review of Independence Day . Though I might've been unduly swayed by seeing the premiere with my son, then ten, who announced after the showing that he would see the movie every week for the rest of his life. DP: The thing that has mattered most to you is your family. Your book opens with a column that could be called \u201ca two-hankie job.\u201d How hard is it to write about the people that you love, to give people a glimpse into your personal life? CK: I didn\u2019t become a writer to write about myself. In fact, I don't even like using the word \"I\" in writing an opinion column, let alone a personal one. The only times I really have written about my own life is when it had a purpose outside myself, such as honoring a person, perhaps a friend or mentor, of extraordinary character. DP: As a long-time fan of yours, there are some of your columns that I remember reading, and where I was when I read it, and how I said to my husband, \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I was thinking!\u201d Do you know when a column is going to be a hit? CK: Quite the opposite. I'm always amazed how wrong I am. A column that I think will sink like a stone might catch on like wildfire. Others that I'm proud and smug about as I submit for publication, leave no trace. Which is why I'm a writer, not a publisher. I wasn't made for marketing. DP: The original essay you penned for Things That Matter is like an award-winning exhibit of your heart and mind. What will readers learn about you that they may not have known? CK: How improbable my life story is. I still wake up simply amazed how I've ended up where I am, mostly by serendipity and sheer blind luck. I started out as a doctor. I ended as a writer. And that's the least of the stunning twists and turns that have defined my life\u2014which I write about, for the first time, in the introductory essay to Things That Matter . DP: You have become a must-read and a must-see on television news programs. Parents shush their children when you\u2019re about to speak. On the rare Friday when you don\u2019t have a column or when you\u2019re not on Special Report with Bret Baier , your mom gets calls of \u201cWhere is Charles?\u201d Disappointment hangs heavy over your fans. But who are your weekly must-reads? CK: George Will. David Brooks. Mickey Kaus. And for that happy half of every year\u2014April through October\u2014the (daily) box score of the Washington Nationals. DP: Do you think that your training as a psychiatrist has given you an advantage when observing people in politics? CK: Actually, no. Psychiatry has everything to say about mental illness, very little to say about ordinary life. It offers no magical formulas for understanding human behavior beyond what any lay person can see. Although I do like to joke that there's not much difference in what I do today as a political analyst in Washington from what I used to do as a psychiatrist in Boston\u2014in both lines of work, I deal every day with people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. The only difference is that the paranoids in Washington have access to nuclear weapons. DP: You wrote a column on September 12, 2001 that is included in Things That Matter . How difficult was that to write under the time pressure of the day, and to keep your commentary to standard column length? CK: Like the whole country, I was on fire with fury. I felt I simply had to write. The difficulty was less time pressure than emotional pressure\u2014trying to suppress my feelings so I could be as analytical as possible. Sometimes that kind of writing can be disastrous. I think this one came out right. DP: Given the mention in your essay, and because I have a gut feeling that we\u2019re on the same page, what is your preferred style on serial commas? CK: With commas the rule should always be: the fewer the better. They are a scourge, a pestilence upon the land. They must be given no quarter. When you list three things, it should be written: a, b and c. If you see a comma after the \"b\"\u2014call 911 immediately. DP: Many readers may not realize that you once were a Democrat? Was it a gradual or a spectacular breakup? CK: Like most breakups, gradual. Like few breakups, however, without regret. DP: You have covered politics and government since the Carter administration. Do you believe that America\u2019s politics are too strained, too partisan, and too deranged to make meaningful progress? CK: Not at all. What we need is not a new politics but a new president. DP: What do you think will be the things that matter 20\u201330 years from now? CK: The things that really matter, as I try to explain in the introductory essay\u2014the cosmic questions of origins and meaning, the great achievements of science and art, the great mysteries of creation and consciousness\u2014shall always be with us. Thirty years from now, 300 years from now. I hope that one contribution of this book will be to provide some illumination on these wondrous mysteries and achievements. DP: If you had a magic wand and could get the U.S. federal government to do three things, what would be your top priorities? CK: Abolish the income tax code with its staggeringly intrusive and impenetrable provisions and replace it with a clean consumption tax. Get out of the race business and return the country to the colorblind vision of Martin Luther King. Kill the penny. Review \u201cRequired reading\u2026Krauthammer is among the very best\u2014and this is the best of the best, selected by him, with an engaging and fascinating introduction\u2026Amazingly fresh, and full of thought-provoking formulations and arguments.\u201d \u2013The Weekly Standard \u201cA fantastic read, a cerebral read, a fun read.\u201d \u2013Guy Benson, Townhall \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a big hit.\u201d \u2013Bill O\u2019Reilly, The O\u2019Reilly Factor (October 21, 2013) \u201cKrauthammer\u2019s assets include steel-trap logic, an ep\u00e9e wit, a profound sense of history, and a withering contempt for journalists who would rather cringe in the dark than bring the truth to light.\u201d \u2013City Journal America, you\u2019ve got to read this for your own great pleasure and relief.\u201d \u2013 Hugh Hewitt (October 31, 2013) \"The best American columnists make their British counterparts look like bumbling amateurs,but none of them writes with more sense,sensibility and sanity than the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer. Things That Matter , selected from a lifetime of writing, bears comparison with the greatest of American prose.\" -Daniel Johnson, Standpoint \"Usually thought of as a conserva-tive, this syndicated columnist has won both the left-wing People for the American Way\u2019s First Amendment Award and the right-wing Bradley Foundation\u2019s first $250,000 Bradley Prize. Readers of all political persuasions will find plenty here that\u2019s thought-provoking and worthwhile.\" -Pittsburg Tribune-Review \u201cKrauthammer\u2019s first collection in more than 20 years is a priceless introduction to the columnist\u2019s writing. And for those who have thrilled at the sight of a Krauthammer byline for decades, Things That Matter is a window into the master polemicist\u2019s habits of mind, heart, and technique.\u201d -Matthew Continetti, Commentary \u201cFor three decades, Charles Krauthammer has enriched American political discourse with his sharply-honed analysis, humane values, and questing mind.\u00a0 From personal meditations to learned examinations of history and policy, Things That Matter stands as a record of a transformative period in the American experience, and a remarkable intellect at work.\u201d -Henry A. Kissinger \"Charles Krauthammer is not only the most influential conservative commentator in America, his writing transcends the crush of daily events and can be read, with profit, always.\" \u2013David Brooks, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of The Social Animal \u201cAmid today's clutter of print and cacophony of broadcast commentary, Charles Krauthammer's lapidary judgments stand out, and stand the test of time. Literature has been called news that lasts. Krauthammer's columns take journalism to the level of literature.\u201d \u2013George F. Will, Washington Post columnist \u201cBlending high-mindedness with strong conservative values, he has commanded respect on both the extreme and moderate sides of the spectrum, becoming the closest thing the factionalized GOP could have to a spokesperson, a de facto opposition leader for the thinking right.\u201d - POLITICO About the Author Charles Krauthammer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was a syndicated columnist, political commentator and physi\u00adcian. His column was syndicated to 400 news\u00adpapers worldwide. He was a nightly panelist on Fox News\u2019s Special Report with Bret Baier . He\u2019s a former member of the President\u2019s Council on Bioethics and of Chess Journalists of America. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. introductionI. THE BOOK What matters? Lives of the good and the great, the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist, the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, homage and sacrilege in monumental architecture, fashions and follies and the finer uses of the F-word.What matters? Manners and habits, curiosities and conundrums social and ethical: Is a doctor ever permitted to kill a patient wishing to die? Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase \u201cwomen and children\u201d? How many lies is one allowed to tell to advance stem cell research?What matters? Occam\u2019s razor, Fermat\u2019s last theorem, the Fermi paradox in which the great man asks: With so many habitable planets out there, why in God\u2019s name have we never heard a word from a single one of them?These are the things that most engage me. They fill my days, some trouble my nights. They give me pause, pleasure, wonder. They make me grateful for the gift of consciousness. And for three decades they have occupied my mind and commanded my pen.I don\u2019t claim these things matter to everyone. Nor should they. I have my eccentricities. I\u2019ve driven from Washington to New York to watch a chess match. Twice. I\u2019ve read Stephen Hawking\u2019s A Brief History of Time . Also twice, though here as a public service\u2014to reassure my readers that this most unread bestseller is indeed as\u00a0inscrutable as they thought. And perhaps most eccentric of all, I left a life in medicine for a life in journalism devoted mostly to politics, while firmly believing that what really matters, what moves the spirit, what elevates the mind, what fires the imagination, what makes us fully human are all of these endeavors, disciplines, confusions and amusements that lie outside politics.Accordingly, this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd. Working title: There\u2019s More to Life than Politics. But in the end I couldn\u2019t. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything\u2014high and low and, most especially, high\u2014lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.\u201cBeauty is truth, truth beauty,\u2014that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,\u201d every schoolchild is fed. But even Keats\u2014 poet, romantic, early 19th-century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to come\u2014kept quotational distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics\u2014 because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.This is no abstraction. We see it in North Korea, whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material. We saw it in China\u2019s Cultural Revolution, a sustained act of national self-immolation, designed to dethrone, debase and destroy the highest achievements of five millennia of Chinese culture. We saw it in Taliban Afghanistan, which, just months before 9/11, marched its cadres into the Bamiyan Valley and with tanks, artillery and dynamite destroyed its magnificent cliff-carved 1,700-year-old Buddhas lest they\u2014like kite flying and music and other things lovely\u2014disturb the scorched-earth purity of their nihilism.\u00a0Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. The entire 20th century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War I not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europe\u2019s senseless self-inflicted devastation forever changed Western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly\u2014to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state\u2014that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution. Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now-vanished world of European Jewry.The only power comparably destructive belongs to God. Or nature. Or, if like Jefferson you cannot quite decide, Nature\u2019s God. Santorini was a thriving island civilization in the Mediterranean until, one morning 3,500 years ago, it simply fell into the sea. An earthquake. A volcanic eruption. The end.And yet even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man\u2014more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.Which in its day-to-day conduct tends not to be the most elevated of human enterprises. Machiavelli gave it an air of grandeur and\u00a0glory, but Disraeli\u2019s mordant exultation \u201cI have climbed to the top of the greasy pole,\u201d best captured its quotidian essence\u2014grubby, grasping, manipulative, demagogic, cynical.The most considered and balanced statement of politics\u2019 place in the hierarchy of human disciplines came, naturally, from an American. \u201cI must study politics and war,\u201d wrote John Adams, \u201cthat my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.\u201dAdams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. That\u2019s politics done right, hard-earned, often by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams\u2019 double reference to architecture: The second generation must study naval architecture\u2014a hybrid discipline of war, commerce and science\u2014before the third can freely and securely study architecture for its own sake.The most optimistic implication of Adams\u2019 dictum is that once the first generation gets the political essentials right, they remain intact to nurture the future. Yet he himself once said that \u201cthere never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.\u201d Jefferson was even less sanguine about the durability of liberty. He wrote that a constitutional revolution might be needed every 20 years. Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.To which I have devoted much of my life. And which I do not disdain by any means. Indeed, I intend to write a book on foreign policy and, if nature (or God or Nature\u2019s God) gives me leave, to write yet one more on domestic policy. But this book is intended at least as\u00a0much for other things. Things that for me, as for Adams, shine most brightly. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.57}, {"asin": "140160241X", "title": "FranklinCovey - Everyday Greatness: Inspiration for a Meaningful Life - Hardcover", "author": "Stephen R. Covey", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Personal Transformation"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.59}, {"asin": "080509668X", "title": "Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)", "author": "Martin Dugard", "description": "Amazon.com Review Amazon Exclusive: Senator John McCain Reviews Killing Patton In Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II\u2019s Most Audacious General , Bill O\u2019Reilly and Martin Dugard have written a lively, provocative account of the death of General George S. Patton and the important events in the final year of the Allied victory in Europe, which Patton\u2019s brilliant generalship of the American Third Army did so much to secure. The fourth book in the bestselling Killing series is rich in fascinating details, and riveting battle scenes. The authors have written vivid descriptions of a compelling cast of characters, major historical figures such as Eisenhower, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, and others, as well as more obscure players in the great drama of the Second World War and the life and death of Patton. O\u2019Reilly and Dugard express doubts about the official explanation for Patton\u2019s demise from injuries he suffered in an automobile accident. They surmise that the General\u2019s outspokenness about his controversial views on postwar security, particularly his animosity toward the Soviets, our erstwhile allies, might have made him a target for assassination. They cast a suspicious eye toward various potential culprits from Josef Stalin to wartime espionage czar \u201cWild Bill\u201d Donovan and a colorful OSS operative, Douglas Bazata, who claimed later in life to have murdered Patton. Certainly, there are a number of curious circumstances that invite doubt and speculation, Bazata\u2019s admission for one. Or that the drunken sergeant who drove a likely stolen truck into Patton\u2019s car inexplicably was never prosecuted or even reprimanded. But whether you share their suspicions or not this is popular history at its most engrossing. From accounts of the terribly costly battle for Fort Driant in the hills near Metz to the Third Army\u2019s crowning achievement, its race to relieve the siege of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge, the reader experiences all the drama of the \u201cgreat crusade\u201d in its final, thrilling months. The authors\u2019 profiles of world leaders and Patton\u2019s contemporaries are economic but manage to offer fresh insights into the personalities of well-known men. Just as compelling are the finely wrought sketches of people of less renown but who played important parts in the events. There is PFC Robert Holmund, who fought and died heroically at Fort Driant having done all he could and then some to take his impossible objective. PFC Horace Woodring, Patton\u2019s driver, who revered the general, went to his grave mystified by the cause and result of the accident that killed his boss. German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel\u2019s young son, Manfred, exchanged a formal farewell handshake with him after learning his father would be dead in a quarter hour, having been made to commit suicide to prevent the death and dishonor of his family. These and many other captivating accounts of the personal and profound make Killing Patton a pleasure to read. I enjoyed it immensely and highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in World War II history and the extraordinary man who claimed Napoleon\u2019s motto, \u201caudacity, audacity, always audacity,\u201d as his own. About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa , and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General By Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard Henry Holt and Company Copyright \u00a9 2014 Bill O'Reilly and Martin DugardAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8050-9668-2 CHAPTER 1 The Hills above Metz, France October 3, 1944 12:02 P.M. Private First Class Robert W. Holmlund is scared. He believes his life may be over at age twenty-one. The American assault is just two minutes old\u2014two minutes that feel like twenty. The private serves as an explosives expert in the Third Army, Company B, Eleventh Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division. Holmlund is a student from the American heartland who left trade school to join the war. His senior commander is the most ferocious general on the Allied side, George S. Patton Jr. But unlike Patton, who now oversees his vast army from the safety of his headquarters twenty-five miles behind the front, Holmlund and the men of Baker Company are in grave danger as they sprint toward the heavily defended German fort known as Driant. German machine-gun bullets whiz past Holmlund's helmet at twice the speed of sound. Heads and torsos shatter all around him. U.S. artillery thunders in the distance behind them, laying down cover fire. The forest air smells of gunpowder, rain, and the sharp tang of cordite. The ground is nothing but mud and a thick carpet of wet leaves. Here and there a bramble vine reaches out to snag his uniform and trip his feet. Over his broad shoulders, Holmlund wears a block of TNT known as a satchel charge. Grenades dangle from his cartridge belt like grapes on a vine. And in his arms, rather than carrying it by the wooden handle atop the stock, Holmlund cradles his fifteen-pound, four-foot-long Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, as he would an infant. Only, this baby is a killing machine, capable of firing 650 three-inch bullets per minute. Though he doesn't show it, Robert W. Holmlund is scared, despite all that firepower, just like every single man in this lethal forest. But there is no time to indulge his fear right now. No time for homesickness or doubt. Fort Driant looms four hundred yards distant. Everything about the fortress is a mystery, from the location of its big 150 mm howitzers to the maze of tunnels deep underground where its Wehrmacht inhabitants eat, sleep, pray, clean their rifles, plan their battles, and then suddenly poke their heads out of secret openings to kill. Patton has ordered Baker Company to get inside Driant. The best way to do that is to climb on the roof, which is concealed by mounds of earth. From there, it's a matter of finding a doorway or some other hidden opening that will allow Baker to descend and wage war in the tunnels. Baker is part of a two-pronged assault. On the opposite side of the fort, the men of Easy Company are also on the attack. But they do so warily, for Driant has already bloodied them once. It happened six days ago. Skies were clear. P-47 fighter-bombers screamed in low on the morning of the assault, dropping napalm and thousand-pound bombs. American artillery then pounded Driant, shelling the Germans with deadly accuracy. Easy Company launched their attack alongside the men of George Company at 1415 hours under a heavy smoke screen. They had no way of knowing that the aerial bombing and ground artillery had no effect on the Wehrmacht fighters, nor that the enemy was snug and secure within Driant's fifteen-foot-thick walls and in hidden forest pillboxes. Step by step, thinking themselves unseen, the U.S. soldiers advanced. Fingers were on triggers as the men scanned the forest, waiting for the muzzle flashes that would expose the enemy. But the Germans did not shoot. Not yet. So Easy and George crept closer to Driant. With each passing moment, they became more convinced that the smoke screen had completely concealed them. They marched closer and closer, and still no German gunshots. Soon a thick tangle of barbwire loomed before the Americans, marking the outer perimeter of Driant's defenses. There was no way through the razor-sharp coils. The advance ground to a halt. The Germans opened fire. The autumn afternoon was rent by a terrifying sound the Americans knew all too well. Their slang for the high-speed ripping sound of a German MG-42 machine gun is \"Hitler's Zipper.\" To the Wehrmacht, this killing tone is simply the \"Bone Saw.\" MG-42s opened up from every direction. Bullets tore through the woods at twelve hundred rounds per minute, capable of killing a man from more than a half mile away. But the machine guns were just the beginning. Soon mortars, rifles, and even heavy artillery pounded the Americans from every direction. And just like that, the American attack was over. Soldiers hugged the ground for four long hours as German gunners pinpointed their positions and took slow, deliberate aim. It was only after darkness fell that the men of Company E and Company G crawled back to the safety of the American lines. September 27 was a bad day for the men of Easy. By the end of the fight, eighteen soldiers had been either killed or wounded. Today will be even worse. * * * Private Holmlund can go no farther. Nor can the rest of Baker Company. The mountain of barbwire surrounding Driant blocks their path. Thirty feet tall and just as thick, the impenetrable tangle waits to trap any man unlucky enough to snag his uniform or his body within its tendrils. Clipping at it with hand cutters will take days\u2014which is why Holmlund's company commander, Capt. Harry Anderson, has given the order: blow the wire to hell. Behind him, Holmlund hears the low rumble of a Continental R-975 air-cooled engine. The telltale crunch of steel treads soon follows, announcing the arrival of an M-4 Sherman tank. Even as the German machine gunners continue to fire on Baker, the Sherman weaves through the trees and takes aim. Its 75 mm gun belches smoke as it fires a round of M-48 high explosive into the wire. A direct hit is soon followed by another, and then another. Within moments, the barbwire parts just enough for Baker Company to sprint through. Captain Anderson splits the soldiers into three groups. Holmlund's squad continues toward Driant in a straight line, while the other two squads flank to the right. The landscape is pocked with shell craters, like a man-made lunar surface. Trees and shrubs grow randomly, offering just the slightest bit of camouflage from the German defenders. The private is in the first wave of American attackers. He dives into a shell crater, presses himself flat against the lip, then pokes his head over the top and fires his BAR at the enemy. Holmlund then sprints forward to a row of small elm trees, where he once again takes cover and seeks out a target. The ground is cool and damp, moisture seeping through his uniform. He fires and moves forward, always forward, never taking his focus off the flat roof of Driant. Despite the cool October temperature, Holmlund is now drenched in sweat. His face and hands are flecked with mud. He hurls himself into another shell crater and hugs the earth. This close to the ground, he is eye level with the fungus and bright green mold sprouting up through the fallen leaves. Bullets whiz low over his head. He reloads and listens, waiting for the chance to fire. The sounds of the battlefield are familiar: the chatter of machine guns, the screams of the mortally wounded, the concussive thud of hand grenades, orders barked in short, terse sentences. Screams for \"Medic\" fill the air. Holmlund fires a burst from his rifle and then runs forward. He races past fallen comrades. He knows them all. They did push-ups side by side during basic training in Alabama. They sailed together for Europe in the hold of a troopship. They sat in an English pasture just hours before D-day, listening to General Patton deliver the greatest speech any of them had ever heard. And then, after D-day, Holmlund and Baker fought their way across France, rejoicing as they captured one small village after another, following Patton's order that they kill Germans in brutal and relentless fashion\u2014lest they themselves be killed first. Now many of Holmlund's buddies lie dead or dying. And so ends the sound of their laughter, their rage, their boasts, their tales about that special girl back home, and all that talk about what they're going to do with their lives once the war ends. Holmlund doesn't even give them a second glance. And he doesn't stop moving forward. To stop is to become a target. Holmlund's fighting squad dwindles from twelve men down to six. The squad leader is hit, and Holmlund takes command without thinking twice about it. Slowly, in a form of progress that is measured in feet and inches instead of yards, Baker Company moves closer and closer to the German fortress. Two hours into the battle, PFC Robert W. Holmlund of Delavan City, Wisconsin, finds himself standing atop Fort Driant. * * * \"The real hero,\" Holmlund heard George S. Patton say just four months ago, \"is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overwhelm his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.\" As Holmlund watched, General Patton drew himself up to his full six-foot-two-inch height. His shoulders were broad and his face ruddy, with a strong chin and an aquiline nose. His uniform was a marvel, with four rows of ribbons, four shiny brass buttons, a polished helmet bearing his three general's stars, tan riding pants, and knee-high cavalry boots. Most vividly, a Colt .45-caliber pistol with an ivory grip was holstered on his hip, sending a strong signal that Patton is no bureaucrat. He's a warrior, and everybody had better know it. Patton continued: \"Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best, and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men\u2014and they are He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and that they are not supermen.\" George Patton delivered \"the Speech\" in the British countryside, to the men of his Third Army, on June 5, 1944. Some of the soldiers watching were combat veterans. Most, like Holmlund, were brand new to the war. They found hope in Patton's words. They found a belief in their own courage. And most of all, each man sitting in that pasture under a glorious blue English sky found strength in the knowledge that he was being commanded by the most audacious, forthright, and brilliant general on either side of the war. Until that day, Holmlund had never seen Patton in the flesh, and had only heard stories about the legendary general\u2014the man who'd never lost a battle, hero of North Africa and Sicily, but who was temporarily relieved of his command for slapping two privates convalescing in a military hospital whom he considered cowardly. Neither Holmlund nor any of the thousands of other soldiers seated in this pasture had any idea that their feelings for the general would come to vacillate between love and hate. In fact, Patton's nickname is \"Old Blood and Guts,\" with the understanding that the guts of Patton rode on the blood of his soldiers. \"You are not all going to die,\" Patton reassured the men whom he would soon lead into combat. His voice was high instead of gruff, which came as a surprise to Holmlund. \"Only two percent of you right here today will die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men.\" * * * One half mile north of where Private Holmlund and the men of Company B are making their stand atop Fort Driant, death, as predicted, is coming to their fellow soldiers in Easy Company. The hope of Patton's speech is long forgotten. Unlike their first attack on Driant six days ago, Company E made it through the barbwire this time. But the Germans turned that into a fatal accomplishment, for once inside Easy was pinned down with precision mortar fire. Going forward has become impossible. Even worse, enemy shells are exploding to their rear, meaning that retreating back through the wire is also out of the question. Easy Company tries to solve the problem by calling in an artillery strike on their position, but this \"Danger Close\" barrage does nothing to stop the dug-in German gunners. Instead, friendly fire kills one of their own in a most gruesome fashion: the soldier's head is sliced cleanly from his body by a piece of flying explosive. Easy Company digs in. They have no choice. Two-foot-long portable shovels scrape troughs in the earth as German machine gunners continue to rake Easy's position. It is every man for himself. The terror continues. The Germans of Kampfgruppe Petersen take aim with 8 cm Granatwerfer 34 mortar fire and MG-42 machine guns. The Americans are defenseless. Killing them is as easy as finding the target and patiently squeezing the trigger. The Germans are in no hurry. The Americans are going nowhere. One after another, the young men who comprise Easy Company are cut down in the prime of their life. The company medics race from foxhole to foxhole to tend the wounded. But soon, one after another, they die, too. Hours pass. Rain drizzles down. The nightmare chatter of the Maschinengewehr accompanies the sounds of Company E digging their trenches deeper and deeper. Each man squats as low as possible, careful not to lift his head above ground level. Doing so would be an act of suicide. Easy's foxholes become filled with water, mud, blood, and each man's personal filth. Trench foot, from prolonged exposure to cold and wet, has become so common since the autumn rains arrived that it makes standing in yet another puddle a time of agony. But the men are beyond caring about the stench and squalor of their fighting holes. All they want to do is stay alive. * * * \"Americans despise cowards,\" Patton continued all those months ago, putting his own spin on U.S. history. \"Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American. \"All through your Army careers, you men have bitched about what you call 'chickenshit drilling.' That, like everything else in this Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is alertness. Alertness must be bred into every soldier. I don't give a f-ck for a man who's not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn't be here. You are ready for what's to come. A man must be alert at all times if he expects to stay alive. If you're not alert, sometime, a German son-of-an-asshole-bitch is going to sneak up behind you and beat you to death with a sock full of shit!\" A handful of the senior officers listening to the speech disapproved of Patton's coarse language. Patton could not care less. He believes that profanity is the language of the soldier, and that to speak to soldiers one must use words that will have the most impact. Few can deny that George Patton is entitled to this belief, nor that he is the consummate soldier. He is descended from a Civil War Confederate colonel, and has himself been in the military since graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1909. Soon after, he fought in Mexico against Pancho Villa. He then fought in the First World War at Saint-Mihiel, the legendary battlefield west of Metz where he walks now. Patton was the very first officer ever assigned to the U.S. Army tank corps, and is renowned for his tactical brilliance on the battlefield. He lives by the words of the great French general Napol\u00e9on, \"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace\"\u2014\"Audacity, audacity, always audacity\"\u2014a motto that works well on the field of battle, but not so well in diplomatic situations. Patton has damaged his career again and again by saying and doing the sort of impulsive things that would see a lesser man relieved of his command for good. \"An Army is a team,\" he continues; \"it lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know anything more about real fighting under fire than they know about f-cking!\" Patton was forced to pause, as he knew he would be. The waves of laughter rolling toward the stage were deafening. (Continues...) Excerpted from Killing Patton by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard . Copyright \u00a9 2014 Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.52}, {"asin": "1250070597", "title": "By Honor Bound: Two Navy SEALs, the Medal of Honor, and a Story of Extraordinary Courage", "author": "Dick Couch", "description": "Review \"A compelling and highly readable excursion into the actions of valorous men facing improbable odds.\" -Admiral Eric T. Olson, USN (Ret), Former Commander, US Special Operations Command \"An exciting read and an All-American story that reflects their devotion to duty and to their brothers in arms.\" -Rick Perry, former Governor of Texas \"Tommy and Mike\u2019s valorous heroics remind us all of the exceptional men and women who serve our country, both then and now.\u201d \u2015Admiral Mike Mullen, USN (ret.) Vietnam Veteran and 17th Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff About the Author TOM NORRIS received the Medal of Honor for his behind-enemy-lines rescue of two downed airmen in Vietnam in April 1972. He was born in Maryland and now lives in Northern Idaho.MIKE THORNTON, a native of South Carolina, was awarded the Medal for saving the life of his SEAL officer, Lieutenant Tom Norris. He lives in Texas.DICK COUCH is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who has served as a Navy SEAL and as a CIA case officer. His nonfiction works include By Honor Bound , Down Range , The Finishing School , and The Warrior Elite .", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "B000CQP5RK", "title": "Fantastic Story"}, {"asin": "060980202X", "title": "The Gentleman's Guide to Life: What Every Guy Should Know About Living Large, Loving Well, Feeling Strong, and Looking Good", "author": "Steve Friedman", "description": "From the Inside Flap re a sensitive, bookish type or a beer-guzzling Cyber-jock--or just an average guy--The Gentleman's Guide to Life is a perfect and indispensable primer on looking, living, and feeling good, answering all your questions about clothes, career, fitness, love, and lust.How do I move up without selling out?How do I help my friends (and crush my enemies)?How do I feed and care for my boss?What kind of suit should I wear?What kind of shoes do I wear with the suit? Socks?Do I really need to take my vitamins?Is this impotence or lack of interest?How much sleep do I need?How can I bluff my way through a wine list?What is Cubism? How much should I tip?What CDs should I have to relax? To seduce?Do I like her? Do I really, really like her?What does she mean I don't listen?How do I propose (or ask for the ring back)?Am I the best man I can possibly be? From the Back Cover \"I know what men want. If they read this book, they're much more likely to get it.\"--Frederique, Supermodel About the Author Steve Friedman is a writer living in New York City. He has written for GQ, Esquire, Details, and Mirabella among other publications. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 4.95}, {"asin": "1627790624", "title": "Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)", "author": "Bill O'Reilly", "description": "Review \u201cAn enthralling, gripping account of the bloody battles, huge decisions, and historic personalities that culminated in the decision to drop the atomic bomb and brought the war in the Pacific to its climactic end. A masterful, meticulously researched work that captures the barbarity of the war waged by those who swore allegiance to the Japanese Emperor \u2013 and by those who crushed the military might of the Rising Sun.\u201d \u2013 General David H. Petraeus , commander of the surge in Iraq (2007-8) and coalition forces in Afghanistan (2010-2011) About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa , and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Killing the Rising Sun How America Vanquished World War II Japan By Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard Henry Holt and Company Copyright \u00a9 2016 Henry HoltAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-62779-062-8 CHAPTER 1 Peleliu, Caroline Islands Pacific Ocean September 15, 1944 0832 Hours Destruction is near for the empire. The morning heat is so unbearable that Corporal Lewis Kenneth Bausell, USMC, has trouble breathing. He is huddled inside an amphibious landing vehicle with a dozen other marines of the First Battalion, headed for the section of Japanese-held beach code-named Orange One. Even this early in the morning, the temperature hovers at 100 degrees. The Americans are sweating profusely as their armored craft brings them ever closer to the sand. But heat is not the only factor \u2014 some of the perspiration is from nerves. These marines understand that they may soon die or be maimed for life and few will ever know what happened to them. Unlike in the much more publicized war in Europe, where reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow are making names for themselves by covering every aspect of the fighting, there are few journalists or photographers hitting this remote beach today. The crucial upcoming battle against the Japanese will be waged in near anonymity. Peleliu is important because of its airstrip, a hard-surfaced field capable of launching long-range fighter-bombers. The island is just six miles long and two miles wide, but the terrain is exceptionally rugged, a film of thin soil laid atop coral and limestone. A thousand yards off the beach rise the jungle-covered Umurbrogol ridges, a series of low, jagged peaks forming the island's spine. The Japanese have long coveted tiny, remote Peleliu, first taking possession of the empty island in 1914. For two decades it remained basically unused, but with the war came renewed awareness of its tactical importance. Since this past summer, knowing that the Americans would soon attack, the Japanese have labored to transform Peleliu into a fortress. Most American marines could not care less about the history of Peleliu. Each man approaches the coming battle in his own way. Some smoke to calm their fears, some vomit onto the steel deck, and others worry about wetting their pants. But there is one belief that every man shares: no matter what happens when they hit the beach, surrendering to the enemy will not be an option. Lewis Bausell has been through this before. Only twenty years old, the apprentice bookbinder from Washington, DC, has an easy smile and a wide boxer's nose. His hair is cropped close to his skull. Bausell had a semester left at McKinley Technical High School when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He immediately dropped out of school and tried to enlist in the navy but was rejected. So instead, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. During his more than two years serving his country, Bausell has earned the respect of his peers, and although his rank is not yet official, just one month ago Bausell was selected for promotion to the rank of sergeant because of his heroic performance and leadership during invasions on Tulagi, Gavutu, Guadalcanal, and Cape Gloucester. Now, as the amtrac churns forward through the flat surf toward Peleliu, Bausell buckles the chin strap of his steel helmet. The landing craft stalls momentarily on the coral reef one hundred yards offshore, then continues churning toward the landing zone. Bausell is tempted to peer up and over the side to glimpse the battlefield, but he keeps his head down. Japanese snipers are known to target the curious. All at once, geysers of water erupt around the landing craft. Incoming Japanese 141-mm mortar rounds fill the air. Many find their mark, killing Bausell's fellow marines on other landing craft. The explosions and the roar of artillery are so loud that Bausell and his squadmates cannot hear one another without yelling. The smoke of battle has turned the blue morning sky black. On any other day, Peleliu is a tropical island paradise. Today it is a living hell. \"Hit the beach,\" yells a sergeant as the amtrac's steel treads reach the shore. Bausell vaults up and over the side, landing hard on the bone-white sand and coral. The staccato chatter of hidden Japanese machine guns forces Bausell to press his body flat against the earth. All around him, explosions bring flashes of light. The palm trees lining the beach are in flames. Crimson pools of American blood mingle with the yellow phosphorus of Japanese incendiary devices. \"All any man could do was sweat it out and pray for survival,\" one marine will later write of his first moments on Peleliu. \"It would have been sure suicide to stand up during that firestorm.\" Everything Bausell sees and hears gives the lie to what he and his fellow marines had been told about this tactically vital Japanese stronghold. In preparation for Operation Stalemate, the United States Navy bombarded Peleliu with ten days of aerial raids and two more days of naval shelling. It seemed impossible that anyone could have lived through such an intense barrage of napalm and artillery; \"we have run out of targets,\" a top naval officer complained. American intelligence supported this notion, suggesting that the enemy response would be minimal. The Marine Corps officer commanding the invasion, Major General William Rupertus, predicted a quick and easy battle \u2014 \"a hard fought 'quickie' that will last for four days, five days at most.\" But as Corporal Lewis Bausell and his squad can now attest, Peleliu will not be taken easily. Its defenders have had months to prepare. Mortar launchers and artillery are concealed behind the 2,200-yard beachfront, targeted to strike the precise spots at which the Americans now race ashore. In addition, the Japanese have constructed antitank barriers, laid hundreds of mines, and lined the beach with every coil of barbed wire in the Caroline Islands. \"Spider traps\" \u2014 machine-gun nests made of coconut-tree logs \u2014 are camouflaged so well that they are almost invisible in the swampy landscape where jungle meets the sand. Yet Japanese commander Colonel Kunio Nakagawa is a realist. He knows the Americans will eventually work their way ashore. The US force is huge. So the wily colonel is employing a strategy tried just once before in the war. Despite the horrific welcome the Americans are now receiving, it is not his goal to win this battle on the beaches. Just a fraction of his army now fights the marines, but thousands of other elite troops wait inland, in a network of five hundred hidden caves in the nearby Umurbrogol highlands. These fukkaku defenses will allow Nakagawa and his men to counter the Americans, \"bleeding them white\" by coming out of hiding to attack when the marines least expect it. The attacking Japanese soldiers' ability to swarm out of nowhere led top British general William Slim to refer to them as \"the most formidable fighting insect in history.\" The men of Nakagawa's Fourteenth Imperial Division embody that sentiment. Almost all are veteran warriors, hardened by years of battle. They have been living five stories underground, subsisting on a simple diet of rice and fish and enduring the beatings and harsh discipline from their officers that are typical of the Japanese army. \"You could be beaten for anything,\" one Japanese soldier later remembered. \"Being too short or being too tall, even because somebody didn't like the way you drank coffee. This was done to make each man respond instantly to orders, and it produced results. If you want soldiers who fight hard, they must train hard.\" These soldiers have been taught another crucial lesson: that the Japanese race is superior to all others, and that triumph over the inferior Americans is inevitable. That is a lie. But to soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army, it doesn't matter. Their strongest belief of all is in the samurai code of Bushido, which stipulates that surrender is a form of dishonor. \"The man who would not disgrace himself must be strong,\" reads a line from the Japanese army's Senjinkun, a pocket-size code of behavior issued to all servicemen. \"Do not survive in shame as a prisoner. Die, to ensure that you do not leave ignominy behind you.\" Therein lies the basis for Colonel Nakagawa's trap. There is no escape route for the Japanese, no evacuation plan. The forty-six-year-old Nakagawa, who was decorated nine times for his heroism during Japan's earlier war with China, has already informed his wife that he will never see her again. Soon, very soon, he will lure the unsuspecting Americans into the Umurbrogol highlands and slaughter them. But in turn, he and his men will also be slaughtered. Surrender is not an option. * * * Corporal Lewis Bausell rises up off the sand and sprints in a low crouch. His goal is the protective shelter of a small coral ridge a hundred yards inland. All around him as he runs, shouts of \"Get the hell off the beach!\" mingle with desperate pleas of \"Corpsman!\" Bausell has never seen such destruction. Two hundred marines will die today; hundreds more will be wounded. Terrified corporals and privates now watch the bodies of their brother marines torn apart as fire from Japanese heavy artillery crashes down. \"One figure seemed to fly to pieces,\" a marine will recall of a particularly grisly death. \"With terrible clarity I saw the head and one leg fly into the air.\" \"I saw a wounded Marine near me staggering,\" another American will remember. \"His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick ... he fell behind me, in a red puddle on the white sand.\" Every man here knows what the Japanese army does to prisoners of war. Rather than hold men captive, the Japanese murder them in the most heinous fashion. Veterans of previous battles with this enemy have seen the corpses of marines unlucky enough to be taken alive. Some had their bodies roped to a tree and used for live bayonet practice. Some had their heads, arms, and legs chopped off; scores of US Marines were emasculated with bayonets as they lay dying on the ground. \"It was kill or be killed,\" Marine Corps private Dan Lawler will later remember. \"The Japs didn't take prisoners so we didn't take prisoners either.\" Or, as Marine Corps colonel Lewis \"Chesty\" Puller ordered his men before the Peleliu invasion: \"You will take no prisoners. You will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that's it.\" * * * It seems an eternity, but it is only an hour before Corporal Bausell and a few of his fellow marines manage to get off the sand. Bausell's smile has been replaced by a tight-lipped glare. His instincts sharpened by his many previous landings, Bausell searches the tree line for signs of hidden enemy machine-gun emplacements targeting the invasion force. Suddenly, a burst of light gets Corporal Bausell's attention. The Japanese machine guns fire tracer bullets to help them zero in on a target, but these illuminated rounds can also help the marines pinpoint the shooter's precise location. Bausell sees a stream of tracers emerging from a small cave with a commanding view of the beach. The entrance is concealed by scrub plants and thick brush. Taking charge of the squad, he motions for his men to follow him toward the cave's location. Reaching the cave first, he fires into a small opening. Lieutenant Jack Kimble of Greenville, Mississippi, arrives with a two-man flamethrower team; a stream of fire is launched into the Japanese position in the hope of forcing the enemy to come out. Corporal Bausell, meanwhile, stands ready to shoot them as they emerge. The first Japanese to run screaming from the cave is carrying a grenade. He pulls the pin before Bausell can fire his M1 carbine. Not only does the explosion kill the Japanese soldier but shrapnel slices into several nearby marines. More flame is shot into the cave. Another Japanese soldier emerges. This time, Bausell shoots him dead. Yet another Japanese soldier runs out of the cave, choosing the sure death by rifle fire to being roasted alive. He too carries a grenade, hurling it at the Americans as Bausell raises his weapon. The grenade is launched before Bausell shoots; it lands near him and several other marines. The blast may kill them all. Without hesitation, Corporal Bausell throws his body onto the grenade. His torso rises off the ground as it explodes, smothering the blast. None of his fellow marines is hurt. \"Get that Jap,\" Bausell shouts. Somehow, he is still alive. The flamethrower team shoots off a burst of flame, turning the Japanese soldier into a human torch. Less than two hours after landing on Peleliu, Corporal Lewis Bausell is put on a stretcher and carried back down the beach. He is loaded aboard an amtrac, then ferried out to the hospital ship Bountiful, where he is immediately taken into surgery. But doctors cannot stop the bleeding. The Japanese grenade has sent deadly shards of metal deep into Bausell's internal organs. On September 18, 1944, three days after the invasion of Peleliu, Corporal Lewis Bausell dies. Unlike those of soldiers fighting on World War II's European front, his body will not be lowered into the ground and marked with a monument so that his family might someday visit. Instead, his corpse is wrapped in sailcloth, tethered to a spent artillery shell, and dropped at sea. Corporal Lewis Bausell is the first United States Marine at the Battle of Peleliu whose death will see him awarded America's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor, for actions above and beyond the call of duty in combat. He is not the last. CHAPTER 2 Leyte, Visayas Islands Philippines October 20, 1944 1300 Hours General Douglas MacArthur is grinning. \"As Ripley says, believe it or not, we're here,\" he boasts to his chief of staff. Seven hundred miles west of Peleliu, where marines are now mired in their fifth bloody week of combat, the sixty-four-year-old commander of American forces in the Pacific leans over the rail of the USS Nashville. He gazes into the distance at his beloved Philippines, which were invaded by more than a hundred thousand US Army troops under his command less than four hours ago. His counterpart in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, became famous for the D-Day invasion of France this past June. So MacArthur, well known for his ego, has chosen to call the date of this invasion \"A-Day,\" for \"Attack Day.\" As on Peleliu, intelligence reports predicting minimal enemy resistance have proven very wrong. The Japanese are putting up a fierce fight for the Philippines. Even miles out to sea, MacArthur can hear the chatter of automatic-weapons fire coming from groves of palm trees and see the billowing plumes of black smoke from the jungle. Just overhead, American fighter-bombers buzz toward entrenched enemy positions, keeping a sharp eye out for Japanese Zero fighter planes. Two years ago, after the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese, the most humiliating defeat of MacArthur's storied career, the general promised the world that he would one day come back in glory to retake the islands. Now, he is setting out to make good on that vow. Douglas MacArthur, who likes to refer to himself in the third person as simply \"MacArthur,\" is a shade over six feet tall, the son of a Medal of Honor\u2013winning general through whom he has a lifelong connection to the Philippines. Arthur MacArthur Jr. fought in the American Civil War as a teenager and, after the Spanish-American War, served as military governor of the Philippines. Douglas graduated at the top of his class at West Point, and to this day is as narrow-waisted and fit as on his commissioning day in 1903. MacArthur clambers down a ladder hanging over the Nashville 's side and into a waiting landing craft. As he does every day, the general wears a freshly pressed khaki uniform that bears no insignia or ribbons. He fastidiously maintains the creases on his shirtsleeves and trousers by changing clothes frequently, and has just donned a fresh uniform for the landing. In case the landing goes horribly wrong and MacArthur is at risk of being taken prisoner, a loaded derringer that once belonged to his father rests in his hip pocket. Sweat stains seep into the gold braid encircling MacArthur's weathered field marshal's cap; his dark brown eyes are shielded from the ocean's glare by wire-rimmed Ray-Ban sunglasses. Completing these trademark aspects of his appearance, all of which have made the general an iconic figure worldwide, is the unlit corncob pipe clenched firmly between his teeth. (Continues...) Excerpted from Killing the Rising Sun by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard . Copyright \u00a9 2016 Henry Holt. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.93}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0618966145", "title": "Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America", "author": "Roger Tory Peterson", "description": "Amazon.com Review Product Description In celebration of the centennial of Roger Tory Peterson's birth comes a historic collaboration among renowned birding experts and artists to preserve and enhance the Peterson legacy. This new book combines the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds and Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds into one volume, filled with accessible, concise information and including almost three hours of video podcasts to make bird watching even easier. \u2022 40 new paintings \u2022 Digital updates to Peterson's original paintings, reflecting the latest knowledge of bird identification \u2022 All new maps for the most up-to-date range information available \u2022 Text rewritten to cover the U.S. and Canada in one guide \u2022 Larger trim size accommodates range maps on every spread \u2022 Contributors include: Michael DiGiorgio, Jeff Gordon, Paul Lehman, Michael O'Brien, Larry Rosche, and Bill Thompson III \u2022 Includes URL to register for access to video podcasts Excerpts from Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America Click on each image below to see a larger view Colorful songbirds with heavy, seed-crushing bills, cardinals and grosbeaks are popular at feeders. In North America, the Orchard and Baltimore Orioles are fairly widespread in the East; Bullock's is widespread in the West; and the Spot-breasted Oriole is limited to South Florida. Peterson sometimes painted over figures on a plate and sometimes even cut them out. Canyon Wren was missing from the original art. Michael O'Brien painted a new Canyon Wren for inclusion in the new field guide. The Orange Bishop is native to Africa but has been introduced in California. Peterson had not painted this bird for his field guides, so Michael O\u2019Brien painted this one. Thumbnail maps help you determine at a glance if a bird is likely to be in your region. Large maps in back give detailed range information. From Booklist As new or revised field guides are published, they are getting too big to carry in a pocket. This one is no exception. It is larger and heavier than earlier Peterson Field Guides and combines the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds (1992) and the\u00a0Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds (1992) in a single volume.\u00a0The new features include a more conversational text, online access to video podcasts, and small range maps with the plates as well as the usual range-maps section at the end.\u00a0The text covers both Canada and the U.S., so it is more inclusive than many guides. When his first edition was published some 75 years ago, Peterson\u2019s system for identifying field marks became the gold standard for birders worldwide. This updated edition has corrections to the taxonomy (name changes and specie identifications).\u00a0Every effort has been made to present the most current information. Peterson\u2019s paintings have been digitized, and 40 new paintings in his style are included where needed.\u00a0The contributors who worked on this guide are well-known and respected birders, illustrators, and writers and have maintained the high standards that Peterson set. Birding field-trip leaders will want to make room in their backpacks for this guide because the large illustrations will be very useful in teaching while birding. Libraries of all types will also want this volume marking the 100th\u00a0anniversary of Peterson\u2019s birth because of its concise, accurate information and large illustrations. --Linda Scarth Review \"I'm happy to report, the Peterson guide is back, and in a big way.\" - Birders World\"This new field guide should solidify Peterson's already monumental place in the history of birding.\" Cleveland Plain Dealer\"This book is a classic with updated information.\" - Birding Business About the Author Lee Allen Peterson grew up in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and is the younger son of Roger Tory Peterson. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, Lee wrote the Peterson Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants and spent years photographing plants and giving natural history lectures at colleges and nature centers. He and his wife, Courtney, live in southeastern Pennsylvania.<br /><br />Roger Tory Peterson, one of the world's greatest naturalists, received every major award for ornithology, natural science, and conservation, as well as numerous honorary degrees, medals, and citations, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Peterson Identification System has been called the greatest invention since binoculars, and the Peterson Field Guides\u00ae are credited with helping to set the stage for the environmental movement. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 47.9}, {"asin": "B0074CLMA4", "title": "Gone, But Not Forgotten", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Phillip Margolin is the author of fifteen New York Times bestsellers. Each novel displays a unique, compelling insider\u2019s view of criminal behavior which comes from his long background as a criminal defense attorney who has handled thirty murder cases. He lives in Portland, Oregon. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From the Inside Flap me Russ went into the bedroom, he\u00a0\u00a0missed the rose and the note. His back was to the bed\u00a0\u00a0when he stripped off his clothes and hung them in\u00a0\u00a0the closet. When fifteen more minutes passed\u00a0\u00a0without Vicky, Russ went back into the bedroom to phone\u00a0\u00a0her best friend. That was when he saw the note on\u00a0\u00a0the pillow on the immaculately made bed. There was\u00a0\u00a0a black rose lying across the plain, white paper.\u00a0\u00a0Written in a careful hand were the\u00a0\u00a0words \"Gone, But Not Forgotten.\" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Publisher \"The first time Russ went into the bedroom, he missed the rose and the note. His back was to the bed when he stripped off his clothes and hung them in the closet. When fifteen more minutes passed without Vicky, Russ went back into the bedroom to phone her best friend. That was when he saw the note on the pillow on the immaculately made bed. There was a black rose lying across the plain, white paper. Written in a careful hand were the words \"Gone, But Not Forgotten.\" \"Best fiction book of the year? Easy. Gone , But Not Forgotten keeps the twists and turns coming a breakneck speed.\" -- Larry King \"One scary story... it takes a really crafty storyteller to put people on the edge of their seats and keep them there. But Phillip Margolin does just that.\" -- Chicago Tribune \"This gripping, page-turning crime thriller is engrossing, intelligent and well-crafted... Gone , But Not Forgotten is the book you will want to tel your friends about.\" -- Jean M. Auel \"Absolutely mesmerizing.\" -- Cosmopolitan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \"Best\u00a0\u00a0fiction book of the year?\u00a0\u00a0Easy. Gone , But Not Forgotten keeps the\u00a0\u00a0twists and turns coming a breakneck speed.\" --\u00a0\u00a0Larry King \"One scary story... it\u00a0\u00a0takes a really crafty storyteller to put people on\u00a0\u00a0the edge of their seats and keep them there. But\u00a0\u00a0Phillip Margolin does just that.\" -- Chicago\u00a0\u00a0Tribune\"This gripping, page-turning\u00a0\u00a0crime thriller is engrossing, intelligent and\u00a0\u00a0well-crafted... Gone , But\u00a0\u00a0Not Forgotten is the book you will want to\u00a0\u00a0tell your friends about.\" -- Jean M. Auel\u00a0\u00a0\"Absolutely mesmerizing.\" -- Cosmopolitan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile Whitton's reading of this gripping story of a clever serial killer is as brilliant as Margolin's writing. J.A.H. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Back Cover \"Best fiction book of the year? Easy. Gone , But Not Forgotten keeps the twists and turns coming a breakneck speed.\" -- Larry King \"One scary story... it takes a really crafty storyteller to put people on the edge of their seats and keep them there. But Phillip Margolin does just that.\" -- Chicago Tribune< \"This gripping, page-turning crime thriller is engrossing, intelligent and well-crafted... Gone , But Not Forgotten is the book you will want to tell your friends about.\" -- Jean M. Auel \"Absolutely mesmerizing.\" -- Cosmopolitan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly Margolin's gripping, gruesome whodunit about vanishing Portland housewives was a PW bestseller. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Kirkus Reviews A rash of grisly torture/murders of upscale Portland, Oregon, housewives--each kidnapped by someone who leaves behind a black rose and a note saying ``Gone, but not forgotten''--turns out to have unholy roots in an identical series of killings across the country a decade earlier. Martin Darius, the megalomaniac developer accused of the crimes, swears he's innocent. But Nancy Gordon, an ex-detective from Hunter's Point (New York) homicide, tells his lawyer, Betsy Tannenbaum, that he's Peter Lake, whom she's convinced was behind the Hunter's Point killings--including those of Lake's wife and young daughter. Betsy's own investigation points to a coverup nine years ago: Lake was pardoned by police and a governor desperate to find starving kidnap victims that Nancy Gordon never mentioned to Betsy. Now that that governor's nomination to the Supreme Court could be jeopardized by any whiff of the pardon, Darius admits to Betsy that, yes, he's Lake and that he did indeed kill those women back then--but not the current victims, whom he insists obsessive Gordon has murdered in order to frame him. Gordon, meanwhile, has disappeared, and a third suspect has surfaced: Samantha Reardon, a surviving Hunter's Point victim whose graphically detailed captivity may be fueling a psychotic thirst for revenge. ``Can you imagine a case you wouldn't take?'' a reporter asks Betsy about her repulsive client--but in fact Betsy's ethical dilemma is only the beginning of her troubles. Margolin's writing won't win any prizes (``Darius was in Betsy's soul''; he's ``not just a bad person, but pure evil'')--but this slick, pulpish first novel will keep an awful lot of people up until dawn. -- Copyright \u00a91993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Library Journal Four women disappear from Hunter's Point, New York, before the murdered bodies of Sandra Lake and her six-year-old daughter are found. Next to Mrs. Lake are a black rose and a note that reads, \"Gone, but not forgotten.\" Ten years later women are vanishing from Portland, Oregon. In each of their homes is a black rose and a note identical to that found in Hunter's Point. After hearing about the New York case and its possible connection to his, Portland's district attorney, Alan Page, arrests wealthy Martin Darius for the torture and murder of the people whose bodies are found on his property. Meanwhile, Betsy Tannenbaum, a rising star in the legal profession and Darius's lawyer, discovers incriminating evidence against him. Margolin combines the riveting suspense of the traditional thriller with the current legal thriller to create a first-rate novel containing all the best elements of a mystery as well. The pat denouement is the only negative in this thoroughly enticing book. Essential for all fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/93. - Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., Ohio Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "1338262181", "title": "The Tales of Beedle the Bard: The Illustrated Edition (Harry Potter)", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "description": "About the Author J.K. ROWLING is the author of the enduringly popular, era-defining Harry Potter seven-book series, which have sold over 600 million copies in 85 languages, been listened to as audiobooks for over one billion hours and made into eight smash hit movies. To accompany the series, she wrote three short companion volumes for charity, including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them , which went on to inspire a new series of films featuring Magizoologist Newt Scamander. Harry\u2019s story as a grown-up was continued in a stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , which J.K. Rowling wrote with playwright Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany. In 2020, she returned to publishing for younger children with the fairy tale The Ickabog , the royalties for which she donated to her charitable trust, Volant, to help charities working to alleviate the social effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. Her latest children\u2019s novel, The Christmas Pig , was published in 2021. J.K. Rowling has received many awards and honours for her writing, including for her detective series written under the name Robert Galbraith. She supports a wide number of humanitarian causes through Volant, and is the founder of the international children\u2019s care reform charity Lumos. J.K. Rowling lives in Scotland with her family.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "1091381089", "title": "The Outlaw Stinky Joe (Baer Creighton)", "author": "Clayton Lindemuth", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 13.99}], "target_asin": "0618966145"}
{"user_id": "AED53OLQNIQQALOPX4A5ZEKUSD5Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B07F3CMXR9", "title": "Travesty: A Nail-Biting Thriller (An Amber Monroe Crime Thriller Book 5)", "author": "C.M. Sutter", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "1946203394", "title": "Find Your Hedgehog and Stop Working: When You Find Your Passion, Work Stops Being Work", "author": "Socrate Exantus", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 17.95}, {"asin": "1625860811", "title": "An Unlikely Discipler: A Car Dealer's Journey Down a Road Less Traveled", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 66.89}, {"asin": "B07R29FDQD", "title": "A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains Book 1)", "author": "Victor Methos", "description": "Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense \u201c A Killer\u2019s Wife is a high-stakes legal thriller loaded with intense courtroom drama, compelling characters, and surprising twists that will keep you turning the pages at breakneck speed.\u201d \u2014T.R. Ragan, New York Times bestselling author \u201cExquisitely paced and skillfully crafted, A Killer\u2019s Wife delivers a wicked psychological suspense wrapped around a hypnotic legal thriller. One cleverly designed twist after another kept me saying\u2014I did not see that coming.\u201d \u2014Steven Konkoly, Wall Street Journal bestselling author \u201cA gripping thriller that doesn\u2019t let up for a single page. Surprising twists with a hero you care about. I read the whole book in one sitting!\u201d \u2014Chad Zunker, bestselling author of An Equal Justice From the Publisher We all have an ex we regret\u2014but Jessica Yardley\u2019s ex-husband, Eddie, is everyone\u2019s nightmare. Finding out your husband is a murderer isn\u2019t something you ever get over. As an attorney, Jessica has spent years fighting injustice for others and making sure she and her daughter still have the safest and best life possible. But when a copycat killer mimicking Eddie\u2019s MO enters the scene, Jessica knows law enforcement may not be able to catch him. Forced to confront her fears and the only source who truly understands the murderer, she visits her ex-husband. But doing so puts her and her daughter\u2019s lives at risk...Eddie has his own agenda for the family he claims he never stopped loving. Sometimes to find the answer, you need the help of your worst enemy. Now not only must Jessica stop a serial killer on the loose, she must also protect her daughter and herself from one behind bars. A Killer\u2019s Wife is a chilling tale with twists and turns I didn\u2019t see coming. It\u2019s a thriller that stays with you long after the last page. - Megha Parekh, Editor About the Author At the age of thirteen, when his best friend was interrogated by the police for over eight hours and confessed to a crime he didn\u2019t commit, Victor Methos knew he would one day become a lawyer. After graduating from the University of Utah School of Law, Methos sharpened his teeth as a prosecutor for Salt Lake City before founding what would become the most successful criminal defense firm in Utah. In ten years Methos conducted more than one hundred trials. One particular case stuck with him, and it eventually became the basis for his first major bestseller, The Neon Lawyer . Since that time, Methos has focused his work on legal thrillers and mysteries, earning a Best Novel Edgar nomination for his title A Gambler\u2019s Jury . He currently splits his time between Southern Utah and Las Vegas. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B077GRGYJ4", "title": "A Merciful Silence (Mercy Kilpatrick Book 4)", "author": "Kendra Elliot", "description": "Review \u201cKendra Elliot goes from strength to strength in her Mercy Kilpatrick stories, and this fourth installment is a gripping, twisty, and complex narrative that will have fans rapt\u2026Easily the most daring and successful book in this impressive series.\u201d \u2014RT Book Reviews About the Author Kendra Elliot has landed on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list multiple times and is the award-winning author of the Bone Secrets and Callahan & McLane series, as well as the Mercy Kilpatrick novels: A Merciful Death , A Merciful Truth , and A Merciful Secret . Kendra is a three-time winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award, an International Thriller Writers finalist, and an RT Award finalist. She has always been a voracious reader, cutting her teeth on classic female heroines such as Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Laura Ingalls. She was born, raised, and still lives in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her husband and three daughters, but she looks forward to the day she can live in flip-flops. Visit her at www.kendraelliot.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B076TLCXJK", "title": "Malice: A Heart Stopping Thriller (An Agent Jade Monroe FBI Thriller Book 5)", "author": "C.M. Sutter", "description": "About the Author C.M. Sutter is a crime fiction writer who resides in Florida, although she is originally from California. She is a member of numerous writers' organizations, including Fiction for All, Fiction Factor, and Writers etc. In addition to writing, she enjoys spending time with her friends and family. She is an art enthusiast and loves to create gourd birdhouses, pebble art, and handmade soaps. Hiking, bicycling, fishing, and traveling are a few of her favorite pastimes. Be the first to be notified of new releases and promotions at http: //cmsutter.com. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0375725601", "title": "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America", "author": "Erik Larson", "description": "Review \u201cEngrossing . . . exceedingly well documented . . . utterly fascinating.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cA dynamic, enveloping book. . . . Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel. . . . It doesn\u2019t hurt that this truth is stranger than fiction.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \"So good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already.\"\u00a0\u2014 Esquire \u201cAnother successful exploration of American history. . . . Larson skillfully balances the grisly details with the far-reaching implications of the World\u2019s Fair.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cAs absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cPaints a dazzling picture of the Gilded Age and prefigure the American century to come.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cA wonderfully unexpected book. . . Larson is a historian . . . with a novelist\u2019s soul.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Sun-Times From the Inside Flap Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America?s place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction. From the Back Cover Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America's place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction. About the Author ERIK LARSON is the author of four national bestsellers: In the Garden of Beasts , Thunderstruck , The Devil in the White City , and Isaac's Storm , which have collectively sold more than 5.5 million copies. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker , The Atlantic Monthly , Harper's and other publications and his books have been published in fourteen countries. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Black City How easy it was to disappear:A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home. Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago's Hull House, wrote, \"Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.\" The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of \"our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.\"The women walked to work on streets that angled past bars, gambling houses, and bordellos. Vice thrived, with official indulgence. \"The parlors and bedrooms in which honest folk lived were (as now) rather dull places,\" wrote Ben Hecht, late in his life, trying to explain this persistent trait of old Chicago. \"It was pleasant, in a way, to know that outside their windows, the devil was still capering in a flare of brimstone.\" In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to \"a human being with his skin removed.\"Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains that entered and left the city did so at grade level. You could step from a curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on average two people were destroyed at the city's rail crossings. Their injuries were grotesque. Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards. Streetcars fell from drawbridges. Horses bolted and dragged carriages into crowds. Fires took a dozen lives a day. In describing the fire dead, the term the newspapers most liked to use was \"roasted.\" There was diphtheria, typhus, cholera, influenza. And there was murder. In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed each other rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred homicides. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot each other by accident. But all this could be understood. Nothing like the Whitechapel killings had occurred. Jack the Ripper's five-murder spree in 1888 had defied explanation and captivated readers throughout America, who believed such a thing could not happen in their own hometowns.But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.And in Chicago a young handsome doctor stepped from a train, his surgical valise in hand. He entered a world of clamor, smoke, and steam, refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs. He found it to his liking.The letters came later, from the Cigrands, Williamses, Smythes, and untold others, addressed to that strange gloomy castle at Sixty-third and Wallace, pleading for the whereabouts of daughters and daughters' children.It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root.This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.41}, {"asin": "1465462902", "title": "The Arts: A Visual Encyclopedia (DK Children's Visual Encyclopedias)", "author": "DK", "description": "About the Author DK was founded in London in 1974 and is now the world's leading illustrated reference publisher and part of Penguin Random House, formed on July 1, 2013. DK publishes highly visual, photographic nonfiction for adults and children. DK produces content for consumers in over 87 countries and in 62 languages, with offices in Delhi, London, Melbourne, Munich, New York, and Toronto. DK's aim is to inform, enrich, and entertain readers of all ages, and everything DK publishes, whether print or digital, embodies the unique DK design approach. DK brings unrivalled clarity to a wide range of topics with a unique combination of words and pictures, put together to spectacular effect. We have a reputation for innovation in design for both print and digital products. \u00a0 Our adult range spans travel, including the award-winning DK Eyewitness Travel Guides, history, science, nature, sport, gardening, cookery, and parenting. DK\u2019s extensive children\u2019s list showcases a fantastic store of information for children, toddlers, and babies. DK covers everything from animals and the human body, to homework help and craft activities, together with an impressive list of licensing titles, including the bestselling LEGO\u00ae books. DK acts as the parent company for Alpha Books, publisher of the Idiot's Guides series and Prima Games, video gaming publishers, as well as the award-winning travel publisher, Rough Guides.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 23.98}, {"asin": "1484714547", "title": "World of Reading: Avengers The New Team: Level 1", "author": null, "description": "About the Author", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.92}], "target_asin": "B076TLCXJK"}
{"user_id": "AEYUXRIDU46OF4JC57YBRWHXBI5Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1626567204", "title": "Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster", "author": "Edgar H. Schein", "description": "Review \u201c Humble Consulting is a fine blend of poetic writing and practical methodology. It is an intimate conversation about how service, in this case consulting, works in the real world. All who want a deeper understanding of the way to create relationships that produce outcomes will value this book. To simply recommend it is an understatement.\u201d \u2014Peter Block, author of Flawless Consulting, The Answer to How Is Yes \u201cWhat is the most powerful force in consulting\u2019s relational success\u2014where you and the client move beyond the transactional to the deeper transformational?\u00a0 I used to think it was what our amazing OD founders Ed Schein and Warren Bennis saw as the core value of Organization Development: \u00a0what they called that special \u201cspirit of inquiry.\u201d Now I see that it\u2019s something far more foundational. In a word, its \u201chumility\u201d and Ed Schein, with this book is modelling it for all of us in the way he, the master, is yet the student, disclosing his innermost doubts and mistakes, revealing his subtle insights and brilliant successes, and up-ending almost all of our assumptions of what really matters most. This is the first book I now recommend to consultants young and old: for without humility\u2014a stance wide-open, a state-of \u201cnot knowing\u201d and totally vulnerable and present-- you cannot do this work. The message: make humility your greatest strength, and never\u00a0lose\u00a0it.\u201d - David L. Cooperrider, author of Appreciative Inquiry and Fairmount Minerals Professor of Social Entrepreneurship, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University \u201cEd Schein takes the principles of Humble Inquiry and beautifully extends them to the consulting process in this book. He humbly and generously gives us a window into his own life and consulting process by sharing real stories from his years of consulting, including his own inner thoughts and unexpressed feelings. Every consultant should read this for insights into how we should deal with our doubts, questions, and anxieties. This is another major contribution to our work and our field from Dr. Schein.\u201d \u2014Matt Minahan, Chair, Board of Trustees, OD Network \"In this book Ed Schein has looked back over\u00a0his long and\u00a0distinguished consulting experience and come up with an\u00a0important book. \u00a0 Anyone who is\u00a0called\u00a0upon to give help or advice, be\u00a0they boss,\u00a0consultant, parent or friend,\u00a0should start by reading\u00a0this. \u00a0I used it to\u00a0hold up a mirror to my own experience of giving advice and resolved to modify my behavior in future, to be more humble, in the Schein way.\" \u2014Charles Handy, author of The Age of Unreason \u201cChock-full of useful case examples, Humble Consulting is about establishing a relationship with the client that is collaborative, personal, and empathetic rather than prescriptive. Schein has once again contributed significantly and creatively to our field of organization change and development.\u201d \u2014W. Warner Burke, PhD, E. L. Thorndike Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, and Editor, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science \u201cEd Schein\u2019s books on consulting have always been the most professionally useful things I read. And this book could once again reshape the consulting industry. It shifts the place from which effective consultants operate from the head to the heart and from the heart to the hand. Essential reading!\u201d \u2014Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer, MIT, cofounder of the U.Lab and autbor of Theory U \u201cEd Schein has done it again! This book is a must-read for anyone in the helping professions who wants to make meaningful progress on complex challenges.\u00a0Drawing on his own experience as consultant, scholar, and author, Ed brilliantly makes the case that it is through real human connections that we have the best shot at making a difference in an increasingly interdependent world.\u201d \u2014Diane Rawlins, InsideOut Consulting \u201c Humble Consulting pulls the curtain back on the pretense that the vast majority of consultants and consulting organizations put forward\u2014that they have \u2018the answer.\u2019 I plan on keeping a copy in my office to hand out to consultants as they continue to show up and ask that I tell them what keeps me up at night and they respond with the solution that they uniquely have to address it.\u201d \u2014James Hereford, Chief Operating Officer, Stanford Health Care \u201cLong a critic of OD\u2019s overreliance on process, I\u2019ve always admired Ed Schein\u2019s insistence that process consultation be relevant. Now, in his new book, Humble Consulting, he shows us how. In his usual and clear style, he calls OD practitioners to account and to help in powerful and integrated ways.\u201d \u2014Chris Worley, Professor and Strategy Director, NEOMA Business School Center for Leadership and Effective Organizations \u201cAs someone who always strives to be a more effective consultant, I find Ed Schein\u2019s reflections and insights hugely reassuring.\u00a0In Humble Consulting , with great care and sensitivity, Ed Schein shares years of wisdom and encourages his readers to reflect on and experiment with their own practice. I believe anyone working in a helping role will benefit from reading this wonderful book.\u201d \u2014Philip Mix, organization development consultant and member of the NTL Institute \u201cIn Humble Consulting , master consultant Edgar Schein shows us how to escape the limitations of a traditional consulting practice to vastly improve both the impact and the meaning of our work. This book is at once brilliant and incredibly practical.\u201d \u2014Anthony L. Suchman, MD, MA, consultant, Relationship Centered Health Care \u201c Humble Consulting is a book every leader and every consultant should read. Using numerous cases from his own experience, Schein describes the specific components of a true helping relationship and shows the powerful impact when consulting rests on curious questioning that honors and unlocks the knowledge held by the other.\u201d \u2014David L. Bradford, PhD, Eugene D. O\u2019Kelly Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Emeritus, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and coauthor of the bestselling books Influence without Authority and Power Up \u201cFinally, a consulting process that demonstrates and emulates the type of culture toward which organizations and their leaders aspire.\u201d \u2014Robert Cooke, author of Human Synergistics\u2019 Organizational Culture Inventory \u201cEd Schein once again moves the needle in refining the essence of consulting. Schein invokes a shift from considering clients as objects to considering clients as living, dynamic beings. The artistry of balancing formality and intimacy, dancing with the dynamic client system, paying attention to the environment, and engaging in endless reflective learning makes for a potent model and process. Read the wisdom and be open to transformation.\u201d \u2014Sarita Chawla, President, Metalens Consulting; Senior Faculty, New Ventures West; and Diamond Approach teacher \u201cIn Humble Consulting ,\u00a0Ed Schein weaves the cultural and process consulting threads of his life\u2019s work into a masterpiece of emotional, cultural, and methodological insight. Read this book and be prepared to change your mind, heart, and practice.\u201d \u2014David E. Goldberg, author of The Design of Innovation and coauthor of A Whole New Engineer \u201cThis senior icon in the field continues to make meaningful and significant contributions which could only be realized through years of experience and reflection. I have been reading Edgar Schein's work for almost 50 years now, and I have learned from each of his works. But somehow, this his latest, is special.\u201d \u2014Peter\u00a0F.\u00a0Sorensen, PhD, director,Master of Science in Management and Organizational Behavior program, Benedictine University About the Author Edgar H. Schein is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of numerous bestselling books including the recent Humble Inquiry. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PrefaceThis book brings together various insights and ideas I have acquired over fifty years of research, teaching, and consulting and, at the same time, reflects how the kinds of problems that organizations face in our rapidly changing world have forced the evolution of those ideas.  As I began my career as a human relations trainer and part-time consultant in the 1960s, I evolved the model of Process Consultation (introduced in my books Process Consultation, 1969; and Process Consultation Revisited, 1999), which emphasizes the need to involve the client in the process of figuring out what is wrong and what can be done about it. After several decades of working with this model and updating the book, I began to realize that the model we were using for organization and management consulting really had broader applications to all kinds of helping relationships, resulting in the 2009 book Helping. Analyzing the helping process from a sociological point of view also revealed how much our cultural norms influenced what we thought should be both the client\u2019s role and the consultant\u2019s role in the helping process.  In my own experience as a helper, it seemed crucial that the client really be able to tell what is bothering him or her and be able to be open and trusting in doing so. I then discovered that the major inhibiting factor to clients\u2019 being open and trusting is the cultural force in the United States toward telling as being the heroic model, which led helping and consulting models to be structured in terms of the formal professional stages of diagnose and then tell as recommendations. My management consulting friends told me that \u201cthis is required if you are really doing your job,\u201d which, to my dismay, I found many clients passively believed.  I recognized that the obsession with telling was a broader characteristic of the US managerial culture, which led me to write the book Humble Inquiry (2013) to point out how much potential harm was done in making subordinates feel psychologically unsafe in upward reporting if they saw safety or quality issues in how work was getting done.  In my own consulting efforts, I found that telling did not work and, furthermore, that the clients who called me in for consultation often had previously experienced the formal approach with other consultants and did not find the diagnose and then recommend approach terribly helpful. The formal process often missed the real problem or recommended things that could not be implemented for a variety of reasons that the consultant evidently had not considered.  At the same time, the problems that confronted leaders and managers became more complex to diagnose and even more difficult to \u201cfix.\u201d I also learned through several experiences that will be discussed in the cases in this book that sometimes just the earliest questions, comments, and puzzlements that I expressed in the initial contacts with a client proved to be very helpful in enabling the client to perceive and think about the situation. This often led to immediate next moves that the client could think of that were seen by both helper and client as immediately beneficial.  All this led me to go beyond the previous models and write about what I experienced\u2014real help can be fast, but it requires an open, trusting relationship with the client that the helper Preface xiii has to build from the very beginning. Because of the difficulty and complexity of the problems, and because the client\u2019s own view of what is going on is so important in the relationship, this also requires a great deal of humility in the consultant. So in this book I will describe the new kinds of problems, the new consultant\u2013client relationship that will have to be built, and the new kinds of attitudes and behaviors that consultants will have to learn in order to be really helpful.  I think of this as an evolution in my thinking. Many of these ideas may have been implicit in earlier works, but they are only now coming into consciousness both as insights and as new principles of what has to happen if we really want to help on complex, dynamic \u201cmessy\u201d problems and if we want to do it fast because, in many cases, clients need to do something adaptive right away.  Where Does This Fit into a Larger Historical Context?  Humble Consulting draws on elements of many prior models that deal with complexity, interdependence, diversity, and instability. Almost every theory of helping refers to the concept of relationship, but few of them talk about levels of relationships and what is involved in negotiating them. One exception is Otto Scharmer\u2019s Theory U (2007), in which he explicitly differentiates levels of conversation in his analysis of how to reach the deepest level within ourselves and in our relationships to find the true sources of innovation.  The theories and models that are most relevant to understanding these kinds of problems and developing workable next moves were initially best articulated in the study of highly reliable organizations by Karl Weick with his concepts of \u201cloose coupling,\u201d \u201csense making,\u201d \u201cembracing errors,\u201d and \u201cresilience\u201d (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007). On the sociological side, I have always found Erving Goffman\u2019s analysis of interaction and \u201csituational proprieties\u201d to be an essential model for understanding how relationships are formed, maintained, and repaired when damaged (Goffman, 1959, 1963, 1967).  Closely related are the systemic models of \u201corganizational learning\u201d (e.g., Senge, 1990) and family therapy (e.g., Madanes, 1981). The work on \u201cmindfulness\u201d (Langer, 1997) is crucial in what I see to be the new skills that will be needed. The change programs that rely on so-called lean methods, based on the work of Deming and Juran that evolved into the Toyota Production System, are relevant if they are well executed and involve the employees who actually do the work (Plsek, 2014). Open sociotechnical systems approaches to problem identification and solution as evolved by the Tavistock Clinic have provided much more helpful ideas than standardized methods of measurement, analysis, and problem solving.  Perhaps most relevant of all is what Bushe and Marshak (2015) have identified in the last decade as \u201cdialogic organization development,\u201d as contrasted with \u201cdiagnostic organization development,\u201d in highlighting what leadership theorists like Heifetz (1994) also emphasize\u2014that the complex problems of today are not technical ones that can be solved with specific tools. The best we can do is to find workable responses or what I am calling here \u201cadaptive moves.\u201d This will involve new kinds of conversations of a more dialogic, open-ended variety. The emphasis on the concept of \u201cmoves\u201d is important in this context because it implies action without necessarily having a plan or solution in mind.  In the end I fall back on much of my learning in running sensitivity training groups in human relations labs for the National Training Labs in Bethel, Maine, where the key operational concept was \u201cspirit of inquiry\u201d and accepting Preface xv that we did not always know where our learning process would take us (Schein and Bennis, 1965). Building a relationship that enables the client to \u201clearn how to learn\u201d was then and becomes now more than ever one of the crucial goals of Humble Consulting.  The spirit of inquiry is best exemplified nowadays in the concept of \u201cdialogue\u201d as propounded by Bill Isaacs (1999) and in Barrett\u2019s hugely insightful book Yes to the Mess (2012), which shows us brilliantly how the skills of improvisation as exhibited in the jazz combo provide some of the most important clues as to what helpers and leaders will have to be able to do in the future.  How the Book Is Organized Chapter 1 lays out the basic problem\u2014the complex messy problems of today and the future require a new model of helping, coaching, and consultation. Chapter 2 lays out the new elements or components of the model of Humble Consulting. The following chapters then explain and exemplify each of those components. Chapter 3 explains the concept of a Level Two relationship. Chapter 4 shows how that relationship has to be built from the moment of first contact with the client by adopting a certain attitude that hinges on maximizing curiosity. Chapter 5 explores the whole concept of personalization as key to the new consulting model. Chapter 6 highlights that the consulting is almost always more helpful on the processes that occur between client and consultant as they explore how to make adaptive moves. Chapter 7 then explores the concept of adaptive moves in more detail and in terms of the innovations that are required to make them helpful. The book closes with some conclusions and challenges for the future. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Industries"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 24.95}, {"asin": "1930084072", "title": "Catholic Verse Finder (\"Bible Cheat Sheet\") English version", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "ASINs for HQP"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1250067057", "title": "Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win", "author": "Leif Babin", "description": "Review \u201cThis is the SEAL Leadership book we have been waiting for. Poignant, powerful, practical. A must read for every leader.\u201d \u2015 Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO, Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, and chairman, Fox Television Stations \u201cLeif and Jocko are the real deal. I\u2019m honored to have served with them. They led SEALs in the fight through the hell that was the Battle of Ramadi. This book shows how they did it.\u201d \u2015 Marcus Luttrell, U.S. Navy SEAL and #1 national bestselling author of Lone Survivor \u201cThe smartest, most revolutionary management approach since Jack Welch's Six Sigma .\u201d \u2015 Don Imus, radio host, Imus in the Morning \u201cFinally, a leadership book that actually demonstrates how to truly lead. Riveting, engaging, and free from the usual clich\u00e9 platitudes, this book is strikingly impactful and will dramatically improve leaders of all types.\u201d \u2015 Amy Brandt Schumacher, entrepreneur, executive, and philanthropist \u201c Extreme Ownership provides huge value for leaders at all levels. An inspiring and page-turning read, the leadership lessons are easy to digest and implement. It provides a powerful SEAL framework for action to lead teams in high-stakes environments. This book made me a better leader and enabled my entire team step up our game!\u201d \u2015 Jared Hamilton, founder and CEO, DrivingSales \"One of the best books on leadership I've ever read and a tremendous war story book as well.\" \u2015Marc Andreessen About the Author JOCKO WILLINK is author of Extreme Ownership , a decorated retired Navy SEAL officer, and co-founder of Echelon Front, where he is a leadership instructor, speaker, and executive coach. Jocko spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy SEAL Teams, starting as an enlisted SEAL and rising through the ranks to become a SEAL officer. As commander of SEAL Team Three's Task Unit Bruiser during the battle of Ramadi, he orchestrated SEAL operations that helped the \"Ready First\" Brigade of the US Army's First Armored Division bring stability to the violent, war-torn city. Task Unit Bruiser became the most highly decorated Special Operations Unit of the Iraq War. Jocko returned from Iraq to serve as Officer-in-Charge of training for all West Coast SEAL Teams. There, he spearheaded the development of leadership training and personally instructed and mentored the next generation of SEAL leaders who have continued to perform with great success on the battlefield. During his career, Jocko was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and numerous other personal and unit awards. In 2010, Jocko retired from the Navy and launched Echelon Front where he teaches the leadership principles he learned on the battlefield to help others lead and win. Clients include individuals, teams, companies, and organizations across a wide-range of industries and fields. Jocko is also the author of the children's book Way of the Warrior Kid and the New York Times bestseller Discipline Equals Freedom . LEIF BABIN is author of Extreme Ownership , a decorated former Navy SEAL officer, and co-founder of Echelon Front, where he serves as leadership instructor, speaker, and executive coach. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Leif served thirteen years in the Navy, including nine as a Navy SEAL. As a SEAL platoon commander in SEAL Team Three's Task Unit Bruiser, he planned and led major combat operations in the Battle of Ramadi that helped the \"Ready First\" Brigade of the US Army's 1st Armored Division bring stability to the violent, war-torn city. Task Unit Bruiser became the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War. Leif returned from combat as the primary leadership instructor for all officers graduating from the SEAL training pipeline. There, he reshaped SEAL leadership training to better prepare SEAL officers for the immense challenges of combat. During his last tour, Leif served as Operations Officer and Executive Officer at a SEAL Team where he again deployed to Iraq with a Special Operations Task Force. He is the recipient of the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart. In 2011, Leif left active duty and co-founded Echelon Front, a leadership consulting company that helps others build their own high-performance winning teams. Clients include individuals, companies, and organizations across a wide-range of industries. Leif speaks on leadership, U.S. military strategy, and foreign policy matters. His editorials have been published in the Wall Street Journal and he has appeared on a variety of national television news and radio programs.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 22.65}, {"asin": "1422126005", "title": "Teaching Smart People How to Learn (Harvard Business Review Classics)", "author": "Chris Argyris", "description": "About the Author Chris Argyris is the James Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior Emeritus at Harvard University. He has consulted to numerous private and governmental organizations. He has received many awards including thirteen honorary degrees and Lifetime's Contributions Awards from the Academy of Management, American Psychological Association, and American Society of Training Directors. His most recent books are, Flawed Advice and the Management Trap (OUP, 1999), and Reasons and Rationalizations (OUP, 2004). A chair professorship was established in 1994 at Yale University. He is a Director Emeritus of Monitor Group.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 9.39}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1439153159", "title": "Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion", "author": "Gregory Boyle", "description": "Review \"Destined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality.\" --\"The Los Angeles Times \" \"Destined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality.\" --\"The Los Angeles Times \"\"A spiritual masterpiece touching the innermost sanctum of the human soul. Boyle approaches each person as a child of God and fully deserving of love and compassion. His capacity to reach the heart of the most hardened, and to see the best in everyone, inspires. I laughed, wept, and underlined on virtually every page.\" --KERRY KENNEDY, FOUNDER OF THE RFK CENTER FOR JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS\"An astonishing book . . . about suffering and dignity, death and resurrection, one of my favorite books in years. It is lovely and tough and tender beyond my ability to describe and left me in tears of both sorrow and laughter.\"--ANNE LAMOTT, AUTHOR OF GRACE (EVENTUALLY)\"An extraordinary reflection of a life totally committed to reshaping and redirecting the lives of countless young gang members (from L.A.'s gang culture), Greg Boyle's Tattoos on the Heart proves one man with courage is a majority.\" --MARTIN SHEEN\"Father Boyle reminds us all that every single child and youth is a part of God's 'jurisdiction'--and when they know that we are seeing them as God does, they are capable of great things. Father Boyle is a national treasure.\" --MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, PRESIDENT, CHILDREN'S DEFENSE FUND\"One of the bravest, most humane, heartbreaking, brilliant, and hopeful stories I've read in ages. Father Greg, the Gandhi of the Gangs, fills Tattoos with unquenchable soul force and down-to-earth love.\" --JACK KORNFIELD, AUTHOR OF A PATH WITH HEART\"Sometimes we are allowed to see in our own lifetimes what we were supposed to see in the life and ministry of Jesus. Read, and let your life be changed!\" --FATHER RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M., CENTER FOR ACTION AND CONTEMPLATION, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO\"Tattoos on the Heart is an astounding book and a remarkable testament. No one brings more triumph and tragedy to the street gang story than Greg Boyle. No one brings more conviction and compassion than Greg Boyle. And no one writes the gang story more beautifully.\" --MALCOLM KLEIN, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA\"Tattoos on the Heart is an honest, raw, and compelling collection from Father Greg Boyle's life and work with gang-involved youth. His commitment should teach us all a lesson in compromise, sharing, learning, loving, and, most important, living life to the fullest.\" --ANJELICA HUSTON \u201cDestined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality.\u201d \u2014\"The Los Angeles Times \"\"Incandescent, always hope-filled and often hilarious. Boyle somehow maintains an exuberant voice that celebrates the strength, compassion and humanity of people often demonized. He simply highlights charity and goodness wherever they are found. Boyle intersperses his narratives about gang members and his work with them with theological and spiritual reflections from a variety of theologians, poets and other writers. By introducing book-buying, highly educated readers to people we may never otherwise encounter, Boyle aspires to \"broaden the parameters of our kinship.'\"--\"The Christian Century\" About the Author Gregory Boyle is an American Jesuit priest and the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world. He has received the California Peace Prize and been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. In 2014, the White House named Boyle a Champion of Change. He received the University of Notre Dame\u2019s 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor given to American Catholics. He is the acclaimed author of Tattoos on the Heart and Barking to the Choir . The Whole Language is his third book, and he will be donating all net proceeds to Homeboy Industries. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Tattoos on the Heart Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.53}, {"asin": "B07DTB7MJ4", "title": "That Feeling When: LGBT+ Summer Camp Romance (The #lovehim Series Book 1)", "author": "S. M. James", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0545110297", "title": "Fly Guy Meets Fly Girl! (Fly Guy #8) (8)", "author": "Tedd Arnold", "description": "From School Library Journal Kindergarten-Grade 2\u2014On a boring day, Fly Guy and his boy, Buzz, amble down the sidewalk, play in the park, and cool off in the fountain. Buzz befriends Liz, who introduces her pink pet, Fly Girl, who wears a tiny bow on one antenna. The flies talk and talk \"Wuzzle Wuzzle\" as clever thought bubbles depict their conversation. They speak of walking through green goo together, kissing, getting married, and starting life together in an empty dog-food can, but decide to just remain friends once they imagine how much Buzz and Liz would miss them. Arnold's trademark cartoon illustrations and comical narrative will brighten any beginning reader's day, and while some boys may say this romance is totally gross, they will find plenty to laugh about in this funny addition to the series.\u2014 Laura Scott, Farmington Community Library, MI Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Tedd Arnold is the bestselling author and illustrator of the Fly Guy (Zig Zag et Zazie) series, Green Wilma , Parts , and other popular picture books. He is also the illustrator of Detective Blue. He has received Theodor Seuss Geisel Honors for Hi! Fly Guy (Salut Zig Zag!) and I Spy Fly Guy! (O\u00f9 es-tu Zig Zag?). Tedd lives with his wife, Carol, in Florida.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "B089P216NP", "title": "Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates", "author": "Alex Berenson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 2.99}], "target_asin": "1439153159"}
{"user_id": "AG3WLRDJC5DBT2ODQWT2LVRKMYMA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0897214897", "title": "Ortho's All About Creating Japanese Gardens", "author": "Alvin Horton", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Gardening & Landscape Design"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 8.22}, {"asin": "054784428X", "title": "Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World", "author": "Dalai Lama", "description": "Review \"An impressive guide for teaching religious tolerance and respect to readers of all ages.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \"This wise, humane book , an original work rather than a collection of talks, is an incisive statement of His Holiness\u2019s thinking on ways to bring peace to a suffering world . \" -- Publishers Weekly \u2014 From the Inside Flap An unprecedented event: a beloved world religious leader proposes a way to lead an ethical, happy, and spiritual life beyond religion and offers a program of mental training for cultivating key human values Ten years ago, in his best-selling \"Ethics for a New Millennium,\" His Holiness the Dalai Lama first proposed an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles. Now, in \"Beyond Religion,\" the Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way. Transcending the mere \"religion wars,\" he outlines a system of ethics for our shared world, one that gives full respect to religion. With the highest level of spiritual and intellectual authority, the Dalai Lama makes a stirring appeal for what he calls a \"third way,\" a path to an ethical and happy life and to a global human community based on understanding and mutual respect. \"Beyond Religion\" is an essential statement from the Dalai Lama, a blueprint for all those who may choose not to identify with a religious tradition, yet still yearn for a life of spiritual fulfillment as they work for a better world. From the Back Cover An unprecedented event: a beloved world religious leader proposes a way to lead an ethical, happy, and spiritual life beyond religion and offers a program of mental training for cultivating key human values Ten years ago, in his best-selling Ethics for a New Millennium , His Holiness the Dalai Lama first proposed an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles. Now, in Beyond Religion , the Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way. Transcending the mere \u201creligion wars,\u201d he outlines a system of ethics for our shared world, one that gives full respect to religion. With the highest level of spiritual and intellectual authority, the Dalai Lama makes a stirring appeal for what he calls a \u201cthird way,\u201d a path to an ethical and happy life and to a global human community based on understanding and mutual respect. Beyond Religion is an essential statement from the Dalai Lama, a blueprint for all those who may choose not to identify with a religious tradition, yet still yearn for a life of spiritual fulfillment as they work for a better world. About the Author Tenzin Gyatso , His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, is the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people. His tireless efforts on behalf of human rights and world peace have brought him international recognition. He is the recipient of the Raoul Wallenberg Congressional Human Rights Award, the Albert Schweitzer Award, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION I am an old man now. I was born in 1935 in a small village in northeastern Tibet. For reasons beyond my control, I have lived most of my adult life as a stateless refugee in India, which has been my second home for over fifty years. I often joke that I am India\u2019s longest-staying guest. In common with other people of my age, I have witnessed many of the dramatic events that have shaped the world we live in. Since the late 1960s, I have also traveled a great deal, and have had the honor to meet people from many different backgrounds: not just presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, and leaders from all the world\u2019s great religious traditions, but also a great number of ordinary people from all walks of life. \u00a0\u00a0Looking back over the past decades, I find many reasons to rejoice. Through advances in medical science, deadly diseases have been eradicated. Millions of people have been lifted from poverty and have gained access to modern education and health care. We have a universal declaration of human rights, and awareness of the importance of such rights has grown tremendously. As a result, the ideals of freedom and democracy have spread around the world, and there is increasing recognition of the oneness of humanity. There is also growing awareness of the importance of a healthy environment. In very many ways, the last half-century or so has been one of progress and positive change. \u00a0\u00a0At the same time, despite tremendous advances in so many fields, there is still great suffering, and humanity continues to face enormous difficulties and problems. While in the more affluent parts of the world people enjoy lifestyles of high consumption, there remain countless millions whose basic needs are not met. With the end of the Cold War, the threat of global nuclear destruction has receded, but many continue to endure the sufferings and tragedy of armed conflict. In many areas, too, people are having to deal with environmental problems and, with these, threats to their livelihood and worse. At the same time, many others are struggling to get by in the face of inequality, corruption, and injustice. \u00a0\u00a0These problems are not limited to the developing world. In the richer countries, too, there are many difficulties, including widespread social problems: alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, family breakdown. People are worried about their children, about their education and what the world holds in store for them. Now, too, we have to recognize the possibility that human activity is damaging our planet beyond a point of no return, a threat which creates further fear. And all the pressures of modern life bring with them stress, anxiety, depression, and, increasingly, loneliness. As a result, everywhere I go, people are complaining. Even I find myself complaining from time to time! \u00a0\u00a0It is clear that something is seriously lacking in the way we humans are going about things. But what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values. \u00a0\u00a0By inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warmheartedness\u2014or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner values emerge. We all appreciate in others the inner qualities of kindness, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, and generosity, and in the same way we are all averse to displays of greed, malice, hatred, and bigotry. So actively promoting the positive inner qualities of the human heart that arise from our core disposition toward compassion, and learning to combat our more destructive propensities, will be appreciated by all. And the first beneficiaries of such a strengthening of our inner values will, no doubt, be ourselves. Our inner lives are something we ignore at our own peril, and many of the greatest problems we face in today\u2019s world are the result of such neglect.\u00a0\u00a0Not long ago I visited Orissa, a region in eastern India. The poverty in this part of the country, especially among tribal people, has recently led to growing conflict and insurgency. I met with a member of parliament from the region and discussed these issues. From him I gathered that there are a number legal mechanisms and well-funded government projects already in place aimed at protecting the rights of tribal people and even giving them material assistance. The problem, he said, was that the funds provided by the government were not reaching those they were intended to help. When such projects are subverted by corruption, inefficiency, and irresponsibility on the part of those charged with implementing them, they become worthless. \u00a0\u00a0This example shows very clearly that even when a system is sound, its effectiveness depends on the way it is used . Ultimately, any system, any set of laws or procedures, can only be as effective as the individuals responsible for its implementation. If, owing to failures of personal integrity, a good system is misused, it can easily become a source of harm rather than a source of benefit. This is a general truth which applies to all fields of human activity, even religion. Though religion certainly has the potential to help people lead meaningful and happy lives, it too, when misused, can become a source of conflict and division. Similarly, in the fields of commerce and finance, the systems themselves may be sound, but if the people using them are unscrupulous and driven by self-serving greed, the benefits of those systems will be undermined. Unfortunately, we see this happening in many kinds of human activities: even in international sports, where corruption threatens the very notion of fair play. \u00a0\u00a0Of course, many discerning people are aware of these problems and are working sincerely to redress them from within their own areas of expertise. Politicians, civil servants, lawyers, educators, environmentalists, activists, and so on\u2014people from all sides are already engaged in this effort. This is very good so far as it goes, but the fact is, we will never solve our problems simply by instituting new laws and regulations. Ultimately, the source of our problems lies at the level of the individual. If people lack moral values and integrity, no system of laws and regulations will be adequate. So long as people give priority to material values, then injustice, inequity, intolerance, and greed\u2014all the outward manifestations of neglect of inner values\u2014will persist. \u00a0\u00a0So what are we to do? Where are we to turn for help? Science, for all the benefits it has brought to our external world, has not yet provided scientific grounding for the development of the foundations of personal integrity\u2014the basic inner human values that we appreciate in others and would do well to promote in ourselves. Perhaps we should seek inner values from religion, as people have done for millennia? Certainly religion has helped millions of people in the past, helps millions today, and will continue to help millions in the future. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today\u2019s secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics. One reason for this is that many people in the world no longer follow any particular religion. Another reason is that, as the peoples of the world become ever more closely interconnected in an age of globalization and in multicultural societies, ethics based in any one religion would only appeal to some of us; it would not be meaningful for all. In the past, when peoples lived in relative isolation from one another\u2014as we Tibetans lived quite happily for many centuries behind our wall of mountains\u2014the fact that groups pursued their own religiously based approaches to ethics posed no difficulties. Today, however, any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics. \u00a0\u00a0This statement may seem strange coming from someone who from a very early age has lived as a monk in robes. Yet I see no contradiction here. My faith enjoins me to strive for the welfare and benefit of all sentient beings, and reaching out beyond my own tradition, to those of other religions and those of none, is entirely in keeping with this. \u00a0\u00a0I am confident that it is both possible and worthwhile to attempt a new secular approach to universal ethics. My confidence comes from my conviction that all of us, all human beings, are basically inclined or disposed toward what we perceive to be good. Whatever we do, we do because we think it will be of some benefit. At the same time, we all appreciate the kindness of others. We are all, by nature, oriented toward the basic human values of love and compassion. We all prefer the love of others to their hatred. We all prefer others\u2019 generosity to their meanness. And who among us does not prefer tolerance, respect, and forgiveness of our failings to bigotry, disrespect, and resentment? \u00a0\u00a0In view of this, I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion. The development and practice of this new system of ethics is what I propose to elaborate in the course of this book. It is my hope that doing so will help to promote understanding of the need for ethical awareness and inner values in this age of excessive materialism. \u00a0\u00a0At the outset I should make it clear that my intention is not to dictate moral values. Doing that would be of no benefit. To try to impose moral principles from outside, to impose them, as it were, by command, can never be effective. Instead, I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence, and happiness we all seek. Of course, all the world\u2019s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness, can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religion. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Buddhism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.69}, {"asin": "1400078431", "title": "The Year of Magical Thinking", "author": "Joan Didion", "description": "Review \u201cThrilling . . . a living, sharp, and memorable book. . . . An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.\u201d\u2014Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review \u201cStunning candor and piercing details. . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief.\u201d\u2014Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times \u201cI can\u2019t think of a book we need more than hers. . . . I can\u2019t imagine dying without this book.\u201d\u2014John Leonard, New York Review of Books \u201cAchingly beautiful. . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward.\u201d\u2014Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times \u201cAn act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage. . . . To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost.\u201d\u2014Lev Grossman, Time About the Author JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue ,\u00a0which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River , in 1963. Didion\u2019s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). \u00a0 Didion\u2019s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album , was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.  \u00a0 In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation\u2019s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: \"An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion\u2019s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.\u201d In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA\u2019s Lifetime Achievement Award.Didion said of her writing: \"I write entirely to find out what I\u2019m thinking, what I\u2019m looking at, what I see and what it means.\u201d She died in December 2021. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 1. Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity. Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (\u201cNotes on change.doc\u201d) reads \u201cMay 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,\u201d but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.For a long time I wrote nothing else. Life changes in the instant.The ordinary instant. At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, \u201cthe ordinary instant.\u201d I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word \u201cordinary,\u201d because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. \u201cHe was on his way home from work\u2014happy, successful, healthy\u2014and then, gone,\u201d I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an \u201cordinary Sunday morning\u201d it had been. \u201cIt was just an ordinary beautiful September day,\u201d people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: \u201cTuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.\u201d\u201cAnd then\u2014gone.\u201d In the midst of life we are in death , Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think my ) otherwise empty house even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me.Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no version I heard included the details I could not yet face, for example the blood on the living room floor that stayed there until Jos\u00e9 came in the next morning and cleaned it up.Jos\u00e9. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying to Las Vegas later that day, December 31, but never went. Jos\u00e9 was crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood. When I first told him what had happened he had not understood. Clearly I was not the ideal teller of this story, something about my version had been at once too offhand and too elliptical, something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the same failure later when I had to tell Quintana), but by the time Jos\u00e9 saw the blood he understood.I had picked up the abandoned syringes and ECG electrodes before he came in that morning but I could not face the blood.In outline.It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o\u2019clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center\u2019s Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as \u201cBeth Israel North\u201d or \u201cthe old Doctors\u2019 Hospital,\u201d where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. 2.December 30, 2003, a Tuesday.We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North.We had come home.We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat.The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of Europe\u2019s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.John was talking, then he wasn\u2019t.At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking he had asked me if I had used single-malt Scotch for his second drink. I had said no, I used the same Scotch I had used for his first drink. \u201cGood,\u201d he had said. \u201cI don\u2019t know why but I don\u2019t think you should mix them.\u201d At another point in those seconds or that minute he had been talking about why World War One was the critical event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed.I have no idea which subject we were on, the Scotch or World War One, at the instant he stopped talking.I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable.I remember saying Don\u2019t do that .When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I remember trying to lift him far enough from the back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the sense of his weight as he fell forward, first against the table, then to the floor. In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the New York\u2013Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not taped the numbers by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.Someone else.I called one of the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said Just come . When the paramedics came I tried to tell them what had happened but before I could finish they had transformed the part of the living room where John lay into an emergency department. One of them (there were three, maybe four, even an hour later I could not have said) was talking to the hospital about the electrocardiogram they seemed already to be transmitting. Another was opening the first or second of what would be many syringes for injection. (Epinephrine? Lidocaine? Procainamide? The names came to mind but I had no idea from where.) I remember saying that he might have choked. This was dismissed with a finger swipe: the airway was clear. They seemed now to be using defibrillating paddles, an attempt to restore a rhythm. They got something that could have been a normal heartbeat (or I thought they did, we had all been silent, there was a sharp jump), then lost it, and started again.\u201cHe\u2019s still fibbing,\u201d I remember the one on the telephone saying.\u201c V -fibbing,\u201d John\u2019s cardiologist said the next morning when he called from Nantucket. \u201cThey would have said \u2018 V -fibbing.\u2019 V for ventricular.\u201dMaybe they said \u201cV-fibbing\u201d and maybe they did not. Atrial fibrillation did not immediately or necessarily cause cardiac arrest. Ventricular did. Maybe ventricular was the given.I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen next. Since there was an ambulance crew in the living room, the next logical step would be going to the hospital. It occurred to me that the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I would not be ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take. I would waste time, get left behind. I found my handbag and a set of keys and a summary John\u2019s doctor had made of his medical history. When I got back to the living room the paramedics were watching the computer monitor they had set up on the floor. I could not see the monitor so I watched their faces. I remember one glancing at the others. When the decision was made to move it happened very fast. I followed them to the elevator and asked if I could go with them. They said they were taking the gurney down first, I could go in the second ambulance. One of them waited with me for the elevator to come back up. By the time he and I got into the second ambulance the ambulance carrying the gurney was pulling away from the front of the building. The distance from our building to the part of New York\u2013Presbyterian that used to be New York Hospital is six crosstown blocks. I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gurney was already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the driveway. Everyone else in sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. \u201cIs this the wife,\u201d he said to the driver, then turned to me. \u201cI\u2019m your social worker,\u201d he said, and I guess that is when I must have known.I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew.\u201d This was what the mother of a nineteen-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said on an HBO documentary quoted by Bob Herbert in The New York Times on the morning of November 12, 2004. \u201cBut I thought that if, as long as I didn\u2019t let him in, he couldn\u2019t tell me. And then it\u2014none of that would\u2019ve happened. So he kept saying, \u2018Ma\u2019am, I need to come in.\u2019 And I kept telling him, \u2018I\u2019m sorry, but you can\u2019t come in.\u2019 \u201dWhen I read this at breakfast almost eleven months after the night with the ambulance and the social worker I recognized the thinking as my own.Inside the emergency room I could see the gurney being pushed into a cubicle, propelled by more people in scrubs. Someone told me to wait in the reception area. I did. There was a line for admittance paperwork. Waiting in the line seemed the constructive thing to do. Waiting in the line said that there was still time to deal with this, I had copies of the insurance cards in my handbag, this was not a hospital I had ever negotiated\u2014New York Hospital was the Cornell part of New York\u2013Presbyterian, the part I knew was the Columbia part, Columbia-Presbyterian, at 168th and Broadway, twenty minutes away at best, too far in this kind of emergency\u2014but I could make this unfamiliar hospital work, I could be useful, I could arrange the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian once he was stabilized. I was fixed on the details of this imminent transfer to Columbia (he would need a bed with telemetry, eventually I could also get Quintana transferred to Columbia, the night she was admitted to Beth Israel North I had written on a card the beeper numbers of several Columbia doctors, one or another of them could make all this happen) when the social worker reappeared and guided me from the paperwork line into an empty room off the reception area. \u201cYou can wait here,\u201d he said. I waited. The room was cold, or I was. I wondered how much time had passed between the time I called the ambulance and the arrival of the paramedics. It had seemed no time at all ( a mote in the eye of God was the phrase that came to me in the room off the reception area) but it must have been at the minimum several minutes. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.71}, {"asin": "0451227166", "title": "Haley's Hints Green Edition: 1000 Great Tips to Save Time, Money, and the Planet!", "author": "Graham Haley", "description": "About the Author Graham Haley is a host and bestselling author best known for the money saving series Haley's Hints . In addition to his books, he also starred in his own television show, which was shown across four continents, and has appeared numerous times in newspapers, magazines, and radio. He lives with his wife, Rosemary, and their children in Toronto. Rosemary Haley is one half of the duo behind the bestselling Haley's Hints series, which has been a trove of money saving household tips for over ten years. In addition to their book series, Rosemary and her husband Graham have been shared their secrets via numerous features in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, most notably the Haley's Hints television show, which is aired across four continents. She now lives in Toronto.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 14.0}, {"asin": "1572238844", "title": "If I Had a Horse: How Different Life Would Be", "author": "Melissa Sovey", "description": "Review The personification of horse as mentor is explicit and the implied correlations to the female relationship are mystifying ... --Central Coast MagazineAs you flip through the pages, the beautiful and moving horse images take you away to fields and pastures to share a moment with a special spirit ... A volume of dreams and memories to return to over and over. --Mary D. MidkiffAuthor Melissa Sovey-Nelson's poetic text melds seamlessly with the striking photos, which display horses in a variety of natural settings and moods. The book, comprised of \"reflections on how the horse experience migrates into the way we think of ourselves and of others,\" could be categorized as both artistic and inspirational. It is clearly one that horse lovers will return to again and again. --Ocala Style Magazine About the Author Melissa Sovey-Nelson is a contributor for Willow Creek Press titles including Chiwowhua .", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B005TH96LS", "title": "Gift"}, {"asin": "0692587624", "title": "The God Complex: Family Secrets", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Ros and Judy are a brother/sister writing team. This is their first collaboration. They have written books together as well as separately.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 16.0}, {"asin": "1439186766", "title": "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!", "author": "Thomas Lennon", "description": "Review \"Ben and Tom are a great fit for me. I love working with talented writers and then telling people everything was my idea. This is a great book, that I pitched to them a while back... I'm thrilled that they finally got around to writing it.\" --Danny DeVito\"Some screenwriters have a knack for capturing the heart and soul of characters, the nuance of themes, the richness of the human experience. And some are like Tom and Ben.\" --Shawn Levy, Film Director & Producer\"These guys are proof that with no training and little education, ANYONE can make it as a screenwriter.\" --Paul Rudd\"These guys probably ripped off everything in this book just like they do in all their screenplays. That would explain why it's actually kind of good.\" --Ed Helms\"These two guys are the reason Night at the Museum won so many Oscars\" --Ben Stiller\"Tom and Ben are two of the writers currently working in Hollywood. I can add they make a 'profit' on each of their writing jobs, as I believe they have very little overhead. Therefore, they are clearly qualified to write this book. Having not read it, I can tell you that it is uproariously funny, perhaps the best book on writing ever.\" --Zak Penn, Film Screenwriter & Director\"Tom and Ben's valuable insight into writing for a Volkswagen bug and creating the 'Lawrence of Arabia of Ping Pong films' make this book far more informative to the young dramatist than the vastly over-rated 'Aristotle's Poetics.'\" --Jonathan Glickman, Film Producer, President of MGM, Motion Picture Group About the Author Thomas Lennon attended the Tisch School of the Arts, where he cofounded the influential sketch comedy group, The State. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actress Jenny Robertson, and their son, Oliver.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.76}, {"asin": "1523396512", "title": "Love Beyond Looks: A 5-Week Bible Study On Body Image", "author": "Kasey Shuler", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Bible Study & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.99}], "target_asin": "B005TH96LS"}
{"user_id": "AFA4JQI56LSUXSFGETK6PNX3QTQQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0486479315", "title": "A Heat Transfer Textbook: Fourth Edition (Dover Civil and Mechanical Engineering)", "author": "John H. Lienhard", "description": "About the Author John H. Lienhard IV is internationally known for his work in heat transfer and thermal science, which spans more than 40 years of research and teaching. He is a Professor at the University of Houston.A specialist in the fields of heat transfer and fluid mechanics, John H. Lienhard V is a Professor at MIT, where he is the Associate Head for Education and Director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy.", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Engineering"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 16.19}, {"asin": "1118012895", "title": "Fundamentals of Machine Component Design", "author": "Robert C. Juvinall", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Graphics & Design"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 83.42}, {"asin": "0387955011", "title": "If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life", "author": "Stephen Webb", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 79.89}, {"asin": "0077366743", "title": "Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach with Student Resources DVD", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Yunus A. \u00c7engel (Turkey) is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno.Michael Boles (Raleigh, NC) is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the North Carolina State University.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Physics"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 45.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1133112285", "title": "Essential Calculus: Early Transcendentals - Standalone Book", "author": "James Stewart", "description": "About the Author The late James Stewart received his M.S. from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He conducted research at the University of London and was influenced by the famous mathematician, George Polya, at Stanford University. Dr. Stewart most recently served as a professor of mathematics at McMaster University and the University of Toronto. His research focused on harmonic analysis. Dr. Stewart authored the best-selling calculus textbook series, including CALCULUS, CALCULUS: EARLY TRANSCENDENTALS and CALCULUS: CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS, as well as a series of successful precalculus texts and college algebra and trigonometry texts.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Mathematics"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 76.01}, {"asin": "1627795391", "title": "Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?", "author": "Thomas Frank", "description": "Review \u201cThoroughly entertaining . . . Frank delights in skewering the sacred cows of coastal liberalism . . . he argues that the Democratic party\u2015once \u201cthe Party of the People\u201d\u2015now caters to the interests of a \u201cprofessional managerial class\u201d consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers . . . A serious political critique.\u201d \u2015 New York Times Book Review (front page)\u201cWhat makes Frank\u2019s book new, different and important is its offer of a compelling theory as to how and why the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Roosevelt is now so unlikely to champion the economic needs of everyday people. . . . In such a looking-glass world, Listen, Liberal is a desperately needed corrective.\u201d\u2015 History News Network \u201cIn his new book, progressive commentator Thomas Frank says Democrats need to take a good long look in the mirror if they want answers to why blue-collar workers are feeling abandoned and even infuriated by what used to be their party.\u201d\u2015 New York Post \u201cThe most important political book of 2016, and one that should disturb and hopefully influence progressives for years to come.\u201d\u2015 OBRag.com \u201cA must-read.\u201d\u2015 Naomi Klein \u201cOver the past four decades, Frank argues, the Democrats have embraced a new favorite constituency: the professional class\u2015the doctors, lawyers, engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, financiers and other so-called creatives whose fetish for academic credentials and technological innovation has infected the party of the working class. . . . For that class, Frank argues, income and wealth inequality is not a problem but an inevitable condition.\u201d\u2015 Washington Post \u201cAn astute dissection of contemporary Democratic politics that demonstrates, cogently and at times acidly, how the party lost the allegiance of blue-collar Americans.\u201d\u2015 Publisher\u2019s Weekly \u201cNo one has written more consistently and stylishly about the conservative onslaught in America and the betrayal of liberal democratic values than Thomas Frank, arguably the Left\u2019s leading essayists and the founder of The Baffler . This is Mr. Frank\u2019s best book since What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas? \u201d\u2015 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette \u201cA tough and thought-provoking look at what\u2019s wrong with America . . . Frank puts forth an impressive catalog of Democratic disappointments, more than enough to make liberals uncomfortable.\u201d\u2015 Booklist \u201cImportant . . . engaging . . . An edgy\u2015even disturbing\u2015analysis of the Democratic Party\u2019s jilting of its traditional base.\u201d\u2015 The National Book Review \u201cAn engaging and witty demolition of the [Democratic] party, especially its modern post-New Deal incarnation . . . Listen, Liberal is a great read for this election season.\u201d\u2015 SocialistWorker.org \u201cThomas Frank\u2019s new book Listen, Liberal documents a half-century of work by the Democratic elite to belittle working people and exile their concerns to the fringes of the party\u2019s platform. If the prevailing ideology of the Republican establishment is that of a sneering aristocracy, Democratic elites are all too often the purveyors of a smirking meritocracy that offers working people very little.\u201d\u2015 Huffington Post \u201cLong overdue . . . Listen, Liberal is a powerful addition to America\u2019s political discourse. It is full of truths and, sadly, the truth hurts.\u201d\u2015 Washington City Paper \u201cDemocrats often use the fact that Republicans have gone off the deep end to ignore their left flank, on the grounds that those liberals have nowhere else to go politically. Listen, Liberal contributes to the literature that expresses deep frustration with that decision, the fuel for a revolt.\u201d\u2015 The Fiscal Times \u201cAs with Frank\u2019s other books, Listen, Liberal is a piece of contemporary history that tells us not only what the powerful are up to, but how the trick is being pulled, with an admirable deployment of irony. . . . While his previous books are essentially about devils being devils, this one shows how the angels have fallen further than they realize.\u201d\u2015 Prospect (UK)\u201cAn indispensable read . . . provocative and stimulating.\u201d\u2015 National Newswatch About the Author Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal , Pity the Billionaire , The Wrecking Crew , and What's the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's , Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and writes regularly for The Guardian . He lives outside Washington, D.C.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.1}, {"asin": "B0BZFPFVYP", "title": "Life Inside A Jar Coloring Book For Adults: 40 Black Framed Cool Pictures With Landscapes, Animals, Waterfalls, Cities, Homes And More | Black Line ... Relief | Perfect Gift For Women, Men, Teens", "author": "Ethereal Sheets Press", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "B08GYG1JX5", "title": "The Tory: The Rebels and Redcoats Saga, Book 1", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction", "Family Saga"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}], "target_asin": "1133112285"}
{"user_id": "AHRHIP5MUOBTLUUUQOGQ4OAJODZQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0763677728", "title": "Where's the Pair?", "author": "Britta Teckentrup", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2\u2014Animal lovers and picture book sleuths will find much to enjoy in this follow-up to The Odd One Out (Candlewick, 2014). Each spread features a different group of animals, from chameleons to yaks to beetles, and encourages readers to find the matching pair among a variety of sizes, colors, and body positions. Some pages provide a real challenge, requiring close inspection and making this the perfect step up from simpler spotting books. Vibrant, folksy mixed-media illustrations in a rainbow of colors make the depicted animals at once realistic and appealing without becoming garish, while charming details like bears wearing scarves add a touch of whimsy. Rhyming text flows beautifully and never feels forced, using a wide vocabulary to continually encourage pair detection: \"although all their patterns/ are similar types,/which two are sporting/identical stripes?\" As an added bonus, several pages include the proper name for the animal's group\u2014a sloth of bears, a romp of otters. VERDICT Beautiful illustrations and charming rhymes combine in a spotting book that's perfect for one-on-one sharing.\u2014Kelsey Johnson-Kaiser, La Crosse Public Library, WI Review The warm color palette and handmade appearance of this traditional pairing book are a refreshing break from the harsh colors and mechanical appearance of similar offerings in this genre. Children will enjoy sharing the sometimes quite difficult challenges with their adults.\u2014Kirkus ReviewsBeautiful illustrations and charming rhymes combine in a spotting book that\u2019s perfect for one-on-one sharing.\u2014School Library JournalBritta Teckentrup invites children to scrutinize animal groupings in \u201cWhere\u2019s the Pair?,\" a traditional seek-and-find book that is made notable by the elegance of its pictures.\u2014The Wall Street Journal About the Author Britta Teckentrup is a fine artist who has written and illustrated many well-loved books for children, including Big Smelly Bear and Up & Down. Born in Hamburg, Germany, she studied at St. Martin\u2019s College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.89}, {"asin": "081094460X", "title": "365 Penguins", "author": "Jean-Luc Fromental", "description": "From School Library Journal Kindergarten-Grade 4\u2013This hilarious, oversize picture book integrates challenging math concepts and environmental concerns into a clever narrative. On New Year's Day, a family receives an anonymous package containing a penguin. The young narrator chases the bird around the house as it runs amok and knocks over lamps and furniture. His sister, Amy, finds a note, I'm number 1. Feed me when I'm hungry. Just as the message implies, there are more to come; by the end of the year, 365 in all. Penguins, penguins everywhere./Black and white and in my hair, sighs Amy. As they arrive, readers must recall the number of days in each month\u2013by the end of February, they are calculating the number of penguins in all. Then Father decides to organize them, first into four groups of 15, later in boxes by the dozen, and, finally, into a cubic formation. By summer, the heat, noise, and smell are unbearable. On New Year's Eve, ecologist Uncle Victor arrives and the mystery is solved. The engaging story is illustrated in a flat retro design with a palette dominated by orange, blue, gray, and black and white. The comical birds watch TV, dance with their teenage sister, and eat everything in sight. The text provides endless opportunities for word problems, and units on penguins and global warming will never be the same. \u2013Barbara Auerbach, New York City Public Schools Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist In this oversize picture book from France, family members deal with penguins that arrive at their home--one a day, for a full year. The high jinks begin on New Year's Day. As the penguin population increases, Dad, Mom, and the kids use multiplication and a few other schemes to organize, feed, and care for the increasing number of birds, but the scheme they hatch only meets with temporary success. At the end of the year, Uncle Victor, an ecologist, arrives; explains why he has sent the birds; and takes all but one of them, Chilly, away. The premise is goofy, but the math is fun, and the generous trim size, eleven by fourteen and one-half inches, allows plenty of room to show the growing penguin population. The illustrations, in orange, blue, and black, give a retro, almost surreal look to the art, which perfectly fits the story. This is a lively romp from the beginning to the end--when the first polar bear arrives. But that's another story. Randall Enos Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.1}, {"asin": "1596430907", "title": "Almost Everything", "author": "Alexis Siegel", "description": "From School Library Journal PreSchool-Grade 3\u2013Following the same format as Zoo-Ology (Roaring Brook, 2003), Jolivet has taken 13 diverse categories such as trees and flowers, the human body, tools, and historical costumes, and illustrated dozens of objects both unique and commonplace on spreads almost two feet high. There is no attempt to maintain relative size. The hedgehog is the same size as the snail, the squirrel is smaller than the butterfly, etc. Extinct animals mingle with those that are not, and colors are not always natural. While some objects are specifically labeled, many are given only their generic name, e.g., duck or frog as opposed to mallard duck or red-eyed tree frog. The glossary provides more information, but some of it is misleading. The entry under crab states that these animals live \u2026between rocks on the seaside, a statement that is not true for the one pictured and the majority of others. The pages on the human body feature an anatomically correct male and female, as well as a silhouette of a child in utero. The linocut prints can be appreciated for their artistic quality and will be fun for browsers to pore over, but instructive possibilities are limited. \u2013Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist PreS-Gr. 2. In this follow-up to Zoo-ology (2003), French illustrator Jolivet offers another splendidly oversize collection of themed pictures. Once again, there is no story--only captions, categories, and a magnificent array of illustrations. Each spread represents a different category (trees and flowers, tools, historical costumes, and more), and small pictures fill the pages. The clean graphic contrasts of the boldly outlined colored images, which resemble linoleum cuts, will help children find individual pictures amid the chaotic compositions. Younger children may have questions about some of the more advanced concepts; a spread about the human body, for example, includes diagrams showing the muscular and circulatory systems, male and female sexual organs, and a silhouette of a pregnant female, a full-term baby curled inside. Final pages include long columns of facts and notes about featured pictures. Children will return again and again to the lovely, detailed pages, and teachers will find lots of uses for this, from storytelling exercises to vocabulary work. An excellent choice for interactive reading and sharing. Gillian Engberg Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Joelle Jolivet is the author and illustrator of Zoo-ology , a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She lives in France. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 34.99}, {"asin": "0763665290", "title": "Home", "author": "Carson Ellis", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2\u2014The realistic, fanciful, and stereotypical merge in this picture book homage to the place we call home. Gouache-and-ink art featuring warm, earthy colors with splashes or spots of red illustrate the hand-lettered, simple text (\"Home is a house in the country. Or home is an apartment.\" and later, \"Sea homes. Bee homes. Hollow tree homes.\"). Familiar and unfamiliar (Kenya) and sometimes magical (Atlantis) settings inhabited by humans, animals, and mythical beings are included. The illustrations offer much to pore over and connections to be made. The dove that appears on the title page can be found throughout the book and the silhouette in an upstairs window of the house that appears on the first spread, reveals itself to be the hat of a girl on the final pages. The penultimate scene is that of an artist in her home surrounded by items familiar to readers (a weathervane, figure of a house, a ship in a bottle and a globe, and a piece of black-and-white fabric, and a pointed cap). These objects will give observant children pause and send them back to page one to see what other details and images are carried throughout the story. However, the Mideastern lair, the Japanese businessman's geometric home, a wigwam, and a pagoda, may give others pause for different reasons. VERDICT While skillfully rendered and artistically pleasing, this eclectic assortment of domiciles is hardly representational and is less than ideal for classroom usage.\u2014Daryl Grabarek, School Library Journal Review Arrestingly illustrated... Ellis, in her picture-book debut, draws with simplicity and precision, yet there are often so many fanciful details that second and third looks will come naturally. ... The whole effect makes the pictures seem like frameable art.\u2014Booklist (starred review)It\u2019s a work that confers classic gifts: time to look and time to wonder.\u2014Publishers Weekly (starred review)[Ellis'] sly humor and irreverent spirit only endear her to kids and grown-ups alike.\u2014The New York TimesEllis' compelling ink and gouache paintings, in a palette of blue-grays, sepia and brick red, depict scenes ranging from mythical, underwater Atlantis to a distant moonscape. ... Visually accomplished.\u2014Kirkus ReviewsA dreamy, painterly meditation on the diversity and range of dwellings around the world and across time and imagination. ... The text encourages the reader to participate (\u201cBut whose home is this? And what about this?\u201d), and the cover illustration further extends the options of where we can live. All the choices are warmly inviting.\u2014The Horn BookA simple yet deep look at homes... This is a great vocabulary builder as you talk about all the homes \u2014 what makes them the same and what makes them different.\u2014Chicago TribuneA stunner.\u2014The Wall Street JournalEnchanting and accessible, \"Home\" is an instant classic for the K-3 set and a thoughtful Northwest-grown gift.\u2014Seattle TimesIn her beautiful and inviting solo debut, Home , Carson Ellis (Wildwood series artist) illustrates the many different kinds of homes that humans and animals\u2014past, present and even fictional\u2014might inhabit.\u2014Shelf AwarenessSkillfully rendered and artistically pleasing.\u2014School Library JournalCharming.\u2014Apartment Therapy About the Author Carson Ellis previously illustrated The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket and Dillweed's Revenge by Florence Parry Heide. She also collaborated with her husband, Colin Meloy, on the best-selling Wildwood series . Carson Ellis lives with her family outside Portland, Oregon. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0763671274", "title": "The Odd One Out", "author": "Britta Teckentrup", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2\u2014A fun seek-and-find book featuring animals of all kinds. The mixed-media illustrations are reminiscent of the illustrator's Animal 123 and Animal Spots and Stripes (both Chronicle, 2012). Each tessellation has one variant for readers to find: a turtle in his shell, a bird with a worm. Each puzzle is challenging but not to the point of frustration. The brief rhyming text is well paced, making it easy to read aloud, though this will be a one-on-one share rather than a group read. There are many picture puzzle books available, but this one stands apart because of its whimsical illustrations and well-written rhyming clues.\u2014Laura Stanfield, Campbell County Public Library, Ft. Thomas, KY From Booklist Page after page of flying, jumping, marching, parading, and moseying animals challenge readers to spot the one among them doing something ever-so-slightly different than the others. Somewhere between all the double-humped camels is a cousin with a single hump. One of the monkeys leaping by has taken a fall and wound up with an arm and a knee wrapped in bandages. A lone caterpillar admires the gorgeous rainbow array of butterflies streaking past. Accompanying each illustration, packed end to end with friendly animals, is a short rhyming verse that tells you who to look for, and each picture has its own tone-defining color scheme and design concept, keeping the experience fresh with each turn of the page. Little eyes will be very eager to spot each hidden figure and will find an appropriate level of challenge doing it (except, perhaps, when they have to gaze into 1,000 hypnotic pairs of lemur eyes). Whether they\u2019re sharing this in one-on-one reading time or as a fun group activity, young animal lovers will be fully engaged. Preschool-Grade 1. --Jesse Karp Review Surely the trendiest creatures in children\u2019s books this year... Teckentrup\u2019s multimedia illustrations have the look of silk-screen prints, with color overlays to create a sense of texture. ... Looking carefully takes patience and persistence, and children will feel a pleasurable sense of reward when, in the case of those lemurs, they at last locate the one \u2014 among its hundred-or-so friends \u2014 with its eyes crossed.\u2014The New York Times OnlineAccompanying each illustration, packed end to end with friendly animals, is a short rhyming verse that tells you who to look for, and each picture has its own tone- defining color scheme and design concept, keeping the experience fresh with each turn of the page. Little eyes will be very eager to spot each hidden figure and will find an appropriate level of challenge doing it ... Whether they\u2019re sharing this in one-on-one reading time or as a fun group activity, young animal lovers will be fully engaged.\u2014Booklist OnlineA fun seek-and-find book featuring animals of all kinds. ... The brief rhyming text is well paced, making it easy to read aloud, though this will be a one-on-one share rather than a group read. There are many picture puzzle books available, but this one stands apart because of its whimsical illustrations and well-written rhyming clues.\u2014School Library JournalIn this classic take on a hunt for the odd one out, Teckentrup creates elegant Escher-like wallpapers of prints depicting a varied selection of interesting animals. ... Subtle coloration and textures and thoughtfully chosen background colors give the pages a hand-printed feel.\u2014Kirkus ReviewsTeckentrup asks readers to scan pleasingly patterned images for an \"odd one out.\" ... Teckentrup's mod block-print graphics, reminiscent of Laura Ljungkvist's stylized work, present dizzying crowds of creatures\u2014seals, lemurs, penguins, and butterflies among them.\u2014Publishers Weekly OnlineThe Golden Age of children's book illustration may have ended in the 1930s, but we are surely living through some sort of extended epoch of graphic excellence in books for small children. How else to explain the profusion of arrestingly stylish books about numbers, colors and concepts? Britta Teckentrup makes a chic contribution to the category with \"The Odd One Out,\" a collection of rhyming puzzles that encourages children to seek and find a single inconsistency in various animal-filled tableaux. ... [Y]ounger ones will take pleasure in spotting the tiny, feathery pink shrimp amid a great shoal of colorful fish, for instance, or pointing to the one cross-eyed lemur in a mustard-colored troop.\u2014The Wall Street JournalWonderful... Reading the story and finding all the odd animals could take quite a while, but the illustrations are so beautiful you won't mind taking your time with each page.\u2014NPR, Best Books of 2014Each page features rhymes along with elegant illustrations that are sure to mesmerize.\u2014Parents Magazine (tablet edition) Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.66}, {"asin": "0761318941", "title": "Zoo - ology", "author": "Jo\u00eblle Jolivet", "description": "From School Library Journal PreSchool-Grade 3-Jolivet presents striking, oversized panoramas of living creatures from all corners of the globe. The animals appear in eclectic groups such as \"underground,\" \"at night,\" or \"black and white\" rather than more conventional divisions. The resulting patterns reveal the variety yet interconnectedness of the living world. Younger children will enjoy hunting for the chameleon that can be found on each spread, which may be challenging since it changes color and posture from page to page. Adults may consult the four pages of notes written in small type at book's end to learn a fact or two about each animal. However, the text is really a supplement to the splendid illustrations. Besides its attraction for browsers and its potential as an attention-getting introduction to studies about animals, the book could serve as a stimulus for students working on graphic-design projects. Consequently, the audience for this lovely volume may extend well beyond the primary grades. Kathy Piehl, Minnesota State University, Mankato Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist PreS. A teeming zoo of creatures swims, flies, and stampedes through the nearly two-foot-tall pages of this beautifully illustrated French import. There are few words and no story. Instead, Jolivet groups her animals loosely into sometimes rhyming categories related to habitats, habits, or appearance: \"In the Trees, \"In the Seas, \"At Night,\" \"Spots and Stripes,\" and so on. Rendered in bright colors and in the bold, clean lines and graphic contrasts of linoleum cuts, the animals appear in chaotic spreads that may be more decorative than instructive. But the book's magnificent size and diversity of animals make a powerful visual impact that will easily attract preschoolers to the expansive pages, where they'll point to the animals they know and discover a world of new species. Browsers will also like the hide-and-seek game offered by a hidden chameleon on each page. An appendix, printed in tiny type, offers one or two facts about each of the many animals featured in the book. An unusual, and unusually handsome, offering. Gillian Engberg Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review \u201cWith its imposing trim size (nearly 13\" 18\"), this striking volume is almost literally a book to get lost in. Jolivet (Alphablock) matches the grandeur of the scale with large, dramatic illustrations of animals, insects and the like, at least 30 per spread, for a total exceeding 350 species. Working with a zoology consultant from the French National Museum of Natural History, the artist (who is French) groups the creatures by a stimulating variety of themes: natural habitat (\"Hot\"; \"Cold\"; \"Freshwater\"; \"In the seas\"), appearance (\"Feathered\"; \"Horned\"), size (\"Large and small\"), etc. These categories appear in modest type at the bottom right-hand corner of each spread, inviting readers to find for themselves what the assembled birds and beasts have in common. Jolivet also encourages close scrutiny by challenging kids to find the chameleon (yes, it changes color) planted in each spread. But even without these extra incentives, the audience will almost certainly want to scrutinize the art. Rendered in harmonious combinations of strong, vibrant colors, thickly outlined, the illustrations look like woodcuts, dazzlingly printed on soft yellow ground in dynamic arrangements. The name of each species is set in thin type, curving to mirror the angle of, say, the giraffe's neck or the head of a triggerfish. Four pages of endmatter index the represented species and supply additional information about each. Big as this book is, it will more likely whet than sate readers' appetites. \u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly Starred Review \u201cA teeming zoo of creatures swims, flies, and stampedes through the nearly two-foot-tall pages of this beautifully illustrated French import. There are few words and no story. Instead, Jolivet groups her animals loosely into sometimes rhyming categories related to habitats, habits, or appearance: \"In the Trees, \"In the Seas, \"At Night,\" \"Spots and Stripes,\" and so on. Rendered in bright colors and in the bold, clean lines and graphic contrasts of linoleum cuts, the animals appear in chaotic spreads that may be more decorative than instructive. But the book's magnificent size and diversity of animals make a powerful visual impact that will easily attract preschoolers to the expansive pages, where they'll point to the animals they know and discover a world of new species. Browsers will also like the hide-and-seek game offered by a hidden chameleon on each page. An appendix, printed in tiny type, offers one or two facts about each of the many animals featured in the book. An unusual, and unusually handsome, offering. \u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cJolivet presents striking, oversized panoramas of living creatures from all corners of the globe. The animals appear in eclectic groups such as \"underground,\" \"at night,\" or \"black and white\" rather than more conventional divisions. The resulting patterns reveal the variety yet interconnectedness of the living world. Younger children will enjoy hunting for the chameleon that can be found on each spread, which may be challenging since it changes color and posture from page to page. Adults may consult the four pages of notes written in small type at book's end to learn a fact or two about each animal. However, the text is really a supplement to the splendid illustrations. Besides its attraction for browsers and its potential as an attention-getting introduction to studies about animals, the book could serve as a stimulus for students working on graphic-design projects. Consequently, the audience for this lovely volume may extend well beyond the primary grades.\u201d \u2015 School Library Journal About the Author Joelle Jolivet is the author and illustrator of Zoo-ology , a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She lives in France. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 20.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0763668966", "title": "Maps", "author": "Aleksandra Mizieli\u0144ska", "description": "Review [F]eatures playful line drawings of national and geographical attributes, including famous native folk (Freud, Kandinsky, Count Dracula). ... [A]n entertaining and informative choice for budding geographers or Eurail travelers-to-be.\u2014The New York Times Book Review[A] delight to explore, as the Mizielinskis fill their maps with tiny labeled images of local wildlife, cuisine, activities, and notable citizens... Compelling.\u2014Publishers WeeklyHandsomely detailed illustrations include major industries, regional insects, birds, fish, and other animals, plants, crops and prepared food, and famous people. ... This book supports and encourages geographic literacy.\u2014Library Media Connection (highly recommended)[R]ewarding fare ... for both young cartografiends and armchair travelers.\u2014Kirkus ReviewsThis handsome and fun-to-browse volume will inspire armchair travelers. ... The artwork\u2019s muted earth tones, decorative borders, and fine-lined drawings are reminiscent of an antique rendering, while the numerous small cartoon illustrations add a light, contemporary touch. ... [W]insome renderings.\u2014School Library JournalAt once a celebration of diversity and an investigation of the natural and cultural offerings that make each country unique, this expansive and impressive book of maps ... is richly detailed with dozens of extraordinary drawings... Hours of fascinating perusal await.\u2014Foreword ReviewsThere is no dearth of atlases for children, but Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielinski's \"Maps\" is a standout. ... [The authors'] enthusiasm and love for facts kids might want to know shine forth in charming little illustrations.\u2014Newsday[A] sumptuous illustrated children's atlas that combines chic, muted colors with witty and informative drawings on heavy matte paper that whispers under the fingers. ... The sort of book you can't help touching, \"Maps\" is as likely to engross adults as it is 7- to 10-year-olds. ... [I]t gives aesthetic pleasure all the way from the table of contents to the flags of the world at book's end.\u2014The Wall Street Journal[A] nonfiction visual feast... [G]loriously portrays the world's profusion of creatures, mountains and man-made structures in chic, subdued shades of beige, mauve and eau de Nil.\u2014The Wall Street JournalA visual extravaganza with fascinating trivia in pages as spacious and luxurious as a classic road atlas. It's an invitation to travel around the world one page at a time. ... \"Maps\" is a treat, with its richness of details catering to young readers in this electronic age who thrive on all kinds of visual stimuli. This book will also appeal to other members of the family. All will scour for details and trivia as obscure, fun and varied as where one might sandboard or see a yak.\u2014Shelf Awareness for ReadersAlong with geographical features and pictures, you'll find amusing depictions of indigenous animals, native dress and characteristic architecture... Between the buildings, food and history, the maps will awaken a wanderlust for unfamiliar and exotic locale.\u2014Metro PhiladelphiaNot exactly your library\u2019s world atlas. These maps, illustrated in distinctive style by the authors, denote the culture and history of a place rather than its exact coordinates.\u2014Entertainment Weekly About the Author Aleksandra Mizielin\u00b4 ska and Daniel Mizielin\u00b4 ski graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, in 2007. In 2010 they were nominated for the Bologna Ragazzi Award and the IBBY Honor List.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 20.99}, {"asin": "0470926619", "title": "Student Study Guide and Solutions Manual to accompany Organic Chemistry", "author": "David R. Klein", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Chemistry"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 21.0}, {"asin": "1621572226", "title": "Economic Logic", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Economics"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 53.31}, {"asin": "B079V7XVK3", "title": "Shadow Twin (Black Dog Book 5)", "author": "Rachel Neumeier", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0763668966"}
{"user_id": "AGNOPAX7TM7NNASWHONWR6MDLZVA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B085C74285", "title": "Deadly Cross (Alex Cross Book 28)", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "About the Author James Patterson is the world's bestselling author. The creator of Alex Cross, he has produced more enduring fictional heroes than any other novelist alive. He lives in Florida with his family. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Review \"[Patterson's] books don't pussyfoot around when it comes to the villains. These are bad, bad people.\" -- \"Al Roker, praise for the author\" \"Patterson never, and I mean never, disappoints.\" -- \"USA Today, praise for the author\" \"Patterson's novels are sleek entertainment machines, the Porsches of commercial fiction, expertly engineered and lightning fast.\" -- \"Publishers Weekly, praise for the author\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 2.99}, {"asin": "B00U6DNYLI", "title": "Cross Justice (Alex Cross Book 23)", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "About the Author James Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records . Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977 James Patterson's books have sold more than 300 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels , the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider . He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Narrator Ruben Santiago Hudson infuses Alex with his own blend of passion and vigor to make this presentation his own. As Alex's search for the real killer sends him deep into his own family's secrets, Hudson's voice peels back layers of raw and heartrending emotion. Jefferson Mays provides counterpoint to Hudson's performance with his skillful creation of the depraved killer. Together, the two narrators anchor the plot with enduring performances and bring Alex home at last. -- \"AudioFile\" Patterson's Alex Cross is back again in another crazy, suspenseful mystery that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. Patterson's writing style never disappoints, with his characters still seeming fresh even more than twenty novels in. No story is the same, and this book is as worthy a read as all the ones before it. -- \"RT Book Reviews (4 stars)\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B01JHQPTWQ", "title": "Golden Prey (A Prey Novel Book 27)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B06XFV4X2V", "title": "The People vs. Alex Cross", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "About the Author James Patterson is one of the most popular writers of all time, with more than three hundred million copies of his books sold worldwide. He holds the record for most New York Times bestsellers and is the author of the two most popular detective series of the past decade, the Alex Cross novels and the Women's Murder Club. Patterson has won an Edgar Award, the mystery world's highest honor, and his novels Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider were made into feature films. His lifelong work to promote books and reading is reflected in his website ReadKiddoRead.com, which helps parents, grandparents, teachers, and librarians find the very best children's books for their kids. Patterson is a recipient of the Los Angeles Times' 2015 Innovator's Award. --This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. Review \"Behind all the noise and the numbers, we shouldn't forget that no one gets this big without amazing natural storytelling talent--which is what James Patterson has, in spades. The Alex Cross series proves it.\" \u2015 Lee Child \"It's no mystery why James Patterson is the world's most popular thriller writer: his uncanny skill in creating living, breathing characters we truly feel for and seamless, lightning-fast plots. I do this for a living, and he still manages to keep me guessing from the first to last page. Simply put: Nobody does it better.\" \u2015 Jeffrey Deaver \"James Patterson is The Boss. End of.\"\u2015 Ian Rankin \"The page-turningest author in the game right now.\"\u2015 San Francisco Chronicle \"Patterson has mastered the art of writing page-turning bestsellers.\"\u2015 Chicago Sun-Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B08DMVCQNL", "title": "Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel Book 31)", "author": "John Sandford", "description": "Review \u201cEntertaining. . . Fans will enjoy seeing the two old buddies and their cohorts wading into dangerous [sic] waters.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-nine Prey novels; four Kidd novels; twelve Virgil Flowers novels; three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Muggers Lucas Davenport used his phone's flashlight to illuminate the cut through the knee-high wall, and from there, to the path that led down to Fort Lauderdale Beach. Early-morning traffic down Beach Boulevard was quiet, the subdued hum of small SUVs and sedans. The cars turning left off Sunrise Boulevard played their headlights across his back as he walked, throwing his shadow on the white sand. Out on the Atlantic, he could see a bare hint of the coming dawn. Lucas walked across the sand until he was a dozen feet from the water, where the smell of seaweed pressed against his face like a hand. He sat down, took off his shoes and socks. He sat there for a while, as the eastern horizon grew brighter. Not much was going through his head-the light, the smell of the seaweed, the sound of salt water breaking up the beach. A breeze sprang up with the dawn, but was barely strong enough to push the six-inch rollers ashore. After a while, he noticed that the world was beginning to light up. His phone rang. He dug it out of his jacket pocket and turned it off without answering, or even looking at it. At some point, the rim of the sun broke the edge of the horizon, a brilliant arc throwing rippling orange slashes across the water. A sportfishing boat went by, a half mile out. Then the muggers showed up. Two men, one Anglo, one Hispanic, both thin, dark-haired, wearing worn dark clothing, their faces weathered from life on the street, like driftwood boards. Lucas knew they were muggers by the way they approached, a certain crablike walk, a phony confidence, an attitude that could turn in a moment from friendliness to naked aggression and then possibly to retreat, if Lucas should turn out to be something unexpected. They checked him out, a guy in a sport coat barefoot on the sand, maybe shaking off a drunk? A gold watch on the left wrist, right hand in his lap. He looked at them and said, \"Hey, guys.\" The Anglo said, \"Nice watch you got.\" Lucas: \"Got it from my wife for my birthday. A Patek Philippe. Twenty-eight thousand dollars, if you can believe that. I told her we should have sponsored some hungry kids somewhere. She said that we already did that and I should have some nice things.\" The guy in back stopped and hooked his friend's elbow to slow down his approach; the feral sense that something was not right. \"You okay?\" the lead mugger asked. Lucas said, \"No.\" He slipped his right hand out of his lap, and held it straight up in front of his nose; he was gripping a black Walther PPQ. One of the muggers said, \"Whoa.\" \"Why were you guys going to mug me? Don't bullshit me, tell me the truth,\" Lucas said. \"You gonna stick something in your arm? Stick something up your nose? Or what?\" They stuttered around for a moment, looking like they might run, but there was no place to hide on the empty beach and running through the sand would be slow. Much slower than a bullet. The Anglo guy said, \"Mostly looking for something to eat. Ain't had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.\" \"Okay.\" Lucas sat motionless for a few seconds, the muzzle of the gun straight up to the sky, between his hands, as though he were praying, and then he fished in his jacket pocket for his wallet, extracted a bill, folded it into quarters, and tossed it across the sand. \"Pick it up,\" he said. The Anglo looked at his friend, then eased carefully forward, stopped, and picked up the bill. \"Fifty bucks.\" \"Fifty bucks,\" Lucas said. \"Go get something to eat.\" They backed away, watching him, then turned and moved away more quickly. Before they were out of earshot, Lucas called, \"Hey. Guys.\" They stopped and looked back. \"When I get up from here and walk down the beach, if I see you jumping someone, I'll fuckin' kill both of you. You understand?\" The Hispanic guy said, \"Yes, sir.\" And the two of them hotfooted it down the beach path to the street and out of sight. Lucas looked back out at the ocean. The sun was halfway above the horizon now, the orange burning off, going to yellow. Another day. Wasn't going to be a good one. July Chapter One Five years earlier, the high school guidance counselor sat Barney Hall down and said, \"Barney, you're bright enough, but you're not college material. Not yet.\" He was looking over Hall's standard test scores and other accumulated records from thirteen years in the Lower Cape May Regional School District. \"You're not mature for your age. If you hadn't been sent to detention once a week, you wouldn't have done any studying at all.\" Hall was a cheerful, good-looking, middle-sized kid with broad shoulders and bright white teeth, who must have said a hundred times in his life, \"Watch this-and hey, hold my beer, willya?\" He had a girlfriend named Sue, whom he'd known since fourth grade, who was happy to hold his beer, most of the time, and then apply the bandages afterward. Hall worked after school and all summers as a mechanic in his dad's yacht salvage yard, or junkyard, depending on who was doing the talking. \"I'm trying to do better, sir,\" he told the counselor. \"Don't bullshit me, son. Would I be correct in believing that you were drinking beer at Toby Jones's wedding last weekend and got drunk and fell off the dock and damn near drowned?\" \"I'm a good swimmer, sir. There was no danger.\" \"That's not the point, Barney. Anyway, if you want to do anything in life, you need to get serious, and right quick. Knowing you, looking at these records, I'm thinking your best course would be the military. The military would give you responsibility from day one. If you don't come through, they'll slap your ass in the brig. You need that discipline. Mind, I'm not saying the Marine Corps. You're way too smart for that.\" \"I wasn't thinking college, not right away,\" Hall said. \"I've been talking with Sue, and . . . how about the Coast Guard, sir? There're some Coasties that hang out at my dad's place and I like listening to them talk. I've been on the water and working on boats all my life.\" The counselor poked a finger at him: \"That's the smartest thing I ever heard you say, Barney. You do a few years in the Coast Guard, get yourself some rank and responsibility and they'll even send you to college when you're ready. God help me, you could wind up an officer.\" \"Whoa. That'd be awesome, sir.\" \"And do me a favor, son. Get rid of that T-shirt.\" The T-shirt featured a basketball-sized, full-color image of a bantam rooster, with the legend, everything's bigger in texas. Hall looked down at the T-shirt. \"It's just a chicken, sir.\" \"It's a cock,\" the counselor said. \"You know it and I know it. I don't want to see it in this school again.\" Hall married Sue the June after high school graduation, joined the Coast Guard at the end of a glorious summer, and after boot camp and advanced training, was stationed in Fort Lauderdale. Sue Hall went to Broward College and became a registered nurse and started working on a bachelor's degree in nursing. Hall found the boatyards of Marina Mile to be the most amazing places he'd ever been. When Sue got pregnant with their first one, he got off-duty work rebuilding diesel engines in one of the Marina Mile engine shops. The extra work would get them childcare money so Sue could finish her BS degree. At night, they'd drink PBR under palm trees in their trailer park, until Sue got pregnant, when they switched to ginger ale, and she'd say, \"Barnes, we're gonna do good in life. I can feel it coming on.\" The owner of the engine shop had a pile of old boats out back, which he couldn't sell, and Hall kept looking at a 1999 Boston Whaler 260 Outrage that had been stripped of the twin outboards and had a hole in the hull, and now sat derelict atop a tandem trailer with two flat tires on each side, overgrown with weeds. After some talk, the owner agreed to give Hall the boat along with two badly abused, but salvageable, Merc 225s and the trailer-all Hall had to do was work five additional unpaid hours a week, in the evenings and on weekends, on top of his regular weekend shift, for two years, and the boat was his. Plus, he could use the shop and its tools to rehab the trailer and the Mercs and do whatever fiberglass work the boat needed. The boat was solid, except for the hole, which could be fixed. That\u00d5s the entire backstory as to why Hall, Sue, and their first boy, Lance, almost a one-year-old, were trolling down the debris line on the outer reef south of Pompano Beach, Florida, looking for dorado-mahi-mahi-when Hall spotted something unusual happening with a snazzy-looking Mako center console a half mile ahead of them. He said, \u00d2Sue, hand me the glasses.\u00d3 The Mako had two white outboards hanging off the back, which Hall recognized as big 350s, giving the boat seven hundred horses with which to get across the ocean. \"What's out there, Barnes?\" Sue asked. She was a rangy young woman, would have been a cowgirl in Texas, sunburnt, fighter-pilot blue eyes, her rose-blond hair frizzy from salt water. \"Something strange going on, babe. I've been watching him, 'cause that's a sharp boat. All of a sudden it slowed down and stopped and it looks like it picked up a diver in the middle of the ocean. I mean, who was already in the middle of the ocean before they got there. Went right to him.\" \"You don't see that every day,\" Sue said. Hall was still on the glasses. \"He's, uh, looks like they've got some lift bags coming over the side . . . in the middle of the ocean.\" \"Maybe picking up some bugs?\" She was referring to spiny lobsters. \"From a guy they left in the middle of the ocean?\" Sue said, with a sudden urgency, \"Barnes, I've got a bad feeling about this. Let's turn around. Bring the boat back north.\" \"Yeah.\" That seemed like a good idea. Hall turned the boat in a wide fisherman's semicircle and headed back north, but kept watching the Mako through the glasses. He was careful to be standing behind the center console when he used the binoculars, because he'd learned early in his Coast Guard training that if you saw somebody whose arms, head, and chest formed an equilateral triangle, they were looking at you through binoculars-and every few minutes, one of the men on the Mako would check them out with binoculars. Twenty minutes after it stopped, the sleek-looking craft lurched forward and headed south. Hall got his cell phone, called in to the watch officer at the Coast Guard station at Fort Lauderdale. \"Sir, this is Barney Hall. I'm south of Pompano Beach in my own boat, but I saw something strange out here. There's a black-and-white Mako 284 heading toward Port Everglades. We saw him picking up something from the middle of the ocean. He was running fast, then stopped, and there was a diver waiting for him right there in the water. There were no other boats around, no dive flag. They were using lift bags . . .\" \"Can you stay with him, Hall?\" \"No, sir, not entirely, he's running fast. I can keep him in sight until he makes the turn. I'll be a mile back of him by then.\" \"He looked suspicious?\" \"Yes, he did, sir. If I was on duty, I'd stop him, for sure.\" \"We'll do that, then. We'll have somebody waiting for him inside.\" Hall told Sue to put on her life jacket and bring in the fishing lines; the baby was already wrapped in a fat orange PFD. He turned the boat and they tracked the Mako until it made the turn into the Port Everglades cut. Hall got back on his phone and called the watch officer and said, \u00d2It\u00d5s Hall, sir, he\u00d5s making the turn.\u00d3 \"We're on it, Hall. Good job.\" The Mako was ambushed by a Coast Guard RIB-rigid inflatable boat-which had orange inflatable tubes wrapped around a hard-shell hull. The petty officer second class who was running the boat got on channel 16 and called, \u00d2Mako 284 Chevere, this is the United States Coast Guard coming up behind to make a courtesy inspection. Cut your speed to five knots and hold your course. We\u00d5ll board you from the starboard side.\u00d3 Coast Guard inspection boats were usually larger RIBs with pilothouses; the boat that had been scrambled to intercept the Mako was smaller, three men aboard, no pilothouse. The Coast Guard boat pulled up behind the Mako and the petty officer in the bow saw two men waiting in the stern-bulky guys, dressed like sport fishermen, bright-colored shirts and shorts, sunglasses, and billed hats. Then, as they were a few feet off, ready to board, one of the men on the stern of the Mako lifted up a heavy long-nosed black rifle with a red-dot sight. With a motion that was practiced and almost graceful, he shot the two Coast Guardsmen in the bow, and then twice shot the PO2 who was running the boat. The four shots together took no more than two seconds. The gun barked, rather than banged, a flat noise because of the suppressor on the barrel; the gunshots were loud, but not especially audible over the sound of the boat engines. The PO2 had killed the boat's speed for the boarding and when he saw the rifle come up he reached forward to hit the accelerator, but a bullet took him in the throat and then another in the chest, and the slugs turned him away and he fell into the bottom of the boat, dying, blood spreading around him on the wet floor, a purple flood. The Coast Guard boat turned into a slow circle across the wide port and the Mako accelerated away. As the Mako left, Hall, Sue, and the baby nosed through the cut in their rehabbed Whaler and saw the Coast Guard boat turning away from it. Hall watched for a moment, then said, \"There's something wrong, Sue.\" \"Get over there,\" Sue said. \"That Mako's running like a thief in the night. I'll get the gun.\" They kept a .38 Special in a waterproof can down an equipment hatch. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 2.99}, {"asin": "B09SGXDRBC", "title": "Triple Cross: The Greatest Alex Cross Thriller Since Kiss the Girls", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "About the Author James Patterson is the world's bestselling author. The creator of Alex Cross, he has produced more enduring fictional heroes than any other novelist alive. He lives in Florida with his family. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "B07QXJQWG2", "title": "Criss Cross (Alex Cross Book 27)", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "Review \"Alex is racing from crime scene to crime scene, spotting familiar details linked to Cross family secrets and knowing his life is on the line.\" -- \"Library Journal\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author James Patterson is the world's bestselling author. The creator of Alex Cross, he has produced more enduring fictional heroes than any other novelist alive. He lives in Florida with his family. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B07N5GV9YL", "title": "Bloody Genius (A Virgil Flowers Novel Book 12)", "author": "John Sandford", "description": "Review \u201c[A] smartly plotted mystery.\u201d\u2014 New York Times Book Review More Praise for Bloody Genius \u201cSandford is a terrific storyteller who can spin an intriguing tale without having to fill it with death-defying mayhem. . .\u00a0Armchair sleuths who are intent on solving the crime for themselves will need to be on their toes.\u201d\u2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cCompulsively readable. . . Readers who like a bit of unrepentant wiseass in their sleuths will find Flowers fits the bill. Sandford makes blending humor and mystery look easy.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cFlowers remains one of the great modern fictional detectives, and Sandford, as always, supplies amazing secondary characters, sharp dialogue, and plots that confound and amaze. A near-perfect crime novel.\u201d\u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201c[A] fast-paced, intensifying adventure. As always, the investigation is intricately plotted, while details of Flowers's family life are included for fans of the character. . . The irreverent humor and language is perfect for the unconventional law officer in the darkly entertaining series.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201c[Sandford] appears to have no shortage of story ideas. More impressively, he continues to execute them brilliantly. . . Another dazzling whodunit.\u201d\u2014 The Real Book Spy \u201cSteadily absorbing revelations of all manner of malfeasance, beautifully handled.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews About the Author John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-nine Prey novels; four Kidd novels; twelve Virgil Flowers novels; three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Barthelemy Quill led his companion through the murk and up the library stairs toward his personal study carrel. Though Quill was normally restrained to the point of rigor mortis, she could hear him breathing, quick breaths, excited. They'd been there before, and the woman found the experience both weird and interesting. She was a step behind him, and lower, and she reached out and stroked his thigh. But at the top of the stairs, Quill put out a hand, pressing it back against her chest, and whispered, \"Shh. There's a light.\" The library was never entirely dark, not even in the middle of the night, but there'd never before been a moving light. She could see one now, no brighter than an iPhone, dancing like a ghost through the bookshelves. Not a security guard. It was an iPhone, she thought. Not the flashlight, but the much weaker screen light. Quill moved away from her and closer to the light-he was wearing gray dress slacks, a gray knit dress shirt, and a black sport coat, so he was basically invisible in the dark. The woman felt a chill crawl up her arms and she stepped sideways into the book stacks. She'd learned well the lesson of trusting her instincts about trouble. She turned a corner on one of the stacks and crouched, listening in the silence. Then Quill's voice: \"Hey! Hey! Where'd you get . . . I'm calling the police! You stay right where you're at.\" Then a wet Whack! And, after a second, another. Whack! The sound was heavy and violent, as if delivered with a crowbar. The whacks were followed by a couple of bumps. And not another word from Quill. The woman crunched herself up, made herself smaller, opened her mouth wide to silence her breathing, a trick she'd learned in another life while taking singing lessons. Like Quill, she'd dressed in dark clothing, as their entry into the library was unauthorized and possibly illegal. Before this moment, that had added another thrill to their clandestine meetings. Now . . . Something terrible had happened, she thought. After the whacks and subsequent bumps, there was a deep silence, as though the iPhone user were listening. That was followed by shuffling noises, more bumps, a door closed and a locked turned, and then the weak iPhone light reappeared. She never saw the person with the phone but kept her arms over her face and her head down: faces shine in the dark, and eyes are attracted to eyes. She heard light footsteps fading away, risked a look up and saw the iPhone light disappearing around the corner toward the stairs. The killer was just as stunned. Quill had come out of nowhere, as the killer stood by the open carrel door, laptop in hand. Quill\u00d5s face had been twisted with anger. He\u00d5d shouted, \u00d2Hey! Hey!\u00d3 and something else, then, \u00d2I\u00d5m calling the police!\u00d3 Quill'd turned away, and, without thinking, panicking, the killer had lifted the laptop computer and brought it down on Quill's head. After the first blow, Quill had said, \"Ah!\" and gone down, and his forehead had hit the edge of the carrel desk and his head had turned. His gray eyes jerked to the assailant, but had already begun to dim, as he sank to his hands and knees. The killer swung the notebook again and this time Quill went flat on the floor. The DreamBook Power P87 made an excellent weapon, not because of its Intel Xeon i7 processor, or its 64 gigs of RAM, or its high-definition display, but because it weighed more than twelve pounds and had sharp corners. By comparison, an Irwin Tools fiberglass-handled general purpose claw hammer, an otherwise excellent weapon, weighs only sixteen ounces, a pound. When the killer sank the computer into the back of Quill\u00d5s head, the professor smacked the desk with his forehead, his head turned, and his eyes twisted toward his assailant, and he dropped to his hands and knees like a poleaxed ox, if oxen have hands and knees. A blow followed, a downward chop like that of a guillotine blade. The later autopsy suggested the first blow had been sufficient enough to kill, if the assailant had been willing to wait a minute. He hadn't. The second impact certainly finished the job, and Quill lay sprawled across the floor and partially under the carrel desk, leaking both blood and cerebrospinal fluid. Quill never felt much pain, only an awareness of the blows and his beginning to fall. The lights went out, and he dropped into a darkness deeper than any sleep. The library carrel had been his own personal cubbyhole, renewed semester by semester over the years. Strictly speaking, that shouldn't have been the case, but Quill was rich and handsome and famous for his research into innovative therapies for spinal nerve injuries. So he got by with it. And it had become a go-to place for his late-night sexual assignations, away from all eyes. The killer had a thousand thoughts raging through his head. Near the top, however, was: Get out! And: DNA! And: Fingerprints! The library was nearly silent, broken only by the vague clicks and hums of any building at night with heaters and fans. The killer stood listening, then looked down at the body, licked his lips once, thinking. The laptop came with a soft plastic cover. He used it to wrap one of his hands and then dragged Quill's leg from the doorway into the carrel, where, with the door closed, the body couldn't be easily seen through the narrow translucent window. His heart was pumping hard, he was breathing like a steam engine. He tried to calm himself, took a moment, stepped on something. The fob to Quill's BMW lay on the floor where he'd dropped it, along with his cell phone. The killer picked up the cell, the keys, and the murder weapon, took another moment to listen. As expected, the library was empty and dead silent: it closed at six o'clock, and he'd murdered Quill at the stroke of midnight. The killer left the carrel at three minutes after midnight, pulled his black ball cap farther down over his eyes and tilted his head down to defeat any cameras. He locked the carrel door and started toward the stairs. The hair on the back of his neck suddenly bristled, like from the chill you'd get walking past a cemetery. He stopped. Was he alone? He listened, heard nothing. He walked slowly and quietly down the stairs to the first floor, creeping through it on his soft-soled running shoes, and out the door. The river was right there. He went to the walkway running alongside it, stopped under a light to separate the professor's keys from their fob and threw the fob in the river. The keys went in his pocket; he might find a use for them. He continued across a bridge to the other side, saw no one. He stopped to put the computer and its soft cover in his backpack. The cell phone went into a \"Mission Darkness\" Faraday bag with a see-through window, along with his own. Quill had begun making a call to 911 when he was killed, so the killer had access to the phone's operation and could keep it working with the occasional poke. Back inside the library, Quill\u00d5s companion waited, frozen in place, for what seemed like hours-maybe ten minutes. After the iPhone light disappeared, she had not heard another thing. Taking a chance, she dug silently in her purse and found the switchblade she'd purchased in Iowa, where they were legal, as personal protection. She wrapped the knife in the tail of her jacket and pushed the button that popped open the razor-sharp four-and-seven-eighths-inch serrated blade, the mechanical unlatching muffled by the cloth. She listened for another moment, then crawled down the aisle between the book stacks, got to her knees, then to her feet, and slipped over to the carrel. The door had a small, vertical-slit window, but with translucent glass. She muttered, \"Shit,\" and waited, and waited, listening, tried the door, but it was locked. She turned on her iPhone's flashlight and directed it down through the window but couldn't see anything at all through the cloudy pane. Nothing was moving inside. Quill, she thought, might be dead. He was probably badly hurt, at the least. She should call the police; but she wasn't the type. The thought held her for a moment. She didn't owe Quill. He'd brought her into this. If he was still alive, and survived, she could tell him that she ran away and never knew that he'd been hurt. The decision made, she turned off the light and slipped through the library, her lips moving in a prayer that wasn't a prayer, because she didn't know any, but simply a Please! Please! Please! addressed to any god who might be tuned in. She made it down the stairs and out into the river air, the Mississippi curling away beneath the bridge with anything but innocence: it had seen more murders than any single man or woman ever would. A half block from the library, the woman folded the knife but kept it in her hand, her thumb on the spring release. On the far side of the bridge, she was swallowed up by the night. Because he was murdered on a Friday night and had no firm appointments over the weekend, and missed only one day at the lab, Quill\u00d5s body wasn\u00d5t found until Tuesday, when an untoward odor began leaking under the carrel\u00d5s locked door. Definitely not coffee. Inquiries were made, a second key was found, the door was opened, the cops were called. Quill had lived alone since his third wife moved out. Neither of his first two wives, nor his estranged third, made any secret of the fact that they thoroughly disliked him. A two-week investigation produced baffled cops. The cops didn't think they were baffled-not yet, anyway-but the Star Tribune and local television stations agreed that they were. And who do you believe, the cops or the mainstream media? When no suspect had been produced after two weeks, Quill's well-connected sister, co-heir to their father's wildly successful company, Quill Micro-Sprockets, called her old friend and a major political donee, the governor of Minnesota. The governor called the commissioner of the Department of Public Safety; the commissioner called the director of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension; the BCA director called one of his supervisory agents; the supervisory agent, after a comprehensive course of vulgarity, obscenity, and profanity, made a call of his own. At the end of the daisy chain was a Flowers. Chapter Two Virgil Flowers walked out of a caf\u017d in Blue Earth, Minnesota, slightly bilious after a dinner of brown slices of beef and brown gravy over brown potatoes and dead green beans, coconut cream pie on the side, with a pointless Diet Coke. He had to quit all that; he knew it, but hadn't yet done it. He burped and the burp tasted . . . brown. He'd taken three steps out the door before he noticed a motley group of twenty people standing in the parking lot, staring up at the sky to the south. When he turned to look, he saw the UFO. There was no question about it, really. The alien craft was obviously far away, but still appeared to be more than half the size of a full moon. It was motionless, hovering over the countryside like a polished dime, brilliantly lit, alternating gold and white light, almost as bright as the setting sun, and hard to look at without squinting. A man dressed like a farmer, in mud-spattered jeans and muddier gum boots, said wisely, \"It only appears to be motionless. It's probably a jumbo jet headed into the Twin Cities, flying low and right toward us. The sun's hitting it at just the right angle, and we're getting a reflection.\" A pale woman with orange-blond dreadlocks, and the voice of a high school teacher, said, \"No, it's not a jet. It's not moving. Line it up with that phone pole and you see it's not moving.\" Virgil and the farmer edged sideways to line the UFO up with the telephone pole, and the woman was right; the UFO wasn't moving. The farmer exhaled heavily, and said, \"Okay. I got nothin'.\" More people were coming out of the caf\u017d, attracted by the crowd in the parking lot. A man in a plaid sport jacket said, \"This could be the start of something big.\" \"Like an invasion,\" the dreadlocks lady said. She mimed a shudder. \"Like in Cloverfield. You don't know exactly what it is, but it's coming and it's bad.\" \"Wouldn't they invade Washington or someplace like that?\" a thin man asked. \"Why would they invade Iowa?\" A jocko-looking guy said, \"Not because they're recruiting for a pro football team,\" and he and a jocko friend, who was wearing a red University of Minnesota jacket, exchanged high fives. Somebody said, \"I left my camera at home. Wouldn't you know it? Probably see Bigfoot on the way back.\" A short, fat mail carrier: \"I saw a show where the aliens completely wasted LA, but it turned out everything was being controlled from one central bunker, and when the Army hit that, all the aliens' tanks and shit quit working.\" \"Independence Day,\" somebody said. \"Where they nuked the mother ship, and then the fighters could get through the force fields?\" \"No, I saw that one, too, but this was a different movie,\" the letter carrier said. \"Ground troops in LA. Got the aliens with a bazooka or something.\" A young man with black-rimmed glasses and slicked-back dark hair said, with the voice of authority, \"Battle: Los Angeles. Thirty-five percent on the Tomatometer. The ground squad lit them up with a laser indicator so American fighters could target the alien HQ. Or maybe they called in the artillery, I don't precisely recall.\" A young woman in a jewel-blue nylon letter jacket that matched her eyes said, \"I hope they don't get us pregnant with those monster things like in Aliens. You know, that ate their way out of your womb when they hatched.\" \"I don't think that was Aliens,\" the authoritative young man said. \"But just in case, maybe you oughta get a lotta good lovin' before they arrive.\" Jewel Blue, the voice of scorn: \"Dream on, Poindexter.\" Virgil scratched his chin, momentarily at a loss. He was a tall, thin, blue-eyed man, with blond hair curling well down over his ears. He was wearing a canvas sport coat over a \u00d2Moon Taxi\u00d3 T-shirt and jeans, with cowboy boots and a blue ball cap. As an official law enforcement officer of the state of Minnesota-L\u00d5\u0192toile du Nord-he thought he should do something about an alien invasion but didn\u00d5t know exactly what. Call it in maybe? --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1936873621", "title": "By Light We Knew Our Names", "author": "Anne Valente", "description": "Review \"In these wonderful stories, Anne Valente shows again and again her talent for extracting the obsessions and anxieties and wonder of childhood, then extrapolating them across the whole of a life: Here feelings manifest as objects, relationships exist as gifts physically given, and every page contains a thrilling combination of sadness and joy, humor and loss, science and mystery and magic. By Light We Knew Our Names is a striking debut, reminiscent of Aimee Bender and Lorrie Moore, but with a bright promise all its own.\" \u2014Matt Bell, author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods \"In general, issues trump characterization in these stories; well-crafted and perhaps overly solemn, they are the kind of fare that used to appear in the 'better' women\u2019s magazines. Valente\u2019s territory may be small, but she covers it with insight and depth.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Anne Valente's fiction appears in Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal and Redivider, among others, and her essays appear in The Washington Post and The Believer. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics (Origami Zoo Press, 2013). Winner of Copper Nickel's 2012 Fiction Prize, her work was listed as notable in Best American Non-Required Reading 2011. Originally from St. Louis, she currently lives in the Midwest.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Short Stories & Anthologies"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.37}, {"asin": "0615586694", "title": "The Adventures of Miki the Narwhal: Miki's Long Journey", "author": "Joseph Pro", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1989096530", "title": "Royals of Villain Academy 6: Foul Conjuring", "author": "Eva Chase", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}], "target_asin": "B07N5GV9YL"}
{"user_id": "AGEMEXEAV6VZNIQUM3BFKO2KH7TQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0142411833", "title": "Defining Dulcie", "author": "Paul Acampora", "description": "About the Author Paul Acampora lives in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.Paul Acampora lives in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 6.1}, {"asin": "B003UHU726", "title": "Now and Always", "author": "Lori Copeland", "description": "From the Back Cover Very few things distract Katie Addison when she's on a mission, whether it's opening her home to abused women, rehabilitating injured horses, or helping tall, gorgeous Warren Tate mend his broken heart. But when financial difficulties pile up for her, Katie hesitantly admits she herself may need help. Since his fiance left him, Warren is done with women---especially independent women, which he'd guess describes Katie Addison to a tee. Reluctantly he agrees to help Katie with her financial troubles. But when his budget doesn't include Katie's daily lattes, Warren realizes he may have a challenging client on his hands. Meanwhile, Sheriff Ben O'Keefe can't seem to get Katie's attention. Everyone in town knows he has had a longstanding crush on her. But to Katie, Ben is just Ben. When mysterious events turn Katie to him for help, is it the chance Ben has been waiting for? About the Author Lori Copeland is a bestselling author whose books includde Now and Always, Simple Gifts, Unwrapping Christmas, and Monday Morning Faith, which was a finalist for the 2007 Christy Awards. Lori was inducted into the Springfield Writers Hall of Fame in 2000 and lives in the beautiful Ozarks with her husband and family.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 50.95}, {"asin": "0618033777", "title": "Goose Chase", "author": "Patrice Kindl", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Kindl (Owl in Love) once again takes flight, this time proffering an engaging gaggle of a dozen geese and the orphaned Goose Girl who tends them. Eschewing a \"once upon a time\" opening, the spunky narrator sets the novel's tone: \"What do I care for custom? 'Tis my own story I am telling and I will tell it as I please.\" Goose Girl addresses the audience from the high tower in which she is trapped by a king and prince (from dueling kingdoms), both of whom covet her hand, her golden tresses (which yield gold dust) and her tears (which turn to diamonds), not to mention her beauty the latter three were gifts from a mysterious old woman to whom the girl showed some kindness. Luckily, her 12 charges evade the royals and organize their keeper's rescue. Kindl draws on a wealth of fairy tale lore to describe what follows. The geese deposit Goose Girl in a dilapidated cottage, where a trio of ogresses reside and promptly take her captive; the prince tracks her down, and Baba Yaga fans will recognize a few of the heroine's tricks that help her escape. Next, Goose Girl and the prince are cast into a dungeon belonging to an ally of the aforementioned king (that initial high tower of entrapment is not the only reference to Rapunzel Goose Girl's hair here comes to her aid). Those familiar with the Brothers Grimm's \"The Six Swans\" may not be surprised by the ending, but it's how Kindl gets there, tying up all loose ends along the way, that will hold readers' attention. Ages 10-14. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal Gr 6-9-When an orphaned Goose Girl gives bread to an old beggar woman, the hag rewards her with a spell that makes her beautiful and rich, with her tears crystallizing into diamonds and gold dust falling from her hair. The desirable young woman then attracts a tyrannical king and a seemingly dim-witted prince, both of whom want to marry her. Determined to stay single, Alexandria Aurora Fortunato endures imprisonment in a tower; an escape that finds her in the valley of the grave-stealing, cannibalistic yet bumbling ogresses; and other dangers before she learns that she is a princess and that the 12 geese she tended are, in fact, her sisters. Her many adventures, while amusing, bog down the story a bit, leaving readers ready for a resolution. Still, Alexandria is a witty, feisty, no-nonsense feminist, and her tale is told with tongue in cheek and lots of laugh-out-loud humor. While the story bares only slight resemblance to the classic \"Goose Girl,\" other tales are added to the mix: the girl's magical hair grows very long and she wears glass slippers. Kindl's writing is full of imagery and alliteration, and is peppered with old-fashioned and nonsense words that add to the fun. With its touch of romance, this coming-of-age story will appeal to teens who enjoy fantasy based on fairy tales.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Gr. 6-9. Trapped in a tower until she chooses between two equally ghastly suitors--an evil king and an insipid prince--Goose Girl needs a quick miracle. Enter her faithful, magical geese, which transport her away from the wedding dilemma and set in motion a classic adventure-chase that turns into a delightful, witty fairy-tale spoof. It seems Goose Girl's kindness to a shriveled old woman resulted in a reward: Goose Girl can form gold dust in her hair, cry tears of diamonds, and become a ravishing beauty--talents that have brought about her marriage predicament: \"In the future I shall know precisely what to do if another old beggar woman comes pestering me while I'm herding my geese in the high meadow.\" Not easily discouraged, the dull prince pursues his darling and nearly becomes a meal for a hilariously disgusting trio of ogresses, who just happen to have captured his ladylove. After more escapes and perilous flights, Goose Girl falls into the clutches of the evil king. Just as the wedding is about to take place, the beggar woman arrives on the scene and works her magic. It seems the bold heroine was a princess all along, and the geese, when restored to their real form, are her older sisters. Kindl's humor, the strong characterizations, and vibrant action give the story wings. A happy ending is, of course, understood. Anne O'Malley Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Patrice Kindl's first novel, Owl in Love, was an ALA Notable Book for Children, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and an SCBWI Golden Kite Award Honor Book. She lives in Middleburgh, New York. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "1400070023", "title": "Mine Is the Night: A Novel (Here Burns My Candle Series)", "author": "Liz Curtis Higgs", "description": "Review New York Times bestseller Praise for Mine Is the Night \u201c Mine Is the Night was everything I hoped it would be\u2014the crown of the series! I loved the historical setting, the details, the love stories, the characters who change and grow. The pace and storylines kept me turning pages; I couldn\u2019t put it down.\u201d \u2014Francine Rivers, best-selling author of Redeeming Love \u201cFew authors stir my emotions more deeply than Liz Curtis Higgs. One does not merely read her novels; one forges a bond so deep with her characters that reader and story become one, embarking on a journey that both inspires and transforms. But be warned\u2014 Mine Is the Night will steal your night from the first page to the last, and never will hours be better spent. It was an absolute pleasure to read.\u201d \u2014Julie Lessman, author of A Hope Undaunted \u201cLiz Curtis Higgs has once again combined her extraordinary skill as a storyteller with her elegant writing style to weave a grand Scottish tale, one that transports us back to the past in an emotional and unforgettable journey. Beautifully crafted and clearly written from the heart, Mine Is the Night just took its place among my other favorite novels from one of our most gifted historical authors. I was reluctant to see the story of the Kerr women end\u2014but what an ending it is!\u201d \u2014BJ Hoff, author of The Emerald Ballad \u201cLiz Curtis Higgs brings the book of Ruth to life in Jacobite Scotland with Mine Is the Night, a page-turning, emotionally intense, gloriously researched, and soul-stirring read. I was in eighteenth-century Scotland with characters I did not want to leave. Simply brilliant.\u201d \u2014Linda Windsor, author of Healer \u201cLiz Curtis Higgs does it again! Mine Is the Night delivers a compelling story of intrigue, adventure, and love. With extreme attention to detail and historical accuracy, Liz creates a love story to last the ages. Her ability to weave Bible story, historical culture, and fiction into a rich tapestry is sure to delight you and leave you longing for more.\u201d \u2014Tracie Peterson, best-selling author of Embers of Love \u201cStunning from start to finish! Sharply witty, charming, romantic, captivating. Liz Curtis Higgs delivers a finale that satisfies in every way. Her best yet!\u201d \u2014Tamera Alexander, author of Beyond This Moment About the Author Liz Curtis Higgs is the author of twenty-eight books with three million copies in print, including her armchair travel guide to Scotland, My Heart\u2019s in the Lowlands, and her best-selling Scottish historical novels, Thorn in My Heart, Fair Is the Rose , Christy Award\u2013winner Whence Came a Prince, Grace in Thine Eyes , and Here Burns My Candle, the riveting prequel to Mine Is the Night. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The distant hoofbeats were growing louder.Elisabeth Kerr quickly pushed aside the curtain and leaned out the carriage window. A cool spring rain, borne on a blustery wind, stung her cheeks. She could not see the riders on horseback, hidden by the steep hill behind her. But she could hear them galloping hard, closing the gap. Her mother-in-law seemed unconcerned, her attention drawn to the puddle forming at their feet. A frown creased her brow. \u201cDo you mean for us to arrive in Selkirk even more disheveled than we already are?\u201d Three long days of being jostled about in a cramped and dirty coach had left MarjoryKerr in a mood as foul as the weather.\u201c\u2019Tis not the rain that concerns me.\u201d Elisabeth resumed her seat, feeling a bit unsteady. \u201cNo ordinary traveling party would ride with such haste.\u201dMarjory\u2019s breath caught. \u201cSurely you do not think\u2014\u201d\u201cI do.\u201dHad they not heard the rumors at every inn and coaching halt? King George\u2019s men were scouring the countryside for anyone who\u2019d aided bonny Prince Charlie in his disastrous bid to reclaim the British throne for the long deposedStuarts. Each whispered account was worse than the last. Wounded rebel soldiers clubbed to death. Houses burned with entire families inside. Wives and daughters ravished by British dragoons.Help us, Lord. Please. Elisabeth slipped her arm round her mother-in-law\u2019s shoulders as she heard the riders crest the hill and bear down on them.\u201cWe were almost home,\u201d Marjory fretted.\u201cThe Lord will rescue us,\u201d Elisabeth said firmly, and then they were overtaken.A male voice cut through the rain-soaked air, and the carriage jarred to a halt.Mr. Dewar, their round-bellied coachman, dropped from his perch and landed by the window with a grunt. He rocked back on his heels until he found his balance, then yanked open the carriage door without ceremony. \u201cBeg yer pardon, leddies. The captain here would have a wird with ye.\u201dMarjory\u2019s temper flared. \u201cHe cannot expect us to stand in the rain.\u201d\u201cOn the contrary, madam.\u201d A British dragoon dismounted and rolled into view like a loaded cannon. His shoulders were broad, his legs short, his neck invisible. \u201cI insist upon it. At once, if you please.\u201dWith a silent prayer for strength, Elisabeth gathered her hoops and maneuvered through the narrow carriage doorway. She was grateful for Mr. Dewar\u2019s hand as she stepped down, trying not to drag her skirts through the mud. Despite the evening gloom, her eyes traced the outline of a hillside town not far south. Almost home.The captain, whom Elisabeth guessed to be about five-and-forty years, watched in stony silence as Marjory disembarked. His scarlet coat was drenched, his cuffed, black boots were covered with filth, and the soggy brim of his cocked hat bore a noticeable wave.He was also shorter than Elisabeth had first imagined. When she lifted her head, making the most of her long neck, she was fully two inches taller than he. Some days she bemoaned her height but not this day.By the time Marjory joined her on the roadside, a half-dozen uniformed men had crowded round. Broadswords hung at their sides, yet their scowls were far more menacing.\u201cCome now,\u201d Mr. Dewar said gruffly. \u201cYe\u2019ve nae need to frighten my passengers. State yer business, and be done with it. We\u2019ve little daylight left and less than a mile to travel.\u201d\u201cSelkirk is your destination?\u201d The captain seemed disappointed. \u201cNot many Highland rebels to be found there.\u201d\u201c\u2019Tis a royal burgh,\u201d Marjory told him, her irritation showing. \u201cOur townsfolk have been loyal to the crown for centuries.\u201dElisabeth shot her a guarded look. Have a care, dear Marjory.The captain ignored her mother-in-law\u2019s comments, all the while studying their plain black gowns, a curious light in his eyes. \u201cIn mourning, are we? For husbands, I\u2019ll wager.\u201d He took a brazen step toward Elisabeth, standing entirely too close. \u201cTell me, lass. Did your men give their lives in service to King George? At Falkirk perhaps? Or Culloden?\u201dShe could not risk a lie. Yet she could not speak the truth.Please, Lord, give me the right words.Elisabeth took a long, slow breath, then spoke from her heart. \u201cOur brave men died at Falkirk honoring the King who has no equal.\u201dHe cocked one eyebrow. \u201cDid they now?\u201d\u201cAye.\u201d She met the captain\u2019s gaze without flinching, well aware of which sovereign she had in mind. I am God, and there is none like me. She\u2019d not lied. Nor had the dragoon grasped the truth behind her words: by divine right the crown belonged to Prince Charlie.\u201cNo one compares to His Royal Highness, King George,\u201d he said expansively.\u201cThough I am sorry for your loss. No doubt your men died heroes.\u201dElisabeth merely nodded, praying he\u2019d not ask their names. A list of royalist soldiers killed at Falkirk had circulated round Edinburgh for weeks. The captain might recall that Lord Donald and Andrew Kerr were not named among the British casualties. Instead, her handsome husband and his younger brother were counted among the fallen rebels on that stormy January evening.My sweet Donald. However grievous his sins, however much he\u2019d wounded her, she\u2019d loved him once and mourned him still.Her courage bolstered by the thought of Donald in his dark blue uniform, Elisabeth squared her shoulders and ignored the rain sluicing down her neck. \u201cMy mother-in-law and I are eager to resume our journey. If we are done here\u2014\u201d\u201cWe are not.\u201d Still lingering too near, the captain inclined his head, measuring her. \u201cA shame your husband left such a bonny widow. Though if you fancy another soldier in your bed, one of my men will gladly oblige\u2014\u201d\u201cSir!\u201d Marjory protested. \u201cHow dare you address a lady in so coarse a manner.\u201dHis dragoons quickly closed ranks. \u201cA lady?\u201d one of them grumbled. \u201cShe sounds more like a Highlander to my ear.\u201dThe captain\u2019s expression darkened. \u201cAye, so she does.\u201d Without warning he grasped the belled cuff of Elisabeth\u2019s sleeve and turned back the fabric.\u201cWhere is it, lass?Where is your silk Jacobite rose?\u201d\u201cYou\u2019ve no need to look.\u201d Elisabeth tried to wrest free of him. \u201cI haven\u2019t one.\u201dIgnoring her objections, he roughly examined the other cuff, nearly tearing apart the seam. \u201cThe white rose of Scotland was Prince Charlie\u2019s favorite, was it not? I\u2019ve plucked them off many a Highland rebel.\u201d\u201cI imagine you have.\u201d Elisabeth freed her sleeve from his grasp. \u201cAre you quite satisfied?\u201d\u201cFar from it, lass.\u201d The captain eyed the neckline of her gown, his mouth twisting into an ugly sneer. \u201cIt seems your flower is well hidden. Nevertheless, I mean to have it.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1595545417", "title": "So Not Happening (The Charmed Life)", "author": null, "description": "From School Library Journal Grade 6\u20139\u2014Isabella Kirkwood is a popular, privileged Manhattan socialite who is in for a big awakening when her mother remarries, and the teen is forced to move to Oklahoma farm country. Shortly after starting at her new school, she posts a blog on her former New York private academy's Web site insulting everything and everyone in her new town. Almost immediately, her new classmates find out about it, and Isabella becomes a social pariah. The series is labeled Christian fiction, but other than scattered references to prayers and church attendance, there is little in the story to indicate any kind of spiritual awakening or growth on the part of the main character. In addition, a number of situations stretch the bounds of plausibility, such as when Isabella accepts a reporting assignment requiring her to sit for hours in a Dumpster in order to \"investigate\" the school's lack of recycling. Her stepfather is secretly training to be a pro-wrestler, and one of her classmates attempts to burn down her house while she is babysitting her stepbrother, and later holds her at gunpoint. Although much of the story is predictable, there are also some genuinely humorous moments mixed in. This is an additional purchase for libraries seeking chick-lit series that are free of sexual content and coarse language.\u2014 Jessica Marie, Renton Public Library, WA Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B000H2MXN8", "title": "The Amethyst Heart", "author": "Penelope J. Stokes", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1617399817", "title": "Crimilia", "author": "Meredith Leigh Burton", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1599900734", "title": "Princess Academy", "author": "Shannon Hale", "description": "Review The most compelling, believable, poignant love story I have read in many a year. Shannon Hale is already, after only a few books, one of our best writers of fantasy. She is also one of those rare storytellers who can bring a jaded old reviewer like me to well-earned tears. ( Orson Scott Card, New York Times bestselling author )Shannon Hale writes deft, lyrical, wonderful fantasy. ( Holly Black, author of The Spiderwick Chronicles and Tithe )When it comes to contemporary classics, Shannon Hale has the makings of someone whose books will be read and reread for decades to come. ( The 2006 Newbery Committee ) Princess Academy is the strong, well-written story of one girl's determination to show that even a small mountain flower can be as valuable as a gold crown. ( Teenreads.com )[A] magical read! ( Discovery Girls )An unalloyed joy. ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review )This is not a fluffy, predictable fairy tale . . . Instead, Hale weaves an intricate, multilayered story about families, relationships, education, and the place we call home. ( School Library Journal, starred review ) About the Author Shannon's mother says she was a storyteller from birth, jabbering endlessly in her carriage as the two strolled through the neighborhood; once she could form complete sentences, she made up stories, bribing her younger siblings to perform them in mini plays. When she was ten, she began writing books, mostly fantasy stories where she was the heroine, and she continued writing secretly for years while pursuing acting in stage and improv comedy. After detours studying in Mexico, the U. K., and Paraguay, Shannon earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Utah and a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. In the interim, she submitted short stories and novels to magazines and publishers, saving all her rejection letters which she has since laminated into one continuous 60-foot roll which she proudly unfurls to audiences as a testament to her dedication and determination. Since the publication of her first book, The Goose Girl , in 2003, Shannon has become a beloved author to young readers as well as booksellers and educators. Her third novel, Princess Academy , earned her a Newbery Honor and is a The New York Times , Book Sense, and Publishers Weekly bestseller. Shannon has also written two books for adults, Austenland and The Actor and the Housewife . Shannon lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her husband, Dean, their children, and their pet, a small plastic pig. www.shannonhale.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.64}, {"asin": "0385351534", "title": "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me: Stories and a novella", "author": "David Gates", "description": "Review \u201cGates offers all the pleasures to be found in Edward St. Aubyn, and more, because where the English writer is formal and elegant, Gates brings a loping, loose-limbed, colloquial American rhythm to his fiction. . . I doubt there is a better writer of conversational dialogue at work in America.\u201d \u2014James Wood, The New Yorker \u201cBrutal, viciously intelligent, and full of reckless, difficult love for its characters. These are gripping, sophisticated, gasp-inducing stories.\u201d \u2014Ben Marcus, The New Yorker \u201cKnowing and frank stories. . . a smart book about smart, articulate people who get in their own way again and again [with] not a lazy phrase on view.\u201d \u2014Ron Carlson, The New York Times Book Review \u201cThis is David Gates at his best. . . . It\u2019s a book of fiction about people you\u2019ll never believe aren\u2019t real.\u201d \u2014Dana Varinsky, Time Out New York \u201cThis novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever.\u201d \u2014Sara Nelson, Amazon\u201cGates is a master of variation [and] how good this book is, how craftily conversational the prose is, how often seemingly tossed-off lines produce that coveted spine tingle.\u201d \u2014Dylan Hicks, The Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cHe\u2019s really, really funny about failure. \u00a0Nobody writes about failure better than David Gates.\u201d \u2014Lorin Stein, NPR\u201cDavid Gates\u00a0is a wonderful\u00a0 writer. The stories in A Hand Reached down to Guide Me are fully realized,\u00a0entertaining, gripping, astute, painful, wise, outrageous\u00a0and \u00a0funny\u2014all at the same time.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Geoff Dyer \u201cThis novella-plus-stories is by turns tragic and hilarious and has a deadpan quality that makes me think of masters like Updike and Cheever.\u201d \u2014Sara Nelson, Amazon\u201cRemarkable. . . \u00a0Gates turns a clear yet compassionate eye on a motley crew of characters who cheat, drink, snort, and lie their way through the autumn of their lives [and] the result is a moving account of flawed existence.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker \u201cStories with crystalline urgency. . .\u00a0Gates is one of the writers keeping the classic American short story alive [and he] gets his people right, both men and women. . . . His first collection in fifteen years carries the weight of maturity; of being more acquainted with the impulses and compromises one makes over the course of a lifetime.\u201d \u2014Jana Martin, Chronogram \u201cThe collection is really good [but] I\u2019m surprised more isn\u2019t made of his comic talents. There\u2019s a caustic wit at work on nearly every page; empathy and misanthropy match stride for stride in a way that recalls Cheever at his best. In \u2018Banishment\u2019\u2014a previously unpublished novella about a spectacularly bad marriage\u2014it sometimes seems there\u2019s an act of casual betrayal on every page, each designed to puncture another set of social mores.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review \u201cGates [has] staked out a territory, the anxieties of a particular corner of the middle class: artsy, at one time hip or (even slightly) radical, aspirational [in] creativity or spirit. That these aspirations have crumbled is part of the point, as his characters reckon with the compromises, physical and emotional, that living brings [as well as] the tension between the profane and the sacred, between the height of our ambitions and the depths of our desires. . . .These [stories] capture a floating insubstantiality we can\u2019t help but recognize because it also belongs to us.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014David L. Uhlin, The Los Angeles Times \u201cMalice and goodness duke it out in the dark hearts of David Gates's characters. . . . [He] isn't one to pass judgments. \u00a0He just sends devastatingly original dispatches from the heart of darkness. . . . It broadens the spectrum of truthfulness and emotion for which he is known [and] captures both the unfettered love and flashes of rage.\u201d \u2014 Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201cDeliciously wicked... The naughty musings most of us choose to ignore compel Gates\u2019s characters to act . . . . These people mock their demons and, when called to account, exhibit such complexity, humor and intelligence that you'll savor every page.\u201d \u2014Kristy Davis, More magazine\u201cWhere has David Gates been all of my life? How is it that I\u2019ve missed a writer who transforms all our failures and foibles into tales so gripping they read like great mystery novels? A Hand Reached Down To Guide Me is as unflinching as fiction gets, one of those books that feels like a discovery from the first page to the last.\u201d \u2014Adam Ross Acclaim from the U.K. \u201cThe irreverent and confident prose of this American writer is bewitching\u2026Gates\u2019s landscapes are deliciously detailed - you can feel the sofa fabric, read the newspapers, smell the bourbon - but his tours de force are his sublime characters \u2026 You will fall in love with (or hate) every damn sexy, well-read, disillusioned one of them.\u201d \u2014 Daily Mail \u201cWhether you read the nicely poised conclusion of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me as defeated or optimistic, the narrator speaks with the authentic voice of hard-won experience: \"I can still sing,\" he notes. \"Having some age on me, maybe I sound more like the real thing.\" This could be Gates' own 68-year-old hand reaching down. For he is the real thing, as is illustrated on every page of this sad, hilarious and unflinchingly brilliant book.\u201d \u2014The Independent \u201cIt is an absolute delight to be back in his masterful hands. Reading David Gates is far from an uncomplicated experience; his writing is dark, bitter, hilarious, truthful and complex, full of emotional turmoil and damaged characters, deeply flawed people doing pretty unspeakable things to themselves and others, and yet the self-aware flickers of humour, the knowing nods to the frailty of human existence, make him utterly compulsive\u2026On the evidence of the new book, Gates remains a formidable and important writer for our times. And Jernigan retains its crazed power as a novel. Read them both.\u201d \u2014 Independent on Sunday \u201cGates\u2019s 1991 novel, Jernigan \u2026charted its eponymous anti-hero\u2019s descent into alcoholism in a perfect balancing act of horror and hilarity. Like that memorable debut, all 12 stories in A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me are set in the north-eastern US, where references to the Puritan past form an ironic contrast to the insatiable appetites of the present. Whatever \u201clane\u201d Gates lures his characters down, you can be sure it will lead through the Valley of Humiliation \u2014 although the prospect of perdition at the end is, just occasionally, tempered with surprising glimmers of redemption.\u201d \u2014 Financial Times \u201cGates is a technically excellent writer who can brilliantly illuminate the insides of his characters\u2019 heads. There\u2019s a truthfulness to this book that is both the best and most depressing thing about it.\u201d \u2014 Glasgow Herald \u201cGates is a truly formidable talent, but you\u2019d be wary of having him over to dinner: you\u2019d wonder what he was thinking.\u201d \u2014 Sunday Times \u201cWhile David Gates\u2019 style is different, the tone edgier, he shares Richard Ford\u2019s understanding of the self-desctructive aspects of human nature\u2026Gates\u2019 strengths are sharp, witty dialogue, sexual tension and subtlety. Also, a non-judgmental tone, even when his characters do something devastatingly cruel\u2026In each story, we witness humanity in their weakest, most shameful moments: \u2018I went back to working...until\u2014God, must we? Until I was able to sell my father\u2019s house\u2019 ( A Hand Reached Down ). I suspect it is this\u2014shall we call it courage? \u2014 that attracts readers.\u201d \u2014 Irish Examiner \u201cGates\u2019 brilliance is all the more surprising given the seemingly restricted nature of his milieu\u2026Gates unearths hard-won truths and makes sure they\u2019re funny, too.\u201d \u2014 Metro \u201cFerociously talented\u2026this new collection of stories\u2026is a testament to his singular genius.\u201d \u2014 Catholic Herald About the Author DAVID GATES lives in Missoula, Montana, and Granville, New York. He teaches at the University of Montana and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, and was a writer and editor at Newsweek, where he specialized in music and books. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The day after we\u2019d had dinner, he called me at the paper, to thank me and my young man for coming out with him, then waited a week to call again. He happened to be on his way north from the city, and did I have time for a quick drink? I could hear my husband typing in the next cubicle. \u201cThat sounds fine,\u201d I said. \u201cWonderful. You\u2019re welcome to bring your young man along, but I don\u2019t think he likes me much.\u201d \u201cRight,\u201d I said. \u201cThat\u2019s probably not necessary.\u201d  \u201cEven better then. Five thirty too early for you?\u201d  \u201cI don\u2019t think so.\u201d  \u201cAnd what\u2019s a good place? I don\u2019t really know this town.\u201d  The typing stopped. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to say just now.\u201d \u201cSurely there must be\u2014ah. God, I\u2019m a little slow today. You\u2019re not alone.\u201d \u201cExactly.\u201d \u201cOkay, let me think. I passed an Applebee\u2019s coming in on Route Nine. You know where it is? We can go someplace from there.\u201d \u201cRight,\u201d I said. \u201cWell, thanks.\u201d  \u201cCopy desk giving you shit?\u201d my husband said.  \u201cNo, just something I needed to find out about.\u201d  \u201cIt was that guy.\u201d  \u201cFor Christ\u2019s sake,\u201d I said. \u201cIs that why you\u2019ve been so weird?\u201d  \u201cI was going to ask you the same thing.\u201d  \u201cThis is too stupid to even discuss,\u201d I said. \u201cAnyway\u2014\u201d I nodded over at the editor, who was talking on the phone.  \u201cThen what time are you coming home?\u201d he said.  \u201cNot late,\u201d I said. \u201cI was supposed to meet somebody for a quick drink. Probably seven, seven thirty? We could order in and maybe have a little date night after.\u201d \u201cWho are you meeting?\u201d \u201cAndrea,\u201d I said. As soon as I said it, I realized it would have been more in character for me to resent being questioned. \u201cI used to work with her at Newsweek? She\u2019s taking the train up.\u201d \u201cMind if I come along?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a lot of girl talk. But sure, if you want.\u201d Worst case, I could get away and call the man, then take my husband to a bar and keep checking my watch. Andrea\u2019s such a flake\u2014that\u2019s what I\u2019d say. How could he not believe in Andrea? \u201cNo, on second thought I think I\u2019ll bag it.\u201d  \u201cYou weren\u2019t testing me, were you?\u201d  \u201cWhat would be the use?\u201d he said.  The man was waiting outside the Applebee\u2019s in his truck, his window down, reading the Times. I\u2019d put on a halter top that morning\u2014it was such a hot day, and I hadn\u2019t thought I\u2019d have to see anybody. Now I wished I\u2019d had time to drive home and change. \u201cLet\u2019s just go here,\u201d I said. \u201cI shouldn\u2019t stay long.\u201d \u201cI suppose their liquor\u2019s the same as anybody else\u2019s,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ll have to provide the ambience.\u201d He opened his door, stood up on tip- toes and stretched his arms over his head. His T-shirt came up and exposed an inch of still-lean waistline, which might have been the idea. \u201cIt\u2019s certainly the last place anybody\u2019d come looking for you.\u201d \u201cMy husband doesn\u2019t spy on me. If that\u2019s what you mean.\u201d \u201cNo, I can\u2019t imagine your putting up with that. Still, a booth might be in order.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re making this sound like something it isn\u2019t,\u201d I said. \u201cGood for you,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ve spared us the preliminaries.\u201d He put a palm on my bare shoulder blade. Up to that point, I hadn\u2019t thought I was seriously considering this man. \u201cSuppose we go in and talk about it.\u201d When the waitress had set down our drinks and moved off, he said, \u201cSince you\u2019re pressed for time\u2014cheers, by the way. It\u2019s obvious that I\u2019ve taken a shine to you, and it\u2019s obvious that I\u2019m much too old, and of course you have your young man\u2014my God, you look like you\u2019ve just been shot. This is much more embarrassing for me.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t seem that embarrassed,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m not, oddly enough. The situation is embarrassing, yes. But basically you\u2019re either going to tell me to go peddle my papers or you\u2019re not. Which should be clarifying. My position is just that I\u2019d like some time with you.\u201d \u201cThat would be difficult,\u201d I said.  \u201cHmm,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve heard stronger expressions of outrage.\u201d  \u201cI\u2019ll bet you have.\u201d  \u201cOh sure, you can typecast me if you want to. You might take it as a compliment that I\u2019m not trying to sneak up on you. Just one person to another.\u201d \u201cExcept that I\u2019m married.\u201d \u201cAs was I.\u201d  \u201cAnd I love my husband.\u201d  \u201cI\u2019d think the worse of you if you didn\u2019t. I\u2019m not trying to make your life any harder.\u201d He picked up the glossy menu, with color photos of steaks. \u201cGod, this place is what hell\u2019s going to be like.\u201d \u201cWhy would you think my life is hard?\u201d I said. \u201c \u2018Getting through the day\u2019? Isn\u2019t that what you said? Sounds like joy unbounded.\u201d \u201cSo what would we do? If I could spend time with you? Apparently you\u2019re good at sitting around and drinking.\u201d \u201cNot much escapes you, does it?\u201d he said. \u201cI was thinking that what we did would be entirely up to us. We could start out just being kind to each other.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 15.39}, {"asin": "0932004873", "title": "Steves' Review of Nuclear Medicine Technology: Preparation for Certification Examinations", "author": "Norman E. Bolus", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 155.0}, {"asin": "0767402162", "title": "Coming Alive from Nine to Five: A Career Search Handbook", "author": "Betty Neville Michelozzi", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 13.98}], "target_asin": "1599900734"}
{"user_id": "AFYZW5YTYGZIUSEKQPEJNZXGTVIQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1515767566", "title": "Rainbows (Amazing Sights of the Sky)", "author": "Martha E. H. Rustad", "description": "About the Author Martha E. H. Rustad is the author of more than one hundred nonfiction children's books, on topics ranging from baby ducks to black holes to ancient Babylon. She lives with her family in Brainerd, Minnesota.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 6.95}, {"asin": "1648763723", "title": "The History of Constitution: A History Book for New Readers (The History Of: A Biography Series for New Readers)", "author": "Lisa Trusiani", "description": "Review \u201cAs a middle school teacher, I am always looking for books that bring history alive for students. Despite the popularity of the musical Hamilton, the United States Constitution can be a rather dry subject for many young people. Trusiani manages to make the topic sing. The Constitution is a living document, indeed!\u201d \u2014Charlotte Agell, middle school teacher and author/illustrator \u201cThis comprehensive, engaging read answers all the questions a young reader may have regarding the Constitution\u2014why, how, when, where, and what does it mean for today. Trusiani writes with the reader in mind, clearly and thoroughly. A great read and a great resource!\u201d \u2014Jennifer Meserve, first grade teacher About the Author LISA TRUSIANI has written hundreds of comics stories and nonfiction books for children. Her work has received the iParenting Media HOT Award, National Parenting Center Award, NAPPA Parenting Publishing GOLD Award, several Parents\u2019 Choice Awards, and the Lupine Honors Award from the Maine Library Association.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1507215576", "title": "The Everything Kids' Soccer Book, 5th Edition: Rules, Techniques, and More about Your Favorite Sport!", "author": "Deborah Crisfield", "description": "Review \u201cA nice resource.\u201d \u2014 World Soccer Talk About the Author Carlos Folgar has been a soccer coach for over ten years across many age groups. In 2016, he founded the Wolf Pack Soccer Academy in Concord, MA where he is still the head coach and owner. He has earned an Advanced National Diploma from the National Soccer Coaches Association of America as well as state, regional, and national goalkeeper diplomas. He is currently the head coach for the boys U12 and U18 teams for the Global Premier Soccer Club in Waltham, Massachusetts.Deborah W. Crisfield is a veteran soccer coach and author of more than thirty books, including The Everything Kids\u2019 Soccer Book, 3rd Edition and many other sports and reference books. She lives in Summit, New Jersey.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Sports & Outdoors"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1646118731", "title": "The Story of Jane Goodall: A Biography Book for New Readers (The Story Of: A Biography Series for New Readers)", "author": "Susan B. Katz", "description": "About the Author Susan B. Katz is an author, National Board-Certified Teacher, and educational consultant. She has taught for more than 25 years and has five published books, including My Mama Earth and All Year Round . Visit her online at SusanKatzBooks.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1646115309", "title": "The Story of Neil Armstrong: A Biography Book for New Readers (The Story Of: A Biography Series for New Readers)", "author": "Sarah L. Thomson", "description": "About the Author Sarah L. Thomson has published more than 30 books, including prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, picture books, and novels. She worked as an editor at HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster before becoming a full-time writer. She lives in Portland, Maine. Learn more about her work at SarahLThomson.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Biographies"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "1928068723", "title": "Hanover House (Evelyn Talbot Chronicles)", "author": "Brenda Novak", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0230612652", "title": "Leading the Charge: Leadership Lessons from the Battlefield to the Boardroom", "author": "Anthony C. Zinni", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Zinni, former special envoy to the Middle East, and Koltz (coauthors of The Battle for Peace ) turn their focus to what they regard as a profound leadership crisis in America. Leaders\u2014in politics, the military and business\u2014have failed to evolve with the times, say the authors, who identify 11 core elements of new (and effective) managers, including developing a strong ethical sense and honing listening and decision-making skills. The authors dedicate entire chapters to each of these elements and explore what it takes to shepherd nations, companies and families in times of crisis as well as how to nurture and train future leaders. Zinni's principles of governance\u2014applicable to parents as well as presidents\u2014touches everything from the Spitzer scandal to U.S. policies in the Middle East and dispenses practical guidelines with particular relevance and resonance. (Aug.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \u201cGen. Anthony Zinni (Ret.) in drawing upon a lifetime of competition on the battlefield and in corporate boardrooms has issued a call to action to restore American leadership and greatness. This is a must read for anyone who is concerned about what has happened to our country.\u201d \u2015 William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense \u201cFrom one of America's most respected and experienced military leaders and strategic thinkers comes a real, unvarnished, thorough examination of leadership. General Zinni lays out not only lessons of leadership but the leadership that will be required for America's future. This book should be high on the list of important reading for our citizens, educators, leaders in every sphere of our society\u2026 and especially our next generation of leaders.\u201d \u2015 Senator Chuck Hagel \u201cAs only a true leader can, Tony Zinni goes straight to the root of our challenges today. For too long, leadership and its attendant qualities have been undervalued. Tony's clear-eyed observations and advice on this topic come at a time when they are sorely needed and certainly from a person who well understands the necessary elements of leadership \u2013 vision, execution, and accountability.\u201d \u2015 Richard L. Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State \u201c Leading the Charge is a thoughtful and evocative lesson plan on leadership which is equally applicable to business leaders as well as military and political leaders. In today's \u2018briar patch' complex environment where borders do not exist and politics, economics, and military and social issues intertwine, he has artfully detailed the strategy, tactics and logistics that are required for leaders to be successful. From \u2018knowing the sea you swim in' to the importance of balance to building a good organization, General Zinni methodically takes today's and tomorrow's leaders through a self reflective, inspiring exercise.\u201d \u2015Thomas J. Campbell, President, DC Capital Partners \u201cGeneral Zinni lays out a comprehensive approach to leadership which is insightful and forward looking. He highlights key lessons which should be invaluable for professionals in all walks of life. He is a powerful role model and his philosophy reminds us of the critical difference that great leadership can make.\u201d \u2015 Robert Kaplan, Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School and former Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs \u201cLeading the Charge is an insightful, highly useful guide to meeting the challenges in today's world. We highly recommend that readers put Leading the Charge on their 'must read-must buy' list and add it to their personal libraries. This former 4-star Marine general's outstanding book is a '5-star' guide to leadership -- we rate this book '5 STARS,' our highest rating.\u201d \u2015 Col. Jerry D. Morelock (ret.), Armchair General \u201cDispenses practical guidelines with particular relevance and resonance.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cThis book makes it clear that General Zinni not only has absorbed good leadership traits from his multifaceted life, but also has studied it deeply. He has tried to share that deep understanding with others, in the Marines, in business and in academic settings. This may be the best of all examples of true leadership.\u201d \u2015 Semper Fi, the Magazine of the Marine Corps League About the Author General Tony Zinni (Ret.) was commander in chief of CENTCOM and special envoy to the Middle East. He has appeared on The Daily Show and Meet the Press among others. He is currently chairman of the board at BAE Systems, Inc. Tony Koltz co-authored Tom Clancy's Into the Storm and Battle Ready as well as The Battle for Peace , a New York Times bestseller. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 22.01}, {"asin": "1508400717", "title": "Laugh-Out-Loud Jokes for Kids Book: One of The Most Funniest Joke Books for Kids from World Famous Kids Authors. Marvellous Gift for All Young Fun Lovers! (Knock Knock, The Funniest Laugh out Loud)", "author": "Mike Ferris", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Humor"], "average_rating": 3.5, "price": 9.99}], "target_asin": "1646115309"}
{"user_id": "AFLQYIIOBSJPVT7WHI4ZJ3ALQABQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1631593536", "title": "Create Your Life Book: Mixed-Media Art Projects for Expanding Creativity and Encouraging Personal Growth", "author": "Tamara Laporte", "description": "Review This is a beautiful book with vibrant color and whimsical projects. The stepped-out photographs make for clear, easy-to-follow instructions. It is equal parts self-help and art book. I applaud Tamara for creating such a wonderful book, through it's absolutely no surprise. This is a must-have for every mixed-media artist's bookshelf.\u2015 Somerset Studio About the Author Tamara Laporte is a celebrated mixed-media artist and art teacher who has been running her own creative business, willowing.org, since late 2008. Since then, she has become a creative catalyst for thousands of artists. Her work, which can be described as \u201cmixed-media folk art meets magical realism,\u201d ranges from whimsical children\u2019s illustrations to more stylised fantasy art. Symbolism and layering play a big part in her work, and her paintings often contain healing themes, uplifting messages, and inspirational poetry. Tamara believes that the act of creating art can be a gateway into healing and personal growth. Her art classes often contain an element of self-development along with instruction on\u00a0art techniques. She is deeply devoted to helping people get in touch with their creative fire, and works tirelessly to bring uplifting, nourishing, creative, and empowering content to her amazing tribe of thousands. The author of the best-selling Create Your Life Book, Tamara's work has been\u00a0featured in many art magazines,\u00a0books, and media outlets. She runs a variety of popular art classes on her ning network, which has more than 24,500 members and grows by 150\u2013200 mixed-media enthusiasts each month. She lives in Devon, UK.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Other Media"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 22.71}, {"asin": "0996942785", "title": "Fun Fab Swatch Pad: Fun color swatching templates designed for artists by artists! (Fun Fab Drawing Series)", "author": "Karen Campbell", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Graphic Design"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "078944691X", "title": "The Ultimate LEGO Book", "author": "DK Publishing", "description": "Amazon.com Review \"This book is not a book about a toy. It is a book about an idea, a set of values, and a long-term commitment to empowering children to use their creativity and build their imagination.\" So states Lego Group president Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen in his introduction to this fascinating, visually exciting tribute to Lego bricks and the people who play with them. Lego \"maniacs\" are no mere invention of Lego Group's industrious marketing machine. Enthusiastic fans of the ingeniously designed, colorful plastic building blocks do indeed exist, and in vast numbers--as of 1996, an estimated 300 million children and adults had played with Lego bricks since the first one rolled off the presses in 1949. (How many yellow knob-headed Lego people populate the earth today? A cool 2.3 billion.) The visual wizards at Dorling Kindersley have labored together with the staff at Lego to assemble a hefty, photo-rich book essential to the library of any maniac (or maniac emeritus). The Ultimate Lego Book recounts the company's early history as a one-man operation back in the 1930s and subsequent creation of its first plastic \"automatic binding brick,\" to the contemporary construction of myriad Legoland theme parks. Trivia buffs will appreciate the playful but detailed graphic time line (first Lego window, 1957; first wheel, 1962; first dolphin, 1995). Everyone will love the pages of imagination-stretching constructions, from the small but clever (an unmistakable Elvis, complete with pompadour) to the overwhelmingly detailed (a meticulous model of Grand Central Station) to the downright strange (a life-size space helmet with visor and gas mask). The Lego universe includes a Mona Lisa replica, a 10,500-piece pelican, and even a yellow submarine. Enjoy! (Ages 6 to 106) --Paul Hughes", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.97}, {"asin": "0316101877", "title": "Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life (Middle School, 1)", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "Review A #1 New York Times BestsellerA #1 Indiebound BestsellerA 2010 Oregon Children's Choice Award WinnerA 2012 Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Young ReadersA 2013 Hawaii's Children's Choice Award WinnerA 2013 ALSC Summer Reading List BookA 2014 Oregon Reader's Choice Award NomineeA 2014 ALSC Summer Reading List Book* \"Patterson artfully weaves a deeper and... thought-provoking tale of childhood coping mechanisms and everyday school and family realities.... Hand this book to misbehaving, socially awkward, or disengaged boys and girls.... It might help them believe that there is a place for them in the world, no matter how dire times may seem in the present.\"\u2015 School Library Journal, starred review \"A keen appreciation of kids' insecurities and an even more astute understanding of what might propel boy readers through a book.... a perfectly pitched novel.\"\u2015 Los Angeles Times \"The book's... dynamic artwork, and message that 'normal is boring' should go a long way toward assuring kids who don't fit the mold that there's a place for them, too.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Incredibly detailed and imaginative illustrations... add depth and humor.... an enjoyable story that even the most reluctant readers should enjoy.\"\u2015 Library Media Connection About the Author James Patterson is the world\u2019s bestselling author. The creator of Max Einstein and Middle School, he founded JIMMY Patterson to publish books that young readers will love. He lives in Florida with his family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life By Patterson, James Little, Brown and Company Copyright \u00a9 2011 Patterson, JamesAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780316101875 CHAPTER 1 I\u2019M RAFe KHATCHADORiAN, TRAGiC HeRO It feels as honest as the day is crummy that I begin this tale of total desperation and woe with me, my pukey sister, Georgia, and Leonardo the Silent sitting like rotting sardines in the back of a Hills Village Police Department cruiser. Now, there\u2019s a pathetic family portrait you don\u2019t want to be a part of, believe me. More on the unfortunate Village Police incident later. I need to work myself up to tell you that disaster story. So anyway, ta-da , here it is, book fans, and all of you in need of AR points at school, the true autobio of my life so far. The dreaded middle school years. If you\u2019ve ever been a middle schooler, you understand already. If you\u2019re not in middle school yet, you\u2019ll understand soon enough. But let\u2019s face it: Understanding me \u2014I mean, really understanding me and my nutty life\u2014isn\u2019t so easy. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so hard for me to find people I can trust. The truth is, I don\u2019t know who I can trust. So mostly I don\u2019t trust anybody. Except my mom, Jules. (Most of the time, anyway.) So\u2026 let\u2019s see if I can trust you. First, some background. That\u2019s me, by the way, arriving at \u201cprison\u201d\u2014also known as Hills Village Middle School\u2014in Jules\u2019s SUV. The picture credit goes to Leonardo the Silent. Getting back to the story, though, I do trust one other person. That would actually be Leonardo. Leo is capital C Crazy, and capital O Off-the-Wall, but he keeps things real. Here are some other people I don\u2019t trust as far as I can throw a truckload of pianos. There\u2019s Ms. Ruthless Donatello, but you can just call her the Dragon Lady. She teaches English and also handles my favorite subject in sixth grade\u2014after-school detention. Also, Mrs. Ida Stricker, the vice principal. Ida\u2019s pretty much in charge of every breath anybody takes at HVMS. That\u2019s Georgia, my super-nosy, super-obnoxious, super-brat sister, whose only good quality is that she looks like Jules might have looked when she was in fourth grade. There are more on my list, and we\u2019ll get to them eventually. Or maybe not. I\u2019m not exactly sure how this is going to work out. As you can probably tell, this is my first full-length book. But let\u2019s stay on the subject of us for a little bit. I kind of want to, but how do I know I can trust you with all my embarrassing personal stuff\u2014like the police car disaster story? What are you like? Inside , what are you like? Are you basically a pretty good, pretty decent person? Says who? Says you? Says your \u2019rents? Says your sibs? Okay, in the spirit of a possible friendship between us\u2014and this is a huge big deal for me\u2014here\u2019s another true confession. This is what I actually looked like when I got to school that first morning of sixth grade. We still friends, or are you out of here? Hey\u2014 don\u2019t go \u2014all right? I kind of like you. Seriously. You know how to listen, at least. And believe me, I\u2019ve got quite the story to tell you. CHAPTeR 2 THE MIDDLE SCHOOL/MAX SECURITY PRISON Okay, so imagine the day your great-great-grandmother was born. Got it? Now go back another hundred years or so. And then another hundred. That\u2019s about when they built Hills Village Middle School. Of course, I think it was a prison for Pilgrims back then, but not too much has changed. Now it\u2019s a prison for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. I\u2019ve seen enough movies that I know when you first get to prison, you basically have two choices: (1) pound the living daylights out of someone so that everyone else will think you\u2019re insane and stay out of your way, or (2) keep your head down, try to blend in, and don\u2019t get on anyone\u2019s bad side. You\u2019ve already seen what I look like, so you can probably guess which one I chose. As soon as I got to homeroom, I went straight for the back row and sat as far from the teacher\u2019s desk as possible. There was just one problem with that plan, and his name was Miller. Miller the Killer, to be exact. It\u2019s impossible to stay off this kid\u2019s bad side, because it\u2019s the only one he\u2019s got. But I didn\u2019t know any of that yet. \u201cSitting in the back, huh?\u201d he said. \u201cYeah,\u201d I told him. \u201cAre you one of those troublemakers or something?\u201d he said. I just shrugged. \u201cI don\u2019t know. Not really.\u201d \u201c\u2019Cause this is where all the juvies sit,\u201d he said, and took a step closer. \u201cIn fact, you\u2019re in my seat.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t see your name on it,\u201d I told him, and I was just starting to think maybe that was the wrong thing to say when Miller put one of his XXXL paws around my neck and started lifting me like a hundred-pound dumbbell. I usually like to keep my head attached to my body, so I went ahead and stood up like he wanted me to. \u201cLet\u2019s try that again,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is my seat. Understand?\u201d I understood, all right. I\u2019d been in sixth grade for about four and a half minutes, and I already had a fluorescent orange target on my back. So much for blending in. And don\u2019t get me wrong. I\u2019m not a total wimp. Give me a few more chapters, and I\u2019ll show you what I\u2019m capable of. In the meantime, though, I decided to move to some other part of the room. Like maybe somewhere a little less hazardous to my health. But then, when I went to sit down again, Miller called over. \u201cUh-uh,\u201d he said. \u201cThat one\u2019s mine too.\u201d Can you see where this is going? By the time our homeroom teacher, Mr. Rourke, rolled in, I was just standing there wondering what it might be like to spend the next nine months without sitting down. Rourke looked over the top of his glasses at me. \u201cExcuse me, Mr.Khatch\u2026 Khatch-a\u2026 Khatch-a-dor\u2014\u201d \u201cKhatchadorian,\u201d I told him. \u201cGesundheit!\u201d someone shouted, and the entire class started laughing. \u201cQuiet!\u201d Mr. Rourke snapped as he checked his attendance book for my name. \u201cAnd how are you today, Rafe?\u201d he said, smiling like there were cookies on the way. \u201cFine, thanks,\u201d I answered. \u201cDo you find our seating uncomfortable?\u201d he asked me. \u201cNot exactly,\u201d I said, because I couldn\u2019t really go into details. \u201cThen SIT. DOWN. NOW!\u201d Unlike Miller the Killer, Mr. Rourke definitely has two sides, and I\u2019d already met both of them. Since nobody else was stupid enough to sit right in front of Miller, that was the only seat left in the room. And because I\u2019m the world\u2019s biggest idiot sometimes, I didn\u2019t look back when I went to sit in my chair. Which is why I hit the dirt as I went down\u2014all the way down\u2014to the floor. The good news? Given the way things had started off, I figured middle school could only get better from here. The bad news? I was wrong about the good news. CHAPTeR 3 AT LEAST I\u2019VE GOT LEO Do you remember that nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife? How neither of them ate the same thing, but between the two of them they got the job done? Same deal with me and Leo, except the fat and the lean are words and pictures. Make sense? I do the talking, and Leo takes care of the drawing. Leo speaks to me sometimes, but that\u2019s about it. Conversation just isn\u2019t his thing. If Leo wanted to tell you your house was on fire, he\u2019d probably draw you a picture to let you know. The guy is about as talkative as a giraffe. (Oh, I\u2019ve got a thousand of them, ladies and gentlemen.) Say hi, Leo. See what I mean? Besides, if it\u2019s true that a picture\u2019s worth a thousand words, then my buddy Leo has more to say than anyone I\u2019ve ever met. You just have to know how to listen. Bottom line, Leonardo the Silent is my best friend, at Hills Village or anywhere else. And before his head gets too big to fit through the door, I should say there\u2019s not a whole lot of competition for that title. I\u2019m not exactly what you might see in the dictionary when you look up popular. Which brings me to the next thing that happened that day. CHAPTER 4 RAH, RAH, RAH, YADA, YADA, YADA\u2026 After homeroom they\u2019d usually ship us off to first period, but today was \u201cspecial.\u201d There was going to be a Big! School! Assembly! to kick off the year, and everyone was all excited about it. Of course, by everyone , I mean everyone but me. They herded us all into the gym and sat us down on the bleachers. There was a podium on the floor with a microphone, and a big sign on the wall: WELCOME TO HVMS!!! The principal, Mr. Dwight, got up and spoke first. After a speech that went something like\u2026 he brought out the cheerleaders, who brought out the football, soccer, and cross-country teams, who brought everyone to their feet, yelling and screaming. (Of course, by everyone , I mean everyone but me.) The only things missing were the circus tent and a couple of dancing elephants. After that part, Mrs. Stricker announced that anyone who wanted to run for student council representative should come down to the microphone and address the assembly. Five or six kids from every grade stood up, like they\u2019d been expecting this. I guess Mr. Rourke might have said something about it in homeroom, but I\u2019d been too busy waiting for Miller to drive a pencil through the back of my neck. I hadn\u2019t paid attention to too much else. They started with the sixth graders first. We heard from two bozos who I didn\u2019t know, then a guy named Matt Kruschik who ate his own boogers until fourth grade, and then\u2014 \u201cHi, everyone. I\u2019m Jeanne Galletta.\u201d About half of the sixth grade and even some of the seventh and eighth graders started clapping right away. She must have gone to Millbrook Elementary, because I\u2019d never seen her before. I went to Seagrave Elementary, where we chased rats in gym class, and most of the kids got free lunch, including me. \u201cI think I\u2019d be a good class representative because I know how to listen,\u201d Jeanne said. \u201cAnd there\u2019s nothing more important than that.\u201d I was listening, I was listening. She was pretty, for sure. She had the kind of face that you just want to stare at for as long as possible. But she also seemed kind of cool, like she didn\u2019t think she was better than anyone else. Even if she was. \u201cI have a lot of good ideas for how to make the school a better place,\u201d she goes on. \u201cBut first, I want to do one thing.\u201d She leaves the mike and comes over, right in front of where I\u2019m sitting. Then she looks straight at me and says, \u201cAre you Rafe?\u201d Suddenly, I\u2019m feeling about as talkative as Leo, but I manage to spit out an answer. \u201cThat\u2019s me,\u201d I say. \u201cDo you want to maybe split a large fries in the cafeteria later?\u201d she asks. \u201cSure. I\u2019m buying,\u201d I say, because there\u2019s a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket that I just found that morning. \u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cThe fries are on me.\u201d Meanwhile, everyone\u2019s watching. The band starts playing, the cheerleaders start cheering, and Miller the Killer chokes to death on a peanut M&M. Then I win the lottery, world peace breaks out everywhere, and Mrs. Stricker tells me that based on my all-around awesomeness, I can just skip sixth grade and come back next year. \u201c\u2026 so I hope you\u2019ll vote for me,\u201d Jeanne was saying, and everyone started clapping like crazy. I never even heard most of her speech. But she definitely had my vote. CHAPTeR 5 THOSE OH-SO-CRUEL RULES The next girl to speak at assembly was Lexi Winchester. I knew Lexi from my old school, and she was a real nice kid. Still, Jeanne Galletta had my vote. Sorry, Lex. Once the speeches were over, I thought the assembly was done too. No such luck. Mrs. Stricker came back to the microphone and held up a little green book so everyone could see it. \u201cCan anyone tell me what this is?\u201d Stricker said. \u201cYeah,\u201d Miller the Killer mumbled somewhere behind me. \u201cA complete waste of time.\u201d \u201cThis,\u201d Mrs. Stricker said, \u201cis the Hills Village Middle School Code of Conduct . Everything you need to know about how to behave at school\u2014and how not to behave\u2014is right here in this book.\u201d A bunch of teachers came around and started handing out a copy to each student in the gym. \u201cWhen you receive yours, open up to page one and follow along with me,\u201d Stricker said. Then she started reading\u2026 really\u2026 slowly. \u201c \u2018Section One: Hills Village Middle School Dress Code\u2026\u2019 \u201d When I got my copy, I flipped all the way to the back of the book. There were sixteen sections and twenty-six pages total. In other words, we were going to be lucky to get out of this assembly by Christmas. \u201c \u2018\u2026 All students are expected to dress appropriately for an academic environment. No student shall wear clothing of a size more than two beyond his or her normal size\u2026.\u2019 \u201d HELP! That\u2019s what I was thinking about then. Middle school had just started, and they were already trying to bore us to death. Please, somebody stop Mrs. Stricker before she kills again! Leo took out a pen and started drawing something on the inside of the back cover. Stricker turned to the next page and kept reading. \u201c \u2018Section Two: Prohibited Items. No student shall bring to school any electronic equipment not intended for class purposes. This includes cell phones, iPods, cameras, laptop computers\u2026.\u2019 \u201d The whole thing went on and on. And on. And on. By the time we got to Section 6 (\u201cGrounds for Expulsion\u201d), my brain was turning into guacamole, and I\u2019m pretty sure my ears were bleeding too. People always talk about how great it is to get older. All I saw were more rules and more adults telling me what I could and couldn\u2019t do, in the name of what\u2019s \u201cgood for me.\u201d Yeah, well, asparagus is good for me, but it still makes me want to throw up. As far as I could tell, this little green book in my hands was just one long list of all the ways I could\u2014and probably would\u2014get into trouble between now and the end of the school year. Meanwhile, Leo was drawing away like the maniac he is. Every time Stricker mentioned another rule, he scribbled something else on the page in front of him. Finally, he turned it around and showed me what he was working on. All I could think when I saw that picture was\u2014I want to be that kid. He looked like he was having a WAY better day than I was. And that\u2019s when I got my idea. My really stupendous, really, really Big Idea. It came on like a flash flood. This was the best idea anyone had ever had in the whole history of middle school. In the whole history of ideas! Not only was it going to help me get through the year, I thought, it might also just save my life here at Hills Village. That was, if I had the nerve to actually try it. CHAPTeR 6 EUREKA! Did you ever hear the expression \u201cbreaking every rule in the book\u201d? That was it. That was my Big Idea. Break every rule in the book. Literally. The way I saw it, the HVMS Code of Conduct could be my worst enemy here at school, or if I played it right, I could turn it into my best friend. Sorry, Leo. I mean my second-best friend. All it would take was a little bit of work\u2026 and a ton of guts. Maybe two tons. Leo knew exactly what I was thinking. The idea had come from his picture, after all. \u201cGo for it,\u201d he whispered. \u201cJust pick something out of the book and get started.\u201d \u201cRight now?\u201d I whispered back. \u201cWhy not? What are you waiting for?\u201d he said, and I guess the answer was\u2014two tons of guts. I just kind of sat there, frozen, so Leo flipped open the book for me and pointed to something on the page without even looking down. When I saw where his finger landed, I almost started having a heart attack. \u201cI can\u2019t do that!\u201d I told him. \u201cWhat if someone gets hurt?\u201d \u201cHow does this hurt anyone?\u201d Leo said. \u201cExcept maybe you.\u201d Somehow that didn\u2019t make me feel any better. \u201cListen,\u201d Leo told me, \u201cyou\u2019re never going to be one of those people\u201d\u2014he pointed at all the student council candidates and jocks and cheerleaders sitting on chairs that had been set up on the gym floor. \u201cBut this,\u201d he said, thumping the rule book with his pen, \u201cthis is something you can do.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I tried lamely. \u201c Or ,\u201d Leo said, \u201cyou can keep going the way you\u2019re going, and every day can be just like this one.\u201d He shrugged. \u201cIt might not be so bad. There are only a hundred and eighty school days in a year.\u201d That did it. \u201cOkay, okay,\u201d I said, and even though my heart was pounding out \u201cThe Star-Spangled Banner,\u201d I got up and walked over to where one of the prison guards (I mean, teachers) was standing by the gym door. \u201cI need a bathroom pass,\u201d I told her. \u201cYou can wait,\u201d she said. \u201c \u2018Section Eight\u2019!\u201d Stricker boomed over the microphone. \u201cWe\u2019re halfway there!\u201d \u201cPlease?\u201d I said, trying to look as much like a pants-wetter as possible. The teacher gave a big sigh, like she wished she\u2019d been a lawyer instead. \u201cOkay, five minutes,\u201d she said. Five minutes was more than enough. I went out to the hall and into the boys\u2019 bathroom while she was still watching me. Then I counted to ten and stuck my head out again. Nobody was around. As far as I knew, the whole school was inside that gym. It was now or never. I sprinted up the hall, around the long way behind the office, and then cut down another hallway, through the cafeteria, and into an empty stairwell in the back. By the time I found what I was looking for, I\u2019d been gone only a minute or two. I stood there, staring at the little red box on the wall. I could just hear Leo now, like he was right there. Don\u2019t think about it. Just DO it! I flipped the latch, opened the wire cage around the alarm box, and put my finger on the little white handle inside. This was what you call the point of no return. My mission, should I choose to accept it\u2026 and all that. Still\u2014was I crazy? Was I completely nuts for thinking I could pull this off? Yes, I told myself. You are. Okay, I thought. Just checking. And I pulled the alarm. CHAPTeR 7 CHAOS I\u2019m not sure what the fire alarm sounded like in the gym, but it was about ten thousand decibels in that stairwell: wah-AH! wah-AH! wah-AH! I covered my ears as I sprinted back to the bathroom. The idea was to make it there before the teachers could get everyone lined up and marching outside. Then I could stroll out like I\u2019d just finished my business and blend into the crowd. Turns out, I didn\u2019t need a plan. By the time I got anywhere near the gym, everyone was already running, walking, and for all I know skipping in every possible direction. I guess Mrs. Stricker hadn\u2019t gotten to the part about what to do if a fire alarm sounds (Section 11). In fact, I could still hear her over the mike in the gym. \u201cEveryone remain calm! Line up with your teachers and proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest exits.\u201d I\u2019m not sure who she was talking to. It looked like the whole school was already out here in the hall. And in the parking lot. And on the soccer field. And on the basketball courts. I couldn\u2019t believe this was all because of me! I kind of felt guilty about it, but it was kind of\u2026 amazing. To be honest, only half of that sentence is true. It was more like I knew I should feel bad, but I didn\u2019t. Meanwhile, the fire alarm was still blaring\u2014 But it just sounded to me like\u2014 When I found Leo outside, he gave me a big, double high five. \u201cThat\u2019s one for execution and one for the idea,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t take all the credit,\u201d I told him. \u201cThe idea was half yours.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s true,\u201d he said, and high-fived himself. Then he showed me his drawing again. \u201cCheck it out. I made some improvements.\u201d I opened up my copy of the Code of Conduct and turned to Section 11, Rule 3: \u201cStudents shall not tamper with smoke or fire alarms under any circumstances.\u201d Then I took Leo\u2019s pen and drew a line right through it. That felt pretty good too. One rule down and\u2026 well, all the rest to go. CHAPTeR 8 MY HOME PAGE On the bus ride home that afternoon, everyone was talking about my little fire drill. It was a rush, sitting there and knowing they were all talking about me. Of course, everything good has to come to an end. Before long, I was getting off the bus and walking through the front door of my house. Meet my future stepfather, also known as the low point of my day. His name is Carl, but we call him Bear. Two years ago, he was just this customer at the diner where my mom works. Now, somehow, Mom has a ring on her finger, and Bear lives here with us. That\u2019s Ditka, Bear\u2019s lame excuse for a guard dog. Ditka knows all about \u201cattack\u201d but not so much about \u201cdown\u201d or \u201cstop.\u201d He usually tries to eat my face for an after-school snack. \u201cDitka, down! Down! \u201d Bear said, coming out of hibernation as I walked in the door. Bear pulled Ditka off of me and then flopped back into his Bear-shaped place on the couch. \u201cHey, Squirt. How was the first day?\u201d (He calls me Squirt. Do I even have to point that out?) \u201cSchool was unbelievable,\u201d I said. \u201cI kind of, well, sort of, met this amazing girl, and then I set off the fire alarm during an assembly\u2014\u201d Okay, that\u2019s not what I really said, but it wouldn\u2019t have mattered if I did. Bear\u2019s not exactly a good listener. \u201cUh-huh,\u201d he said. He reached up and stretched\u2014his workout for the day. \u201cDid you sign up for football yet?\u201d \u201cNah,\u201d I said. I took a couple of pudding cups out of the fridge and kept moving toward my room. \u201cWhy the heck not?\u201d he yelled after me. \u201cFootball\u2019s the one thing you\u2019re actually good at!\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t worry, I didn\u2019t forget I\u2019m a loser, Loser,\u201d I said as I zoomed down the hall. \u201cDID YOU JUST CALL ME A LOSER?\u201d Bear roared back. \u201cNo, I called myself a loser,\u201d I said, and slammed my door. \u201cLoser.\u201d Like I said\u2014low point of my day. Bear and Mom had just gotten engaged that summer, over Fourth of July. That\u2019s when Bear moved in. Mom asked Georgia and me what we thought about it before she said yes, but what were we going to tell her? \u201cYou\u2019re about to get engaged to the world\u2019s biggest slug\u201d? I don\u2019t think she would have listened, anyway. Now Mom was working double shifts at the diner all the time just to make enough money, and Bear was spending 99 percent of his time on our couch, except maybe to go to the bathroom or to collect his stupid unemployment check. Bottom line? My mom was way too good for this guy, but unfortunately neither of them seemed to know it. Continues... Excerpted from Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life by Patterson, James Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Patterson, James. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.11}, {"asin": "0316206717", "title": "Middle School: Get Me Out of Here!", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "Review Praise for Middle School: Get Me out of Here! A #1 New York Times BestsellerAn Indiebound BestsellerOne of Barnes & Noble's Best Books of 2012\"Patterson and Tebbetts have created strong characters and relationships throughout the novel. Rafe has his triumphs and failures, but he's a realistic kid whom readers would want as a friend and coconspirator.\"\u2015 School Library Journal \"Will be enjoyed by middle-grade boys, particularly reluctant readers.\"\u2015 VOYA \"Short chapters and a partially graphic format are sure to appeal.\"\u2015 Booklist Praise for Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life : A #1 New York Times BestsellerA #1 Indiebound BestsellerA 2012 Top Ten Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Readers* \"As Patterson artfully weaves a deeper and more thought-provoking tale of childhood coping mechanisms and everyday school and family realities, readers are drawn into a deeper understanding of and compassion for the main characters.\"\u2015 School Library Journal, starred review \"A keen appreciation of kids' insecurities and an even more astute understanding of what might propel boy readers through a book.... a perfectly pitched novel.\"\u2015 Los Angeles Times \"Cleverly delves into the events that make middle school so awkward: cranky bus drivers, tardy slips, bathroom passes and lots of rules.... Hopefully, this isn't the last we hear from Rafe Khatchadorian.\"\u2015 The Associated Press \"It's a chatty, funny, engaging book.... filled with energetic cartoons... that will appeal to your little rebel, depicting teachers as dungeon-keepers, matadors and flying dragons. Patterson... knows how to structure a plot and builds in some surprising--even touching--twists.... Rafe is the bad boy with a heart of gold.\"\u2015 New York Times \"The book's... dynamic artwork and message that 'normal is boring' should go a long way toward assuring kids who don't fit the mold that there's a place for them, too.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Incredibly detailed and imaginative illustrations... add depth and humor.... an enjoyable story that even the most reluctant readers should enjoy.\"\u2015 Library Media Connection \"There is substance as well as appeal here.... Patterson deftly manages the pace of revelations that take readers deeper into Rafe's fragile trust.... Readers ready for something else in the same vein but more substantive than Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Peirce's Big Nate should be introduced to Rafe.\"\u2015 The Bulletin About the Author James Patterson is the world\u2019s bestselling author. The creator of Max Einstein and Middle School, he founded JIMMY Patterson to publish books that young readers will love. He lives in Florida with his family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Middle School: Get Me out of Here! By Patterson, James Little, Brown and Company Copyright \u00a9 2012 Patterson, JamesAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780316206716 CHAPTeR 1 WHOOM! Well, who\u2019d have thought so much could change in one summer? Not me, that\u2019s for sure. Not my best buddy, Leonardo the Silent. Probably not the folks at Airbrook Arts Community School either. That\u2019s where I was supposed to start seventh grade in the fall. Supposed to. You caught that, right? There\u2019s a reason my last book was called Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life . Sixth grade was only the start. I\u2019ve got a whole lot more to tell you about. But first I should introduce myself. Anyway, I guess I should have seen it coming. It\u2019s like every time things start to look okay in my crazy life, something always comes along to change it. It\u2019s like it just falls out of the sky. And everything changed on the day Swifty\u2019s Diner burned to the ground. Here\u2019s what happened. See, there\u2019s this thing called a grease trap over the grill at the diner, where Swifty (also known as Fred) cooked about fifteen dozen greasy burgers every day. If you don\u2019t clean out the trap once in a while, it turns into a giant fireball, just waiting to go off. And guess what? I didn\u2019t get to see much. I was in the storage room in the back, just passing the time and waiting for Mom to finish her lunch shift. Then all of a sudden, I heard this giant WHOOM! People started yelling, the fire alarm started blaring, and I could smell smoke. A second later, Mom was there. \u201cCome on, Rafe,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have to go\u2014right now!\u201d And she hustled me out the back door. Nobody was hurt, but flames were coming through the windows and up through the roof before the Hills Village Fire Department even got there. By the time the firefighters finally put out the fire, Swifty\u2019s Diner looked more like Swifty\u2019s Big Pile of Ashes. Everything was all black and smoking, and the restaurant was just\u2014gone. And that\u2019s not all. No Swifty\u2019s meant no job for Mom. No job meant no money to pay the rent on our house. No house meant we had to pack up all our stuff and get out. (See what I mean about everything changing?) The only place we could go was Grandma Dotty\u2019s. She told Mom we could come stay there as long as we wanted, which was really nice of her and everything, but the problem was, she lived in the city, about eighty miles away. In other words, way too far for me to even think about going to Airbrook anymore. Now I was going to be starting seventh grade at some big-city middle school, where kids like me get turned into chopped meat every single day. So there you have it. Chapter 1 isn\u2019t even over, and I\u2019m already starting a whole new life. Try to keep up if you can. This is only the very beginning, where I say\u2014 Good-bye, Hills Village! Good-bye, lucky breaks! And hello, seventh grade! CHAPTeR 2 MOViNG DAY Here\u2019s what it looked like on the day we left Hills Village. Not too shabby, huh? CHAPTeR 3 OR SOMeTHiNG LiKe THAT Yeah, I wish. If you know me, then you know I have what my mom likes to call an \u201cactive imagination\u201d and what some of my teachers might call a \u201ctendency to lie.\u201d I like to think of it as putting my own spin on the things that happen to me. But don\u2019t worry\u2014I\u2019ll always steer you straight. In fact, here\u2019s what it really looked like when we left town: Those people waving are Ms. Donatello and Jeanne Galletta, two of the only people who were nice to me at Hills Village Middle School. Ms. Donatello was my sixth-grade English teacher. I used to call her the Dragon Lady, but she turned out to be human after all. She was also the one who got me into Airbrook, before my big plans went down the garbage disposal. As for Jeanne, she was nice to everyone, so I don\u2019t even know if that counts. When I told her I\u2019d try to keep in touch, she said I could leave a message on her HVMS student page. Was that a good sign? You tell me. I don\u2019t exactly have a ton of experience with girls. Or friends. Much less\u2026 girlfriends. Still, if there was one person I was going to miss, it was Jeanne. So if you haven\u2019t guessed by now, it\u2019s not like I was leaving behind some kind of perfect track record in Hills Village. Which is maybe the understatement of the year. And if you want to know what I mean, just check out the next chapter. CHAPTeR 4 MY TOP TeN(ACTuALLY ONLY SiX) Rafe Khatchadorian\u2019s Top Ten Six Biggest Accomplishments From Sixth Grade (try not to be too impressed): CHAPTeR 5 WeLCOMe TO THe BiG CiTY! This is going to be great,\u201d Mom kept saying while we drove into the city. \u201cI can\u2019t wait to show you guys around. There\u2019s so much to do here, and you\u2019re going to love the park.\u201d I stopped listening after a while. I think my sister, Georgia, did too. We both just stared out the window, trying to imagine living here. Fill in whatever city you want\u2014New York, Chicago, Boston, South Bend, Boise, Omaha\u2026 whatever. Just imagine lots of shiny skyscrapers, perfectly clean sidewalks, and millions of happy people catching money as it rains out of the sky. Now think about the exact opposite of that. Got it? Welcome to Grandma Dotty\u2019s neighborhood. Also known as our new home. \u201cThis is where you grew up?\u201d Georgia said, and not in a nice way. \u201cIt used to be\u2026 different,\u201d Mom said, but you could tell she meant better . Now I knew why Grandma always came to visit us in Hills Village and not the other way around. All the houses on the block were crammed together, one after the other. They didn\u2019t have any side yards or front yards. Just sidewalks. I saw a lot of garbage cans and graffiti too. \u201cI\u2019m never going to make any friends here,\u201d Georgia whined. \u201cCome on, honey. I know it\u2019s a big adjustment, but you\u2019ve got to stay positive,\u201d Mom said. \u201cOkay,\u201d Georgia said. \u201cI\u2019m positive I\u2019m never going to make any friends here.\u201d Mom took a deep breath. \u201cHow about you, Rafe? Are you ready to give city life a chance?\u201d \u201cSure,\u201d I said. \u201cWhy not?\u201d The truth was, I felt exactly the same way as Georgia. I didn\u2019t want to live here, and I definitely didn\u2019t want to go to school here. But unlike my little sister, who never knows when to shut her mouth, I knew that Mom was doing the best she could. \u201cWell, here we are,\u201d she said, and stopped in front of the fifth house from the end of the block. \u201cSix twenty-five Killarney Avenue.\u201d Georgia made a sound like she was coughing up a hair ball. \u201cIt\u2019s the worst one on the street!\u201d she said. \u201cIt just needs some spiffing up,\u201d Mom said. \u201cYou\u2019ll see. All it takes is a little imagination. Isn\u2019t that right, Rafe?\u201d \u201cSure,\u201d I said. \u201cJust a little imagination. That\u2019s all.\u201d CHAPTeR 6 SMALL AND FuLL I always used to hear Mom say Grandma Dotty was a big pack rat. And to be honest, I never really thought about what that meant. I just thought: But as soon as we walked into her house, I knew exactly what it meant. If there were two words to describe Grandma\u2019s place, they would be small and full . \u201cCome in, come in, come in!\u201d she said, hugging us all like crazy. \u201cDo you have much more to bring in from the car?\u201d Grandma asked Mom. \u201cNot much,\u201d Mom said. Most of our stuff was in a big storage locker back in Hills Village. \u201cThat\u2019s good. I\u2019m a little short on closet space at the moment,\u201d Grandma said, but it looked to me like she was a little short on Rafe-Mom-and-Georgia space too. \u201cWhat\u2019s with the long faces, kiddos?\u201d Grandma asked me and Georgia. \u201cYou two look like someone\u2019s dog just died.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re just tired,\u201d Mom told her. \u201cIt\u2019s been a big day.\u201d \u201cThis little one\u2019s ready to drop,\u201d Grandma said, looking at Georgia. \u201cAnd Ralph, I\u2019ll bet you could eat a horse and a half by now.\u201d \u201cUm\u2026\u201d I said, but I was thinking\u2014 All of a sudden, I felt even weirder about being here. \u201cIt\u2019s Rafe , Mom,\u201d my mom said. \u201cNot Ralph.\u201d \u201cWell, of course it is,\u201d Grandma said. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Rafe. Just a slip of the tongue. Now, come on\u2014who\u2019s hungry?\u201d I looked at Mom, and she nodded like everything was going to be fine. And in fact, whatever Grandma was cooking smelled amazing, just like Mom\u2019s lasagna from home. Then, when we came into the kitchen, I saw something else familiar. \u201cIsn\u2019t that one of yours?\u201d I asked Mom. \u201cSure is,\u201d she said. The last time I\u2019d seen any of her paintings on a wall was at Swifty\u2019s Diner, but those had gone up in smoke, along with everything else. \u201cIn this house, your mother is a famous artist,\u201d Grandma said. Then she turned around and bowed right down in front of Mom. Mom laughed. Georgia did too, for the first time in about a week. \u201cThat\u2019s the ticket!\u201d Grandma said. \u201cMuch better.\u201d She reached over and tickled Georgia under the chin, and pretty soon everyone was laughing. \u201cNow these are the Khatchadorians I remember,\u201d Grandma said, and hugged me all over again. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have a great time together. Isn\u2019t that right, Ralph?\u201d CHAPTeR 7 A NiGHT ON THe TOWN It\u2019s two in the morning and I\u2019m wide awake. Mom gave me the choice between sleeping on the couch downstairs and sharing the guest room with Georgia, which of course was no contest. At least down here I have a little privacy. Still, I can\u2019t sleep. I\u2019m too busy trying to figure out how I\u2019m going to get through this year. It hasn\u2019t even started yet, and all I see is rough road ahead. I finally drift off, but it isn\u2019t long before Leonardo the Silent strolls into my dreams. \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m trying to sleep,\u201d I tell him. \u201cNo, you\u2019re trying to mope,\u201d Leo tells me. \u201cCome on. There\u2019s a whole big city out there. We\u2019ve got better things to do.\u201d He\u2019s right, of course. I jump out of bed (out of couch?), and we make a fake Rafe under the blankets, including a superrealistic mask of my face, just in case Mom or Grandma comes down in the middle of the night. Then we slip into our stealth gear and out the door. A second later we hit the streets. \u201cWhere do you want to go first?\u201d Leo asks. \u201cSomewhere up high,\u201d I say. \u201cLet\u2019s get a look at what we\u2019re dealing with.\u201d \u201cExcellent choice.\u201d He points the way toward the city\u2019s tallest building. \u201cGood thing I brought the climbing gear.\u201d We move like shadows, using back alleys and hidden passages to get there. With all the shortcuts Leo knows, we\u2019re standing at the base of Megamega Towers in no time. \u201cSo that\u2019s what three hundred stories looks like,\u201d I say. \u201cWait till you see it from the top,\u201d Leo tells me. As soon as we\u2019re harnessed up, we step into our suction-cup boots and head toward the sky. \u201cDon\u2019t look down until we get there,\u201d Leo tells me. \u201cIt\u2019ll be worth the wait.\u201d He\u2019s right about that too. Once we hit the roof of that skyscraper, I can see for miles and miles in every direction. \u201cCan\u2019t do this in Hills Village,\u201d Leo says. The cars below look like baby ants with tiny headlights, and the whole city is spread out in front of me like the world\u2019s biggest game board. All I have to do now is pick my next move. \u201cMaybe this year isn\u2019t going to be so bad after all,\u201d I say. \u201cWell, if you like this,\u201d Leo says, \u201cyou\u2019re going to love the ride down.\u201d As we step into our portable hang glider, the sun just starts to show over the horizon. My first night in the big city has flown by already. Mom will be waking up soon, and I\u2019ve got to head back. But in the meantime\u2014what a view! CHAPTeR 8 TiMe OuT Okay, time out for a second. If you read the last book, then you already know all about Leo. I mean, especially the part about how he\u2019s not really real. But if that\u2019s news to you, then there\u2019s some other stuff you should probably know too. It\u2019s kind of heavy, but let me get it out of the way now. The real Leonardo was my twin brother. He got sick and died when we were both three years old. It was really sad, for sure, but it was also a long time ago. I barely remember any of it. The point is, I\u2019ve always wondered what Leo would be like if he were still around. I guess that\u2019s who I\u2019ve been talking to all this time\u2014like an idea of Leo, also known as Leonardo the Silent. So now, if you\u2019re thinking\u2014 \u2014all I can tell you is, I\u2019m not. Seriously. I\u2019m just\u2026 well, I don\u2019t really know what I am. Imaginative, I guess. A loner, for sure. But not cuckoo. Mom says Leo\u2019s my muse. That\u2019s someone who helps an artist get ideas and think things through, even though the muse isn\u2019t really there. And, yeah, that pretty much describes him. Leo may not be real, but in some weird way he helps me deal with the things that are. That\u2019s also why he\u2019s my best friend. Hey, I never said it wasn\u2019t complicated. I just said I\u2019m not crazy. CHAPTeR 9 MOM THROWS A CuRVeBALL The next morning, Mom made really good French toast for breakfast. It\u2019s Georgia\u2019s favorite, with bananas and maple syrup. And extra cinnamon on mine. \u201cRafe, when you\u2019re done, I want you to put on the shirt I left out for you,\u201d Mom said. \u201cAnd clean pants, please.\u201d That stopped me with a mouthful of everything. Nothing good ever happens in clothes your mom picks out for you. \u201cWhat\u2019s going on?\u201d I said. She just smiled and slid me some seconds. \u201cIt\u2019s a surprise,\u201d she said. \u201cWhere\u2019s Rafe going?\u201d Georgia said. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening? Can I come?\u201d \u201cEveryone\u2019s coming,\u201d Mom said, but that\u2019s all she would tell. A little while later, we were piled into the car and headed up Killarney Avenue. Mom really knew her way around the city. She pointed out the science museum, the IMAX, the ballpark, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I knew she was trying to get us excited about living here. What I didn\u2019t understand was why my shirt had to be tucked in right now. Finally, I said, \u201cMom\u2014please. Just tell me where we\u2019re going.\u201d \u201cOkay, okay. We\u2019re almost there anyway,\u201d she said. \u201cNow, don\u2019t be nervous\u2014\u201d \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d I said. \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t I be nervous?\u201d \u201cWell, I know how disappointed you were about not going to Airbrook,\u201d Mom said. \u201cBut this morning, we might be able to do something about that. You\u2019ve got an interview, Rafe. At Cathedral School of the Arts.\u201d Continues... Excerpted from Middle School: Get Me out of Here! by Patterson, James Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Patterson, James. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.97}, {"asin": "0345538374", "title": "J.R.R. Tolkien 4-Book Boxed Set: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings", "author": "J. R. R. Tolkien", "description": "About the Author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. After serving in World War I, he embarked upon a distinguished academic career and was recognized as one of the finest philologists in the world. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in 1959. He is, however, beloved throughout the world as the creator of Middle-earth and author of such classic works as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He died on September 2, 1973, at the age of eighty-one.", "categories": ["Books", "Boxed Sets", "Children's Books"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 19.78}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0811864952", "title": "Ivy and Bean's Treasure Box: (Beginning Chapter Books, Funny Books for Kids, Kids Book Series) (Ivy + Bean)", "author": "Annie Barrows", "description": "Review \"Annie Barrows accomplish the almost impossible task of reflecting the world of second grader, creating the tension and drama of family and friendships in language that can be read easily by child who recently graduated from easy readers to early chapter books. \" - Lisa Von Drasek, Children's Librarian, Bank Street College of Education. About the Author Annie Barrows has written many books for adults, but Ivy and Bean is her first series for kids. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two daughters.Sophie Blackall is an Australian illustrator whose previous books include Ruby's Wish and Meet Wild Boars. She lives in New York.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 11.91}, {"asin": "B00JEHI6HE", "title": "The Kraals of Ulundi: A Novel of the Zulu War", "author": "David Ebsworth", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "0130320137", "title": "Operational Amplifiers with Linear Integrated Circuits", "author": "William D. Stanley", "description": "From the Back Cover Designed for both introductory and upper level courses covering Operational Amplifiers and Linear Integrated Circuits, Stanley's text focuses on developing the student's ability to analyze and design various circuit fluctuations. The focus is on applications, not rote memorization. The main features of the book include: Complete updating of the newer devices used in industry and available in the market. Complete updating of the newer devices used in industry and available in the market. Inclusion of Electronics Workbench/MultiSim software example problems at the end of each chapter. Inclusion of Electronics Workbench/MultiSim software example problems at the end of each chapter. End-of-chapter problems are divided into three categories\u2015drill, derivation, and design\u2015to help students fully understand and practice the various problems they will encounter in the workplace. End-of-chapter problems are divided into three categories\u2015drill, derivation, and design\u2015to help students fully understand and practice the various problems they will encounter in the workplace. Most chapters include additional laboratory exercises to provide sufficient work for the core of a supporting library. Most chapters include additional laboratory exercises to provide sufficient work for the core of a supporting library.", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Engineering"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 84.75}, {"asin": "1641526378", "title": "The Big Book of Silly Jokes for Kids", "author": "Carole P. Roman", "description": "Review \"Amusing and entertaining, The Big Book of Silly Jokes for Kids by Carole P. Roman is a really fun read.\" - Kristen Van Kampen (Teen Reviewer) for Readers' Favorite - 5-Star Review! \"A really fun book, and an excellent way to encourage reading - a winner in my book (no pun intended).\" - David Savage, What's Good To Do In The UK? \"Every kid and adult love jokes, even the typical \"knock-knock\" ones or corny puns. I like having books to read for our four young grandchildren when they visit, especially if they are funny or produce laughter.\" - Conny Withay, Blog \"The Big Book of Silly Jokes for Kids: 800+ Jokes!\" is \"perfectly punny\"--a treat for kids of all ages.\" - Booked Solid with Virginia C \"While getting paid to sleep would literally be a dream job, pun intended, we think Roman may have found her waking dream job when she put together this truly joyful book.\" - Bianca Schulze, The Children's Book Review From the Author The Big Book of Silly Jokes for Kids: 800+ Jokes! Awards: Readers' Favorite 5-Star Review Readers' Favorite 5-Star Review Winner 2020- Book Excellence Award- Humor Winner 2020- Book Excellence Award- Humor 2020 Reader's Favorite Humor 2020 Reader's Favorite Humor Our latest ranking on Amazon: #9 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)#1\u00a0in\u00a0Children's Joke & Riddle Books (Books)#1\u00a0in\u00a0Children's Composition & Creative Writing Books #9 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1\u00a0in\u00a0Children's Joke & Riddle Books (Books) #1\u00a0in\u00a0Children's Joke & Riddle Books (Books) #1\u00a0in\u00a0Children's Composition & Creative Writing Books #1\u00a0in\u00a0Children's Composition & Creative Writing Books", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 5.99}], "target_asin": "0811864952"}
{"user_id": "AGLLGRXASBG7MUMBQPYP7WQZSRLQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00IGYXZJA", "title": "Four Stars"}, {"asin": "0399167064", "title": "Big Little Lies", "author": "Liane Moriarty", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2014: What is it about Liane Moriarty\u2019s books that makes them so irresistible? They\u2019re just classic \u201cdomestic\u201d novels about marriage, motherhood, and modern upper-middle-class family life, after all. And despite the fact that Big Little Lies is Moriarty\u2019s sixth adult novel (and it comes decades after the grandmother of this kind of thing, Bridget Jones\u2019 Diary ), it is remarkably new and fresh and winning Set in an Australian suburb, Big Little Lies focuses on three women, all of whom have children at the same preschool. One is a great beauty married to a fabulously rich businessman; they have a \u201cperfect\u201d set of twins. One is the can-do mom who can put together a mean pre-school art project but can\u2019t prevent her teenage daughter from preferring her divorced dad. The third is a withdrawn, single mother who doesn\u2019t quite fit in. Right from the start--thanks to a modern \u201cGreek chorus\u201d that narrates the action--we know that someone is going to end up dead. The questions are who and how. Miraculously, Moriarty keeps this high concept plot aloft, largely because she infuses it with such wit and heart. She also knows not to overplay the message she\u2019s sending: that we all tell lies--to each other and, more importantly, to ourselves. --Sara Nelson Review Praise for Big Little Lies \u201cMs. Moriarty\u2019s long-parched fans have something new to dig into\u2026 Big Little Lies [may have] even more staying power than The Husband\u2019s Secret. \u201d\u2014 The New York Times \u201cFunny and thrilling, page-turning but with emotional depth, Big Little Lies is a terrific follow-up to The Husband\u2019s Secret .\u201d\u2014 Booklist (starred review)\u201c Big Little Lies tolls a warning bell about the big little lies we tell in order to survive. It takes a powerful stand against domestic violence even as it makes us laugh at the adults whose silly costume party seems more reminiscent of a middle-school dance.\u201d\u2014 The Washington Post \u201cMoriarty demonstrates an excellent talent for exposing the dark, seedy side of the otherwise \u201cperfect\u201d family unit\u2026Highly recommended.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal (starred review)\u201cIrresistible\u2026Exposing the fault lines in what looks like perfection is a specialty of Liane Moriarty\u2026 Moriarty\u2019s sly humor and razor-sharp insights will keep you turning the pages to find out.\u201d\u2014 People Magazine\u00a0\"The secrets burrowed in this seemingly placid small town...are so suburban noir they would make David Lynch clap with glee...[Moriarty] is a fantastically nimble writer, so sure-footed that the book leaps between dark and light seamlessly; even the big reveal in the final pages feels earned and genuinely shocking.\u201d\u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cIf you're looking for a novel that will turn you into a compulsive book-finisher look no further. Moriarty has produced another gripping, satirical hit...It\u2019s can\u2019t-put-downability comes from its darker subplots...A book that will make you appreciate the long days of summer.\u201d\u2014 Oprah.com \"Reading one [of\u00a0Liane Moriarty's novels] is a bit like drinking a pink cosmo laced with arsenic...a fun, engaging and sometimes disturbing read\u2026Moriarty is back in fine form.\"\u2014 USA Today \u201cA juicy drama.\u201d\u2014 People Stylewatch \u201cNot your average mommy novel. It\u2019s a juicy, twisted murder mystery replete with themes of marital abuse and self-denial\u2026The perfect mindless beach read.\u201d\u2014 Purewow.com \u201cSuburbia is about to get a lot more scandalous.\u201d\u2014 Closer Weekly \"The Aussie author of last year\u2019s runaway hit The Husband\u2019s Secret comes back with another winning and wise novel that intertwines the lives of three women.\"\u2014 EW.com \"It\u2019s no mystery why Liane Moriarty is a summer staple: with wit and compassion...[she] keeps it real.\"\u2014 Family Circle \u201cRiveting and insightful\u2026Moriarty has crafted a great summer read full of perceptive glimpses into the many guises of human relationships: mother-child, husband-wife (and ex-wife) and above all, the strong bond of female friendships.\u201d\u2014 Bookpage \"Deservedly popular Moriarty invigorates \u2026 women\u2019s fiction through wit, good humor, sharp insight into human nature and addictive storytelling.\"\u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) About the Author Liane Moriarty is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Truly Madly Guilty , Big Little Lies , The Husband\u2019s Secret , The Hypnotist\u2019s Love Story , and What Alice Forgot . She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***\u00a0\u00a0Copyright \u00a9 2014 by Liane Moriarty Chapter 1 \u201cThat doesn\u2019t sound like a school trivia night,\u201d said Mrs. Patty Ponder to Marie Antoinette. \u201cThat sounds like a riot.\u201d The cat didn\u2019t respond. She was dozing on the couch and found school trivia nights to be trivial. \u201cNot interested, eh? Let them eat cake! Is that what you\u2019re thinking? They do eat a lot of cake, don\u2019t they? All those cake stalls. Goodness me. Although I don\u2019t think any of the mothers ever actually eat them. They\u2019re all so sleek and skinny, aren\u2019t they? Like you.\u201d Marie Antoinette sneered at the compliment. The \u201clet them eat cake\u201d thing had grown old a long time ago, and she\u2019d recently heard one of Mrs. Ponder\u2019s grandchildren say it was meant to be \u201clet them eat brioche\u201d and also that Marie Antoinette never said it in the first place. Mrs. Ponder picked up her television remote and turned down the volume onDancing with the Stars. She\u2019d turned it up loud earlier because of the sound of the heavy rain, but the rain had eased now. She could hear people shouting. Angry hollers crashed through the quiet, cold night air. It was somehow hurtful for Mrs. Ponder to hear, as if all that rage were directed at her. (Mrs. Ponder had grown up with an angry mother.) \u201cGoodness me. Do you think they\u2019re arguing over the capital of Guatemala? Do you know the capital of Guatemala? No? I don\u2019t either. We should Google it. Don\u2019t sneer at me.\u201d Marie Antoinette sniffed. \u201cLet\u2019s go see what\u2019s going on,\u201d said Mrs. Ponder briskly. She was feeling nervous and therefore behaving briskly in front of the cat, the same way she\u2019d once done with her children when her husband was away and there were strange noises in the night. Mrs. Ponder heaved herself up with the help of her walker. Marie Antoinette slid her slippery body comfortingly in between Mrs. Ponder\u2019s legs (she wasn\u2019t falling for the brisk act) as she pushed the walker down the hallway to the back of the house. Her sewing room looked straight out onto the school yard of Pirriwee Public. \u201cMum, are you mad? You can\u2019t live this close to a primary school,\u201d her daughter had said when she was first looking at buying the house. But Mrs. Ponder loved to hear the crazy babble of children\u2019s voices at intervals throughout the day, and she no longer drove, so she couldn\u2019t care less that the street was jammed with those giant, truck-like cars they all drove these days, with women in big sunglasses leaning across their steering wheels to call out terribly urgent information about Harriett\u2019s ballet and Charlie\u2019s speech therapy. Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces. Their busy little bottoms strutting into the school in their tight gym gear. Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses. It made Mrs. Ponder laugh. Fondly, though. Her three daughters were exactly the same. And they were all so pretty. \u201cHow are you this morning?\u201d she always called out if she was on the front porch with a cup of tea or watering the front garden as they went by. \u201cBusy, Mrs. Ponder! Frantic!\u201d they always called back, trotting along, yanking their children\u2019s arms. They were pleasant and friendly and just a touch condescending because they couldn\u2019t help it. She was so old! They were so busy! The fathers, and there were more and more of them doing the school run these days, were different. They rarely hurried, strolling past with a measured casualness. No big deal. All under control. That was the message. Mrs. Ponder chuckled fondly at them too. But now it seemed the Pirriwee Public parents were misbehaving. She got to the window and pushed aside the lace curtain. The school had recently paid for a window guard after a Year 3 boy\u2019s cricket ball had smashed the glass and nearly knocked out Marie Antoinette. (A group of them had given her a hand-painted apology card, which she kept on her fridge.) There was a two-story sandstone building on the other side of the playground with an event room on the second level and a big balcony with ocean views. Mrs. Ponder had been there for a few functions: a talk by a local historian, a lunch hosted by the Friends of the Library. It was quite a beautiful room. Sometimes ex-students had their wedding receptions there. That\u2019s where they\u2019d be having the school trivia night. They were raising funds for SMART Boards, whatever they were. Mrs. Ponder had been invited as a matter of course. Her proximity to the school gave her a funny sort of honorary status, even though she\u2019d never had a child or grandchild attend. She\u2019d said no thank you to the school trivia night invitation. She thought school events without the children in attendance were pointless. The children had their weekly school assembly in the same room. Each Friday morning, Mrs. Ponder set herself up in the sewing room with a cup of English Breakfast and a ginger-nut biscuit. The sound of the children singing floating down from the second floor of the building always made her weep. She\u2019d never believed in God, except when she heard children singing. There was no childish singing now. Mrs. Ponder could hear a lot of bad language. She wasn\u2019t a prude about bad language\u2014her eldest daughter swore like a trooper\u2014but it was upsetting and disconcerting to hear someone maniacally screaming that particular four-letter word in a place that was normally filled with childish laughter and shouts. \u201cAre you all drunk?\u201d she said. Her rain-splattered window was at eye level with the entrance doors to the building, and suddenly people began to spill out. Security lights illuminated the paved area around the entrance like a stage set for a play. Clouds of mist added to the effect. It was a strange sight. The parents at Pirriwee Public had a baffling fondness for costume parties. It wasn\u2019t enough that they should have an ordinary trivia night; she knew from the invitation that some bright spark had decided to make it an \u201cAudrey and Elvis\u201d trivia night, which meant that the women all had to dress up as Audrey Hepburn and the men had to dress up as Elvis Presley. (That was another reason Mrs. Ponder had turned down the invitation. She\u2019d always abhorred costume parties.) It seemed that the most popular rendition of Audrey Hepburn was the\u00a0Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s\u00a0look. All the women were wearing long black dresses, white gloves and pearl chokers. Meanwhile, the men had mostly chosen to pay tribute to the Elvis of the latter years. They were all wearing shiny white jumpsuits, glittery gemstones and plunging necklines. The women looked lovely. The poor men looked perfectly ridiculous. As Mrs. Ponder watched, one Elvis punched another across the jaw. He staggered back into an Audrey. Two Elvises grabbed him from behind and pulled him away. An Audrey buried her face in her hands and turned away, as though she couldn\u2019t bear to watch. Someone shouted, \u201cSTOP THIS!\u201d Indeed. What would your beautiful children think? \u201cShould I call the police?\u201d wondered Mrs. Ponder out loud, but then she heard the wail of a siren in the distance, at the same time as a woman on the balcony began to scream and scream. Gabrielle: It wasn\u2019t like it was just the mothers, you know. It wouldn\u2019t have happened without the dads. I guess it\u00a0started\u00a0with the mothers. We were the main players, so to speak. The mums. I can\u2019t stand the word \u201cmum.\u201d It\u2019s a frumpy word, don\u2019t you think? \u201cMom\u201d is better. With an\u00a0o. It sounds skinnier. We should change to the American spelling. I have body image issues, by the way. Who doesn\u2019t, right? Bonnie: It was all just a terrible misunderstanding. People\u2019s feelings got hurt, and then everything just spiraled out of control. The way it does. All conflict can be traced back to someone\u2019s feelings getting hurt, don\u2019t you think? Divorce. World wars. Legal action. Well, maybe not every legal action. Can I offer you an herbal tea? Stu: I\u2019ll tell you exactly why it happened:\u00a0Women don\u2019t let things go.\u00a0Not saying the blokes don\u2019t share part of the blame. But if the girls hadn\u2019t gotten their knickers in a knot . . . And that might sound sexist, but it\u2019s not, it\u2019s just a fact of life. Ask any man\u2014not some new-age, artsy- fartsy, I-wear-moisturizer type, I mean a real man\u2014ask a real man, then he\u2019ll tell you that women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges. You should see my wife in action. And she\u2019s not even the worst of them. Miss Barnes: Helicopter parents. Before I started at Pirriwee Public, I thought it was an exaggeration, this thing about parents being overly involved with their kids. I mean, my mum and dad loved me, they were, like,\u00a0interested\u00a0in me when I was growing up in the nineties, but they weren\u2019t, like,\u00a0obsessed\u00a0with me. Mrs. Lipmann: It\u2019s a tragedy, and deeply regrettable, and we\u2019re all trying to move forward. I have no further comment. Carol: I blame the Erotic Book Club. But that\u2019s just me. Jonathan: There was nothing erotic about the Erotic Book Club, I\u2019ll tell you that for free. Jackie: You know what? I see this as a feminist issue. Harper: Who said it was a feminist issue? What the heck? I tell you what started it: the\u00a0incident\u00a0at the kindergarten orientation day. Graeme: My understanding was that it all goes back to the stay-at-home mums battling it out with the career mums. What do they call it? The Mummy Wars. My wife wasn\u2019t involved. She doesn\u2019t have time for that sort of thing. Thea: You journalists are just loving the French nanny angle. I heard someone on the radio today talking about the \u201cFrench maid,\u201d which Juliette was certainly not. Renata had a housekeeper as well. Lucky for some. I have four children, and no staff to help out! Of course, I don\u2019t have a problem\u00a0per se\u00a0with working mothers, I just wonder why they bothered having children in the first place. Melissa: You know what I think got everyone all hot and bothered? The head lice. Oh my gosh, don\u2019t let me get started on the head lice. Samantha: The head lice? What did that have to do with anything? Who told you that? I bet it was Melissa, right? That poor girl suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after her kids kept getting reinfected. Sorry. It\u2019s not funny. It\u2019s not funny at all. Detective-Sergeant Adrian Quinlan: Let me be clear: This is not a circus. This is a murder investigation. Chapter 2 SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE TRIVIA NIGHT Forty. Madeline Martha Mackenzie was forty years old today. \u201cI am forty,\u201d she said out loud as she drove. She drew the word out in slow motion, like a sound effect.\u00a0\u201cFooorty.\u201d She caught the eye of her daughter in the rearview mirror. Chloe grinned and imitated her mother. \u201cI am five.\u00a0Fiiiive.\u201d \u201cForty!\u201d trilled Madeline like an opera singer. \u201cTra la la la!\u201d \u201cFive!\u201d trilled Chloe. Madeline tried a rap version, beating out the rhythm on the steering wheel. \u201cI\u2019m forty, yeah, forty\u2014\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s enough now, Mummy,\u201d said Chloe firmly. \u201cSorry,\u201d said Madeline. She was taking Chloe to her \u201cKindergarten\u2014Let\u2019s Get Kindy Ready!\u2014Orientation.\u201d Not that Chloe required any orientation before starting school next January. She was already very firmly oriented at Pirriwee Public. At this morning\u2019s drop- off Chloe had been busy taking charge of her brother, Fred, who was two years older but often seemed younger. \u201cFred, you forgot to put your book bag in the basket! That\u2019s it. In there. Good boy.\u201d Fred had obediently dropped his book bag in the appropriate basket before running off to put Jackson in a headlock. Madeline had pretended not to see the headlock. Jackson probably deserved it. Jackson\u2019s mother, Renata, hadn\u2019t seen it either, because she was deep in conversation with Harper, both of them frowning earnestly over the stress of educating their gifted children. Renata and Harper attended the same weekly support group for parents of gifted children. Madeline imagined them all sitting in a circle, wringing their hands while their eyes shone with secret pride. While Chloe was busy bossing the other children around at orientation (her gift was bossiness, she was going to run a corporation one day), Madeline was going to have coffee and cake with her friend Celeste. Celeste\u2019s twin boys were starting school next year too, so they\u2019d be running amuck at orientation. (Their gift was shouting. Madeline had a headache after five minutes in their company.) Celeste always bought exquisite and very expensive birthday presents, so that would be nice. After that, Madeline was going to drop Chloe off with her mother-in- law, and then have lunch with some friends before they all rushed off for school pickup. The sun was shining. She was wearing her gorgeous new Dolce and Gabbana stilettos (bought online, thirty percent off). It was going to be a lovely, lovely day. \u201cLet the Festival of Madeline begin!\u201d her husband, Ed, had said this morning when he brought her coffee in bed. Madeline was famous for her fondness of birthdays and celebrations of all kinds. Any excuse for champagne. Still. Forty. As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel \u201cforty\u201d the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn\u2019t have real feelings when you were forty, because you\u2019d be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty-ness. Forty-year-old woman found dead.\u00a0Oh dear. Twenty-year-old woman found dead.\u00a0Tragedy! Sadness! Find that murderer! Madeline always had to do a minor shift in her head when she heard something on the news about a woman dying in her forties.\u00a0But, wait, that could be me! That would be sad! People would be sad if I was dead! Devastated, even. So there, age- obsessed world. I might be forty, but I am cherished. On the other hand, it was probably perfectly natural to feel sadder over the death of a twenty-year-old than a forty-year-old. The forty-year-old had enjoyed twenty years more of life. That\u2019s why, if there were a gunman on the loose, Madeline would feel obligated to throw her middle-aged self in front of the twenty- year-old. Take a bullet for youth. It was only fair. Well, she would if she could be sure it was a nice young person. Not one of those insufferable ones, like the child driving the little blue Mitsubishi in front of Madeline. She wasn\u2019t even bothering to hide the fact that she was using her mobile phone while she drove, probably\u00a0texting\u00a0or updating her Facebook status. See! This kid wouldn\u2019t have even noticed the loose gunman! She would have been staring vacantly at her phone, while Madeline sacrificed her life for her! It was infuriating. The little car appeared to be jammed with young people. At least three in the back, their heads bobbing about, hands gesticulating. Was that somebody\u2019s foot waving about? It was a tragedy waiting to happen. They all needed to concentrate. Just last week, Madeline had been having a quick coffee after her ShockWave class and reading a story in the paper about how all the young people were killing themselves sending texts while they drove.\u00a0On my way. Nearly there!These were their last foolish (and often misspelled) words. Madeline had cried over the picture of one teenager\u2019s grief-stricken mother, absurdly holding up her daughter\u2019s mobile phone to the camera as a warning to readers. \u201cSilly little idiots,\u201d she said out loud as the car weaved dangerously into the next lane. \u201cWho is an idiot?\u201d said her daughter from the backseat. \u201cThe girl driving the car in front of me is an idiot because she\u2019s driving her car and using her phone at the same time,\u201d said Madeline. \u201cLike when you need to call Daddy when we\u2019re running late?\u201d said Chloe. \u201cI only did that one time!\u201d protested Madeline. \u201cAnd I was very careful and very quick! And I\u2019m\u00a0forty\u00a0years old!\u201d \u201cToday,\u201d said Chloe knowledgeably. \u201cYou\u2019re forty years old today.\u201d \u201cYes! Also, I made a quick call, I didn\u2019t send a text! You have to take your eyes off the road to text. Texting while driving is illegal and naughty, and you must promise to never ever do it when you\u2019re a teenager.\u201d Her voice quivered at the thought of Chloe being a teenager and driving a car. \u201cBut you\u2019re allowed to make a quick phone call?\u201d checked Chloe. \u201cNo! That\u2019s illegal too,\u201d said Madeline. \u201cSo that means you broke the law,\u201d said Chloe with satisfaction. \u201cLike a\u00a0robber.\u201d Chloe was currently in love with the idea of robbers. She was definitely going to date bad boys one day. Bad boys on motorcycles. \u201cStick with the nice boys, Chloe!\u201d said Madeline after a moment. \u201cLike Daddy. Bad boys don\u2019t bring you coffee in bed, I\u2019ll tell you that for free.\u201d \u201cWhat are you babbling on about, woman?\u201d sighed Chloe. She\u2019d picked this phrase up from her father and imitated his weary tone perfectly. They\u2019d made the mistake of laughing the first time she did it, so she\u2019d kept it up, and said it just often enough, and with perfect timing, so that they couldn\u2019t help but keep laughing. This time Madeline managed not to laugh. Chloe currently trod a very fine line between adorable and obnoxious. Madeline probably trod the same line herself. Madeline pulled up behind the little blue Mitsubishi at a red light. The young driver was\u00a0still\u00a0looking at her mobile phone. Madeline banged on her car horn. She saw the driver look in her rearview mirror, while all her passengers craned around to look. \u201cPut down your phone!\u201d she yelled. She mimicked texting by jabbing her finger in her palm. \u201cIt\u2019s illegal! It\u2019s dangerous!\u201d The girl stuck her finger up in the classic up-yours gesture. \u201cRight!\u201d Madeline pulled on her emergency brake and put on her hazard lights. \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d said Chloe. Madeline undid her seat belt and threw open the car door. \u201cBut we\u2019ve got to go to orientation!\u201d said Chloe in a panic. \u201cWe\u2019ll be late! Oh,\u00a0calamity!\u201d \u201cOh, calamity\u201d was a line from a children\u2019s book that they used to read to Fred when he was little. The whole family said it now. Even Madeline\u2019s parents had picked it up, and some of Madeline\u2019s friends. It was a very contagious phrase. \u201cIt\u2019s all right,\u201d said Madeline. \u201cThis will only take a second. I\u2019m saving young lives.\u201d She stalked up to the girl\u2019s car on her new stilettos and banged on the window. The window slid down, and the driver metamorphosed from a shadowy silhouette into a real young girl with white skin, sparkly nose ring and badly applied, clumpy mascara. She looked up at Madeline with a mixture of aggression and fear. \u201cWhat is your\u00a0problem?\u201d Her mobile phone was still held casually in her left hand. \u201cPut down that phone! You could kill yourself and your friends!\u201d Madeline used the exact same tone she used on Chloe when she was being extremely naughty. She reached in the car, grabbed the phone and tossed it to the openmouthed girl in the passenger seat. \u201cOK? Just stop it!\u201d She could hear their gales of laughter as she walked back to the car. She didn\u2019t care. She felt pleasantly stimulated. A car pulled up behind hers. Madeline smiled, lifted her hand apologetically and hurried back to be in her car before the lights changed. Her ankle turned. One second it was doing what an ankle was meant to do, and the next it was flipping out at a sickeningly wrong angle. She fell heavily on one side. Oh, calamity. That was almost certainly the moment the story began. With the ungainly flip of an ankle. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.19}, {"asin": "0385539703", "title": "The Children Act", "author": "Ian McEwan", "description": "Review \"Absorbing.\" \u2014 The New Yorker \"McEwan presents a ferociously intelligent and competent woman struggling to rule on a complex legal matter while feeling humiliated and betrayed by her husband ... a notable volume from one of the finest writers alive.\" \u2014Ron Charles, The Washington Post \"A short, concise, strong novel in which a judge's ruling decides the fate of a teenage boy in ways she never intended or imagined\u00a0... it's a book that begins with the briskness of a legal brief written by a brilliant mind, and concludes with a gracefulness found in the work of few other writers.\"\u2014 Meg Wolitzer, NPR \"A quietly exhilarating book ... The Children Act chronicles the recalibration of a 30-year marriage after it has fallen out of balance.\" \u2014Mona Simpson, Los Angeles Times \"Haunting ... a brief but substantial addition to the author\u2019s oeuvre.\" \u2014 Entertainment Weekly , A- \"[ The Children Act \u2019s] sense of life-and-death urgency never wavers\u00a0... you would have to go back to Saturday or Atonement to find scenes of equivalent intensity and emotional investment.\" \u2014 Wall Street Journal \"Smart and elegant ... a grown-up novel that reminds us just how messy life can be and how the justice system ... doesn't always deliver justice.\" \u2014Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today \" The Children Act manages to be highly subtle and page-turningly dramatic at once ... Only a master could manage, in barely over 200 pages, to engage so many ideas, leaving nothing neatly answered.\" \u2014Boston Globe \"Heartbreaking and profound, it skillfully juxtaposes the dilemmas of ordinary life and tabloid-ready controversy.\" \u2014 People \"McEwan crafts a taut morality tale in crystalline sentences.\" \u2014 O Magazine \"As in Atonement , what doesn\u2019t happen has the power to destroy; as in Amsterdam , McEwan probes the dread beneath civilized society. In spare prose, he examines cases, people, and situations, to reveal anger, sorrow, shame, impulse, and yearning. He rejects religious dogma that lacks compassion, but scrutinizes secular morality as well ... Few will deny McEwan his place among the best of Britain\u2019s living novelists.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly , starred review \"McEwan, always a smart, engaging writer, here takes more than one familiar situation and creates at every turn something new and emotionally rewarding in a way he hasn\u2019t done so well since On Chesil Beach.\" \u2014Kirkus Reviews , starred review \"Irrefutably creative ... With his trademark style, which is a tranquil mix of exacting word choice and easily flowing sentences, McEwan once again observes with depth and wisdom the universal truth in the uncommon situation.\" \u2014 Booklist , starred review About the Author IAN McEWAN is the bestselling author of fifteen books, including the novels Sweet Tooth ; Solar , winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach ; Saturday ; Atonement , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs , both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam , winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time , winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites , winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ONELondon. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise longue, staring past her stockinged feet toward the end of the room, toward a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centered on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine. On the floor by the chaise longue, within her reach, the draft of a judgment. And Fiona was on her back, wishing all this stuff at the bottom of the sea.In her hand was her second Scotch and water. She was feeling shaky, still recovering from a bad moment with her husband. She rarely drank, but the Talisker and tap water was a balm, and she thought she might cross the room to the sideboard for a third. Less Scotch, more water, for she was in court tomorrow and she was duty judge now, available for any sudden demand, even as she lay recuperating. He had made a shocking declaration and placed an impossible burden on her. For the first time in years, she had actually shouted, and some faint echo still resounded in her ears. \"You idiot! You fucking idiot!\" She had not sworn out loud since her carefree teenage visits to Newcastle, though a potent word sometimes intruded on her thoughts when she heard self-serving evidence or an irrelevant point of law.And then, not long after that, wheezy with outrage, she had said loudly, at least twice, \"How dare you!\"It was hardly a question, but he answered it calmly. \"I need it. I'm fifty-nine. This is my last shot. I've yet to hear evidence for an afterlife.\"A pretentious remark, and she had been lost for a reply. She simply stared at him, and perhaps her mouth was open. In the spirit of the staircase, she had a response now, on the chaise longue. \"Fifty-nine? Jack, you're sixty! It's pathetic, it's banal.\"What she had actually said, lamely, was, \"This is too ridiculous.\"\"Fiona, when did we last make love?\"When did they? He had asked this before, in moods plaintive to querulous. But the crowded recent past can be difficult to recall. The Family Division teemed with strange differences, special pleading, intimate half-truths, exotic accusation. And as in all branches of law, fine-grained particularities of circumstance needed to be assimilated at speed. Last week, she heard final submissions from divorcing Jewish parents, unequally Orthodox, disputing their daughters' education. The draft of her completed judgment was on the floor beside her. Tomorrow, coming before her again would be a despairing Englishwoman, gaunt, pale, highly educated, mother of a five-year-old girl, convinced, despite assurances to the court to the contrary, that her daughter was about to be removed from the jurisdiction by the father, a Moroccan businessman and strict Muslim, to a new life in Rabat, where he intended to settle. Otherwise, routine wrangles over residence of children, over houses, pensions, earnings, inheritance. It was the larger estates that came to the High Court. Wealth mostly failed to bring extended happiness. Parents soon learned the new vocabulary and patient procedures of the law, and were dazed to find themselves in vicious combat with the one they once loved. And waiting offstage, boys and girls first-named in the court documents, troubled little Bens and Sarahs, huddling together while the gods above them fought to the last, from the Family Proceedings Court, to the High Court, to the Court of Appeal.All this sorrow had common themes, there was a human sameness to it, but it continued to fascinate her. She believed she brought reasonableness to hopeless situations. On the whole, she believed in the provisions of family law. In her optimistic moments she took it as a significant marker in civilization's progress to fix in the statutes the child's needs above its parents'. Her days were full, and in the evenings recently, various dinners, something at Middle Temple for a retiring colleague, a concert at Kings Place (Schubert, Scriabin), and taxis, Tube trains, dry-cleaning to collect, a letter to draft about a special school for the cleaning lady's autistic son, and finally sleep. Where was the sex? At that moment, she couldn't recall.\"I don't keep a record.\"He spread his hands, resting his case.She had watched as he crossed the room and poured himself a measure of Scotch, the Talisker she was drinking now. Lately, he was looking taller, easier in his movements. While his back was turned to her she had a cold premonition of rejection, of the humiliation of being left for a young woman, of being left behind, useless and alone. She wondered if she should simply go along with anything he wanted, then rejected the thought.He had come back toward her with his glass. He wasn't offering her a Sancerre the way he usually did around this time.\"What do you want, Jack?\"\"I'm going to have this affair.\"\"You want a divorce.\"\"No. I want everything the same. No deception.\"\"I don't understand.\"\"Yes you do. Didn't you once tell me that couples in long marriages aspire to the condition of siblings? We've arrived, Fiona. I've become your brother. It's cozy and sweet and I love you, but before I drop dead, I want one big passionate affair.\"Mistaking her amazed gasp for laughter, for mockery perhaps, he said roughly, \"Ecstasy, almost blacking out with the thrill of it. Remember that? I want one last go, even if you don't. Or perhaps you do.\"She stared at him in disbelief.\"There it is, then.\"This was when she had found her voice and told him what kind of idiot he was. She had a powerful grip on what was conventionally correct. That he had, as far as she knew, always been faithful made his proposition all the more outrageous. Or if he'd deceived her in the past he'd done it brilliantly. She already knew the name of the woman. Melanie. Not so remote from the name of a fatal form of skin cancer. She knew she could be obliterated by his affair with this twenty-eight-year-old statistician.\"If you do this it'll be the end for us. It's as simple as that.\"\"Is this a threat?\"\"My solemn promise.\"By then she had regained her temper. And it did seem simple. The moment to propose an open marriage was before the wedding, not thirty-five years later. To risk all they had so that he might relive a passing sensual thrill! When she tried to imagine wanting something like it for herself\u2014her \"last fling\" would be her first\u2014she could think only of disruption, assignations, disappointment, ill-timed phone calls. The sticky business of learning to be with someone new in bed, newly devised endearments, all the fakery. Finally, the necessary disentangling, the effort required to be open and sincere. And nothing quite the same when she came away. No, she preferred an imperfect existence, the one she had now.But on the chaise longue it rose before her, the true extent of the insult, how he was prepared to pay for his pleasures with her misery. Ruthless. She had seen him single-minded at the expense of others, most often in a good cause. This was new. What had changed? He had stood erect, feet well apart as he poured his single malt, the fingers of his free hand moving to a tune in his head, some shared song perhaps, not shared with her. Hurting her and not caring\u2014that was new. He had always been kind, loyal and kind, and kindness, the Family Division daily proved, was the essential human ingredient. She had the power to remove a child from an unkind parent and she sometimes did. But remove herself from an unkind husband? When she was weak and desolate? Where was her protective judge?Self-pity in others embarrassed her, and she wouldn't have it now. She was having a third drink instead. But she poured only a token measure, added much water and returned to her couch. Yes, it had been the kind of conversation of which she should have taken notes. Important to remember, to measure the insult carefully. When she threatened to end the marriage if he went ahead, he had simply repeated himself, told her again how he loved her, always would, that there was no other life but this, that his unmet sexual needs caused him great unhappiness, that there was this one chance and he wanted to take it with her knowledge and, so he hoped, her assent. He was speaking to her in the spirit of openness. He could have done it \"behind her back.\" Her thin, unforgiving back.\"Oh,\" she murmured. \"That's decent of you, Jack.\"\"Well, actually...\" he said, and didn't finish.She guessed he was about to tell her the affair had already begun and she couldn't bear to hear it. Didn't need to. She saw it. A pretty statistician working on the diminishing probability of a man returning to an embittered wife. She saw a sunlit morning, an unfamiliar bathroom, and Jack, still decently muscled, pulling a half-unbuttoned clean white linen shirt over his head in that impatient way he had, a discarded shirt tossed toward the laundry basket hanging by one arm before sliding to the floor. Perdition. It would happen, with or without her consent.\"The answer's no.\" She had used a rising tone, like a flinty schoolmarm. She added, \"What else would you expect me to say?\"She felt helpless and wanted the conversation to end. There was a judgment to approve before tomorrow for publication in the Family Law Reports. The fates of two Jewish schoolgirls had already been settled in the ruling she had delivered in court, but the prose needed to be smoothed, as did the respect owed to piety in order to be proof against an appeal. Outside, summer rain beat against the windows; distantly, from beyond Gray's Inn Square, tires hissed on drenched asphalt. He would leave her and the world would go on.His face had been tight as he shrugged and turned to leave the room. At the sight of his retreating back, she felt the same cold fear. She would have called after him but for the dread of being ignored. And what could she say? Hold me, kiss me, have the girl. She had listened to his footsteps down the hall, their bedroom door closing firmly, then silence settling over their flat, silence and the rain that hadn't stopped in a month.First the facts. Both parties were from the tight folds of the strictly observant Haredi community in north London. The Bernsteins' marriage was arranged by their parents, with no expectation of dissent. Arranged, not forced, both parties, in rare accord, insisted. Thirteen years on, all agreed, mediator, social worker and judge included, that here was a marriage beyond repair. The couple were now separated. Between them they managed with difficulty the care of the two children, Rachel and Nora, who lived with the mother and had extensive contact with the father. Marriage breakdown had started in the early years. After the difficult birth of the second girl, the mother was unable to conceive again, due to radical surgery. The father had set his heart on a large family and thus began the painful unraveling. After a period of depression (prolonged, said the father; brief, said the mother), she studied at the Open University, gained a good qualification and entered on a career in teaching at primary level once the younger had started school. This arrangement did not suit the father or the many relatives. Within the Haredim, whose traditions were unbroken for centuries, women were expected to raise children, the more the better, and look after the home. A university degree and a job were highly unusual. A senior figure of good standing in the community was called as a witness by the father and said as much.Men did not receive much education either. From their mid-teens, they were expected to give most of their time to studying the Torah. Generally, they did not go to university. Partly for this reason, many Haredim were of modest means. But not the Bernsteins, though they would be when their lawyers' bills were settled. A grandparent with a share in a patent for an olive-pitting machine had settled money on the couple jointly. They expected to spend everything they had on their respective silks, both women well known to the judge. On the surface, the dispute concerned Rachel and Nora's schooling. However, at stake was the entire context of the girls' growing up. It was a fight for their souls.Haredi boys and girls were educated separately to preserve their purity. Modish clothes, television and the Internet were forbidden, and so was mixing with children who were allowed such distractions. Homes that did not observe strict kosher rules were out of bounds. Every aspect of daily existence was well covered by established customs. The problem had started with the mother, who was breaking with the community, though not with Judaism. Against the father's objections, she was already sending the girls to a coeducational Jewish secondary school where television, pop music, the Internet and mixing with non-Jewish children were permitted. She wanted her girls to stay on at school past the age of sixteen and to go to university if they wished. In her written evidence she said she wanted her daughters to know more about how others lived, to be socially tolerant, to have the career opportunities she never had, and as adults to be economically self-sufficient, with the chance of meeting the sort of husband with professional skills who could help to support a family. Unlike her husband, who gave all his time to studying, and teaching the Torah eight hours a week without pay.For all the reasonableness of her case, Judith Bernstein\u2014angular pale face, uncovered frizzy ginger hair fastened with a huge blue clasp\u2014was not an easy presence in court. A constant passing forward with freckly agitated fingers of notes to her counsel, much muted sighing, eye-rolling and lip-pursing whenever her husband's counsel spoke, inappropriate rummaging and jiggling in an outsized camel leather handbag, removing from it at one low point in a long afternoon a pack of cigarettes and a lighter\u2014provocative items in her husband's scheme, surely\u2014and lining them up side by side, on hand for when the court rose. Fiona saw all this from her advantage of height but pretended not to.Mr. Bernstein\u2019s written evidence was intended to persuade the judge that his wife was a selfish woman with \u201canger- management \u00a0problems\u201d (in the Family Division, a common, often mutual charge) who had turned her back on her marriage vows, argued with his parents and her community,\u00a0cutting the girls off from both. On the contrary, Judith said from the stand, it was her parents-in-law who would not see her or the children until they had returned to the proper way of life, disowned the modern world, including\u00a0social media, and until she kept a home that was kosher by their terms.Mr. Julian Bernstein, reedily tall, like one of the rushes that hid the infant Moses, apologetically\u00a0stooped over court papers, sidelocks stirring \u00a0moodily as his barrister accused his wife of being unable to separate her own needs from the children\u2019s. What she said they needed was whatever she wanted for herself. She was wrenching\u00a0the girls\u00a0away from a warmly secure and familiar environment, disciplined but loving, whose rules and observances provided for every contingency, whose identity\u00a0was clear, its methods proven through the generations, and whose members were generally happier and more fulfilled than those of the secular consumerist world outside\u2014a world that mocked the spiritual life and whose mass culture denigrated\u00a0girls and women. Her ambitions were frivolous, her methods disrespectful, even destructive. She loved her children far less than she loved herself.To which\u00a0Judith\u00a0responded huskily\u00a0that\u00a0nothing\u00a0denigrated a person, boy or girl, more than the denial of a decent education and the dignity of proper work; that all through her childhood and teenage years she had been told that her only purpose in life was to run a nice home for her husband and care for his children\u2014and that too was a denigration of her right to choose a purpose for herself. When she pursued, with great difficulty, her studies at the Open University, she faced ridicule, contempt and anathemas. She had promised herself that the girls would not suffer the same limitations.The opposing barristers were in tactical agreement (because it was plainly the judge\u2019s view) that the issue was not merely a matter of education. The court must choose, on behalf of the children, between total religion and something a little less. Between cultures, identities, states of mind, aspirations, sets of family relations, fundamental definitions, basic loyalties, unknowable futures.In such matters there lurked an innate predisposition in favor of the status quo, as long as it appeared benign. The draft of Fiona\u2019s judgment\u00a0was twenty-one\u00a0pages long, spread in a wide fan facedown on the floor, waiting\u00a0for her to take it up, a sheet at a time, to mark with soft pencil.No sound from the bedroom, nothing but the susurrus of traffic gliding through the rain. She resented the way she waslistening out for him, her attention poised, holding its breath, for the creak of the door or a floorboard. Wanting it,\u00a0 dreading it.Among fellow judges, Fiona Maye was praised, even in her absence, for crisp prose, almost ironic, almost warm, and for the compact terms in which she laid out a dispute. The Lord Chief Justice\u00a0himself was heard to observe of her in a murmured aside at lunch, \u201cGodly distance, devilish understanding, and still\u00a0beautiful.\u201d Her own view was that with each passing year she inclined a little\u00a0more to an exactitude some might have called\u00a0pedantry,\u00a0to the unassailable \u00a0definition that might pass one day into frequent citation, like Hoffmann in Piglowska v. Piglowski , or Bingham or Ward or the indispensable Scarman, all\u00a0of whom she had made use of here. Here being the limp,\u00a0unperused first page hanging from her fingers. Was her life about to change? Were learned friends soon to be murmuring in awe over lunch here, or in Lincoln\u2019s or Inner or Middle Temple, And then she threw him out ? Out of the delightful Gray\u2019s Inn flat, where she would sit alone until at last the rent, or the years, mounting like\u00a0the sullen tidal Thames, swept her out too?Back to her business. Section one: \u201cBackground.\u201d After routine observations about the family\u2019s living arrangements, about residence of the children\u00a0and contact with\u00a0the father, she described in a separate paragraph the Haredi community, and how within it religious practice was a total way of life. The distinction between what was rendered to Caesar and what to God was meaningless, much as it was for observant Muslims. Her pencil hovered. To cast Muslim and Jew as one, might that seem unnecessary or provocative, at least to the father? Only if he was unreasonable, and she thought he was not. Stet.Her second section was entitled\u00a0\u201cMoral differences.\u201d The court was being asked to choose an education for two young girls, to choose between values. And in cases like this one, an appeal to what was generally acceptable in society at large was of little help. It was here she invoked Lord Hoffmann. \u201cThese are value judgments on which reasonable people may differ. Since judges are also people, this means that some degree of diversity in their application of values is inevitable...\u201dOver the page, in her lately developing taste for the patient, exacting digression, Fiona devoted several hundred words to a definition of welfare, and then a consideration of the standards to which such welfare might be held. She followed Lord Hailsham in allowing the term to be inseparable from well-being and to include all that was relevant to a child\u2019s development as a person. She acknowledged Tom Bingham in accepting that she was obliged to take a medium- and long-term view, noting that a child today might well live into the twenty-second century.\u00a0She quoted from an 1893\u00a0judgment by Lord Justice Lindley to the effect that welfare was not to be gauged\u00a0in purely financial terms, or merely by reference to physical comfort. She would take the widest possible view. Welfare, happiness, well-being must embrace the philosophical concept of the good life. She listed some relevant ingredients, goals toward which a child might\u00a0grow. Economic and moral freedom, virtue, compassion and altruism,\u00a0satisfying work through engagement with demanding tasks, a flourishing network of personal relationships, earning the esteem of others, pursuing larger meanings to one\u2019s existence, and having at the center of one\u2019s life one or a small number of significant relations defined above all by love.Yes, by this last essential she herself was failing. The Scotch and water in a tumbler\u00a0at her side was untouched; the sight of its urinous yellow,\u00a0its intrusive \u00a0corky smell, now repelled her. She should be angrier,\u00a0she should be talking\u00a0to an old friend\u2014she had several\u2014she should be striding into the bedroom, demanding to know more. But she felt shrunken to a geometrical point of anxious purpose. Her judgment\u00a0must be ready for printing by tomorrow\u2019s deadline, she must work. Her personal life was nothing. Or should have been. Her attention remained divided between the page in her hand and, fifty feet away, the closed bedroom door. She made herself read a long paragraph, one she had been dubious about the moment she had spoken it aloud in court. But no harm in a robust statement of the obvious. Well-being was social . The intricate web of a child\u2019s relationships with family and friends was the crucial ingredient. No child an island. Man a social animal, in Aristotle\u2019s famous construction. With four hundred words on this theme, she put to sea, with learned references (Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill) filling\u00a0her sails. The kind of civilized reach every good judgment needs.And next, well-being was a mutable concept, to be evaluated by the standards of the reasonable man or woman of today. What sufficed a generation\u00a0ago might now fall short. And again, it was no business of the secular court to decide between religious beliefs or theological differences. All religions were deserving of respect provided they were, in Lord Justice Purchas\u2019s phrase, \u201clegally and socially acceptable\u201d and not, in Lord Justice Scarman\u2019s darker formulation, \u201cimmoral or socially obnoxious.\u201dCourts should be slow to intervene in the interests of the child against the religious principles of the parents. Sometimes they must. But when? In reply, she invoked one of her favorites, wise Lord Justice\u00a0 Munby in the Court of Appeal. \u201cThe infinite variety of the human condition precludes arbitrary definition.\u201d The admirable Shakespearean touch. Nor custom stale her infinite variety. The words derailed her. She knew the speech of Enobarbus by heart, having played him once as a law student, an all-female affair on a lawn in Lincoln\u2019s Inn Fields one sunny midsummer\u2019s afternoon. When the burden of bar exams had recently been lifted from her aching back. Around that time, Jack fell in love with her, and not long after, she with him. Their first lovemaking was in a borrowed attic room that roasted under its roof in the afternoon sun. An unopenable porthole window gave a view east of a slice of Thames toward the Pool of London.She thought of his proposed or actual lover, his statistician, Melanie\u2014she had met her once\u2014a silent young woman with heavy amber beads and a taste for the kind of stilettos that could wreck an old oak floor. Other women cloy / The appetites they\u00a0feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies. It could be just like that, a poisonous obsession, an addiction drawing him away from home, bending him out of shape, consuming all they had of past and future, as well as present. Or Melanie belonged, as Fiona herself clearly did, with \u201cother women,\u201d the ones who cloy, and he would be back within the fortnight, appetite sated, making plans for the family holiday.Either way, unbearable.\u00a0Unbearable and fascinating. And irrelevant. She forced herself back to her pages, to her summary of the evidence from both parties\u2014efficient and drily sympathetic \u00a0enough. Next, her account of the court-appointed social worker\u2019s report. A plump, well-intentioned\u00a0young woman often out of breath, uncombed hair, untucked unbuttoned blouse. Chaotic, twice late for the proceedings, due to some complicated trouble with car keys and documents locked in her car and a child to collect from school. But in place of the usual please-both-parties dither, the Cafcass woman\u2019s account was sensible, even incisive, and Fiona quoted her with approval. Next?She looked up and saw her husband on the other side of the room, pouring another drink, a big one, three fingers, perhaps four. And barefoot now, as he, the bohemian academic, often was indoors in summer. Hence the quiet entrance. Likely he had been lying on the bed,\u00a0regarding for half an hour the lacy ceiling\u00a0moldings, reflecting on her unreasonableness. The hunched tension of the shoulders, the way he returned the stopper\u2014a smack with the heel of his thumb\u2014suggested that he had padded in for an argument. She knew the signs. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 7.66}, {"asin": "0761177256", "title": "Santa!: A Scanimation Picture Book", "author": "Rufus Butler Seder", "description": "About the Author Rufus Butler Seder is an optical genius whose first significant invention was Lifetiles, glass-walled murals that appear to come to life when the viewer walks by. He\u2019s installed them at the Smithsonian, SeaWorld, Union Station, and other museums, aquariums, train stations, and ocean liners around the world. Next came Scanimation, and his company EyeThink, Inc., a business that produces a line of toys and gifts using technologies he\u2019s invented. Mr. Seder lives in Boston, Massachusetts.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Holidays & Celebrations"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.97}, {"asin": "1451681755", "title": "The Light Between Oceans", "author": "M. L. Stedman", "description": "Review \"Irresistible...seductive...a high concept plot that keeps you riveted from the first page.\" \u2014Sara Nelson, O , the Oprah magazine \u201cAn extraordinary and heart-rending book about good people, tragic decisions and the beauty found in each of them.\u201d \u2014Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief \u201cM.L. Stedman\u2019s The Light Between Oceans is a beautiful novel about isolation and courage in the face of enormous loss. It gets into your heart stealthily, until you stop hoping the characters will make different choices and find you can only watch, transfixed, as every conceivable choice becomes an impossible one. I couldn\u2019t look away from the page and then I couldn\u2019t see it, through tears. It\u2019s a stunning debut.\u201d \u2014Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It \u201cM.L. Stedman, a spectacularly sure storyteller, swept me to a remote island nearly a century ago, where a lighthouse keeper and his wife make a choice that shatters many lives, including their own. This is a novel in which justice for one character means another\u2019s tragic loss, and we care desperately for both. Reading The Light Between Oceans is a total-immersion experience, extraordinarily moving.\u201d \u2014Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane and Untold Story \u201cHaunting...Stedman draws the reader into her emotionally complex story right from the beginning, with lush descriptions of this savage and beautiful landscape, and vivid characters with whom we can readily empathize. Hers is a stunning and memorable debut.\u201d \u2014 Booklist , starred review \u201c[Stedman sets] the stage beautifully to allow for a heart-wrenching moral dilemma to play out... Most impressive is the subtle yet profound maturation of Isabel and Tom as characters.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly , starred review \u201cThe miraculous arrival of a child in the life of a barren couple delivers profound love but also the seeds of destruction. Moral dilemmas don\u2019t come more exquisite than the one around which Australian novelist Stedman constructs her debut.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews , starred review \u201cThis heartbreaking debut from M L Stedman is a gem of a book that you'll have trouble putting down\u201d \u2014 Good Housekeeping \u201cThis fine, suspenseful debut explores desperation, morality, and loss, and considers the damaging ways in which we store our private sorrows, and the consequences of such terrible secrets.\u201d \u2014 Martha Stewart Whole Living \u201cAs time passes the harder the decision becomes to undo and the more towering is its impact. This is the story of its terrible consequences. But it is also a description of the extraordinary, sustaining power of a marriage to bind two people together in love, through the most emotionally harrowing circumstances.\u201d \u2014Victoria Moore, The Daily Mail \u201cA love story that is both persuasive and tender\u2026\u201d \u2014Elizabeth Buchan, The Sunday Times (UK) \u201cWhat an extraordinary book this is. Tom, traumatised on the western front, takes a job as lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, 100 miles off the Australian coast between the Indian and Southern oceans, where he hopes that the vast surrounding emptiness will bring him peace. When after three years and as many miscarriages his wife hears a baby's cry and discovers a dead man and a baby in a washed up dinghy, she feels her prayers have been answered. The ensuing tragedy is as inevitable as Hardy at his most doom-laden. And as unforgettable.\u201d \u2014Sue Arnold, Guardian \u201cLyrical\u2026Stedman\u2019s debut signals a career certain to deliver future treasures.\u201d \u2015 People \u201cA beautifully delineated tale of love and loss, right and wrong, and what we will do for the happiness of those most dear.\u201d -- Tova Beiser \u2015 The Boston Globe \u201cElegantly rendered\u2026heart-wrenching\u2026the relationship between Tom and Isabel, in particular, is beautifully drawn.\u201d -- Elysa Gardner \u2015 USA Today Told with the authoritative simplicity of a fable\u2026Stedman\u2019s intricate descriptions of the craggy Australian coastline and her easy mastery of an old-time provincial vernacular are engrossing. As the couple at the lighthouse are drawn into and increasingly tragic set of consequences, these remote, strange lives are rendered immediate and familiar.\u201d \u2015 The New Yorker \u201cSublimely written, poetic in its intensity and frailty\u2026This is a simply beautiful story that deserves the praise and wide audience it\u2019s receiving. A stunning debut from a new voice that I can\u2019t wait to hear again.\u201d -- Karen Brooks, author of Illumination About the Author M.L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London. The Light Between Oceans is her first novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Light Between Oceans Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.2}, {"asin": "0385354282", "title": "The Girl in the Spider's Web: A Lisbeth Salander novel, continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series", "author": "David Lagercrantz", "description": "Review \u201cSalander and Blomkvist have survived the authorship transition intact and are just as compelling as ever . . . Fans of Stieg Larsson\u2019s captivating odd couple of modern detective fiction will not be disappointed.\u201d \u2014Michiko Kakutani, New York Times \u201cRest easy, Lisbeth Salander fans\u2014our punk hacker heroine is in good hands . . . A twisty, bloody thrill ride . . . seamlessly woven together by Lagercrantz\u2014in fact, if you hadn\u2019t seen his name on the book jacket, you\u2019d likely assume it was Larsson\u2019s own handiwork . . . An instant page-turner.\u201d \u2014 USA Today (4 out of 4 stars) \u201cWithout ever becoming pastiche, the book is a respectful and affectionate homage to the originals . . . Lagercrantz\u2019s continuation, while never formulaic, is a cleaner and tighter read than the originals.\u201d \u2014 Guardian \u201cLagercrantz has more than met the challenge. Larsson\u2019s brainchildren are in good hands and may have even come up a bit in the world.\u201d \u2014 Wall Street Journal \u201cWhat of Lisbeth Salander? Given that Lagercrantz knows she\u2019s what readers want, her long and suspenseful introduction is masterful.\u201d \u2014Lee Child, New York Times Book Review (cover) \u201cA worthy, crowd-pleasing fourth installment . . . Lagercrantz, his prose more assured than Larsson\u2019s, keeps Salander\u2019s fiery rage at the white-hot level her fans will want.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred) \u201cLagercrantz does an excellent job . . . Anyone craving more Salander bad-assery should get their hands on a copy of Spider\u2019s Web faster than Lisbeth can hack into the NSA.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cLagercrantz\u2019s real achievement here is the subtle development of Lisbeth\u2019s character; he allows us access to her complex, alienated world but is careful not to remove her mystery and unknowability. Lisbeth Salander remains, in Lagercrantz\u2019s hands, the most enigmatic and fascinating anti-heroine in fiction.\u201d \u2014 Financial Times \u201cLagercrantz deftly blends the spirit of Larsson\u2019s work and characters with his own literary skills and bright imagination. Spider\u2019s Web is an intelligent novel that has Salander entangled in one of the most contentious issues of our times . . . Riveting . . . Pyrotechnic.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cA thrilling next installment . . . In spinning a complex and intriguing new chapter in the adventures of Blomkvist and Salander, Lagercrantz has written a worthy successor to one of the more uniquely compelling thriller sagas of his generation . . . An engrossing novel.\u201d \u2014 Paste \u201cAction-packed and thoroughly enjoyable . . . [A] finely-wrought thriller . . . I will eagerly devour the next adventure for Salander and Blomkvist, especially now that we know their fate lies in the hands of a writer worthy of their story.\u201d \u2014The Daily Beast \u201cLagercrantz stays true to Larsson\u2019s vision . . . No doubt about it, Lagercrantz has done a skillful job.\u201d \u2014 Sydney Morning Herald \u201c[A] smart, action-packed thriller that is true to the spirit of the characters Larsson created while adding interesting new ones and updating the political backdrop that made the Millennium series so compelling.\u201d \u2014 Buffalo News \u201cFans of the original trilogy will be pleased with Lagercrantz\u2019s new installment. The novel is a smart, propulsive thriller and espionage tale with a timely digital age plot (think Snowden and Wikileaks).\u201d \u2014 Hollywood Reporter \u201cPassion and fire, check: there are plenty of both here . . . Fast-moving, credible, and intelligently told. Larsson fans won\u2019t be disappointed.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cLagercrantz pulls it off . . . One devours Larsson\u2019s books for the plots, the action, the anger, and most of all for Lisbeth Salander, a character who resembles Sherlock Holmes or James Bond . . . Lagercrantz has caught her superbly.\u201d \u2014 Daily Telegraph (UK) \u201cDavid Lagercrantz was set an almost impossible task by Stieg Larsson\u2019s estate when they asked him to write a \u2018continuation\u2019 novel featuring Lisbeth Salander. He has carried it out with intelligence and vigour. The Girl in the Spider\u2019s Web conveys the essence and atmosphere of Larsson\u2019s Millennium novels. He has captured the spirit of their characters and devised inventive plots.\u201d \u2014 The Times (UK) \u201cFans of the original trilogy need not fear . . . The novel is well-researched and more intelligent than the average thriller.\u201d \u2014 The Independent (UK) \u201cLagercrantz makes sensible decisions in this fourth volume . . . . Blomkvist is given a cleverly and very contemporary storyline . . . A worthwhile read for anyone who\u2019s zipped through the trilogy and finished wanting more.\u201d \u2014 Daily Express (UK) \u201cSometimes you almost forget that the spine of the book says David Lagercrantz and not Stieg Larsson . . . There is definitely the same narrative zest and love of intrigue, and also the impressive research . . . Lagercrantz has written a thriller that is captivating in its own right.\u201d \u2014 Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) \u201cA real page turner.\u201d \u2014Bor\u00e5s Tidning (Sweden) \u201cLagercrantz has studied the first three parts of the series well, and the reader will recognize not only their Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander and the social criticism, but also other essential parts of the story\u2019s DNA . . . David Lagercrantz has proven that he deserves both attention and respect. \u201d \u2014 Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) \u201cAn excellent thriller . . . elegantly constructed.\u201d \u2014 Stern (Germany) About the Author DAVID LAGERCRANTZ is an acclaimed Swedish journalist and author. He has worked as a crime reporter for Expressen, and has written several novels, including the forthcoming Fall of Man in Wilmslow . He worked with international soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovi\u0107 on his memoir, I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovi\u0107, which was short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award and was nominated for the August Prize in Sweden.www.stieglarsson.net Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Wrange tried to concentrate on the game, but he was not managing too well. Fortunately this punk girl was going to be easy pickings. She wasn\u2019t bad, as it turned out\u2014she probably spent a lot of time playing\u2014but what good was that? He toyed with her a little, and she was bound to be impressed. Who knows, maybe he could even get her to come home with him after- wards. True, she looked stroppy, and Wrange did not go in for stroppy girls, but she had nice tits and he might be able to take out his frustrations on her. It had been a disaster of a morning.  \u00a0 It wasn\u2019t grief that he felt: it was fear. Wrange really did try hard to convince himself that he had done the right thing. What did the goddamn professor expect when he treated him as if he didn\u2019t exist? But of course it wouldn\u2019t look good that Wrange had sold him down the river. He consoled himself with the thought that an idiot like Balder must have made thou- sands of enemies, but deep down he knew: the one event was linked to the other, and that scared him to death. \u00a0 Ever since Balder had started working at Solifon, Wrange had been afraid that the drama would take a frightening new turn, and here he was now, wishing that it would all go away. That must have been why he went into town this morning on a compulsive spree to buy a load of designer clothes, and had ended up here at the chess club. Chess still managed to distract him, and the fact was that he was feeling better already. He felt like he was in control and smart enough to keep on fooling them all. Look at how he was playing. \u00a0 This girl was not half bad. In fact there was something unorthodox and creative in her play, and she would probably be able to teach most people in here a thing or two. It was just that he, Arvid Wrange, was crushing her. His play was so brilliant and sophisticated that she had not even noticed he was on the brink of trapping her queen. Stealthily he moved his positions forward and\u00a0 snapped it up\u00a0 without sacrificing more than a knight. In a flirty, casual tone bound to impress her he said, \u201cSorry, baby. Your queen is down.\u201d \u00a0 But he got nothing in return, no smile, not a word, nothing. The girl upped the tempo, as if she wanted to put a quick end to her humiliation, and why not? He\u2019d be happy to keep the process short and take her out for two or three drinks before he pulled her. Maybe he would not be very nice to her in bed. The chances were that she would still thank him afterwards. A miserable cunt like her would be unlikely to have had a fuck for a long time and would be totally unused to guys like him, cool guys who played at this level. He decided to show off a bit and explain some higher chess theory. But he never got the chance. Something on the board did not feel quite right. His game began to run into some sort of resistance he could not understand. For a while he persuaded himself that it was only his imagination, perhaps the result of a few careless moves. If only he concentrated he would be able to put things right, and so he mobilized his killer instinct. \u00a0 But the situation just got worse. \u00a0 He felt trapped\u2014however hard he tried to regain the initiative she hit back\u2014and in the end he had no choice but to acknowledge that the balance of power had shifted, and shifted irreversibly. How crazy was that? He had taken her queen, but instead of building on that advantage he had landed in a fatally weak position. Surely she had not deliberately sacrificed her queen so early in the game? That would be impossible\u2014the sort of thing you read about in books, it doesn\u2019t happen in your local chess club in Vasastan, and it\u2019s definitely not something that pierced punk chicks with attitude problems do, especially not to great players like him. Yet there was no escape. \u00a0 In four or five moves he would be beaten and so he saw no alternative but to knock over his king with his index finger and mumble congratulations. Even though he would have liked to serve up some excuses, some- thing told him that that would make matters worse. He had a sneaking feeling that his defeat was not just down to bad luck, and almost against his will he began to feel frightened again. Who the hell was she? Cautiously he looked her in the eye and now she no longer looked like a stroppy, insecure nobody. Now she seemed cold\u2014like a predator eyeing its prey. He felt deeply ill at ease, as if the defeat on the chessboard were but a prelude to something much, much worse. He glanced towards the door. \u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re not going anywhere,\u201d she said.  \u201cWho are you?\u201d he said. \u201cNobody special.\u201d \u201cSo we haven\u2019t met before?\u201d  \u201cNot exactly.\u201d \u201cBut nearly, is that it?\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve met in your nightmares, Arvid.\u201d  \u201cIs this some kind of joke?\u201d \u201cNot really.\u201d \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d \u201cWhat do you think I mean? \u201cHow should I know?\u201d \u00a0 He could not understand why he was so scared. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 13.86}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1624140572", "title": "101 Kids Activities That Are the Bestest, Funnest Ever!: The Entertainment Solution for Parents, Relatives & Babysitters!", "author": "Holly Homer", "description": "Review \u201cYou don't have to spend a fortune at 'Toys R Them' just because your kids say they're bored. In 101 Kids Activities, Holly and Rachel give you a ton of great, free or cheap ideas to keep your children entertained year-round.\u201d \u2015 Dave Ramsey, New York Times bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio show host \u201c 101 Kids Activities is a must-have for moms and dads everywhere!\u201d \u2015 Melissa Bourbon Ramirez, bestselling author of A Magical Dressmaking mystery series \u201cI've come to rely on Holly and Rachel to continually produce simple and creative activities that really engage kids of all ages. Their blog has long been bookmarked as a go-to resource for me, and I can't wait to add their new book to our shelves!\u201d \u2015 Stephanie Morgan, founder of Modern Parents Messy Kids \u201cFrom fun math to learning to use scissors to making crazy sticky crafts to engaging in detective games, this book has it all. I can read it and know that my kids will have a zillion ways to keep busy while still learning!\u201d \u2015 Kimberly Clayton Blaine, MA, MFT, licensed family therapist, executive producer of TheGoToMom.TV \u201c 101 Kids Activities is a wonderful resource that will make you the coolest parent on the block.\u201d \u2015 Cindy Hopper, founder of the blog Skip to My Lou From the Back Cover Never again will you hear the all-too-common call of, I'm bored! with this kid-pleaser for many ages. Whether your kid is 3, 5 or 12-years old it's hard to keep them entertained all day, or even for a few hours. But now, when they ask to watch television because they're bored, you'll have the perfect solution with this book. 101 Kids Activities That Are the Bestest, Funnest Ever! has time-tested, exciting activities to keep your children laughing and learning for hours. Holly Homer and Rachel Miller are the women behind the wildly popular site KidsActivitiesBlog.com, which has over 12,000 subscribers, 102,000 Pinterest followers, 49,000 Facebook likes and 20,000 Twitter followers. Activities range from catapult competitions and spray bottle freeze tag to how to make tissue box monster shoes and melted crayon fabric art. And with outdoor and indoor activities and tips for adjusting according to your child's age, you'll have hours and hours of never-ending fun with your family. This parenting life raft is the perfect way to spend enjoyable quality-time with your kids, no matter their age. About the Author Holly Homer and Rachel Miller are the women behind KidsActivitiesBlog.com, which gets more than 2 million hits a month. They are on the \"20 Must-Follow Moms\" list on Pinterest. They live in Fort Worth, Texas. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.59}, {"asin": "1847512941", "title": "Redback (A John Marquez Mystery, 4)", "author": "Kirk Russell", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.78}, {"asin": "B07HGP8T1L", "title": "Claire (Ghosts in the Burbs Book 1)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "030020471X", "title": "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Frederick Douglass (1818\u20131895) was an African American abolitionist and social reformer, author, orator, and statesman. John R. McKivigan is Mary O\u2019Brien Gibson Professor of History at Indiana University\u2013Purdue University, Indianapolis. Peter P. Hinks is a well-published author of scholarly monographs and documentary volumes. Heather L. Kaufman is a research associate of the Douglass Papers.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.95}], "target_asin": "1624140572"}
{"user_id": "AG52YDD3Q2MLDHBZWOPBJ3KXIUYQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0793574285", "title": "Favorite Hymns for Easy Guitar", "author": "Hal Leonard", "description": "About the Author Founded in 1947, Hal Leonard LLC has become the worlds largest source of music performance and instructional materials, with a catalog of over a million products in both physical and digital form. They represent many of the greatest songwriters and artists of all time and publish and distribute works from all genres of music for all styles of musicians and ensembles.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1848712634", "title": "Discovering God's Will", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson is a Ligonier teaching fellow, a trustee with the Banner of Truth Trust and distinguished visiting professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. He previously served as the senior minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., and he has written more than two dozen books, including Some Pastors and Teachers, Devoted to God's Church, and Maturity.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0793562023", "title": "ABC Keyboard Stickers", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Founded in 1947, Hal Leonard LLC has become the worlds largest source of music performance and instructional materials, with a catalog of over a million products in both physical and digital form. They represent many of the greatest songwriters and artists of all time and publish and distribute works from all genres of music for all styles of musicians and ensembles.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 3.5}, {"asin": "1596386347", "title": "Is Jesus in the Old Testament? (Basics of the Faith)", "author": "Iain M. Duguid", "description": "Review If reading the first two-thirds of your Bible feels like wandering through a foreign country, Iain Duguid's \"Is Jesus in the Old Testament?\" offers hope. Not only does he demonstrate that the Old Testament is all about Jesus. He shows how the ancient scriptures' promises and longings find fulfillment in your Savior as the new Adam, new Israel, and new David. This booklet will enrich your appreciation of the events and words by which God forecasted Christ's redemptive mission before his arrival, and will deepen your faith and wonder. -- Dennis E. Johnson, Ph.D., Professor of Practical Theology, Westminster Seminary California About the Author Iain M. Duguid (PhD, University of Cambridge) is professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has written numerous works of biblical exposition, including Esther & Ruth in the Reformed Expository Commentary series, Ezekiel in the NIV Application Commentary series, and Numbers in the Preaching the Word series.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Bible Study & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1598564366", "title": "Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible: New Modern Edition [6 volume - Set]", "author": "Matthew Henry", "description": "About the Author Matthew Henry (1662-1714) has been known and loved for three centuries for his devotional commentary on the Bible. It has not been generally known that he was also a distinguished preacher. He began preaching at twenty-four years old and held pastorates until his death. The greatness of his sermons consists in their scriptural content, lucid presentation, practical application, and Christ-centeredness.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "World"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 104.93}, {"asin": "0692797076", "title": "Roam (Coming of Age stand-alone Thrillers)", "author": "Erik Therme", "description": "From the Author IF SHE LIVES: Harlow #3 IF SHE LIVES: Harlow #3 IF SHE WAKES: Harlow #2 IF SHE WAKES: Harlow #2 IF SHE DIES: Harlow #1 IF SHE DIES: Harlow #1 I KNOW YOU: Psychological Thriller I KNOW YOU: Psychological Thriller KEEP HER CLOSE: Crime Thriller KEEP HER CLOSE: Crime Thriller ROAM: Suspense ROAM: Suspense RESTHAVEN: YA Suspense RESTHAVEN: YA Suspense MORTOM: Mystery MORTOM: Mystery About the Author Erik Therme has thrashed in garage bands, inadvertently harbored runaways, and met Darth Vader. When he's not at his computer, he can be found cheering on his youngest daughter's volleyball team, or watching horror movies with his oldest. He currently resides in Iowa City, Iowa--one of only twenty-eight places in the world that UNESCO has certified as a City of Literature. Join Erik's mailing list to be notified of new releases and author giveaways: eepurl.com/cD1F8L", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0995203601", "title": "Head Covering: A Forgotten Christian Practice for Modern Times", "author": "Jeremy Gardiner", "description": "Review Jeremy Gardiner has written a thoughtful and helpful argument from Scripture and church history for women to cover their heads in worship. This book deserves a fair hearing from all who desire to obey God's Word in whatever it teaches.- Dr. Joel Beeke , president of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary Jeremy Gardiner's book gently, respectfully, and accurately addresses all of the questions I had as I grappled with the passage in 1 Corinthians 11 on head covering. I appreciate his careful and thorough exegesis of the passage and his willingness to tackle all of the current objections and alternate views on the subject. I wish I had this resource decades ago.- April Cassidy , author of The Peaceful Wife: Living in Submission to Christ as Lord If you are interested in studying what the Bible teaches on the head covering issue, this excellent book will serve as a helpful resource for you. \u00a0In this book, Jeremy provides extensive interactions with the text of Scripture, coupled with relevant considerations from church history and recent cultural developments in the West; and these interactions are presented in a way that is earnest and humble and largely accessible to the average reader. I encourage you to approach this book with a humble pre-commitment to follow whatever you learn that the Bible actually teaches on the subjects addressed. If you approach this book with such a posture, I know that you will find much help from God on these pages.- Milton Vincent , author of A Gospel Primer for Christians and pastor of Cornerstone Fellowship Bible Church Jeremy Gardiner has done the church good service in calling us back to the obedience of God's Word our parents and grandparents rejected a century ago. Gardiner gives a clear explanation of the Scriptural command, going on to treat with accuracy and kindness the many objections moderns have raised.- Tim Bayly , former executive director of The Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood and author of Daddy Tried I started wearing a head covering (in a church that does not wear head coverings) a few years ago. I felt challenged to put the word of God above the word of man at every turn, and to resist relativizing its teachings according to my own culture -- even my Christian culture. I commend the courage of Jeremy Gardiner in standing for the whole counsel of God.- Andr\u00e9e Seu Peterson , senior writer at WORLD Magazine This book is more important than you might think. I've come to understand that this \"small\" issue of Christian head covering is nothing of the sort. Not only is the Church's ability to faithfully exegete the Sacred Text at stake, but as we look at culture, we also see the systematic loss of what the symbol represents. Jeremy has done a great service for the Body of Christ by helping to resurrect the LORD's commands for His own worship. May the LORD forgive us for thinking we know better.\u00a0- Dr. Carlton C. McLeod , senior pastor of Calvary Revival Church Chesapeake and founder of D6 Reformation About the Author Jeremy Gardiner is the founder of the Head Covering Movement , a ministry focused on restoring the symbol of head covering during church gatherings. He is also the founder and operator of Gospel e-Books , a popular website that provides alerts for free and discounted Christian e-books. Jeremy lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with his wife and four children. They are active members at Fellowship Baptist Church .", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "1935670271", "title": "Wish List: a Donovan Creed Novel", "author": "John Locke", "description": "About the Author John Locke is the international best-selling author of seven Donovan Creed novels, all of which have made the Amazon/Kindle Top 20 Best Seller's List! Saving Rachel held the #1 spot for more than three weeks and remains one of the all-time best selling ebooks in history! Locke has had four books in the Top 10 at the same time, and six in the\u00a0Top 20! His Emmett Love western, Follow the Stone, has been\u00a0ranked #1 Western\u00a0since the first week after release. John lives in Kentucky, where he is working on his second Emmett Love Western, Don't Poke the Bear! Every 7 seconds, 24 hours a day, a John Locke novel is downloaded somewhere in the world!", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 9.99}], "target_asin": "1598564366"}
{"user_id": "AGOLR3TFFRAH57PR2JY2ORERAOFA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00WR12MEC", "title": "What She Knew: A Novel", "author": "Gilly Macmillan", "description": "From the Back Cover Rachel Jenner is walking in a Bristol park with her eight-year-old son, Ben, when he asks if he can run ahead. It\u2019s an ordinary request on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and Rachel has no reason to worry\u2014until Ben vanishes. The police are called, search parties go out, and Rachel, already insecure after her recent divorce, feels herself coming undone. As hours and then days pass without a sign of Ben, everyone who knew him is called into question, from Rachel\u2019s newly married ex-husband to her mother-of-the-year sister. Inevitably, media attention focuses on Rachel too, and the public\u2019s attitude toward her begins to shift from sympathy to suspicion. As she desperately pieces together the threadbare clues, Rachel realizes that nothing is quite as she imagined it to be, not even her own judgment. And the greatest dangers may lie not in the anonymous strangers of every parent\u2019s nightmares, but behind the familiar smiles of those she trusts the most. Where is Ben? The clock is ticking . . . .\u00a0 \u201cTightly focused and fast-paced. You won\u2019t rest until you really know what happened.\u201d\u2014Lisa Ballantyne, author of The Guilty One \u201cEvery parent\u2019s nightmare. . . deceptively clever.\u201d\u2014Rosamund Lupton, author of Sister \u201cCompletely addictive. A nail-biting, sleep-depriving, brilliant read.\u201d \u2014Saskia Sarginson, author of The Twins --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Gilly Macmillan is the internationally bestselling\u00a0author of What She Knew , The Perfect Girl , Odd Child Out , I Know You Know , and The Nanny. She resides in Bristol, England. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cGilly Macmillan introduces some smart variations on the [missing child] theme in her debut mystery...Macmillan enlivens the narrative with emails, newspaper headlines, passages from professional journals, even transcripts from Inspector Clemo\u2019s sessions with a psychotherapist. But her best move is to include vicious blog posts that go viral.\u201d ( New York Times Book Review )\u201cThis accomplished, intelligent debut should come with a warning--it\u2019s completely addictive. A nail-biting, sleep-depriving, brilliant read.\u201d (Saskia Sarginson, author of The Twins )\u201cEvery parent\u2019s nightmare, handled with intelligence and sensitivity, the novel is also deceptively clever. I found myself racing through to find out what happened.\u201d (Rosamund Lupton, international bestselling author of Sister )\u201cTightly focused and fast-paced. You won\u2019t rest until you really know what happened.\u201d (Lisa Ballantyne, author of The Guilty One )\u201cA nuanced, completely addictive debut.\u201d ( People )\u201cHeart-in-the-mouth excitement from the start of this electrifyingly good debut\u2026an absolute firecracker of a thriller that convinces and captivates from the word go. A must read.\u201d ( Sunday Mirror )\u201cA mother and son spend an ordinary Sunday at a park near Londontown. Until the boy goes missing. Cue dramatic music. This read\u2019s basically The Changeling meets an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit but set in the UK.\u201d (The Skimm)\u201cWhat an amazing, gripping, beautifully written debut. WHAT SHE KNEW kept me up late into the night (and scared the life out of me).\u201d (Liane Moriarty, New York Times bestselling author)\u201cOne of the brightest debuts I have read this year - a visceral, emotionally charged story\u2026.heart-wrenchingly well told and expertly constructed, this deserves to stay on the bestseller list until Christmas\u201d (The Daily Mail)\u201cA terrific debut\u201d (Reader's Digest) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap Rachel Jenner is walking in a Bristol park with her eight-year-old son, Ben, when he asks if he can run ahead. It's an ordinary request on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and Rachel has no reason to worry--until Ben vanishes. The police are called, search parties go out, and Rachel, already insecure after her recent divorce, feels herself coming undone. As hours and then days pass without a sign of Ben, everyone who knew him is called into question, from Rachel's newly married ex-husband to her mother-of-the-year sister. Inevitably, media attention focuses on Rachel too, and the public's attitude toward her begins to shift from sympathy to suspicion. As she desperately pieces together the threadbare clues, Rachel realizes that nothing is quite as she imagined it to be, not even her own judgment. And the greatest dangers may lie not in the anonymous strangers of every parent's nightmares, but behind the familiar smiles of those she trusts the most. Where is Ben? The clock is ticking. . . . --Saskia Sarginson, author of The Twins --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "0307381374", "title": "Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes from My Family to Yours: A Cookbook", "author": "Beth Berman", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Grammy Award\u2013winning country singer Trisha Yearwood throws her hat into the celebrity cookbook ring with this cheerful if uninspired collection of home-style Southern recipes. Among family and friends, Yearwood is known for her cooking, she writes, and a foreword by her husband and fellow singer, Garth Brooks, explains that Yearwood's secret is that she cooks with love, a technique not fully explored in this book. Aimed at the kitchen beginner, the book presents a list of necessary equipment and hints on substitutions, like making confectioner's sugar from granulated sugar, and is sprinkled throughout with helpful notes from Yearwood and her mother and sister\u2014both of whom are co-writers. International stardom clearly hasn't dampened Yearwood's enthusiasm for down-home treats like Pimento Cheese Spread, Hashbrown Casserole, and Cranberry Salad with Cool Whip, Cream Cheese and Gelatin. Her family members make frequent appearances in the many color photographs and in the form of favorite dishes like Jack's Brunswick Stew and Gwen's Fried Chicken with Milk Gravy. Yearwood is an advocate for no-fuss, simple cooking with plenty of supermarket shortcuts, and this volume will most appeal to fans who want to get a little closer to Yearwood and Brooks (like a chance to recreate the celebs' wedding cake at home). (Apr.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author TRISHA YEARWOOD started off her recording career as a receptionist at MTM Records and has since had nine number one songs, ten albums, four Gold Record winners, four Platinum Awards, a Double Platinum seller, and a Quadruple Platinum blockbuster. She won back-to-back Country Music Awards as Female Vocalist of the Year in 1997 and 1998 and has been honored with three Grammy Awards. In 2005, Trisha married superstar Garth Brooks, and they currently reside in Oklahoma. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Potato Salad Serves 12 When it comes to potato salad, you like what you like. This recipe is mayonnaise-based, but if you like a mustard-based potato salad, just experiment a little. Add some yellow mustard and leave out a little bit of the mayonnaise. Make these recipes your own by finding out what works for you. Our traditional potato salad uses peeled potatoes, but unpeeled work too, and the skins add some color to your dish. 5 pounds red potatoes, peeled and cut in 1/2-inch \u00adcubes 2 teaspoons salt, plus more to \u00adtaste 4 hard\u00ad-\u00adboiled eggs, peeled, and \u00addiced 3/4 cup \u00admayonnaise 1/2 cup sweet pickle \u00adrelish Black \u00adpepper Place the potatoes in a medium saucepan or pressure cooker (see Note). Add 2 teaspoons salt and enough water to cover the potatoes. Boil the potatoes for 30 minutes, or until they are tender when pierced with the point of a knife but hold their shape. Drain the potatoes, transfer them to a large mixing bowl, and allow them to cool completely. Add the chopped eggs, mayonnaise, and sweet relish, and fold gently to combine. Add salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerate until ready to serve.  From Gwen: Don\u2019t overcook the potatoes. They should hold their shape during mixing. Note: The potatoes may be cooked in a pressure cooker. Sprinkle salt over the potatoes. Follow the manufacturer\u2019s instructions and pressure-cook for 5 minutes. Release the pressure immediately and drain and cool the potatoes. Sweet Potato Souffl\u00e9 Serves 8This is a nice variation on regular sweet potatoes for a Thanksgiving side dish. It's almost a dessert, it's so sweet!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a05 medium sweet potatoes (about 9 ounces each) \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a02 large eggs \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a01 cup granulated sugar \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a01 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, at room temperature \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a01/2 teaspoons vanilla extract \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a01/2 cup milk \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0Pinch of salt Topping \u2022\u00a01 cup finely chopped pecans \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a01 cup brown sugar, packed \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a01/3 cup all-purpose flour \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a01/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, softened 1. Preheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Grease a 2 1/2-quart baking dish with butter. On a foil-covered baking sheet, bake the sweet potatoes for 1 hour, or until they are soft. When cool enough to handle, peel the potatoes, place the flesh in a large mixing bowl, and mash until very smooth. Add the eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla, milk, and salt. Combine well with an electric mixer or hand mixer. Turn the mixture into the baking dish. 2. In a medium bowl, stir together the pecans, brown sugar, flour, and butter until thoroughly combined. Spoon the mixture over the sweet potatoes, making an even layer. Bake the casserole for 30 minutes, or until slightly browned. Let the casserole sit for 5 minutes before serving. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 28.99}, {"asin": "B00MYJHH56", "title": "House Cleaning Package", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0307465233", "title": "Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood: Stories and Recipes to Share with Family and Friends: A Cookbook", "author": "Trisha Yearwood", "description": "Amazon.com Review Recipe from Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood : Chicken Pizza serves 12 to 14 Ingredients 2 13.8-ounce cans premade pizza crust dough 4 tablespoons olive oil 2 teaspoons minced garlic 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (about 8 ounces) 2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese (about 8 ounces) 1 bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into strips 1 red onion, sliced vertically 3 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, grilled and diced 6 slices bacon, cooked until crisp and crumbled Preheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Roll the pizza dough out and fit onto two 15-inch pizza pans. Drizzle 1 tablespoon of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of garlic on each pizza crust, followed by 1/2 cup each of the mozzarella cheese and 1/2 cup of the Cheddar cheese. Scatter half of the bell pepper, sliced onion, chicken, and bacon on top of the cheeses. Sprinkle another 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese and 1/2 cup Cheddar cheese over each pizza and drizzle each pizza with 1 tablespoon more of olive oil. Bake the pizzas for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the crusts are lightly browned. Slice each pizza into 8 pieces. From Publishers Weekly Singer Trisha Yearwood has found another way to reach her audience\u2014with this follow-up to her successful Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen , she serves up more homey, Southern-inflected fare from her country music kitchen. And this newest is every pinch of salt the sequel\u2014from the foreword by her husband, Garth Brooks, and her intimate personal anecdotes to the recipes donated by family and friends (her grandmother's strawberry cake; Brooks's mother's cabbage rolls, her mama's homemade waffles). Yearwood jumps off with some helpful hints, such as the importance of fresh-shredded cheese and how to use scissors to release a stubborn piecrust. The meat of the book is rib-sticking classics for both special occasions and weeknights, like sweet potato pudding, jalape\u00f1o hushpuppies, and a Lowcountry boil. Yearwood's ingredients are not for the faint of heart or high of cholesterol (Garth's Breakfast Bowl, for example is a mix of eggs, frozen tater tots, sausage, bacon, and packaged cheese and garlic tortellini). But Yearwood's enthusiasm and warmth come through, particularly in the handwritten notes at the bottom of the pages. Photos. (Apr.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author TRISHA YEARWOOD is a three-time Grammy-award winning country music star and the author of the bestselling cookbook Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen. She is married to megastar Garth Brooks. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. chicken pizza serves 12 to 14\u00a02 13.8-ounce cans premade pizza crust dough4 tablespoons olive oil2 teaspoons minced garlic2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (about 8 ounces)2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese (about 8 ounces)1 bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into strips1 red onion, sliced vertically3 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, grilled and diced6 slices bacon, cooked until crisp and crumbled Preheat the oven to 350\u00b0F.Roll the pizza dough out and fit onto two 15-inch pizza pans. Drizzle 1 tablespoon of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of garlic on each pizza crust, followed by\u00a01/2 cup each of the mozzarella cheese and\u00a01/2 cup of the Cheddar cheese. Scatter half of the bell pepper, sliced onion, chicken, and bacon on top of the cheeses. Sprinkle another 1/2\u00a0cup mozzarella cheese and\u00a01/2 cup Cheddar cheese over each pizza and drizzle each pizza with 1 tablespoon more of olive oil. Bake the pizzas for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the crusts are lightly browned. Slice each pizza into 8 pieces. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1728231434", "title": "2022 National Park Foundation Wall Calendar: 12-Month Nature Calendar & Photography Collection (Monthly Calendar)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Nature & Ecology"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.24}, {"asin": "0385338163", "title": "The Book of Bright Ideas: A Novel", "author": "Sandra Kring", "description": "About the Author Sandra Kring lives in Wisconsin. Her debut novel, Carry Me Home , was a BookSense Notable Pick and a 2005 Midwest Booksellers\u2019 Choice Award nominee. The Book of Bright Ideas was a 2006 Target Bookmarked\u2122 selection and was named to the New York Public Library\u2019s Books for the Teen Age list in 2007. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One I should have known that summer of 1961 was gonna be the biggest summer of our lives. I should have known it the minute I saw Freeda Malone step out of that pickup, her hair lit up in the sun like hot flames. I should have known it, because Uncle Rudy told me what happens when a wildfire comes along. We were standing in his yard, Uncle Rudy and I, at the foot of a red pine that seemed to stretch to heaven, when a squirrel began knocking pinecones to the ground with soft thuds. Uncle Rudy bent over with a grunt and picked one of the green cones up, rolling it a bit in his callused palm before handing it to me. It was cool in my hands. Sap dripped down the side like tears. \u201cHere\u2019s somethin\u2019 I bet you don\u2019t know, Button,\u201d he said, using the nickname he himself gave me. \u201cThat cone there, it ain\u2019t like the cones of most other trees. Most cones, all they need is time, or a squirrel to crack \u2019em open so they can drop their seeds and start a new tree. But that cone there, it ain\u2019t gonna open up and drop its seeds unless a wildfire comes through here.\u201d \u201cA wildfire?\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d Uncle Rudy said, scraping the scalp under his cap with his dirty fingernail. \u201cSee them little scales there, how they\u2019re closed up tight like window shutters? Under- neath \u2019em are the seeds\u2014flat little things, flimsy as a baby\u2019s fingernails\u2014with a point at one end. If a fire comes along, the heat is gonna cause those scales to peel back and drop their seeds, while the ground is still scorching hot. Then that tiny seed is gonna burrow in and take root.\u201d I was nine years old the summer Freeda and Winnalee Malone rushed across our lives like red-hot flames, peeling back the shutters that sat over our hearts and our minds, setting free our sweetest dreams and our worst nightmares. Too young to know at the onset that anything out of the ordinary was about to happen. I was sitting on my knees behind the counter at The Corner Store playing with my new Barbie doll, her tiny outfits lined up on the scuffed linoleum. It was the first day of summer vacation, and Aunt Verdella was watching me because my ma was working for Dr. Wagner, the dentist, taking appointments and sending out bills and stuff like that. Aunt Verdella didn\u2019t work, like my ma, but she\u2019d been filling in at the store for Ada Smithy (who was having a recuperation from an opera- tion, because she\u2019d had some ladies\u2019 troubles). It was Aunt Verdella\u2019s last day, then Ada was coming back, and we could stay at Aunt Verdella\u2019s while she looked after me. Aunt Verdella was standing next to me, the hem of her dress like a blue umbrella above me. She was talking to Fanny Tilman about Ada, and Aunt Verdella\u2019s voice sounded almost like it was crying when she said, \u201cSuch a pity, such a pity,\u201d and Fanny Tilman asked her what the pity was for, anyway. \u201cAda\u2019s well past her prime, so seems to me that not getting the curse from here on out should be more of a blessing than a pity,\u201d she said, and Aunt Verdella said, \u201cBut still . . .\u201d While they talked, I was trying to get Barbie\u2019s tweed jacket on, which wasn\u2019t easy because her elbows didn\u2019t bend, and that tiny hand of hers kept snagging on the sleeve. While I was tugging, I was itching. I was looking at the little clothes spread out and trying hard to remember if she was supposed to wear the red jacket with the brown skirt or the green skirt. I cleared my throat a few times, like I always did when I didn\u2019t know what I was supposed to do next, and Aunt Verdella looked down at me. \u201cButton, you\u2019re doin\u2019 that thing with your throat again. What\u2019s the matter, honey?\u201d Aunt Verdella\u2019s voice was loud, so loud that sometimes it pained my ears when she wasn\u2019t even yelling, and her body always reminded me of a snowman made with two balls instead of three. The littlest ball was her head, sitting right on top of one big, fat ball. I stood up. My knees felt gritty and I glanced down at them, hoping they weren\u2019t getting too dirty, because I knew Ma\u2019s lips were gonna pull so tight they\u2019d turn white, like they always did when Aunt Verdella brought me home looking all grubby. \u201cI can\u2019t get her jacket on,\u201d I said. I handed Aunt Verdella my Barbie, the tweed jacket flapping at her back. Aunt Verdella laughed as she took it. Fanny Tilman peered at me, her puffy eyes puckering. \u201cIs that Reece and Jewel\u2019s little one?\u201d she said, like Aunt Verdella could hear her but I couldn\u2019t. I put my head down and stared at a gouge in the gray countertop. \u201cYep, this is our Button,\u201d Aunt Verdella said. She wrapped her freckly arm\u2014stick-skinny like her legs\u2014around me and pulled me to her biggest ball. It was soft and warm, not snowman-cold at all. \u201cShe looks like Jewel,\u201d Mrs. Tilman said, and she sounded a bit sorry about this. I saw her looking at my ears, which were too big for my head, and the face she made made me feel smaller than I already was. Aunt Verdella thought that long hair would hide my ears until I grew into them, but Ma said long hair was too much work to keep neat and she already had enough to do. Every couple of months, she\u2019d snip it short, thin it with those scissors that have missing teeth, then curl it with a Tony perm. When she was done, my hair was bunched up in ten or eleven little pale brown knots. I wanted hair long enough to hang loose past my shoulders and cover my ears when I was around people, and to put up in a ponytail that swished my back when I wasn\u2019t. But, shoot, I knew I\u2019d never have anything but those stubby knots. Aunt Verdella finished dressing Barbie, then handed her to me. I stood there a minute, wanting to ask her which skirt matched, but I didn\u2019t want to talk with Fanny Tilman still looking at me, so I sat back down on the linoleum and stared at the two skirts some more. Aunt Verdella had the door propped open with a big rock, because it was nice outside and the store was too hot with the sun beating through the windows. I was staring at the doll clothes when the sound of metal scraping on pavement filled the store. \u201cUh-oh, somebody\u2019s losing their muffler,\u201d Aunt Verdella said. The racket from the scraping muffler got louder and sharper before it came to a stop. Aunt Verdella got up on her tiptoes, the tops of her white shoes making folds like Uncle Rudy\u2019s forehead did when she brought home a whole trunkload of junk from the community sale. \u201cGood Lord, look what the cat\u2019s drug into town now,\u201d Fanny Tilman said. \u201cJust what we need, a band of gypsies.\u201d \u201cOh, Fanny!\u201d Aunt Verdella said. I heard a door creak open, then slam shut. A lady\u2019s voice started talking, but I couldn\u2019t make out what it was saying. I heard some banging and then, \u201cJesus H. Christ! Is anybody gonna come pump my gas or not?\u201d Folks who got gas at The Corner Store pumped their own gas, except for a couple of old ladies and the outsiders. Aunt Verdella called out, \u201cI\u2019ll be right there, dear!\u201d \u201cExcuse me, Button,\u201d she said as she stepped over me and hurried around the counter. I put my fingertips on the counter and pulled myself up to take a peek. Mrs. Tilman was standing in the open doorway, her purse clutched in her arms like she thought the \u201cgypsies\u201d were going to try swiping it. She was busy gawking, so I stood all the way up and peeked out between the handmade signs Scotch-taped to the window. The bed of the red pickup truck at the pumps, and the wagon towed behind it, were piled high with junky furniture I knew didn\u2019t match and boxes stuffed with bunched-up clothes and dishes that spilled out over the tops. My eyes almost bugged out of my head when I saw the lady who was standing next to the truck while Aunt Verdella pumped her gas. She had the prettiest color hair I\u2019d ever seen. Red, but like a red I\u2019d never set eyes on before: shiny like a pot of melted copper pennies. Not dark, not light, but somewhere in between, and bright like fire. She stretched like a cat, the sleeveless blouse tied at her waist riding up a belly that was flat and the color of buttered toast. She was made like my Barbie doll, with two big bumps under her blouse, a skinny waist, and long legs under kelly-green pedal pushers. She was wearing a pair of sunglasses with a row of rhinestones at the corners that shot rays into my eyes when she turned toward the store. There was something about the lady, too, that shined just as bright as her hair and those rhinestones. Not a warm kind of shining, but a sharp kind, like bright sun jabbing through the window and stinging your eyes. Aunt Verdella cranked her head toward the store and yelled, \u201cButton, bring Auntie the restroom key, will ya?\u201d I stepped up on the wooden stool and reached for the key, which was taped to a ruler so it couldn\u2019t get lost easy, and I hurried it outside. As much as I hated meeting new people, I wanted to see the pretty lady up close. The Barbie lady took off her sunglasses and poked them into her fiery hair, which was piled high on her head in a messy sort of way. She had green eyes like a cat\u2019s, and her eyelids were sparkly with the same color, clear up to her eyebrows. She had real nice ears too. Tiny, and laying flat to her head like ears are supposed to. I handed Aunt Verdella the key, and she gave it to the pretty lady, who was glaring at the truck, a crabby look on her face. \u201cThe ladies\u0335...", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Women's Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 16.98}, {"asin": "0063046644", "title": "All American Christmas", "author": "Rachel Campos-Duffy", "description": "About the Author Rachel Campos-Duffy serves as a cohost of FOX & Friends Weekend . In addition, Campos-Duffy is the host of Moms on FOX Nation. The program aims to shine a light on family life and motherhood with women from across the country. She is also a recurring guest host on the network\u2019s hit shows FOX & Friends and Outnumbered . She is married to former congressman and FOX News Media contributor Sean Duffy. They have nine children. Sean Duffy serves as a FOX News Media contributor, providing political analysis across all FOX News Media platforms. For nearly nine years, Duffy represented the people of Wisconsin\u2019s Seventh Congressional District, the state\u2019s largest district. While in Congress, he served on the Financial Services Committee and as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Housing, Community Development and Insurance. He is married to FOX and Friends Weekend cohost Rachel Campos-Duffy.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.6}, {"asin": "1101902590", "title": "I Almost Forgot About You: A Novel", "author": "Terry McMillan", "description": "Review \"McMillan is a gifted storyteller\u2026 The cast of characters enriches the narrative, bringing nuance and clarity to scenes and moving the plot along\u2026. Georgia\u2019s story reminds readers who have clocked a lot of living that it\u2019s never too late to reconnect and reflect on the past as they craft the future they want.\" \u2014 Fort Worth Star Telegram \"The ripple effects from Terry McMillan\u2019s breakthrough in contemporary African-American fiction still influence our daily lives... [ I Almost Forgot About You is]\u00a0much in the same vein of McMillan\u2019s other novels that track Black women\u2019s journeys through self-discovery.\"\u2014 BLAC Detroit \"McMillan is a master at her craft.\u00a0Without a doubt, this book will be a hit with anyone who feels stuck in life and is ready to make a move. McMillan has done it again. Get this book and read about Georgia\u2019s journey. This is another book that should be on everyone\u2019s reading list.\"\u2014 The Baton Rouge Advocate \u201cIn I Almost Forgot About You , McMillan gives us a story about the possibility of change at any age couched in her customary vivacious prose and lush portrayals of character and relationships. Watching 50-something Georgia slowly reinvent herself and find lasting love along the way is a joy to behold. Here is a deeply felt, deeply courageous novel about the courage to face yourself and your past to discover\u2014and create\u2014the future you want for yourself.\u201d \u2014The Root \"The reader finds herself torn between gritting her teeth at how right McMillan gets the relationships between best friends, ex-spouses, ex-lovers, parents and children and putting the book down to laugh out loud. Run, don't walk and pick up this exuberant summer read.\" \u2014 BookPage \u201cNobody does female reinvention better than McMillan\u2026 another winner for McMillan\u2019s groaning bookshelf of hits.\u201d \u2014 AARP magazine \u201cMcMillan has written an engaging novel with an appealing cast of women... This near-perfect choice for women\u2019s book club discussions will prompt arguments of what makes a guy too good to be true. Stock up with multiple copies.\u201d \u2013 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cTerry McMillan's novels have always been about telling the uncensored truth about friends, family, lovers, and oneself.\u00a0 Through addictively revealing conversations \u2013 including an instructive one about the sexual prowess of men who made the A list \u2013 McMillan's narrator is the ideal running commentator on what smart women do to reach the pinnacle of success and what they must do to get the hell out before it's too late. It's a story about both reinvention and acceptance, told in McMillan's quintessential voice, now even more expansive, prismatically perceptive, and laugh-aloud generous in how we talk about love and all its wonders.\u201d \u2014Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement \u201cOne of my favorite authors since I read Waiting to Exhale in college, Terry McMillan has done it again with this one. Overflowing with her trademark heart and humor, I Almost Forgot About\u00a0You will inspire you\u00a0to live a little bigger. I wish Georgia weren\u2019t fictional\u2014I would find her and befriend her.\u201d \u2014Emily Giffin, #1 New York Time s bestselling author of First Comes Love and Something Borrowed \u201cThe warmth and wisdom we have come to expect from Terry McMillan are on full display and you won\u2019t be able to walk away from Georgia and her exuberant life. This is that thrilling kind of novel that reminds us how sometimes, fairy tales happen when we least expect them, if only we open ourselves to possibility.\u201d \u2014Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State About the Author Terry McMillan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale , How Stella Got Her Groove Back, A Day Late and a Dollar Short , and The Interruption of Everything and the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction . Each of Ms. McMillan\u2019s seven previous novels was a New York Times bestseller, and four have been made into movies: Waiting to Exhale (Twentieth Century Fox, 1995); How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Twentieth Century Fox, 1998); Disappearing Acts (HBO Pictures, 1999); and A Day Late and a Dollar Short (Lifetime, 2014). She lives in California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Running Out of Time?\u00a0It\u2019s another exciting Friday night, and I\u2019m curled up in bed--alone, of course--propped up by a sea of pillows, still in my lab coat, the sash so taut it\u2019s suffocating the purple silk dress beneath it, but I don\u2019t care. After a grueling day of back-to-back patients, I\u2019m a few minutes away from being comatose, but I\u2019m also hungry, which is why I\u2019m channel-surfing and waiting for my pizza to get here. I stop when I come to my favorite standby: Law & Order: Criminal Intent, even though I\u2019ve seen almost all of them--including the reruns. These days I usually just watch the first five or ten minutes, long enough to see Detective Goren stride onto the crime scene in his long trench coat, tilt his head to the side while he puts on those rubber gloves, rub the new growth on that beautiful square chin, and bend down to study the victim. It\u2019s at this moment, before he utters a word, when I usually pucker up, blow him a kiss, and then change the channel. I\u2019ve lusted over Detective Goren and yearned to be held against shoulders like his long before my second marriage bottomed out.Truth be told, over the years I\u2019ve fallen in love every Wednesday with Gary Dourdan\u2019s lips as CSI Warrick Brown, and even though I was no Trekkie, Avery Brooks\u2019s deep baritone and sneaky smile made me say \u201cYes\u201d aloud to the TV. I also let myself be seduced for hours in dark theaters, hypnotized by Benicio del Toro\u2019s dreamy eyes, even though he was a criminal. By Denzel\u2019s swagger when he was a slick gangster. Brad Pitt as a sexy young thief. Ken Watanabe as the most sensual samurai I wanted to ride on a horse with, and I wanted to be a black geisha and torture him until I finally let him have all of me.I hate to admit it, but if I had the energy, I\u2019d kill to have sex with the first one who walked into my bedroom tonight. I\u2019d let him do anything he wanted to do to me. It\u2019s been centuries since I\u2019ve had sex with a real man, and I\u2019m not even sure I\u2019d remember what to do first should I ever get so lucky again. In fact, I think I\u2019d be too uncomfortable, not to mention scared of getting all touchy-feely, and don\u2019t even get me started on him seeing me naked. Hell, this is why I sleep with the remote.When I hear the doorbell, I glance over at the broken blue clouds inside the clock on the night table. I\u2019ve been waiting forty minutes for this pizza, which means they\u2019re going to owe me a free one! I roll off the bed on my side, even though the other side has been empty for years. I walk over to the door and yell, \u201cBe right there!\u201d Then I grab my wallet out of my purse and beeline it to the front door, because I\u2019m starving. That is so not true. I\u2019m just a little hungry. I\u2019m trying to stop lying to myself about little things. I\u2019m still working on the big ones.I open the door, and standing there sweating is a young black kid who can\u2019t be more than eighteen. His head looks like a small globe of shiny black twists that I know are baby dreadlocks. His cheeks are full of brand-new zits. His name tag says free.\u201cI\u2019m so sorry for the delay, ma\u2019am. There was a accident at the bottom of the hill, and I couldn\u2019t get up here, so this one\u2019s on the house.\u201dHe looks so sad, and I\u2019m wondering if the price of this pizza is going to be deducted from his little paycheck, but I dare not ask.\u201cI don\u2019t mind paying for it,\u201d I say. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t your fault there was an accident.\u201d I take the pizza from him and set it on the metal stairwell.\u201cThat\u2019s real thoughtful of you, but I\u2019m just glad this is my last delivery for the night,\u201d he says, leaning to one side as if he\u2019s pretending not to look behind me, but of course he is. \u201cThis a real nice crib you got here. I ain\u2019t never seen no yellow floors before. It\u2019s downright wicked.\u201d\u201cThanks,\u201d I say, and hand him a twenty.He looks as if he\u2019s in shock. \u201cLike I said, ma\u2019am, this pizza is on the house, and I also got some drink coupons you can have, too,\u201d he says, pulling them out of the pocket of his red shirt.\u201cIt\u2019s a tip,\u201d I say. \u201cIs your real name Free?\u201d\u201cYes, ma\u2019am.\u201d\u201cHow do you feel about it?\u201d\u201cI dig it. I get asked all the time about it.\u201d\u201cSo how old are you, Free?\u201d\u201cI\u2019m eighteen.\u201d He\u2019s still staring at the twenty but then quickly shoves it inside the back pocket of his jeans in case I come to my senses and change my mind.\u00a0\u201cAre you in college?\u201d I\u2019m hoping he says yes and that he\u2019s taking English so one day soon he\u2019ll stop saying ain\u2019t.\u201cAlmost. That\u2019s why I\u2019m working. You really giving me this whole twenty?\u201dI nod. \u201cDo you know what you want to major in?\u201d\u201cMechanical engineering,\u201d he says with certainty.\u201cThat\u2019s great.\u201d\u201cYour husband rich?\u201d\u201cWhat makes you think I\u2019d have to have a husband to be rich?\u201d\u201cEverybody that live up in these hills is. Even them two dykes that live next door. And they married.\u201d\u201cThose dykes aren\u2019t just my neighbors, they\u2019re also my friends, and they\u2019re lesbians.\u201d\u201cA\u2019right. My bad,\u201d he says, flinging his arms up like Don\u2019t shoot. \u201cI didn\u2019t mean no harm.\u201d\u201cI know. Anyway, I\u2019m divorced. And I\u2019m not rich. But I also don\u2019t struggle.\u201d\u201cYou cleaned him out, then, huh?\u201d\u201cNo.\u201dThen he gives me the once-over. \u201cYou some kind of doctor?\u201dI look down at my lab coat. \u201cYes. I\u2019m an optometrist.\u201d\u201cWhich one is that?\u201d\u201cI help people see clearly,\u201d I say, so as not to complicate it.\u201cWho helps you?\u201d he asks with a smile, which throws me off completely. What a loaded question to ask a woman old enough to be his grandmother. \u201cJust fooling with you, Dr. Young. No disrespect intended.\u201d\u201cNone taken, Free.\u201dWho helps me see? See what?\u201cCool. Well, look, I gotta dash and get this car back to my cousin, but major thanks for the mega-tip, and I have to say it\u2019s nice somebody black gave it to me. Most of the white folks up here ain\u2019t big on tipping, except for them lesbians.\u201dWhat he just said was a little on the racist and sexist side, but I know he meant well. He runs down the sidewalk and jumps into that raggedy car of his, removes the pizza sign displayed on top, and disappears down the hill. I lean against the doorframe watching him go. I really should\u2019ve praised him for working to pay for college, and if he hadn\u2019t been in such a hurry, I would have loved to tell him that he might find his calling in college and he might not. But I\u2019d also tell him to search until he did. Otherwise he could end up doing something he just happened to be good at, something respectable that might guarantee him a nice income, but one day, when he\u2019s older, like, say, fifty-three soon to be fifty-four, when his kids have grown up and he\u2019s twice divorced and bored with his profession and his life and the thought of trying to change it all--or even where he lives--scares the hell out of him because it feels like it\u2019s too late, I\u2019d tell him to please figure out a way to do it anyway, since I\u2019m an excellent example of what can happen when you don\u2019t.I turn off the porch light, close the door, and I can\u2019t believe all of this is flooding in. I walk across these cool yellow concrete floors and sit on these cool metal stairs and look out at the light jutting up through those soft navy blue waves in the cool black-bottomed pool, and I look up a flight where both of my daughters used to sleep, and I look down to where the library and the guest room are, and I sit here and eat this entire cheese-and-tomato pizza.I am full of regret.Monday mornings are the worst, which is why I left a little early. The freeway is still slow going. But I\u2019m used to it. I crack my window, although it can\u2019t be more than fifty degrees. The dampness coming from the bay can\u2019t eclipse the clarity of this morning as thousands of us slowly descend around a curve, and there waiting for us like a giant postcard is the Bay Bridge and right behind it the San Francisco skyline. This is a beautiful place to live.But then, as typically happens at least once a week, the traffic suddenly comes to a screeching halt. I can see the reason up ahead. A four-car pile-up is blocking two of the five lanes, and everyone is trying to move over to make room for the fire trucks and ambulances I now hear. I just pray no one is hurt. I roll my window all the way down and put the car in park. Some have already turned off their engines. I leave mine running and call my office.When my cell phone rings, I know who it is before I even glance at the screen. \u201cHello, Miss Early,\u201d I say to my mother, for obvious reasons but also because her name is Earlene.\u201cHello back to you, Miss Georgia.\u201dOf course I was never any Miss Georgia, because I was born in Bakersfield, where she still lives, and I was named after my late father, whose name was George. There\u2019s hardly a day that goes by when someone doesn\u2019t ask me if I\u2019m from Georgia. In college I just started lying and said yes: Macon. But then they wanted to know why I didn\u2019t have a drawl.\u201cWhat can I do you for, ma\u2019am? Are you feeling okay?\u201d\u201cI\u2019m probably healthier than you. Anyway, I\u2019m calling for two reasons. I\u2019m going on a cruise for seniors with my church.\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s nice,\u201d I say, trying not to laugh, because I\u2019m thinking this is going to be one wild and scandalous cruise.\u201cThat\u2019s all you have to say?\u201d\u201cI\u2019m thrilled for you, Ma. I know you go to one of those megachurches, but are there enough seniors in the congregation to fill a whole cruise ship?\u201d\u201cOf course not. There are ten churches, and we\u2019re not going to be the only older people on it.\u201dShe\u2019s eighty-one. Soon to be eighty-two.\u201cWhen and where are you going?\u201d\u201cWe leave two weeks and one day from today. For ten whole days! We\u2019re going to four or five islands in the Caribbean that I can\u2019t remember right now. One of them is the Grand Cayman.\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s a whole lot of numbers, Ma, but it sounds like so much fun. It\u2019ll be good for you.\u201d\u201cI know. I still miss your brother and your dad, and I get lonely in this condo, and I\u2019ll just go on and admit that I get tired of going to church just so I can have a social life and I don\u2019t have to get dressed up to worship at home. Anyway, I\u2019ll be doing a lot of praying standing in front of those slots.\u201d She laughs.\u201cOkay, Ma, what\u2019s the other thing? Because I\u2019m stuck in traffic, and it looks like it\u2019s about to start moving.\u201d\u201cWell, you know it\u2019s almost time for my annual eye exam, and my cruise conflicts with the date I have on my calendar.\u201d\u201cMa, it\u2019s not set in stone.\u201d\u201cI know. So I\u2019m hoping to get a rain check to see if we can make it after the holidays, unless you think I need to have it sooner.\u201d\u201cMa, you don\u2019t have to have the test on the same day every year, but around the same time is just smart to do at your age.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m not senile yet, Georgia.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m not even going to respond to that. And who is we? Please don\u2019t say Dolly.\u201d\u201cWell, it\u2019s not safe for me to drive that far alone anymore, so Dolly is willing to do the driving.\u201dWhy me, Lord? Dolly is my older second cousin, whom I love but don\u2019t like that much, because she\u2019s got a nasty attitude and never has anything nice to say about anybody, especially me. I know this to be true, because gossip travels faster within families. She has convinced herself that I think I\u2019m hot shit because I went to college and live in a nice house with a pool. Some relatives I can live without, and Dolly\u2019s on the top of that list.\u201cThe boys want to come, too. They haven\u2019t seen you in years, and they\u2019ve been having a hard time finding work.\u201dThe boys are over thirty. And haven\u2019t worked in years either. Last time they were here, they smoked marijuana in the bathroom and tried to drink up half the liquor in the bar.\u201cI\u2019m about to start remodeling, so there\u2019ll be no place for them to sleep,\u201d I lie.\u201cWell, it\u2019s about time. And I hope you tone it down some. I feel like I\u2019m walking into a rainbow every time I come through your front door.\u201d\u201cGotta go. Love you.\u201d I usually give her smooches, but she just hurt my feelings, so I don\u2019t much feel like it.I rush past the tall wall of windows, and Marina, our six-foot Japanese receptionist, waves at me. She\u2019s on the phone, sitting behind the long maple counter. In the four years she\u2019s worked here, she\u2019s worn black every single day--including on her fingernails. From here you can see only her shoulders. She waves, then gives me a slow thumbs-up that all is fine. I wasn\u2019t really worried, but I don\u2019t like to inconvenience patients, even though the situation is more often the reverse.Unlike home, the office is serene. The walls are a pale gray, a warm yellow, and one is white. My mother approves. Nine chairs are white, except for one that\u2019s yellow. Four oblong purple tables are scattered around the area meant for fitting eyewear. Almost every inch of wall space is filled with frames and sunglasses to suit almost every taste and price.One of my most annoying but favorite patients, Mona Kwon, rushes to open the door for me. \u201cThank you, Mona!\u201d I say, and head on over to Marina. Mona sits in her chair; the one next to the door if it\u2019s empty, or else she\u2019ll stand. She\u2019ll be seventy-five soon. She only needs strong readers but claims she can\u2019t see the tips of her fingernails when she holds them out in front of her. She comes in to have her glasses adjusted at least twice a month. She has forty pair and counting. The techs think she\u2019s probably suffering from dementia. I think she\u2019s just lonely. She also doesn\u2019t like the techs to warm her frames; she insists I do it. After lifting them out of the hot sand and slipping them behind her ears, I watch her stare into the mirror a few minutes too long, as if, or until, she\u2019s satisfied she looks like whoever she wants to be. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.49}], "target_asin": "1728231434"}
{"user_id": "AHCU6KPRILJDRFQPV2CRWTKIXEYA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0740780883", "title": "The Green Book of Crosswords: 200 Puzzles", "author": null, "description": "About the Author The Puzzle Society is the Web's premier source for challenging, professionally constructed puzzles and games. Updated daily and boasting a gaming archive of more than 8,000 puzzles, The Puzzle Society offers more than 70 nationally syndicated puzzles, including the Washington Post Crossword, Los Angeles Times Crossword, Universal Crossword , Universal Jigsaw , and Daily Jumble .", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 6.58}, {"asin": "1250198372", "title": "The New York Times Greatest Hits of Thursday Crossword Puzzles: 100 Medium Puzzles", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.88}, {"asin": "0525575472", "title": "Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth", "author": "Rachel Maddow", "description": "Review \u201c Blowout is a rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today. . . . [It features] many colorful tales about villains, scoundrels and adventurers. . . . A brilliant description of many of the problems caused by our reliance on fossil fuels.\u201d \u2014The New York Times Book Review \u201cAn account of international intrigue, high finance, low characters, and outrageous legal and illegal acts that put the global economy and Western democracy at grave risk . . . [Maddow] tells this tale deliberately and methodically, building her case not as a cable commentator, but as a Rhodes Scholar. . . . She displays a deep understanding of what makes Russia work in the age of Putin.\u201d \u2014 Boston Globe \u201cI can\u2019t stress enough what a great storyteller Rachel Maddow is. [She carries] the reader through some hair-raising journalism in such an engaging and propulsive fashion you simply cannot put the book down. . . . It has left a most lasting impression.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cAt its heart, this book is a tale of two countries, the United States and Russia, and how, as Maddow sees it\u2014individually and together\u2014they have been warped by a rapacious fossil fuel industry. . . . Fulminating comes easy to Rachel Maddow. What sets her apart from other serial fulminators is that she does it with facts\u2014and sardonic wit.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cAll fans of Maddow, and even her detractors, will learn something new from this highly readable yet impressively detailed book. Anyone interested in the covert deals that change the nature of the global environmental and political landscape will devour. A must-have for all collections.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cRadiates zing, intelligence, and black humor. Much like its author.\u201d \u2014 InStyle \u201c[Maddow] may be a popular, progressive news-and-commentary anchor on MSNBC, but it's not to be forgotten that she holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford and seems to devour whole libraries of data before breakfast each day. . . . Expect a tweetstorm as Maddow\u2019s indictment of a corrupt industry finds readers\u2014and it deserves many.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cKnown for her intense inquiries into complex subjects, Maddow brings her laser-like intuitiveness and keen and wily perception to Big Oil, that stalwart of global economics, and the shadowy nexus of commerce and politics. Maddow likes murky, the murkier the better, and her examination of the intricacies of off-shore drilling, transnational pipelines, and hydraulic fracking is as deep as the coveted wells themselves. . . . Like trailblazing journalists before her, Maddow exposes both the slapdash and sinister practices underlying geopolitics and energy policies and revels in peeling back the layers of malfeasance to stoke righteous outrage.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) About the Author Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award\u2013winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the\u00a0#1 New York Times bestselling\u00a0author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power ; Blowout:\u00a0Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth; and Bag Man:\u00a0The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House . Maddow received a bachelor\u2019s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. OneSplendor and FragranceIf you had to point to a beginning, to the exact location of the big bang from which American industrial and economic power began its astounding and sometimes reckless expansion, it would be at the end of a percussion-driven, blunt-force drill bit, lowered through a cast-iron pipe, powered by a six-horsepower steam engine, slamming down and down and down into the earth on a farm in northwest Pennsylvania. At a depth of sixty-nine and a half feet, the operators of the drill struck what they had been looking for, and on August 28, 1859, the crude yet sublime substance\u2014\u201crock oil,\u201d as it was called at the time\u2014presented itself on the earth\u2019s surface.That discovery, like the big bang itself, is but a subatomic pinhole in space compared with all that has followed. Edwin Laurentine Drake and his hired man, \u201cUncle Billy\u201d Smith, pulled the equivalent of maybe twenty forty-two-gallon barrels of crude oil from the ground on a good day. The inhabitants of our planet weren\u2019t exactly starving for more in 1859, or at least didn\u2019t yet know they were. The first commercially viable gas-powered engine, and the ensuing addiction, were still a few generations away.Today\u2019s drillers produce an average of more than ninety million barrels of oil worldwide every day, and a lot of natural gas, too, which fuels cars, jets, freight trains, ocean liners, power plants, factories, and farm machinery, as well as the economies of republics, monarchies, and dictatorships around the globe. Nearly a hundred countries, representing six continents, are in the oil and gas game, and many have been in it for a century or more. But the United States got there first (Russia was a very distant second), and only the United States can lay claim to having shaped the industry\u2019s prevailing culture: the tools of its trade, its financing, its administration, its ethic, and its reach. \u201cThe organization of the great business of taking petroleum out of the earth, piping the oil over great distances, distilling and refining it, and distributing it in tank steamers, tank wagons, and cans all over the earth,\u201d the president emeritus of Harvard noted in 1915, \u201cwas an American invention.\u201dIn fact, it could be argued, the oil business as we know it today was the invention of one particular American, John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller was there almost from the beginning. He created and husbanded the exemplar of the industry, Standard Oil, and along the way he helped to popularize the idea of America as the testing ground where the extravagant possibilities and the outsized benefits of free-market capitalism have been proven. Rockefeller, a junior partner in a Cleveland merchant commission house trading in grain, hay, meat, and miscellany when Edwin Drake made his strike in 1859, watched the oil business unfold up close. When he entered the field in 1863, at age twenty-three, he understood his best bet was to concentrate on refining the crude oil and to leave to others the rather messy and costly process of actually getting it out of the ground.Within ten years, Rockefeller had managed to get control of nearly all of the oil refineries in Cleveland, which had established itself as the nation\u2019s main refining center. Rockefeller\u2019s new corporation, Standard Oil, shipped a million barrels of refined oil in a single year. By 1875, thanks to the fire sale that followed the first frightening financial panic and depression in industrialized America, Rockefeller had taken control of every major refining center in the country. \u201cWe were all in a sinking ship,\u201d he would later explain, \u201cand we were trying to build a lifeboat to carry us all to shore. . . . The Standard was an angel of mercy, reaching down from the sky, and saying \u2018Get in the ark. Put in your old junk. We\u2019ll take the risks!\u2019\u2009\u201dStandard Oil\u2019s main product at the time was kerosene, which proved a welcome innovation in illumination. It was efficient, effective, plentiful, and reasonably priced. The most widely used lighting oil at the time, which was struck from soft coal, was dirty; whale oil was hard to get (see Moby-Dick) and dwindling in supply; kerosene from petroleum\u2014or rock oil\u2014was just the thing to illuminate the clean, bright new future. \u201cRock oil emits a dainty light,\u201d promised the new industry. \u201cThe brightest and yet the cheapest in the world, a light fit for Kings and Royalists and not unsuitable for Republicans and Democrats.\u201d Farmers and city dwellers could afford to read well into the night. Factory owners could afford to keep their works open around the clock. Rockefeller\u2019s magic potion was a worldwide phenomenon; in 1875, before any European-based company was producing kerosene in bulk, 75 percent of the output from Rockefeller\u2019s American refineries was loaded up and shipped overseas. Cash flowed back across the Atlantic. Standard\u2019s production capacity grew year after year. The efficiencies that followed\u2014economies of scale\u2014allowed Rockefeller to cut the cost of refining by more than 85 percent and to cut the cost to the consumer by 70 percent. Demand swelled, and so did revenues.Rockefeller\u2019s company, meanwhile, just kept eating would-be competitors. About 90 percent of America\u2019s crude flowed through Standard Oil by the end of the 1890s. The company had money and means to produce its own crude, and refine it, and get it shipped to market on its own (always favorable) terms. Standard was capable of controlling the price of oil and railroad freight rates and had cash in the bank to pay off the state and federal legislators who wrote laws governing the industry. \u201cJohn D. and his colleagues regarded government regulators as nuisances to be bypassed wherever possible,\u201d says Rockefeller\u2019s estimable biographer, Ron Chernow. \u201cHe felt that politicians were basically parasites who would shake down businessmen. I mean, all of this bribery he saw as extortion; that is, the politicians shaking him down, rather than his paying off the politicians. . . . I think he regarded these payments really as a business expense.\u201dStandard Oil eventually grew into \u201cthe largest business empire on earth,\u201d according to Chernow. \u201cI don\u2019t know that the business world has ever seen an agglomeration of wealth and power on the scale of Standard Oil.\u201d This was the era of consolidation, of the Big Trust, which was nineteenth-century parlance for monopoly\u2014the Sugar Trust, the Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, the Tobacco Trust, the Rope-and-Twine Trust. But the Rockefeller-controlled Oil Trust was the first, the biggest, the most powerful, and easily the most talked-about trust in the country. Rockefeller himself stood with Andrew Carnegie (steel), Philip Armour (meat products), and James Buchanan Duke (cigarettes) as the richest and most powerful commodity producers on the continent. They sat on mounds of private wealth unimaginable in the young republic at the time of Rockefeller\u2019s own birth. John D. died nearly fifty years before the debut of the Forbes 400, the annual listing of the wealthiest private individuals in the country. But when the editors of a book timed to coincide with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of that list made some calculations, they declared Rockefeller the richest single individual in the history of America. They figured his peak net worth at $305 billion (in 2006 dollars), which means that if John D. were to be magically reanimated today, with his peak fortune still intact, his personal wealth would roughly triple that of the whippersnapper who sat atop the Forbes list in 2019.Millions of barrels of ink have been expended in trying to explain the reasons for Rockefeller\u2019s spectacular achievement, to reveal the cardinal (and perhaps replicable) tactic, to pinpoint the specific innate genius that made it all happen. Theories abound. Take, for instance, what could be called the Bung Theory. A bung is the stopper once used to seal up a barrel of oil, and Rockefeller\u2019s intense interest in this unromantic industrial cog, his keen watch on the monthly bung count, offers a tantalizing lead on the secret to his success. \u201cYour March inventory showed 10,750 bungs on hand,\u201d Rockefeller once wrote to one of his foremen. \u201cThe report for April shows 20,000 new bungs bought, 24,000 bungs used, and 6,000 bungs on hand. What became of the other 750 bungs?\u201d Maybe the key was pinching every penny! John D. Rockefeller wasted nothing, see, so he could push his costs down, undercut all competitors on price, and drive them out of the business, or at least into Standard Oil\u2019s angel of mercy ark.Then there is the well-traveled Great Monster Theory. \u201cRun, children, or Rockefeller\u2019ll get you,\u201d was a threat that could strike terror in the Pennsylvania oil patch in the late nineteenth century. The Great Monster Theory gained much currency in the popular mind after Ida Tarbell\u2019s remarkable series of investigative articles published in McClure\u2019s Magazine beginning in 1902, \u201cThe History of the Standard Oil Company.\u201d Tarbell, who grew up in the patch, itemized the more than thirty years of Rockefeller\u2019s underhanded, corrupt, predatory behavior that constituted his effort to wipe the field of competitors. He was, in Tarbell\u2019s rendering, a rapacious and devious villain. Widows and orphans, beware. It didn\u2019t hurt that Rockefeller, aged sixty-three at the time of publication, looked ready to inhabit the villain role by then. He was already growing thin and pinched\u2014and worse. \u201cHe suffered from something called alopecia. In 1901, he lost not only all the hair on his head; he lost all body hair,\u201d Chernow explains. \u201cIda Tarbell came along a year later, did this series portraying him as a monster. And since he was hairless and suddenly looked old\u2014and ghoulish\u2014his appearance seemed to ratify what she was saying in the series, so that the timing was particularly unfortunate for Rockefeller.\u201dThere is also the Man of His Times Theory. Rockefeller, this theory posits, was simply playing by the very loose set of rules of his day, just like everybody else was. The boundaries of capitalism and democracy in America were still being chalked, the rules of the game still being written. The prevailing ethic was best summed up by one of Rockefeller\u2019s early partners, Henry M. Flagler, who kept a copy of this little ditty on his desk: \u201cDo unto others as they would do unto you\u2014and do it first.\u201d The point of the free market was not to compete but to win. \u201cThe most serious charge that can be laid at [Standard\u2019s] door is that it has succeeded,\u201d wrote an oilman who felt compelled to sell out to Rockefeller in the 1880s or suffer the consequences. \u201cIt has outwitted its competitors who sought to play the same game but had not so thoroughly mastered the art. . . . In the business battle, the extremity of one is the opportunity of the other. . . . It is the rule of our competitive life that the time when the business rival is on the downward road\u2014when creditors are pressing him hard, when banks are clamoring that he shall meet his paper, when the sheriff is threatening to close his doors\u2014this is the opportunity for the other rival to strike the finishing blow and make merchandise out of the misery of his fellow-man.\u201d Rockefeller\u2019s eldest son and heir offered an exceedingly aromatic metaphor to justify this need to (occasionally, of course) rely on cutthroat tactics. \u201cThe American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it,\u201d John D. junior sermonized. \u201cThis is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.\u201dRockefeller himself had a number of pet theories about his spectacular rise. A devout and puritanical Baptist, John D. was certain there was a higher being at work. \u201cI believe the power to make money is a gift from God,\u201d he explained to one writer, \u201cjust as are the instincts for art, music, literature, the doctor\u2019s talent, the nurse\u2019s, yours\u2014to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.\u201dThese various theories, and the many others in circulation, are not mutually exclusive. The whole truth of John D. Rockefeller is complicated and involves pieces of them all. But the rock-bottom fact on which everything else rests is actually quite simple: Standard Oil just kept turning out the finest product on the market, at the lowest price to the consumer. Ka-ching! Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Industries"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.68}, {"asin": "1524763136", "title": "Becoming", "author": "Michelle Obama", "description": "Review \u201cA serious work of candid reflection by a singular figure of early-twenty-first-century America . . . Becoming is refined and forthright, gracefully written and at times laugh-out-loud funny.\u201d \u2014Isabel Wilkerson, The New York Times Book Review \u201c Becoming is inspirational without trying to be. From the first words, the very warmth that permeates its author emanates from the pages. . . . Becoming manages to be a coming-of-age tale, a love story and a family saga all in one. More importantly, this book is a reminder that America is still a work-in-progress, and that hope can be an action word if we allow it to be. Becoming is a balm that America needs, from a woman America does not yet deserve.\u201d \u2014Angie Thomas, Time \u201cDeeply personal and refreshingly honest . . . She\u2019s thoughtful, humorous, bracingly revealing, and when it\u2019s time, she does us all the favor of showing us the human side of a man worshipped by so many. . . . It\u2019s human and genuine and welcoming to see the layers of humanity she holds open. . . . Michelle Obama\u2019s story can maybe inspire you to find a path for your own story.\u201d \u2014Shonda Rhimes, Shondaland \u201cA complex, accomplished life recounted with confidence and candor . . . Every page sparkles with directness and grace.\u201d \u2014Douglas Brinkley, The Boston Globe About the Author Michelle Obama served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama started her career as an attorney at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama. She later worked in the Chicago mayor\u2019s office, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Mrs. Obama also founded the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an organization that prepares young people for careers in public service. She is the author of the #1 global bestseller Becoming and the #1 national bestseller American Grown . The Obamas currently live in Washington, D.C., and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 17.69}, {"asin": "1250217814", "title": "The New York Times Wednesday Crossword Puzzle Omnibus: 200 Medium-Level Puzzles", "author": "Will Shortz", "description": "About the Author The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. Founded in 1851, the newspaper has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization. Its website receives 30 million unique visitors per month. Will Shortz has been the crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times since 1993. He is also the puzzlemaster on NPR\u2019s Weekend Edition Sunday and is founder and director of the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. He has edited countless books of crossword puzzles, Sudoku, KenKen, and all manner of brain-busters.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.49}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1501175513", "title": "Fear: Trump in the White House", "author": "Bob Woodward", "description": "Review \u201cA harrowing portrait of the Trump presidency . . . Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump\u2019s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.\u201d \u2014 Phillip Rucker and Robert Costa, The Washington Post \u201cA damning picture of the current presidency.\u201d \u2014 David Martin, CBS News \u201cAn unprecedented inside-the-room look through the eyes of the President's inner circle. . . . stunning.\u201d\u2014 CNN \u201cA devastating reported account of the Trump Presidency that will be consulted as a first draft of the grim history it portrays . . . What Woodward has written is not just the story of a deeply flawed President but also, finally, an account of what those surrounding him have chosen to do about it.\u201d\u2014 Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker \u201c Fear is Woodward at his best, the quintessential investigative reporter with an eye for detail and an uncanny ability to get key players to ensure that their perspective is etched into history. Its timing could not be more critical for a nation exhausted by tweets and spin, and trying to assess the danger to democracy posed by a presidency that shatters its norms and demeans its institutions.\u201d\u2014 John Diaz, San Francisco Chronicle \u201cIn an age of \u2018alternative facts\u2019 and corrosive tweets about \u2018fake news,\u2019 Woodward is truth\u2019s gold standard. . . . explosive\u00a0. . . devastating . . . jaw-dropping.\u201d\u2014 Jill Abramson, The Washington Post \u201cWoodward's latest book shows the administration is broken, and yet what comes next could be even worse.\u201d\u2014 David A. Graham, The Atlantic \u201c[Woodward] is the master and I'd trust him over politicians of either party any day of the week.\u201d \u2014 Peter Baker \u201cWoodward . . . depicts the Trump White House as a byzantine, treacherous, often out-of-control operation . . . Mr. Woodward\u2019s book has unsettled the administration and the president in part because it is clear that the author has spoken with so many current and former officials.\u201d \u2014 Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman, New York Times \u201c The more heartening message from FEAR is that we still have institutions and individuals, including Bob Woodward, who will continue checking the most destructive instincts of Donald Trump.\u201d \u2014 Joe Scarborough \u201cYou can trust that Woodward has gone to inordinate lengths to get to the best obtainable version of the truth.\u201d \u2014 Mike Allen, Axios \u201cI wonder how many journalists have arrived in Washington over the years dreaming of becoming the next Bob Woodward . . . Though his books are often sensational, he is the opposite of sensationalist. He\u2019s diligent, rigorous, fastidious about the facts, and studiously ethical. There\u2019s something almost monastic about his method . . . He\u2019s Washington's chronicler in chief.\u201d \u2014 Nick Bryant, BBC \u201cNo, Bob Woodward is not a Democratic operative. He\u2019s a highly respected journalist who has a track record of writing meticulously detailed books about presidents with an uncanny knack for getting behind-the-scenes details.\u201d \u2014 POLITICO Playbook \u201cHe\u2019s got tapes. That\u2019s what the Trump White House really did not\u00a0understand until today, if they understand it even now.\u201d \u2014 Lawrence O\u2019Donnell, MSNBC \u201cI think you\u2019ve always been fair.\u201d \u2014 President Donald J. Trump, in a call to Bob Woodward, August 14, 2018 About the Author Bob Woodward is an associate editor at The Washington Post where he has worked for 49 years and reported on every American president from Nixon to Trump. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for the Post \u2019s coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, and second\u00a020 years later as the lead Po st reporter for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.7}, {"asin": "1465053751", "title": "Maltese 2017 Calendar", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Calendars"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0764333119", "title": "Large Letter Postcards: The Definitive Guide, 1930s-1950s: The Definitive Guide, 1930s-1950s", "author": "Fred Tenney", "description": "About the Author Fred Tenney developed a passion for buying and selling collectibles, particularly postcards. He is a prominent buyer and seller of the large-letter genre. Kevin Hilbert has collected postcards since early childhood and was bitten by the \"large letter\" bug in the 2000s. They both reside in Arizona", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Antiques & Collectibles"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 39.99}, {"asin": "187569059X", "title": "CP69059 - Progressive Blues Rhythm Guitar Method BK/CD", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 24.95}], "target_asin": "1501175513"}
{"user_id": "AHSU3KR223TTQNXSJLFZYOLFDT3Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1877741094", "title": "Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity", "author": "Ray Bradbury", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 3.77}, {"asin": "1982123745", "title": "The Devil's Hand: A Thriller (4) (Terminal List)", "author": "Jack Carr", "description": "Review \"The fourth book in Carr's Terminal List series is another intense international thriller featuring former Navy SEAL James Reece. He's now on a long-planned CIA mission related to the 9/11 attacks, facing down the threat of a potentially disastrous bioweapons attack.\" \u2015 AARP, \"New Novels for Spring\" \"Carr delivers engrossing backstory, incorporates current events seamlessly, and never flinches from breathless depictions of violence.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201dCarr continues to draw on his own experiences as a SEAL to give the story a level of realism that writers who\u2019ve not actually served sometimes have a hard time achieving.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \" The Terminal List is widely regarded as one of the best debut thrillers of all-time, and rightfully so, but The Devil\u2019s Hand is even better, and should go down as one of the best books in the genre, period.\" \u2015 The Real Book Spy \"An action thriller extraordinaire that is not to be missed.\" \u2015 Providence Journal About the Author Jack Carr is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and former Navy SEAL. He lives with his wife and three children in Park City, Utah. He is the author of The Terminal List , True Believer , Savage Son , The Devil\u2019s Hand, and In the Blood .\u00a0His debut novel, The Terminal List , was adapted into the #1 Amazon Prime Video series starring Chris Pratt.\u00a0He is also the host of the\u00a0top-rated podcast Danger Close .\u00a0Visit him at OfficialJackCarr.com and follow along on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @JackCarrUSA. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 CIA Applicant Processing Unit Dulles Discovery Building Chantilly, Virginia Present Day \u201cIS YOUR FIRST NAME James?\u201d \u201cYes,\u201d Reece replied. \u201cHave you ever lied to get out of trouble?\u201d Reece paused. \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cDo you intend to answer these questions truthfully?\u201d Another pause. \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cIs today Wednesday?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cHave you ever committed a crime for which you were not caught?\u201d \u201cYes?\u201d \u201cAre we in Virginia?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cHave you ever committed murder?\u201d \u201cAh\u2026\u201d \u201cJust yes or no, please.\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d Reece saw the polygrapher make a note. \u201cAre you a United States citizen?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d Through his peripheral vision, Reece saw the polygrapher make another notation and adjust a setting on his laptop. Great. \u201cHave you ever been part of a group that has wanted to overthrow the United States government?\u201d Reece sat in the nondescript room of what would have been a normal office park anywhere else in America. This one was located in Chantilly, Virginia, and was owned by a front company created by the CIA. Reece was halfway through day one of his three-day CIA processing evaluation. Even with his past experience and relationship with the Agency he still had to pass the medical and psychological screening tests to officially join the ranks of Ground Branch. Bureaucracy was, after all, bureaucracy. \u201cLet\u2019s try this again,\u201d \u201cJohn\u201d said in a tone meant to convey exasperation. \u201cBe sure to answer yes or no honestly. And remain completely still. Keep your eyes focused on one point on the wall in front of you or we will have to start all over.\u201d Reece felt his pulse quicken. He\u2019d been on the receiving end of an interrogation before, and then, just as now, he wanted nothing more than to tear his interrogator\u2019s throat out. He\u2019d completed a form in the waiting area, answering the exact questions he was currently being asked. He\u2019d even gone over them with his \u201cexaminer\u201d before being hooked up to the machine. \u201cHave you ever been part of a group that has wanted to overthrow the United States government?\u201d the polygraph examiner asked a second time. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you ever been in the employment of a foreign intelligence service?\u201d Reece tried to reframe the question in his mind. Instead, a memory intruded; Ivan Zharkov standing in the snow outside his dacha in Siberia, the flames from the downed Mi8 helicopter smoldering behind him, the dead bodies of his security detail strewn about the ground around him, a security detail Reece had killed. Are you offering to spy for me, Mr. Reece? \u201cNo,\u201d Reece responded. The polygraph examiner made another note. A blood pressure cuff squeezed Reece\u2019s left arm, two rubber air-filled tubes called pneumographs encircled his chest and stomach to record his breathing, and galvanometers had been placed on the first and third fingers of his right hand to measure sweat secretions. His chair was fitted with a sensor pad, thanks to Ana Montes, a senior Cuban analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who had been recruited by Cuban intelligence while in graduate school at Johns Hopkins. From 1985 until her arrest on espionage charges in 2001, she routinely passed classified information to Havana that was then transferred to the Soviets. Later, that information was sold to China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran. Her Cuban handlers had trained her to manipulate her polygraph by contracting her sphincter muscles, which is why Reece now sat on a sensor. He was also in socks, his feet resting on two individual pads. All movements would be recorded by the polygraph. The room was small, but not claustrophobically so, about twice the size of a single patient room at a doctor\u2019s office. Reece thought it was possible the off-white walls had faded to their current hue by absorbing the fear that permeated the space on an almost daily basis. There was a camera visible in the upper left-hand corner, but Reece was sure the CIA had concealed a few others so as not to miss a single eye twitch or muscle movement. Though he stared at a blank wall, a mirror had been installed just off-center, two-way of course, for observation. The room was bare of any additional distractions other than the small table to his left where the polygrapher sat with his computer. It was unquestionably designed to make CIA candidates as uncomfortable as possible. \u201cHave you ever committed a crime for which you were not caught?\u201d Visions of his dead wife and daughter caused his heart rate to increase. Reece swallowed as he remembered watching the silver Mercedes G550 SUV crest the rise on the mountain road outside Jackson through the magnification of his Nightforce NXS 2.5-10x32mm scope, just before pressing the trigger to send a Barnes Triple Shock .300 Winchester Magnum through the brain stem of Marcus Boykin, the first person Reece had eliminated on his quest to avenge his family and SEAL Troop. \u201cMr. Reece?\u201d his examiner asked. \u201cWhat?\u201d \u201cWe have to get through these questions. Have you ever committed a crime for which you were not caught?\u201d Reece felt the working end of his Winkler/Sayoc Tomahawk catch in the bone and brain matter of Imam Hammadi Izmail Masood\u2019s crushed skull before twisting it out and going to work on the gristle of the terrorist\u2019s neck muscles. Reece had freed the head from the terrorist\u2019s body so he could impale it on the spiked fence of the mosque as a warning to the others that death was coming for them all. \u201cNo,\u201d Reece lied. \u201cHave you visited antipolygraph.org to prepare for this examination?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d This answer visibly perturbed the examiner. \u201cAre you sitting down?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cHave you ever committed murder?\u201d \u201cI thought we covered that.\u201d \u201cJust yes-or-no answers.\u201d Again, Reece\u2019s mind accessed memories he\u2019d never be able to repress. He remembered hitting send on the cell phone that detonated the suicide vest on political fundraiser Mike Tedesco, turning him and SEAL Admiral Gerald Pilsner into human mist. He remembered shoving the HK pistol into Josh Holder\u2019s mouth, feeling teeth breaking around the long suppressor before the .45-caliber bullet blew the back of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service man\u2019s head off. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you ever plotted to overthrow the U.S. government?\u201d Reece thought of the EFP, Explosively Formed Penetrator, he\u2019d built. It was an instrument of terror overseas, but Reece had used the tactics and techniques of the enemy on home soil. He\u2019d become an insurgent. The IED sent a slug of molten copper through the armored Suburban of Congressman J. D. Hartley in SoHo, eviscerating the conspirator and bringing the reality of war to the home front. Reece saw the look of abject horror in Secretary of Defense Loraine Hartley\u2019s eyes as he shot her twice in the chest and once in the head in her Fishers Island mansion. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cIs the wall white?\u201d \u201cSort of.\u201d \u201cOnce again, just yes or no.\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cHave you ever been involved in the torture of enemy combatants?\u201d The odor of vomit and piss from the floor of Saul Agnon\u2019s hotel room keyed the memory of the attorney\u2019s waterboarding and untimely death via a concoction of illicit drugs Reece had acquired to make the murder seem like a drug overdose, giving Reece the time he needed to eliminate his remaining targets. Reece saw the horror in Captain Howard\u2019s eyes as he eviscerated the JAG officer with the sinister curved blade of the HFB karambit. As his guts slipped through his fingers and spilled onto the soft jungle floor, Howard frantically attempted to shove them back inside. Reece skewered them to a tree and forced the lawyer to walk around the trunk, his entrails escaping from his stomach until he collapsed at its base to be eaten alive by the creatures of the swamp. Reece thought of passing the vodka to General Qusim Yedid in Athens, a glass spiked with a Novichok liquid-soluble precursor. And he remembered filling the 60cc syringe with capsaicin to inject into Dimitry Mashkov to elicit information that led to the location of Oliver Grey. \u201cNo,\u201d Reece said. \u201cHave you used illegal drugs you have not mentioned previously?\u201d Reece shut his eyes, remembering the drugs his Troop had been given prior to their last deployment. Those PTSD beta-blockers had sinister side effects, side effects that a group of military, political, and private sector conspirators needed to cover up an ambush in Afghanistan and the murder of Reece\u2019s family in their Coronado home. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cDid you intentionally falsify information on your application or security paperwork?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you ever stolen anything from your previous place of employment?\u201d Reece remembered rolling the dolly down the hallway to his Troop\u2019s weapons locker in the SEAL Team Seven armory and loading it with rifles, NODs, AT-4s, LAW rockets, a machine gun, claymores, and C-4 to load out for his mission of vengeance. He\u2019d liberated it all before the admiral and his JAG had suspended his security clearance. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you ever stolen anything worth over five hundred U.S. dollars?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d Reece said, unsuccessfully attempting to block the vision of himself loading the stolen ordnance into the back of his Land Cruiser. \u201cDo you have any undisclosed relationships with foreign nationals?\u201d The faces of Ivan Zharkov, Marco del Toro, and Mohammed Farooq flashed through his mind. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you ever kept a war trophy?\u201d Reece paused. \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you ever sold government property?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you, or do you know anyone who brought back enemy weapons from overseas?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cIs there anything in your background that would disqualify you from getting this job?\u201d Reece remembered his best friend and former teammate, Ben Edwards, holding up the detonator attached to strands of det cord wrapped around investigative journalist Katie Buranek\u2019s neck, her head battered and bruised, tears streaming, bandana securing her mouth. Ben had watched in utter disbelief as Reece killed financier Steve Horn and the secretary of defense before centering his M4 on the CIA assassin\u2019s face and pressing the trigger, eliminating the final target on his terminal list. \u201cMr. Reece?\u201d \u201cNo. Nothing.\u201d \u201cJohn\u201d removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He then made a production of turning off the computer, though Reece knew quite well that it continued to monitor his vitals and that the audio and visual recording devices in the room were still running. He wondered who was watching through the two-way glass. \u201cMr. Reece, this is not going well.\u201d \u201cReally? I\u2019m shocked.\u201d \u201cYou must take this seriously. I have to tell you, almost every answer you\u2019ve given indicated deception on the polygraph, even your name.\u201d \u201cWell, I\u2019ve used a couple aliases.\u201d \u201cWe covered this, Mr. Reece. Just any names not denoted on your employment questionnaire.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s been a busy couple of years, John .\u201d \u201cLet me converse with my supervisors. I\u2019ll be right back.\u201d \u201cJohn\u201d left Reece alone in the room, still tethered to the computer and still under surveillance. Reece looked at the camera in the corner and shook his head. Fuckers. Reece knew the polygraph was largely theater. Yes, the machine measured blood pressure, breathing, sweat secretions, and muscle movements, but there was a reason that results of a \u201clie detector\u201d test were inadmissible in every court in the civilized world. Its value was in making the candidate think it could detect deception. It was an expensive prop, one that had gotten more than one candidate over the years to admit to crimes that they would almost certainly have gotten away with otherwise. Reece had visited the antipolygraph.org site years ago as part of a battlefield interrogation course he\u2019d attended in the SEAL Teams. It was the approved \u201ctactical questioning\u201d course of instruction, meant to provide left and right limits to operators in the field who might not have the luxury of having a BIT, or Battlefield Interrogation Team, attached to their unit. The techniques taught at the approved interrogation school were more akin to how a detective would interview the suspect of a crime in the United States. Reece wouldn\u2019t learn the darker arts of interrogation until he was detailed to a CIA covert action unit in Iraq at the height of the war. There he would learn techniques that had come in handy over the years, techniques that were not part of a manual and were not searchable via Google. Reece shut his eyes. Calm down, Reece. This is all part of the game, a game you need to win. Remember why you are here; you made a promise to Freddy Strain\u2019s widow. \u201cI\u2019ll find who did this, Joanie. I\u2019ll find everyone responsible.\u201d The triggerman was still breathing: Nizar Kattan, a Syrian sniper Reece had vowed to put in the ground. An assassin Reece needed the CIA\u2019s robust intelligence capabilities to locate. There was also the letter. A letter and a safe-deposit box key from his father. A letter from the grave. Later, Reece. Just get through the day. Reece\u2019s day had started early that morning with a blood draw. He had given a urine sample and completed his vision and hearing tests. He had an appointment at medical the following day to complete his physical. He\u2019d taken the 567-question MMPI-2 psychological test, which he\u2019d found both amusing and irritating. He would have to sit down with an Agency psychologist on his third day. Reece knew the MMPI was designed to uncover psychological issues that might be disqualifying to a candidate applying for employment with the Central Intelligence Agency. It was administered to uncover repressed aggression, psychoticism, alcoholism, anxiety, marital distress, fears, depression, anger, cynicism, low self-esteem, defensiveness, antisocial behavior, schizophrenia, and paranoia. Paranoia. Reece noticed that day two contained a long block of \u201cfree time\u201d in his printed schedule. He knew this was a placeholder to \u201cretake\u201d the polygraph. Enough SEALs had gone through CIA processing over the years that it was anything but secret. Day three was set aside for an office visit with Victor Rodriguez, director of what was now called the Special Activities Center. The SAC ran the paramilitary wing of the Agency. Vic had tried to recruit him for Ground Branch at their very first meeting when Reece had landed on the USS Kearsarge in the Adriatic Sea after he and Freddy Strain had taken out Amin Nawaz, the terrorist known as Europe\u2019s Osama bin Laden. Reece had agreed to finish the job he\u2019d started at the behest of the United States government to track down and turn or kill a former CIA asset he\u2019d worked with and befriended in Baghdad. That mission had led to Freddy\u2019s death from a sniper\u2019s bullet in Odessa. His relationship with Katie had taken a bit of a hit when he\u2019d disappeared into the Siberian tundra for six months, tracking the CIA traitor responsible for the death of Reece\u2019s father, a legendary Vietnam-era SEAL and Cold War CIA case officer. Reece glanced at the Rolex Submariner on his wrist, a watch that his father had purchased at the PX in Saigon, a watch that had been slipped from his dead hand in a back alley in Buenos Aires. Reece had taken it back from the man responsible before sending him to the afterlife with seven hundred grams of RDX from a Russian claymore. The polygraph examiner had been gone for ten minutes. Was he really meeting with a supervisor? No chance. They were just making him sweat. It was all part of the interrogation playbook: convincing unwitting subjects to admit to disqualifying crimes and thereby putting a feather in the cap of the polygrapher who \u201ccaught\u201d them. They were especially fond of \u201ccatching\u201d and disqualifying those with special operations backgrounds. Katie had been supportive of Reece\u2019s decision to accept a provisional contract with the CIA. She had been with him from the start of the nightmare and helped uncover the conspiracy that led to the ambush of his SEAL Team in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the slaying of his young daughter and pregnant wife. She\u2019d waited and wondered when he disappeared off the coast of Fishers Island, New York, after saving her life, and she\u2019d been by his side as he recovered from brain surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Their relationship had taken a romantic turn in the mountains of Montana before they\u2019d been targeted on home soil by a Russian mafia hit team at the direction of Oliver Grey. She\u2019d been through a lot, and even though she had been less than happy when he went off the grid in Russia, she understood. Reece was on a mission, one that was not yet complete. Reece heard the door mechanism click and turned his head to see the director of the CIA\u2019s Special Activities Center enter the room. \u201cJesus, Reece, can\u2019t you do anything the easy way?\u201d Victor Rodriguez asked. Vic was second-generation Agency. He was a former Army Special Forces officer whose father had led a squad in Brigade 2506, the CIA-trained group of Cuban exiles that had attempted the 1961 overthrow of Fidel Castro in what would become known as the Bay of Pigs. Vic had worked his way up through the ranks and had started recruiting Reece when he\u2019d headed the Special Operations Group, the paramilitary side of what was up until 2016 called the Special Activities Division. He still preferred the older nomenclature. He was now responsible for SOG and the Political Action Group, two entities whose work was, more often than not, connected. The dark side of the Agency was in his blood. He\u2019d grown up under the ever-looming specter of Bah\u00eda de Cochinos and had vowed to never again allow a failure at the nexus of intelligence and covert action. Victor Rodriguez was responsible for the third arm of U.S. foreign policy; when diplomacy and overt military pressure or intervention failed or was not possible for political reasons, the Special Activities Center was the Tertia Optio : the third option. Vic had convinced Reece to sign on as a contractor and had put on the full-court press when Reece returned from Russia. He wanted the former frogman on board as a SOG paramilitary operations officer. In a late-night phone call a month earlier, Reece had agreed. This three-day screening was part of the process. If Reece passed, he would get an EOD, or Enter On Duty, date and then begin his training at the Farm. \u201cCan you just tell the twerp to finish up so we can get through this?\u201d \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work like that. We discussed the poly, Reece. You need to pass just like everyone else. How hard is it? Medical, dental, piss in a cup, answer some questions. You have a presidential pardon, so even if you are technically lying on the exam you are actually telling the truth.\u201d \u201cDoesn\u2019t mean I have to like it.\u201d \u201cNo, but you have to do it. Isn\u2019t that even some SEAL saying?\u201d \u201c You don\u2019t have to like it, you just have to do it ,\u201d Reece confirmed. \u201cGood. Just do it. You are being given a lot of leeway because of what you and Freddy did to save the former president. And even though it\u2019s not officially recognized or condoned, there are rumors swirling about you taking out Oliver Grey. The Agency, and the counter-intel folks in particular, do not take kindly to turncoats in our midst. They missed Nicholson, Ames, and Grey. It\u2019s rumored you gave Grey the sentence most of the Agency wishes on traitors.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m answering these as best I can, Vic.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re just counter-intel and lifestyle poly questions. You know the drill; your examiner will tell you to come back tomorrow. Play nice and let\u2019s get you to the Farm.\u201d \u201cUnderstood. Just tell \u2018John\u2019 to stop pissing me off.\u201d \u201cPlay nice,\u201d Vic repeated before turning to exit the polygraph room. \u201cAnd please don\u2019t throw him through the two-way mirror. Those things are more expensive than you think.\u201d When \u201cJohn\u201d returned, Reece lowered his heart rate the way he would before taking a long-range sniper shot. He focused on Katie\u2019s smile and answered with the correct yes and no answers. It wasn\u2019t every day you got to beat a lie detector test. Passing the polygraph meant Nizar Kattan was one step closer to death. Two days later Vic sifted through Reece\u2019s test results. No drugs in his system, no sexually transmitted diseases, vision and hearing well above Agency standards. It was the polygraph and MMPI test that concerned him. The MMPI had resulted in paranoid and aggressive personality traits, which was not totally unexpected considering what Reece had been through over the past three years. Vic shifted his focus from the Multiphasic Personality Inventory to the polygraph. IS YOUR FIRST NAME JAMES? FALSE POSITIVE HAVE YOU EVER LIED TO GET OUT OF TROUBLE? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE DO YOU INTEND TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS TRUTHFULLY? DECEPTION INDICATED IS TODAY WEDNESDAY? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU EVER COMMITTED A CRIME FOR WHICH YOU WERE NOT CAUGHT? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE ARE WE IN VIRGINIA? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU EVER COMMITTED MURDER? DECEPTION INDICATED ARE YOU A UNITED STATES CITIZEN? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU EVER BEEN PART OF A GROUP THAT HAS WANTED TO OVERTHROW THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT? DECEPTION INDICATED HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN THE EMPLOYMENT OF A FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SERVICE? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU VISITED ANTIPOLYGRAPH.ORG TO PREPARE FOR THIS EXAMINATION? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE ARE YOU SITTING DOWN? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU EVER COMMITTED MURDER? DECEPTION INDICATED HAVE YOU EVER PLOTTED TO OVERTHROW THE U.S. GOVERNMENT? DECEPTION INDICATED IS THE WALL WHITE? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INVOLVED IN THE TORTURE OF ENEMY COMBATANTS? DECEPTION INDICATED HAVE YOU USED ILLEGAL DRUGS YOU HAVE NOT MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY? DECEPTION INDICATED DID YOU INTENTIONALLY FALSIFY INFORMATION ON YOUR APPLICATION OR SECURITY PAPERWORK? DECEPTION INDICATED HAVE YOU EVER STOLEN ANYTHING FROM YOUR PREVIOUS PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT? DECEPTION INDICATED HAVE YOU EVER STOLEN ANYTHING WORTH OVER FIVE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS? DECEPTION INDICATED DO YOU HAVE ANY UNDISCLOSED RELATIONSHIPS WITH FOREIGN NATIONALS? DECEPTION INDICATED HAVE YOU EVER KEPT A WAR TROPHY? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU EVER SOLD GOVERNMENT PROPERTY? TRUTHFUL CONCLUSIVE HAVE YOU, OR DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO BROUGHT BACK ENEMY WEAPONS FROM OVERSEAS? DECEPTION INDICATED IS THERE ANYTHING IN YOUR BACKGROUND THAT WOULD DISQUALIFY YOU FROM GETTING THIS JOB? DECEPTION INDICATED FINAL POLYGRAPH TEST RESULTS: INCONCLUSIVE Vic closed the file and looked at the faded black-and-white framed photograph on the wall of his office. The men wore World War II\u2013era \u201cduck hunter\u201d patterned camouflage uniforms and carried an assortment of small arms, including a Johnson M1941 held by Vic\u2019s father. Never again , Vic thought. On the front cover of the file he signed his name over his director\u2019s signature block and checked a box marked APPROVED. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "B06WVC1RMX", "title": "The Occult Madonna", "author": "Douglas D. Hawk", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B08NX2GFYT", "title": "The Valley", "author": "Mike Salt", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "B09QP697VQ", "title": "PRICE MANOR: the house that burns", "author": "Mike Salt", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0316359408", "title": "The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 1 (Tintin in America / Cigars of the Pharaoh / The Blue Lotus)", "author": "Herge", "description": "About the Author Herg\u00e9 , one of the most famous Belgians in the world, was a comics writer and artist. The internationally successful Adventures of Tintin are his most well-known and beloved works. They have been translated into 38 different languages and have inspired such legends as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He wrote and illustrated for The Adventures of Tintin until his death in 1983.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.79}, {"asin": "B00ADZRJ7Y", "title": "Scriptshadow Secrets (500 Screenwriting Secrets Hidden Inside 50 Great Movies)", "author": "C.E. Reeves", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1934964603", "title": "The Sixth Gun, Book 1: Cold Dead Fingers", "author": "Brian Hurtt", "description": "About the Author CULLEN BUNN is the writer of comic books such THE SIXTH GUN, SHADOW ROADS, THE DAMNED, HELHEIM, and THE TOOTH for Oni Press. He has also written titles including HARROW COUNTY (Dark Horse), UNCANNY X-MEN, and DEADPOOL AND THE MERCS FOR MONEY (Marvel). Cullen claims to have worked as an Alien Autopsy Specialist, Rodeo Clown, Pro Wrestling Manager, and Sasquatch Wrangler. He has fought for his life against mountain lions and performed on stage as the World\u2019s Youngest Hypnotist. Buy him a drink sometime, and he'll tell you all about it. His website is www.cullenbunn.com. Twitter: @cullenbunnBrian Hurtt is an artist/writer who has spent most of his career working on collaborative creator-owned projects. His first such collaboration was in 2006 when Brian teamed with writer Cullen Bunn to create the Prohibition-era, monster-noir, cult classic, The Damned. A few years later the two teamed up again to create The Sixth Gun--a weird-west, epic supernatural fantasy. Spun out of that world, they're now collaborating on Shadow Roads. Brian also contributes to the popular webcomic Table Titans, in which he is the writer and artist of the stories \"Whispers of Dragons\" and \"Road to Embers\". Brian lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. Brihurtt.com Twitter: @brihurtt", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 17.65}, {"asin": "1601822650", "title": "Kill Kitchener", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Andrew Blasco was born to hardworking, middle-class parents in central Pennsylvania and is the youngest of three children, including his twin brother. His father arranged the first job Andrew and his brother would hold at the age of fourteen: janitors at the local school. Shortly after college, Andrew waded into politics serving on several campaigns ranging from local to federal offices. After serving as staff in the U.S. House of Representatives, he began lobbying for various industries in Harrisburg that included issues from gambling to medicine. He has also served as the head of industry nonprofits and has started several business ventures. An avid outdoors man, he enjoys hunting and camping with his family and friends. He still lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife, Shawna, and their two children, Jude and Genevieve.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.48}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1919613242", "title": "The House on Harlan", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0765356864", "title": "One Second After (A John Matherson Novel, 1)", "author": "William R. Forstchen", "description": "Review \u201cCivilization slides into the abyss of a new dark age in this horrifying apocalyptic novel. Forstchen has put Bin Laden's wet dream on paper and, in the process, taken civilization straight to the rack.\u201d \u2015 Stephen Coonts, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of War \u201cThe only thing more terrifying than this masterfully crafted story is the possibility of it actually happening\u2015and not a damn thing being done to protect us.\u201d \u2015 W.E.B. Griffin & William E. Butterworth IV \u201cForstchen's work has flair and power.\u201d \u2015 Joel Rosenberg, author of The Sleeping Dragon \u201cForstchen did such a damned fine job with One Second After that shortly after the first page, I had been reeled in hook, line, and sinker.\u201d \u2015 David Hagberg, New York Times bestselling author of Tower Down About the Author William R. Forstchen is the author of the New York Times bestseller One Second After and We Look Like Men of War , among numerous other books in diverse subjects ranging from history to science fiction. He has co-authored several books with Newt Gingrich, including Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War , Pearl Harbor , Days of Infamy , To Try Men\u2019s Souls and Valley Forge . Forstchen holds a Ph.D. in History from Purdue University, with specializations in military history and the history of technology. He is currently a Faculty Fellow and Professor of History at Montreat College, near Asheville North Carolina. He is a pilot and flies an original WWII recon \"warbird.\" He resides near Asheville with his daughter Meghan. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. One Second After By William R. Forstchen Tor Books Copyright \u00a9 2011 William R. ForstchenAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780765356864 Chapter One BLACK MOUNTAIN, NORTH CAROLINA, 2:30 EDT John Matherson lifted the plastic bag off the counter. \"You sure I have the right ones?\" he asked. Nancy, the owner of the shop, Ivy Corner, smiled. \"Don't worry, John; she already had them picked out weeks ago. Give her a big hug and kiss for me. Hard to believe she's twelve today.\" John sighed and nodded, looking down at the bag, stuffed with a dozen Beanie Babies, one for each year of Jennifer's life, which started twelve years ago this day. \"Hope she still wants these at thirteen,\" he said. \"God save me when that first boy shows up at the door wanting to take her out.\" The two laughed, Nancy nodding in agreement. He was already enduring that with Elizabeth, his sixteen- year- old, and perhaps for that, and so many other reasons as well, he just wished that he could preserve, could drag out, just for a few more days, weeks, or months the precious time all fathers remember fondly, when they still had their \"little girl.\" It was a beautiful spring day, the cherry trees lining the street in full bloom, a light shower of pink petals drifting on the wind as he walked up the street, past Doc Kellor's office, the antique stores, the new, rather Gothic- looking art gallery that had opened last month, the usual curio shops, and even an old- style ice- cream parlor . . . at a dollar fifty a scoop. Next up the street was Benson's Used and Rare Books. John hesitated, wanted to go in just for a few minutes, then pulled out his cell phone to check the time. Two thirty. Her bus would be rolling in at three, no time today to go in, have a cup of coffee, and talk about books and history. Walt Benson saw him, held up a cup, gesturing for John to join him. He shook his head, pointed to his wrist even though he never wore a watch, and continued to walk up to the corner to where his Talon SUV was parked in front of Taylor's Hardware and General Store. John paused and looked back down the street for a moment. I'm living in a damn Norman Rockwell painting, he thought yet again, for the thousandth time. Winding up here . . . he never imagined it, never planned for it, or even wanted it. Eight years back he was at the Army War College, Carlisle, PA, teaching military history and lecturing on asymmetrical warfare, and waiting to jump the hoop and finally get his first star. And then two things happened. His promotion came through, with assignment to Brussels as a liaison to NATO, a rather nice posting to most likely end out his career . . . and then Mary had returned from the doctor's several days after the promotion, her face pale, lips pressed tight, and said four words: \"I have breast cancer.\" The commandant at Carlisle, Bob Scales, an old friend who had stood as godfather for John's Jennifer, understood the request he then laid before him. John would take the promotion, but could it be to the Pentagon? It'd place them nearby to Johns Hopkins, and not too far from Mary's family. It didn't work. Cutbacks were hitting as it was, oh, there was great sympathy from upstairs, but he had to take Brussels if he wanted the star and maybe a year later they'd find a slot for him stateside. After talking to Mary's doctor . . . John resigned. He would take her back home to Black Mountain, North Carolina, which was what she wanted and the cancer treatment center at Chapel Hill would be nearby. Bob's connections were good, remarkably good, when John first mentioned Black Mountain. A single phone call was made; the old- boy network, though disdained as politically incorrect, did exist and it did help at times when needed. The president of Montreat College, North Carolina, in Mary's hometown, did indeed \"suddenly\" need an assistant director of development. John hated development and admissions work but survived fit until finally a tenure- track professorship in history opened four years back and he was slotted in. The fact that the president of the college, Dan Hunt, owed his life to Bob Scales, who had dragged him out of a minefield back in 1970, was a definite mark in John's favor that could not be ignored between friends. Dan had lost his leg, Bob got another of his Bronze Stars for saving him, and the two had been buddies ever since, each looking out, as well, for those whom the other cared for. So Mary got to go home, after twenty years of following John from Benning, to Germany, to Okinawa, sweating out Desert Storm, from there to the Pentagon, then a year, a wonderful year, at West Point and then three more wonderful years teaching at Carlisle. At heart he was a history teacher, and maybe whichever bastard in the personnel office at the Pentagon had nixed John's request to stay stateside had done him a favor. So they came home to Black Mountain, North Carolina. He did not hesitate one second in granting her wish, resigning his commission and promotion and moving to this corner of the Carolina mountains. He looked back down Main Street, frozen for a moment in time and memories. Mary would be gone four years next week, her last time out a slow, exhausting walk down this street, which as a girl she had run along. It was indeed a Norman Rockwell town. That final walk down this street with her, everyone knew her, everyone knew what was happening, and everyone came out to say hi, to give her a hug, a kiss, all knowing it was farewell but not saying it. It was a gesture of love John would never forget. He pushed the thought aside. It was still too close and Jennifer's bus would be pulling up in twenty minutes. He got into his Talon, started it up, turned onto State Street, and headed east. He did love the view as State Street curved through town, past yet more shops, nearly all the buildings redbrick, dating back to the turn of the century. The village had once been a thriving community, part of the tuberculosis sanitarium business. When the railroad had finally pierced the mountains of western North Carolina in the early 1880s some of the first to flood in were tuberculosis victims. They came by the thousands, to the sanitariums that sprang up on every sunlit mountain slope. By the early twenties there were a dozen such institutions surrounding Asheville, the big city situated a dozen miles to the west of Black Mountain. And then came the Depression. Black Mountain remained frozen in time, and then came antibiotics right after the war and the sanitariums emptied out. And all those wonderful buildings, which in other towns would have given way to shopping plazas and strip malls, had remained intact, progress passing Black Mountain by. Now there were conference centers for various churches and summer camps for kids where the sanitariums had been. His own college had been founded at such a site up in what everyone called the Cove. A small college, six hundred kids, most of them from small towns across the Carolinas and a few from Atlanta or Florida. Some of the kids were freaked out by the relative isolation, but most of them grudgingly admitted they loved it, a beautiful campus, a safe place, an old logging trail across the edge of the campus leading straight on up to Mount Mitchell, good white water nearby for kayaking, and plenty of woods to disappear into for partying for some of them, to get around the fairly strict campus rules. The town itself finally revived, starting in the 1980s, but wonderfully, the charming turn- of- the- century look was maintained, and in the summer and fall the streets would be crammed with tourists and day- trippers coming up from Charlotte or Winston- Salem to escape the boiling heat of the lowlands, joined by hundreds of summer \"cottagers\" who lived in the Cove, many of the cottages darn near mansions for some of the older wealth of the South. That had been Mary's family, Old South and wealth. Me-ma Jennie, Mary's mother and Jennifer's namesake, still hung on doggedly to their home up in the Cove, refusing to consider moving, even though \"Papa\" Tyler was now in a nearby nursing home, in the final stages of cancer. John continued to drive east, the traffic on Interstate 40, coming up through the Swannanoa Gap, roaring by on his left. The old- timers in the town still expressed their hatred of that \"darn road.\" Before it came in, Black Mountain was a sleepy southern mountain hamlet. With the road had come development, traffic, and the foods of tourists on weekends that the chamber of commerce loved and everyone else tried to tolerate. Staying on the old highway that paralleled the interstate, John drove for less than a mile out of town, then turned right onto a dirt road that twisted up the side of a hill overlooking the town. The old mountain joke used to be \"you know you're getting directions to a mountain home when they say, 'Turn onto the dirt road.' \" For a kid from New Jersey, John still got a bit of a kick out of the fact that he did indeed live in the South, on the side of a mountain, halfway up a dirt road, with a view worth a million bucks. The home he and Mary had purchased was in one of the first new developments in the area. In a county where there was no zoning, the lower part of the hill had several trailers, an old shack where Connie Yarborough, a wonderful down- the- hill neighbor, still did not have electricity or town water, and next to her was an eccentric Volkswagen repair shop . . . the owner, Jim Bartlett, a true sixties throwback, his lot littered with dozens of rusting Beetles, vans, and even a few precious VW Buses and Karmann Ghias. The house (Mary and John actually named Rivendell, because of their mutual love of Tolkien) offered a broad sweeping view of the valley below; the skyline of Asheville was in the distance, framed by the Great Smoky Mountains beyond, facing due west so Mary could have her sunsets. When trying to describe the view he'd just tell friends, \"Check out Last of the Mohicans ; it was filmed a half hour from where we live.\" It was a fairly contemporary-looking type of home, high ceiling, the west wall, from bedroom across the living room to the dining area, all glass. The bed was still positioned to face the glass wall, as Mary wanted it so she could watch the outside world as her life drifted away. He pulled up the drive. The two \"idiots\" Ginger and Zach, both golden retrievers, both beautiful- looking dogs\u2014and both thicker than bricks when it came to brains\u2014had been out sunning on the bedroom deck. They stood up and barked madly, as if he were an invader. Though if he were a real invader they'd have cowered in terror and stained the carpet as they .ed into Jennifer's room to hide. The two idiots charged through the bedroom, then out through the entryway screen door . . . the lower half of the door a charade, as the screen was gone. Put a new one in, it'd last a few days and the idiots would charge right through it again. John had given up on that fight years ago. As for actually closing the door . . . it never even crossed his mind anymore. This was Black Mountain. Strange as it seemed, folks rarely locked up, keys would be left in cars, kids did indeed play in the streets in the evening, there were parades for the Fourth of July, Christmas, and the ridiculous Pine cone Festival, complete to the crowning of a Miss Pinecone. Papa Tyler had absolutely humiliated his daughter, Mary, in front of John early on in their courtship when he proudly pulled out a photo of her, Miss Pine cone 1977. In Black Mountain there was still an ice- cream truck that made the rounds on summer nights. . . . It was all one helluva difference from his boyhood just outside of Newark, New Jersey. There was a car parked at the top of the driveway. Mary's mother, Me-ma Jennie. Me-ma Jennie was behind the wheel of her wonderful and highly eccentric 1959 Ford Edsel. Ford . . . that's where the family money had come from, ownership of a string of car dealerships across the Carolinas dating back to Henry Ford himself. There was even a photo framed in the house up in the Cove of Mary's great-granddad and Henry Ford at the opening of a dealership in Charlotte back before World War I. Though it wasn't polite to be overtly \"business\" in their strata and Jennie preferred the role of genteel southern lady, in her day, John knew, she was one shrewd business person, as was her husband. John pulled up alongside the Edsel. Jennie put down the book she was reading and got out. \"Hi, Jen.\" She absolutely hated \"Ma,\" \"Mother,\" \"Mom,\" or, mortal sin of all mortal sins, \"Me-ma\" or \"Grandma\" from her Yankee son- in- law, who was definitely not her first choice for her only daughter. But that had softened with time, especially towards the end, especially when he had brought the girls back home to Jen. The two got out of their cars and she held up a cheek to be kissed, her height, at little more than five foot two, overshadowed by his six- foot- four bulk, and there was a light touch of her hand on his arm and an affectionate squeeze. \"Thought you'd never get here in time. She'll be home any minute.\" Jen had yet to slip into the higher pitch or gravelly tone of an \"old lady's\" voice. He wondered if she practiced every night reciting before a mirror to keep that wonderful young woman-sounding southern lilt. It was an accent that still haunted him. The same as Mary's when they had first met at Duke, twenty- eight years ago. At times, if Jen was in the next room and called to the girls, it would still bring tears to his eyes. \"We got time. Why didn't you go inside to wait?\" \"With those two mongrels? The way they jump, they'd ruin my nylons.\" Ginger and Zach were all over John, jumping, barking, leaping about . . . and studiously avoiding Jen. Though dumb, goldens knew when someone didn't like them no matter how charming they might be. John reached in, pulled out the bag of Beanies, and, walking over to the stone wall that bordered the path to the house, began to line them up, one at a time, setting them side by side. \"Now John, really, isn't she getting a bit old for that?\" \"Not yet, not my little girl.\" Jen laughed softly. \"You can't keep time back forever.\" \"I can try, can't I?\" he said with a grin. She smiled sadly. \"How do you think Tyler and I felt about you, the day you came through our door?\" He reached out and gave her an affectionate touch on the cheek. \"You guys loved me.\" \"You a Yankee? Like hell. Tyler actually thought about driving you off with a shotgun. And that first night you stayed over . . .\" Even after all these years he found he still blushed a bit at that. Jen had caught Mary and him in a less than \"proper\" situation on the family room sofa at two in the morning. Though not fully improper, it was embarrassing nevertheless, and Jen had never let him live it down. He set the Beanies out, stepped back, eyeballed them, like a sergeant examining a row of new recruits. The red, white, and blue \"patriot\" bear on the right should be in the middle of the ranks where a flag bearer might be. He could hear the growl of the school bus as it shifted gears, turning off of old Route 70, coming up the hill. \"Here she comes,\" Jen announced excitedly. Going back to the Edsel, she leaned in the open window and brought out a .at, elegantly wrapped box, tied off with a neat bow. \"Jewelry?\" John asked. \"Of course; she's twelve now. A proper young lady should have a gold necklace at twelve. Her mother did.\" \"Yeah, I remember that necklace,\" he said with a grin. \"She was wearing it that night you just mentioned. And she was twenty then.\" \"You cad,\" Jen said softly, and slapped him lightly on the shoulder, and he pretended that it was a painful blow. Ginger and Zach had stopped jumping around John, both of them cocking their heads, taking in the sound of the approaching school bus, the squeal of the brakes as it stopped at the bottom of the driveway, its yellow barely visible now through the spring- blooming trees. They were both off like lightning bolts, running full tilt down the driveway, barking up a storm, and seconds later he could hear the laughter of Jennifer; of Patricia, a year older and their neighbor; and of Seth, Pat's eleventh-grade brother. The girls came running up the driveway, Seth threw a stick, the two dogs diverted by it for a moment but then turned together and charged up the hill behind the girls. Seth waved then crossed the street to his house. John felt a hand slip into his . . . Jen's. \"Just like her mother,\" Jen whispered, voice choked. Yes, he could see Mary in Jennifer, slender, actually skinny as a rail, shoulder-length blond hair tied back, still a lanky little girl. She slowed a bit, reaching out to put a hand on a tree as if to brace herself, Patricia turned and waited for her. John felt a momentary concern, wanted to go down to her, but knew better, Jen actually held him back. \"You are too protective,\" Jen whispered. \"She must handle it on her own.\" Young Jennifer caught her breath, looked up, a bit pale, saw them waiting, and a radiant smile lit her face. \"Me-ma! And you drove the Edsel today. Can we go for a ride?\" Jen let her hand slip, bent over slightly as Jennifer ran up to her grandmother, the two embracing. \"How's my birthday girl?\" They hugged and Grandma Jen showered Jennifer with kisses, twelve of them, counting each off. Pat looked over at the Beanies lined up, smiled, and looked up at John. \"Afternoon, Mr. Matherson.\" \"How are you, Pat?\" \"I think she needs to be checked,\" Pat whispered. \"It can wait.\" \"Daddy!\" Jennifer was now in his arms. He lifted her up, hugged her with fierce intensity so that she laughed, then groaned, \"You'll break my back!\" He let go of her, watching her eyes as she looked past him to the Beanie Babies lining the wall . . . and yes, there was still that childlike glow in them. \"Patriot Bear! And Ollie Ostrich!\" As she started to sweep them up, he looked over at Jen with a bit of a triumphant smile, as if to say, \"See, she's still my little girl.\" Jen, rising to the challenge, came up to Jennifer's side and held out the .at box. \"Happy Birthday, darling.\" Jennifer tore the paper off. Ginger, thinking the paper was now a gift to her, half- swallowed it and ran off as Zach chased her. When Jennifer opened the box her eyes widened. \"Oh, Me-ma.\" \"It's time my girl had a real gold necklace. Maybe your friend can help you put it on.\" John looked down at the gift. My God, it must of cost a fortune, heavy, almost pencil thick. Jen looked at him out of the corner of her eye as if to meet any challenge. \"You're a young lady now,\" Jen announced as Pat helped to clasp the necklace on, and then Jen produced a small mirror from her purse and held it up. \"Oh, Grandma . . . it's lovely.\" \"A lovely gift for a lovely lady.\" John stood silent for a moment, not sure what to say as his little girl gazed into the mirror, raising her head slightly, the way a woman would, to admire the gold. \"Sweetie, I think you better check your blood sugar; you seemed a bit winded coming up the hill,\" John finally said, and his words came out heavily, breaking the moment. \"Yes, Daddy.\" Jennifer leaned against the wall, took off her backpack and pulled out the blood-sugar test monitor. It was one of the new digital readout models. No more finger pricking, just a quick jab to the arm. She absently fingered the necklace with her free hand while waiting for the readout. One forty- two . . . a bit high. \"I think you better get some insulin into you,\" John said. She nodded. Jennifer had lived with it for ten years now. He knew that was a major part of his protectiveness of her. When she was in her terrible twos and threes, it tore his heart out every time he had to prick her finger, the sight of his or Mary's approach with the test kit set off howls of protest. The doctors had all said that, as quickly as possible, Jennifer had to learn to monitor herself, that John and Mary needed to step back even when she was only seven and eight to let her know her own signs, test, and medicate. Mary had handled it far better than John had, perhaps because of her own illness towards the end. Jen with her strength had the same attitude. Strange. Here I am, a soldier of twenty years. Saw some action, but the only casualties were the Iraqis, never my own men. I was trained to handle things, but when it came to my daugher's diabetes, a damn aggressive type 1, I was always on edge. Tough, damn good at what I did, well respected by my men, and yet complete jelly when it comes to my girls. \"There's a few more gifts inside,\" John said. \"Why don't you girls go on in? Once your sister gets home and your friends show up we can have our party.\" \"Oh, Dad, didn't you get Elizabeth's message?\" \"What message?\" \"Here, silly.\" She reached up and .shed the cell phone out of his breast pocket, tucked in behind a pack of cigarettes. She started to pull the cigarettes out, to stomp on them or tear them up, but a look from him warned her off. \"Someday, Daddy,\" she sighed, then taking the phone she punched a few keys and handed it back. \"Home late. Out with Ben,\" the screen read. \"She texted you and me during lunch.\" \"Texted?\" \"Yes, Daddy, text message, all the kids are doing it now.\" \"What's wrong with a phone call?\" She looked at him as if he were from the antediluvian period and then headed inside. \"Texted?\" Jen asked. John held the phone so she could read the message. Jen smiled. \"Better start keeping a sharper watch on Elizabeth,\" she said. \"If that Ben Johnson has any of his grandfather's blood in him.\" She chuckled as if remembering something from long ago. \"I don't need to hear this.\" \"No, you don't, Colonel.\" \"Actually, I kind of prefer 'Doctor,' or 'Professor.' \" \"A doctor is someone who sticks things in you. A professor, well, they always struck me as a bit strange. Either rakes chasing the girls or boring, dusty types. Down here in the South, 'Colonel' sounds best. More masculine.\" \"Well, I am no longer in active ser vice. I am a professor, so let's just settle for 'John.' \" Jen gazed up at him for a moment, then came up to his side, stood on tiptoes, and kissed his cheek lightly. \"I can see why my own little girl once fell for you, John. You'll lose both of them soon enough to some pimply- faced boys, so do hang on to her as long as you can.\" \"Well, you sure as hell didn't help, draping that gold necklace on her. What did it cost, a thousand, fifteen hundred?\" \"Roughly, but then again, no lady tells the truth when it comes to her buying jewelry.\" \"Until the bill comes in and the husband has to pay.\" There was a pause. He knew he had misspoken. If he had said such a thing around Mary, she'd have lit into him about a woman being independent and the hell with a husband handling the bills . . . and in fact she did handle all the family finances right up till the last weeks of her life. As for Tyler, though, he no longer even knew what a bill was, and that hurt, no matter how self-reliant Jen tried to appear to be. \"I best be going,\" Jen said. \"Sorry, I didn't mean it that way.\" \"It's all right, John. Let me go up to the nursing home to spend some time with Tyler and I'll be back for the party.\" \"Jennifer was expecting a ride in that monstrous car of yours.\" \"The Edsel, my dear young man, was a generation ahead of its time.\" \"And the biggest .op in the history of Ford Motors. My God, look at that grille; it's ugly as sin.\" She lightened up a bit with the banter. There were half a dozen cars in her huge garage, several newer ones but also an actual Model A, up on blocks, and, beauty of beauties, a powder blue 1965 Mustang convertible. A lot of bad memories, though, were tied to that Mustang. When John and Mary were dating, they had conned her parents into letting them borrow the car for a cruise up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mount Mitchell and John, driving it, had rear- ended an elderly couple's Winnebago. No one was hurt, but the car was totaled and Tyler had poured thousands into getting it restored . . . and swore that no one other than him or Jen would ever drive it again. And Jen still lived by that ruling. \"This Edsel will run forever, my dear, and just check on eBay to see how much it's worth. I bet a heck of a lot more than that SUV thing you've got.\" He settled back against the stone wall as Jen maneuvered \"the monster\" around and cruised down the driveway at breakneck speed. The wall was warm from the afternoon sun. The Beanies were still there, and oh, that did hurt a bit; at least she could have carried Patriot Bear or the ostrich in. Inside he could hear Jennifer and Pat chatting away about the necklace until the stereo kicked on. Some strange female wailing sounds. Britney Spears? No, she was old stuff now, thank God. What it was he couldn't tell, other than the fact that he didn't like it. Pink Floyd, some of the old stuff his parents listened to like Sinatra or Glenn Miller, or, better yet, the Chieftains were more his speed. He picked up one of the Beanies, Patriot Bear. \"Well, my friend, guess we'll soon be left behind,\" he said. Leaning against the wall, he soaked in the view, the tranquility of the moment, broken only by the distant rumble of traffic on I-40 and the noise inside the house. Ginger and Zach came back from their romp in the field behind the house and flopped down at his feet, panting hard. The scent of lilacs was heavy on the air; if anyone wanted to truly see spring, they should live in these mountains. Down in the valley below, the cherry trees were in full bloom, just several hundred feet higher here at his home they were just beginning to blossom, but the lilacs were already blooming. To his right, ten miles away, the top of Mount Mitchell was actually crowned with a touch of snow, winter was still up there. \"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed . . .\" The scent always triggered in his mind Whitman's lament for Lincoln. It reminded John that to night, the second Tuesday of the month, was Civil War Roundtable night in the basement of the Methodist church. It'd be another fun round of the usual raucous debate, the other members all needling him as their one and only Yankee, whom they could pick on. And then the phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, expecting it to be Elizabeth. There was going to be hell to pay if it was. How she could stand up her kid sister on her birthday to sneak off with that pimple- faced, horny, fast- handed Johnson kid . . . But the area code was 703 . . . and John recognized the next three numbers . . . the Pentagon. He opened the phone and clicked it on. \"Hey, Bob.\" \"John, how you doing? Where's my goddaughter?\" He said it doing a halfway decent imitation of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone. Bob Scales, now three stars, John's former boss at Carlisle and a damn good friend, had stood as Jennifer's godfather, and though Irish Catholic rather than Italian, he took the job seriously. He and his wife, Barbara, usually came down three or four times a year. When Mary died they had taken a couple of weeks off and stayed to help. They never had children and thus they considered Jennifer and Elizabeth to be their surrogates. \"Growing up,\" John said sadly. \"Her grandmother gave her a gold necklace that must of cost a grand or more, which counted a helluva lot more than the Beanies, and the stack of Pokemon cards still waiting inside. I even got tickets to Disney World for once school lets out that I'll give her at dinner, but I wonder now if it will be the same.\" \"You mean when you took her there when she was six and Elizabeth ten? Hell, yeah, it will be different, but you'll still see the little girl come out down there, even with Elizabeth. How's Elizabeth doing, by the way?\" \"I'm thinking of shooting her boyfriend later today.\" Bob roared with laughter. \"Maybe it's best I didn't have daughters,\" Bob finally replied. \"Sons, yeah . . .\" His voice trailed off for a moment. \"Hey, let me speak to Jennifer, OK?\" \"Sure.\" John walked into the house, shouting for Jennifer, who came dashing out of her bedroom, still wearing that damn necklace, and grabbed the phone. \"Hi, Uncle Bob!\" John tapped her on the shoulder. \"You take your insulin?\" he asked. She nodded her head; then chattering away, she walked around the house. John looked out the window across the valley to the mountains beyond. It was a beautiful, pristine spring day. And his mood began to lighten. Several of Jennifer's friends would be over soon for a small party. He'd cook up some burgers on the grill out on the side deck; the kids would then retreat to Jennifer's room. He had just opened the pool in the backyard over the weekend, and though the water was a chilly sixty-eight, a couple of the kids might jump in. He'd flush them out around dark, go to his Roundtable meeting, and maybe later this eve ning he'd dig back into that article he was committed to for the Civil War Journal about Lee versus Grant as a strategic commander . . . a no- brainer but still an extra five hundred bucks when done and another vita builder for tenure review next year. He could stay up late; his first lecture wasn't until eleven in the morning tomorrow. \"Dad, Uncle Bob wants you!\" Jennifer came out of her bedroom, holding up the phone. John took it, gave her a quick peck on the top of her head and a playful swat as she ran back off. Seconds later the damn stereo in her room doubled in sound. \"Yeah, Bob?\" \"John, I gotta run.\" He could sense some tension in Bob's voice. He could hear some voices in the background . . . shouting. It was hard to tell, though; Jennifer's stereo was blaring. \"Sure, Bob. Will you be down next month?\" \"Look, John, something's up. Got a problem here. I gotta\u2014\" The phone went dead. At that same instant, the ceiling fan began to slowly wind down, the stereo in Jennifer's room shut down, and looking over to his side alcove office he saw the computer screen saver disappear, the green light of the on button on the nineteen- inch monitor disappearing. There was a chirping beep, the signal that the home security and .re alarm system was off- line; then that went silent as well. \"Bob?\" Silence on the other end. John snapped the phone shut. Damn, power failure. \"Dad?\" It was Jennifer. \"My CD player died.\" \"Yeah, honey.\" Thank God, he thought silently. \"Power failure.\" She looked at him, a bit crestfallen, as if he were somehow responsible or could snap his finger to make the CD player come back on. Actually, if he could permanently arrange for that damn player to die, he would be tempted to do it. \"What about my party? Pat just gave me a CD and I wanted to play it.\" \"No worry, sweetie. Let me call the power company. Most likely a blown transformer.\" He picked up the landline phone . . . silence, no dial tone. Last time that happened some drunk had rammed into a telephone pole down at the bottom of the hill and wiped everything out. The drunk of course had walked away from it. Cell phone. John opened it back up, started to punch numbers . . . nothing. Damn. Cell phone was dead. He put it down on the kitchen table. Puzzling. The battery in his phone must have gone out just as Bob clicked off. Hell, without electricity John couldn't charge it back up to call the power company. He looked over at Jennifer, who stared at him expectantly, as if he would now resolve things. \"No problem at all, kid. They'll be on it, and besides, it's a beautiful day; you don't need to be listening to that garbage anyhow. Why can't you like Mozart or Debussy the way Pat here does?\" Pat looked at him uncomfortably and he realized he had committed one of the mortal sins of parenting; never compare your daughter to one of her buddies. \"Go on outside; give the dogs a run. They'll have the power back by dinnertime.\" Excerpted from ONE SECOND AFTER by William R. Forstchen Copyright \u00a9 2009 by William R. Forstchen Published in March 2009 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher. Continues... Excerpted from One Second After by William R. Forstchen Copyright \u00a9 2011 by William R. Forstchen. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.89}, {"asin": "B000JMKNVA", "title": "Gone, Baby, Gone: A Novel (Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro Book 4)", "author": "Dennis Lehane", "description": "Amazon.com Review Cheese Olamon, \"a six-foot-two, four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who'd somehow arrived at the misconception he was black,\" is telling his old grammar school friends Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro why they have to convince another mutual chum, the gun dealer Bubba Rugowski, that Cheese didn't try to have him killed. \"You let Bubba know I'm clean when it comes to what happened to him. You want me alive. Okay? Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone.\" Of all the chilling, completely credible scenes of sadness, destruction, and betrayal in Dennis Lehane's fourth and very possibly best book about Kenzie and Gennaro, this moment stands out because it captures in a few pages the essence of Lehane's success. Private detectives Kenzie and Gennaro, who live in the same working-class Dorchester neighborhood of Boston where they grew up, have gone to visit drug dealer Cheese in prison because they think he's involved in the kidnapping of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. Without sentimentalizing the grotesque figure of Cheese, Lehane tells us enough about his past to make us understand why he and the two detectives might share enough trust to possibly save a child's life when all the best efforts of traditional law enforcement have failed. By putting Kenzie and Gennaro just to one side of the law (but not totally outside; they have several cop friends, a very important part of the story), Lehane adds depth and edge to traditional genre relationships. The lifelong love affair between Kenzie and Gennaro--interrupted by her marriage to his best friend--is another perfectly controlled element that grows and changes as we watch. Surrounded by dead, abused, and missing children, Kenzie mourns and rages while Gennaro longs for one of her own. So the choices made by both of them in the final pages of this absolutely gripping story have the inevitability of life and the dazzling beauty of art. Other Kenzie/Gennaro books available in paperback: Darkness, Take My Hand , A Drink Before the War , Sacred . --Dick Adler From Library Journal This fourth entry in Lehane's series featuring Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro has all the makings of a successful mystery: suspenseful plotting, effective dialog, strong characterization, realistic setting, and themes that are bound to hold the reader's attention, e.g., child neglect, abuse, and kidnapping. Moreover, it asks the sort of moral question that moves it beyond the boundaries of its purported genre into the realm of serious fiction. Unfortunately, narrator Robert Lawrence provides a reading that greatly mars the story's impact. His narration is generally uninvolved and poorly paced, as if he'd been set on automatic pilot. And while he adopts different voices for the various characters, they are often mismatched and sound more like caricatures. Occasionally he is right on target but not often enough to redeem this audio version of an otherwise fine novel. Not recommended.?Sister M. Anna Falbo CSSF, Villa Maria Coll. Lib., Buffalo, NYCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \" Gone, Baby, Gone is a tough, true, powerful story written by a stunningly good novelist, one of our very best.\" -- James Patterson \"Compelling. . .just the way we like it. . .When it comes to describing the action, Mr. Lehane delivers big time.\" -- The Wall street Journal \"Gone, Baby Gone is a tough, true powerful story written by a stunningly good novelist, one of our very best.\" -- James Patterson \"Lehane tackles corruption in many forms as he brings his complicated plot to its satisfying resolution...\" -- Publishers Weekly \"To the list that includes such names as Robert B. Parker and Linda Barnes, add that of Dennis Lehane.\" -- Chicago Tribune About the Author Dennis Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He is the author of A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel, Darkness Take My Hand, Sacred, Gone Baby Gone, Prayers for Rain, and Mystic River. He currently lives in Boston with his wife, Sheila. From the Inside Flap The Bookcassette\u00ae format is a special recording technique developed as a means of condensing the full, unabridged audio text of a book to record it on fewer tapes. In order to listen to these tapes, you will need a cassette player with balance control to adjust left/right speaker output. Special adaptors to allow these tapes to be played on any cassette player are available through the publisher or some US retail electronics stores. From Booklist Lehane's fourth Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro mystery will further enhance the author's growing reputation. Kenzie and Gennaro reluctantly agree to search for Amanda McCready, who has been missing for more than a year, thus dramatically reducing the chances of finding her alive. The maverick PI duo immediately smells trouble, both from the child's druggie mother and from the uncooperative Boston police, who aren't eager to be shown up. The case quickly proves every bit as horrifying as Kenzie and Gennaro expected: parental neglect, police corruption, and a drug deal gone bad have combined to make one innocent five-year-old the pawn in a high-stakes power struggle. Lehane combines the intensity of Andrew Vachss, who also writes unflinchingly about child-abuse and abandonment cases, with the charismatic appeal of his protagonists, a working-class Nick and Nora who walk the meanest of streets. The wrenching portrait of a bent cop whose instincts are admirable but whose actions are appalling only adds to the emotional impact of this grim, utterly unsentimental blue-collar tragedy. Bill Ott From AudioFile This dark story of child abduction set in the Boston area would have been better served by a reading less broad than the one provided here by Robert Lawrence. Too many simple, one-note interpretations undercut the subtlety of the well-drawn, complex characters and make those that are broad to begin with almost intolerable to be heard. Fortunately, the result is not completely ruinous, as Lawrence's one well-conceived performance is of the first-person narrator, private investigator Patrick Kenzie, whose engaging combination of thoughtful intelligence and streetwise savvy is communicated well to the listener. This only makes me curious about why so many of the other characters in this complex tale involving hoodlums, murderers, violence and pedophilia sound like refugees from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. J.P.M. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing. Of those, a large portion are abducted by one parent estranged from the other, and over fifty percent of the time the child's whereabouts are never in question. The majority of these children are returned within a week. Another portion of those twenty-three hundred children are runaways. Again, the majority of them are not gone long, and usually their whereabouts are either known immediately or easily ascertained--a friend's house is the most common destination. Another category of missing children is the throwaway-those who are cast out of their homes or who run away, and the parents decide not to give chase. These are often the children who fill shelters and bus terminals, street corners in the red-light districts, and, ultimately, prisons. Of the more than eight hundred thousand children reported missing nationally every year, only thirty-five hundred to four thousand fall into what the Department of Justice categorizes as Non-Family Abductions, or cases in which the police soon rule out family abductions, running away, parental ejection, or the child becoming lost or injured. Of these cases, three hundred children disappear every year and never return. No one-not parents, friends, law enforcement, child-care organizations, or centers for missing people-knows where these children go. Into graves, possibly; into cellars or the homes of pedophiles; into voids, perhaps, holes in the fabric of the universe where they will never be heard from again. Wherever these three hundred go, they stay gone. For a moment or two they haunt strangers who've heard of their cases, haunt their loved ones for far longer. Without a body to leave behind, proof of their passing, they don't die. They keep us aware of the void. And they stay gone. \"My sister,\" Lionel McCready said, as he paced our belfry office, \"has had a very difficult life.\" Lionel was a big man with a slightly houndish sag to his face and wide shoulders that slanted down hard from his collarbone, as if something we couldn't see sat atop them. He had a shaggy, shy smile and a firm grip in a callused hand. He wore a brown UPS deliveryman's uniform and kneaded the brim of the matching brown baseball cap in his beefy hands. \"Our mom was a-well, a boozer, frankly. And our dad left when we were both little kids. When you grow up that way, you--I guess you-maybe you got a lot of anger. It takes some time to get your head straight, figure out your way in life. It's not just Helene. I mean, I had some serious problems, took a hard bust in my twenties. I was no angel.\" \"Lionel,\" his wife said. He held up a hand to her, as if he had to spit it out now or he'd never spit it out at all. \"I was lucky. I met Beatrice, straightened my life out. What I'm saying, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro, is that if you're given time, a few breaks, you grow up. You shake that crap. My sister, she's still growing up, what I'm saying. Maybe. Because her life was hard and-\" \"Lionel,\" his wife said, \"stop making excuses for Helene.\" Beatrice McCready ran a hand through her short strawberry hair and said, \"Honey, sit down. Please.\" Lionel said, \"I'm just trying to explain that Helene hasn't had an easy life.\" \"Neither have you,\" Beatrice said, \"and you're a good father.\" \"How many kids do you have?\" Angie asked. Beatrice smiled. \"One. Matt. He's five. He's staying with my brother and his wife until we find Amanda.\" Lionel seemed to perk up a bit at the mention of his son. \"He's a great kid,\" he said, and seemed almost embarrassed by his pride. \"And Amanda?\" I said. \"She's a terrific kid, too,\" Beatrice said. \"And she's way too young to be out there on her own.\" Amanda McCready had disappeared from this neighborhood three days ago. Since then, the entire city of Boston, it seemed, had become obsessed with her whereabouts. The police had put more men on the search than they had on the manhunt for John Salvi after the abortion clinic bombings four years ago. The mayor held a press conference in which he pledged no city business would take precedence over her disappearance until she was found. The press coverage was saturating: front page of both papers each morning, lead story in all three major telecasts at night, hourly updates inserted between the soaps and talk shows. And in three days-nothing. Not a hint of her. Amanda McCready had been on this earth four years and seven months when she vanished. Her mother had put her to bed on Sunday night, checked in on her once around eight-thirty, and the next morning, shortly after nine, had looked in at Amanda's bed and seen nothing but sheets dented with the wrinkled impression of her daughter's body. The clothes Helene McCready had laid out for her daughter--a pink T-shirt, denim shorts, pink socks, and white sneakers-were gone, as was Amanda's favorite doll, a blond-haired replica of a threeyear-old that bore an eerie resemblance to its owner, and whom Amanda had named Pea. The room showed no signs of struggle. Helene and Amanda lived on the second floor of a three-decker, and while it was possible Amanda had been abducted by someone who'd placed a ladder under her bedroom window and pushed the screen open to gain entry, it was also unlikely. The screen and windowsills had shown no signs of disturbance, and the ground at the foundation of the house bore no ladder marks. What was far more likely, if one assumed a four-year-old didn't suddenly decide to leave home on her own in the middle of the night, was that the abductor entered the apartment through the front door, without picking the lock or prying the hinges loose from the jamb, because such actions were unnecessary on a door that had been left unlocked. From Publishers Weekly Vanished, in this complex and unsettling fourth case for PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro (after Sacred, 1997) is four-year-old Amanda McCready, taken one night from her apartment in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston, where her mother had left her alone. Kenzie and Gennaro, hired by the child's aunt and uncle, join in an unlikely alliance with Remy Broussard and Nick Raftopoulos, known as Poole, the two cops with the department's Crimes Against Children squad who are assigned to the case. In tracing the history of Amanda's neglectful mother, whose past involved her with a drug lord and his minions, the foursome quickly find themselves tangling with Boston's crime underworld and involved in what appears to be a coup among criminals. Lehane develops plenty of tension between various pairs of parties: the good guys looking for Amanda and the bad guys who may know where she is; the two PIs and the two cops; various police and federal agencies; opposing camps in the underworld; and Patrick and Angie, who are lovers as well as business partners. All is delivered with abundant violence?e.g., bloated and mutilated corpses; gangland executions; shoot-outs with weapons of prodigious firepower; descriptions of sexual abuse of small children; threats of rape and murder?that serves to make Amanda's likely fate all the more chilling. Lehane tackles corruption in many forms as he brings his complicated plot to its satisfying resolution, at the same time leaving readers to ponder moral questions about social and individual responsibility long after the last page is turned. Author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Back Cover Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find four-year-old Amanda McCready, abducted from her bed on a warm, summer night. They meet her stoned-out, strangely apathetic mother, her loving aunt and uncle, the mother's dangerous, drug-addled friends, and two cops who've found so many abused or dead children they may be too far over the edge to come back. Despite enormous public attention, rabid news coverage, and dogged police work, the investigation repeatedly hits a brick wall. Led into a world of drug dealers, child molesters, and merciless executioners, Patrick and Angie are soon forced to face not only the horrors adults can perpetrate on innocents but also their own conflicted feelings about what is best, and worst, when it comes to raising children. And as the Indian summer fades and the autumn chill deepens, Amanda McCready stays gone, banished so completely that she seems never to have existed. Then another child disappears. . . . Dennis Lehane takes you into a world of triple crosses, elaborate lies, and shrouded motives, where the villains may be more moral than the victims, the missing should possibly stay missing, and those who go looking for them may not come back alive. Settle in and turn off the phone. From its haunting opening to its shocking climax, Gone, Baby, Gone is certain to be one of the most thrilling, talked-about suspense novels you read this year. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 1.99}, {"asin": "B0122RZPJO", "title": "Brighter Than the Sun: A Reyes Alexander Farrow Story (Charley Davidson Series)", "author": "Darynda Jones", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 3.99}], "target_asin": "1919613242"}
{"user_id": "AGYO7V72V3NJ6EFQ3GXEAEZS5UTA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1400078458", "title": "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon", "author": "David Grann", "description": "Review \u201cSuspenseful. . . . Rollicking. . . . Reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller. . . . The Lost City of Z is at once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing that combines Bruce Chatwinesque powers of observation with a Waugh-like sense of the absurd. Mr. Grann treats us to a harrowing reconstruction of Fawcett\u2019s forays into the Amazonian jungle, as well as an evocative rendering of the vanished age of exploration.\u201d \u2014Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times \u201cBreathtaking. . . . Grann brings Fawcett\u2019s remarkable story to a beautifully written, perfectly paced fruition. . . . Any writer who can breathe life into letters written by scientists in the early 1900s deserves more than a hat tip.\u201d \u2014 The Los Angeles Times \u201cBrilliant. . . . Impressively researched and skillfully crafted. . . . Grann makes abundantly clear in this fascinating, epic story of exploration and obsession, [that] the lethal attraction of the Amazon mystery remains strong.\u201d \u2014 The Boston Globe \u201cA smart biographical page-turner.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cGrann escapes death and tracks down Z, giving the reader the kind of Indiana Jones kicks best experienced vicariously.\u201d \u2014 Details \u201cA riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure.\u201d \u2014John Grisham, internationally acclaimed #1 bestselling author \u201cThoroughly researched, vividly told. . . . Grann recounts Fawcett\u2019s expeditions with all the pace of a white-knuckle adventure story. . . . A thrill ride from start to finish.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cThe story of Z goes to the heart of the central questions of our age. In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins? A fascinating and brilliant book.\u201d \u2014Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Talking to Strangers \u201cA spellbinding tale that produces fresh surprises around each turn. . . . An amazing story.\u201d \u2014 Dallas Morning News \u201cA fascinating yarn that touches on science, history, and some truly obsessive personalities.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cThere is something about Fawcett\u2019s spirit and self-assurance that captivates. . . . To read The Lost City of Z is to feel grateful that Grann himself bothered to set out for the Amazon in search of the bones of an explorer whose body was long ago reclaimed by the jungle.\u201d \u2014 Christian Science Monitor \u201cIn a hyperconnected and exhaustively charted world, here is a revelation about wildness and the mad desire to plunge into it. . . . Unfathomably riveting. . . . Grann wildly delivers the goods.\u201d \u2014 GQ \u201cA blockbuster tale of adventure.\u201d \u2014 New York Observer \u201cMarvelous. . . . [Grann] combines a colorful narrative of Fawcett\u2019s early life, military career, jungle treks, theories and even conversations with a biography of an extraordinary man and an overview of the last great and highly competitive age of exploration.\u201d \u2014 Bloomberg News \u201cA blood-stirring reading experience.\u201d \u2014 The Denver Post \u201cA deeply satisfying revelation. . . . What could be better\u2014obsession, mystery, deadly insects, shrunken heads, suppurating wounds, hostile tribesmen\u2014all for us to savor in our homes, safely before the fire.\u201d \u2014Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile and The Devil in the White City \u201cWhat makes Mr. Grann\u2019s telling of the story so captivating is that he decides not simply to go off in search of yet more relics of our absent hero\u2014but to go off himself in search of the city that Fawcett was looking for so heroically when he suddenly went AWOL.\u201d \u2014Simon Winchester, The Wall Street Journal \u201cFast-paced adventure. . . . Grann delights us with the lure of obsession under a canopy of trees.\u201d \u2014 Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cAbsorbing and fair-minded. . . . In restoring a life that history has swallowed from general view, and vindicating a crackpot theory, Mr. Grann has also exposed the toll that explorers often took on those who loved or depended on them.\u201d \u2014Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times \u201cAn engrossing book, whose protagonist could outmarch Lara Croft and out-think Indiana Jones. . . . It\u2019s almost enough to make you reach for a backpack.\u201d \u2014 The Daily Telegraph (London) \u201cA riveting adventure-mystery in the tradition of Conan Doyle\u2019s The Lost World , said to be inspired by Fawcett.\u201d \u2014 The Toronto Star \u201cPerfect for armchair travelers and readers with fond childhood memories of books recounting tales of adventure in the dark wild. . . . What [Grann] found should help change how we think about the Amazon. . . . Read it, shiver with delight and thank your lucky stars you\u2019re never going to get as close to a candir\u00fa as Fawcett and Grann did. (Look it up on Wikipedia, if you dare.)\u201d \u2014 Richmond Times-Dispatch \u201cThrilling. . . . What a story. . . . The beauty is that as incredible as it is, it\u2019s true.\u201d \u2014 Daily News \u201cOutstanding. . . . A powerful narrative, stiff lipped and Victorian at the center, trippy at the edges, as if one of those stern men of Conrad had found himself trapped in a novel by Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez.\u201d \u2014Rich Cohen, The New York Times Book Review \u201cDid Grann find the lost city? . . . It\u2019s worth reading every page of this marvelous book to find out.\u201d \u2014 Houston Chronicle \u201cGrann is no hard-as-nails explorer, and his self-deprecating personal narrative . . . serves as a comic counterpoint to the superhuman exploits of Fawcett. Grann may not be able to hack the wilderness very well, but as a storyteller he\u2019s first-rate.\u201d \u2014Outside \u201cGrann has an extraordinary sense of pacing, and his scenes of forest adventure are dispatched in passages of swift, arresting simplicity. . . . A splendid, suspenseful book.\u201d \u2014 Bookforum \u201cWith this riveting work, David Grann emerges on our national landscape as a major new talent. His superb writing style, his skills as a reporter, his masterful use of historical and scientific documents, and his stunning storytelling ability are on full display here, producing an endlessly absorbing tale about a magical subject that captivates from start to finish. This is a terrific book.\u201d \u2014Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-wiining author \u201cA thrilling yarn. . . . What [Grann] finds is what makes The Lost City of Z so gratifying, and in the end he, and we along with him, find ourselves stunned by what Percy Fawcett discovered.\u201d \u2014 The Oregonian \u201cGrann paints a vivid picture of the final days of trail-blazing, Earth-bound grand exploration, before airplanes and radios began stripping the mystery from the unknown parts of the world.\u201d \u2014 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA) \u201cMeticulously researched and spellbinding. . . . Reads like a cross between an Indiana Jones adventure and a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. . . . Gripping.\u201d \u2014 The Ottawa Citizen \u201cIrresistible. . . . At once a biography of Fawcett, a history of the era of exploration, a science book on the nature and ethnography of the Amazon and a thrilling armchair adventure. . . . [It] has everything to fire the imagination: Romance, nostalgia, bravery, monomania, hardship, adventure, science, tragedy, mystery.\u201d \u2014 South Florida Sun Sentinel \u201c The Lost City of Z is meticulously researched, riveting and horrifying, guided by a core mystery that seems unimaginable and an author driven into the depths of the jungle by his daring to imagine it.\u201d \u2014 Philadelphia City Paper \u201cAbsorbing. . . . A wonderful story of a lost age of heroic exploration.\u201d \u2014 The Sunday Times (London) \u201cTantalizing. . . . Grann gives us a glimpse of the vanished age of exploration [as well as] a suspenseful, often very funny account of his own trek as a complete amateur into the \u2018green hell\u2019 of the Amazon. . . . Immensely entertaining.\u201d \u2014 The Gazette (Montreal) \u201cThankfully, for those of us who secretly live and breath for the swashbuckling adventure tale, every now and then a book comes along that renews our faith in the epic quest narrative, its ability to inform and enlighten even as it feeds our most primal need for dramatic amusement. [The Lost City of Z] succeeds tremendously in these pursuits.\u201d \u2014 The Globe and Mail (Canada) About the Author DAVID GRANN is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of THE WHITE DARKNESS and the collection THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES. Grann's storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1WE SHALL RETURNOn a cold January day in 1925, a tall, distinguished gentleman hurried across the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey, toward the S.S. Vauban, a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot ocean liner bound for Rio de Janeiro. He was fifty-seven years old, and stood over six feet, his long arms corded with muscles. Although his hair was thinning and his mustache was flecked with white, he was so fit that he could walk for days with little, if any, rest or nourishment. His nose was crooked like a boxer's, and there was something ferocious about his appearance, especially his eyes. They were set close together and peered out from under thick tufts of hair. No one, not even his family, seemed to agree on their color-some thought they were blue, others gray. Yet virtually everyone who encountered him was struck by their intensity: some called them \"the eyes of a visionary.\" He had frequently been photographed in riding boots and wearing a Stetson, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, but even in a suit and a tie, and without his customary wild beard, he could be recognized by the crowds on the pier. He was Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world. He was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. For nearly two decades, stories of his adventures had captivated the public's imagination: how he had survived in the South American wilderness without contact with the outside world; how he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never before seen a white man; how he battled piranha, electric eels, jaguars, crocodiles, vampire bats, and anacondas, including one that almost crushed him; and how he emerged with maps of regions from which no previous expedition had returned. He was renowned as the \"David Livingstone of the Amazon,\" and was believed to have such unrivaled powers of endurance that a few colleagues even claimed he was immune to death. An American explorer described him as \"a man of indomitable will, infinite resource, fearless\"; another said that he could \"outwalk and outhike and outexplore anybody else.\" The London Geographical Journal, the pre-eminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that \"Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.\" In 1916, the Royal Geographical Society had awarded him, with the blessing of King George V, a gold medal \"for his contributions to the mapping of South America.\" And every few years, when he emerged from the jungle, spidery thin and bedraggled, dozens of scientists and luminaries would pack into the Society's hall to hear him speak. Among them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was said to have drawn on Fawcett's experiences for his 1912 book The Lost World, in which explorers \"disappear into the unknown\" of South America and find, on a remote plateau, a land where dinosaurs have escaped extinction. As Fawcett made his way to the gangplank that day in January, he eerily resembled one of the book's protagonists, Lord John Roxton:Something there was of Napoleon III, something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman._._._._He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous because they are held in leash. None of Fawcett's previous expeditions compared with what he was about to do, and he could barely conceal his impatience, as he fell into line with the other passengers boarding the S.S. Vauban. The ship, advertised as \"the finest in the world,\" was part of the Lamport & Holt elite \"V\" class. The Germans had sunk several of the company's ocean liners during the First World War, but this one had survived, with its black, salt-streaked hull and elegant white decks and striped funnel billowing smoke into the sky. Model T Fords shepherded passengers to the dock, where longshoremen helped cart luggage into the ship's hold. Many of the male passengers wore silk ties and bowler hats; women had on fur coats and feathered caps, as if they were attending a society event, which, in some ways, they were-the passenger lists of luxury ocean liners were chronicled in gossip columns and scoured by young girls searching for eligible bachelors. Fawcett pushed forward with his gear. His trunks were loaded with guns, canned food, powdered milk, flares, and handcrafted machetes. He also carried a kit of surveying instruments: a sextant and a chronometer for determining latitude and longitude, an aneroid for measuring atmospheric pressure, and a glycerin compass that could fit in his pocket. Fawcett had chosen each item based on years of experience; even the clothes he had packed were made of lightweight, tear-proof gabardine. He had seen men die from the most innocuous seeming oversight-a torn net, a boot that was too tight. Fawcett was setting out into the Amazon, a wilderness nearly the size of the continental United States, to make what he called \"the great discovery of the century\"-a lost civilization. By then, most of the world had been explored, its veil of enchantment lifted, but the Amazon remained as mysterious as the dark side of the moon. As Sir John Scott Keltie, the former secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and one of the world's most acclaimed geographers at the time, noted, \"What is there no one knows.\" Ever since Francisco de Orellana and his army of Spanish conquistadores descended the Amazon River, in 1542, perhaps no place on the planet had so ignited the imagination-or lured men to their death. Gaspar de Carvajal, a Dominican friar who accompanied Orellana, described woman warriors in the jungle who resembled the mythical Greek Amazons. Half a century later, Sir Walter Raleigh spoke of Indians with \"their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts\"-a legend that Shakespeare wove into Othello: Of the Cannibals that each other eat,The Anthropophagi and men whose headsDo grow beneath their shoulders.What was true about the region-serpents as long as trees, rodents the size of pigs-was sufficiently beyond belief that no embellishment seemed too fanciful. And the most entrancing vision of all was of El Dorado. Raleigh claimed that the kingdom, which the conquistadores had heard about from Indians, was so plentiful in gold that its inhabitants ground the metal into powder and blew it \"thorow hollow canes upon their naked bodies untill they be al shining from the foote to the head.\" Yet each expedition that had tried to find El Dorado ended in disaster. Carvajal, whose party had been searching for the kingdom, wrote in his diary, \"We reached a [state of] privation so great that we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so great was our weakness that we could not remain standing.\" Some four thousand men died during that expedition alone, of starvation and disease, and at the hands of Indians defending their territory with arrows dipped in poison. Other El Dorado parties resorted to cannibalism. Many explorers went mad. In 1561, Lope de Aguirre led his men on a murderous rampage, screaming, \"Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to_._._._destroy the world?\" Aguirre even stabbed his own child, whispering, \"Commend thyself to God, my daughter, for I am about to kill thee.\" Before the Spanish crown sent forces to stop him, Aguirre warned in a letter, \"I swear to you, King, on my word as a Christian, that if a hundred thousand men came, none would escape. For the reports are false: there is nothing on that river but despair.\" Aguirre's companions finally rose up and killed him; his body was quartered, and Spanish authorities displayed the head of the \"Wrath of God\" in a steel cage. Still, for three centuries, expeditions continued to search, until, after a toll of death and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archeologists had concluded that El Dorado was no more than a delusion.Fawcett, however, was certain that the Amazon contained a fabulous kingdom, and he was not another soldier of fortune or a crackpot. A man of science, he had spent years gathering evidence to prove his case-digging up artifacts, studying petroglyphs, and interviewing tribes. And after fierce battles with skeptics Fawcett had received funding from the most respected scientific institutions, including the Royal Geographical Society, the American Geographical Society, and the Museum of the American Indian. Newspapers were proclaiming that Fawcett would soon startle the world. The Atlanta Constitution declared, \"It is perhaps the most hazardous and certainly the most spectacular adventure of the kind ever undertaken by a reputable scientist with the backing of conservative scientific bodies.\" Fawcett had concluded that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas. He had christened this lost world the City of Z. \"The central place I call 'Z'-our main objective-is in a valley_._._._about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone,\" Fawcett had stated earlier. \"The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple.\" Reporters on the dock in Hoboken, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, shouted questions, hoping to learn the location of Z. In the wake of the technological horrors of the Great War, and amid the spread of urbanization and industrialization, few events so captivated the world. One newspaper exulted, \"Not since the days when Ponce de Le\u2014n crossed the unknown Florida in search of the Waters of Perpetual Youth_._._._has a more alluring adventure been planned.\" Fawcett welcomed \"the fuss,\" as he described it in a letter to a friend, but he was careful about how he responded. He knew that his main rival, Alexander Hamilton Rice, a multimillionaire American doctor who commanded vast resources, was already entering the jungle with an unprecedented array of equipment. The prospect of Dr. Rice finding Z terrified Fawcett. Several years earlier, Fawcett had watched as a colleague from the Royal Geographical Society, Robert Falcon Scott, had set out to become the first explorer to reach the South Pole, only to discover, shortly before he froze to death, that his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, had beaten him by thirty-three days. In a recent letter to the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett wrote, \"I cannot say all I know, or even be precise as to locality, for these things leak out, and there can be nothing so bitter to the pioneer as to find the crown of his work anticipated.\" He was also afraid that if he released details of his route, and others attempted to find Z or rescue him, it would result in countless deaths. An expedition of fourteen hundred armed men had previously vanished in the same region. A news bulletin telegraphed around the globe declared, \"Fawcett Expedition_._._._to Penetrate Land Whence None Returned.\" And Fawcett, who was resolved to reach the most inaccessible areas, did not intend, like other explorers, to go by boat; rather, he planned to hack straight through the jungle on foot. The Royal Geographical Society had warned that Fawcett \"is about the only living geographer who could successfully attempt\" such an expedition and that \"it would be hopeless for any people to follow in his footsteps.\" Before he left England, Fawcett confided to his younger son, Brian, \"If with all my experience we can't make it, there's not much hope for others.\" As reporters clamored around him, Fawcett explained that only a small expedition would have any chance of survival. It would be able to live off the land, and not pose a threat to hostile Indians. The expedition, he had stated, \"will be no pampered exploration party, with an army of bearers, guides and cargo animals. Such top-heavy expeditions get nowhere; they linger on the fringe of civilization and bask in publicity. Where the real wilds start, bearers are not to be had anyway, for fear of the savages. Animals cannot be taken because of lack of pasture and the attack of insects and bats. There are no guides, for no one knows the country. It is a matter of cutting equipment to the absolute minimum, carrying it all oneself, and trusting that one will be able to exist by making friends with the various tribes one meets.\" He now added, \"We will have to suffer every form of exposure._._._._We will have to achieve a nervous and mental resistance, as well as physical, as men under these conditions are often broken by their minds succumbing before their bodies.\" Fawcett had chosen only two people to go with him: his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimell. Although they had never been on an expedition, Fawcett believed that they were ideal for the mission: tough, loyal, and, because they were so close, unlikely, after months of isolation and suffering, \"to harass and persecute each other\"-or, as was common on such expeditions, to mutiny. Jack was, as his brother Brian put it, \"the reflection of his father\": tall, frighteningly fit, and ascetic. Neither he nor his father smoked cigarettes or drank. Brian noted that Jack's \"six feet three inches were sheer bone and muscle, and the three chief agents of bodily degeneration-alcohol, tobacco and loose living-were revolting to him.\" Colonel Fawcett, who followed a strict Victorian code, put it slightly differently: \"He is_._._._absolutely virgin in mind and body.\" Jack, who had wanted to accompany his father on an expedition since he was a boy, had spent years preparing-lifting weights, maintaining a rigid diet, studying Portuguese, and learning how to navigate by the stars. Still, he had suffered little real deprivation, and his face, with its luminescent skin, crisp mustache, and slick brown hair, betrayed none of the hardness of his father's. With his stylish clothes, he looked more like a movie star, which is what he hoped to become upon his triumphant return. Raleigh, though smaller than Jack, was still nearly six feet tall and muscular. (A \"fine physique,\" Fawcett told the R.G.S.) His father had been a surgeon in the Royal Navy and had died of cancer in 1917, when Raleigh was fifteen. Dark-haired, with a pronounced widow's peak and a riverboat gambler's mustache, Raleigh had a jocular, mischievous nature. \"He was a born clown,\" said Brian Fawcett, the \"perfect counterpart of the serious Jack.\" The two boys had been virtually inseparable since they roamed the Devonshire countryside around Seaton, England, where they grew up, riding bicycles and shooting rifles in the air. In a letter to one of Fawcett's confidants, Jack wrote, \"Now we have Raleigh Rimell on board who is every bit as keen as I am._._._._He is the only intimate friend I have ever had. I knew him before I was seven years old and we have been more or less together ever since. He is absolutely honest and decent in every sense of the word and we know each other inside out.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1608198065", "title": "Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir", "author": "Roz Chast", "description": "From Booklist New Yorker cartoonist and prolific author Chast (What I Hate from A to Z, 2011) writes a bravely honest memoir of watching her parents decline, become too frail to stay in the Brooklyn apartment they called home for five decades, suffer dementia and physical depletion, and die in their nineties in a hospice-care facility. Unlike many recent parent-focused cartoon memoirs, such as Alison Bechdel\u2019s Are You My Mother? (2012) and Nicole J. George\u2019s Calling Dr. Laura (2012), in which the story is as much about the cartoonist\u2019s current work and family life as it is about his or her parents, Chast keeps her narrative tightly focused on her mother and father and her own problematic\u2014though not uncommon\u2014guilt-provoking relationships with them. Chast\u2019s hallmark quirky sketches are complemented by annotated photos from her own and her parents\u2019 childhoods. Occasionally, her hand-printed text will take up more than a full page, but it\u2019s neatly wound into accompanying panels or episodes. An unflinching look at the struggles facing adult children of aging parents. --Francisca Goldsmith Review \"By turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Ms. Chast reminds us how deftly the graphic novel can capture ordinary crises in ordinary American lives.\" - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times \"A tour de force of dark humor and illuminating pathos about her parents\u2019 final years as only this quirky genius of pen and ink could construe them.\" - Elle \"An achievement of dark humor that rings utterly true.\" - Washington Post \"One of the major books of 2014 . . . Moving and bracingly candid . . . This is, in its original and unexpected way, one of the great autobiographical memoirs of our time.\" - Buffalo News \"Better than any book I know, this extraordinarily honest, searing and hilarious graphic memoir captures (and helps relieve) the unbelievable stress that results when the tables turn and grown children are left taking care of their parents. . . [A] remarkable, poignant memoir.\" - San Francisco Chronicle \"Very, very, very funny, in a way that a straight-out memoir about the death of one\u2019s elderly parents probably would not be . . . Ambitious, raw and personal as anything she has produced.\" - New York Times \"Devastatingly good . . . Anyone who has had Chast\u2019s experience will devour this book and cling to it for truth, humor, understanding, and the futile wish that it could all be different.\" - St. Louis Post Dispatch \"Gut-wrenching and laugh-aloud funny. I want to recommend it to everyone I know who has elderly parents, or might have them someday.\" - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \"Joins Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, William Trevor's The Old Boys, and Kingsley Amis's Ending Up in the competition for the funniest book about old age I've ever read. It is also heartbreaking.\" - Barnes & Noble Review \"Chast tackles those intimate and difficult changes with just the same humor and honesty as everything else. Readers who are starting to transition from children to caretakers of their own parents will find comfort in Chast\u2019s work, and almost anyone can appreciate the pleas to talk about something more pleasant with your family.\" - Paste, 10 Comics to Help You Escape (or Appreciate) Your Family this Holiday Season \"Revelatory\u2026 So many have faced (or will face) the situation that the author details, but no one could render it like she does. A top-notch graphic memoir that adds a whole new dimension to readers\u2019 appreciation of Chast and her work.\" - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \" The book is a literary masterpiece. It\u2019s so profound and emotional about death and family, it\u2019s just mind-blowing.\" - Amanda Peet, Vogue's \"Required Reading\" \"Chast is at the top of her candid form, delivering often funny, trenchant, and frequently painful revelations -- about human behavior, about herself -- on every page.\" - David Small, author of Stitches \"Never has the abyss of dread and grief been plumbed to such incandescently hilarious effect. The lines between laughter and hysteria, despair and rage, love and guilt, are quavery indeed, and no one draws them more honestly, more . . . unscrimpingly, than Roz Chast.\" - Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home \"Roz Chast squeezes more existential pain out of baffled people in cheap clothing sitting around on living-room sofas with antimacassar doilies in crummy apartments than Dostoevsky got out of all of Russia\u2019s dark despair. This is a great book in the annals of human suffering, cleverly disguised as fun.\" - Bruce McCall, author of Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons About the Author Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn. Her cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978. Since then, she has published more than one thousand cartoons in the magazine. She has written and illustrated many books, including What I Hate: From A to Z , and the collections of her own cartoons The Party After You Left and Theories of Everything . She is the editor of The Best American Comics 2016 and the illustrator of Calvin Trillin's No Fair! No Fair! and Daniel Menaker's The African Svelte , all published in Fall 2016. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.99}, {"asin": "B00507DA7I", "title": "Our Day In The Sun", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Caribbean"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "1631216694", "title": "Rick Steves Germany 2018", "author": "Rick Steves", "description": "About the Author Since 1973, Rick Steves has spent about four months a year exploring Europe. His mission: to empower Americans to have European trips that are fun, affordable, and culturally broadening. Rick produces a best-selling guidebook series, a public television series, and a public radio show, and organizes small-group tours that take over 20,000 travelers to Europe annually. He does all of this with the help of a hardworking, well-traveled staff of 100 at Rick Steves' Europe in Edmonds, Washington, near Seattle. When not on the road, Rick is active in his church and with advocacy groups focused on economic justice, drug policy reform, and ending hunger. To recharge, Rick plays piano, relaxes at his family cabin in the Cascade Mountains, and spends time with his partner Trish, son Andy, and daughter Jackie.Connect with Rick:facebook.com/RickStevestwitter: @RickStevesinstagram: ricksteveseurope", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 26.18}, {"asin": "0525427201", "title": "Bettyville: A Memoir", "author": "George Hodgman", "description": "Amazon.com Review The Amazon Spotlight Pick for March 2015: When George Hodgman left Manhattan for Paris to visit his aging mother, he didn\u2019t realize it would be the beginning of an unintended, and indeterminate tenure as a caregiver. Did I mention that it\u2019s Paris, Missouri? They say you can\u2019t go home again, and in Hodgman\u2019s case, you can understand why he wouldn\u2019t want to\u2014Paris hadn\u2019t proven to be the most hospitable place for someone coming to terms with their sexuality. This was compounded by the fact that Hodgman\u2019s parents didn\u2019t approve of who he \u201cturned out to be,\u201d which was as specific as they were willing to get on the matter. Any gaps in their understanding were filled with an insidious silence that kept this otherwise loving family at arm\u2019s length. I haven\u2019t forgotten what this book is called and, no doubt, you will fall in love with the impossible and endearing woman that is its namesake. But at its heart, Bettyville serves as a poignant cautionary tale about the dangers of leaving difficult things unsaid, and in these pages, Hodgman practices what he preaches. \u2013Erin Kodicek Review Nautilus Book Awards Gold WinnerPraise for Bettyville \u201cA remarkable, laugh-out-loud book . . . Rarely has the subject of\u00a0elder care\u00a0produced such droll human comedy, or a heroine quite on the mettlesome order of Betty Baker Hodgman. For as much as the book works on several levels (as a meditation on belonging, as a story of growing up gay and the psychic cost of silence, as metaphor for recovery), it is the strong-willed Betty who shines through.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \u201cA lovely memoir . . .You won\u2019t finish this tale dry-eyed.\u201d \u2014People , Book of the Week \u201cA gorgeously constructed memoir . . . Hodgman creates an unforgettable portrait of his mother, Betty\u2014a strong-willed nonagenarian struggling against the slow-motion breakdown of her mind and body. He evokes her with wit and tenderness.\u201d \u2014The New York Times Book Review \u201cWithout a doubt my favorite book of the year. Wise, witty, and heartbreaking . . . a surprisingly profound and hilarious look at aging, mothers and sons, fathers and sons, growing up gay and small-town life in America.\u201d \u2014Nathan Lane, \u201cWho Read What: Books of the Year 2015,\u201d The Wall Street Journal \u201cA humorous, bittersweet account of Hodgman\u2019s caring for his aging, irascible mother.\u201d \u2014 Vanity Fair \u201cHodgman has written what will be seen, even years from now, as the quintessential book on taking care. . . . His desire to empathize, his focus on goodness, his search for hope allow him to find the beauty in the hour of now.\u201d \u2014Chicago Tribune \u201cAn intimate, heartfelt portrait of a mother and son, each at the crossroads of life . . .\u00a0Hodgman\u2019s sharp wit carries the book ever forward.\u201d \u2014 Minneapolis Star-Tribune \u201cA superb memoir . . . Hodgman is by turns wry, laugh-out-loud funny, self-deprecating, insecure to the point of near suicide, and an attentive caregiver despite occasional, understandable resentments. . . . I have read several hundred American memoirs; I would place Bettyville in the top five.\u201d \u2014Steve Weinberg, Kansas City Star \u201cIn his tender, sardonic, and fearless account of life with Betty\u2014who has never acknowledged that her son is gay\u2014Hodgman delivers an epic unfolding of his lifelong search for acceptance and love.\u201d \u2014 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution \u201cHodgman paints a witty and poignant portrait of a son and his mother reconciling their differences and learning, among other things, how to cook, come to grips with caretaking, understand unspoken sexuality, and treat each other with patience, love, and self-respect. Surely we all have a beautifully complex and hilarious (if not semi-dysfunctional) relationships with our mothers, but none of us are likely to commemorate it with the skill and humor of Hodgman.\u201d \u2014Los Angeles Magazine \u201cAn exquisitely written memoir about the complicated but deeply genuine love a son feels for his courageous, headstrong, vulnerable mother in the twilight of her life. George Hodgman is stunningly clear-eyed and yet so darned big-hearted. Bettyville is just wonderful.\u201d \u2014Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle \u201cThe idea of a cultured gay man leaving New York City to care for his aging mother in Paris, Missouri, is already funny, and George Hodgman reaps that humor with great charm. But then he plunges deep, examining the warm yet fraught relationship between mother and son with profound insight and understanding. This book looks outside, too, offering a moving lament for small-town America. Hodgman tenderly evokes the time before family farms and small businesses were replaced by meth labs and Walmarts. Yet he\u2019s not sentimental about that lost world\u2014he knew its cruelties firsthand. As George and his mother come to terms with one another at the end of her days, the book begins to shimmer with something much more rare than love: a boundless, transcendent, and simple kindness. Bettyville is a beautiful book about the strange plenitude that comes from finally letting go of everything.\u201d \u2014Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home \u201c Bettyville is a beautifully crafted memoir, rich with humor and wisdom. George Hodgman has created an unforgettable book about mothers and sons, and about the challenges that come with growing older and growing up.\u201d \u2014Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club \u201cThis is a superior memoir, written in a witty and episodic style, yet at times it\u2019s heartbreaking . . . filled with a lifetime\u2019s worth of reflection and story after fascinating story.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cHodgman writes with wit and empathy about all the loss he\u2019s confronted with. Betty\u2019s poor health is mirrored by the fail\u00adure of towns like Paris, whose farms and lumberyards are now Walmarts and meth labs. Coming out in the age of AIDS, he lost the people he was close to when he had nowhere else to turn. . . . That doesn\u2019t mean Bettyville is without humor\u2014far from it. Paris eccentrics (one woman shampoos her hair in the soda fountain) com\u00adpete with Hodgman\u2019s colleagues in the office of Vanity Fair . . . . This is a portrait of a woman in decline, but still very much alive and committed to getting the lion\u2019s share of mini-Snickers at every op\u00adportunity. When things are left un\u00adsaid between parents and children, it leaves a hurt that can never be completely repaired, but love and dedication can make those scarred places into works of art. Bettyville is one such masterpiece.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201cThe book is instantly engaging, as Hodgman has a wry sense of humor, one he uses to keep others at a distance. Yet the book is also devastatingly touching. Betty is one tough cookie, and she is crumbling. Hodgman as a young man came out around the same time AIDS did, complicating his already complicated feelings immeasurably. There\u2019s a lot for Hodgman to handle, yet he does, despite the urge to give in to his own sadness and his own former drug addiction. A tender, resolute look at a place, literal and figurative, baby boomers might find themselves.\u201d \u2014Booklist \u201c Bettyville is a gorgeous memoir. I was completely engaged, not just because of George Hodgman\u2019s great ear and his sense of timing, but because he delivers Betty to us in such a manner that she steps off the page . I felt transported to a better place, to a time period and a web of relationships with which we can all identify,\u00a0 no matter where we grew up. Beyond the humor and the pathos, the quotidian and the bizarre, there remain profound lessons about life and love that I will carry away.\u201d \u2014Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone \u201cGeorge Hodgman achieves something stunning with this book\u2014by paying such deep, loving attention to his mother\u2019s (admittedly colorful) life, he offers us the chance to pay close attention to our own strange and beautiful Bettyvilles, which in the end is all we can ask of any art. This bejeweled pillbox is rich and funny and heartwrenching and might just you cure you of your ills; if those ills include loneliness or feeling like you don\u2019t belong\u2014you are not alone.\u201d \u2014Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City \u201cOne of the great benefits of reading memoir is that it offers the reader more people to love. I love Betty, and I love George Hodgman, whose beautiful book this is. Read Bettyville . Laugh, weep, and be grateful.\u201d \u2014Abigail Thomas, author of A Three Dog Life \u201c Bettyville reminded me of some Homeric legend, complete with treacherous chimeras and ravenous gorgons, except that it is told with such grace, wit, and spirited generosity that you hardly sense you are on a fragile bark, adrift on a perilous sea. This story of a sensitive Midwestern boy coming to terms with his homosexuality, his drug addiction, his clueless parents, his all-out war with shame, is nothing short of epic. It begins as a simple trip home from fast-track Manhattan to Paris, Missouri, to care for a failing mother, but by the time we are through, we have descended to an underworld, witnessed a plague, traveled all nine circles of hell, and emerged exhilarated by the grit and valor of our remarkable guide. It is, in every sense, a tale about the power of love.\u201d \u2014Marie Arana, author of American Chica \u201cWith great tenderness, honesty, and a searing, sardonic humor, George Hodgman has written a love letter to his mother, at once a penance and a tribute.\u00a0 In doing so, he has given us Betty, a character for the ages. This is a beautiful, illuminating book.\u201d \u2014Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion \u201cWhen I read the first few pages of Bettyville , I immediately connected. The detail is poetry and, yes, George Hodgman tells a story that is all our stories if we grow up different, struggling not to hurt those we treasure. But what I will most remember is the human struggle of Betty\u2014the woman at the window, the woman at the piano, the woman whose desire to help others represents the best of small-town America. The silence she was taught and the complications of our parents\u2019 journeys to be there for us, as best they could, is what I will take away from Bettyville , where she will always reside. Hers is the quiet love that outlasts the distances and lets us survive.\u201d \u2014Richard Blanco, United States inaugural poet, author of The Prince of los Cucuyos: A Miami Childhood About the Author GEORGE HODGMAN is a veteran magazine and book editor who has worked at Simon & Schuster, Vanity Fair , and Talk magazine. His writing has appeared in Entertainment Weekly , Interview , W , and Harper\u2019s Bazaar , among other publications. He lives in New York City and Paris, Missouri. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. This book is dedicated, first and foremost, to my best friends, my parents: George A. and Betty Baker Hodgman. Every word about them is written with love. If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. \u2014Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights 1 Missouri is a state of stolen names, bestowed to bring the world a little closer: Versailles, Rome, Cairo, New London, Athens, Carthage, Alexandria, Lebanon, Cuba, Japan, Santa Fe, Cleveland, Canton, California, Caledonia, New Caledonia, Mexico, Louisiana. Paris, our home. Then there are the funny-named places. Licking is a favorite, along with Fair Play, Strain, Elmo, Peculiar, Shook, Lone Jack, Butts, Lupus, Moody, Clover, Polo, Shake Rag, and the T towns that always end my list\u2014Turtle, Tightwad, Tulip, and Tea. When I cannot sleep, I try to see how many I can still name, an old game played with my parents when I was a kid looking out the car window at the rolling brown waters of the Mississippi. . . . Something has awakened me, though inside there is only the sound of the air conditioner and outside it is pitch black and quiet, but for the trains. The clock says 2:30, give or take. I won\u2019t go back to sleep. Where am I? Not in my apartment; there are no sirens, horns, or streaks of neon shining through the blinds. This is not Manhattan, not Chelsea, not West Twenty-third Street. I am home, in Paris, Missouri, population 1,246 and falling. Living here, I say to myself, for just a few more days or weeks. For now. Until Carol, the good-hearted farm woman who helps watch out for Betty, recovers from surgery on her rotator cuff. Or until my mother can be admitted to an assisted living facility. Until there is rain, or Betty\u2019s spirits mend, or I get a regular job again. Until something happens here on Sherwood Road, and my mother is gone, and I must close up shop. I hear Betty\u2019s voice from the hall: \u201cWho turned up the air-conditioning so high? He\u2019s trying to freeze me out.\u201d And here she is, all ninety years of her, curlers in disarray, chuckling a bit to herself for no reason, peeking into our guest room where I have been mostly not sleeping. It is the last place in America with shag carpet. In it, I have discovered what I believe to be a toenail from high school. On the spare bed, there is a quilt with stars and crescent moons, figures of girls and boys joining hands along the borders, and the embroidered signatures of long-gone farm women, including my great-aunt Mabel\u2019s. I am installed here, along with the Christmas wrappings, the desk of Betty\u2019s uncle Oscar, and the bed I slept in with my grandmother as a boy, listening to Mammy\u2019s snores and the sound of the furnace startled into service. My grandmother\u2019s home in the village of Madison, ten or so miles west of us, where my mother grew up, was nicknamed the House of Many Chimneys. In the garden by the back door there were pink roses, which my grandmother, half blind and old, fretted over constantly, nicking her fingers on the thorns. The hallway light is on. Betty has been in the kitchen, cadging a snack as she does in the middle of the night after being awakened by the need for the bathroom or dreams that make her cry out. Something\u2014her dreams, her thoughts, her memories\u2014hounds my mother at night. A light sleeper, she toddles around in her thick white socks, clearing her throat loudly, veering slightly from side to side, turning on the coffee, which will be cold by morning, checking to see if everything is in her own odd idea of order. After she has gone to bed, I try to light the path she takes to the kitchen in the dark, leaving on the lamp in my father\u2019s office, along with one in the foyer, to provide a trail to guide her through the hall. \u201cAre you awake?\u201d my mother asks. \u201cI am now,\u201d I say. Betty, who I recently discovered sorting through the contents of my suitcase, turns on the overhead light in my room, wrinkles her brow, and peers in like a camp counselor on an inspection tour, as if she suspects I might be entertaining someone who has paddled in from across the lake. She must keep an eye out. I am a schemer. There are things going on behind her back, plans afoot, she fears. She has no intention of cooperating with any of them. When the phone rings, she listens to every word, not sure if she can trust me with her independence. I don\u2019t blame her. I am an unlikely guardian. A month ago I thought the Medicare doughnut hole was a breakfast special for seniors. I am a care inflictor. She\u2019s not easy to corral. Her will remains at blast-force strength. \u201cIt\u2019s a hot day, but I\u2019m going to that sale,\u201d she murmured last week in her sleep as outside the temperature soared past a hundred and, in her dream, she jabbed her finger up to place a bid. She is testier with me than anyone, sometimes slapping the air if I come too close. There are days I cannot please her. Carol, who has worked in nursing homes, says that old people who are failing get the angriest with those they are most attached to, the people who make them realize they are no longer themselves. But Betty\u2019s crankiness is an act, I think, a way to conceal her embarrassment at having to ask anything of anyone. When I do something for her, she looks away. Accustomed to fending for herself, she hates all this. . . . \u201cI was worried,\u201d Betty says. \u201cYou said last night you couldn\u2019t sleep. I was worried you wouldn\u2019t sleep tonight.\u201d She stares at me. \u201cNo, I\u2019m sleeping. I\u2019m asleep. Right now I\u2019m talking in my sleep.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re in bed in your clothes again.\u201d \u201cI dozed off reading.\u201d (Actually, I go to bed in clothes because I am waiting to be called into action, anticipating a fall, or stroke, or shout out. She seems so frail when I tuck her in. I keep the ambulance number, along with the one for the emergency room, on my bedside table.) \u201cIt isn\u2019t a good thing for people to go to bed in their clothes\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. The Appeal didn\u2019t come today,\u201d she complains. Our little town\u2019s newspaper, which reports civic events, charitable campaigns, and church news\u2014including the \u201cMovement of the Spirit\u201d at the Full Gospel Church\u2014has appeared erratically recently, possibly because of the increasingly short-staffed post office. This is the kind of lag that can throw my mother into crisis mode. She wants what she wants when she wants it. \u201cDid someone call today? From the church? I can\u2019t find my other shoe, the Mephisto.\u201d I say we will look in the morning, and my mother, somewhat satisfied, almost smiles. For a second, there is the old Betty, who does not often appear now, my old friend. In St. Louis, when we turn off Skinker onto Delmar, not far from the University City gates, Betty always points out the place where, as a young woman, working as a secretary at Union Electric, she waited for the streetcar. She seldom mentions the past, but loves to return to that old streetcar stop. Back in the 1940s, after the war, she was a pretty girl with wavy light brown hair, fresh from the \u201cMiss Legs\u201d contest at the university. Listening to her memories, I see her in a cast-off coat, not long after the war, looking down the tracks toward Webster Groves where she stayed with her aunt, called Nona. There is innocence in her expression, excitement at her new city life as she stands by other women in expensive dresses, the sort that Mammy never allowed her to buy. Sometimes I wonder whether she wishes she had gotten on that streetcar and ridden it to some other life. By the time my mother realized that she was smart or saw she had the kind of looks that open doors, she had already closed too many to go back. \u201cI just wanted a house with a few nice things,\u201d she told me once. \u201cThat was my little dream.\u201d . . . Betty\u2014actually Elizabeth, or, on her best stationery, Elizabeth Baker Hodgman\u2014doesn\u2019t see well at all. Certain corners of the world are blurred. Her hearing sometimes fails her, but it is often difficult to determine whether she is missing something or simply choosing not to respond. Also, she is suffering from dementia or maybe worse. Some days she is just about fine, barking orders at Earleen, our cleaning lady, sharp enough to play bridge with her longtime partners. Other times, though, she is a lost girl with sad eyes. I am scared I am going to break her. I am new at all this. We have hunts for liquid tears, or checks, or hearing aids, or the blouse Earleen was supposed to have ironed for church. The mind of my mother has often drifted away from peripheral matters. She has always been busy on the inside, a little far away. Now more than ever, she is in and out, more likely to drift off into her own world for a minute or two. Or sit staring for long spells with a vacant look. Or forget the name of someone she knew, back then, before she had to worry about not remembering. In the afternoons, her whimpers and moans, her little chats with herself are all I hear in the house. The nights, especially just before bed, are the worst. She knows something is happening to her, but would never say so. We circle around her sadness, but she will not let me share it. Acknowledging anything would make it real. These, I fear, are her last days as herself. . . . My mother always drove fast, never stayed home. In the old days, we sped across the plains in our blue Impala, radio blaring DJ Johnny Rabbitt\u2019s all-American voice on KXOK St. Louis. She took me to the county line where I waited for the bus to kindergarten. My mother\u2014\u201ctoo damn high strung,\u201d my father said\u2014stayed in the bathroom fussing with her hair and smoking Kent cigarettes until the very last minute. \u201cI look like something the cat drug in,\u201d she told herself, frowning into the mirror. When she finally came out, I\u2019d be sitting on the hood of the car, my Batman lunch box already empty except for wads of foil and a few hastily scraped carrots. \u201cI\u2019m a nervous wreck,\u201d I\u2019d cry out. I was an only child, raised mostly among adults. I repeated what I heard and didn\u2019t get half of what I was saying. \u201cWhy are you just sitting there?\u201d she\u2019d yell as if I were the one delaying things. Those mornings, heading to school, I learned to love pop music, a lifelong fixation. My mother and I sang along to \u201cThis Diamond Ring\u201d by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, \u201cYou\u2019ve Lost That Lovin\u2019 Feeling\u201d by the Righteous Brothers, and Petula Clark\u2019s \u201cDowntown.\u201d Betty took her shoe off the foot she used for the gas pedal and almost floored it. I like fast things, and the highway between Madison and Moberly will always be one of the places where I will see my mother, hair wrapped in rollers under a scarf, wearing a pair of sunglasses, taking me off into the big wide world. \u201cWhat are you looking at, little demon?\u201d she would ask. \u201cDon\u2019t bug me,\u201d I\u2019d say. \u201cMind your own business.\u201d \u201cYou are my business.\u201d \u201cBetty,\u201d my father often said, \u201cno one would mistake that kid for anyone\u2019s but yours.\u201d I was Betty\u2019s boy. This year, Betty had to give up her driver\u2019s license after backing into a ditch. Now she must sit home, awaiting invitations. \u201cThey won\u2019t even let me go to the grocery store,\u201d she says. Her eyes are wistful and her fingers, with their chipped pink polish, are itchy for the feel of the car keys. . . . Suddenly, Betty yells out. \u201cOh God,\u201d I think as I run to her, trip on a hair curler and barely escape ankle injury. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d I ask as I approach her door. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d \u201cSay,\u201d she begins, \u201cyou didn\u2019t get toilet paper.\u201d We go through enough toilet paper for an army. I think she is involved in some sort of art project. A kind of Christo thing. \u201cI\u2019ll get some tomorrow,\u201d I say. \u201cThat suits me,\u201d she answers, pausing before asking, \u201cDid you make me a hair appointment?\u201d \u201cI told them it was an emergency.\u201d It is 3 a.m. I steal a cigarette from my mother\u2019s old, hidden cache and sit out on the step in front of our house in the dark. The mailbox made by my father is falling apart now. I would fix it, but am not handy. Nor do I assemble. A trip to Ikea is enough to unhinge me. I would prefer a spinal tap to putting together a coffee table. I am running out of meals I know how to prepare. Tonight, feeling nostalgic, I rolled out tuna casserole made with Campbell\u2019s Mushroom Soup and crushed potato chips. \u201cI didn\u2019t know anyone still made this,\u201d she said. \u201cI was trying to think outside the box\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Mushrooms are vegetables. Or are they a fungus?\u201d \u201cBe still.\u201d Mushrooms, I realized, are a fungus. I had served my mother a fungus casserole. With barbecue potato chips. . . . \u201cThere is no such thing as a perfect parent.\u201d Betty always said that. But to me she was perfect. Especially when she thought she was not. In grade school, on holidays, the mothers brought refreshments. Popcorn balls\u2014crunchy white confections with the popped kernels held together with sorghum\u2014were my favorites. When it was her turn to bring treats, Betty asked what I wanted. I said, \u201cPopcorn balls.\u201d She said, \u201cOh brother,\u201d and lit a cigarette. The kitchen was not her natural habitat. Her tendency to never turn things off led to exploding percolators and smoky puffs from toasters. A few days after my popcorn-ball request, I found Betty in front of the oven in her hair rollers, which were held in place with pink picks that tended to turn up all around the house. The kitchen, never a page from Good Housekeeping, was strewn with bowls and baking sheets. Sticky lumps of popcorn and fallen curlers were everywhere. On a tray there was a strange grouping of misshapen popcorn balls. When I said they were supposed to be all the same size, Betty appeared exasperated, harassed, so forlorn and disappointed. She had failed. Nothing was right. She thought she had to be some kind of model mother. I reached for a ball and took a bite. \u201cI think these are the best I\u2019ve had,\u201d I told her as I stuck some of the picks from her curlers into the balls so they would look a little snazzy. \u201cWhy are you doing that?\u201d she said. \u201cGo outside and throw something.\u201d . . . My mother should not live alone now, but vetoes all conventional alternatives. I try to pretend I am in control. It is my time to play the grown-up and I don\u2019t want the part. \u201cDon\u2019t put me in a place with a lot of old people,\u201d she says. \u201cFine,\u201d I say to myself. \u201cI\u2019ll go.\u201d In my apartment in New York there are tumbling piles of books and, in the refrigerator, cartons of take-out food I forgot to throw out. By now it must have sprouted new life forms. I imagine squatters with grimy faces, warming their hands over fires crackling from large rusty barrels. Chickens are running everywhere, clucking and bursting madly into flight. I am probably going to have to stay here in Missouri and become a horse whisperer. I have three pairs of pants and about five summer shirts, food-stained from my culinary efforts. This visit, for my mother\u2019s birthday, was supposed to last two weeks. It is getting on two months. I lost my job; I have the time. I am not a martyr. I am just available, an unemployed editor relegated to working freelance. I think about leaving, but cannot seem to make it to the plane. My fingers will not dial the American Airlines number and I realize that my place in New York would feel very empty if I returned. I miss the company of people from work. I\u2019d miss Betty too. Turns out I am a person who needs people. I hate that. \u201cDon\u2019t leave me,\u201d Betty says, if I go to bed before she is ready also. \u201cAre you going to leave me?\u201d If I start to move my work to my father\u2019s desk in the back of the house, forsaking the card table near the couch that is her center of command, she begs me to stay. She sits beside me all day, always wants me near, a real change from the woman who was always shooing me away, off to camp or college, or the next phase, off to be independent. If I allow someone else to take her to the doctor\u2014the foot doctor, say, not an emergency situation\u2014she is angry for a day or two. This is how it is now. My mother is scared. I cannot believe it. But she will not speak of her fears. She is locked up tight. She keeps her secrets. I keep mine. That is our way. We have always struggled with words. I am never certain quite what I will wake up to. Recently, as she was preparing for our daily walk, I discovered her trying to put her sock on over her shoe. This interlude, I know, cannot last. My life, such as it is, is on hold. I am worried by how we are living now, scared of drifting, losing footing on my own ground. Soon she will need more than I can provide, but she is not ready to give up. Despite her vision, her fading hearing, her stomach problems, and the rest, she tries to hold on in this place that is so familiar, her home. It is the smallest things that trouble my mother most\u2014the glass broken, the roast she cannot bake right, the can opener she cannot command to do its work, the TV remote control she cannot operate. Tell her the house is on fire and she will go on with the newspaper. Tell her you cannot find her address book and she will almost fold. Yet she has always been a determined woman, a force. She has been my rock and I am convinced that, at some level, she has survived to give me\u2014a gay man whose life she has never understood\u2014a place to call home. In her wake now, a path of open cabinets, dirty Kleenexes and crumbs, cantaloupe seeds on the couch and the floor, bills she intends to pay, food left out to spoil. I polish the silver, fix her meals, buy her new bracelets, leave Peppermint Patties under her pillow, drive her to her battalion of doctors. I buy mountains of fresh fruit, still\u2014like ice cream\u2014a luxury for a woman raised in the country during the Depression. Even after decades of relative prosperity, a bowl of fresh strawberries remains a thing of beauty to her, a wonderful surprise. She spies them with the delight of an excited girl. I try to imagine anything that will make her a little happier. If only, just once in a while, she could look a little happier. I know that her days are numbered in this house, built by my father, where deer run in the backyard and Sara Dawson down the street watches for Betty\u2019s light in the mornings, in the kitchen window where so many times I have seen my mother\u2019s face watching out for me as I turned into the driveway. For both of us, finally, I know, these are our final days of home. I am a loner, but I hate to lose people. I can only imagine how scary it is to know that the person one is losing is oneself. 2 In Missouri in springtime, the rivers rise and the rolling fields stretching acres and acres, miles and miles, gradually go green as the farmers fret over the wet ground, wondering when it will be dry enough to disc and get the crops out. In the mornings, old women wander through wet grass, bending with dirty hands over jonquils or bursts of peonies, rising to inspect children walking to school or hang summer clothes to air in the breeze. In April and May, torrents of rain come, lightning chars the tree trunks, and the branches fall, and the thunderclaps crash. Creeks and rivers flood the river bottoms and roads. Betty hit the gas and drove through the water, never acknowledging anything unusual. More twisters touch down here than ever now. A few years back, the town of Joplin, a few hundred miles away, was nearly destroyed by a funnel cloud that gathered force as it made its way across the plains. Many people died. The world took note. Betty had little to report. These things happen. That is life. One year, near Paris, a farmer was taken up in the winds. Betty did not register the event, just marched on. She is from determined stock. According to a family story, my mother\u2019s grandmother Anna Callison began a journey one spring morning at the age of eighty-five, departing from Union Station in St. Louis. She traveled alone by train halfway across the country, to Virginia, where as a girl during the Civil War she fetched a drink of water for Traveller, the horse of General Robert E. Lee. She headed back to catch a glimpse of Traveller\u2019s bones, which had been recently excavated, to remember the morning when she saw the general, the war, the days when she was a girl. No one could stop her. Not Mammy, or Nona, or Uncle Oscar. \u201cThat old woman was crazy,\u201d Betty says. . . . Spring is long gone now; it is August and the heat has been record breaking. No rain since June. Even the river bottom looks like desert and the corn in the fields is burning on the stalks. On the television news at 6 p.m., I learn that members of the Missouri legislature, some of whom carry guns into sessions, are considering a bill to ban the imposition of sharia law. There is a controversy over a resolution forbidding teenagers access to tanning beds without parental permission. Betty scrutinizes the television. \u201cThey are going to start arresting teenagers for illegal tanning,\u201d I tell her. \u201cYou\u2019re not as funny as you think you are,\u201d she replies. My humor makes her look as pained as she did at parties when my father, a tenor, and never bashful, belted out barroom ditties as the other husbands strained to mutter a word. I am irony. She is no nonsense. Our lives have been lived on different planes. I like staying up all night, hunched over a manuscript, playing with the words and sentences. I like setting out for somewhere early in the morning when no one is stirring. When I scan my existence, I can recognize no recognizable pattern. At home in New York, I listen to music, read books, fish old photographs from trash cans on the street. I like the unconventional, the city and its stories, castoffs and characters of dubious reputation. My mother has sometimes lived her life for the neighbors. I have never been able to remember the neighbors\u2019 names. . . . \u201cWho is that?\u201d Betty demands to know as a kid roars by in his pickup as we back out of our driveway into the early evening. \u201cNow where is he going?\u201d On the corner, where the city is excavating and there is a pile of dirt, she demands, \u201cWhat are they doing? It looks like they\u2019ve dug a big hole. You better watch out.\u201d She is wearing the jeans she will never take off and a blouse with wrinkles she cannot see. For many days this pairing has been her choice. I have given up trying to control her clothes. God grant me the serenity to accept the clothes I cannot change. We are thirty minutes late for a dinner so I hit the gas, and in moments we are turning onto 24, heading out of town. We pass a church, not so well kept up, where the sign that usually displays Bible verses beckons with a request: PRAY FOR RAIN. Prayers are frequent around here, especially this summer. Angels are hoped for. A woman nearly killed in a car crash on I-70 claims to have seen an angel crossing the road before her car veered out of control. We pass the place where, some years back, Major\u2019s Drive-In Theater blew down in a bad spring storm. We pass shiny black cows. Mammy always talked about how pretty she thought black cows looked against green grass. But the grass is not green this summer and Mammy is a long time gone. Betty sighs as she surveys the fields. \u201cIt\u2019s a good thing we don\u2019t have to try to sell lumber to the farmers this year,\u201d she said. \u201cLotsa luck.\u201d She hugs her purse, a bag of flowered cloth I purchased for her birthday and she declared too youthful. \u201cI thought you didn\u2019t like that purse,\u201d I commented. \u201cIt\u2019s bought and paid for,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not going to turn my nose up at it.\u201d This is the real country, not a place for rich weekenders. Tractors putt along highways where vapor rises and tar melts. We go by one of the lumberyards our family used to own, closed decades now, where a meth lab was discovered in an outbuilding. Betty turns her head rather than see the place. Some man keeps a collection of boa constrictors on the premises now. Recently one escaped to slither down Rock Road toward the home of my high school typing teacher, an excitable woman, unprepared for a morning of snake wrestling. To my way of thinking, the only proper place for a boa is around Cher\u2019s neck at the Golden Globes. Dinner is at the home of Jane Blades, my old friend. We are late because Betty has demanded her gin and tonic, her five o\u2019clock ritual. When Betty asks whom Jane is married to, I say, \u201cNo one you know.\u201d She says she hopes Jane does not have to support him. \u201cWhoever he is.\u201d Betty never thinks anyone has married the right person. Some speak of love and romance. This is not my mother. A ring on the finger is not, in her opinion, a ticket to high heaven, but she is usually curious about the quality of the diamond. . . . \u201cI shouldn\u2019t even be going,\u201d Betty says. \u201cI\u2019m an ugly old woman. I\u2019m an old battle-ax.\u201d \u201cHow do you think I feel?\u201d I ask her. \u201cI don\u2019t have a pair of decent pants I can button over my stomach.\u201d \u201cYou could take off a few pounds.\u201d \u201cDid you fix your hair that way intentionally?\u201d \u201cJust be quiet. Don\u2019t say a word.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m probably headed for a gastric bypass.\u201d \u201cStop,\u201d she says. \u201cDon\u2019t talk.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Al Roker had one.\u201d \u201cWhat?\u201d \u201cA gastric bypass. He had it on The Today Show .\u201d \u201cDuring the weather report?\u201d \u201cEveryone could see it. I thought Earleen would never shut up about it.\u201d . . . Betty peers at the huge metal barbecue on Jane\u2019s patio. \u201cWhat is that ?\u201d she asks. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I say. \u201cA school bus?\u201d When Jane comes out, we hug, but Betty draws back. Her family, the Bakers, did not hug socially, and she is not a woman who cares much for such. Nor is she often sentimental. Inside a silver locket she has worn for years, a gift from my father, are the stock photographs of strangers it came with. When she speaks of dying, I tell her how sad I will be. She waves my words away. \u201cThe world goes on,\u201d she says. Jane\u2019s house is nice, but a little bare compared to ours, cluttered with antiques laden with hat-pin holders, candy dishes, decanters, ashtrays, and figurines. Many of our things are dusty, but Betty can\u2019t see well enough to recognize this. One could safely say that she considers the absence of bric-a-brac a social problem roughly comparable to malnutrition. My father, the unofficial architect of the lumberyards once owned by my mother\u2019s family, supervised the remodeling of Jane\u2019s house decades ago. He gave my friend his greatest compliment. She did not, as he always put it, dillydally over everything. When I bring this up, Jane says my dad made her laugh, Betty says nothing. She never mentions my father, dead since 1997. She is always silent about loss. \u201cOh God, what a character,\u201d Jane says of Big George. My mother stares at me. Inside is Evie Cullers, a colorful soul whose light blue sweatshirt says COUNTRY KWWR, MISSOURI\u2019S SUPERSTATION; it looks clean enough for a baby. A former floral designer, now in her sixties, Evie sometimes bemoans the poor quality of current funerals and warns of the pitfalls of cremation. \u201cThey burn everybody on the same tray and there is a potential for getting one person\u2019s ashes mixed up with another\u2019s. \u201cIf I\u2019m gonna be livin\u2019 in a urn,\u201d she declared, \u201cI\u2019m not crazy about the idea of having a roommate.\u201d I love Evie because she is a character; Betty is sympathetic to her as both have vision problems. \u201cI was over to Wal-Mart,\u201d Evie tells me. \u201cI was searching for something in the drug section and asked some kid for help, said I was visually impaired. He said he\u2019d get someone. Five minutes later, I hear over the loudspeaker, \u2018Blind woman needs help in drugs.\u2019 I mean, what else do they say on the loudspeaker at Wal-Mart? \u2018We got a bitch in toys\u2019?\u201d Betty\u2019s eye difficulties, not quite as serious as Evie\u2019s now\u2014thanks to a legion of doctors and treatments\u2014began when I was in grade school when her retina detached during a surgery for a condition called latticed retinas that Mammy had as well. There have been eight or ten surgeries since then, culminating in transplanted corneas. It has been decades since she has seen clearly, but no complaints have been uttered. She has played the hand she was dealt, bluffing her way at night or on cloudy days. Just like Evie. . . . We stand around the kitchen island. Betty accepts a glass of wine, but I decline because I have to. I\u2019m nervous, but can\u2019t drink; I can\u2019t take anything that isn\u2019t prescribed. I have a history. Twenty years ago, I was snorting lines of speed before I went to work. When I crashed I never told Betty what had happened. I knew she would try to help, but I knew what she would think of me. I listen as everyone talks about their children. Betty, not one to fuss over wee ones or beg to hold a baby, pays little attention to the pictures being passed. She is quiet, as she is in public these days. She seems to have declared herself beyond participation. Sometimes she seems to fade away. By the time she goes to bed, when things get bad, she will have fewer pieces left in place. Camilla, Jane\u2019s sister, who has worked construction all over the world, including in Iraq, talks about Baghdad. The city, she says, barely exists now. \u201cJust like here,\u201d remarks Evie. \u201cStoutsville is just gone. We had banks, stores, a restaurant, even a movie theater. And the trains. Every time I heard the whistle, I\u2019d run down to the tracks to wave at the engineer. In summer, the gypsies would come and steal everything. They wore bright colors and drove old cars. Mama would tell us to get under the bed when they were around. People said they liked to run off with children. \u201cThere\u2019s not a kid here anybody\u2019d take now.\u201d \u201cIn ten years,\u201d says Camilla, \u201cwe could be sitting around this table and there could be no Paris at all.\u201d . . . Places like Paris are vanishing. Main Streets in all the towns around are boarded up. Gone are Lillibelle\u2019s Dress Shop, Mrs. Bailey\u2019s department store, Nevin\u2019s Florist, the barbershop where old farmers emerged after a cut and card game to take a pinch of chewing tobacco from the pockets of their overalls. We are decades past the last picture show. Wal-Mart, staffed by those known as Wal-martians, has taken its toll. There is a bail bondsman, and on television, a place called Family Pawn advertises relentlessly. \u201cI\u2019ve never pawned anything,\u201d Betty has confessed to me. \u201cHave you?\u201d I read histories of the place I am from\u2014the Civil War battles, the characters, the traveling Chautauquas, the old houses that lined the shady streets when Paris was the heart of \u201cLittle Dixie,\u201d a bastion of Southern sympathy. Long ago, there was an opera house; a grand hotel; a woolen mill that produced yarns, flannel, and blankets. There was a pottery works; a flour mill; plow, wagon, and shoe factories; tobacco warehouses; a feed store; a livery stable; a factory where cigars (Queen of Paris) were made and a wooden Indian stood out front. At Murphy and Bodine\u2019s Clothing Store, a huge stuffed bear in the window displayed men\u2019s coats and hats. Things are different now. A book I read said three things changed rural America: the breakup of the family farm; Wal-Mart; meth. . . . After dinner, Jamie Callis, who graduated a year before me, arrives. The immediate center of attention, she is bawdier than I remembered and I am miffed; I want the spotlight. In the kitchen, Jane whispers that this is Jamie\u2019s first time out since her husband, a veteran, committed suicide. A few days ago when Earleen told Betty all about this, my mother interrupted: \u201cStop, stop. I can\u2019t hear that. I can\u2019t hear it.\u201d Betty shyly edges her hand toward Jamie\u2019s; she wants to offer something, but cannot reach her without calling attention to herself, and when she sees that I am looking, she withdraws. . . . Driving home, we pass Jamie\u2019s big old house, which was her parents\u2019, and Betty notices a flower bed at the edge of her driveway. \u201cI hope her flowers make it,\u201d Betty says. \u201cHers more than anyone\u2019s. Look at that woman. A lot of people would fold. She\u2019s carrying on. I like her.\u201d Later, Betty and I are watching the news. She looks up, unhappy. \u201cI\u2019m ignorant, aren\u2019t I?\u201d she asks. \u201cJane\u2019s sister\u2019s gone everywhere. I\u2019ve never been anywhere much. I never went far.\u201d Ignorance has always been one of my mother\u2019s greatest fears\u2014for herself and for me. Growing up, she emphasized that I would be going to college. She planned for me to become a lawyer, like my father\u2019s father, in St. Louis. I didn\u2019t see it. When I was a kid, I had no notion of what could happen to me. I knew that, somehow, I did not fit exactly; but this was my home. I loved my home. I still hear the sound of the clothes falling in the dryer on the other side of my bedroom wall in our old house. On hot nights I lay with my head at the end of my bed to catch the breeze from the humming fan. Out my window, I could see the field, planted with soybeans. All summer long, Bobby Buck and I ran between the rows of beans all afternoon; at night after supper; and then after dark, when it felt dangerous to go barefoot, as we always were. A curled-up snake might be waiting underfoot. Some animal might spring up. I closed my eyes and took off. Across the street lived the Masons\u2014J.C. and Maggie and their kids, Kevin and Missy. J.C., who drove a big gravel truck, or Maggie took us all to grade school in their sea-green Chrysler, its ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. \u201cYour love,\u201d the radio played, \u201cis like a itchin\u2019 in my heart,\u201d or \u201cCome on, come on boy, see about me.\u201d Early morning in Missouri: fog billowing around the grain elevators, streets slick with ice, blue windows, big women in aprons behind the diner counter beating the hell out of egg yolks. \u201cTell me a joke,\u201d Missy cried, her small face streaked with a bit of breakfast, swimming in the hood of a parka circled with dirty fluff. \u201cSay a joke. Say a joke. Say a joke.\u201d I was always trying to be funny. I remember Missy, maybe four years old, in winter, with skinned knees in a torn pair of shorts and a pair of her mother\u2019s battered high heels, making her way across the highway, hair full of flakes of snow. Most kids lived on farms. Some of the country kids brought the same lunches every day: one strip of bologna on a slice of bread folded around with a dot of mustard. One girl had skin so dry from walking in the cold to feed that no one would touch her when we played games. I read books and worried. Sometimes when company came I hid in the front closet, among the coats, with their just dry-cleaned smell and blue plastic wrappings. In summer I hung around the house, filling the captain\u2019s decanters with Dr. Pepper, which I drank from my parents\u2019 wineglasses. I watched TV, mostly soap operas: As the World Turns, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and The Edge of Night . When something remarkable happened, I called my aunt June, long-distance, to discuss these events. June\u2014married to my mother\u2019s younger brother, Bill, was a former beauty operator whose home was decorated with furniture from her parents\u2019 funeral parlor in Kansas. She always thought she knew who had done the murders. \u201cI can tell,\u201d she said, as if gifted with special insight into homicide, a special benefit, she implied, of being raised in the funeral home business. In the afternoons I peeped into the tavern to see who was drunk or rode my bike to Mammy\u2019s where a handful of old ladies\u2014Winnie Baker, Betty\u2019s aunt; her sister Maude Eubank; Ruth Holder; and Bess Swartz\u2014often played canasta. Mammy kept score with a pencil she sharpened with a kitchen knife and stuck in her pinned-up braids. She reminded the women, when they excused themselves, not to put paper in the toilet, which was temperamental. I sat on the front porch, listening and reading Ladies\u2019 Home Journal, particularly absorbed by the monthly column \u201cCan This Marriage Be Saved?\u201d though I somehow knew I would never be kissing the bride. I sometimes walked with Mammy to Mildred\u2019s Beauty Shop, where I read Photoplay and Modern Screen as the blue-haired ladies lined up, waiting for the dryers in their bibs and wave clips, their new hair colors dripping in rivulets down the sides of their heads. Mammy didn\u2019t go to Mildred\u2019s that often. When it was possible, she washed her hair in rainwater, collected in a flat tin pan, kept on the top of the well, amid the pink roses covered in coffee grounds and eggshells, their branches held together with nylon stockings. . . . Before bed, I check Facebook where Jamie Callis has written, \u201cWhy can\u2019t we go back in time? Joyful family and love.\u201d I hear my mother talking to herself as she does when it gets late and she seems particularly anxious and confused. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with you?\u201d she asks herself over and over. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with you?\u201d For a minute, I think she is talking to me. But she would only be so ferocious with herself. \u201cAre you okay, Betty?\u201d I ask. \u201cAre you okay?\u201d Standing in the doorway of her room, I see her wagging her finger at someone who is not there. \u201cI\u2019m fine,\u201d she says. She is yelling at me all of a sudden. \u201cI\u2019m fine.\u201d She is so frustrated, ashamed of herself. I want to go to her, give her a hug, but she would just draw back. \u201cYou\u2019re my buddy,\u201d I tell her. \u201cAm I?\u201d she asks. \u201cYou know I wouldn\u2019t want just another damn sweet old lady,\u201d I say. Later when I look in, she is dozing with the covers kicked off and her purse in bed beside her, making the odd, sweet noises old people make when they sleep. When she opens her eyes, I put an old soft towel in the dryer to warm up and then spread it around her feet, which she complains get cold at night. 3 Here in Paris, too anxious to linger after the alarm, I get up early to edit in the quiet. A freelance book editor I am struggling to balance Betty, manuscripts with snarled sentences\u2014and my checkbook. Last night, I was up late on the phone with one of my clients, a loon from Los Angeles who believes he has dug up an unprosecuted Nazi still stomping around Germany. Instead of actually acting on my edits, he has e-mailed hundred of documents to be summarized for entry into the text. I have had very little sleep. My sympathies are veering toward the Reich. Mornings in New York, I could be found editing books through the night, at the Malibu Diner on West Twenty-third Street. I sipped my coffee, watched the street and the people, scrutinizing the cops mingling with ancient ladies with drop earrings, streaks of red on their faces, and blaring lipstick\u2014old showgirl types, their often-tinted hair in dry curlicues, who come out early to order rye toast and soft-boiled eggs. I have always lived alone. My life as an editor of books and magazines has been spent lingering in the white spaces between lines of copy, trying to get the work perfect. I was raised to get it right. I was raised to work. These were some of the things my mother taught me by example. . . . Betty started playing the piano when she was a girl. She has a way with the instrument, but it was my father\u2019s voice that people really noticed. Big George was known for singing. The possessor of a voice that could boost celebrants and move even casual mourners, he performed at weddings and special occasions in Madison and Paris. Betty accompanied him. One night, I remember her practicing the \u201cThe Lord\u2019s Prayer\u201d over and over so many times I got a headache. \u201cStop playing \u2018The Lord\u2019s Prayer,\u2019\u201d I screamed out from my bedroom. \u201cDon\u2019t bug me,\u201d Betty yelled back. \u201cI\u2019m in a mood.\u201d When my father came home, later than usual, I threw my arms around him as my mother asked where he had been. She said they had to practice for a funeral the next day. We hadn\u2019t had much dinner. Betty never really ate, just pushed her food around on her plate. She wanted to stay thin. \u201cThy kingdom come,\u201d my father sang, \u201cthy will be done.\u201d His voice filled the house. They went through the song over and over as I slept on the couch. The warmth of my father\u2019s hand on my back brought me back. When I got up, he stood me in front of him with his hands on my shoulders and my feet on his work boots. He walked me all the way to my room like this as Betty kept on at the piano. Betty kept practicing just to make sure she got it right, got it perfect. I had listened to my mother so many nights, playing the church songs over and over; I could sleep through it. But my father, a man with a temper, never could. Big George got up, furious. \u201cDammit, Betty. Dammit,\u201d he said, his voice loud and angry, \u201cleave that alone and come to bed. I am worn the hell out.\u201d \u201cNo one,\u201d my mother yelled back, \u201cwants to hear the pianist hit a clunker when they\u2019re about to go into the ground.\u201d . . . All through school, I worked as hard as I could, tried to win approval. From anyone. I was so hungry for something. My quest to be perfect never really stopped. I tried at work, on every project, at all the jobs I held. For a long time, as I moved from job to job, I was always praised and got promoted, over and over. But I never got it quite right. I am not sure my mother believes she ever got it right either. I don\u2019t think she believes that either one of us have ever really hit the mark. I struggle with my moods. They come in big waves, erratic and intense, though I hide them. I have had to fight at times to stay upright. But here my mother keeps me going. I just get up. I crack the eggs, pick the pieces of shell out of the bowl, and flick them across the room with my fingertips. This morning, as usual, there was coffee, ready and waiting. Every night Betty changes the filter and puts the water, some of which she always manages to spill, into our old, huffy-puffy machine. During her night missions she turns it on for when I come in. She is very conscientious about this; it almost is the last task, aside from the laundry, that she is able to complete successfully. Although she can still play the piano occasionally for church, she cannot cook, or clean, or do anything that requires organizational ability or thinking ahead. She makes the coffee too weak, but if I try to intercede before she gets to it, she looks hurt. It is her job. And she thinks I use too much Folgers. \u201cCoffee\u2019s high,\u201d she says. \u201cCoffee\u2019s high-priced.\u201d Procrastinating, trying to avoid the Nazi hunter\u2019s last crazed draft, I snag this and that from the kitchen. A day that begins with four coffees, two cinnamon rolls, and several trips to the refrigerator for caramel praline ice cream is likely to lead a person into risky emotional territory. If that doorbell rings it had better not be a Jehovah\u2019s Witness. . . . \u201cWhat is that stuff you drink at Christmas?\u201d Betty asks when she gets up. \u201cWhat is the name of that stuff you drink at Christmas? I lay awake half last night trying to remember the name of it.\u201d \u201cEggnog,\u201d I say. We are to drive to Columbia to the hairdresser later. If we don\u2019t leave by noon, we\u2019ll be late and Bliss, Betty\u2019s hairdresser at Waikiki Coiffures, will throw a fit or, as she has threatened, cancel my mother\u2019s appointment. I hate Bliss. She stares at my mother\u2019s clothes on the bad days when we don\u2019t get things quite right. Betty pretends not to notice, but I see how it hurts her feelings. There is a lot she pretends not to notice these days. She doesn\u2019t even seem to take in the weather. This is the third month of the drought. There may be hope for beans, but not for the corn; the farmers are cutting it down for silage. I have never known exactly what silage is, but I wonder if it would enhance a dinner salad. Our flowers, miraculously, have survived, mostly. I am trying my best to keep them alive. In the mornings my mother stands at the window in the dining room, where the silver is tarnished now, in front of a wicker stand where she once kept geraniums, gazing out at the roses for as long as she can bear to stand up. Her face in the pane is like streaks of a watercolor. Even though she is old, I think she is more beautiful than ever, softer. You would never guess her age until she speaks. I do my best to make sure that when she looks in the mirror, there is someone who is familiar though sometimes nothing else is. When dealing with older women, a trip to a hairdresser and two Bloody Marys goes further than any prescription drug. . . . The pink rosebushes came from my grandmother\u2019s garden in Madison. My uncle Bill, adept at an astonishing range of skills, moved them here for Betty after my grandmother gave up her house. \u201cI am grateful to Bill for that,\u201d she says. As if there is not much else she gives him credit for. \u201cIt was a hard job. He worked and worked. He worked hard.\u201d When I lie awake worrying about what will come next, I wonder if my mother is contemplating, as she stands at that window, what will become of her mother\u2019s roses\u2014transplanted by her brother\u2019s old rough hands, pruned by my father, watered and tended by the family through decades of harsh summer sun\u2014after she is gone. Caring for things\u2014flowers or people\u2014has never been my strong point. I worry about doing right by my mother. She deserves someone who can help her better, someone who can change a flat or stuff a turkey. My life has been unconventional. I have walked the streets of New York City, lived in studio apartments, eaten tons of takeout. I have made only desultory attempts at personal arrangements. In fact, I have no personal arrangements. Maybe it is impossible to come home again and not to wonder how it is that things turned out quite this way, why I am here, how it came to this, how it is that I cannot quite find the appropriate term for my \u201clifestyle,\u201d why it is that my mother simply shakes her head when I share details of my existence, why she cannot bring herself to speak of my life. . . . My mother has never tried to be anyone but herself. \u201cAt least I\u2019m out and out with my meanness,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not a sneak. I hate a sneak.\u201d When I was growing up, we tussled a lot, but never really fought. Yes, Betty had her blowups, her bad days, her little tempests, but there was also the sly way she winked when I came home in the midst of one of her bridge games; the way she rolled her eyes at Mrs. Corn in church just for me to see. I was her conspirator and she made me laugh or want to reach out, sometimes, to protect the part of her that rarely showed, her secret soft spot. At the country club, where she could turn a game of golf into a disaster movie, her face took on a wistful look as she watched her ball plunk down a few feet from the tee. Once on Ladies\u2019 Day, Doris Rixsey took the golf club from her hand and said, \u201cHoney, let\u2019s just go have a highball.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Professionals & Academics"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 13.18}, {"asin": "014312661X", "title": "Coming Out to Play", "author": null, "description": "Review \u201cRogers made history\u2026 As the first openly gay male to play a game in a major professional team sport in North America, Rogers\u2019 ascension to becoming a pioneer was complete. Rogers\u2019 return was symbolic, poetic and seamless all at the same time.\u201d Avi Creditor, Sports Illustrated \u201cBy standing up, coming out and continuing to play the sport he loves, Robbie Rogers has inspired millions of people around the world. He has refused to let fear stop him from living and loving and his story will move you as it has me.\" Anderson Cooper \"Robbie Rogers is a courageous man who speaks his truth and lives his life in his truth. We all benefit when someone has the courage to tell their story like Robbie has done. Bravo.\" Maria Shriver \"Robbie Rogers' story transcends sport; he's an inspiration to his peers and future generations.\" Jason Collins, center for the Brooklyn Nets and the first 'out' NBA player \"Robbie Rogers' story is as heroic on the field as it is off.\" Mark Cuban , owner of The Dallas Mavericks, Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theatres \"With courage and honesty, Robbie Rogers has offered us a graceful genuine story about a crucial value in everyone\u2019s life: being true to oneself and to one\u2019s feelings. It\u2019s impossible not to be moved by it.\" Giovanni Frazzetto , Neuroscientist and author of\u00a0Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love: What Neuroscience Can--and Can't--Tell Us About How We Feel \"Valuable insight into the myriad off-field issues that can affect footballers, and the impact they have on their careers... Reading about those tough experiences will be of benefit to many, players and fans alike.\"\" Sky Sports \u201cYou want courage? Rogers came out. In a male team sports world that had never embraced gay athletes, Rogers announced his orientation.\u201d Grant Wahl, Sports Illustrated \"Rogers\u2019s debut is great inspiration for people of all ages struggling with shame and grappling with identity issues with regard to sexuality or otherwise. Those who enjoy memoir and stories of people who overcome difficulty will embrace \u00adthis account.\" Library Journal \u201cIn one day, instead of representing the past\u2014the idea that the only way a male athlete could come out would be if he also retired\u2014Robbie Rogers will represent the future.\u201d The Nation \u201cRogers is now one of the most recognizable faces in the fight against homophobia.\u201d CNN \u201c[Rogers\u2019] status as the only openly gay male athlete in a prominent North American professional sport has made waves.\u201d The Guardian \u201c2013 will be remembered as the year Rogers came out as gay, retired from the sport, and returned to become a trailblazer in the sports world.\u201d Rant Sports About the Author Robbie Rogers started playing soccer at the age of four. He has played for the Columbus Crew, the U.S. Olympic national team, and Leeds United in the U.K., and currently plays for the L.A. Galaxy. Rogers is also co-owner of Halsey, a menswear brand, and is a cofounder of and ambassador for the Beyond \u201cit\u201d campaign. He lives in Los Angeles. Eric Marcus is the author and coauthor of several of books, including Breaking the Surface , the #1 New York Times \u2013bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***Copyright \u00a9 2014 Robbie Rogers CHAPTER 1\u00a0CRACK-UP I was out cold before my face hit the ground. February 18, 2012, should have been one of the happiest days of my life. Instead, I was crumpled in a heap on the stunningly green pitch (what they call a sports field in England), unconsciously breathing in the scent of freshly cut grass. If I\u2019d been able to hear anything\u2014and I guarantee you that I wasn\u2019t hearing a thing because my brain was still seeing stars\u2014 I could have heard a pin drop, because the twenty-one thousand soccer fans in the stands that sunny afternoon were holding their breath to see if the motionless American, who\u2019d just made his debut at the historic Elland Road soccer stadium with their beloved Leeds United, was dead or alive. Just the day before, I was as conscious as I\u2019d ever been when I saw my name posted on the game-day roster at our training grounds for a match against the Doncaster Rovers. I can\u2019t say I was surprised to see my name as much as I was relieved to finally have the chance to play after a month of training with my new team. Being placed on the game-day roster was no guarantee that I\u2019d actually get to play, because I wasn\u2019t in the starting eleven (the eleven \u201cfootballers\u201d who are designated to start the game). But if you don\u2019t get on the bench in the first place, there\u2019s no chance you\u2019ll be called in as a substitute. It turned out to be a very dirty, ugly game\u2014not much possession, not great passing\u2014but even so, I enjoyed watching and just being there. The Leeds fans are very passionate. From the start of the game they\u2019re always chanting, singing, and cheering for their team. Going into the second half the score was 0\u20130. There were five of us on the bench, and once the second half started the coach sent us to warm up at the side of the field, first two of us and then the other three. For a few minutes we jogged and stretched to get ready to possibly go in, and then went back to sit on the bench. And then I got called in. You don\u2019t have a lot of time between getting called and the start of play, but in the few seconds it took to get from the bench to my position on the pitch I thought, This is Leeds United. This is Elland Road. I\u2019m playing football in England. I\u2019m so proud and excited just being on this field where there\u2019s so much history and so many great footballers have played. Since I was a little boy kicking a ball up the steep driveway of the house where I grew up in Southern California, I\u2019d dreamed of playing professional soccer in England. They have the biggest leagues and the most devoted fans, the game is always fast and competitive, and the greatest players want to go there. And now, having worked so hard to make this dream come true, I was running onto the pitch for an English team for the first time. If I was at all nervous in that moment it was only because I was making my debut and was eager to make a great first impression with the fans. I had no idea just how big an impression I\u2019d make. I was only in the game for eleven minutes when one of our defenders kicked the ball up in the air. As it was coming down I challenged for the ball in hopes of winning possession for our team. I could see I was in a good position to head it toward our striker or the opposing team\u2019s goal. So I was backpedaling fast, thinking that I could connect with the ball and flick it off the back of my head. And at the same time, one of their defenders was racing flat-out from the opposite direction so he could flick the ball off the front of his head toward our goal. We both launched ourselves off the ground to meet the ball, but instead of connecting with the ball, my opponent head-butted me straight in the back of my head with the front of his\u2014I was knocked out midair. --- If anyone had known the real Robbie Rogers\u2014and up to that point I\u2019d made sure that no one did\u2014they might have said it would take a blow to my head to get me to face facts about my life. But as I lay paralyzed on the field, fighting my way back to consciousness, all I could think was, Where am I and how did I get here? Good questions to consider in that brain-numbing moment\u2014facedown in the grass, an ocean and a continent away from home. CHAPTER 2 MY TWIN I was a twin. I don\u2019t know how I sensed it without anyone ever telling me, but one day when I was six or seven years old I asked my mother if I\u2019d had a twin brother. But instead of telling you what my mom told me happened to my twin, I thought I\u2019d let her tell the story because she was there: We lived in San Pedro (which is part of Los Angeles) on Seventh Street in a little Spanish-style house right down the street from my office, where I had a legal practice. I was in the middle of a trial, but for some reason I needed to go to the house and either I\u2019d forgotten my key or the key didn\u2019t work. There was a side window that I\u2019d always left open a crack, so I decided to climb in, not even thinking that it was a foolish thing to do considering that I was three months pregnant. The window was maybe four feet off the ground and I\u2019m only five feet tall, so it was a bit of a struggle to get up to the window, and I slipped and fell. It wasn\u2019t until I had some spotting and bleeding later that day that I realized there might be a problem. So I called my doctor, John Roller, who was a dear friend. In fact, he\u2019d delivered two of my mother\u2019s children. He said, \u201cYou need to come in right now.\u201d And I said, \u201cI\u2019m in trial, but I\u2019ll come in after court today.\u201d Sometimes I think about my behavior at that time and wonder, Was I nuts to wait? But I waited and once he examined me he told me I was having a miscarriage and that he wanted me to go to the hospital for a D&C (dilation and curettage, which is a procedure to remove any remaining tissue from the pregnancy). I said, \u201cNo, I can\u2019t, I\u2019m in trial.\u201d As you might imagine, I was extremely upset and was probably in denial about what was happening to me and by focusing on the trial I didn\u2019t have to think about losing my baby. So the doctor said, \u201cI\u2019m going to give you a prescription that will at least slough off the majority of the lining of your uterus, and I want you to promise me you\u2019ll get it and take this medication tonight.\u201d I promised I would and I did. I don\u2019t know how I managed in the days and weeks that followed, because I had just lost this child and went through a postpartum depression of sorts, but I dealt with the trial, and looked after my two young daughters, and kept going. Approximately four months after this miscarriage, I was still feeling like I was pregnant and called John. He said that he thought I was just going through a difficult time after the miscarriage and needed more time to grieve the loss. But at five months I still had that feeling, so I called John again and said, \u201cI know you think I\u2019m crazy, but I think I\u2019m pregnant.\u201d He said, \u201cWell, maybe you got pregnant again. Weirder things have happened.\u201d So I went to see him and after examining me he said, \u201cYou are pregnant.\u201d I said, \u201cHow far along?\u201d And he said, \u201cFive months!\u201d I had no idea that I\u2019d been pregnant with twins. In those days they didn\u2019t do routine sonograms, which would have shown two heartbeats before the miscarriage and one after. So I remember thinking, Oh, my gosh, what if I\u2019d had the D&C? I would have lost the second baby without even knowing it. After telling me how incredible this was John got very pensive and said, \u201cBecause of the medication I prescribed for you the baby may have birth defects.\u201d Both my doctor and I were Catholic, which is one of the reasons we were so close. He told me that he wouldn\u2019t perform an abortion, but that I might consider consulting with another physician and discussing this option, which I never did. I told him, and I don\u2019t think he was surprised, that I was \u201clooking forward to having the baby and whatever gift the Lord gives me.\u201d Through the rest of my pregnancy I was extremely worried and I prayed, \u201cPlease Lord, you\u2019ve given me this child, please take care of him and protect this little boy.\u201d Then on Mother\u2019s Day, May 12, 1987, Robbie was born. John was there to deliver him and he was overjoyed and pranced around the room with this child in his arms, and said, \u201cHe\u2019s perfect! Everything about him is perfect!\u201d And then Robbie urinated on him and John added, \u201cEverything works!\u201d Later, John told me that he\u2019d kept a secret from me. He said, \u201cThe last time I delivered a baby on Mother\u2019s Day, the child was very malformed and passed away, and I didn\u2019t want to share that with you until after the birth.\u201d No wonder John had been so relieved. I never said a word to my children about Robbie\u2019s twin, so I was shocked when Robbie asked me about his twin brother. He said, \u201cI was a twin, wasn\u2019t I?\u201d I\u2019d probably pushed the memory so far down that it took me a moment before I realized what Robbie was talking about. In a way, it was so eerie. --- So that\u2019s the story of my unnamed twin. But there was one other thing I told my mother when I first asked her about my brother. I said, \u201cI know I had a brother and before he died, he gave me his speed.\u201d CHAPTER 3 \u201cBORDERLINE PRODIGY\u201d I\u2019ve always been known for my \u201cexplosive speed,\u201d as any number of sports journalists have observed over the course of my career. But whether my ability to run fast comes from my twin brother, God, the universe, or just my genes, to me it was just me. So what I did on the soccer field came naturally and didn\u2019t seem at all exceptional, although I was happy to put my apparent speed to good use against my opponents. In later years, after I\u2019d started playing professional soccer, reporters writing about my athletic skills helped provide me with some perspective on the gifts I\u2019d been given and when they first became evident. For example, a 2008 article in the Columbus Dispatch newspaper said I\u2019d been a \u201cborderline prodigy in soccer and judo\u201d since I was five. What the article didn\u2019t note was that by the time I was five I\u2019d already been kicking a soccer ball for two years and playing team soccer for one. In the Rogers family it was inevitable that I\u2019d be involved in sports because sports were central to my family\u2019s life even before I showed up on the scene. My two older sisters, Alicia and Nicole (Coco, for short), were already playing soccer and competing in judo before I was out of diapers. By the time I was three I often went along to soccer practice and games, and to keep myself occupied I kicked around a ball on the sidelines, running back and forth and never stopping until it was time to go home. I don\u2019t know if it was my right-footed or left-footed kicking skills (which my father helped me hone), or just the fact that I never stopped kicking the ball that caught the eye of one of my sisters\u2019 coaches. But he approached my mom and suggested they enroll me in AYSO (American Youth Soccer Organization), even though I was only four and younger than any other players. After that, if I wasn\u2019t playing in an AYSO game, I was at home practicing my kicking or organizing neighborhood games or juggling the ball around the house. My mom and dad really encouraged me to play because they saw how good it was for me and were happy about the lessons I learned from being on a team. (Though my mom wasn\u2019t so happy the one time I kicked the ball in our living room, which was totally against the rules, and destroyed a treasured family heirloom vase\u2014I was so upset that Mom wound up comforting me.) My first team was called the Purple Octopuses, and then at the end of my first season I was recruited to the \u201cSelect\u201d league and a team that was made up of the best players from local AYSO teams. And from there, at age seven, I got recruited to play for the South Bay Gunners, which for a time was an all-Hispanic team, except for me. (I was also two years younger than all of the other Gunners.) While soccer was an increasingly popular sport for kids my age, among Hispanic immigrants soccer was already the number one sport for boys, just as professional soccer is the number one team sport in the world (with the exception of the United States). What I didn\u2019t know at the time was that none of this was free. My parents had to pay a fee (my mom thinks it was about $1,000) just to be on the league team, and then there was the cost of travel whenever we played a team far enough away from home that we needed to stay at a hotel. It would have been bad enough (and costly enough) if I\u2019d been an only child and soccer had been my only sport, but until I was ten years old, soccer was just one of my two major sports, because Alicia and Coco also competed in judo. And whatever my sisters did, I had to do, too. So very quickly I joined them in class, in competitions, and then on the winners\u2019 podium. Like my very talented sisters, I won multiple regional championships in judo. (Alicia, Coco, and I all won all three regional championships in our age groups\u2014the triple crown\u2014at least twice. People come from all over the country to compete at these championships, so they\u2019re actually considered national competitions even though they cover certain regions.) Between judo and soccer we got to travel all over California and from New Jersey to Hawaii and many places in between. My sisters even got to go to Japan and England, and my parents paid for it all. I can\u2019t imagine how much financial pressure that put them under, but they never said no. With three of us playing two sports\u2014and at some point we added my brother, Tim, and sister Katie to the mix\u2014the daily practice and competition schedule was insane. I don\u2019t know how our parents managed it, especially since they had a joint law practice that kept them pretty busy. On a typical weekday one of my parents would leave work early (after going in at six-thirty or seven in the morning) to pick us up after school and drive us to soccer practice, then we\u2019d get a quick dinner, and then go on to judo practice. If we were lucky, we got home by nine and then did our homework. Later, when I\u2019d given up judo and was playing soccer for the Palos Verdes Raiders, my evenings were my own, except on those occasions when my mother would pick me up after club soccer and take me to ODP. That\u2019s the Olympic Development Program, which is a national program designed to identify young players who show skill and talent, and then develop them so there\u2019s a pool of great players for the national team to draw from. Weekends were in some ways more intense than the weekdays because we\u2019d all pile into the car and my parents would get us to six soccer games and a judo tournament in two days. That was even more demanding than it sounds, because those games and tournaments were typically in different places at different times. Mostly I loved it, but sometimes it got to be too much, so Timmy and I would hide our dad\u2019s car keys so we could just stay home and chill. Dad always found them. When it came to games and competitions Mom and Dad always encouraged us to do our best, but never came down on us for losing. That didn\u2019t mean we had the option of not playing. We had to play a sport\u2014at least one\u2014and we had to go to practice. My parents were careful not to limit me to judo and soccer and made sure I had opportunities to try other sports, like baseball and football. I also skateboarded and surfed\u2014I still surf. It took me about five minutes to realize I hated both football and baseball. Mom remembers all of this a lot better than I do: Robbie was always a talented athlete, always. When he was in intermediate school one of Robbie\u2019s coaches wanted him to play flag football because he was so fast. I went to Robbie\u2019s first formal game and he made three touchdowns. When he got off the field he said it was the stupidest game because all they do is hand you a ball and you have to run with it. He never played it again. It was the same with Little League. When Robbie was seven or eight I enrolled him in Little League and soon after, the coach said, \u201cThis kid has real athletic talent. You should forget about soccer and judo. There\u2019s a lot of money in baseball. He\u2019s incredible on the bases.\u201d Robbie didn\u2019t like standing still, so he got very good at stealing bases. At the end of his first season, when we asked Robbie about playing the next season, he said, \u201cDid you know that Coach So-and-so said to step in front of the ball just so I could get on the bases? I never want to play that sport again. It is so stupid. You run around the bases for a few seconds and then you stand in the middle of a field and wait for the ball to come to you.\u201d That was the end of baseball. My sister Alicia recalls that one of the reasons I hated baseball, which isn\u2019t something I remember, was that I was so afraid of the ball hitting my \u201cprivates.\u201d She said, \u201cDuring the one season Robbie played Little League, they took pictures of him and you can see he isn\u2019t really paying attention to the camera because he was so busy guarding his privates.\u201d Not surprisingly, none of these photos survive. --- To me it didn\u2019t matter how many sports I was good at because from the start I was most passionate about soccer, and soccer ruled my moods. If my team won, I was happy for the week. If we lost, I\u2019d get depressed and my mother would try to cheer me up. The best, of course, was winning a championship, and the first time that happened I was nine or ten years old and my team, the Gunners, won the State Cup. We were the best soccer team in our age group in California and winning that championship put me on top of the world, especially since I\u2019d scored one of the goals. After we won we were so excited that we celebrated as if we\u2019d just won the World Cup. But we were kids and to us it probably felt better winning that championship than it did for a professional soccer player being the best in the world. I loved the competition and also loved the feeling of accomplishing something great with my team\u2014and it was that feeling that motivated me to keep playing long after my childhood. Early on, there were rewards that went beyond just the sheer joy of winning. My parents, especially my dad, would reward me with things if I hit certain benchmarks (which, come to think of it, probably wasn\u2019t the healthiest sort of arrangement). For example, my dad might say, \u201cIf you score six goals in a game, we\u2019ll get you a cat.\u201d I got a cat. Then he said, \u201cIf you score seven goals in a game, we\u2019ll get you a snake.\u201d I got a snake, and frogs, and toys (water guns were a favorite), and my bike. I also learned to make deals of my own with my parents, like, \u201cIf I score today I want you to take me for sushi.\u201d I think they would have taken me anyway, but it was a nice incentive I set for myself, and my parents were happy to go along with it. (One time, when I was playing professional soccer for the Columbus Crew in 2010, I had the chance to pay my mom back and told her in advance of a game we were set to play on Mother\u2019s Day that I\u2019d score a goal for her, which I did. We were playing against New England and that goal won the game 3\u20132\u2014and it was my first goal in nearly a year!) Beyond my passion for playing soccer, I was also a huge soccer fan, along with all the other soccer-playing kids in my neighborhood. So we constantly talked about our favorite teams and players. My favorite was Arsenal Football Club. Arsenal is an English team based in the north of London. From the first time I saw Arsenal I became a huge fan and fell in love with the way they played\u2014at times it was almost an art form, so they were fun to watch early in the morning on television while I sat on the couch having some breakfast. Arsenal\u2019s nickname was \u201cthe Invincibles\u201d for the 2003\u20132004 regular season because during that time they never lost a game in the Premier League. Arsenal in those days was an incredible mix of guys who were very talented, including Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry, Robert Pir\u00e8s, Freddie Ljungberg, Nwankwo Kanu, Ashley Cole, and Gilberto Silva. They were all stars in their own ways, but Arsenal\u2019s biggest star and my favorite Arsenal player was Thierry Henry\u2014he was fast, technical, and scored amazing goals. But my all-time favorite player when I was growing up never played for Arsenal, and he wasn\u2019t even English. His name is Zinedine Zidane. He was a French midfielder and played for Juventus, Real Madrid, and a few other clubs; he was a true artist on the field and I hoped that one day I could be even half the soccer player he was. Not all of my soccer friends followed a British team like I did, but most of them followed a team somewhere in the world, whether it was Italy, Spain, or Germany. It\u2019s hard to explain, but you developed a really personal relationship with your favorite team, even a continent away. Whenever we played soccer in the streets of my neighborhood, I always called my team Arsenal. And we\u2019d play against teams named for real Arsenal opponents, like Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal\u2019s biggest rival, Tottenham Hotspurs. We almost always won. It\u2019s sort of amazing to me that I ever organized those games, because outside of sports I was a very shy child. My mother tells me that I was the kind of kid who would cling to his mother\u2019s leg when a stranger came to the house. And when she took me to school for the first time I wouldn\u2019t let go. She recalled, \u201cPart of my heart was ripped out because that little guy . . . I\u2019d pull one hand off and there would be an automatic flypaper reaction and his hand was right back where it started. I was finally able to peel him off me, but he was inconsolable as the teacher led him into school. So when I got to the office I called the school and fortunately by then he had settled down. He was a gentle, loving, tender child, but in moments like that my heart ached for him.\u201d It\u2019s not like I don\u2019t recognize myself in my mother\u2019s description, because in a lot of ways I\u2019m still shy, but when it came to sports, something happened to me and I was confident, competitive, even fearless. On the soccer field or competing in judo, no one ever got to see the child who was terrified of leaving his mother on his first day of school. --- I loved competing in both soccer and judo, but it was too much. There wasn\u2019t any time to just be a kid, and when I was ten years old I told my mom I\u2019d had enough. I said that I just couldn\u2019t do both and wanted to quit judo. I explained that I\u2019d miss judo, but I enjoyed soccer more. Judo is an individual sport and soccer is a team sport, and I really enjoyed being part of a team. If I\u2019d had any doubt about my decision at the time, it disappeared later when I realized soccer could help me go to college on a scholarship. But the fact that I enjoyed it more than judo really made the decision easy for me, and I never looked back. It wasn\u2019t until later in my life that I realized all that running around had been too much for my parents, too, and for my mom in particular. In my family, we all see my mom as a powerhouse who never runs out of energy. But she\u2019s actually this tiny person\u2014she says she\u2019s five feet tall, but I\u2019m not so sure if she\u2019s even that tall, and she\u2019s as thin as a rail. With a full-time job and five children to look after and with all those sports to get us to and all of the money it took to keep it all going, Mom was struggling to stay above water. Of course as a child I couldn\u2019t see that anything was wrong, until my parents\u2019 marriage shattered, like a fragile treasured heirloom that got knocked to the ground by a soccer ball. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Biographies"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1594679290", "title": "An American Band", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.36}, {"asin": "1596686324", "title": "Mastering Herringbone Stitch: The Complete Guide", "author": "Melinda A. Barta", "description": "Review \"A solid overview of the popular herringbone technique: from the creation of flat bands--to round and tubular--and on to twisted tubular variations, as well as connections to other types of stitches.\" -- Perlen Poesie \"I can recommend this excellent instructional book to you completely and wholeheartedly. It is not only educational and helpful in the best sense, it is BEAUTIFUL!\" -- Pretty Kitty Dog Moon Jewelry About the Author Melinda Barta is the editor of Beadwork magazine. In her Beadwork column, Custom Cool, she teaches beaders of all skill levels how to create custom components using beadweaving stitches. Melinda is the author of the books Custom Cool Jewelry , Hip to Stitch , and Mastering Peyote Stitch , and coauthor of Mixed Metals (all from Interweave).", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.19}, {"asin": "0072226781", "title": "Introduction to Networking", "author": "Richard Alan McMahon", "description": "From the Back Cover Essential IT Skills for On-the-Job Success Mike Meyers, one of the premier computer and network skills trainers, has developed a learning system designed to teach key IT principles in an easy-to-understand way that will prepare you for an IT career. His proven ability to explain concepts in a clear, direct, even humorous way makes these books interesting, motivational, and fun. Inside this book, you will learn to: Distinguish between network classifications Distinguish between network classifications Work with network components, such as cables, network interface cards, and concentrators Work with network components, such as cables, network interface cards, and concentrators Identify network protocols, including TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and others Identify network protocols, including TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and others Install Novell NetWare, Windows 2000, and Red Hat Linux servers Install Novell NetWare, Windows 2000, and Red Hat Linux servers Install Windows XP Professional and Red Hat Linux workstations Install Windows XP Professional and Red Hat Linux workstations Create network file systems, including FAT, NTFS, and NFS Create network file systems, including FAT, NTFS, and NFS Configure and troubleshoot network printing Configure and troubleshoot network printing Plan for a secure network Plan for a secure network Implement network management tools and techniques Each chapter includes:Learning Objectives Four-Color Illustrations Step-by-Step Tutorials Try This! and Cross-Check Exercises Inside Information Sidebars Helpful Notes, Tips, and Warnings Chapter Summaries and Key Term Lists End-of-Chapter Quizzes and Lab Projects Mapped to the NWCET IT Skills Standards Implement network management tools and techniques Each chapter includes: Learning Objectives Learning Objectives Four-Color Illustrations Four-Color Illustrations Step-by-Step Tutorials Step-by-Step Tutorials Try This! and Cross-Check Exercises Try This! and Cross-Check Exercises Inside Information Sidebars Inside Information Sidebars Helpful Notes, Tips, and Warnings Helpful Notes, Tips, and Warnings Chapter Summaries and Key Term Lists Chapter Summaries and Key Term Lists End-of-Chapter Quizzes and Lab Projects Mapped to the NWCET IT Skills Standards End-of-Chapter Quizzes and Lab Projects Mapped to the NWCET IT Skills Standards About the Author Richard McMahon is a professor at the University of Houston, and an experienced textbook author. He has published Networking Administration for NetWare Versions 4.11 and 5, MCSE Windows 2000 Security Design Exam Prep, MCSE SQL Server 2000 Database Design Exam Cram, and a series of Office XP textbooks. Professor McMahon currently teaches Introduction to Networking at the University of Houston with enrollments of 200 students per year.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Networking & Cloud Computing"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 1.97}, {"asin": "1422143562", "title": "Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future", "author": "Jonah Sachs", "description": "Review \u201c Story Wars is a thorough guide for the novice or even practiced storytellers in all of us. Sachs offers story structures, ways of thinking about characters and messages. He pulls artfully from recent brand successes from companies including Nike and Apple. And he tells a few good stories along the way.\u201d \u2014 Forbes \u201cSachs is full of ideas and strategies to help readers give their brands the rare, compelling story that will raise their message above the melee of advertising noise\u2026 the ideas are powerful and solid, and will make inspiring reading for marketing professionals looking to set their stories apart.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cIn this timely, practical, perceptive, and thought-provoking book, Sachs (CEO, Free Range Studios) does a remarkable job trumpeting storytelling as a means by which people can effectively influence others.\u201d \u2014 CHOICE \u201cThe book is an interesting blend of marketing and advertising history, mythology, and psychology that pulled me in and kept me turning the pages\u2026 the eye-catching illustrations of Drew Beam. Beam's artwork combined with Sachs's writing style kept me glued to the pages\u2026 this one has earned a place on my bookshelf and a noteworthy position on my leadership development reading list.\u201d \u2014 T+D magazine, American Society for Training & Development \u201cThis fast-paced entertaining book takes on storytelling from the POV of a 24/7 information culture and shares the strategies and tactics that fuel today\u2019s most compelling content.\u201d \u2014 Ketchum PR, On the Bookshelf: New Year Reads \u201cSachs offers a step-by-step guide to corporate storytelling, showing how brands can use recognisable characters, such as \"freaks, cheats and familiars\" to create instantly relatable campaigns\u2026Marketers who are able to define the core values of a brand then use them to engage the target audience in a compelling, relatable story are the ones who will thrive in the new media landscape of the \"digitoral\" age.\u201d \u2014 Warc \u201cHis investigation also unveiled a process to help others create winning stories that he shares with great depth and charm in this book.\u201d \u2014 800 CEO READ \u201cTo influence this brave new world, first convince the global media marketplace of your story. The better the story, the better chance of making people think differently.\u201d \u2014 Quantas magazine \u201cIn the often superficial, deceptive world of marketing and advertising, social innovator Jonah Sachs is an individual with a conscience...Sachs\u2019s engaging work is a call to arms for anyone who works to influence consumer choices.\u201d \u2014 getAbstract ADVANCE PRAISE for Winning the Story Wars : Dan Heath, coauthor, Switch and Made to Stick \u2014 \u201cJonah Sachs knows stories. He\u2019s responsible for some of the most popular and respected viral messages of all time: The Story of Stuff , The Meatrix , Grocery Store Wars , and others. This book is a storytelling call to arms, an appeal to tell the stories that matter. So read Winning the Story Wars \u2014and join the fray.\u201d Nick Coe, CEO, Bath & Body Works; former President, Land\u2019s End\u2014 \u201cHistory is written by the winners. And as Jonah Sachs makes abundantly clear, it is now being written by the marketers, the new mythmakers of our time. Whatever your product or your cause, if you want it to succeed, read this wise and enlightening book.\u201d Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director, Greenpeace International\u2014 \u201c Winning the Story Wars will convince you that storytelling is the most powerful way to move people to action. And it will teach you to use that power to orient our world to a more positive future. If you\u2019re ready to be a great storyteller, read this book.\u201d Deepak Chopra, founder, The Chopra Foundation\u2014 \u201cGreat leaders transform the world through stories that inspire hope, stability, trust, compassion, and authenticity. This important and thought-provoking book shows that leadership in marketing will require the living and telling of such stories as well.\u201d Bill Bradley, former US Senator; Managing Director, Allen & Company\u2014 \u201cWe know about who we are both individually and as a society through stories. In this brilliant book, Jonah Sachs tells us how we lost our storytelling capacity and how we must regain it, constructing our own myths and living the truth of the stories we tell.\u201d Paul Hawken, author, The Ecology of Commerce and Blessed Unrest \u2014 \u201cIn the current maelstrom of media babble and corporate deceit, Jonah Sachs makes sense where none appears to exist. Winning the Story Wars explains why we respond to lies\u2014whether in political or product ads, campaigns or speeches\u2014and how truth ultimately trumps all. This remarkable book delivers on that rare promise of changing how you see the world.\u201d About the Author About the Author: Jonah Sachs. As the cofounder and CEO of Free Range Studios, Sachs has helped hundreds of major brands and causes break through the media noise with unforgettable campaigns. His work on renowned viral videos including The Meatrix and The Story of Stuff have brought key social issues to the attention of more than sixty-five million people online. A constant innovator, his studio\u2019s websites and stories have taken top honors three times at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Sachs\u2019s work and opinions have been featured in a variety of media, including the New York Times , NPR, and Fast Company magazine, which named him one of its fifty most influential social innovators. About the Illustrator: Drew Beam Drew Beam is the Innovation Director at Free Range Studios, where he helps clients see the future and leap into it. After earning his BFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Beam built a successful career creating visuals and innovation strategies for dozens of Fortune 500 companies. His illustrations have been published by Time Warner Books, Penguin Books, and Rolling Stone magazine, to name just a few.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Industries"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 4.94}], "target_asin": "1594679290"}
{"user_id": "AE67CKFLCDMIE2AS6BQG5WWNP5GQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00ROHAH0U", "title": "The Three Generals: Book Two of the Scipio Africanus Saga (Scipio Africanus Trilogy 2)", "author": "Martin Tessmer", "description": "About the Author Martin Tessmer is a retired military consultant and University of Colorado professor. His previous twelve books have ranged from online training to hiking guides to ancient Roman History. He lives in Denver, Colorado. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00I8O0960", "title": "Marius' Mules: Prelude to War", "author": "S.J.A. Turney", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 1.49}, {"asin": "B01HBWZ26G", "title": "Defender of Rome: A Tale of the Ancient Republic", "author": "Ken Farmer", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B004EYT3N8", "title": "Marius' Mules I: The Invasion of Gaul", "author": "S.J.A. Turney", "description": "About the Author sjaturney.co.uk --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "B00TH8UOXY", "title": "Rome: Fury of the Legion - 57 B.C.", "author": "R. Cameron Cooke", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00O28ER5K", "title": "Marius' Mules VII: The Great Revolt", "author": "S.J.A. Turney", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "B0136WDP4G", "title": "Marius' Mules VIII: Sons of Taranis", "author": "S.J.A. Turney", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 4.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B00IWDL9QG", "title": "Marching With Caesar: Rebellion", "author": "R. W. Peake", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "B009EB4YDU", "title": "Taking on the Dead (The Famished Trilogy Book 1)", "author": "Annie Walls", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 2.99}, {"asin": "1499615213", "title": "Gritos de Amor: Manifestaciones Del Corazon (Spanish Edition)", "author": "LEONARDO VALENCIA GOMEZ LEOVA", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Poetry"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 20.0}, {"asin": "B005YPIJPY", "title": "Five Stars"}], "target_asin": "B00IWDL9QG"}
{"user_id": "AFZEGFDRX4BKMVHAHTOCUHUP43IQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1402205635", "title": "Darcy & Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley", "author": "Linda Berdoll", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Berdoll's second lighthearted romp through Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice set (following Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife ) turns nasty. Things start off sweetly as the terminally dignified Darcy returns from the continent to greet wife Elizabeth and the twins she has borne in his absence. Despite initial annoyance engendered by Elizabeth's recuperation, during which sex is rather out of the question, hearth and home soon return to normal. However, dealing with Darcy's conniving aunt, Lady De Bourgh, as well as the machinations of his troublesome sister-in-law, Lydia, and his arch-rival and nemesis Wickham (here truly evil), threaten their domestic happiness. Elizabeth takes all this circumspectly but with keen concern; between bouts of marital jollity, she provides Darcy with wise and commendable counsel. The story is thick in period trappings and language; the secondary characters and tangential story lines are Dickensian to a fault and the ending is very deus ex machina. But Berdoll's take on Darcy & Co. contains enough pleasures to overcome overwriting and underplotting. (May) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Readers and writers can't let go of literary maven Jane Austen. In this latest addition to the canon of continuations featuring reticent yet passionate Mr. Darcy and his wife, the spirited Elizabeth, the happy couple is enjoying their new twin infants, their abundant estates, and their lust for each other. In the first chapter alone, the author goes to great lengths, using the most civilized language, to describe Darcy's, well, length and his pent-up desire for his buxom spouse. Therein lies the plot, thin but entertaining, yet written with such mirth that readers won't care. Enticing backstories have been crafted for characters old and new. Shrewd villainess Lady de Bourgh and degenerate dilettante Wickham reappear to meddle in the lives of the happy couple. Although the florid prose is packed with the historical details, descriptions, and familiar characters fans appreciate, the plot trots along at a good pace. A frothy historical dessert following a meaty entree of a classic, suitable for fans of Regency romance who don't mind a little spice. Kaite Mediatore Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review \"I am amazed by Berdoll's ability to flesh out complex and interesting characters and plot lines. There isn't a single boring passage in the book, even when the characters are only talking about mundane matters. Berdoll has an amazing grasp on understanding human nature and how to make the characters seem larger than life with their thoughts and motivations.\" \u2015 Blogcritics.org From the Author The inestimable Jane Austen had penned only six books when she died in 1817 at age forty-one. Pride and Prejudice, her third work, was published in 1813 and has been judged by many to be the finest novel in the English language. The story of the courtship of the beautiful and spirited Elizabeth Bennet and the handsome but haughty Mr. Darcy is as brilliant as it is brief. As remarkable a writer as she was, Miss Austen wrote only of what a respectable unmarried woman in Regency society would be privy to. Therefore, Pride and Prejudice concludes with the nuptials. Regrettably, in ending her story upon the very cusp of what undoubtedly would be a marriage of unrivalled passion, she has gifted many of her readers with an unfortunate case of literary coitus interruptus. This hunger has spawned a prolificacy of sequels\u0097most attempting to replicate the original in restraint, if not wit. Readers of sequels seem to fall into two categories\u0097those who are longing to learn what Darcy might have whispered into Lizzy\u0092s ear in their nuptial chamber, and those who fall into a swoon at the notion of such heresy. If you, dear reader, happen to fall into the latter category, we offer this caution before you read further: Hang onto your bonnet, you\u0092re in for a bumpy ride. As our story recommences, all should be bliss within the Darcy household. At long last, Lizzy has birthed an heir and Darcy is again by her side. Motherhood, however, has not only rendered her busy and distracted, childbirth itself has left her temporarily \"indisposed.\" Although Darcy\u0092s heart aches for what his Lizzy has endured, it is not the throbbing of his heart that is most troubling to his serenity\u0097it is the palpable pain in his loins About the Author Researching her bestselling novels Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and Darcy & Elizabeth, author Linda Berdoll was surprised and delighted by the euphemisms she turned up--most of them of an insulting nature. Berdoll compiled them here to entertain and enlighten. She lives on a pecan farm in Del Valle, Texas, with her husband. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Come live with me, and be my love,And we will some new pleasures prove,Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,With silken lines, and silver hooks.\u2015John DonneThe inestimable Jane Austen had penned only six books when she died in 1817 at age forty-one. Pride and Prejudice, her third work, was published in 1813 and has been judged by many to be the finest novel in the English language. The story of the courtship of the beautiful and spirited Elizabeth Bennet and the handsome but haughty Mr. Darcy is as brilliant as it is brief.As remarkable a writer as she was, Miss Austen wrote only of what a respectable unmarried woman in Regency society would be privy to. Therefore, Pride and Prejudice concludes with the nuptials. Regrettably, in ending her story upon the very cusp of what undoubtedly would be a marriage of unrivalled passion, she has gifted many of her readers with an unfortunate case of literary coitus interruptus.This hunger has spawned a prolificacy of sequels\u2015most attempting to replicate the original in restraint, if not wit. Readers of sequels seem to fall into two categories\u2015those who are longing to learn what Darcy might have whispered into Lizzy's ear in their nuptial chamber, and those who fall into a swoon at the notion of such heresy.If you, dear reader, happen to fall into the latter category, we offer this caution before you read further: Hang onto your bonnet, you're in for a bumpy ride.As our story recommences, all should be bliss within the Darcy household. At long last, Lizzy has birthed an heir and Darcy is again by her side. Motherhood, however, has not only rendered her busy and distracted, childbirth itself has left her temporarily \"indisposed.\"Although Darcy's heart aches for what his Lizzy has endured, it is not the throbbing of his heart that is most troubling to his serenity\u2015it is the palpable pain in his loins...Chapter 1: New Pleasures ProvedTo all the world the month of June in the year of our Lord, 1815 would come to be known as the season of Waterloo. To the members of the Darcy household, it would be called that, but not remembered as such. Far too many other events of greater personal importance to them had transpired to remember it so simply.Although France was the conquered, England paid a harsh price for its victory. The county of Derbyshire was not immune to that heavy toll. So vast were the repercussions, they were felt even within the usually impenetrable walls of Pemberley. Lives were lost, marriages brought about, and babies born all in the space of a few months.Having weathered these many woes within the bosom of her very own family, Elizabeth Darcy felt exquisitely compensated by the two babes nestled in her arms. Indeed, that her husband had survived war, quarantine, brigands, and pestilence and returned to her whole was all she desired.What wiles he employed and whose auspices he availed himself of as he trekked through the battlefields and drawing rooms of France to accomplish his mission of rescuing his sister was of no importance to her.Of even less concern was that the emissary he chose to send word to her of his progress was a woman with whom he had once shared uncommon intimacy. Indeed, when at last he had returned to his wife's waiting arms, all question of his connexion with that beautiful woman was forgot. At least at first, but not for long.Of even less importance was whether George Wickham was actually dead and buried or was gallivanting about the Continent.Whilst Wickham's fate remained unknown, there were other vexations. What with Mrs. Darcy labouring to withstand a growing curiosity (approaching to eclipse the Alps in dimension) as to just what went on between her husband and his fetching French emissary, and Mr.Darcy labouring with equal vigour to withstand a desire for his nursing wife aroused to a similar degree, a dance of uncommon peculiarity commenced.It extended well into the next year. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 12.67}, {"asin": "0316024961", "title": "New Moon (The Twilight Saga)", "author": "Stephenie Meyer", "description": "About the Author Stephenie Meyer is the author of the #1 bestselling Twilight Saga, The Host , and The Chemist . Twilight has enraptured millions of readers since its publication in 2005 and has become a modern classic, redefining genres within young adult literature and inspiring a phenomenon that has had readers yearning for more. The series has sold 160 million copies worldwide and was made into five blockbuster feature films. Stephenie lives in Arizona with her husband. Her website is stepheniemeyer.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 17.1}, {"asin": "1569755884", "title": "Mr. Darcy Presents His Bride: A Sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Helen Halstead was born in Adeliade, South Australia in 1950, and works as a teacher. She has been a fan of Jane Austen\u2019s ironic humor and exquisite prose from the age of thirteen.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 13.9}, {"asin": "0615147410", "title": "Two Shall Become One: Mr. and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy", "author": "Sharon Lathan", "description": "From the Publisher From the Sourcebooks Publishing House page: \"A portrait of a passionate, deeply committed love as it would realistically unfold during the Regency era of English history. Darcy and Lizzy are on a quest of colossal magnitude: life and marriage. \"Two Shall Become One ~ Mr. and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy\" is a novel, a romance, a Regency historical, a family saga, a literary journey filled with humor, joy, and exquisite but tempered sensuality, focusing on the obstacles inherent in all. The novel begins on their wedding day and flows seamlessly through the first days into weeks as they bond through the intimacy of consummation and co-manage the ordinary and extraordinary events that transpire. Experience their honeymoon, Lizzy's nervousness as she assumes the role of Mistress of Pemberley, memories of how their relationship blossomed during the engagement, Christmas with numerous guests, a Twelfth Night Masque, day to day life in a 19th century estate, and their first trauma. Interwoven amongst all these events is passion of incredible proportions and a consuming love.\" From the Author NOTE: This is a self-published edition from 2007 that is no longer in print. Any copies sold on Amazon or elsewhere by outside sellers are not new and should not be purchased.\u00a0The updated version of this novel is Mr and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy: Two Shall Become One . Please visit my website at sharonlathanauthor.com/sharons-novels for more information on my series as published by Sourcebooks Landmark, Inc. About the Author Sharon Lathan is the best-selling author of The Darcy Saga sequel series to Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice . Sharon began writing in 2006 and her first novel, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy: Two Shall Become One was published in 2009. Sharon's ninth novel - Darcy & Elizabeth: A Season of Courtship - is Book One of the Darcy Saga Prequel Duo recounting the betrothal months before the Darcy Saga began. Miss Darcy Falls in Love was chosen for World Book Night US 2014.  Sharon is a native Californian relocated in September 2013 to the green hills of Kentucky. She resides with her husband of thirty-years, and grown son. Currently retired from a thirty-year profession as a registered nurse in Neonatal Intensive Care, Sharon is pursuing her dream as a full-time writer.  Sharon is a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, JASNA Louisville, the Romance Writers of America, the Beau Monde and Hearts Through History chapters of the RWA, the Louisville RWA, and serves on the board of her California RWA chapter, the Yosemite Romance Writers.  For more information about Sharon, the Regency Era, and her novels, visit her website/blog at: SharonLathan.net Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Classics"], "average_rating": 3.6, "price": 28.53}, {"asin": "1402212070", "title": "Emma & Knightley: Perfect Happiness in Highbury: A Sequel to Jane Austen's Emma", "author": "Rachel Billington", "description": "About the Author Rachel Billington has published thirteen novels, including A Woman's Age, Loving Attitudes, Bodily Harm and, most recently, Magic and Fate. She has also published two children's novels and three religious books for younger children, as well as The Great Umbilical, a work of nonfiction about mothers and daughters. Her plays have been performed on radio and television and her varied work as a reviewer and journalist included a regular weekly column, published as \"The Family Year.\"She is married with four children. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Chapter 1EMMA KNIGHTLEY, HANDSOME, CLEVER and rich, with a husband whose affection for her was only equalled by her affection for him, had passed upward of a year of marriage in what may be described as perfect happiness; certainly this is how she described it to herself as she sat at her writing desk from which she had an excellent view of her father, Mr Woodhouse, taking a turn round the shrubbery on the arm of her beloved Mr Knightley. Emma smiled as she watched them, smiled and repressed a sigh as she saw the tender way in which Mr Knightley \u0096 she would never bring herself to call him George \u0096 put his upright, manly self between the cool autumnal breeze and the frail figure of her father. Since she, herself, usually performed this daily office for her father \u0096 Mr Knightley often being occu\u00acpied in the mornings when her father felt the air most conducive to good health \u0096 seldom did she have the opportunity of seeing her parent as he appeared at a distance to the objective eye. His walking was tentative, it could not be denied, but then he had never been quick, or never since she could remember him. It was possible \u0096 Emma considered the idea from the heights of her still new stature as a wife \u0096 that his sense of himself as an invalid had stemmed from the early death of Mrs Woodhouse, causing him to distrust health. If that were the cause \u0096 and, by his affectionate accounts of his wife, she had possessed all the vivacity, intellectual vigour and good health that any woman could wish for \u0096 then it was understandable that her adoring husband's tempera\u00acment should receive a severe shock at her unexpected death; that he would never be the same, but always fearful, not just for himself, but for his daughters (Emma had an elder sister, Isabella), their husbands, Isabella's five children (soon to be six), his friends, acquaintances and, in short, the whole world, small as it was, that he inhabited. For Mr Woodhouse, a draught from a not properly closed window was as dangerous as a wind chased from Petersburg over the snowy wastes of Siberia; a sneeze from relation or friend caused as much consternation as the plague spots in a Turkoman port; a boot only slightly damp from a walk across mown grass excited his terror to such an extent that the wearer \u0096 usually Emma, who was his nearest and dearest, although not of an espe\u00accially active, energetic disposition \u0096 must submit to a hot mustard bath and constant enquiries as to her temperature. All this Emma had known since she was a child and such was her love for her father, so fond was she of him, that she had thought of it as illus\u00actrating the kindness of his heart rather than as any weakness of character. But that had been before her marriage. Making no more pretence to write her letter \u0096 it was to be a note to mark the birthday of her eldest nephew, Henry, who was with his family, in London \u0096 she once again contemplated the two figures so closely adjoined in the pathway. They had now turned and were directly facing her, although they were seen some way off and the sunlight in their faces would have precluded them from any view of Emma. Ah, indeed! thought Emma, it is the contrast that makes me uneasy. But this was too dangerous a way of thinking and must be quelled instantly. Yet, as is often the case, this little acknowledgement of unease led on to a much graver one for, as she watched her father with the same fond eyes that had put him first all her life; that had, indeed, insisted that she could never leave his side and thus brought her husband from his home at Donwell Abbey into her home of Hartfield, she found herself wondering how long he, Mr Woodhouse, an avowed invalid, would live. It was a terrible thought for a daughter to have about her father, so terrible, so utterly filled with vice that she disowned it at once, clanged shut the door into her heart that had revealed such grimacing horror, and, in a moment, was smiling once more into the sunny garden and thinking, with all contentment, how wonderful it was that her strong Mr Knightley, so much outdoors with his farm business, such a powerful walker that it needed all her wiles to persuade him into using the carriage, should yet so comfort\u00acably subdue his step to fit her father's. He did it, she knew, not only out of his love for her or even out of his respect for his father-in-law but because he truly loved her father. He had told her so; and Mr Knightley never lied. Emma dropped her eyes to her paper, now adorned with blobs of ink resembling some fantastic beast. Another thought, as misshapen as the ink, appeared irrepressible in her mind. Why was it that the more patient, kind, understanding, candid, Mr Knightley showed himself to her father, the more uneasy, restless and unsympathetic she herself became? Why, in the face of such goodness, was she tempted to become bad? Scrumpling the paper with a frown, Emma stood up briskly; she would go and meet the two people she loved most in the world and join their pleasure in each other's company with her own delight in theirs. She was on the point of summoning her maid to bring shawl and hat when the girl herself appeared, holding a letter which had that moment been brought to the door. Seeing at once it was from the very household, that of her sister, to whom she should have been writing, Emma sat back down on her seat again and broke the seal to the envelope. First, however, she noted with satisfaction that Mr Knightley and her father had turned their backs to her and were started on their second turn round the shrubbery. News from his eldest daughter, whether good, bad or of no real account, was equally capable of arousing Mr Woodhouse's fears \u0096 as if change itself was threat \u0096 so Emma was in the habit of first apprising herself of such information as Henry's little successes at school or baby Emma's new tooth; and then grad\u00acually passing it on to her father. For her, to the contrary, news from outside the house of Hartfield where her days passed so quietly, was always exciting and as eagerly read as a romance. Emma, whose fertile imagination had become very active, as if to compensate for an uneventful life, seldom admitted herself disappointed with even the dullest material. On this occasion, however, she had no need to use any exceptional powers, and, as she read, her mobile face expressed consternation, shock and something most like disbelief. Her youthfully clear skin changed from pink to pale to pink and finally \u0096 as tears started in her eyes \u0096 to a pallor from which all colour had drained. Indeed, it almost looked as if she must faint, so shocking to her were the contents of the letter. But Emma was no weakling and soon she had wiped her eye with her little embroidered kerchief and, with a more resolute expression, picked up the letter once more.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 9.79}, {"asin": "0316015849", "title": "Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)", "author": "Stephenie Meyer", "description": "About the Author Stephenie Meyer is the author of the #1 bestselling Twilight Saga, The Host , and The Chemist . Twilight has enraptured millions of readers since its publication in 2005 and has become a modern classic, redefining genres within young adult literature and inspiring a phenomenon that has had readers yearning for more. The series has sold 160 million copies worldwide and was made into five blockbuster feature films. Stephenie lives in Arizona with her husband. Her website is stepheniemeyer.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Twilight By Stephenie Meyer Megan Tingley Books Copyright \u00a9 2006 Stephenie MeyerAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780316015844 Chapter One Forks High School had a frightening total of only three hundred and fifty-seven - now fifty-eight - students; there were more than seven hundred people in my junior class alone back home. All of the kids here had grown up together-their grandparents had been toddlers together. I would be the new girl from the big city, a curiosity, a freak. Maybe, if I looked like a girl from Phoenix should, I could work this to my advantage. But physically, I'd never fit in anywhere. I should be tan, sporty, blond - a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps - all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun. Instead, I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete; I didn't have the necessary hand-eye coordination to play sports without humiliating myself - and harming both myself and anyone else who stood too close. When I finished putting my clothes in the old pine dresser, I took my bag of bathroom necessities and went to the communal bathroom to clean myself up after the day of travel. I looked at my face in the mirror as I brushed through my tangled, damp hair. Maybe it was the light, but already I looked sallower, unhealthy. My skin could be pretty - it was very clear, almost translucent- looking - but it all depended on color. I had no color here. Facing my pallid reflection in the mirror, I was forced to admit that I was lying to myself. It wasn't just physically that I'd never fit in. And if I couldn't find a niche in a school with three thousand people, what were my chances here? I didn't relate well to people my age. Maybe the truth was that I didn't relate well to people, period. Even my mother, who I was closer to than anyone else on the planet, was never in harmony with me, never on exactly the same page. Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain. But the cause didn't matter. All that mattered was the effect. And tomorrow would be just the beginning. I didn't sleep well that night, even after I was done crying. The constant whooshing of the rain and wind across the roof wouldn't fade into the background. I pulled the faded old quilt over my head, and later added the pillow, too. But I couldn't fall asleep until after midnight, when the rain finally settled into a quieter drizzle. Thick fog was all I could see out my window in the morning, and I could feel the claustrophobia creeping up on me. You could never see the sky here; it was like a cage. Breakfast with Charlie was a quiet event. He wished me good luck at school. I thanked him, knowing his hope was wasted. Good luck tended to avoid me. Charlie left first, off to the police station that was his wife and family. After he left, I sat at the old square oak table in one of the three unmatching chairs and examined his small kitchen, with its dark paneled walls, bright yellow cabinets, and white linoleum floor. Nothing was changed. My mother had painted the cabinets eighteen years ago in an attempt to bring some sunshine into the house. Over the small fireplace in the adjoining handkerchief-sized family room was a row of pictures. First a wedding picture of Charlie and my mom in Las Vegas, then one of the three of us in the hospital after I was born, taken by a helpful nurse, followed by the procession of my school pictures up to last year's. Those were embarrassing to look at - I would have to see what I could do to get Charlie to put them somewhere else, at least while I was living here. It was impossible, being in this house, not to realize that Charlie had never gotten over my mom. It made me uncomfortable. I didn't want to be too early to school, but I couldn't stay in the house anymore. I donned my jacket - which had the feel of a biohazard suit - and headed out into the rain. It was just drizzling still, not enough to soak me through immediately as I reached for the house key that was always hidden under the eaves by the door, and locked up. The sloshing of my new waterproof boots was unnerving. I missed the normal crunch of gravel as I walked. I couldn't pause and admire my truck again as I wanted; I was in a hurry to get out of the misty wet that swirled around my head and clung to my hair under my hood. Inside the truck, it was nice and dry. Either Billy or Charlie had obviously cleaned it up, but the tan upholstered seats still smelled faintly of tobacco, gasoline, and peppermint. The engine started quickly, to my relief, but loudly, roaring to life and then idling at top volume. Well, a truck this old was bound to have a flaw. The antique radio worked, a plus that I hadn't expected. Finding the school wasn't difficult, though I'd never been there before. The school was, like most other things, just off the highway. It was not obvious that it was a school; only the sign, which declared it to be the Forks High School, made me stop. It looked like a collection of matching houses, built with maroon-colored bricks. There were so many trees and shrubs I couldn't see its size at first. Where was the feel of the institution? I wondered nostalgically. Where were the chain-link fences, the metal detectors? I parked in front of the first building, which had a small sign over the door reading FRONT OFFICE. No one else was parked there, so I was sure it was off limits, but I decided I would get directions inside instead of circling around in the rain like an idiot. I stepped unwillingly out of the toasty truck cab and walked down a little stone path lined with dark hedges. I took a deep breath before opening the door. Inside, it was brightly lit, and warmer than I'd hoped. The office was small; a little waiting area with padded folding chairs, orange-flecked commercial carpet, notices and awards cluttering the walls, a big clock ticking loudly. Plants grew everywhere in large plastic pots, as if there wasn't enough greenery outside. The room was cut in half by a long counter, cluttered with wire baskets full of papers and brightly colored flyers taped to its front. There were three desks behind the counter, one of which was manned by a large, red-haired woman wearing glasses. She was wearing a purple t-shirt, which immediately made me feel overdressed. The red-haired woman looked up. \"Can I help you?\" \"I'm Isabella Swan,\" I informed her, and saw the immediate awareness light her eyes. I was expected, a topic of gossip no doubt. Daughter of the Chief's flighty ex-wife, come home at last. \"Of course,\" she said. She dug through a precariously stacked pile of documents on her desk till she found the ones she was looking for. \"I have your schedule right here, and a map of the school.\" She brought several sheets to the counter to show me. She went through my classes for me, highlighting the best route to each on the map, and gave me a slip to have each teacher sign, which I was to bring back at the end of the day. She smiled at me and hoped, like Charlie, that I would like it here in Forks. I smiled back as convincingly as I could. When I went back out to my truck, other students were starting to arrive. I drove around the school, following the line of traffic. I was glad to see that most of the cars were older like mine, nothing flashy. At home I'd lived in one of the few lower-income neighborhoods that were included in the Paradise Valley District. It was a common thing to see a new Mercedes or Porsche in the student lot. The nicest car here was a shiny Volvo, and it stood out. Still, I cut the engine as soon as I was in a spot, so that the thunderous volume wouldn't draw attention to me. I looked at the map in the truck, trying to memorize it now; hopefully I wouldn't have to walk around with it stuck in front of my nose all day. I stuffed everything in my bag, slung the strap over my shoulder, and sucked in a huge breath. I can do this, I lied to myself feebly. No one was going to bite me. I finally exhaled and stepped out of the truck. I kept my face pulled back into my hood as I walked to the sidewalk, crowded with teenagers. My plain black jacket didn't stand out, I noticed with relief. Once I got around the cafeteria, building three was easy to spot. A large black \"3\" was painted on a white square on the east corner. I felt my breathing gradually creeping toward hyperventilation as I approached the door. I tried holding my breath as I followed two unisex raincoats through the door. The classroom was small. The people in front of me stopped just inside the door to hang up their coats on a long row of hooks. I copied them. They were two girls, one a porcelain-colored blonde, the other also pale, with light brown hair. At least my skin wouldn't be a standout here. I took the slip up to the teacher, a tall, balding man whose desk had a nameplate identifying him as Mr. Mason. He gawked at me when he saw my name - not an encouraging response - and of course I flushed tomato red. But at least he sent me to an empty desk at the back without introducing me to the class. It was harder for my new classmates to stare at me in the back, but somehow, they managed. I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Bront?, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I'd already read everything. That was comforting ... and boring. I wondered if my mom would send me my folder of old essays, or if she would think that was cheating. I went through different arguments with her in my head while the teacher droned on. When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me. \"You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?\" He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type. \"Bella,\" I corrected. Everyone within a three-seat radius turned to look at me. \"Where's your next class?\" he asked. I had to check in my bag. \"Um, Government, with Jefferson, in building six.\" There was nowhere to look without meeting curious eyes. \"I'm headed toward building four, I could show you the way....\" Definitely over- helpful. \"I'm Eric,\" he added. I smiled tentatively. \"Thanks.\" We got our jackets and headed out into the rain, which had picked up. I could have sworn several people behind us were walking close enough to eavesdrop. I hoped I wasn't getting paranoid. \"So, this is a lot different than Phoenix, huh?\" he asked. \"Very.\" \"It doesn't rain much there, does it?\" \"Three or four times a year.\" \"Wow, what must that be like?\" he wondered. \"Sunny,\" I told him. \"You don't look very tan.\" \"My mother is part albino.\" He studied my face apprehensively, and I sighed. It looked like clouds and a sense of humor didn't mix. A few months of this and I'd forget how to use sarcasm. We walked back around the cafeteria, to the south buildings by the gym. Eric walked me right to the door, though it was clearly marked. \"Well, good luck,\" he said as I touched the handle. \"Maybe we'll have some other classes together.\" He sounded hopeful. I smiled at him vaguely and went inside. The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subject he taught, was the only one who made me stand in front of the class and introduce myself. I stammered, blushed, and tripped over my own boots on the way to my seat. After two classes, I started to recognize several of the faces in each class. There was always someone braver than the others who would introduce themselves and ask me questions about how I was liking Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but mostly I just lied a lot. At least I never needed the map. One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. She was tiny, several inches shorter than my five feet four inches, but her wildly curly dark hair made up a lot of the difference between our heights. I couldn't remember her name, so I smiled and nodded as she prattled about teachers and classes. I didn't try to keep up. We sat at the end of a full table with several of her friends, who she introduced to me. I forgot all their names as soon as she spoke them. They seemed impressed by her bravery in speaking to me. The boy from English, Eric, waved at me from across the room. It was there, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make conversation with seven curious strangers, that I first saw them. They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as possible in the long room. There were five of them. They weren't talking, and they weren't eating, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them. They weren't gawking at me, unlike most of the other students, so it was safe to stare at them without fear of meeting an excessively interested pair of eyes. But it was none of these things that caught, and held, my attention. They didn't look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big - muscled like a serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond. The last was lanky, less bulky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair. He was more boyish than the others, who looked like they could be in college, or even teachers here rather than students. The girls were opposites. The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back. The short girl was pixielike, thin in the extreme, with small features. Her hair was a deep black, cropped short and pointing in every direction. And yet, they were all exactly alike. Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest of all the students living in this sunless town. Paler than me, the albino. They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes - purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose. Though their noses, all their features, were straight, perfect, angular. But all this is not why I couldn't look away. I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful - maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired boy. They were all looking away - away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched, the small girl rose with her tray - unopened soda, unbitten apple - and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and glided through the back door, faster than I would have thought possible. My eyes darted back to the others, who sat unchanging. \"Who are they?\" I asked the girl from my Spanish class, whose name I'd forgotten. As she looked up to see who I meant - though already knowing, probably, from my tone - suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine. He looked away quickly, more quickly than I could, though in a flush of embarrassment I dropped my eyes at once. In that brief flash of a glance, his face held nothing of interest - it was as if she had called his name, and he'd looked up in involuntary response, already having decided not to answer. My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at the table like I did. \"That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife.\" She said this under her breath. I glanced sideways at the beautiful boy, who was looking at his tray now, picking a bagel to pieces with long, pale fingers. His mouth was moving very quickly, his perfect lips barely opening. The other three still looked away, and yet I felt he was speaking quietly to them. Strange, unpopular names, I thought. The kinds of names grandparents had. But maybe that was in vogue here - small town names? I finally remembered that my neighbor was called Jessica, a perfectly common name. There were two girls named Jessica in my History class back home. \"They are ... very nice-looking.\" I struggled with the conspicuous understatement. \"Yes!\" Jessica agreed with another giggle. \"They're all together though - Emmett and Rosalie, and Jasper and Alice, I mean. And they live together.\" Her voice held all the shock and condemnation of the small town, I thought critically. But, if I was being honest, I had to admit that even in Phoenix, it would cause gossip. Continues... Excerpted from Twilight by Stephenie Meyer Copyright \u00a9 2006 by Stephenie Meyer. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0996045880", "title": "The Pigs Did It!", "author": "Candy Grant", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 8.95}, {"asin": "0802484484", "title": "7 Men Who Rule the World from the Grave", "author": "Dave Breese", "description": "About the Author DAVE BREESE (1926-2002) was a graduate of Judson College and Northern Baptist Seminary and also served as president of Christian Destiny Ministries and World Prophetic Ministry. He was an evangelist, author, lecturer, and university speaker who ministered in more than sixty countries. In addition to a widespread broadcast ministry, Dr. Breese wrote several books, including Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave, Satan\u2019s Ten Most Believable Lies, Living for Eternity , and His Infernal Majesty . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave By Dave W. Breese Moody Publishers Copyright \u00a9 1990 Dave W. BreeseAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8024-8448-2 Contents Preface, Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1. Biology Is Destiny: Charles Darwin, 2. Thinking Further About Science, 3. Social Darwinism, 4. The Ruling Principle for All Humanity: Karl Marx, 5. Thinking Further About Marxism, 6. Closing the Book: Julius Wellhausen, 7. The Coming of the Strange Fire, 8. Looking Within: Sigmund Freud, 9. The Coming of the Strange Fire, 10. New Hope for the Nations: John Maynard Keynes, 11. The advent of Diffusion: Sren Kierkegaard, 12. Who Shall Overcome?, CHAPTER 1 Biology Is Destiny: Charles Darwin \"After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty's ship Beagle , a ten-gun brig, under the command of Fitzroy, RN, sailed from Devonport on the twenty-seventh of December, 1831.... \"The object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patheonia and Tierra del Fuego, commenced under Captain King in 1826 to 1830\u2014to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and of some islands in the Pacific\u2014and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the World. On the sixth of January, we reached Teneriffe, but were prevented landing by fears of our bringing the cholera; the next morning we saw the sun rise behind the rugged outline of the Grand Canary island, and suddenly illumine the peak of Teneriffe, whilst the lower parts were veiled in fleecy clouds. This was the first of many delightful days never to be forgotten. On the sixteenth of January, 1832, we anchored at Porto Praya, in St. Jago, the chief island of the Cape de Verde archipelago.\" Those are the opening words of a diary. Similar entries have been made in similar diaries in the early days of many a voyage from many a port down through history across the world. This entry, however, is something special. It is the beginning of a diary that was to become one of the most important in history, a diary that would chronicle a set of experiences that led to a decisive shift in thinking about the natural sciences, a change that would, in turn, influence the world of thought outside the natural sciences, leading ultimately to changes in the entire culture of many a nation. So it was that in the introduction to a 1972 reprinting of the diary Walter Sullivan said: This book was prelude to what became probably the most revolutionary change that has ever occurred in man's view of himself. The change, in fact, has still not fully run its course. It demands that we regard ourselves as inseparably a part of nature and accept the fact that our descent was from more primitive creatures and, ultimately, from the common origin of all life on earth. It is the view that we will never fully understand ourselves until we understand our origins and the traits\u2014chemical, biological, and behavioral\u2014that we share with other species. Those are large, ambitious words, but Sullivan is accurate in saying that the diary led to \"the most revolutionary change that has ever occurred in man's view of himself,\" for the adventure that was so significant and informative for the writer that it grew into a set of concepts, then a book, and then an approach to life, was to change fundamentally man's very understanding of himself. The writer of the diary was Charles Darwin. The diary was The Voyage of the Beagle , Darwin's account of the expedition that embraced the five most exciting years of his life. In fact, most of what occurred in his life before the voyage Darwin held to be but the prelude to the expedition to the shores of South America, and most of what came afterward was meditative and sedentary, a life characterized by illness and reclusion, but mostly by the recounting of the observations of the Beagle voyage . It was as if Darwin lived on those memories. What Darwin formulated came to be seen as a plausible new understanding of man and nature important enough to be thought the work of a genius and the beginning of a new epoch in world history. In the years following the publication of the diary (1836) and the books that grew out of the experiences described in the diary, most notably the landmark On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), the academic world has attempted to repudiate its pre-Darwinist past and to think of mankind as part of a common continuum with nature and the universe. This intellectual revolution has caused man to reinterpret his past, rethink his present, and revise his anticipations for the future. Darwin is seen as giving the world a comprehension of itself so unlike the view held in the past that, in a sense, he restarted history. Darwin's influence continues to be pervasive today, and he holds a leading rank among those men who rule the world from the grave. Who was this man, and what was the intellectual revolution he produced? Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809 to a family already given to a tradition of involvement in the world of thought as it intersected the world of biology and botany. Darwin's grandfather was the well-known Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), a physician and man of letters, known especially for his poetry. Erasmus Darwin practiced medicine as a physician in Lichfield, England, and cultivated a botanical garden. He was the author of a long poem, The Botanic Garden , written in 1789, in which he expanded the botanical system of the earlier botanist Linnaeus. In another work, Zoonomia , Erasmus Darwin attempted to explain organic life along the lines of evolutionary principles, a presentation that anticipated Charles's later theories. Young Darwin's educational career was somewhat inconclusive. He studied medicine at Edinburgh, but could not stomach surgery without anesthetics. He then changed to ministerial studies at Cambridge, though he lost interest in the ministry during those college years. Referring to that period of his life, Darwin said in his autobiography: From what little I had heard or thought on the subject, I had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the church of England; although otherwise I liked the thought of becoming a country clergyman. Accordingly, I read with care Pearson on the Creed, and a few other books on divinity, and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted. He observed in his autobiography: \"Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once intended to be a clergyman.\" In later years he reacted against what he considered to be the narrowness of the orthodox literalists, who opposed him. Darwin's interest in natural history led him in his college years to a friendship with J. S. Henslow, the well-known botanist of that day. It was through Henslow's urging and arrangements that young Darwin was invited to become the official naturalist aboard the Beagle for the five-year cruise. Darwin saw this as the vital period of his life in which his attentions were focused on the field that was to become the occupation of his life. On the cruise aboard the Beagle he gave himself to the accumulation, assimilation, codification, and intensive study of the data, work that led him to develop a theory to account for the way in which the various species came to be differentiated from one another. That concept is now known as Darwinism. In the introduction to Origin of the Species , the volume that grew out of the experiences described in the diary, Darwin recounted those days and the compelling influence they had upon his emergent young mind. When on board the H.M.S. Beagle , as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the later chapters of this volume, seem to throw some light on the origin of the species\u2014the mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work, I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable. From that period to the present day, I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision. What were the conclusions to which Darwin came as a result of his research as naturalist on the Beagle? Let it first be noted that Darwin had a touch of humility about his conclusions. \"I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume in which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived.\" The overarching conclusion, and what may well be called the index of Darwinism, is the concept he called, and we continue to call, natural selection . Darwin himself attempted to explain the concept: As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, it will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected . From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. Thus we have Darwin's definition of the core of his evolutionary faith\u2014the natural selection of individuals who have won the competition for scarce resources. Those individuals whose distinctive capacities gave them a better chance of survival in the surrounding environment lived, and lived long enough to pass on their particular genetic makeup to the next generation. Over time these slight differences accumulated, with the result that eventually organisms emerged that no one would claim were the same species. Herbert Spencer was later to coin the phrase \"survival of the fittest\" to describe the effects of the action of natural selection. Darwin's views were similar to those of an earlier French scientist, Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chavalier de Lamarck (1744-1829), though with an essential difference. Both men claimed that evolution accounted for the differences in the various species, but whereas Darwin held that evolution was the result of the transmission of inborn genetic traits from one generation to another, Lamarck believed that evolution was the result of acquired traits being passed on to progeny. Lamarck's views have been thoroughly discredited. For them to be correct, there would need to be the transmission of acquired capacities in the muscles, tissues, brain cells, and so on, to the actual genes of the individual so that genetic transmission could advance the strengths of the father into the son\u2014something for which no evidence has been forthcoming. It has never been shown that there is a necessary transmission of acquired characteristics from the parents to the offspring. Yet it is important to mention Lamarck, for both the proponents and opponents of the theory of evolution sometimes merge Darwin's and Lamarck's views in the course of arguments for or against evolution. Moreover, even though Darwin's concept of evolution was different from Lamarck's, and though Darwin was not intending to study ultimate origins but merely the differentiation of species, both theories invite a study of ultimate origins and both assume as a given an \"other\" outside the organism that leads to a change in the organism. Carried back to ultimate origins, both Darwin and Lamarck offer as many questions as they supply answers. Darwin strongly argued that the evidence of what he called \"variation under domestication\" was proof of this process of generic change. He argued that if the breeder of a certain species could bring into being changes he preferred (color, size, and so on), then nature could do far better. He wrote an entire chapter on the subject of variation under domestication. He said, for instance, that when we compare the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us is that they generally differ more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature. And if we reflect on the vast diversity of the plants and animals which have been cultivated and which have varied during all ages under the most different climates and treatment, we are driven to conclude that this great variability is due to our domestic productions having been raised under conditions of life not so uniform as, and somewhat different from, those to which the parent species had been exposed under nature. Darwin concluded a lengthy discussion of the concept with the interesting observation: \"To sum up on the origin of our domestic races of animals and plants, changed conditions of life are of the highest importance in causing variability, both by acting directly on the organization, and indirectly by affecting the reproductive system.\" Darwin built many disclaimers and conditions into his argument. He said, for example, that it is not probable that variability is an inherent and necessary contingent under all circumstances. The greater or less force of inheritance and revision, determine whether variations shall endure. Variability is governed by many unknown laws, of which correlated growth is probably the most important. Something, but how much we do not know, may be attributed to the definite action of the conditions of life. Some, perhaps a great effect, may be attributed to the increased use or disuse of parts. The final result is thus rendered infinitely complex.... Over all these causes of Change, the accumulative action of Selection, whether applied methodically and quickly, or unconsciously and slowly but more efficiently, seems to have been the predominant Power. Darwin was a collector. He collected insects, beetles, flora, and fauna on his trip to the Galapagos on the Beagle . He wrote extensively about differences in coloration, shape, size, beak length, and other variations among the birds he observed from one island to another. He used these observations to press the assumption that the mysterious force called natural selection had produced these differences. In later life, Darwin raised pigeons and observed their development closely. Also, he paid great attention to various flowers in his garden and assembled what he called \"data\" from those observations. In fact, so numerous were Darwin's observations and so voluminous was his data that the sheer weight of his writings tended to be a part of the proof of his contention for the survival of the fittest. The world of the natural sciences was impressed. It is almost as if the scientists were waiting for such a view. However, the scientists so impressed with Darwin's theory seemed to forget or ignore the fact that no way presently exists whereby data from the present can prove, of itself, anything about ultimate origins. Proof, to live up to its name, must mean demonstrating that something we do not know conforms exactly to something we do know. Consequently, there is simply nothing we know either by observation or through logical proof concerning the origin of individual species or the origin of life itself. Our observations in the present are exactly that\u2014 present data. What we think they tell us about the past are subjective considerations. They cannot be held to be science at all. In considering Darwin's theory, we find ourselves curious about this thing called a species . What really is a species? This question bedeviled Darwin all his life, and it has not, in fact, been answered to this very day. It is a simple fact of science that no two things anywhere are exactly alike. There are no two birds, elephants, eyes, feet, claws, or feathers that can be declared alike by the standards of provable science. Similarities are there, but everyone knows that similarities often prove to be embarrassingly superficial. Mistaken identity due to \"similarity\" is an experience common to us all. A species in the field of science, therefore, has never been exactly defined. Even the most modern scientific journals discuss this fact only when forced to, and then only under the most general terms. One can therefore easily argue that a species exists only by human definition and not in exactly provable objective fact. Darwin himself said, \"I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties.\" In fact, Darwin suggested the methodology to decide the matter of species: Hence, in determining whether a form should be ranked as a species or a variety, the opinion of naturalists having sound judgment and wide experience seems the only guide to follow . We must, however, in many cases, decide by a majority of naturalists, for a few well-marked and well-known varieties can be named which have not been ranked as species by at least some competent judges. What do we have here? An entire book built around the word species , which word can only be defined by a vote of the naturalists. Appropriate comment could be made to this methodology, but it at least demonstrates that the idea of species and their origins is built on troubled logic, inexact science, and the absence of clear definitions. (Continues...) Excerpted from Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave by Dave W. Breese . Copyright \u00a9 1990 Dave W. Breese. Excerpted by permission of Moody Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "World"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "0425268810", "title": "The Liar's Key (The Red Queen's War)", "author": "Mark Lawrence", "description": "Review Praise for Mark Lawrence and The Red Queen\u2019s War \u201cMark Lawrence is the best thing to happen to fantasy in recent years.\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author\u00a0Peter V. Brett\u201cLawrence\u2019s epic fantasy is a great summer read, full of humor, revenge, and perils that this warrior-and-coward duo must evade in order [to] save their kingdoms and themselves.\u201d\u2014 The Washington Post \u201cExciting action and quick-witted dialog make it a fantastic summer page-turner.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cJalan Kendeth is a fine addition to this Loki-like roster of tricksters, knaves, and cowards: heroes and antiheroes we love to hate and hate to love...Mark Lawrence\u2019s growing army of fans will relish this rollicking new adventure and look forward to the next one.\u201d\u2014The Daily Mail\u201cAs richly told as the earlier trilogy: The author makes this place, a post-cataclysm earth of the far future, feel as real as any place you\u2019ve ever visited. For fans of the Broken Empire series and readers who enjoy a good, epic-sized fantasy story (readers of, say, George R. R. Martin), this is a must-read.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cShrewd Jalan and honorable Snorri make a marvelous team, lightening a very dark story with wry humor. The brisk adventure and black magic will leave readers eager for the next chapter in the series.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Mark Lawrence is a research scientist working on artificial intelligence. He is a dual national with both British and American citizenship, and has held secret-level clearance with both governments. At one point, he was qualified to say, \u201cThis isn\u2019t rocket science\u2014oh wait, it actually is.\u201d He is the author of the Broken Empire trilogy ( Prince of Thorns , King of Thorns , and Emperor of Thorns ), the Red Queen\u2019s War trilogy ( Prince of Fools , The Liar\u2019s Key , and The Wheel of Osheim ) and the Book of the Ancestor series ( Red Sister ). Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PROLOGUE Two men in a room of many doors. One tall in his robes, stern, marked with cruelty and intelligence, the other shorter, very lean, his hair a shock of surprise, his garb a changing motley confusing the eye. The short man laughs, a many-angled sound as likely to kill birds in flight as to bring blossom to the bough. \u201cI have summoned you!\u201d The tall man, teeth gritted as if still straining to hold the other in place, though his hands are at his side. \u201cA fine trick, Kelem.\u201d \u201cYou know me?\u201d \u201cI know everyone.\u201d A sharp grin. \u201cYou\u2019re the door-mage.\u201d \u201cAnd you are?\u201d \u201cIkol.\u201d His clothes change, tattered yellow checks on blue where before it was scarlet fleur de lis on grey. \u201cOlik.\u201d He smiles a smile that dazzles and cuts. \u201cLoki, if you likey.\u201d \u201cAre you a god, Loki?\u201d No humour in Kelem, only command. Command and a great and terrible concentration in stone-grey eyes. \u201cNo.\u201d Loki spins, regarding the doors. \u201cBut I\u2019ve been known to lie.\u201d \u201cI called on the most powerful\u2014\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t always get what you want.\u201d Almost sing-song. \u201cBut sometimes you get what you need. You got me.\u201d \u201cYou are a god?\u201d \u201cGods are dull. I\u2019ve stood before the throne. Wodin sits there, old one-eye, with his ravens whispering into each ear.\u201d Loki smiles. \u201cAlways the ravens. Funny how that goes.\u201d \u201cI need\u2014\u201d \u201cMen don\u2019t know what they need. They barely know what they want. Wodin, father of storms, god of gods, stern and wise. But mostly stern. You\u2019d like him. And watching\u2014always watching\u2014oh the things that he has seen!\u201d Loki spins to take in the room. \u201cMe, I\u2019m just a jester in the hall where the world was made. I caper, I joke, I cut a jig. I\u2019m of little importance. Imagine though\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. if it were I that pulled the strings and made the gods dance. What if at the core, if you dug deep enough, uncovered every truth\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. what if at the heart of it all\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. there was a lie, like a worm at the centre of the apple, coiled like Oroborus, just as the secret of men hides coiled at the centre of each piece of you, no matter how fine you slice? Wouldn\u2019t that be a fine joke now?\u201d Kelem frowns at this nonsense, then with a quick shake of his head returns to his purpose. \u201cI made this place. From my failures.\u201d He gestures at the doors. Thirteen, lined side by side on each wall of an otherwise bare room. \u201cThese are doors I can\u2019t open. You can leave here, but no door will open until every door is unlocked. I made it so.\u201d A single candle lights the chamber, dancing as the occupants move, their shadows leaping to its tune. \u201cWhy would I want to leave?\u201d A goblet appears in Loki\u2019s hand, silver and overflowing with wine as dark and red as blood. He takes a sip. \u201cI command you by the twelve arch-angels of\u2014\u201d \u201cYes, yes.\u201d Loki waves away the conjuring. The wine darkens until it\u2019s a black that draws the eye and blinds it. So black that the silver tarnishes and corrupts. So black it is nothing but the absence of light. And suddenly it\u2019s a key. A black glass key. \u201cIs that\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0?\u201d There\u2019s a hunger in the door-mage\u2019s voice. \u201cWill it open them?\u201d \u201cI should hope so.\u201d Loki spins the key around his fingers. \u201cWhat key is that? Not Acheron\u2019s? Taken from heaven when\u2014\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s mine. I made it. Just now.\u201d \u201cHow do you know it will open them?\u201d Kelem\u2019s gaze sweeps the room. \u201cIt\u2019s a good key.\u201d Loki meets the mage\u2019s eyes. \u201cIt\u2019s every key. Every key that was and is, every key that will be, every key that could be.\u201d \u201cGive it to\u2014\u201d \u201cWhere\u2019s the fun in that?\u201d Loki walks to the nearest door and sets his fingers to it. \u201cThis one.\u201d Each door is plain and wooden but when he touches it this door becomes a sheet of black glass, unblemished and gleaming. \u201cThis is the tricky one.\u201d Loki sets his palm to the door and a wheel appears. An eight-spoked wheel of the same black glass, standing proud of the surface, as if by turning it one might unlock and open the door. Loki doesn\u2019t touch it. Instead he taps his key to the wall beside it and the whole room changes. Now it is a high vault, clean lines, walls of poured stone, a huge and circular silver-steel door in the ceiling. The light comes from panels set into the walls. A corridor leads off, stretching further than the eye can see. Thirteen silver-steel arches stand around the margins of the vault, each a foot from the wall, each filled with a shimmering light, as if moonbeams dance across water. Save for the one before Loki, which is black, a crystal surface fracturing the light then swallowing it. \u201cOpen this door and the world ends.\u201d Loki moves on, touching each door in turn. \u201cYour death lies behind one of these other doors, Kelem.\u201d The mage stiffens then sneers. \u201cGod of tricks they\u2014\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t worry.\u201d Loki grins. \u201cYou\u2019ll never manage to open that one.\u201d \u201cGive me the key.\u201d Kelem extends his hand but makes no move toward his guest. \u201cWhat about that door?\u201d Loki looks up at the circle of silver-steel. \u201cYou tried to hide that one from me.\u201d Kelem says nothing. \u201cHow many generations have your people lived down here in these caves, hiding from the world?\u201d \u201cThese are not caves!\u201d Kelem bridles. He pulls back his hand. \u201cThe world is poisoned. The Day of a Thousand Suns\u2014\u201d \u201c\u2014was two hundred years ago.\u201d Loki waves his key carelessly at the ceiling. The vast door groans, then swings in on its hinges, showering earth and dust upon them. It is as thick as a man is tall. \u201cNo!\u201d Kelem falls to his knees, arms above his head. The dust settles on him, making an old man of him. The floor is covered with soil, with green things growing, worms crawl, bugs scurry, and high above them, through a long vertical shaft, a circle of blue sky burns. \u201cThere, I\u2019ve opened the most important door for you. Go out, claim what you can before it all goes. There are others repopulating from the east.\u201d Loki looks around as if seeking an exit of his own. \u201cNo need to thank me.\u201d Kelem lifts his head, rubbing the dirt from his eyes, leaving them red and watering. \u201cGive me the key.\u201d His voice a croak. \u201cYou\u2019ll have to look for it.\u201d \u201cI command you to\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d But the key is gone, Loki is gone. Only Kelem remains. Kelem and his failures. ONE Petals rained down amid cheers of adoration. Astride my glorious charger at the head of Red March\u2019s finest cavalry unit, I led the way along the Street of Victory toward the Red Queen\u2019s palace. Beautiful women strained to escape the crowd and throw themselves at me. Men roared their approval. I waved\u2014 Bang. Bang. Bang. My dream tried to shape the hammering into something that would fit the story it was telling. I\u2019ve a good imagination and for a moment everything held together. I waved to the highborn ladies adorning each balcony. A manly smirk for my sour-faced brothers sulking at the back of\u2014 Bang! Bang! Bang! The tall houses of Vermillion began to crumble, the crowd started to thin, faces blurred. BANG! BANG! BANG! \u201cAh hell.\u201d I opened my eyes and rolled from the furs\u2019 warmth into the freezing gloom. \u201cSpring they call this!\u201d I struggled shivering into a pair of trews and hurried down the stairs. The tavern room lay strewn with empty tankards, full drunks, toppled benches, and upended tables. A typical morning at the Three Axes. Maeres sniffed around a scatter of bones by the hearth, wagging his tail as I staggered in. BANG! BANG\u2014 \u201cAll right! All right! I\u2019m coming.\u201d Someone had split my skull open with a rock during the night. Either that or I had a hell of a hangover. Damned if I knew why a prince of Red March had to answer his own front door, but I\u2019d do anything to stop that pounding tearing through my poor head. I picked a path through the detritus, stepping over Erik Three-Teeth\u2019s ale-filled belly to reach the door just as it reverberated from yet another blow. \u201cGod damn it! I\u2019m here!\u201d I shouted as quietly as I could, teeth gritted against the pain behind my eyes. Fingers fumbled with the lock bar and I pulled it free. \u201cWhat?\u201d And I hauled the door back. \u201cWhat?\u201d I suppose with a more sober and less sleep-addled mind I might have judged it better to stay in bed. Certainly that thought occurred to me as the fist caught me square in the face. I stumbled back, bleating, tripped over Erik, and found myself on my arse staring up at Astrid, framed in the doorway by a morning considerably brighter than anything I wanted to look at. \u201cYou bastard!\u201d She stood hands on hips now. The brittle light fractured around her, sending splinters into my eyes but making a wonder of her golden hair and declaring in no uncertain terms the hour-glass figure that had set me leering at her on my first day in Trond. \u201cW-what?\u201d I shifted my legs off Erik\u2019s bulging stomach, and shuffled backward on my behind. My hand came away bloody from my nose. \u201cAngel, sweetheart\u2014\u201d \u201cYou bastard!\u201d She stepped after me, hugging herself now, the cold following her in. \u201cWell\u2014\u201d I couldn\u2019t argue against \u201cbastard,\u201d except technically. I put my hand in a puddle of something decidedly unpleasant and got up quickly, wiping my palm on Maeres, who\u2019d come over to investigate, tail still wagging despite the violence offered to his master. \u201cHedwig ver Sorren?\u201d Astrid had murder in her eyes. I kept backing away. I might have half a foot over her in height but she was still a tall woman with a powerful right arm. \u201cOh, you don\u2019t want to believe street talk, my sweets.\u201d I swung a stool between us. \u201cIt\u2019s only natural that Jarl Sorren would invite a prince of Red March to his halls once he knew I was in town. Hedwig and I\u2014\u201d \u201cHedwig and you what?\u201d She took hold of the stool as well. \u201cUh, we\u2014 Nothing really.\u201d I tightened my grip on the stool legs. If I let go I\u2019d be handing her a weapon. Even in my jeopardy visions of Hedwig invaded my mind, brunette, very pretty, wicked eyes, and all a man could want packed onto a short but inviting body. \u201cWe were barely introduced.\u201d \u201cIt must have been a pretty bare introduction if it has Jarl Sorren calling out his housecarls to bring you in for justice!\u201d \u201cOh shit.\u201d I let go of the stool. Justice in the north tends to mean having your ribs broken out of your chest. \u201cWhat\u2019s all the noise?\u201d A sleepy voice from behind me. I turned to see Edda, barefoot on the stairs, our bed furs wrapped around her middle, slim legs beneath, and milk pale shoulders above, her white-blond hair flowing across them. Turning away was my mistake. Never take your eye off a potential foe. Especially after handing them a weapon. \u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 \u201cEasy!\u201d A hand on my chest pushed me back down onto a floor that felt thick with grime. \u201cWhat the\u2014\u201d I opened my eyes to find a \u201csomeone\u201d looming over me, a big someone. \u201cOuch!\u201d A big someone poking clumsy fingers at a very painful spot over my cheekbone. \u201cJust removing the splinters.\u201d A big fat someone. \u201cGet off me, Tuttugu!\u201d I struggled to get up again, managing to sit this time. \u201cWhat happened?\u201d \u201cYou got hit with a stool.\u201d I groaned a bit. \u201cI don\u2019t remember a stool, I\u2014 OUCH! What the hell?\u201d Tuttugu seemed set on pinching and jabbing at the sorest part of my face. \u201cYou might not remember the stool but I\u2019m pulling pieces of it out of your cheek\u2014so keep still. We don\u2019t want to spoil those good looks, now do we?\u201d I did my best to hold still at that. It was true, good looks and a title were most of what I had going for me and I wasn\u2019t keen to lose either. To take my mind off the pain I tried to remember how I had managed to get beaten with my own furniture. I drew a blank. Some vague recollection of high-pitched screaming and shouting\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. a memory of being kicked whilst on the floor\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. a glimpse through slitted eyes of two women leaving arm in arm, one petite, pale, young, the other tall, golden, maybe thirty. Neither looked back. \u201cRight! Up you get. That\u2019s the best I can do for now.\u201d Tuttugu hauled on my arm to get me on my feet. I stood swaying, nauseous, hung over, perhaps still a little drunk, and\u2014though I found it hard to credit\u2014slightly horny. \u201cCome on. We have to go.\u201d Tuttugu started to drag me toward the brightness of the doorway. I tried digging in my heels but to no avail. \u201cWhere?\u201d Springtime in Trond had turned out to be more bitter than a Red March midwinter and I\u2019d no interest in exposing myself to it. \u201cThe docks!\u201d Tuttugu seemed worried. \u201cWe might just make it!\u201d \u201cWhy? Make what?\u201d I didn\u2019t remember much of the morning but I hadn\u2019t forgotten that \u201cworried\u201d was Tuttugu\u2019s natural state. I shook him off. \u201cBed. That\u2019s where I\u2019m going.\u201d \u201cWell if that\u2019s where you want Jarl Sorren\u2019s men to find you\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cWhy should I give a fig for Jarl Sorr\u2014oh.\u201d I remembered Hedwig. I remembered her on the furs in the jarlshouse when everyone else was still at her sister\u2019s wedding feast. I remembered her on my cloak during an ill-advised outdoors tryst. She kept my front warm but damn my arse froze. I remembered her upstairs at the tavern that one time she slipped her minders\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I was surprised we didn\u2019t shake all three axes down from above the entrance that afternoon. \u201cGive me a moment\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. two moments!\u201d I held up a hand to stay Tuttugu and charged upstairs. Once back in my chamber a single moment proved ample. I stamped on the loose floorboard, scooped up my valuables, snatched an armful of clothing, and was heading back down the stairs before Tuttugu had the time to scratch his chins. \u201cWhy the docks?\u201d I panted. The hills would be a quicker escape\u2014and then a boat from Hjorl on A\u00f6efl\u2019s Fjord just up the coast. \u201cThe docks are the first place they\u2019ll look after here!\u201d I\u2019d be stood there still trying to negotiate a passage to Maladon or the Thurtans when the jarl\u2019s men found me. Tuttugu stepped around Floki Wronghelm, sprawled and snoring beside the bar. \u201cSnorri\u2019s down there, preparing to sail.\u201d He bent down behind the bar, grunting. \u201cSnorri? Sailing?\u201d It seemed that the stool had dislodged more than the morning\u2019s memories. \u201cWhy? Where\u2019s he going?\u201d Tuttugu straightened up holding my sword, dusty and neglected from its time hidden on the bar shelf. I didn\u2019t reach for it. I\u2019m fine with wearing a sword in places where nobody is going to see it as an invitation\u2014Trond was never such a place. \u201cTake it!\u201d Tuttugu angled the hilt toward me. I ignored it, wrestling myself into my clothes, the coarse weave of the north, itchy but warm. \u201cSince when did Snorri have a boat?\u201d He\u2019d sold the Ikea to finance the expedition to the Black Fort\u2014that much I did remember. \u201cI should get Astrid back here to see if another beating with a stool might knock some sense into you!\u201d Tuttugu tossed the sword down beside me as I sat to haul my boots on. \u201c Astrid? .\u00a0.\u00a0. Astrid!\u201d A moment returned to me with crystal clarity\u2014Edda coming down the stairs half-naked, Astrid watching. It had been a while since a morning went so spectacularly wrong for me. I\u2019d never intended the two of them to collide in such circumstances but Astrid hadn\u2019t struck me as the jealous sort. In fact I hadn\u2019t been entirely sure I was the only younger man keeping her bed warm whilst her husband roamed the seas a-trading. We mostly met at her place up on the Arlls Slope, so stealth with Edda hadn\u2019t been a priority. \u201cHow did Astrid even know about Hedwig?\u201d More importantly, how did she reach me before Jarl Sorren\u2019s housecarls, and how much time did I have? Tuttugu ran a hand down his face, red and sweating despite the spring chill. \u201cHedwig managed to send a messenger while her father was still raging and gathering his men. The boy galloped from Sorrenfast and started asking where to find the foreign prince. People directed him to Astrid\u2019s house. I got all this from Olaaf Fish-hand after I saw Astrid storming down the Carls Way. So\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d He drew a deep breath. \u201cCan we go now, because\u2014\u201d But I was up and past him, out into the unwholesome freshness of the day, splattering through half-frozen mud, aimed down the street for the docks, the mast tops just visible above the houses. Gulls circled on high, watching my progress with mocking cries. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1952439248", "title": "The Cicada Tree", "author": "Robert Gwaltney", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 17.99}], "target_asin": "0996045880"}
{"user_id": "AFH5J4ZPVM4KIRDJWH3JMIKJC3PA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B079347XWM", "title": "Washout: A Folly Beach Mystery", "author": "Bill Noel", "description": "About the Author Author of Folly and The Pier, part of the Folly Beach Mystery series, Bill Noel works as a university administrator and fine art photographer. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Susan. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.99}, {"asin": "B0792JYQDC", "title": "Missing: A Folly Beach Mystery", "author": "Bill Noel", "description": "About the Author Bill Noel is the author of the popular Folly Beach Mystery series, which includes the titles Folly, The Pier, Washout, The Edge, The Marsh, and Ghosts. He is a fine arts photographer and retired university administrator. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Susan. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Fore Word Reviews ClarionReview Missing:A Folly Beach Mystery Bill Noel\u00a0Five Stars (out ofFive)\u00a0Solid characters,delightful prose, and well-paced action set Missing apart from otheramateur-detectivenovels.\u00a0Love, loss, scruples,and power are the scaffolding upon which Bill Noel builds a book that is oneheck of a read. \u00a0The book followsretiree and widower Chris Landrum and his friend Charles Fowler. They've donesome private detective work more by chance than design, garnering a reputationfor keen analysis and common sense.\u00a0Chris is sought outby a teen who thinks he saw a woman being abducted. Chris and Charles agree tolook into the matter, and they open up a can of worms: the new mayor is asoulless shark who plots to turn what he refers to as \"my island\" into aparadise for the wealthy. Complicating this power play are the discoveries ofthree dead women on or near Folly Beach.\u00a0Set in South Carolinanear Charleston, Noel deftly soaks Missing with just enough descriptiveterms to make the sensation of clean ocean air and unspoiled beaches lift fromthe page like a mist.\u00a0More than thesetting, however, it's the characters who are most memorable, thanks to theirsolidity and variety. All the characters are three-dimensional, familiarpersonalities, as Noel has mastered the art of showing more than telling.\u00a0The cover art and back coversummation work well to snag a reader's attention. Both aresparse but elegant. The textitself is smooth and very easy to read.\u00a0With its delightful prose styleand well-paced action, Missing sets itself apart from otheramateur-detective novels. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 2.99}, {"asin": "1522974512", "title": "She Believed She Could So She Did - A Daily Gratitude Journal | Planner", "author": "Rogena Mitchell-Jones", "description": "Review GREAT Notebook. Use it as a place to keep your daily to-do list, write your grocery list, keep track of appointments. Not just a journal. With a scored cover, it is handy as an all-purpose notebook for everyday use. \"The journals are not only splendid but, as a reference book, nothing is more valuable to a writer than personal journals kept over extended periods of time.\" --Marguerite Quantaine \"The journals are not only splendid but, as a reference book, nothing is more valuable to a writer than personal journals kept over extended periods of time.\" --Marguerite Quantaine \"Yes! I just love these journals! On your nightstand, in your car, beside your computer, near the door for when you sit on the deck, or in the backyard, or at the beach, traveling anywhere. And each time you open the journal or close the journal, you see a message of wisdom, humor, fun, and many more covers. In addition, they make wonderful gifts. Check out the Amazon page for all the great covers - there's a theme for everyone you know.\" --Kieran York \"Yes! I just love these journals! On your nightstand, in your car, beside your computer, near the door for when you sit on the deck, or in the backyard, or at the beach, traveling anywhere. And each time you open the journal or close the journal, you see a message of wisdom, humor, fun, and many more covers. In addition, they make wonderful gifts. Check out the Amazon page for all the great covers - there's a theme for everyone you know.\" --Kieran York \"Beautiful journal, wonderful high quality. The inside pages are lined so nicely. I love the 7 by 10-inch size. It is so pretty to look at! the colors just pop. I will be ordering more, for myself as well as gifts. How could I not at this fantastic price and quality? You can use this for just about anything. List making, note taking in school. There are so many beautiful covers to choose from. I love mine!\" --Christine Dupre \"Beautiful journal, wonderful high quality. The inside pages are lined so nicely. I love the 7 by 10-inch size. It is so pretty to look at! the colors just pop. I will be ordering more, for myself as well as gifts. How could I not at this fantastic price and quality? You can use this for just about anything. List making, note taking in school. There are so many beautiful covers to choose from. I love mine!\" --Christine Dupre \"Lovely journals. Can be used as a planner or a notebook. The cover is thick with a nice feel--matte finish. Lined pages. All around nice book to carry with you.\" --Kay Reads Books \"Lovely journals. Can be used as a planner or a notebook. The cover is thick with a nice feel--matte finish. Lined pages. All around nice book to carry with you.\" --Kay Reads Books", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Individual Artists"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0810996529", "title": "Music", "author": "Andrew Zuckerman", "description": "About the Author Andrew Zuckerman is a New York\u2013based photographer, author, and filmmaker. His book Creature (2007), a portrait series of animals, was released to critical acclaim and has reprinted numerous times. Wisdom (2008), a book, film, and traveling exhibition, is an ongoing project made with the support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Photography & Video"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 3.56}, {"asin": "B000KHMCR2", "title": "Harvard Classics, Deluxe Edition, Don Quixote of the Mancha", "author": "Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Classics"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 39.65}, {"asin": "B01C1LUFFK", "title": "The Whistler: A Novel", "author": "John Grisham", "description": "Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 The satellite radio was playing soft jazz, a compromise. Lacy, the owner of the Prius and thus the radio, loathed rap almost as much as Hugo, her passenger, loathed contemporary country. They had failed to agree on sports talk, public radio, golden oldies, adult comedy, and the BBC, without getting near bluegrass, CNN, opera, or a hundred other stations. Out of frustration on her part and fatigue on his, they both threw in the towel early and settled on soft jazz. Soft, so Hugo\u2019s deep and lengthy nap would not be disturbed. Soft, because Lacy didn\u2019t care much for jazz either. It was another give-and-take of sorts, one of many that had sustained their teamwork over the years. He slept and she drove and both were content. Before the Great Recession, the Board on Judicial Conduct had access to a small pool of state-owned Hondas, all with four doors and white paint and low mileage. With budget cuts, though, those disappeared. Lacy, Hugo, and countless other public employees in Florida were now expected to use their own vehicles for the state\u2019s work, reimbursed at fifty cents a mile. Hugo, with four kids and a hefty mortgage, drove an ancient Bronco that could barely make it to the office, let alone a road trip. And so he slept. Lacy enjoyed the quiet. She handled most of her cases alone, as did her colleagues. Deeper cuts had decimated the office, and the BJC was down to its last six investigators. Seven, in a state of twenty million people, with a thousand judges sitting in six hundred courtrooms and processing a half a million cases a year. Lacy was forever grateful that almost all judges were honest, hardworking people committed to justice and equality. Otherwise, she would have left long ago. The small number of bad apples kept her busy fifty hours a week. She gently touched the signal switch and slowed on the exit ramp. When the car rolled to a stop, Hugo lurched forward as if wide awake and ready for the day. \u201cWhere are we?\u201d he asked. \u201cAlmost there. Twenty minutes. Time for you to roll to your right and snore at the window.\u201d \u201cSorry. Was I snoring?\u201d \u201cYou always snore, at least according to your wife.\u201d \u201cWell, in my defense, I was walking the floor at three this morning with her latest child. I think it\u2019s a girl. What\u2019s her name?\u201d \u201cWife or daughter?\u201d \u201cHa\u2011ha.\u201d The lovely and ever-pregnant Verna kept few secrets when it came to her husband. It was her calling to keep his ego in check and it was no small task. In another life, Hugo had been a football star in high school, then the top-rated signee in his class at Florida State, and the first freshman to crack the starting lineup. He\u2019d been a tailback, both bruising and dazzling, for three and a half games anyway, until they carried him off on a stretcher with a jammed vertebra in his upper spine. He vowed to make a comeback. His mother said no. He graduated with honors and went to law school. His glory days were fading fast, but he would always carry some of the swagger possessed by all-Americans. He couldn\u2019t help it. \u201cTwenty minutes, huh?\u201d he grunted. \u201cSure, or not. If you like, I\u2019ll just leave you in the car with the motor running and you can sleep all day.\u201d He rolled to his right, closed his eyes, and said, \u201cI want a new partner.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s an idea, but the problem is nobody else will have you.\u201d \u201cAnd one with a bigger car.\u201d \u201cIt gets fifty miles a gallon.\u201d He grunted again, grew still, then twitched, jerked, mumbled, and sat straight up. He rubbed his eyes and said, \u201cWhat are we listening to?\u201d \u201cWe had this conversation a long time ago, when we left Tallahassee, just as you were beginning to hibernate.\u201d \u201cI offered to drive, as I recall.\u201d \u201cYes, with one eye open. It meant so much. How\u2019s Pippin?\u201d \u201cShe cries a lot. Usually, and I say this from vast experience, when a newborn cries it\u2019s for a reason. Food, water, diaper, momma--whatever. Not this one. She squawks for the hell of it. You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re missing.\u201d \u201cIf you\u2019ll recall, I\u2019ve actually walked the floors with Pippin on two occasions.\u201d \u201cYes, and God bless you. Can you come over tonight?\u201d \u201cAnytime. She\u2019s number four. You guys thought about birth control?\u201d \u201cWe are beginning to have that conversation. And now that we\u2019re on the subject, how\u2019s your sex life?\u201d \u201cSorry. My mistake.\u201d At thirty-six Lacy was single and attractive, and her sex life was a rich source of whispered curiosity around the office. They were going east toward the Atlantic Ocean. St. Augustine was eight miles ahead. Lacy finally turned off the radio when Hugo asked, \u201cAnd you\u2019ve been here before?\u201d \u201cYes, a few years back. Then boyfriend and I spent a week on the beach in a friend\u2019s condo.\u201d \u201cA lot of sex?\u201d \u201cHere we go again. Is your mind always in the gutter?\u201d \u201cWell, come to think of it, the answer has to be yes. Plus, you need to understand that Pippin is now a month old, which means that Verna and I have not had normal relations in at least three months. I still maintain, at least to myself, that she cut me off three weeks too early, but it\u2019s sort of a moot point. Can\u2019t really go back and catch up, you know? So things are fairly ramped up in my corner; not sure she feels the same way. Three rug rats and a newborn do serious damage to that intimacy thing.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll never know.\u201d He tried to focus on the highway for a mile or two, then his eyelids grew heavy and he began to nod. She glanced at him and smiled. In her nine years with the Board, she and Hugo had worked a dozen cases together. They made a nice team and trusted each other, and both knew that any bad behavior by him, and there had been none to date, would immediately be reported to Verna. Lacy worked with Hugo, but she gossiped and shopped with Verna. St. Augustine was billed as the oldest city in America, the very spot where Ponce de Le\u00f3n landed and began exploring. Long on history and heavy on tourism, it was a lovely town with historic buildings and thick Spanish moss dripping from ancient oaks. As they entered its outskirts, the traffic slowed and tour buses stopped. To the right and in the distance, an old cathedral towered above the town. Lacy remembered it all very well. The week with the old boyfriend had been a disaster, but she had fond memories of St. Augustine. One of many disasters. \u201cAnd who is this mysterious deep throat we are supposed to meet?\u201d Hugo asked, rubbing his eyes once again, now determined to stay awake. \u201cDon\u2019t know yet, but his code name is Randy.\u201d \u201cOkay, and please remind me why we are tag teaming a secret meeting with a man using an alias who has yet to file a formal complaint against one of our esteemed judges.\u201d \u201cI can\u2019t explain. But I\u2019ve talked to him three times on the phone and he sounds, uh, rather earnest.\u201d \u201cGreat. When was the last time you talked to a complaining party who didn\u2019t sound, uh, rather earnest?\u201d \u201cStick with me, okay? Michael said go, and we\u2019re here.\u201d Michael was the director, their boss. \u201cOf course. No clue as to the alleged unethical conduct?\u201d \u201cOh yes. Randy said it was big.\u201d \u201cGee, never heard that before.\u201d They turned onto King Street and poked along with the downtown traffic. It was mid-July, still the high season in north Florida, and tourists in shorts and sandals drifted along the sidewalks, apparently going nowhere. Lacy parked on a side street and they joined the tourists. They found a coffee shop and killed half an hour flipping through glossy real estate brochures. At noon, as instructed, they walked into Luca\u2019s Grill and got a table for three. They ordered iced tea and waited. Thirty minutes passed with no sign of Randy, so they ordered sandwiches. Fries on the side for Hugo, fruit for Lacy. Eating as slowly as possible, they kept an eye on the door and waited. As lawyers, they valued their time. As investigators, they had learned patience. The two roles were often in conflict. At 2:00 p.m., they gave up and returned to the car, as smothering as a sauna. As Lacy turned the key, her cell phone rattled. Caller unknown. She grabbed it and said, \u201cYes.\u201d A male voice said, \u201cI asked you to come alone.\u201d It was Randy. \u201cI suppose you have the right to ask. We were supposed to meet at noon, for lunch.\u201d A pause, then, \u201cI\u2019m at the Municipal Marina, at the end of King Street, three blocks away. Tell your buddy to get lost and we\u2019ll talk.\u201d \u201cLook, Randy, I\u2019m not a cop and I don\u2019t do cloak-and-dagger very well. I\u2019ll meet you, say hello and all that, but if I don\u2019t have your real name within sixty seconds then I\u2019m leaving.\u201d \u201cFair enough.\u201d She canceled the call and mumbled, \u201cFair enough.\u201d The marina was busy with pleasure craft and a few fishing boats coming and going. A long pontoon was unloading a gaggle of noisy tourists. A restaurant with a patio at the water\u2019s edge was still doing a brisk business. Crews on charter boats were spraying decks and sprucing things up for tomorrow\u2019s charters. Lacy walked along the central pier, looking for the face of a man she\u2019d never met. Ahead, standing next to a fuel pump, an aging beach bum gave a slight, awkward wave and nodded. She returned the nod and kept walking. He was about sixty, with too much gray hair flowing from under a Panama hat. Shorts, sandals, a gaudy floral-print shirt, the typical bronze, leathery skin of someone who spent far too much time in the sun. His eyes were covered by aviator shades. With a smile he stepped forward and said, \u201cYou must be Lacy Stoltz.\u201d She took his hand and said, \u201cYes, and you are?\u201d \u201cName\u2019s Ramsey Mix. A pleasure to meet you.\u201d \u201cA pleasure. We were supposed to meet at noon.\u201d \u201cMy apologies. Had a bit of boat trouble.\u201d He nodded down the pier to a large powerboat moored at the end of the dock. It wasn\u2019t the longest boat in the harbor at that moment, but it was close. \u201cCan we talk there?\u201d he asked. \u201cOn the boat?\u201d \u201cSure. It\u2019s much more private.\u201d Crawling onto a boat with a complete stranger struck her as a bad idea and she hesitated. Before she could answer, Mix asked, \u201cWho\u2019s the black guy?\u201d He was looking in the direction of King Street. Lacy turned and saw Hugo casually following a pack of tourists nearing the marina. \u201cHe\u2019s my colleague,\u201d she said. \u201cSort of a bodyguard?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t need a bodyguard, Mr. Mix. We\u2019re not armed, but my friend there could pitch you into the water in about two seconds.\u201d \u201cLet\u2019s hope that won\u2019t be necessary. I come in peace.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s good to hear. I\u2019ll get on the boat only if it stays where it is. If the engines start, then our meeting is over.\u201d \u201cFair enough.\u201d She followed him along the pier, past a row of sailboats that looked as though they had not seen the open sea in months, and to his boat, cleverly named Conspirator. He stepped on board and offered a hand to help her. On the deck, under a canvas awning, there was a small wooden table with four folding chairs. He waved at it and said, \u201cWelcome aboard. Have a seat.\u201d Lacy took quick stock of her surroundings. Without sitting, she said, \u201cAre we alone?\u201d \u201cWell, not entirely. I have a friend who enjoys boating with me. Name is Carlita. Would you like to meet her?\u201d \u201cOnly if she\u2019s important to your story.\u201d \u201cShe is not.\u201d Mix was looking at the marina, where Hugo was leaning on a rail. Hugo waved, as if to say, \u201cI\u2019m watching everything.\u201d Mix waved back and said, \u201cCan I ask you something?\u201d \u201cSure,\u201d Lacy said. \u201cIs it safe to assume that whatever I\u2019m about to tell you will be rehashed with Mr. Hatch in short order?\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s my colleague. We work together on some cases, maybe this one. How do you know his name?\u201d \u201cI happen to own a computer. Checked out the website. BJC really should update it.\u201d \u201cI know. Budget cuts.\u201d \u201cHis name vaguely rings a bell.\u201d \u201cHe had a brief career as a football player at Florida State.\u201d \u201cMaybe that\u2019s it. I\u2019m a Gator fan myself.\u201d Lacy refused to respond to this. It was so typical of the South, where folks attached themselves to college football teams with a fanaticism she\u2019d always found irksome. Mix said, \u201cSo he\u2019ll know everything?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cCall him over. I\u2019ll get us something to drink.\u201d 2 Carlita served drinks from a wooden tray--diet sodas for Lacy and Hugo, a bottle of beer for Mix. She was a pretty Hispanic lady, at least twenty years his junior, and she seemed pleased to have guests, especially another woman. Lacy made a note on her legal pad and said, \u201cA quick question. The phone you used fifteen minutes ago had a different number than the phone you used last week.\u201d \u201cIs that a question?\u201d Mix replied. \u201cIt\u2019s close enough.\u201d \u201cOkay. I use a lot of prepaid phones. And I move around all the time. I\u2019m assuming the number I have for you is a cell phone issued by your employer, correct?\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s right. We don\u2019t use personal phones for state business, so my number is not likely to change.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019ll make it simpler, I guess. My phones change by the month, sometimes by the week.\u201d So far, in their first five minutes together, everything Mix said had only opened the door for more questions. Lacy was still miffed at being stood up for lunch, and she didn\u2019t like the first impression he made. She said, \u201cOkay, Mr. Mix, at this point Hugo and I go silent. You start talking. Tell us your story, and if it has huge gaps that require us to fish around and stumble in the dark, then we\u2019ll get bored and go home. You were coy enough on the phone to lure me here. Start talking.\u201d Mix looked at Hugo with a smile and asked, \u201cShe always this blunt?\u201d Hugo, unsmiling, nodded yes. He folded his hands on the table and waited. Lacy put down her pen. Mix swallowed a mouthful of beer and began: \u201cI practiced law for thirty years in Pensacola. Small firm--we usually had five or six lawyers. Back in the day we did well and life was good. One of my early clients was a developer, a real high roller who built condos, subdivisions, hotels, strip malls, the typical Florida stuff that goes up overnight. I never trusted the guy but he was making so much money I finally took the bait. He got me in some deals, small slices here and there, and for a while it all worked. I started dreaming of getting rich, which, in Florida anyway, can lead to serious trouble. My friend was cooking the books and taking on way too much debt, stuff I didn\u2019t know about. Turns out there were some bogus loans, bogus everything, really, and the FBI came in with one of its patented RICO cluster bombs and indicted half of Pensacola, me included. A lot of folks got burned--developers, bankers, realtors, lawyers, and other shysters. You probably didn\u2019t hear about it because you investigate judges, not lawyers. Anyway, I flipped, sang like a choirboy, got a deal, pled to one count of mail fraud, and spent sixteen months in a federal camp. Lost my license and made a lot of enemies. Now I lie low. I applied for reinstatement and got my license back. I have one client these days, and he\u2019s the guy we\u2019ll talk about from now on. Questions?\u201d From the empty chair, he retrieved an unmarked file and handed it to Lacy. \u201cHere\u2019s the scoop on me. Newspaper articles, my plea agreement, all the stuff you might need. I\u2019m legit, or as legit an any ex-con can be, and every word I\u2019m saying is true.\u201d --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review \u201cRiveting\u2026finely drawn\u2026 The Whistler centers on an elaborate conspiracy involving an Indian reservation, an organized crime syndicate and a crooked judge skimming a small fortune from the tribal casino\u2019s monthly haul.\u201d --The New York Times Book Review \u201cA main character who\u2019s a seriously appealing woman...a whistle-blower who secretly calls attention to corruption...a strong and frightening sense of place...Grisham\u2019s on his game.\u201d \u2014Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201cA fascinating look at judicial corruption\u2026an entirely convincing story and one of Grisham\u2019s best. \u00a0I can\u2019t think of another major American novelist since Sinclair Lewis who has so effectively targeted social and political ills in our society. In Grisham\u2019s case, it is time at least to recognize that at his best he is not simply the author of entertaining legal thrillers but an important novelistic critic of our society. In more than 30 novels, he has often used his exceptional storytelling skills to take a hard look at injustice and corruption in the legal world and in our society as a whole.\u201d --Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post \u201cGrisham's latest involves the rich and powerful and an abuse of the justice system.\u00a0 Grisham novels are crowd-pleasers because he knows how to satisfy readers who want to see injustice crushed, and justice truly prevails for those who cannot buy influence.\u201d -- Associated Press \u201cGrisham has become an institution. For more than 25 years now he\u2019s been our guide to the byways and backwaters of our legal system, superb in particular at ferreting out its vulnerabilities and dramatizing their abuse in gripping style. He excels at describing injustice and corruption.\u00a0 Grisham\u2019s legal knowledge is impressive, and his ability to convey it unparalleled in popular fiction.\u201d -- USA Today --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author John Grisham is the author of twenty-nine novels, one work of nonfiction, a collection of stories, and five novels for young readers. From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1476728755", "title": "The Wright Brothers", "author": "David McCullough", "description": "Review \u201cA story of timeless importance, told with uncommon empathy and fluency. . . . A story, well told, about what might be the most astonishing feat mankind has ever accomplished. . . . The Wright Brothers soars.\u201d -- Daniel Okrent \u2015 The New York Times Book Review \u201cDavid McCullough has etched a brisk, admiring portrait of the modest, hardworking Ohioans who designed an airplane in their bicycle shop and solved the mystery of flight on the sands of Kitty Hawk, N.C. He captures the marvel of what the Wrights accomplished and, just as important, the wonder felt by their contemporaries. . . . Mr. McCullough is in his element writing about seemingly ordinary folk steeped in the cardinal American virtues\u2014self-reliance and can-do resourcefulness.\u201d -- Roger Lowenstein \u2015 The Wall Street Journal \u201c[McCullough] takes the Wrights\u2019 story aloft. . . . Concise, exciting, and fact-packed. . . . Mr. McCullough presents all this with dignified panache, and with detail so granular you may wonder how it was all collected.\u201d -- Janet Maslin \u2015 The New York Times \"McCullough\u2019s magical account of [the Wright Brothers'] early adventures \u2014 enhanced by volumes of family correspondence, written records, and his own deep understanding of the country and the era \u2014 shows as never before how two Ohio boys from a remarkable family taught the world to fly.\" -- Reeve Lindbergh \u2015 The Washington Post \u201cDavid McCullough\u2019s The Wright Brothers is a story about two brothers and one incredible moment in American history. But it\u2019s also a story that resonates with anyone who believes deeply in the power of technology to change lives \u2013 and the resistance some have to new innovations.\u201d -- Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google\"An outstanding saga of the lives of two men who left such a giant footprint on our modern age.\" \u2015 Booklist (starred review) \u201c[An] enjoyable, fast-paced tale. . . . A fun, fast ride.\u201d \u2015 The Economist \"[A] fluently rendered, skillfully focused study. . . . An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"McCullough's usual warm, evocative prose makes for an absorbing narrative; he conveys both the drama of the birth of flight and the homespun genius of America's golden age of innovation.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author David McCullough (1933\u20132022)\u00a0twice received the Pulitzer Prize,\u00a0for Truman and John Adams , and twice received the National Book Award,\u00a0for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback . His other acclaimed books include The Johnstown Flood , The Great Bridge , Brave Companions , 1776 , The Greater Journey , The American Spirit , The Wright Brothers , and The Pioneers .\u00a0He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation\u2019s highest civilian award. Visit DavidMcCullough.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Wright Brothers Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Transportation"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.83}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0800734831", "title": "Missing Isaac", "author": "Valerie Fraser Luesse", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.38}, {"asin": "1646114086", "title": "The Ultimate Brain Health Puzzle Book for Adults: Crosswords, Sudoku, Cryptograms, Word Searches, and More! (Ultimate Brain Health Puzzle Books)", "author": "Phil Fraas", "description": "Review \u201cThe variety of puzzles makes you exercise all your problem solving \"muscles,\" and it's why I love this book. If you're looking to expand your puzzle-solving skills at the hands of a puzzle-making master, then this is the book for you. The puzzle explanations and solving strategy tips are especially helpful. I can't wait for the sequel!\u201d \u2014Patrick Min, PhD, creator of www.calcudoku.org and author of numerous Calcudoku and Killer Sudoku puzzle books \u201cWith most puzzle books, I would go straight to solving the puzzles. However, I was curious about the other content and took the time to read the instructions on solving types of puzzles that I'd not been interested in before. Working through them (from easy to more difficult) was a great way to be introduced to puzzles other than crosswords. The quality of the book, from the feel of the cover to the thickness of the pages, shows the publishers understood that this book would be handled often.\u201d \u2014Charles Hutchinson, Technology Director and Digital Platform Consultant \u201cI was excited to receive my copy of The Ultimate Brain Health Puzzle Book for Adults . As a fan of logic puzzles, I dove straight into the Difficult section, and enjoyed the challenge of several well-crafted Sudoku, Calcudoku, Cryptograms, and Logic Grids . I look forward to having Phil's collection of excellent puzzles as an enjoyable mental diversion for days to come.\u201d \u2014Steven Clontz, Author of Tricky Logic Puzzles for Adults , Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of South Alabama \u201cFrom old favorites like the crossword to fresh takes on new trends (Calcudoku, anyone?), Phil Fraas' collection of puzzles will keep you occupied\u2014and possibly keep you up late trying to solve them! This is the perfect book for anyone who has ever wished for a greater assortment of brain-teasers all in one book.\u201d \u2014Jennifer Martin-Romme, Former Editor at Zenith City News About the Author Phil Fraas is a longtime constructor of crossword puzzles, who started in the early 1980s when he had several of his first efforts published in the New York Times. He now oversees and constructs puzzles for a free crossword, sudoku, and word search puzzle website, https://yourpuzzlesource.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0451451538", "title": "Vampire$: A Novel", "author": "John Steakley", "description": "Amazon.com Review Vampire$ (the title does end with a dollar sign) is about a tightly knit group of professional vampire killers. They may say they're in it for the money, but their death-defying bravado and warm male friendships are as intense as those in any soldier-hero epic. The irrepressible, foul-mouthed, hard-drinkin' Jack Crow--decked out in high-tech chain mail and wielding a fearsome crossbow--is the leader of the bunch. He's the sort of man who screams obscenities at the pope, and then (after a lot of booze) weeps in the pontiff's lap over the horrors he's witnessed. Author John Steakley is the son of a Chevrolet dealer from Cleburne, Texas, and he uses his roots to good effect. Not only does much of the action take place in the Lone Star state, but when we first meet the major character named Felix, he's an apparition out of the Old West--living in an abandoned boxcar on the Rio Grande with a Mexican whore, an endless supply of tequila, and a tacky bleeding Jesus on the wall. Vampire$ is one gaudy, action-packed novel. The men are men, the women are vulnerable, and the vampires are mean, ugly monsters. Unless you don't like that sort of thing, you'll love it. Review Gives a closer, longer look at violent vampire-hunting than anything else to date, often at a breath-taking pace. -- The Vampire's Closet", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.86}, {"asin": "B08THPZZ97", "title": "A Line to Kill: A Novel (A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery Book 3)", "author": "Anthony Horowitz", "description": "About the Author ANTHONY HOROWITZ is the author of the US bestselling Magpie Murders and The Word is Murder , and one of the most prolific and successful writers in the English language; he may have committed more (fictional) murders than any other living author. His novel Trigger Mortis features original material from Ian Fleming. His most recent Sherlock Holmes novel, Moriarty , is a reader favorite; and his bestselling Alex Rider series for young adults has sold more than 19 million copies worldwide. As a TV screenwriter, he created both Midsomer Murders and the BAFTA-winning Foyle\u2019s War on PBS. Horowitz regularly contributes to a wide variety of national newspapers and magazines, and in January 2014 was awarded an OBE. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"The most conventional of Horowitz\u2019s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \u201c[D]eliciously shifty . . . brilliant.\u201d\u00a0 -- Toronto Star\u201c A Line to Kill is utterly entertaining and a magnificent pleasure.\u201d -- Winnipeg Free Press --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.99}], "target_asin": "0800734831"}
{"user_id": "AGZFFCEZVCMI2FQSMHFTRBH4MSXQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "150324749X", "title": "In Defense of Classical Liberalism: An Economic Analysis", "author": "Matt Palumbo", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.0}, {"asin": "1841124362", "title": "Did the Pedestrian Die?: Insights from the World's Greatest Culture Guru", "author": "Fons Trompenaars", "description": "Review \"...lively and informative read...an excellent introduction to the issues of transcultural management...\" (People Management, 10 July 2003) \"...essential reading for those concerned with cultural issues...\" (Long Range Planning, Vol 37, 2004) From the Inside Flap The Dilemma  You are a passenger in a car driven by a close friend. He hits a pedestrian. You know he was going at least 35 miles per hour in an area of the city where the maximum speed allowed is 20 miles per hour. There are no witnesses. His lawyer says that if you are prepared to testify under oath that he was only driving at 20 miles per hour it may save him from serious consequences. What right has your friend to expect you to protect him? a: My friend has a DEFINITE right to expect me to testify to the lower figure. b: He has SOME right to expect me to testify to the lower figure. c: He has NO right to expect me to testify to the lower figure. Fons Trompenaars has put this dilemma to some 70,000 managers in over 65 countries. The responses vary tremendously and will often change when Fons then reveals a further important factor - that the pedestrian is indeed very? dead! But there is one thread that remains common no matter where and to whom Fons is posing this dilemma: regardless of their culture, people would like to help their friends as well as respect the truth and support laws that protect pedestrians. Culture is the way one solves dilemmas. That is, the way one resolves dilemmas is culturally determined. Did the Pedestrian Die? is an accumulation of a decade of research into cultural diversity across the globe with a wide range of client organizations. Trompenaars and his research team have identified the issues that really make a difference at the level of the individual and the organization as whole. In addition to his well-established cross-cultural database of 70,000 managers from across the world, more recently Trompenaars has interviewed thousands of business leaders and managers to understand the challenges and concerns they face, the tensions between competing priorities, demands and values. Often humorous, always inspiring, Did the Pedestrian Die? collects the insights of the world?s most sought-after culture guru and shows how they can be put to immediate effect in any organization. From the Back Cover ?Most decisions that managers face involve objectives that are in apparent conflict; they constitute the horns of a dilemma. By the use of numerous examples Trompenaars shows how managers can escape these horns. The examples are invaluable for every manager.? RUSSEL L. ACKOFF, author of Creating the Corporate Future ?Dilemma identification is an elegant method for appreciating and transcending the complexity that paralyzes strategic thinking, as Trompenaars' Did the Pedestrian Die? elegantly shows.? PETER SENGE, author of The Fifth Discipline PRAISE FOR 21 LEADERS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: \"?this is an important book\" BUSINESS LIFE PRAISE FOR BUILDING CROSS CULTURAL COMPETENCE: \"...You will gain fascinating insights into literature, philosophy, economics, ancient and modern history and obscure Japanese films. It is not like a management book at all. I recommend it.\" DAILY TELEGRAPH \"There are lots of fascinating stories about how we differ, and we are encouraged to respect all forms of diversity. The book will give people working internationally a deeper level of understanding of the issues, pitfalls and potential ways to reconcile cultural differences at work.\" PEOPLE MANAGEMENT About the Author Fons Trompenaars is founder and Managing Director of Trompenaars Hampden-Turner (THT), an innovative centre of excellence for intercultural management issues ? for both globalization and managing diversity. He is the author and co-author of several books, including the worldwide bestseller, Riding the Waves of Culture and 21 Leaders for the 21st Century . Visit www.thtconsulting.com for more information on Fons and THT. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 3.1, "price": 18.18}, {"asin": "B007XJ6YSS", "title": "Land of the Blind: A Novel", "author": "Jess Walter", "description": "Amazon.com Review Jess Walter, a reporter whose first novel fictionalized the true crime story of a serial killer in Spokane, Washington, ( Over Tumbled Graves ) has penned a riveting, elegiac thriller about a middle-aged man who wants Spokane police detective Caroline Mabry to witness his confession to a crime that hasn't yet been discovered. As Clark Mason writes the long story of a childhood friendship gone horribly wrong, readers will shudder, remembering their own tortured adolescence and revisiting it in that of Eli Boyle, whose physical and social awkwardness made him a natural target for his peers. Back then, even Clark joined the crowd in making fun of Eli. But he also showed him some kindness--enough to make Eli agree to let Clark turn his fantasy game, Empire, into a high-tech start-up years later, and to bankroll Clark's run for Congress. But when the technology boom goes bust and Clark's dreams run out of steam, Eli makes a last, frightening bid for what he's always wanted--revenge on those who made his childhood hell, including the woman Clark has loved since high school. Walter's abilities as a prose stylist and his sense of narrative tension shine through in this extremely well written novel, which is far stronger than his first, but shares its deep sense of time and place. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist *Starred Review* Caroline Mabry, Spokane homicide detective recently demoted to the swing shift, dubs the vagrant with the eye patch the \"Loon.\" In fact, he's Clark Mason, a recently failed candidate for Congress, and he wants to confess to a homicide. His confession reads like an autobiography: Mason didn't want to be the poor kid from Spokane; he wanted to be the rich guy, the guy on the news, the guy who got all the girls. He succeeded, after a fashion, always reinventing himself to fit the impressions of others. His confession fills up pad after legal pad as he recounts his high-school years and his friendship with the class geek, Eli Boyle. Mason, with his law degree and connections to the dot-com world of venture capital and quick fortunes, ensnares his old friend Eli in the development of a computer game called Empire. It's a con, but the money flows. Until it stops. Caroline eventually finds a body, but can you charge someone with a homicide for what he didn't do, for the person he never became, for the truths he never uttered? Walter, the critically praised author of Over Tumbled Graves (2001), also featuring Caroline Mabry, raises these and other profound questions in a mystery novel of uncommon depth. Despite themselves, readers will question their own self-images and assess just how far they've really come from the scared high-school kid who wanted to be exactly like everyone else but somehow still unique. A haunting, deeply troubling novel. Wes Lukowsky Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly Spokane detective Caroline Mabry, the heroine of Walter's acclaimed debut, Over Tumbled Graves, returns in a supporting role in this new thriller. Burned out on the job and stuck in the night shift, Caroline is in the station house when Clark Mason stumbles in after midnight, needing to confess to a murder. With his fitted shirt, long tousled hair and eye patch (all three black), Clark intrigues Caroline, even as she chastises herself for the vague attraction. Before long, he's frenziedly writing his story on a series of legal pads, and she's following up on the leads that spill from his lips as he writes. His flashbacks stretch as far back as childhood, when Clark alternately befriends and betrays the intense misfit Eli Boyle. The first betrayal occurs when Clark is caught between scapegoat Eli and scary preteen bully Pete Kramer. Adolescence, with its romantic predicaments, only complicates the relationship between these three. As Clark's narrative rolls slowly forward in time, Caroline tracks down the people he mentions. Walter is at his incisive best juxtaposing the characters in the present with their childhood selves. Spokane is carefully rendered in all its moody complexity. Wracked by urban blight and an inferiority complex (it's no Seattle), the city holds an ineffable attraction for both Caroline and Clark. Similarly, Walter's novel takes sketchy detours and its characters repel as much as compel, but lucid writing and a palpable sense of nostalgia make it hypnotically compelling. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review An exceptional crime novel that transcends the mystery of crime and takes a courageous look at an even more profound mystery- the mystery of what it takes to continue living. As Jess Walter probes the nature of evil and its impact, he challenges his readers to reconsider their own complexity. Totally absorbing. * Ursula Hegi on Over Tumbled Graves * 'Walter renders his blind land with a clear-eyed, compassionate vision. * Kirkus Reviews * A most accomplished debut. * Sunday Telegraph on Over Tumbled Graves * A home run off the first pitch...a tremendous debut, full of pace and tension and unexpected twists, but also full of depth and quiet intelligence that together lift it head and shoulders above the pack. * Lee Child on Over Tumbled Graves * Jess Walter has just about lapped the field with his superior first novel OVER TUMBLED GRAVES. The suspense and surprises are terrific, but best of all are the characters he has managed to create. * James Patterson * --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap While working the weekend night shift, Caroline Mabry, a weary Spokane police detective, encounters a seemingly unstable but charming derelict who tells her, I'd like to confess. But he insists on writing out his statement in longhand. In the forty-eight hours that follow, the stranger confesses to not just a crime but an entire life--spinning a wry and haunting tale of youth and adulthood, of obsession and revenge, and of two men's intertwined lives. Fiendishly clever and darkly funny, Land of the Blind speaks to the bonds and compromises we make as children--and to the fatal errors we can make at any time. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover In this fiendishly clever and darkly funny novel, Jess Walter speaks deeply to the bonds and compromises we make as children -- and the fatal errors we can make at any moment in our lives. While working the weekend night shift, Caroline Mabry, a weary Spokane police detective, encounters a seemingly unstable but charming derelict. \"I'd like to confess,\" he proclaims. But he insists on writing out his confession in longhand. In the forty-eight hours that follow, the stranger admits to not just a crime, but an entire life: a wry and haunting tale of poverty and politics, of obsession and revenge. And as he writes, Caroline pushes herself to near collapse, racing against the clock to investigate not merely a murder, but the story of two men's darkly intertwined lives. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Jess Walter is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets , the National Book Award finalist The Zero , and Citizen Vince , the winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's , McSweeney's , and Playboy , as well as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading . He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "B000SIN3R6", "title": "Shame the Devil: A Novel (DC Quartet Book 4)", "author": "George Pelecanos", "description": "About the Author George Pelecanos is the bestselling author of twenty novels set in and around Washington, D.C. He is also an independent film producer, and a producer and Emmy-nominated writer on the HBO series The Wire , Treme , and The Deuce . He lives in Maryland. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile A botched robbery at a DC pizzeria leaves six people--including the driver of the getaway car--dead. For the next three years, the people who lost friends and loved ones in the incident struggle to heal from the tragedy. Then the killers return to DC to avenge their partner's death. The story is a tight, dark thriller peopled by very human--and some very evil--characters. Actor Richard Brewer reads the text in a steady staccato, but his attempts at underworld street talk and some of his pronunciation of ethnic words miss the mark. S.E.S. \u00a9 AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover The boys are back in town Frank Farrow is a natural-born killer. Roman Otis is a fine-looking crooner who does his killing on the side. On a hot D.C. afternoon Frank and Roman hit a pizza shop called May's. When the hit was over, four people were executed. A cop was shot. A boy was dead. And when the sirens stopped wailing and the killers vanished into the heat, dozens of lives were shattered forever. Now it's three years later, and Dimitri Karras, who lost a son, is starting to live again. But Dimitri's old acquaintance, a P.I. named Nick Stefanos, has just unburied the past--by discovering the killers' identity. Suddenly the second act of a crime story is about to be told. Because the May's pizza parlor killers are coming back into town: where they'll be greeted with open arms, broken hearts, and at least one loaded gun. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Shame the Devil By George P. Pelecanos Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Copyright \u00a9 2011 George P. PelecanosAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-316-13340-1 CHAPTER 1 The car was a boxy late-model Ford sedan, white over black, innocuous borderingon invisible, and very fast. It had been a sheriff's vehicle originally, boughtat auction in Tennessee, and further modified for speed. The car rolled north on Wisconsin beneath a blazing white sun. The men insidewore long-sleeved shirts, tails out. Their shirtfronts were spotted with sweatand their backs were slick with it. The black vinyl on which they sat was hot tothe touch. From the passenger seat, Frank Farrow studied the street. Thesidewalks were empty. Foreign-made automobiles moved along quietly, theiroccupants cool and cocooned. Heat mirage shimmered up off asphalt. The city wasnarcotized\u2014it was that kind of summer day. \"Quebec,\" said Richard Farrow, his gloved hands clutching the wheel. He pushedhis aviator shades back up over the bridge of his nose, and as they neared thenext cross street he said, \"Upton.\" \"You've got Thirty-ninth up ahead,\" said Frank. \"You want to take that shoot-off,just past Van Ness.\" \"I know it,\" said Richard. \"You don't have to tell me again because I know.\" \"Take it easy, Richard.\" \"All right.\" In the backseat, Roman Otis softly sang the first verse to \"One in a MillionYou,\" raising his voice just a little to put the full Larry Graham inflectioninto the chorus. He had heard the single on WHUR earlier that morning, and thetune would not leave his head. The Ford passed through the intersection at Upton. Otis looked down at his lap, where the weight of his shotgun had begun to etch adeep wrinkle in his linen slacks. Well, he should have known it. All you had todo was look at linen to make it wrinkle, that was a plain fact. Still, aman needed to have a certain kind of style to him when he left the house forwork. Otis placed the sawed-off on the floor, resting its stock across the toesof his lizard-skin monk straps. He glanced at the street-bought Rolex strappedto his left wrist: five minutes past ten A.M. Richard cut the Ford up 39th. \"There,\" said Frank. \"That Chevy's pulling out.\" \"I see it,\" said Richard. They waited for the Chevy. Then Frank said, \"Put it in.\" Richard swung the Ford into the space and killed the engine. They were at theback of a low-rise commercial strip that fronted Wisconsin Avenue. The doorleading to the kitchen of the pizza parlor, May's was situated in the center ofthe block. Frank wiped moisture from his brush mustache and ran a hand throughhis closely cropped gray hair. \"There's the Caddy,\" said Otis, noticing the black DeVille parked three spacesahead. Frank nodded. \"Mr. Carl's making the pickup. He's inside.\" \"Let's do this thing,\" said Otis. \"Wait for our boy to open the door,\" said Frank. He drew two latex examinationgloves from a tissue-sized box and slipped them over the pair he already had onhis hands. He tossed the box over his shoulder to the backseat. \"Here. Doubleup.\" Roman Otis raised his right hand, where a silver ID bracelet bearing theinscription \"Back to Oakland\" hung on his wrist. He let the bracelet slip downinside the French cuff of his shirt. He put the gloves on carefully, thenreflexively touched the butt of the .45 fitted beneath his shirt. He caught aglimpse of his shoulder-length hair, recently treated with relaxer, in therearview mirror. Shoot, thought Otis, Nick Ashford couldn't claim to have afiner head of hair on him. Otis smiled at his reflection, his one gold toothcatching the light. He gave himself a wink. \"Frank,\" said Richard. \"We'll be out in a few minutes,\" said Frank. \"Don't turn the engine over untilyou see us coming back out.\" \"I won't,\" said Richard, a catch in his voice. The back kitchen door to May's opened. A thin black man wearing a full apronstepped out with a bag of trash. He carried the trash to a Dumpster and swung itin, bouncing it off the upraised lid. On his way back to the kitchen he eye-swept the men in the Ford. He stepped back inside, leaving the door ajar behindhim. \"That him?\" asked Otis. \"Charles Greene,\" said Frank. \"Good boy.\" Frank checked the .22 Woodsman and the .38 Bulldog holstered beneath his oxfordshirt. The guns were snug against his guinea-T. He looked across the bench athis kid brother, sweating like a hard-run horse, breathing through his mouth,glassy eyed, scared stupid. \"Remember, Richard. Wait till you see us come out.\" Richard Farrow nodded one time. Roman Otis lifted the shotgun, slipped it barrel down into his open shirt,fitting it in a custom-made leather holster hung over his left side. It wouldshow; there wasn't any way to get around it. But they would be going straightin, and they would move fast. \"Let's go, Roman,\" said Frank. Otis said, \"Right.\" He opened the car door and touched his foot to the street. \"C'MON,\" SAID Lisa Karras, \"put your arms up, Jimmy.\" Lisa's son raised his hands and then dropped them as she tried to fit themaroon-and-gold shirt over his head. He wiggle-wormed out of the shirt, giggledas he backed up against a scarred playroom wall. Looking at him, Lisa laughedtoo. There were mornings when she would be trying to get him off to school or getherself to an appointment and Jimmy would keep pushing her buttons until she'dlose her temper in a big way. But this was not one of those mornings. Jimmy hadbeen out of kindergarten since June, and Lisa had not picked up any freelancedesign work in the last month. This was just a slow morning on a hot summer day.The two of them had nothing but time. \"Hey, kiddo, I thought you said you wanted some ice cream.\" Jimmy Karras zoomed over and raised his arms. Lisa got the short-sleevedRedskins jersey on him before he had a chance to squirm out of it, then sat himdown and fitted a pair of miniature Vans sneakers on his feet. \"Double knots, Mom.\" \"You got it.\" Jimmy stood up and raced off. He skipped once, something he did without thoughtwhen he was happy, on the way to the door. Ice cream at ten A.M. Lisa almost laughed, thinking of what her peers would haveto say about that. Most of the other mothers in the neighborhood were content tosit their kids down in front of the television set on hot days like this. ButLisa couldn't stand to be in the house all day, no matter the weather. And sheknew that Jimmy liked to get out too. A trip to the ice cream store would bejust fine. Jimmy stood on his toes at the front door, trying to turn the lock. A rabbit'sfoot hung from a key chain fixed to a belt loop of his navy blue shorts. Therabbit's foot was white and gray, with toenails curling out of the fur. Lisa hadgiven her husband, Dimitri, a few sharp words when he had brought it home fromthe surplus store, but she had let the matter drop when she saw her son's eyeswiden at the sight of it. The rabbit's foot was one of those strangeitems\u2014pocketknives, lighters, firecrackers\u2014that held a mutualfascination for fathers and sons. She had long since given up on trying tounderstand. \"Help me, Mom.\" \"You got it.\" She rested the flat of her palm on his short, curly brown hair as she turned thelock. His scalp was warm to the touch. \"Mom, can we go for a Metro ride today?\" \"One thing at a time, okay, honey?\" \"Could we take the Metro to the zoo?\" \"I don't think so. Anyway, it's too hot. The animals will all be inside.\" \"Aw,\" said Jimmy, flipping his hand at the wrist. \"Gimme a break!\" Jimmy ran down the concrete steps as she locked the front door of the colonial.She watched him bolt across the sidewalk and head toward the street. \"Jimmy!\" she yelled. Jimmy stopped short of the street at the sound of her voice. He turned, pointingat her and laughing, his eyes closed, his dimples deeply etched in a smooth ovalface. Mrs. Lincoln, the old woman next door, called from her porch, \"You better watchthat boy!\" Lisa smiled and said cheerfully, \"He's a handful , all right.\" And underher breath she added, \"You dried-up old crow.\" As Lisa got down to the sidewalk of Alton Place, Jimmy said, \"What'd you say,Mom?\" \"Just saying hello to Mrs. Lincoln.\" \"You mean Mrs. Stinkin'?\" \"Now, don't you ever say that except in our house, honey. Daddy was just kiddingwhen he made up that name for her. It's not nice.\" \"But she does smell funny, though.\" \"Old people have a different smell to them, that's all.\" \"She smells.\" \"Jimmy!\" \"Okay.\" They walked a bit. They stopped at the corner of 38th Street, and Jimmy said,\"Where we goin' for ice cream, Mom?\" \"That store next to the pizza parlor.\" \"Which pizza parlor?\" said Jimmy. \"You know,\" said Lisa Karras. \"May's.\" ROMAN OTIS went in first, putting a hard shoulder to the door. Frank Farrowstepped in next, cross-drawing the .22 and the .38 revolver at once. He kickedthe door shut behind him as Otis drew the sawed-off and pumped a shell into thebreech. \"All right,\" said Otis. \"Don't none a y'all move.\" Charles Greene, the pizza chef, stood still behind the kitchen's stainless steelprep table and raised his hands. Mr. Carl, a short man with a stub of unlitcigar wedged in the side of his liver-lipped mouth, stood to the side of thetable. On the tiled floor beside him sat an olive green medium-size duffel bag,zipped shut. \"What is this?\" said Mr. Carl, direct and calm, looking at the armed white manwith the gray hair. Frank up-jerked the .38. \"Raise your hands and shut your mouth.\" Carl Lewin raised his arms very slowly, careful not to let his sport jacketspread open and reveal the .32 Davis he carried wedged against his right hip onpickup day. \"Against the wall,\" said Frank. Greene and Mr. Carl moved back. Frank holstered the .22, stepped over to theduffel bag, and opened it. He had a quick look inside at the stacks of green:tens, twenties, and hundreds, loosely banded. He ran the zipper back up its neckand nodded at Otis. \"Okay, pizza man,\" said Otis. \"Who we got in the front of the house?\" Charles Greene licked his dry lips. \"The bartender. And the day waiter's out inthe dining room, setting up.\" \"Go out there and bring the waiter back with you,\" said Otis. \"Don't be funny,neither.\" Greene hesitated, and Otis said, \"Go on, boy. Let's get this over withso we can all be on our way.\" Greene had a look at Mr. Carl before hurrying from the kitchen. Mr. Carl staredat the gray-haired white man without speaking. Then they heard footstepsreturning to the kitchen and a chiding young voice saying, \"What could be soimportant, Charlie? I've got side work.\" The waiter, who was named Vance Walters, entered the kitchen with Greene behindhim. At the sight of the men and their guns, Walters nearly turned to run, thenswallowed and breathed out slowly. The moment had passed, and now it was toolate. He wondered, as he always did, what his father would have done in asituation such as this one. He raised his hands without a prompt. If he'd justcooperate, they wouldn't hurt him, whoever they were. \"What's your name?\" said Frank. \"Vance,\" said the waiter. \"Over there against the wall with your boss,\" said Frank. Otis watched the waiter with the perfect springy haircut hurry around the preptable. One of those light-steppin' mugs. Vance with the tight-ass pants. Otisknew the look straightaway. Marys like Vance got snatched up on the cell blockright quick. \"I'll get the bartender,\" said Frank to Otis. Frank Farrow left the kitchen. Otis pointed the shotgun at each of the three menagainst the wall in turn. He began to sing \"One in a Million You\" under hisbreath. As he sang, he smiled at Mr. Carl. DETECTIVE WILLIAM Jonas cruised up Wisconsin in his unmarked and made the turnup 39th. The cold air felt good blowing against his torso, and for a change hewas fairly relaxed. It wasn't often that he rolled on the clean, white-breadstreets of upper Northwest's Ward 3. Most of his action was in neighborhoodslike Trinidad, Petworth, LeDroit Park, and Columbia Heights. But this morning hehad an interview with a teenage kid who worked at the chain video store overnear Wilson High. The kid lived in Shaw, and he had grown up with a couple ofyoung citizens charged with beating a pipehead to death outside a plywood-doorhouse east of 14th and Irving. Jonas hated to roust the kid at work, but theyoung man had been uncooperative on his home turf. Jonas figured that the kidwould talk, and talk quick, at his place of employment. William Jonas had two sons at Wilson himself. They took the bus across town fromJonas's house on Hamlin Street, over in Brookland. It wouldn't be too long before he had his boys in college and could retire hisshield. The money was already put away for their schooling. He'd been saving onan automatic-withdrawal plan since they were boys. Thank the good Lord for bluechips. With his pension and the house damn near 75 percent paid off, he and Deecould enjoy themselves for real. He'd be in his middle fifties bythen\u2014retired and still a relatively young man. But it was a little earlyto be dreaming on it. He had a few years left to go. As he went slowly up 39th, Jonas noticed a parked car on his right, lookedalmost like an old cop car, with a man behind the wheel, sitting there with allfour windows rolled down. The man was pockmarked and sweating something awful;his sunglasses slipped down to the end of his nose as he bent forward, trying toput a match to a cigarette. Looked like his hand was shaking, too, and ... damn ifhe wasn't wearing some kind of rubber gloves. As Jonas passed, the man glancedout the window and quickly averted his eyes. In the rearview Jonas saw Virginiaplates on the front of the car\u2014a Merc, maybe. No, he could see thefamiliar blue oval on the grillwork: a Ford. Veazy Street, Warren, Windom ... Now that had to be the only car he'd seen allmorning with the windows down on a hotter-than-the-devil day like today.Everyone else had their air-conditioning on full, and what car didn't have air-conditioning these days? And the man behind the wheel, white like everyone inthis neighborhood but still not like them, had seemed kind of nervous.Like he didn't belong there. Wearing those gloves, too. Twenty-five years on theforce and Bill Jonas knew . He had a few minutes before his interview with the video-store kid. Maybe he'dcruise around the block, give that Ford another pass. RICHARD FARROW hotboxed his smoke while watching the black car hang a left a fewblocks up 39th. Any high school kid with an ounce of weed in his glove box wouldhave spotted the unmarked car. And the driver, some kind of cop, had given himthe fish-eye as he passed. The question was, Was the black cop in the black car going to come around theblock and check him out again? Richard touched the grip of the nine millimeter tucked between his legs. The wayhe had it, snug up against his rocks and pressing on his blue jeans, it had feltgood. But now the sensation faded. He grabbed the Beretta and tapped the barrelagainst his thigh. He dragged hard on his cigarette and flicked the butt out tothe street. God, it was hot. What the fuck was he doing here, anyway? Sure, he'd done his share of small-timeboosts\u2014car thefts, smash-and-grabs, like that\u2014with his older brotherwhen they were in their teens. Back between Frank's reform school years and hisfirst four-year jolt. Then Frank got sent up for another eight, and during thattime Richard went from one useless job to the next, fighting his variousaddictions\u2014alcohol, crystal meth, coke, and married women\u2014along theway. The funny thing was, when Frank got out of the joint the last time, he wassmarter, tougher, and more connected than Richard would ever be. Yeah, crime andprison had been good to Frank. So when Frank had phoned and asked his littlebrother if he would be interested in a quick and easy score that he and Otiswere about to pull off, Richard had said yes. He saw it as a last chance to turnhis life around. And to be on a level playing field\u2014to be a success, foronce\u2014with Frank. Richard looked in the rearview. The black car had circled and was coming upbehind him on 39th. Richard turned the key in the ignition. A natural reaction, that's all. Herealized Frank had told him not to, but ... fuck it, it wouldn't do anygood to get himself down about it now. He'd done it. The cop car was slowing down. It was crawling. \"Come on, Frank,\" said Richard. He heard the high pitch of his own voice and wasashamed. Richard stared straight ahead as the cop car accelerated and passed. Richardexhaled, removed his glasses, wiped at the sweat that stung his eyes. (Continues...) Excerpted from Shame the Devil by George P. Pelecanos . Copyright \u00a9 2011 George P. Pelecanos. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly When the shooting stops on a blistering summer day at May's Pizza Parlor in Washington, D.C., in 1995, five people lie dead, a policeman is left crippled and robber Frank Farrow speeds off with his loot and not a trace of regret. But Farrow, the main villain in Pelecanos's fine new addition to his hard-boiled lineup, still isn't satisfied. He wants to return to finish off the injured cop, who killed Farrow's brother during the shoot-out. Farrow doesn't anticipate, however, the burning desire for revenge harbored by the family and friends of those butchered in the notorious pizza bloodbath. Chief among them is 50-ish Dimitri Karras, whose five-year-old son died when he was mowed down by the getaway vehicle Farrow was driving. Now, three years later, Karras is just getting his life back together, much like the other survivors, all of whom meet regularly to share their grief and soothe their torment. By chance, Karras teams up with Nick Stephanos, a freelance investigator who finds out Farrow is back in town to exact his twisted vengeance. Stephanos tries to dissuade Karras from tracking down Farrow, but even he understands the urge for retaliation. Karras and Stephanos, who have starred in several of Pelecanos's earlier books (King Suckerman; The Sweet Forever), deepen considerably as characters in this hard-driving story of heartache, Stephanos's adjustment to the new-found maturity of middle age and Dmitri's search for some small relief in revenge. Set against a backdrop of greasy-spoon diners, church basements, dive bars and sparsely furnished apartments, the narrative is unsettlingly harsh yet captivatingly tender, the gritty back-and-forth of everyday urban life vividly etched. 11-city author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"For some time George P. Pelecanos has been the best-kept secret in crime fiction -- maybe all fiction ... The word among writers and those in the know has long been 'Read Pelecanos.'\"-- Michael Connelly, author of Void Moon \"One of the best crime novelists alive, George Pelecanos is an American original.\"-- Dennis Lehane, author of Prayers for Rain \"Tough and skillful...there are action scenes as fierce as any you will read and street talk that hits the ear as smart and accurate.\" -- San Francisco Chronicle Also by George P. Pelecanos: The Sweet Forever \"Brilliant.\" -- The Dallas Morning News \" The Sweet Forever is the bomb!\"-- The Seattle Times King Suckerman \" King Suckerman 's got jive, juice, and a whole lotta justice.\" -- Time Out \"A great read ... stunning and forceful.\"-- Michael Connelly, author of Void Moon Available from Dell --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon.com Review Penzler Pick, February 2000 : Just as Robert B. Parker and Dennis Lehane have made Boston their own and Los Angeles has been the distinct province of a lineage leading from Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald to Michael Connelly and Robert Crais, so is George Pelecanos the storyteller who's put Washington, D.C., on the noir map. Once considered \"the best-kept secret in crime fiction\" by his peers, he is now fast leaving behind those days of strictly word-of-mouth fame and cult status. Telling it like he sees it, and looking fearlessly into those dark, forgotten alleyways that lay too far beyond the corridors of power to make it into any guidebooks, Pelecanos conjures up a gritty, ghostly Washington of working-class neighborhoods and aging suburbs and shoots it through with chillingly unpredictable menace. Most Washington natives probably wouldn't recognize the place--but they couldn't stop trying either, knowing that they've at least glimpsed (out of the corners of their eyes) those environs where a Pelecanos character is most at home. In Shame the Devil , we find a society of grieving men and women connected by loss, betrayal, the need for revenge, and the shadowy presence of evil. As in other Pelecanos tales, the heroes are not easily identified, love is a coming together of wounded souls, and answers are found where least expected. In the aftermath of a botched armed robbery, a fair number of lives have been thrown into a downward spiral. The problems, however, come on faster and with more fury once the status quo sustaining the survivors has been breached by an ill-wishing and unwanted addition to their little group. Here are two favorite moments. In one, protagonist Dimitri Karras asks the name of a fellow bar patron. Hearing that he's called Happy, Karras comments that he doesn't look too happy. The answer: \"He's pacing himself.\" The other: we hear the thoughts of the sociopathic villain: \"Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element of any career criminal's education.\" With Shame the Devil , Pelecanos solidifies his position among the elite of the brilliant coterie of young noir writers who are creating the emerging classics of the genre. --Otto Penzler --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap back in townFrank Farrow is a natural-born killer. Roman Otis is a fine-looking crooner who does his killing on the side. On a hot D.C. afternoon Frank and Roman hit a pizza shop called May's. When the hit was over, four people were executed. A cop was shot. A boy was dead. And when the sirens stopped wailing and the killers vanished into the heat, dozens of lives were shattered forever.Now it's three years later, and Dimitri Karras, who lost a son, is starting to live again. But Dimitri's old acquaintance, a P.I. named Nick Stefanos, has just unburied the past--by discovering the killers' identity. Suddenly the second act of a crime story is about to be told. Because the May's pizza parlor killers are coming back into town: where they'll be greeted with open arms, broken hearts, and at least one loaded gun. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Library Journal The setting is Washington, DC, where everybody lies, cheats, and steals, but the characters of Pelecanos's (King Suckerman) new novel would have a tough time wangling an invite to the White House. This time the robbery of a pizza parlor in 1995 leads to the death of an innocent boy, the son of Dimitri Karras, back from earlier efforts by Pelecanos. The plot is the very leisurely working out of the aftermath of that robbery. Much of the action (and talk) center on The Spot, a neighborhood bar/gathering place where Karras gets a job as a dishwasher. The talkAwhich, with Pelecanos's ear for dialog, is goodAmoves from family to neighborhood and sometimes even to the Pizza Parlor murders. A bit of Dashiell Hammett as filtered through the lens of Spike Lee, Shame the Devil can be recommended to anyone who fancies neighborhood stories exchanged on the stoop at sunset. Those looking for a fast-paced page-turner might pass. For urban and larger public libraries. -ABob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1477827749", "title": "Five Night Stand: A Novel", "author": "Richard J. Alley", "description": "Review \u201cIn Five Night Stand , Memphis author Richard J. Alley tells the story of three people whose lives intersect over the course of five nights in New York City\u2015a debut novel set to a pounding jazz beat of triumphs, failings, uncertainties, secret sins, and tragedies.\u201d \u2015Chapter16 About the Author Richard J. Alley, a longtime freelance writer and editor, was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife and four children.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "B000FC0SIM", "title": "On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue))", "author": "Stephen King", "description": "Review \"A one-of-a-kind classic.\" \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \"This is a special book, animated by a unique intelligence, and filled with useful truth.\" \u2014Michael Chabon \" On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style .\" \u2014Roger Ebert \u201cThe best book on writing. Ever.\u201d \u2014 The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) About the Author Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers.\u00a0His recent work includes Holly , Fairy Tale , Billy Summers , If It Bleeds , The Institute , Elevation , The Outsider , Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch , Finders\u00a0Keepers ,\u00a0and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner\u00a0for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a\u00a0top ten book of 2011 by The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower , It , Pet Sematary , Doctor Sleep , and Firestarter are the basis for\u00a0major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient\u00a0of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the\u00a02014 National Medal of Arts, and the\u00a02003 National Book Foundation Medal for\u00a0Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.\u00a0He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife,\u00a0novelist Tabitha King. From Publishers Weekly As his diehard fans know, King is a member of a writers-only rock 'n' roll band (Amy Tan is also a member), and this recording starts off with a sampling of their music. It may sound unsettling to some, but King quickly puts listeners at ease with his confident, candid and breezy tone. Here, King tells the story of his childhood and early influences, describes his development as a writer, offers extensive advice on technique (read: write tight and no bullshit) and finally recounts his well-known experience of being hit by a drunk driver while walking on a country road in 1999 and the role that his work has played in his rehabilitation. While some of his guidance is not exactly revolutionary (he recommends The Elements of Style as a must-have reference), other revelations that vindicate authors of popular fiction, like himself, as writers, such as his preference for stressing character and situation over plot, are engrossing. He also offers plenty of commonsense advice on how to organize a workspace and structure one's day. While King's comical childhood anecdotes and sober reflections on his accident may be appreciated while driving to work or burning calories on a treadmill, the book's main exercise does not work as well in the audio format. King's strongest recommendation, after all, is that writers must be readers, and despite his adept performance, aspiring authors might find that they would absorb more by picking up the book. Based on the Scribner hardcover (Forecasts, July 31, 2000). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \" A one-of-a-kind classic. \" -- \"Wall Street Journal \" \" This is a special book, animated by a unique intelligence, and filled with useful truth. \" -- \"Michael Chabon\" \" On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style . \" -- \"Roger Ebert\" \"The best book on writing. Ever. \" -- \"Cleveland Plain Dealer\" \"Tthis combination of memoir and masterclass by fiction's most successful modern storyteller showcases the blunt, casual brilliance of King at his best. As well as being genuinely useful, it's a fascinating chronicle of literary persistence and of a lifelong love affair with language and narrative.\" -- \"The Guardian (London)\" \"With examples that reach from T. S. Eliot to pulp fiction, there's much trenchant material here on how to construct a story, how to revise, and how to go about building a career...This is unmistakably King: friendly, sharply perceptive, cheerfully vulgar, sometimes adolescent in his humor, sometimes impatient with fools, but always sincere in his love of language and writing. \" -- \"Kirkus Reviews\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From AudioFile When Stephen King says \"blood\" or \"lips,\" his Bangor, Maine, accent drags the \"l\" into his own dialect. Disguised as a writer's manual, King's latest yarn spills out the story of his life, which happens to revolve around writing. Fans will be eager to hear the master tell where his stories, his dialogue, his characters, and his language began. And, more than in any previous narration, King's energy and emotion radiate around his favorite subject, literature. At the end he relives a recent bone-crushing accident, precipitated by a character right out of one of his own novels. The author/patient recounts his discovery that his passionate mania for writing helps mend both bones and heart. J.A.H. \u00a9 AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Amazon.com Review Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches , not Sandra Dee. \"I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.\" But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of \"I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber.\" As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie . King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery , the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers , and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). \"There's one novel, Cujo , that I barely remember writing.\" King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's \"tool kit\": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo From Booklist King could write a phone book and make it not only a best-seller but also gripping reading. So expect his fiction-writing how-to to be a megahit that reaches plenty of readers besides wanna-be novelists. It is riveting, thanks to King's customary flair for the vernacular and conversational tone, and to the fact that he flanks his advice with two memoirs, the latter recalling his near-fatal 1999 stint as the victim of a bad driver. The first memoir, \"C.V.,\" concentrates on his life as a writer, which began in childhood. It took some time to publish for money, but ever since Carrie garnered $400,000 for paperback rights, he has been the Stephen King. He loves to write, though he emphasizes it is far more work than play. Loving it is essential, though, and having a good \"toolbox,\" full of vocabulary, grammar, and the usage and mechanics prescribed by Strunk and White's perdurable Elements of Style , is next most important. It is invaluable to read a lot, and the key to novel writing is following the story--not a plot that can be charted or outlined, but the developments natural for the characters, given the situation they are in. For himself, King says, good health and a good marriage have been crucial, never more so than during his recovery from the accident. Good advice and a good, ordinary life, relayed in spunky, vivid prose, are the prime ingredients of what must be considered not at all the usual writer's guide. Ray Olson Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved From Kirkus Reviews Generous, lucid, and passionate, King ( Hearts in Atlantis , 1999, etc.) offers lessons and encouragement to the beginning writer, along with a warts-and-all account of a less-than-carefree life. The composition of this memoir, King's first nonfiction work since Danse Macabre , was interrupted when he was almost killed by a drunk driver in 1999. The first portion of it shares the making of the writer: his impoverished but experientially rich childhood, his first efforts and influences, the threadbare existence he and his wife Tabitha lived until the publication of Carrie , and his remarkable success thereafter. There are some delightful anecdotes here. In a late-night creative frenzy, his wife sleeping in their London hotel room, King asks the concierge for a place to write and is led to Rudyard Kipling's desk. Though intimidated, King proceeds to write the beginnings of Misery , then thanks the concierge, who tells him, \"Kipling died there actually. . . . While writing.\" King discusses his problems with drugs and alcohol and offers an assessment of his own work (he doesn't think much of Insomnia or Rose Madder , but he liked Cujo and regrets that he was too drunk at the time to remember writing any of it). Written largely while recovering from his accident, the rest of the memoir answers the questions King hears from aspiring writers, as well as the questions they should be asking, but don't. With examples that reach from T.S. Eliot to pulp fiction, there's much trenchant material here on how to construct a story, how to revise, and how to go about building a career. King stresses character and situation over plotting, and insists on basics-like Strunk and White and, above all, endless reading and writing. While his proposed output might intimidate some, his enthusiasm wins out.A useful book for any young writer, and a must for fans, this is unmistakably King: friendly, sharply perceptive, cheerfully vulgar, sometimes adolescent in his humor, sometimes impatient with fools, but always sincere in his love of language and writing -- Copyright \u00a9 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. From Library Journal In 1981 King penned Danse Macabre, a thoughtful analysis of the horror genre. Now he is treating his vast readership to another glimpse into the intellect that spawns his astoundingly imaginative works. This volume, slim by King standards, manages to cover his life from early childhood through the aftermath of the 1999 accident that nearly killed him. Along the way, King touts the writing philosophies of William Strunk and Ernest Hemingway, advocates a healthy appetite for reading, expounds upon the subject of grammar, critiques a number of popular writers, and offers the reader a chance to try out his theories. But most important, we who climb aboard for this ride with the master spend a few pleasant hours under the impression that we know what it!s like to think like Stephen King. Recommended for anyone who wants to write and everyone who loves to read. -\"Nancy McNicol, Hagaman Memorial Lib., East Haven, CT Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal Adult/High School-By the time King was 14, the scads of rejection slips he'd accumu-lated grew too heavy for the nail in the wall on which they were mounted. He replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. This straight-up book inspires without being corny, and teens suspicious of adult rhap-sodies to perseverance will let down their guard and be put at ease by the book's gritty conversational tone. The first 100 pages are pure memoir-paeans to the horror movies and fanzines that captivated King as a child, the expected doses of misadventure (weeks of detention for distributing his own satirical zine at school; building an electromagnet that took out the electricity of half a street), and hard times. King writes just as passion-ately in the second half of the book, where the talk turns to his craft. He provides plenty of samples of awkward or awful writing and contrasts them with polished versions. Hand this title to reluctant readers and reluctant writers, sit back, and watch what happens.-Emily Lloyd, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Review \"\"On Writing\" had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's \"The Elements of Style\".\"--Roger Ebert\"A one-of-a-kind classic.\"--\"The Wall Street Journal\"\"The best book on writing. Ever.\"--\"The Plain Dealer\" (Cleveland)\"This is a special book, animated by a unique intelligence, and filled with useful truth.\"--Michael Chabon --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "B002NXORA6", "title": "Provinces of Night: A Novel", "author": "William Gay", "description": "Review \u201cAn extremely seductive read.\u201d\u2013 The Washington Post Book World \u201cGay is unafraid to tackle the biggest of the big themes, nor does he shy away from the grand gesture that makes those themes manifest.\u201d\u2013 The New York Times Book Review \u201cThere is much to admire here: breathtaking, evocative writing and a dark, sardonic humor.\u201d\u2013 USA Today \u201cEarthily idiosyncratic, spookily Gothic . . . an author with a powerful vision.\u201d \u2013 The New York Times From the Trade Paperback edition. Amazon.com Review In his second novel, Provinces of Night , William Gay re-creates the oppressive, evocative atmosphere of the American Deep South that he first explored in his debut novel, The Long Home . Against the backdrop of rural Tennessee in the 1950s, our teenage protagonist, Fleming Bloodworth, finds himself alone in the family home after his father, Boyd, abandons him to hunt down and kill his wife's lover. At the same time, Fleming's grandfather decides to return to his family after 20 years of self-imposed exile. He returns to discover that his remaining two sons, Warren and Brady, are in turn an alcoholic womanizer and a Bible-quoting fantasist who enjoys putting curses on his enemies. This is a self-consciously big novel in the Southern tradition that could easily have buckled under the weight of its own ambition. Instead, Gay pulls it off with ease, presenting us with a stream of unforgettable characters. While the central themes of love, loyalty, and forgiveness are explored seriously and sensitively, the finely wrought prose is also sprinkled with moments of genuine humor as Gay proves that he's not afraid to gently mock his gang of Southern eccentrics. This is a wonderful novel and a worthy successor to the tradition it so obviously admires. --Jane Morris, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author William Gay is the author of the novel The Long Home. His short stories have appeared in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and New Stories from the South 1999 and 2000. He was awarded the 1999 William Peden Award and the 2000 James A. Michener Memorial Priz --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly Like one of Wallace Stevens's best-known poems, Gay's (The Long Home) second novel begins with a jar on a hill in TennesseeDonly this one appears to contain tiny human bones. That's a suitably ominous prelude to the dark saga of the Bloodworth clan, which revolves mostly around 17-year-old Fleming, an aspiring writer trying to evade the family legacy of violence and self-destruction. It is 1952 and his father, Boyd, has left their decrepit mountain home \"seventy miles back of Nashville\" for Detroit, not to work in an automobile factory like the other \"hillbillies\" but to search forDand killDthe peddler who has run off with his wife. Meanwhile, Fleming's grandfather, E.F. Bloodworth, a blues musician, is on his way home after having suffered a \"stroke of paralysis\" 20 years earlier. His handsome Uncle Warren, a former war hero now at loose ends, is a dissipated womanizer with an even more dissolute and unstable son, and his Uncle Brady \"witches\" for water, tells fortunes and casts hexes on those who do him wrong. Even as the Tennessee Valley Authority is moving in to clear and flood their valley and bring in \"the electricity,\" Fleming's relatives and neighbors live by the backwoods code of violence exemplified by E.F., a man whose exploits are legendary among the locals. Only Raven Lee Halfacre, the 16-year-old daughter of a promiscuous alcoholic and the \"prettiest girl in a three county area,\" offers the boy a glimpse of another way of life. Fleming's name echoes that of one of Faulkner's most memorable characters, and Gay's prose resembles that of Faulkner at his most florid. His stylistic quirksDespecially his refusal to set off dialogue with quotation marksDtake some getting used to, but the pitch-perfect rendition of the cadences of Southern speech and deeply poetic descriptions of the landscape more than compensate. (Dec. 26) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner urged future writers to remember \"the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing.\" Gay must have listened, because his second novel is a powerful story of honor, love, and other conflicts of the human heart. E. F. Bloodsworth returns to his dying hometown in Tennessee after 20 years away. His wife has grown old. His oldest child drinks and philanders up and down the East Coast, while his youngest child sits on his front porch, hexing the mailman. His middle son, Boyd, has left town to kill his wife's lover. Only Boyd's son, the bookish Fleming, gives E. F. his due respect. These two members of the cursed and broken Bloodsworth family, grandfather and grandson, must carve out some redemption in the little time they have left. The story that unfolds offers southern writing at its very finest, soaked through with the words and images of rural Tennessee, packed full of that which really matters, the problems of the human heart. John Green Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Inside Flap 952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman\u2019s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he\u2019s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won\u2019t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he\u2019s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.\u2019s grandson, is pleased with the old man\u2019s homecoming, but Fleming\u2019s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent --This text refers to the paperback edition. From Library Journal After a hugely successful debut with The Long Home, Gay delivers another remarkable literary powerhouse. Gay re-creates the sights and sounds of rural Tennessee, which soon becomes home for the reader. Home, in this case, is a place of great emotional turmoil as three generations of Bloodworths struggle to love and leave one another. All of the Bloodworths but young Fleming seem to be either crazy or on their way there. Fleming, however, is captivated by his infamous grandfather, a crusty, caustic blues guitarist, who after 20 years of wandering has returned to settle his affairs before he dies. Even as he struggles to understand his family's irreconcilable views of the old man, Fleming grows attached to him. It is through his grandfather's music that Fleming encounters the beautiful and careless Raven Lee, who offers him the only chance he has ever had to change his future. Full to the hilt with deeply engrossing characters and surroundings, this novel will surely capture the hearts and minds of any reader.DShannon Haddock, Bellsouth Corporate Lib. & Business Research Ctr., Birmingham, AL Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Back Cover It's 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman's Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he's been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won't be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he's an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.'s grandson, is pleased with the old man's homecoming, but Fleming's life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre. In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption-a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.\" --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0470039094", "title": "Markets in Profile", "author": "Robert B. Dalton", "description": "From the Inside Flap Fifteen years since publishing Mind over Markets\u0097their seminal work on markets and investor behavior\u0097Dalton, Jones, and Dalton have greatly expanded their scope, delving deeply into the ways in which the auction process reveals the actions of all investor time frames. They believe that by understanding timeframe behavior through developing market structure, it is possible to identify asymmetric opportunities that can ameliorate risk and help ensure financial dominance. This book is a bold call to action for all investors\u0097from day traders through the longest-term individual investors, to traditional asset managers and hedge funds that control trillions of dollars. It challenges serious traders, investors, and researchers to reach beyond price-based market analysis and traditional fundamental research for a more contextual approach . . . an approach that translates the principles of behavioral finance into actionable reality by examining the relationship between price, time, and volume. The authors take a profoundly different approach toward the traditional separation between day, short-, intermediate-, and long-term investors, pointing out that even the longest-term professional investor is a day trader on the day they enter, exit, trim, or add to a position. Lead author Jim Dalton and coauthor Eric Jones\u0097having been heavily involved in selecting hedge funds and traditional managers for a leading Wall Street financial services firm\u0097can attest to the importance of each basis point of performance in a world where one quarter's results can trigger financial triumph or a quick exodus. In May of 2006, two months before the book was to be delivered to the publisher, the U.S. stock market broke eight percent in a matter of days\u0097sending investors and the media into a tailspin. The authors saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate their theories in real-time, as opposed to cherry-picking historical events that supported their claims. The event unfolds in Chapter 6 and the authors offer sound advice and strategies on how to navigate market activity yet to unfold. The results are summarized in the Appendix, which was written after the book was submitted to the publisher. You be the judge. Filled with in-depth insight and expert advice, Markets in Profile teaches you the market's basic auction process, redefines how to view and conduct research, separates the markets into different time frames, illustrates the importance of inventory imbalances, and, in sum, demystifies market behavior by showing you how to organize the market's auction process in a scientific, systematic way. From the Back Cover Praise for MARKETS in PROFILE \"Good books teach, but the best books enlighten. Markets in Profile is much more than a lucid explanation of the Market Profile and its application; it is an enlightening perspective on auction markets and the principles underlying all trading, regardless of time frame. Clearly written with many practical examples, Markets in Profile moves seamlessly from trading how-to's to trading psychology and back again, emphasizing the trader's dual challenge of understanding markets and understanding self. In so doing, authors Dalton, Dalton, and Jones have produced a worthy successor to their classic Mind over Markets.\" \u2015Brett N. Steenbarger, PhD, author of The Psychology of Trading and Enhancing Trader Performance \" Markets in Profile is a brilliant, insightful work that should be required reading for any trader. Dalton, Dalton, and Jones will transform your trading technique through their unique knowledge of the markets and understanding of trading psychology.\" \u2015Martin Sheridan, commodities trader, NYMEX member \"This book provides a fresh approach to behavioral finance\u2015ideas that I have used to great benefit.\" \u2015Gregory A. Ehret, Senior Managing Director, State Street Global Advisors \"Few people understand the dynamics of the auction process as well as Jim Dalton. Market Profile offers a graphic representation of this process and Markets in Profile illustrates Jim's mastery of it.\" \u2015Steve Dickey, Vice President of Market Data Products, Chicago Board of Trade \"Market data speak volumes and Jim Dalton has deciphered the code. In Markets in Profile, Jim shares his techniques of profitable trading in a most readable and entertaining format. Serious traders, both professional and amateur, should benefit from the application of Jim's volumetric approach to reading what investors are telling us through their collective buy-sell transactions.\" \u2015Walter Sall, professional investor About the Author JAMES F. DALTON has been a pioneer in the popularization of the Market Profile, a unique method of identifying trading/investment opportunities. Most recently, Mr. Dalton was director of research for managed accounts at UBS Financial Services. He began his career in the investment industry as a broker with Merrill Lynch and Shearson Lehman. ROBERT BEVAN DALTON is a freelance writer and creative director for a variety of agencies, organizations, and nonprofits in the great northwest. ERIC T. JONES has observed markets and investors throughout his twenty-three years of developing investment products and leading investment manager research teams. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Markets in Profile Profiting from the Auction Process By James F. Dalton Robert Bovan Dalton Eric T. Jones John Wiley & Sons Copyright \u00a9 2007 John Wiley & Sons, LtdAll right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-470-03909-0 Chapter One The Only Constant It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. -W. Edwards Deming My first car was a used '49 Chevy. We could pull it into the garage and change the plugs, set the timing, clean the carburetor and be on our way. Back then, it was relatively easy to understand engines and how to keep them running smoothly. Today, if someone asked me to explain the first thing about what's happening under the hood of my car, I wouldn't have a clue. There's a parallel between that Chevy and my first excursion into the world of investing. When I became a stockbroker in the late sixties, my choices were pretty simple: common stocks, preferreds, a few warrants, limited over-the-counter options, U.S. government treasuries, municipals and corporate bonds, and cash. While there were mutual funds, they were extremely limited and many brokerage firms discouraged brokers from selling them to customers. The financial markets have moved from simple to complex at a rate of change that is impossible to fully grasp. This accelerating complexity has been multiplied by the Internet explosion, global expansion, and myriad other factors, leaving individual traders and investors bewildered and grasping at narrow fragments of the larger picture, or subscribing to the beliefs of supposed experts who promise clarity and shelter from the information maelstrom. It's no wonder that the current financial atmosphere is one of continual change and uncertainty. In his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), Thomas S. Kuhn examines the way change realigns the \"received beliefs\" of any given community; because a community's participants define themselves according to the ideas they share, they often take great pains to defend those ideas. In fact, it's not uncommon for this defensive posture to result in the active suppression of new theories that undermine reigning assumptions. Therefore research, Kuhn writes, is not about discovering new truths, but rather \"a strenuous and devoted attempt\" to force new data into accepted conceptual boxes. In short, change threatens the very terms with which we identify who we are (and how we invest our money). But history has proved that in all things stasis never lasts-eventually an anomaly arises that is so compelling it cannot be ignored or dismissed as a \"radical theory.\" Inevitably, the anomaly unseats the norm, resulting in a paradigm shift in shared assumptions. These shifts, as Kuhn describes them, are nothing short of revolutionary. Paradigm shifts force a community to reconstruct its foundation of belief. Facts are reevaluated. Data are examined through new lenses and, despite vehement resistance by those who refuse to let go of outdated ideas, the old paradigm is overthrown. A new community is established, and the \"radical theories\" are accepted as the new normative establishment. The cycle of change begins again. How important is change? Think about the many powerful institutions and intrepid individuals that once lead the fray and who are now long gone; those who recognize change early can take advantage of change, those who can't overturn their past beliefs get left behind. That pattern repeats itself endlessly in all human endeavors. In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), Malcolm Gladwell defined the way people react to change by classifying them on a spectrum: innovators : early adopters : early majority : late majority : laggards We are going to show you how to use market-generated information to identify and adapt to change before your competitors-once the majority recognizes that change is occurring, all assymetric opportunity is lost. This book challenges you to be an innovator, to overturn (change) many of the assumptions that now guide your perception of economic and market conditions. You may be faced with information that runs counter to the prevailing beliefs of those whom you have trusted for guidance. Daniel Kahneman said it best: \"Resistance is the initial fate of all new paradigms. Often this resistance is strongest among the institutions responsible for teaching and upholding the status quo.\" To begin, we address change in the financial markets from the broadest perspective, which is from the point of view of investors who operate in the longest timeframe. But it is important to note that this same process occurs for traders/investors of all timeframes-those who capitalize on five-minute price swings, day traders who make several daily decisions, short-term traders who hold positions for several days, intermediate-term traders who track bracket extremes, as well traders who hold their positions for several months or even years. What we are addressing, across all timeframes, is how change occurs. We believe that the financial markets-and therefore all participants, businesses, and industries dependent on the markets-are at the vortex of a truly significant change. Over the coming years, investors, traders, portfolio managers, financial advisors, pension consultants, and even academics will all have to pick their spot on the spectrum of change ... and win or lose because of it. There is no single key driver behind the change we're experiencing. Rather, a series of developments-some connected and some not-over the past 30 years have created the evolution that is now underway. The balance of this chapter introduces these events and their implications on the financial markets and those who operate within them (traders, portfolio managers, advisors, etc.). To help you visualize the following discussion, Figure 1.1 illustrates several key developments of recent market history in the context of the U.S. equity market. THE CREATION OF ERISA The first serious change in the modern financial services business took place in the early seventies, partly as a result of the U.S. bear market that culminated in October 1974. Leading to the trend's nadir, equity valuation had decreased by approximately 40 percent (see Figure 1.1), the bond market had dropped an equivalent amount, and there was an estimated 35 percent decline in purchasing power. It should come as no surprise that innovation flourished under these extreme conditions; change demands the surrender of security, and in 1974 the very notion of security was cast in doubt. Not surprisingly, new government regulations designed to protect employees' hard-earned retirement funds followed closely on the heels of this cataclysmic plunge. Enter ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act), enacted in 1974 and designed to protect employee pensions. While performance measurement had got under way in the 1960s, ERISA increased focus on return relative to risk, which jumpstarted a new era of corporate accountability. While this new accountability was clearly needed, ERISA was concerned more with the process by which pension-investment decisions were made, rather than with the investments themselves, which had the effect of ushering in an industry that focused on asset allocation, manager selection, and performance evaluation. Pension funds began to exercise more prudence when selecting money managers, hiring consultants to assist them in meeting their fiduciary responsibilities. The pension-consulting industry-began to boom. On the surface, ERISA had many positives-it improved diversification and disclosure and promoted standards that enabled investors to better understand and compare investment performance. However, lurking below the surface was a negative that would take years to fully reveal itself: many of the processes implemented as a result of ERISA served to stifle innovation and creativity in the investment management business. THE RISE AND FALL OF RELATIVE PERFORMANCE The push toward improved diversification and process transparency resulted in managers developing extremely specific approaches to investing (see Figure 1.2). In turn, consultants needed improved ways to judge how individual managers were performing relative to the market, and relative to each other. Consultants initially used broad markets indices to gauge performance. However, as more and more specialty managers began to appear, benchmarks began to evolve and, as with all change, these evolutions became increasingly complex. Specialized market indexes were employed to gauge performance. Categories were formed so that managers could be compared against their peers. Consultants pigeonholed asset managers into distinct styles so they could more easily monitor their activity and fire them (or not hire them) if they didn't fit neatly into preconceived categories. Over time, this forced many money managers to become highly specialized, focusing on individual styles like growth or value, which in turn were further broken down into large-cap, mid-cap, and small-cap strategies, as well as a host of other variations. Throughout the Great Bull market that began in 1982 and ran for almost 20 years, managers that attempted to be creative and innovative sometimes found that their ability to raise assets diminished-even if they had stellar track records-because they no longer fit within a convenient category. The perceived institutional need to compare performance to peers and market benchmarks resulted in most of the focus being on relative performance , rather than absolute performance . (In short, \"relative return\" has to do with how an asset class performs relative to a benchmark, such as the S&P 500. \"Absolute return\" speaks to the absolute gain or loss an asset or portfolio posts over a certain period.) The relativistic approach to evaluating performance proved to be a boon for asset managers, in that they could now focus on constructing portfolios that had only to equal or perform marginally better than market benchmarks- regardless of whether performance was positive or negative . Relativism provided a windfall for asset managers, in that it often masked poor absolute performance; an asset manager with a negative return could still win the Boeing pension fund simply by outperforming peers and benchmarks! As long as performance was measured on a relative basis, the money management industry continued to raise significant assets (upon which fees could be charged). While this wasn't so detrimental during the rising markets of the time, the relative-performance crutch did little to prepare managers to compete in the less certain markets that followed the end of the great bull market in 2000. The tide would soon turn: Once it was clear that the market was no longer going up, clients would begin to demand that their managers do more than simply match the market. THE FALL OF THE GREAT BULL Coupled with an extended bull market, the enactment of ERISA had the effect of codifying modern portfolio theory (MPT) in the eyes of the majority of investors and investment managers. (In a nutshell, MPT emphasizes that risk is an inherent part of higher reward, and that investors can construct portfolios in order to optimize risk for expected returns.) For fiduciaries, the concept of controlled risk through diverse asset allocation is certainly appealing. When markets are \"behaving\" (as they were for nearly two bullish decades) the return, risk, and correlation assumptions used to generate asset allocation analyses tend to sync relatively well with market activity; a trend is predictable as long as it continues. In this environment, modern portfolio theory became the comfortable thread that held the financial markets' complex patchwork quilt together. Within this model, asset managers that performed well on a relative basis within a single, easily identifiable style could consistently raise assets. Once they stepped away from their advertised style, however, their opportunities became limited. An unfortunate result of this phenomenon was that this narrow, restrictive environment tended to limit the growth of asset managers' skill base. It's difficult to understand how talented, competitive individuals allowed themselves to remain locked into one specific management style for so long, especially when that style had clearly fallen out of favor. I saw managers literally go out of business rather than change their investment approach. As the great bull began to show signs of strain and the equity markets began to behave with far less certainty (no longer trending up). It became apparent that the relativistic, MPT-driven business model embraced by traditional asset managers-one in which money was managed on a relative basis, track records were marketed based on relative performance, and performance was measured in relative terms-was plagued by significant weaknesses. Alexander M. Ineichen of Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) estimated that total global equity peaked at a little over $31 trillion at the top of the bull market, falling to approximately $18 trillion at the 2002 low-a decline of approximately 42 percent. As during the 1974 period, the investment community reluctantly began to embrace change in order to cope with the divide that opened between the objectives of traditional money managers and the needs of their clients. One of the prime causes for this divide was that MPT depends on \"reasonable\" assumptions for each asset class. Implicitly, this requires a very long-term view; investors must plan on holding their investments for a long time in order to reap the desired rewards. Unfortunately, when markets failed to cooperate toward the end of the bull market, it became evident that most individuals and institutions have a vastly different perspective of what \"long-term\" means, especially when short-term performance is on the line. During times of market stress, the correlations between asset classes often fall apart, which often results in unexpectedly poor performance. THE RISE OF ABSOLUTE RETURN There appears to be a dearth of insight into how investors respond when the shorter timeframe delivers significantly different results than was advertised and expected for the longer term. But there is no lack of evidence that long-term-minded investors, when confronted with unexpectedly poor short-term results, tend to liquidate their holdings at precisely the wrong time. As the markets became more volatile and uncertain, traders and investors who had broken free of the relativistic herd, embracing an absolute-return philosophy, continued to produce positive returns at a time when the majority of traditional asset managers were posting consistently negative returns (along with the market). Because absolute-return investors measure themselves against the risk-free rate, rather than relative to a market index, they must be more flexible and nimble. They must have the ability to employ a much broader arsenal of investment strategies in order to achieve their goal of delivering consistently positive performance. This group can employ all styles across all capitalizations. They can also short securities, which creates even more opportunities and enables portfolio managers to exploit both overpriced as well as underpriced securities. (Continues...) Excerpted from Markets in Profile by James F. Dalton Robert Bovan Dalton Eric T. Jones Copyright \u00a9 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Business & Finance"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 45.4}, {"asin": "1416571728", "title": "Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking (1) (Ruhlman's Ratios)", "author": "Michael Ruhlman", "description": "Review \"Cooking, like so many creative endeavors, is defined by relationships. For instance, knowing exactly how much flour to put into a loaf of bread isn't nearly as useful as understanding the relationship between the flour and the water, or fat, or salt. That relationship is defined by a 'ratio,' and having a ratio in hand is like having a secret decoder ring that frees you from the tyranny of recipes. Professional cooks and bakers guard ratios passionately so it wouldn't surprise me a bit if Michael Ruhlman is forced into hiding like a modern-day Prometheus, who in handing us mortals a power better suited to the gods, has changed the balance of kitchen power forever. I for one am grateful. I suspect you will be too.\" \u2014Alton Brown, author of I'm Just Here for the Food About the Author Michael Ruhlman is the author of award-winning cookbooks and nonfiction narratives. He is the author of chef Thomas Keller\u2019s seminal The French Laundry Cookbook as well as the highly successful series about the training of chefs: The Making of a Chef , The Soul of a Chef , and The Reach of a Chef . He is also the author of The Elements of Cooking and Ratio . Ruhlman has worked at The New York Times and as a food columnist for the Los Angeles Times . He has attended the Culinary Institute of America and is the author of eighteen books\u2014about food and cooking, and also such wide ranging subjects as a pediatric heart surgeon and building wooden boats. Michael lives with his wife in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Cooking Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.69}, {"asin": "B008SBHG7I", "title": "Ruins", "author": "Achy Obejas", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In 1994 Havana, times are hard: for maladroitly named Usnavy and his family, home is one windowless, sparsely furnished room, and rationing is so tight that pieces of a blanket... beaten and marinated in spices and a little beef broth pass for sandwich meat. When not managing the local bodega or playing dominoes with childhood friends, earnest Usnavy tries to keep his out-of-work wife and 14-year-old daughter from despair and disillusionment. His one treasure, as precious as his mother's legacy, is a most extraordinary lamp\u2026 of multicolor stained glass and shaped like an oversized dome. Around this lamp (a genuine Tiffany?), poet and novelist Obejas spins a mystery with political ramifications. Keeping within the tight frame of Usnavy's day-to-day life, Obejas confronts the ruin of Cuba; the fate of those who escape to the States, and those who remain; and broad issues of religious and sexual identity. With the deft and evocative detail of a poet's, Obejas's prose is as illuminating and honest as her struggling protagonist. (Mar.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From the Publisher Ruins has been selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program! About the Author Achy Obejas is the award-winning author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, We Came all the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?, and editor of Havana Noir. A long-time contributor to the Chicago Tribune, she was part of the 2001 investigative team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the series, 'Gateway to Gridlock.' From Booklist *Starred Review* A fatherless child named in honor of the big U.S. Navy ships in Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Usnavy, weary and destitute at 54 in 1994, still believes fervently in Cuba\u2019s Communist mission even though his neighbors are fleeing to the U.S. under the cover of darkness on anything that will float. Usnavy works, navigates state bureaucracy, plays dominos in the square with his ribald buddies, and basks in the radiance of his only treasure, an opulent, Tiffany-like stained-glass lamp. A rare object of beauty, an embodiment of light and transcendence, it links humble and honest Usnavy to a hidden facet of Cuban history, and to the freer world of creativity and its shadow side of greed and desperation,\u00a0deception and secret justice. Following the substantial Days of Awe (2001), prizewinning, ever-innovative Cuban American writer Obejas evinces a new, focused lyricism as she penetrates to the very heart of the Cuban paradox in a story as pared down and intense as its narrator\u2019s life. Inlaid with images of transformation, this Havana story in the Hemingway mode illuminates the tragedies and resiliency of a twilight land caught in the spell of a failed dream and portrays with exquisite sensitivity a man reaching toward the light. --Donna Seaman Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.49}, {"asin": "B00845508K", "title": "Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular", "author": "L. Rust Hills", "description": "Review \u201cWhen [Hills] writes about writing, we should all pay close attention.\u201d \u2014Richard Yates \u00a0 \u201cAdmirable, wise, and comradely.\u201d \u2014John Leggett \u00a0 \u201cEvery aspiring fiction writer ought to read this.\u201d \u2014 Writer\u2019s Digest About the Author L. Rust Hills (1924\u20132008) was best known as the longtime fiction editor of Esquire . He was also the author of the trilogy The Memoirs of a Fussy Man . Amazon.com Review \"There are now not enough commercial magazines regularly publishing literary fiction to count on the fingers of a single hand,\" says Rust Hills. So why bother writing literary short stories, or books about doing so? Because, says Hills, a longtime fiction editor at Esquire , \"what young writers want to write, or ought to want to write, is literature.\" In Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular , Hills examines \"the essential techniques of fiction and how they function.\" The short story is a tricky form, with no margin for error: \"The successful contemporary short story,\" says Hills, \"will demonstrate a more harmonious relationship of all its aspects than will any other literary art form, excepting perhaps lyric poetry.\" Many of the fictional elements discussed in this book will not be new to most fiction writers. We know that stories must have beginnings, middles, and ends; we know about epiphany and suspense and stock characters. But Hills claims that much of how we look at fiction derives from drama theory and from the formulas of \"slick fiction\" (fiction that once served the purpose mindless television now serves). Learned but not pedantic, Hills addresses these elements strictly in terms of literary short fiction. An interesting side note here is Hills's discussion of the shift in support for American writers. \"It is no longer the book publishers and magazines,\" he says, \"but rather the colleges and universities that ... provide the major financial support for the great majority of American writers today.\" Given that, we might find it odd that this book comes from a man best known for his magazine editing. But we shouldn't. \"Teaching fiction writing and editing magazine fiction have ... the same rather odd ultimate purpose in common: trying to get someone else to produce a fine short story.\" One caveat emptor: our copy of this edition fell quite apart upon our first, gentle reading of it. --Jane Steinberg --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 1.99}, {"asin": "908227860X", "title": "Understanding Price Action: practical analysis of the 5-minute time frame", "author": "Bob Volman", "description": "Review About the Author Bob Volman (1961) is an independent trader working solely for his own account. He is the author of Forex Price Action Scalping , a book widely acclaimed by active scalpers for its ingenuity and practical usefulness, and in steady demand since its first publication in 2011. Understanding Price Action is his second volume on price technical trading, containing all the insights and practicalities any trader could ever hope to find within a single trading guide. Free excerpts (PDF) can be downloaded from www.upabook.wordpress.com", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "International"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "159184052X", "title": "Balance Sheet Basics: Financial Management for Nonfinancial Managers", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Ronald C. Spurga , CFP, has worked as an investment banker and Wall Street analyst for several decades. He received his graduate degree from Dartmouth College and taught at Rutgers University, Fordham University, and New York University.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 13.0}, {"asin": "B007XIC45Q", "title": "Citizen Vince: An Edgar Award Winner", "author": "Jess Walter", "description": "From Booklist It's October 1980, and laid-back loner Vince Camden never misses a morning making maple bars at the doughnut shop he manages in Spokane, Washington. And he rarely misses a night relieving locals of their bankrolls at an after-hours poker game, selling his hooker pals pot at cost, and running a lucrative credit-card theft ring. Vince has landed in eastern Washington via the witness-protection plan, and he is starting to like the simple pleasures, including receiving his first voter-registration card. So even when a hit man, a local cop, and Mob-boss-in-waiting John Gotti get Vince in their crosshairs, he keeps trying to figure out if he should pull the lever for Reagan or Carter. This tale of unlikely redemption works because of Walter's virtuoso command of character and dialogue--along with a wicked second-act twist. The novel is also a gritty love letter to Spokane and all the other second-tier cities where residents don't realize how good they've got it, and with its Capara-like spirit, it serves as a surprisingly satisfying antidote to the avalanche of cynical chatter emanating from this year's political campaigns and commentators. Frank Sennett Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201c(An) immensely entertaining crime thriller and wry social commentary.\u201d (Chicago Tribune)\u201cRich in robust characters ad wry dialogue, with agile prose, a big heart and a finely tuned plot.\u201d (Seattle Times)\u201cA splendidly entertaining, thoughtful book ... Jess Walter continues to impress.\u201d (Sunday Telegraph)\u201cWhat makes Walter\u2019s third novel so enjoyable is Vince, a flawed but sympathetic character trying to find redemption.\u201d (Library Journal)1st Place, General Trade-Jacket, New York Book Show (No Source) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Bookmarks Magazine Jess Walter, who steps back in history for his third novel, brings back an \"utterly inventive\" tale of crime and politics ( Washington Post ). Walter, whose previous books include Land of the Blind and a non-fiction account of the Ruby Ridge massacre, Every Knee Shall Bow , seems to have found his stride as a novelist. Critics praise the author\u2019s ability to straddle\u2014or shatter\u2014the conceits of the mystery novel, while offering a sincere, at times hilarious, rumination on the challenges of citizenship and the price of freedom. Except for the Seattle Times \u2019s vote against the stream of consciousness chapters that delve into Reagan and Carter\u2019s minds, the pundits all agree: Citizen Vince is the real deal. Copyright \u00a9 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover At 1:59 a.m. in Spokane, Washington\u2014eight days before the 1980 presidential election\u2014Vince Camden pockets his stash of stolen credit cards and drops by an all-night poker game before heading to his witness-protection job dusting crullers at Donut Make You Hungry. Along with a neurotic hooker girlfriend, this is the total sum of Vince's new life. But when a familiar face shows up in town, Vince realizes his sordid past is still too close behind him. During the next unforgettable week, he'll negotiate a coast-to-coast maze of obsessive cops, eager politicians, and assorted mobsters\u2014only to find that redemption might exist, of all places, in the voting booth. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap At 1:59 a.m. in Spokane, Washington--eight days before the 1980 presidential election--Vince Camden pockets his stash of stolen credit cards and drops by an all-night poker game before heading to his witness-protection job dusting crullers at Donut Make You Hungry. Along with a neurotic hooker girlfriend, this is the total sum of Vince's new life. But when a familiar face shows up in town, Vince realizes his sordid past is still too close behind him. During the next unforgettable week, he'll negotiate a coast-to-coast maze of obsessive cops, eager politicians, and assorted mobsters--only to find that redemption might exist, of all places, in the voting booth. -- Library Journal --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Citizen Vince By Jess Walter HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright \u00a9 2008 Jess WalterAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780061577659 Chapter One One day you know more dead people than live ones. The thought greets Vince Camden as he sits up in bed, frantic, casting around a dark bedroom for proof of his existence and finding only props: nightstand, dresser, ashtray, clock. Vince breathes heavily. Sweats in the cool air. Rubs his eyes to shake the dust of these musings, not a dream exactly, this late-sleep panic -- fine glass thin as paper, shattered and swirling, cutting as it blows away. Vince Camden pops his jaw, leans over, and turns off the alarm just as the one, five, and nine begin their fall. Each morning at 1:59 he sits up like this and turns off the clock radio in the split second before two and the shrill blast of alarm. He wonders: How is a thing like that possible? And yet ... if you can manage such a trick -- every morning waking up a few ticks before your alarm goes off -- why couldn't you count all the dead people you know? Start with Grandparents. Two sets. One grandfather had a second wife. That's five. Vince runs a toothbrush over his molars. Mother and father. Seven. Does a stillborn sister count? No. A person has to have been alive to be dead. By the time he finishes his shower, blow-dries his hair, and gets dressed -- gray slacks, longsleeve black dress shirt, two buttons open -- he's gone through family, neighbors, and former associates: already thirty-four people he knows to be dead. Wonders if that's high, if it's normal to know so many dead people. Normal. That word tails him from a safe distance most days. He opens a drawer and pulls out a stack of forged credit cards, looks at the names on the cards: Thomas A. Spaulding. Lane Bailey. Margaret Gold. He imagines Margaret Gold's lovely normal life, a crocheted afghan tossed over the back of her sofa. How many dead people could Margaret Gold possibly know? Vince counts out ten credit cards -- including Margaret Gold's -- and puts these in the pocket of his windbreaker. Fills the other pocket with Ziploc bags of marijuana. It's 2:16 in the morning when Vince slides his watch onto his wrist, careful not to catch the thick hair on his forearm. Oh yeah, Davie Lincoln -- retarded kid used to carry money in his mouth while he ran errands for Coletti in the neighborhood. Choked on a half-dollar. Thirty-five. Vince stands in the tiny foyer of his tiny house, if you can call a coatrack and a mail slot a foyer. Zips his windbreaker and snaps his cuffs out like a Vegas dealer leaving the table. Steps out into the world. About Vince Camden: he is thirty-six and white. Single. Six feet tall, 160 pounds, broad-shouldered and thin, like a martini glass. Brown and blue, as the police reports have recorded his hair and eyes. His mouth curls at the right corner, thick eyebrows go their own way, and this casts his face in perpetual smirk, so that every woman who has ever been involved with him eventually arrives at the same expression, hands on hips, head cocked: Please. Be serious . Vince is employed in midlevel management, food industry: baking division -- donuts. Generally, there is less to making donuts than one might assume. But Vince likes it, likes getting to work at 4:30 in the morning and finishing before lunch. He feels as if he's gotten one over on the world, leaving his place of employment for lunch and simply not coming back. He's realizing this is a fixed part of his personality, this desire to get one over on the world. Maybe there is a hooky gene. Outside, he pulls the collar of his windbreaker against his cheeks. Cold this morning: late October. Freezing, in fact -- the steam leaks from his mouth and reminds him of an elementary school experiment with dry ice, which reminds him of Mr. Harlow, his fifth-grade teacher. Hanged himself after it became common knowledge that he was a bit too fond of his male students. Thirty-six. It's a serene world from your front steps at 2:20 in the morning: dim porch lights on houses black with sleep; sidewalks split the dark dewed lawns. But the night has a grimmer hold on Vince's imagination, and he shivers with the creeping sensation -- even as he reminds himself it's impossible -- that he's on the menu tonight. \" So what ... YOU want me to do this thing or not?\" The two men stare across the bench seat of a burgundy Cadillac Seville. The driver asks: \"How much would something like that cost?\" The bigger man, in the passenger seat, is impatient, restless, but he pauses to think. It's a fair question. After all, it is 1980, and the service industries are mired in this stagnant economy, too. Are the criminal sectors subject to the same sad market forces: inflation, deflation, stagflation? Recession? Do thugs suffer double-digit unemployment? Do criminals feel malaise? \"Gratis,\" quotes the passenger. \"Gratis?\" repeats the driver, shifting in the leather seat. \"Yeah.\" And after a pause: \"Means free.\" \"I know what it means. I was just surprised. That's all. You're saying you'll help me out with this guy for free?\" \"I'm saying we'll work something out.\" \"But it won't cost me anything?\" \"We'll work it out.\" And it says something about the man driving the Cadillac that in addition to not knowing what the word gratis means, he also doesn't realize that nothing is free. Continues... Excerpted from Citizen Vince by Jess Walter Copyright \u00a9 2008 by Jess Walter. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Jess Walter est n\u00e9 en 1965. En tant que journaliste, il a collabor\u00e9 \u00e0 Neewsweek, au Washington Post et au Boston Globe. Il vit \u00e0 Spokane, Washington. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 12.49}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0084753UI", "title": "Lord Jim", "author": "Allan H. Simmons", "description": "From the Publisher This book is in Electronic Paperback Format. If you view this book on any of the computer systems below, it will look like a book. Simple to run, no program to install. Just put the CD in your CDROM drive and start reading. The simple easy to use interface is child tested at pre-school levels. Windows 3.11, Windows/95, Windows/98, OS/2 and MacIntosh and Linux with Windows Emulation. Includes Quiet Vision's Dynamic Index. the abilty to build a index for any set of characters or words. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One HE WAS an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun, but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically. His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain cheerily, forcing upon him a card--the business card of the ship-chandler--and on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things that are eaten and drunk on board ship; where you can get everything to make her seaworthy and beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her cable to a book of gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern; and where her commander is received like a brother by a ship-chandler he has never seen before. There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars, writing implements, a copy of harbour regulations, and a warmth of welcome that melts the salt of a three months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The connection thus begun is kept up, as long as the ship remains in harbour, by the daily visits of the water-clerk. To the captain he is faithful like a friend and attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the bill is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane occupation. Therefore good water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk who possesses Ability in the abstract has also the advantage of having been brought up to the sea, he is worth to his employer a lot of money and some humouring. Jim had always good wages and as much humouring as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with black ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart. To his employers the reasons he gave were obviously inadequate. They said \"Confounded fool!\" as soon as his back was turned. This was their criticism on his exquisite sensibility.To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he was just Jim--nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to another--generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia--and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say--Lord Jim.Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back, a paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses tacked along a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a \"training-ship for officers of the mercantile marine.\"He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation and pulled stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head with an excellent physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was in the fore-top, and often from there he looked down, with the contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude of roofs cut in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered on the outskirts of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose perpendicular against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke like a volcano. He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet, with the hazy splendour of the sea in the distance, and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shell-fish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men--always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.\"Something's up. Come along.\"He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders. Above could be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and when he got through the hatchway he stood still--as if confounded.It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since noon, stopping the traffic on the river and now blew with the strength of a hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns firing over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided, and between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling tide, the small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore, the motionless buildings in the driving mist, the broad ferryboats pitching ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-stages heaving up and down and smothered in sprays. The next gust seemed to blow all this away. The air was full of flying water. There was a fierce purpose in the gale, a furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his breath in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.He was jostled. \"Man the cutter!\" Boys rushed past him. A coaster running in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor, and one of the ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of boys clambered on the rails, clustered round the davits. \"Collision. Just ahead of us. Mr. Symons saw it.\" A push made him stagger against the mizzen-mast, and he caught hold of a rope. The old training-ship chained to her moorings quivered all over, bowing gently head to wind, and with her scanty rigging humming in a deep bass the breathless song of her youth at sea. \"Lower away!\" He saw the boat, manned, drop swiftly below the rail, and rushed after her. He heard a splash. \"Let go; clear the falls!\" He leaned over. The river alongside seethed in frothy streaks. The cutter could be seen in the falling darkness under the spell of tide and wind, that for a moment held her bound, and tossing abreast of the ship. A yelling voice in her reached him faintly: \"Keep stroke, you young whelps, if you want to save anybody! Keep stroke!\" And suddenly she lifted high her bow, and, leaping with raised oars over a wave, broke the spell cast upon her by the wind and tide.Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. \"Too late, youngster.\" The captain of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed on the point of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain of conscious defeat in his eyes. The captain smiled sympathetically. \"Better luck next time. This will teach you to be smart.\"A shrill cheer greeted the cutter. She came dancing back half full of water, and with two exhausted men washing about on her bottom boards. The tumult and the menace of wind and sea now appeared very contemptible to Jim, increasing the regret of his awe at their inefficient menace. Now he knew what to think of it. It seemed to him he cared nothing for the gale. He could affront greater perils. He would do so--better than anybody. Not a particle of fear was left. Nevertheless he brooded apart that evening while the bow-man of the cutter--a boy with a face like a girl's and big grey eyes--was the hero of the lower deck. Eager questioners crowded round him. He narrated: \"I just saw his head bobbing, and I dashed my boat-hook in the water. It caught in his breeches and I nearly went overboard, as I thought I would, only old Symons let go the tiller and grabbed my legs--the boat nearly swamped. Old Symons is a fine old chap. I don't mind a bit him being grumpy with us. He swore at me all the time he held my leg, but that was only his way of telling me to stick to the boat-hook. Old Symons is awfullyexcitable--isn't he? No--not the little fair chap--the other, the big one with a beard. When we pulled him in he groaned, 'Oh, my leg! oh, my leg!' and turned up his eyes. Fancy such a big chap fainting like a girl. Would any of you fellows faint for a jab with a boat-hook?--I wouldn't. It went into his leg so far.\" He showed the boat-hook, which he had carried below for the purpose and produced a sensation. \"No, silly! It was not his flesh that held him--his breeches did. Lots of blood, of course.\"Jim thought it a pitiful display of vanity. The gale had ministered to a heroism as spurious as its own pretence of terror. He felt angry with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for taking him unawares and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow escapes. Otherwise he was rather glad he had not gone into the cutter, since a lower achievement had served the turn. He had enlarged his knowledge more than those who had done the work. When all men flinched, then--he felt sure--he alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas. He knew what to think of it. Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible. He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of a staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided courage. Chapter Two AFTER TWO years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread--but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Besides, his prospects were good. He was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a thorough knowledge of his duties; and in time, when yet very young, he became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.Only once in all that time he had again the glimpse of the earnestness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent as people might think. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention--that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary--the sunshine, the memories, the future,--which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.Jim, disabled by a falling spar at the beginning of a week of which his Scottish captain used to say afterwards, \"Man! it's a pairfect meeracle to me how she lived through it!\" spent many days stretched on his back, dazed, battered, hopeless, and tormented as if at the bottom of an abyss of unrest. He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. Jim saw nothing but the disorder of his tossed cabin. He lay there battened down in the midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck. But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost. Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about it.His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at an Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was slow, and he was left behind. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1900. Originally intended as a short story, the work grew to a full-length novel as Conrad explored in great depth the perplexing, ambiguous problem of lost honor and guilt, expiation and heroism. The title character is a man haunted by guilt over an act of cowardice. He becomes an agent at an isolated East Indian trading post. There his feelings of inadequacy and responsibility are played out to their logical and inevitable end. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature ''Lord Jim belongs to no era because it is timeless, novelistic art at its most sublime. . . Narrator Frederick Davidson is nothing short of perfection in his portrayal of Marlowe's complex persona. . . . '' -- Library Journal --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Book Description An authoritative and closely annotated scholarly edition of Conrad's modernist masterpiece. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born into a Polish family who lived in the Ukraine. At the age of sixteen he went to sea, and later joined the British Merchant Navy, becoming a Master Mariner and a British citizen in 1886. After twenty years at sea, he came to live in England, where he wrote many famous novels, including Lord Jim, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, and The Secret Agent. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile Conrad's haunting story of adventure turned tragedy portrays a young man's struggle against his own weaknesses. Because of its complex characters, shifting settings and roving points of view, Lord Jim needs an attentive and insightful narrator. Nigel Graham is just such a performer. Keeping a cool, steady tone, Graham captures the excitement and terror of the story. Listeners are lead in and out of grueling psychological sketches which run side by side with scenes of intense characterizations and action. Graham handles all with expertise. Vocal characterizations and accents are present but not overwhelming; the narrator ensures the story's continuity. J.S.G. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"One always learns from Cedric Watts. True to form, he provides a reliable text, cogent annotations, and a stimulating, eminently readable introduction to this enigmatic novel. Better still, the selections illustrating Conrad's sources, his reception by contemporaries, and the historical context of his ambivalence about colonialism are rich yet frequently unfamiliar. Is there room for yet another Lord Jim? In the case of Broadview's excellent new edition, the answer is emphatically yes.\" (Laurence Davies )\"Professor Watts's assiduity and thoroughness make this edition of Lord Jim a delight. The edition is meticulous and informed in its comments on the novel, scrupulously but unobtrusively annotated, and offers a judicious selection of supporting material. In short, this edition of the novel sets the standard for its successors to follow.\" (Allan Simmons, General Editor of The Conradian ) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Book Description This edition, established through modern textual scholarship, presents an authoritative text of Conrad's novel. The Introduction traces its sources and contemporary reception. The explanatory notes identify literary and historical references and real-life places and indicate Conrad's main influences. Glossaries, maps and illustrations are provided for further context. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon.com Review This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character who reaches the status of a literary hero. A classic novel. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap Lord Jim is a classic story of one man's tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under the circumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known world which made Conrad's work so immediately popular. But it is also the book in which its author, through a brilliant adaptation of his stylistic apparatus to his obsessive moral, psychological and political concerns, laid the groundwork for the modern novel as we know it. With An Introduction By Norman Sherry An expert on the works of Joseph Conrad, Professor Norman Sherry is the author of Conrad's Eastern World, Conrad's Western World and Conrad and His World. He is also the editor of Conrad: The Critical Heritage, and the official biographer of Graham Greene. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover One of Joseph Conrad\u2019s greatest novels, Lord Jim brilliantly combines adventure and analysis. Haunted by the memory of a moment of lost nerve during a disastrous voyage, Jim submits to condemnation by a Court of Inquiry. In the wake of his disgrace he travels to the exotic region of Patusan, and as the agent at this remote trading post comes to be revered as \u2018Tuan Jim.\u2019 Here he finds a measure of serenity and respect within himself. However, when a gang of thieves arrives on the island, the memory of his earlier disgrace comes again to the fore, and his relationship with the people of the island is jeopardized. This new Broadview edition is based on the first British edition of 1900, which provides the historical basis for the accompanying critical and contextual discussions. The appendices include a wide variety of Conrad\u2019s source material, documents concerning the scandal of the Jeddah, along with other materials such as a substantial selection of early critical comments. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1900. Originally intended as a short story, the work grew to a full-length novel as Conrad explored in great depth the perplexing, ambiguous problem of lost honor and guilt, expiation and heroism. The title character is a man haunted by guilt over an act of cowardice. He becomes an agent at an isolated East Indian trading post. There his feelings of inadequacy and responsibility are played out to their logical and inevitable end. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature ''Lord Jim belongs to no era because it is timeless, novelistic art at its most sublime. . . Narrator Frederick Davidson is nothing short of perfection in his portrayal of Marlowe's complex persona. . . . '' -- Library Journal --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "World Literature"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": null}, {"asin": "1400080673", "title": "Thunderstruck", "author": "Erik Larson", "description": "Review NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER \u201cLarson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cLarson's gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale...He beautifully captures the awe that greeted early wireless transmissions on shipboard...he restores life to this fascinating, long-lost world.\u201d \u2014 Washington Post \u201cA ripping yarn of murder and invention.\u201d \u2014Los Angeles Times \u201cOf all the non-fiction writers working today, Erik Larson seems to have the most delicious fun...for his newest, destined-to-delight book, Thunderstruck , Larson has turned his sights on Edwardian London, a place alive with new science and seances, anonymous crowds and some stunningly peculiar personalities.\u201d \u2014Chicago Tribune \u201c[Larson] interweaves gripping storylines about a cryptic murderer and the race for technology in the early 20th century. An edge-of-the-seat read.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cCaptivating...with Thunderstruck , Larson has selected another enthralling tale\u2014two of them, actually...[he] peppers the narrative with an engaging array of secondary figures and fills the margins with rich tangential period details...Larson has once again crafted a popular history narrative that is stylistically closer to a smartly plotted novel.\u201d \u2014 Miami Herald \u201cAs he did with The Devil in the White City , Larson has created an intense, intelligent page turner that shows how the march of progress and innovation affect both the world at large and the lives of everyday people.\u201d \u2014 Atlanta Journal-Constitution\u201c Captivating...with Thunderstruck , Larson again demonstrates that he's one of the best nonfiction writers around and proves that real-life murders can be as compelling to read about as fictional ones.\u201d \u2014Dallas/Forth Worth Star-Telegram \u201c[Larson] captures the human capacity for wonder at the turn of the century...[he] has perfected a narrative form of his own invention.\u201d \u2014Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cAn enthralling narrative and vivid descriptions...Larson has done a marvelous job of bringing the distinct stories together in his own unique way. Simply fantastic!\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cSplendid, beautifully written... Thunderstruck triumphantly resurrects the spirit of another age, when one man's public genius linked the world, while another's private turmoil made him a symbol of the end of \"the great hush\" and the first victim of a new era when instant communication, now inescapable, conquered the world.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, which examines how Winston Churchill and his \u201cSecret Circle\u201d went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41. Larson\u2019s The Devil in the White City is set to be a Hulu limited series; his In the Garden of Beasts is under option by Tom Hanks for a feature film. He recently published an audio-original ghost story, No One Goes Alone , which has been optioned by Chernin Entertainment, in association with Netflix. His Thunderstruck has been optioned by Sony Pictures Television for a limited TV series.\u00a0Larson lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is a writer and retired neonatologist; they have three grown daughters. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Ghosts and Gunfire Distraction In the ardently held view of one camp, the story had its rightful beginning on the night of June 4, 1894, at 21 Albemarle Street, London, the address of the Royal Institution. Though one of Britain\u2019s most august scientific bodies, it occupied a building of modest proportion, only three floors. The false columns affixed to its facade were an afterthought, meant to impart a little grandeur. It housed a lecture hall, a laboratory, living quarters, and a bar where members could gather to discuss the latest scientific advances. Inside the hall, a physicist of great renown readied himself to deliver the evening\u2019s presentation. He hoped to startle his audience, certainly, but otherwise he had no inkling that this lecture would prove the most important of his life and a source of conflict for decades to come. His name was Oliver Lodge, and really the outcome was his own fault\u2014 another manifestation of what even he acknowledged to be a fundamental flaw in how he approached his work. In the moments remaining before his talk, he made one last check of an array of electrical apparatus positioned on a demonstration table, some of it familiar, most unlike anything seen before in this hall. Outside on Albemarle Street the police confronted their usual traffic problem. Scores of carriages crowded the street and gave it the look of a great black seam of coal. While the air in the surrounding neighborhood of Mayfair was scented with lime and the rich cloying sweetness of hothouse flowers, here the street stank of urine and manure, despite the efforts of the young, red-shirted \u201cstreet orderlies\u201d who moved among the horses collecting ill-timed deposits. Officers of the Metropolitan Police directed drivers to be quick about exiting the street once their passengers had departed. The men wore black, the women gowns. Established in 1799 for the \u201cdiffusion of knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical improvements,\u201d the Royal Institution had been the scene of great discoveries. Within its laboratories Humphry Davy had found sodium and potassium and devised the miner\u2019s safety lamp, and Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the phenomenon whereby electricity running through one circuit induces a current in another. The institution\u2019s lectures, the \u201cFriday Evening Discourses,\u201d became so popular, the traffic outside so chaotic, that London officials were forced to turn Albemarle into London\u2019s first one-way street. Lodge was a professor of physics at the new University College of Liverpool, where his laboratory was housed in a space that once had been the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. At first glance he seemed the embodiment of established British science. He wore a heavy beard misted with gray, and his head\u2014\u201cthe great head,\u201d as a friend put it\u2014was eggshell bald to a point just above his ears, where his hair swept back into a tangle of curls. He stood six feet three inches tall and weighed about 210 pounds. A young woman once reported that the experience of dancing with Lodge had been akin to dancing with the dome of St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral. Though considered a kind man, in his youth Lodge had exhibited a cruel vein that, as he grew older, caused him regret and astonishment. While a student at a small school, Combs Rectory, he had formed a club, the Combs Rectory Birds\u2019 Nest Destroying Society, whose members hunted nests and ransacked them, smashing eggs and killing fledglings, then firing at the parent birds with slingshots. Lodge recalled once beating a dog with a toy whip but dismissed this incident as an artifact of childhood cruelty. \u201cWhatever faults I may have,\u201d he wrote in his memoir, \u201ccruelty is not one of them; it is the one thing that is utterly repugnant.\u201d Lodge had come of age during a time when scientists began to coax from the mists a host of previously invisible phenomena, particularly in the realm of electricity and magnetism. He recalled how lectures at the Royal Institution would set his imagination alight. \u201cI have walked back through the streets of London, or across Fitzroy Square, with a sense of unreality in everything around, an opening up of deep things in the universe, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the shade, so that the square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed like shadowy unrealities, phantasmal appearances, partly screening, but partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind.\u201d The Royal Institution became for Lodge \u201ca sort of sacred place,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwhere pure science was enthroned to be worshipped for its own sake.\u201d He believed the finest science was theoretical science, and he scorned what he and other like-minded scientists called \u201cpracticians,\u201d the new heathen, inventors and engineers and tinkerers who eschewed theoretical research for blind experimentation and whose motive was commercial gain. Lodge once described the patent process as \u201cinappropriate and repulsive.\u201d As his career advanced, he too was asked to deliver Friday Evening Discourses, and he reveled in the opportunity to put nature\u2019s secrets on display. When a scientific breakthrough occurred, he tried to be first to bring it to public notice, a pattern he had begun as early as 1877, when he acquired one of the first phonographs and brought it to England for a public demonstration, but his infatuation with the new had a corollary effect: a vulnerability to distraction. He exhibited a lofty dilettantism that late in life he acknowledged had been a fatal flaw. \u201cAs it is,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI have taken an interest in many subjects, and spread myself over a considerable range\u2014a procedure which, I suppose, has been good for my education, though not so prolific of results.\u201d Whenever his scientific research threatened to lead to a breakthrough, he wrote, \u201cI became afflicted with a kind of excitement which caused me to pause and not pursue that path to the luminous end. . . . It is an odd feeling, and has been the cause of my not clinching many subjects, not following up the path on which I had set my feet.\u201d To the dismay of peers, one of his greatest distractions was the world of the supernatural. He was a member of the Society for Psychical\u00a0 Research, established in 1882 by a group of level-headed souls, mostly scientists and philosophers, to bring scientific scrutiny to ghosts, s\u00e9ances, telepathy, and other paranormal events, or as the society stated in each issue of its Journal, \u201cto examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.\u201d The society\u2019s constitution stated that membership did not imply belief in \u201cphysical forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.\u201d That the SPR had a Committee on Haunted Houses deterred no one. Its membership expanded quickly to include sixty university dons and some of the brightest lights of the era, among them John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, William E. Gladstone, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), and the Rev. C. L. Dodgson (with the equally prominent pen name Lewis Carroll). The roster also listed Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister of England, and William James, a pioneer in psychology, who by the summer of 1894 had been named the society\u2019s president. It was Lodge\u2019s inquisitiveness, not a belief in ghosts, that first drove him to become a member of the SPR. The occult was for him just one more invisible realm worthy of exploration, the outermost province of the emerging science of psychology. The unveiling during Lodge\u2019s life of so many hitherto unimagined physical phenomena, among them Heinrich Hertz\u2019s discovery of electromagnetic waves, suggested to him that the world of the mind must harbor secrets of its own. The fact that waves could travel through the ether seemed to confirm the existence of another plane of reality. If one could send electromagnetic waves through the ether, was it such an outrageous next step to suppose that the spiritual essence of human beings, an electromagnetic soul, might also exist within the ether and thus explain the hauntings and spirit rappings that had become such a fixture of common legend? Reports of ghosts inhabiting country houses, poltergeists rattling abbeys, spirits knocking on tables during s\u00e9ances\u2014all these in the eyes of Lodge and fellow members of the society seemed as worthy of dispassionate analysis as the invisible travels of an electromagnetic wave. Within a few years of his joining the SPR, however, events challenged Lodge\u2019s ability to maintain his scientific remove. In Boston William James began hearing from his own family about a certain \u201cMrs. Piper\u201d\u2014Lenore Piper\u2014a medium who was gaining notoriety for possessing strange powers. Intending to expose her as a fraud, James arranged a sitting and found himself enthralled. He suggested that the society invite Mrs. Piper to England for a series of experiments. She and her two daughters sailed to Liverpool in November 1889 and then traveled to Cambridge, where a sequence of sittings took place under the close observation of SPR members. Lodge arranged a sitting of his own and suddenly found himself listening to his dead aunt Anne, a beloved woman of lively intellect who had abetted his drive to become a scientist against the wishes of his father. She once had told Lodge that after her death she would come back to visit if she could, and now, in a voice he remembered, she reminded him of that promise. \u201cThis,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwas an unusual thing to happen.\u201d To Lodge, the encounter seemed proof that some part of the human mind persisted even after death. It left him, he wrote, \u201cthoroughly convinced not only of human survival, but of the power to communicate, under certain conditions, with those left behind on the earth.\u201d Partly because of his diverse interests and his delight in new discoveries, by June 1894 he had become one of the Royal Institution\u2019s most popular speakers. The evening\u2019s lecture was entitled \u201cThe Work of Hertz.\u201d Heinrich Hertz had died earlier in the year, and the institution invited Lodge to talk about his experiments, a task to which Lodge readily assented. Lodge had a deep respect for Hertz; he also believed that if not for his own fatal propensity for distraction, he might have beaten Hertz to the history books. In his memoir, Lodge stopped just short of claiming that he himself not Hertz, was first to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. And indeed Lodge had come close, but instead of pursuing certain tantalizing findings, he had dropped the work and buried his results in a quotidian paper on lightning conductors. Every seat in the lecture hall was filled. Lodge spoke for a few\u00a0 moments, then began his demonstration. He set off a spark. The gun- shot crack jolted the audience to full attention. Still more startling was\u00a0 the fact that this spark caused a reaction\u2014a flash of light\u2014in a distant, unattached electrical apparatus. The central component of this apparatus was a device Lodge had designed, which he called a \u201ccoherer,\u201d a tube filled with minute metal filings, and which he had inserted into a conventional electric circuit. Initially the filings had no power to conduct electricity,\u00a0 but when Lodge generated the spark and thus launched electromag- netic waves into the hall, the filings suddenly became conductors\u2014they \u201ccohered\u201d\u2014and allowed current to flow. By tapping the tube with his finger, Lodge returned the filings to their nonconductive state, and the circuit went dead. Though seemingly a simple thing, in fact the audience had never seen anything like it: Lodge had harnessed invisible energy, Hertz\u2019s waves, to cause a reaction in a remote device, without intervening wires. The applause came like thunder. Afterward Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished mathematician and physicist and secretary of the Royal Society, came up to Lodge to congratulate him. He knew of Lodge\u2019s tendency toward distraction. What Lodge had just demonstrated seemed a path that even he might find worthy of focus. \u201cWell, now you can go ahead,\u201d Rayleigh told Lodge. \u201cThere is your life work!\u201d But Lodge did not take Lord Rayleigh\u2019s advice. Instead, once again exhibiting his inability to pursue one theme of research to conclusion, he left for a vacation in Europe that included a scientific foray into a very different realm. He traveled to the Ile Roubaud, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France, where soon very strange things began to happen and he found himself distracted anew, at what would prove to be a critical moment in his career and in the history of science. For even as Lodge conducted his new explorations on the Ile Roubaud, far to the south someone else was hard at work\u2014ingeniously, energetically, compulsively\u2014exploring the powers of the invisible world, with the same tools Lodge had used for his demonstration at the Royal Institution, much to Lodge\u2019s eventual consternation and regret. The Great Hush It was not precisely a vision, like some sighting of the Madonna in a tree trunk, but rather a certainty, a declarative sentence that entered his brain. Unlike other lightning-strike ideas, this one did not fade and blur but retained its surety and concrete quality. Later Marconi would say there was a divine aspect to it, as though he had been chosen over all others to receive the idea. At first it perplexed him\u2014the question, why him, why not Oliver Lodge, or for that matter Thomas Edison? The idea arrived in the most prosaic of ways. In that summer of 1894, when he was twenty years old, his parents resolved to escape the extraordinary heat that had settled over Europe by moving to higher and cooler ground. They fled Bologna for the town of Biella in the Italian Alps, just below the Santuario di Oropa, a complex of sacred buildings devoted to the legend of the Black Madonna. During the family\u2019s stay, he happened to acquire a copy of a journal called Il Nuovo Cimento, in which he read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz written by Augusto Righi, a neighbor and a physics professor at the University of Bologna. Something in the article produced the intellectual equivalent of a spark and in that moment caused his thoughts to realign, like the filings in a Lodge coherer. \u201cMy chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it into practice,\u201d he said later. \u201cIn fact Oliver Lodge had, but he had missed the correct answer by a fraction. The idea was so real to me that I did not realize that to others the theory might appear quite fantastic.\u201d What he hoped to do\u2014expected to do\u2014was to send messages over long distances through the air using Hertz\u2019s invisible waves. Nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible. Quite the opposite. To the rest of the scientific world what he now proposed was the stuff of magic shows and s\u00e9ances, a kind of electric telepathy. His great advantage, as it happens, was his ignorance\u2014and his mother\u2019s aversion to priests. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.29}, {"asin": "0741442124", "title": "A Time for You: A Red Hat Novel", "author": "Jack R. Pyle", "description": "About the Author Jack R. Pyle was born in a no-longer-in existence company coal town in the Mid-West and he was reared in the South by a family of strong women and storytellers. In the spirit of that tradition, Jack writes of the Blue Ridge mountains, the piney flats of Florida and the folklore of moon signs, with an authority that has its deep roots in experience. He is the winner of the 1999 Book of the Year award of the AWA for his novel, The Sound of Distant Thunder, an Appalachian tale of mountain revenge. The real world, warts and all, is his world.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 3.0, "price": "from 6.88"}, {"asin": "1474820972", "title": "365 Stories and Rhymes (Deluxe Edition): Tales of Action and Adventure (365 Treasury)", "author": "Parragon Books Ltd", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}], "target_asin": "B0084753UI"}
{"user_id": "AFLKAISCT3Q3NUZ3E7JJX2FSMQHA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0226589366", "title": "The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion - Our Social Skin, 2nd Edition", "author": "Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann", "description": "About the Author Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann is founder and director of the Public Opinion Research Center in Allensbach, Germany, and professor of communications research at the University of Mainz.", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 30.99}, {"asin": "1483384012", "title": "Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Rights, Liberties, and Justice", "author": "Lee Epstein", "description": "Review \" Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Rights, Liberties, and Justice is superb. It entertains students while forcing them to think about the cases and issues. That is a rare achievement for a textbook. [The book] does a great job of placing the cases within the context of their particular eras and reminds students that you cannot divorce courts and their rulings from the rest of the political structure and the times in which the opinions are issued. The text blends social science and law better than any other available today.\" -- Robert M. Howard \" Constitutional Law for a Changing America is a great teaching textbook. Most constitutional law textbooks begin with an interpretive essay, and then just give the cases one after the other in a separate section. [This book] introduces each topic in a comprehensive way, but then embeds the cases in a narrative that helps students see the cases in context. The authors do a great job of introducing each case, explaining how it relates to other cases and pointing out specific things to look for, to help students think about what they\u2032re reading. Combined with the bullet points in the new editions summarizing the arguments for both sides in each case, this is tremendously effective in helping students learn and understand both the details of the cases and their broader significance. The photos and \"Aftermath\" boxes give students a vivid sense of human stories behind the cases. I use this book with confidence that it will help me teach more effectively.\" -- John Kaplan \" Constitutional Law for a Changing America perfectly balances contextual material with the text of the opinions. No other casebook comes close to matching the depth and breadth of supplementary information. The various tables, charts, and graphs all help students place the Court in the broader context of the American political system. The authors accomplish this while still maintaining a focus on constitutional questions and debates. Especially useful are the \"Arguments\" sections, which are an exceptionally effective tool for engaging students with the different perspectives in the cases.\" -- Chad Westerland \"My students like the Epstein/Walker text not only because the cases are edited in a way that allows for easy reading, but also because the facts and arguments of each case are separated from the decision itself, giving students some guidance in their reading. The additional excerpts provide context for students that they always want to discuss. As an instructor, I like the online bank of cases because the additional resources permit for flexibility in what cases I choose to cover in class.\" -- Amanda DiPaolo About the Author Lee Epstein is Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor\u00a0at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a fellow of the American\u00a0Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political\u00a0and Social Science. A recipient of 12 grants from the National Science\u00a0Foundation for her work on law and legal institutions, Epstein has\u00a0authored or co-authored over 100 articles and essays, as well as 15 books,\u00a0including The Choices Justices Make (co-authored with Jack Knight), which\u00a0won the Pritchett Award for the Best Book on Law and Courts and the\u00a0Lasting Contribution Award for making a \u201clasting impression on the field\u00a0of law and courts.\u201d The Constitutional Law for a Changing America series\u00a0(co-authored with Thomas G. Walker) received the Teaching and Mentoring\u00a0Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science\u00a0Association. Her most recent books are The Behavior of Federal Judges, with William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, and An Introduction to\u00a0Empirical Legal Research, with Andrew D. Martin. Thomas G. Walker is the Goodrich C. White Professor of Political Science at Emory University, where he teaches courses in constitutional law and the judicial process. He is the coauthor of A Court Divided (1988), with Deborah Barrow, which won the V. O. Key, Jr. Award for the best book on southern politics, and the Constitutional Law for a Changing America series, with Lee Epstein. He is also author of Eligible for Execution: The Story of the Daryl Atkins Case (2009).", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.98}, {"asin": "1452226768", "title": "Constitutional Law for a Changing America: Institutional Powers and Constraints, 8th Edition", "author": "Lee Epstein", "description": "Review \u201cThe design and focus of the book are terrific. I use several of the supplemental cases from the resource center in every unit; they are very helpful.\u201d -- Steven B. Lichtman Published On: 2012-12-20\u201cOverall, I like the Epstein and Walker book very much. In particular, I like the cases included as well as the specific excerpts. Additionally, I like the online bank of cases because there are some that I prefer to cover in class. Having the \u2018Facts\u2019 separated from the \u2018Arguments\u2019 is very appreciated and allowed for a more focused discussion during class and students were able to follow along more easily.\u201d -- Kirk Randazzo Published On: 2012-12-20\u201cStudents find the text lively and very helpful. In fact, some had been relying on Internet downloads until they realized how much essential background material they were forfeiting by not using the text. They find the text, moreover, easy to read\u2015anything but ponderous (which many competing casebooks are).\u201d -- Elizabeth Hull Published On: 2012-12-20\u201cThe strengths of the Epstein/Walker text include currency with online updates of most recent post-publication decisions; significant political analysis and editorial commentary to supplement the court\u2019s legal opinions; summary tables of legal doctrine; and boxed comparative information about constitutional law and high courts in other countries. I also find the \u2018Facts\u2019 section critical as it assists students in case analysis that requires comparisons when deciding whether a precedent is controlling or can be distinguished. The \u2018Arguments\u2019 section helps students understand the need to address both sides when answering test problems or writing research papers.\u201d -- Howard Tolley Published On: 2012-12-20\u201cStudents really like the book and have made spontaneous comments in their course evaluations about how much they enjoy the text. The text has several strengths: great use of visuals and graphics; case discussion is quite good at placing cases in historical context; and the boxes with personal interest pieces are also very helpful.\u201d -- Liane C. Kosaki, PhD Published On: 2012-12-20 About the Author Lee Epstein is Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor\u00a0at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a fellow of the American\u00a0Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political\u00a0and Social Science. A recipient of 12 grants from the National Science\u00a0Foundation for her work on law and legal institutions, Epstein has\u00a0authored or co-authored over 100 articles and essays, as well as 15 books,\u00a0including The Choices Justices Make (co-authored with Jack Knight), which\u00a0won the Pritchett Award for the Best Book on Law and Courts and the\u00a0Lasting Contribution Award for making a \u201clasting impression on the field\u00a0of law and courts.\u201d The Constitutional Law for a Changing America series\u00a0(co-authored with Thomas G. Walker) received the Teaching and Mentoring\u00a0Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science\u00a0Association. Her most recent books are The Behavior of Federal Judges, with William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, and An Introduction to\u00a0Empirical Legal Research, with Andrew D. Martin. Thomas G. Walker is the Goodrich C. White Professor of Political Science at Emory University, where he teaches courses in constitutional law and the judicial process. He is the coauthor of A Court Divided (1988), with Deborah Barrow, which won the V. O. Key, Jr. Award for the best book on southern politics, and the Constitutional Law for a Changing America series, with Lee Epstein. He is also author of Eligible for Execution: The Story of the Daryl Atkins Case (2009).", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 11.0}, {"asin": "0316322423", "title": "I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban", "author": "Christina Lamb", "description": "Review \"The touching story will not only inform you of changing conditions in Pakistan, but inspire your rebellious spirit.\"\u2015 Matthew Love, Time Out New York \"Ms. Yousafzai has single-handedly turned the issue of the right of girls-and all children-to be educated into headline news. And she is a figure worth hearing.\"\u2015 Isabel Berwick, The Financial Times \"Wise beyond her years....\"\u2015 Annie Gowen, Marie Claire \"Riveting.... Co-written with Christina Lamb, a veteran British journalist who has an evident passion for Pakistan and can render its complicated history with pristine clarity, this is a book that should be read not only for its vivid drama but for its urgent message about the untapped power of girls.... It is difficult to imagine a chronicle of a war more moving, apart from perhaps the diary of Anne Frank. With the essential difference that we lost that girl, and by some miracle, we still have this one.\"\u2015 Marie Arana, Washington Post \"Remarkable...a must-read, first-person account of her journey through global terrorism, her brave, encouraging parents, and her own fight for girls' education.\"\u2015 MarieClaire.com \"The victory of Malala Yousafzai is that she's just getting started.\"\u2015 Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon \"Briskly written but full of arresting detail.... Striking [and] surprising...\"\u2015 Jill Lawless, Associated Press \"Ms. Yousafzai's stature as a symbol of peace and bravery has been established across the world...\"\u2015 Salman Masood, The New York Times \"Not only has Malala Yousafzai become an international symbol of inspiration and bravery, but her survival instilled educators with courage-and is slowly helping make Pakistani schools safer.\"\u2015 Nick Schifrin, ABC.com \"For a teenage girl in a distant corner of the globe to spark life into this movement-against overwhelming odds-is truly extraordinary. The world must not allow Malala's message to die.\"\u2015 Dallas Morning News \"Her powerful message remains undiluted.\"\u2015 Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly \"In simple, clear writing, I AM MALALA gives a rare and moving first-person glance into what it's like to be a teenager in a country seized by extremists who stand against the basic freedoms you believe in.\" \u2015 Krystin Arneson, Bustle \"Malala matters....In her modesty and dignity, she should be Islam's beloved daughter, her journey a return to the early promise of Muslim modernism.\"\u2015 Fouad Ajami, New York Post \"Incredibly inspirational.... Malala is intelligent and fiery with dreams of changing the world, but the book has the added benefit of being a true story that is easily interwoven with important global issues such as human rights, development, education, and peace.... If there is one thing that I AM MALALA should teach us, it is to look beyond Manichean narratives of good and evil. It is important to applaud Malala for the awareness she has built around important issues like education for young women.\"\u2015 Cristina Maza, PolicyMic \"Riveting.... [Malala's] clear voice [is] beautifully captured by Lamb.\"\u2015 Rafia Zakaria, Ms. Magazine \"A gripping story.... What makes this book so important is not just the universal value of Malala's cause.... It's the relevance of her story to one of the most vexing security questions in today's crazy world....\"\u2015 Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer \"An inspiring, clearly written memoir that offers a glimpse of an extraordinary young woman and the confounding world from which she comes.\"\u2015 Karen Sandstrom, Cleveland Plain Dealer \"One hears some ghosts of Anne Frank in reading I AM MALALA, the flightiness, effervescence and, well...girlishness of an adolescent girl flung once again the indifferent violence of inhuman men, like flowers hurled against a stone wall.\"\u2015 Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald \"An eye-opener in the fight for girls' education equality.\"\u2015 More \"The voice that beams, 'I am Malala' is the voice that continues to meet the assassin's challenge. It is the voice of a courageous campaigner who still fights for girls' education. The voice of an icon who may one day be able to return to her country, but who even from afar symbolizes its noblest cause.\"\u2015 Shehryar Fazli, Los Angeles Review of Books \"A story for each and every girl who chooses to break societal taboos, challenge the clergy, declare war against illiteracy and believe in the power of the pen.\"\u2015 Daud Khattak, Newark Star Ledger \"[A] vivid autobiography.... Yousafzai possesses an eloquence beyond her years, but her touching asides drive home the fact that she's also very much a 16-year-old girl.... Captivating and surprisingly personal.\"\u2015 Erika W. Smith, Bust \"Like millions around the world, I draw strength from brave Malala's example.... Malala is a testament that women everywhere will not be intimidated into silence. We will make our voices heard.\"\u2015 Gabrielle Giffords, Time magazine's \"TIME 100\" \"Compelling. It's a brave girl's tale in an unsafe country, and it reveals her fierce determination to make the world a better place.\"\u2015 Michael Taube, Washington Times \"How did Yousafzai have the courage, at 15, to stand up to the Taliban in her native Pakistan? Her memoir, written less than a year after she nearly died for her efforts, will open your eyes.\"\u2015 People About the Author Malala Yousafzai , the educational campaigner from Swat Valley, Pakistan, came to public attention by writing for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban. Using the pen name Gul Makai, she often spoke about her family's fight for girls' education in her community.In October 2012, Malala was targeted by the Taliban and shot in the head as she was returning from school on a bus. She miraculously survived and continues her campaign for education.In recognition of her courage and advocacy, Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, becoming the youngest-ever recipient at just seventeen years of age. She was also honored with the National Youth Peace Prize in Pakistan in 2011 and the International Children's Peace Prize in 2013, and she was short-listed for Time magazine's Person of the Year.Malala continues to champion universal access to education through the Malala Fund, a non-profit organization investing in community-led programs and supporting education advocates around the world. Christina Lamb is one of the world's leading foreign correspondents. She has reported on Pakistan and Afghanistan since 1987. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, she is the author of five books and has won a number of awards, including Britain's Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times, as well as the Prix Bayeux-Calvados, Europe's most prestigious award for war correspondents. She currently works for the Sunday Times and lives in London and Portugal with her husband and son.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.95}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0060891548", "title": "On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction", "author": "William Zinsser", "description": "Review \u201c On Writing Well belongs on any shelf of serious reference works for writers.\u201d \u2014 New York Times \u201cNot since The Elements of Style has there been a guide to writing as well presented and readable as this one. A love and respect for the language is evident on every page.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal About the Author William Zinsser is a writer, editor and teacher. He began his career on the New York Herald Tribune and has since written regularly for leading magazines. During the 1970s he was master of Branford College at Yale. His 17 books, ranging from baseball to music to American travel, include the influential Writing to Learn and Writing About Your Life . He teaches at the New School in New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction By William Zinsser HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright \u00a92006 William ZinsserAll right reserved. ISBN: 0060891548 Chapter One The Transaction A school in Connecticut once held \"a day devoted to the arts,\" and I was asked if I would come and talk about writing as a vocation. When I arrived I found that a second speaker had been invited -- Dr. Brock (as I'll call him), a surgeon who had recently begun to write and had sold some stories to magazines. He was going to talk about writing as an avocation. That made us a panel, and we sat down to face a crowd of students and teachers and parents, all eager to learn the secrets of our glamorous work. Dr. Brock was dressed in a bright red jacket, looking vaguely bohemian, as authors are supposed to look, and the first question went to him. What was it like to be a writer? He said it was tremendous fun. Coming home from an arduous day at the hospital, he would go straight to his yellow pad and write his tensions away. The words just flowed. It was easy. I then said that writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed. Next Dr. Brock was asked if it was important to rewrite. Absolutely not, he said. \"Let it all hang out,\" he told us, and whatever form the sentences take will reflect the writer at his most natural. I then said that rewriting is the essence of writing. I pointed out that professional writers rewrite their sentences over and over and then rewrite what they have rewritten. \"What do you do on days when it isn't going well?\" Dr. Brock was asked. He said he just stopped writing and put the work aside for a day when it would go better. I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke. \"What if you're feeling depressed or unhappy?\" a student asked. \"Won't that affect your writing?\" Probably it will, Dr. Brock replied. Go fishing. Take a walk. Probably it won't, I said. If your job is to write every day, you learn to do it like any other job. A student asked if we found it useful to circulate in the literary world. Dr. Brock said he was greatly enjoying his new life as a man of letters, and he told several stories of being taken to lunch by his publisher and his agent at Manhattan restaurants where writers and editors gather. I said that professional writers are solitary drudges who seldom see other writers. \"Do you put symbolism in your writing?\" a student asked me. \"Not if I can help it,\" I replied. I have an unbroken record of missing the deeper meaning in any story, play or movie, and as for dance and mime, I have never had any idea of what is being conveyed. \"I love symbols!\" Dr. Brock exclaimed, and he described with gusto the joys of weaving them through his work. So the morning went, and it was a revelation to all of us. At the end Dr. Brock told me he was enormously interested in my answers -- it had never occurred to him that writing could be hard. I told him I was just as interested in his answers -- it had never occurred to me that writing could be easy. Maybe I should take up surgery on the side. As for the students, anyone might think we left them bewildered. But in fact we gave them a broader glimpse of the writing process than if only one of us had talked. For there isn't any \"right\" way to do such personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you. Some people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by word processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and then revise; others can't write the second paragraph until they have fiddled endlessly with the first. But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they don't just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind the tension. Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me -- some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it change his life? It's not necessary to want to spend a year alone at Walden Pond to become involved with a writer who did. This is the personal transaction that's at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to \"personalize\" the author. It's a question of using the English language in a way that it will achieve the greatest clarity and strength. Can such principles be taught? Maybe not. But most of them can be learned. Continues... Excerpted from On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition by William Zinsser Copyright \u00a92006 by William Zinsser. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.29}, {"asin": "0760700702", "title": "100 Great Archaeological Discoveries", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Archaeology"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 20.72}, {"asin": "0060256656", "title": "The Giving Tree", "author": "Shel Silverstein", "description": "Amazon.com Review To say that this particular apple tree is a \"giving tree\" is an understatement. In Shel Silverstein's popular tale of few words and simple line drawings, a tree starts out as a leafy playground, shade provider, and apple bearer for a rambunctious little boy. Making the boy happy makes the tree happy, but with time it becomes more challenging for the generous tree to meet his needs. When he asks for money, she suggests that he sell her apples. When he asks for a house, she offers her branches for lumber. When the boy is old, too old and sad to play in the tree, he asks the tree for a boat. She suggests that he cut her down to a stump so he can craft a boat out of her trunk. He unthinkingly does it. At this point in the story, the double-page spread shows a pathetic solitary stump, poignantly cut down to the heart the boy once carved into the tree as a child that said \"M.E. + T.\" \"And then the tree was happy... but not really.\" When there's nothing left of her, the boy returns again as an old man, needing a quiet place to sit and rest. The stump offers up her services, and he sits on it. \"And the tree was happy.\" While the message of this book is unclear (Take and take and take? Give and give and give? Complete self-sacrifice is good? Complete self-sacrifice is infinitely sad?), Silverstein has perhaps deliberately left the book open to interpretation. (All ages) --Karin Snelson Review \u201cIf you\u2019re looking for a children\u2019s book that teaches generosity or unselfishness, most people will point you right to The Giving Tree , Shel Silverstein\u2019s lovely story of a tree that will do anything for the boy it loves\u2014and for good reason. This classic is always a good place to start.\u201d \u2014 Brightly From the Back Cover \"Once there was a tree . . . and she loved a little boy.\" So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted and versatile Shel Silverstein. Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older, he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave. Since it was first published fifty years ago, Shel Silverstein's moving parable for readers of all ages has offered an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return. About the Author Shel Silverstein 's incomparable career as a bestselling children's book author and illustrator began with Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back . He is also the creator of picture books including A Giraffe and a Half , Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros? , The Missing Piece , The Missing Piece Meets the Big O , and the perennial favorite The Giving Tree , as well as classic poetry collections such as Where the Sidewalk Ends , A Light in the Attic , Every Thing On It , Don't Bump the Glump! , and Runny Babbit . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Classics"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.66}, {"asin": "B0067MKPB4", "title": "Las huellas imborrables: Una investigaci\u00f3n sobre el peso de la culpa y los horrores del pasado (Los cr\u00edmenes de Fj\u00e4llbacka n\u00ba 5) (Spanish Edition)", "author": "Camilla L\u00e4ckberg", "description": "About the Author Camilla L\u00e4ckberg es la exitosa autora de la serie de Los cr\u00edmenes de Fj\u00e4llbacka, de la que se han vendido hasta la fecha m\u00e1s de 28 millones de ejemplares en todo el mundo. Con Alas de plata hace una nueva incursi\u00f3n en el g\u00e9nero del suspense psicol\u00f3gico despu\u00e9s de Una jaula de oro. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review \u00abUna vez m\u00e1s, la sueca Camila L\u00e4ckberg nos deja sin aliento con una de sus inquietantes historias.\u00a0\u00bb AR\u00abThriller sueco con otro caso de la pareja protagonista de La princesa de hielo.\u00bb Semana --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 5.49}], "target_asin": "0060891548"}
{"user_id": "AH6XMEJINQTTIBLVGDQZM5OCMWFA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "076114739X", "title": "10 Color Book", "author": "William Accorsi", "description": "From the Back Cover A First Book of Colors With Shapes to Snap In and Rhymes to Read Aloud A big brown bone for a dog named Ace, a pink bar of soap to wash your face.  Big, interactive, and filled with fun, here's a book for reading and playing again and again! About the Author William Accorsi is the author of 10 Button Book and 10 Color Book . He is a folk artist who creates sculptures of animals and people out of wire, beads, and buttons. His work hangs in major galleries and collections throughout the USA, and he is the only artist to have been awarded two solo exhibitions at New York\u2019s Museum of Arts and Design. Mr. Accorsi lives in Beacon, New York.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "0312603908", "title": "The Tudor Secret (The Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles)", "author": "C. W. Gortner", "description": "Review Riveting . . . In Gortner's capable hands, Prescott is a believable and enjoyable hero, a man of strong loyalties but na\u00efve enough to be exploited. And while the Dudleys are mostly broadly drawn villains, Robert has depth, and though readers familiar with the Tudor era will know the key players, they may be surprised by their depiction here. Gortner handles action with aplomb, adding a riveting, fast-paced thriller to the crowded genre of Tudor fiction. ( Publishers Weekly on The Tudor Secret )Even Tudor fans who know all the key players and historical backdrop will be captivated by Gortner's storytelling and his engaging hero. He juxtaposes his na\u00efve and loyal hero with the cruel Robert Dudley, enhancing the plot and grabbing reader interest as much as the quick pace and lush historical references. The novel is both entertaining and thoughtful. ( RT Book Review on The Tudor Secret )Dazzling cast of characters . . . at its heart, the brilliant and enigmatic Elizabeth. Never have spy and counterspy been more challenged, villains more duplicitous, and life for those in power--or hoping to be--more dangerous. . . . Fast-moving tale of espionage and suspense . . . The velvet peril of Tudor England comes alive in this haunting look at Elizabeth I's secret spy. ( Margaret George, New York Times bestselling author of The Autobiography of Henry VIII on The Tudor Secret )A brilliantly executed plot and three-dimensional characters . . . this is historical fiction, and very well done at that; very highly recommended. ( Historical Novels Review, editors' choice )An intriguing and provocative book about one of history's most controversial queens and the turbulent world of sixteenth-century France. ( Sharon Kay Penman, New York Times bestselling author of Devil's Brood on The Confessions of Catherine de Medici )A dramatic, epic novel . . . Meticulously researched, this engrossing novel offers a fresh portrait of a queen who has too often been portrayed as a villain. ( Sandra Gulland, bestselling author of The Josephine B. Trilogy, on The Confessions of Catherine de Medici )A can't-put-it-down novel. . . . Gortner is a brilliant new star in historical fiction! ( Robin Maxwell, author of The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, on The Last Queen )A sparkling historical . . . Disturbing royal secrets and court manipulations wickedly twist this enthralling story, brilliantly told. ( Publishers Weekly on The Last Queen )Meticulously researched . . . Gortner breathes life into his queen. ( Library Journal on The Confessions of Catherine de Medici ) About the Author C. W. Gortner is the author of the acclaimed historical novels The Last Queen and The Confessions of Catherine de Medici . He holds an MFA in writing with an emphasis on Renaissance studies from the New College of California. In his extensive travels to research his books, he has danced a galliard in a Tudor great hall and experienced life in a Spanish castle. He is also a dedicated advocate for animal rights and environmental issues. Half Spanish by birth, he lives in Northern California.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 44.88}, {"asin": "0763659002", "title": "Bizzy Bear: Off We Go!", "author": "Benji Davies", "description": "Review Truly has my heart.\u2014A Fuse #8 Production (SLJ blog) About the Author Benji Davies divides his time between illustrating children's books and directing animation. He has worked on a wide range of projects all over the world. He lives in London.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "1532375883", "title": "Lander Rock Climbs 2018", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 33.27}, {"asin": "1897533853", "title": "Under the Sea-Sparkle Books", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 22.99}, {"asin": "1454913630", "title": "Where's the Fairy?", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 6.02}, {"asin": "039480077X", "title": "Horton Hatches the Egg", "author": "Dr. Seuss", "description": "Amazon.com Review Poor Horton. Dr. Seuss's kindly elephant is persuaded to sit on an egg while its mother, the good-for-nothing bird lazy Maysie, takes a break. Little does Horton know that Maysie is setting off for a permanent vacation in Palm Springs. He waits, and waits, never leaving his precarious branch, even through a freezing winter and a spring that's punctuated by the insults of his friends. (\"They taunted. They teased him. They yelled 'How Absurd! Old Horton the Elephant thinks he's a bird!'\") Further indignities await, but Horton has the patience of Job--from whose story this one clearly derives--and he is rewarded in the end by the surprise birth of... an elephant-bird. Horton Hatches the Egg contains some of Theodor Geisel's most inspired verse and some of his best-ever illustrations, the dated style of which only accentuates their power and charm. A book no childhood should be without. (Ages 2 to 7) --Richard Farr From the Inside Flap Illus. in color by the author. It's the talk of the jungle when an elephant hatches an egg. Extravagant nonsense and rollicking verse. From the Back Cover Illus. in color by the author. It's the talk of the jungle when an elephant hatches an egg. Extravagant nonsense and rollicking verse. About the Author Theodor Seuss Geisel\u2014aka Dr. Seuss \u2014is one of the most beloved children\u2019s book authors of all time. From The Cat in the Hat to Oh, the Places You\u2019ll Go!, his iconic characters, stories, and art style have been a lasting influence on generations of children and adults. The books he wrote and illustrated under the name Dr. Seuss (and others that he wrote but did not illustrate, including some under the pseudonyms Theo. LeSieg and Rosetta Stone) have been translated into 45 languages. Hundreds of millions of copies have found their way into homes and hearts around the world. Dr. Seuss\u2019s long list of awards includes\u00a0Caldecott Honors, the Pulitzer Prize, and eight honorary doctorates. Works based on his original stories have won three Oscars, three Emmys, three Grammys, and a Peabody. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0316749826", "title": "A Mouse Told His Mother", "author": "Mary Jane Begin", "description": "From School Library Journal PreSchool-Grade 2. This delightful story captures the easy banter between a little mouse and his mother. When informed that it is bedtime, the little creature avoids the subject by insisting that he is going on an adventure. While his mother guides him through the nighttime rituals, little mouse's imagination takes charge. Along the way, he informs her of his intentions to dive for pirate treasure, climb a mountain, ride a bucking bronco, and more. '\"I am going to the moon.' 'Take your toothbrush,' said his mother.\" This back and forth goes on until the inevitable resolution with little mouse tucked in bed fast asleep. Each page begins with the catch phrase from the title, creating a lulling repetition that is sure to make young eyes heavy. Begin's illustrations successfully blend little mouse's fantasies with reality. When he imagines he's flying an airplane, his patchwork quilt becomes the landscape below. This thoughtful and well-illustrated book will be welcome in any bedtime collection.?Christy Norris, Valley Cottage Library, NYCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Ages 3^-5. A young mouse is on his way to bed--but you wouldn't know it from the way he talks. He is going on a trip, he is off to catch a crocodile, he is climbing up snowcapped mountains. Wise Mama Mouse gives him practical advice to temper his flights of fancy: he is going to bed; he should wash well and put on his warm pajamas. Roberts cleverly matches each of the little mouse's pronouncements with the more grounded recommendations from his mother. Begin, who appears to have specialized in drawing mouse worlds such as that in Pryor's Porcupine Mouse (1988), provides wonderful glossy artwork that fills the pages. She cleverly creates both the wide world of the little mouse's imagination and the cozier bedroom closer to home in this delightful nighttime lark. Ilene Cooper From Kirkus Reviews A mouse child, at bedtime, tells his mother that he's going on a trip--to the moon, to dive for pirate treasure, to fly an airplane around the world, to explore a spooky cave, etc. Each exploit is suggested by something he sees around him--the boat in his bathtub, a toy plane, the dark ``cave'' under his bed. Without contradicting him, his mother gently brings him back to earth--and nearer bed--each time by reminding him to take his toothbrush, pack and extra blanket, and ``lights out now.'' In the delightful point- counterpoint between parent and child, Roberts (with Patricia Hubbell, Camel Caravan, 1996) follows the model of Margaret Wise Brown's Runaway Bunny; the parent wins this one, too, when the tired mouse drifts off to sleep with a smile on his face. Children will have fun matching the mouse's adventures with the everyday objects that inspire them. Begin has imagined the domestic details of a mouse's world with winsome humor: twig furniture, an acorn-cap washbasin, a bathtub made from an empty catfood tin; the pictures not only enhance the story, but really make it work. (Picture book. 3-7) -- Copyright \u00a91997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.95}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0765356864", "title": "One Second After (A John Matherson Novel, 1)", "author": "William R. Forstchen", "description": "Review \u201cCivilization slides into the abyss of a new dark age in this horrifying apocalyptic novel. Forstchen has put Bin Laden's wet dream on paper and, in the process, taken civilization straight to the rack.\u201d \u2015 Stephen Coonts, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of War \u201cThe only thing more terrifying than this masterfully crafted story is the possibility of it actually happening\u2015and not a damn thing being done to protect us.\u201d \u2015 W.E.B. Griffin & William E. Butterworth IV \u201cForstchen's work has flair and power.\u201d \u2015 Joel Rosenberg, author of The Sleeping Dragon \u201cForstchen did such a damned fine job with One Second After that shortly after the first page, I had been reeled in hook, line, and sinker.\u201d \u2015 David Hagberg, New York Times bestselling author of Tower Down About the Author William R. Forstchen is the author of the New York Times bestseller One Second After and We Look Like Men of War , among numerous other books in diverse subjects ranging from history to science fiction. He has co-authored several books with Newt Gingrich, including Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War , Pearl Harbor , Days of Infamy , To Try Men\u2019s Souls and Valley Forge . Forstchen holds a Ph.D. in History from Purdue University, with specializations in military history and the history of technology. He is currently a Faculty Fellow and Professor of History at Montreat College, near Asheville North Carolina. He is a pilot and flies an original WWII recon \"warbird.\" He resides near Asheville with his daughter Meghan. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. One Second After By William R. Forstchen Tor Books Copyright \u00a9 2011 William R. ForstchenAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780765356864 Chapter One BLACK MOUNTAIN, NORTH CAROLINA, 2:30 EDT John Matherson lifted the plastic bag off the counter. \"You sure I have the right ones?\" he asked. Nancy, the owner of the shop, Ivy Corner, smiled. \"Don't worry, John; she already had them picked out weeks ago. Give her a big hug and kiss for me. Hard to believe she's twelve today.\" John sighed and nodded, looking down at the bag, stuffed with a dozen Beanie Babies, one for each year of Jennifer's life, which started twelve years ago this day. \"Hope she still wants these at thirteen,\" he said. \"God save me when that first boy shows up at the door wanting to take her out.\" The two laughed, Nancy nodding in agreement. He was already enduring that with Elizabeth, his sixteen- year- old, and perhaps for that, and so many other reasons as well, he just wished that he could preserve, could drag out, just for a few more days, weeks, or months the precious time all fathers remember fondly, when they still had their \"little girl.\" It was a beautiful spring day, the cherry trees lining the street in full bloom, a light shower of pink petals drifting on the wind as he walked up the street, past Doc Kellor's office, the antique stores, the new, rather Gothic- looking art gallery that had opened last month, the usual curio shops, and even an old- style ice- cream parlor . . . at a dollar fifty a scoop. Next up the street was Benson's Used and Rare Books. John hesitated, wanted to go in just for a few minutes, then pulled out his cell phone to check the time. Two thirty. Her bus would be rolling in at three, no time today to go in, have a cup of coffee, and talk about books and history. Walt Benson saw him, held up a cup, gesturing for John to join him. He shook his head, pointed to his wrist even though he never wore a watch, and continued to walk up to the corner to where his Talon SUV was parked in front of Taylor's Hardware and General Store. John paused and looked back down the street for a moment. I'm living in a damn Norman Rockwell painting, he thought yet again, for the thousandth time. Winding up here . . . he never imagined it, never planned for it, or even wanted it. Eight years back he was at the Army War College, Carlisle, PA, teaching military history and lecturing on asymmetrical warfare, and waiting to jump the hoop and finally get his first star. And then two things happened. His promotion came through, with assignment to Brussels as a liaison to NATO, a rather nice posting to most likely end out his career . . . and then Mary had returned from the doctor's several days after the promotion, her face pale, lips pressed tight, and said four words: \"I have breast cancer.\" The commandant at Carlisle, Bob Scales, an old friend who had stood as godfather for John's Jennifer, understood the request he then laid before him. John would take the promotion, but could it be to the Pentagon? It'd place them nearby to Johns Hopkins, and not too far from Mary's family. It didn't work. Cutbacks were hitting as it was, oh, there was great sympathy from upstairs, but he had to take Brussels if he wanted the star and maybe a year later they'd find a slot for him stateside. After talking to Mary's doctor . . . John resigned. He would take her back home to Black Mountain, North Carolina, which was what she wanted and the cancer treatment center at Chapel Hill would be nearby. Bob's connections were good, remarkably good, when John first mentioned Black Mountain. A single phone call was made; the old- boy network, though disdained as politically incorrect, did exist and it did help at times when needed. The president of Montreat College, North Carolina, in Mary's hometown, did indeed \"suddenly\" need an assistant director of development. John hated development and admissions work but survived fit until finally a tenure- track professorship in history opened four years back and he was slotted in. The fact that the president of the college, Dan Hunt, owed his life to Bob Scales, who had dragged him out of a minefield back in 1970, was a definite mark in John's favor that could not be ignored between friends. Dan had lost his leg, Bob got another of his Bronze Stars for saving him, and the two had been buddies ever since, each looking out, as well, for those whom the other cared for. So Mary got to go home, after twenty years of following John from Benning, to Germany, to Okinawa, sweating out Desert Storm, from there to the Pentagon, then a year, a wonderful year, at West Point and then three more wonderful years teaching at Carlisle. At heart he was a history teacher, and maybe whichever bastard in the personnel office at the Pentagon had nixed John's request to stay stateside had done him a favor. So they came home to Black Mountain, North Carolina. He did not hesitate one second in granting her wish, resigning his commission and promotion and moving to this corner of the Carolina mountains. He looked back down Main Street, frozen for a moment in time and memories. Mary would be gone four years next week, her last time out a slow, exhausting walk down this street, which as a girl she had run along. It was indeed a Norman Rockwell town. That final walk down this street with her, everyone knew her, everyone knew what was happening, and everyone came out to say hi, to give her a hug, a kiss, all knowing it was farewell but not saying it. It was a gesture of love John would never forget. He pushed the thought aside. It was still too close and Jennifer's bus would be pulling up in twenty minutes. He got into his Talon, started it up, turned onto State Street, and headed east. He did love the view as State Street curved through town, past yet more shops, nearly all the buildings redbrick, dating back to the turn of the century. The village had once been a thriving community, part of the tuberculosis sanitarium business. When the railroad had finally pierced the mountains of western North Carolina in the early 1880s some of the first to flood in were tuberculosis victims. They came by the thousands, to the sanitariums that sprang up on every sunlit mountain slope. By the early twenties there were a dozen such institutions surrounding Asheville, the big city situated a dozen miles to the west of Black Mountain. And then came the Depression. Black Mountain remained frozen in time, and then came antibiotics right after the war and the sanitariums emptied out. And all those wonderful buildings, which in other towns would have given way to shopping plazas and strip malls, had remained intact, progress passing Black Mountain by. Now there were conference centers for various churches and summer camps for kids where the sanitariums had been. His own college had been founded at such a site up in what everyone called the Cove. A small college, six hundred kids, most of them from small towns across the Carolinas and a few from Atlanta or Florida. Some of the kids were freaked out by the relative isolation, but most of them grudgingly admitted they loved it, a beautiful campus, a safe place, an old logging trail across the edge of the campus leading straight on up to Mount Mitchell, good white water nearby for kayaking, and plenty of woods to disappear into for partying for some of them, to get around the fairly strict campus rules. The town itself finally revived, starting in the 1980s, but wonderfully, the charming turn- of- the- century look was maintained, and in the summer and fall the streets would be crammed with tourists and day- trippers coming up from Charlotte or Winston- Salem to escape the boiling heat of the lowlands, joined by hundreds of summer \"cottagers\" who lived in the Cove, many of the cottages darn near mansions for some of the older wealth of the South. That had been Mary's family, Old South and wealth. Me-ma Jennie, Mary's mother and Jennifer's namesake, still hung on doggedly to their home up in the Cove, refusing to consider moving, even though \"Papa\" Tyler was now in a nearby nursing home, in the final stages of cancer. John continued to drive east, the traffic on Interstate 40, coming up through the Swannanoa Gap, roaring by on his left. The old- timers in the town still expressed their hatred of that \"darn road.\" Before it came in, Black Mountain was a sleepy southern mountain hamlet. With the road had come development, traffic, and the foods of tourists on weekends that the chamber of commerce loved and everyone else tried to tolerate. Staying on the old highway that paralleled the interstate, John drove for less than a mile out of town, then turned right onto a dirt road that twisted up the side of a hill overlooking the town. The old mountain joke used to be \"you know you're getting directions to a mountain home when they say, 'Turn onto the dirt road.' \" For a kid from New Jersey, John still got a bit of a kick out of the fact that he did indeed live in the South, on the side of a mountain, halfway up a dirt road, with a view worth a million bucks. The home he and Mary had purchased was in one of the first new developments in the area. In a county where there was no zoning, the lower part of the hill had several trailers, an old shack where Connie Yarborough, a wonderful down- the- hill neighbor, still did not have electricity or town water, and next to her was an eccentric Volkswagen repair shop . . . the owner, Jim Bartlett, a true sixties throwback, his lot littered with dozens of rusting Beetles, vans, and even a few precious VW Buses and Karmann Ghias. The house (Mary and John actually named Rivendell, because of their mutual love of Tolkien) offered a broad sweeping view of the valley below; the skyline of Asheville was in the distance, framed by the Great Smoky Mountains beyond, facing due west so Mary could have her sunsets. When trying to describe the view he'd just tell friends, \"Check out Last of the Mohicans ; it was filmed a half hour from where we live.\" It was a fairly contemporary-looking type of home, high ceiling, the west wall, from bedroom across the living room to the dining area, all glass. The bed was still positioned to face the glass wall, as Mary wanted it so she could watch the outside world as her life drifted away. He pulled up the drive. The two \"idiots\" Ginger and Zach, both golden retrievers, both beautiful- looking dogs\u2014and both thicker than bricks when it came to brains\u2014had been out sunning on the bedroom deck. They stood up and barked madly, as if he were an invader. Though if he were a real invader they'd have cowered in terror and stained the carpet as they .ed into Jennifer's room to hide. The two idiots charged through the bedroom, then out through the entryway screen door . . . the lower half of the door a charade, as the screen was gone. Put a new one in, it'd last a few days and the idiots would charge right through it again. John had given up on that fight years ago. As for actually closing the door . . . it never even crossed his mind anymore. This was Black Mountain. Strange as it seemed, folks rarely locked up, keys would be left in cars, kids did indeed play in the streets in the evening, there were parades for the Fourth of July, Christmas, and the ridiculous Pine cone Festival, complete to the crowning of a Miss Pinecone. Papa Tyler had absolutely humiliated his daughter, Mary, in front of John early on in their courtship when he proudly pulled out a photo of her, Miss Pine cone 1977. In Black Mountain there was still an ice- cream truck that made the rounds on summer nights. . . . It was all one helluva difference from his boyhood just outside of Newark, New Jersey. There was a car parked at the top of the driveway. Mary's mother, Me-ma Jennie. Me-ma Jennie was behind the wheel of her wonderful and highly eccentric 1959 Ford Edsel. Ford . . . that's where the family money had come from, ownership of a string of car dealerships across the Carolinas dating back to Henry Ford himself. There was even a photo framed in the house up in the Cove of Mary's great-granddad and Henry Ford at the opening of a dealership in Charlotte back before World War I. Though it wasn't polite to be overtly \"business\" in their strata and Jennie preferred the role of genteel southern lady, in her day, John knew, she was one shrewd business person, as was her husband. John pulled up alongside the Edsel. Jennie put down the book she was reading and got out. \"Hi, Jen.\" She absolutely hated \"Ma,\" \"Mother,\" \"Mom,\" or, mortal sin of all mortal sins, \"Me-ma\" or \"Grandma\" from her Yankee son- in- law, who was definitely not her first choice for her only daughter. But that had softened with time, especially towards the end, especially when he had brought the girls back home to Jen. The two got out of their cars and she held up a cheek to be kissed, her height, at little more than five foot two, overshadowed by his six- foot- four bulk, and there was a light touch of her hand on his arm and an affectionate squeeze. \"Thought you'd never get here in time. She'll be home any minute.\" Jen had yet to slip into the higher pitch or gravelly tone of an \"old lady's\" voice. He wondered if she practiced every night reciting before a mirror to keep that wonderful young woman-sounding southern lilt. It was an accent that still haunted him. The same as Mary's when they had first met at Duke, twenty- eight years ago. At times, if Jen was in the next room and called to the girls, it would still bring tears to his eyes. \"We got time. Why didn't you go inside to wait?\" \"With those two mongrels? The way they jump, they'd ruin my nylons.\" Ginger and Zach were all over John, jumping, barking, leaping about . . . and studiously avoiding Jen. Though dumb, goldens knew when someone didn't like them no matter how charming they might be. John reached in, pulled out the bag of Beanies, and, walking over to the stone wall that bordered the path to the house, began to line them up, one at a time, setting them side by side. \"Now John, really, isn't she getting a bit old for that?\" \"Not yet, not my little girl.\" Jen laughed softly. \"You can't keep time back forever.\" \"I can try, can't I?\" he said with a grin. She smiled sadly. \"How do you think Tyler and I felt about you, the day you came through our door?\" He reached out and gave her an affectionate touch on the cheek. \"You guys loved me.\" \"You a Yankee? Like hell. Tyler actually thought about driving you off with a shotgun. And that first night you stayed over . . .\" Even after all these years he found he still blushed a bit at that. Jen had caught Mary and him in a less than \"proper\" situation on the family room sofa at two in the morning. Though not fully improper, it was embarrassing nevertheless, and Jen had never let him live it down. He set the Beanies out, stepped back, eyeballed them, like a sergeant examining a row of new recruits. The red, white, and blue \"patriot\" bear on the right should be in the middle of the ranks where a flag bearer might be. He could hear the growl of the school bus as it shifted gears, turning off of old Route 70, coming up the hill. \"Here she comes,\" Jen announced excitedly. Going back to the Edsel, she leaned in the open window and brought out a .at, elegantly wrapped box, tied off with a neat bow. \"Jewelry?\" John asked. \"Of course; she's twelve now. A proper young lady should have a gold necklace at twelve. Her mother did.\" \"Yeah, I remember that necklace,\" he said with a grin. \"She was wearing it that night you just mentioned. And she was twenty then.\" \"You cad,\" Jen said softly, and slapped him lightly on the shoulder, and he pretended that it was a painful blow. Ginger and Zach had stopped jumping around John, both of them cocking their heads, taking in the sound of the approaching school bus, the squeal of the brakes as it stopped at the bottom of the driveway, its yellow barely visible now through the spring- blooming trees. They were both off like lightning bolts, running full tilt down the driveway, barking up a storm, and seconds later he could hear the laughter of Jennifer; of Patricia, a year older and their neighbor; and of Seth, Pat's eleventh-grade brother. The girls came running up the driveway, Seth threw a stick, the two dogs diverted by it for a moment but then turned together and charged up the hill behind the girls. Seth waved then crossed the street to his house. John felt a hand slip into his . . . Jen's. \"Just like her mother,\" Jen whispered, voice choked. Yes, he could see Mary in Jennifer, slender, actually skinny as a rail, shoulder-length blond hair tied back, still a lanky little girl. She slowed a bit, reaching out to put a hand on a tree as if to brace herself, Patricia turned and waited for her. John felt a momentary concern, wanted to go down to her, but knew better, Jen actually held him back. \"You are too protective,\" Jen whispered. \"She must handle it on her own.\" Young Jennifer caught her breath, looked up, a bit pale, saw them waiting, and a radiant smile lit her face. \"Me-ma! And you drove the Edsel today. Can we go for a ride?\" Jen let her hand slip, bent over slightly as Jennifer ran up to her grandmother, the two embracing. \"How's my birthday girl?\" They hugged and Grandma Jen showered Jennifer with kisses, twelve of them, counting each off. Pat looked over at the Beanies lined up, smiled, and looked up at John. \"Afternoon, Mr. Matherson.\" \"How are you, Pat?\" \"I think she needs to be checked,\" Pat whispered. \"It can wait.\" \"Daddy!\" Jennifer was now in his arms. He lifted her up, hugged her with fierce intensity so that she laughed, then groaned, \"You'll break my back!\" He let go of her, watching her eyes as she looked past him to the Beanie Babies lining the wall . . . and yes, there was still that childlike glow in them. \"Patriot Bear! And Ollie Ostrich!\" As she started to sweep them up, he looked over at Jen with a bit of a triumphant smile, as if to say, \"See, she's still my little girl.\" Jen, rising to the challenge, came up to Jennifer's side and held out the .at box. \"Happy Birthday, darling.\" Jennifer tore the paper off. Ginger, thinking the paper was now a gift to her, half- swallowed it and ran off as Zach chased her. When Jennifer opened the box her eyes widened. \"Oh, Me-ma.\" \"It's time my girl had a real gold necklace. Maybe your friend can help you put it on.\" John looked down at the gift. My God, it must of cost a fortune, heavy, almost pencil thick. Jen looked at him out of the corner of her eye as if to meet any challenge. \"You're a young lady now,\" Jen announced as Pat helped to clasp the necklace on, and then Jen produced a small mirror from her purse and held it up. \"Oh, Grandma . . . it's lovely.\" \"A lovely gift for a lovely lady.\" John stood silent for a moment, not sure what to say as his little girl gazed into the mirror, raising her head slightly, the way a woman would, to admire the gold. \"Sweetie, I think you better check your blood sugar; you seemed a bit winded coming up the hill,\" John finally said, and his words came out heavily, breaking the moment. \"Yes, Daddy.\" Jennifer leaned against the wall, took off her backpack and pulled out the blood-sugar test monitor. It was one of the new digital readout models. No more finger pricking, just a quick jab to the arm. She absently fingered the necklace with her free hand while waiting for the readout. One forty- two . . . a bit high. \"I think you better get some insulin into you,\" John said. She nodded. Jennifer had lived with it for ten years now. He knew that was a major part of his protectiveness of her. When she was in her terrible twos and threes, it tore his heart out every time he had to prick her finger, the sight of his or Mary's approach with the test kit set off howls of protest. The doctors had all said that, as quickly as possible, Jennifer had to learn to monitor herself, that John and Mary needed to step back even when she was only seven and eight to let her know her own signs, test, and medicate. Mary had handled it far better than John had, perhaps because of her own illness towards the end. Jen with her strength had the same attitude. Strange. Here I am, a soldier of twenty years. Saw some action, but the only casualties were the Iraqis, never my own men. I was trained to handle things, but when it came to my daugher's diabetes, a damn aggressive type 1, I was always on edge. Tough, damn good at what I did, well respected by my men, and yet complete jelly when it comes to my girls. \"There's a few more gifts inside,\" John said. \"Why don't you girls go on in? Once your sister gets home and your friends show up we can have our party.\" \"Oh, Dad, didn't you get Elizabeth's message?\" \"What message?\" \"Here, silly.\" She reached up and .shed the cell phone out of his breast pocket, tucked in behind a pack of cigarettes. She started to pull the cigarettes out, to stomp on them or tear them up, but a look from him warned her off. \"Someday, Daddy,\" she sighed, then taking the phone she punched a few keys and handed it back. \"Home late. Out with Ben,\" the screen read. \"She texted you and me during lunch.\" \"Texted?\" \"Yes, Daddy, text message, all the kids are doing it now.\" \"What's wrong with a phone call?\" She looked at him as if he were from the antediluvian period and then headed inside. \"Texted?\" Jen asked. John held the phone so she could read the message. Jen smiled. \"Better start keeping a sharper watch on Elizabeth,\" she said. \"If that Ben Johnson has any of his grandfather's blood in him.\" She chuckled as if remembering something from long ago. \"I don't need to hear this.\" \"No, you don't, Colonel.\" \"Actually, I kind of prefer 'Doctor,' or 'Professor.' \" \"A doctor is someone who sticks things in you. A professor, well, they always struck me as a bit strange. Either rakes chasing the girls or boring, dusty types. Down here in the South, 'Colonel' sounds best. More masculine.\" \"Well, I am no longer in active ser vice. I am a professor, so let's just settle for 'John.' \" Jen gazed up at him for a moment, then came up to his side, stood on tiptoes, and kissed his cheek lightly. \"I can see why my own little girl once fell for you, John. You'll lose both of them soon enough to some pimply- faced boys, so do hang on to her as long as you can.\" \"Well, you sure as hell didn't help, draping that gold necklace on her. What did it cost, a thousand, fifteen hundred?\" \"Roughly, but then again, no lady tells the truth when it comes to her buying jewelry.\" \"Until the bill comes in and the husband has to pay.\" There was a pause. He knew he had misspoken. If he had said such a thing around Mary, she'd have lit into him about a woman being independent and the hell with a husband handling the bills . . . and in fact she did handle all the family finances right up till the last weeks of her life. As for Tyler, though, he no longer even knew what a bill was, and that hurt, no matter how self-reliant Jen tried to appear to be. \"I best be going,\" Jen said. \"Sorry, I didn't mean it that way.\" \"It's all right, John. Let me go up to the nursing home to spend some time with Tyler and I'll be back for the party.\" \"Jennifer was expecting a ride in that monstrous car of yours.\" \"The Edsel, my dear young man, was a generation ahead of its time.\" \"And the biggest .op in the history of Ford Motors. My God, look at that grille; it's ugly as sin.\" She lightened up a bit with the banter. There were half a dozen cars in her huge garage, several newer ones but also an actual Model A, up on blocks, and, beauty of beauties, a powder blue 1965 Mustang convertible. A lot of bad memories, though, were tied to that Mustang. When John and Mary were dating, they had conned her parents into letting them borrow the car for a cruise up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mount Mitchell and John, driving it, had rear- ended an elderly couple's Winnebago. No one was hurt, but the car was totaled and Tyler had poured thousands into getting it restored . . . and swore that no one other than him or Jen would ever drive it again. And Jen still lived by that ruling. \"This Edsel will run forever, my dear, and just check on eBay to see how much it's worth. I bet a heck of a lot more than that SUV thing you've got.\" He settled back against the stone wall as Jen maneuvered \"the monster\" around and cruised down the driveway at breakneck speed. The wall was warm from the afternoon sun. The Beanies were still there, and oh, that did hurt a bit; at least she could have carried Patriot Bear or the ostrich in. Inside he could hear Jennifer and Pat chatting away about the necklace until the stereo kicked on. Some strange female wailing sounds. Britney Spears? No, she was old stuff now, thank God. What it was he couldn't tell, other than the fact that he didn't like it. Pink Floyd, some of the old stuff his parents listened to like Sinatra or Glenn Miller, or, better yet, the Chieftains were more his speed. He picked up one of the Beanies, Patriot Bear. \"Well, my friend, guess we'll soon be left behind,\" he said. Leaning against the wall, he soaked in the view, the tranquility of the moment, broken only by the distant rumble of traffic on I-40 and the noise inside the house. Ginger and Zach came back from their romp in the field behind the house and flopped down at his feet, panting hard. The scent of lilacs was heavy on the air; if anyone wanted to truly see spring, they should live in these mountains. Down in the valley below, the cherry trees were in full bloom, just several hundred feet higher here at his home they were just beginning to blossom, but the lilacs were already blooming. To his right, ten miles away, the top of Mount Mitchell was actually crowned with a touch of snow, winter was still up there. \"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed . . .\" The scent always triggered in his mind Whitman's lament for Lincoln. It reminded John that to night, the second Tuesday of the month, was Civil War Roundtable night in the basement of the Methodist church. It'd be another fun round of the usual raucous debate, the other members all needling him as their one and only Yankee, whom they could pick on. And then the phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, expecting it to be Elizabeth. There was going to be hell to pay if it was. How she could stand up her kid sister on her birthday to sneak off with that pimple- faced, horny, fast- handed Johnson kid . . . But the area code was 703 . . . and John recognized the next three numbers . . . the Pentagon. He opened the phone and clicked it on. \"Hey, Bob.\" \"John, how you doing? Where's my goddaughter?\" He said it doing a halfway decent imitation of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone. Bob Scales, now three stars, John's former boss at Carlisle and a damn good friend, had stood as Jennifer's godfather, and though Irish Catholic rather than Italian, he took the job seriously. He and his wife, Barbara, usually came down three or four times a year. When Mary died they had taken a couple of weeks off and stayed to help. They never had children and thus they considered Jennifer and Elizabeth to be their surrogates. \"Growing up,\" John said sadly. \"Her grandmother gave her a gold necklace that must of cost a grand or more, which counted a helluva lot more than the Beanies, and the stack of Pokemon cards still waiting inside. I even got tickets to Disney World for once school lets out that I'll give her at dinner, but I wonder now if it will be the same.\" \"You mean when you took her there when she was six and Elizabeth ten? Hell, yeah, it will be different, but you'll still see the little girl come out down there, even with Elizabeth. How's Elizabeth doing, by the way?\" \"I'm thinking of shooting her boyfriend later today.\" Bob roared with laughter. \"Maybe it's best I didn't have daughters,\" Bob finally replied. \"Sons, yeah . . .\" His voice trailed off for a moment. \"Hey, let me speak to Jennifer, OK?\" \"Sure.\" John walked into the house, shouting for Jennifer, who came dashing out of her bedroom, still wearing that damn necklace, and grabbed the phone. \"Hi, Uncle Bob!\" John tapped her on the shoulder. \"You take your insulin?\" he asked. She nodded her head; then chattering away, she walked around the house. John looked out the window across the valley to the mountains beyond. It was a beautiful, pristine spring day. And his mood began to lighten. Several of Jennifer's friends would be over soon for a small party. He'd cook up some burgers on the grill out on the side deck; the kids would then retreat to Jennifer's room. He had just opened the pool in the backyard over the weekend, and though the water was a chilly sixty-eight, a couple of the kids might jump in. He'd flush them out around dark, go to his Roundtable meeting, and maybe later this eve ning he'd dig back into that article he was committed to for the Civil War Journal about Lee versus Grant as a strategic commander . . . a no- brainer but still an extra five hundred bucks when done and another vita builder for tenure review next year. He could stay up late; his first lecture wasn't until eleven in the morning tomorrow. \"Dad, Uncle Bob wants you!\" Jennifer came out of her bedroom, holding up the phone. John took it, gave her a quick peck on the top of her head and a playful swat as she ran back off. Seconds later the damn stereo in her room doubled in sound. \"Yeah, Bob?\" \"John, I gotta run.\" He could sense some tension in Bob's voice. He could hear some voices in the background . . . shouting. It was hard to tell, though; Jennifer's stereo was blaring. \"Sure, Bob. Will you be down next month?\" \"Look, John, something's up. Got a problem here. I gotta\u2014\" The phone went dead. At that same instant, the ceiling fan began to slowly wind down, the stereo in Jennifer's room shut down, and looking over to his side alcove office he saw the computer screen saver disappear, the green light of the on button on the nineteen- inch monitor disappearing. There was a chirping beep, the signal that the home security and .re alarm system was off- line; then that went silent as well. \"Bob?\" Silence on the other end. John snapped the phone shut. Damn, power failure. \"Dad?\" It was Jennifer. \"My CD player died.\" \"Yeah, honey.\" Thank God, he thought silently. \"Power failure.\" She looked at him, a bit crestfallen, as if he were somehow responsible or could snap his finger to make the CD player come back on. Actually, if he could permanently arrange for that damn player to die, he would be tempted to do it. \"What about my party? Pat just gave me a CD and I wanted to play it.\" \"No worry, sweetie. Let me call the power company. Most likely a blown transformer.\" He picked up the landline phone . . . silence, no dial tone. Last time that happened some drunk had rammed into a telephone pole down at the bottom of the hill and wiped everything out. The drunk of course had walked away from it. Cell phone. John opened it back up, started to punch numbers . . . nothing. Damn. Cell phone was dead. He put it down on the kitchen table. Puzzling. The battery in his phone must have gone out just as Bob clicked off. Hell, without electricity John couldn't charge it back up to call the power company. He looked over at Jennifer, who stared at him expectantly, as if he would now resolve things. \"No problem at all, kid. They'll be on it, and besides, it's a beautiful day; you don't need to be listening to that garbage anyhow. Why can't you like Mozart or Debussy the way Pat here does?\" Pat looked at him uncomfortably and he realized he had committed one of the mortal sins of parenting; never compare your daughter to one of her buddies. \"Go on outside; give the dogs a run. They'll have the power back by dinnertime.\" Excerpted from ONE SECOND AFTER by William R. Forstchen Copyright \u00a9 2009 by William R. Forstchen Published in March 2009 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher. Continues... Excerpted from One Second After by William R. Forstchen Copyright \u00a9 2011 by William R. Forstchen. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.89}, {"asin": "B00SW6YH1W", "title": "Don't Get SCREWED: Auto Finance & Insurance Department Explained (Screwed Guides Collection - How to Buy a Car & Save Time and Money Book 3)", "author": "Drew Eubanks", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Automotive"], "average_rating": 2.9, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0500233624", "title": "Art Noveau Furniture", "author": "Alastair Duncan", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 48.97}, {"asin": "1455520659", "title": "The Longest Ride", "author": "Nicholas Sparks", "description": "Review \"Sparks is a poet . . . a master.\"\u2015 Philadelphia Inquirer \"Epic Sparks . . . showcases the author's most accomplished work to date . . . There are moments of perfection . . . Reaching not only young and old, the novel is commingled with enough cowboy action, literary flavor, and a maturing gift for dialogue to reach across the sexes.\"\u2015 Mountain Times (NC) \"These parallel love stories are each rich in their own right, but together, they tell a broader and more complicated tale of love's growth and evolution over time . . . some surprising twists right up until the very end.\"\u2015 BookReporter.com About the Author With over 100 million copies of his books sold, Nicholas Sparks is one of the world's most beloved storytellers. His novels include sixteen #1 New York Times bestsellers, and all of his books, including Three Weeks with My Brother , the memoir he wrote with his brother, Micah, have been New York Times and international bestsellers, and were translated into more than fifty languages. Eleven of Nicholas Sparks's novels -- The Choice, The Longest Ride, The Best of Me, Safe Haven, The Lucky One, The Last Song, Dear John, Nights in Rodanthe, The Notebook, A Walk to Remember , and Message in a Bottle -- have been adapted into major motion pictures.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.43}], "target_asin": "0765356864"}
{"user_id": "AE3L3537ERAB4XJFX3FMWPBT6ZJA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1616367164", "title": "Skirting Heresy: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe", "author": null, "description": "Review \"MacDonald\u2019s prose is elegant and clear throughout in this engaging examination of the historical figure Margery Kempe.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA work of scholarship and the imagination.\u201d \u2014 Bloomberg News \u201cA fascinating work. The trials, pilgrimages, weeping, and relentless uproar that surrounded Kempe are all very much brought to life by MacDonald, a gifted writer and story-teller. All very believable, and even inspiring. If you want a very different summer read, quick and engaging, about someone important, about something important, you should pick up Skirting Heresy .\u201d \u2014 National Review \u201cElizabeth MacDonald has done us a genuine service in recovering and translating into a modern, page-turning narrative this very unusual story of a world which was rent by conflicts very like those we face today.\u201d \u2014 Aleteia \"Elizabeth MacDonald vividly brings to life both the world of medieval England and even more impressively, the heroic Margery Kempe, whose insights and courage speak to the modern world. This book will absorb and enlighten you.\" \u2014 Steve Forbes , editor, Forbes magazine\u201cElizabeth MacDonald likely would hate being compared to a saint, but her writing here proves once again, her own inherent goodness. Few journalists reach such an understanding in life. Then again, few journalists come close to what my friend 'Lizzy' has done in life, and the subjects she tackles routinely in life.... Quite a book. Quite a subject. Quite an author.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Neil Cavuto , host of Cavuto and Your World With Neil Cavuto \"Elizabeth MacDonald is a gifted reporter \u2014 her ability to weave passion and truth together shines in Skirting Heresy . MacDonald\u2019s account of Margery Kempe\u2019s life is a compelling must-read story for religious readers and history buffs alike.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Greta Van Susteren , host of On the Record with Greta Van Susteren \u201cOne of the best historical narratives I\u2019ve read in a long time. Elizabeth MacDonald has skillfully delivered a gripping, bold new take on a captivating historical figure, Margery Kempe, a story that shows what was happening in Catholic England before Joan of Arc was executed.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Larry Kudlow , anchor, CNBC \u201cElizabeth MacDonald\u2019s story about Margery Kempe is an amazing historical perspective of a fascinating character that reads like a mystery you can\u2019t put down, full of passion and intrigue. I loved learning more about Margery\u2014a strong medieval woman of faith taking a stand for what she believed in against all odds.\u201d \u2014 Gretchen Carlson , host of The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson \"Elizabeth MacDonald portrays Kempe as a feminist before her time. Writing in a clear, no-nonsense style, MacDonald, a business reporter, weaves medieval history with material from Kempe's memoir, dictated in approximately 1436. This memoir, The Book of Margery Kempe , is considered the first English autobiography. That it was fashioned by a woman is another first. ...At this time, women were not allowed to preach the Gospel and couldn't travel without men. Yet Kempe managed to do both. She made several pilgrimages and traveled to the Holy Land. She chastised her neighbors' wrongdoings as well as that of town and church leaders. If she saw fault with the actions of mayors, priests and bishops, she let them know about it. She was never one to keep her thoughts to herself, and as seen in this entertaining biography, that was a good thing.\"\u2014 Diane Scharper , National Catholic Reporter An engrossing and important revival of a timeless life story, of an heroic woman, Margery Kempe. MacDonald, like her subject, is a truth teller in the modern sense, ever eager to shine a light on what needs to be known.\u201d\u2014 RealClearMarkets About the Author Elizabeth MacDonald is an editor and on-air personality at the FOX Business Network as well as on FOX News and has won more than a dozen journalism awards. She has covered business news for two-and-a-half decades, including at the Wall Street Journal and as an editor at Forbes magazine, where she created the World\u2019s Most Powerful Women annual ranking. MacDonald has spent time working with Mother Teresa\u2019s community in Calcutta, volunteering at an AIDS clinic in Harlem, and engaged in other ministries of outreach in the New York metropolitan area.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Catholicism"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 10.39}, {"asin": "0385413041", "title": "Beach Music", "author": "Pat Conroy", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Booksellers and other vitally interested parties can quit holding their collective breath: Conroy has not lost his touch. His storytelling powers have not failed; neither has his poetic skill with words, nor his vivid imagination. His long-awaited sixth book sings with the familiar elegiac Southern cadences, his prose is sweepingly lyrical (if sometimes melodramatic), unabashedly sentimental (if sometimes indigestibly schmaltzy). The hero, Jack McCall, describes himself as a man on the run from his past: the suicide of his beloved wife; the destructive influence of his icy, manipulative mother and mean, bullying, alcoholic father; the betrayal of his youthful ideals, his faith in the Catholic Church, his boyhood friends. There is, of course, the familiar theme of dysfunctional families; in addition to the McCalls, two other family units vie for the dubious title of most messed-up. But Conroy has added a new element here, by dramatizing his conviction that the \"unbearable wound\" of Vietnam was our country's spiritual Holocaust. Conroy takes on these emotionally laden issues in chapters so direct and powerful that readers will be moved by his intimacy with the material, and perhaps astonished by his authority over it. Conroy meshes complex plot lines with ease. Jack, a food and travel writer, fled with his toddler daughter, Leah, to Rome in 1982 in the wake of his wife Shyla's suicidal jump from a bridge in Charleston, S.C., and her parents' subsequent lawsuit to deny him custody of Leah. He returns home some years later because his mother is dying of leukemia. In addition to becoming embroiled in family tension, he begins a slow process of reconciliation with Shyla's parents, who eventually tell him the stories of their respective Holocaust experiences; with his first love, Ledare Ashley, now a scriptwriter employed by their youthful chum, Mike Hess, to write a screenplay of their growing-up years; and with his parents and siblings. He witnesses the return to Waterford of another friend, Jordan Elliot, who has been presumed dead for 18 years after he was accused of murder during a protest against the Vietnam War, and who was betrayed by the fourth member of their boyhood clan, Capers Middleton, who is now running for governor of South Carolina. Though the book suffers from some florid digressions (a fish story that makes Jonah's adventure seem tame, a totally inappropriate shaggy-dog tale), it is always passionately sincere. Conroy's dark humor has its usual sardonic edge, and his characters' rat-a-tat repartee is laden with casual obscenities and jocular insults. As expected, the characters are larger than life-impossibly beautiful, romantic, witty; in particular, Jack's precocious daughter may seem too mature, sweet, graceful, poised and smart to be true. In the end, of course, as Jack understands that everybody in his life carries a tragic secret equal to the anguish he bears, he achieves healing in the very community, and the very South, he had been determined to leave forever. 750,000 first printing; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selection; author tour. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist As is the case with so many likely best-sellers, the publisher of Pat Conroy's new novel did not distribute advance galleys to prepublication review media, ensuring that by the time you read this review, library patrons will already be clamoring for the opportunity to weep their way through another melodramatic extravaganza from the author of The Prince of Tides (1987). They won't be disappointed. Conroy evolves from the Margaret Mitchell school of southern writing, where everything must be Big--the smartest, most beautiful people on the planet living the biggest lives on the grandest sets and, of course, wracked by the greatest tragedies. It's all here in the story of Jack McCall of Waterford, South Carolina, his five brothers, drunken father, white-trash mother, and Holocaust-surviving in-laws. Nothing small happens in this book: the McCalls' story is played out against World War II, Auschwitz, the sixties, and, of course, the South in all its triumph and tragedy. Even the little moments are big in their way: the best cup of cappuccino, the most beautiful southern evening, the freshest shrimp, the most precocious kid. And yet, sneer as we will, we also must admit that Conroy plays the high-concept game as well as anyone. Like Mitchell, he builds narrative momentum that is impossible to resist, and he writes with a hammy eloquence that, while often infuriating, fits his subject matter perfectly. You won't stop reading, but you'll hate yourself in the morning. Bill Ott Review \u201cReading PAT CONROY is like watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel.\u201d\u2013 Houston Chronicle \u201cAstonishing . . . stunning . . . the range of passions and subjects that brings life to every page is almost endless.\u201d\u2013 The Washington Post Book World \u201cBlockbuster writing at its best.\u201d\u2013 Los Angeles Times Book Review \u201cPAT CONROY\u2019S writing contains a virtue now rare in most contemporary fiction: passion.\u201d\u2013 The Denver Post \u201cMagnificent...beach music is clearly CONROY\u2019S best.\u201d\u2013 San Francisco Chronicle From the Trade Paperback edition. From the Publisher With the spectacular success of the unforgettable Prince Of Tides , Pat Conroy established himself as America's favorite storyteller, a writer whose anguished and painfully honest insights into families and the human heart emerge in richly lyrical prose and compulsively readable narratives. Now, in Beach Music , he tells of the dark memories that haunt families in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust. Beach Music is about Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with his young daughter, trying to find peace after the recent trauma of his wife's suicide. But his solitude is disturbed by the appearance of his sister-in-law, who begs him to return home, and of two school friends, who want his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester and never resurfaced. These requests launch Jack on a journey that encompasses the past and the present in both Europe and the American South and that leads him to shocking and ultimately liberating truths. Told with deep feeling and the unmistakable brand of Conroy humor, this powerful novel adds another masterpiece to the legendary list of classics that his body of works has become. From the Inside Flap Pat Conroy is without doubt America's favorite storyteller, a writer who portrays the anguished truth of the human heart and the painful secrets of families in richly lyrical prose and unforgettable narratives. Now, in Beach Music , he tells of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust. Beach Music is about Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with his young daughter, trying to find peace after the recent trauma of his wife's suicide. But his solitude is disturbed by the appearance of his sister-in-law, who begs him to return home, and of two school friends asking for his help in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester and never resurfaced. These requests launch Jack on a journey that encompasses the past and the present in both Europe and the American South, and that leads him to shocking--and ultimately liberating--truths.Told with deep feeling and trademark Conroy humor, Beach Music is powerful and compulsively readable. It is another masterpiece in the legendary list of classics that his body of work has already become.PAT CONROY is the author of five previous books: The Boo , The Water Is Wide , The Great Santini , The Lords of Discipline , and The Prince of Tides , the last four of which were made into feature films. About the Author Pat Conroy is the bestselling author of The Water is Wide , The Great Santini , The Lords of Discipline , The Prince of Tides , and Beach Music . He lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina. From the Paperback edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. In 1980, a year after my wife leapt to her death from the Silas Pearlman Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, I moved to Italy to begin life anew, taking our small daughter with me.\u00a0\u00a0Our sweet Leah was not quite two when my wife, Shyla, stopped her car on the highest point of the bridge and looked over, for the last time, the city she loved so well.\u00a0\u00a0She had put on the emergency brake and opened the door of our car, then lifted herself up to the rail of the bridge with the delicacy and enigmatic grace that was always Shyla's catlike gift.\u00a0\u00a0She was also quick-witted and funny, but she carried within her a dark side that she hid with bright allusions and an irony as finely wrought as lace.\u00a0\u00a0She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was nearly sunset and a tape of the Drifters' Greatest Hits poured out of the car's stereo.\u00a0\u00a0She had recently had our car serviced and the gasoline tank was full.\u00a0\u00a0She had paid all the bills and set up an appointment with Dr. Joseph for my teeth to be cleaned.\u00a0\u00a0Even in her final moments, her instincts tended toward the orderly and the functional.\u00a0\u00a0She had always prided herself in keeping her madness invisible and at bay; and when she could no longer fend off the voices that grew inside her, their evil set to chaos in a minor key, her breakdown enfolded upon her, like a tarpaulin pulled across that part of her brain where once there had been light.\u00a0\u00a0Having served her time in mental hospitals, exhausted the wide range of pharmaceuticals, and submitted herself to the priestly rites of therapists of every theoretic persuasion, she was defenseless when the black music of her subconscious sounded its elegy for her time on earth.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0On the rail, all eyewitnesses agreed, Shyla hesitated and looked out toward the sea and shipping lanes that cut past Fort Sumter, trying to compose herself for the last action of her life.\u00a0\u00a0Her beauty had always been a disquieting thing about her and as the wind from the sea caught her black hair, lifting it like streamers behind her, no one could understand why anyone so lovely would want to take her own life.\u00a0\u00a0But Shyla was tired of feeling ill-made and transitory and she wanted to set the flags of all her tomorrows at half-mast. Three days earlier, she had disappeared from our house in Ansonborough and only later did I discover that she had checked in to the Mills-Hyatt House to put her affairs in order.\u00a0\u00a0After making appointments, writing schedules, letters, and notes that would allow our household to continue in its predictable harmony, she marked the mirror in her hotel room with an annulling X in bright red lipstick, paid her bill with cash, flirted with the doorman, and gave a large tip to the boy who brought her the car.\u00a0\u00a0The staff at the hotel remarked on her cheerfulness and composure during her stay.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As Shyla steadied herself on the rail of the bridge a man approached her from behind, a man coming up from Florida, besotted with citrus and Disney World, and said in a low voice so as not to frighten the comely stranger on the bridge, \"Are you okay, honey?\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0She pirouetted slowly and faced him.\u00a0\u00a0Then with tears streaming down her face, she stepped back, and with that step, changed the lives of her family forever. Her death surprised no one who loved her, yet none of us got over it completely.\u00a0\u00a0Shyla was that rarest of suicides: no one held her responsible for the act itself; she was forgiven as instantly as she was missed and afterward she was deeply mourned.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For three days I joined the grim-faced crew of volunteers who searched for Shyla's remains.\u00a0\u00a0Ceaselessly, we dragged the length and breadth of the harbor, enacting a grotesque form of braille as hoods felt their way along the mudflats and the pilings of the old bridge that connected Mount Pleasant and Sullivan's Island.\u00a0\u00a0Two boys\u00a0\u00a0were crabbing when they noticed her body moving toward them beside the marsh grass.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After her funeral, a sadness took over me that seemed permanent, and I lost myself in the details and technicalities connected to death in the South. Great sorrow still needs to be fed and I dealt with my disconsolate emptiness by feeding everyone who gathered around me to offer their support.\u00a0\u00a0I felt as though I were providing sustenance for the entire army in the field who had come together to ease the malignant ache I felt every time Shyla's name was mentioned.\u00a0\u00a0The word Shyla itself became a land mine.\u00a0\u00a0That sweet-sounding word was merciless and I could not bear to hear it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0So I lost myself in the oils and condiments of my well-stocked kitchen.\u00a0\u00a0I fatted up my friends and family, attempted complicated recipes I had always put off making, and even tried my hand at Asian cuisine for the first time.\u00a0\u00a0With six gas burners ablaze, I turned out velvety soups and rib-sticking stews.\u00a0\u00a0I alternated between cooking and weeping and I prayed for the repose of the soul of my sad, hurt wife.\u00a0\u00a0I suffered, I grieved, I broke down, and I cooked fabulous meals for those who came to comfort me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was only a short time after we buried Shyla that her parents sued me for custody of my child, Leah, and their lawsuit brought me running back into the real world.\u00a0\u00a0I spent a dispiriting year in court trying to prove my fitness as a father.\u00a0\u00a0It was a time when I met a series of reptilian lawyers so unscrupulous that I would not have used their marrow to feed wild dogs or their wiry flesh to bait a crab pot.\u00a0\u00a0Shyla's mother and father had gone crazy with grief and I learned much about the power of scapegoating by watching their quiet hatred of me as they grimaced though the testimony regarding my sanity, my finances, my reputation in the community, and my sexual life with their eldest child.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Though I have a whole range of faults that piqued the curiosity of the court, few who have ever seen me with my daughter have any doubts about my feelings for her.\u00a0\u00a0I get weak at the knees at the very sight of her.\u00a0\u00a0She is my certification, my boarding pass into the family of man, and whatever faith in the future I still retain.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But it was not my overriding love of Leah that won the day in court.\u00a0\u00a0Before she took her final drive, Shyla had mailed me a letter that was part love letter and part apology for what she had done.\u00a0\u00a0When my lawyer had me read that letter aloud to the court, it became clear to Shyla's parents and everyone present that laying her death at my feet was, at best, a miscarriage of justice.\u00a0\u00a0Her letter was an act of extraordinary generosity written in the blackest hours of her life.\u00a0\u00a0She blew it like a kiss toward me as a final gesture of a rare, exquisite sensibility.\u00a0\u00a0Her letter saved Leah for me.\u00a0\u00a0But the ferocity of that court battle left me exhausted, bitter, and raw around the edges.\u00a0\u00a0It felt as though Shyla had died twice.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I answered my wife's leap from the bridge and the fierceness of that legal battle with a time of disorientation and sadness; and then with Italy.\u00a0\u00a0Toward Europe, I looked for respite and hermitage, and the imminence of my secret flight from South Carolina again restored a fight spirit within me.\u00a0\u00a0I had made a good living as a food and travel writer and running away had always been one of the things I did best.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The flight to Europe was my attempt to place the memory of both Shyla and South Carolina permanently in the past.\u00a0\u00a0I hoped I would save my life and Leah's from the suffocation I was beginning to feel in the place where Shyla and I had come of age together.\u00a0\u00a0For me, the South was carry-on baggage I could not shed no matter how many borders I crossed, but my daughter was still a child and I wanted her to grow into young womanhood as a European, blissfully unaware of that soft ruinous South that had killed her mother in one of its prettiest rivers.\u00a0\u00a0My many duties as a father I took with great seriousness, but there was no law that I was aware of that insisted I raise Leah as a Southerner.\u00a0\u00a0Certainly, the South had been a mixed blessing for me and I carried some grievous wounds into exile with me.\u00a0\u00a0All the way across the Atlantic Leah slept in my lap and when she awoke, I began her transformation by teaching her to count in Italian.\u00a0\u00a0And so in Rome we settled and began the long process of refusing to be Southern, even though my mother started a letter-writing campaign to coax me back home.\u00a0\u00a0Her letters arrived every Friday: \"A Southerner in Rome? A low country boy in Italy? Ridiculous.\u00a0\u00a0You've always been restless, Jack, never knew how to be comfortable with your own kind.\u00a0\u00a0But mark my words.\u00a0\u00a0You'll be back soon.\u00a0\u00a0The South's got a lot wrong with it.\u00a0\u00a0But it's permanent press and it doesn't wash out.\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Though my mother was onto something real, I stuck by my guns.\u00a0\u00a0I would tell American tourists who questioned me about my accent that I no longer checked the scores of the Atlanta Braves in the Herald T... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 21.99}, {"asin": "0762108711", "title": "The Most Scenic Drives in America: 120 Spectacular Road Trips", "author": "Jerry Bates", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Travel"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.13}, {"asin": "B00L9B7IKE", "title": "The Girl on the Train: A Novel", "author": "Paula Hawkins", "description": "Review \u201c The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl. . . . The Girl on the Train is liable to draw a large, bedazzled readership too. . . . The Girl on the Train is full of back-stabbing, none of it literal.\u201d\u2014Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201c The Girl on the Train marries movie noir with novelistic trickery. . . hang on tight. You'll be surprised by what horrors lurk around the bend.\u201d\u2014 USA Today \u201cLike its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London and the reader cannot help but turn pages. . . . The welcome echoes of Rear Window throughout the story and its propulsive narrative make The Girl on the Train an absorbing read.\u201d\u2014 The Boston Globe \u201c[ The Girl on the Train ] pulls off a thriller's toughest trick: carefully assembling everything we think we know, until it reveals the one thing we didn't see coming.\"\u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201c Gone Girl fans will devour this psychological thriller. . . . Hawkins\u2019s debut ends with a twist that no one\u2014least of all its victims\u2014could have seen coming.\u201d\u2014 People \u201cGiven the number of titles that are declared to be 'the next' of a bestseller . . . book fans have every right to be wary. But Paula Hawkins\u2019 novel The Girl on the Train just might have earned the title of 'the next Gone Girl .\u201d\u2014 Christian Science Monitor \u201cHawkins\u2019s taut story roars along at the pace of, well, a high-speed train. \u2026Hawkins delivers a smart, searing thriller that offers readers a 360-degree view of lust, love, marriage and divorce.\u201d\u2014 Good Housekeeping \u201cThere\u2019s nothing like a possible murder to take the humdrum out of your daily commute.\u201d\u2014 Cosmopolitan \"Paula Hawkins has come up with an ingenious slant on the currently fashionable amnesia thriller. . . . Hawkins juggles perspectives and timescales with great skill, and considerable suspense builds up along with empathy for an unusual central character.\"\u2014 The Guardian \u201cPaula Hawkins deftly imbues her debut psychological thriller with inventive twists and a shocking denouement. \u2026 Hawkins delivers an original debut that keeps the exciting momentum of The Girl on the Train going until the last page.\u201d\u2014 Denver Post \u201c The Girl on the Train, Hawkins\u2019s first thriller, is well-written and ingeniously constructed.\u201d \u2013 The Washington Post \u201cThe novel is at its best in the moment of maximum confusion, when neither the reader nor the narrators know what is occurring\u201d \u2013 The Financial Times \u201cThis fresh take on Hitchcock\u2019s Rear Window is getting raves and will likely be one of the biggest debuts of the year.\u201d\u2014 Omaha World-Herald \u201cHawkins\u2019s tale of love, regret, violence and forgetting is an engrossing psychological thriller with plenty of surprises. . . . The novel gets harder and harder to put down as the story screeches toward its unexpected ending.\u201d\u2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cA gripping, down-the-rabbit-hole thriller.\u201d\u2014 Entertainment Weekly Hotlist \u201cThe Thriller So Engrossing, You'll Pray for Snow: Send in the blizzards, because nothing as mundane as work, school or walking the dog should distract you from this debut thriller. A natural fit for fans of Gone Girl-style unreliable narrators and twisty, fast-moving plots, The Girl on the Train will have you racing through the pages.\"\u2014Oprah.com  \u201cIt's difficult to say too much more about the plot of The Girl on the Train ; like all thrillers, it's best for readers to dive in spoiler-free. This is a debut novel\u2014Hawkins is a journalist by training\u2014but it doesn't read like the work of someone new to suspense. The novel is perfectly paced, from its arresting beginning to its twist ending; it's not an easy book to put down. . . . . What really makes The Girl on the Train such a gripping novel is Hawkins' remarkable understanding of the limits of human knowledge, and the degree to which memory and imagination can become confused.\u201d\u2014NPR.org   \u201c[L]ike Gone Girl , Hawkins's book is a highly addictive novel about a lonely divorcee who gets caught up in the disappearance of a woman whom she had been surreptitiously watching. And beyond the Gone Girl comparisons, this book has legs of its own.\u201d\u2014GQ.com  \u201cPaula Hawkins\u2019 thriller is a shocking ride.\u201d \u2013US Weekly \u201cAn ex-wife indulges her voyeuristic tendencies in Paula Hawkins\u2019s film-ready The Girl on the Train. In the post- Gone Girl era, crimes of love aren\u2019t determined by body counts or broken hearts, but by who controls the story line.\u201d \u2013 Vogue \u201c The Girl on the Train [is] a harrowing new suspense novel\u2026a complex and thoroughly chilling psychological thriller\u2026 The Girl on the Train is one of those books where you can\u2019t wait \u2014 yet almost can\u2019t bear \u2014 to turn the page. It\u2019s a stunning novel of dread.\u201d \u2013 New York Daily News \u201c The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is a psychologically gripping debut that delivers.\u201d \u2013 The Missourian \u201c The Girl on the Train is the kind of slippery, thrilling read that only comes around every few years (see Gone Girl ).\u201d \u2013 BookPage \u201cHawkins, a former journalist, is a witty, sharp writer with a gift for creating complex female characters.\u201d \u2013 Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201c The Girl on the Train is as tautly constructed as Gone Girl or A.S.A. Harrison's The Silent Wife , and has something more: a main character who is all screwed up but sympathetic nonetheless. Broken, but dear. . . . No matter how well it's written, a suspense novel can fall apart in the last pages, with an overly contrived or unbelievable ending. Here, The Girl on the Train shines, with its mystery resolved by a left-field plot twist that works, followed, surprisingly, by what you might call a happy ending.\u201d\u2014 Newsday \u201cI\u2019m calling it now: The Girl on the Train is the next Gone Girl . Paula Hawkins\u2019s highly anticipated debut novel is a dark, gripping thriller with the shocking ending you crave in a noir-ish mystery.\u201d \u2013 Bustle \u201cRachel takes the same train into London every day, daydreaming about the lives of the occupants in the homes she passes. But when she sees something unsettling from her window one morning, it sets in motion a chilling series of events that make her question whom she can really trust.\u201d\u2014 Woman\u2019s Day \u201cHawkins\u2019s debut novel is a tangle of unreliable narrators, but what will have readers talking is her deft handling of twists and turns and her eerily fine-tuned narrative. This is one creepy, dark thriller. . . . The book is smartly paced and delightfully complex. Just when it seems Hawkins is leading us one way, Rachel, Anna, or Megan change the game. Nothing can be taken for granted in The Girl on the Train , not even the account of the girl herself.\u201d\u2014 Las Vegas Weekly \"Psychologically astute debut . . . The surprise-packed narratives hurtle toward a stunning climax, horrifying as a train wreck and just as riveting.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201c[A] chilling, assured debut. . . . Even the most astute readers will be in for a shock as Hawkins slowly unspools the facts, exposing the harsh realities of love and obsession's inescapable links to violence.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus (starred review)  \u201cintricate, multilayered psychological suspense debut, from a staggered timeline and three distinct female narrators. Rachel, who is unabashed in her darker instincts, anchors the narrative. Readers will fear, pity, sympathize and root for her, though she's not always understandable or trustworthy. . . . En route to a terrorizing and twisted conclusion, all three women\u2014and the men with whom they share their lives\u2014are forced to dismantle their delusions about others and themselves, their choices and their respective relationships.\u201d\u2014 Shelf Awareness \"This month we're gearing up for Paula Hawkins's mystery The Girl on the Train . Its three narrators keep readers guessing as they try to suss out who's behind one character's shocking disappearance. Can you figure out who did it before they do?\"\u2014 Martha Stewart Living \u201cWhat a thriller!\u201d\u2014 People Style Watch \u201cHawkins keeps the tension ratcheted high in this thoroughly engrossing tale of intersecting strangers and intimate betrayals. Kept me guessing until the very end.\u201d\u2014Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times \u2013bestselling author of the Detective D. D. Warren series  \u201cI simply could not put it down.\u201d\u2014Tess Gerritsen, New York Times \u2013bestselling author of the Rizzoli and Isles series  \u201cGripping, enthralling\u2014a top-notch thriller and a compulsive read.\u201d\u2014S. J. Watson, New York Times \u2013bestselling author of Before I Go to Sleep \u201cBe ready to be spellbound, ready to become as obsessed. . . . The Girl on the Train is the kind of book you\u2019ll want to press into the hands of everyone you know, just so they can share your obsession and you can relive it.\u201d\u2014Laura Kasischke, author of The Raising \u201cWhat a group of characters, what a situation, what a book! It\u2019s Alfred Hitchcock for a new generation and a new era.\u201d\u2014Terry Hayes, author of I Am Pilgrim \u201cArtfully crafted and utterly riveting. The Girl on the Train \u2019s clever structure and expert pacing will keep you perched on the edge of your seat, but it\u2019s Hawkins\u2019s deft, empathetic characterization that will leave you pondering this harrowing, thought-provoking story about the power of memory and the danger of envy.\u201d\u2014Kimberly McCreight, New York Times \u2013bestselling author of Reconstructing Amelia Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2015: Intersecting, overlapping, not-quite-what-they-seem lives. Jealousies and betrayals and wounded hearts. A haunting unease that clutches and won\u2019t let go. All this and more helps propel Paula Hawkins\u2019s addictive debut into a new stratum of the psychological thriller genre. At times, I couldn\u2019t help but think: Hitchcockian . From the opening line, the reader knows what they\u2019re in for: \u201cShe\u2019s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks\u2026\u201d But Hawkins teases out the mystery with a veteran\u2019s finesse. The \u201cgirl on the train\u201d is Rachel, who commutes into London and back each day, rolling past the backyard of a happy-looking couple she names Jess and Jason. Then one day Rachel sees \u201cJess\u201d kissing another man. The day after that, Jess goes missing. The story is told from three character\u2019s not-to-be-trusted perspectives: Rachel, who mourns the loss of her former life with the help of canned gin and tonics; Megan (aka Jess); and Anna, Rachel\u2019s ex-husband\u2019s wife, who happens to be Jess/Megan\u2019s neighbor. Rachel\u2019s voyeuristic yearning for the seemingly idyllic life of Jess and Jason lures her closer and closer to the investigation into Jess/Megan\u2019s disappearance, and closer to a deeper understanding of who she really is. And who she isn\u2019t. This is a book to be devoured. -Neal Thompson About the Author Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for fifteen years before turning her hand to fiction. She lives in London. The Girl on the Train is her first thriller. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. RACHEL FRIDAY, JULY 5, 2013 MORNING There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks. Light-blue cloth\u2014a shirt, perhaps\u2014jumbled up with something dirty white. It's probably rubbish, part of a load dumped into the scrubby little wood up the bank. It could have been left behind by the engineers who work this part of the track, they're here often enough. Or it could be something else. My mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination; Tom said that, too. I can't help it, I catch sight of these discarded scraps, a dirty T-shirt or a lonesome shoe, and all I can think of is the other shoe and the feet that fitted into them.\u00a0 The train jolts and scrapes and screeches back into motion, the little pile of clothes disappears from view and we trundle on towards London, moving at a brisk jogger's pace. Someone in the seat behind me gives a sigh of helpless irritation; the 8:04 slow train from Ashbury to Euston can test the patience of the most seasoned commuter. The journey is supposed to take fifty-four minutes, but it rarely does: this section of the track is ancient, decrepit, beset with signalling problems and never-ending engineering works. The train crawls along; it judders past warehouses and water towers, bridges and sheds, past modest Victorian houses, their backs turned squarely to the track.My head leaning against the carriage window, I watch these houses roll past me like a tracking shot in a film. I see them as others do not; even their owners probably don't see them from this perspective. Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There's something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.Someone's phone is ringing, an incongruously joyful and upbeat song. They're slow to answer, it jingles on and on around me. I can feel my fellow commuters shift in their seats, rustle their newspapers, tap at their computers. The train lurches and sways around the bend, slowing as it approaches a red signal. I try not to look up, I try to read the free newspaper I was handed on my way into the station, but the words blur in front of my eyes, nothing holds my interest. In my head I can still see that little pile of clothes lying at the edge of the track, abandoned. EVENING The premixed gin and tonic fizzes up over the lip of the can as I bring it to my mouth and sip. Tangy and cold, the taste of my first-ever holiday with Tom, a fishing village on the Basque coast in 2005. In the mornings we'd swim the half mile to the little island in the bay, make love on secret hidden beaches; in the afternoons we'd sit at a bar drinking strong, bitter gin and tonics, watching swarms of beach footballers playing chaotic twenty-five-a-side games on the low-tide sands.I take another sip, and another; the can's already half empty, but it's OK, I have three more in the plastic bag at my feet. It's Friday, so I don't have to feel guilty about drinking on the train. TGIF. The fun starts here.It's going to be a lovely weekend, that's what they're telling us. Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies. In the old days we might have driven to Corly Wood with a picnic and the papers, spent all afternoon lying on a blanket in dappled sunlight, drinking wine. We might have barbecued out back with friends, or gone to the Rose and sat in the beer garden, faces flushing with sun and alcohol as the afternoon went on, weaving home, arm in arm, falling asleep on the sofa. Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies, no one to play with, nothing to do. Living like this, the way I'm living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness, when everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. It's exhausting, and it makes you feel bad if you're not joining in. The weekend stretches out ahead of me, forty-eight empty hours to fill. I lift the can to my mouth again, but there's not a drop left. MONDAY, JULY 8, 2013 MORNING It's a relief to be back on the 8:04. It's not that I can't wait to get into London to start my week\u2014I don't particularly want to be in London at all. I just want to lean back in the soft, sagging velour seat, feel the warmth of the sunshine streaming through the window, feel the carriage rock back and forth and back and forth, the comforting rhythm of wheels\u00a0on tracks. I'd rather be here, looking out at the houses beside the track, than almost anywhere else. There's a faulty signal on this line, about halfway through my journey. I assume it must be faulty, in any case, because it's almost always red; we stop there most days, sometimes just for a few seconds, sometimes for minutes on end. If I sit in carriage D, which I usually do, and the train stops at this signal, which it almost always does, I have a perfect view into my favourite trackside house: number fifteen. Number fifteen is much like the other houses along this stretch of track: a Victorian semi, two storeys high, overlooking a narrow, well-tended garden that runs around twenty feet down towards some fencing, beyond which lie a few metres of no-man's-land before you get to the railway track. I know this house by heart. I know every brick, I know the colour of the curtains in the upstairs bedroom (beige, with a dark-blue print), I know that the paint is peeling off the bathroom window frame and that there are four tiles missing from a section of the roof over on the right-hand side. I know that on warm summer evenings, the occupants of this house, Jason and Jess, sometimes climb out of the large sash window to sit on the makeshift terrace on top of the kitchen-extension roof. They are a perfect, golden couple. He is dark-haired and well built, strong, protective, kind. He has a great laugh. She is one of those tiny bird-women, a beauty, pale-skinned with blond hair cropped short. She has the bone structure to carry that kind of thing off, sharp cheekbones dappled with a sprinkling of freckles, a fine jaw. While we're stuck at the red signal, I look for them. Jess is often out there in the mornings, especially in the summer, drinking her coffee. Sometimes, when I see her there, I feel as though she sees me, too, I feel as though she looks right back at me, and I want to wave. I'm too self-conscious. I don't see Jason quite so much, he's away a lot with work. But even if they're not there, I think about what they might be up to. Maybe this morning they've both got the day off and she's lying in bed while he makes breakfast, or maybe they've gone for a run together, because that's the sort of thing they do. (Tom and I used to run together on Sundays, me going at slightly above my normal pace, him at about half his, just so we could run side by side.) Maybe Jess is upstairs in the spare room, painting, or maybe they're in the shower together, her hands pressed against the tiles, his hands on her hips. EVENING Turning slightly towards the window, my back to the rest of the carriage, I open one of the little bottles of Chenin Blanc I purchased from the Whistlestop at Euston. It's not cold, but it'll do. I pour some into a plastic cup, screw the top back on and slip the bottle into my handbag. It's less acceptable to drink on the train on a Monday, unless you're drinking with company, which I am not.\u00a0 There are familiar faces on these trains, people I see every week, going to and fro. I recognize them and they probably recognize me. I don't know whether they see me, though, for what I really am. It's a glorious evening, warm but not too close, the sun starting its lazy descent, shadows lengthening and the light just beginning to burnish the trees with gold. The train is rattling along, we whip past Jason and Jess's place, they pass in a blur of evening sunshine. Sometimes, not often, I can see them from this side of the track. If there's no train going in the opposite direction, and if we're travelling slowly enough, I can sometimes catch a glimpse of them out on their terrace. If not\u2014like today\u2014I can imagine them. Jess will be sitting with her feet up on the table out on the terrace, a glass of wine in her hand, Jason standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders. I can imagine the feel of his hands, the weight of them, reassuring and protective. Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches. TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2013 MORNING The pile of clothes from last week is still there, and it looks dustier and more forlorn than it did a few days ago. I read somewhere that a train can rip the clothes right off you when it hits. It's not that unusual, death by train. Two to three hundred a year, they say, so at least one every couple of days. I'm not sure how many of those are accidental. I look carefully, as the train rolls slowly past, for blood on the clothes, but I can't see any. The train stops at the signal as usual. I can see Jess standing on the patio in front of the French doors. She's wearing a bright print dress, her feet are bare. She's looking over her shoulder, back into the house; she's probably talking to Jason, who'll be making breakfast. I keep my eyes fixed on Jess, on her home, as the train starts to inch forward. I don't want to see the other houses; I particularly don't want to see the one four doors down, the one that used to be mine. I lived at number twenty-three Blenheim Road for five years, blissfully happy and utterly wretched. I can't look at it now. That was my first home. Not my parents' place, not a flatshare with other students, my first home. I can't bear to look at it. Well, I can, I do, I want to, I don't want to, I try not to. Every day I tell myself not to look, and every day I look. I can't help myself, even though there is nothing I want to see there, even though anything I do see will hurt me. Even though I remember so clearly how it felt that time I looked up and noticed that the cream linen blind in the upstairs bedroom was gone, replaced by something in soft baby pink; even though I still remember the pain I felt when I saw Anna watering the rose-bushes near the fence, her T-shirt stretched tight over her bulging belly, and I bit my lip so hard, it bled. I close my eyes tightly and count to ten, fifteen, twenty. There, it's gone now, nothing to see. We roll into Witney station and out again, the train starting to pick up pace as suburbia melts into grimy North London, terraced houses replaced by tagged bridges and empty buildings with broken windows. The closer we get to Euston, the more anxious I feel; pressure builds; how will today be? There's a filthy, low-slung concrete building on the right-hand side of the track about five hundred metres before we get into Euston. On its side, someone has painted: LIFE IS NOT A PARAGRAPH . I think about the bundle of clothes on the side of the track and I feel as though my throat is closing up. Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis. EVENING The train I take in the evening, the 5:56, is slightly slower than the morning one\u2014it takes one hour and one minute, a full seven minutes longer than the morning train despite not stopping at any extra stations. I don't mind, because just as I'm in no great hurry to get into London in the morning, I'm in no hurry to get back to Ashbury in the evening, either. Not just because it's Ashbury, although the place itself is bad enough, a 1960s new town, spreading like a tumour over the heart of Buckinghamshire. No better or worse than a dozen other towns like it, a centre filled with caf\u00e9s and mobile-phone shops and branches of JD Sports, surrounded by a band of suburbia and beyond that the realm of the multiplex cinema and out-of-town Tesco. I live in a smart(ish), new(ish) block situated at the point where the commercial heart of the place starts to bleed into the residential outskirts, but it is not my home. My home is the Victorian semi on the tracks, the one I part-owned. In Ashbury I am not a homeowner, not even a tenant\u2014I'm a lodger, occupant of the small second bedroom in Cathy's bland and inoffensive duplex, subject to her grace and favour. Cathy and I were friends at university. Half friends, really, we were never that close. She lived across the hall from me in my first year, and we were both doing the same course, so we were natural allies in those first few daunting weeks, before we met people with whom we had more in common. We didn't see much of each other after the first year and barely at all after college, except for the occasional wedding. But in my hour of need she happened to have a spare room going and it made sense. I was so sure that it would only be for a couple of months, six at the most, and I didn't know what else to do. I'd never lived by myself, I'd gone from parents to flatmates to Tom, I found the idea overwhelming, so I said yes. And that was nearly two years ago. It's not awful . Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring. But it's not so bad, I can think of worse traits in a flatmate. No, it's not Cathy, it's not even Ashbury that bothers me most about my new situation (I still think of it as new, although it's been two years). It's the loss of control. In Cathy's flat I always feel like a guest at the very outer limit of her welcome. I feel it in the kitchen, where we jostle for space when cooking our evening meals. I feel it when I sit beside her on the sofa, the remote control firmly within her grasp. The only space that feels like mine is my tiny bedroom, into which a double bed and a desk have been crammed, with barely enough space to walk between them. It's comfortable enough, but it isn't a place you want to be, so instead I linger in the living room or at the kitchen table, ill at ease and powerless. I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head. WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, 2013 MORNING The heat is building. It's barely half past eight and already the day is close, the air heavy with moisture. I could wish for a storm, but the sky is an insolent blank, pale, watery blue. I wipe away the sweat on my top lip. I wish I'd remembered to buy a bottle of water. I can't see Jason and Jess this morning, and my sense of disappointment is acute. Silly, I know. I scrutinize the house, but there's nothing to see. The curtains are open downstairs but the French doors are closed, sunlight reflecting off the glass. The sash window upstairs is closed, too. Jason may be away working. He's a doctor, I think, probably for one of those overseas organizations. He's constantly on call, a bag packed on top of the wardrobe; there's an earthquake in Iran or a tsunami in Asia and he drops everything, he grabs his bag and he's at Heathrow within a matter of hours, ready to fly out and save lives. Jess, with her bold prints and her Converse trainers and her beauty, her attitude, works in the fashion industry. Or perhaps in the music business, or in advertising\u2014she might be a stylist or a photographer. She's a good painter, too, plenty of artistic flair. I can see her now, in the spare room upstairs, music blaring, window open, a brush in her hand, an enormous canvas leaning against the wall. She'll be there until midnight; Jason knows not to bother her when she's working. I can't really see her, of course. I don't know if she paints, or whether Jason has a great laugh, or whether Jess has beautiful cheek-bones. I can't see her bone structure from here and I've never heard Jason's voice. I've never seen them up close, they didn't live at that house when I lived down the road. They moved in after I left two years ago, I don't know when exactly. I suppose I started noticing them about a year ago, and gradually, as the months went past, they became important to me. I don't know their names, either, so I had to name them myself. Jason, because he's handsome in a British film star kind of way, not a Depp or a Pitt, but a Firth, or a Jason Isaacs. And Jess just goes with Jason, and it goes with her. It fits her, pretty and carefree as she is. They're a match, they're a set. They're happy, I can tell. They're what I used to be, they're Tom and me five years ago. They're what I lost, they're everything I want to be. EVENING My shirt, uncomfortably tight, buttons straining across my chest, is pit-stained, damp patches clammy beneath my arms. My eyes and throat itch. This evening I don't want the journey to stretch out; I long to get home, to undress and get into the shower, to be where no one can look at me. I look at the man in the seat opposite mine. He is about my age, early to midthirties, with dark hair, greying at the temples. Sallow skin. He's wearing a suit, but he's taken the jacket off and slung it on the seat next to him. He has a MacBook, paper-thin, open in front of him. He's a slow typist. He's wearing a silver watch with a large face on his right wrist\u2014it looks expensive, a Breitling maybe. He's chewing the inside of his cheek. Perhaps he's nervous. Or just thinking deeply. Writing an important email to a colleague at the office in New York, or a carefully worded break-up message to his girlfriend. He looks up suddenly and meets my eye; his glance travels over me, over the little bottle of wine on the table in front of me. He looks away. There's something about the set of his mouth that suggests distaste. He finds me distasteful. I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I'm off-putting in some way. It's not just that I've put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it's as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move. One night last week, when I left my room to get myself a glass of water, I overheard Cathy talking to Damien, her boyfriend, in the living room. I stood in the hallway and listened. \"She's lonely,\" Cathy was saying. \"I really worry about her. It doesn't help, her being alone all the time.\" Then she said, \"Isn't there someone from work, maybe, or the rugby club?\" and Damien said, \"For Rachel? Not being funny, Cath, but I'm not sure I know anyone that desperate.\" THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2013 MORNING I'm picking at the plaster on my forefinger. It's damp, it got wet when I was washing out my coffee mug this morning; it feels clammy, dirty, though it was clean on this morning. I don't want to take it off because the cut is deep. Cathy was out when I got home, so I went to the off-licence and bought two bottles of wine. I drank the first one and then I thought I'd take advantage of the fact that she was out and cook myself a steak, make a red-onion relish, have it with a green salad. A good, healthy meal. I sliced through the top of my finger while chopping the onions. I must have gone to the bathroom to clean it up and gone to lie down for a while and just forgotten all about it, because I woke up around ten and I could hear Cathy and Damien talking and he was saying how disgusting it was that I would leave the kitchen like that. Cathy came upstairs to see me, she knocked softly on my door and opened it a fraction. She cocked her head to one side and asked if I was OK. I apologized without being sure what I was apologizing for. She said it was all right, but would I mind cleaning up a bit? There was blood on the chopping board, the room smelled of raw meat, the steak was still sitting out on the countertop, turning grey. Damien didn't even say hello, he just shook his head when he saw me and went upstairs to Cathy's bedroom. After they'd both gone to bed I remembered that I hadn't drunk the second bottle, so I opened that. I sat on the sofa and watched television with the sound turned down really low so they wouldn't hear it. I can't remember what I was watching, but at some point I must have felt lonely, or happy, or something, because I wanted to talk to someone. The need for contact must have been over-whelming, and there was no one I could call except for Tom. There's no one I want to talk to except for Tom. The call log on my phone says I rang four times: at 11:02, 11:12, 11:54, 12:09. Judging from the length of the calls, I left two messages. He may even have picked up, but I don't remember talking to him. I remember leaving the first message; I think I just asked him to call me. That may be what I said in both of them, which isn't too bad.The train shudders to a standstill at the red signal and I look up. Jess is sitting on her patio, drinking a cup of coffee. She has her feet up against the table and her head back, sunning herself. Behind her, I think I can see a shadow, someone moving: Jason. I long to see him, to catch a glimpse of his handsome face. I want him to come outside, to stand behind her the way he does, to kiss the top of her head. He doesn't come out, and her head falls forward. There is something about the way she is moving today that seems different; she is heavier, weighed down. I will him to come out to her, but the train jolts and slogs forward and still there is no sign of him; she's alone. And now, without thinking, I find myself looking directly into my house, and I can't look away. The French doors are flung open, light streaming into the kitchen. I can't tell, I really can't, whether I'm seeing this or imagining it\u2014is she there, at the sink, washing up? Is there a little girl sitting in one of those bouncy baby chairs up there on the kitchen table? I close my eyes and let the darkness grow and spread until it morphs from a feeling of sadness into something worse: a memory, a flashback. I didn't just ask him to call me back. I remember now, I was crying. I told him that I still loved him, that I always would. Please, Tom, please, I need to talk to you. I miss you . No no no no no no no. I have to accept it, there's no point trying to push it away. I'm going to feel terrible all day, it's going to come in waves\u2014stronger then weaker then stronger again\u2014that twist in the pit of my stomach, the anguish of shame, the heat coming to my face, my eyes squeezed tight as though I could make it all disappear. And I'll be telling myself all day, it's not the worst thing, is it? It's not the worst thing I've ever done, it's not as if I fell over in public, or yelled at a stranger in the street. It's not as if I humiliated my husband at a summer barbecue by shouting abuse at the wife of one of his friends. It's not as if we got into a fight one night at home and I went for him with a golf club, taking a chunk out of the plaster in the hallway outside the bedroom. It's not like going back to work after a three-hour lunch and staggering through the office, everyone looking, Martin Miles taking me to one side , I think you should probably go home, Rachel . I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and I thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set. EVENING I have been thinking about Jess all day, unable to focus on anything but what I saw this morning. What was it that made me think that something was wrong? I couldn't possibly see her expression at that distance, but I felt when I was looking at her that she was alone. More than alone\u2014lonely. Perhaps she was\u2014perhaps he's away, gone to one of those hot countries he jets off to to save lives. And she misses him, and she worries, although she knows he has to go. Of course she misses him, just as I do. He is kind and strong, everything a husband should be. And they are a partnership. I can see it, I know how they are. His strength, that protectiveness he radiates, it doesn't mean she's weak. She's strong in other ways; she makes intellectual leaps that leave him openmouthed in admiration. She can cut to the nub of a problem, dissect and analyse it in the time it takes other people to say good morning. At parties, he often holds her hand, even though they've been together years. They respect each other, they don't put each other down. I feel exhausted this evening. I am sober, stone-cold. Some days I feel so bad that I have to drink; some days I feel so bad that I can't. Today, the thought of alcohol turns my stomach. But sobriety on the evening train is a challenge, particularly now, in this heat. A film of sweat covers every inch of my skin, the inside of my mouth prickles, my eyes itch, mascara rubbed into their corners. My phone buzzes in my handbag, making me jump. Two girls sitting across the carriage look at me and then at each other, with a sly exchange of smiles. I don't know what they think of me, but I know it isn't good. My heart is pounding in my chest as I reach for the phone. I know this will be nothing good, either: it will be Cathy, perhaps, asking me ever so nicely to maybe give the booze a rest this evening? Or my mother, telling me that she'll be in London next week, she'll drop by the office, we can go for lunch. I look at the screen. It's Tom. I hesitate for just a second and then I answer it. \"Rachel?\" For the first five years I knew him, I was never Rachel, always Rach. Sometimes Shelley, because he knew I hated it and it made him laugh to watch me twitch with irritation and then giggle because I couldn't help but join in when he was laughing. \"Rachel, it's me.\" His voice is leaden, he sounds worn out. \"Listen, you have to stop this, OK?\" I don't say anything. The train is slowing, and we are almost opposite the house, my old house. I want to say to him, Come outside, go and stand on the lawn. Let me see you. \"Please, Rachel, you can't call me like this all the time. You've got to sort yourself out.\" There is a lump in my throat as hard as a pebble, smooth and obstinate. I cannot swallow. I cannot speak. \"Rachel? Are you there? I know things aren't good with you, and I'm sorry for you, I really am, but . . . I can't help you, and these constant calls are really upsetting Anna. OK? I can't help you anymore. Go to AA or something. Please, Rachel. Go to an AA meeting after work today.\" I pull the filthy plaster off the end of my finger and look at the pale, wrinkled flesh beneath, dried blood caked at the edge of my fingernail. I press the thumbnail of my right hand into the centre of the cut and feel it open up, the pain sharp and hot. I catch my breath. Blood starts to ooze from the wound. The girls on the other side of the carriage are watching me, their faces blank. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0679736484", "title": "Collected Stories (Vintage Classics)", "author": "Willa Cather", "description": "Review All the stories Willa Cather wanted published in book form -- collected for the first time in one volume.A ruined beauty whose dignity has survived a lifetime of loss and disenchantment. A Czech immigrant who finds a paradoxical contentment on the harsh expanse of the Nebraska prairie. A solitary young painter spying raptly and guiltily on his exquisite neighbor. These are some of the lives that Willa Cather renders, with a fine balance of compassion and detachment, in these nineteen stories. Here are the landscapes that have awed readers of novels like O Pioneers! and Death Comes for the Archbishop , from frontier farms to the red rock canyons of the Southwest.Here are the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; the ways in which the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.Vintage Classics are quality paperback editions of the world's greatest written works. They are durably bound and are printed exclusively on acid-free paper. From the Back Cover In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment. About the Author WILLA CATHER , author of twelve novels, including O Pioneers!, My \u00c1ntonia , and Death Comes for the Archbishop , was born in Virginia in 1873 but grew up in Nebraska, where many of her novels are set. She died in 1947 in New York City. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Short Stories & Anthologies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.95}, {"asin": "076249543X", "title": "Turner Classic Movies Cinematic Cities: New York: The Big Apple on the Big Screen", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Movies"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "B004S7Y6L0", "title": "A Must Read"}, {"asin": "B00BPWHPNW", "title": "Fetch My Latte: Sharing Feelings With Stupid People", "author": "Kurt Schlichter", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 2.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0714839841", "title": "The House Book", "author": "Terence Conran", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Architecture"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 3.53}, {"asin": "B0BKSGFL94", "title": "American Promise: Growing Up to be an Engineer in the '50s and '60", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Parenting & Relationships", "Parenting"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.0}, {"asin": "0062384066", "title": "Baltimore Blues: The First Tess Monaghan Novel (Tess Monaghan Novel, 1)", "author": "Laura Lippman", "description": "About the Author Since Laura Lippman\u2019s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the \u201cessential\u201d crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her \u201cspecial, even extraordinary,\u201d and Gillian Flynn wrote, \u201cShe is simply a brilliant novelist.\u201d Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 12.18}, {"asin": "B084LG4PH9", "title": "A King So Cold: A Dark Fantasy Romance (Royals Book 1)", "author": "Ella Fields", "description": "Review The romance in this book is seriously hot! - Christireadsalot THIS IS\u00a0EVERYTHING I WANT IN A BOOK. It's passionate, it's wicked, it's sexy, it's\u00a0intense, it's fast-paced, and heart-stopping and magical and creative and DOWN RIGHT ADDICTING. I'm so hungover right now. - Angie, Angie and Jessica's Dreamy Reads Incredible!\u00a0Energetic, angsty, vengeful, and steamy. - Fifty Shades of D and J Without a doubt one of the best fantasy romances I've read in quite awhile. - K Ramjohn, Goodreads reviewer Ella's words are lyrical as they wrap around you and pull you into this world full of intrigue, lies, love, lust and power. I love fantasy reads and this one easily slid right up there with Sarah J. Maas for me. - Aundi, Musings of the Modern Belle This story was intense from the first chapter .\u00a0It's dark, gritty, filthy and completely magical. - The Iron Tiara 5 captivating, sinfully delicious stars! WOW. This was my first time reading a fantasy romance novel and I was completely and utterly consumed. I am wrecked. This book was everything and so much more. A top read of 2020 hands down. - Katie's Kindle Addictions Absolutely enchanting .\u00a0I did not want to put this down . - Anita, BookToRead I'm 100% OBSESSED with this book. After reading this I realized that the blurb is vague for a reason. I cannot tell you how many twists there are in this book! - Just Clay Reads Holy royals leaving me flushed . This book was HOT, right from the start. A perfect royal fantasy-complete with lust, power hungry characters and an EPIC romance of fairytale proportions. This story lives outside the box of any genre or trope. - Author Trilina Pucci One of the BEST books I've EVER read. It truly blew my mind!!!! Absolute perfection. - Michelle, Book Nerd This book was intoxicating and I plain and simply NEED MORE ! Ella has officially made me a fantasy romance fan or at least HER stories about fantasy romance. - Vivian, Goodreads reviewer From the very first page, you knew this was going to be a book that would be impossible to forget . I've read some really, really great books. A King So Cold is my favorite and top read of 2020 so far. - BCBooks This book is obsessive worthy. I never wanted to leave!\u00a0- NativeHippiesBookObsession Love, friendship, heartbreak, redemption, loyalty and sacrifice. Omg\u00a0I was on edge throughout the book, dying and contemplating what happens next.\u00a0The angst is so damn real. It was killing me and those love scenes holy hotness whoa.\u00a0This book consumed me from the very beginning. - Diksha, Goodreads reviewer 6 delicious stars! A King So Cold is by far my favorite Ella Fields book! Seductively intriguing, and utterly addictive. Ella trapped me in this sinfully dark world and I did not want to leave! - USA Today Bestselling Author, Cassandra Robbins Angst and suspense. Murder, revenge, Mayhem. Double-crossing. This is a book that I will\u00a0never forget. - Jen, Dirty Bad Bloggers A page turner that sucks you in and doesn't want to let you go. This book is like devouring a bar of chocolate, impossible to put down! - USA Today Bestselling Author, T.L. Smith My mind is absolutely and completely BLOWN . I am in so much awe of how simply amazing this story is. This is Ella Fields at her finest, y'all. I am NOT kidding. - Annette, Book Nerd This is a fantasy romance\u00a0unlike any I have ever read. Even if you aren't a fan of fantasy usually, Ella brings her signature angst and beauty to this world of anti-heroes and high stakes royal scheming. - USA Today bestselling author, Giana Darling", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0714839841"}
{"user_id": "AFXTGH6HX6L74ICIYTPLQH4BNVBQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B09KGRTS45", "title": "Broken Kingdom: Dark Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (Corium University Book 3)", "author": "J.L. Beck", "description": "Review \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"This trilogy was a wild ride from start to finish and the conclusion did not disappoint. \" -Kat J\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"One-click Broken Kingdom now and get ready to be pulled back into a dark world filled with magnetic characters and criminally addictive storylines that I couldn't quit even if I tried.\" -Made Me Blush Books\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"The ending had me crying ugly tears! It was just so perfect! It was better than I ever expected.\" -Bek_lovestoread\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"This is by far the best book I've read this year its kept grip from, every page, I turn right up to the end this series will always be my go to books over and over again as it so good.\" -Haz\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"This series has been on crazy ride starting from hatred and ending up with two souls intwined forever.\" -Courtney\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"I would love to give this book more than 5 stars!\" -Coastie Mom", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0578909146", "title": "The Dare", "author": "Harley LaRoux", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Erotica"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.44}, {"asin": "B09HQ9Z1YM", "title": "Storm of Chaos and Shadows: A fae fantasy novel", "author": "C.L. Briar", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B081SPQB21", "title": "Little Emmett: A Novel", "author": "Abe Moss", "description": "From the Author Novels: The Writhing - Fleeing from certain death, a man stumbles upon a small town harboring nightmares even worse than he could imagine. The Writhing - Fleeing from certain death, a man stumbles upon a small town harboring nightmares even worse than he could imagine. Bathwater Blues - Each on the brink of self-destruction, four lost souls find themselves in the care of a strange man claiming to have answers to all their troubles. Bathwater Blues - Each on the brink of self-destruction, four lost souls find themselves in the care of a strange man claiming to have answers to all their troubles. By the Light of His Lantern -Cursed to spend eternity in a land of monsters and darkness, a young man must confront the truth of his past in order to save himself and find redemption. By the Light of His Lantern -Cursed to spend eternity in a land of monsters and darkness, a young man must confront the truth of his past in order to save himself and find redemption. Little Emmett - A dark, dystopian horror tale about one little boy's struggle for survival in a world unprepared for the true power he possesses. Little Emmett - A dark, dystopian horror tale about one little boy's struggle for survival in a world unprepared for the true power he possesses. Under the Wicked Moon - On a trip to visit their ailing grandmother, a family falls victim to ancient evils lurking in the Nevada desert. Under the Wicked Moon - On a trip to visit their ailing grandmother, a family falls victim to ancient evils lurking in the Nevada desert. Short Stories: The Final Babysitter - Offered a babysitting gig which seems too good to be true, a teenage girl finds herself in the throes of a disturbing family tradition. The Final Babysitter - Offered a babysitting gig which seems too good to be true, a teenage girl finds herself in the throes of a disturbing family tradition. About the Author Abe Moss has been writing horror stories for as long as he can remember, and hopes to never stop. He loves creature-features, psychologicalhorror, supernatural horror, cosmic horror, you name it. With each bookhe writes, he hopes to try something a little different. Thepossibilities are endless and that's what he really loves aboutstorytelling. He hopes you'll enjoy his stories, too!", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "0545290791", "title": "Cut", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.96}, {"asin": "B09H7Q4B74", "title": "The Ritual: A Dark College Romance", "author": "Shantel Tessier", "description": "Review \"Oh. Em. Gee. That was flipping insane, and I got to tell you, I loved every second of it!\" Behind Closed Door Book Review \"Oh. Em. Gee. That was flipping insane, and I got to tell you, I loved every second of it!\" Behind Closed Door Book Review \"First word amazing, The Ritual has to be one of my favorite reads of 2021.\" Elizabeth Clinton. Goodreads reviewer \"First word amazing, The Ritual has to be one of my favorite reads of 2021.\" Elizabeth Clinton. Goodreads reviewer \"Unpredictable. Original. Thrilling. Steamy. Mind blowing. Shantel is a genius and continues to shine with The Ritual.\" The Lushy Reader \"Unpredictable. Original. Thrilling. Steamy. Mind blowing. Shantel is a genius and continues to shine with The Ritual.\" The Lushy Reader \"This book is Shantel Tessier at her best! I promise you once you start, you won't want to put this book down!\" Rita. Goodreads reviewer \"This book is Shantel Tessier at her best! I promise you once you start, you won't want to put this book down!\" Rita. Goodreads reviewer \"The Ritual is unlike anything I have read this year and easily, quite possibly, my favorite of 2021. Shantel outdoes herself again!!!!\" Beth Kazmierczak. Goodreads reviewer \"The Ritual is unlike anything I have read this year and easily, quite possibly, my favorite of 2021. Shantel outdoes herself again!!!!\" Beth Kazmierczak. Goodreads reviewer \"Crazy intense. Insanely addictive. Dark and twisted. Everything I freaking love with some boundary pushing triggers in a dark college romance.\" The Smutbrarians \"Crazy intense. Insanely addictive. Dark and twisted. Everything I freaking love with some boundary pushing triggers in a dark college romance.\" The Smutbrarians", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B09HY437VX", "title": "Dukes of Ruin (Dark College Bully Romance): Royals of Forsyth University Book 4", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B09D8QK2V6", "title": "MONSTERS UNDER MY BED: A Monster Romance (Bogeymen Book 1)", "author": "M.J. Marstens", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B07J6GX4YQ", "title": "Once Bitten, Twice Turned: A Fantasy Novel (The Hybrid Theory Book 1)", "author": "Anne Marshall", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B09ZYQ1WGS", "title": "Storm of Blood and Vengeance: A fae fantasy novel (Storm of Chaos and Shadows Book 2)", "author": "C.L. Briar", "description": "About the Author C.L. Briar is a graduate of San Diego State University. In her spare time, she likes to participate in impromptu dance parties with her two little girls, and to look for nice bugs in the backyard, when the weather allows. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, two daughters, and dog. The family welcomed a third little girl to their crazy tribe in early 2022. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1682152014", "title": "Faith: Hollywood & Vine Deluxe Edition (Faith, 1)", "author": "Jody Houser", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 22.99}, {"asin": "B08RGYGH6R", "title": "A Room of Their Own", "author": "Rakefet Yarden", "description": "From the Author \"A Room of Their Own\" was born in a time of crisis. A time when the pains of the past took painful hold of me. We wrote the book together during our therapy sessions, and it helped us to take a step back and look at things from a new perspective.\u00a0We found ourselves writing each in our own homes for many hours until Dani and Rotem were born, two characters whose special bond helped them both to heal and grow.\u00a0The book is filled with love for people and animals, a love that has the power to heal.\u00a0Slowly, the book began to form, and we realized that we had a story that begged to be told.\u00a0Dani is a fragile but powerful character, she is passive but also determined and passionate. She is a character born out of Hila's broken heart, which healed and grew strong together with her.\u00a0Rotem is a strong and sensitive woman, who gives but demands, has compassion but does not give in. Rotem's vulnerability meets Dani's and together they build a room of their own from which they can embark into the world stronger.\u00a0The book shows which parts of therapy are helpful, what breaks us apart and what has the power to piece us back together and bring growth out of trauma.\u00a0It demonstrates the link between sexual abuse at the hands of someone from the family, suicidal tendencies and eating disorders. It highlights how a constructive patient-therapist relationship is built.\u00a0This book was written in two voices - Rakefet wrote the part of the therapist, Rotem Golan, while Hila told the story of the patient, Dani Friedman. About the Author As a child, Rakefet Yarden wanted to be a writer or a tourist guide. Today she is a therapist and a writer - pretty close to her dreams.\u00a0She lives in Israel in the Golan Heights - a peaceful place to raise her 3 beautiful daughters and her handsome dog.\"A Room of Their Own\" was written together with one of her patients during a session, but it is not a true story. Hila Kreimer Dan-Ber raises two girls, 17 horses and 20 dogs in a farm located in the west part of the Golan Heights, close to the Sea of Galilee.\u00a0She founded the farm with her husband, and together they run a special center for therapeutic horse riding.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "B09HL757K1", "title": "Drop Dead Queen: Dark Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (Corium University Book 2)", "author": "J.L. Beck", "description": "Review \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"I ugly cried... bad. It was not a good look. But an excellent read!\" -ARC Review\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"Not only did the entirety of Drop Dead Queen blow me away but the ENDING. Oh. My. Gosh. The ending almost had me throwing my kindle, screaming WHAT THE FAWK. It was intense and worth staying with the story. Absolutely cannot wait until the next one.\" -Shelby B\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"I inhaled this book in 24 hours it was so good.\" -Brittany\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"Quinton is thee best villian alpha-hole hero ever!!\"\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---\"The continuation to Aspen and Quinton story was explosive and mind blowing. I was completely drawn back into their world. I loved every dark twisted and steamy moment of this book!\"\u00a0\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605---Maddeningly mind-reeling with every page until it blows you away to bits!\"", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B09NYJRYYK", "title": "Lifeline", "author": "Michelle Heard", "description": "Review \"By far the MOST INTENSE AND CAPTIVATING BOOK I HAVE READ so far. This book left me speechless, it literally broke my heart, and a lot of tears were shed.\" ~ Sazidah, GR Reviewer. \"Heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and absolutely incredible, Lifeline is such an impactful read. 10 STARS !!!\" ~ Stital. \" EDGE OF THE SEAT Action packed with all the swoony feels, emotional ride!\" ~ Cushin Violeta's Bookish Realm. \"Michelle Heard broke me so many times in Lifeline that I have lost count. This dark, edgy romantic suspense kept me on the edge, and I have lost all sense of time and place while reading. GRIPPING. HEART POUNDING. SENSATIONAL. I feel emotionally drained, yet I cannot push you enough to read this book .\" ~ PP's Bookshelf. \"Be warned, this book is not for the faint of heart! But if you stick it out, I promise it will be ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS YOU HAVE EVER READ . That's what this story is... a book that will destroy you, rebuild you, and still leave you begging for more. I wish I could give this book more than 5 stars- it is a must-read!\" ~ LivingLovingReading.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0324649487", "title": "Nevada Real Estate Exam Prep (Preparation Guide)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Real Estate"], "average_rating": 3.4, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "B009VKXARU", "title": "Poison Princess Free Preview Edition: (The First 17 Chapters) (The Arcana Chronicles Book 1)", "author": "Kresley Cole", "description": "About the Author Kresley Cole is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Immortals After Dark paranormal series and the young adult Arcana Chronicles. Her books have been translated into over twenty foreign languages, garnered three RITA awards, and consistently appear on the bestseller lists in the US and abroad.\u00a0Before becoming a writer, Cole was a world-ranked athlete, coach, and graduate student. She has traveled over much of the world and draws from those experiences to create her memorable characters and settings. She lives in Florida with her family and \u201cfar too many animals,\u201d and spends any free time traveling. You can learn more about her and her work at KresleyCole.com or Facebook.com/KresleyCole. Sign up for Kresley\u2019s email newsletter to receive the latest book release updates, as well as info about contests and giveaways (KresleyCole.com/Newsletter).", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B0BW2ZKNYR", "title": "Missouri hour log", "author": "Missouri Mama", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 17.14}], "target_asin": "B09NYJRYYK"}
{"user_id": "AHC2QLZR3O26T4ROAPW32HIDI2GA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00ZX99WCA", "title": "Harmony Black", "author": "Craig Schaefer", "description": "From the Publisher Harmony Black is a morning person. She always wears business suits when working and prefers Diet Coke. She is also a witch, who uses her power to protect the innocent from supernatural threats. I am not a morning person, and I\u2019m definitely not a witch, yet despite this, I relate to Harmony. Within the pages of Harmony Black , author Craig Schaefer has created a character so vivid, I feel as if she is really out there, behind the scenes, keeping us safe.   Harmony Black\u2019s world is dark, and the forces of chaos are fighting to make it darker for the humans that inhabit it. But that\u2019s what people like Harmony and the under-the-radar government organization she works with, Vigilant Lock, are there for: to protect us from the things that go bump in the night. As Harmony learns to embrace her supernatural abilities, she also becomes part of a team of individuals who have powers similar to hers and who share her mission. Vigilant Lock is a glimmer of hope, providing laughter and friendship in an otherwise terrifying place. And when the Bogeyman comes calling, Harmony needs the rest of her team as much as the world needs her.   This book has some frightening moments, but through it all, I trusted Harmony to live up to her name. She uses compassion and love alongside her magical abilities to fight the demons that live among humans. The depth of character in both Harmony and her Vigilant Lock colleagues is what makes this book stand out. I\u2019ll happily follow Harmony and her team on any perilous adventure, confident that the forces of good will prevail in the end. - Adrienne Lombardo, Editor About the Author Craig Schaefer\u2019s books have taken readers to the seamy edge of a criminal underworld drenched in shadow through the Daniel Faust series; to a world torn by war, poison, and witchcraft by way of the Revanche Cycle series; and across a modern America mired in occult mysteries and a conspiracy of lies in the new Harmony Black series. Despite this, people say he\u2019s strangely normal. He lives in Illinois with a small retinue of cats, all of whom try to interrupt his writing schedule and/or kill him on a regular basis. He practices sleight of hand in his spare time, although he\u2019s not very good at it.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00Y21VGYW", "title": "A Death in Sweden", "author": "Kevin Wignall", "description": "Review \"This superior espionage thriller has all the moral ambiguity and heart-quickening action scenes you could ask for.\" - Sunday Express \"Clever, gripping and precise...Set in the dark Scandinavian forests, this is a tight and elegant novel, focusing on morality and identity.\" - Catholic Herald From the Publisher I still remember the moment I received a call from a colleague at Thomas & Mercer about A Death in Sweden . He was holed up at his local coffee shop with the book in his hands and told me he couldn\u2019t come into the office until he\u2019d finished it\u2014it was that good. He sent me the manuscript right away. I read it in one sitting and didn\u2019t need further convincing.   Within the first few pages, I realized I was in for something very special. I immediately fell under the spell of the author\u2019s lean, cool prose and the mystery of a man who saves the life of a fellow passenger in a bus crash. This final act of heroism reveals a secret: our hero never existed.   Set amid a world of political wrangling and murder, A Death in Sweden depicts the lives of men who carry out governments\u2019 dirty work\u2014the kind intelligence agencies can\u2019t or don\u2019t want to do themselves.   This is no ordinary spy thriller: of course it is filled with action, intrigue, and suspense, but the emotionally complex characters and their motivations, murky pasts, and shaky futures are what give this book the heart and depth to make it a truly remarkable read. - Emilie Marneur, Editor About the Author Kevin Wignall is a British writer, born in Brussels in 1967. He spent many years as an army child in different parts of Europe and went on to study politics and international relations at Lancaster University. He became a full-time writer after the publication of his first book, People Die (2001). His other novels are Among the Dead (2002); Who is Conrad Hirst? (2007), shortlisted for the Edgar Award and the Barry Award; and Dark Flag (2010). Hunter\u2019s Prayer was originally titled For the Dogs in the USA. The film Hunter\u2019s Prayer , directed by Jonathan Mostow and starring Sam Worthington and Odeya Rush, will be released worldwide in 2015. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0062334204", "title": "Amelia Bedelia Chapter Book 4-Book Box Set: Books 1-4", "author": "Herman Parish", "description": "From the Back Cover Amelia Bedelia is all boxed up! Includes four funny chapter books! About the Author Herman Parish was in the fourth grade when his aunt, Peggy Parish, wrote the first book about Amelia Bedelia. The author lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Lynne Avril has illustrated all the stories about young Amelia Bedelia. The artist lives in Phoenix, Arizona.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 15.6}, {"asin": "0545068592", "title": "Silly Milly (Scholastic Reader, Level 1)", "author": "Wendy Cheyette Lewison", "description": "About the Author Wendy Cheyette Lewison has written many books for children. She lives in Westchester County, New York.  Nadine Bernard Westcott has illustrated numerous books for children. She lives in Nantucket, MA with her husband, Bill.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "1612382010", "title": "Rick Steves' Italian Phrase Book & Dictionary", "author": "Rick Steves", "description": "About the Author Rick Steves has spent 100 days every year since 1973 exploring Europe. Rick produces a public television series (Rick Steves' Europe) , a public radio show (Travel with Rick Steves), and an app and podcast (Rick Steves Audio Europe); writes a bestselling series of guidebooks and a nationally syndicated newspaper column; organizes guided tours that take thousands of travelers to Europe annually; and offers an information-packed website (RickSteves.com). With the help of his hardworking staff of 80 at Europe Through the Back Door\u2014in Edmonds, Washington, just north of Seattle\u2014Rick's mission is to make European travel fun, affordable, and culturally broadening for Americans.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.91}, {"asin": "1742206026", "title": "Lonely Planet Alaska (Travel Guide)", "author": "Brendan Sainsbury", "description": "Book Description Lonely Planet will get you to the heart of Alaska About the Author Originario de Hampshire, Inglaterra, Brendan Sainsbury\u00a0lleva 20 a\u00f1os viajando a Cuba como gu\u00eda y escritor de viajes. Ha explorado cada rinc\u00f3n del pa\u00eds, desde el cabo de San Antonio hasta la Punta de Mais\u00ed, usando todos los medios de transporte conocidos, desde la bicicleta hasta el autoestop. Actualmente radicado en Vancouver, Canad\u00e1, Brendan ha participado en m\u00e1s de 50 gu\u00edas de Lonely Planet, incluidas seis ediciones de Cuba. Tambi\u00e9n es el autor de la \u00faltima edici\u00f3n de la gu\u00eda Pocket Havana. Para m\u00e1s informaci\u00f3n, v\u00e9ase https://auth.lonelyplanet.com/profiles/brendansainsburyGreg Benchwick lleva los \u00faltimos 15 a\u00f1os recorriendo Sudam\u00e9rica en cami\u00f3n, ha escrito discursos para la ONU, ha entrevistado a jefes de Estado y ganadores de premios Grammy y ha creado decenas de v\u00eddeos y aplicaciones para LonelyPlanet.com, National Geographic Traveler y otras publicaciones internacionales. Es experto en viajes sostenibles, desarrollo internacional, comida, vino y en pas\u00e1rselo bien.Catherine Bodry vive en Anchorage, Alaska, pero pasa buena parte de su tiempo en el sureste asi\u00e1tico. Ha escrito, entre otros lugares, sobre Alaska, Tailandia y China. Amante de las monta\u00f1as, pasa tanto tiempo como le es posible entre montes, ya sea corriendo, haciendo excursiones, acampando, buscando frutos del bosque, practicando rafting o, simplemente, admir\u00e1ndolas. Para Lonely Planet ha colaborado en una docena de gu\u00edas y libros, entre ellas varias ediciones de Alaska, Canad\u00e1, Tailandia y Pacifc Northwest Trips.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Australia & South Pacific"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 5.95}, {"asin": "1465428348", "title": "DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Alaska", "author": "DK", "description": "Review \"Known\u2026 for its four-color maps, photos and illustrations, the [DK] Eyewitness Guides are extremely user-friendly for travelers who want their information delivered in a concise, visual way.\" \u2013 Chicago Tribune \"The best option\u2026 Color photos, maps, and diagrams bring the place to life.\" \u2013 The Philadelphia Inquirer About the Author About DK Eyewitness Travel Guides : For more than two decades, DK Eyewitness Travel Guides have helped travelers experience the world through the history, art, architecture, and culture of their destinations. Expert travel writers and researchers provide independent editorial advice, recommendations, and reviews. With guidebooks to hundreds of places around the globe available in print and digital formats, DK Eyewitness Travel Guides show travelers how they can discover more. DK Eyewitness Travel Guides : the most maps, photography, and illustrations of any guide.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 37.84}, {"asin": "1941325114", "title": "Adult Coloring Book: Stress Relieving Animal Designs", "author": "Blue Star Coloring", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Graphic Design"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0394800931", "title": "My Book About Me", "author": "Dr. Seuss", "description": "Amazon.com Review One of the titles for the younger crowd in the Beginners Books series, My Book About Me has an unusual interactive twist--you make it up as you go along. On each page there's something new to complete, from \"I weigh ___ pounds\" to \"My teeth. I counted them. I have ___ up top. I have ___ downstairs.\" It's a simple idea, but with a surprising amount of educational value--getting children to name their home country, to recognize and draw in the color of their own eyes, learn their telephone number and address, to name favorite clothes, foods, and colors, and more. Finally, there's a two-page spread where each owner of the book can write his or her own story. Illustrator Roy McKie's style is halfway between the P.D. Eastman of Are You My Mother and the mainstream Seuss of Cat in the Hat and Thidwick: The Big-Hearted Moose . (Ages 4 to 8) --Richard Farr From the Inside Flap Illus. in full color. Encourages children to find out about themselves, while having fun writing and drawing their own biographies. From the Back Cover Illus. in full color. Encourages children to find out about themselves, while having fun writing and drawing their own biographies. About the Author THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL\u2014aka Dr. Seuss\u2014is one of the most beloved children\u2019s book authors of all time. From The Cat in the Hat to Oh, the Places You\u2019ll Go! , his iconic characters, stories, and art style have been a lasting influence on generations of children and adults. The books he wrote and illustrated under the name Dr. Seuss (and others that he wrote but did not illustrate, including some under the pseudonyms Theo. LeSieg and Rosetta Stone) have been translated into thirty languages. Hundreds of millions of copies have found their way into homes and hearts around the world. Dr. Seuss\u2019s long list of awards includes Caldecott Honors for McElligot\u2019s Pool , If I Ran the Zoo , and Bartholomew and the Oobleck , the Pulitzer Prize, and eight honorary doctorates. Works based on his original stories have won three Oscars, three Emmys, three Grammys, and a Peabody. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 7.97}, {"asin": "B0091TMAK4", "title": "Only The Innocent (Tom Douglas Thrillers Book 1)", "author": "Rachel Abbott", "description": "Review \u201cRachel Abbott has proved with this debut that she is a cracking writer. The book is a complex layered web, every chapter adding more and more layers of intrigue that pull you in further. I love thrillers and have read many of them, and this one stands out as one of the best. Amazing stuff.\u201d \u2015Rachel Dove, The Kindle Book Review \u201cAbbott carefully constructed a world of mystery, depravity, sex, violence, manipulation and intrigue on so many different levels that I can honestly say you truly have to read until the last page to understand and appreciate the complexity of the story.\u201d \u2015Karen DeLabar, Writing on the Rocks --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Rachel Abbott was born and raised in Manchester, England, and trained as a systems analyst before launching her own interactive media company in the early 1980s. She sold her company in 2000, and in 2005 moved to the Le Marche region of Italy. She lives there today with her husband, dividing her time between writing her second novel, cooking, and dabbling in web design. Sarah Coomes was trained at The Royal Academy Of Dramatic Art, London. She has worked as an actress extensively in theatre, film, and television. She has won numerous awards for her own comedy and play writing, including The Westminster Prize. She lives in London and Los Angeles. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Review \u201cRachel Abbott has proved with this debut that she is a cracking writer. The book is a complex layered web, every chapter adding more and more layers of intrigue that pull you in further. I love thrillers and have read many of them, and this one stands out as one of the best. Amazing stuff.\u201d \u2015Rachel Dove, The Kindle Book Review \u201cAbbott carefully constructed a world of mystery, depravity, sex, violence, manipulation and intrigue on so many different levels that I can honestly say you truly have to read until the last page to understand and appreciate the complexity of the story.\u201d \u2015Karen DeLabar, Writing on the Rocks --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0062110721", "title": "Pete the Cat: Pete at the Beach (My First I Can Read)", "author": "James Dean", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2-In the first early level reader, Pete tries to have fun building sand castles, eating sandwiches, and searching for shells, but the hot sun makes him sizzle while his brother is out there riding his surfboard, staying nice and cool. Finally, the heat gets to Pete and he decides to try the water. He faces his fear of the big waves and, after a few attempts, is surfing just like Bob. Strong artwork, summer hues, and familiar characters make this a great addition to collections. In Whale of a Tale, Splat the Cat goes to the beach for vacation and promises to find the perfect seashell to bring home to his grandpa. As he begins his search, he is pulled in all directions, helping his dad set up the beach umbrella, spelling names in the sand for his sister, and, of course, stopping for fish and ice cream. Finally, he gets his chance to search for shells but he just can't seem to find the right one until he stumbles into the water and lands on a friendly whale who helps him with his mission. The artwork and perspective are well designed, and whimsical drawings assist new readers with context clues and even inspire a few giggles. Two solid choices for emergent readers.-Melissa Smith, Royal Oak Public Library, MI\u03b1(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. From the Back Cover It's a hot summer day, and Pete and his mom and brother are going to the beach! Pete loves the beach, but the waves make the water look scary. When his brother Bob offers to give him a surfing lesson, will Pete give it a try? About the Author James Dean is the #1 New York Times bestselling creator and illustrator of Pete the Cat. He is a self-taught artist originally from Fort Payne, Alabama. He published his first book, The Misadventures of Pete the Cat , a history of his artwork, in 2006, and he illustrated his first children\u2019s book, Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes , in 2008. There are now dozens of published Pete the Cat titles, all inspired by James\u2019 real-life rescue pet. Kimberly Dean is an artist, yoga enthusiast, and a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Before fulfilling her dream of becoming a full-time author and artist, she worked for the governor\u2019s press office in the state of Georgia. Her dreams became a reality in 2013 with the release of her first children\u2019s book, Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses . She has written many books since then, including the Willow and Oliver series. Kimberly lives in Georgia with her dog, Gypsy, and cat, Phoebe. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.97}, {"asin": "0525428887", "title": "Dragons Love Tacos 2: The Sequel", "author": "Adam Rubin", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 1\u2014The kid and his taco-loving dragon friends are back, and there's a crisis. There are no tacos left in the world. \"None. Nada. Nil.\" Circumstances require use of the time machine to go back to a party for a handful of tacos to plant and grow into trees. However, spicy salsa messes things up again, with journeys back to wrong time periods, including when dragons loved diapers and when tacos loved dragons. Eventually heading home, the kid watches in disbelief as the dragons lose their resolve and gobble down ALL the tacos\u2026except one. He plants a taco tree and the world is saved from disaster. Created with watercolor, gouache, color pencil, and digital elements, the images are comical, especially the scenes of spicy salsa fire breath and its aftermath. Deadpan statements such as \"Oh boy, not again\" and \"Oh, come on\" reinforce the humor. VERDICT Kids who can't get enough dragons or tacos will be won over by this humorous tale. A silly addition for old fans and new readers alike.\u2014Gaye Hinchliff, King County Library System, WA Review \"As Rubin puts it, 'dragons love diapers. I mean, tacos. Dragons love tacos. / Heck, everyone loves tacos.' Most young readers, even those in diapers, would agree.\"\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"This sequel\u2019s dialed-up energy and absurdity remain a tasty\u2014and very funny\u2014combination.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly \"This zany companion promises to be as gut-bustingly ridiculous and yes-I'll-gladly-read-it-again-and-again entertaining as the first.\"\u00a0\u2014 PopSugar About the Author Adam Rubin is the New York Times bestselling author of a half dozen critically acclaimed picture books including Secret Pizza Party and Robo-Sauce . He spent ten years working as a creative director in the advertising industry before leaving his day job to write full-time. Adam has a keen interest in improv comedy, camping, and magic tricks. He Lives in Barcelona, Spain. Daniel Salmieri is an artist, illustrator, and author from Brooklyn, NY. He has illustrated twelve picture books including the New York Times best seller, Dragons Love Tacos . Daniel is a regular contributor to several magazines and newspapers including The New Yorker and the New York Times , and works on a wide array of projects from packaging design to branding. He currently lives with his wife, son, and their dog Ronni in New York City. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.5}, {"asin": "0781797500", "title": "Sarrafian's Anatomy of the Foot and Ankle: Descriptive, Topographic, Functional", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 152.98}, {"asin": "080509668X", "title": "Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)", "author": "Martin Dugard", "description": "Amazon.com Review Amazon Exclusive: Senator John McCain Reviews Killing Patton In Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II\u2019s Most Audacious General , Bill O\u2019Reilly and Martin Dugard have written a lively, provocative account of the death of General George S. Patton and the important events in the final year of the Allied victory in Europe, which Patton\u2019s brilliant generalship of the American Third Army did so much to secure. The fourth book in the bestselling Killing series is rich in fascinating details, and riveting battle scenes. The authors have written vivid descriptions of a compelling cast of characters, major historical figures such as Eisenhower, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, and others, as well as more obscure players in the great drama of the Second World War and the life and death of Patton. O\u2019Reilly and Dugard express doubts about the official explanation for Patton\u2019s demise from injuries he suffered in an automobile accident. They surmise that the General\u2019s outspokenness about his controversial views on postwar security, particularly his animosity toward the Soviets, our erstwhile allies, might have made him a target for assassination. They cast a suspicious eye toward various potential culprits from Josef Stalin to wartime espionage czar \u201cWild Bill\u201d Donovan and a colorful OSS operative, Douglas Bazata, who claimed later in life to have murdered Patton. Certainly, there are a number of curious circumstances that invite doubt and speculation, Bazata\u2019s admission for one. Or that the drunken sergeant who drove a likely stolen truck into Patton\u2019s car inexplicably was never prosecuted or even reprimanded. But whether you share their suspicions or not this is popular history at its most engrossing. From accounts of the terribly costly battle for Fort Driant in the hills near Metz to the Third Army\u2019s crowning achievement, its race to relieve the siege of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge, the reader experiences all the drama of the \u201cgreat crusade\u201d in its final, thrilling months. The authors\u2019 profiles of world leaders and Patton\u2019s contemporaries are economic but manage to offer fresh insights into the personalities of well-known men. Just as compelling are the finely wrought sketches of people of less renown but who played important parts in the events. There is PFC Robert Holmund, who fought and died heroically at Fort Driant having done all he could and then some to take his impossible objective. PFC Horace Woodring, Patton\u2019s driver, who revered the general, went to his grave mystified by the cause and result of the accident that killed his boss. German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel\u2019s young son, Manfred, exchanged a formal farewell handshake with him after learning his father would be dead in a quarter hour, having been made to commit suicide to prevent the death and dishonor of his family. These and many other captivating accounts of the personal and profound make Killing Patton a pleasure to read. I enjoyed it immensely and highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in World War II history and the extraordinary man who claimed Napoleon\u2019s motto, \u201caudacity, audacity, always audacity,\u201d as his own. About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa , and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General By Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard Henry Holt and Company Copyright \u00a9 2014 Bill O'Reilly and Martin DugardAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8050-9668-2 CHAPTER 1 The Hills above Metz, France October 3, 1944 12:02 P.M. Private First Class Robert W. Holmlund is scared. He believes his life may be over at age twenty-one. The American assault is just two minutes old\u2014two minutes that feel like twenty. The private serves as an explosives expert in the Third Army, Company B, Eleventh Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division. Holmlund is a student from the American heartland who left trade school to join the war. His senior commander is the most ferocious general on the Allied side, George S. Patton Jr. But unlike Patton, who now oversees his vast army from the safety of his headquarters twenty-five miles behind the front, Holmlund and the men of Baker Company are in grave danger as they sprint toward the heavily defended German fort known as Driant. German machine-gun bullets whiz past Holmlund's helmet at twice the speed of sound. Heads and torsos shatter all around him. U.S. artillery thunders in the distance behind them, laying down cover fire. The forest air smells of gunpowder, rain, and the sharp tang of cordite. The ground is nothing but mud and a thick carpet of wet leaves. Here and there a bramble vine reaches out to snag his uniform and trip his feet. Over his broad shoulders, Holmlund wears a block of TNT known as a satchel charge. Grenades dangle from his cartridge belt like grapes on a vine. And in his arms, rather than carrying it by the wooden handle atop the stock, Holmlund cradles his fifteen-pound, four-foot-long Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, as he would an infant. Only, this baby is a killing machine, capable of firing 650 three-inch bullets per minute. Though he doesn't show it, Robert W. Holmlund is scared, despite all that firepower, just like every single man in this lethal forest. But there is no time to indulge his fear right now. No time for homesickness or doubt. Fort Driant looms four hundred yards distant. Everything about the fortress is a mystery, from the location of its big 150 mm howitzers to the maze of tunnels deep underground where its Wehrmacht inhabitants eat, sleep, pray, clean their rifles, plan their battles, and then suddenly poke their heads out of secret openings to kill. Patton has ordered Baker Company to get inside Driant. The best way to do that is to climb on the roof, which is concealed by mounds of earth. From there, it's a matter of finding a doorway or some other hidden opening that will allow Baker to descend and wage war in the tunnels. Baker is part of a two-pronged assault. On the opposite side of the fort, the men of Easy Company are also on the attack. But they do so warily, for Driant has already bloodied them once. It happened six days ago. Skies were clear. P-47 fighter-bombers screamed in low on the morning of the assault, dropping napalm and thousand-pound bombs. American artillery then pounded Driant, shelling the Germans with deadly accuracy. Easy Company launched their attack alongside the men of George Company at 1415 hours under a heavy smoke screen. They had no way of knowing that the aerial bombing and ground artillery had no effect on the Wehrmacht fighters, nor that the enemy was snug and secure within Driant's fifteen-foot-thick walls and in hidden forest pillboxes. Step by step, thinking themselves unseen, the U.S. soldiers advanced. Fingers were on triggers as the men scanned the forest, waiting for the muzzle flashes that would expose the enemy. But the Germans did not shoot. Not yet. So Easy and George crept closer to Driant. With each passing moment, they became more convinced that the smoke screen had completely concealed them. They marched closer and closer, and still no German gunshots. Soon a thick tangle of barbwire loomed before the Americans, marking the outer perimeter of Driant's defenses. There was no way through the razor-sharp coils. The advance ground to a halt. The Germans opened fire. The autumn afternoon was rent by a terrifying sound the Americans knew all too well. Their slang for the high-speed ripping sound of a German MG-42 machine gun is \"Hitler's Zipper.\" To the Wehrmacht, this killing tone is simply the \"Bone Saw.\" MG-42s opened up from every direction. Bullets tore through the woods at twelve hundred rounds per minute, capable of killing a man from more than a half mile away. But the machine guns were just the beginning. Soon mortars, rifles, and even heavy artillery pounded the Americans from every direction. And just like that, the American attack was over. Soldiers hugged the ground for four long hours as German gunners pinpointed their positions and took slow, deliberate aim. It was only after darkness fell that the men of Company E and Company G crawled back to the safety of the American lines. September 27 was a bad day for the men of Easy. By the end of the fight, eighteen soldiers had been either killed or wounded. Today will be even worse. * * * Private Holmlund can go no farther. Nor can the rest of Baker Company. The mountain of barbwire surrounding Driant blocks their path. Thirty feet tall and just as thick, the impenetrable tangle waits to trap any man unlucky enough to snag his uniform or his body within its tendrils. Clipping at it with hand cutters will take days\u2014which is why Holmlund's company commander, Capt. Harry Anderson, has given the order: blow the wire to hell. Behind him, Holmlund hears the low rumble of a Continental R-975 air-cooled engine. The telltale crunch of steel treads soon follows, announcing the arrival of an M-4 Sherman tank. Even as the German machine gunners continue to fire on Baker, the Sherman weaves through the trees and takes aim. Its 75 mm gun belches smoke as it fires a round of M-48 high explosive into the wire. A direct hit is soon followed by another, and then another. Within moments, the barbwire parts just enough for Baker Company to sprint through. Captain Anderson splits the soldiers into three groups. Holmlund's squad continues toward Driant in a straight line, while the other two squads flank to the right. The landscape is pocked with shell craters, like a man-made lunar surface. Trees and shrubs grow randomly, offering just the slightest bit of camouflage from the German defenders. The private is in the first wave of American attackers. He dives into a shell crater, presses himself flat against the lip, then pokes his head over the top and fires his BAR at the enemy. Holmlund then sprints forward to a row of small elm trees, where he once again takes cover and seeks out a target. The ground is cool and damp, moisture seeping through his uniform. He fires and moves forward, always forward, never taking his focus off the flat roof of Driant. Despite the cool October temperature, Holmlund is now drenched in sweat. His face and hands are flecked with mud. He hurls himself into another shell crater and hugs the earth. This close to the ground, he is eye level with the fungus and bright green mold sprouting up through the fallen leaves. Bullets whiz low over his head. He reloads and listens, waiting for the chance to fire. The sounds of the battlefield are familiar: the chatter of machine guns, the screams of the mortally wounded, the concussive thud of hand grenades, orders barked in short, terse sentences. Screams for \"Medic\" fill the air. Holmlund fires a burst from his rifle and then runs forward. He races past fallen comrades. He knows them all. They did push-ups side by side during basic training in Alabama. They sailed together for Europe in the hold of a troopship. They sat in an English pasture just hours before D-day, listening to General Patton deliver the greatest speech any of them had ever heard. And then, after D-day, Holmlund and Baker fought their way across France, rejoicing as they captured one small village after another, following Patton's order that they kill Germans in brutal and relentless fashion\u2014lest they themselves be killed first. Now many of Holmlund's buddies lie dead or dying. And so ends the sound of their laughter, their rage, their boasts, their tales about that special girl back home, and all that talk about what they're going to do with their lives once the war ends. Holmlund doesn't even give them a second glance. And he doesn't stop moving forward. To stop is to become a target. Holmlund's fighting squad dwindles from twelve men down to six. The squad leader is hit, and Holmlund takes command without thinking twice about it. Slowly, in a form of progress that is measured in feet and inches instead of yards, Baker Company moves closer and closer to the German fortress. Two hours into the battle, PFC Robert W. Holmlund of Delavan City, Wisconsin, finds himself standing atop Fort Driant. * * * \"The real hero,\" Holmlund heard George S. Patton say just four months ago, \"is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overwhelm his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.\" As Holmlund watched, General Patton drew himself up to his full six-foot-two-inch height. His shoulders were broad and his face ruddy, with a strong chin and an aquiline nose. His uniform was a marvel, with four rows of ribbons, four shiny brass buttons, a polished helmet bearing his three general's stars, tan riding pants, and knee-high cavalry boots. Most vividly, a Colt .45-caliber pistol with an ivory grip was holstered on his hip, sending a strong signal that Patton is no bureaucrat. He's a warrior, and everybody had better know it. Patton continued: \"Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best, and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men\u2014and they are He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and that they are not supermen.\" George Patton delivered \"the Speech\" in the British countryside, to the men of his Third Army, on June 5, 1944. Some of the soldiers watching were combat veterans. Most, like Holmlund, were brand new to the war. They found hope in Patton's words. They found a belief in their own courage. And most of all, each man sitting in that pasture under a glorious blue English sky found strength in the knowledge that he was being commanded by the most audacious, forthright, and brilliant general on either side of the war. Until that day, Holmlund had never seen Patton in the flesh, and had only heard stories about the legendary general\u2014the man who'd never lost a battle, hero of North Africa and Sicily, but who was temporarily relieved of his command for slapping two privates convalescing in a military hospital whom he considered cowardly. Neither Holmlund nor any of the thousands of other soldiers seated in this pasture had any idea that their feelings for the general would come to vacillate between love and hate. In fact, Patton's nickname is \"Old Blood and Guts,\" with the understanding that the guts of Patton rode on the blood of his soldiers. \"You are not all going to die,\" Patton reassured the men whom he would soon lead into combat. His voice was high instead of gruff, which came as a surprise to Holmlund. \"Only two percent of you right here today will die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men.\" * * * One half mile north of where Private Holmlund and the men of Company B are making their stand atop Fort Driant, death, as predicted, is coming to their fellow soldiers in Easy Company. The hope of Patton's speech is long forgotten. Unlike their first attack on Driant six days ago, Company E made it through the barbwire this time. But the Germans turned that into a fatal accomplishment, for once inside Easy was pinned down with precision mortar fire. Going forward has become impossible. Even worse, enemy shells are exploding to their rear, meaning that retreating back through the wire is also out of the question. Easy Company tries to solve the problem by calling in an artillery strike on their position, but this \"Danger Close\" barrage does nothing to stop the dug-in German gunners. Instead, friendly fire kills one of their own in a most gruesome fashion: the soldier's head is sliced cleanly from his body by a piece of flying explosive. Easy Company digs in. They have no choice. Two-foot-long portable shovels scrape troughs in the earth as German machine gunners continue to rake Easy's position. It is every man for himself. The terror continues. The Germans of Kampfgruppe Petersen take aim with 8 cm Granatwerfer 34 mortar fire and MG-42 machine guns. The Americans are defenseless. Killing them is as easy as finding the target and patiently squeezing the trigger. The Germans are in no hurry. The Americans are going nowhere. One after another, the young men who comprise Easy Company are cut down in the prime of their life. The company medics race from foxhole to foxhole to tend the wounded. But soon, one after another, they die, too. Hours pass. Rain drizzles down. The nightmare chatter of the Maschinengewehr accompanies the sounds of Company E digging their trenches deeper and deeper. Each man squats as low as possible, careful not to lift his head above ground level. Doing so would be an act of suicide. Easy's foxholes become filled with water, mud, blood, and each man's personal filth. Trench foot, from prolonged exposure to cold and wet, has become so common since the autumn rains arrived that it makes standing in yet another puddle a time of agony. But the men are beyond caring about the stench and squalor of their fighting holes. All they want to do is stay alive. * * * \"Americans despise cowards,\" Patton continued all those months ago, putting his own spin on U.S. history. \"Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American. \"All through your Army careers, you men have bitched about what you call 'chickenshit drilling.' That, like everything else in this Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is alertness. Alertness must be bred into every soldier. I don't give a f-ck for a man who's not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn't be here. You are ready for what's to come. A man must be alert at all times if he expects to stay alive. If you're not alert, sometime, a German son-of-an-asshole-bitch is going to sneak up behind you and beat you to death with a sock full of shit!\" A handful of the senior officers listening to the speech disapproved of Patton's coarse language. Patton could not care less. He believes that profanity is the language of the soldier, and that to speak to soldiers one must use words that will have the most impact. Few can deny that George Patton is entitled to this belief, nor that he is the consummate soldier. He is descended from a Civil War Confederate colonel, and has himself been in the military since graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1909. Soon after, he fought in Mexico against Pancho Villa. He then fought in the First World War at Saint-Mihiel, the legendary battlefield west of Metz where he walks now. Patton was the very first officer ever assigned to the U.S. Army tank corps, and is renowned for his tactical brilliance on the battlefield. He lives by the words of the great French general Napol\u00e9on, \"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace\"\u2014\"Audacity, audacity, always audacity\"\u2014a motto that works well on the field of battle, but not so well in diplomatic situations. Patton has damaged his career again and again by saying and doing the sort of impulsive things that would see a lesser man relieved of his command for good. \"An Army is a team,\" he continues; \"it lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know anything more about real fighting under fire than they know about f-cking!\" Patton was forced to pause, as he knew he would be. The waves of laughter rolling toward the stage were deafening. (Continues...) Excerpted from Killing Patton by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard . Copyright \u00a9 2014 Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.52}], "target_asin": "0062110721"}
{"user_id": "AGNBRF2ZEB2LXNXV67TR44XS5V2Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0635021161", "title": "The Best Book of Hispanic Biographies (Fiesta! Siesta! and All the Rest-A!)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "B003UHU80C", "title": "When God Turned Off the Lights: True Stories of Seeking God in the Darkness", "author": "Cecil B. Murphey", "description": "About the Author CECIL MURPHEY , known as \u201cthe man behind the words,\u201d is an award-winning writer who has collaborated on a number of bestselling books, including 90 Minutes in Heaven and Heaven Is Real with Don Piper, Touchdown Alexander with Shaun Alexander and Rebel with a Cause with Franklin Graham. He is a recipient of the Gold Medallion Award, two-time recipient of the Silver Angel Award for Excellence in Media, and the inaugural recipient in 2007 of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association. Dr. Murphey is the author of I Choose to Stay and The Immortality of Influence. He writes a weekly devotional for Crosswalk.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 40.38}, {"asin": "1884479154", "title": "The Rosary & Chaplet of Divine Mercy", "author": "Vinny Flynn & Still Waters", "description": "About the Author Known to many as \"the man who sings the Divine Mercy Chaplet on EWTN,\" this father of seven has been involved in a ministry of mercy for over thirty years, using his gifts of teaching, writing, counseling, music, and prayer to help people understand the teachings of the Church and open their hearts to the healing touch of God's love. A former Executive Editor of the Marian Helpers Bulletin and former General Manager of Divine Mercy International, Vinny has a special gift of making theological concepts and the teachings of the Church come alive with new meaning and relevancy. His powerful teachings on Divine Mercy, Mary, the Sacraments, and the Father's love have made him a popular speaker at conferences and retreats. Vinny is a member of the Knights of Columbus and has been active in the Catholic Charismatic renewal since 1971, serving for several years on the pastoral leadership team of the Mother of Divine Mercy Prayer Group in Stockbridge. Vinny's family music ministry, Still Waters, features himself and his daughters Colleen, Erin, and Mary, with support vocals from Vinny's wife Donna and their four sons, John, Tim, Brian, and Kevin. The music is gentle and prayerful, with haunting guitar and violin interludes. Seen frequently at the National Shrine of Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, MA and on Mother Angelica's EWTN cable network, Still Waters takes its name from the 23rd Psalm. As Vinny explains, \"It is our prayer that through our music you will be led beside the still waters into the healing presence of Jesus the Good Shepherd, who alone can restore your soul.\" John, Brian, and Erin have each released their own solo albums of contemporary Catholic music; joyous, upbeat praise songs that set your feet dancing, alternating with gentle worship songs that bring tears to your eyes and a new love of God to your heart. In 1993, under the spiritual direction of Fr. George Kosicki, CSB, Vinny and Donna established a recording/publishing company, Spirit Song Ministries, to produce and distribute their family music albums, talks on tape, and religious publications. In 1999 it became a full-time family apostolate which they run from their home. In 2003, the family ministries were incorporated under the name MercySong, Inc. as a 501c(3) Catholic not-for-profit organization dedicated to bringing healing to others by leading them to a personal experience of the Father's love through music, teaching, writing, counseling, and prayer.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "0876283059", "title": "ESL Teacher's Holiday Activities Kit", "author": "Elizabeth Claire", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Foreign Language Study & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1933184388", "title": "End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life", "author": "Susan Conroy", "description": "From the Back Cover It's one of those books that come out of nowhere almost literally just when the world needs it most. Is it all correct what it reveals about the future, both for the world and the soul? From the vantage point of earth, who can say? It is written by a human. But a great saint Th r se of Lisieux was so taken by this book that it spurred her entry into the convent. \"Reading this book was one of the greatest graces of my life,\" she says in her autobiography. \"The impression I received from it is too sweet to express. All the great truths of religion and the mysteries of eternity plunged into my soul a happiness not of this earth.\" Completed in 1881 by an aged French priest, this remarkable book surfaced long enough to draw Th r se into the convent and then, for more than a century, plunged back into obscurity. Now we offer you the very first English translation of this hope-filled, chilling work. In it, Fr. Arminjon gets right to the point: \"The end of the world, Christ says, will come when the human race, sunk in the depths of indifference, is far from thinking about punishment and justice. It will be as in the days of Noah, when men lived without a care, built luxurious homes, and mocked Noah as he built his ark.\" \"Civilization will be at its zenith, markets overflowing with money, and stocks will never have been higher. Mankind, wallowing in unprecedented material prosperity, will have ceased to hope for heaven. Crudely attached to pleasures, man will say 'My soul, you have goods to last for many years. Eat, drink and be merry.' \" Doesn't that sound eerily like America just a year or so ago? Fr. Arminjon insists that we \"steer clear of every perilous opinion and make no assertion that is not justified by Tradition and the doctrine of the Fathers.\" Yet it's precisely his sober reliance on Scripture and Tradition that makes this book so convincing . . . and so chilling! But Fr. Arminjon doesn't merely sketch the darkness ahead; he also shows how Jesus will fill that darkness with light; and he details the rich bounty Christ has in store for all who stay faithful. That's what caught Th r se up in such fervent love of God, nourished her impatience for Heaven, and confirmed her decision to choose a life wholly consecrated to Divine Love. The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life: let it show you how to read the signs of the times and prepare you to bear yourself as a Christian (as it did Th r se) . . . no matter what the future holds! About the Author Father Charles Arminjon (1824-1885) was a priest from the town of Chamb\u00e9ry in the French Alps. After years as a seminary professor, Father Arminjon took up the mission of full-time preacher, and he went on to gain great renown for his ability to inspire in his listeners a deeper and more ardent love for Christ. Throughout France and abroad he delivered sermons, ran retreats, and preached at conferences - the most famous of which form the basis for The End of the Present World.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Catholicism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.79}, {"asin": "1416575995", "title": "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement", "author": "W. Keith Campbell", "description": "Review \"\"The Narcissism Epidemic\" is a must read, an essential antidote to a culture spinning out of control. Filled with facts, fascinating examples, and written in a highly readable style, Twenge and Campbell's outstanding book shows how narcissism has been on the rise and has taken over almost every part of our lives and how we can rescue our culture from ourselves. An outstanding accomplishment by two people who truly care about the debacle of self-worship. It should be read by anyone interested in the future of our country\" -- Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D., author of \"Anxiety Free: Unravel Your Fears Before They Unravel You\"\"A must-read for anyone who is a parent, a relationship partner, in the workforce, in school, or on the job market. Twenge and Campbell not only define narcissism but detail its antecedents, consequences, and underlying processes in a way that brings together so much of what one sees in modern western culture. Grounded in research and peppered with media and anecdotal stories, The Narcissism Epidemic offers practical, much-needed solutions to coping in the age of entitlement.\" -- Kathleen Vohs, Ph.D., University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professor, Editor of \"Self and Relationships: Connecting Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Processes\"\"An important and illuminating book. Drs. Twenge and Campbell expertly analyze many strands of American culture and reveal an alarming tapestry of psychocultural narcissism. They also offer sound strategies for slowing this epidemic.\" -- Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D., author of \"Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel\" and \"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids\"\"Filled with important, disturbing research detailing the alarming cultural spread of narcissism today -- a serious social problem to which many people are unwittingly contributing without realizing the disastrous consequences. The authors give sound advice and provide an important resource for anyone who cares about compassion, empathy, and emotional connection rather than ME, ME, ME!\" -- Karyl McBride, Ph.D., author of \"Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers \"\"Phenomenal...\"The Narcissism Epidemic\" clearly and succinctly identifies the dangerous disease and the catastrophic ways it threatens our society and future, and reveals urgently needed solutions at every level. The chapter on parenting alone makes this book priceless and should be compulsory reading.\" -- Patrick Wanis PhD, Celebrity Life Coach, Human Behavior & Relationship Expert, author of \"How to Find Happiness\"\"The evidence Twenge and Campbell have compiled is compelling and appalling.... Twenge and Campbell marshal statistics, polls, charts, studies and anecdotes to assemble a complete picture of the epidemic's current state of contagion, brought on by the Internet, reality television, a booming economy, easy credit and other developments over the past decade. The authors dismantle the prevailing myths that have made us inclined to tolerate and even encourage narcissism: that it's a function of high self-esteem, that it's a function of low self-esteem, that a little narcissism is healthy, that narcissists are in fact superior, that you have to love yourself to be able to love someone else.\" -- \"New York Times Style Magazine\"\"The other night, when I was reading Twenge and Campbell's excellent and timely new book, my husband was busy framing a fake \"Sports Illustrated\" cover, with a picture of our 7-year old over the caption, \"Player of the Year.\" \"The Narcissism Epidemic\" will hew close to the bone, rouse, and provoke many readers as it shines a spotlight on an important -- and highly costly -- trend in our lives. Rooted in hard data and illuminated with revealing anecdotes, stories, and solutions, \"The Narcissism Epidemic\" is both a pleasure and an education. But enough about this book. Let's talk about me.\" -- Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., author of \"The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want\"\"This insightful book shows us how the epidemic of narcissism touches almost all aspects of our lives. Twenge and Campbell's astute analysis and salient anecdotes powerfully map the problem and the high price we all pay. They expertly show us the kinds of actions we can take to free ourselves of the epidemic's ruthless grip and how the future wellbeing of humane society depends on our doing so.\" -- Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., Professor of Education at Wheelock College and co-author of \"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids\" About the Author Jean M. Twenge, PhD, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of more than a hundred scientific publications and several books based on her research, including Generations , iGen , and Generation Me . Her research has been covered in Time , The Atlantic, Newsweek , The New York Times , USA TODAY , and The Washington Post . She has also been featured on Today , Good Morning America , Fox and Friends , CBS This Morning , and NPR. She lives in San Diego with her husband and three daughters. W. Keith Campbell , Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia, is the author of more than 65 scientific journal articles and book chapters and the book, When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself: How to Deal with a One-way Relationship (Sourcebooks, 2005). He has published\u00a0more than 30 journal articles and chapters on narcissism, more than any other academic researcher. He is also a contributing author of the study on the rise in narcissism covered by the Associated Press. His research has appeared in USA Today, Newsweek, and The Washington Post, and he has been featured on Fox News\u2019 The Big Story and made numerous radio appearances. He holds a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA from San Diego State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Narcissism Epidemic Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Psychology & Counseling"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "1881451828", "title": "Create Success Brain Sync Subliminal", "author": "Kelly Howell", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 3.98}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1901923207", "title": "Deep Sleep Every Night", "author": "Glenn Harrold", "description": "Review \"WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have suffered with chronic insomnia for years...pills, doctors, you name it...I believe that I must own every CD ever made. Glenn Harrold has changed my life with his incredible Deep Sleep cd. I have slept generally well since the first night I used it, and my whole emotional, physical, etc, states are transformed. Depression and despair gone, I can laugh with friends, have a normal life. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have forwarded the link for your site to many friends. Thank you again.\" Rebecca Collins --Rebecca Collins (USA)\"The best sleep hypnosis CD ever made!!!!!! I have had insomnia for years and I must own every sleep hypnosis tape ever made, but this one is magical...it just works.\" --Amazon (USA): A reader from Dallas, TX USA\"I have to tell you I'm so impressed by the Deep Sleep CD I purchased from you recently that I can't believe it. I didn't think anything would make a dent in what has been chronic insomina but this does help more than a little. Thank you so much.\" Alexandra Hammond --Alexandra Hammond (London)", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 38.0}, {"asin": "B073RSN7Y1", "title": "Brothers of the Flame (An Ariel Kimber Novel Book 1)", "author": "Mary Martel", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "1505732816", "title": "Wilting", "author": "Ray Decker Jr", "description": "From the Author Hello Everyone,I want to thank you for taking the time to check out my 1st book. 'Wilting'. It took me a long time to build up the courage to release one of my stories, but after the explosion of support I can't believe I didn't do it sooner. I hope you all enjoy the book!Thanks,Ray About the Author Ray Decker, author of the book Wilting and upcoming novel A Perfect Life, was born in Nashua N.H. on October, 20th 1990 and raised in the small town of Wellsburg N.Y. He grew up with his loving parents and two sisters. Some of his many creative outlets include writing, drawing, and painting.\u00a0Ray discovered a gift for writing through the encouragement of his family, friends, and loving boyfriend.When Ray isn't working on his projects he enjoys reading, playing video games, and listening to music.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "007803468X", "title": "Analysis for Financial Management, 10th Edition", "author": "Robert C. Higgins", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 17.97}], "target_asin": "1901923207"}
{"user_id": "AGLVXSVW2R3GJ5PGCLPL3QE4AWOQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1439176671", "title": "Day by Day Armageddon", "author": "J. L. Bourne", "description": "Review \"There is zombie fiction and then there is crawl-out-of-the-grave-and-drag-you-to-hell zombie fiction. Day by Day Armageddon is hands down the best zombie book I have ever read.\" --Brad Thor, #1 New York Times Best Selling Author From the Author The Day by Day Armageddon project started on a simple pad of paper and from there propagated the universe of worldwide undead devastation.\u00a0 J.L. Bourne intended the original work to appear as if it were hand written--very raw and realistic.\u00a0 He began uploading his work piece by piece to the Internet as a serial depicted as a simple serial of journal entries.  The online journal was intended to immerse the reader into the world that was Day by Day Armageddon--J.L. Bourne's vision of one man, on the run from billions of undead, surviving against all odds.  After months of posting regular serial updates, Bourne began the laborious task of writing the novel version of the underground online cult phenomenon.\u00a0 Suspecting that a traditional publisher might alter his work and take away the raw feel of the journal outlining the fall of humanity, Bourne originally published his work non-traditionally and unconventionally.\u00a0 He wanted the story out there for everyone to enjoy.\u00a0 He wanted it untouched, as a real post-apocalyptic journal might be. He was quoted as saying, \"there are no publishers or editors in the apocalypse.\"  Several publishers contacted Bourne before he was approached by Permuted Press.\u00a0 The two quickly came to an agreement and went to work.\u00a0 The first edition was re-mastered to the underground cult classic it is today.  Handwritten notes, underlines, scribbles, random thoughts and other unique markings gave the journal a chillingly realistic (or was it surrealistic?) feel.  Day by Day Armageddon has since propagated massive interest among fans of post-apocalyptic and zombie fiction.   As a result if his cult success, J.L. Bourne was approached by Simon & Schuster on the prospect of joining up with their Pocket/Gallery Books divisions to release Day by Day Armageddon to the mainstream.\u00a0 It was not long until Day by Day Armageddon was headed to the printing press on a 50,000 copy first print run.  Since that time it has seen many, many printings.  The sequel to the original cult classic aptly named, Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile is the wildly successful follow-up to Bourne's first novel.\u00a0 Go ahead, click the Buy Now button, but first, lock your doors. About the Author J.L. Bourne is a commissioned military officer and acclaimed author of the horror series Day by Day Armageddon, and the dystopian thriller, Tomorrow War . With twenty years of active military and intelligence community service behind him, J.L. brands a realistic and unique style of fiction. He lives on the Gulf Coast but is sometimes spotted toting a rifle and a Bowie knife in the rural hills of Arkansas where he grew up. Visit him at JLBourne.com before the grid goes dark. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Day by Day Armageddon By J. L. Bourne Permuted Press Copyright \u00a9 2009 J. L. BourneAll right reserved. ISBN: 9781439176672 In the Beginning... January 1st 0358 hrs Happy New Year to me. After a drunken night of fun, I sobered up and headed back home. I am so tired and bored of being home on vacation. I'm thankful for the break in training but Arkansas gets old quick. All my good friends are still drinking the same beer and doing the same thing. I will be extremely happy to get back home to San Antonio. New Year's resolution: start keeping a journal. January 2nd 1100 hrs My hangover is finally gone. I like to watch the news when I am near a television, but out here at my parent's house it seems that all they get are the local channels. I'm not going to attempt to try the dial up connection, as it will only frustrate me to the point of madness. I guess I will just check my e-mail when I get home. It seems that something is going on in China; the local news reported some type of influenza virus sweeping them over there. The flu season was bad here this year. I received my flu shot on base, avoiding the shortages of vaccine. I'm glad I get to go home tomorrow and get re-connected with my nice high speed Internet connection and digital cable. My damn cell phone doesn't even work in this desolate place. The worst thing about being here is knowing I'm going to have to do a lot of flying to get back up to speed. When I signed up for naval aviation I didn't think it was going to involve constant work and studying just to stay competent. January 3rd 0609 hrs My grandmother called this morning to tell mom that we were going to war with China and to try to talk me into going to Canada to desert the military. I honestly think my grandmother has lost it. I turned on the news half expecting to see some kind of bullshit trade embargo deal with China. The news went on to say that President Bush has agreed to send medical military personnel over to China for consultation purposes only. Makes me wonder, what do we have in America that a big bad country like China would need? They have all the natural resources anyone would want. I keep thinking I may have kept a light on in my house back in San Antonio. I have two small solar cell panels on my roof but I am wired to the electric grid. I just use the panels to sell electricity back to the utility company when I'm away on deployment. They have already paid for themselves. January 5th 2004 hrs After a nice ten-hour drive from NW Arkansas, I made it home yesterday. I received a satellite radio for Christmas and activated it for my trip home. I listened to BUZZ, or FOX all the way home with some music from my MP3 player thrown in every now and then. Wish I would have thought to hook the satellite radio up at my parent's house because I am almost certain that it would have worked out there even though it's in the middle of nowhere. This China situation is starting to heat up. The news reports that we have lost over ten medical personnel to this China \"bug.\" The other \"military consultants\" that are still in China are going to have to be quarantined prior to getting back to the United States. Talk about a pain in the ass. You go over there to help someone out and all you get in return is a prison sentence. Today was not a bad Monday. Had to go fly a few sorties for training. The EP-3 is basically a C-130 with a lot of antennas. It's somewhat non-maneuverable, but it can receive some valuable data from 20,000 feet. My friend in Groton, CT called today. Bryce is a Navy submarine officer. He really helped me out on a great deal on salvage parts off the old diesel boats when I was installing those panels in my house a few years back. He said that he was finally getting a divorce, she admitted to cheating on him. I kind of had a feeling about this girl, but I never said anything. Don't think it would have mattered if I did. We talked about this China thing for a long time and he seems to think it's some bad flu bug. I kind of think the same thing. January 9th 1023 hrs TGIF. My mother called today on my cell worried asking me if I knew anything about what's going on overseas. I had to once again explain to my mother that just because I'm an officer in the Navy does not mean that I know who killed JFK or what happened in Roswell, NM. I love my mom, she just drives me nuts. I comforted her the best I could but something just isn't right. This nonsense is getting too much coverage in the news. I know the reporters smell a rat by the questions that they are asking FEMA and the Whitehouse and Homeland Defense. The President made a speech (only available on AM band radio, probably to avoid to much publicity) and told the people that there is nothing to worry about and that the Army/Navy medical team in China had to send one of our doctors home because he was too ill to be left with the inadequate care/facilities in the location he was in. Another strange thing is that my squadron was scheduled to go to Atsugi, Japan next month for training in the Pacific and it was cancelled. I asked my skipper about it, he just told me that they were trying not to take any chances with anything, and that there were rumors of \"sick persons\" in Honshu, Japan area. He gave me the nod and told me not to worry. Something doesn't sound right about this whole thing and it's starting to mess with my mind. I have a feeling I might want to go to the store and get some bottled water and things of that nature. January 10th 0700 hrs Not much sleep for me last night. I kept the news on all night just in case I missed anything. \"I can assure the American people that we are taking every effort to contain this epidemic within the borders of China.\" Go ahead; say it in your best southern accent. I went to Wal-Mart today and bought a few things just in case I had to stay indoors to avoid getting sick. I bought some bottled water, canned beef stew and went by the base to chat with my supply friend at the warehouse. He told me that he could part with a few cases of MREs for a new nomex flight suit. Didn't bother me, I have a couple dozen of them. I picked out one of my lesser-worn flight suits and brought it to him. At least I will have a little variety in my diet if I need to stay home despite the fact that MREs are not an optimum bug out food because of how much they weigh and the excess space taken up by the packaging. Vance (my supply connection) informed me he saw on an online government invoice, that a few thousand cases of MRE food were shipped to NORAD and a few other locations in the northwest. I asked him if it were normal, and he told me that these facilities haven't requested this much of a food supply since the Cuban missile crisis. I am thinking that if this is serious enough for the big wigs to want to lock themselves up for a few months it is more serious than I thought. 1042 hrs I unloaded my \"meals ready to eat\" and noticed that one of the packages was busted. The smell of \"Case A\" MRE filled the air and reminded me of all of them that I had eaten when on station in the Arabian Gulf area on a ridiculous ground assignment. I hated it over there. It was so damn hot all the time, and when I had to embark on the ship it didn't make it any better. I checked my battery bank and all six batteries were in the green. Made me think of Bryce, and the \"steal\" I got on those old submarine batteries. Back when submarines were diesel and not nuclear, they ran on batteries when under the water and when they surfaced they charged the batteries with a diesel generator. Some countries still use the old diesel boats. I thought this was a good idea, however, charging them with solar panels takes considerably longer, ten hours instead of three but the sun is free. I miss my sisters, Jenny and Mandy. I haven't seen much of them since I have been in the service; they have sort of grown up on me. I called my dad's house and spoke to Jenny, the youngest. She was still half asleep when I called. I used to pick on her badly when she was little. Oh well, I love the little shit, and it builds character. Mandy is living back home, until she can get back on her feet again. Mandy has never been one to open up and talk to me about anything. I wish things would have been different, or that we would have been closer in our childhood. I really need to clean my guns. Especially my CAR-15, she is really dirty. Might as well clean my pistols while I'm at it. While I'm on the subject, a few hundred rounds for the carbine is not a bad idea since it's so cheap. I don't exactly like looters, and if any of this quarantine shit comes this way, I want to be on the ball. 1436 hrs Ok, I'm starting to worry, the Atlanta Center for Disease Control has reported a case of this \"disease\" at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Since there are no communists here to hush the news, the report got out. Apparently this disease causes the victim to lose some motor function, and also makes the victim seem to act erratic. I called in to the squadron to ask some questions. They told me that it's possible we might get Monday off so the Department of Defense can assess the threat to armed forces personnel inside the United States. My mother also called about the news report and told me that the Bethesda Naval Hospital was the same hospital that they took Kennedy to when he was shot. I laughed at my mom's conspiracy theory attitude and told her to look after her husband (my stepfather) and try to avoid town if they already have enough supplies to stay put. I'm off to the local H.E.B. grocery store to get some stores, oh yeah, bought a thousand rounds for the carbine. Had to go to a few different stores to get them all. No one wanted to sell me that much all at once. It was probably some kind of liberal law that I didn't know about causing the red tape, or it could be a worried gun shop owner conserving some for himself and trying to keep his customers happy at the same time. Almost out the door when I got the call to get in uniform and report to squadron H.Q. More to come. 1912 hrs Just got back from my meeting at my squadron on base. I'm a little troubled. We got word that we have an important mission to fly tomorrow, on a Sunday. Apparently we are to fly recon over Atlanta, actually Decatur, Georgia. We are to focus on a specific area, namely the area around the CDC in Atlanta. It's nothing serious, we are just ordered to be a check and balance for the \"G-men\" in Washington, to make sure the CDC isn't hiding anything. It is just a photo recon, and signal recon mission. Reminds me of the time I listened to my ex-girlfriend's phone conversation when I was flying training missions around the San Antonio area. I love the signals intelligence (SIGINT) equipment as it saved me a lot of money and time with that woman. Also in the news, one of the reporters was really punking out the Bethesda public affairs officer for not allowing press passage into the hospital to ask the medical personnel questions. O'rielly was asking...\"What are you people hiding?\" The young officer held her ground and insisted that it was just for the protection of the press corps that no extra personnel be admitted to the hospital, and besides it was not public property, it was a U.S. Government military hospital. Sort of odd that such a low ranking officer would be giving this type of interview. January 11th 1944 hrs I don't know what to think now. We were on station, sent to spy on our own government (CDC) at 0816 this morning. We started tuning our equipment to intercept any cell phone/land line/data transfer in or out of the CDC. I almost couldn't believe some of the things that were being said. There was an FBI agent on board, which is very unusual. During the brief prior to flight he stated it is technically illegal under Posse Comitatus for the military to be deployed inside the United States for official missions. The agent was to be the official mission commander of the aircraft as to circumvent the military from being implicated for breaking any laws by operating inside the US. We were getting broken transmissions between the different CDC compounds about the virus being difficult to contain, and how the director of the CDC doesn't wish to look bad or in a bad light in front of the President.They were being as confidential as possible about this problem. They were using Secure Telephone Units (STU phones), but we had a little help from the National Security Agency so breaking the code was as easy as hitting decrypt on our proprietary software. They went on to say that one of the infected males that they had quarantined had bitten a nurse in a fit of rage when she was trying to feed him. They had strapped him to his bed and put a mouthpiece in his mouth to avoid any further problems. The nurse wasn't doing so well and he had started to run a fever over the last few hours. The CDC voice also said, \"Jim, (person on the other end) you wont believe the vital signs we are getting from the male.\" Jim said, \"What do you mean, can you give me specifics?\" CDC voice, \"no, no specifics over the phone.\" That is enough to start worrying for me. After we landed, I was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement then I promptly broke it. I called my parents and told them what I thought they should do, then I started my own preparations. I found out we were not coming in tomorrow and that we were only required to call in by 0800 hrs. I already cleaned up my rifle, so it was time to take care of the pistols. That brings my weapon number up to four firearms and a good knife. Went up on the roof to clean my solar cells, they were dingy and dusty. I also pulled up my notes on switching power from the power grid to submarine batteries, as it might prove useful in the future. I loaded all my magazines (10) for a total of 290 rounds. I never like to load the full thirty per magazine, as this could cause an inadvertent weapon jam. My bottom floor windows are only double pane, so I went to the local super hardware store to purchase some DIY window bars for the two windows I have that are chest level. All others are too high to effectively reach without a ladder. I am going to install them now. I installed the bars using a tape measure, pencil, 5/32 drill bit, and a square head screwdriver (proprietary screwdriver that came with the bars and it's supposed to be difficult to get the screws out without using a drill.) If a looter is good enough to drill out my bars and take my shit while I'm still sleeping, I'll fucking load it on his truck for him. While doing a quick walk around my yard perimeter, I have decided that my rock wall is not nearly high enough. Any ablebodied man could easily jump it. I had the wall built with the house. I have broken some bottles that I had in the spare room and I used some bonding cement to glue the shards around the top of my wall perimeter every foot or so. At least it might slow someone down. I was listening to my headset radio while I worked and now that I am more informed, I can only see the situation getting worse. The radio says that the president is issuing a statement in the morning at 0900 EST. Down the street in the distance I can see a family packing up the SUV and leaving. No one takes vacations this time of year so I can only infer that they are bugging out. I'm going to get more supplies tomorrow after I listen to the president's speech and call in to my squadron to check in. January 12th 0934 hrs All I can say is, wow. The President pretty much said that the disease is highly contagious and there is no cure at this time. He said that Americans are encouraged to stay indoors and to report anyone with \"suspicious symptoms\" to the authorities at once. One of the press cronies managed to get a question in and asked, \"Mr. President! Mr. President! Could you please elaborate on suspicious symptoms?\" The President replied that we should be on the look out for person or persons acting wildly and looking ill. He also said, \"It is extremely important that if any of our family members have these symptoms it is paramount that you give them no special treatment, turn them in just as you would a stranger with the same symptoms.\" A 1-800 number flashed on the screen and he then said: \"I urge you to call this number in the event that there are any outbreak symptoms in your community. We have specially trained men and women to handle the situation, we will take your loved ones to a suitable medical facility for treatment.\" The President also said that he is ordering a full withdrawal of American military and civilians in China and Iraq. He commented that he was considering withdrawing troops from the DMZ in South Korea. A video clip played in the background showing the U.S. Embassy in China being evacuated under the close supervision of heavily armed U.S. Marines. One of the clips showed three Marines taking down the American flag to signify that the embassy was officially decommissioned. A scene not unlike the fall of Saigon flashed on to the screen. There were mobs of U.S. citizens being evacuated via helicopter from a random rooftop in Beijing. There were sounds of automatic weapons in the background but the people on the roof didn't seem concerned, they just wanted out. I'm off to get supplies. 1522 hrs It was a total mad house. I got into an accident in the parking lot at the hardware store, and some lady almost fought me for the (4) five gallon barrels of water that I bought at Wal-Mart. I also bought some more 9mm rounds while I was there. I am happy that I have a few cases of MREs and enough water to sustain me in case this gets worse. I also bought some cheap throwaway facemask to wear in case there are any outbreaks at my location. I bought what was left on the shelf in the canned goods section. I purchased fifty cans of different soups. I can't believe this. I haven't felt this surreal since 9/11. My parents are safe out in the hills of Arkansas, I advised them to stay home and don't go into town for anything. They always have a freshly stocked freezer, and water is not an issue since they use well water. They have a small generator for electricity in the winter when the power lines freeze and break. I bought some hardware at one of the major hardware chains; some boards for general purpose and some heavy steel brackets and bolts to install a primitive barricade on my front and back doors. It was just a simple 4x4 board sliding into a rest on the inside of my door to keep anyone from smashing their way in. I think that if I ration myself to one liter per day and 1000-1500 calorie diet, I could last for at least five months on my current supply of food. I also turned on the citizen band radio today to see who was on. I selected channel nineteen to hear what the truckers had to say about all this. They were generally angry about all the roadblocks and cargo searches they were experiencing. Apparently the CDC and INS were concerned about semi trucks carrying a truckload of illegal immigrants in the trailer over the border. Something about it not being safe and that they had an incident of a case of this bug when an INS agent opened gate to the back of another trucker's trailer. According to what I was hearing, they had to quarantine the whole truck and the agent on duty because every damn person in the back was infected and one of the infected immigrants attacked the agent, probably scared of going back to Mexico. I'm going to call one of my Marine buddies out in San Diego to see what he is doing about all this. 1854 hrs I just got off the phone with my buddy Shep in the Marines. He said that there were armed National Guardsmen on the street corners in San Diego and that he was being called in to be a part of his base's security team. He told me that he was told to move his wife on base to the cold war shelter that was being reopened and that they were going to close the gates and quarantine the base in the event that there was an outbreak in that area. The sun is down now. I have motion sensor lights on my house around the perimeter. In the event a looter sneaks over and tries to steal anything, at least the light will go on. When I go to sleep tonight, I will sleep with the Glock under my pillow and the CAR-15 next to my bed. The news is going on about reports of strange phenomenon reported in the major cities, apparently some cases of cannibalism have been reported. That is America for you. The shit hits the fan and everyone goes crazy. Since I happen to live in the outskirts of the eighth largest city in the nation, this news isn't good news. I hear police and ambulance sirens going up and down the street outside my wall. I'm hungry but I have already had too much to eat today. Celery fits the bill I suppose. 2113 hrs CNN is reporting with a web camera in Times Square. Apparently they own it and the feds haven't thought to have it shut down. They are panning it around and the grainy images are showing armed military troops shooting civilians. Damn, there are going to be some lawsuits over this one. The image was quickly cut-off by the emergency broadcast system. After a few minutes the picture came in as the Secretary of Homeland Defense stepped up to a podium marked with the seal of the President. \"America, I'm sorry to report that despite our best efforts, this disease has broken the bonds of our containment measures. It is no longer safe to inhabit larger cities. Safe zones are being set up on the outskirts of high population areas and will be open to those not infected with this disease. Please try to remain calm, as what I'm about to say will sound quite abominable. This disease is reportedly transmitted by the bite from one of the infected. We are not sure if this is linked to saliva, blood or both. The infected soon succumb to their wound and expire, only to rise within the hour and seek out living humans. It is not known why those who die of natural causes are returning; however this is also the case. I apologize that the President could not be here, as he is being transferred to a secure location. May God be with us all in this trying time. I now turn you over to General Meyers.\" As soon as the Homeland Defense Secretary began to close his folder, he was bombarded with questions from the press corps below the stage. It was more like Wall Street trading than a press conference. Even though you couldn't see the crowd of press in front of the podium, you could feel them there by the ambient noise, camera flashes, and garbled voices. One of the particularly alarming question and answer included one of the reporters asking how the Secretary knew the creatures were dead or if they were merely infected with a disease. The Secretary replied by saying, \"Living humans don't have ambient body temperatures that match the ambient air temperature. This morning we locked one of the creatures in a lab reefer. We have recorded a sustained body temperature at 40 degrees Fahrenheit for over twelve hours and counting.\" The crowd gasped at this in disbelief and more questions poured toward the podium. \"What are the chances of being infected by a bite?\" The secretary took a deep breath and said, \"So far the communicability of this disease is one hundred percent post-attack if the skin is broken by a bite.\" I can't fucking believe this is happening. I am calling my family. 2200 hrs After trying to call for over thirty minutes, I realized that that's exactly what everyone else in the United States is doing. The phone lines can't handle that kind of usage. I tried my mobile phone. Same results. \"Network busy.\" I also listened to what the General had to say during my redial attempts. \"The best defense in this situation is to remain in your home and await the evacuation teams. Avoid infected personnel at all costs. If you are forced into an altercation with one of these individuals, the only thing that will have effect is trauma to the cranium. If you are unfortunate enough to be forced to defend yourself from a loved one, do so with same vigilance you would a stranger, as that is what he or she is. Try your best to avoid getting bitten as there is no way to avoid infection by these means. The reports coming in from our troops returning from China indicate that the creatures are primarily attracted to loud noises. It seems they use this as a primary method for finding prey. I must stress that it is in your best interest to remain indoors and to remain quiet and calm. Our best guess from our CIA human intelligence (HUMINT) operators on the ground in China is that the disease has been rampant in China for more than three weeks and they are in a state of disaster. If we don't do things differently than the Chinese did we could be doomed to the same fate.\" The General was then ushered off the podium and given a stern glance by one of the civilian government officials. What followed next was an attempt by one of the speakers to apply a calm tone to what the General had relayed. I'm scared...I really don't know what else to do other than turn the lights out sit here and write...my rifle is slung over my shoulder even as I sit here...There is a knock at the door. Back soon... 2350 hrs One of my fellow officers from the squadron came over to tell me about the rumors he had heard from Jake, our mutual friend when Jake had returned from a mission over one of the outbreak areas in Atlanta, GA. During the mission Jake said that he had seen numerous infected corpses walking the streets in the south part of town. He said he could see the stray dogs barking at them in the streets and watched as the infected tried to lunge at the dogs. He was using the camera pod to digitally zoom in. To him it seemed like some of the younger gang members were trying to take law into their own hands by shooting the infected corpses. From what my friend said, Jake was as white as a ghost when he landed, not believing what his eyes had transmitted to his brain. Chris, my midnight visitor was scared from what Jake had told him, I could see it in his eyes. He asked if I wanted to come with him and stay on the base in the shelter that they had organized. I knew what he was talking about. On the base there are numerous cold war bomb shelters still active and mostly being used to store civil defense food and water and various medical supplies. I looked at Chris and told him that he would be ok, just keep a level head and watch his back. I told him that I was going to stay here alone and try to keep out of view of anybody and anything. He asked me if I was sure, I told him yes. He left and I'm tired. Going to lock it up and watch some news then TRY to get some sleep. I still can't believe this. Part of me wants to see for myself, part of me wants to just hide under the table with my guns and shiver. January 13th 1143 hrs No sleep came for me last night. I kept hearing police and ambulance sirens and fire trucks. Very disturbing. Thought I could hear gunshots in the distance, but it could have been vehicle backfire. Got out of bed at 0500 hrs. Went to the garage to get the florescent bulbs for perimeter and inside lights. I normally use regular bulbs because they are a little brighter, but given my situation, I may have to temporarily live off solar/battery power if any fires knock out the transformers or power grid. The news is only portraying death doom and destruction. The news is now saying that every major city is reporting cases of the dead walking. This morning I began boarding up all my windows, even the ones that are not on ground level. I also boarded up the two vulnerable windows that I recently installed bars on, just in case. I feel pretty safe about the windows. I put the efficient bulbs on my perimeter lights. Disadvantage: It takes them a couple of seconds to come on when the motion sensor trips. Advantage: Will not drain my deep-cycle batteries as quickly. I'm concerned about my safety, but I am taking every precaution to ensure that I am doing ok. I'm making a new section for supplies so that I can keep track of the amount of water and food I am consuming. I also checked the acid level of my batteries. They are good to go. Should last through this, unless...well I don't want to go there in my mind right now. 1555 hrs I finally got through to my Mother and Stepfather (Dad). Mom was hysterical. I had to talk to dad to get any words in. He told me that things were fine and that they were as safe as possible. They hadn't seen any signs of the disease, but told me that there were reports in town of possible outbreak (10 miles away). They had the guns and dogs ready for looters if the situation should arise. I asked dad what his plans were if things got too bad at home. He said that he and mom and the dogs would probably head out to Fincher cave if things got too bad. It is just a small cave that I used to play in when I was young. Old man Fincher used to threaten to shoot me with his rock salt loaded twelve gauge if I kept trespassing in his cave without my parents. That seems like ages ago. I was only twelve then. I told them that I would stay in touch as long as the lines were up. It was no use with the cell phone as it was already dead. The high maintenance services would be the first to go. 1910 hrs The lights were flickering today. Not a normal occurrence here. I was cleaning my rifle when it happened. I thought they were going to go out, but they held. Sirens and gunshots can be heard in the wind. That sums most of the sounds I heard today. After I got of the phone with my family (decided to call my Dad, no answer), I also started preparations to keep my house from looking too inhabited. I took the staple gun and some extra blankets and gunned them over my re-enforced windows to make sure no ambient light gets out when I check the TV for news or turn on a light, or use my computer. I have a couple old batteries left over from my last laptop. Not the same model as my Apple, but I could get it to work with some electrical wire if I had to. I'm just thinking worse case. I used some duct tape and wired my web cam to overlook my front yard so instead of opening curtains to look outside, I could just look in my screen. When my computer is in sleep mode (clamshell closed), I can't even see the needles move on my drain gauge of my battery bank. I had to use my extra USB cable from my printer, but who really cares about printing anything at a time like this. It's not like I'm going to be printing pizza coupons. I sent out some e-mails but got them all back. There were numerous error messages stating that server (insert random IP) was down. It's dark here now. I would get my camera out and take a picture outside my upstairs window. I'm just too scared. 2319 hrs I woke up to the sounds of gunshots nearer this time and turned the cam on. Looks like a green Army transport truck parked under a street light on the corner in front of my house. There are soldiers loading a body in the back of the truck. I have to sleep tonight. Perimeter is secure...I just took the risk of taking an off-the-shelf sleep aid (just 1/2 dose) to try to cut the edge off. The news says that martial law is in effect in the inner city. I'm on the outskirts. It could be put into effect here too if these Army guys keep showing up. Oh yeah, I got a call from the squadron today, I didn't answer. It was my Executive Officer telling me I had to report to the shelter and to call him immediately upon receipt of his message. Yeah right, fuck you sir...feeling the effects of sleepiness... January 14th 0815 hrs I fell asleep to the sound of ocean tides on my mp3 player. I turned it up to drown out some of the noise. Woke up around 0300 to take a piss. I actually forgot what was going on. It reminded me of my childhood and early adulthood when something bad would happen, like a death in the family. There were brief moments of levity where my mind would forget the tragedy and then the cold hard facts would hit me. The second my hand reached out to turn on the television the tragedy returned to my conscious thought. I watched as endless talking heads were giving their theory on the cause and effect. The stock market is to the point of non-recovery. The Coast Guard's helicopter fleet has been reassigned inland to aid law enforcement and military personnel evacuate some of the harder hit areas. A news clip that really got to me in particular, showed a group of survivors on a rooftop in San Diego. The helicopter was circling the roof of the building and I could see the wind from the helicopter rotors blowing the people's hair and clothes around. The people were trapped on top of a large air conditioning unit; apparently they had climbed up there to escape their pursuers (a dozen walking corpses). A particular shocking image was that of a mother and her daughter. The mother had her daughter's mouth taped over and her hands and feet bound. She wasn't one of us anymore. The daughter was dead. The mother just couldn't let go. The poor ignorant woman. I don't know how to react to seeing the world crumble. There are countless cities scrolling by on the news tickers. Even my own city made its way across the bottom of the screen. There are no commercials on the television, only the talking heads. Reporter: \"The following scenes display material that is not suitable for young children.\" The scene showed a group of reporters in their news van driving through downtown Chicago. The camera was pointing to the driver and you could see that he was visibly shaken and trying his best to keep the van on the road. The camera then panned to a frontal view. There are seas of figures in front and on the sides of the van. I could tell the van was moving as quickly as it could. You could hear a male voice crying from the back of the van. The driver did his best to weave in and out, but there were just to many bodies walking into the van to avoid. The camera panned back to the rear seat to get a shot of the female reporter. She said, \"As you can see, it would be SUICIDE to enter the city of Chicago, may god help us all.\" She then made a \"cut-throat\" gesture and the camera cut out. The screen went back to the reporter. He made a half-hearted statement about hoping they would return safely, all the while trying to keep up a fake smile. I turned off the TV and made my own assessment outside my house. 0900 hrs Perimeter wall: solid Street view: Emergency vehicles only. I see some human figures, but can't tell friend or foe. Threats: I see a fire burning in the distance about a mile up the road. I can tell by direction of smoke that it's blowing away from me. 2212 hrs I came across a post on a survivalist forum online. I guess the news isn't reporting the whole truth. A sailor holding out on a U.S. Naval warship posted today. Apparently he is living off fish and seagulls. I hope he makes it. This just reassures my thought that the government is and will continue to hide the facts. This brings up a question. What government? I haven't seen any representatives of the White House on the TV in over 24 hours. I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon prepping my backpack with a \"bug-out\" kit, in the event I have to get the fuck out of Dodge, and also filling up the bathtubs in my house. The water hasn't shut off yet so I'm going to start drinking out of the tub to conserve my bottled water. I began rationing food today. Only had a can of stew and a banana. Might as well eat all the fruit now because it will be useless within a week (sans the apples). I checked the perimeter again, and decided that I will keep my flight suit on at all times and remain as camouflaged as possible when I go out. I have a nomex mask and gloves and ten nomex flight suits. I think it's a good idea to wear the flight suit because: 1. They are fireproof, and 2. They are one piece and no hassle, which means less to get snagged on shit if I have to get on the run. The only bad thing is that I need to be in a very safe place if I need to use the head. I fashioned a pretty good washboard from the grill part of my propane grill. Had to wire brush it clean, but it will serve a good purpose in keeping my clothes clean and giving me less of a chance of catching disease or rash. I'm going to shave every other day to save on razors. 2350 hrs I heard movement outside my gates and disabled the motion sensor lights while putting on my mask and gloves. I grabbed my rifle and went outside to investigate the area. I saw a strange man in civilian clothes stumbling up the street bumping into my rock wall at random intervals. Looked a lot like those corpses on the TV (the way he walked). I'm not taking any chances, nor am I going to get \"commando\" fever. I shall remain silent too avoid being seen or heard by anything alive or dead. Besides, it was too dark to tell whether or not he was alive or dead. I feel like a fucking idiot for not stealing some NVGs from the squadron when I had the chance. They would be handy in this situation. Good night journal. January 15th 2237 hrs I spent the whole day monitoring the situation outside my home. I saw some of the poor bastards shuffling up the street around 1045 this morning. I used my binoculars to get a decent view. Some of the ashen bodies looked normal, some of them not so normal. One of them had its throat torn out. Very unsettling. My phone rang today around noon (it was out momentarily earlier). I had set it to quiet mode a couple days ago. I was sitting next to it, so I decided to pick it up, half expecting it to be one of my superiors wondering why I'm not on the base in the shelter. It was one of my squadron buddies, Jake. We went through Officer Candidate School together. Surprisingly enough, we both picked the same profession, and ended up the same places. He was telling me the situation on base, and I can say that I made a good decision by staying here. He told me that he was sent to pick up some blankets from the base storage units near the west gate. When he arrived he said that the military police were constantly shooting over the fence at the creatures in an effort to weed out some of the mass before it was too much for the gate to handle. A Humvee with a .50 cal was dispatched to deal with the crowd but they had to retreat when the gunner almost got pulled off the vehicle. He said he didn't know how long the gates would hold, but he was sure that they couldn't get by the concrete bomb shelter. I asked him from where he was calling. He told me that he was calling the base's DSN lines (lines strictly for DOD use). He said that the officers were all heavily armed in the bunker and that he thought they had enough food for at least a few weeks. I told him not to worry about me, and that no one knows I'm even here. Instant Karma was playing in the background. That is all for today, journal. January 16th 2200 hrs The phones are dead again. At least the broadband is still working. All the news websites have stopped putting up the nice colorful flash images and are just sticking to basic tickers. I suppose they don't have time to be fancy. I spent the day preparing, loading up some bottled water and one case of MREs to the attic just in case. I also took some plywood from the garage and made a temporary floor up there big enough to sleep on. No emergency vehicles today. The air was thick with smoke from fires in the city. I can see the fires outside now even through the rain. All the lights are off in my house. The electricity kept flickering again today. If the electricity goes out all together, it will take me at least twenty minutes to set up for solar/battery power \"off grid.\" The news isn't even broadcasting live anymore on TV. It's obvious they are controlling the broadcast remotely because all you see are street corner cameras that are only connected to the world through the WWW. Oh, and the tickers on the screen keep rolling by showing government shelter centers. Half of it is misspelled and hastily typed, not unlike this journal. One camera of particular interest was a traffic camera pointing at a random interstate in California. It showed those dead bastards trapped in their vehicles with their seat belts still on trying to scratch and moan their way out. From the looks of it, they died in an accident and came back only to be stuck in a car with no motor skills to unfasten the seatbelt. That makes me feel better, because if they can't un-click the belt, they can't turn the doorknob. Theory: Phones down, Internet up...why? I think it's because most of the lines dealing with the Internet are buried or satellite. Most of the phone lines are above ground and susceptible to fire and weather. January 17th 1424 hrs The sun is out. It is getting hot indoors. I don't want to run the air conditioner out of fear of the noise it will make. Electricity is intermittent. Water pressure is failing. I'm keeping the tubs filled up as I drink water. I'm not risking a shower or bath because I will have to drain the water to do this and I might lose total pressure. Using a bucket and sponge to take a bath. Trying to shave every other day to keep my morale up. The same news keeps flashing on the screen. No reporters in two days. I'm trying to establish a routine as to maintain sanity. In the early AM I am walking the perimeter before the sun rises as to avoid attention from those things. Later in the AM I intend to work out by doing basic calisthenics. I had a real scare this morning. A cat had jumped my fence in order to avoid being killed by one of those things. I didn't think much of it until the cat had ran off and jumped the fence opposite the side it came in on. That's when the thing that was pursuing it decided it wanted to keep up the chase. I could only see its hands as it groped over the fence feeling for the cat. It just kept cutting itself on the broken glass that I had glued there a few days earlier. I guess these things have no fear of pain. I think it got angry because it started beating on my wall. I could hear the thuds from the other side. Let it thud away I suppose it's going to take a lot more than that to tear down my rock wall. There are four or five of them in that area now. They are shambling around. I get a feeling they sense I'm here, but I cannot be sure. If it gets too bad, I will have to deal with them. I was thinking I might get my stepladder and some of my reserve kerosene and put it in my pesticide sprayer. I will climb the ladder and spray them down then light a match and burn them to death, again. It's much quieter than shooting them I suppose. At least this way I will be able to get a good look at one of them. I'm off to make preparations for this. 1600 hrs I cannot begin to describe how disgusting these things look. I am a believer now. They are certainly dead and certainly want me to be dead with them. I quietly went to the garage to get my kerosene, ladder and sprayer. I set the ladder up first. Went over to the section that I thought they were near. I could hear footsteps where I placed the ladder. I wanted so bad to see, but I was scared to look. I went back to the garage, and picked up the rest of my death squad gear. I could have easily shot them, but I don't want to make the noise, or waste the ammunition. I filled the sprayer up and climbed the ladder. First rung...I could see the tops of three of their heads...second rung, they noticed my presence and this awful gurgling moaning sound erupted from one of them. Sounded like, well I don't know what it sounded like. I got to the top of the ladder and there were six of them gathered around my position on the opposite side of the wall. I pumped the canister to get pressure to the sprayer and doused the bastards with kerosene. They were fucking pissed, or hungry, or both, I don't know. I lit a match and threw it at the closest one, no dice, didn't ignite. I repeated this three more times as these vicious things kept clawing at the wall trying to get to me. Finally on the fourth attempt one of them caught fire. I knew I had to stay there on the ladder so I could make them bump into each other and spread the fire. Finally when they were all up in flames, I stepped down from the ladder and put away my gear. I could hear the popping sound of burning fat for the next two hours. I'm glad it had rained for the past few days, or I wouldn't have even thought about doing this. I really have to start making a back up plan in the event I get SNAFU'ed here at my house. 1. They feel no pain. 2. They want to eat me. 3. Fire re-kills them. 4. Not sure about small arms fire yet. 1815 hrs The sun is quickly going down. From my laptop web cam, I can see numerous figures up the street gathering around another house. I wonder if someone is alive in there? I hear birds going crazy in that direction. Not sure what the deal is. I hope if someone is alive in there, they have the common sense to stay quiet, because I really don't want to find out how gunfire affects them just yet. I don't want to be a hero today. I miss the world already. I miss flying. I miss being a Naval officer. I guess I still am, but I'm not sure if there is even a government around to recognize my commission. I sharpened my knife to a honed perfection today. It was sort of a relaxation technique. Also cleaned my carbine, although she didn't need it. A visual inspection was made of all weapons. The solar panels are running efficiently. I dread going on the roof to clean them, because I'm sure I will be spotted. I should do it at night. That's a ways off. I heard the sound of a helicopter today, didn't take the chance to go outside and look even though those things can't spot me from ground level. Maybe they can smell me. It makes me wonder what senses they lost or gained from dying and coming back. I think it probably took longer than normal for the ones that I burned to die, as compared to a normal human. I saw the caps of the flames from my house over the wall stumbling around for at least three minutes. The average human would collapse from pain in less than thirty seconds, I would guess. When it gets dark, I am going to use the LASER sight on my pistol to try to signal the house up the street. At least that way the creatures will not see the signal, only the recipient will if they exist or are even alive. Copyright 2004, 2007 by J. L. Bourne Continues... Excerpted from Day by Day Armageddon by J. L. Bourne Copyright \u00a9 2009 by J. L. Bourne. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 15.51}, {"asin": "159439380X", "title": "Training for Sudden Violence: 72 Practice Drills", "author": "Rory Miller", "description": "Review Those of us who teach self-defense have a vital responsibility to ensure that our students can actually use what they learn. The challenge is that we can never know when a student will be forced to apply their skills. It could be today, tomorrow, next year or never. That makes it the instructor's responsibility to make each and every student as competent as possible as quickly as possible. In Drills Rory Miller gives exercises and training philosophy that serve this goal. Some of the drills are mental, because the author recognizes that survival is not just a physical problem. Some are simple, things you can do right now. Some, like scenarios, are on the leading edge of current professional training. There's a lot in this book, and no fluff. Concise, effective, and useful, I cannot recommend it highly enough! -- Lawrence A. Kane, martial artist, author of Surviving Armed Assaults, co-author of The Little Black Book of Violence and Scaling ForceRory Miller has once again provided a master piece delineating not only his well thought out and useful drills for martial arts and self-defense, but providing invaluable insight for teaching martial arts and self-defense skills across the broad range of experience and need. Many of his drills provide more mental and psychological training than physical and, as such, viable to any practitioner from the novice to the expert. His book provides practical exercises building off of his previous books, Meditations on Violence and Facing Violence. -- Jeffrey Cooper, MD, Emergency Physician, Tactical Physician, 6th Dan, Okinawan Goju-Ryu KaratePower is the ability to do things. So knowledge isn't power. Just \u201cknowing\u201d has no ability to get things done. Knowledge has to be effectively applied to be powerful. That's why this latest book from Rory Miller is so very important; it teaches drills that effectively develop the ability apply many differing skills and attributes. Rory once again shares his hard won expertise in a logical and accessible way.\u2015Iain Abernethy, 6th dan, World Combat Association Chief International Coach, author -- Iain Abernethy, 6th Dan, World Combat Association Chief International Coach, author of Mental Strength, Throws for Strikers, and Karate's Grappling MethodsThe best way to train for a serious fight is full out; however, if you do that, you may break your toys -- or they may break you. If somebody doesn't get hurt, you are doing it wrong. Rory Miller has developed a series of drills that can help. No drill is perfect, but those in this book on how to survive serious mayhem, are effective. Read it, and learn. -- Steve Perry, New York Times bestselling author, Shadows of the Empire About the Author Rory Miller is a writer and teacher living peacefully in the Pacific Northwest. He has served for seventeen years in corrections as an officer and sergeant working maximum security, booking and mental health; leading a tactical team; and teaching subjects ranging from Defensive Tactics and Use of Force to First Aid and Crisis Communications with the Mentally Ill. For fourteen months he was an advisor to the Iraqi Corrections System working in Baghdad and Kurdish Sulaymaniyah. Somewhere in the midst of that he received a BS degree in Psychology; served in the National Guard as a Combat Medic (91A/B); earned college varsities in judo and fencing and received a mokuroku in jujutsu. He has drunk chichu with reformed cannibals and 18-year-old scotch with generals...and loves long sword fights on the beach. Wim Demeere began training at the age of 14, studying the grappling ats of judo and jujitsu for several years before turning to the kick/punch arts of traditional kung fu and full contact fighting. He won four national titles and a bronze medal at the 1995 Word Wushu Championships. In 2001, he became the national coach of the Belgian Wushu fighting team. Wim instructs both business executives and athletes in nutrition, strength, endurance, and martial arts. Wim Demeere lives in Belgium.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Individual Sports"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 16.62}, {"asin": "0615986935", "title": "A History of Violence:: An Encyclopedia of 1400 Chicago Mob Murders.1st Edition", "author": "Dr. Wayne A. Johnson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "True Crime"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 24.95}, {"asin": "149617223X", "title": "The Official Kata Manual of The Kodenkan Danzan Ryu Jujitsu Association: KDRJA Kata Manual", "author": "George Arrington", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Individual Sports"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 30.0}, {"asin": "0072980621", "title": "Student Study Guide to accompany Chemistry", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Raymond Chang received his B.Sc. degree in chemistry from London University, England and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University. After doing postdoctoral research at Washington University and teaching for a year at Hunter College, he joined the chemistry at Williams College, where he has taught since 1968. Professor Chang has written books on spectroscopy, physical chemistry, and industrial chemistry.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Chemistry"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 30.73}, {"asin": "1594393311", "title": "Conflict Communication: A New Paradigm in Conscious Communication", "author": "Rory Miller", "description": "Review A manual of advice born of long experience with violence\u2026Unpleasant but useful information, particularly for those who routinely come in contact with highly aggressive people. \u2015 Kirkus Concise, helpful, and well-organized, this is strongly recommended reading for those interested in learning to verbally de-escalate violence. \u2015 Foreword Reviews Like the Post-it\u00ae note, Conflict Communications is something you never knew you needed but cannot live without. The materials are straightforward and easy to apply, yet profoundly insightful. Once you begin to recognize the patterns that Miller describes within yourself and others it will forever change the way you interact. Armed with this new information I was able to resolve a longstanding deadlock on a $168M contract in less than two hours. It\u2019s amazingly powerful and wholeheartedly recommended. -- Lawrence Kane, Sensei; Sr. Leader, ITI Strategy, Sourcing, and Asset Management at a Fortune\u00ae 50 company; best selling authorA set of extremely effective tools for predicting, avoiding, and managing conflicts. -- MAJ Gregory Postal, MD\u2026a priceless skill... -- Jack HobanShould be mandatory reading\u2026 -- Tony Blauer, Blauer Tactical SystemsBreaks out of the martial arts and law enforcement genre... -- Jeffrey Cooper, MD, Emergency Physician, Tactical Physician, 6th Dan, Okinawan Goju-Ryu KarateThe standard by which others [writing] on the subject shall be judged. -- Steve Perry, New York Times bestselling author, Shadows of the EmpireWon't just help your relationships, it just might save your life. -- Alain B. Burrese, JD About the Author Rory Miller is a writer and teacher living peacefully in the Pacific Northwest. He has served for seventeen years in corrections as an officer and sergeant working maximum security, booking and mental health; leading a tactical team; and teaching subjects ranging from Defensive Tactics and Use of Force to First Aid and Crisis Communications with the Mentally Ill. For fourteen months he was an advisor to the Iraqi Corrections System working in Baghdad and Kurdish Sulaymaniyah. Somewhere in the midst of that he received a BS degree in Psychology; served in the National Guard as a Combat Medic (91A/B); earned college varsities in judo and fencing and received a mokuroku in jujutsu. He has drunk chichu with reformed cannibals and 18-year-old scotch with generals...and loves long sword fights on the beach.", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 13.41}, {"asin": "076031974X", "title": "War Stories of the Green Berets", "author": "Hans Halberstadt", "description": "About the Author Hans Halberstadt studied documentary film in college and later took up writing, authoring or co-authoring more than fifty books. Most of his books have been on military subjects, especially U.S. special operations forces, armor, and artillery. He has also written extensively about farming and railroads. Halberstadt served in the U.S. Army as a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. He and his wife, April, live in San Jose, California.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.95}, {"asin": "B01LZ1MXK3", "title": "The Night Trade (A Livia Lone Novel Book 2)", "author": "Barry Eisler", "description": "Review \u201cAn entertainingly riveting read from cover to cover, The Night Trade showcases author Barry Eisler as a master of narrative-driven fiction enriched for the reader with unexpected twists and turns throughout.\u201d \u2014Midwest Book Review Praise for Barry Eisler\u2019s Livia Lone : An Amazon Best Book of 2016 A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of 2016 Selection \u201cAn absolutely first-rate thriller\u2026Emotionally true at each beat.\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cAn explosive thriller that plunges into the sewer of human smuggling\u2026Filled with raw power, [ Livia Lone ] may be the darkest thriller of the year.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cReaders may be reminded of Stieg Larsson\u2019s beloved Lisbeth Salander when they meet Livia Lone, and will be totally riveted by the story of this woman on a mission to right the wrongs in her past.\u201d \u2014Bookish \u201cYou won\u2019t be able to tear yourself away as the story accelerates into a Tarantino-worthy climax and when you\u2019re left gasping in the wake of its gut-wrenching vigilante justice, you\u2019ll belatedly realize you learned a lot about a social travesty that gets far too little attention\u2026 Livia Lone is a harrowing tale with a conscience.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Review of Books About the Author Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA\u2019s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan Judo Institute along the way. Eisler\u2019s bestselling thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller, have been included in numerous \u201cBest of\u201d lists, have been translated into nearly twenty languages, and include the #1 bestseller Livia Lone . Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when he\u2019s not writing novels, blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Learn more at www.barryeisler.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1621253031", "title": "Prepare Now Survive Later", "author": "Bob Mayer", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Safety & First Aid"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 40.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B001VAA5TO", "title": "Combat Conditioning: Functional Exercises For Fitness And Combat Sports, Revised Edition", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1597800295", "title": "The Door to Saturn (The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, Vol. 2)", "author": "Clark Ashton Smith", "description": "About the Author Clark Ashton Smith was a self-educated poet and author best remembered for his short stories of fantasy, horror, and the supernatural published in genre pulp magazines such as Wonder Stories and Weird Tales in the late 1920s and 1930s. Smith died in 1961 in California.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 122.67}, {"asin": "088368358X", "title": "How to Be the Happy Wife of an Unsaved Husband", "author": "Linda Davis", "description": "From the Back Cover Every time you get your hopes up, they come crashing down--shattering like broken promises. You crumble under the weight of your own disappointment. In despair, you cry out to God, \"Why don't You do something? I need your help! Will You ever save my husband?\"This is the heart-wrenching cry of a Christian woman whose husband doesn't know Christ as his Savior and Lord. A great spiritual gulf separates them. It is difficult to agree on day-to-day decisions, let alone larger questions. Everyday life becomes a lonely and painful existence.Linda Davis lived in this difficult situation for fifteen years as she prayed and waited for her husband to become a Christian. Her pain came not only because her husband wasn't saved, but also because very few people in the church knew how to help her during her struggle. Yet understanding how to cope with this situation is crucial for a wife's own spiritual health and for strength to endure the strain she is under. Drawing from personal experience and biblical wisdom, Linda Davis describes how you can: * Be happy in spite of your circumstances* Understand your husband's point of view* Witness to your husband without saying a word* Release your husband to God* Rely on God's perfect timing for your husband's salvation* Understand what God means by submission* Deal with rejection and hostility* Be set free from worry and guiltThe Christian wife of an unsaved husband has a special ministry that no one else can fulfill. Linda Davis explains how to minister to your husband while living a rewarding life both spiritually and personally. This book will benefit any woman who desires a deeper spiritual life for both her husband and herself. About the Author Linda Davis is a registered nurse, real estate\u00a0agent, speaker, and writer. A lifetime resident\u00a0of the St. Louis area, she and her husband, Mark, are avid hot\u2011air ballooning enthusiasts.\u00a0Married since the age of eighteen, Linda and\u00a0Mark have two adult sons, Scot and Todd.\u00a0Linda\u2019s ministry gifts are in the areas of\u00a0evangelism and encouraging others to a deeper\u00a0relationship with Jesus Christ.", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.52}, {"asin": "159017187X", "title": "Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (New York Review Books Classics)", "author": "Patrick Leigh Fermor", "description": "Review \"\u2026 Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh Fermor\u2019s ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase\u2026and partly thanks to his capacity to weave a compelling story out of sometimes unpromising material. One of the best tales of all is the hilarious digression in Roumeli on the attempted recovery of a pair of Byron\u2019s slippers from a man in Missolonghi, on behalf of Byron\u2019s very odd great-granddaughter Lady Wentworth\u2026When you see through all the nonsense about Hellenic continuity, there is, underneath, a much more nuanced account of the ambivalences of modern Greece, its people and its myths (its own myths about itself and us, as much as our myths about it).\" \u2014 Mary Beard, The London Review of Books \"Recommended to those who admire exotic people, unbookish intelligence and captivating style.\" \u2014 Gilbert Highet \" Here it all is once again: brilliance, the felicitous profusion, the exuberance of learning and information. . . . Roumeli is not a beginning and middle and end book, but a series of pictures loosely related, mainly placed in Roumeli, in the north of Greece. Its unity, however, is not geographic so much as psychological. It deals with secluded ways and people\u2014communities but not minglers\u2014people who either by the necessities of their crafts or the strength of their traditions have kept to their own stream, side by side but not deeply affected by the changes around them\u2026.Placed as we are at probably the most sudden turn in history, any writing that deals with what has so short a time of survival ahead adds, as it were, a museum interest to its own intrinsic qualities. These pictures of Greece are things that a coming generation will look for in vain among the realities of their day.\" \u2014 Freya Stark, The New York Times \u201cPatrick Leigh Fermor has written great travel books besides Roumeli and Mani , but I like to think that his extraordinary style is especially well suited to the subject of Greece, that the beautiful cragginess and almost blinding brilliance of his prose correspond particularly to that country\u2019s rugged, dazzled landscapes. Here Fermor establishes an ideal of travel writing: no one responds to a people and a place with more erudition and sensitivity.\u201d \u2014Benjamin Kunkel\u201c[Leigh Fermor] becomes fascinated by the last true nomads of the region, the Sarakats\u00e1ns.\u00a0 His description of their wanderings is, for me, the best sort of literary geography lesson, and has even more geopolitical relevance now than when he wrote it.\u201d - Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Geographical Praise for Patrick Leigh Fermor: \"One of the greatest travel writers of all time\u201d\u2013 The Sunday Times \u201cA unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last and the greatest of a generation whose like we won't see again.\u201d\u2013 Geographical \u201cThe finest traveling companion we could ever have . . . His head is stocked with enough cultural lore and poetic fancy to make every league an adventure.\u201d \u2013 Evening Standard If all Europe were laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.\u201d\u2014Ben Downing, The Paris Review About the Author Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was an intrepid traveler, a heroic soldier, and a writer with a unique prose style. After his stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison of\ufb01cer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He lived partly in Greece\u2014in the house he designed with his wife, Joan, in an olive grove in the Mani\u2014and partly in Worcestershire. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to British\u2013Greek relations. Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity , a book of poems, Dinner with Persephone , a travel memoir about Greece, Sugar Cane , a children\u2019s book, and The Book of Heaven , a novel. She lives in New York.", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 18.95}], "target_asin": "B001VAA5TO"}
{"user_id": "AG3PIPU5JZNSCHQR5AHMWXIYAAOQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00CCY4T2W", "title": "Wanderlust: A Dark Romance Novel", "author": "Skye Warren", "description": "Review Praise for Wanderlust: \"I loved this dysfunctional couple and couldn't get enough of them.\" - Reader's Confession\"I would say this wasdark and disturbing.....and it kind of was but for me, when it counts,it's a seriously sweet emotional book.\" - Dark Reading Room\"I love how Ms. Warren is able to make the angst of these two people so real...downright heartbreaking.\" - Salacious Reads\"And Hunter - you psychotic, tortured and oh-so complex beast of a man...how I adore you!\" - Not Now...Mommy's Reading About the Author Skye Warren is the New York Times bestselling author of dark romance.Don't miss a release! Find out about new releases and exclusive giveaways here:skyewarren.com/newsletter\u00a0And like Skye Warren on Facebook here:facebook.com/skyewarrenThank you for reading! <3", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "1497454999", "title": "Love, in English", "author": "Karina Halle", "description": "Book Description A standalone, contemporary romance.... He\u2019s thirty-eight. I\u2019m twenty-three. He speaks Spanish. I speak English. He lives in Spain. I live in Canada. He dresses in thousand-dollar suits. I\u2019m covered in tattoos. He\u2019s married and has a five-year old daughter. I\u2019m single and can\u2019t commit to anyone or anything. Until now.Because when they say you can\u2019t choose who you fall in love with, boy ain\u2019t that the damn truth. *** To a restless dreamer like Vera Miles, it sounded like the experience of a lifetime. Instead of spending her summer interning for her astronomy major, she would fly to Spain where she\u2019d spend a few weeks teaching conversational English to businessmen and women, all while enjoying free room and board at an isolated resort. But while Vera expected to get a tan, meet new people and stuff herself with wine and paella, she never expected to fall in love. Mateo Casalles is unlike anyone Vera has ever known, let alone anyone she\u2019s usually attracted to. While Vera is a pierced and tatted free spirit with a love for music and freedom, Mateo is a successful businessman from Madrid, all sharp suits and cocky Spanish charm. Yet, as the weeks go on, the two grow increasingly close and their relationship changes from purely platonic to something\u2026more. Something that makes Vera feel alive for the first time. Something that can never, ever be. Or so she thinks **Reviews** \"A three-dimensional love story with depth, hope, and heart-wrenching consequences. This book makes me want to drop everything and fly to Spain.\" - K.A. Tucker, author of Ten Tiny Breaths \"I have to say that this is the most emotional and beautiful book Halle has written. She's written great love stories before but there was nothing else to distract you here, no horror, no action. This is all emotions, real and gritty and hard.\" - Ginger Read Reviews \"Love, in English is so much more than just boy meets girl. It's a story of two people from opposite sides of the world that find something in each other that makes them question what it is to live and what it is to just be alive. I dare you not to be moved by the story of Vera and Mateo.\" - My Book Muse \"I fell in love with this story and all of the characters. Halle created such a passionate, romantic and magical story that it is in a word....Unforgettable. Love, In English is addictive complete with amazing writing and many heartwarming moments that anyone looking for their next brilliant read should look no further.\" - Shhh Mom's Reading \"Stormy. Passionate. Gripping. A tumultuous story with ups and downs, with shades of gray and vibrant colors. It's a story about choices and emotions, bravery and fate, of boldly being yourself and fighting for the destiny we choose.\" - Vilma's Book Blog", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 18.0}, {"asin": "1492955949", "title": "Hers", "author": "Dawn Robertson", "description": "About the Author Dawn Robertson is a two time best selling, twenty-something indie author, and mother. She lives in sunny senior citizen packed Florida, where she wrangles her flock of kids and writes smut. Dawn can normally be found swearing like a sailor, making late night drive-thru appearances, arguing with her kids (or being run over by their power wheels), reading a steamy romance while hiding in her bathroom, writing her little heart out on her laptop (or dragging her Macbook to the Genius bar praying they can save her latest work in progress), shopping for My Little Pony goodies, being the life of the party at a book signing, or sipping on a smoothie. She loves to hear from her fans, readers, and authors alike. Feel free to drop her a message. Dawn rarely takes life seriously, so be sure to expect heavy sarcasm from her. She is also the life of the party, so be sure to meet up with her at one of the many author events she will be attending in the next couple months. Buy her a shot of whiskey, and she will love you for life. Find Dawn Robertson: Facebook: http: //facebook.com/authordawnrobertson Twitter: http: //twitter.com/eroticadawn Website: http: //eroticadawn.com AuthorDawnRobertson@gmail.com", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Erotica"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "1537462415", "title": "Pretty Stolen Dolls", "author": "Ker Dukey", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Romantic Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.0}, {"asin": "1545391777", "title": "The Queen and the Cure (The Bird and the Sword Chronicles)", "author": "Amy Harmon", "description": "Review \"Emotional, vivid, lush. Heart wrenching and heart healing. One of my favorite books EVER.\" - - Mia Sheridan, New York Times bestselling author. \"With The Queen and the Cure you have a breathtaking tale of epic proportions, one which I will be re-reading over and over again.\" -- USA Today bestselling author, Penny Reid. \"We loved absolutely everything about this magnificent story. This wasn't just a read, this book was an adventure. And the romance! The romance was captivating, beguiling, and so beautiful! We completely lost ourselves in this exquisite story.\" --- TotallyBooked Blog About the Author Amy Harmon is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times Bestselling author. Her books have been published in thirteen languages, truly a dream come true for a little country girl from Levan, Utah. Amy Harmon has written ten novels - the USA Today Bestsellers, Making Faces and Running Barefoot, as well as The Law of Moses, The Song of David, Infinity + One, Slow Dance in Purgatory, Prom Night in Purgatory, and the New York Times Bestseller, A Different Blue. Her recent release, The Bird and the Sword, is a Goodreads Best Book of 2016 nominee. Her next release, FROM SAND AND ASH, a historical set during WWII, will be available on December 1, 2016 via Lake Union Publishing. For updates on upcoming book releases, author posts and more, join Amy at www.authoramyharmon.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Mythology & Folk Tales"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "1514185016", "title": "The Song of David (The Law of Moses)", "author": "Amy Harmon", "description": "About the Author Amy Harmon is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times Bestselling author. Amy knew at an early age that writing was something she wanted to do, and she divided her time between writing songs and stories as she grew. Having grown up in the middle of wheat fields without a television, with only her books and her siblings to entertain her, she developed a strong sense of what made a good story. Her books are now being published in several countries, truly a dream come true for a little country girl from Levan, Utah. Amy Harmon has written eight novels - the USA Today Bestsellers, Making Faces and Running Barefoot, as well as Slow Dance in Purgatory, Prom Night in Purgatory, Infinity + One, The Law of Moses, and the New York Times Bestseller, A Different Blue. Her newest release, The Song of David, is now available.", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1492740357", "title": "Until November (Until Series)", "author": "Aurora Rose Reynolds", "description": "About the Author Aurora Rose Reynolds is a New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose wildly popular series include The Until Series, Until Him, Until Her, Underground Kings and Shooting Stars. Her writing career started in an attempt to get the outrageously alpha men who resided in her head to leave her alone and has blossomed into an opportunity to share her stories with readers all over the world.", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1490544755", "title": "Tension", "author": "R.L. Griffin", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Women's Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "1512038563", "title": "King (The King Series)", "author": "T.M. Frazier", "description": "Review \"Dark and gritty, sweet and sexy, raw and shocking, and utterly addictive, with an unapologetic, badass Alpha male hero and unexpected twists that I never saw coming!! I couldn't put it down from the moment I started it...\" -Aestas Book Blog\"King brought me into the dynamic, sexy, and thrilling world of T.M. Frazier's books and I never want to leave.\" - NYT Bestselling Author Carrie Ann Ryan\"Super hot and oh so wrong.\" -NYT Bestselling Author Kylie Scott\"The pacing is stellar. The writing is profound. And the characters are emotionally-gripping. This is a stop-what-you're-doing-and-one-click book. But be prepared to get nothing done, because you'll read it in one sitting. Then you'll stew about it. Then you'll search frantically for the sequel.\" -NYT Bestselling Author Pam Godwin\u00a0\"Dark, emotional, gritty, compelling, exciting, heartbreaking, and romantic, King and Tyrant had it all.\" -Ana's Attic Book Blog\"The story of King and Doe is different, unique, captivating, heartbreaking, funny and passionate.\"-Read More Sleep Less Book Blog", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Erotica"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "1493584154", "title": "Fraternizing", "author": "C.C. Brown", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0615894739", "title": "Tug of War", "author": "K. Larsen", "description": "Review SMIBookClub - \"I highly recommend this book and it is a definite 5 star read for me!\" BookBoyfriendReview - \"I like drama & Larsen delivers.\u00a0She did a wonderful job of slowly exposing Clara's past, making me want to continue reading to find out what happens next. I liked that it wasn't all put out on the table before me. It was set up in courses, this way my palette was ready for the next taste and I could savor it.\" NerdGirl - \"This book is amazing! The characters are so real you read the words and the movie plays in your head. I went through many emotions with the characters. 5 Stars!\"Get your FREE books today;\u00a0eepurl.com/2Svvb From the Author This book was challenging to write. Clara is hard to love. She is not whiny, or a push over. She is loud, and stuck in her ways and she has faults. I love a strong female lead and I wanted to write one that isn't perfect. I wanted a real life type story. We all have that friend who does stupid stuff or makes mistakes that we still love in the end. This story is for all those women. The ones who are imperfect, works in progress.", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Romantic Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": null}, {"asin": "1944995056", "title": "Bluff", "author": null, "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 9 Up\u2014In this cautionary tale of a cheerleader's descent into poker addiction, 17-year-old Chelsea is one of the less privileged members of a cheer squad filled with rich girls. She has an absent mother and a deeply depressed father, her family's bills don't always get paid on time, and there's certainly not enough money for the necessary squad fees. Her first visit to the casino is altruistic: to make enough cash to keep her family going. But quickly the thrill of the games\u2014and the presence of handsome security guard Nate\u2014draw her to the table night after night. In an unusual departure from more frequently seen settings of teens coping with addiction, Dill places her drama at the smoky poker tables of unglamorous casinos, where Chelsea struggles with her inner demons while surrounded by senior citizens with bouffant hairstyles. Her burgeoning romance with Nate is always shown as sweet, a bright light amid her downward spiral. Both poker lovers and cheer fans will appreciate the detail included about both worlds, though previous knowledge of either is not necessary to enjoy the story. VERDICT The engaging style, fast pace, and unusual settings make this a solid choice to recommend to reluctant readers.\u2014Ann Foster, Saskatoon Public Library Review \"A sly, insightful close-up of risk-taking\u2019s seductive, addictive appeal.\" - Kirkus Reviews - - Kirkus Reviews DILL, Julie. Bluff. 250p. Amberjack. Feb. 2017. pap. $10.99. ISBN 9781944995058. Gr 9 Up\u2013In this cautionary tale of a cheerleader\u2019s descent into poker addiction, 17-year-old Chelsea is one of the less privileged members of a cheer squad filled with rich girls. She has an absent mother and a deeply depressed father, her family\u2019s bills don\u2019t always get paid on time, and there\u2019s certainly not enough money for the necessary squad fees. Her first visit to the casino is altruistic: to make enough cash to keep her family going. But quickly the thrill of the games\u2015and the presence of handsome security guard Nate\u2015draw her to the table night after night. In an unusual departure from more frequently seen settings of teens coping with addiction, Dill places her drama at the smoky poker tables of unglamorous casinos, where Chelsea struggles with her inner demons while surrounded by senior citizens with bouffant hairstyles. Her burgeoning romance with Nate is always shown as sweet, a bright light amid her downward spiral. Both poker lovers and cheer fans will appreciate the detail included about both worlds, though previous knowledge of either is not necessary to enjoy the story. VERDICT The engaging style, fast pace, and unusual settings make this a solid choice to recommend to reluctant readers.\u2013Ann Foster, Saskatoon Public Library - - School Library Journal Seventeen-year-old Oklahoma native Chelsea Knowles has grown up playing cards with her single father, and with their financial situation in a very dire place, she puts those skills to the test, sneaking into a local casino, where she wins big at poker. Suddenly, Chelsea has money to spare, and she begins to see playing poker as a means to help her father pay the bills and to afford the clothes and social opportunities she\u2019s only dreamed about. Thus begins a gambling spree with all the highs and lows that come with the territory, as well as a romance with Nate, an attractive casino worker a few years her senior. Debut author Dill paints a visceral portrait of the way financial pressures take a toll on a family, particularly on teenagers who don\u2019t necessarily feel as though they can anything about it. Chelsea\u2019s tender if fraught relationship with her father, given extra depth through flashbacks, and the electric thrill she gets as money starts coming in, will make it easy for readers to understand why she embarks on such a risky path. Ages 13\u2013up. (Feb.) - - Publisher's Weekly From the Back Cover Seventeen-year-old Chelsea Knowles is surrounded by the privileged. Michael Kors gym bags and designer shoes are part of her daily scene, but the talented cheerleader has a secret: she and her dad can barely pay the bills. Broken by his wife walking out on their family, Chelsea's father ignores his responsibilities. Between cheer costs, grocery bills, electricity, and other regular financial burdens, it's no surprise when a cut-off notice arrives in the mail. Chelsea knows it'll be up to her to keep the lights on.With the deck stacked against her, Chelsea decides to bet their future on the dubious poker knowledge she learned from her father before he gave up on parenting. Nervous but determined, Chelsea heads to a casino with very little security and wins big. Thrilled by her win, she's quickly drawn to the casino again and again. She risks it all, especially when the attractive, young pit boss takes an interest in her.Chelsea's life, no longer filled with cheerleading, school, and hanging out with her friends, is now consumed by smoky casino floors and the ups and downs of a gambler's life. True gamblers know when to fold, but Chelsea keeps betting long after her needs are met. The complicated web of lies soon begins to spin out of control, threatening to expose everything. Will someone see through her bluff? About the Author Julie Dill lives in Oklahoma City where the wind always comes sweeping down the plains\u2014literally. \u00a0\u00a0As a young girl she always wanted to be a teacher, so she went on to receive her Bachelor\u2019s of Science in Education from the University of Central Oklahoma and taught in elementary schools for ten years. Currently, she serves as an adjunct professor and loves helping students achieve success. One of her greatest professional accomplishments is earning her National Board Certification. \u00a0\u00a0She holds a Master\u2019s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Oklahoma City University and continues to work on various writing projects.\u00a0 From hiking in Colorado, to playing poker in Vegas, she\u2019s always up for a new challenge.\u00a0 Julie is a busy mom of two teenage daughters, and any extra time that she may carve out is spent reading, writing, and rooting for the Oklahoma City Thunder. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.97}, {"asin": "B01FB9L0UI", "title": "Behind The Hands That Kill (In the Company of Killers Book 6)", "author": "J.A. Redmerski", "description": "Review \"This series is Spectacular!\" - SMI BOOK CLUB \"Mind-f*ck at its finest and I loved every single minute of it.\" - Amazon Customer on The Swan & the Jackal \"Say goodbye to your nails...\" - Amazon Customer on Killing Sarai \"Dark, compelling, deathly violent and just fan-bloody-tastic!\" - Goodreads Reviewer on Reviving Izabel \"There is no going back for me, this series has me completely and utterly addicted...\" - Books She Reads \"5+ Crushing, Amazing & Shocking STARS\" -Seeds of Iniquity The Book Enthusiast on The Swan & the Jackal \" These books are genius!!!\" - Amazon Customer on Seeds of Iniquity About the Author J.A. (Jessica) Redmerski is a New York Times , USA Today , Wall Street Journal , and #1 Amazon bestselling author, as well as international bestseller and award winner. She is a hybrid author who began indie-publishing in 2012, and later, with the success of THE EDGE OF NEVER, signed several titles with a traditional publisher. She juggles several different genres; her works have been translated into more than twenty languages, and have been optioned for film and television.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "1492785423", "title": "Don't Lie To Me", "author": "Stacey Lynn", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Erotica"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.24}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1494226405", "title": "Catch My Fall", "author": "Ella Fox", "description": "About the Author I love to read. Always have, always will. My favorite genre is romance, but I also enjoy thrillers, mysteries, some sci-fi, rock n' roll biographies and autobiographies. I'm obsessed with music. OBSESSED. I'm very partial to rock music, but I also enjoy rap, country, classical, oldies and pop. I could go on \"Don't Forget The Lyrics\" and clean up! My two favorite bands of all time are Fleetwood Mac & The Foo Fighters, followed VERY closely by Social Distortion, Alice in Chains, Jerry Cantrell, The Eagles, Blondie, Heart, Tori Amos, Pearl Jam, U2, The Cure, Garbage, The Goo Goo Dolls, Duran Duran, The Beastie Boys, Depeche Mode, Elton John, The Misfits and Metallica. Clearly, I've got eclectic taste. If you got a look at my iTunes library you would die laughing. I live for the GREASE soundtrack and can sing the hell out of any Guns n' Roses song. I'm a total practical joker. I love to laugh. My favorite TV shows and movies tend to be comedies but I absolutely love Twin Peaks, Lost and Dark Shadows. I have a soft spot for eighties music. If I could hang out with any celebrity for one day, I'd choose Dave Grohl from The Foo Fighters. My celebrity crush is (currently) Ian Sommerhalder. I think he's adorable.", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "B007MSN4UG", "title": "By J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book 1)", "author": "J.K. Rowling", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 26.47}, {"asin": "0525457232", "title": "The Complete Tales of Winnie-The-Pooh", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 29.49}, {"asin": "0425234347", "title": "The Inn at Angel Island (An Angel Island Novel)", "author": "Thomas Kinkade", "description": "About the Author Thomas Kinkade is America's most collected living artist. He lives in California. Katherine Spencer was a fiction editor before turning to a full-time career as a writer. She is the author of more than twenty books for both children and adults. She lives on Long Island.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}], "target_asin": "1494226405"}
{"user_id": "AFNEQMUHLKGGWAEKCGKYKXVM2HHA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "2891920848", "title": "Leonardo Da Vinci: Engineer and Architect (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)", "author": "Meinrad Maria Grewenig", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Architecture"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 23.04}, {"asin": "0070371962", "title": "The Unknown Leonardo", "author": "Ladislao Reti", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.65}, {"asin": "0892438177", "title": "To Hell & Back With Dante: A Modern Reader's Guide to the Divine Comedy", "author": "Joseph Gallagher", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.09}, {"asin": "0805090886", "title": "Loot", "author": "Sharon Waxman", "description": "Review \u201cSharon Waxman has written a compelling page turner about the world of antiquities and art-world skulduggery. She manages to combine rigorous, scholarly reporting with a flair for intrigue and personality that gives Loot the fast pace of a novel. I enjoyed it immensely.\u201d \u2015 Tina Brown \u201c Loot is a riveting foray into the biggest question facing museums today: who should own the great works of ancient art? Sharon Waxman is a first-rate reporter, a veritable Euphronios of words, who not only explores the legal and moral ambiguities of the conflict but brings to life the colorful -- even outrageous -- personalities facing off for a high noon showdown over some of the world's iconic works of art. Vivid, witty, and delightful, this book will beguile any reader with an interest in art and museums.\u201d \u2015 Douglas Preston, author of The Monster of Florence \u201cSharon Waxman's Loot is the most instructive as well as the most intelligent (and the most entertaining) guide through the labyrinth of antiquity and the ways in which the claims of the departed intersect with the rights of the living.\u201d \u2015 Christopher Hitchens author of God Is Not Great and The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? \u201cSharon Waxman approaches her subject with the passion of a great journalist and the rigor of a scholar. It may never again be possible for some of us to walk down the halls of the Louvre or the British Museum or the Metropolitan without a vague sense of disquietude, a frisson of wonder about the provenance of some of their showcase works of ancient art.\u201d \u2015 Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit \u201cSharon Waxman's Loot is indispensable for everyone concerned with the illicit trade in smuggled antiquities. She exposes the self-serving humbug that too often afflicts both affluent possessors and righteous nationalists and shows that we all have a stake in getting an honest account of how great objects came to rest in our grandest museums.\u201d \u2015 Karl E. Meyer, author of The Plundered Past and co-author of Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East \u201cFast-paced and compelling\u2026.Waxman has an array of wondrous tales to tell\u2026.Considerable, admirable, and totally absorbing.\u201d \u2015 The Boston Globe \u201c Loot is hip to the politics underlying the whole repatriation craze. . . . This book's title is absolutely true.\u201d \u2015 Newark Star-Ledger \u201cA journalistic tour de force -- an exhaustively researched, even-handed compendium of the disputes roiling museums and source countries.\u201d \u2015 CultureGrrl art blog \u201c[An] insightful new exploration into cultural plunder.\u201d \u2015 Dallas Morning News \u201cA measured, detailed and accessible history of cultural custody cases, bringing the ages-old quandary up to date.\u201d \u2015 Kansas City Star \u201cAbsorbing and well-researched . . . [Waxman] gives all actors in this bitterly antagonistic drama a hearing and writes with flair and an earnest sense of inquiry.\u201d \u2015 The Washington Post Book World \u201cA remarkable book . . . After reading [Loot] you will never again view an antiquity in a museum in the same light.\u201d \u2015 Kings Features Syndicate \u201cLoot does an excellent job of exploring the political underpinnings of the contest over antiquities\u2026[Waxman's] critical distance allows her to see both sides of this tangled story. . . Loot is an engaging and informative read.\u201d \u2015 Art + Auction Magazine \u201cLively and wide-ranging. . . Waxman has written the definitive volume.\u201d \u2015 ARTnews Magazine \u201cSkillfully blending history and reportage . . . Waxman's account is animated by interviews with museum curators, accused smugglers and government officials, putting a human spin on the complex cultural politics before arriving at a middle ground that strives for international collaboration in preserving a broad global heritage.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly, starred review \u201cFormer New York Times culture correspondent [Sharon] Waxman adroitly and expertly explores a centuries-old struggle . . . In Waxman's hands, the question of justice remains intriguingly slippery, and the argument over who owns history takes on new depth. Erudite and wholly satisfying.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cExposes hypocrisy on all sides of the debates.\u201d \u2015 The Roanoke Times \u201cComprehensive and revealing . . . Waxman is a congenial, globe-hopping tour guide through cramped offices, dank tomb sites, and sleek, art-filled palaces.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201c[An] intelligent, well-informed book . . . [Waxman] skillfully interweaves lucid historical accounts with savvy contemporary interviews. . . . This wide-ranging narrative limns a multifaceted problem with no single solution. Facing facts would be a good place to start, Waxman concludes.\u201d \u2015 Los Angeles Times \u201cWaxman, a former correspondent for the New York Times, recounts tales of arrogance, greed and lust in museum personnel who, however well educated, are all too human in their daily affairs. . . . The questions Waxman raises are real, and her proposals to remedy the situation are the start of a much-needed discussion.\u201d \u2015 San Francisco Chronicle Book Review \u201cWaxman illustrates this overstuffed book with the colorful personalities and histories behind some of the most famous ancient artworks (the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone), and the questions she raises are fascinating ones...Loot contains its share of golden treasures underneath all that dust.\u201d \u2015 Gilbert Cruz, Time \u201c Loot ... is a timely account of how the world of antiquities arrived at the situation it is in today ... an engaging and informative read.\u201d \u2015 Andrew Slayman, ArtInfo.com About the Author Sharon Waxman is a former culture correspondent for The New York Times and holds a master's degree in Middle East studies from Oxford University. She covered Middle Eastern and European politics and culture for ten years before joining The Washington Post and then The New York Times to report on Hollywood and other cultural news. She is the author of Rebels on the Backlot , and the CEO and founder of The Wrap News .", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 18.59}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0679400699", "title": "The Rape Of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War", "author": "Lynn H. Nicholas", "description": "Amazon.com Review Every few months you'll read a newspaper story of the discovery of some long-lost art treasure hidden away in a German basement or a Russian attic: a Cranach, a Holbein, even, not long ago, a da Vinci. Such treasures ended up far from the museums and churches in which they once hung, taken as war loot by Allied and Axis soldiers alike. Thousands of important pieces have never been recovered. Lynn Nicholas offers an astonishingly good account of the wholesale ravaging of European art during World War II, of how teams of international experts have worked to recover lost masterpieces in the war's aftermath and of how governments \"are still negotiating the restitution of objects held by their respective nations.\" From Publishers Weekly \"Never had works of art been so important to a political movement and never had they been moved about on such a vast scale.\" Nicholas's lavishly illustrated work chronicles the transfer, trading and looting of a large proportion of Europe's cultural treasures by the Nazis and the recovery of most of them during the Allied counterattack and early postwar years. She describes the Nazis' attempt to \"purify\" the world of \"degenerate\" art and their orgy of destruction, confiscation and theft, and reveals how curators at the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence and other great museums supervised the removal of objects d'art to places of safety that included mine shafts and remote chateaux in anticipation of the German onslaught. Among these treasures were such masterpieces of sculpture and oils as Winged Victory of Samothrace and Van Gogh's Dr. Gachet , tapestries, church altars, crown jewels, literary manuscripts and symphonic scores. Nicholas's detailed account, meticulously researched in museum archives and supplemented with interviews, brings into focus the men and women who took responsibility for the protection, preservation, rescue and restoration of the artistic patrimony of Europe. Ambitious and fully realized, the book is a major contribution to the history of art; and first-time author Nicholas, an academic researcher of European history, shows herself to be a writer of notable talent. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal First-time author Nicholas presents a poorly written survey of the traffic in art under the Nazi regime, first in Germany and then in occupied Europe. She has a great deal of information, but it is not presented clearly or consistently. Nicholas has worked extensively with original documents and secondary works to reconstruct the German confiscation of art across the Continent, not just from Jews but from individuals and institutions in every country. Part cultural policy, part individual cupidity-especially by Goering-part egomania (Hitler's plans for a great museum in Linz), the \"rape of Europe\" makes for an engrossing story, but it is beyond the author's powers to deal with this story at more than an anecdotal level. While more limited in scope, firsthand accounts like Craig Smyth's Repatriation of Art from the Collecting Point in Munich After World War II (Abner Schram, 1988) are preferable. Pass on this. Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist The world is still trying to fathom the enormity of the violence perpetrated by the Nazis. While the unending horror of the Holocaust continues to shock and baffle us, other facets of this unprecedented attempt at ethnic and cultural annihilation are still being revealed. One such facet consists of the mind-boggling facts about the Germans' wholesale pillaging of the art treasures of Europe. Nicholas painstakingly reconstructs the entire art debacle, relating one improbable but fully documented tale after another of systematic confiscation, outright theft, shameful deal-making, and fiendish destruction. The flip side to these atrocities is a litany of heroic efforts by curators, art historians, and many others to conceal, preserve, and protect the art of their land. Nicholas chronicles dozens of risky and dramatic struggles to keep the treasures of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France, Russia, and Italy out of the hands of their mad conquerors. While thousands upon thousands of precious paintings, sculptures, medieval manuscripts, and other invaluable objects were torn from churches, homes, libraries, and museums and shipped to Germany, hundreds more were frantically buried, camouflaged, or stashed in basements, country estates, salt mines, or quarry tunnels. Nicholas is in full command of a daunting amount of detailed information. She eloquently and efficiently introduces a huge cast of characters and artworks and manages to cover both the terrifying war years and the curatorial and logistical nightmare of their aftermath, when the Allies' overworked \"Monument men\" labored against all odds and in spite of many controversies to return recovered masterpieces to their rightful owners. Nicholas, a first-time author, has constructed a momentous and riveting work. Donna Seaman From Kirkus Reviews A sprawling, vivid look at the fate of Europe's artworks during WW II. ``Never,'' states Nicholas in her admirably accomplished first book, ``had works of art been so important to a political movement and never had they been moved about on such a vast scale....'' Charting this unprecedented movement, Nicholas begins with the Nazis' twofold ``purification'' effort to ban ``degenerate'' culture and to scour public and private collections of enemy lands and races for nobly Germanic art. Backed always by astonishing statistics, the author recounts not only the brutal pursuit of both goals in western continental Europe and the even harsher, racially motivated pillage of Russian and Polish art treasures, but also the baffling exceptions to rules: the modernist ``garbage'' (Goebbels) imported into Germany and auctioned for hard foreign currency; the Jewish experts in Nordic art made ``Honorary Aryans''; the hands of Jewish women kissed by Goering in his quest for favorite canvases. As a former researcher at Washington's National Gallery who made a childhood visit through the devastated Germany of 1948, Nicholas is well equipped to elucidate the technicalities and vivify the chaos of wartime Europe's emergency storage sites, their improvised safety and climate controls, the economics and legalities of the art trade and postwar reclamations, and America's interests during and after the war in custodianship, reparation politics, and efforts to protect its own collections. Nonetheless, Nicholas does not, so to speak, lose the big picture, duly prefacing each country-by-country account with background history of the war. One interesting Cold War issue she considers is the politically sensitive return to newly Communist countries of plundered religious relics. The book abounds in poignant and bizarre details, from masterpieces traded for everything from human lives to ``8 kilograms of millet,'' to Chinese bronzes found holding manure in East German pigsties. Nicholas restores harrowing political contexts to ``safe,'' pristinely displayed museum masterpieces. (87 b&w illustrations and 3 maps) -- Copyright \u00a91994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 28.7}, {"asin": "1909487597", "title": "Perfect Plates in 5 Ingredients", "author": "John Whaite", "description": "Review I love the pared-down premise of this book. John has created clever ingredient combinations that demonstrate the power of simplicity in cooking. The photography is lickable, too...\u2015 Karen Barnes, Editor, delicious. magazine , delicious. magazine This book ... is as rich in flavor and flair as his previous two titles; the pared-back approach certainly doesn't imply any constraints on his creativity.\u2015 Nigella Lawson About the Author John Whaite won the third series of The Great British Bake Off. He studied at Le Cordon Bleu, though his love of food came from learning at his mother's knee. He writes for the Telegraph and is resident chef on ITV's Lorraine . He is the presenter of ITV food programme The Chopping Block , out in April 2016. He has also opened his own cooking school John Whaite's Kitchen. This is his third book.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Quick & Easy"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 52.15}, {"asin": "051514701X", "title": "The Gray Man", "author": "Mark Greaney", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In Greaney's fast-paced, fun debut thriller, Court The Gray Man Gentry, a former CIA operative now renowned as the ultimate killer for hire, is on the job in Syria and Iraq. To his shock, he learns that a team sent in to rescue him now has him targeted for elimination. On the run, Gentry slowly realizes that huge forces are marshaling against him, from his former government to the one man in England he always trusted. With unbelievable powers of survival, the Gray Man eludes teams of killers and deadly traps, while the reader begins to cheer for this unlikely hero. Cinematic battles and escapes fill out the simplistic but satisfying plot, and Greaney deftly provides small details to show Gentry's human side, offset by the petty rivalries and greed of his enemies. (Oct.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \u201cI LOVE THE GRAY MAN.\u201d\u2014#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child \u201cBOURNE FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM.\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author James Rollins \u201cWriting as smooth as stainless steel and a hero as mean as razor wire... The Gray Man glitters like a blade in an alley.\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author David Stone \u201cA high-octane thriller that doesn\u2019t pause for more than a second for all of its 464 pages...For readers looking for a thriller where the action comes fast and furious, this is the ticket.\u201d\u2014 Chicago Sun-Times \u201cTake fictional spy Jason Bourne, pump him up with Red Bull and meth, shake vigorously\u2014and you\u2019ve got the recipe for Court Gentry.\u201d\u2014 The Memphis Commercial Appeal \u201cFrom the opening pages, the bullets fly and the bodies pile up. Through the carnage, Gentry remains an intriguing protagonist with his own moral code.\u201d\u2014 Booklist About the Author Mark Greaney has a degree in international relations and political science. In his research for the Gray Man novels, he traveled to more than thirty-five countries and trained alongside military and law enforcement in the use of firearms, battlefield medicine, and close-range combative tactics.\u00a0He is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers Tom Clancy Support and Defend , Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect , Tom Clancy Commander in Chief , and Tom Clancy True Faith and Allegiance . With Tom Clancy, he coauthored Locked On , Threat Vector , and Command Authority . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Warning: This excerpt contains content of an adult subject matter and adult language. PROLOGUE A flash of light in the distant morning sky captured the attention of the Land Rover's blood-soaked driver. Polarized Oakleys shielded his eyes from the brunt of the sun's rays; still, he squinted through his windshield's glare, desperate to identify the burning aircraft that now spun and hurtled towards earth, a smoldering comet's tail of black smoke left hanging above it. It was a helicopter, a large Army Chinook, and horrific though the situation must have been for those on board, the driver of the Land Rover breathed a subdued sigh of relief. His extraction transport was to be a Russian-built KA-32T, crewed by Polish mercenaries and flown in from over the border in Turkey. The driver found the dying Chinook regrettable but preferable to a dying KA-32T. He watched the chopper spin in its uncontrolled descent, staining the blue sky directly in front of him with burning fuel. He turned the Land Rover hard to the right and accelerated eastward. The blood-soaked driver wanted to get as far away from here as fast as possible. As much as he wished there was something he could do for the Americans on board the Chinook, he knew their fate was out of his hands. And he had his own problems. For five hours he'd raced across the flatlands of western Iraq, fleeing the dirty work he'd left behind, and now he was less than twenty minutes from his exfiltration. A shot-down chopper meant that in minutes this place would be crawling with armed fighters, defiling bodies, shooting assault rifles into the air, and jumping around like fucking morons. It was a party the bloodstained driver would not mind missing, lest he himself become a party favor. The Chinook sank off to his left and disappeared behind a brown ridge in the distance. The driver fixed his eyes on the road ahead. Not my problem , he told himself. He was not trained to search and to rescue, he was not trained to give aid, and he\u00a0 certainly was not trained to negotiate for hostages. He was trained to kill. He'd done so back over the border in Syria, and now it was time to get out of the kill zone. As his Rover accelerated through the haze and dust at over one hundred kilometers an hour, he began a dialogue with himself. His inner voice wanted to turn back, to race to the Chinook's crash site to check for survivors. His outer voice, on the other hand, was more pragmatic. \"Keep moving, Gentry, just keep moving. Those dudes are fucked. Nothing you can do about it.\" Gentry's spoken words were sensible, but his inner monologue just would not shut up. ONE The first gunmen arriving at the crash site were not Al Qaeda and had nothing to do with the shoot down. They were four local boys with old wooden--stocked Kalashnikovs who'd held a sloppy morning roadblock a hundred meters from where the chopper impacted with the city street. The boys pushed through the growing phalanx of onlookers, the shopkeepers and the street kids who dove for cover when the twin-rotor helicopter hurtled down among them, and the taxi drivers who swerved off the road to avoid the American craft. The four young gunmen approached the scene warily but without a shred of tactical skill. A loud snap from the raging fire, a single handgun round cooking off in the heat, sent them all to cover. After a moment's hesitation, their heads popped back up, they aimed their rifles, and then emptied their barking and bucking guns into the twisted metal machine. A man in a blackened American military uniform crawled from the wreckage and received two dozen rounds from the boys' weapons. The soldier's struggle ceased as soon as the first bullets raked across his back. Braver now after the adrenaline rush of killing a man in front of the crowd of shouting civilians, the boys broke cover and moved closer to the wreckage. They reloaded their rifles and raised them to shoot at the burning bodies of the flight crew in the cockpit. But before they could open fire, three vehicles raced up from behind: pickup trucks full of armed Arabian foreigners. Al Qaeda. The local kids wisely backed away from the aircraft, stood back with the civilians, and chanted a devotional to God as the masked men fanned out in the road around the wreckage. The broken corpses of two more soldiers fell clear from the rear of the Chinook, and these were the first images of the scene caught by the three-man Al Jazeera camera crew that jumped from truck three. Just under a mile away, Gentry pulled off the road, turned into a dry streambed, and forced the Land Rover as deep as possible into the tall brown river grasses. He climbed out of the truck and raced to the tailgate, swung a pack onto his back, and hefted a long camel-colored case by its carry handle. As he moved away from the vehicle, he noticed the drying blood all over his loose-fitting local clothing for the first time. The blood was not his own, but there was no mystery to the stain. He knew whose blood it was. Thirty seconds later, he crested the little ridge by the streambed and crawled forward as quickly as possible while pushing his gear in front of him. When Gentry felt suitably invisible in the sand and reeds, he pulled a pair of binoculars from the pack and brought them to his eyes, centered on the plume of black smoke rising in the distance. His taut jaw muscles flexed. The Chinook had come to rest on a street in the town of al Ba'aj, and already a mob had descended on the debris. Gentry's binoculars were not powerful enough to provide much detail, so he rolled onto his side and unsnapped the camel-colored case. Inside was a Barrett M107, a fifty-caliber rifle that fired shells half the size of beer bottles and dispatched the heavy bullets with a muzzle velocity of nearly nine football fields a second. Gentry did not load the gun, only aimed the rifle at the crash site to use the powerful optics mounted to it. Through the sixteen-power glass he could see the fire, the pickup trucks, the unarmed civilians, and the armed gunmen. Some were unmasked. Local thugs. Others wore black masks or wrapped keffiyeh to cover their faces. This would be the Al Qaeda contingent. The foreign fucks. Here to kill Americans and collaborators and to take advantage of the instability in the region. A glint of metal rose into the air and swung down. A sword hacking at a figure on the ground. Even through the powerful sniper scope Gentry could not tell if the\u00a0 prostrate man had been dead or alive when the blade slashed into him. His jaw tightened again. Gentry was not an American soldier himself, never had been. But he was an American. And although he had neither responsibility for nor relationship with the U.S. military, he'd seen years of images on television of carnage just like that which was happening before him, and it both sickened and angered him to the very limits of his considerable self-control. The men around the aircraft began to undulate as one. In the glare from the heat pouring out of the arid earth between his overwatch and the crash site, it took him a moment to grasp what was happening, but soon he recognized the inevitable outpouring of gleeful emotion from the butchers around the downed helicopter. The bastards were dancing over the bodies. Gentry unwrapped his finger from the trigger guard of the huge Barrett and let his fingertip stroke the smooth trigger. His laser range finder told him the distance, and a small group of canvas tents between himself and the dance party flapped in the breeze and gave him an idea of the windage. But he knew better than to fire the Barrett. If he charged the weapon and pulled the trigger, he would kill a couple of shitheads, yes, but the area would turn so hot in an instant with news of a sniper in the sector that every postpubescent male with a gun and a mobile phone would be on his ass before he made it to within five miles of his extraction. Gentry's exfiltration would be called off, and he would have to make his own way out of the kill zone. No, Gentry told himself. A meager measure of payback would be righteous, but it would set off a bigger shit storm than he was prepared to deal with. Gentry was not a gambler. He was a private assassin, a hired gun, a contract operator. He could frag a half dozen of these pricks as fast as he could lace his boots, but he knew such retribution would not be worth the cost. He spat a mixture of saliva and sand on the ground in front of him and turned to put the huge Barrett back in its case. The camera crew from Al Jazeera had been smuggled over the border from Syria a week earlier with the sole purpose of chronicling an Al Qaeda victory in northern Iraq. The videographer, the audio technician, and the reporter/producer had been moved along an AQ route, had slept in AQ safe houses alongside the AQ cell, and they'd filmed the launch of the missile, the impact with the Chinook, and the resulting fireball in the sky. Now they recorded the ritualistic decapitation of an already dead American soldier. A middle--aged man with handwritten name tape affixed to his body armor that read, \"Phillips\u2014Mississippi National Guard.\" Not one of the camera crew spoke English, but they all agreed they had clearly just recorded the destruction of an elite unit of CIA commandos. The customary praise of Allah began with the dancing of the fighters and the firing of the weapons into the air. Although the AQ cell numbered only sixteen, there were over thirty armed men now in step with one another in front of the smoldering metal hulk in the street. The videographer focused his lens on a moqtar, a local chieftain, dancing in the center of the festivities. Framing him perfectly in front of the wreckage, his flowing white dishdasha contrasting magnificently with the black smoke billowing up behind him. The moqtar bounced on one foot over the decapitated American, his right hand above him swinging a bloody scimitar into the air. This was the money shot. The videographer smiled and did his best to remain professional, careful to not follow along with the rhythm and dance in celebration of the majesty of Allah to which he and his camera now bore witness. The moqtar shouted into the air with the rest. \"Allahu Akhbar!\" God is greater! He hopped in euphoria with the masked foreigners, his thick facial hair opened to reveal a toothy smile as he looked down at the burnt and bloody piece of dead American meat lying in the street below him. The crew from Al Jazeera shouted in ecstasy as well. And the videographer filmed it all with a steady hand. He was a pro; his subject remained centered, his camera did not tremble or flinch. Not until the moment when the moqtar's head snapped to the side, burst open like a pressed grape, and sinew, blood, and bone spewed violently in all directions. Then the camera flinched. Gentry just couldn't help himself. He fired round after round at the armed men in the\u00a0 crowd, and all the while he cussed aloud at his lack of discipline, because he knew he was throwing his own timetable, his entire operation out the window. Not that he could hear his own curses. Even with his earplugs, the report of the Barrett was deafening as he sent huge projectiles downrange, one after another, the\u00a0 blowback from the rifle's muzzle break propelling sand and debris from the ground around him up and into his face and arms. As he paused to snap a second heavy magazine into the rifle, he took stock of his situation. From a tradecraft perspective, this was the single dumbest move he could have made, virtually shouting to the insurgents around him that their mortal enemy was here in their midst. But damn if it did not feel like the right thing to do. He resecured the big rifle in the crook of his shoulder, already throbbing from the recoil, sighted on the downed chopper site, and resumed his righteous payback. Through the big scope he saw body parts spin through the air as another huge bullet found the midsection of a masked gunman. This was simple revenge, nothing more. Gentry knew his actions altered little in the scope of things, apart from changing a few sons of bitches from solids into liquids. His body continued firing into the now scattering murderers, but his mind was already worrying about his immediate future. He wouldn't even try for the LZ now. Another chopper in the area would be a target too good for the angry AQ survivors to ignore. No, Gentry decided, he would go to ground: find a drainage culvert or a little wadi, cover himself in dirt and debris, lie all day in the heat, and ignore hunger and bug bites and his need to piss. It was going to suck. Still, he reasoned as he slammed the third and final magazine into the smoking rifle, his poor decision did serve some benefit. A half dozen dead shitheads are , after all, a half dozen dead shitheads. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.49}, {"asin": "0865651957", "title": "Paris: City of Art", "author": "Jean-Marie P\u00e9rouse de Montclos", "description": "About the Author Jean-Marie P\u00e9rouse de Montclos is a curator and historian. He is universally acclaimed as a leading authority on French architecture and has authored more than twenty books on various aspects of French culture, art, and architecture.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 95.0}], "target_asin": "0679400699"}
{"user_id": "AELGME2LUPTRWXCSBUU5QE5YDQOQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1617456551", "title": "Whimsical Wool Appliqu\u00e9: 50 Blocks, 7 Quilt Projects", "author": "Kim Schaefer", "description": "About the Author Kim Schaefer is a best-selling author and the founder of Little Quilt Company, which is known for its small, fun-to-make quilting patterns. A fabric designer with Andover Fabrics, Kim lives with her family in Southeastern Wisconsin. littlequiltcompany.com", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.52}, {"asin": "1497206251", "title": "Creating Art with Alcohol Ink: Complete Guide to 12 Easy Techniques, 17 Spectacular Projects (Design Originals) How to Paint with Dripping, Pouring, Layering, Masking, and More, Step-by-Step", "author": "Laurie Williams", "description": "From the Back Cover A COMPLETE GUIDE TOPainting with Alcohol Ink Perfect for artists of any experience level, Creating Art with Alcohol Ink offers everything you need to know to paint with confidence and creativity. Filled with expert guidance and tons of inspiring and skill-building projects, discover all the possibilities alcohol ink offers and take your art to a whole new level! What's Inside: Detailed overviews of the basics of alcohol ink, safety, supplies, color theory, and more Detailed overviews of the basics of alcohol ink, safety, supplies, color theory, and more Easy-to-follow tutorials for 12 of the most popular alcohol ink painting techniques (plus more bonus techniques) Easy-to-follow tutorials for 12 of the most popular alcohol ink painting techniques (plus more bonus techniques) 17 step-by-step projects of beautiful landscapes, flowers, and abstract designs by various artists 17 step-by-step projects of beautiful landscapes, flowers, and abstract designs by various artists Projects for different mediums, from tile coasters to paper, metal, and other surfaces Projects for different mediums, from tile coasters to paper, metal, and other surfaces An inspirational gallery of alcohol ink art on guitars, tabletops, switch plates, candles, bottles, ornaments, and more An inspirational gallery of alcohol ink art on guitars, tabletops, switch plates, candles, bottles, ornaments, and more \"Expand your creative prowess with alcohol ink as Laurie and Sheryl guide you through a world of artistic wonder. This book demonstrates that alcohol ink art knows no bounds!\" \u2014Tiffani Buteau, Artist and Cofounder of T-Rex Alcohol Inks About the Author Laurie Williams is the founder of the Alcohol Ink Art Community. When she's not in the studio creating art, she is helping businesses across the US succeed in online marketing. Her painting journey began 20 years ago when she first discovered alcohol inks. The Alcohol Ink Art Community is an online portal for everything alcohol ink, contributing to a by teaching, encouraging creativity, and helping artists, of all levels, build and grow their art busines. Sheryl Williams' classes are the building blocks of techniques and tools that develop the necessary skills to express the art within. Nothing means more to her than her students finding their artistic voice. Born in Los Angeles, California, but now residing in Delta, Colorado, she began painting in 2011 through an art journaling class. She taught herself watercolor and developed a distinct, detailed style by painting with an almost dry brush. She began working with alcohol ink in 2013 and realized there was no limit to what you can do. She has been teaching online since 2015 and has hundreds of students worldwide.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Painting"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 24.99}, {"asin": "1633222160", "title": "Art on the Rocks: More than 35 colorful & contemporary rock-painting projects, tips, and techniques to inspire your creativity!", "author": "F. Sehnaz Bac", "description": "About the Author Artist F. Sehnaz Bac is celebrated for her radiantly colorful and charming painted stones, which she sells on Etsy as I Sassi Dell'Adriatico (The Adriatic Stones). Sehnaz has more than 600,000 Facebook followers. She lives in Alba Adriatica, Italy, a small town on the Adriatic Sea.Artist and illustrator Marisa Redondo works primarily with watercolors and oils. Most of her work is nature inspired. Art has always been her greatest love.\u00a0Growing up in the heart of San Diego, drawing\u00a0was how she found a calm balance in the busy city.\u00a0Currently based in Northern California, Marisa is fascinated by nature's creations and the little pieces of life that often go unnoticed, from\u00a0the fine lines of feathers to the spores of a dandelion. Through watercolor she\u00a0explores the organic patterns and intricate details impressed on everything from the earth.\u00a0Her paintings\u00a0are a mix of the modern city she came from and the natural land\u00a0where she now live. Learn more at\u00a0riverlunaart.com.Talented artist Margaret Vance paints beautifully vibrant and colorful rock art full of intricate detail and pattern. As in nature, no two painted stones are alike. Each stone and its design is unique. Margaret works with each stone's shape, size, and texture to create a singular mix of art and nature. Learn more at etherealandearth.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 1.69}, {"asin": "1631597914", "title": "Creative Alcohol Inks: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Amazing Effects--Explore Painting, Pouring, Blending, Textures, and More! (Volume 2) (Art for Modern Makers, 2)", "author": "Ashley Mahlberg", "description": "About the Author Ashley Mahlberg of Ink Reel Studio is an abstract artist and graphic designer. Inspired by the Washington coast, Ashley\u2019s work mimics organic forms, flow, and dynamic color palettes found in her everyday surroundings. Ashley licenses her work, shows her art in local commercial spaces, and has been a featured artist on The Crafter\u2019s Box (thecraftersbox.com), where she taught alcohol ink techniques. See more of Ashley\u2019s work on Instagram (@inkreel), inkreelstudio.com,\u00a0and Etsy (InkReelArtStudio).\u00a0She lives in Burlington, Washington.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Painting"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.36}, {"asin": "1913484106", "title": "Guinness World Records 2022", "author": "Guinness World Records", "description": "About the Author Guinness World Records (GWR) is the global authority on record-breaking achievement. First published in 1955, the iconic annual Guinness World Records books have sold over 143 million copies in over 40 languages and in more than 100 countries.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Trivia & Fun Facts"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 19.98}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0764305433", "title": "Commemorative Coca-Cola Bottles (A Schiffer Book for Collectors)", "author": "Joyce Spontak", "description": "About the Author Joyce Spontak, a baby boomer, has been involved in antiques and interested in advertising collectibles since childhood. She is devoted to Planter's Mr. Peanut, and she has co-authored two books on the subject. She recently began collecting and distributing miniature Coca-Cola bottles.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Antiques & Collectibles"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 29.95}, {"asin": "B07QMGCR5L", "title": "Monster", "author": "S.E. Green", "description": "Review \"Wow! The moment I read the first page I was hooked. I couldn't put the novel down and Green once again captivates the readers with intense detail. This is everything from the setting to character development. Bravo Green-you did it again!\" ~Sylvia, Amazon Reviewer From the Author MONSTER Categories: Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense Psychological Psychological Horror Horror Kidnapping Kidnapping Serial Killers Serial Killers Murder Murder Suspense Suspense Crime Crime Thriller Thriller Domestic Domestic Literature & Fiction Genre Fiction Genre Fiction Women's Fiction Women's Fiction Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense Crime Crime Psychological Psychological Contemporary Contemporary", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0321205685", "title": "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development", "author": "Mike Cohn", "description": "From the Back Cover Agile requirements: discovering what your users really want. With this book, you will learn to: Flexible, quick and practical requirements that work Flexible, quick and practical requirements that work Save time and develop better software that meets users' needs Save time and develop better software that meets users' needs Gathering user stories -- even when you can't talk to users Gathering user stories -- even when you can't talk to users How user stories work, and how they differ from use cases, scenarios, and traditional requirements How user stories work, and how they differ from use cases, scenarios, and traditional requirements Leveraging user stories as part of planning, scheduling, estimating, and testing Leveraging user stories as part of planning, scheduling, estimating, and testing Ideal for Extreme Programming, Scrum, or any other agile methodology Ideal for Extreme Programming, Scrum, or any other agile methodology ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with \"user stories\": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied , Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle. You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing. User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other \"proxies\" Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other \"proxies\" Writing user stories for acceptance testing Writing user stories for acceptance testing Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach. ADDISON-WESLEY PROFESSIONAL Boston, MA 02116 www.awprofessional.com ISBN: 0-321-20568-5 About the Author Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. With more than twenty years of experience, Mike has been a technology executive in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 40s, and is a founding member of the Agile Alliance. He frequently contributes to industry-related magazines and presents regularly at conferences. He is the author of User Stories Applied (Addison-Wesley, 2004).", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Programming"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 25.56}, {"asin": "0974094412", "title": "Born A Healer: I Was Born a Healer. You Were Born a Healer, Too!", "author": "Chunyi Lin", "description": "Review Master Lin has extensive experiences in the ancient meditative practices of China. He has presented complex techniques in simple, easy-to-understand terms that can help anyone better control pain and sickness. I strongly recommend Master Lin and Spring Forest Qigong. --Kenneth S. Cohen, M.A., M.S.TH., China ScholarSpring Forest Qigong is going to revolutionize the manner in which we look at healing. Chunyi, congratulations on writing a book that will be helpful to many people and is interesting to read. You continue to do creative, remarkable, and invaluable work in helping to improve the health of all people. --Bill Manahan, M.D., Assistant Professor of Family Practice and Community Health, University of Minnesota Medical SchoolIt is without reservation that I say Master Lin is at the top of his field among qigong masters in the U.S. --Michael Zeng, M.D., President Emeritus of the International Institute of Chinese Medicine, Santa Fe, New Mexico About the Author Chunyi Lin is a certified International Qigong Master and the creator of Spring Forest Qigong. His fluency in numerous Chinese dialects provided him the rare opportunity to study with many of the most respected Qigong Masters in his native China. He has been teaching Qigong and using Qigong techniques to help others for more than twenty years. Master Lin is also a Tai Chi Master and highly skilled in Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture. Mr. Lin served as Director of Qigong Programs at Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Anoka, Minnesota, from 1999 to 2004. During 2004 he created an Educational Partnership with Normandale Community College of Bloomington, MN to provide fully accredited courses in Spring Forest Qigong health and healing techniques. All of the course curricula were created by Mr. Lin and he serves as the program director and lead instructor. Lin was formerly a college professor in Guangdon Province in China. In January of 2005, he was awarded a Masters Degree in Human Development-Holistic Health & Wellness from St. Mary s University in Minneapolis, MN. Master Lin teaches four levels of Spring Forest Qigong and has created a series of home learning materials for students, including videos, guided audio meditations and reference manuals. He is a frequent keynote speaker at national health conferences. Since coming to the United States in 1995, he has helped thousands upon thousands of people to learn about the powerful, healing benefits of Spring Forest Qigong. He now devotes all of his time to the teaching of Spring Forest Qigong and helping others. He also sees people for private healing sessions. He lives in the Twin Cities. His vision is \"a healer in every family and a world without pain.\" Gary Rebstock is a thirty year veteran of television news as an anchor, reporter and producer. He has received numerous broadcast journalism awards from regional Emmys to international film festival honors to the Thomas Moore Stork Award for Excellence in International Journalism form the World Affairs Council of San Francisco. He has been a student of Spring Forest Qigong since 1997. He lives in the Twin Cities.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0764305433"}
{"user_id": "AE3QNRDCFBNNPX5OJXPEEAUSRRPQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00DPM7TIG", "title": "All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel", "author": "Anthony Doerr", "description": "Review \u201cMesmerizing\u2026 Exquisite\u2026 The written equivalent of a Botticelli or a Michelangelo.\u201d \u2013 The Portland Oregonian \u201cStunning\u2026 Uplifting\u2026 Not to be missed.\u201d \u2013 Entertainment Weekly \u201cHauntingly beautiful.\u201d \u2013 The New York Times \u201cEach and every person in this finely spun assemblage is distinct and true.\u201d \u2013 USA Today \u201cIntertwines secret radio broadcasts, a cursed diamond, a soldier\u2019s deepest doubts into a richly compelling package\u2026 Irresistible.\u201d \u2013 People \u201cGorgeous\u2026 Moves with the pace of a thriller.\u201d \u2013 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cEnthrallingly told, beautifully written.\u201d \u2014Amanda Vaill, The Washington Post \u201cDazzling . . . Startlingly fresh.\u201d \u2014John Freeman, The Boston Globe \u201cIntricate . . . A meditation on fate, free will, and the way that, in wartime, small choices can have vast consequences.\u201d \u2014The New Yorker \u201cBrims with scrupulous reverence for all forms of life. The invisible light of the title shines long after the last page.\u201d \u2014Tricia Springstubb, The Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cAnthony Doerr writes beautifully. . . . A tour de force.\u201d \u2014Elizabeth Reid, Deseret News \u201cAnthony Doerr again takes language beyond mortal limits.\u201d \u2014Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair \u201cPerfectly captured . . . Doerr writes sentences that are clear-eyed, taut, sweetly lyrical.\u201d \u2014Josh Cook, Minneapolis StarTribune \u201cA beautiful, expansive tale . . . Ambitious and majestic.\u201d \u2014Steph Cha, Los Angeles Times \u201cDoerr is an exquisite stylist; his talents are on full display.\u201d \u2014 Alan Cheuse, NPR \u201cThe craftsmanship of Doerr\u2019s book is rooted in his ability to inhabit the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner.\u201d \u2014 Steve Novak, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette \u201cDoerr deftly guides All the Light We Cannot See toward the day Werner\u2019s and Marie-Laure\u2019s lives intersect during the bombing of Saint-Malo in what may be his best work to date.\u201d \u2014 Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor \u201cTo open a book by Anthony Doerr is to open a door on humanity. . . . His sentences shimmer. . . . His paragraphs are luminous with bright, sparkling beauty.\u201d \u2014Martha Anne Toll, Washington Independent Review of Books \u201cEndlessly bold and equally delicate . . . An intricate miracle of invention, narrative verve, and deep research lightly held, but above all a miracle of humanity . . . Anthony Doerr\u2019s novel celebrates\u2014and also accomplishes\u2014what only the finest art can: the power to create, reveal, and augment experience in all its horror and wonder, heartbreak and rapture.\u201d \u2014Shelf Awareness \u201cIntricately structured . . . All the Light We Cannot See is a work of art and of preservation.\u201d \u2014Jane Ciabattari, BBC \u201cMagnificent.\u201d \u2014Carmen Callil, The Guardian (UK) \u201cThe whole enthralls.\u201d \u2014Good Housekeeping \u201cA revelation.\u201d \u2014Michael Magras, Bookreporter.com \u201cDoerr conjures up a vibrating, crackling world. . . . Intricately, beautifully crafted.\u201d \u2014 Rebecca Kelley, Bustle.com \u201cThere is so much in this book. It is difficult to convey the complexity, the detail, the beauty, and the brutality of this simple story.\u201d \u2014Carole O\u2019Brien, Aspen Daily News \u201cBeautifully written . . . Soulful and addictive.\u201d \u2014Chris Stuckenschneider, The Missourian \u201cA novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr\u2019s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. . . . Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.\u201d \u2014Booklist (starred review) \u201cDoerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.\u201d \u2014Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cIf a book\u2019s success can be measured by its ability to move readers and the number of memorable characters it has, Story Prize\u2013winner Doerr\u2019s novel triumphs on both counts. Along the way, he convinces readers that new stories can still be told about this well-trod period, and that war\u2014despite its desperation, cruelty, and harrowing moral choices\u2014cannot negate the pleasures of the world.\u201d \u2014Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cThis novel has the physical and emotional heft of a masterpiece. . . . It presents two characters so interesting and sympathetic that readers will keep turning the pages hoping for an impossibly happy ending. . . . Highly recommended for fans of Michael Ondaatje\u2019s The English Patient.\u201d \u2014 Evelyn Beck, Library Journal (starred review) About the Author Anthony Doerr is the author of the New York Times bestselling Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and All the Light We Cannot See , winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector , the novel About Grace , and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome . He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library\u2019s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. From Booklist *Starred Review* A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr\u2019s magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. It rests, historically, during the occupation of France during WWII, but brief chapters told in alternating voices give the overall\u2014and long\u2014\u00adnarrative a swift movement through time and events. We have two main characters, each one on opposite sides in the conflagration that is destroying Europe. Marie-Louise is a sightless girl who lived with her father in Paris before the occupation; he was a master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. When German forces necessitate abandonment of the city, Marie-Louise\u2019s father, taking with him the museum\u2019s greatest treasure, removes himself and his daughter and eventually arrives at his uncle\u2019s house in the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Young German soldier Werner is sent to Saint-Malo to track Resistance activity there, and eventually, and inevitably, Marie-Louise\u2019s and Werner\u2019s paths cross. It is through their individual and intertwined tales that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.High-Demand Backstory: A multipronged marketing campaign will make the author\u2019s many fans aware of his newest book, and extensive review coverage is bound to enlist many new fans. --Brad Hooper --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. All the Light We Cannot See Mus\u00e9um National d\u2019Histoire Naturelle Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a tall and freckled six-year-old in Paris with rapidly deteriorating eyesight when her father sends her on a children\u2019s tour of the museum where he works. The guide is a hunchbacked old warder hardly taller than a child himself. He raps the tip of his cane against the floor for attention, then leads his dozen charges across the gardens to the galleries. The children watch engineers use pulleys to lift a fossilized dinosaur femur. They see a stuffed giraffe in a closet, patches of hide wearing off its back. They peer into taxidermists\u2019 drawers full of feathers and talons and glass eyeballs; they flip through two-hundred-year-old herbarium sheets bedecked with orchids and daisies and herbs. Eventually they climb sixteen steps into the Gallery of Mineralogy. The guide shows them agate from Brazil and violet amethysts and a meteorite on a pedestal that he claims is as ancient as the solar system itself. Then he leads them single file down two twisting staircases and along several corridors and stops outside an iron door with a single keyhole. \u201cEnd of tour,\u201d he says. A girl says, \u201cBut what\u2019s through there?\u201d \u201cBehind this door is another locked door, slightly smaller.\u201d \u201cAnd what\u2019s behind that?\u201d \u201cA third locked door, smaller yet.\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s behind that?\u201d \u201cA fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.\u201d The children lean forward. \u201cAnd then?\u201d \u201cBehind the thirteenth door\u201d\u2014the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands\u2014\u201cis the Sea of Flames.\u201d Puzzlement. Fidgeting. \u201cCome now. You\u2019ve never heard of the Sea of Flames?\u201d The children shake their heads. Marie-Laure squints up at the naked bulbs strung in three-yard intervals along the ceiling; each sets a rainbow-colored halo rotating in her vision. The guide hangs his cane on his wrist and rubs his hands together. \u201cIt\u2019s a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?\u201d They nod. He clears his throat. \u201cCenturies ago, in the place we now call Borneo, a prince plucked a blue stone from a dry riverbed because he thought it was pretty. But on the way back to his palace, the prince was attacked by men on horseback and stabbed in the heart.\u201d \u201cStabbed in the heart?\u201d \u201cIs this true?\u201d A boy says, \u201cHush.\u201d \u201cThe thieves stole his rings, his horse, everything. But because the little blue stone was clenched in his fist, they did not discover it. And the dying prince managed to crawl home. Then he fell unconscious for ten days. On the tenth day, to the amazement of his nurses, he sat up, opened his hand, and there was the stone. \u201cThe sultan\u2019s doctors said it was a miracle, that the prince never should have survived such a violent wound. The nurses said the stone must have healing powers. The sultan\u2019s jewelers said something else: they said the stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen. Their most gifted stonecutter spent eighty days faceting it, and when he was done, it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at its center, like flames inside a drop of water. The sultan had the diamond fitted into a crown for the prince, and it was said that when the young prince sat on his throne and the sun hit him just so, he became so dazzling that visitors could not distinguish his figure from light itself.\u201d \u201cAre you sure this is true?\u201d asks a girl. \u201cHush,\u201d says the boy. \u201cThe stone came to be known as the Sea of Flames. Some believed the prince was a deity, that as long as he kept the stone, he could not be killed. But something strange began to happen: the longer the prince wore his crown, the worse his luck became. In a month, he lost a brother to drowning and a second brother to snakebite. Within six months, his father died of disease. To make matters even worse, the sultan\u2019s scouts announced that a great army was gathering in the east. \u201cThe prince called together his father\u2019s advisers. All said he should prepare for war, all but one, a priest, who said he\u2019d had a dream. In the dream the Goddess of the Earth told him she\u2019d made the Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea, and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the prince plucked it out, the goddess became enraged. She cursed the stone and whoever kept it.\u201d Every child leans forward, Marie-Laure along with them. \u201cThe curse was this: the keeper of the stone would live forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortunes would fall on all those he loved one after another in unending rain.\u201d \u201cLive forever?\u201d \u201cBut if the keeper threw the diamond into the sea, thereby delivering it to its rightful recipient, the goddess would lift the curse. So the prince, now sultan, thought for three days and three nights and finally decided to keep the stone. It had saved his life; he believed it made him indestructible. He had the tongue cut out of the priest\u2019s mouth.\u201d \u201cOuch,\u201d says the youngest boy. \u201cBig mistake,\u201d says the tallest girl. \u201cThe invaders came,\u201d says the warder, \u201cand destroyed the palace, and killed everyone they found, and the prince was never seen again, and for two hundred years no one heard any more about the Sea of Flames. Some said the stone was recut into many smaller stones; others said the prince still carried the stone, that he was in Japan or Persia, that he was a humble farmer, that he never seemed to grow old. \u201cAnd so the stone fell out of history. Until one day, when a French diamond trader, during a trip to the Golconda Mines in India, was shown a massive pear-cut diamond. One hundred and thirty-three carats. Near-perfect clarity. As big as a pigeon\u2019s egg, he wrote, and as blue as the sea, but with a flare of red at its core. He made a casting of the stone and sent it to a gem-crazy duke in Lorraine, warning him of the rumors of a curse. But the duke wanted the diamond very badly. So the trader brought it to Europe, and the duke fitted it into the end of a walking stick and carried it everywhere.\u201d \u201cUh-oh.\u201d \u201cWithin a month, the duchess contracted a throat disease. Two of their favorite servants fell off the roof and broke their necks. Then the duke\u2019s only son died in a riding accident. Though everyone said the duke himself had never looked better, he became afraid to go out, afraid to accept visitors. Eventually he was so convinced that his stone was the accursed Sea of Flames that he asked the king to shut it up in his museum on the conditions that it be locked deep inside a specially built vault and the vault not be opened for two hundred years.\u201d \u201cAnd?\u201d \u201cAnd one hundred and ninety-six years have passed.\u201d All the children remain quiet a moment. Several do math on their fingers. Then they raise their hands as one. \u201cCan we see it?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cNot even open the first door?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cHave you seen it?\u201d \u201cI have not.\u201d \u201cSo how do you know it\u2019s really there?\u201d \u201cYou have to believe the story.\u201d \u201cHow much is it worth, Monsieur? Could it buy the Eiffel Tower?\u201d \u201cA diamond that large and rare could in all likelihood buy five Eiffel Towers.\u201d Gasps. \u201cAre all those doors to keep thieves from getting in?\u201d \u201cMaybe,\u201d the guide says, and winks, \u201cthey\u2019re there to keep the curse from getting out.\u201d The children fall quiet. Two or three take a step back. Marie-Laure takes off her eyeglasses, and the world goes shapeless. \u201cWhy not,\u201d she asks, \u201cjust take the diamond and throw it into the sea?\u201d The warder looks at her. The other children look at her. \u201cWhen is the last time,\u201d one of the older boys says, \u201cyou saw someone throw five Eiffel Towers into the sea?\u201d There is laughter. Marie-Laure frowns. It is just an iron door with a brass keyhole. The tour ends and the children disperse and Marie-Laure is reinstalled in the Grand Gallery with her father. He straightens her glasses on her nose and plucks a leaf from her hair. \u201cDid you have fun, ma ch\u00e9rie?\u201d A little brown house sparrow swoops out of the rafters and lands on the tiles in front of her. Marie-Laure holds out an open palm. The sparrow tilts his head, considering. Then it flaps away. One month later she is blind. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Does the world need yet another novel about WWII? It does when the novel is as inventive and beautiful as this one by Anthony Doerr. In fact, All the Light We Cannot See --while set mostly in Germany and France before and during the war--is not really a \u201cwar novel\u201d. Yes, there is fear and fighting and disappearance and death, but the author\u2019s focus is on the interior lives of his two characters. Marie Laure is a blind 14-year-old French girl who flees to the countryside when her father disappears from Nazi-occupied Paris. Werner is a gadget-obsessed German orphan whose skills admit him to a brutal branch of Hitler Youth. Never mind that their paths don\u2019t cross until very late in the novel, this is not a book you read for plot (although there is a wonderful, mysterious subplot about a stolen gem). This is a book you read for the beauty of Doerr\u2019s writing-- \u201cAbyss in her gut, desert in her throat, Marie-Laure takes one of the cans of food\u2026\u201d--and for the way he understands and cherishes the magical obsessions of childhood. Marie Laure and Werner are never quaint or twee. Instead they are powerful examples of the way average people in trying times must decide daily between morality and survival. --Sara Nelson --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Artist Anthony Doerr --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "B003XYERRM", "title": "The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III", "author": "Sharon Penman", "description": "Review \u201cA painstakingly drawn picture of royal medieval England from bedchamber to battleground.\u201d --- Los Angeles Times Book Review \u201cThe reader is left with the haunting sensation that perhaps the good a man does can live after him---especially in the hands of a dedicated historian.\u201d--- The San Diego Union \u201cThose who know Richard III from Shakespeare will find that\u00a0Sharon Kay Penman presents a contrasting view of the English monarch . . . He\u2019s an altogether nice man, a romantic hero as suitable to our late twentieth-century standards . . . as he was to those of medieval England . . . There is a vengeful quality to her insistence that is appealing; it makes for a good story.\u201d--- The New York Times Book Review \u201cMs. Penman\u2019s novel, rich in detail and research, attempts to set the record straight . . . it is an uncommonly fine novel, one that brings a far-off time to brilliant life.\u201d --- Chattanooga Daily Times About the Author For many years while she was a student and then a tax lawyer, SHARON KAY PENMAN slowly but steadily worked on a novel about the life of Richard III. After finishing the manuscript, however, her only copy was stolen from her car in a busy parking lot. Penman rewrote the entire novel that would become The Sunne in Splendour . When it was originally\u00a0published in 1982, she quit her job to write full-time. Penman is the author of six critically acclaimed historical novels and four medieval mysteries, one of which was a finalist for an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery from the Mystery Writers of America. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap ader is left with the haunting sensation that perhaps the good a man does can live after him--especially in the hands of a dedicated historian.\"SAN DIEGO UNIONIn this stirring historical novel, Sharon Kay Penman redeems Richard III from his villainous role in history as the hulking, evil hunchback. This dazzling recreation of his life is filled with the sights and sounds of battle, and the passions of the highborn. Most of all, it brings to life a gifted man whose greatest sin was that he held principles too firmly for the times in which he lived, and loved too deeply to survive love's loss. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Publisher As a publisher I have been lucky to be able to visit bookstores all over the country, independent and chain alike. What interests me first about these stores is what titles are being displayed in the 'Staff Recommends' section of the store. It is here that you can find treasured, beloved books quite dear to someone who works in the stores, someone waiting quite eagerly for the chance to hand sell their recommended titles.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is in these Staff Recommend sections that I kept on seeing our Penman's titles, HERE BE DRAGONS, FALLS THE SHADOW, THE RECKONING and also SUNNE IN SPLENDOUR and WHEN CHRIST AND HIS SAINTS SLEPT.It's funny, you can sell something for years before you notice that the author has been quietly making a powerful impact on people everywhere.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I started with HERE BE DRAGONS and I have never looked back. Her trilogy of the decline of the Welsh kings ( DRAGON, FALLS THE SHADOW and THE RECKONING)is a holiday gift I give year after year, and I'm happy to say they have always been embraced and loved. From my 15 year old niece to my 70 year old mother and many ages in between, all readers are enchanted and transported to a land and an age gone forever. But Penman makes them live forever in our minds and hearts with fantastic, unforgettable characters and wonderful history. HERE BE DRAGONS is such a great title--medieval mapmakes would write those words across any part of the map that was unknown.. a wonderful metaphor for how little the Welsh and English knew of each other.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0SUNNE IN SPLENDOUR--Warning: This is not Shakespeare's Richard III. In this novel, Richard is a victim of circumstance and man vilified by the Tudors, but here presented as a decent and normal man, a man of conscience.AND he is not a murderer. Yes, those princes did die, but not by Richard's hand.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0WHEN CHRIST AND HIS SAINTS SLEPT Another wonderful title, for it refers to the 15 years of England's darkest time-the civil war between the cousins Queen Maud and King Steven. England was deserted, for Christ and his saints were sleeping. I had never even heard of these royals. Queen Maud was the legitimate heir to the throne, but a woman, and there fore not fit to rule. She is also the mother of Henry, who later married Eleanor of Aquitaine . Pretty heady stuff, more incredible men and women, another book to get totally lost in. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Although it has been years since all these books were first published, I can name 5 stores I have been in in the past 3 months that have one of these titles in the Staff Recommends section.-Alice Kesterson, Ballantine Regional Sales Manger --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "0062300547", "title": "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis", "author": "Vance, J. D.", "description": "Review \u201c[A] compassionate, discerning sociological analysis\u2026Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he\u2019s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans. Imagine that.\u201d \u2014 Jennifer Senior, New York Times \u201c[ Hillbilly Elegy ] is a beautiful memoir but it is equally a work of cultural criticism about white working-class America\u2026.[Vance] offers a compelling explanation for why it\u2019s so hard for someone who grew up the way he did to make it\u2026a riveting book.\u201d \u2014 Wall Street Journal \u201c[Vance\u2019s] description of the culture he grew up in is essential reading for this moment in history.\u201d \u2014 David Brooks, New York Times \u201c[ Hillbilly Elegy ] couldn\u2019t have been better timed...a harrowing portrait of much that has gone wrong in America over the past two generations...an honest look at the dysfunction that afflicts too many working-class Americans.\u201d \u2014 National Review \"[A]n American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It\u2019s one of the best books I\u2019ve ever read\u2026 [T]he most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what\u2019s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance.\" \u2014 Rod Dreher, The American Conservative \u201cJ.D. Vance\u2019s memoir, \u201cHillbilly Elegy\u201d, offers a starkly honest look at what that shattering of faith feels like for a family who lived through it. You will not read a more important book about America this year.\u201d \u2014 The Economist \u201c[A] frank, unsentimental, harrowing memoir...a superb book...\u201d \u2014 New York Post \u201cThe troubles of the working poor are well known to policymakers, but Vance offers an insider\u2019s view of the problem.\u201d \u2014 Christianity Today \u201cVance movingly recounts the travails of his family.\u201d \u2014 Washington Post \u201cWhat explains the appeal of Donald Trump? Many pundits have tried to answer this question and fallen short. But J.D. Vance nails it...stunning...intimate...\u201d \u2014 Globe and Mail (Toronto) \u201c[A] new memoir that should be read far and wide.\u201d \u2014 Institute of Family Studies \u201c[An] understated, engaging debut...An unusually timely and deeply affecting view of a social class whose health and economic problems are making headlines in this election year.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cBoth heartbreaking and heartwarming, this memoir is akin to investigative journalism. \u2026 A quick and engaging read, this book is well suited to anyone interested in a study of modern America, as Vance\u2019s assertions about Appalachia are far more reaching.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cVance compellingly describes the terrible toll that alcoholism, drug abuse, and an unrelenting code of honor took on his family, neither excusing the behavior nor condemning it\u2026The portrait that emerges is a complex one\u2026Unerringly forthright, remarkably insightful, and refreshingly focused, Hillbilly Elegy is the cry of a community in crisis.\u201d \u2014 Booklist To understand the rage and disaffection of America\u2019s working-class whites, look to Greater Appalachia. In HILLBILLY ELEGY, J.D. Vance confronts us with the economic and spiritual travails of this forgotten corner of our country. Here we find women and men who dearly love their country, yet who feel powerless as their way of life is devastated. Never before have I read a memoir so powerful, and so necessary. \u2014 Reihan Salam, executive editor, National Review \u201cA beautifully and powerfully written memoir about the author\u2019s journey from a troubled, addiction-torn Appalachian family to Yale Law School, Hillbilly Elegy is shocking, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and hysterically funny. It\u2019s also a profoundly important book, one that opens a window on a part of America usually hidden from view and offers genuine hope in the form of hard-hitting honesty. Hillbilly Elegy announces the arrival of a gifted and utterly original new writer and should be required reading for everyone who cares about what\u2019s really happening in America.\u201d \u2014 Amy Chua, New York Times bestselling author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother \u201cElites tend to see our social crisis in terms of \u2018stagnation\u2019 or \u2018inequality.\u2019 J. D. Vance writes powerfully about the real people who are kept out of sight by academic abstractions.\u201d \u2014 Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Zero to One From the Back Cover From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America\u2019s white working class through the author\u2019s own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis\u2014that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. In Hillbilly Elegy , J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck. The Vance family story began with hope in postwar America. J.D.\u2019s grandparents were \u201cdirt poor and in love\u201d and moved north from Kentucky\u2019s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.\u2019s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. About the Author J.D. Vance grew up in the Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky. He enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and served in Iraq. A graduate of the Ohio State University and Yale Law School, he has contributed to the National Review and the New York Times, and\u00a0works as an investor at a leading venture capital firm. Vance lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his family. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.16}, {"asin": "B01BU1ITMI", "title": "The Wrong Side of Goodbye (A Harry Bosch Novel Book 19)", "author": "Michael Connelly", "description": "Review Praise for The Wrong Side of Goodbye: \"....a powerful, Macdonald-esque meditation on the claims the past exerts on the present. Few mystery novelists make background facts and simple descriptions sing the way this writer does. And no writer exploits Los Angeles - its geography, its historical power wars, its celebrity culture, its lore - as compellingly as Connelly....he must be read.\" \u2015 Lloyd Sachs , Chicago Tribune \"If any novelist is worthy to walk once more through the front door of Raymond Chandler's iconic Sternwood mansion, it's Michael Connelly. For over two decades, Connelly has been brilliantly updating and enlarging the possibilities of the classic L.A. hard-boiled novel, first bestowed upon the world in 1939 with Chandler's debut, The Big Sleep . This latest Bosch outing is its own accomplishment: brooding and intricate, suspenseful and sad. In short, it's another terrific Michael Connelly mystery....a master of the genre.\" \u2015 Maureen Corrigan , Washington Post \"Bosch at his best.\"\u2015 Marilyn Stasio , New York Times Book Review \"Connelly has created in Bosch one of the great characters in contemporary crime fiction.\"\u2015 Colette Bancroft , Tampa Bay Times \"Michael Connelly is the master of the universe in which he lives, and that is the sphere of crime thrillers. This man is so good at what he does.... THE WRONG SIDE OF GOODBYE is the twenty first Harry Bosch story and it is just as good or better than the first one was. Nobody writes like Connelly, nobody. He is unique in his style and also in the character of Harry Bosch he has created. If you read one page about Harry Bosch as written by Michael Connelly you will be hooked for life.\" \u2015 Jackie K. Cooper , Huffington Post \"It is impossible for Connelly to tell a bad story. Moving effortlessly between Bosch's private and public cases, he ratchets up the tension...pulling off in the final few chapters a California noir sleight of hand that would make Ross Macdonald envious.\" \u2015 Robert Anglen , The Arizona Republic \"In each novel, Connelly has dug deeper into Harry's psyche, as he skillfully does in The Wrong Side of Goodbye ....Connelly's melding of the police procedural, private detective novel and intense character study remains solid. Harry isn't with the LAPD anymore, but readers will be glad to know he is still on the job.\"\u2015 Oline H. Cogdill , South Florida Sun Sentinel \"....it is immensely satisfying to see Bosch's sustained and deepened passion for his mission- \"Everybody count or nobody counts\" - undiminished by age or circumstance, even as a younger generation of detectives of all colors and orientations share the stage to carry on the work that has given Bosch, and this series, such an enduring appeal. Harry Bosch and his law enforcement heirs are still fighting the good fight, luckily, for us all.\" \u2015 Paula L. Woods , Los Angeles Times \"It is a disturbing and yet cathartic tale-within-a-tale that proves once again what a master storyteller Connelly is.\"\u2015 Bruce Tierney , BookPage \"Connelly continues to discover new depths to his character and new stories to tell that reveal those depths in always compelling ways. Hats off one more time to a landmark crime series.\"\u2015 Bill Ott , Booklist (starred review) \"Swift, unpredictable, and thrilling.\" \u2015 Bookreporter \"Michael Connelly writes with a seamless unity of tone and pace that makes reading his crime novels absolutely effortless and totally engaging...his narrative rolls out in a perfect parade of action, memory, emotion, color and tension.\" \u2015 Margie Romero , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette \"Bosch fans will rejoice at the pluperfect ending.\"\u2015 Tim O'Connell , Florida Times-Union \"....lots of surprises and surprise endings. Bosch's legion of readers will come away entertained - and gratified that in his acknowledgments, Connelly all but promises yet another Bosch tale.\"\u2015 Harry Levins , St. Louis Post-Dispatch \"....another masterful Michael Connelly mystery...highly recommended.\" \u2015 Maureen McCarthy , Minneapolis Star-Tribune \"This is an excellent police procedural crime novel, one of Connelly's best; it's full of well-developed characters, taut situations and vivid descriptions.\" \u2015 Ray Walsh , Lansing State Journal \"Irresistible...Connelly nods to his early inspiration Raymond Chandler while strengthening his own claim to the mystery writers' pantheon.\"\u2015 Colette Bancroft , Tampa Bay Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Praise for The Wrong Side of Goodbye: \"....a powerful, Macdonald-esque meditation on the claims the past exerts on the present. Few mystery novelists make background facts and simple descriptions sing the way this writer does. And no writer exploits Los Angeles - its geography, its historical power wars, its celebrity culture, its lore - as compellingly as Connelly....he must be read.\" \u2015 Lloyd Sachs , Chicago Tribune \"If any novelist is worthy to walk once more through the front door of Raymond Chandler's iconic Sternwood mansion, it's Michael Connelly. For over two decades, Connelly has been brilliantly updating and enlarging the possibilities of the classic L.A. hard-boiled novel, first bestowed upon the world in 1939 with Chandler's debut, The Big Sleep . This latest Bosch outing is its own accomplishment: brooding and intricate, suspenseful and sad. In short, it's another terrific Michael Connelly mystery....a master of the genre.\" \u2015 Maureen Corrigan , Washington Post \"Bosch at his best.\"\u2015 Marilyn Stasio , New York Times Book Review \"Connelly has created in Bosch one of the great characters in contemporary crime fiction.\"\u2015 Colette Bancroft , Tampa Bay Times \"Michael Connelly is the master of the universe in which he lives, and that is the sphere of crime thrillers. This man is so good at what he does.... THE WRONG SIDE OF GOODBYE is the twenty first Harry Bosch story and it is just as good or better than the first one was. Nobody writes like Connelly, nobody. He is unique in his style and also in the character of Harry Bosch he has created. If you read one page about Harry Bosch as written by Michael Connelly you will be hooked for life.\" \u2015 Jackie K. Cooper , Huffington Post \"It is impossible for Connelly to tell a bad story. Moving effortlessly between Bosch's private and public cases, he ratchets up the tension...pulling off in the final few chapters a California noir sleight of hand that would make Ross Macdonald envious.\" \u2015 Robert Anglen , The Arizona Republic \"In each novel, Connelly has dug deeper into Harry's psyche, as he skillfully does in The Wrong Side of Goodbye ....Connelly's melding of the police procedural, private detective novel and intense character study remains solid. Harry isn't with the LAPD anymore, but readers will be glad to know he is still on the job.\"\u2015 Oline H. Cogdill , South Florida Sun Sentinel \"....it is immensely satisfying to see Bosch's sustained and deepened passion for his mission- \"Everybody count or nobody counts\" - undiminished by age or circumstance, even as a younger generation of detectives of all colors and orientations share the stage to carry on the work that has given Bosch, and this series, such an enduring appeal. Harry Bosch and his law enforcement heirs are still fighting the good fight, luckily, for us all.\" \u2015 Paula L. Woods , Los Angeles Times \"It is a disturbing and yet cathartic tale-within-a-tale that proves once again what a master storyteller Connelly is.\"\u2015 Bruce Tierney , BookPage \"Connelly continues to discover new depths to his character and new stories to tell that reveal those depths in always compelling ways. Hats off one more time to a landmark crime series.\"\u2015 Bill Ott , Booklist (starred review) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Michael Connelly is the author of twenty-eight previous novels, including #1 New York Times bestsellers The Crossing and The Burning Room . His books, which include the Harry Bosch series and Lincoln Lawyer series, have sold more than sixty million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels and is the executive producer of Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. He spends his time in California and Florida. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0465062881", "title": "Endurance", "author": "Alfred Lansing", "description": "Review \"One of the most gripping, suspenseful, intense stories anyone will ever read.\"\u2015 Chicago Tribune \"Riveting.\"\u2015 The New York Times \"Without a doubt this painstakingly written authentic adventure story will rank as one of the classic tales of the heroic age of exploration.\"\u2015 Christian Science Monitor \"Grit in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity.\"\u2015 Wall Street Journal \"[An] incomparable telling of Shackleton's travails.\"\u2015 Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review About the Author Alfred Lansing (1921-1975) was a native of Chicago. After serving more than five years in the Navy, he enrolled at Northwestern University, where he studied journalism. Until 1949 he edited a weekly newspaper in Illinois, later joined the United Press, and eventually became a freelance writer.", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Transportation"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 10.89}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B076KLSSR5", "title": "The Last Trial (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers Book 3)", "author": "Robert Bailey", "description": "Review \u201cTake a murder, a damaged woman, and a desperate daughter and you have the recipe for The Last Trial , a complex and fast-paced legal thriller. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2014DP Lyle, award-winning author About the Author Robert Bailey is the bestselling author of the McMurtrie & Drake legal thriller series. The Last Trial is the third novel in the series. The first two novels, The Professor and Between Black and\u00a0White , both\u00a0won the Beverly Hills Book Award for\u00a0legal\u00a0thriller of the year. Between Black and White was also a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. For the past eighteen years, Bailey has been a civil defense trial lawyer in his hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, where he lives with his wife and three children. For more information, please visit www.robertbaileybooks.com. Review \u201cTake a murder, a damaged woman, and a desperate daughter and you have the recipe for The Last Trial , a complex and fast-paced legal thriller. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2015DP Lyle, award-winning author --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B01N2NLNH5", "title": "Greatest Enemy: A David Rivers Thriller (American Mercenary Book 1)", "author": "Jason Kasper", "description": "Review \"David Rivers is an equal to Jack Reacher or Mitch Rapp.\" \"Blew me away...Explodes the assassin-action-anti hero genre...Original, daring, riveting on every level.\" \"This is the first time in 30 years I've been rocked back on my heels by a new author.\" \"David Rivers is right up there with John Rain, Scott Harvath, Mitch Rapp, or Jack Reacher.\" \"Forget about comparisons to Thor, Flynn or Clancy... Jason Kasper blazes his own trail. The American Mercenary series is action-adventure storytelling at its best.\"-Brian Andrews, #1 Bestselling Co-Author of the Andrews & Wilson TIER ONE series \"Jason Kasper delivers a dark, intensely gripping thrill ride with the American Mercenary series. These unforgettable, action-packed thrillers are perfect for fans of Mitch Rapp, Jason Bourne, and Jack Reacher.\" -Steven Konkoly, USA Today Bestselling Author of The Rescue About the Author Empty", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1443415782", "title": "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore [Paperback]", "author": "Robin Sloan", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "1603209387", "title": "People Celebrity Puzzler: Holiday-O-Rama!", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 79.0}], "target_asin": "B076KLSSR5"}
{"user_id": "AFY7ULRMWIKTG3CG4TNWE76OLMLQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0781783518", "title": "Exercise Physiology: Integrating Theory and Application", "author": "William J. Kraemer", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.76}, {"asin": "0321592743", "title": "Study Guide and Selected Solutions Manual for College Physics Volume 1", "author": "Jerry D. Wilson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Science & Mathematics"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "0789436507", "title": "Baby Faces", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "1400201659", "title": "Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be", "author": "Rachel Hollis", "description": "Review 'If Rachel Hollis tells you to wash your face, turn on that water! She is the mentor every woman needs, from new mommas to seasoned business women.' -- - Anna Todd, New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of the After series'Rachel's voice is the winning combination of an inspiring life coach and your very best (and funniest) friend. Shockingly honest and hilariously down to earth, Girl, Wash Your Face is a gift to women who want to flourish and live a courageously authentic life.' -- - Megan Tamte, founder and co-CEO of Evereve'There aren't enough women in leadership telling other women to GO FOR IT. We typically get the caregiver; we rarely get the boot camp instructor. Rachel lovingly but firmly tells us it is time to stop letting the tail wag the dog and get on with living our wild and precious lives. Girl, Wash Your Face is a dose of high-octane straight talk that will spit you out on the other end, chasing down dreams you hung up on long ago. Love this girl.' -- - Jen Hatmaker, New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and founder of Legacy Collective'In Rachel Hollis's first nonfiction book, you will find she is less cheerleader and more life coach. This means readers won't just walk away inspired; they will walk away with the right tools in hand to actually do their dreams. Dream doing is what Rachel is all about. You will be, too, when you read her newest book.' -- - Jessica Honegger, founder and co-CEO of the Noonday Collection About the Author Rachel laid the foundation for her lifestyle brand and media company with the same unfiltered honesty and staunch inclusivity that made her a three-time New York Times bestselling author. Hollis connects with a highly engaged and growing global audience of women who treasure her transparency and optimism. She is one of the most sought-after motivational speakers, plays host to some of today\u2019s top podcasts, and is a proud mama of four who uses her platform to empower and embolden women around the world. Rachel calls Texas home; more specifically, the Hill Country just outside of Austin.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "0312511078", "title": "My Big Animal Book (My Big Board Books)", "author": "Roger Priddy", "description": "Review Priddy Books are ...\"visually delightful with an interactive element.\" - School Library Journal About the Author Roger Priddy 's passion for educating children through fun, informative and engaging books has led him to create some of publishing's most enduring and successful nonfiction early learning books. Bestselling titles include First 100 Words , Bright Baby Animals , and Alphaprints: ABC . Roger lives in London and has three children, who have been the inspiration behind many of his best publishing ideas.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0525522603", "title": "I've Been Thinking . . .: Reflections, Prayers, and Meditations for a Meaningful Life", "author": "Maria Shriver", "description": "Review \u201cThis book is full of hope, inspiration, wisdom--from a woman [who] embodies all that she writes. Such a wonderful read.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cShriver tackles motherhood, faith, acceptance, and more in her search for how we can all live a more meaningful life. With quotes, prayers, and personal anecdotes, this book feels like a long walk with a close friend.\u201d \u2014 PopSugar\" An uplifting collection. . .\u00a0intimate and thought-provoking.\u201d \u2014 goop \u201cSometimes, we could all use a read that makes us feel good and inspired. . . . a collection of moving quotes and reflections from Maria Shriver designed to get you through whatever journey you\u2019re on.\u201d \u2013Hello Giggles \u201cThe honesty of this uplifting book will please Shriver\u2019s established readership as well as new readers looking for inspiration.\u201d \u2013Publishers Weekly \u201cMaria Shriver is a beacon of compassion and understanding\u2014a life force.\u201d \u2014Tom Brokaw \u201cThis book is superb. Shriver teaches all of us in the graduate program of life to seek meaning through the joy of following your heart. Just the kind of advice a heart surgeon cherishes.\u201d \u2014 Mehmet Oz, MD \u201cIn I\u2019ve Been Thinking . . . Shriver serves up golden nuggets of wisdom, honesty, and inspiration that take us out of our individual worlds and connects us to what\u2019s important, true, and meaningful in the journey of being human.\u201d \u2014Mark Hyman, MD; director, Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine \u201cMaria Shriver is a person of unusual compassion, intelligence, and honor. If you want to feel uplifted, inspired, and comforted, read it. This book, like its author, is a precious gift to the world.\u201d \u2014Martha Beck \u201cThought-provoking, spirited, a deep and personal message to help one discover a meaningful and joyful life.\u201d \u2014Deepak Chopra \u201cIf you are feeling stuck, lost, or you just need a pick-me-up, this is the book for you. Shriver\u2019s wisdom will fill you up.\u201d \u2014Hoda Kotb, coanchor, The Today Show \u201cThere\u2019s so much noise in the world, so many distractions, responsibilities, choices. Shriver\u2019s soulful words of wisdom, guidance, and strength are both beautiful and invaluable.\u201d \u2014Elizabeth Lesser, cofounder, Omega Institute \u201cMaria Shriver\u00a0has always\u00a0been a voice of hope, unity, equality, and love\u2014a wise, steady voice calling us to become our best selves. Here, she gives us her hard-earned wisdom, tenderness, courage and wildly gorgeous, inclusive, accessible faith. . . . It\u2019s a book every person should keep close.\u201d \u2014Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior \u201cA gem. . . \u00a0a spiritual and emotional gift to everyone who reads it.\u201d \u2014Joan Chittister \u201cThis book will fill up your inspirational tank until it overflows! Essential for anyone needing to restore peace, purpose, and passion.\u201d \u2014DeVon Franklin About the Author Maria Shriver is the mother of four, a Peabody Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning journalist and producer, the author of seven New York Times bestselling books and a bestselling coloring book, an NBC News Special Anchor, and founder of The Women's Alzheimer's Movement. When she's not thinking or writing, she can be found hanging with her kids. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Power of Gratitude \u201cGratitude is a flower that blooms in noble souls.\u201d \u2014Pope Francis I believe strongly in the power of gratitude. And scientific research backs that up. It shows that making a daily conscious effort to be grateful does in fact make you a happier, more hopeful person. There are those lucky ones who come by their attitude of gratitude naturally. It seems like they were born happy, optimistic, and grateful. But most of us have to work at having a positive frame of mind. I\u2019ve found that the best way to get that is to have a daily gratitude practice. So every morning when I open my eyes, and before my feet touch the ground, I thank God for the gift of my life. I give thanks for my health, my family, my friends, and for the country I\u2019m blessed to live in. I\u2019ve found that starting out that way makes for a better day and, in turn, I believe it makes for a better life. I seek out people who have a gratitude practice. I love talking with them and learning from them. They look at the world through a clear lens. They\u2019re more joyful. When adversity arises, they bounce back faster. They know and feel that they have a good thing going. And they do. The truth is, you can never be grateful enough. So it\u2019s worth seeking out people who are like this and asking them how they stay that way: their practices, their principles, and how they put those into action. The power of gratitude can turn a bad day into a good one. It reboots your spirit. It makes you look at your life in a different way. Being thankful can make all the difference in your day. So start your very own daily gratitude practice. Write down what you\u2019re grateful for, reflect on what you wrote, and carry the gratitude into your day. It\u2019ll make all the difference in the world. Dear God, thank you for all the times when I am blessed by the kindness of others. You have surrounded me with people who care for me and bless me every day with kind words and actions. Help me to show them the same kindness they have provided. Help me to know how deeply I appreciate them and to know that I treasure them as a gift from you to me. Amen. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Catholicism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.23}, {"asin": "158979379X", "title": "Renegade Champion: The Unlikely Rise of Fitzrada", "author": "Richard R. Rust", "description": "Review Those of us who come from older generations cannot but admire what the late Col. Richard Rust achieved in producing, as a true labor of love, such a touching tribute to his mother. [We] will also be grateful to him for having evoked so many fond old horse-show memories. -- William Steinkraus, four-time Olympic medal winnerRenegade Champion is honest, compelling, and sometimes bittersweet. \u2015 In and Around Horse Country This true story reads like a Hollywood script but better. Unlike many biographies, this one is decorated with anecdotes that only a child would pick up through a lifetime spent with his mother. He does a masterful job of relating facts and blending them with these wonderful tidbits, so that the reader seems to feel what's going through Pohl's mind rather than simply reading her words. \u2015 The Chronicle Of The Horse Renegade Champion: The Unlikely Rise of Fitzrada is a fitting tribute to Jane Pohl and the horse that propelled her to the top of the male-dominated jumper circuit of the 1940s. It\u2019s an extraordinary treat to go back in time when prized show horses were actually working hunters, to a world where Thoroughbreds were exalted, and to big indoor shows being covered nationally in newspapers. But more than that readers will easily relate to her frustrations and triumphs of a horse crazy girl, showing on a shoestring budget, rubbing and grooming herself and training a horse that doesn\u2019t have a blue-blooded pedigree\u2014it\u2019s all there in vivid detail as if Jane wrote the book herself. \u2015 Retired Racehorse blog Review Whether she wanted the job or not, [Jane Pohl] broke down the doors that led to women being included on the Olympic equestrian teams in 1964. Male or female, we owe her a debt of gratitude. From the Publisher \"If you buy that horse, you're buying your daughter's death warrant,\" Jane Pohl's father heard from the army barracks in the spring of 1941. But the potential that the teenage equestrian saw in the small, temperamental Thoroughbred was enough to convince him otherwise. Earlier that year, when Fitzrada arrived at the Army base where Jane's family lived, the horse was stubborn, insufferable, and dangerous. Any man who dared saddle him up, soon found himself face down in the dirt. Jane, excited to ride any horse and up for the challenge, had the most success with Fitz. She was patient and consistent, and the horse responded well at last showing a great affinity for jumping. Unfortunately, a terrible riding accident resulted in serious injuries for both Jane and Fitz, and the Army decided that it was time to destroy the horse. Heartbroken, Jane pleaded with her reluctant father-the only way to save the Fitz was to buy him from the army. Jane Pohl's foresight proved to be correct. Jane and Fitz went on to take the Virginia show jumping circuit by storm, winning 37 jumper and 6 hunter championships. At a time when women were rarely seen in jumping classes at horse shows and were not taken seriously by male competitors, Jane and Fitz helped to break down barriers against women riders competing in the Olympics. In 1946, Jane and Fitz found themselves at the Jumper Championship of America at the prestigious National Horse Show in Madison Square Garden-the highest jumping title in the world. The road there for horse and rider was a five-year test of faith, patience, and understanding friendship. About the Author Richard R. Rust was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, a practicing civil engineer, and an amateur sportsman. As a child, he rode his tricycle under Fitz\u2019s belly and started riding ponies at age four. His mother, Jane Pohl, is the subject of this book, and his father, D. N. Rust III, was an amateur steeplechase trainer and rider with two wins of the Virginia Gold Cup. He died in 2008. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.57}, {"asin": "0967174805", "title": "Stranger in the Woods: A Photographic Fantasy", "author": "Carl R. Sams", "description": "About the Author Wildlife photographers Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick are the authors of the award-winning \"In the Woods\" children's picture book series. Their most famous title, Stranger in the Woods has changed their lives and touched the hearts of children and adult all over the world. Their new book, I Am Africa allows them to share gentle lessons of nature from the continent of Africa. As in all of their work, they strive to inspire children to love and appreciate the natural world. Stoick has been photographing wildlife for more than 20 years.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.88}, {"asin": "0446615862", "title": "The Wedding", "author": "Nicholas Sparks", "description": "Review \"Sparks's fans have from the very beginning eagerly anticipated a sequel to the romantic tale of Allie and Noah Calhoun. The wait is now over...Sparks tells his sweet story...[with] a gasp-inducing twist at the very end.\"\u2015 PublishersWeekly \"Nicholas Sparks follows up his beloved bestseller The Notebook with a touching novel about one man's attempt to save a failing marriage.\"\u2015 BookPage \"Sweet but packs a punch...There is a twist that pulls everything together.\"\u2015 CharlotteObserver About the Author With over 100 million copies of his books sold, Nicholas Sparks is one of the world's most beloved storytellers. His novels include sixteen #1 New York Times bestsellers, and all of his books, including Three Weeks with My Brother , the memoir he wrote with his brother, Micah, have been New York Times and international bestsellers, and were translated into more than fifty languages. Eleven of Nicholas Sparks's novels -- The Choice, The Longest Ride, The Best of Me, Safe Haven, The Lucky One, The Last Song, Dear John, Nights in Rodanthe, The Notebook, A Walk to Remember , and Message in a Bottle -- have been adapted into major motion pictures.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.99}], "target_asin": "0525522603"}
{"user_id": "AHKP5MDAPHC5JPIPT6I734SRC26A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B0044KMQWW", "title": "Best Stories from the White House, 2E", "author": "C. Brian Kelly", "description": "About the Author C. Brian Kelly , a prize-winning journalist, is president and founder of Montpelier Publishing and a columnist and editor emeritus for Military History magazine. He also is a lecturer in newswriting at the University of Virginia. Kelly's articles have appeared in Reader's Digest, Friends, Yankee, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone , and other magazines, and he is the author of several books on American history. Ingrid Smyer is a freelance writer and editor. They live in Charlottesville, Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": "from 12.99"}, {"asin": "B0044KMQWW", "title": "Best Stories from the White House, 2E", "author": "C. Brian Kelly", "description": "About the Author C. Brian Kelly , a prize-winning journalist, is president and founder of Montpelier Publishing and a columnist and editor emeritus for Military History magazine. He also is a lecturer in newswriting at the University of Virginia. Kelly's articles have appeared in Reader's Digest, Friends, Yankee, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone , and other magazines, and he is the author of several books on American history. Ingrid Smyer is a freelance writer and editor. They live in Charlottesville, Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": "from 12.99"}, {"asin": "B0044KMQWW", "title": "Best Stories from the White House, 2E", "author": "C. Brian Kelly", "description": "About the Author C. Brian Kelly , a prize-winning journalist, is president and founder of Montpelier Publishing and a columnist and editor emeritus for Military History magazine. He also is a lecturer in newswriting at the University of Virginia. Kelly's articles have appeared in Reader's Digest, Friends, Yankee, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone , and other magazines, and he is the author of several books on American history. Ingrid Smyer is a freelance writer and editor. They live in Charlottesville, Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": "from 12.99"}, {"asin": "B0044KMQWW", "title": "Best Stories from the White House, 2E", "author": "C. Brian Kelly", "description": "About the Author C. Brian Kelly , a prize-winning journalist, is president and founder of Montpelier Publishing and a columnist and editor emeritus for Military History magazine. He also is a lecturer in newswriting at the University of Virginia. Kelly's articles have appeared in Reader's Digest, Friends, Yankee, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone , and other magazines, and he is the author of several books on American history. Ingrid Smyer is a freelance writer and editor. They live in Charlottesville, Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": "from 12.99"}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0044KMQWW", "title": "Best Stories from the White House, 2E", "author": "C. Brian Kelly", "description": "About the Author C. Brian Kelly , a prize-winning journalist, is president and founder of Montpelier Publishing and a columnist and editor emeritus for Military History magazine. He also is a lecturer in newswriting at the University of Virginia. Kelly's articles have appeared in Reader's Digest, Friends, Yankee, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone , and other magazines, and he is the author of several books on American history. Ingrid Smyer is a freelance writer and editor. They live in Charlottesville, Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": "from 12.99"}, {"asin": "1542046599", "title": "I Am Watching You", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.17}, {"asin": "1589974093", "title": "KIdsboro - Battle for Control (Adventures in Odyssey Kidsboro)", "author": "Marshal Younger", "description": "About the Author Marshal Younger is producer for Focus on the Family's audio drama Adventures in Odyssey, a show for which he has written more than 100 episodes. He is the author of several children's novels and has served as writer/producer of innovative projects such as Treasure of the Incas CD-ROM game and Answer That! Adventures in Odyssey DVD game. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, Stephanie, their son and three daughters.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "B00BQA5XQY", "title": "A Lady Never Surrenders (The Hellions of Halstead Hall)", "author": "Sabrina Jeffries", "description": "About the Author Sabrina Jeffries is the award-winning author of nearly two dozen novels. She lives with her husband and son in North Carolina. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One EalingNovember 1825 When Bow Street Runner Jackson Pinter entered Halstead Hall\u2019s library, he wasn\u2019t surprised to find only one person there. He was early, and no one in the Sharpe family was ever early. \u201cGood morning, Masters,\u201d Jackson said, inclining his head toward the barrister who sat poring over some papers. Giles Masters was husband to the eldest Sharpe sister, Lady Minerva. Or Mrs. Masters, as she\u2019d chosen to be called. Masters looked up. \u201cPinter! Good to see you, old fellow. How are things at Bow Street?\u201d \u201cWell enough for me to take the time to hold this meeting.\u201d \u201cI daresay the Sharpes have run you ragged investigating their parents\u2019 deaths.\u201d \u201cMurders,\u201d Jackson corrected him. \u201cWe\u2019ve determined that for certain now.\u201d \u201cRight. I forgot that Minerva said the pistol found at the scene had never been fired. A pity no one noticed it nineteen years ago, or an investigation might have been mounted then and a great deal of heartache prevented.\u201d \u201cMrs. Plumtree paid off anyone who might have explored further.\u201d Masters sighed. \u201cYou can\u2019t blame her. She thought she was preventing scandal.\u201d Jackson frowned. Instead she\u2019d prevented the discovery of the truth. And that was why she\u2019d ended up with five grandchildren stuck in the past, unable to go on with their lives. That\u2019s why she\u2019d laid down her ultimatum\u2014all of them had to marry by the end of the year or none would inherit. So far, they\u2019d obliged her. All but one. In his mind arose an image of Lady Celia that he swiftly squelched. \u201cWhere is everyone?\u201d \u201cStill at breakfast. They\u2019ll be trooping across the courtyard soon, I\u2019m sure. Have a seat.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll stand.\u201d He strode over to the window that overlooked the Crimson Courtyard, named for its red tile. Being at Halstead Hall always made Jackson uneasy. The sprawling mansion shrieked \u201caristocracy.\u201d Having spent his early childhood in a Liverpool slum before moving to a terrace house in Cheapside at age ten, he found Halstead Hall too large, too sumptuous\u2014and too full of Sharpes. After nearly a year with them as his clients, he still wasn\u2019t sure how he felt about them. Even now, as he saw them walking across the courtyard beneath a cloud-darkened November sky, he tensed up. They didn\u2019t look as if they planned to spring anything on him. They looked happy and content. First came the great lord himself\u2014Oliver Sharpe, the ninth Marquess of Stoneville, said to be a near copy of his olive-skinned, black-haired, and black-eyed father. Initially Jackson had despised the man, having made the mistake of believing the gossip about him. He still thought Stoneville had chosen the wrong path after his parents\u2019 deaths, but since the marquess seemed to be making up for it now, perhaps there was good in him after all. Beside him walked Lord Jarret, whose blue-green eyes and black hair were said to make him look more a blend of his half-Italian father and blond mother. He was Jackson\u2019s favorite of the brothers. No-nonsense and even-tempered, Jarret was the easiest to talk to. And once his scheming maternal grandmother, Mrs. Hester Plumtree, had allowed him to take over the family business, the man had flourished. Jarret worked hard at Plumtree Brewery; Jackson could admire that. After him came Lord Gabriel with his new wife, Lady Gabriel, on one arm. No doubt the other two men\u2019s wives were in their confinement\u2014Lady Stoneville was expected to deliver within the month, and Lady Jarret wasn\u2019t far behind. But Jackson wouldn\u2019t be surprised to hear of an impending child soon from the youngest Sharpe brother. The couple seemed very much in love, which was rather astonishing, considering that their marriage had initially been contracted just to fulfill Mrs. Plumtree\u2019s ridiculous ultimatum. That august woman clung to Gabe\u2019s other arm. Jackson admired Mrs. Plumtree\u2019s determination and pluck\u2014it reminded him of his beloved aunt Ada, who\u2019d raised him and now lived with him. But what the elderly woman was demanding of her grandchildren reeked of hubris. No one should have such power over their descendants, not even a legend like Hetty Plumtree, who\u2019d singlehandedly built the family brewery into a major concern after the death of her husband. Behind her, the two Sharpe sisters came out to cross the courtyard. He dragged in a heavy breath as the younger one caught his eye. Masters approached to look out the window, too. \u201cAnd there she comes, the most beautiful woman in the world.\u201d \u201cAnd the most maddening,\u201d Jackson muttered. \u201cWatch it, Pinter,\u201d Masters said in a voice tinged with amusement. \u201cThat\u2019s my wife you\u2019re talking about.\u201d Jackson started. He hadn\u2019t been staring at Mrs. Masters. \u201cI beg your pardon,\u201d he murmured, figuring he\u2019d best not explain. Masters would never accept that Lady Celia was to her sister as a gazelle was to a brood mare. The newly wedded barrister was blinded by love. Jackson wasn\u2019t. Any fool could see that Lady Celia was the more arresting of the two. While Mrs. Masters had the lush charms of a dockside tart, Lady Celia was a Greek goddess\u2014willowy and tall, small-breasted and long-limbed, with a fine lady\u2019s elegant brow, a doe\u2019s soft eyes. \u2026 And a vixen\u2019s temper. The damned female could flay the flesh from a man\u2019s bones with her sharp tongue. She could also heat his blood with one unguarded smile. God save him, it was a good thing her smile had never been bestowed on him . Otherwise, he might act on the fantasy that had plagued him from the day he\u2019d met her\u2014to shove her into some private closet where he could plunder her mouth with impunity. Where she would wrap those slender arms about his neck and let him have his way with her. Confound her, until she had come along, he\u2019d never allowed himself to desire a woman he couldn\u2019t have. He\u2019d rarely allowed himself to desire anyone , only the occasional whore when he felt desperate for female companionship. Now he couldn\u2019t seem to stop doing so. It was because he\u2019d seen too little of her lately. What he needed was a surfeit of Lady Celia to make him sick of her. Then he might purge this endless craving for the impossible. With a scowl, he turned from the window, but it was too late. The sight of Lady Celia crossing the courtyard dressed in some rich fabric had already stirred his blood. She never wore such fetching clothes; generally her lithe figure was shrouded in smocks to protect her workaday gowns from powder smudges while she practiced her target shooting. But this morning, in that lemon-colored gown, with her hair finely arranged and a jeweled bracelet on her delicate wrist, she was summer on a dreary winter day, sunshine in the bleak of night, music in the still silence of a deserted concert hall. And he was a fool. \u201cI can see how you might find her maddening,\u201d Masters said in a low voice. Jackson stiffened. \u201cYour wife?\u201d he said, deliberately being obtuse. \u201cLady Celia.\u201d Hell and blazes. He\u2019d obviously let his feelings show. He\u2019d spent his childhood learning to keep them hidden so the other children wouldn\u2019t see how their epithets wounded him, and he\u2019d refined that talent as an investigator who knew the value of an unemotional demeanor. He drew on that talent as he faced the barrister. \u201cAnyone would find her maddening. She\u2019s reckless and spoiled and liable to give her future husband grief at every turn.\u201d When she wasn\u2019t tempting him to madness. Masters raised an eyebrow. \u201cYet you often watch her. Have you any interest there?\u201d Jackson forced a shrug. \u201cCertainly not. You\u2019ll have to find another way to inherit your new bride\u2019s fortune.\u201d He\u2019d hoped to prick Masters\u2019s pride and thus change the subject, but Masters laughed. \u201cYou, marry my sister-in-law? That, I\u2019d like to see. Aside from the fact that her grandmother would never approve, Lady Celia hates you.\u201d She did indeed. The chit had taken an instant dislike to him when he\u2019d interfered in an impromptu shooting match she\u2019d been participating in with her brother and his friends at a public park. That should have set him on his guard right then. A pity it hadn\u2019t. Because even if she didn\u2019t despise him and weren\u2019t miles above him in rank, she\u2019d never make him a good wife. She was young and indulged, not the sort of female to make do on a Bow Street Runner\u2019s salary. But she\u2019ll be an heiress once she marries. He gritted his teeth. That only made matters worse. She would assume he was marrying her for her inheritance. So would everyone else. And his pride chafed at that. Dirty bastard. Son of shame. Whoreson. Love-brat. He\u2019d been called them all as a boy. Later, as he\u2019d moved up at Bow Street, those who resented his rapid advancement had called him a baseborn upstart . He wasn\u2019t about to add money-grubbing fortune hunter to the list. \u201cBesides,\u201d Masters went on, \u201cyou may not realize this, since you haven\u2019t been around much these past few weeks, but Minerva claims that Celia has her eye on three very eligible potential suitors.\u201d Jackson\u2019s startled gaze shot to him. Suitors? The word who was on his lips when the door opened and Stoneville entered. The rest of the family followed, leaving Jackson to force a smile and exchange pleasantries as they settled into seats about the table, but his mind kept running over Masters\u2019s words.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}], "target_asin": "B0044KMQWW"}
{"user_id": "AGJHF467NSEUPGPVEPMQPYQGMX4A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0615514650", "title": "Joy of Hooking (With Yarn!)", "author": "Judy Taylor", "description": "Review Writers Digest Awards writes: The book might be a revelation to many readers, especially women. Rug hooking is a absorbing hobby women in particular can undertake. Eminently practical in its treatment of the subject, the well organized and written how-to book explains what rug hooking is, its traditions and background, how to do it, and then projects beginners can try to do. Step-by-step instructions, with handy pictures, look like they would enable readers to achieve considerable successes. Needed equipment is listed. Using yarn to hook poems, sayings, and aphorisms into rugs is another feature extolled. The gallery of rug hookings is colorful and impressive. A valuable 28-minute beginners' guide DVD is incorporated inside the book. Overall, the book is a fine introduction to rug hooking that should hook readers into trying out this avocation. --Writers Digest Awards Self Publishing Awards, 2011Writer's Digest Awards writes: The author gives a thorough, easy to understand look at a lesser known fiber art. The author s skill and passion for the subject is clear and draws readers in. While the book is mostly how-to oriented, it also covers history and craft supply issue, adding depth to the content. The wide range of sample rugs allows readers to see all the possible projects they could tackle; most of the samples have a slightly old-fashioned feel, but readers could easily adapt the skills to more cutting edge fashion patterns. The author s insider tips and experience make this book so much more value than basic how to books or internet instructions. While the book mostly focuses on rugs and flat projects, it also shows how to make three dimensional pieces like stuffed animals. The DVD is a great help for those now to this art form who like to learn in a way that is both visual and auditory; the DVD captures the quaint feel of this art. The included pattern is a great gift to beginners as well. --Writer's Digest Self-Publishing Awards, 2011 About the Author Judy Taylor is an artist and teacher, residing in Washington State. Her instructional DVD won the coveted Gold Award for Excellence at the International Television and Video Artists Assn. Her first book, Hooking With Yarn sold out of its first printing. More at Little House Rugs.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 35.64}, {"asin": "1911267981", "title": "Guitar: The First 100 Chords for Guitar: How to Learn and Play Guitar Chords: The Complete Beginner Guitar Method (Beginner Guitar Books)", "author": "Joseph Alexander", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "0932334679", "title": "Beaversprite: My Years Building an Animal Sanctuary", "author": "Hope Sawyer Buyukmihci", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 97.87}, {"asin": "1591933854", "title": "Birds of the Northeast Playing Cards (Nature's Wild Cards)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 5.95}, {"asin": "0831749717", "title": "Eric Sloane's I Remember America", "author": "Eric Sloane", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Travel"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.81}, {"asin": "0989310442", "title": "The Beavers of Popple's Pond: Sketches from the Life of an Honorary Rodent", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.95}, {"asin": "0446575941", "title": "The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision (Celestine Series)", "author": "James Redfield", "description": "About the Author James Redfield is the New York Times bestselling author of The Celestine Prophecy , which was a #1 international bestseller. This phenomenal novel spent over three years on the New York Times bestsellers list. Redfield continued the story with the sequels The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision, The Secret of Shambhala: In Search of the Eleventh Insight , and The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision . James Redfield is also the author of the nonfiction title Celestine Vision and co-author of God and the Evolving Universe . He co-wrote and co-produced the film version of The Celestine Prophecy .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1558217762", "title": "The Pipe Book", "author": "Alfred Dunhill", "description": "From the Back Cover Alfred Dunhill's passion for perfection led him to develop a pipe collection so that he might become a better tobacconist - the more he knew about pipes, the better he could serve his pipe-smoking customers. From this collection emerged an archivist and a catalog, and from the catalog evolved The Pipe Book - a thorough exploration of nearly every type of pipe known to man, with in-depth explanations of the pipes' origins, structures, and uses, as well as fascinating anthropological discussions that span the entire world and hundreds of years. Included here are everything from primitive makeshift, mound, and earthen pipes through models of ivory, clay, and porcelain to the modern briars, cobs, and meerschaums. And just as fascinating are the vivid and insightful discussions of the significance of smoking in different cultures, from the ancient Mayans to twentieth-century Europeans and everything in between. (61/4 X 83/4, 306 pages, b&w photos, illustrations) About the Author Alfred Dunhill Limited is one of the premier manufacturers and retailers of luxury goods of this century. It has an established reputation in the field of smokers' requisites, with such innovations as the White Spot trademark applied to pipes and the patented shell briar pipe. Alfred Dunhill died in 1959. His grandson, Richard Dunhill, is chairman of Alfred Dunhill Limited.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Antiques & Collectibles"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 19.98}, {"asin": "1434342670", "title": "Millennial Hospitality IV: After Hours", "author": "Charles James Hall", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 22.95}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "3791355937", "title": "The Holiday Train Show: The New York Botanical Garden", "author": null, "description": "Review \u201cDazzling full-page views of the entire spectacle makes the experience come alive for readers, while essays explore the engineering of the tracks and bridges as well as notable featured trains. The book is a perfect gift that commemorates a visit to the Holiday Train Show and its 25 memorable years.\u201d -Antique and Auction News About the Author Joanna L. Groarke is Director of Public Engagement and Library Exhibitions Curator at The New York Botanical Garden.Paul Busse is the founder of Applied Imagination.Karen Daubmann is The New York Botanical Garden\u2019s Associate Vice President of Exhibitions and Public Engagement.", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Transportation"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 29.99}, {"asin": "0446920959", "title": "Meaning in Star Trek", "author": "Karin Blair", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.0}, {"asin": "1683442911", "title": "Traced: Human DNA's Big Surprise", "author": "Nathaniel T Jeanson", "description": "About the Author DR. NATHANIEL JEANSON received his B.S. in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and his PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from Harvard University. As an undergraduate, he researched the molecular control of photosynthesis, and his graduate work involved investigating the molecular and physiological control of adult blood stem cells. His findings have been presented at regional and national conferences, and have been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Blood, Nature, and Cell . Since 2009, he has been actively researching the origin of species, both at the Institute for Creation Research and at Answers in Genesis.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 22.49}, {"asin": "1442472065", "title": "City of Bones(The Mortal Instruments)", "author": "Cassandra Clare", "description": "About the Author Cassandra Clare is the #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of The Red Scrolls of Magic , Lady Midnight , Lord of Shadows , and Queen of Air and Darkness , as well as the internationally bestselling Mortal Instruments series and Infernal Devices trilogy. She is the coauthor of The Bane Chronicles with Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson; Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy with Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, and Robin Wasserman; and Ghosts of the Shadow Market with Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link, and Robin Wasserman. Her books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages and made into a feature film and a TV show. Cassandra lives in western Massachusetts. Visit her at CassandraClare.com. Learn more about the world of the Shadowhunters at Shadowhunters.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 47.93}], "target_asin": "3791355937"}
{"user_id": "AHMXWEVJLVY2M5FR2M6FZ3DKNXGA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B004UJ8ABI", "title": "Canoeing in the wilderness", "author": "Henry David Thoreau", "description": "About the Author Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, yogi,[3] and historian. A leading transcendentalist,[4] Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay \"Civil Disobedience\" (originally published as \"Resistance to Civil Government\"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and Yankee attention to practical detail.[5] He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist.[7][8] Though \"Civil Disobedience\" seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government-\"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government\"[9]-the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: \"'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.\" Thoreau had a distinctive appearance, with a nose that he called his \"most prominent feature\".[15] Of his appearance and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote:[16] His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,-eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Nature & Ecology"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1565124081", "title": "Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked At The Edge Of The World", "author": "Joan Druett", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In early 1864, heading back to Australia after a failed mining expedition, the crew of the Grafton encountered a violent storm and found themselves shipwrecked in the Auckland Islands, off the coast of New Zealand. Druett, a maritime historian ( In the Wake of Madness ), draws upon the journals of the ship's captain, Thomas Musgrave, and prospector Fran\u00e7ois Raynal to reveal how the crew pulled together and made the best of their circumstances for nearly two years. By contrast, when the Invercauld ran aground on the other side of the island months later\u2014beyond an impassable mountain range, and hence unaware they were not alone\u2014the surviving sailors quickly began eating their dead crewmates out of desperation. Soon, only three remained, the ineffectual captain and another officer being kept alive by a resourceful seaman. Druett tells the two stories in strict chronological order, allowing readers to become familiar with the Grafton party before weaving the Invercauld survivors into the narrative. She zeroes in on the salient details of their ordeals, identifying the plants that kept the castaways from contracting scurvy or sketching out an improvised recipe for soap with equal aplomb. This is a fine addition to the genre of survival tales like Endurance or In the Heart of the Sea . (Jul. 20) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library Journal Adult/High School\u2014Using diaries, ship logs, and newspaper accounts, Druett re-creates the different experiences of the survivors of two wrecked vessels. In January 1864, the five-man crew of the Grafton left Sydney, Australia, intending to locate a source of argentiferous tin allegedly to be found on remote Campbell Island. In May 1864, the Invercauld left Melbourne for South America, with no passengers and a crew of 25, to sail to Callao to take on a cargo of fertilizer. Neither ship reached its final destination. Instead, both were shipwrecked on opposite ends of the same subantarctic island. Grafton 's crew survived, and could even be said to have prospered. By working together, the men managed to build a shelter, hunt sea lions, and, eventually, build a boat and launch their own rescue team. The initial 19 survivors of the Invercauld , on the other hand, fell into arguing and quibbling with no direction or plan. Their number soon dwindled to 16, and then to 3. Viewers of television's Survivor and readers of survival novels will enjoy Island , and the book could provide teens with the know-how to stay alive if they ever found themselves in a similar situation.\u2014 Joanne Ligamari, Rio Linda School District, Sacramento, CA Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine The author of several works on nautical history and a maritime mystery series, Joan Druett is a knowledgeable, entertaining tour guide through the seafaring life of the 19th century and the hardships of \"castaway life\" ( New York Times Book Review ). Druett illustrates how each group coped with the hostile conditions and why their respective strategies (or lack thereof) succeeded or failed by allowing the details of each story to drive the narrative. Some critics found those details too graphic-particularly the descriptions of cannibalism and clubbing baby seals-but Druett's straightforward, restrained writing style steers clear of sensationalism or melodrama. Based on survivors' memoirs, interviews, and newspaper articles, Island of the Lost is an enthralling tale with a timeless message. Copyright \u00a9 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist In January 1864, five seamen from the wrecked schooner Grafton were stranded on Auckland^B Island, 300 miles from New Zealand. On the opposite end of the island another ship, the Invercauld , was wrecked during a gale. The Grafton 's sailors built a cabin and a forge and survived for almost two years before building another ship and leaving the island. Nineteen sailors survived the wreck of the Invercauld ; eventually only three were left alive. Druett, the author of 16 other books, consulted survivors' journals and other sources to relate their struggles--how they were able to obtain food, how they built furniture, their need for solidarity, and how they spent their leisure hours. They also spent time washing their garments, hunting for sea lions to eat, and continually planning and hoping to be saved. The amount of detail Druett has amassed is truly impressive, resulting in an invaluable account of survival. George Cohen Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review \"A compelling fact-upon-fact style that lets the men's incremental accomplishments and unlikely survival supply the drama.\"--News & Observer From the Inside Flap Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.  In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave\u0097rather than succumb to this dismal fate\u0097inspires his men to take action. With barely more than their bare hands, they build a cabin and, remarkably, a forge, where they manufacture their tools. Under Musgrave's leadership, they band together and remain civilized through even the darkest and most terrifying days.  Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island\u0097twenty miles of impassable cliffs and chasms away\u0097the Invercauld wrecks during a horrible storm. Nineteen men stagger ashore. Unlike Captain Musgrave, the captain of the Invercauld falls apart given the same dismal circumstances. His men fight and split up; some die of starvation, others turn to cannibalism. Only three survive. Musgrave and all of his men not only endure for nearly two years, they also plan their own astonishing escape, setting off on one of the most courageous sea voyages in history.  Using the survivors' journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings this extraordinary untold story to life, a story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos. From the Back Cover Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.  In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave\u2014rather than succumb to this dismal fate\u2014inspires his men to take action. With barely more than their bare hands, they build a cabin and, remarkably, a forge, where they manufacture their tools. Under Musgrave's leadership, they band together and remain civilized through even the darkest and most terrifying days.  Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island\u2014twenty miles of impassable cliffs and chasms away\u2014the Invercauld wrecks during a horrible storm. Nineteen men stagger ashore. Unlike Captain Musgrave, the captain of the Invercauld falls apart given the same dismal circumstances. His men fight and split up; some die of starvation, others turn to cannibalism. Only three survive. Musgrave and all of his men not only endure for nearly two years, they also plan their own astonishing escape, setting off on one of the most courageous sea voyages in history.  Using the survivors' journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings this extraordinary untold story to life, a story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos. About the Author Joan Druett is a maritime historian and the award-winning author of several books, including Petticoat Whalers , She Was a Sister Sailor , Hen Frigates , Tupaia , and The Discovery of Tahiti. Her interest in maritime history began in 1984, when she discovered the grave of a young American whaling wife while exploring the tropical island of Rarotonga; she subsequently received a Fulbright fellowship to study whaling wives in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California. Her ground-breaking work in the field of seafaring women was also recognized with a L. Byrne Waterman Award. She is married to Ron Druett, a maritime artist. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Australia & Oceania"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 15.89}, {"asin": "1686889607", "title": "Shirley F'N Lyle: VIVA the REVOLUTION", "author": "Clayton Lindemuth", "description": "Review \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u00bd Manhattan Book Review \"Shirley F'N Lyle is a great story. A wild adventure with blood, guts, spit, gore, guns, and four-by-fours that will leave you wanting more. \"\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Seattle Book Review \"a fast, compelling ride... heavier on the grit than the chick... I along with many others will be looking forward to more.\" California Bookwatch: Ribald, sometimes rude, rollicking, and risqu\u00e9: that's Shirley and her world, and this is the power and impact of a story that's a standout whether you want to label it chic lit, women's literature, or urban mystery. No matter what it's labeled, the out-of-the-box read that is Shirley F'N Lyle: VIVA the REVOLUTION is highly recommended for readers of contemporary women's fiction who like their characters urban, rough, and outrageously hilarious. \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 Literary Titan: Shirley F'N Lyle\u00a0is a fantastically entertaining novel... \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u00bd SPR: Sassy, hard-nosed storytelling swirling between hard-hitting truths about society make this book more than a pulp-fiction pleasure. Shirley F'N Lyle: VIVA the REVOLUTION is a cutting, empowering, and unforgettable tale of heroism in the most unexpected of places. US Review of Books: Full of action, danger, and some surprisingly frank reflection on self-deprecation, there's also a subtle layer of comedy as all of the dangerous elements of the story turn against one another under false pretenses and incorrect assumptions. That tension all builds up to a climax that will be sure to surprise and delight readers and leave them ready for more. READER VIEWS: Clayton Lindemuth has done an excellent job by creating a fast paced, laugh out loud tale of angst and redemption. He created a plot full of twists and turns, with a character that is surprisingly likable. I found myself cheering her on... So much fun to read!", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Women's Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "0976626608", "title": "The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants", "author": "Samuel Thayer", "description": "About the Author Samuel Thayer is an internationally recognized authority on edible wild plants who has authored two award-winning books on the topic, Nature\u2019s Garden and The Forager\u2019s Harvest . He has taught foraging and field identification for more than two decades. Besides lecturing and writing, Samuel is an advocate for sustainable food systems who owns a diverse organic orchard and harvests wild rice, acorns, hickory nuts, maple syrup, and other wild products. He lives in rural northern Wisconsin with his wife and three children.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.39}, {"asin": "0972831010", "title": "Enemies Foreign and Domestic", "author": "Matthew Bracken", "description": "Review Enemies Foreign And Domestic review in GUNS Magazine, November 2005 A stadium massacre leads to the banning of all semi-automatic rifles, the teaser on the jacket reads. But who really fired the fatal shots, and why? The answer, we learn, involves nothing less than a modern day Reichstag fire, engineered and instigated by an evil and ambitious ATF supervisor and his squad of violent agency misfits. The political fallout of the stadium shooting is a national ban on assault weapons. With free rein to create more domestic terror incidents, and with unprincipled politicians and a complicit media, gun owners are easily demonized as a manipulated public demands more security. All Brad Fallon wanted to do was restore his vintage sailboat, Guajira, take his savings from three years of working the ANWR oil fields, and cruise the world. He hadn't counted on his interest and proficiency in shooting being used to entrap him, or being ultimately forced into covert rebellion against rogue federal agents. But back a man into a corner with other men -- all proficient in modern weaponry, and all unbending believers in liberty -- make it clear that you mean to destroy them, and a most dangerous type of resistance is born: a competent one. Author Matthew Bracken has written a thrilling first novel (did I mention this is also a passionate love story?), one that engages, grips and doesn t let up. He avoids the proselytizing that can plague the liberty genre, and delivers a solid, exciting tale with deep and believable characters. Bracken's background with UDT and SEAL Teams, and as the designer/builder of a cutter that he soloed from Panama to Guam, adds credibility to the technical and tactical details he weaves into the plot. I can't wait for the sequel, scheduled for release early in 2006. David Codrea, GUNS Magazine --GUNS Magazine, November 2005John Ross' review of Enemies Foreign And Domestic I have several complaints about most thriller novelists. First, their protagonists are too often 100% virtuous with no humanizing flaws. Second, the protagonists let their enemies live when you KNOW the bad guys are going to come back and murder their kids etc. Third, everything the government does (hi-tech weapons, military & police tactics, criminal investigations, etc.) functions flawlessly. Fourth, too many stories have all the brilliant thinking and brave actions done by government employees (Special Forces, policemen, Intelligence operatives, etc.) Lastly, some novels have a basic premise that is just not believable. (Clancy's RAINBOW SIX is a prime example.) Novelist Matthew Bracken has avoided these sins almost entirely in his excellent debut novel ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC. It is a challenge for any writer to come up with a plot that is at once plausible enough to have the reader accept it but also unlikely enough that it has not actually happened yet in real life. EFAD's dramatic concept is this: Wally Malvone, a lone mid-level ATF executive, engineers (with one accomplice) a long-range shooting into a football stadium and successfully arranges for an addled, destitute veteran to take the blame and be killed in the process. Malvone does this because he needs an emergency that will encourage the President to embrace a plan he has put together: Forming a secret \"hit squad\" comprised of overaggressive ATF agents with disciplinary problems. This squad's duty is to be proactive: identify domestic terrorists (\"militia members\") and kill them during raids. The trial is in the media, when the cameras see the (planted) contraband retrieved from the slain terrorist's dwelling. Malvone wants to have this hit squad for the obvious reasons: funding, power, and prestige. Naturally, some of the victims drawn into Malvone's web of treachery decide they have no choice but to fight back. At each point in the storyline, as the good guys and bad guys acted and reacted, I kept asking myself if what was happening was plausible. How would *I* rewrite it to make it more believable? In some cases I thought that I would have had the parties react a bit differently, but I had to admit my alternate scenario was not necessarily more likely. The fact is that when you get into the realm of serious, institutionalized government abuse of power in an environment with lots of resourceful, angry, well-armed people and the near-instant information flow of the Internet, you're in uncharted waters. One critic said the female lead was an adolescent fantasy (21 years old, beautiful, motorcycle rider, expert shot, virgin) and I would have given her more edginess, but hey, a lot of readers like their heroes untainted. Anyway, EFAD is an action-packed read, with most of the skill and creativity being demonstrated by the private sector, which is IMO 100% realistic. Send a copy to your favorite Senator or Congressman... EFAD is also good inspiration for me to get back to work on DETOUR, the sequel to UC. No promises, except there should be something in it to offend just about everyone. John Ross, author of \"Unintended Consequences\" January 2004 --John Ross, author of \"Unintended Consequences\" January 2004 About the Author Matt Bracken was born in 1957 in Baltimore Maryland, and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979 with a degree in Russian Studies. He was commissioned as a Naval officer, and served on east coast SEAL teams during the 1980s as a Special Warfare officer, including leading a SEAL detachment to Beruit Lebanon in 1983. He has worked as a boat builder, welder, and charter boat skipper, and holds a Coast Guard captain's license. He is also the author of \"Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista\" (2006) and \"Foreign Enemies And Traitors,\" (2009)", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 19.95}, {"asin": "1935071890", "title": "Safe: How to Protect Yourself, Your Family, and Your Home", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Wayne LaPierre has served as the executive vice president and chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association of America since 1991.Backed by NRA's 4 million active members, Wayne has led NRA efforts to restore the relevance and sanctity of the Second Amendment. Today, this right continues to be preserved by freedom's largest, most potent and devoted voluntary organization.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 7.74}, {"asin": "1938067215", "title": "'If I had a Son': Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman", "author": "Jack Cashill", "description": "About the Author Jack Cashill is an independent writer and producer who has written for Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Weekly Standard. Cashill writes weekly for WND and has authored nine books of nonfiction under his own name, five of which have been featured on Book-TV, and collaborated quietly on six others. Cashill also\u00a0has produced a score of documentaries for regional PBS and national cable channels. He holds a Ph.D. from Purdue.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Sociology"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 19.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0393245446", "title": "Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War", "author": "Mary Roach", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of June 2016: It takes a special kind of writer to make topics ranging from death to our gastrointestinal tract interesting (sometimes hilariously so), and pop science writer Mary Roach is always up to the task. In her latest book, Grunt , she explores how our soldiers combat their non-gun-wielding opponents--panic, heat exhaustion, the runs, and more. It will give you a new appreciation not only for our men and women in uniform (and by the way, one of the innumerable things you\u2019ll learn is how and why they choose the fabric for those uniforms), but for the unsung scientist-soldiers tasked with coming up with ways to keep the \u201cgrunts\u201d alive and well. If you are at all familiar with Roach\u2019s oeuvre, you know her enthusiasm for her subjects is palpable and infectious. This latest offering is no exception. --Erin Kodicek, The Amazon Book Review From School Library Journal Roach does it again. Amid all the debates about the military-industrial complex in our country, its impact on medicine, invention, and other scientific pursuits is often overlooked. Roach interviews those in science-related military careers, employing her cockeyed sense of humor and awing readers with what she uncovers. (http://ow.ly/PN4C305MyAa)\u2014Jamie Watson, Baltimore County Public Library Review \"A mirthful, informative peek behind the curtain of military science.\" \u2015 Washington Post \"From the ever-illuminating author of Bonk and Stiff comes an examination of the science behind war. Even the tiniest minutiae count on the battlefield, and Roach leads us through her discoveries in her inimitable style.\" \u2015 Elle \"Our most consistently entertaining science journalist\u2026Roach goes where other writers wouldn\u2019t dare\u2026.And her search produces images\u2015a kind of technopoetry\u2015that are hard to forget.\" \u2015 O Magazine \"[Roach] takes on the challenges the military faces to keep its fighters safe and healthy with her trademark flair (and zingy footnotes).\" \u2015 Entertainment Weekly \"Roach is a tenacious investigative journalist with an appetite for the unappetizing... Grunt ranks high in the Roach repertoire.\" \u2015 USA Today \"Mary Roach\u2019s latest bit of brilliance\u2026.As meticulously researched, beautifully written, and disturbingly funny as her previous books\u2026 Grunt examines the science behind war, as well as the researchers who are leading the charge in these state-of- the-art developments. Roach\u2019s prose is a triumph\u2015an engaging blend of anecdote, research, and reflection.\" \u2015 Boston Globe \"[Roach] writes exquisitely about the excruciating\u2026.wildly informative and vividly written\" \u2015 Los Angeles Times \"Nobody does weird science quite like [Roach], and this time, she takes on war. Though all her books look at the human body in extreme situations (sex! space! death!), this isn\u2019t simply a blood-drenched affair. Instead, Roach looks at the unexpected things that take place behind the scenes.\" \u2015 Wired \"Roach...applies her tenacious reporting and quirky point of view to efforts by scientists to conquer some of the soldier\u2019s worst enemies.\" \u2015 Seattle Times \"Extremely likable\u2026and quick with a quip\u2026.[Roach\u2019s] skill is to draw out the good humor and honesty of both the subjects and practitioners of these white arts among the dark arts of war.\" \u2015 San Francisco Chronicle \"Covering these topics and more, Roach has done a fascinating job of portraying unexpected, creative sides of military science.\" \u2015 New York Post About the Author Mary Roach is the author of five best-selling works of nonfiction, including Grunt , Stiff , and, most recently, Fuzz . Her writing has appeared in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine , among other publications. She lives in Oakland, California. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0692047700", "title": "Networking with a Purpose: How I Built My Power Team, Raised 16 Million Dollars & Got On HGTV!", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Amy Mahjoory is the founder and president of Blue Ink Homes, a multi-million-dollar real estate investing company based in Chicago, IL. Prior to creating Blue Ink Homes, Amy earned her Bachelor of Arts in Supply Chain Management from Michigan State University and her Master of Business Administration majoring in Operations Management from St. Edward's University. For fourteen years, Amy worked for Dell Inc. in Austin, Texas where she became a highly recognized global leader in Procurement, Logistics and Operations Management. Amy's success can be attributed, in large part, to her team-building talents and cutting-edge business systems. She focuses on surrounding herself with some of the most dynamic and dedicated entrepreneurs, mentors, peers, employees and investors. Her strengths include strategic networking, team building, problem solving, outsourcing and raising private money. Amy has a genuine interest in helping others succeed. Most of Amy's success originates from her belief in working smarter, not harder. Amy is an expert real estate investor, entrepreneur, published author, TV personality, national real estate coach and motivational public speaker. Amy's number one goal is to provide the absolute highest level of service to her clients.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Women & Business"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 18.23}, {"asin": "0142500054", "title": "Miss Bindergarten Celebrates the 100th Day of Kindergarten (Picture Puffins)", "author": "Joseph Slate", "description": "Review Children and adults both will be delighted (\"Booklist\", starred review) The lively, rhyming text is accompanied by illustrations that reveal details worth poring over. (\"The Horn Book\") About the Author Joseph Slate , a native West Virginian, has always loved to paint and write. Mr. Slate is professor of art emeritus at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he taught for 30 years. He now lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, Patty. A Marine Air Corps veteran, he and his wife have set foot on all seven continents and traveled in 39 countries. They have lived in both Japan and Italy. Ashley Wolff is the author and/or illustrator of over 55 children\u2019s picture books including I Love My Mommy Because and I Love My Daddy Because, Stella and Roy Go Camping, Me Baby, You Baby, The Wild Little Horse, Who Took the Cookies from the Cookie Jar?, I Call My Grandma Nana and the beloved Miss Bindergarten Series. Her books have won numerous state and national awards.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0071847022", "title": "Official GRE Value Combo", "author": "Educational Testing Service", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Test Preparation", "Graduate School"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.15}], "target_asin": "0393245446"}
{"user_id": "AFMCTQ7VEDMZI5JRSGW5OTB4E5VA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0809467879", "title": "Country Baking: Delicious, Pies, Cakes, Cookies, Breads, and More for All Occasions (American Country)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 13.42}, {"asin": "0809470667", "title": "Historic Houses (American Country)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "0847815684", "title": "Traditional Country Style", "author": "Elizabeth Wilhide", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 6.1}, {"asin": "1588162850", "title": "Country Living Shortcuts to Decorating Country Style", "author": "Caroline Atkins", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Design writer Atkins compiled this deftly organized decorating guide with an eye toward infusing a homey, rustic spirit into any space. Country style, she writes, is calm, unhurried and charmingly antique (think mellowed wood, sunwashed color and natural stone). But in a nod to our harried reality, most of the book\u0092s ideas are achievable in an afternoon. Addressing a different room in each chapter, Atkins outlines design strategies from simple projects to more involved alterations, from a change of quilt to homemade wreaths to decorative moldings. Rich photographs-at least one on every page-illustrate a cozy pastoral setting through colors, fabrics, furniture and lighting. The book presents several iterations on \"country style,\" including homespun, romantic and English-cottage elegant, to diversify its suggestions, and also contains useful quick-reference panels to color palettes, windowsill herb gardens, etc.Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 24.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1561586226", "title": "Colonial Style: Creating Classic Interiors in Your Cape, Colonial, or Saltbox Home", "author": "Treena Crochet", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Nostalgia for a past that \"was simpler, somehow better\" has led to the enduring popularity of Colonial-style architecture and decor, writes Crochet ( Designer's Guide to Furniture Styles ). While new Colonial-style houses are being built across the country, older homes are being restored to their past glory. Focusing on three house styles from the 17th and 18th centuries\u2014Colonial, Cape Cod and Saltbox\u2014Crochet shows readers how such homes can retain historically accurate features while accommodating modern needs. Without being too much of a purist (she advocates knocking down interior walls if a house feels claustrophobic), Crochet stresses the importance of creating a unified look: she's particularly keen on concealing televisions, microwaves and sinks by adapting period pieces of furniture to house them. While restoration buffs will relish the book's details on such things as quirk bead molding, gunstock corner posts and strap hinges, those seeking to bring some history to a newer home will find hints on incorporating salvaged floorboards or recreating authentic-looking plaster walls and wood paneling. Although the book is generally helpful and looks beautiful, it's marred by poor editing: some writing is sloppy, and repetitions abound (must we be repeatedly told, for instance, that decorative molding was more ornate in public rooms than in kitchens and servants' quarters?). Still, Crochet's enthusiasm for her subject is evident, and her vast knowledge will please historically minded homeowners. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From the Author This book is for homeowners who appreciate the historic character of their old house, whether Colonial, Cape Cod, or Saltbox style. The numerous examples are from actual homeowners who updated their 17th or 18th century homes with a sense of the past without sacrificing modern amenities or luxuries. It is meant to inspire homeowners to learn about the inherent qualities of these older homes while making it loveable and liveable for themselves in the 21st century. About the Author This book is for homeowners who appreciate the historic character of their old house, whether Colonial, Cape Cod, or Saltbox style. The numerous examples are from actual homeowners who updated their 17th or 18th century homes with a sense of the past without sacrificing modern amenities or luxuries. It is meant to inspire homeowners to learn about the inherent qualities of these older homes while making it loveable and liveable for themselves in the 21st century. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 51.0}, {"asin": "0736429891", "title": "MONSTERS IN A BOX -", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.0}, {"asin": "1480030473", "title": "An Innocent Client (Joe Dillard Series)", "author": "Scott Pratt", "description": "Review Pratt's richly developed characters are vivid and believable, especially the strong Southern women who fight their male-dominated culture from behind a facade of vulnerability in this brilliantly executed debut. --Publisher's Weekly -- Starred ReviewIt s Scott Turow and Grisham... The opening chapter is maybe the most compelling I have read in a decade. --Ken Bruen From the Author SCOTT PRATT is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose books have sold more than six million copies. He was born in South Haven, Michigan, and grew up in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He was a veteran of the United States Air Force and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from East Tennessee State University and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Tennessee. BOOKS IN THE JOE DILLARD SERIES An Innocent Client An Innocent Client In Good Faith In Good Faith Injustice for All Injustice for All Reasonable Fear Reasonable Fear Conflict of Interest Conflict of Interest Blood Money Blood Money A Crime of Passion A Crime of Passion Judgment Cometh (And That Right Soon) Judgment Cometh (And That Right Soon) Due Process Due Process Last Resort (Coming Summer 2023) Last Resort (Coming Summer 2023) BOOKS IN THE DARREN STREET SERIES Justice Redeemed Justice Redeemed Justice Burning Justice Burning Justice Lost Justice Lost BOOKS IN THE PRESLEY CARTER SERIES Blood is Black Blood is Black BOOKS IN THE BILLY BECKETT SERIES Deep Threat Deep Threat Divine Strike Divine Strike Ripcord Ripcord Break Point Break Point Out of Bounds Out of Bounds BOOKS IN THE MILLER & STEVENS SERIES The Sins of the Mother The Sins of the Mother STANDALONES River on Fire River on Fire CHILDREN'S BOOKS An Elephant's Standing in There An Elephant's Standing in There A Ride on a Cloud A Ride on a Cloud FIND SCOTT Website:\u00a0 scottprattfiction.comContact:\u00a0 scott@scottprattfiction.com\u00a0Join our Email List: mailchi.mp/scottprattfiction/mailing-list-sign-up\u00a0Facebook (Scott Pratt): facebook.com/ScottPrattFiction\u00a0Facebook (Joe Dillard Fans): facebook.com/groups/196640251521065\u00a0Twitter: twitter.com/prattbooks\u00a0Goodreads: goodreads.com/author/show/2419708.Scott_Pratt\u00a0Instagram: Instagram.com/scottprattauthor\u00a0Bookbub: bookbub.com/authors/scott-pratt From the Inside Flap Two weeks after my birthday, I finished up a hearing on a drug case in federal court in Greeneville and had just gotten in my truck to drive back to Johnson City when I looked at my cell phone and saw a text message from Caroline: About the Author Scott Pratt was born in South Haven, Michigan, in 1956, and grew up in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He is a veteran of the United States Air Force and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from East Tennessee State University and a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Tennessee. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and four dogs. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 12.02}, {"asin": "B00CFM5FKG", "title": "Calculus- simpleNeasyBook", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 2.99}], "target_asin": "1561586226"}
{"user_id": "AEY3IYJ6N7SFADJZMMUTZHLZOKRA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0062968815", "title": "The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World", "author": "Patrik Svensson", "description": "Review \u201cA masterful narrative that is part memoir and part scientific detective story.\u201d \u2014 Smithsonian Magazine, \u201c10 Best Science Books of the Year\u201d \u201cA beguiling chronicle.\u201d \u2014 Nautilus \u201cSvensson has, quite stunningly, discovered in the natural and human history of the European eel a metaphor for his father\u2019s life and a way to explore questions of knowledge, belief and faith.\u201d \u2014 Washington Post \u201cCaptivating . . . shot through with electric current. The book\u2019s deadpan title perhaps undercuts its depth and complexity. Yes, this is a book about eels, those uncanny creatures, but in Svensson\u2019s capable hands it is also a book about obsession and mystery, about faith and science, and about the limits of knowledge . . . Like Annie Dillard and Rachel Carson, Svensson knows the best nature writing is done with emotion and drive.\u201d \u2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cFascinating.\u201d \u2014 What's Jordana Reading, Summer Reads \"Enthralling.\" \u2014 Colorado Springs Gazette \u201cNature writing at its finest. Svensson's memories of eel fishing with his father speak to the intersection of life and science, and add to its heart.\u201d \u2014 Shelf Awareness \u201cBlending a wonderfully evocative and succinct timeline of scientific discoveries about eels with a memoir of his changing relationship with his father, Svensson has produced an extremely readable book on a fish that all have heard of but few (on our side of the pond) have actually seen.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cAn unusual and beguiling guide to an unusual and beguiling animal. . . . Svensson\u2019s book, like its subject, is a strange beast: a creature of metamorphosis, a shape-shifter that moves among realms. It is a book of natural history, and a memoir about a son and his father. It is also an exploration of literature and religion and custom, and what it means to live in a world full of questions we can\u2019t always answer.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker \u201cAs much a boon to my mental life as a blow to my social one. For weeks after reading I found myself cornering people at parties to obliterate them with a machine-gun spray of eel facts. But according to The Book of Eels , I\u2019m not alone in my eelmania. . . . If you don\u2019t think of yourself as someone who might enjoy meditating on eel glory, well, I didn\u2019t either, and here I am transcribing my encounter for publication.\u201d \u2014 New York magazine \u201cCaptivating . . . The Book of Eels is, in the end, not really about eels but about life itself.\u201d \u2014 Wall Street Journal \u201cPoses questions about philosophy, the metaphysical, and the spiritual, as well as scientific issues, in a way that will stir readers. This beautifully crafted book challenges us not only to understand eels but our own selves. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cSvensson . . . melds the personal and scientific in this captivating look at the European eel. . . . Nature-loving readers will be enthralled by [his] fascinating zoological odyssey.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cInspires readers to see eels in a whole new way.\u201d \u2014 Los Angeles Times , \u201c21 New and Classic Books to Keep You in Touch with the Natural World\u201d \u201cAn account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death. . . . an intriguing natural history . . . that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cWithout a doubt, the most delicious natural history book of the decade.\u00a0Svensson\u2019s prose effortlessly undulates between his own personal experience and a thousand years of scientific inquiry.\u00a0But it\u2019s his call to conservation\u2014not just of this noble eel but of our memories both personal and cultural\u2014that truly elevates this\u00a0remarkably poignant work.\u201d \u2014 Mark Siddall,\u00a0Curator and Professor, American Museum\u00a0of Natural History \u201cA wonderful read. The story of the eel is one of the most fascinating on the planet,\u00a0but equally\u00a0fascinating is the story Patrik Svensson tells so well here about the mysteries of being.\u201d \u2014 Bernd Heinrich, author of Mind of the Raven \u201cWith lyricism and sharp clarity, Patrik Svensson lets us in on the secret dream-like world of the eel. As we move deeper into a book that intertwines beautiful nature writing with a moving memoir of a quiet father and a loyal son\u2014as well as healthy doses of philosophical thought from Aristotle to Freud\u2014we get to know one of Earth's most unknowable creatures and revel in a life so different than our own.\u201d \u2014 David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains \u201c What an amazing book.\u00a0 About eels! \u2014 a haunting and extraordinary creature. Patrik Svensson explores both their mystery and the science that has brought them into focus in the last few decades and made them seem a vivid indicator species for the health of our planet. \u201d \u2014 Robert Hass, author of Summer Snow About the Author Patrik Svensson is an arts and culture journalist at Sydsvenskan newspaper. He lives with his family in Malm\u00f6, Sweden. The Gospel of Eels is his first book.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.05}, {"asin": "1594485690", "title": "The Man Who Quit Money", "author": "Mark Sundeen", "description": "Review \"This is a beautiful, thoughtful and wonderful book. I suspect I may find myself thinking about it every day for the rest of my life.\" - Elizabeth Gilbert\"Mark Sundeen's astonishing and unsettling book goes directly to the largest questions about how we live and what we have lost in a culture obsessed with money. Sundeen tells the story of a gentle and generous man who sought the good life by deciding to live without it. What's most unsettling and astonishing is that he appears to have succeeded.\" - William Greider\"Maybe it's just this odd, precarious moment we live in, but Daniel Suelo's story seems to offer some broader clues for all of us. Mark Sundeen's account will raise subversive and interesting questions in any open mind.\" - Bill McKibben\u00a0\u201cSuelo isn\u2019t a conflicted zealot, or even a principled aesthete. He\u2019s a contented man who chooses to wander the Earth and do good. He\u2019s also someone you\u2019d want to have a beer with and hear about his life, as full of fortune and enlightenment as it is disappointment and darkness\u2026 At its core, The Man Who Quit Money is the story of a man who decided to live outside of society, and is happier for it.\u201d \u2013 Men\u2019s Journal \u201cSundeen deftly portrays [Suelo] as a likeable, oddly sage guy\u2026 who finds happiness in radical simplicity [and] personifies a critique that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt remorse on the treadmill of getting and spending.\" \u2013 Outside Magazine \u201cCaptivating\u2026 Suelo emerges as a remarkable and complex character\u2026 Sundeen brings his subject vividly to life [and] makes a case for Suelo's relevance to our time.\u201d \u2013 The Seattle Times \u201cExquisitely timed\u2026 The Man Who Quit Money is a slim, quick read that belies the weightiness underneath. The very quality that makes us see a \u201cman walking in America\u201d (Suelo\u2019s words) and be simultaneously attracted and repelled is exposed here in beautiful detail.\u201d \u2013 The Missoula Independent \u201cIn America, renunciation breaks the rules, but, as everyone evicted from Zuccotti Park or bludgeoned at Berkeley or just steamed in-between knows, the rules require breaking. Sundeen\u2026 sets out to understand the process and logic behind a money-free lifestyle while tracing the spiritual, psychological, physical, and philosophical quest that led this particular man to throw over our society\u2019s arguably counterfeit-yet-prevailing faith in money, or, more precisely, in debt.\u201d \u2013 The Rumpus \u201cA fascinating subject\u2026 both resonant as a character study and infinitely thought-provoking in its challenge to all our preconceptions about modern life\u2014and about the small and large hypocrisies people of all philosophies and religious paths assume they need to accept.\u201d \u2013 The Salt Lake City Weekly \u201cThoughtful and engrossing biography that also explores society\u2019s fixation with financial and material rewards...Although few readers will even consider emulating Suelo\u2019s scavenger lifestyle, his example will at least provoke some serious soul-searching about our collective addiction to cash.\u201d \u2013 Booklist About the Author Mark Sundeen is an award-winning writer whose nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and The Believer. He is the author of Car Camping (HarperCollins, 2000) and The Making of Toro (Simon & Schuster, 2003), and co-author of North by Northwestern (St. Martin's, 2010), which was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has taught fiction and nonfiction in the MFA programs at the University of New Mexico and Western Connecticut State University. He lives in Montana and Utah.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Personal Finance"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "110198161X", "title": "The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century", "author": "Kirk W. Johnson", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of May 2018: The title of The Feather Thief smartly echoes Susan Orleans' The Orchid Thief , and The Feather Thief has good reason to compare itself to such an admired book. Strange niches of history. Obsessives who refuse to adhere to the law. A writer who stumbles upon a story that becomes an obsession in its own right. All these elements combust to create Johnson's investigation into the theft of 299 rare bird skins from a British natural history museum. While bird skins might sound like (ahem) dry reading, Johnson knows just how to fascinate the reader, plunging with vigor into exotic bird exploration, the crackdown on rare bird trafficking, and the insular world of fly-tying enthusiasts, all of which lead, almost inevitably, to the theft from the Tring Museum. The most likely receivers of the stolen goods? Fly-tiers with an unquenchable thirst for feathers from blue chatterers, the resplendent quetzal, and birds of paradise so they can re-create outlandish Victorian-era salmon flies. Although the thief is caught, Johnson decides to investigate himself what happened to the 106 never-recovered bird skins, pulling the reader even deeper into the thief's bizarre world. Clever, informative, and sometimes endearingly bumbling, this mix of natural history and crime opens up new worlds. You'll never look at a stuffed bird the same way again. \u2014Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review Review \u201cFascinating . . . a complex tale of greed, deception, and ornithological sabotage.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cFascinating from the first page to the last\u2014you won\u2019t be able to put it down.\u201d \u2014 Southern Living \u201cA fascinating book . . . the kind of intelligent reported account that alerts us to a threat and that, one hopes, will never itself be endangered.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \u201cThrilling . . . This book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set.\u201d\u2014 Paris Review , \u201cStaff Picks\u201d \u201cJohnson, like Susan Orlean before him, is a magnifier: he sees grand themes\u2014na\u00efvet\u00e9, jealousy, depression, the entitlement of man . . . That vision makes a book about things like Victorian salmon fly tiers feel heavy as gold.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker , \u201cWhat We\u2019re Reading This Summer\u201d\u201c[A] true-crime caper recounted with relish.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 O, The Oprah Magazine , \u201c10 Titles to Pick Up Now\u201d\u201cVivid and arresting . . . Johnson [is] a wonderfully assured writer.\u201d \u2014 The Times (London)\u201cOne of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever. . . . Johnson is an intrepid journalist . . . [with] a fine knack for uncovering details that reveal, captivate, and disturb.\u201d\u2014 Christian Science Monitor \u201cAn uncommon book . . . \u00a0[that] informs and enlightens. . . A heist story that manages to underline the enduring and continuing importance of natural history collections and their incredible value to science. We need more books like this one.\u201d \u2014 Science \u201cThe best compliment I can give a nonfiction writer is that they make me care deeply about an obscure topic I would otherwise never have been interested in. That\u2019s the case with Kirk Wallace Johnson\u2019s The Feather Thief .\u201d \u2014 Eva Holland, Outside , \u201cThe Best Summer Books\u201d \u201cA fascinating account of a bizarre crime . . . The Feather Thief is one of the more peculiar and gripping crime stories in recent memory.\u201d \u2014 LitHub CrimeReads, \u201cThe Essential True Crime Books of Spring 2018\u201d \u201cJohnson succeeds in conveying the gravity of this natural-history 'heist of the century,' and one of The Feather Thief \u2019s greatest strengths is the excitement, horror, and amazement it evokes. It\u2019s nonfiction that reads like fiction, with plenty of surprising moments.\u201d \u2014 Outside \u201cA riveting read.\u201d \u2014 Nature \u201cA literary police sketch\u2014part natural history yarn, part detective story, part the stuff of tragedy.\u201d \u2014 Smithsonian \u201cWithin pages I was hooked. This is a weird and wonderful book . . . Johnson is a master of pacing and suspense . . . It\u2019s a tribute to [his] storytelling gifts that when I turned the last page I felt bereft.\u201d \u2014Maggie Fergusson, The Spectator (London)\u201cA riveting story about mankind\u2019s undeniable desire to own nature\u2019s beauty and a spellbinding examination of obsession, greed, and justice . . .[told] in engrossing detail. . . . A\u00a0gripping page-turner.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Bustle \u201cEnthralling.\u201d \u2014 HelloGiggles \u201cRichly informative, with handy illustrations, endlessly fascinating and crackingly entertaining, The Feather Thief is the kind of true-crime narrative that gives Erik Larson's much-lauded The Devil in the White\u00a0City a run for the money.\u201d \u2014 Shelf Awareness \u201cHighly entertaining . . . journalism at its best . . . If you know nothing about fly-fishing or tying, it doesn\u2019t matter, as long as you like a well-written story.\u201d \u2014Karen Gallagher, The Baltimore Sun 's Roughly Speaking podcast\u201cReads like a whodunit . . . I could not put it down.\u201d\u2014Tom Rosenbauer, The\u00a0Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast \u201cThis is the type of book I absolutely love \u2013 one that takes a seemingly obscure topic and shines a brilliant and bizarre and endlessly fascinating light upon it. The crime itself is riveting, but Kirk Wallace Johnson\u2019s portrayal of the crazy world of feather fanatics makes this an unforgettable read.\u201d\u2014Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods \u201cCaptivating...Everything the author touches in this thoroughly engaging true-crime tale turns to storytelling gold. . . . Johnson's flair for telling an engrossing story is, like the beautiful birds he describes, exquisite. . . . A superb tale about obsession, nature, and man's \u2018unrelenting desire to lay claim to its beauty, whatever the cost.\u2019\u201d \u2014Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review\u201c[An]\u00a0enthralling account of a truly bizarre crime. . . . Johnson goes deep into the exotic bird and feather trade and concludes that though obsession and greed know no bounds, they certainly make for a fascinating tale. The result is a page-turner that will likely appeal to science, history, and true crime readers.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly, Starred Review\u201cA remarkably compelling story of obsession and history.\u201d \u2014 Booklist, Starred Review\u201cYou'll never look at a feather the same way again after reading this riveting detective story . . . [ The Feather Thief ] brilliantly weaves together Alfred Russel Wallace, the surprisingly shadowy history of fly fishing, conservation and the plumage of the most beautiful birds on earth.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 The Bookseller (UK) \u201cA true-crime tale that weaves seemingly unrelated threads\u2014a museum break-in; the development of evolutionary theory; a case of post-Iraq PTSD; endangered birds; and (above all) the murky underworld of fly-tying obsessives\u2014into a spellbinding narrative tapestry.\u201d  \u2014Mark Adams, author of Turn Right at Machu Picchu \u201c A captivating tale of an unlikely thief and his even more unlikely crime, and a meditation on obsession, greed, and the sheer fascination in something as seemingly simple as a feather.\u201d\u2014Paul Collins, author of The Murder of the Century \u201cA stirring examination of the devastating effects of human greed on endangered birds, a powerful argument for protecting our environment\u2014and, above all, a captivating crime story.\u201d\u2014Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees \u201cThis gem of a book, about a heist of archival birds, is marvelous, moving, and transcendent. I can\u2019t stop thinking about it.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara and The Feud \u201cThis extraordinary book exposes an international underground that traffics in rare and precious natural resources, yet was previously unknown to all but a few. A page-turning read you won\u2019t soon forget, The Feather Thief tells us as much about our cultural priorities as it does about the crimes themselves. There\u2019s never been anything like it.\u201d\u00a0  \u2014Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs About the Author Kirk W. Johnson is the author of To Be a Friend Is Fatal and the founder of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times , The Washington Post , and the Los Angeles Times , among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Berlin, and the USC Annenberg Center. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PROLOGUE By the time Edwin Rist stepped off the train onto the platform at Tring, forty \u00a0miles north of London, it was already quite late. The residents of the sleepy town had finished their suppers; the\u00a0little ones were in bed. As he began the long walk into town, the Midland line glided off into darkness. A few hours earlier Edwin had performed in the Royal Academy of Music\u2019s \u201cLondon Soundscapes,\u201d a celebration of Hayden, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Before the concert, he\u2019d packed a pair of latex gloves, a miniature LED flashlight, a wire cutter, and a diamond-blade glass cutter in a large rolling suitcase, and stowed it in his concert hall locker. He bore a passing resemblance to a lanky Pete Townshend: intense eyes, prominent nose, and a mop of hair, although instead of shredding a Fender, Edwin played the flute. There was a new moon that evening, making the already-gloomy stretch of road even darker. For nearly an hour, he dragged his suit- case through the mud and gravel skirting the road, under gnarly old trees strangled with \u00a0ivy. Turlhanger\u2019s\u00a0 Wood \u00a0slept to the north, Chestnut Wood to the south, fallow fields and the occasional \u00a0copse in between. A car blasted by, its headlights blinding. Adrenaline coursing, he knew he was getting close. The entrance to the market town of Tring is guarded by a sixteenth-century pub called the Robin Hood. A few roads beyond, nestled between the old Tring Brewery and an HSBC branch, lies the entrance to Public Footpath 37. Known to locals as Bank Alley, the footpath isn\u2019t more than eight feet wide and is framed by seven-foot-high brick walls. Edwin slipped into the alley, into total darkness. He groped his way along until he was standing directly behind the building he\u2019d spent months casing. All that separated him from it was the wall. Capped with three rusted \u00a0strands of barbed wire, it might \u00a0have \u00a0thwarted his plans were it not for the wire cutter. After clearing an opening, he lifted the suitcase to the ledge, hoisted himself up, and glanced anxiously about. \u00a0No sign of the guard. There was a space of several feet between his perch on the wall and the building\u2019s nearest window, forming a small ravine. If he fell, he could injure himself\u2014or worse, make\u00a0 a clamor that would \u00a0summon security. But he\u2019d known this part wouldn\u2019t be easy. Crouched on \u00a0top \u00a0of the \u00a0wall, \u00a0he reached \u00a0toward the \u00a0window with the glass cutter and began to grind it along the pane. Cutting glass was harder \u00a0than \u00a0he had anticipated, though, and as he struggled to carve an opening, the glass cutter slipped from his hand and fell into the ravine. His mind raced. Was this a sign? He was think- ing about \u00a0bailing \u00a0on the whole\u00a0 crazy scheme when\u00a0 that voice, the one that\u00a0 had urged him onward these past months, shouted Wait a minute! You can\u2019t give up now. You\u2019ve come all this way! He crawled \u00a0back down \u00a0and picked up a rock. Steadying himself atop the wall, he peered around in search of guards before bashing the window \u00a0out, wedging his suitcase through the shard-strewn opening, \u00a0and climbing into the British Natural History Museum. Unaware that he had just tripped an alarm in the security guard\u2019s office, Edwin pulled out the LED light, which cast a faint glow in front of him as he made his way down the hallways toward the vault, just as he\u2019d rehearsed in his mind.  He wheeled his suitcase quietly through corridor after corridor, drawing \u00a0ever closer to the most beautiful \u00a0things he had ever seen. If he pulled this off, they would bring him fame, wealth, and prestige. They would solve his problems. He deserved them. He entered \u00a0the vault, its hundreds of large white steel cabinets standing in rows like sentries, \u00a0and got to work. He pulled out the first drawer, catching a waft of mothballs. Quivering \u00a0beneath \u00a0his fingertips were a dozen Red-ruffed Fruitcrows, gathered\u00a0 by natural- ists and biologists \u00a0over hundreds of years from the forests and jungles of South America and fastidiously preserved \u00a0by generations of curators for the benefit of future research. Their coppery-orange feathers glimmered despite the faint light. Each bird, maybe a foot and a half from beak to tail, lay on its back in funerary repose, eye sockets filled with cotton, feet folded close against \u00a0the body. Tied around their legs were biodata labels: faded, handwritten records of the date, altitude, latitude, and \u00a0longitude of their capture, along with other vital details. He unzipped the suitcase and began filling it with the birds, emptying one drawer after another. The occidentalis subspecies that he snatched \u00a0by the handful had been gathered a century earlier from the Quind\u00edo Andes region of western Colombia. He didn\u2019t know exactly how many he\u2019d be able to fit into his suitcase, but he managed forty-seven of the museum\u2019s forty-eight male specimens before wheeling his bag on to the next cabinet. Down in the security office, the guard was fixated on a small television screen. Engrossed in a soccer match, he hadn\u2019t yet noticed the alarm indicator blinking on a nearby panel. Edwin opened \u00a0the next cabinet \u00a0to reveal dozens of Resplendent Quetzal \u00a0skins gathered \u00a0in the 1880s from the Chiriqu\u00ed cloud forests of western Panama, \u00a0a species now threatened by widespread deforestation and protected by international treaties. At nearly four feet in length, the birds were particularly difficult to stuff into his suitcase, but he maneuvered thirty-nine of them inside by gently curling their sweeping tails into tight coils. \u00a0 Moving down the corridor, he swung open the doors of another cabinet, this one housing species of the Cotinga birds of South and Central \u00a0America. He swiped fourteen one-hundred-year-old skins of the Lovely Cotinga, a small turquoise bird with a reddish-purple breast endemic to Central America, before relieving the museum of thirty-seven specimens of the Purple-breasted Cotinga, twenty-one skins of the Spangled Cotinga, and another ten skins of the endangered Banded Cotinga, of which as few as 250 mature individuals are estimated to be alive today.The Gal\u00e1pagos island finches and mockingbirds gathered by Charles Darwin in 1835 during \u00a0the voyage of the HMS Beagle\u2014 which had been instrumental in developing \u00a0his theory of evolution through natural selection\u2014were resting in nearby drawers. Among the museum\u2019s most valuable holdings were skeletons and skins of extinct birds, including the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon, along with an elephant-folio edition of John James Audubon\u2019s The Birds of America . Overall, the museum houses one of the world\u2019s largest collection of ornithological specimens: 750,000 bird skins, 15,000 skeletons, 17,000 birds preserved in spirit, 4,000 nests, and 400,000 sets of eggs, gathered over the centuries from the world\u2019s most remote forests, mountainsides, jungles, and swamps. But Edwin hadn\u2019t broken into the museum for a drab-colored finch. He had lost track of how long he\u2019d been in the vault when he finally wheeled his suitcase to a stop before a large cabinet. A small plaque indicated its contents: paradisaeidae. Thirty-seven \u00a0King Birds of Paradise, swiped in seconds. Twenty-four Magnificent Rifle-birds. Twelve Superb Birds of Paradise. Four Blue Birds of Paradise. Seventeen Flame Bowerbirds. These flawless specimens, gathered against almost impossible odds from virgin forests of New Guinea and the \u00a0Malay Archipelago 150 years earlier, went into Edwin\u2019s bag, their tags bearing the name of a self-taught naturalist whose breakthrough had given Darwin the scare of his life: a. r. wallace.  \u00a0 \u00a0 The guard glanced at the CCTV feed, an array of shots of the parking lot and the museum campus. He began his round, pacing the hallways, checking the doors, scanning for anything awry Edwin had long since lost count of the number of birds that passed through his hands. He had originally planned to choose only the best of each species, but in the excitement of the plunder, he grabbed and stuffed until his suitcase could hold no more. The guard stepped outside to begin a perimeter check, glancing up at the windows \u00a0and beaming his flashlight on the section abutting the brick wall of Bank Alley. Edwin stood before the broken window, now framed with shards of glass. So far everything had gone according to plan, with the exception of the missing glass cutter. All that remained was to climb back out of the window without slicing himself open, and melt into the anonymity of the street. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Industries"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 21.49}, {"asin": "1560374462", "title": "Charles Fritz, the Complete Collection: 100 Paintings Illustrating the Journals of Lewis and Clark", "author": "Charles Fritz", "description": "Review If Lewis and Clark had selected an artist to accompany them on their historic journey, no doubt they would have chosen a painter with a keen eye and an adventurous spirit---someone like Charles Fritz. -- -B. Byron Price, director, Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West, University of OklahomaOne of the most frequently asked questions on the planning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition concerns Jefferson's failure to send a professional artist with the Corps. Now, thanks to a carefully researched and historically accurate series of paintings by Montana artist Charles Fritz, Americans have the opportunity to see what Lewis and Clark observed, what they looked like, and the people they met on their way to the Pacific. This is a rare chance to step back in time and appreciate Lewis and Clark's experiences from 1804 to 1806. -- -Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the best-selling book Undaunted Courage With the completion of Charles Fritz's monumental project, a huge void has been filled! Through the eyes of a gifted and dedicated American artist, we now have a view of the world of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. This book will hold a special place in the William Clark family library, and it is a must for any serious student of Lewis and Clark or anyone who appreciates the adventure and magic of early Western exploration. -- -Peyton C. Bud Clark, great, great, great grandson of Captain William ClarkOne of the most frequently asked questions on the planning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition concerns Jefferson's failure to send a professional artist with the Corps. Now, thanks to a carefully researched and historically accurate series of paintings by Montana artist Charles Fritz, Americans have the opportunity to see what Lewis and Clark observed, what they looked like, and the people they met on their way to the Pacific. This is a rare chance to step back in time and appreciate Lewis and Clark's experiences from 1804 to 1806. -- -Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the best-selling book Undaunted Courage With the completion of Charles Fritz's monumental project, a huge void has been filled! Through the eyes of a gifted and dedicated American artist, we now have a view of the world of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. This book will hold a special place in the William Clark family library, and it is a must for any serious student of Lewis and Clark or anyone who appreciates the adventure and magic of early Western exploration. -- -Peyton C. Bud Clark, great, great, great grandson of Captain William ClarkOne of the most frequently asked questions on the planning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition concerns Jefferson's failure to send a professional artist with the Corps. Now, thanks to a carefully researched and historically accurate series of paintings by Montana artist Charles Fritz, Americans have the opportunity to see what Lewis and Clark observed, what they looked like, and the people they met on their way to the Pacific. This is a rare chance to step back in time and appreciate Lewis and Clark's experiences from 1804 to 1806. -- -Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the best-selling book Undaunted Courage With the completion of Charles Fritz's monumental project, a huge void has been filled! Through the eyes of a gifted and dedicated American artist, we now have a view of the world of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. This book will hold a special place in the William Clark family library, and it is a must for any serious student of Lewis and Clark or anyone who appreciates the adventure and magic of early Western exploration. -- -Peyton C. Bud Clark, great, great, great grandson of Captain William ClarkOne of the most frequently asked questions on the planning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition concerns Jefferson's failure to send a professional artist with the Corps. Now, thanks to a carefully researched and historically accurate series of paintings by Montana artist Charles Fritz, Americans have the opportunity to see what Lewis and Clark observed, what they looked like, and the people they met on their way to the Pacific. This is a rare chance to step back in time and appreciate Lewis and Clark's experiences from 1804 to 1806. -- -Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the best-selling book Undaunted Courage With the completion of Charles Fritz's monumental project, a huge void has been filled! Through the eyes of a gifted and dedicated American artist, we now have a view of the world of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. This book will hold a special place in the William Clark family library, and it is a must for any serious student of Lewis and Clark or anyone who appreciates the adventure and magic of early Western exploration. -- -Peyton C. Bud Clark, great, great, great grandson of Captain William Clark From the Back Cover Charles Fritz: 100 Paintings Illustrating the Journals of Lewis and Clark unites exquisite Western art with one of our nation's greatest epics. The result of a decade of comprehensive research and on-location painting, this expanded collection of 100 paintings depicts the triumphs and travails of the Corps of Discovery's two-and-a-half-year trek through unknown territory to the Pacific Ocean and back between 1804 and 1806. Although several members of the Corps of Discovery kept journals, an artist did not accompany the expedition. Unlike almost every expedition since, there had been no one to visually document the unique people, landscapes, animals, and plants never before seen by Americans living in the East. With artistry and a passion for historical accuracy, Charles Fritz, one of the nation's most respected Western artists, brings the Journals of Lewis and Clark to life, telling this remarkable American story visually-and for the first time allowing us to experience what the Corps saw on their historic journey. About the Author Charles Fritz grew up in Mason City, Iowa, and studied history and education at Iowa State University in Ames. His luminous paintings of the West have been included in many museum exhibitions across the country, including the Albuquerque Museum; Artists of America; Great American Masters; Denver Art Museum: Gilcrease Museum; Prix de West Exhibition, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; C.M. Russell Museum; and the Salmagundi Club. His work has been featured in many magazines, periodicals, and books, including Donald Hagerty's Leading the West: One Hundred Contemporary Painters and Sculptors and Canyon de Chelly: 100 Years of Painting and Photography . Fritz resides in Billings, Montana, with his wife, Joan, and their sons, Isaac and Erik. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "B01K3GGXA6", "title": "In Pursuit of Birds: A Foray with Field Glasses and Sketchbook by Ladislav R Hanka (2015-08-02)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 25.0}, {"asin": "0299294544", "title": "Field Guide to Wisconsin Streams: Plants, Fishes, Invertebrates, Amphibians, and Reptiles", "author": "Ron Dolen", "description": "Review \"Great illustrations, clear and practical information, and breadth of coverage make this guide a winner. It will be a go-to resource for amateurs and professionals drawn to Wisconsin's streams.\"\u2014Emily Stanley, University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison\u201cWell-done field guide filled with an abundance of photographs and line drawings. . . . The book is small and lightweight, making it convenient for use in the field. . . . Will benefit any amateur or professional in the field, particularly because of the many helpful images.\u201d\u2014 Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine e \u201cAccessible for the professional biologist, as well as schoolteachers wanting students to identify stream life, or the general public interested in stream ecology. . . . Useful throughout the region as ranges of many of the species and taxonomic groups covered in this guide cross state lines into . . . Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, or Iowa.\u201d\u2014 Ecological Restoration About the Author Michael A. Miller is a stream ecologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources whose professional interests include watershed and stream ecology and management. Katie Songer is an environmental scientist, educator, and writer who has worked with AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Ron Dolen is an environmental scientist and educator who has conducted watershed studies and trained citizen volunteer stream monitors at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Earth Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 990.0}, {"asin": "0671661949", "title": "Trout Magic", "author": "Robert Traver", "description": "About the Author John D. Voelker, also known by his pen name Robert Traver, was a noted lawyer, author and fly fisherman from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Born and raised in Ishpeming, he later attended the University of Michigan Law School.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Miscellaneous"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.79}, {"asin": "1493026208", "title": "Orvis From Lure to Fly: Fly Fishing for Spinning and Baitcast Anglers", "author": "Dave Karczynski", "description": "Review \"Dave Karczynski could write about a puddle of mud drying out and make it interesting. When his work crosses my desk, I read it right now. And it's always a treat.\" -- Greg Thomas, former Editor, Fly Rod & Reel\"No matter how old you are, coming to fly fishing from conventional fishing is, in my opinion, the best education you can have for fly fishing. (In fact, some of the very best saltwater fly anglers I know started as commercial fishermen). You are already more than halfway there. Fly fishing is not some arcane black art. It's just another way of sticking a hook in a fish's mouth. You are about to join someone I think you'll come to feel is your fishing buddy. Dave will take you on a journey without condescension, and will explain all the silly fly-fishing jargon. He'll reference similarities and differences to conventional fishing. He speaks your language. And I totally agree with Dave's philosophy of starting with panfish. Everybody associates fly fishing with trout, but if you begin fly fishing by chasing trout you will quickly become discouraged and frustrated. Trout are hard to catch, unless you find wilderness brook trout or cutthroats that have seen minimal fishing pressure. So take fly-rod fishing in the order he presents it here. Don't be impatient. You have the rest of your life to enjoy fly fishing alongside all the other methods of fishing you enjoy.\" -- Tom Rosenbauer, author of The Orvis Fly-Fishing Guide and a marketing manager with the Orvis Company in Manchester, Vermont, from the Foreword--Tom Rosenbauer, Author and Orvis Marketing Director, from the Foreword About the Author Dave Karczynski is a writer and photographer specializing in sporting culture and narrative. Whether it\u2019s the glacial rivers of the Himalayan outback or the high country lakes of the Polish Carpathians, deep wild country is where Dave feels most at home. A former Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan and recipient of the 2012 Robert Traver Award for outdoor writing, he is a regular contributor to Outdoor Life, Fly Rod & Reel, The Drake, and many other magazines. In addition to Orvis From Lure to Fly, Dave is also the co-author of Modern Smallmouth: Modern Tactics, Tips and Techniques. When not on the water or in the woods, Dave teaches creative writing and photography at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Hunting & Fishing"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 24.6}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1510713700", "title": "Trout Tips: More than 250 fly-fishing tips from the members of Trout Unlimited", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.91}, {"asin": "0470390042", "title": "The First-Year Teacher's Checklist: A Quick Reference for Classroom Success", "author": "Julia G. Thompson", "description": "Review \"Thompson's work helps beginning teachers?even those with no prior teaching experience?to understand the basics of effective teaching. The First Year Teacher's Checklist makes it easy for educators who are just starting out to understand what it will take to become a successful teacher. I will definitely make this book required reading for my teacher interns.\" ?Bill Snead, director of Alternative Certification Programs, Harris County Department of Education, Houston, Texas \"A must-have resource for new teachers and interns. Easy to read, discuss, and implement, it will improve your instruction along with helping you manage your to-do lists, your classrooms, and all of the new tasks and items involved with your first year of teaching. Keep it handy!\" ?Mike Rogers, president, EverythingAboutLearning.com, a PEAK Learning Systems Company \"New teachers and those who support their success will thrive on Julia's succinct delineation of the daily business of teaching.\" ?Layne Ferguson, teacher development specialist, Department of Teacher Leadership and Professional Development, Prince George's County Public Schools, Maryland Review \"Thompson's work helps beginning teachers?even those with no prior teaching experience?to understand the basics of effective teaching. The First Year Teacher's Checklist makes it easy for educators who are just starting out to understand what it will take to become a successful teacher. I will definitely make this book required reading for my teacher interns.\" ?Bill Snead, director of Alternative Certification Programs, Harris County Department of Education, Houston, Texas \"A must-have resource for new teachers and interns. Easy to read, discuss, and implement, it will improve your instruction along with helping you manage your to-do lists, your classrooms, and all of the new tasks and items involved with your first year of teaching. Keep it handy!\" ?Mike Rogers, president, EverythingAboutLearning.com, a PEAK Learning Systems Company \"New teachers and those who support their success will thrive on Julia's succinct delineation of the daily business of teaching.\" ?Layne Ferguson, teacher development specialist, Department of Teacher Leadership and Professional Development, Prince George's County Public Schools, Maryland From the Inside Flap The First-Year Teacher's Checklist This easy-to-use reference\u2014with hundreds of helpful, classroom-tested answers, ideas, techniques, and teaching tools\u2014will help you on your way to a successful and productive school year. Designed to be flexible, the book offers a choice of ideas and approaches that best fit your classroom situation. Master teacher Julia Thompson shows you how to: Develop successful relationships with students, colleagues, administrators, and parents Develop successful relationships with students, colleagues, administrators, and parents Manage professional responsibilities and develop career skills Manage professional responsibilities and develop career skills Create an orderly classroom where students are courteous and respectful Create an orderly classroom where students are courteous and respectful Motivate students to become independent learners Motivate students to become independent learners Use proven strategies to prevent misbehavior Use proven strategies to prevent misbehavior Design instruction that will appeal to every student Design instruction that will appeal to every student Set up a classroom for maximum comfort and learning Set up a classroom for maximum comfort and learning Thrive in the world of high-stakes testing Thrive in the world of high-stakes testing \"Thompson's work helps beginning teachers\u2014even those with no prior teaching experience\u2014to understand the basics of effective teaching. The First Year Teacher's Checklist makes it easy for educators who are just starting out to understand what it will take to become a successful teacher. I will definitely make this book required reading for my teacher interns.\" \u2014 BILL SNEAD , director of Alternative Certification Programs, Harris County Department of Education, Houston, Texas \"A must-have resource for new teachers and interns. Easy to read, discuss, and implement, it will improve your instruction along with helping you manage your to-do lists, your classrooms, and all of the new tasks and items involved with your first year of teaching. Keep it handy!\"  \u2014 MIKE ROGERS , president, EverythingAboutLearning.com, a PEAK Learning Systems Company \"New teachers and those who support their success will thrive on Julia's succinct delineation of the daily business of teaching.\" \u2014 LAYNE FERGUSON, teacher development specialist, Department of Teacher Leadership and Professional Development, Prince George's County Public Schools, Maryland From the Back Cover The First-Year Teacher's Checklist This easy-to-use reference\u0097with hundreds of helpful, classroom-tested answers, ideas, techniques, and teaching tools\u0097will help you on your way to a successful and productive school year. Designed to be flexible, the book offers a choice of ideas and approaches that best fit your classroom situation. Master teacher Julia Thompson shows you how to: Develop successful relationships with students, colleagues, administrators, and parents Develop successful relationships with students, colleagues, administrators, and parents Manage professional responsibilities and develop career skills Manage professional responsibilities and develop career skills Create an orderly classroom where students are courteous and respectful Create an orderly classroom where students are courteous and respectful Motivate students to become independent learners Motivate students to become independent learners Use proven strategies to prevent misbehavior Use proven strategies to prevent misbehavior Design instruction that will appeal to every student Design instruction that will appeal to every student Set up a classroom for maximum comfort and learning Set up a classroom for maximum comfort and learning Thrive in the world of high-stakes testing Thrive in the world of high-stakes testing \"Thompson's work helps beginning teachers\u0097even those with no prior teaching experience\u0097to understand the basics of effective teaching. The First Year Teacher's Checklist makes it easy for educators who are just starting out to understand what it will take to become a successful teacher. I will definitely make this book required reading for my teacher interns.\" \u0097 BILL SNEAD , director of Alternative Certification Programs, Harris County Department of Education, Houston, Texas \"A must-have resource for new teachers and interns. Easy to read, discuss, and implement, it will improve your instruction along with helping you manage your to-do lists, your classrooms, and all of the new tasks and items involved with your first year of teaching. Keep it handy!\"  \u0097 MIKE ROGERS , president, EverythingAboutLearning.com, a PEAK Learning Systems Company \"New teachers and those who support their success will thrive on Julia's succinct delineation of the daily business of teaching.\" \u0097 LAYNE FERGUSON, teacher development specialist, Department of Teacher Leadership and Professional Development, Prince George's County Public Schools, Maryland About the Author Julia G. Thompson has been a public school teacher for more than 25 years. An active speaker, consultant, and teacher trainer, she publishes a website (juliagthompson.com) offering tips for teachers on a wide variety of topics. Thompson is the bestselling author of The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide and Discipline Survival Kit for the Secondary Teacher . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 19.73}, {"asin": "1598639056", "title": "David Busch's Nikon D90 Guide to Digital SLR Photography (David Busch's Digital Photography Guides)", "author": "David D. Busch", "description": "About the Author With more than a million books in print, David D. Busch is the world's #1 selling digital camera guide author, and the originator of popular digital photography series like David Busch's Pro Secrets and David Busch's Quick Snap Guides. He has written more than a dozen hugely successful guidebooks for Canon and Canon digital SLR models, as well as many popular books devoted to dSLRs, including Mastering Digital SLR Photography, Second Edition, and Digital SLR Pro Secrets. As a roving photojournalist for more than twenty years, he illustrated his books, magazine articles, and newspaper reports with award-winning images. He's operated his own commercial studio, suffocated in formal dress while shooting weddings-for-hire, and shot sports for a daily newspaper and upstate New York college. His photos and articles have appeared in Popular Photography & Imaging, The Rangefinder, The Professional Photographer, and hundreds of other publications. He has also reviewed dozens of digital cameras for CNet and Computer Shopper, and his advice has been featured in National Public Radio's \"All Tech Considered.\" When About.com named its top five books on Beginning Digital Photography, debuting at the #1 and #2 slots were Busch's Digital Photography All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies and Mastering Digital Photography. During the past year, he's had as many as five of his books listed in the Top 20 of Amazon.com's Digital Photography Bestseller list--simultaneously! Busch's 120-plus other books published since 1983 include bestsellers like David Busch's Quick Snap Guide to Digital SLR Lenses. Visit his website at http://www.dslrguides.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Photography & Video"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 29.33}, {"asin": "0062267752", "title": "Simpsons Comics Colossal Compendium Volume 1 (Simpsons Comic Compilations)", "author": "Matt Groening", "description": "About the Author Matt Groening, the creator and executive producer of the Emmy \u00ae Award-winning series The Simpsons , as well as creator of the cartoon strip \"Life in Hell\" and the animated FOX television series Futurama , is the man responsible for bringing animation back to primetime and creating an immortal nuclear family. In addition, Groening formed Bongo Comics Group in 1993 and currently serves as publisher of The Simpsons Library of Wisdom, Simpsons Episode Guides, Simpsons Comics, Bart Simpson Comics, Radioactive Man Comics, Simpsons Comics Treasure Trove, the annual Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror, Futurama Comics and more than 36 comic compilations, as well as many instant classics including Bart Simpsons Guide to Life , The Simpsons Handbook and The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album .", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.49}], "target_asin": "1510713700"}
{"user_id": "AEW7CNPNLXKLFJTV64BABKLPK4EQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "067168387X", "title": "Gone With the Wind: The Definitive Illustrated History of the Book, the Movie and the Legend", "author": "Herb Bridges", "description": "About the Author Herb Bridges is the world's leading authority on Gone With the Wind and has amassed the world's largest collection of GWTW memorabilia. Along with Terryl C. Boodman, he is co-editor of Gone With the Wind: The Screenplay. He has published three other books about the movie, The Filming of Gone With the Wind, Frankly, My Dear..., and Scarlet Fever. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE The Legend In the spring of 1936, a new novel blew onto the American scene with the force of a hurricane -- Gone With the Wind. Essentially the story of a willful girl and the people around her during and after the Civil War, the book was an overnight sensation, selling a million copies and commanding thirty-one printings in its first year of publication. People were crazy about GWTW, as it soon became known. The first printing sold out almost as fast as it rolled off the presses. Eager fans thronged around its author each time she set foot on a city street, as if she were a movie star, while the press beat a path to her door and never left it. GWTW had arrived. Now, more than fifty years later, it is still popular. Readers are just as apt now, as then, to discover it sold out in bookstores and already checked out in libraries. What was the mind behind Gone With the Wind? How was a work of such enduring popularity created? To know that, one must know its author, Margaret Mitchell. And to know her, one must slip back in time. Atlanta, Georgia, 1900. The War Between the States had been waged and lost only thirty-five years earlier and was still a fresh and vivid memory. In the gracious homes that lined Peachtree Street and the shanties along Decatur Street still lived the survivors of a conflict that had already taken permanent root in the collective consciousness of the South and flourished. Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8 of that year, the fifth generation of her family to proudly call themselves Atlantans, steeped in the legends of the city and the South. As a child she spent long, lazy Sunday afternoons \"sitting on the bony knees of Confederate veterans and the fat, slick laps of old ladies who had survived the war,\" listening to tales of relatives who walked fifty miles with their skulls cracked by Yankee bullets, stuffed wrapping paper beneath their corsets to keep warm during the blockade, and sat down to supper with Rebel leaders. And all these tales were told not as epic drama but as ordinary family happenings that could have occurred just yesterday. When she was six, Margaret herself became a rebel, against going to school. On a blazing hot September day her mother drove her out along the road to Jonesboro, pointing out the ruins of great houses that had fallen during or because of the war, chimneys standing ghostly among the scattered leaves and creeping foliage of the encroaching woods. She also pointed out the proud homes that still stood, testimony to their owners' steely spirit. She explained that all the people who had once lived in all the houses had believed they had wealth and beauty and good times that would never end. But their world did end. And it would happen again, Margaret's mother warned. And when it did, she had better be prepared. \"...All that would be left after a world ended would be what you could do with your hands and what you had in your head,\" not the least of which was an education. Margaret went to school. Margaret grew up with the twentieth century, a Jazz Age baby, sufficiently enlightened in the New Era of women's equality to set off for college with aspirations of becoming a neurologist or psychiatrist. During her first year, however, her mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and she came home to keep house for her father and brother. A freethinking flapper, \"one of those short-haired, short-skirted, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to hell or be hanged before they were thirty,\" as she described herself, Margaret talked her way into, and succeeded admirably at, a position as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, no mean feat in an age where the only newspapermen were men. Margaret -- Peggy, her friends called her -- moved about in a modern world of moving pictures, speedy automobiles, electric iceboxes airplanes, and radios, but to her the Civil War was just as recent and probably more real. She found herself in 1926, at the height of the Jazz Age, housebound with a broken ankle that developed into arthritis she began to write a novel about the Civil War. She was first of all a voracious reader. Her husband, John Marsh, brought home armloads of library books every night to entertain her until one evening he announced that he had exhausted the supply; she had read every book in the library except the exact sciences. Dropping a sheaf of copy paper in her lap, he told her she now had no choice but to write her own book. She didn't know why she chose the Civil War as her subject, she would later say; it was just always there in her background. The first chapter she wrote was the final one, in which Rhett leaves Scarlett alone to think about him \"tomorrow,\" and from there she wrote a chapter here and a chapter there, apparently in no particular sequence, but as the spirit moved her. As each chapter was completed, it was sealed into a manila envelope and stacked next to the typewriter. When the stack became two and the two became towers, the envelopes were squirreled away in varying spots in the three-room apartment -- some under the bed, some under the sofa, others in the pots-and-pans cupboard. When friends visited, the typewriter and the current chapter were covered over with a large bath towel. Peggy didn't like people to know she was working on a book. And, anyway, she never planned to sell it; it was only for her own amusement. Sometime in 1929, the novel was finished, all except for the opening chapter and two others. The stock market crashed, a black and ominous Depression fell over the world, and Margaret Mitchell went on about the business of being Mrs. Peggy Marsh. She had written the book mostly during the three years she had spent laid up, sometimes bedridden, with her bad ankle, having been told by doctors that she might never walk again. She finished the book, her ankle thankfully healed, and as she put it, \"When my foot got well, I stopped writing because walking seemed far more interesting.\" Peggy had been engaged once, to a young man who was shortly thereafter killed in World War I, and married once before -- for a period of only months -- to a fellow emotionally unequipped for life with the headstrong Margaret. But now her ship had come in. Being Mrs. Marsh was fun. Peggy and John lived in a small, dark apartment they affectionately called \"The Dump\" and used as a base for lively, intellectually stimulating dinner parties and evening entertainments. Life flowed on like Southern molasses, sometimes thick and grainy, crystallized with illnesses or the woes of friends, but always sweet. Then, in the spring of 1935, life abruptly changed. Lois Cole, one of the few intimates who knew Peggy had been writing a book, was working for the Macmillan Company, publishers, in New York. The firm had reasoned that Southern books by new authors were frequent sellers and decided to send senior editor Harold Latham on a tour of the South. Lois suggested that he stop and talk with Peggy Marsh. Mr. Latham followed through, calling on her at her home. Mrs. Marsh, however, insisted that she was not an author, was not writing, had never written a book, and wasn't the least bit interested in being reviewed by any publisher. Mr. Latham packed his bags and prepared to leave Atlanta. But first he attended a tea where Peggy introduced him to a young girl who did hope to make it big as an author. As she drove the girl and her friends home from the tea, another young lady in the car spilled the beans about Peggy writing a book. The first girl was amazed. She couldn't believe that Mrs. Marsh could write. She didn't seem the type. She took life much too lightly, the girl said, and was wasting her time trying to be a serious novelist. As Peggy put it later, the girl had said,", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Performing Arts"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 22.26}, {"asin": "1680225146", "title": "School Years Keepsake Book: Record Memories From Kindergarten Through Eighth Grade", "author": "New Seasons", "description": "About the Author Publications International, Ltd.\u00a0US Amazon Store Publications International, Ltd. (\u200bPIL) publishes books and products for kids and adults in many categories: reference, leisure, inspirational, automotive, sports, cookbooks, stationery (New Seasons), interactive and early learning (Little Grasshopper Books).", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.98}, {"asin": "0060256656", "title": "The Giving Tree", "author": "Shel Silverstein", "description": "Amazon.com Review To say that this particular apple tree is a \"giving tree\" is an understatement. In Shel Silverstein's popular tale of few words and simple line drawings, a tree starts out as a leafy playground, shade provider, and apple bearer for a rambunctious little boy. Making the boy happy makes the tree happy, but with time it becomes more challenging for the generous tree to meet his needs. When he asks for money, she suggests that he sell her apples. When he asks for a house, she offers her branches for lumber. When the boy is old, too old and sad to play in the tree, he asks the tree for a boat. She suggests that he cut her down to a stump so he can craft a boat out of her trunk. He unthinkingly does it. At this point in the story, the double-page spread shows a pathetic solitary stump, poignantly cut down to the heart the boy once carved into the tree as a child that said \"M.E. + T.\" \"And then the tree was happy... but not really.\" When there's nothing left of her, the boy returns again as an old man, needing a quiet place to sit and rest. The stump offers up her services, and he sits on it. \"And the tree was happy.\" While the message of this book is unclear (Take and take and take? Give and give and give? Complete self-sacrifice is good? Complete self-sacrifice is infinitely sad?), Silverstein has perhaps deliberately left the book open to interpretation. (All ages) --Karin Snelson Review \u201cIf you\u2019re looking for a children\u2019s book that teaches generosity or unselfishness, most people will point you right to The Giving Tree , Shel Silverstein\u2019s lovely story of a tree that will do anything for the boy it loves\u2014and for good reason. This classic is always a good place to start.\u201d \u2014 Brightly From the Back Cover \"Once there was a tree . . . and she loved a little boy.\" So begins a story of unforgettable perception, beautifully written and illustrated by the gifted and versatile Shel Silverstein. Every day the boy would come to the tree to eat her apples, swing from her branches, or slide down her trunk\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and the tree was happy. But as the boy grew older, he began to want more from the tree, and the tree gave and gave. Since it was first published fifty years ago, Shel Silverstein's moving parable for readers of all ages has offered an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return. About the Author Shel Silverstein 's incomparable career as a bestselling children's book author and illustrator began with Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back . He is also the creator of picture books including A Giraffe and a Half , Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros? , The Missing Piece , The Missing Piece Meets the Big O , and the perennial favorite The Giving Tree , as well as classic poetry collections such as Where the Sidewalk Ends , A Light in the Attic , Every Thing On It , Don't Bump the Glump! , and Runny Babbit . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Classics"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.66}, {"asin": "0873588592", "title": "My Name Is Gabriela/Me llamo Gabriela (Rise and Shine) (English, Multilingual and Spanish Edition)", "author": "Monica Brown", "description": "From School Library Journal Starred Review. Kindergarten-Grade 2\u2013This lyrical homage to the Chilean Nobel Prize winner is a joy to read. Written in the first person, the simple text follows the life of the poet from her earliest days (in which, as a girl, she chooses her own name and teaches herself to read) to her internationally renowned career in literature. Brown and the unnamed translator have created a poignantly poetic text that reads equally well in English and in Spanish. It depicts, above all else, the poets lifelong love affair with words and stories. Parras naive-style illustrations, which appear to be painted on wood, go well beyond complementing the text. They offer a view into a softly colored world of people, places, and creatures, real or imagined, that were described in Mistrals work. An exquisite addition for most collections. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 15.95}, {"asin": "B004OYWMMW", "title": "Great shape"}, {"asin": "1543930174", "title": "Still Rising: A Story of Strength, Weakness, And Unexpected Healing", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Richard and Daphne Gaspard 's relationship began while they both served in their church youth group and worship team. From early on, they knew that God would use them in ministry together. Both natives of south Louisiana, Richard and Daphne were married in December of 1994, and began their life together in Tulsa, OK, where Daphne completed her degree from Oral Roberts University while Richard served as an adjunct instructor there, as well as the chief audio engineer at Oral Roberts Television. When their oldest daughter, Kylie, was born, they knew they wanted to rear her near family and friends in Cajun country, so the three of them, along with their two dogs and their youngest daughter, Katie, on the way, packed up and headed home in August of 2000. That decade brought their ministry life full circle, as they both served on staff at Crossroads Church in Lafayette, and their girls began to follow in their footsteps, serving in youth and music. But, in 2015, tragedy struck. Katie was diagnosed with a rare blood disease, requiring extensive medical treatment, including a bone marrow transplant. After months and months of suffering, due to complications from that transplant, Katie passed away on July 20, 2017. Richard and Daphne, although crushed from the loss, have determined that they do not want what happened to Katie to be all for nothing. Their hearts' desire is to tell her story and speak to those who are suffering, or have gone through tragic loss. Together, they authored a book chronicling Katie's journey, while showing God's hand in the process. Richard and Daphne are both available for speaking engagements. Please contact them at info@wearestillrising.com .", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 16.0}, {"asin": "0470129050", "title": "Realms, Regions and Concepts, 13th Edition", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Earth Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 14.53}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0486434125", "title": "The Castle of Otranto (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)", "author": "Horace Walpole", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 4.0}, {"asin": "1476705720", "title": "1001 Ideas That Changed the Way We Think", "author": "Robert Arp", "description": "From Booklist As the title reveals, this work covers ideas that have inspired humankind and changed our lives. Entries are listed chronologically, and the first is \u201cHuman Control of Fire,\u201d estimated to have occurred around 1,600,000 BCE, while the last entry is \u201cNot-Junk DNA,\u201d regarding the human genome work done in 2012. Some entries are well-known events, such as Sir Isaac Newton\u2019s discovery of gravity and President Lincoln\u2019s Gettysburg Address. However, a wide variety of topics are discussed, including Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Fountain of youth, Allegory of the cave, Robin Hood, Public library, Freudian slip, Santa Claus, Gray\u2019s Anatomy (the book, not the television show), and Robotics, to name but a few. The brief entries are arranged in sections covering \u201cAncient World (Pre 500 CE),\u201d \u201cMiddle Ages (500\u20131449),\u201d \u201cEarly Modern (1450\u20131779),\u201d \u201cLate Modern (1780\u20131899),\u201d \u201cEarly 20th Century (1900\u20131949),\u201d and \u201cContemporary (1950\u2013present).\u201d A keyword index at the beginning of the book divides entries into \u201cArt and Architecture,\u201d \u201cPhilosophy,\u201d \u201cPolitics and Society,\u201d \u201cPsychology,\u201d \u201cReligion,\u201d and \u201cScience and Technology,\u201d and there is a general index at the end. Colorful illustrations and photographs are found throughout the book\u2014at least one and often more on every other page. This entertaining and informative book is recommended for both public and academic libraries. --Rachael Elrod Review \u201cThe '1001' series may sound like a gimmick but it's not\u2026 Editor Robert Arp has produced a reference guide that's fun to browse.\u201d \u2015 Boston Globe \"Highly attractive... Recommended.\" \u2015 Library Journal \"Entertaining and informative.\" \u2015 Booklist About the Author Robert Arp is a visiting professor for the department of philosophy at Florida State University and a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Center for Biomedical Ontology. His areas of specialization include philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and modern philosophy. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Historical Study & Educational Resources"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 32.31}, {"asin": "B079K8JLCZ", "title": "The Librarian's Vampire Assistant", "author": "Mimi Jean Pamfiloff", "description": "Review What are \"people\" saying about The Librarian's Vampire Assistant ? \"What did I just read? A mystery? A platonic clusterf**k? Avampire novel? Mind blown.\" - An anonymous Mimi Jean fan \"Happy ever after? Don't hold your breath. These characters are completely against the idea, though I'm not giving up hope.\" -Minky, world's best pet \"The ending lacked proper vengeance.\" -Carlitos Crime Family \"Vampires are real? Shut the front door!\" -Miriam, Head Librarian, Phoenix, AZ \"F**ck love! I'm over it.\" - Vampire Viviana \"Mystery. Heartbreak. I'm going to strangle that Michael.\" - Lula, the Librarian's Vampire Assistant's Assistant. \"Romance is for fools and love is for the ignorant. I'm a vampire. We live, we take, we exist. Belonging to a respectable family and loyalty are all that matter, but one can hardly call that love.\" - The Librarian's Assistant About the Author MIMI JEAN PAMFILOFF is a USA Today and New York Times bestselling romance author with over one million books sold worldwide. Although she obtained her MBA and worked for more than fifteen years in the corporate world, she believes that it's never too late to come out of the romance closet and follow your dream. Mimi lives with her Latin Lover hubby, two pirates-in-training (their boys), and the rat terrier duo, Snowflake and Mini Me, in Arizona. She hopes to make you laugh when you need it most and continues to pray daily that leather pants will make a big comeback for men. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00UCLPCE6", "title": "The Professor (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers Book 1)", "author": "Robert Bailey", "description": "Review \u201cTaut, page-turning, and smart, The Professor is a legal thriller that will keep readers up late as the twists and turns keep coming. Set in Alabama, it also includes that state\u2019s greatest icon, one Coach Bear Bryant. In fact, the Bear gets things going with the energy of an Alabama kickoff to Auburn. Robert Bailey knows his state and he knows his law. He also knows how to write characters that are real, sympathetic, and surprising. If he keeps writing novels this good, he\u2019s got quite a literary career before him.\u201d \u2014Homer Hickam, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Rocket Boys and October Sky \u201cGripping from the first page to the last.\u201d \u2014Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump About the Author Robert Bailey was born in Huntsville, Alabama. He earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in history from Davidson College in North Carolina before going to law school at the University of Alabama, where he made Law Review. For the past thirteen years, Bailey has been a civil defense trial lawyer in his hometown of Huntsville, where he lives with his wife and three children. The Professor is his first novel. For more information, please visit www.robertbaileybooks.com. Review \u201cTaut, page-turning, and smart, The Professor is a legal thriller that will keep readers up late as the twists and turns keep coming. Set in Alabama, it also includes that state\u2019s greatest icon, one Coach Bear Bryant. In fact, the Bear gets things going with the energy of an Alabama kickoff to Auburn. Robert Bailey knows his state and he knows his law. He also knows how to write characters that are real, sympathetic, and surprising. If he keeps writing novels this good, he\u2019s got quite a literary career before him.\u201d \u2015Homer Hickam, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Rocket Boys and October Sky \u201cGripping from the first page to the last.\u201d \u2015Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0486434125"}
{"user_id": "AGVFPYJ2MX7Q4VYSETOWNH3BKD2A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00AQMH0G4", "title": "Hillbilly Heart: A Memoir", "author": "Todd Gold", "description": "About the Author Hailing from small-town Kentucky, Billy Ray Cyrus is an American country music singer/songwriter who helped to make country music an international sensation. His album Some Gave All has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and is the best-selling debut album of all time for a solo male artist. In addition to his music career, Cyrus starred in the TV series Doc from 2001 to 2004 and co-starred in the Disney Channel series Hannah Montana with his daughter Miley Cyrus. From Booklist According to him, when he has reached critical points in his life, singer-songwriter Billy Ray Cyrus hears voices. So far, parents, teachers, girlfriends, juvenile-court judges, tarot-card readers, complete strangers, and even spirits have warned him of dangers and offered directions to reform his life, but he often fends off advice as long as he can. He especially resisted the ghostly \u201cBuy a guitar and start a band\u201d message until he discovered that left-handed guitars exist, which he understood as a sign from God telling him to heed the inexplicable call. Although he learned to play guitar quickly and had natural singing ability, he spent many years performing in dangerous dance halls, under the influence of alcohol, drugs, and women, before he landed a recording contract in Nashville. With wit and candor reminiscent of his song lyrics, Cyrus recounts his rise to musical stardom, the start of his acting career, and his struggles to maintain a marriage and raise children. His fans and those of his daughter Miley Cyrus will enjoy this tell-everything memoir. --Rick Roche --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \"The first time I met Billy Ray I felt like I had known him all of my life.\u00a0 I still feel the same way today. He is a warm feeling in my heart and a sweet thought on my mind. He seems like family to me.\u00a0 I've always been interested in his life, his success and in his children, especially my beautiful fairy god daughter, Miley. I'm very proud of Billy Ray and find him very fascinating and interesting.\u00a0 I know you will enjoy finding out all about him, his life and rise to fame.\u00a0 What we have most in common is a Hillbilly Heart .\" \u2014Dolly Parton \"What a life this guy has had. He goes from having one of the biggest records in the history of radio to watching his daughter grow from a child to one of the biggest stars in the business. There are very few people who can handle that. Billy Ray has done an incredible job as a father and an artist and now as an author.\" \u2014Kenny Rogers \"Billy Ray's talent, whether singing, acting, or writing, amazes me, and his versatility sets him apart from most. Hillbilly Heart is a beautiful account of Billy Ray's colorful life\u2014great stories, told by a humble man. My life is richer, and the world is a better place, because of him\u2014just as yours will be after reading this book.\" \u2014Randy Travis \"It's no exaggeration to call country star Cyrus' memoir a hoot.\" \u2014New York Post \"Told in a natural and candid tone, the book will please country-music fans and may even win over some skeptics.\u2026a warm account of a star who has managed to remain humble.\" \u2014Kirkus Reviews \"Cyrus chronicles a rollercoaster life, from his troubled adolescence and the revelation that he wanted to become a musician, to life on the road, the challenges and successes of writing music, the difficulties and joys of marriage, and his work in television.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly \"Such earnest yearning, in his songs and in the telling of his life story, endears Billy Ray Cyrus to his audience. During recent interviews promoting the book, Cyrus makes a point to honor and pay tribute to the victims of last week's Boston Marathon bombing. Against the backdrop of such a terrible and baffling event, the timing of Hillbilly Heart , with its positive focus on faith in the source of all good things, seems fortuitous.\" \u2014Biographile \"This book is an honest look at his life. He\u2019s truthful about his drinking, drugs and the mistakes he\u2019s made in his life.\" \u2014Red Carpet Crash --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B005L9B29I", "title": "Slow Curve on the Coquihalla (A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery, Book 1)", "author": "R.E. Donald", "description": "Review \"highly recommended\" - Midwest Book Review ... the world of long-distance truckers remains closed to most of us. Not so for R. E. Donald. She and her late husband spent decades in the transportation industry. This mystery novel, Slow Curve on the Coquihalla , uses that experience wonderfully well. This book is filled with details of what life is really like for long-haulers and the people who love them. It's tough enough for a guy who isn't sure about reading mysteries; and satisfying for any mystery fan who loves convoluted plots. - Sharon Wildwind, Story Circle Book Reviews From the Author This is the first novel in my Hunter Rayne highway mystery series. I wanted to write about a world I knew, and the kind of mystery that I most enjoyed as a reader. In the '90s, I was a big fan of mystery writers Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes. I especially enjoyed Grimes' Richard Jury series, and used it as a rough model for my new series, with the major difference being\u00a0that the highway mystery settings and characters are uniquely North American.I hope you enjoy reading about Hunter Rayne and his cast of supporting characters as much as I enjoy writing about them.R.E. (Ruth) Donald From the Back Cover What readers are saying about the Hunter Rayne highway mysteries:\"A great take to bed read for anyone who loves crime fiction in a traditional fashion.\"\"Whodunit addicts will not be disappointed.\"\"Those were the best mysteries I've read in a long time!!\"\"...this book caught my attention from the very first pages and it only got better.\u00a0 I recommend this book to anyone who has a love for a good mystery.\" --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": null}, {"asin": "B0061XK85M", "title": "Ice on the Grapevine (A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery, Book 2)", "author": "R.E. Donald", "description": "Review A 2012 Global Ebook Awards finalist, ... Ice on the Grapevine: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery is a tense murder mystery featuring tough-minded ex-homicide detective turned eighteen-wheel truck driver Hunter Rayne. ... [It] is a riveting mystery that will keep the reader guessing to the very end. - Midwest Book Review This is a well spun yarn, full of plot detail and credible human response. Whodunit addicts will not be disappointed. - The Kindle Book Review ... a straightforward and uncomplicated story, well-told and tightly edited. ... Ice on the Grapevine is well worth having a look at. - Crime Fiction Lover, the Site for Die-Hard Crime & Thriller Fans (UK) --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "B00M6F2ONI", "title": "Night with a SEAL (Hot SEALs)", "author": "Cat Johnson", "description": "Review \"Her military men are Alpha with a capital A!\" Guilty Indulgences\"After reading this book I'm ready to read everything she's ever written right NOW!\"\u00a0Shameless Book Club\"Smoldering and sexy with a brilliant story\" Book Obsessed Chicks From the Author When I wrote and published Night with a SEAL, Jon and Ali's story was complete in my mind. Their love was new but they were happy and together.\u00a0It wasn't until years later that an idea for a new adventure for them came to me. That's when I wrote Romanced by a SEAL,\u00a0featuring Jon and Ali's lives a few years down the road as together they navigate the trials and tribulations of life, love, and bad guys.\u00a0Romanced by a SEAL can be read and enjoyed as a standalone story, just like Night with a SEAL can be. But of course, true fans of Jon and Ali will especially love reading them together! From the Inside Flap Hot SEALs Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: NIGHT WITH A SEAL NIGHT WITH A SEAL SAVED BY A SEAL SAVED BY A SEAL SEALED AT MIDNIGHT SEALED AT MIDNIGHT KISSED BY A SEAL KISSED BY A SEAL PROTECTED BY A SEAL PROTECTED BY A SEAL LOVED BY A SEAL LOVED BY A SEAL TEMPTED BY A SEAL TEMPTED BY A SEAL WED TO A SEAL WED TO A SEAL ROMANCED BY A SEAL ROMANCED BY A SEAL RESCUED BY A HOT SEAL RESCUED BY A HOT SEAL BETTING ON A HOT SEAL BETTING ON A HOT SEAL ESCAPE WITH A HOT SEAL ESCAPE WITH A HOT SEAL MATCHED WITH A HOT SEAL MATCHED WITH A HOT SEAL SEAL THE DEAL SEAL THE DEAL HOT SEAL IN HOLLYWOOD HOT SEAL IN HOLLYWOOD DESIRE IN DC DESIRE IN DC Red Hot & Blue Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: RED BLOODED RED BLOODED A FEW GOOD MEN A FEW GOOD MEN BB DALTON BB DALTON MODEL SOLDIER MODEL SOLDIER A PRINCE AMONG MEN A PRINCE AMONG MEN SMALLTOWN HEAT SMALLTOWN HEAT TRUE BLUE TRUE BLUE RED HOT & BLUE COLLECTION RED HOT & BLUE COLLECTION SEALs in Paradise Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: HOT SEAL, DIRTY MARTINI HOT SEAL, DIRTY MARTINI HOT SEAL, TIJUANA NIGHTS HOT SEAL, TIJUANA NIGHTS HOT SEAL, RUNAWAY BRIDE HOT SEAL, RUNAWAY BRIDE HOT SEAL, HEARTBREAKER HOT SEAL, HEARTBREAKER HOT SEAL, COLD WATER HOT SEAL, COLD WATER Hot For Hire Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: HOT BILLIONAIRE FOR HIRE HOT BILLIONAIRE FOR HIRE HOT CHICK FOR HIRE HOT CHICK FOR HIRE HOT SPY FOR HIRE HOT SPY FOR HIRE HOT HERO FOR HIRE HOT HERO FOR HIRE USMC Out of Uniform Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: CROSSING THE LINE CROSSING THE LINE CINDERELLA LIBERTY CINDERELLA LIBERTY Smalltown Secrets Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: KISSING BOOKS KISSING BOOKS RED HOT RED HOT HONEY BUNS HONEY BUNS ZERO FORKS ZERO FORKS UNDERCOVER SANTA UNDERCOVER SANTA MISTER NAUGHTY MISTER NAUGHTY DOG DAYS DOG DAYS BAD DECISIONS BAD DECISIONS Studs in Spurs Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: UNRIDDEN UNRIDDEN BUCKED BUCKED RIDE RIDE HOOKED HOOKED FLANKED FLANKED THROWN THROWN CHAMPION CHAMPION SPURRED SPURRED WRECKED WRECKED STUDS IN SPURS VOLUME 1 STUDS IN SPURS VOLUME 1 STUDS IN SPURS VOLUME 2 STUDS IN SPURS VOLUME 2 Maverick Ranch Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: COWBOY BLUE COWBOY BLUE COWBOY HEARTS COWBOY HEARTS Oklahoma Nights Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: ONE NIGHT WITH A COWBOY ONE NIGHT WITH A COWBOY TWO TIMES AS HOT TWO TIMES AS HOT THREE WEEKS WITH A BULL RIDER THREE WEEKS WITH A BULL RIDER HE'S THE ONE ANTHOLOGY HE'S THE ONE ANTHOLOGY IN A COWBOY'S BED ANTHOLOGY IN A COWBOY'S BED ANTHOLOGY Midnight Cowboys Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: MIDNIGHT RIDE MIDNIGHT RIDE MIDNIGHT WRANGLER MIDNIGHT WRANGLER MIDNIGHT HEAT MIDNIGHT HEAT Sex, Lies & Wedding Cake Collection by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: GILLIAN'S ISLAND GILLIAN'S ISLAND PRIVATE LIES PRIVATE LIES NEW ORLEANS NEW ORLEANS The Trilogy Collection by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: OPPOSITES ATTRACT OPPOSITES ATTRACT NICE & NAUGHTY NICE & NAUGHTY JUST DESSERTS JUST DESSERTS BLACK CAT BLACK CAT Cathouse Cinderella Series by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: CAT HAUS CAT HAUS BEFORE CATE BEFORE CATE Red Hot Reads Collection by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: THE EX FILES THE EX FILES EDUCATING ANSLEY EDUCATING ANSLEY THE BILLIONAIRE'S FAKE FIANCEE THE BILLIONAIRE'S FAKE FIANCEE BENEATH THE SURFACE BENEATH THE SURFACE ROUGH STOCK ROUGH STOCK TEXAS TWO STEP TEXAS TWO STEP Cocky Hero Collection by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: COCKY IMMORTALS COCKY IMMORTALS COCKY COUNTRY BOYS COCKY COUNTRY BOYS COCKY JOES COCKY JOES Standalones by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: MOTHER CLUCKER (Vi Keeland & Penelope Ward's World) MOTHER CLUCKER (Vi Keeland & Penelope Ward's World) LONGHORN LINEBACKER LONGHORN LINEBACKER Multi-author Anthologies featuring NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: HAPPY IS THE BRIDE HAPPY IS THE BRIDE THAT MISTLETOE MOMENT THAT MISTLETOE MOMENT Silver SEALs by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: SEAL STRONG SEAL STRONG Shadow SEALs by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: SHADOW PAWN SHADOW PAWN The Long Road Home by NYT Bestselling author Cat Johnson: HOME FRONT HOME FRONT HOME FIRES HOME FIRES About the Author Cat Johnson is a New York Times bestseller and the author of the USA Today bestselling Hot SEALs series. She writes hot contemporary romance. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B00413QNA8", "title": "The Last Rebel: Survivor", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0805087850", "title": "The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories", "author": "Edward Hollis", "description": "From Booklist Hollis provocatively opens with his interpretation of Thomas Cole\u2019s famous 1840 painting, The Architect\u2019s Dream, a fantastical imagining of styles from the classical to the gothic. Viewing Cole\u2019s beguiling mirage, Hollis explains its intoxicating allure, especially for those engaged in historical restoration. He then relates Cole\u2019s ideas about architectural perfection to particular buildings and their original and subsequent purposes. He begins with the Parthenon. A temple to Athena and a gunpowder warehouse, it has been many things, as have the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Notre Dame in Paris, Gloucester Cathedral in Britain, and the Alhambra in Spain. Hollis chronicles these \u201csecret lives\u201d over centuries of construction, ruination, and restoration in a dreamy manner, curving the intentions of conquerors or architects around the structural or decorative attributes of the buildings. Not confined to world-famous monuments, Hollis\u2019 attractive approach attends to vernacular structures as well: the Holy House (a focus of Catholicism\u2019s Marian devotion); a public housing complex in Manchester, England; the confections of Las Vegas; and the Berlin Wall. An architect by occupation, Hollis writes history eclectically, informatively, and entertainingly. --Gilbert Taylor Review \u201cScintillating\u2026 Every so often, works on the building art capture the public imagination. Now Tracy Kidder and Witold Rybczynski are joined by Edward Hollis, whose new book, The Secret Lives of Buildings , offers an advanced seminar for graduates of Rybczynski\u2019s introductory courses\u2026 Provides the ground for a reinvigorated public discourse on the role of architecture in contemporary society\u2026 Worthy of wide consideration.\u201d\u2014 Martin Filler, The New York Review of Books \u201cWhat a happy tingle of discovery to come across a book that differs sharply from all the others in its field!\u2026 Hollis thinks with such originality and writes with such flair that he is a pleasure to read.\u201d\u2014Stanley Abercrombie, The American Scholar \u201cA fantasia from the real and the imagined\u2026 An unusual sort of speculative history, almost a work of experimental fiction. The buildings, which are its nominal subjects, are only MacGuffins on which Hollis hangs a series of short stories on the themes of love, loss and time.\u201d\u2014 Ian Volner, Time Out New York \u201cHollis brings together an iconoclastic attitude and a lively writing style to create a kind of counter-history of architecture, one that starts where the original designers left off and narrates the subsequent biography of the \u2018wonderful and chimeric monsters\u2019 that buildings are.\u201d\u2014 Kirk Savage, The Washington Post \u201cHollis exposes the surprisingly motley histories of some of the world\u2019s great landmarks\u2026 The chapter on the Parthenon actually brought me to tears.\u201d\u2014 Jenna Russell, The Boston Globe \u201cDelightful... A beautifully wrought book... Here are wondrous stories writ in stone, and Edward Hollis has written about them very well indeed.\u201d\u2014 Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian (UK)\u00a0\u201cAn accessible and ambitious exploration of the nature and meanings of architecture\u2026 Hollis has the gift of making these buildings seem real and alive.\u201d\u2014 Simon Bradley, The Sunday Times (UK)\u00a0\u201cThere is something Sebaldian about The Secret Lives of Buildings : a digressive pleasure in the sheer strangeness of architecture and the mortal intrigues by which it was wrought\u2026 Hollis is particularly good on the history of architectural reconstruction.\u201d\u2014 Brian Dillon, The Independent (UK)\u00a0\u201cEngaging and erudite... Hollis is magical on the layers of myth and history in the classical world.\u201d\u2014 Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times (UK)\u00a0\u201cTremendous... It\u2019s unusual for a nonfiction book to match a neat conceit with elegant execution, but Hollis has achieved it. The stories are actually stories, not mere scrolls of fact. It helps that he has a beautifully wry tone... Hollis experiments with structure, chronology, leitmotifs and repetitions, and makes his book a rare thing: nonfiction you can reread.\u201d\u2014 Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday \u201cA fascinating tale, a fairytale journey that shifts seamlessly between edification and revelation\u2026 Quite unlike any other recent book on architecture and a worthy nominee for the Guardian \u2019s First Book Award.\u201d\u2014 Mark Cousins, Building Design (UK)\u00a0\u201cA new and entertaining view of the context in which historic structures have existed\u2026 Recommended to readers interested in architecture, the ideas of space and place, and intellectually stimulating historical tales.\u201d\u2014 Valerie Nye, Library Journal \u201cHollis moves gracefully through both buildings and historical periods with an impressive command of detail and a sensitivity to the people involved.\u2026 A strong, satisfying exploration of the history, beauty, and wonder of Western architecture.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cNot confined to world-famous monuments, Hollis\u2019s attractive approach attends to vernacular structures as well... He writes history eclectically, informatively, and entertainingly.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cAny architecture or history buff would be pleased to find The Secret Lives of Buildings under the tree... Iconic structures like the Parthenon, the Berlin Wall and even the Vegas Strip have led more storied lives than we realize. Hollis shares these stories\u00a0with a fairy-tale charm.\u201d\u2014 BookPage \u201cEdward Hollis rewrites architectural history in this beautiful and unsettling study of how the masterpieces of Western architecture have changed over time. Temples become mosques; monuments become ruins; deserts become cities, and deserts again. After reading this book, no building will seem quite the same.\u201d\u2014Christopher Woodward, author of In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature About the Author Edward Hollis is an architect and designer who teaches at the Edinburgh College of Art. Trained at Cambridge and Edinburgh universities, he worked for five years in the United Kingdom as a practicing architect, specializing in alterations to historic buildings. This is his first book. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction The Architect's Dream Once upon a time, an architect had a dream. The curtain of his bourgeois parlor was rent, and he found himself reclining on top of a colossal column overlooking a great port. On a nearby hill, the spire of a Gothic cathedral rose above pointed cypresses in a dark wood; on the other side of the river, a Corinthian rotunda and the brick arches of a Roman aqueduct were bathed in golden light. This aqueduct had been built on top of a Grecian colonnade, in front of which a procession led from the waterside to an elaborate Ionic shrine. Farther away the austere form of a Doric temple crouched beneath an Egyptian palace, and behind them all, veiled in haze and a wisp of cloud, was the Great Pyramid. It was a moment of absolute stillness. A perspective in time had become a perspective in space, as the past receded in an orderly fashion, style by style, from the parlor curtain of the present all the way back to the horizon of antiquity. The Dark Ages partially obscured classical splendor; Roman magnificence was built on the foundation of Grecian reason; the glory that was Greece lay in the shadow of the ur-architecture of Egypt. The array of buildings formed an architectural canon, each example dispensing inspiration, advice, and warning to the architect from the golden treasury of history. All the great buildings of the past had been resurrected in a monumental day of rapture. Everything had been made new, and neither weather nor war nor wandering taste had scarred the scene. Everything was fixed just as it had been intended to be: each building was a masterpiece, a work of art, a piece of frozen music, unspoiled by compromise, error, or disappointment. There was nothing that could be added or taken away except for the worse. Each building was beautiful, its form and function held in perfect balance. The scene was what architecture was, and is, and should be. But just before he awoke, the architect realized that he was dreaming, and he recalled the words of Prospero renouncing his conjured dominion at the end of The Tempest . The cloud-capp\u2019d towers, the gorgeous palaces, \u00a0 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, \u00a0 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, \u00a0 And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, \u00a0 Leave not a rack behind: We are such stuff \u00a0 As dreams are made on, and our little life \u00a0 Is rounded with a sleep. *** The Architect\u2019s Dream was dreamed by an \u00e9migr\u00e9 from the Old World to the New. Thomas Cole was born in Lancashire in 1801, but he spent his adult life among the crags and forests of the Hudson Valley north of New York City, where he painted pictures of an arcadia not yet buried under towers and palaces and temples. Cole could not prevent himself from thinking about the Old World he had left behind, and he knew that one day the New World would come to resemble it. His cycle of paintings titled The Course of Empire depicted the Hudson Valley at five different stages: in The Savage State , The Arcadian or Pastoral State , at The Consummation of Empire , at The Destruction of Empire , and in Desolation . In these five images, a virgin forest at dawn becomes a great city at noon. By dusk it is a broken heap of stones, whited under a watery moon. In 1840, the architect Ithiel Town commissioned Cole to paint The Architect\u2019s Dream and paid him in pattern books. Town didn\u2019t much like the painting, but it came to be regarded as Cole\u2019s masterpiece. Cole\u2019s funeral eulogy extolled it among the \u201cprincipal works . . . of his genius\u201d as \u201can assemblage of structures, Egyptian, Gothic, Grecian, Moorish, such as might present itself to the imagination of one who had fallen asleep after reading a work on the different styles of architecture.\u201d Cole\u2019s vision still haunts architects. Pick up any classic work on architecture, glance at the pictures, and you will find yourself lost in a similar panorama of \u201cthe different styles.\u201d Crisp line drawings describe the masterworks of antiquity looking as new and fresh as the day they were born; blue skies, clean streets, and a complete absence of people lend architectural photographs the timeless quality of The Architect\u2019s Dream . It\u2019s not just the illustrations; the written history of architecture is also a litany of masterpieces, unchanging and unchanged, from the Great Pyramid of Giza to its glass descendants in Paris or Las Vegas. The great buildings of the past are described as if the last piece of scaffolding has just been taken away, the paint is still fresh on the walls, and the ribbon has not yet been cut\u2014as if, indeed, history had never happened. It is a timeless vision because timeless is just what we expect great architecture to be. Nearly a century ago, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos observed that architecture originates not, as one might expect, in the dwelling, but in the monument. The houses of our ancestors, which were contingent responses to their\u00a0ever-shifting needs, have perished. Their tombs and temples, which\u00a0 were intended to endure for the eternity of death and the gods, remain, and it is they that form the canon of architectural history. The very discourse of architecture is a discourse on perfection, a word which derives from the Latin for finished . The Roman theorist Vitruvius claimed that architecture was perfect when it held commodity, firmness, and delight in delicate balance. A millennium and a half later, his Renaissance interpreter Leone Battista Alberti wrote that perfect beauty is that to which nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away. The modernist architect Le Corbusier described the task of his profession as \u201cthe problem of fixing standards, in order to face the problem of perfection.\u201d In the discourse of architecture, all buildings, in order to remain beautiful, must not change; and all buildings, in order not to change, must aspire to the funereal condition of the monument. The tomb of Christopher Wren in the crypt of St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral in London is a simple affair for so great a man, but the inscription on the wall above the sarcophagus belies its modesty. \u201cSi monumentum requiris, circumspice,\u201d it reads; \u201cIf you seek a monument, look around you.\u201d All architects hope that the buildings they have designed will memorialize their genius, and so they dare to hope that their buildings will last forever, unaltered. *** But The Architect\u2019s Dream is just that: a dream, an illusion, a flat picture imprisoned in a frame. Imagine, for a moment, that the architect woke up from his dream, stepped out of the painting, and walked out of the museum where it is exhibited. He might still find himself on top of a colossal column, but it wouldn\u2019t command some monumental prospect. Instead, he would be looking into a tenement stairwell, which is just what he\u2019d see if he\u2019d climbed to the summit of the surviving columns of the Temple of Augustus in Barcelona. The Gothic cathedral would not be in some dark forest but right next door, and the walls of its crypt might be made from the foundations of a shrine to Apollo, as they are in Girona. The columns of that shrine might form the cathedral porch, as they do at Syracuse; and the altar would be an upturned Roman bathtub, just as it is in the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome. The cathedral would, like Chartres or Gloucester, have taken hundreds of years to build, and it would be a chaotic collage of different styles, overlaid with Victorian restorations of great enthusiasm and dubious accuracy. The Ionic temple, like that of Diana in Ephesus, would have been burned down by indignant Christians in the fifth century, while the Corinthian rotunda would have been turned into a fortress, just as the Pantheon was in medieval Rome. The Doric temple would have flitted away: its sculpture would be on display in London, like the Elgin marbles, and the building itself would have reappeared elsewhere, as the altar of Pergamene Zeus has been reconstructed in Berlin. The arches of the Roman aqueduct would be buried under the crowded slums of Jerusalem or Naples, its vaults now hiding places for criminals and the secret police. Only the tomb, the Great Pyramid, would have remained unaltered\u2014marooned, monumentally useless, in the suburban sands of Giza. The Architect\u2019s Dream would have become a Jazz Age Manhattan, a twenty first century Shanghai, an Ottoman Istanbul, a medieval Venice, a noisy, dirty entrep\u00f4t of multitudinous architectures in the process of constant change. This city would be anything but still. In the process of its perpetual and simultaneous construction and decay, buildings would appear and disappear; they would be built on top of one another, out of one another, or inside one another. They would do battle, and then they would mate and produce monstrous offspring. Not a single building would survive as its makers had intended. And the architect, who might be excused for finding his awakening a nightmare, would realize that the real world is stranger and more dreamlike than a painted dream. Before returning to his column within the picture frame, he might cast one last glance at the stormy scene outside and recall another passage from The Tempest . Full fathom five thy father lies; \u00a0 Of his bones are coral made; \u00a0 Those are pearls that were his eyes; \u00a0\u00a0Nothing of him that does fade, \u00a0 But doth suffer a sea-change \u00a0 Into something rich and strange. *** This is a book of tales about the lives that buildings lead, in the course of which they all change into \u201csomething rich and strange\u201d; and their cumulative argument is that the history of architecture is nothing like The Architect\u2019s... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Architecture"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 42.96}, {"asin": "B089M1J44K", "title": "Jocelyn Learns to Dance", "author": "Jocelyn E. Cox", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "B0052REVCY", "title": "Socrates: A Man for Our Times", "author": "Paul Johnson", "description": "Review Praise for Socrates by Paul Johnson: \u201cAn admirably concise view of a remarkable life whose influence remains central to the foundations of Western thought.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201c[Johnson\u2019s] genuine love of the demos makes him an all-too-rare figure in today\u2019s chattering classes.\u201d \u2014 First Things \u201cJohnson writes more concisely than most scholars and brings to his prose a wealth of anecdote and asides unknown to most academics. His Socrates comes alive not through arguments over Platonic dating or Pythagorean influence, but by wit and allusion to Jane Austen novels, Samuel Johnson, John Maynard Keynes, firsthand remembrances of Winston Churchill's speeches and Richard Dawkins. A valuable overview.\u201d \u2014 Washington Times \u201cRobust.\u201d \u2014 The New Republic \u201cWith effortless erudition, Paul Johnson brings to life the world of the great philosopher.\u201d \u2014 Women's Wear Daily \u201cA succinct, useful exploration of life in ancient Athens and of the great philosopher\u2019s essential beliefs.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA wonderfully readable account of life in Athens, its political quarrels, and its failures. As good as a murder mystery, Johnson\u2019s narrative is exciting.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cEnlightening.... Johnson disentangles centuries of scarce and questionable sources to offer a riveting account of a homely but charismatic middle-class man whose ideas still shape the way we decide how to act, and how we fathom the notion of body and soul.\u201d \u2014 History Book Club \u201cJohnson is an accomplished historian and writer with a fluid, unpretentious style and an honest voice. These gifts, which have made his 12 previous books enjoyable and popular, are no less evident in Socrates.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Independent Review of Books \u201cThis snappy biography goes down easy while offering a full portrait of Socrates\u2014the man, the thinker, the celebrity\u2014and the world he lived in.\u201d \u2014 Z\u00f3calo Public Square \u201cSpectacular...a delight to read.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal --This text refers to the hardcover edition. About the Author Paul Johnson is a historian whose work ranges over the millennia and the whole gamut of human activities. He regularly writes book reviews for several UK magazines and newspapers, such as the Literary Review and the Spectator , and he lectures around the world. He lives in London. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 11.99}], "target_asin": "B00413QNA8"}
{"user_id": "AEI6ZIWCI7PES3TETTRWLZLO75WA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0310722365", "title": "NIV, Faithgirlz! Bible: Revised Edition, Hardcover", "author": "Nancy Rue", "description": "About the Author Nancy Rue has written over 100 books for girls, is the editor of the Faithgirlz Bible, and is a popular speaker and radio guest with her expertise in tween and teen issues. She and husband, Jim, have raised a daughter of their own and now live in Tennessee.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Bibles"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 32.64}, {"asin": "0310820367", "title": "Faithgirlz Poly Canvas Pink Medium Book & Bible Cover", "author": "Zondervan", "description": "From the Back Cover This poly canvas Bible cover for girls, featuring an exterior zippered pocket, a decorative zipper pull and interior pen and pencil holders fits the NIV Faithgirlz!(TM) Bible as well as the NIV Young Women of Faith Bible and the NIV Discoverers Bible as well as many other books and Bibles up to 6 1/8' x 8 13/16' (224mmx156mm).", "categories": ["Books", "Stationery, Journals & Notebooks", "Bible Covers"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "1401235425", "title": "Batman 1: The Court of Owls", "author": "Scott Snyder", "description": "Review \u201cA+.\u00a0The hero's got personality (and is unafraid to release a quip as sharp as a Batarang), a horde of supervillains, gumption to spare and a whole host of high-tech gadgetry to suitably impress longtime fans and those new to the Dark Knight.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cThis is one of the best comics of the week.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 The New York Times \u201c[Writer Scott Snyder] pulls from the oldest aspects of the Batman myth, combines it with sinister-comic elements from the series\u2019 best period, and gives the whole thing\u00a0terrific\u00a0forward-spin by setting up an honest-to-gosh mystery for Batman to solve.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cScott Snyder, already the company's greatest asset over the last four weeks, spins a stack of plates immediately\u2026. Too often Batman comics focus heavily on the hero persona \u2026 Snyder sets up equal amounts of conflict for both Wayne's public and private personas.\u201d \u2014 Time Out Chicago \u201cA stunning debut\u2026. Snyder knows these characters, sets up an intriguing mystery, and delivers some action that Capullo realizes stunningly. This is definitely in the top rank of the revamp. \u2014 The Onion/ AV Club \u00a0 \u201cHits all the right notes.\u00a0I enjoyed the living hell out of this.\u201d \u2014i o9 \u201cBruce Wayne is a\u00a0badass. The end.\u201d \u2014IGN  \u00a0 \u201cThere's enough here, kept at a high enough level to make it interesting and viable across media and digestible enough for even the most novice DC Universe reader\u2026.\u00a0Score one for DC and score one for Snyder and Capullo in finding a new fan.\u201d\u2014Comic Book Resources About the Author Scott Snyder is the bestselling and award-winning writer of Batman, American Vampire and Swamp Thing as well as the short story collection Voodoo Heart. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College, NYU and Columbia University. He lives on Long Island with his wife, Jeanie, and his sons Jack and Emmett.\u00a0 He is a dedicated and un-ironic fan of Elvis Presley.", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 11.11}, {"asin": "1401237789", "title": "Batman 2: The City of Owls", "author": "James Tynion IV", "description": "Review Praise for Scott Snyder's Batman: Court of Owls Vol. 1 : \u201cA+.\u00a0The hero's got personality (and is unafraid to release a quip as sharp as a Batarang), a horde of supervillains, gumption to spare and a whole host of high-tech gadgetry to suitably impress longtime fans and those new to the Dark Knight.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cThis is one of the best comics of the week.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 The New York Times \u201c[Writer Scott Snyder] pulls from the oldest aspects of the Batman myth, combines it with sinister-comic elements from the series\u2019 best period, and gives the whole thing\u00a0terrific\u00a0forward-spin by setting up an honest-to-gosh mystery for Batman to solve.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cScott Snyder, already the company's greatest asset over the last four weeks, spins a stack of plates immediately\u2026. Too often Batman comics focus heavily on the hero persona \u2026 Snyder sets up equal amounts of conflict for both Wayne's public and private personas.\u201d \u2014 Time Out Chicago About the Author Scott Snyder is the bestselling and award-winning writer of Batman, American Vampire and Swamp Thing as well as the short story collection Voodoo Heart. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College, NYU and Columbia University. He lives on Long Island with his wife, Jeanie, and his sons Jack and Emmett.\u00a0 He is a dedicated and un-ironic fan of Elvis Presley.", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.68}, {"asin": "0062731009", "title": "The Cartoon Guide to Physics (Cartoon Guide Series)", "author": "Larry Gonick", "description": "Amazon.com Review It's been said that before physics students can fly with Feynman they need to walk with Halliday and Resnick. Those of us who are still toddling along, however, need Larry Gonick. Gonick's characteristically quirky drawings are teamed with physicist Art Huffman's prose to produce lessons like this: picture Sir Isaac Newton driving a Mack truck labeled \"Big Inertia.\" Ike is talking into a CB radio, saying: \"Breaker one nine: force overcomes inertia and produces acceleration. Do you read?\" As the jacket copy says, \"If you think a negative charge is something that shows up on your credit-card bill--if you imagine that Ohm's law dictates how long to meditate--if you believe that Newtonian mechanics will fix your car,\" here's the book for you. --Mary Ellen Curtin Review \"Gonick is close to being one of a kind.\"\"-- Discover\" From the Back Cover If you think a negative charge is something that shows up on your credit card bill -- if you imagine that Ohm's Law dictates how long to meditate -- if you believe that Newtonian mechanics will fix your car -- you need The Cartoon Guide to Physics to set you straight. You don't have to be a scientist to grasp these and many other complex ideas, because The Cartoon Guide to Physics explains them all: velocity, acceleration, explosions, electricity and magnetism, circuits -- even a taste of relativity theory -- and much more, in simple, clear, and, yes, funny illustrations. Physics will never be the same! About the Author Larry Gonick has been creating comics that explain math, history, science, and other big subjects for more than forty years. He has been a calculus instructor at Harvard (where he earned his BA and MA in mathematics) and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and he is currently staff cartoonist for Muse magazine. He lives in San Francisco, California. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Studying & Workbooks"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0376090685", "title": "Children's Play Areas (Southern Living)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 28.95}, {"asin": "B00EIJPJ5U", "title": "Unravelled", "author": "M. K. Tod", "description": "About the Author M.K. Tod began writing in 2005 while living as an expat in Hong Kong. Her novel Unravelled was awarded Indie Editors Choice by the Historical Novel Society. In addition to writing historical novels, she blogs about reading and writing historical fiction, reviews books for the Historical Novel Society and the Washington Independent Review of Books , and has conducted three highly respected reader surveys. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and is the mother of two adult children. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 2.99}, {"asin": "1506703453", "title": "The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.69}, {"asin": "067187845X", "title": "Memory (Miles Vorkosigan Adventures)", "author": "Lois McMaster Bujold", "description": "Amazon.com Review Miles turns 30, and--though he isn't slowing down just yet--he is starting to lose interest in the game of Wall: the one where he tries to climb the wall, fails, gets up, and tries again. Having finally reached a point in his life where he can look back and realize that he has managed to prove his courage and competence, he can move on to bigger and better things. Depending on how you count it, this is the eighth, ninth, tenth, or eleventh book in a series--not all are about Miles or even his extended family. A good place to start is with the first Vorkosigan story, Shards of Honor .", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 7.99}], "target_asin": "0376090685"}
{"user_id": "AFRFN4VMABKIZ5CMSOLHR56DJCSQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0872860124", "title": "The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects", "author": "Alan Watts", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Buddhism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.95}, {"asin": "0802713491", "title": "The Basque History of the World", "author": "Mark Kurlansky", "description": "Amazon.com Review The buzz about the Guggenheim Bilbao aside, the Basques seldom get good press--from the 12th-century Codex of Calixtus (\"A Basque or Navarrese would do in a French man for a copper coin\") to current news items about ETA, the Basque nationalist group. Mark Kurlansky , author of Cod , sets out to change all that in The Basque History of the World . \"The singular remarkable fact about the Basques is that they still exist,\" Kurlansky asserts. Without a defined country (other than Euskadi, otherwise known as \"Basqueland\"), with no known related ethnic groups, the Basques are an anomaly in Europe. What unites the Basques, above all, is their language--Euskera. According to ETA, \"Euskera is the quintessence of Euskadi. So long as Euskera is alive, Euskadi will live.\" To help provide a complete picture of the Basques, Kurlansky looks at their political, economic, social, and even culinary history, from the valiant Basque underground in World War II to medieval whalers to modern makers of the g\u00e2teau Basque . The most affecting chapter focuses on Guernica, a small market town bombed by German planes for over three hours on April 26, 1937, and uses interviews with survivors to illustrate the horror of the attack. Kurlansky is clearly enamored of the Basques, which leads him to see them in a uniformly positive light. That rosy outlook aside, The Basque History of the World is an excellent introduction to these romantic people. Are they the original Europeans? Kurlansky doesn't weigh in on the issue, preferring instead to honor the Basque request Garean gareana legez --let us be what we are. --Sunny Delaney From Publishers Weekly Straddling the border of southern France and northern Spain, the land of the Basques has long been home to a people who had no country of their own but have always viewed themselves as a nation. In this marvelous work of cultural history and appreciation, Kurlansky traces Basque history from pre-Roman times, when Basques worked as the mercenaries of Carthage, to the region's recent renaissance in language and arts. Along the way, he explains how the Basques came to be among Europe's first whalers, capitalists, explorers, industrialists and international traders. As he did in Cod, Kurlansky fuses political and economic history with delightful digressions into cultural and culinary traditions (several delicious recipes are included). The book is as politically loaded with opinion as it is culturally informative: Kurlansky expresses sympathy for the cause of Basque independence, arguing that many of Spain's current policies toward its Basque minority are holdovers from the repressive Franco regime. He also tends to accept the claim that the Basques \"are the original Europeans,\" largely on the ground that Euskera, the Basque language, appears to have no linguistic relative and is likely the oldest European language still spoken. For all the ground it covers, this wildly informative work is a marvel of clarity, glittering with unusual facts and marked by penetrating insights into a people always \"making complex choices about the degree of independence that was needed to preserve their way of life, while looking to the rest of the world for commercial opportunities to ensure their prosperity.\" 56 illustrations, 6 maps, 10 recipes. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy Agency. 5-city author tour. (Oct.) FYI: Cod received the James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing and was a New York Public Library Best Book of 1997. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The author of Cod, one of last year's quirkiest and most enjoyable entries, returns with a slightly less meandering but equally entertaining history of the Basques. Kurlansky brings a novelist's storytelling talents, a journalist's eye for the salient fact, and an unapologetic admiration of his subject to an episodic narrative of Europe's oldest surviving culture. (LJ 10/1/99) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A comprehensive view of all things Basque, from the author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1997). The Basque History of the World is an honorable title, alerting readers to its singularly Basque-centric mix of cultural studies, history, and politics. The writing is direct and accessible, although limited by the occasional descriptive clich (jagged mountains and crisp fall days). Its most interesting when describing the periods when Basque history intersects with the history of the larger world. For example, in a section on the Spanish Civil War, Kurlansky utilizes quotes from survivors of the 1937 bombing of Guernica by Francos forces, the first large-scale use of air power against a civilian population, to create a sense of suspense, dread, and terror. The bravery of members of the Basque underground, who helped over 700 downed Allied fliers escape from Nazi-occupied territory to England during WWII, is also depicted through compelling first-person recollections. The last third of the book, covering the post-WWII period and the radicalization of a faction of the Basque independence movement, is most problematic. While Kurlansky adeptly explains the logic for Basque autonomy and presents the most radical wings justification for its historical use of terrorism, his analysis too often accepts the Basque view at face value and offers no independent perspective. Perhaps this is because Kurlansky is enamored of his subject, especially the Basque language, Euskera. Euskera warrants attention, as its a unique non-Indo-European language with no known linguistic relatives. Kurlansky knows the Basques well and includes many entertaining anecdotes, myths, and facts about them, all of which reflect a quaint Basque chauvinism. According to the author, the Basque are: probably the original Europeans, the first Europeans to cultivate tobacco, the first bankers in Spain, the most devout Catholics in the world, and among the inventors of beach resorts. In its entirety, this is an informative but ethnocentric history that readers should approach with their critical faculties intact. (Author tour) -- Copyright \u00a91999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review ...entertaining and instructive.... he intersperses his political and military chronicle with lively anecdotes and digressions... -- The New York Times Book Review , Alan Riding By the time Mr. Kurlansky's lively, anecdotal, all-encompassing history of Basque ingenuity and achievement concludes, one is inclined to believe that all Spain would benefit if Basques were politely recruited to manage the country's finances and technology and otherwise left to do things their way on their home ground. -- The Atlantic Monthly, November 1999 About the Author Mark Kurlansky began his career as a foreign correspondent writing about the last years of Francoism in Spain, especially in the Basque provinces, and he has returned there annually for the past twenty-five years. He is the author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World , which won the James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing, and also of A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny , and A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry . He lives in New York City. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "B0007DMUIK", "title": "Magic and Mystery in Tibet", "author": "Alexandra David-Neel", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Asia"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 65.0}, {"asin": "0982696612", "title": "Pursuing Liberty: America Through the Eyes of the Newly Free", "author": "Cory Emberson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 1.39}, {"asin": "B007R6S2YQ", "title": "Treasures of the Lost Knight", "author": "T.J. Garrison", "description": "About the Author As an avid traveler and scuba diver, the author has extensively explored the Caribbean and Bahamas and has participated in search efforts with an exploration and salvage company for the last undiscovered galleon wreck of the 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet off the coast of Vero Beach, Florida. When not writing, he enjoys, diving, history, and family. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 2.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1889633348", "title": "The Immortal: True Accounts of the 250-Year-Old Man, Li Qingyun", "author": "Stuart A. Olson", "description": "About the Author Stuart Alve Olson, longtime protege of Master T.T. Liang (1900-2002), is a teacher, translator, and writer on Taoist philosophy, health, and internal arts. In 2006, he formed Valley Spirit Arts to present his books and DVDs, and is the head teacher at the Sanctuary of Tao in Phoenix, Arizona, where he focuses on translating various Taoist texts, conducting lectures, leading retreats, and teaching.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Philosophy"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 39.95}, {"asin": "0316453188", "title": "Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life (The Dr. Hyman Library, 11)", "author": "Mark Hyman M.D.", "description": "Review \u201c Young Forever will revolutionize how we approach aging. In this powerful new book, Dr. Hyman gives us all the tools to turn on longevity switches and age in reverse. But more importantly, he shows us how to live more youthfully, with purpose and connection \u2014 and that\u2019s really the most important thing.\u201d\u2015 Jay Shetty, author of Think Like a Monk \u201c Young Forever is an impressive guidebook to health and longevity.\u201d\u2015 David A. Sinclair, PhD, New York Times-bestselling author of Lifespan \u201cDr. Hyman is one of our leading Functional Medicine practitioners and teachers. In this vital new book, he integrates the latest science with his personal healing experience and decades of deep clinical insights, outlining a path towards growing older while staying young in body, mind, and spirit. An invigorating, illuminating, and innovative work that will enrich the lives of many.\u201d\u2015 Gabor Mat\u00e9, MD, author of The Myth of Normal \u201cAn empowering guide to reversing the hallmarks of aging. Young Forever shows us that we already possess the tools we need to maintain a high quality of life, no matter our chronological age.\u201d\u2015 Sara Gottfried, MD, New York Times-bestselling author of The Hormone Cure \u201cAnyone who believes that their biology is bound by time will be surprised by the groundbreaking science shared by Dr. Hyman in this beautifully-written book. Well-researched, easy to understand, and inspiringly practical, Young Forever will be a game-changer for anyone who reads it, and for the world at large.\u201d\u2015 Dr. Uma Naidoo, author of This Is Your Brain on Food \u201c Young Forever is the ultimate guide to a long and thriving life. Dr. Hyman synthesizes his decades of clinical expertise with hoards of scientific literature to provide a clear, accessible, and holistic roadmap to a very optimistic future. Young Forever covers the full spectrum of longevity tools, from foundational nutritional principles, to cutting edge advances on topics like peptides, glucose biosensors, and whole body imaging. Reading this book will help you better understand your body. You can start today towards optimal function and a bright future.\u201d\u2015 Casey Means, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Levels Health \u201cDr. Hyman expertly distills the new research on aging into clear, actionable steps for reversing our biological age that anyone can implement in their daily lives. A must read for everyone aspiring for a long, active life.\u201d\u2015 Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google \u201cAnyone pursuing a long life of health and happiness must read this book. Young Forever , by my friend Dr. Hyman, will change how you view aging. It will give you hope for living your best life for a very long time.\u201d\u2015 Wim Hof, New York Times-bestselling author of The Wim Hof Method \u201c Young Forever is a new key addition to my collection of books on longevity. In this genuinely life-changing book, Dr. Hyman lays out the blueprint for living longer and healthier than many may have previously thought possible. A great read for all ages!\u201d\u2015 Eric Verdin, President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging \u201cDr. Hyman has once again seized on a trend and written an excellent book. This time it's longevity. Young Forever offers easily digestible science, legitimate advice for living longer, and Mark\u2019s consummately readable style.\u201d\u2015 Dan Buettner, National Geographic Fellow and #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Blue Zones \u201cDr. Hyman has unlocked the key to defeating the illnesses of old age. Young Forever is full of well-researched secrets, practical habits, and lifestyle advice that will keep us feeling energetic and full of life as we age. Dr. Hyman is one of the most influential health experts I trust the most; he has taught me so much about how to take care of my body.\u201d\u2015 Vani Hari, New York Times-bestselling author and founder of FoodBabe.com & Truvani \u201cNow more than ever, it\u2019s clear aging is modifiable. Dr. Hyman elegantly synthesizes recent scientific advances into actionable insights that can help us turn back the clock, improving our lives and those of our loved ones.\u201d\u2015 David Furman, PhD, Associate Professor and Director, AI Platform, The Buck Institute for Research on Aging \u201cIf you want to apply the extraordinary recent discoveries as to how to prevent premature aging to your own life, there is no better book! This is a must-read for anyone who strives to create vibrant health throughout a century or more of living.\u201d\u2015 Jeffrey Bland, PhD, founder of The Institute for Functional Medicine and president of Big Bold Health \u201c Young Forever implores you to contemplate the value of your years on earth and what you\u2019d do with infinite health. Dr. Hyman presents a radical new approach to aging, extending your health, and more importantly, increasing the quality of your life. This book will teach you how to live better, for longer.\u201d\u2015 Tony Robbins, global entrepreneur, investor, #1 New York Times-bestselling author, philanthropist, and life and business strategist \u201cDr. Hyman expertly unpacks mountains of longevity research\u2014the most exciting frontier in medical science today\u2014to deliver an accessible and practical guidebook for living your longest and healthiest life.\u201d\u2015 Nathan Price, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Thorne HealthTech \u201cThere is a lot happening in the world of longevity science right now. What do we actually need to be thinking about, engaging in, or aware of? Dr. Hyman has created a comprehensive guide to understanding every facet of the aging journey, and most importantly, what we all need to do now to live our best, strongest, and healthiest lives, slowing the hands of time to a crawl, or even, perhaps, reversing them!\u201d\u2015 Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, author of Younger You: Reduce Your Bio Age and Live Longer, Better \u201cFor too long healthcare has been reactive \u2014 providing care only after the wheels have fallen off the bus. Dr. Hyman, the quintessential pioneer of functional medicine, shows us in Young Forever that the key to great healthcare is being proactive \u2014 detecting the warning signs of impending illness and intervening with lifestyle changes (and medications) as early as possible. This, with Dr. Hyman's second piece of critical advice \u2014 fully believing your best days are still ahead of you \u2014 should get you to the most senior of years that you can truly enjoy!\u201d\u2015 Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi, Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and New York Times-bestselling author of The Healing Self \u201cIn Young Forever , Dr. Hyman generously provides a thorough and fascinating explanation of how your cells age, then he lays out a powerful set of tools you can use to slow your aging and rejuvenate your body and soul. Only the legendary Dr. Mark Hyman could have written a book so broadly integrative and wise. This is a truly precious guide for vitality and healthy longevity!\u201d\u2015 Elissa Epel, PhD, New York Times-bestselling author of The Telomere Effect \u201cThe science of aging says you can get even better as you get older! Dr. Mark Hyman\u2019s Young Forever delivers this message as a clarion call to anyone who wants to combine quantity and quality of life as they age. With clear and cutting edge explanations about the biology of aging and an easy-to-follow program based on the principles of functional medicine, Dr. Hyman knocks it out of the park once again in this blockbuster book. It\u2019s time to make room for more candles on your birthday cake if you want to feel young forever.\u201d\u2015 William W Li, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Beat Disease and President and Medical Director of The Angiogenesis Foundation \"Dr. Hyman is one of the international leaders in functional medicine, and in this excellent book, he combines his expertise, based on 30 years of clinical practice, with major recent discoveries in the longevity field to provide straightforward recommendations that will help readers live longer and healthier.\u201d\u2015 Valter Longo, PhD, author of The Longevity Diet About the Author Mark Hyman, MD ,\u00a0is the founder and senior adviser for the Cleveland Clinic\u2019s Center for Functional Medicine, board president for clinical affairs for the Institute for Functional Medicine, founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, and host of the leading health podcast The Doctor\u2019s Farmacy . He is the bestselling author of numerous books, including The Pegan Diet ; Food Fix ; Food ; and Eat Fat, Get Thin .", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Diets & Weight Loss"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.1}, {"asin": "1250077028", "title": "Furiously Happy", "author": "Jenny Lawson", "description": "Review Praise for Jenny Lawson: \"We\u2019re living in an era of bestselling books by female comedians\u2026 But Lawson\u2019s book needs no lovable, familiar face on the front cover\u2026She\u2019s unapologetic, candid, outrageous, and the book reaches new levels of hilarity because of it.\" \u2015 Entertainment Weekly (A)\u201cJenny made me laugh so hard I feared for my safety! I think that's how she was able to get past my defenses and make me feel more okay about myself.\u201d \u2015Allie Brosh\u201cYou'll laugh, wince, writhe in discomfort, cry, then laugh again\u2026But the two things you'll never do is doubt Jenny's brilliance or her fearlessness\u2026She's changing the conversation one rented sloth at a time.\u201d \u2015Bren\u00e9 Brown\u201cLawson's self-deprecating humor is not only gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate; it allows her to speak...in a real and raw way.\u201d \u2015 O, The Oprah Magazine \u201cTake one part David Sedaris and two parts Chelsea Handler and you'll have some inkling of the cockeyed humor of Jenny Lawson...[She] flaunts the sort of fearless comedic chops that will make you spurt Diet Coke through your nose.\u201d \u2015 Parade About the Author Jenny Lawson is an award-winning humorist known for her great candor in sharing her struggle with mental illness. She lives in Texas with her husband and daughter and was constantly \u201cbuying too many books\u201d (\u201cNot a real thing,\u201d she insists), so she decided to skip the middleman and just started her own bookshop, which also serves booze because books and booze are what magic is made of. She has previously written Let\u2019s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy , both of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. She also wrote You Are Here , which inexplicably made it onto the New York Times bestseller list in spite of the fact that it was basically a very fun coloring book. She would like to be your friend unless you\u2019re a real asshole. And yes, she realizes that this whole paragraph is precisely the reason she shouldn\u2019t be allowed to write her own bio.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.08}, {"asin": "0786804904", "title": "Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue", "author": "Julius Lester", "description": "From School Library Journal Starred Review. Grade 6-9\u2013This powerful and engaging historical novel is told in dialogue and through monologues. It also moves around in time, from the period when the story takes place to \"interludes,\" in which the various characters look back on these events years later. It begins with a factual event\u2013the largest slave auction in United States history that took place in 1859 on Pierce Butler's plantation in Georgia. The book introduces Butler, his abolitionist ex-wife Fanny Kemble, their two daughters, the auctioneer, and a number of slaves sold to pay off Butler's gambling debts. Emma, a fictional house slave, is the centerpiece of the novel. She cares for the master's daughters and has been promised that she will never be sold. On the last day of the auction, Butler impulsively sells her to a woman from Kentucky. There she marries, runs away, and eventually gains her freedom in Canada. Lester has done an admirable job of portraying the simmering anger and aching sadness that the slaves must have felt. Each character is well drawn and believable. Both blacks and whites liberally use the word \"nigger,\" which will be jarring to modern-day students. The text itself is easy to read and flows nicely. Different typefaces distinguish the characters' monologues, their dialogues with one another, and their memories. Still, middle school readers may have some difficulty following the plot until they get used to the unusual format. Altogether this novel does a superb job of showing the inhumanity of slavery. It begs to be read aloud, and it could be used in sections to produce some stunning reader's theatre. \u2013Bruce Anne Shook, Mendenhall Middle School, Greensboro, NC From Booklist *Starred Review* Gr. 6-9. From his first book, To Be a Slave (1968), Lester has told the history of slavery through personal accounts that relay the dehumanizing message of the perpetrators. Here he draws on historical sources to fictionalize a real event: the biggest slave auction in American history, which took place in Savannah, Georgia, in 1859. He imagines the individual voices of many who were there, adults and kids, including several slaves up for sale, the auctioneer, and the white masters and their families buying and selling the valuable merchandise. The huge cast speaks in the present tense and sometimes from the future looking back. A note fills in the facts. The horror of the auction and its aftermath is unforgettable; individuals whom the reader has come to know are handled like animals, wrenched from family, friends, and love. Then there's a sales list with names, ages, and the amount taken in for each person. Brave runaways speak; so does an abolitionist who helps them. Those who are not heroic are here, too, and the racism is virulent (there's widespread use of the n -word). The personal voices make this a stirring text for group discussion. Older readers may want to go on from here to the nonfiction narratives in Growing Up in Slavery (see adjacent review). Hazel Rochman Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 18.95}], "target_asin": "1889633348"}
{"user_id": "AFQM4N256JP4TCECFKVL2VSHSH5Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0071462074", "title": "Endless Referrals, Third Edition", "author": "Bob Burg", "description": "From the Publisher Bob Burg regularly speaks\u00a0to public audiences, corporations and associations, including international Fortune 500 companies. From the Back Cover The definitive guide to turning casual contacts into solid sales opportunities In this fully revised edition, Bob Burg builds on his proven relationship-building principles to bring even more clients to your door and helps you attract only those who are interested in what you sell. He shows how to maximize your daily contacts, utilize your tools both online and off, leverage your relationships, and generate ongoing sales opportunities. \"If you're serious about your sales career, whether you are selling a product, service, or yourself, master the contents of this book and you will practically guarantee your future success.\" --Tom Hopkins, author of How to Master the Art of Selling \"Bob Burg has long been the authority on connecting with clients and building win-win relationships. Endless Referrals should be required reading for sales professionals and entrepreneurs everywhere.\" -- Gary Keller, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Keller Williams Realty Intl. and author of The Millionaire Real Estate Investor \"I've found that acquiring business is the toughest challenge for professional services providers. Thankfully, Bob Burg provides pragmatic and effective techniques to smash that challenge to bits, whether using mail, phone, email, or a polite tap on the shoulder.\" --Alan Weiss, Ph.D., author Million Dollar Consulting \"Bob Burg opens the floodgates to Fort Knox with this book. I like the simple, easy to understand, practical way he outlines the exact way to find endless referrals. A treasure.\" --Dottie Walters, author of Speak & Grow Rich \"A no-nonsense approach to building your business through relationships.\" --Jane Applegate, syndicated Los Angeles Times columnist About the Author Bob Burg regularly speaks\u00a0to public audiences, corporations and associations, including international Fortune 500 companies. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 24.29}, {"asin": "1338236571", "title": "Dog Man: Brawl of the Wild: From the Creator of Captain Underpants (Dog Man #6)", "author": "Dav Pilkey", "description": "Review Everyone Digs Dog Man! * \"Striking color, interactive pages, drawing tutorials, and a plethora of laugh-out-loud moments all work to keep readers\u2019 attention on a tight leash.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review * \"High-intensity, heartwarming, and, above all, hysterically funny.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review * \"Riotously funny and original.\" -- School Library Journal , starred review * \"An utter, unfettered delight.\" -- Booklist , starred review * \"Readers (of any age) will be giggling from start to finish.\" -- Publishers Weekly , starred review * \"Action-oriented cartoons... Laffs aplenty.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review Everyone Digs Dog Man! * \"High-intensity, heartwarming, and, above all, hysterically funny.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review * \"Riotously funny and original.\" -- School Library Journal , starred review * \"An utter, unfettered delight.\" -- Booklist , starred review * \"Readers (of any age) will be giggling from start to finish.\" -- Publishers Weekly , starred review * \"Action-oriented cartoons... Laffs aplenty.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review About the Author When Dav Pilkey was a kid, he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Dav was so disruptive in class that his teachers made him sit out in the hallway every day. Luckily, Dav loved to draw and make up stories. He spent his time in the hallway creating his own original comic books\u2014the very first adventures of Dog Man and Captain Underpants. In college, Dav met a teacher who encouraged him to illustrate and write. He won a national competition in 1986 and the prize was the publication of his first book, WORLD WAR WON. He made many other books before being awarded the 1998 California Young Reader Medal for DOG BREATH, which was published in 1994, and in 1997 he won the Caldecott Honor for THE PAPERBOY. The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, published in 2002, was the first complete graphic novel spin-off from the Captain Underpants series and appeared at #6 on the USA Today bestseller list for all books, both adult and children\u2019s, and was also a New York Times bestseller. It was followed by The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung Fu Cavemen from the Future and Super Diaper Baby 2: The Invasion of the Potty Snatchers, both USA Today bestsellers. The unconventional style of these graphic novels is intended to encourage uninhibited creativity in kids. His stories are semi-autobiographical and explore universal themes that celebrate friendship, tolerance, and the triumph of the good-hearted. Dav loves to kayak in the Pacific Northwest with his wife.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 4.01}, {"asin": "1452103313", "title": "K is for Knifeball: An Alphabet of Terrible Advice", "author": "Avery Monsen", "description": "Review \"The co-authors of the darkly funny animated stories \"All my friends are dead\" have done it again with this parody children's book, capturing the hilarious essence of their debut novels.\"  -Cool Hunting\"The co-authors of the darkly funny animated stories \"All my friends are dead\" have done it again with this parody children's book, capturing the hilarious essence of their debut novels.\"  -Cool Hunting\"The co-authors of the darkly funny animated stories \"All my friends are dead\" have done it again with this parody children's book, capturing the hilarious essence of their debut novels.\"  -Cool Hunting\"...great fun for adults. The humorous illustrations, done in the style common in kids books, greatly add to the fun.\"  Geek Alerts\"...great fun for adults. The humorous illustrations, done in the style common in kids books, greatly add to the fun.\"  Geek Alerts\"...great fun for adults. The humorous illustrations, done in the style common in kids books, greatly add to the fun.\"  Geek Alerts About the Author Avery Monsen is a New York\u2013based artist and writer. He is the co-author of All my friends are dead. and All my friends are still dead. Jory John is a California-based writer, editor, and cartoonist. He is the co-author of All my friends are dead. and All my friends are still dead.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.42}, {"asin": "0545935172", "title": "Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas: From the Creator of Captain Underpants (Dog Man #5)", "author": "Dav Pilkey", "description": "Review Everyone Digs Dog Man! * \"Striking color, interactive pages, drawing tutorials, and a plethora of laugh-out-loud moments all work to keep readers\u2019 attention on a tight leash.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review * \"High-intensity, heartwarming, and, above all, hysterically funny.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review * \"Riotously funny and original.\" -- School Library Journal , starred review * \"An utter, unfettered delight.\" -- Booklist , starred review * \"Readers (of any age) will be giggling from start to finish.\" -- Publishers Weekly , starred review * \"Action-oriented cartoons... Laffs aplenty.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review Everyone Digs Dog Man! * \"High-intensity, heartwarming, and, above all, hysterically funny.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review * \"Riotously funny and original.\" -- School Library Journal , starred review * \"An utter, unfettered delight.\" -- Booklist , starred review * \"Readers (of any age) will be giggling from start to finish.\" -- Publishers Weekly , starred review * \"Action-oriented cartoons... Laffs aplenty.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review About the Author When Dav Pilkey was a kid, he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Dav was so disruptive in class that his teachers made him sit out in the hallway every day. Luckily, Dav loved to draw and make up stories. He spent his time in the hallway creating his own original comic books\u2014the very first adventures of Dog Man and Captain Underpants. In college, Dav met a teacher who encouraged him to illustrate and write. He won a national competition in 1986 and the prize was the publication of his first book, WORLD WAR WON. He made many other books before being awarded the 1998 California Young Reader Medal for DOG BREATH, which was published in 1994, and in 1997 he won the Caldecott Honor for THE PAPERBOY. The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, published in 2002, was the first complete graphic novel spin-off from the Captain Underpants series and appeared at #6 on the USA Today bestseller list for all books, both adult and children\u2019s, and was also a New York Times bestseller. It was followed by The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung Fu Cavemen from the Future and Super Diaper Baby 2: The Invasion of the Potty Snatchers, both USA Today bestsellers. The unconventional style of these graphic novels is intended to encourage uninhibited creativity in kids. His stories are semi-autobiographical and explore universal themes that celebrate friendship, tolerance, and the triumph of the good-hearted. Dav loves to kayak in the Pacific Northwest with his wife.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.82}, {"asin": "1250095085", "title": "Sad Animal Facts", "author": "Brooke Barker", "description": "About the Author Brooke Barker is a writer, illustrator and animal enthusiast living in Portland, Oregon. She has a dog who can never eat chocolate and three guppies who can't take naps because they don't have eyelids.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 11.84}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1492674311", "title": "P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever", "author": "Raj Haldar", "description": "Review \"Explore the many quirks and anomalies of English spelling and pronunciation in an A-to-Z tribute to some of the most unconventional words in the lexicon. Learn why Y is not for \"why\" and U is not for \"you,\" but V is for \"five\" and C is for \"czar.\" With this book full of puns, alliteration, playful artwork, and plenty of entertaining observations, children of all ages will enjoy celebrating the exceptions to the rules.\" \u2015 Foreword Reviews, STARRED Review \"A win for word nerd kids and pun-tastic dads everywhere.\" \u2015 The Dad \"The book spotlights words that have silent letters, or weird grammar rules, and invites you to ponder dangerous word traps and oddities. And you might learn something new along the way...While other lessons teach really important principles that, honestly, could change your life and maybe even help you find love.\" \u2015 Funny or Die \"A raucous trip through the odd corners of our alphabet.\" \u2015 The New York Times \" P Is for Pterodactyl \" is a word lover's delight and an almost mandatory read-aloud... Amid all the humor, wordplay, and silliness, there's solid, brain-teasing information about words and how they're spelled. It a delight from start to finish, especially for word lovers and their offspring.\" \u2015 Common Sense Media \"This atypical alphabet book humorously addresses \"mischievous words\" that ignore the rules of phonetics and spelling... Each letter's sample is illustrated with cartoony, full-color drawings followed by a comically absurd sentence highlighting other examples. \"G is for Gnocchi. / The gnome yells, \u2018Waiter! There's a bright white gnat nibbling on my gnocchi!' ...the concept will help new readers and new English language learners conquer some of the more peculiar aspects of our language.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Are you a logophile (someone who loves words)? If you are, this delightful picture book will be your new favorite alphabet book... In this book, \u2018A is for Aisle\u2019 and \u2018H is for Heir.\u2019 What? Below each letter and illustration is a sentence describing each word. \"M is for Mnemonic. // But now Mr. M. can\u2019t remember why.\" Isn\u2019t this a delight for readers and writers of all ages? It\u2019s my new favorite.\" \u2015 Imagination Soup About the Author Raj Haldar is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestselling picture book, P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever . But, for close to a decade, he has been better known as Lushlife, the rapper, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. In that time, he's amassed a fervent global fanbase and released award-winning viral music videos that highlight his erudite lyrics. The Sunday New York Times describes his work as \u201can intoxicating mix of captivating rhymes with audacious, gorgeous production.\u201d So it should come as no surprise that Haldar has made the leap into the world of children\u2019s literature. His latest book entitled, This Book is Banned gives young readers a lighthearted entrypoint to begin understanding the dangers of book banning and censorship. His work has been featured by The Washington Post , Interview Magazine , VICE , Pitchfork , Village Voice , Mental Floss , BBC , SPIN and more! Raj currently lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife and two young daughters. Raj Haldar social media, music, books + more! Chris Carpenter is a software developer for a tech startup in New York. Maria Beddia is a freelance illustrator, muralist, and textile designer based in Philadelphia.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "B0BKH4CWP2", "title": "Soft Places", "author": "Betty Rocksteady", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "0805059032", "title": "Mississippi Solo: A River Quest", "author": "Eddy L. Harris", "description": "Amazon.com Review At 30 years old, Eddy Harris leaves his home in St. Louis and sets off into the chilly autumn for Lake Itasca. \"I decided to canoe down the Mississippi River and to find out what I was made of,\" he writes. And Mississippi Solo is his stunning testament. Harris, who has authored Native Stranger , South of Haunted Dreams , and Still Life in Harlem , has been widely acclaimed since the first release of Mississippi Solo in 1988. It is greatly pleasing to see this important and stimulating first work revived. As the Mississippi grows from its tiny source to a wide and powerful flow, Harris gains confidence as a canoeist, faith in his endeavor, and an understanding of his varying identity as an African American traveling alone from north to south in the United States. His exact and brilliantly revealing prose shows us how each bend in this mighty river turns itself within the paddler, how person and river are entwined--and who is in charge. With an astute ear for irony, philosophy, and wisdom, as well as truths about the river, Harris takes the reader through locks and lakes on the northern Mississippi to the wild and swift and meandering river south of St. Louis. Songs of joy, troughs of loneliness, terrific storms, birdsong, paranoia, friendly captains, wild dogs, and ghosts of slaves fill his pages. Then we face off with two hunters, two shotguns, and Harris's single pistol... and still the river leads him on to New Orleans. Like the river he travels, Harris cuts through to the core of himself and his country. Triumphant! --Byron Ricks Review \u201cA wonderful book--and a highly original contribution to the literature of travel.\u201d \u2015 Paul Theroux\" \u201cIn his mastery of language, glinting irony, poetic prose, and uncanny powers of observation, Eddy L. Harris is the equal of Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author Eddy L. Harris is the author of three critically acclaimed books, Native Stranger, South of Haunted Dreams , and Still Life in Harlem , a New York Times Book Review notable book of 1997.\u00a0 A graduate of Stanford University, he teaches at Washington University in Missouri. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.07}, {"asin": "0981646859", "title": "A Garden of Beauty"}], "target_asin": "1492674311"}
{"user_id": "AEMS4HOPX2YYZXPI3SYGEH5BLOAA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0670337676", "title": "The Ghost Belonged to Me", "author": "Richard Peck", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.62}, {"asin": "0595341454", "title": "YO SOY LATINA! : Includes both Original Off-Broadway Version and College Version", "author": "Linda Nieves-Powell", "description": "About the Author Writer, director, and producer Linda Nieves-Powell lives in Staten Island, New York, with her husband and son. She is currently touring colleges and universities performing YO SOY LATINA! and Soul Latina .", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Performing Arts"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.65}, {"asin": "098501332X", "title": "Good info."}, {"asin": "1584857668", "title": "Bright, Shiny Skylar (Hopscotch Hill School)", "author": "Valerie Tripp", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 8.1}, {"asin": "1584857641", "title": "Hallie's Horrible Handwriting (Hopscotch Hill School)", "author": "Valerie Tripp", "description": "From Booklist Reviewed with Valerie Tripp's Thank You, Logan! Gr. 1-2. In the lively, new Hopscotch Hill School series, the kids in the classroom have fun as they learn important lessons from their fabulous teacher. Hallie loves reading, but she has a hard time learning to write. She feels so terrible that she tears up her work. Then her teacher and her kind friends support her and help her develop her skills. It may take a while, but she'll get there. Logan likes taking care of Razzi, the class rabbit; but after she gets a cold and sneezes \"big, wet, yucky sneezes,\" she worries that she'll make Razzi sick. The teacher reassures Logan that rabbits can't catch colds from people but tells her that she must wash her hands and cover her nose and mouth to protect other people from her germs. Allen's energetic full-color illustrations show all the kids in the diverse classroom: Hallie is a pretty redhead in a gorgeous purple outfit; Logan, in muck jeans, splashes cheerfully in the mud. A third title in the series, Bright, Shiny Skylar , centers on an active kid who learns how to focus her energy. The classroom is idyllic, but the problems and their solutions are real; and lengthy appended notes to adults provide excellent advice and suggest activities to nurture children's reading skills and boost self-confidence. Hazel Rochman Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 1.48}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0757913113", "title": "Movie Instrumental Solos: Horn in F, Book & CD", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1984815245", "title": "My Eyes Are Up Here", "author": "Laura Zimmermann", "description": "Review \"Charming, relatable and laugh-out-loud hilarious, My Eyes Are Up Here is a sparkling debut from my new favorite YA author, Laura Zimmermann. Her Greer Walsh is at once all of us and the most special of us. I wanted to hug her, give her a high five and sometimes throttle her, but I always,\u00a0always\u00a0rooted for her.\u201d\u2014Erin Hahn, author of You\u2019d Be Mine and More Than Maybe \u201cMy Eyes Are Up Here is not only a smart and honest book about body positivity. It\u2019s a funny and endearing read that will have you cheering for Greer Walsh, and celebrating the power of female friendship.\"\u2014Deb Caletti, National Book Award finalist and Michael L. Printz Honor medalist \"[S]mart, insightful and often very funny\u00a0[...] this novel perceptively explores the emotional toll experienced by teens who are self-conscious and feeling isolated about being different \u2013 and the liberation that comes with breaking free.\"\u2014 Buffalo News \"By turns hilarious, heartbreaking and totally, completely honest, perfect for those who liked recent novels like Frankly in Love .\"--Culturess.com\"Zimmermann\u2019s debut may have captured my own experience in a way no one ever has before when it comes to being a girl with big boobs.\"\u2014Kelly Jensen for BookRiot.com \u2605 \"Wise and wry... An original, feminist, and timely first choice title for all libraries.\"\u2014SLJ, starred review \"Zimmerman\u2019s debut has a witty, unabashedly honest voice.\" \u2014PW \"Zimmermann\u2019s debut is both insightful and humorous,\u00a0owing to a bright\u00a0and funny yet self-deprecating narrator\u00a0matched with brief chapters that capture Greer\u2019s urgencies\u00a0and insecurities. Girls who lament\u00a0not having the perfect\u00a0body will appreciate this novel, and girls who value their\u00a0best friends will relate without hesitation. Rise up for\u00a0girl\u00a0power!\" \u2014Booklist \"Many girls will resonate with this story of trying to learn to love your body and be comfortable with the skin you\u2019re in. We are both so glad that this book exists and it brought about a lot of important, meaningful dialogue for us both. Highly recommended.\" \u2014SLJ's Teen Librarian Toolbox About the Author Laura Zimmermann is a multiple-time champion of the Twin Cities Moth and Word Sprout story slams, and she was chosen to participate in the 2018 Listen To Your Mother storytelling show. She lives with her family in Minneapolis, MN. My Eyes Are Up Here is her first novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prologue My mother believes there are two types of people: those who like to be the center of attention, and those who are too shy to want anybody to notice them. She thinks I am the second but should be the first. What she\u2019d never understand is that some people like to be noticed for some things but not for other things. Like to be noticed for being an excellent piano player, but not for being allergic to peanuts. Or noticed for wearing new shoes, but not for speaking with an accent. Or noticed for being the only Kennedy High student to score a 5 on the AP Human Geography exam, but not for being the only Kennedy High student whose breasts are bigger than her head. Chapter 1 \u201cCome on, Greer. Maybe you\u2019ll make a new friend.\u201d I answer in annoyed blinks. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to help someone get settled in a new place. It\u2019s a chance to give back.\u201d I blink at her harder, because she\u2019s pretending like I volunteered for this. \u201cHalf an hour. Forty minutes, tops.\u201d Mom\u2019s half hours do not top out at forty minutes. Mom\u2019s half hours can last hours. Especially if she has an audience. We\u2019re here for her work. She is a relocation advisor with Relocation Specialists, Inc. Big companies hire her to help settle new employees in the area. She leads neighborhood tours, arranges school visits, and recommends pediatricians, handymen, or Brazilian waxers. She\u2019s very good at it. It satisfies her constant need to share her opinions and justifies the over-\u00adthe-\u00adtop luxury SUV she leases, with its interior of baby-\u00adseal leather. Sometimes, like now, if she has a client with a kid my age, she\u2019ll drag me along to meet with them, like a junior re-\u00adlo advisor. I\u2019m supposed to answer their questions about being a teenager in suburban Illinois. They never have any questions. It\u2019s always the same. It\u2019s even the same Starbucks. I sit next to Mom and try to look extra welcoming. The new kid stares at their phone under the table so I know that wherever they came from, they had friends cooler than me. If the client is a mom, she\u2019ll ask me the kind of questions she thinks her sulky kid would want to ask if they weren\u2019t too sulky to ask them, and once I start to reply, my mom will interrupt with what she thinks I should answer. It\u2019s completely uncomfortable for everyone, except Mom. Kathryn Walsh is never uncomfortable. Believe it or not, there are times being a mild-\u00admannered, high-\u00adachieving, generally agreeable teenager does not work for me, and dealing with my mother is one of them. If I fought with her more, like Maggie fights with her mom, or if I was embarrassing, like Tyler, she wouldn\u2019t make me do these things. It would be too exhausting. But Kathryn Walsh exhausts me more than I exhaust her, so here I am. She is just so . I am just so not. It is why I go with her to meet the uninterested progeny of people cruel enough/important enough to make their families move during high school. It is why I help my brother, Tyler, with math homework he could find the answers to online. It is why I faithfully attend the yearly reunion of the moms and babies from her childbirth class, hosted by this very coffee establishment every May. This branch of Starbucks is located on the path of least resistance. I follow her inside. The kid I\u2019m supposed to meet will be a sophomore at Kennedy, like me. That\u2019s something. All I have in common with the Natural Birth and Beginnings crowd is being dragged out of the womb by the same midwife. Jackson Oates, whoever he is, is probably going to think this is as awkward as I do, so at least we\u2019ll have that in common, too. Mom greets Mrs. Oates with a hug and they introduce me to Jackson, who does not look like a sulky weirdo. He\u2019s actually kind of non-\u00adsulky and non-\u00adweird. Light-\u00adbrown hair, dark-\u00adbrown eyes, and a big smile as soon as we say hello. He puts out his hand to shake mine, which makes me wonder if the place they just moved from was the 1950s. I\u2019ve been taught to be polite, though, so I shake firmly. He seems pleased. \u201cOh, good! Your parents must have drilled the importance of a good handshake into you, too.\u201d He says it in a dad voice, with a glance sideways at his mother, who rolls her eyes. \u201cI always feel like I\u2019m closing a German business deal,\u201d he adds in a normal voice. His hand is warm. Not sweaty. Just warm like a live body is supposed to be, and like I suspect the usual phone doodlers\u2019 hands are not. \u201cWe meet a lot of new people,\u201d says his mom, as an excuse. \u201cIch will buy zwanzig Apfelkuchens and ein BMW,\u201d he says to me, and against all my instincts, I am charmed. This is not going to be the kind of awkward I thought it would be. This is a different kind of awkward. There\u2019s a quick negotiation while Mom figures out what everyone wants, orders for us (she is just so just so ), and pays. Because she basically views me as her assistant, she says to everyone else, \u201cLet\u2019s grab that table. Greer will wait for the drinks.\u201d Mom and Mrs. Oates head to Mom\u2019s favorite four-\u00adtopper, the one closest to the outlet. Jackson stays next to me, though, watching the barista steam the milk. This is the part where the new goon is supposed to slide in next to their mother and act like I personally made them come here. But Jackson is standing next to me, waiting for the drinks, like we\u2019re in this together. I must look confused. He says, \u201cYou\u2019ve only got two hands. For four drinks?\u201d Like an idiot, I look down at my hands, as though I\u2019m confirming the number. \u201cOh. Right. Yes.\u201d \u201cHey, thanks for coming here today. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve got a lot of things you\u2019d rather be doing.\u201d I thought I did, but this is actually much more interesting than clipping my toenails after all. I sputter, \u201cIt\u2019s no problem.\u201d We stand there in silence for a minute, and I wonder if I\u2019m the non-\u00adconversational goon in this arrangement. I add, \u201cYou realize you\u2019re getting a serious insider\u2019s tour right now. This place is kind of an underground favorite with the locals.\u201d He half grins. \u201cStarbucks?\u201d \u201cOh, so you\u2019ve heard of it?\u201d \u201cKathryn? Coffee ready for Kathryn?\u201d We carry the drinks from the counter. I set down Mrs. Oates\u2019s caf\u00e9 miel and Mom\u2019s oh-\u00adwhat\u2019s-\u00adthat-\u00adis-\u00adit-\u00adFrench-\u00adI\u2019ll-\u00adtry-\u00adthat-\u00adtoo at the table, where they\u2019ve spread out the Relocation Specialists Resource Binder, where Mom keeps all her pro tips about this \u201cuniquely welcoming and family-\u00adoriented community just forty-\u00adfive minutes from downtown Chicago.\u201d I\u2019m pretty sure this Starbucks is in the binder (which is in the Starbucks, which might make it some kind of re-\u00adlo wormhole). Jackson walks right past with my hot chocolate and his chai. \u201cThose cushy chairs are open. Is that good with you?\u201d he says over his shoulder. Umm, yes? I leave Mom, Mrs. Oates, and the binder at the table. Jackson and I plop ourselves in a pair of coffee-\u00adstained leather chairs next to a fireplace that\u2019s not turned on. He looks like he meets strange girls at Starbucks every day. I try to look like I do, too. It turns out Jackson has questions\u2014\u00adgood questions. Instead of starting with \u201cWhat AP classes are there?\u201d because that\u2019s on the website, or \u201cCan you letter in making memes?\u201d because he\u2019s not one of my brother\u2019s seventh-\u00adgrade friends, he jumps right in with \u201cIs it the kind of school where kids come and go all the time, or where there hasn\u2019t been a new kid since second grade?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know exactly how many there are each year,\u201d I say. He is leaning over the arm of the chair toward me, like I am the keeper of an important piece of navigational advice, which I guess I am. I try to remember how many new kids I had in classes last year, and wonder if I can consider them a representative sample, and extrapolate an overall figure from that, until I realize he doesn\u2019t want data; he is asking a different question. A real question. He wants to know what he\u2019s walking into, and he\u2019s asking me. It\u2019s October, halfway through first quarter\u2014\u00admaybe not the best time to start at a new school. By now, people have pretty much staked out where they\u2019re going to sit and who they\u2019re going to talk to. \u201cOh. You\u2019re trying to figure out if you\u2019re going to get lost or be instantly famous.\u201d He nods. \u201cI\u2019m not sure. I\u2019ve never actually been the new kid\u2014\u00ad\u201d \u201cNever?!\u201d \u201cNope. Even when we moved, we stayed in the same school.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s amazing.\u201d I stop for a second, stuck on \u201camazing.\u201d He\u2019s not saying I am amazing. Immobility is amazing. Like bizarre mutations in nature are amazing. But for some reason, that amazing feels kind of nice coming from him. I shake it off. \u201cYes,\u201d I say, \u201cnever leaving the zip code is one of my proudest accomplishments. There\u2019s not a lot of brand-\u00adnew people, but there are three middle schools and only one high school, so there are tons of people I don\u2019t even know.\u201d He nods, like this is what he was hoping for. \u201cI don\u2019t think a new kid would stand out too much. Unless they wanted to.\u201d \u201cWhat about lunch? If I don\u2019t latch on to somebody before then, am I going to have any place to sit?\u201d I can\u2019t imagine that Jackson is not going to find at least forty friends on his first day, because he\u2019s adorable and super friendly, but he\u2019s obviously had a lot of experience being the new kid and I haven\u2019t, so maybe I\u2019m wrong. \u201cIt\u2019s probably safest to latch on to somebody from fourth period, unless they all seem horrible. Just in case, though, here\u2019s what you do: there\u2019s this long counter in front of the big window that looks over the track. People sit there if they have to finish homework or charge their phones. If you want to, you can sit there by yourself without looking like a loser. Everyone will just think you\u2019re writing wistful poetry or something.\u201d What I should have said was \u201cDon\u2019t be stupid, you\u2019ll sit with me!\u201d but I give myself partial credit for explaining about the counter seats. \u201cThat\u2019s perfect. My next question was going to be where I could go to write some wistful poetry.\u201d \u201cOh, man. I\u2019m sorry to tell you this but they cancelled the Wistful Poetry Club last year. Budget cuts.\u201d \u201cWe should probably just go back to Cleveland then.\u201d I know he\u2019s joking, but it reminds me that this is all new to him\u2014\u00adwell, Starbucks isn\u2019t new, and according to my mom, moving isn\u2019t new\u2014\u00adbut Kennedy is new, and his house is new, and all the people are going to be new. I\u2019m new. \u201cWhat\u2019s Cleveland like?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like everywhere else, I guess.\u201d He shrugs. \u201cWe were only there a couple of years.\u201d He has changed, just the tiniest bit. Still friendly. Still adorable. But the tiniest bit\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. sad, maybe. \u201cMy little sister didn\u2019t want to move. Like reeeeally didn\u2019t want to move.\u201d \u201cShe liked Cleveland?\u201d \u201cNot especially. But she hates to move.\u201d \u201cHow about you?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m used to it,\u201d he shrugs. \u201cAnd there are Starbucks everywhere.\u201d \u201cWhat?! NO! But at least this is the original one, right?\u201d And we are back to where we were. I thought I spied a tiny sliver of something less than perfectly confident, but then it vanished. It makes me curious about him. More curious. I wish we were somewhere different. I wish I was showing him something he hadn\u2019t seen a million times before. We pull up our schedules to compare. We\u2019ve got a lot of the same classes, but none at the same time. Plus he\u2019s in German and I\u2019m in Spanish, and he\u2019s one year accelerated in math, but I\u2019m two. I tip my face into my mug so he can\u2019t see that I look disappointed. \u201cYou must be pretty good at math,\u201d he says. Mid-\u00adsip, I snort. Not because I\u2019m some kind of math god. I\u2019m as good as you can be without being one of those kids who have to take college math because they\u2019re too smart for high school math. Last year Mom offered me up as a math tutor to one of her clients when she heard they had a middle schooler who loved math but \u201cneeded to be pushed.\u201d She\u2019d have loved to list me in the binder under Academic Resources\u2014\u00ador at least as a babysitter or something that got me out of the house. The kid turned out to be some kind of genius, though, who took the train to the University of Chicago twice a week to study ergodic theory. I don\u2019t even know what that is. I\u2019m just the top of the regular smart kids. Being good at math\u2014\u00adreally, at any academics\u2014\u00adis pretty much my entire identity. It\u2019s funny to talk to someone who doesn\u2019t know that. At school, what people know about me is that I get good grades; I\u2019m Maggie Cleave\u2019s quieter, more agreeable friend; and that I wear clothes that are three times too big for a full-\u00adgrown bear. That\u2019s it. I don\u2019t play a sport, I\u2019m not in theater, I don\u2019t get in trouble, I\u2019m not a girl you\u2019d ever think about going out with. I\u2019m just Smart Girl. Smart Girl who keeps her arms crossed in front of her chest all the time. But Jackson doesn\u2019t know that. All he knows is that my mom tried to order skim milk in my hot chocolate. To Jackson, I could be all kinds of other things, too. Smart Girl plus . To the new kid, I\u2019m also new. It\u2019s kind of fun to think about for now, even though I know he\u2019ll figure it out once he\u2019s at school. \u201cYou\u2019re not in any of my classes? That\u2019s weird because as a certified relocation advisor I thought you were going to introduce me at the beginning of each period on Monday. Nicht gut\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d he adds in his German businessman voice. He\u2019s sitting in a lumpy, scuffed chair that a million customers have sat in before, but he looks like it\u2019s shaped exactly for him, like however they stretched or slouched or fell asleep, it was all in order to make this chair fit him perfectly. One knee is half up the armrest, his head is propped against his hand, he looks like every muscle in his body is completely relaxed. Like he belongs there. Like he belongs wherever he goes. He is smart and funny and just kind of comfortable, which I almost never am. I was wrong when I thought what we\u2019d have in common was thinking this was awkward. That part is just me. And somehow, this makes me start to unfold. I\u2019ve had my feet on the chair, knees pulled up tight into to my chest, both hands around my mug. Now I unwrap one leg and then the other and drape them over the armrest. I lean back, just a little, adjusting my sweatshirt so it\u2019s still baggy over my body. I hear myself say, \u201cYou\u2019ll be fine. But your German room is in the same hallway as my math class, first period, so if you start to panic, yell for me. Greer! I\u2019m lost!\u201d His cheeks spread out with a big, real smile. \u201cGreer! Helpen mich por favor!\u201d I\u2019m loud enough that Mom looks over, curious. Not annoyed; surprised. Jackson laughs out loud. \u201cSay it in English, though,\u201d I add. \u201cMy German is gesundheit.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 13.85}, {"asin": "B07XJQMF2T", "title": "The Silent Wife: A Novel (Will Trent Book 10)", "author": "Karin Slaughter", "description": "Amazon.com Review Editors' pick: Slaughter's characterization is always complex, nuanced, and utterly believable.\"\u2014Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Karin Slaughter is one of the world\u2019s most popular and acclaimed storytellers. Published in 120 countries with more than 35 million copies sold across the globe, her twenty novels include the Grant County and Will Trent books, as well as the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and the instant New York Times bestselling novels Pretty Girls , The Good Daughter , Pieces of Her , and The Last Widow . Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project\u2014a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, she lives in Atlanta. Her standalone novel Pieces of Her is in production with Netflix,\u00a0starring Toni Collette, and the Grant County and Will Trent series are in development for television. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"As one can only expect from a\u00a0Karin Slaughter\u00a0crime thriller, her latest book The Silent Wife comes with just the right amount of twists, turns, shocks, surprises and domestic thrill and shrill that will keep longtime fans of her Will Trent series on their toes\u2014and welcome new readers to the party.\" -- Parade on The Silent Wife \"Slaughter delivers an unflinching, deeply empathetic exploration of the stigma surrounding rape and the enduring trauma suffered by its survivors.\" -- Publishers Weekly on The Silent Wife \"An all-time HQ fave . . . it gets dark. This one goes out to the twisty thriller fans.\" -- theSkimm on The Silent WIfe \u201cWith a well-written, intriguing plot and an edge-of-the-seat ending, this is sure to keep readers up late into the night.\u201d -- Library Journal (starred review) on The Last Widow \u201cHer talent is the equivalent of an Edgar Allan Poe or a Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . An exemplary storyteller, weaving her words with skill and intelligence. She will be recognized as one of the great talents of the 21st century and will hold an honored place in the realm of world literature.\u201d -- The Huffington Post \u201c[ The Last Widow ] does what all great Slaughter books do: keeps you on the edge of your seat. It\u2019s a chilling whodunit for our times.\u201d -- Parade on The Last Widow \u201cIf you\u2019re into mystery thrillers, then you\u2019re into Karin Slaughter.\u201d\u00a0 -- theSkimm \u201cSlaughter adds depth to her best-selling series with the investigations of old and current cases, while also advancing the key personal relationship. Another slam dunk.\u201d -- Booklist (starred review) on The Silent Wife \"The emotionally sophisticated characters work through the brutality of their jobs in this dynamic psychological thriller and police procedural that will please readers of Slaughter\u2019s \u201cGrant County\u201d series. For fans of Meg Gardiner, David Baldacci, and Carrie Smith.\" -- Library Journa l on The Silent Wife \"Karin Slaughter knows how to craft a character. . . .\u00a0Slaughter\u2019s fans know exactly what they\u2019re in for when they pick up one of her thrillers, but there\u2019s nothing formulaic about them\u2014that spine-tingling chill her stories evoke is largely organic.\" -- The Big Thril l on The Silent Wife --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.23}, {"asin": "1119508487", "title": "The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility", "author": "Waqas Ahmed", "description": "Review An erudite, masterful and entertaining study by a great writer and thinker\u2026 essential reading for the coming decade - Daniel Levitin, Neuroscientist, Musician and Bestselling Author of The Organised Mind I am too stunned to comment on this book\u2026 I am transformed and transcended; I will never be the same - Story Musgrave, NASA astronaut and\u00a0'World's top-ranked Renaissance Man' This revolutionary book has filled one of the great voids in the history of knowledge - Nasser D. Khalili, Scholar, Philanthropist and Founder of\u00a0the Khalili Collections Erudite and most enlightening -\u00a0an indispensable addition to every educational institution worldwide - Ashok Jahnavi Prasad , the world's most academically qualified intellectual Vastly educational\u2026refreshingly inspirational - Edward de Bono , Bestselling Author of Six Thinking Hats andcoiner of \u2018Lateral Thinking\u2019 From the Inside Flap \"Truly inspirational\u2026refreshingly educational\" Edward de Bono \u0096 originator of 'lateral thinking' and bestselling author of Six Thinking Hats Every human is born with multifarious potential; and the most influential, highest performing people in world history realized this. Why, then, do parents, schools and employers today insist that we restrict our many talents and interests; that we 'specialise' in just one ? Over the years, we've been sold a myth, that to 'specialise' is the only way to pursue truth, identity, or even a livelihood. Yet specialisation is nothing but an outdated system that fosters ignorance, exploitation and disillusionment and thwarts creativity, opportunity and progress. In The Polymath , twenty-first century Renaissance Man Waqas Ahmed shows us that there is another way of thinking and being. Through an approach that is both philosophical and practical, he sets out a cognitive journey towards rediscovering and unlocking your innate polymathic state. Going further, he proposes nothing less than a cultural revolution in our education and professional structures, whereby everyone is encouraged to express themselves in multiple ways and fulfil their many-sided potential. www.the-polymath.com From the Back Cover \"I am too stunned to comment on this book\u2026I am transformed and transcended; I will never be the same again\" F. Story Musgrave \u0096 NASA astronaut and polymath The Polymath is an exceptionally versatile human who excels in multiple, seemingly unrelated fields. Over history and across the world this fascinating breed has rejected 'specialisation' and shown us a more complete way of thinking and being. In doing so, they have shaped our past and will own the future. This is how. Journey through history to explore the lives of some of the most adventurous and multifaceted people ever to have lived Journey through history to explore the lives of some of the most adventurous and multifaceted people ever to have lived Discover that many of the most influential people over time were in fact Polymaths Discover that many of the most influential people over time were in fact Polymaths Explore the common traits of history's most self-actualised people such as Imhotep, Aristotle, Ibn Sina, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Maya Angelou Explore the common traits of history's most self-actualised people such as Imhotep, Aristotle, Ibn Sina, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Maya Angelou See how versatility has always been \u0096 and will continue to be \u0096 the most prized competency for change-makers and exceptional performers See how versatility has always been \u0096 and will continue to be \u0096 the most prized competency for change-makers and exceptional performers Understand that the true specialist is actually always a Polymath Understand that the true specialist is actually always a Polymath Find a blueprint for how to unlock your own many-sided potential, and in doing so, disrupt 'specialisation' as a system Find a blueprint for how to unlock your own many-sided potential, and in doing so, disrupt 'specialisation' as a system Learn lessons from some of the greatest living polymaths on how to design a fulfilling, well-rounded life in the 21st century Learn lessons from some of the greatest living polymaths on how to design a fulfilling, well-rounded life in the 21 st century \"With any luck, it will set the world on fire!\" Iain McGilchrist - author, The Master and his Emissary About the Author Waqas has been called 'an emerging young Leonardo da Vinci' for his work in various fields. He is currently Artistic Director at The Khalili Collections \u0096 one of the world's great art collections \u0096 and is simultaneously completing his postgraduate studies in Neuroscience at Kings College, London. Previously, Waqas was Global Correspondent at FIRST Magazine, where his exclusive interviews included world leaders in government, business and academia. He was also the editor of Holy Makkah , the first-of-its-kind exploration of the sacred city, which received praise from UNESCO, the Commonwealth and the Vatican. Born and raised in Britain, Waqas has since lived in several countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. He has degrees in Economics (BSc, SOAS) and International Relations (MSc, LSE), but his real education came from the five years he spent travelling the world researching and writing The Polymath , his first book. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 27.0}], "target_asin": "0757913113"}
{"user_id": "AFEPMWCHGCG7EPDVWGKOIZFHMM7Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1580627560", "title": "Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl\u2015A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship", "author": "Sherry Argov", "description": "Review \u201cA self-help classic.\u201d \u2014Daily Mail \u201cAmerica\u2019s top relationship guide.\u201d \u2014The Book Tribe \u201cOne of \u2018The 10 Most Iconic Relationship Books of the Past Ten Years.\" \u2014Yahoo! \u201cMen don\u2019t really go for \u2018nice.\u2019 They go for \u2018interesting.\u2019\u201d \u2014Chicago Sun-Times \u201cWe\u2019re talking about having so much self-respect, Aretha Franklin would high-five you.\u201d \u2014Los Angeles Times \u201cThe pejorative meaning of the word \u2018bitch\u2019 has been reclaimed... it means a strong, feisty woman who has moxie, and knows when to use it. A bitch is... sap free.\u201d \u2014Pursuit Magazine \u201c[Argov is] talking about a strong woman. Someone who knows what she\u2019s doing in life. Someone who will share the load, but who will stand her ground.\u201d \u2014Joy Behar, Co-host of The View \u201cSherry Argov shows women how to transform a casual relationship into a committed one.\u201d \u2014The Today Show \u201cThe Best of Culture.\u201d \u2014Esquire \u201cA hot book!\u201d \u2014Fox News Channel \u201cA must-read at Sunday brunch.\u201d \u2014New York Daily News \u201c Why Men Love Bitches flew off the shelves.... Men thrive with women who can set boundaries and who push back when they try to cross the line.\u201d \u2014Cosmopolitan \u201cAn anti-whining manifesto that encourages women who feel like doormats to develop a sense of independence.\u201d \u2014Playboy \u201cUltimately Sherry Argov\u2019s message boils down to one of confidence and self respect, which, let\u2019s face it...it\u2019s the only sane way to go. In short...stay for the sage advice.\u201d \u2014Glo MSN \u201cI highly recommend this book for every strong young woman entering college.\u201d \u2014 Society19 \u201cThis book is my Bible.\u201d \u2014 Her Campus From the Author Visit my website at sherryargov.com Follow me on twitter sherryargov@twitter From the Back Cover One of \"The 10 Most Iconic Relationship Books of the Past Ten Years.\" --Yahoo! About the Author SHERRY ARGOV is the author of Why Men Love Bitches , and Why Men Marry Bitches. Her writing has appeared in\u00a0countless magazines including People, Vanity Fair, US Weekly, Cosmopolitan,\u00a0Glamour, Elle,\u00a0 Maxim, and Esquire . Her work has been featured nationally on The Today Show, The View, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and MTV .\u00a0 Her first book Why Men Love Bitches was named one of the \"Ten Most Iconic Relationship Books of the Past Ten Years\" by Yahoo , and \"America's Top Relationship Book\" by Book Tribe. A first-class theater production abroad, her first-class theater\u00a0play has topped Billboard charts for seven consecutive years, and has received critical acclaim. Her work is currently published throughout the world in over thirty languages. For more information, visit the author's website at sherryargov.com . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 13.41}, {"asin": "1412009111", "title": "Thyroid Eye Disease: Understanding Graves' Ophthalmopathy", "author": "Elaine A. Moore", "description": "About the Author Elaine Moore is a Medical Technologist, MT (ASCP), with more than 30 years experience working in hospital laboratories. The mother of two grown children, Elaine, her husband Rick, and their three boxers live in the mountains of Colorado. She is also the author of Graves\\' Disease, A Practical Guide; Autoimmune Diseases & Their Environmental Triggers; and Encyclopedia of Alzheimer\\'s Disease. Visit Elaine at her website at http://daisyelaine_co.tripod.com/gravesdisease/", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Diseases & Physical Ailments"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 23.95}, {"asin": "1440531676", "title": "Toxic Men: 10 Ways to Identify, Deal with, and Heal from the Men Who Make Your Life Miserable", "author": "Lillian Glass", "description": "About the Author Dr. Lillian Glass , a world-renown, well-respected body language expert and foremost authority in the field of communication, is known as \"The First Lady of Communication.\" A media personality, Dr. Glass is a regular commentator for the Nancy Grace show, body language expert on Swift Justice, Dancing With the Stars, Entertainment Tonight, and The Insider , and is seen throughout the media. She has a regular monthly body language column in Cosmopolitan magazine and writes a body language blog for Psychology Today as well as her own popular blog about newsmakers, \"Dr. Lillian Glass Body Language Blog.\" Dr. Glass has used her skills as expert witness for both state and federal cases in the area of vocal forensics and behavioral analysis. She has written more than a dozen books, including the bestsellers Toxic People\u2122; He Says, She Says ; and a body language book I Know What You're Thinking . In her private practice in Beverly Hills, she has helped countless clients, including celebrities, politicians, and world leaders. For more information about Dr. Glass and her services, go to www.drlillianglass.com .", "categories": ["Books", "Parenting & Relationships", "Family Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0394800273", "title": "Snow (I Can Read It All By Myself)", "author": "P. D. Eastman", "description": "From the Inside Flap Illus. in color. \"Joyful verse relates the many ways to enjoy snow. First graders will love it.\"-- Chicago Tribune. From the Back Cover Illus. in color. \"Joyful verse relates the many ways to enjoy snow. First graders will love it.\"--\"Chicago Tribune. About the Author P. D. Eastman was an author-illustrator who created many children\u2019s books, including Are You My Mother? , Go, Dog. Go! , and The Best Nest . Trained at the National Academy of Design, he enlisted in the army in 1943 and was assigned to the Signal Corps Film Unit\u2014which was headed by Theodor Geisel, who would eventually become known to the world as Dr. Seuss. After Geisel later approached him to write for his new\u00a0Beginner Book\u00a0series at Random House, Eastman published his first book, Sam and the Firefly . Since then, Random House has sold more than 30 million books by P. D. Eastman, and he has become one of the most beloved children\u2019s book authors in the world. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.22}, {"asin": "1574861999", "title": "Crochet With Heart: Best-Loved Afghans", "author": "Leisure Arts", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "B00DWYOMPU", "title": "Harmony Guides Basic Crochet Stitches by Interweave Press,2008] (Paperback)", "author": "Erika Knight", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 25.0}, {"asin": "095742468X", "title": "Queen in 3D [Lingua inglese]: A Photographic Biography", "author": "Brian May", "description": "Review [Queen in 3-D] captures the thrilling history of [Queen] with over 300 previously unseen stereoscopic photographs. (Stereoscopic, or 3-D, photography re-creates the illusion of depth by utilizing the binocularity of our vision.) The impressive book includes his own reflective narrative (May didn't need a ghostwriter), and comes with an OWL 3-D viewer, which brings out the full effect of these images. The cover photo, and many of the images within, focuses on Queen s iconic lead singer, Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991 after battling AIDS. Mercury s vocals sometimes operatic (Queen s mix of rock and opera is groundbreaking), other times roaring with rock fury and his theatrical stage persona made him one of music s most beloved frontmen. --Newsweek A unique collection of images that no other rock band is likely to have. --Stereo World \"May, whose perspective from inside of Queen is expanded on in his new memoir (augmented by stereoscopic photography) Queen in 3D, brings out unsung sides of Mercury, especially as a composer and arranger of hard rock. --Mojo About the Author Brian May , founder, member, songwriter and guitarist with the rock band Queen, and co-creator of the internationally successful rock theatrical, We Will Rock You, is also a Doctor of Astrophysics, a leading campaigner for animal rights, and a lifelong 3-D photography enthusiast. Most recently, he has become a successful publisher, dedicated to sharing his vast collection of Victorian stereo photographs with the world through the books released by the London Stereoscopic Company (a fond recreation of the highly successful company of the same name founded in 1854). Brian currently tours with Queen for much of the year with Adam Lambert as lead vocalist, as well as composing, recording and performing in collaboration with West End star Kerry Ellis, an original luminary of the cast of We Will Rock You. His many other recent projects include working on 3-D 360-degree virtual reality movies, and the much-anticipated biopic of Freddie Mercury, which commences filming in September this year. Brian lives in London with his wife, his partner for over thirty years, actress Anita Dobson.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 49.7}, {"asin": "0743278909", "title": "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", "author": "Richard Bach", "description": "About the Author Richard Bach,\u00a0a former USAF pilot, gypsy barnstormer, and airplane mechanic,\u00a0is the author of fifteen books. This, his fourth book, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and has continued to inspire millions for decades. His website is RichardBach.com.Russell Munson began photographing airplanes as a young boy in Denver, Colorado. Photography and flying have been his passions ever since. He is the author and photographer of the book Skyward: Why Fliers Fly and authored and produced the DVD Flying Route 66. He photographs from his Piper Super Cub. His website is RussellMunson.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.2}, {"asin": "1401945333", "title": "Kiss Your Fights Good-bye: Dr. Love's 10 Simple Steps to Cooling Conflict and Rekindling Your Relationship", "author": "Jamie Turndorf", "description": "Review \"Dr. Turndorf has relationships figured out. If you want a great relationship, you must follow her ten-step method for lasting love.\"\u2014 Jack Canfield, multiple New York Times best-selling author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series and contributor to The Secret, with more than 500 million books in print\"If anger and fighting are ruining your dream of a happy marriage (or relationship), Dr. Turndorf\u2019s conflict-resolution program is for you.\"\u2014 John Gray, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus\"This well-researched book offers a thorough, step-by-step program that provides tools for couples to heal even the most troubled relationships.\"\u2014 Dr. John Mack, Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning author and former professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School\"This book is mandatory reading for every couple that wants to build lasting love.\"\u2014 John Bradshaw,author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Homecoming About the Author Known to millions as \"Dr. Love,\" Jamie Turndorf, Ph.D., has been seen on numerous TV shows and is the \"go-to\" relationship expert on CNN, CBS, FOX, VH1, WebMD, and MSNBC. She has been delighting audiences for three decades with her engaging blend of professional expertise and humor, and her remarkable ability to translate clinical psychobabble into easy-to-understand concepts that transform lives. Her conflict-resolution and communication methods help people turn clashes with spouses, partners, family members, or friends into deeper connections.Website: AskDrLove.com", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 18.99}, {"asin": "383914941X", "title": "It's all about L.O.V.E.: Michael Jackson stories you were never meant to read", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 39.5}, {"asin": "0062348108", "title": "Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad-and Surprising Good-About Feeling Special", "author": "Dr. Craig Malkin", "description": "Review \u201cA fresh approach to the way we regard one of psychology\u2019s most complex conditions. In a book that\u2019s persuasive, insightful, and never dry, Dr. Malkin offers the right mix of analysis and advice and presents compelling, ground-breaking evidence that narcissism is necessary\u2015in the right doses, of course.\u201d \u2014 Peggy Drexler, PhD, Assistant Professor, Weill Cornell Medical College, author of Raising Boys Without Men and Our Fathers, Ourselves \u201cThis is an enthralling book. It takes the clich\u00e9s of narcissism and unpacks them to help us understand and accept our human need to feel special while also coping with the dangers of self-absorption. It will become a classic.\u201d \u2014 Dr. Sue Johnson, author of Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships \u201c... a book that will have readers rethinking themselves and, paradoxically, those around them.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cThis is a true gem on the subject of narcissism.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201c[Dr. Malkin\u2019s] reassuring tone and plethora of case histories offer considered advice and generous encouragement.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA gripping and sometimes terrifying book that will make you look anew at your spouse, your parents, your children, your friends, your enemies, your fellow workers and - perhaps most pertinently - your reflection in the mirror.\u201d \u2014 The Daily Mail (UK), \"Book of the Week\" \u201cDr. Craig Malkin offers a surprising, accessible analyis of narcissism\u2015and explains why a healthy dash of narcissism can be a good thing.\u201d \u2014 Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of Better Than Before and The Happiness Project \u201cIn Rethinking Narcissism , Dr. Malkin reveals the surprising good news about narcissism, exploring the complexities of narcissistic traits and deflating popular myths. Most importantly, he shows us how to develop a healthy sense of narcissism and how to manage relationships with narcissistic partners, friends, colleagues, and family.\u201d \u2014 Dr. Drew Pinsky, author of The Mirror Effect \u201cCertainly one of the best books I\u2019ve read this year. Don\u2019t be fooled by the title.. this book is for anyone trying to better understand themselves and other people.\u201d \u2014 Todd Kashdan, PhD, author of The Upside of Your Dark Side \u201c[A] fascinating book.\u201d \u2014 The Independent \u201cAmong all the books that have been published on the topic in the past 10 years, Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad - and Surprising Good - About Feeling Special stands out as a definite must-read.\u201d \u2014 Psych Central \u201cThank you, Dr. Malkin, for saying what needed to be said and clearing things up for me. For all of us.\u201d \u2014 BookTrib \u201cIf you\u2019re to buy just one book on narcissism, this is the one to purchase.\u201d \u2014 Leon Seltzer, author of Paradoxical Strategies in Psychotherapy \u201cMalkin, a therapist and psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, takes a more inspirational attitude...\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201c...gives us all a coherent way of talking about a much-discussed but often over-simplified and over-dramatized subject in these \u2018look at me\u2019 times.\u201d \u2014 Peg Streep, bestselling author of Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt \u201cRethinking Narcissism brings much needed compassion and clarity to one of the most vexing problems in mental health without ever resorting to false hope or naivete. In that way, the book itself is special.\u201d \u2014 Tom Wootton, Huffington Post blogger and author of The Bipolar Advantage \u201cThe book that protects you from narcissists...Is there someone in your life who\u2019s hurting you and you just don\u2019t know it? In this Harvard researcher\u2019s illuminating, reads-like-a-novel-book, he reveals how to identify and repair your relationships to live with more fulfillment.\u201d \u2014 Oprah Book Club 2.0 \u201cIs there a narcissist in your life? Chances are, the answer\u2019s yes-here\u2019s how to spot them.\u201d \u2014 Red Magazine \u201cNarcissists. They\u2019re everywhere\u2026Not according to Dr. Craig Malkin, whose new book suggests we\u2019ve got it all wrong.\u201d \u2014 Sunday Times Magazine (London) \u201cIf you\u2019re only going to read one book about narcissism this is it. Eminently accessible for the lay audience and professional alike, Dr. Malkin\u2019s penetrating insights, his superb ability to tell a good story, and his courage in disclosing elements of his own story, combine to make this remarkable book.\u201d \u2014 Joseph Shay, PhD, Lecturer Harvard Medical School, co-author of Psychodynamic Group Psychotherapy and co-editor of Odysseys in Psychotherapy and Complex Dilemmas in Group Therapy. \u201c...will interest anyone who is intrigued about narcissism, what it means, where it comes from... [Dr. Malkin\u2019s] empiricist side shines through.\u201d \u2014 New England Psychologist \u201cCraig Malkin\u2019s book is another step in the direction of a broad and inclusive psychological understanding of human behavior and a step away from prejudice and narrow concepts of the human mind.\u201d \u2014 Irene Oestrich, Chefspsykolog, PhD From the Back Cover Harvard Medical School psychologist and Huffington Post blogger Craig Malkin addresses the \"narcissism epidemic,\" by illuminating the spectrum of narcissism, identifying ways to control the trait, and explaining how too little of it may be a bad thing. \"What is narcissism?\" is one of the fastest rising searches on Google, and articles on the topic routinely go viral. Yet, the word \"narcissist\" seems to mean something different every time it's uttered. People hurl the word as insult at anyone who offends them. It's become so ubiquitous, in fact, that it's lost any clear meaning. The only certainty these days is that it's bad to be a narcissist\u2014really bad\u2014inspiring the same kind of roiling queasiness we feel when we hear the words sexist or racist. That's especially troubling news for millennials, the people born after 1980, who've been branded the \"most narcissistic generation ever.\" In Rethinking Narcissism readers will learn that there's far more to narcissism than its reductive invective would imply. The truth is that we all fall on a spectrum somewhere between utter selflessness on the one side, and arrogance and grandiosity on the other. A healthy middle exhibits a strong sense of self. On the far end lies sociopathy. Malkin deconstructs healthy from unhealthy narcissism and offers clear, step-by-step guidance on how to promote healthy narcissism in our partners, our children, and ourselves. About the Author Dr. Craig Malkin is an author, clinical psychologist, and lecturer for Harvard Medical School with two decades of experience helping individuals, couples, and families. His articles, advice, and insights on relationships have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Time , the New York Times, The Sunday Times (London), Psychology Today , and Women\u2019s Health , as well as countless other magazines and websites. He\u2019s also been featured multiple times on NPR, CBS Radio, and the Oprah Winfrey Network channel; appeared on various local morning shows; and been a guest on more than sixty radio stations here and abroad. Dr. Malkin is president and director of the Cambridge, Massachusetts\u2013based YM Psychotherapy and Consultation, Inc., which provides psychotherapy and evidence-based couples workshops. He lives in Boston with his wife and twin girls. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Psychology & Counseling"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 29.99}, {"asin": "0440506255", "title": "He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships", "author": "Steven Carter", "description": "Review \"The\u00a0\u00a0authors' achievement is that they have gone beyond\u00a0\u00a0the obvious avoidance patterns to uncover the more\u00a0\u00a0subtle ways men and women sabotage love.\" -- Publisher's Weekly From the Publisher Available for the first time in paperback, this follow-up to the phenomenally successful Men Who Can't Love tackles the issue of commitmentphobia, that persistent obstacle to truly satisfying contemporary relationships. Authors Stephen Carter and Julia Sokol explore why modern men and women are torn between the desire for intimacy and the equally intense need for independence. Drawing on numerous interviews and real-life scenarios, and written with humor, insight, and the kind of wisdom gained by personal experience, He's Scared, She's Scared offes guidance for all of us who want genuine, sustained intimacy with our romantic partners. \"The authors' achievement is that they have gone beyond the obvious avoidance patterns to uncover the more subtle ways men and women sabotage love.\" -- Publisher's Weekly From the Inside Flap Available for the first time in paperback, this\u00a0\u00a0follow-up to the phenomenally successful Men Who Can't Love tackles the issue of\u00a0\u00a0commitmentphobia, that persistent obstacle to truly\u00a0\u00a0satisfying contemporary relationships. Authors\u00a0\u00a0Stephen Carter and Julia Sokol explore why modern men\u00a0\u00a0and women are torn between the desire for intimacy\u00a0\u00a0and the equally intense need for independence.\u00a0\u00a0Drawing on numerous interviews and real-life\u00a0\u00a0scenarios, and written with humor, insight, and the kind\u00a0\u00a0of wisdom gained by personal experience, He's Scared, She's Scared offes guidance\u00a0\u00a0for all of us who want genuine, sustained intimacy\u00a0\u00a0with our romantic partners. From the Back Cover Available for the first time in paperback, this follow-up to the phenomenally successful \"Men Who Can't Love tackles the issue of commitmentphobia, that persistent obstacle to truly satisfying contemporary relationships. Authors Stephen Carter and Julia Sokol explore why modern men and women are torn between the desire for intimacy and the equally intense need for independence. Drawing on numerous interviews and real-life scenarios, and written with humor, insight, and the kind of wisdom gained by personal experience, \"He's Scared, She's Scared offes guidance for all of us who want genuine, sustained intimacy with our romantic partners. About the Author Steven Carter and Julia Sokol are considered to be the leading authorities on the topic of commitment fear. They appear regularly on national talk shows such as Oprah and Sally Jesse Raphael . They have also appeared on Today , Good Morning America , CBS This Morning , CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC. Carter and Sokol's work is featured in such magazines as Cosmopolitan , Glamour , New Woman , and Mademoiselle , and they periodically lecture and run workshops throughout the country. Steven Carter and Julia Sokol are considered to be the leading authorities on the topic of commitment fear. They appear regularly on national talk shows such as Oprah and Sally Jesse Raphael . They have also appeared on Today , Good Morning America , CBS This Morning , CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC. Carter and Sokol's work is featured in such magazines as Cosmopolitan , Glamour , New Woman , and Mademoiselle , and they periodically lecture and run workshops throughout the country. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.0}, {"asin": "1585429139", "title": "Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help YouFind - and Keep - Love", "author": "Rachel Heller", "description": "Review \u201cOver a decade after its publication, one book on dating has people firmly in its grip.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \"Amir Levine and Rachel Heller have written a very smart book: It is clear, easy to read and insightful. It's a valuable tool whether you are just entering a relationship with a new partner or-as in my case--even after you've been married 21 years, and had thought you knew everything about your spouse.\" --Scientific American \"Anyone who has been plagued by that age-old question\u2014'What is his deal ?\"\u2014could benefit from a crash course in attachment theory.\" --Elle \"The authors have distilled years of attachment theory research on the nature of human relationships into a practical, highly readable guide.\" --John B. Herman, M.D., Associate Chief of Psychiatry and Distinguished Scholar of Medical Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School \"Based on twenty-five years of research, laced with vivid and instructive examples, and enriched with interesting and well-designed exercises, the book provides deep insights and invaluable skills that will benefit every reader.\" --Phillip R. Shaver, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychology,\u00a0 University of California, Davis and Past President, International Association for Relationship Research \"Chock-full of tips, questionnaires, and case studies, this is a solidly researched and intriguing approach to the perennial trials of looking for love in all the right places\u009d and improving existing relationships.\" --Publishers Weekly \"A practical, enjoyable guide to forming rewarding romantic relationships.\" --Kirkus Reviews \"This book is both fascinating and fun. Attached will help every reader understand whom they are attracted to as partners, why, and what they can do to reach fulfillment in love. I enjoyed every moment.\" --Janet Klosko, PhD., co-author of the bestselling Reinventing Your Life \"A groundbreaking book that redefines what it means to be in a relationship.\" --John Gray, PhD., bestselling author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are\u00a0 from Venus About the Author Amir Levine, M.D. is an adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He graduated from the residency program at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University and for the past few years Amir has been conducting neuroscience research at Columbia under the mentorship of Nobel Prize Laureate Eric Kandel. Amir also has a passion for working with patients and it is in this context, while working with mothers and children in a therapeutic nursery, that he first discovered the power of attachment theory. His clinical work together with his deep understanding of the brain from a neuroscientist\u2019s perspective contribute to his appreciation of attachment theory and its remarkable effectiveness in helping to heal patients. Amir lives in New York City. Rachel Heller , M.A. studied at Columbia University with some of the most prominent scholars in the field of social psychology. She now works with families and couples as a psychologist in private practice. Rachel lives in Israel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The New Science of Adult Attachment Decoding Relationship Behavior \u2022 Only two weeks into dating this guy and already I\u2019m making myself miserable worrying that he doesn\u2019t find me attractive enough and obsessing about whether or not he\u2019s going to call! I know that once again I\u2019ll manage to turn all my fears about not being good enough into a self-fulfilling prophecy and ruin yet another chance at a relationship! \u2022 What\u2019s wrong with me? I\u2019m a smart, good-looking guy with a successful career. I have a lot to offer. I\u2019ve dated some terrific women, but inevitably, after a few weeks I lose interest and start to feel trapped. It shouldn\u2019t be this hard to find someone I\u2019m compatible with. \u2022 I\u2019ve been married to my husband for years and yet feel completely alone. He was never one to discuss his emotions or talk about the relationship, but things have gone from bad to worse. He stays at work late almost every weeknight and on weekends he\u2019s either at the golf course with friends or watching the sports channel on TV. There\u2019s just nothing to keep us together. Maybe I\u2019d be better off alone. Each of these problems is deeply painful, touching upon the innermost core of people\u2019s lives. And yet no one explanation or solution fits the bill. Each case seems unique and personal; each stems from an endless number of possible root causes. Deciphering them would require a deep acquaintance with all the people involved. Past history, previous relationships, and personality type are just a few of the avenues that a therapist would need to pursue. This, at least, is what we, as clinicians in the field of mental health, were taught and believed, until we made a new discovery\u2014one that provided a straightforward explanation for all three problems described above and many more. The story of this discovery, and what came after it, is what this book is about. IS LOVE ENOUGH? A few years ago, our close friend Tamara started dating someone new: I first noticed Greg at a cocktail party at a friend\u2019s house. He was unbelievably good-looking, and I found the fact that I caught his eye very flattering. A few days later we went out for dinner with some other people, and I couldn\u2019t resist the glimmer of excitement in his eyes when he looked at me. But what I found most enticing were his words and an implicit promise of togetherness that he conveyed. The promise of not being alone. He said things like \u201cTamara, you don\u2019t have to be home all by yourself, you can come and work over at my place,\u201d \u201cYou can call me any time you like.\u201d There was comfort in these statements: The comfort of belonging to someone, of not being alone in the world. If I\u2019d only listened carefully, I could have easily heard another message that was incongruent with this promise, a message that made it clear that Greg feared getting too close and was uncomfortable with commitment. Several times he\u2019d mentioned that he\u2019d never had a stable relationship\u2014that for some reason he always grew tired of his girlfriends and felt the need to move on. Though I could identify these issues as potentially problematic, at the time I didn\u2019t know how to correctly gauge their implications. All I had to guide me was the common belief that many of us grow up with: The belief that love conquers all. And so I let love conquer me. Nothing was more important to me than being with him. Yet at the same time the other messages persisted about his inability to commit. I shrugged them off, confident that with me, things would be different. Of course, I was wrong. As we got closer, his messages got more erratic and everything started to fall apart; he began telling me that he was too busy to meet on this night or that. Sometimes he\u2019d claim that his entire work week looked \u201ccrazy\u201d and would ask if we could just meet on the weekend. I\u2019d agree, but inside I had a sinking feeling something was wrong, but what? From then on I was always anxious. I was preoccupied with his whereabouts and became hypersensitive to anything that could possibly imply that he wanted to break up. But while Greg\u2019s behavior presented me with ample evidence of his dissatisfaction, he interspersed pushing me away with just enough affection and apologies to keep me from breaking up with him. After a while, the ups and downs started to take a toll and I could no longer control my emotions. I didn\u2019t know how to act, and despite my better judgment, I\u2019d avoid making plans with friends in case he called. I completely lost interest in everything else that was important to me. Before long the relationship couldn\u2019t withstand the strain and everything soon came to a screeching halt. As friends, we were happy at first to see Tamara meet someone new that she was excited about, but as the relationship unfolded, we became increasingly concerned over her growing preoccupation with Greg. Her vitality gave way to anxiousness and insecurity. Most of the time she was either waiting for a call from Greg or too worried and preoccupied about the relationship to enjoy spending time with us as she had done in the past. It became apparent that her work was also suffering, and she expressed some concern that she may lose her job. We had always considered Tamara to be an extremely well-rounded, resilient person, and we were starting to wonder if we were mistaken about her strength. Although Tamara could point out Greg\u2019s history of being unable to maintain a serious relationship and his unpredictability, and even acknowledged that she would probably be happier without him, she was not able to muster the strength to leave. As experienced mental-health professionals, we had a hard time accepting that a sophisticated, intelligent woman like Tamara had so derailed from her usual self. Why was such a successful woman acting in such a helpless way? Why would somebody whom we\u2019ve known to be so adaptive to most of life\u2019s challenges become powerless in this one? The other end of the equation was equally puzzling. Why would Greg send out such mixed messages, although it was clear, even to us, that he did love her? There were many possible complex psychological answers to these questions, but a surprisingly simple yet far-reaching insight into the situation came from an unexpected source. FROM THE THERAPEUTIC NURSERY TO A PRACTICAL SCIENCE OF ADULT LOVE At about the same time that Tamara was dating Greg, Amir was working part-time in the Therapeutic Nursery at Columbia University. Here, he used attachment-guided therapy to help mothers create a more secure bond with their children. The powerful effect that attachment-guided treatment had on the relationship between mother and child encouraged Amir to deepen his knowledge of attachment theory. This eventually led him to a fascinating discovery: as research findings first made by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver indicated, adults show patterns of attachment to their romantic partners similar to the patterns of attachment of children with their parents. As he read more about adult attachment, Amir began to notice attachment behavior in adults all around him. He realized that this discovery could have astounding implications for everyday life. The first thing Amir did, once he realized the far-reaching implications of attachment theory for adult relationships, was to call his longtime friend Rachel. He described to her how effectively attachment theory explained the range of behaviors in adult relationships, and asked her to help him transform the academic studies and scientific data he\u2019d been reading into practical guidelines and advice that people could use to actually change the course of their lives. And that\u2019s how this book came to be. THE SECURE, THE ANXIOUS, AND THE AVOIDANT Attachment theory designates three main \u201cattachment styles,\u201d or manners in which people perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children: Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant. Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner\u2019s ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness. In addition, people with each of these attachment styles differ in: \u2022 their view of intimacy and togetherness \u2022 the way they deal with conflict \u2022 their attitude toward sex\u2022 their ability to communicate their wishes and needs \u00a0 \u2022 their expectations from their partner and the relationship \u00a0 All people in our society, whether they have just started dating someone or have been married for forty years, fall into one of these categories, or, more rarely, into a combination of the latter two (anxious and avoidant). Just over 50 percent are secure, around 20 percent are anxious, 25 percent are avoidant, and the remaining 3 to 5 percent fall into the fourth, less common category (combination anxious and avoidant). \u00a0 Adult attachment research has produced hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of books that carefully delineate the way in which adults behave in close romantic ties. These studies have confirmed, many times over, the existence of these attachment styles in adults in a wide range of countries and cultures.   Understanding attachment styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people\u2019s behavior in any romantic situation. In fact, one of the main messages of this theory is that in romantic situations, we are programmed to act in a predetermined manner. Where Do Attachment Styles Come From? Initially it was assumed that adult attachment styles were primarily a product of your upbringing. Thus, it was hypothesized that your current attachment style is determined by the way in which you were cared for as a baby: If your parents were sensitive, available, and responsive, you should have a secure attachment style; if they were inconsistently responsive, you should develop an anxious attachment style; and if they were distant, rigid, and unresponsive, you should develop an avoidant attachment style. Today, however, we know that attachment styles in adulthood are influenced by a variety of factors, one of which is the way our parents cared for us, but other factors also come into play, including our life experiences. For more, see chapter 7. TAMARA AND GREG: A FRESH PERSPECTIVE We revisited our friend Tamara\u2019s story, and saw it in an entirely new light now. Attachment research contained a prototype of Greg\u2014who had an avoidant attachment style\u2014accurate down to the last detail. It summarized how he thought, behaved, and reacted to the world. It predicted his distancing, his finding fault in Tamara, his initiating fights that set back any progress in their relationship, and his enormous difficulty in saying \u201cI love you.\u201d Intriguingly, the research findings explained that though he wanted to be close to her, he felt compelled to push her away\u2014not because he wasn\u2019t \u201cinto her\u201d or because he thought \u201cshe\u2019s not good enough\u201d (as Tamara had concluded). On the contrary, he pushed her away because he felt the closeness and intimacy increasing.  \u00a0 As it also turned out, Tamara wasn\u2019t unique either. The theory explained her behaviors, thoughts, and reactions, typical for someone with an anxious attachment style, with surprising precision as well. It foresaw her increasing clinginess in the face of his distancing; it predicted her inability to concentrate at work, her constant thoughts about the relationship, and her oversensitivity to everything Greg did. It also predicted that even though she decided to break up with him, she could never muster up the courage to do so. It showed why, against her better judgment and the advice of close friends, she would do almost anything to try to be close to him. Most important, this theory revealed why Tamara and Greg found it so hard to get along even though they did indeed love each other. They spoke two different languages and exacerbated each other\u2019s natural tendencies\u2014hers to seek physical and emotional closeness and his to prefer independence and shy away from intimacy. The accuracy with which the theory described the pair was uncanny. It was as though the researchers had been privy to the couple\u2019s most intimate moments and personal thoughts. Psychological approaches can be somewhat vague, leaving plenty of room for interpretation, but this theory managed to provide precise, evidence-based insight into a seemingly one-of-a-kind relationship. \u00a0Although it\u2019s not impossible for someone to change his or her attachment style\u2014on average, one in four people do so over a four-year period\u2014most people are unaware of the issue, so these changes happen without their ever knowing they have occurred (or why). Wouldn\u2019t it be great, we thought, if we could help people have some measure of control over these life-altering shifts? What a difference it would make if they could consciously work toward becoming more secure in their attachment styles instead of letting life sway them every which way!\u00a0 Learning about these three attachment styles was a true eye-opener for us; we discovered that adult attachment behavior was everywhere. We were able to view our own romantic behaviors and those of people around us in a fresh new light. By assigning attachment styles to patients, colleagues, and friends, we could interpret their relationships differently and gain much more clarity. Their behavior no longer seemed baffling and complex, but rather predictable under the circumstances. EVOLUTIONARY TIES Attachment theory is based on the assertion that the need to be in a close relationship is embedded in our genes. It was John Bowlby\u2019s stroke of genius that brought him to the realization that we\u2019ve been programmed by evolution to single out a few specific individuals in our lives and make them precious to us. We\u2019ve been bred to be dependent on a significant other. The need starts in the womb and ends when we die. Bowlby proposed that throughout evolution, genetic selection favored people who became attached because it provided a survival advantage. In prehistoric times, people who relied only on themselves and had no one to protect them were more likely to end up as prey. More often than not, those who were with somebody who deeply cared about them survived to pass on to their offspring the preference to form intimate bonds. In fact, the need to be near someone special is so important that the brain has a biological mechanism specifically responsible for creating and regulating our connection with our attachment figures (parents, children, and romantic partners). This mechanism, called the attachment system , consists of emotions and behaviors that ensure that we remain safe and protected by staying close to our loved ones. The mechanism explains why a child parted from his or her mother becomes frantic, searches wildly, or cries uncontrollably until he or she reestablishes contact with her. These reactions are coined protest behavior , and we all still exhibit them as grown-ups. In prehistoric times, being close to a partner was a matter of life and death, and our attachment system developed to treat such proximity as an absolute necessity. \u00a0 Imagine hearing news of a plane crash in the Atlantic on the evening your partner is flying from New York to London. That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach and the accompanying hysteria you\u2019d feel would be your attachment system at work. Your frantic calls to the airport would be your protest behavior . An extremely important aspect of evolution is heterogeneity. Humans are a very heterogeneous species, varying greatly in appearance, attitudes, and behaviors. This accounts to a great extent for our abundance and for our ability to fit into almost any ecological niche on earth. If we were all identical, then any single environmental challenge would have the potential to wipe us all out. Our variability improves the chances that a segment of the population that is unique in some way might survive when others wouldn\u2019t. Attachment style is no different from any other human characteristic. Although we all have a basic need to form close bonds, the way we create them varies. In a very dangerous environment, it would be less advantageous to invest time and energy in just one person because he or she would not likely be around for too long; it would make more sense to get less attached and move on (and hence, the avoidant attachment style). Another option in a harsh environment is to act in the opposite manner and be intensely persistent and hypervigilant about staying close to your attachment figure (hence, the anxious attachment style). In a more peaceful setting, the intimate bonds formed by investing greatly in a particular individual would yield greater benefits for both the individual and his or her offspring (hence, the secure attachment style). \u00a0 True, in modern society, we are not hunted by predators as our ancestors were, but in evolutionary terms we\u2019re only a fraction of a second away from the old scheme of things. Our emotional brain was handed down to us by Homo sapiens who lived in a completely different era, and it is their lifestyle and the dangers they encountered that our emotions were designed to address. Our feelings and behaviors in relationships today are not very different from those of our early ancestors. PROTEST BEHAVIOR IN THE DIGITAL AGE Armed with our new insights about the implications of attachment styles in everyday life, we started to perceive people\u2019s actions very differently. Behaviors that we used to attribute to someone\u2019s personality traits, or that we had previously labeled as exaggerated, could now be understood with clarity and precision through the lens of attachment. Our findings shed a new light on the difficulty Tamara experienced in letting go of a boyfriend like Greg who made her miserable. It did not necessarily come from weakness. It originated, instead, from a basic instinct to maintain contact with an attachment figure at all costs and was amplified greatly by an anxious attachment style. \u00a0 For Tamara, the need to remain with Greg was triggered by the very slightest feeling of danger\u2014danger that her lover was out of reach, unresponsive, or in trouble. Letting go in these situations would be insane in evolutionary terms. Using protest behavior, such as calling several times or trying to make him feel jealous, made perfect sense when seen in this light. \u00a0 What we really liked about attachment theory was that it was formulated on the basis of the population at large. Unlike many other psychological frameworks that were created based on couples who come to therapy, this one drew its lessons from everyone\u2014those who have happy relationships and those who don\u2019t, those who never get treatment and those who actively seek it. It allowed us to learn not only what goes \u201cwrong\u201d in relationships but also what goes \u201cright,\u201d and it allowed us to find and highlight a whole group of people who are barely mentioned in most relationship books. What\u2019s more, the theory does not label behaviors as healthy or unhealthy. None of the attachment styles is in itself seen as \u201cpathological.\u201d On the contrary, romantic behaviors that had previously been seen as odd or misguided now seemed understandable, predictable, even expected. You stay with someone although he\u2019s not sure he loves you? Understandable. You say you want to leave and a few minutes later change your mind and decide that you desperately want to stay? Understandable too.  \u00a0 But are such behaviors effective or worthwhile? That\u2019s a different story. People with a secure attachment style know how to communicate their own expectations and respond to their partner\u2019s needs effectively without having to resort to protest behavior. For the rest of us, understanding is only the beginning. FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE\u2014DEVELOPING SPECIFIC ATTACHMENTBASED INTERVENTIONS By understanding that people vary greatly in their need for intimacy and closeness, and that these differences create clashes, adult attachment findings offered us a new way of looking at romantic relationships. But while the research made it easy to understand romantic liaisons better, how can we make a difference in them? The theory held the promise of improving people\u2019s intimate bonds, but its translation from the laboratory to an accessible guide\u2014that people can apply to their own lives\u2014didn\u2019t exist. Believing that here lies a key to guiding people toward better relationships, we set out to learn as much as we could about the three attachment styles and the ways they interacted in everyday situations. \u00a0 We started interviewing people from all walks of life. We interviewed colleagues and patients, as well as laypeople of different backgrounds and ages. We wrote summaries of the relationship histories and romantic experiences they shared with us. We conducted observations of couples in action. We assessed their attachment styles by analyzing their comments, attitudes, and behaviors and at times offered specific attachment-based interventions. We developed a technique that allowed people to determine\u2014in a relatively short time\u2014someone else\u2019s attachment style. We taught people how they could use their attachment instincts rather than fight them, in order to not only evade unhappy relationships but also uncover the hidden \u201cpearls\u201d worth cultivating\u2014and it worked! \u00a0 We discovered that unlike other relationship interventions that focus mostly either on singles or on existing couples, adult attachment is an overarching theory of romantic affiliation that allows for the development of useful applications for people in all stages of their romantic life. There are specific applications for people who are dating, those in early stages of relationships, and those who are in long-term ones, for people going through a breakup or those who are grieving the loss of a loved one. The common thread is that adult attachment can be put to powerful use in all of these situations and can help guide people throughout their lives to better relationships. PUTTING INSIGHTS INTO ACTION After some time, attachment-related lingo became second nature to the people around us. We\u2019d listen to them during a therapy session or at dinner saying, \u201cI can\u2019t go out with him, he\u2019s clearly avoidant,\u201d or \u201cYou know me, I\u2019m anxious. A short fling is the last thing I need.\u201d To think that until recently they weren\u2019t even aware of the three attachment styles! \u00a0 Tamara, of course, learned everything there was to know about attachment theory and about the new discoveries we\u2019d made\u2014she brought the subject up in nearly every conversation we held. She finally had summoned the strength to break off her loose ties with Greg. Shortly afterward, she began dating again with a vengeance. Equipped with her newly acquired attachment knowledge, Tamara was able to elegantly dodge potential suitors with an avoidant attachment style, who she now knew were not right for her. People whom she would have spent days agonizing over in the past\u2014analyzing what they were thinking, whether they would call or whether they were serious about her\u2014fell by the wayside effortlessly. Instead Tamara\u2019s thoughts were focused on assessing whether the new people she met had the capacity to be close and loving in the way that she wanted them to be. \u00a0 After some time Tamara met Tom, a clearly secure man, and their relationship developed so smoothly she barely discussed it. It wasn\u2019t that she didn\u2019t want to share intimate details with us, it was that she had found a secure base and there were just no crises or dramas to discuss. Most of our conversations now revolved around the fun things they did, their plans for the future, or her career, which was in full swing again. GOING FORWARD This book is the product of our translation of attachment research into action. We hope that you, like our many friends, colleagues, and patients, will use it to make better decisions in your personal life. In the following chapters, you\u2019ll learn more about each of the three adult attachment styles and about the ways in which they determine your behavior and attitudes in romantic situations. Past failures will be seen in a new light, and your motives\u2014as well as the motives of others\u2014will become clearer. You\u2019ll learn what your needs are and who you should be with in order to be happy in a relationship. If you are already in a relationship with a partner who has an attachment style that conflicts with your own, you\u2019ll gain insight into why you both think and act as you do and learn strategies to improve your satisfaction level. In either case, you\u2019ll start to experience change\u2014change for the better, of course. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 13.75}, {"asin": "1609949811", "title": "Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling", "author": "Edgar H. Schein", "description": "Review \u201cAn invaluable guide for a consultant trying to understand and untangle system and interpersonal knots. Written with a beguiling simplicity and clarity, it is laden with wisdom and practicality.\u201d \u2014Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Stanford University \u201cThe lessons contained in this deceptively simple book reach beyond the author's experience gained from a lifetime of consultation to organizations of all sizes and shapes. It provides life lessons for us all. If, as a result of reading this book, you begin to practice the art of humble asking, you will have taken an important step toward living wisely.\u201d\u2014Samuel Jay Keyser, Peter de Florez Professor Emeritus, MIT\u201cThis book seriously challenges leaders to re-examine the emphasis on task orientation and \u2018telling' subordinates how best to do their jobs. Humble Inquiry increases organizational capacity to learn more from cross-cultural teamwork, reduces stress, and increases organizational engagement and productivity.\u201d \u2014Jyotsna Sanzgiri, MBA, PhD, Professor, California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University\u201cThis book is particularly important for leaders who in these complex times need advice and tools for building trust in their relationships with subordinates individually or in teams.\u201d\u2014Danica Purg, President, IEDC-Bled School of Management, Bled, Slovenia\u201cThis book is an exercise in inquiry by a recognized master of humble insight.\u201d\u2014Art Kleiner, Editor-in-Chief, Booz & Company/strategy+business\u201cEd Schein has provided a new and thoughtful reframing of interpersonal dynamics through the notion of Humble Inquiry. This short book is packed with insights as Schein rigorously explores the impact of his ideas in his usually clear and readable style.\u201d\u2014Michael Brimm, Professor of Organizational Behavior, INSEAD Europe \u201cHumble Inquiry is an elegant treatment of how to go about building and sustaining solid, trusting relationships in or out of the workplace. A masterful take on a critical human skill too infrequently practiced.\u201d\u2014John Van Maanen, Erwin Schell Professor of Management and Professor of Organization Studies, MIT\u201cA fast read and full of insight! Schein uses stories from his personal life and his successful career as a process consultant that pointedly ask, \u2018How willing are you to cast aside hierarchy? How personal are you willing to be?' Considering the cultural, occupational, generational, and gender communication barriers we face every day, Humble Inquiry proposes a very practical, nonthreatening approach to bridging those gaps and increasing the mutual understanding that leads to operational excellence.\u201d\u2014Rosa Antonia Carrillo, MSOD, safety leadership consultant\u201cA remarkably valuable guide for anyone interested in leading more effectively and building strong relationships. Ed Schein presents vivid examples grounded in a lifetime of experience as husband, father, teacher, administrator, and consultant.\u201d\u2014Robert B. McKersie, Professor Emeritus, Sloan School of Management, MIT\u201cEd Schein has an eye for bold yet subtle insights into the big picture and a knack for writing about them clearly. Humble Inquiry\u2014like his previous book Helping\u2014shows that he is equally talented at bringing fresh thinking to well-trodden ground.\u201d\u2014Grady McGonagill, EdD, Principal, McGonagill Consulting \u201cWhat did I gain from reading Humble Inquiry? I became more aware of the subtle but powerful ways we affect each other as we talk and how the right kind of questions can dramatically improve the quality and efficiency of communication, with benefits that range from increased patient safety and satisfaction to employee motivation and morale to organizational performance. You can't afford to not know about this.\u201d\u2014Anthony Suchman, MD, MA, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry\u201cWith the world as his classroom, Ed Schein continues to guide us through modern day chaos with the powerful behaviors of Helping and Humble Inquiry. This is a must-read for anyone who truly wishes to achieve important goals!\u201d\u2014Marjorie M. Godfrey, Codirector, The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice Microsystem Academy\u201cI have had the privilege of working with Ed Schein. Reading Humble Inquiry I could hear his voice asking me those humble questions that joined us in a mutual search for the answer. His book distills what he has learned and practiced in a lifetime of helping high-powered leaders be even more successful.\u201d \u2014Anthony F. Earley, Jr., Chairman, CEO and President, PG&E Corporation \u201cSchein helps us understand the importance of transcending hierarchy and authority to build authentic relationships predicated on trust and respect. Humble iInquiry is a powerful approach to building safe environments for our people and, ultimately, our patients.\u201d\u2014Gary S. Kaplan MD, Chairman and CEO, Virginia Mason Health System\u201cQuiet wisdom from an expert, enlivened by personal examples. Insightful and easy to read, it made me look again at my own behavior in my relationships, both at work and in the home.\u201d\u2014Charles Handy About the Author Edgar H. Schein is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His previous books include Helping; Process Consultation Revisited; The Corporate Culture Survival Guide; DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC; Organizational Culture and Leadership; and Career Anchors. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Humble Inquiry The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling By EDGAR H. SCHEIN Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. Copyright \u00a9 2013 Edgar H. ScheinAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-60994-981-5 Contents Introduction: Creating Positive Relationships and Effective Organizations..11 Humble Inquiry...........................................................72 Humble Inquiry in Practice\u2014Case Examples.................................213 Differentiating Humble Inquiry from Other Kinds of Inquiry...............394 The Culture of Do and Tell...............................................535 Status, Rank, and Role Boundaries as Inhibitors..........................696 Forces Inside Us as Inhibitors...........................................837 Developing the Attitude of Humble Inquiry................................99Notes......................................................................111Acknowledgments............................................................113Index......................................................................115About the Author...........................................................119Author Awards..............................................................123 CHAPTER 1 Humble Inquiry When conversations go wrong, when our bestadvice is ignored, when we get upset with the advice thatothers give us, when our subordinates fail to tell us thingsthat would improve matters or avoid pitfalls, when discussionsturn into arguments that end in stalemates and hurtfeelings\u2014what went wrong and what could have been doneto get better outcomes? A vivid example came from one of my executive studentsin the MIT Sloan Program who was studying for hisimportant finance exam in his basement study. He hadexplicitly instructed his six-year-old daughter not to interrupthim. He was deep into his work when a knock on thedoor announced the arrival of his daughter. He said sharply,\"I thought I told you not to interrupt me.\" The little girl burstinto tears and ran off. The next morning his wife beratedhim for upsetting the daughter. He defended himself vigorouslyuntil his wife interrupted and said, \"I sent her downto you to say goodnight and ask you if you wanted a cup ofcoffee to help with your studying. Why did you yell at herinstead of asking her why she was there?\" How can we do better? The answer is simple, but itsimplementation is not. We would have to do three things:1) do less telling; 2) learn to do more asking in the particularform of Humble Inquiry; and 3) do a better job of listeningand acknowledging. Talking and listening have receivedenormous attention via hundreds of books on communication.But the social art of asking a question has beenstrangely neglected. Yet what we ask and the particular form in which weask it\u2014what I describe as Humble Inquiry\u2014is ultimately thebasis for building trusting relationships, which facilitatesbetter communication and, thereby, ensures collaborationwhere it is needed to get the job done. Some tasks can be accomplished by each person doinghis or her own thing. If that is the case, building relationshipsand improving communication may not matter. In theteam sports of basketball, soccer, and hockey, teamwork is desirable but not essential. But when all the parties have todo the right thing\u2014when there is complete, simultaneousinterdependence, as in a seesaw or a relay race\u2014then goodrelationships and open communication become essential . How Does Asking Build Relationships? We all live in a culture of Tell and find it difficult to ask, especiallyto ask in a humble way. What is so wrong with telling?The short answer is a sociological one. Telling puts theother person down. It implies that the other person does notalready know what I am telling and that the other personought to know it. Often when I am told something that I didnot ask about, I find that I already know that and wonderwhy the person assumes that I don't. When I am told thingsthat I already know or have thought of, at the minimum I getimpatient, and at the maximum I get offended. The fact thatthe other person says, \"But I was only trying to help\u2014youmight not have thought of it,\" does not end up being helpfulor reassuring. On the other hand, asking temporarily empowers theother person in the conversation and temporarily makes mevulnerable. It implies that the other person knows somethingthat I need to or want to know. It draws the other personinto the situation and into the driver's seat; it enables theother person to help or hurt me and, thereby, opens the doorto building a relationship. If I don't care about communicatingor building a relationship with the other person, thentelling is fine. But if part of the goal of the conversation is to improve communication and build a relationship, then tellingis more risky than asking. A conversation that leads to a relationship has to besociologically equitable and balanced. If I want to build arelationship, I have to begin by investing something in it.Humble Inquiry is investing by spending some of my attention up front. My question is conveying to the other person,\"I am prepared to listen to you and am making myselfvulnerable to you.\" I will get a return on my investment ifwhat the other person tells me is something that I did notknow before and needed to know. I will then appreciatebeing told something new, and a relationship can begin todevelop through successive cycles of being told something in response to asking. Trust builds on my end because I have made myselfvulnerable, and the other person has not taken advantageof me nor ignored me. Trust builds on the other person'send because I have shown an interest in and paid attentionto what I have been told. A conversation that builds a trustingrelationship is, therefore, an interactive process in whicheach party invests and gets something of value in return. All of this occurs within the cultural boundaries ofwhat is considered appropriate good manners and civility.The participants exchange information and attention in successivecycles guided by each of their perceptions of the culturalboundaries of what is appropriate to ask and tell aboutin the given situation. Why does this not occur routinely? Don't we all knowhow to ask questions? Of course we think we know howto ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questionsare just another form of telling\u2014rhetorical or just testingwhether what we think is right. We are biased toward tellinginstead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solvingculture in which knowing things and telling otherswhat we know is valued. We also live in a structured societyin which building relationships is not as important as taskaccomplishment, in which it is appropriate and expectedthat the subordinate does more asking than telling, whilethe boss does more telling that asking. Having to ask is a signof weakness or ignorance, so we avoid it as much as possible. Yet there is growing evidence that many tasks getaccomplished better and more safely if team members andespecially bosses learn to build relationships through theart of Humble Inquiry. This form of asking shows interestin the other person, signals a willingness to listen, and,thereby, temporarily empowers the other person. It impliesa temporary state of dependence on another and, therefore,implies a kind of Here-and-now Humility , which must be distinguishedfrom two other forms of humility. Three Kinds of Humility Humility, in the most general sense, refers to granting someoneelse a higher status than one claims for oneself. To be humiliated means to be publicly deprived of one's claimedstatus, to lose face. It is unacceptable in all cultures tohumiliate another person, but the rules for what constituteshumiliation vary among cultures due to differences in howstatus is granted. Therefore, to understand Humble Inquiry,we need to distinguish three kinds of humility based onthree kinds of status: 1) Basic humility \u2014In traditional societies where statusis ascribed by birth or social position, humility is not achoice but a condition. One can accept it or resent it, butone cannot arbitrarily change it. In most cultures the \"upperclass\" is granted an intrinsic respect based on the status oneis born into. In Western democracies such as the UnitedStates, we are in conflict about how humble to be in frontof someone who has been born into it rather than havingachieved it. But all cultures dictate the minimum amount ofrespect required, or the expected politeness and acknowledgmentthat adults owe each other. We all acknowledgethat as human beings we owe each other some basic respectand should act with some measure of civility. 2) Optional humility \u2014In societies where status isachieved through one's accomplishments, we tend to feelhumble in the presence of people who have clearly achievedmore than we have, and we either admire or envy them.This is optional because we have the choice whether or notto put ourselves in the presence of others who would humbleus with their achievements. We can avoid such feelingsof humility by the company we choose and who we chooseto compare ourselves to, our reference groups. When in thepresence of someone whose achievements we respect, wegenerally know what the expected rules of deference anddemeanor are, but these can vary by occupational culture.How to properly show respect for the Nobel Prize-winningphysicist or the Olympic Gold Medal-winner may requiresome coaching by occupational insiders. 3) Here-and-now Humility \u2014There is a third kind ofhumility that is crucial for the understanding of HumbleInquiry. Here-and-now Humility is how I feel when I amdependent on you. My status is inferior to yours at thismoment because you know something or can do somethingthat I need in order to accomplish some task or goal that Ihave chosen. You have the power to help or hinder me in theachievement of goals that I have chosen and have committedto. I have to be humble because I am temporarily dependenton you. Here I also have a choice. I can either not commit totasks that make me dependent on others, or I can deny thedependency, avoid feeling humble, fail to get what I need,and, thereby, fail to accomplish the task or unwittingly sabotageit. Unfortunately people often would rather fail than toadmit their dependency on someone else. This kind of humility is easy to see and feel when youare the subordinate, the student, or the patient/client becausethe situation you are in defines relative status. It is less visiblein a team among peers, and it is often totally invisible tothe boss who may assume that the formal power granted bythe position itself will guarantee the performance of the subordinate.The boss may not perceive his or her dependencyon the subordinate, either because of incorrect assumptionsabout the nature of the task that is being performed orbecause of incorrect assumptions about a subordinate's levelof commitment to the particular job. The boss may assumethat if something is in the subordinate's job description, itwill be done, and not notice the many ways in which subordinateswill withhold information or drift off what they havebeen trained for. But, if I am a boss on a seesaw or in a relayrace in which everyone's performance matters to getting thejob done at all, I am de facto dependent on the subordinatewhether I recognize it or not. Getting the seesaw to moveand passing the baton will work only if all the participants,regardless of formal status, recognize their dependence oneach other. It is in that situation where Humble Inquiry by allthe parties becomes most relevant, where the humility is notbased on a priori status gaps or differences in prior achievement,but on recognized here-and-now interdependence. When you are dependent on someone to get a taskaccomplished, it is essential that you build a relationshipwith that person that will lead to open task-related communication.Consider two possibilities. You are the boss inthe relay race. Telling the person to put out her or his lefthand so that you, who are right-handed, can easily pass thebaton, may or may not lead to effective passing. However, ifyou decide to engage in Humble Inquiry prior to the race,you might ask your teammate's preference for which hand touse. You might then discover that the person has an injuredleft hand that does not work as well, and it would be betterfor you to pass with your left. Shouldn't the subordinate have mentioned that beforethe race anyway? Not if in that culture for one person tospeak up directly to a person of higher status is taboo. Ifthe baton pass is an instrument a nurse passes to the surgeon,isn't it enough for the surgeon to tell the nurse whatshe needs and expect a correct response? Ordinarily yes,but what if the nurse is temporarily distracted by a beepfrom monitoring equipment or confused because of a possiblelanguage problem or thinks it is the wrong instrument?Should he not speak up and admit that he does not understand,or are the cultural forces in the situation such thathe will guess and maybe make a costly mistake? If, in theculture of that operating room, the doctors are gods and onesimply does not question or confront them, that nurse willnot speak up, even if there is potential harm to the patient.My point is that in both of those examples, the boss and thedoctor are de facto dependent on their subordinates andmust, therefore, recognize their Here-and-now Humility.Failure to do so and failure to engage in Humble Inquiry tobuild a relationship prior to the race or the operation itself then leads to poor performance, potential harm, and feelingsof frustration all around. When such situations occur within a given culturewhere the rules of deference and demeanor are clear, thereis a chance that the parties will understand each other. Butwhen the team members in an interdependent task are moremulticultural, both the language and the set of behavioralrules about how to deal with authority and trust may vary.To make this clear, let's look at a hypothetical multiculturalexample from medicine, keeping in mind that the samecultural forces would operate in a comparable example ofa task force in a business or in a curriculum committee ina school. THREE KINDS OF HUMILITY\u2014ASURGICAL TEAM EXAMPLE Consider these three types of humility in the context ofa hypothetical British hospital operating room where acomplex operation is being performed. The surgeon is Dr.Roderick Brown, the son of Lord Brown, who is a respectedsenior surgeon and works with the Royal Family; the anesthesiologistis Dr. Yoshi Tanaka, recently arrived from Japanon a residency fellowship; the surgical nurse is Amy Grant,an American working in the United Kingdom because herhusband has a job there; and the surgical tech is Jack Swift,who is from a lower-class section of London and has gone ashigh as he is likely to go at the hospital. All the members of the team would feel some basichumility with respect to the surgeon, Dr. Brown, except possiblyAmy, who does not particularly respect the British classstructure. Both Amy and Dr. Tanaka would feel optionalhumility with respect to Dr. Brown because they can see howtalented Brown is with surgical tools. Jack is likely to feelsuch optional humility with respect to all the others in theroom. What none of them may be sufficiently aware of is thatthey are interdependent and will, therefore, have to experience Here-and-now Humility from time to time with respectto each other. Dr. Brown, the senior surgeon, may know implicitly,but would not necessarily acknowledge openly, that he isalso dependent on the other three. A situation might wellarise where he needs information or something to be doneby the others in the room who have lower status than he.In the context of the task to be done, situations will arisewhere an occupationally higher-status person temporarilyhas lower status by virtue of being dependent and, therefore,should display Here-and-now Humility to ensure a betterperformance and a safer outcome for the patient. The higher-status person often denies or glosses thiskind of dependency by rationalizing that \"I am, after all,working with professionals.\" That implies that they are allcompetent, are committed to the superordinate goals ofhealing the patient, and accept their roles and relative statusin the room. It implies that they don't feel humiliatedby having orders barked at them or having help demandedof them. Their \"professionalism\" also typically assumesthat they will not humiliate the person with higher statusby offering criticism or help unless asked. The burdenthen falls on the higher-status person to ask for help and to create the climate that gives permission for the help tobe given . Situational Trouble or Surprise . If things work smoothly,there may be no issues around status and open communication.But what if something goes wrong or somethingunexpected occurs? For example, if Dr. Tanaka is about tomake a major mistake on the anesthetics, and the nurse,Amy, notices it, what should she do? Should she speak up?And what are the consequences of her speaking up about it?Being American, she might just blurt it out and risk that Dr.Tanaka would, in fact, be humiliated by being corrected by alower-status nurse, a woman, and an American. If the corrective comment was made by Dr. Brown,it might be embarrassing, but would have been acceptedbecause the senior person can legitimately correct the juniorperson. Dr. Tanaka might actually appreciate it. Jack mighthave seen the potential error but would not feel licensed tospeak up at all. If Amy or the tech made the mistake, theymight get yelled at and thrown off the team because fromthe point of view of the senior doctor, they could easily bereplaced by someone more competent. What if Dr. Brown was about to make a mistake, wouldanyone tell him? Dr. Tanaka has learned in his culture thatone never corrects a superior. This might go so far as to coverup for a surgeon's mistake in order to protect the face of thesuperior and the profession. Amy would experience conflictand might or might not speak up depending on how psychologicallysafe she felt in the situation. That might be based psychologicallysafe she felt in the situation. That might be basedon what kind of history of communication and relationshipshe had with Dr. Brown and other male surgeons in her pastcareer. She might not know whether Dr. Brown would behumiliated by having a nurse offer a corrective comment orquestion. And humiliation must be avoided in most cultures,so it would be difficult for her to speak up unless she and Dr.Brown had built a relationship in which she felt safe to do so. (Continues...) Excerpted from Humble Inquiry by EDGAR H. SCHEIN . Copyright \u00a9 2013 Edgar H. Schein. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.34}, {"asin": "0060759607", "title": "Little Fur Family Board Book", "author": "Margaret Wise Brown", "description": "From the Back Cover There was a little fur familywarm as toastsmaller than mostin little fur coatsand they lived in a warm wooden tree. The Little Fur Family tells the story of a little fur child's day in the woods. The day ends when his big fur parents tuck him in bed \"all soft and warm,\" and sing him to sleep with a lovely bedtime song. Cuddle up to a classic with this timeless story! Garth William's soft illustrations join Margaret Wise Brown's rhythmic text to create a gentle lullaby. Bound in imitation fur, Little Fur Family is sure to comfort and delight. About the Author Margaret Wise Brown, cherished for her unique ability to convey a child\u2019s experience and perspective of the world, transformed the landscape of children\u2019s literature with such beloved classics as Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny . Other perennial favorites by Ms. Brown include My World ; Christmas in the Barn ; The Dead Bird ; North, South, East, West ; and Good Day, Good Night . Garth Williams is the renowned illustrator of almost one hundred books for children, including the beloved Stuart Little by E. B. White, Bedtime for Frances by Russell Hoban, and the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. He was born in 1912 in New York City but raised in England. He founded an art school near London and served with the British Red Cross Civilian Defense during World War II. Williams worked as a portrait sculptor, art director, and magazine artist before doing his first book Stuart Little , thus beginning a long and lustrous career illustrating some of the best known children's books. In addition to illustrating works by White and Wilder, he also illustrated George Selden\u2019s The Cricket in Times Square and its sequels (Farrar Straus Giroux). He created the character and pictures for the first book in the Frances series by Russell Hoban (HarperCollins) and the first books in the Miss Bianca series by Margery Sharp (Little, Brown). He collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown on her Little Golden Books titles Home for a Bunny and Little Fur Family, among others, and with Jack Prelutsky on two poetry collections published by Greenwillow: Ride a Purple Pelican and Beneath a Blue Umbrella . He also wrote and illustrated seven books on his own, including Baby Farm Animals (Little Golden Books) and The Rabbits\u2019 Wedding (HarperCollins).", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1881273156", "title": "The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate", "author": "Gary Chapman", "description": "Amazon.com Review Unhappiness in marriage often has a simple root cause: we speak different love languages, believes Dr. Gary Chapman. While working as a marriage counselor for more than 30 years, he identified five love languages: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. In a friendly, often humorous style, he unpacks each one. Some husbands or wives may crave focused attention; another needs regular praise. Gifts are highly important to one spouse, while another sees fixing a leaky faucet, ironing a shirt, or cooking a meal as filling their \"love tank.\" Some partners might find physical touch makes them feel valued: holding hands, giving back rubs, and sexual contact. Chapman illustrates each love language with real-life examples from his counseling practice. How do you discover your spouse\u0092s \u0096 and your own \u0096 love language? Chapman\u0092s short questionnaires are one of several ways to find out. Throughout the book, he also includes application questions that can be answered more extensively in the beautifully detailed companion leather journal (an exclusive Amazon.com set). Each section of the journal corresponds with a chapter from the book, offering opportunities for deeper reflection on your marriage. Although some readers may find choosing to love a spouse that they no longer even like \u0096hoping the feelings of affection will follow later\u0096 a difficult concept to swallow, Chapman promises that the results will be worth the effort. \"Love is a choice,\" says Chapman. \"And either partner can start the process today.\" -- Cindy Crosby . This text refers to the Amazon.com Exclusive Journal & Paperback Book Set. From the Back Cover &lt;P align=center&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;ARE YOU AND YOUR SPOUSE &lt;BR&gt;SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE?&lt;BR&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P align=left&gt;&lt;/P&gt;He sends you flowers when what you really want is time to talk.&nbsp; She gives you a hug when what you really need is a home-cooked meal.&nbsp; The problem isn't your love--it's your love language!&lt;BR&gt;&lt;BR&gt;In this international best seller, Dr. Gary Chapman reveals how different people express love in different ways.&nbsp; In fact, there are five specific languages of love:&lt;BR&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;-Quality Time&lt;BR&gt;-Words of Affirmation&lt;BR&gt;-Gifts&lt;BR&gt;-Acts of Service&lt;BR&gt;-Physical Touch&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;BR&gt;What speaks volumes to you may be meaningless to your spouse.&nbsp; But here, at last, is the key to understanding each other's unique needs.&nbsp; Apply the right principles, learn the right language, and soon you'll know the profound satisfaction and joy of being able to express your love--and feeling truly loved in return.&lt;BR&gt; About the Author GARY CHAPMAN, PhD , is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The 5 Love Languages . With over 30 years of counseling experience, he has the uncanny ability to hold a mirror up to human behavior, showing readers not just where they go wrong, but also how to grow and move forward. Dr. Chapman holds BA and MA degrees in anthropology from Wheaton College and Wake Forest University, respectively, MRE and PhD degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and has completed postgraduate work at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. For more information visit his website at www.5lovelanguages.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. In the area of love, it is similar. Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other. My friend on the plane was speaking the language of \"Affirming Words\" to his third wife when he said, \"I told her how beautiful she was. I told her I loved her. I told her how proud I was to be her husband.\" He was speaking love, and he was sincere, but she did not understand his language. Perhaps she was looking for love in his behavior and didn't see it. Being sincere is not enough. We must be willing to learn our spouse's primary love language if we are to be effective communicators of love. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "B002LA0AF2", "title": "The Course of Honour: A Novel", "author": "Lindsey Davis", "description": "From Publishers Weekly The author of the popular Marcus Didius Falco mystery series reaches again into the fertile bone pile of ancient Roman history, this time to fashion an unforgettable character out of a little-known woman of the first century A.D. Caenis merits a single reference in the entry on Emperor Vespasian in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edition: \"He then lived with an earlier mistress who had been a freed-woman of Tiberius' sister-in-law Antonia.\" The story is set against the backdrop of particularly turbulent years of the Roman Empire, the time of the most notorious emperors (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero) and some of the most forgettable. In Davis's imagining, the sparks fly from the first accidental meeting when Caenis is a slave and a secretary in Antonia's household and Vespasian a young rustic from Reate visiting Rome. With meticulous detail and powerful drama, Davis chronicles Vespasian's remarkable rise to power and Caenis's equally compelling success in shaping her own future. As presented in this intricate braiding of character and action, fact and imagination, these two strong characters, bound by passionate and enduring love and parted often by what Vespasian bitterly refers to as the \"cursus honorum,\" deserve to take their place in the pantheon of the world's great lovers. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap Ninth in Davis? award-winning and acclaimed Falco novels.The love story of the Emperor Vespasian, who brought peace to Rome after years of strife, and his mistress, the freed slave woman Antonia Caenis, this book recreates Ancient Rome?s most turbulent period ? the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, and Vespasian?s rise to power. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u2022 \"Like reading Pliny rewritten by Raymond Chandler.\" -- Sunday Times \u2022 \"Extremely good... as well as being a convincing love story.\" -- Daily Mail \u2022 \"She brings Ancient Rome to life.\" --Ellis Peters --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"As presented in this intricate braiding of character and action, fact and imagination, these two strong characters ... deserve to take their place in the pantheon of the world's great lovers.\"-- Publishers Weekly \"Davis's vision of everyday life in the roman empire is superb. I haven't read historical fiction this good since I, Claudius by Robert Graves.\"-- Detroit Free Press \"Davis makes Rome live.\"-- The Washington Post --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Davis, author of the Marcus Didius Falco mysteries, here transmutes a stray historical aside into a rich and compelling piece of fiction. The freedwoman Caenis was lover and mistress to the man who became the Roman Emperor Vespasian, a strong and good leader who followed the wicked excesses of Nero. The story is told from Caenis' point of view, beginning with her life as a slave and work as scribe and secretary for Antonia, grandmother of Caligula and Claudius. The full sweep of history in this turbulent period from A.D. 31 to A.D. 69 in the Mediterranean basin is the background for casual details of what was eaten, what was worn, and what daily life was like. Caenis is deeply intelligent, self-contained, and no-nonsense; her love for Vespasian (and his for her) is developed in a way that makes sense to both the head and the heart. Their trials and separations and reconciliations are the stuff of great romantic reading. Any reader of historical fiction will enjoy this one. GraceAnne A. DeCandido --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author LINDSEY DAVIS has written nineteen novels, beginning with The Course of Honour , the love story of the Emperor Vespasian and Antonia Caenis. Her bestselling mystery series features laid-back First Century detective Marcus Didius Falco and his partner Helena Justina, plus friends, relations, pets and bitter enemy the Chief Spy. Her books are translated into many languages and serialised on BBC Radio 4. Past Chair of the Crimewriters' Association and a Vice President of the Classical Association, she has won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Dagger in the Library, and a Sherlock award for Falco as Best Comic Detective. She was born in Birmingham but now lives in London. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Whatever was that? The young man arrested his stride. He halted. At his shoulder his brother drew up equally amazed. An incongruous scent was beckoning them. They both sniffed the air. Incredible! That was a pig's-meat sausage, vigorously frying. Everywhere lay silent. The echoes of their own footfalls had whispered and died. No other sign of occupation disturbed the chill, tall, marble-veneered corridors of the staterooms on the Palatine Hill from which the Roman Empire was administered. Under the long-absent Emperor Tiberius these had never offered much of a homely welcome to strangers. Today was worse than ever. Arches that were meant to be guarded stood framed only by forbidding drapes whose heavy pleats had not been disturbed since they were first hung. No one else was here. Only that rich odour of hot meat and spices continued its ravishing assault. The younger man set off walking faster. He wheeled around corners and brushed along passages as if he had just discovered the proper route to take until, after a fractional hesitation, he whipped open a small door. Before his brother caught up with him he ducked his head and strode through. A furious female slave exploded, 'Skip over the Styx; you're not allowed in here!' Her hair hung in a lank, sorry string. Her face was pasty, a sad contrast to the tinctured ladies at court. Yet despite her grubbiness, she wore her dull frieze dress with courageous style, and although he knew better he threw back at her drily, 'Thanks! What an interesting girl!' Afterwards Caenis could never quite remember which festival it had been. The time of year was certain. Autumn. Autumn, six years before Tiberius died. The year of the fall of Aelius Sejanus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard. Sejanus, who allegedly kept a pack of pet hounds he fed with human blood. Sejanus, who had ruled Rome with a grip of iron for nearly two de cades and who wanted to be Emperor. It could have been the great ten-day series of Games in honour of Augustus. The Augustales, which had been established as a memorial to Rome's first Emperor and were now conducted in honour of the whole Imperial House, would have been an occasion which explained why Antonia had given most of her slaves and freedmen a holiday, including her Chief Secretary, Diadumenus. Even more likely would have been the actual birthday of Augustus, by then a long-established celebration, a week before October began. Thinking of Augustus, the founder of the Empire, could well have stirred Antonia to what she was about to do. Foolish, at any rate, for anyone to attempt business at the Palace on such a day. On any state holiday the priests of the imperial cult led the city in the duties of religion while senators, citizens, freedmen and even slaves, from the most privileged librarians to the glistening bath house stokers, seized their chance and piled into the temples too. Here on the Palatine the slop-carriers and step-sweepers, the polishers of silver cups and jewel-encrusted bowls, the accountants and secretaries, the chamberlains who vetted visitors, the major-domos who announced their names, the lifters of door curtains and carriers of cushions, had all disappeared hours ago. Sejanus would be lording it at the ceremonies; the Praetorians, who ought to be guarding the Emperor, would be guarding him. Caesar's palace complex, which even during Caesar's long absence from Rome thrummed with occupation every day and rustled with innumerable murmurs of life into the dead of night, for once lay hushed. So the door flew open. Someone strode in. Caenis looked up. She scowled; the man frowned. 'Here's somebody\u2014 Sabinus!' he called back over his great shoulder, as he loomed in the low doorway. The fat spattered dangerously beneath the girl's spoon. 'Juno and Minerva\u2014' coughed Caenis, as she was forced back from her pan while the flame lapped sideways across the charcoal brazier in a palely whickering sheet. 'We'll all go up in smoke; will you shut that door!' A second man, presumably Sabinus, came in. This one wore a senator's broad purple stripe on his toga's edge. 'What have you found for us?' The fat went wild again. 'Oh for the gods' sake!' Caenis swore at them, forgetting their rank as she was nearly set alight. 'A bad-tempered slavey with a pan of sausages.' He had the sense at last to close the door. They were lost. Caenis guessed it at once. Even the open spaces and temples among the homes of imperial family members above the Circus Maximus were deserted. The public offices on the Forum side of the Palatine were closed. Stupid to come today. With no guards to cross spears in their faces these two had blundered down a wrong passageway and ended up bemused. Only people who wanted to indulge in sad habits alone were lurking in corners with their furtive pursuits. Only eccentrics and deviants, misers and malcontents: and Caenis. She was one of the group of girls who worked with Diadumenus, copying correspondence for the lady Antonia. Today he had ordered her to remain quietly out of trouble; later she must go to the House of Livia, where their mistress lived, and ask whether any work was required. Caenis was junior but capable; besides, Diadumenus had really not anticipated that anything significant would occur. In most respects Caenis was, like everyone else, on holiday. Hence the sausage. She had been enjoying both her solitude\u2014 rare for a slave\u2014 and the food too. She had scraped together the price by writing letters for other people and picking up lost coins from corridor floors. She had crept in here, sliced the meat evenly and was cooking it in a pan intended for emulsifying face creams before she ate her treat deliberately, on her own. She craved her sausage with good reason: her starved frame needed the meat and fat, her deprived senses hankered after nuts, spices and the luxury of food fiercely hot from a pan. She hated being interrupted. 'Excuse me, sirs, you are not allowed in here.' Warily she tried to camouflage her annoyance. In Rome it was wise to be diplomatic. That applied to everyone. Men who thought they possessed the Emperor's confidence today might be exiled or murdered tomorrow. Men who wanted to survive had to inveigle themselves into the clique surrounding Sejanus. Making friends had been unsafe for years, for the wrong association clung like onion juice under a chef's fingernails. Yet so many promising careers were ending in disaster that today's nobodies might just survive to ride in tomorrow's triumph beneath the laurels and ribbons of the golden Etruscan crown. For a slavegirl it was always best to appear polite: 'Lords, if you are wanting Veronica\u2014' 'Oh, do cheer up!' chaffed the first man abruptly. 'We might prefer you.' Caenis gave her pan a rapid shimmy, agitating the spatula. She chortled derisively. 'Rich, I hope?' The two men glanced at one another, then with a similar slow regretful grin both shook their heads. 'No use to me then!' She saw their veiled embarrassment: traditionalists with good family morals\u2014 in public, anyway. Veronica would shake them. Veronica was the one to astonish a stiff-necked senator. She believed that a slavegirl who was vivacious and pretty could do as well for herself as she pleased. Caenis was too single-minded and intense; she would have to make a life for herself some other way. 'We seem to be lost,' explained the cautious man, Sabinus. 'Your footman let you down?' Caenis queried, nodding at his companion. 'My brother,' stated the senator; very straight, this senator. 'What's his name?' 'Vespasianus.' 'Why no broad stripes too?' she challenged the brother directly. 'Not old enough?' Entry to the Senate was at twenty-five; he was probably not long past twenty. 'You sound like my mother: not clever!' he quipped. Citizens never normally joked with slavegirls about their noble mothers; Caenis stared at him. He had a broad chest, heavy shoulders, a strong neck. A pleasant face, full of character. His chin jutted up; his nose beaked down; his mouth compressed fiercely, though he seemed good-humoured. He had steady eyes. She looked away. As a slave, she preferred not to meet such a gaze. 'Not ready for it,' he added, glaring at his brother as if it were a matter of family argument. Against her better judgement she replied, 'Or is the Senate not ready for you?' She had already noticed his obstinate roughness, a deliberate refusal to hide his country background and accent; she admired it, though plenty in Rome would call it coarse. He sensed her interest. If he wanted it (and she reckoned he did), women probably liked him. Caenis resisted the urge. 'You have lost yourselves in Livia's pantry, sir,' she informed the other man, Sabinus. There was a sudden stillness, which she secretly enjoyed. Though the cubbyhole looked like a perfumery, the two men would be wondering whether this was where the famous Empress had mixed up the poisons with which, allegedly, she removed those who stood in her way. Livia was dead now, but the rumours had acquired their own momentum and even grew worse. The two men were nervously surveying the cosmetic jars. Some were em... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "1937035409", "title": "Stars' Fire", "author": "Natalie Silk", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "B08P724C9J", "title": "Tides of Fate: The Ronin Saga", "author": "Matthew Wolf", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 24.99}], "target_asin": "1881273156"}
{"user_id": "AEOEQZLQGAFTFTDRL6GZNMNTPYFA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0373895542", "title": "Wednesday Night Witches", "author": "Lee Nichols", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Nichols (True Lies of a Drama Queen) takes a Charmed-inspired ride on a broomstick, smartly mixing magic with chick lit cheer. Manhattan teacher Eve Crenshaw escapes to Broome Isle, Maine, after a nasty break-up to visit her former NYU classmate, Natasha Kent. Natasha, a starving artist, introduces Eve to her childhood pal Kim Gray, an \"Earth Mama\" type and direct descendant of a Salem-era witch. They tag themselves \"Wednesday Night Witches\" after participating in a local bar's trivia contest, but the witchery truly begins when they share a potent wine that grants each woman a wish, transforming their lives but endangering the island when they unwittingly release an ancient demon. The arrival of yummy Jack, Garrison and Johnny distracts them while the demon's power grows, leading to a major showdown. These accidental witches lack the depth of Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic spellcasters, but they're still appealing. Nichols fills her cauldron with a very Maine stew and injects the proceedings with a breezy style well suited to escapist summer romances. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist New York City teacher Eve Crenshaw has had it with both her pompous boyfriend and her critical boss, so she leaves New York for Broome Island, where her college roommate Natasha lives. Natasha, a reclusive artist, introduces Eve to her former sister-in-law, Kim, who also happens to be her closest friend on the island. Eve quickly finds a job and, through Kim, a place to live, and finds herself taking to the island, despite its stark contrast to busy, bustling New York. She also finds herself curious about the mythology of the island and Kim's ancestors, who were labeled witches. The three women get together one evening and makes wishes, and they're surprised to find those wishes suddenly coming true. But there's a sinister force afoot, and the women start to worry that Eve's and Kim's new relationships and Natasha's shot at artistic success may prove too good to be true. Readers who enjoy a bit of magic in their chick lit will enjoy Nichols' clever and fun fourth novel. Huntley, Kristine About the Author Lee Nichols was born in Salem, Massachusetts. Her ancestor, Susanna Martens, was condemned and executed for witchcraft at the court of Salem in 1692. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 10.9}, {"asin": "0312978618", "title": "JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation", "author": "Don Davis", "description": "Review \"From my investigation of the Ramsey murder, Steve Thomas was the lead detective on the case from the beginning and may know what happened better than anyone.\" -- Lawrence Schiller, New York Times bestselling author of Perfect Murder, Perfect Town About the Author Steve Thomas received more than a hundred commendations and awards during his thirteen-year police career, including the Award of Excellence and the Medal for Lifesaving, for assignments ranging from recruit training and SWAT to special investigations and undercover narcotics. Prior to the JonBenet case, Thomas worked on a multi-state task force investigating racketeering and organized crime that resulted in numerous grand-jury indictments. Thomas has been a guest lecturer on criminal justice topics and instructed extensively on law-enforcement issues.Don Davis, an award-winning news correspondent for thirty years, with assignments from Vietnam to the White House, has written a dozen books. His most recent is Last Man on the Moon, published by St. Martin's Press. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. JonBenetPART ONELITTLE MISS CHRISTMASPROLOGUEThere was not another little girl in America with her name. JonBen\u00e9t--a combination of her father's first and middle names, John and Bennett--was more of a title created just for her, similar to those of the four daughters of her mother's best friend who also bore classy Francophile names. At home she was called Johnni-B.JonBen\u00e9t Ramsey entered the world on August 6, 1990, in Atlanta's Northside Hospital, weighing six pounds, nine ounces. She was able to fall asleep easily with a bottle and the background noise of a television set, but she also had a grumpy side, and her grandmother would recall that after her second birthday, JonBen\u00e9t could indeed be a Terrible Two. At three and a half, she still regularly drank her milk from the bottle.The family moved from Georgia to Colorado, into a huge house at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, after her first birthday. Her lavishly decorated bedroom was originally built for her two much older stepsisters, Beth and Melinda, but a double tragedy made it hers. Beth was killed in an automobile accident, and JonBen\u00e9t's mother was diagnosed with cancer.The little girl was moved into the bigger bedroom to be closer to her mother, who, ravaged by chemical treatments, temporarily gave up sleeping in the master bedroom in favor of one more convenient to a bathroom. Mother and daughter were right next door. Her room was so warm that even on the coldest winter night, when the outside temperature would dip below zero, JonBen\u00e9t would kick off her covers and sleep with only a sheet and blanket.Her education began with early home schooling and then a church preschool program but did not stop at the classroomdoor. The little girl traveled widely, to New York several times and as far away as Italy. She was a member of Daisy Troop 2349 of the Girl Scouts in Boulder.Summers were spent at a sprawling white house that had been expensively remodeled in Charlevoix, Michigan, where JonBen\u00e9t loved to swim on the tire at the bottom of the hill, swim in the lake, go rollerblading and biking, and be a tomboy who didn't care about getting dirt under her fingernails.Her hair, which would go dishwater dirty during the Colorado winter, would blaze back blond in the Michigan sunshine, with some help from a bottle, and she wore it in a ponytail or a braid. Her favorite foods were macaroni and cheese and fresh fruit, and she loved pineapple.The entrance of JonBen\u00e9t into the peculiar and competitive world of children's beauty pageants was destined from the very start. Her mom, Patsy Ramsey, and her aunt, Pam Paugh, had both won the Miss West Virginia crown and competed for Miss America. JonBen\u00e9t seemed to have what it took to carry on that family tradition. Patsy and her mother, Nedra, were inspired to put JonBen\u00e9t into pageants during a visit to a Little Miss America contest in 1994, and a career was set.JonBen\u00e9t was only four years old, not yet in kindergarten, when she hit the circuit, and the judges immediately knew that the sparkling beginner in the white dress still needed a lot of work, but they said she was a natural. In the summer of 1994 JonBen\u00e9t was accidentally hit on the left cheek by a golf club swung by her brother, Burke, and her mother rushed the child to see a plastic surgeon, who thought Patsy was overreacting. The doctor apparently didn't understand the importance of an imperfection on a budding beauty queen.Her first major win came in Michigan. After a thorough \"pageant scrub\" to clean up dirty knees and elbows, a good hair wash, and a French manicure for those dirty nails, JonBen\u00e9t performed a patriotic song and tap routine and was crowned Little Miss Charlevoix.The child radiated star power, but there was a brain inside that pretty head. She listened attentively to adults talk in the evening, nestled on someone's lap in a big chair, and her vocabulary and sense of logic were remarkable. When her auntfound her running barefoot on the Charlevoix dock and asked, \"Why don't you put your shoes on?\" JonBen\u00e9t answered, \"Aunt Pam, I want to feel the rhythm of the earth under my feet.\" She was a free spirit.In October 1995, she became Little Miss Colorado Sunburst and qualified for a national pageant the next year. In the 1995 Boulder Christmas parade, she sang and waved from a float called the Good Ship Lollipop , which was built by her grandfather. \"Quite a performer,\" the judges said, the payoff for the hundred-dollar-per-hour lessons.She blossomed as a beauty, loving everything about the pageants and making sure to tell her mother, who was leaving for London, to bring her back some hats. The natural prissiness of a little girl came forth as she expressed her strong will, not hesitating to tell an adult doing her hair, \"I don't like that, I want it this way.\"On many nights, JonBen\u00e9t would fall asleep watching videotapes of Patsy and Pam in the Miss America pageant. She wanted to stroll that Atlantic City Boardwalk someday, and it was drummed into her that the coveted sash, trophy, and tiara would come only through total dedication. Once, when she balked, her grandmother groused, \"JonBen\u00e9t, you will do it. This is your job. There are no excuses.\" A family friend recalled JonBen\u00e9t being chilly in a restaurant after a pageant and her mother not allowing the child to put on a sweater because \"You're still on show.\"JonBen\u00e9t did not need a professional trainer with a couple of former Miss West Virginias in the family. They would be her mentors instead of some professional who might turn her into a rigid automaton, with nothing but boring ten- and two o' clock stances, flashing the collar and cuffs, never touching the dress, and perhaps, her grandmother warned, even using the sleazy shoulder shake that homosexuals taught. The strategy was for Johnni-B to go beyond the ordinary and bring her natural friendliness and a touch of class to the shows. In pageants from Rome, Georgia, to Elk Rapids, Michigan, the plan worked.Daddy had money, a great advantage because the pageant world is not for the miserly. Talent lessons were expensive,and her spectacular handmade costumes cost even more. JonBen\u00e9t would not go out there in Kmart dresses, and she regularly brought home \"Best Wardrobe\" titles.But there were some dark secrets. She had a continuing problem with wetting her bed, regressing in her toilet training in the months before her death. Occasionally she would even defecate in the bed and at one point was wetting or soiling her underpants during the day. She would not wipe adequately after a bowel movement. This would never do for a beauty queen.Her intelligence kept pace with her almost flawless beauty, and she kept a list on her night table of books that had been read to her. Her father insisted that knowledge and talent were much more important than looking good. She was truly beautiful but still was only a child beginning to read and write, even though her mother created a more impressive r\u00e9sum\u00e9 on pageant entry forms by claiming that JonBen\u00e9t played the violin, spoke French, and wanted to be an Olympic ice-skating champion.Confidence came with experience, and when the family returned from a trip to Mexico, JonBen\u00e9t made them all do the sinuous macare\u00f1a dance. \"That's not the way you do it,\" she scolded, then led it herself. \"There. That's the way it's done.\"Like lots of kids, although she suffered from colds and coughs, her sinus infections were eventually diagnosed as allergic rhinitis, not unlike a problem that had once plagued her father. In 1995 she tripped in a grocery store, landed on her nose, and the doctor treated her with ice and Popsicles. Six months later she fell again, bonking herself over the left eye. In the twenty-four months before her death, she visited the doctor eighteen times.Her last year was a rainbow ride. In July she won the title of America's Royale Tiny Miss, and the five-year-old took home $500 in prize money. The next month, the Sunburst National Pageant at the Airport Marriott Hotel in Atlanta was a disappointment because she was only second runner-up in the beauty competition, and by now people expected JonBen\u00e9t to win everything, all the time. They were usually right. Titles were bagged with frequency, and the professional touches ofmakeup, perfect hair, and a portfolio of glamour photographs gave the child a sultry look that was part angel, part Lolita. Best-in-show trophies were just over the horizon.In two trips to New York, she saw five Broadway shows and ate a $125 lobster dinner in a fancy restaurant. People waiting in line to see the Statue of Liberty asked permission to take her picture. After turning six that August, JonBen\u00e9t entered private school, and her stage training made oral reports a snap, although her writing skills were minimal. She went to see the school nurse twice in December, both times on a Monday after a weekend.Before the Christmas break, her mother arranged to have JonBen\u00e9t perform as a holiday treat for her classmates, and in pageant finery she sang and danced all day while class after class came through to watch. She went home exhausted. Her lesson in school that day was that perfection and celebrity carried a price. On December 17 she picked up still another crown, Colorado's Little Miss Christmas.Six days later, during a party at her parents' home, a family friend came across a JonBen\u00e9t who was seldom seen. The child was immaculate in a holiday frock, and her platinum blond hair was done perfectly, but she sat alone on a staircase in the butler's kitchen, crying softly. The friend sat beside her.\"What's wrong, honey?\"Little Miss Christmas sobbed, \"I don't feel pretty.\"Copyright \u00a9 2000 by Steve Thomas and Don Davis. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "True Crime"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0373895755", "title": "True Lies of a Drama Queen (Red Dress Ink)", "author": "Lee Nichols", "description": "From Booklist Nichols' charming sequel to Tales of a Drama Queen (2004) finds Elle Medina in a healthy relationship with her boyfriend, Merrick, while earning a dubious living as a fake phone psychic and writing a New Age column for a Santa Barbara paper. Elle is thrown when Maya, her best friend, announces that she is marrying her boyfriend, Brad, in just three short months. Elle insists on coordinating the wedding, despite Maya's reluctance. Maya's concerns prove founded when Elle inadvertently ruins Brad's Jewish conversion dinner. But Elle soon has even bigger problems on her hands when video footage of her dancing scantily clad in a store dressing room turns up on the Santa Barbara Grrrrls Web page. Vowing to find out who's responsible for the hidden camera, Elle now has a mission--and a convenient way to avoid Merrick's suggestion that she look into graduate school and consider moving in with him. Fans of the first book will be thrilled to see zany Elle back in action. Kristine Huntley Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review \"Nichols is one of chick lit's brightest lights.\" -- Publishers Weekly About the Author Lee Nichols grew up in Santa Barbara. She lives in Maine with her writer husband, Joel N. Ross, and their son, Ben. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The groom is perfect this time. His white Hugo Boss suit is crisp, his gray eyes are solemn and joyful and all mine. The palm trees sway in the Santa Barbara ocean breeze like a heavenly chorus of tall skinny angels with green hair. The nomadic tents match the linen napkins, the silver is antique and the orchids are pale green. Everything is discreet. Tasteful. Flawless. Oh, and I got a big honking diamond. The thing's like a glass doorknob, I can barely lift my hand. Though somehow, I think I'll manage. I also got the Luna flatware from Pottery Barn, the lead-crystal Bordeaux glasses,and a year-long subscription to flowering plants from Smith & Hawken. I even got a KitchenAid Mixer in Majestic Yellow\u00a0\u2014 I never mix,but Maya wants one, and I knew she'd be jealous. (As a married and established matron, I will be less petty...but I remain single for another seventeen seconds.) The justice of the peace murmurs something about loving and cherishing, and when he comes to the \"I do\" part, Merrick politely agrees. But I...well, I'm too busy worrying that Maya\u00a0\u2014 best friend and maid of honor\u00a0\u2014 is so poisoned by envy she can't enjoy the ceremony. Okay, actually I'm worried that's she's not envious enough. I won't be happy until she matches the pale green of the orchids. Maya is the sweetest, kindest best friend anyone could want, but if she has a single fault it's that she's so much better than I am. She doesn't get petty, she doesn't get jealous, not even now, on my perfect wedding day. Doesn't she know this means I've won? In fact,not only does she lack all human (I mean negative) emotions, but she's chatting away in the middle of my vows. \"So we're settled on April.\" \"What?\" I say.\"What?\" \"We decided April.\" \"April?\" \"What do you think of the song?\" Maya asks. A cruel jolt and my daydream vanishes. There are swaying palm trees and Maya is clearly present, but there is no wedding\u00a0\u2014 not mine, at least. We've met for lunch at Lead-better Beach on a pristine sunny January day in Santa Barbara, and we sit at one of the tables out back, our bare feet drawing patterns in the sand. Makes me feel like I'm vacationing in Mexico. Maybe after lunch I'll have another margarita and a siesta. No, after lunch I'll have another client and a headache. Because my perfect best friend has told me she and her perfect boyfriend, Brad, are getting married. And they'll have the perfect wedding and the perfect marriage. And I'll be happy for her. Really. Because I love her. And it's not like this means she won or anything...it's not really a competition. Is it? \"Right,\" I say.\"The song.\" \"It's Sting,\" Maya says.\"Everyone loves Sting.\" \"Is it off his first album?\" \"No.\" \"The second?\" \"No.\" \"Then I don't know it.\" Maya grimaces.\"You could at least be a little more excited. Aren't you happy for us?\" \"Of course I'm happy! You know I'm happy. I'm thrilled and happy and...happy! So an April wedding. Where?\" \"In Santa Barbara.Brad's parents want us to have it in Vegas.\" Perfect Brad's parents had retired to Las Vegas last year and hadn't stopped extolling the virtues of low-cost housing,the senior discount at Caesars and the wonders of the Hoover Dam. They were convinced they could persuade Maya and Brad to move there, if only they explained how really affordable the buffets were. \"Vegas,\" I say. \"Some of those chapels are really nice\u00a0\u2014 they're not all cupid-themed, you know.\" Plus, I wouldn't be so jealous if she got married in Las Vegas. \"I'd get married there in a second.\" \"Elle, you would never. \" \"Well, no. What about San Ysidro Ranch?\" Because I shouldn't be such a bad friend. \"Gwyneth Paltrow got married there.\" \"Gwyneth Paltrow makes fifteen million a movie.\" \"I know it's expensive, but you're only going to do this once. You and Brad\u00a0\u2014\" I roll my eyes.\"You'll never divorce.\" \" Elle ...\" \"Who's going to cater?\" Maya shrugs.\"There are listings in the Yellow Pages.\" \"The Yellow Pages,\" I say faintly. Does she have any idea how long it took me to settle on a caterer when I arranged my almost wedding to Louis? \"Well, at least you've got over a year to plan.\" \"No,\" she says.\"April.\" \"Yeah,\" I say.\"April.\" \" This year.\" A sudden chill rises from the sun-drenched beach.\"Maya, that's three months away.\" \"That's why I'm starting now,\" she says, clearly pleased with herself. \"You can't plan a wedding in three months.\" \"Why not?\" \"Because it's never been done,not in all of human history. Because it takes a minimum of four months to select, buy, write and mail invitations.Because all the caterers and venues have been booked since April of last year.\" She appears unconcerned.\"We'll find someplace.\" \"Like the Tiki-Tiki lounge at a motel in Goleta. \" \"Elle, you've gotta get over your Goleta-phobia. That's so early nineties.Goleta's 'The Good Land'now.Brad and I want to buy a house there...if we can afford one.\" \"If you do, I'll never visit.\" \"And there are other reasons Goleta is wonderful, too.\" I make a face, but bow to the inevitable.\"Okay, I'll do it.\" \"Visit?\" \"Visit, we'll see. I mean plan the wedding.\" I detect a flicker of concern.\"Great. That'd be...great.\" \"Three months!\" I say, staying chipper. \"This is gonna be fun.\" \"I mean, if you want to, you could help with the, um...\" \"More than help! I'll be your wedding coordinator. Leave everything to me.\" I beam, thrilled to finally be giving something back to Maya. She's better than I am at virtually everything, but now I can finally help her. \"What are best friends for?\" \"Well,I wouldn't want to...I know you're busy with your, um, career?\" Because I am a good friend, I pretend not to hear the question mark after \"career\" and simply say,\"I will organize an elegant, classical, understated affair...\" She looks so unconvinced I can't help adding, \"I was thinking a Western theme, \"Jackie O meets rodeo.\" Or have you considered a Hawaiian luau?\" I'm still in a wedding planning daze\u00a0\u2014 the flowers, the band, the maid of honor dress\u00a0\u2014 so when my client phones, exactly on schedule,I chat on autopilot until the woman tells me she thinks her boyfriend poisoned her. \"And for a free copy of my newsletter,\"I say,\"all you need is\u00a0\u2014 what? \" \"I, like, think my boyfriend poisoned me.\" I dart into the kitchen and throw open drawers, rummaging for my phone book. I need the number for Poison Control. Is there a national number? Why is she calling a psychic when she's been poisoned\u00a0\u2014 she wants to know if she'll live? I have a list of Important Numbers\u00a0\u2014 domestic violence chief among them\u00a0\u2014 but who knew I'd get a poison question? \"How exactly did you ingest the poison?\" I ask calmly, hurling open a cabinet. \"Are you sure you're poisoned? Did he cook something for you?\" \"He doesn't cook.\" \"Make you a drink?\" Staying calm, staying steady...but where the hell is that phone book? \"Bring you a glass of water?\" \"Not that I recall. Should he bring me glasses of water? Do they do that?\" \"Well, relationships are all different, you have to\u00a0\u2014 but you don't sound worried, how are you feeling?\" \"I feel fine. Never better.\" \"So\u00a0\u2014\" \"Except for the puking.\" \"Eww.\" \"Yeah, like every morning for the last three weeks. And my boyfriend's acting all suspicious, asking how I feel, if I'm okay, do I want anything. I'm gonna start asking for glasses of water.\" \"Sick every morning? Like...morning sickness?\" \"Exactly! Omigod! There's a name for this?\" \"Well, it's not so uncommon, many women\u00a0\u2014\" \"Is it girlfriend poisoning? Is he like Scott Peterson?\" \"Let's back up a second. How are you fixed for birth control?\" \"You mean like rubbers?\" \"Exactly like rubbers.\" \"Oh, yeah, we use them every time, unless we get all, y'know.Caught up in things.You think he poisoned me with a rubber?\" \"I think he poisoned you without a rubber. Did you have sex prior to feeling sick?\" \"Omigod!\" she says, seeing the light. \"Exactly.\" \"He did poison me with a rubber.\" \"Um, no. Let me put it this way\u00a0\u2014 you're pregnant.\" A slight pause.\"You're good, \" she says in a low voice. \"Thank you,\" I say.\"But the question is, how are you? \" \"So he poisoned his pregnant girlfriend? Wow, that's low. That's daytime TV low.\" I'm sure my mother would have an appropriate anecdote, as she watches a lot of Oprah, but I explain from the beginning. The sex without protection. The sperm and egg. The fertilization. The hormones. When realization finally dawns, she's thrilled, \"So that's why he keeps bringing home stuffed animals.\" We spend the rest of the session discussing midwives and pain medication and Desperate Housewives. She's amazed when I tell her the child will definitely be the same sex as one of the grandparents' children. Before the phone hits the cradle,I shoot into the bathroom to check that my birth control pill prescription is current. This surge of activity rouses my dog Miu\u00a0\u2014 though she slept through all the banging around in the kitchen. She's a boxer I adopted from the local shelter as a bald and sickly skeleton (her, not me\u00a0\u2014 I have good hair, and can never lose those last ten pounds) and is now my official babygirl.She lifts her head and yawns at me and I discover the phone book is half-eaten under her ectoplasmic jowls. She still has separation anxiety sometimes, but I know how that feels, so I don't get mad. Not even when she ate the Marc Jacobs handbag I accidentally bought with my credit card, which led to an uncomfortable conversation with Carlos,my credit counselor.Well, he says he's just my creditor, but I need the therapy. * * * My boyfriend, Merrick, lives perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean, in a little gem of a house he designed himself. He's an architect, which is one of the better jobs for a boyfriend, and has some issues with perfectionism, for which he claims his treatment is me. At six o' clock, I pull my car\u00a0\u2014 a BMW, 1974, pumpkin-orange, which Maya says looks like a Halloween float\u00a0\u2014 next to Merrick's Volvo station wagon and walk down the lavender-lined stone path to the front door. I'm a little surprised, when he opens the door, that he's not wearing Hugo Boss, but kiss his sloppy jeans-and-T-shirt self anyway. He steps back when Miu scampers inside, and eyes me. \"You look extra-delicious.\" This is a loving lie, I look like I always look: a strong seven out of ten, with a bit too much chub and a large head, but good hair and nice eyebrows. If I made enough money to afford Kiehl's for everyday use, maybe I'd be an eight. If Visa and Mastercard weren't so shortsighted, and let me buy Theory,I'd be a strong eight.\"On a scale of one to ten?\"I ask. \"Ten.\" \"You're not supposed to say ten,\" I tell him. \"Ten means you're just making me happy. Nine makes me think maybe you're telling the truth.\" \"Then nine. How was your day?\" \"A strong seven.\" \"That's pretty good,\" he says. \"That's the 'sweet spot,\" a strong seven. Anything better, you get spoiled, anything worse, you've missed out.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 5.34}, {"asin": "1594483299", "title": "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize Winner)", "author": "Junot D\u00edaz", "description": "Review \"An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fueled by adrenaline-powered prose. . .\u00a0A book that decisively establishes [D\u00edaz] as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible new voices.\" \u2014 Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times \"D\u00edaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barn-burning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness.\"\u00a0\u2014 New York Magazine \"Genius. . .\u00a0a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific. And what a voice Yunior has. His narration is a triumph of style and wit, moving along Oscar de Leon's story with cracking, down-low humor, and at times expertly stunning us with heart-stabbing sentences. That\u00a0D\u00edaz's novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator's] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth's Zuckerman \u2014 in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is just the word for it) work of modern fiction \u2014 all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else.\"\u00a0\u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \"Astoundingly great. . .\u00a0D\u00edaz\u00a0has written. . .\u00a0a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish, and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games, and classic science fiction. . .\u00a0In lesser hands Oscar Wao would merely have been the saddest book of the year. With D\u00edaz\u00a0on the mike, it's also the funniest.\" \u2014 Time \"Superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight. The great achievement of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is\u00a0D\u00edaz's ability to balance an intimate multigenerational story of familial tragedy. . .\u00a0The past and present remain equally in focus, equally immediate, and\u00a0D\u00edaz's acrobatic prose toggles artfully between realities, keeping us enthralled with all.\" \u2014 The Boston Globe \"Panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel, and the 'language' novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive.\u00a0D\u00edaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer. Really, it's a love novel. . .\u00a0His dazzling wordplay is impressive. But by the end, it is his tenderness and loyalty and melancholy that breaks the heart. That is wondrous in itself.\" \u2014 Los Angeles Times \"D\u00edaz's writing is unruly, manic, seductive. . .\u00a0In\u00a0D\u00edaz's landscape we are all the same, victims of a history and a present that doesn't just bleed together but stew. Often in hilarity. Mostly in heartbreak.\"\u00a0\u2014 Esquire\" The Dominican Republic [D\u00edaz] portrays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a wild, beautiful, dangerous, and contradictory place, both hopelessly impoverished and impossibly rich. Not so different, perhaps, from anyone else's ancestral homeland, but\u00a0D\u00edaz's weirdly wonderful novel illustrates the island's uniquely powerful hold on Dominicans wherever they may wander.\u00a0D\u00edaz made us wait eleven years for this first novel and boom!\u2014 it's over just like that. It's not a bad gambit, to always leave your audience wanting more. So brief and wondrous, this life of Oscar. Wow.\" \u2014 The Washington Post Book World \"Terrific. . .\u00a0High-energy. . .\u00a0It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread.\" \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \"Now that\u00a0D\u00edaz's second book, a novel called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , has finally arrived, younger writers will find that the bar. And some older writers\u2014we know who we are\u2014might want to think about stepping up their game. Oscar Wao shows a novelist engaged with the culture, high and low, and its polyglot language. If Donald Barthelme had lived to read D\u00edaz, he surely would have been delighted to discover an intellectual and linguistic omnivore who could have taught even him a move or two.\" \u2014 Newsweek \"Few books require a 'highly flammable' warning, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot\u00a0D\u00edaz's long-awaited first novel, will burn its way into your heart and sizzle your senses.\u00a0D\u00edaz's novel is drenched in the heated rhythms of the real world as much as it is laced with magical realism and classic fantasy stories.\" \u2014 USA Today \"Dark and exuberant. . . this fierce, funny, tragic book is just what a reader would have hoped for in a novel by Junot\u00a0D\u00edaz.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Junot D\u00edaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown ; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; This Is How You Lose Her , a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist; and a debut picture book, Islandborn. He is the recipient of a MacArthur \u201cGenius\u201d Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.\u00a0A graduate of Rutgers College, D\u00edaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.91}, {"asin": "1590512057", "title": "Cracks", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1416546618", "title": "Death of a Dream (48 Hours Mystery)", "author": "Paul LaRosa", "description": "From Publishers Weekly The real-life brutal murder of Catherine Woods, a beautiful exotic dancer, in November of 2005, fed tabloid headlines. 48 Hours correspondents La Rosa and Moriarty serve up a true crime account of her story and that of Paul Cortez, who was convicted of the crime the following year. Dubbed the Stripper Beauty, Catherine was 18 when she moved to Manhattan from Columbus, Ohio (where her father directs the Ohio State University's marching band). Her dreams of Broadway were tested by a rape. On returning to New York, she soon had an Ohio pal, David Haughn, living with her on the Upper East Side, but began dating others, including Cortez, then 24, an educated band musician and yoga enthusiast who disapproved of Catherine's dancing topless for hefty take-home cash. La Rosa and Moriarty deliver a compelling account of her horrifying murder and the subsequent investigation and trial. Their version of events allows readers to draw their own conclusions as to whether justice was served. (Apr.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Paul Larosa is an Emmy Award-winning producer for the CBS newsmagazine 48 Hours . He won a Primetime Emmy for the acclaimed CBS documentary 9/11 , and has also won a Peabody Award, a Christopher Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. For sixteen years he was reporter for the New York Daily News , where he was the co-winner with Anna Quindlen of the Meyer Berger Award given by Columbia University's School of Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two children.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "True Crime"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "0375800425", "title": "ABC and 1,2,3: A Sesame Street Treasury of Words and Numbers (Sesame Street)", "author": "Joe Mathieu", "description": "Amazon.com Review Learning words and numbers is fun with Big Bird, Elmo, Grover, and the other Sesame Street friends along to help. In the first half of this sturdy oversized book, every page features a letter, A to Z , accompanied by a scene featuring objects starting with that letter. The M spread, for example, shows a moonlit mountain landscape, with Sesame Street detectives Ernie and Bert investigating (with a magnifying glass, of course) the mystery of the missing mitten. Young readers will take pleasure in pointing out the mitten under a tree with a mouse curled up inside and a moose lurking nearby. In the second half of the book, illustrations depict one broom sweeping, swooshing; two hammers pounding, pounding; three big bales of hay; four round rubber tires, and so on up to 20, then continuing with 30, 40, 50, etc., to 100. By then, it takes an entire Sesame Street Fair to show all the items so far enumerated. Two educational books in one terrific treasury! (Ages 4 to 8) --Emilie Coulter From the Inside Flap Children can learn their ABC's and 1, 2, 3's with their favorite Sesame Street characters in this colorful, fun, and educational hardcover. What better way to acquire these important early concepts than with their Muppet friends? The ABC Book of Words allows children to learn the alphabet and new vocabulary on every beautiful spread. The Counting Book has number examples on Sesame Street from \"one broom swooshing\" to \"100 Twiddlebugs at the Twiddlebug Fair!\" Together, these books make for a terrific over-size hardcover packed with value! From the Back Cover Children can learn their ABC's and 1, 2, 3's with their favorite Sesame Street characters in this colorful, fun, and educational hardcover. What better way to acquire these important early concepts than with their Muppet friends? The ABC Book of Words allows children to learn the alphabet and new vocabulary on every beautiful spread. The Counting Book has number examples on Sesame Street from \"one broom swooshing\" to \"100 Twiddlebugs at the Twiddlebug Fair!\" Together, these books make for a terrific over-size hardcover packed with value! Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.35}, {"asin": "193386589X", "title": "Spectrum 23: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art", "author": "John Fleskes", "description": "About the Author John Fleskes is the president and publisher of Flesk Publications. He has published over eighty books to date. Fleskes has contributed to numerous books as writer, editor and designer and serves as the director of the annual showcase \"Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art.\"", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Graphic Design"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 49.95}, {"asin": "0307021688", "title": "Tawny Scrawny Lion (Little Golden Book)", "author": "Kathryn Jackson", "description": "About the Author In 1942, the launch of Little Golden Books revolutionized children\u2019s book publishing by making high-quality picture books available at affordable prices. More than 60 years later, many of the original Golden Book titles are still wildly popular, with The Poky Little Puppy topping the list of ten bestselling children\u2019s books of all time.\u00a0Golden Books\u2019 backlist is teeming with classics such as Dorothy Kunhardt\u2019s Pat the Bunny , and features the stories and artwork of children\u2019s book legends Mary Blair, Margaret Wise Brown, Richard Scarry, Eloise Wilkins, Garth Williams, and many more.\u00a0Today, the Golden Books imprint includes an array of storybooks, novelty books, and coloring and activity books featuring all of the most popular licenses, including Disney, Nickelodeon, Barbie, Thomas & Friends, The Cat in the Hat, Sesame Street, Marvel Super Heroes, and DC Super Friends. Golden Books\u00a0continues to reissue the best of its backlist in a variety of formats, including ebooks and apps, as well as bringing out brand-new books in these evolving new formats. Gustaf Tenggren (1896\u20131970) was a well-known illustrator in his native Sweden before immigrating to the United States in 1920. He illustrated many Golden Books, beginning with The Poky Little Puppy. One of the original twelve Little Golden Books\u00a0published in 1942, The Poky Little Puppy went on to become the bestselling picture book of all time. Other iconic Little Golden Books illustrated by Tenggren include The Saggy Baggy Elephant and Tawny Scrawny Lion. In the late 1930s, Tenggren worked for the Disney Studio, providing concept artwork (created to inspire and guide animators) for various characters and scenes in Bambi, The Old Mill, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Fantasia.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.99}], "target_asin": "1416546618"}
{"user_id": "AGMNY7RG3MPE7QRDUVLCBYIDBQRQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B012CU5RGC", "title": "The Daughters of Palatine Hill: A Novel", "author": "Phyllis T. Smith", "description": "Review \u201cAn absolutely marvelous book, even better than I Am Livia ...Phyllis T. Smith is a remarkable and sophisticated writer who truly breathes life into her characters and her era. A masterful work.\u201d \u2014 Reading the Ages \u201cI found myself absolutely in the thrall of this book from the moment I opened it up.\u201d \u2014 Precious Books and Baubles \u201cSmith brings ancient Rome to life...An excellent follow-up to her first novel, I Am Livia .\u201d \u2014 Historical Novels Review Praise for I Am Livia : \u201cHighly polished and compelling\u2026seamlessly written\u2026[Phyllis T. Smith] offers a richness of historical detail...\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201c I Am Livia is a wonderful journey to ancient Rome that provides amazing, thoughtful insight into one of its most influential and unconventional citizens...Smith\u2019s Livia is such a dynamic character, so approachably human, at times fearless and forceful but also merciful and just...The historical backdrop of Rome becomes more accessible, less academic, when seen through the lives of Smith\u2019s characters.\u201d \u2014 Historical Novels Review About the Author Phyllis T. Smith was born and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. After obtaining a bachelor\u2019s degree from Brooklyn College and a master\u2019s degree from New York University, Phyllis pursued a practical career in computer applications training, yet she found herself drawn to writing fiction and to the history, literature, and art of the ancient world. Her first novel, I Am Livia , was a #1 Kindle and Digital Book World bestseller. She plans to write more novels set in ancient Rome.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00X2F109A", "title": "The Swans of Fifth Avenue: A Novel", "author": "Melanie Benjamin", "description": "Review \u201cExceptional storytelling . . . teeming with scandal, gossip and excitement.\u201d \u2014Harper\u2019s Bazaar \u201cThis moving fictionalization brings the whole cast of characters back to vivid life. Gossipy and fun, it\u2019s also a nuanced look at the beauty and cruelty of a rarefied, bygone world.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cThe era and the sordid details come back to life in this jewel of a novel.\u201d \u2014 O: The Oprah Magazine \u201cShamelessly gossipy . . . a catty, juicy read that\u2019s like a three-martini lunch.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201c[Captures] the mesmerizing sparkle and scandal of New York high society in the 1950s.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cTantalizing . . . Readers will fall into a world of glitz, glamour and the exciting life of the rich and famous. The details and conversations are so rich, you may forget you're reading a novel.\u201d \u2014Associated Press \u201cHighly entertaining.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cTake Gossip Girl and move it to the 50s.\u201d \u2014 theSkimm \u201c[Melanie] Benjamin has given us a compelling look at an American icon, a talented yet vulnerable man, and the complex woman he loved in his own distinctive way.\u201d \u2014 The Philadelphia Inquirer \u201cThe strange and fascinating relationship between Truman Capote and his \u2018swans\u2019 is wonderfully reimagined in this engrossing novel. It\u2019s a credit to Benjamin that we end up caring so much for these women of power, grace, and beauty\u2014and for Capote, too.\u201d \u2014Sara Gruen, New York Time s bestselling author of Water for Elephants \u201cA delicious tale . . . Melanie Benjamin has turned Truman Capote\u2019s greatest scandal into your next must-read book-club selection.\u201d \u2014Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet \u201cReading The Swans of Fifth Avenue is like being ushered into a party where you\u2019re offered champagne and fed the sumptuous secrets of New York\u2019s elite\u2014without having to pay the price afterward. The swans are outmatched only by the elegance of Melanie Benjamin\u2019s prose\u2014captivatingly earnest and sophisticated.\u201d \u2014Vanessa Diffenbaugh , New York Times bestselling author of The Language of Flowers \u201cBenjamin convincingly portrays a large cast of colorful historical figures while crafting a compelling, gossipy narrative with rich emotional depth.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cThe beautiful people of the fifties and sixties glitter in this riveting tale of betrayal and greed. . . . Irresistible, astonishing, and told with verve . . . not to be missed.\u201d \u2014Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. chapter 1.....Once upon a time\u2014It was the best of times, it was the worst of times\u2014There once was a man from Nantucket\u2014Truman giggled. He covered his mouth like a little boy, and tittered until his slender shoulders shook, his blue eyes so gleefully mischievous that he looked like a statue of Pan come to life.\u201cOh, Big Mama! I am such a naughty imp!\u201d\u201cTrue Heart, you are priceless!\u201d Slim had laughed, too, she remembered, laughed until her ribs ached. Truman did that to her in those glorious early days; he made her laugh. That was it, really. The simple truth of the matter.When he was young, back in 1955, when they were all young\u2014or, at least, younger\u2014when fame was new and friendships fledgling, fueled by champagne and caviar and gifts from Tiffany\u2019s, Truman Capote was a hell of a lot of fun to be around.\u201cOnce upon a time,\u201d Slim had finally pronounced.\u201cYes. Well .\u2008.\u2008.\u2008,\u201d and Truman drawled it out in his theatrical way, adding several syllables. \u201cOnce upon a time, there was New York.\u201dNew York.Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor\u2019s famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico\u2019s. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf\u2019s, Tiffany\u2019s.There was a subterranean New York, as well; \u201clower\u201d in every meaning of the word. Ellis Island and the Bowery and the Lower East Side. The subway. Automats and Schrafft\u2019s, hot dogs from a cart, pizza by the slice. Chickens hanging from windows in Chinatown, pickles from a barrel on Delancey. Beatniks in the Village with their torn stockings and dirty turtlenecks and disdain for everything.But that wasn\u2019t the New York that drew the climbers, the dreamers, the hungry. No, it was lofty New York, the city of penthouses and apartments in the St. Regis or the Plaza or the Waldorf, the New York for whom \u201cTake the \u2018A\u2019 Train\u201d was a song, not an option. The New York of big yellow taxis in a pinch, if the limousine was otherwise occupied. The New York of glittering opening nights at the Met; endless charity balls and banquets; wide, clean sidewalks uncluttered by pushcarts and clothing racks and children playing. Views of the park, the river, the bridge, not sooty brick walls or narrow, dank alleys.The New York of the plays, the movies, the books; the New York of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Vogue.It was a beacon, a spire, a beacon on top of a spire. A light, always glowing from afar, visible even from the cornfields of Iowa, the foothills of the Dakotas, the deserts of California. The swamps of Louisiana. Beckoning, always beckoning. Summoning the discontented, seducing the dreamers. Those whose blood ran too hot, and too quickly, causing them to look about at their placid families, their staid neighbors, the graves of their slumbering ancestors and say\u2014I\u2019m different. I\u2019m special. I\u2019m more.They all came to New York. Nancy Gross\u2014nicknamed \u201cSlim\u201d by her friend the actor William Powell\u2014from California. Gloria Guinness\u2014\u201cLa Guinness\u201d\u2014born a peasant in a rural village in Mexico. Barbara Cushing\u2014known as \u201cBabe\u201d from the day she was born, the youngest of three fabulous sisters from Boston.And Truman. Truman Streckfus Persons Capote, who showed up one day on William S. and Babe Paley\u2019s private plane, a tagalong guest of their good friends Jennifer Jones and David O. Selznick. Bill Paley, the chairman and founder of CBS, had gaped at the slender young fawn with the big blue eyes and funny voice; \u201cI thought you meant President Truman,\u201d he\u2019d hissed to David. \u201cI\u2019ve never heard of this little\u2014fellow. We have to spend the whole weekend with him?\u201d Babe Paley, his wife, murmured softly, \u201cOh, Bill, of course you\u2019ve heard of him,\u201d as she went to greet their unexpected guest with her legendary warmth and graciousness.Of course, Bill Paley had heard of Truman Capote. Who hadn\u2019t, in Manhattan in 1955?Truman, Truman, Truman\u2014voices whispered, hissed, envied, disdained. Barely thirty, the Boy Wonder, the Wunderkind, the Tiny Terror (this last, however, mainly uttered by other writers, it must be admitted). Truman Capote, slender, wistful bangs and soulful eyes and unsettling, pouty lips, reclining lazily, staring sultrily from the jacket of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. A novel that neither Babe nor any of her friends such as Slim or Gloria had bothered to read, it must be admitted. But still, they whispered his name at cocktail parties, benefits, and luncheons.\u201cYou must meet\u2014\u201d\u201cI\u2019m simply mad about\u2014\u201d\u201cOf course you know\u2014\u201dTruman.\u201cI introduced you to him first,\u201d Slim reminded Babe after that fateful weekend jaunt to the Paleys\u2019 home in Jamaica; that startling, stunning weekend when Babe and Truman had found themselves blinking at the first dazzling sunrise of friendship, still so new that they didn\u2019t quite understand that it was friendship, this thing that had cast a spell over the two of them to the exclusion of mere mortals. \u201cYou just don\u2019t remember. But he was mine, my True Heart. It\u2019s not fair that you\u2019ve stolen him from me.\u201d And Slim pouted and shook her blond hair, always hanging over one eye, looking more like Lauren Bacall than did Lauren Bacall, which was only appropriate, since Lauren Bacall had modeled herself after Slim. \u201cAround the time he was working on the screenplay of Beat the Devil, Leland brought him home for dinner one night. Don\u2019t you remember?\u201d\u201cNo, it was I who first discovered him,\u201d Gloria insisted with a flash of her exotic dark eyes; that flash that always threatened to expose her real origin, concealed so nearly completely beneath the Balenciaga dresses and Kenneth hairstyles\u2014and studied British accent. \u201cI\u2019m surprised, Slim, that you don\u2019t recall. It was soon after he adapted The Grass Harp for Broadway. I don\u2019t generally go in for Broadway, naturally,\u201d she said with an arch look at Slim, who bristled. \u201cBut I\u2019m very glad I went to that opening night. I told you all about him then, Babe.\u201d\u201cMy dear, no. I invited him for the weekend, in Paris, don\u2019t you recall?\u201d Pamela broke in, her voice so veddy, veddy British that they all, instinctively, leaned in to hear her (and they all, instinctively, recognized the ploy for what it was, and the many times their husbands had done the same thing, only to encounter Pamela\u2019s magnificent cleavage displayed in a low-cut Dior). \u201cLong before any of you\u2014back when he had just published Other Voices, Other Rooms. Bennett Cerf, you know, the publisher\u201d\u2014and she could barely suppress a shudder; one simply did not like to admit one knew those types\u2014\u201casked me if I could entertain this young novelist of his, as he was rather nervous about reviews. You were there, Babe. I\u2019m certain of it.\u201d\u201cLadies, ladies,\u201d admonished C.Z., unflappable and untouchable as ever, never quite \u201cin\u201d but never quite \u201cout\u201d of their world\u2014simple and uncomplicated, a Hitchcock blonde with a sunny smile (and a clenched, exceedingly proper Boston drawl). But C.Z., they all knew, was happier puttering around in her garden, spade in hand, or tending to her horses than she was lunching at Le Pavillon. \u201cI don\u2019t usually care about this sort of thing, but I do believe I was the one who introduced Truman to Babe. We were shopping at Bergdorf\u2019s. Truman is marvelous at picking out just the right handbag. You were there that afternoon, Babe.\u201d\u201cNo, I propose it was on our yacht,\u201d Marella said in her uncertain English; her entire manner was shy and tentative around her friends, since she was much younger than they were, never entirely sure of her place, despite her fabulous wealth and exquisite beauty\u2014and a face that Truman had pronounced \u201cwhat Botticelli would have created, had Botticelli had more talent!\u201d \u201cAlec Korda brought him along, one summer. I believe you and Bill were there, Babe, were you not?\u201dBabe Paley, cool in a blue linen Chanel suit that did not crease, no matter the radiator heat of a New York summer, didn\u2019t reply; she merely looked on, amused, as she removed her gloves, folded them carefully, and slipped them inside her Herm\u00e8s alligator bag. Seated in the middle of the best table at Le Pavillon, she surveyed her surroundings.This was her world, a world of quiet elegance, artifice, presentation. And luncheon was the highlight of the day, the reason for getting up in the morning and going to the hairdresser, buying the latest Givenchy or Balenciaga; the reward for managing the perfect house, the perfect children, the perfect husband. And for maintaining the perfect body. After all, one generally dined at home, or at a dinner party; why else employ a personal chef or two? But one went out for luncheon, at The Colony or Quo Vadis. But especially Le Pavillon, where the owner, Henri Soul\u00e9, displayed his society ladies like the objets of fine art that they were, seating them proudly in the front room, spreading them out in plush red-velvet banquettes, setting the table with the finest linen, Baccarat glasses, exquisite china and silver, and cut crystal bowls of fresh flowers. They drank their favorite wine, pushed the finest French cuisine around their plates (for in order to wear the kind of clothes and possess the kind of cachet to be welcome at Le Pavillon, naturally one could not actually eat), gossiped, and were seen.Photographers were always gathered on the sidewalk outside, waiting to snap the beautiful people inside, and Babe, tall, regal, a gracious smile on her face, was the most sought-after of all, to her friends\u2019 eternal dismay and her own weary disdain\u2014although the most observant, like Slim, might notice that Babe would pause, imperceptibly, if no photographer happened to be around, as if looking, or wishing, for one magically to appear.Why was Babe Paley such a favorite? Why was she the most fussed over, the most sought out for a quick, reverent hello by those not privileged to be seated with her? She was not the most beautiful; that honor must go to Gloria Guinness, with her exquisite neck, lustrous black hair, and flashing eyes. She was not the most amusing; that was Slim Hayward, with her quips and her quick wit, honed at the feet of men like Ernest Hemingway and Howard Hawks and Gary Cooper. She was not the most noble; no, that would be a tie between the Honorable Pamela Digby Churchill, daughter of a baron, ex-daughter-in-law of a prime minister, and Marella Agnelli, a bona fide Italian princess, married to Gianni Agnelli, the heir to the Fiat kingdom.It was her style, that indefinable asset. It was said that the others had style but Babe was style. No one noticed Babe\u2019s clothes, for instance; not at first, even though she was always clad in the chicest, most exquisite designs. They noticed her, her tall, slender frame, her grave dark eyes, the way she had of holding her handbag in the crook of her arm, the simple grace with which she pushed her sunglasses on top of her hair or unbuttoned a coat with just one hand, allowing it to fall elegantly from her shoulders into the always-waiting arms of a ma\u00eetre d\u2019.What they did not notice was the loneliness that trailed after her, along with the faint, grassy scent of her favorite fragrance, Balmain\u2019s Vent Vert. The loneliness that, despite fabulous wealth, numerous houses, children, the most vibrant and powerful husband of all her friends, was her constant companion\u2014or, at least, had been. Until now.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t really matter,\u201d Babe finally pronounced, settling it once and for all. \u201cI\u2019m simply so very glad to know him. To Truman!\u201d And she raised a flute of Cristal.\u201cTo Truman!\u201d her five friends all echoed, and they toasted to their latest find, excited and hungrily anticipating fresh amusements galore, nothing more.\u201cTo Truman,\u201d Babe whispered to herself, and smiled a private little smile that none of her friends had ever seen before. But the Duchess of Windsor had just entered the restaurant, her harsh little face turned first to the left, then to the right, as if she really were royalty, igniting a small wildfire of catty conversation\u2014\u201cIsn\u2019t the duke the most boring man you\u2019ve ever met? But those jewels! The one thing he\u2019s ever done right!\u201d\u2014and none of Babe\u2019s friends was even looking at her.Except for Slim, who narrowed her eyes and bit her lip. And wondered. chapter 2.....There was another young woman who dreamed of New York; another young woman who knew that if she could only find her way there, she could live happily ever after\u2014with or without her young son. Her name was Lillie Mae Faulk, and she was from Monroeville, Alabama. She came to New York, too.Once upon a time.\u201cMy mother\u2019s name was Nina,\u201d Truman told Gloria, told C.Z., told Slim. His eyes gleamed softly, reverently. \u201cNina was beautiful\u2014a real lady. She was too much for Monroeville, Alabama! She always told me, \u2018Truman, my little man, I\u2019m going to take you to New York one day.\u2019 And she did, when I was eleven. That\u2019s when my life really began\u2014because it\u2019s New York! Not sleepy little Monroeville, where nothing ever happened. Although I did get bit by a cottonmouth once, and nearly died. Nearly\u2014oh, my goodness, I was one foot over the line! But they saved me. Nothing can kill me, not even a snake!\u201d\u201cOh!\u201d Slim gasped. Then she grinned. \u201cLet me see the scar!\u201d\u201cBig Mama!\u201d Truman wagged a finger at her but obliged, rolling up his shirt to reveal a thin, supple arm, paler than the moon, covered with a fine down of silken blond hair, as white as the hair on his head, the hair brushing his eyes, always falling, falling over his face like a curtain or a veil. \u201cSee?\u201dSlim did see: two faint punctures on his forearm, barely visible.\u201cThese are my scars, my only scars,\u201d Truman told her, triumphantly. \u201cI don\u2019t have any others!\u201d\u201cMy mother\u2019s name was really Lillie Mae,\u201d Truman revealed to Babe. It was early in their friendship, those days when they had to catch each other up on everything that had happened to them, so that they could mark their lives\u2014Before. And After.\u201cLillie Mae Faulk. And she was a selfish bitch,\u201d Truman said, his voice flat for once. He wasn\u2019t trying to captivate or ensnare; he knew he had Babe, knew it in his heart. Knew it as a dream come true, for that was what it was. --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Melanie Benjamin is the New York Times bestselling author of The Children\u2019s Blizzard , Mistress of the Ritz, The Girls in the Picture, The Swans of Fifth Avenue, The Aviator's Wife, The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, and Alice I Have Been . Benjamin lives in Virginia, where she is at work on her next historical novel. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "042510804X", "title": "Dr. Robert Anthony's Advanced Formula for Total Success", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Motivational"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "B01COJUEZ0", "title": "A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel", "author": "Amor Towles", "description": "Review \"The novel buzzes with the energy of numerous adventures, love affairs, [and] twists of fate.\" \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \"If you're looking for a summer novel, this is it. Beautifully written, a story of a Russian aristocrat trapped in Moscow during the tumult of the 1930s. It brims with intelligence, erudition, and insight, an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of the term.\" \u2014Fareed Zakaria, \"Global Public Square,\" CNN \"Fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat . . . A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story because it manages to be a little bit of everything. There\u2019s fantastical romance, politics, espionage, parenthood and poetry. The book is technically historical fiction, but you would be just as accurate calling it a thriller or a love story.\u201d \u2014Bill Gates \u201cThe book is like a salve. I think the world feels disordered right now. The count\u2019s refinement and genteel nature are exactly what we\u2019re longing for.\u201d \u2014 Ann Patchett \u201cHow delightful that in an era as crude as ours this finely composed novel stretches out with old-World elegance.\u201d \u2014The Washington Post \u201c[A]\u00a0wonderful book at any time . . . [I]t brought home to me how people find ways to be happy, make connections, and make a difference to one another\u2019s lives, even in the strangest, saddest and most restrictive circumstances.\u201d \u2014Tana French, author of The Searcher \u201cMarvelous.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cThe novel buzzes with the energy of numerous adventures, love affairs, twists of fate and silly antics.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \u201cA winning, stylish novel.\u201d \u2014NPR.org \u201cEnjoyable, elegant.\u201d \u2014 Seattle Times \u201cThe perfect book to curl up with while the world goes by outside your window.\u201d \u2014Refinery29 \u201cWho will save Rostov from the intrusions of state if not the seamstresses, chefs, bartenders and doormen? In the end, Towles\u2019s greatest narrative effect is not the moments of wonder and synchronicity but the generous transformation of these peripheral workers, over the course of decades, into confidants, equals and, finally, friends. With them around, a life sentence in these gilded halls might make Rostov the luckiest man in Russia.\u201d \u2014 The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0Book Review \u201cThis is an old fashioned sort of romance, filled with delicious detail. Save this precious book for times you really, really want to escape reality.\u201d \u2014Louise Erdrich \u201cTowles gets good mileage from the considerable charm of his protagonist and the peculiar world he inhabits.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker \u201cIrresistible . . . In his second elegant period piece, Towles continues to explore the question of how a person can lead an authentic life in a time when mere survival is a feat in itself . . . Towles\u2019s tale, as lavishly filigreed as a Faberg\u00e9 egg, gleams with nostalgia for the golden age of Tolstoy and Turgenev.\u201d \u2014 O, The Oprah Magazine \u201c\u2018The Grand Budapest Hotel\u2019 and \u2018Eloise\u2019 meets all the Bond villains.\u201d \u2014TheSkimm \u201cAnd the intrigue! . . . [ A Gentleman in Moscow ] is laced with sparkling threads (they will tie up) and tokens (they will matter): special keys, secret compartments, gold coins, vials of coveted liquid, old-fashioned pistols, duels and scars, hidden assignations (discreet and smoky), stolen passports, a ruby necklace, mysterious letters on elegant hotel stationery . . . a luscious stage set, backdrop for a downright Casablanca -like drama.\u201d \u2014 The San Francisco Chronicle \u201cThe same gorgeous, layered richness that marked Towles\u2019 debut, Rules of Civility , shapes [ A Gentleman in Moscow ].\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly Praise for Rules of Civility \u201cAn irresistible and astonishingly assured debut.\" \u2014 O, the Oprah Magazine \u201cWith this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age\u2026[his] characters are youthful Americans in tricky times, trying to create authentic lives.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cSharp [and] sure-handed.\u201d \u2014 Wall Street Journal \u201cPut on some Billie Holiday, pour a dry martini and immerse yourself in the eventful life of Katey Kontent.\" \u2014 People \u201c[A] wonderful debut novel.\u201d \u2014 The Chicago Tribune \u201cGlittering\u2026filled with snappy dialogue, sharp observations and an array of terrifically drawn characters\u2026Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.\u201d \u2014NPR.org \u201cA book that enchants on first reading and only improves on the second.\u201d \u2014 The Philadelphia Inquirer Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2016: A Gentleman in Moscow is the utterly entertaining second novel from the author of Rules of Civility . Amor Towles skillfully transports us to The Metropol, the famed Moscow hotel where movie stars and Russian royalty hobnob, where Bolsheviks plot revolutions and intellectuals discuss the merits of contemporary Russian writers, where spies spy, thieves thieve and the danger of twentieth century Russia lurks outside its marbled walls. It\u2019s also where wealthy Count Alexander Rostov lives under house arrest for a poem deemed incendiary by the Bolsheviks, and meets Nina. Nina is a precocious and wide-eyed young girl who holds the keys to the entire hotel, wonders what it means to be a princess, and will irrevocably change his life. Despite being confined to the hallway of the hotel, the Count lives an absorbing, adventure-filled existence, filled with capers, conspiracies and culture. Alexander Rostov is a character for the ages--like Kay Thompson\u2019s Eloise and Wes Anderson\u2019s M. Gustav, he is unflinchingly (and hilariously for readers) devoted to his station, even when forced to wait tables, play hide and seek with a young girl, or confront communism. Towles magnificently conjures the grandeur of the Russian hotel and the vibrancy of the characters that call it home. --Al Woodworth, The Amazon Book Review --This text refers to the hardcover edition. About the Author Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow . The two novels have collectively sold more than four million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with\u00a0his wife and two children. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From A Gentleman in Moscow : There were two restaurants in the Hotel Metropol: the Boyarsky, that fabled retreat on the second floor that we have already visited, and the grand dining room off the lobby known officially as the Metropol, but referred to affectionately by the Count as the Piazza.Admittedly, the Piazza could not challenge the elegance of the Boyarsky\u2019s d\u00e9cor, the sophistication of its service, or the subtlety of its cuisine. But the Piazza did not aspire to elegance, service, or subtlety. With eighty tables scattered around a marble fountain and a menu offering everything from cabbage piroghi to cutlets of veal, the Piazza was meant to be an extension of the city\u2014of its gardens, markets, and thorough fares. It was a place where Russians cut from every cloth could come to linger over coffee, happen upon friends, stumble into arguments, or drift into dalliances\u2014and where the lone diner seated under the great glass ceiling could indulge himself in admiration, indignation, suspicion, and laughter without getting up from his chair.And the waiters? Like those of a Parisian caf\u00e9, the Piazza\u2019s waiters could best be complimented as \u201cefficient.\u201d Accustomed to navigating crowds,they could easily seat your party of eight at a table for four. Having noted your preferences over the sound of the orchestra, within minutes they would return with the various drinks balanced on a tray and dispense them round the table in rapid succession without misplacing a glass. If, with your menu in hand, you hesitated for even a second to place your order, they would lean over your shoulder and poke at a specialty of the house. And when the last morsel of dessert had been savored, they would whisk away your plate, present your check, and make your change in under a minute. In other words, the waiters of the Piazza knew their trade to the crumb, the spoon, and the kopek.At least, that was how things were before the war. . . .Today, the dining room was nearly empty and the Count was being\u00a0served by someone who appeared not only new to the Piazza, but new to the art of waiting. Tall and thin, with a narrow head and superior demeanor, he looked rather like a bishop that had been plucked from a chessboard. When the Count took his seat with a newspaper in hand\u2014the international symbol of dining alone\u2014the chap didn\u2019t bother to clear the second setting; when the Count closed his menu and placed it beside his plate\u2014the international symbol of readiness to order\u2014the chap needed to be beckoned witha wave of the hand; and when the Count ordered the okroshka and filet of sole, the chap asked if he might like a glass of Sauterne. A perfect suggestion, no doubt, if only the Count had ordered foie gras!\u201cPerhaps a bottle of the Ch\u00e2teaude Baudelaire,\u201d the Count corrected politely.\u201cOf course,\u201d the Bishop replied with an ecclesiastical smile.Granted, a bottle of Baudelaire was something of an extravagance for a solitary lunch, but after spending another morning with the indefatigable Michel de Montaigne, the Count felt that his morale could use the boost. For several days, in fact, he had been fending off a state of restlessness. On his regular descent to the lobby, he caught himself counting the steps. As he browsed the headlines in his favorite chair, he found he was lifting his hands to twirl the tips of moustaches that were no longer there. He found he was walking through the door of the Piazza at 12:01 for lunch. And at 1:35, when he climbed the 110 steps to his room, he was already calculating the minutes until he could come back downstairs for a drink. If he continued along this course, it would not take long for the ceiling to edge downward, the walls to edge inward, and the floor to edge upward, until the entire hotel had been collapsed into the size of a biscuit tin.As the Count waited for his wine, he gazed around the restaurant, but his fellow diners offered no relief. Across the way was a table occupied by two stragglers from the diplomatic corps who picked at their food while they awaited an era of diplomacy. Over there in the corner was a spectacled denizen of the second floor with four enormous documents spread across his table, comparing them word for word. No one appeared particularly gay; and no one paid the Count any mind. That is, except for the young girl with the penchant for yellow who appeared to be spying on him from her table behind the fountain. According to Vasily, this nine-year-old with straight blond hair was\u00a0the daughter of a widowed Ukrainian bureaucrat. As usual, she was sitting with her governess. When she realized the Count was looking her way, she disappeared behind her menu.\u201cYour soup,\u201d said the Bishop.\u201cAh. Thank you, my good man. It looks delicious. But don\u2019t forget the wine!\u201d\u201cOf course.\u201dTurning his attention to his okroshka, the Count could tell at a glance that it was a commendable execution\u2014a bowl of soup that any Russian inthe room might have been served by his grandmother. Closing his eyes in order to give the first spoonful its due consideration, the Count noted asuitably chilled temperature, a tad too much salt, a tad too little kvass, but a perfect expression of dill\u2014that harbinger of summer which brings to mind the songs of crickets and the setting of one\u2019s soul at ease. But when the Count opened his eyes, he nearly dropped his spoon. For standing at the edge of his table was the young girl with the penchant for yellow\u2014studying him with that unapologetic interest peculiarto children and dogs. Adding to the shock of her sudden appearance was the fact that her dress today was in the shade of a lemon.\u201cWhere did they go?\u201d she asked, without a word of introduction.\u201cI beg your pardon. Where did who go?\u201dShe tilted her head to take a closer look at his face.\u201cWhy, your moustaches.\u201dThe Count had not much cause to interact with children, but he had been raised well enough to know that a child should not idly approach a stranger, should not interrupt him in the middle of a meal, and certainly should not ask him questions about his personal appearance. Was the minding of one\u2019s own business no longer a subject taught in schools?\u201cLike swallows,\u201d the Count answered, \u201cthey traveled elsewhere for the summer.\"Then he fluttered a hand from the table into the air in order to both mimic the flight of the swallows and suggest how a child might follow suit.She nodded to express her satisfaction with his response.\u201cI too will be traveling elsewhere for part of the summer.\u201dThe Count inclined his head to indicate his congratulations.\u201cTo the Black Sea,\u201d she added.Then she pulled back the empty chair and sat.\u201cWould you like to join me?\u201d he asked.By way of response, she wiggled back and forth to make herself comfortable then rested her elbows on the table. Around her neck hung a small pendant on a golden chain, some lucky charm or locket. The Count looked toward the young lady\u2019s governess with the hopes of catching her attention, but she had obviously learned from experience to keep her nose in her book.The girl gave another canine tilt to her head.\u201cIs it true that you are a count?\u201d\u201c\u2019Tis true.\u201dHer eyes widened.\u201cHave you ever known a princess?\u201d\u201cI have known many princesses.\u201dHer eyes widened further, then narrowed.\u201cWas it terribly hard to be a princess?\u201d\u201cTerribly.\u201dAt that moment, despite the fact that half of the okroshka remained in its bowl, the Bishop appeared with the Count\u2019s filet of sole and swapped one for the other.\u201cThank you,\u201d said the Count, his spoon still in hand.\u201cOf course.\u201dThe Count opened his mouth to inquire as to the whereabouts of the Baudelaire, but the Bishop had already vanished. When the Count turned back to his guest, she was staring at his fish.\u201cWhat is that?\u201d she wanted to know.\u201cThis? It is filet of sole.\u201d\u201cIs it good?\u201d\u201cDidn\u2019t you have a lunch of your own?\u201d\u201cI didn\u2019t like it.\u201dThe Count transferred a taste of his fish to a side plate and passed it across the table. \u201cWith my compliments.\u201dShe forked the whole thing in her mouth.\u201cIt\u2019s yummy,\u201d she said, which if not the most elegant expression was at least factually correct. Then she smiled a little sadly and let out a sigh as she directed her bright blue gaze upon the rest of his lunch.\u201cHmm,\u201d said the Count.Retrieving the side plate, he transferred half his sole along with an equal share of spinach and baby carrots, and returned it. She wiggled back and forth once more, presumably to settle in for the duration. Then, having carefully pushed the vegetables to the edge of the plate, she cut her fish into four equal portions, put the right upper quadrant in her mouth, and resumed her line of inquiry.\u201cHow would a princess spend her day?\u201d\u201cLike any young lady,\u201d answered the Count.With a nod of the head, the girl encouraged him to continue.\u201cIn the morning, she would have lessons in French, history, music. After her lessons, she might visit with friends or walk in the park. And at lunch she would eat her vegetables.\u201d\u201cMy father says that princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era.\u201dThe Count was taken aback.\u201cPerhaps a few,\u201d he conceded. \u201cBut not all, I assure you.\u201dShe waved her fork.\u201cDon\u2019t worry. Papa is wonderful and he knows everything there is to know about the workings of tractors. But he knows absolutely nothing about the workings of princesses.\u201dThe Count offered an expression of relief.\u201cHave you ever been to a ball?\u201d she continued after a moment of thought.\u201cCertainly.\u201d\u201cDid you dance?\u201d\u201cI have been known to scuff the parquet.\u201d The Count said this with the renowned glint in his eye\u2014that little spark that had defused heated conversations and caught the eyes of beauties in every salon in St. Petersburg.\u201cScuff the parquet?\u201d\u201cAhem,\u201d said the Count. \u201cYes, I have danced at balls.\u201d\u201cAnd have you lived in a castle?\u201d\u201cCastles are not as common in our country as they are in fairy tales,\u201d the Count explained. \u201cBut I have dined in a castle. . . .\u201dAccepting this response as sufficient, if not ideal, the girl now furrowed\u00a0her brow. She put another quadrant of fish in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Then she suddenly leaned forward.\u201cHave you ever been in a duel?\u201d\u201cAn affaire d\u2019honneur?\u201d The Count hesitated. \u201cI suppose I have been in a duel of sorts. . . .\u201d\u201cWith pistols at thirty-two paces?\u201d\u201cIn my case, it was more of a duel in the figurative sense.\u201dWhen the Count\u2019s guest expressed her disappointment at this unfortunate clarification, he found himself offering a consolation:\u201cMy godfather was a second on more than one occasion.\u201d\u201cA second?\u201d\u201cWhen a gentleman has been offended and demands satisfaction on the field of honor, he and his counterpart each appoint seconds\u2014in essence, their lieutenants. It is the seconds who settle upon the rules of engagement.\u201d\u201cWhat sort of rules of engagement?\u201d\u201cThe time and place of the duel. What weapons will be used. If it is to be pistols, then how many paces will be taken and whether there will be more than one exchange of shots.\u201d\u201cYour godfather, you say. Where did he live?\u201d\u201cHere in Moscow.\u201d\u201cWere his duels in Moscow?\u201d\u201cOne of them was. In fact, it sprang from a dispute that occurred in this hotel\u2014between an admiral and a prince. They had been at odds for quite some time, I gather, but things came to a head one night when their paths collided in the lobby, and the gauntlet was thrown down on that very spot.\u201d\u201cWhich very spot?\u201d\u201cBy the concierge\u2019s desk.\u201d\u201cRight where I sit!\u201d\u201cYes, I suppose so.\u201d\u201cWere they in love with the same woman?\u201d\u201cI don\u2019t think a woman was involved.\u201dThe girl looked at the Count with an expression of incredulity.\u201cA woman is always involved,\u201d she said.\u201cYes. Well. Whatever the cause, an offense was taken followed by a demand for an apology, a refusal to provide one, and a slap of the glove.\u00a0At the time, the hotel was managed by a German fellow named Keffler, who was reputedly a baron in his own right. And it was generally known that he kept a pair of pistols hidden behind a panel in his office, so that when an incident occurred, seconds could confer in privacy, carriages could be summoned, and the feuding parties could be whisked away with weapons in hand.\u201d\u201cIn the hours before dawn . . .\u201d\u201cIn the hours before dawn.\u201d\u201cTo some remote spot . . .\u201d\u201cTo some remote spot.\u201dShe leaned forward.\u201cLensky was killed by Onegin in a duel.\u201dShe said this in a hushed voice, as if quoting the events of Pushkin\u2019s poem required discretion.\u201cYes,\u201d whispered back the Count. \u201cAnd so was Pushkin.\u201dShe nodded in grave agreement.\u201cIn St. Petersburg,\u201d she said. \u201cOn the banks of the Black Rivulet.\u201d\u201cOn the banks of the Black Rivulet.\u201dThe young lady\u2019s fish was now gone. Placing her napkin on her plate and nodding her head once to suggest how perfectly acceptable the Count had proven as a luncheon companion, she rose from her chair. But before turning to go, she paused.\u201cI prefer you without your moustaches,\u201d she said. \u201cTheir absence improves your . . . countenance.\u201dThen she performed an off-kilter curtsey and disappeared behind the fountain. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0449006565", "title": "The Whitechapel Conspiracy", "author": "Anne Perry", "description": "Review \u201cA CHILLING WALK THROUGH HISTORY . . .If ever there was a place that could fuel a revolution, it was the streets around Whitechapel. And it is this threatening, despairing atmosphere that Perry captures so vividly in her historical thriller.\u201d \u2013 The Orlando Sentinel \u201cA juicy mystery . . . The Whitechapel Conspiracy recalls the edginess and romantic spark between Charlotte and Thomas that made the series so appealing to begin with. . . . The novel\u2019s ending is exciting and satisfying.\u201d\u2013 The Boston Globe From the Inside Flap ITECHAPEL CONSPIRACY is \u0093a beauty, brilliantly presented, ingeniously developed and packed with political implications that reverberate on every level of British society.\u0094\u0096 The New York Times Book Review In 1892, the grisly murders of Whitechapel prostitutes by a killer dubbed Jack the Ripper remain a terrifying enigma. And in a packed Old Bailey courtroom, Superintendent Thomas Pitt\u0092s testimony causes distinguished soldier John Adinett to be sentenced to hang for the inexplicable murder of a friend. Instead of being praised for his key testimony, Pitt is removed from his station command and transferred to Whitechapel, one of the East End\u0092s most dangerous slums. There he must work undercover investigating alleged anarchist plots. Among his few allies are his clever wife, Charlotte, and intrepid Gracie, the maid who can travel unremarked in Whitechapel. But none of them anticipate the horrors to be revealed. . . . & From the Back Cover \u201cA CHILLING WALK THROUGH HISTORY . . .If ever there was a place that could fuel a revolution, it was the streets around Whitechapel. And it is this threatening, despairing atmosphere that Perry captures so vividly in her historical thriller.\u201d \u2013 The Orlando Sentinel \u201cA juicy mystery . . . The Whitechapel Conspiracy recalls the edginess and romantic spark between Charlotte and Thomas that made the series so appealing to begin with. . . . The novel\u2019s ending is exciting and satisfying.\u201d\u2013 The Boston Globe About the Author Among Anne Perry \u2019s other novels featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt are Southampton Row , Half Moon Street , Bedford Square , Brunswick Gardens , Ashworth Hall , and Traitors Gate . She also writes the popular novels featuring Victorian private investigator William Monk\u2013among them Funeral in Blue , Slaves of Obsession , The Twisted Root , A Breach of Promise , and The Silent Cry . \u201cHer grasp of Victorian character and conscience still astonishes,\u201d said the Cleveland Plain Dealer . Hundreds of thousands of readers in Europe and America agree. Anne Perry lives in Scotland.Visit the author on her Web site at www.anneperry.net Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The courtroom at the Old Bailey was crowded. Every seat was taken and the ushers were turning people back at the doors. It was April 18, 1892, the Monday after Easter, and the opening of the London Season. It was also the third day in the trial of distinguished soldier John Adinett for the murder of Martin Fetters, traveler and antiquarian.The witness on the stand was Thomas Pitt, superintendent of the Bow Street police station.From the floor of the court Ardal Juster for the prosecution stood facing him.\"Let us start at the beginning, Mr. Pitt.\" Juster was a dark man of perhaps forty, tall and slender with an unusual cast of feature. He was handsome in some lights, in others a trifle feline, and there was an unusual grace in the way he moved.He looked up at the stand. \"Just why were you at Great Coram Street? Who called you?\"Pitt straightened up a little. He was also a good height, but he resembled Juster in no other way. His hair was too long, his pockets bulged, and his tie was crooked. He had testified in court since his days as a constable twenty years before, but it was never an experience he enjoyed. He was conscious that at the very least a man's reputation was at stake, possibly his liberty. In this case it was his life. He was not afraid to meet Adinett's cold, level stare from the dock. He would speak only the truth. The consequences were not within his control. He had told himself that before he climbed the short flight of steps to the stand, but it had been of no comfort.The silence had grown heavy. There was no rustling in the seats. No one coughed.\"Dr. Ibbs sent for me,\" he replied to Juster. \"He was not satisfied with all the circumstances surrounding Mr. Fetters's death. He had worked with me before on other matters, and he trusted me to be discreet should he be mistaken.\"\"I see. Would you tell us what happened after you received Dr. Ibbs's call?\"John Adinett sat motionless in the dock. He was a lean man, but strongly built, and his face was stamped with the confidence of both ability and privilege. The courtroom held men who both liked and admired him. They sat in stunned disbelief that he should be charged with such a crime. It had to be a mistake. Any moment the defense would move for a dismissal and the profoundest apologies would be offered.Pitt took a deep breath.\"I went immediately to Mr. Fetters's house in Great Coram Street,\" he began. \"It was just after five in the afternoon. Dr. Ibbs was waiting for me in the hall and we went upstairs to the library, where the body of Mr. Fetters had been found.\" As he spoke the scene came back to his mind so sharply he could have been climbing the sunlit stairs again and walking along the landing with its huge Chinese pot full of decorative bamboo, past the paintings of birds and flowers, the four ornate wooden doors with carved surrounds, and into the library. The late-afternoon light had poured in through the tall windows, splashing the Turkey rug with scarlet, picking out the gold lettering on the backs of the books that lined the shelves, and finding the worn surfaces of the big leather chairs.Juster was about to prompt him again.\"The body of a man was lying in the far corner,\" Pitt continued. \"From the doorway his head and shoulders were hidden by one of the large leather armchairs, although Dr. Ibbs told me it had been moved a little to enable the butler to reach the body in the hope that some assistance could be given--\"Reginald Gleave for the defense rose to his feet. \"My lord, surely Mr. Pitt knows better than to give evidence as to something he cannot know for himself? Did he see the chair moved?\"The judge looked weary. This was going to be a fiercely contested trial, as he was already uncomfortably aware. No point, however trivial, was going to be allowed past.Pitt felt himself flushing with annoyance. He did know better. He should have been more careful. He had sworn to himself he would make no mistake whatever, and already he had done so. He was nervous. His hands were clammy. Juster had said it all depended upon him. They could not rely absolutely on anyone else.The judge looked at Pitt.\"In order, Superintendent, even if it seems less clear to the jury.\"\"Yes, my lord.\" Pitt heard the tightness in his own voice. He knew it was tension but it sounded like anger. He cast his mind back to that vivid room. \"The top shelf of books was well above arm's reach, and there was a small set of steps on wheels for the purpose of making access possible. It lay on its side about a yard away from the body's feet, and there were three books on the floor, one flat and closed, the other two open, facedown and several pages bent.\" He could see it as he spoke. \"There was a corresponding space on the top shelf.\"\"Did you draw any conclusions from these things which caused you to investigate further?\" Juster asked innocently.\"It seemed Mr. Fetters had been reaching for a book and had overbalanced and fallen,\" Pitt replied. \"Dr. Ibbs had told me that there was a bruise on the side of his head, and his neck was broken, which had caused his death.\"\"Precisely so. That is what he has testified,\" Juster agreed. \"Was it consistent with what you saw?\"\"At first I thought so. . . .\"There was a sudden stirring of attention around the room, and something that already felt like hostility.\"Then, on looking more closely, I saw several small discrepancies that caused me to doubt, and investigate further,\" Pitt finished.Juster raised his black eyebrows. \"What were they? Please detail them for us so we understand your conclusions, Mr. Pitt.\"It was a warning. The entire case rested upon these details, all circumstantial. The weeks of investigation had uncovered no motive whatsoever for why Adinett should have wished harm to Martin Fetters. They had been close friends who seemed to have been similar in both background and beliefs. They were both wealthy, widely traveled, and interested in social reform. They had a wide circle of friends in common and were equally respected by all who knew them.Pitt had rehearsed this in his mind many times, not for the benefit of the court, but for himself. He had examined every detail minutely before he had even considered pursuing the charge.\"The first thing was the books on the floor.\" He remembered stooping and picking them up, angry that they had been damaged, seeing the bruised leather and the bent pages. \"They were all on the same subject, broadly. The first was a translation into English of Homer's Iliad, the second was a history of the Ottoman Empire, and the third was on trade routes of the Near East.\"Juster affected surprise. \"I don't understand why that should cause your doubt. Would you explain that for us.\"\"Because the rest of the books on the top shelf were fiction,\" Pitt answered. \"The Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, a large number of Dickens, and a Thackeray.\"\"And in your opinion the Iliad does not go with them?\"\"The other books on the middle shelf were on the subjects of Ancient Greece,\" Pitt explained. \"Particularly Troy, Mr. Schliemann's work and discourses, objects of art and historical interest, all except for three volumes of Jane Austen, which would more properly have belonged on the top shelf.\"\"I would have kept novels, especially Jane Austen, in a more accessible place,\" Juster remarked with a shrug and a tiny smile.\"Perhaps not if you had already read them,\" Pitt argued, too tense to smile back. \"And if you were an antiquarian, with particular interest in Homeric Greece, you would not keep most of your books on that subject on the middle shelves but three of them on the top with your novels.\"\"No,\" Juster agreed. \"It seems eccentric, to say the least, and unnecessarily inconvenient. When you had noticed the books, what did you do then?\"\"I looked more closely at the body of Mr. Fetters and I asked the butler, who was the one who found him, to tell me exactly what had happened.\" Pitt glanced at the judge to see if he would be permitted to repeat it.The judge nodded.Reginald Gleave sat tight-lipped, his shoulders hunched, waiting.\"Proceed, if it is relevant,\" the judge directed.\"He told me that Mr. Adinett had left through the front door and been gone about ten minutes or so when the bell rang from the library and he went to answer it,\" Pitt recounted. \"As he approached the door he heard a cry and a thud, and on opening it in some alarm, he saw Mr. Fetters's ankles and feet protruding from behind the large leather chair in the corner. He went to him immediately to see if he was hurt. I asked him if he had moved the body at all. He said he had not, but in order to reach it he had moved the chair slightly.\"People began to shift restlessly. This all seemed very unimportant. None of it suggested passion or violence, still less murder.Adinett was staring steadily at Pitt, his brows drawn together, his lips slightly pursed.Juster hesitated. He knew he was losing the jury. It was in his face. This was about facts, but far more than that it was about belief.\"Slightly, Mr. Pitt?\" His voice was sharp. \"What do you mean by 'slightly'?\"\"He was specific,\" Pitt replied. \"He said just as far as the edge of the rug, which was some eleven inches.\" He continued without waiting for Juster to ask. \"Which meant it would have been at an awkward angle for the light either from the window or the gas bracket, and too close to the wall to be comfortable. It blocked o... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.55}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B017RBIZII", "title": "The Last Woman Standing: A Novel", "author": "Thelma Adams", "description": "Review A New York Post Must-Read A 2016 True West Magazine Best of the West: Western Books (Women in the West) A Summer 2016 Hadassah Magazine Top Ten Jewish Bestseller \u201cThe well-known historical scoundrels and lawmen of Tombstone come alive in this book, from Curly Bill and the Clantons to Doc Holliday. These men are vividly portrayed\u2026Overall, Josephine\u2019s voice is strong and bursting with personality. It makes for an engaging narrative.\u201d \u2014Historical Novel Society \u201cThe in-depth details of life in 1880s Arizona and the larger-than-life characters who dwelled in the infamous town will appeal to readers of Westerns and women\u2019s historical fiction alike.\u201d \u2014Authorlink \u201cMs. Adams\u2019 prose is fresh and smart and the feminist sensibility she gives to her subject matter makes for an engaging story. Her keen visual perception is translated into words, which in turn form pictures in our minds\u2013a beautiful cycle of imagination and its translation. The thoughtfulness she employs to explore Josephine\u2019s fears, motivations, and triumphs, pays homage to the gravity of her task\u2014to portray a historical figure with emotional integrity.\u201d \u2014Book Club Babble \u201cA great flesh[ing] out to a lesser-known female Western figure, this book shines\u2026Adams draws her readers in and doesn\u2019t let them go.\u201d \u2014 Montana Bookworm \u201c The Last Woman Standing is the best historical fiction I\u2019ve read in some time. I\u2019m a sucker for a plucky heroine who leaps before she looks. If you\u2019re looking for a good Western, a good romance, or a historical retelling of the O.K. Corral, this book is for you. Adams holds your interest all the way through and gives you an in-depth look into a lesser-known historical figure behind the hero we all know.\u201d \u2014The Celebrity Caf\u00e9 \u201cNarrated with a feminine sensibility in the voice of Josephine, The Last Woman Standing is, at its heart, a love story of epic proportions. The reader is led on an emotional journey to see if, in the end, the good guys prevail and true love conquers all.\u201d \u2014 Atlanta Jewish Times \u201cThis transporting novel swiftly whisks readers away to the rough-and-tumble, gritty boomtown of Tombstone, Arizona, during its heyday. Miners, outlaws, and lawmen live almost side by side, and one remarkable woman makes her mark alongside the men. Blending fact and fiction, Adams brings Josephine Marcus Earp to life with her sassy, no-holds-barred, first-person account. This is a fascinating read that will make readers wish they could join Josie on her life\u2019s journey.\u201d \u2014RT Book Reviews \u201c The Last Woman Standing is an exciting glimpse into the life of a young woman embroiled in the violence and rivalries of Wild West Tombstone\u2026Adams brings a uniquely female perspective to the town\u2019s legends.\u201d \u2014 Night Owl Reviews \u201cIf you enjoy history and romance, danger and deceit, you will find this is a terrific book for your library. Learning more of the past through such a venue keeps you reading and searching to the very end. Adams has given us a strong and passionate story filled with historical facts, and you will find it hard to put this book down. This would be a great book for a reading or discussion group, with a great deal of interest to them both.\u201d \u2014BlogCritics \u201cThere\u2019s a great deal to be said about Thelma Adams\u2019s book The Last Woman Standing \u2026and all of it good. Very, very good. A feminist western mixing real and fictional characters, and totally defiling the era and prevailing attitudes of the times is no easy trick to pull off, and Adams does it with humor and, Lord help us all, charm.\u201d \u2014Examiner.com \u201cMovies, television shows, and books tell the story about lawman Wyatt Earp but very few mention his wife. Married for nearly fifty years, Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp was beautiful, gutsy, and Jewish. Thelma Adams has delved into the life and times of Mrs. Wyatt with her latest\u2026There would be no children but an enduring love, a passion that remained throughout the decades with the hurts and the laughter told during a time in history when one man and one woman would try to tame the west and each other.\u201d \u2014 Las Vegas Informer \u201cTruth can be stranger than fiction, they say. But Adams does a pretty bang-up job of blending the two while embellishing Mrs. Earp\u2019s rightful place in Western lore.\u201d \u2014 The Buffalo News \u201cWyatt Earp dodged many a bullet, but The Last Woman Standing is a fanciful, deeply entertaining account of how Josephine Marcus got him right in the heart.\u201d \u2014 Chronogram \u201cWho doesn\u2019t want to read about the woman who married Wyatt Earp? A legend of her own, she was Jewish, beautiful, and exotic, and Adams has made her alive and kicking on the page. A Wild West story made even wilder, more poignant and inspired by Adams\u2019s fascinating research and glittering prose.\u201d \u2014Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You \u201cIt is not merely because The Last Woman Standing takes us to a time in the past that I felt dislocated upon completing it. Thelma Adams has also taken me back to a time when we could expect a gripping and rich yarn, for lack of a better word. I found myself thinking of Doctorow and Jong and Oates, and other good writers who have taken the historical novel and given it their vast intelligence and talent and a modern-day take on their subject. This\u2014and more\u2014Adams has done, and The Last Woman Standing will make you think of good work done by other writers, but it is also entirely original, and a marvel. It is a book you set aside like a fine wine and wait for the chance to reopen and savor it.\u201d \u2014James Grissom, author of Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog From the Publisher Allow me to introduce you to a woman of the Wild West, a straight-talking, opera-loving, educated, and vivacious woman who was pivotal to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral despite never firing a gun or leading a posse. You may have heard of her husband\u2014legendary lawman Wyatt Earp\u2014but somehow this incredible lady has been given short shrift by history. But no longer, thanks to The Last Woman Standing , which paints such a compelling portrait of Josephine Marcus Earp that I found myself telling everyone about her, researching her life online, and feeling a bit sassier myself.  Not at all a typical Western novel, this is a wildly entertaining fictional story of a charismatic woman and wife on the American frontier. But underneath it all, it is one of the greatest love stories of all time. I was completely entranced by this spitfire who had one of history\u2019s most famous gunslingers wrapped around her finger. Josephine and Wyatt Earp were devoted to each other for nearly fifty years.  If Josephine were alive today, I know I\u2019d want to hang out with her, longing to be her best friend. I can\u2019t believe this magnetic beauty has not cast a bigger shadow on history, but thanks to the efforts of author Thelma Adams, a film critic and acclaimed celebrity interviewer, I suspect we won\u2019t soon forget her. - Danielle Marshall, Editor About the Author Thelma Adams is an established figure in the entertainment industry. For two decades, she has penned celebrity features and criticism for high-profile publications. Her portfolio of actor interviews includes Julianne Moore, George Clooney, Jessica Chastain, and Matthew McConaughey, among many others. While covering film for the New York Post , Us Weekly , and Yahoo Movies, Thelma became a regular at film festivals from Berlin to Dubai, Toronto to Tribeca. She sits on the Hamptons International Film Festival Advisory Board and twice chaired the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle. Her debut novel, Playdate , published by Thomas Dunne Books, won high critical acclaim. Adams is often recognized, as she has been invited to share her expertise on many broadcast outlets, including appearances on NBC\u2019s Today , CBS\u2019s Early Show , and CNN. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a history degree from UC Berkeley and earned an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in Hyde Park, New York, with her family. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1423216709", "title": "Spanish Vocabulary 2: Intermediate (Quick Study Academic)", "author": "Inc. BarCharts", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Foreign Language Study & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 6.95}, {"asin": "0985200200", "title": "Christmas On The Move Out West", "author": "Matthew Gonder", "description": "About the Author Matthew Gonder is an actor, singer, dancer, author, composer, playwright who lives in Paris, France with his amazing wife Pamela and Misol, their royal puff, who the unenlightened vulgarly call a cat. www.matthewgonder.com", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Memoirs"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "1119312574", "title": "Sales EQ: How Ultra High Performers Leverage Sales-Specific Emotional Intelligence to Close the Complex Deal", "author": "Jeb Blount", "description": "From the Inside Flap Technology has disrupted the traditional sales process by giving buyers unprecedented access to product and industry information, more control over the sales process, and more choices of products and vendors. The traditional selling skill set\u2015controlling the sales process, commanding product knowledge, and nailing a great pitch\u2015is now all but obsolete. To differentiate yourself from competitors and hold the short-lived attention span of distracted buyers, you need to be a master of emotions, interpersonal skills, influence frameworks, and human relationships. Your transformation to an ultra-high performer begins here in Sales EQ . Forget about trying to sell people on products, prices, features, and solutions because you sound like every other salesperson and will be ignored by today\u2019s savvy buyer. The new ultra-high sales performers blow away sales quotas by creating emotionally satisfying experiences for their buyers. In this game-changing guidebook to the next evolution of selling, you acquire psychological strategies for leveraging human behavior frameworks, heuristics, and cognitive biases to influence buying behaviors. You\u2019ll learn how to reach ultra-high sales performance and consistently crush your number. Sales acceleration specialist Jeb Blount, who Forbes named one of the World\u2019s Top 30 Social Selling Influencers, delivers a straightforward, conversational discussion on the ins and outs of his widely proven approach to mastering and closing the complex sale. He brings topics to life with personal stories about his own lessons learned and applying these same techniques to his sales efforts, complete with word-for-word dialogue to prepare you for what you may encounter in the field. There\u2019s nothing else to buy with this complete training program, and by the end you will be able to: Assess, understand, and raise your Sales EQ Assess, understand, and raise your Sales EQ Gain full control over the sales conversation by flipping the buyer script Gain full control over the sales conversation by flipping the buyer script Draw buyers into your space, direct their attention, and keep them engaged by disrupting their expectations Draw buyers into your space, direct their attention, and keep them engaged by disrupting their expectations Wipe out buyer resistance, conflict, and objections with proven influence frameworks Wipe out buyer resistance, conflict, and objections with proven influence frameworks Lock in micro-commitments and next steps agreements to keep your deals from stalling and accelerate pipeline velocity Lock in micro-commitments and next steps agreements to keep your deals from stalling and accelerate pipeline velocity In Sales EQ , you get the key that unlocks the secret to shaking irrational buyers out of their comfort zone and leaving them no other choice but to say, \u201cyes.\u201d From the Back Cover Praise for SALES EQ \u201c Sales EQ will stun the reader. It presents a pragmatic, easily implementable set of facts, and reverses old world thoughts and sales process with chapters like \u2018To BUY is Human.\u2019 Sales EQ will help you understand the new standard of sales. I loved this book. Buy it. Bank it!\u201d \u2015Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Red Book of Selling \u201cThe best sales techniques, tools, and training will take you absolutely nowhere\u2026unless you also have the Sales EQ to engage buyers first. Jeb Blount gets straight to the heart of selling and explains how sellers can get in sync with their buyers at the human-to-human level that matters most of all.\u201d \u2015Deb Calvert, author of DISCOVER Questions \u2122 Get You Connected \u201cIn Sales EQ , Jeb Blount takes you on an unprecedented journey into what it really takes to master the complex sale. Be prepared to change the way you think about sales.\u201d \u2015Mark Hunter, author of High-Profit Prospecting Truth! Jeb Blount makes the brilliant and disruptive case that Sales EQ trumps all else and then shows us how to reach ultra-high sales performance in this powerful, game-changing guide.\u201d \u2015Mike Weinberg, author of New Sales. Simplified . and Sales Management. Simplified \u201cIn Sales EQ , Jeb Blount cracks the code on what it really takes to become an ultra-high performer in the sales profession. A must-read for any salesperson.\u201d \u2015Mark Roberge, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School; former CRO, HubSpot; and author of The Sales Acceleration Formula About the Author JEB BLOUNT is CEO of Sales Gravy, Inc. He advises many of the world\u2019s leading organizations and their executives on the impact of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills on customer experience, strategic account management, sales, and developing high-performing sales teams. He is the author of eight books, including Fanatical Prospecting, People Love You, People Follow You, and People Buy You. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Marketing & Sales"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.99}], "target_asin": "B017RBIZII"}
{"user_id": "AEGB5GLVPI7T64ZA77CBKNWRXPFQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0525574476", "title": "The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America", "author": "Timothy Snyder", "description": "Review A New York Times Editors' Choice Shortlisted for the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize \u201cA brilliant and disturbing analysis, which should be read by anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world.\u201d \u2014 Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens \u201cCombining topical reporting with delvings into the history of ideas and some political-philosophical musing in the author\u2019s own voice, this relatively short book covers a vast canvas. . . . A roller-coaster world calls for a news editor\u2019s skill in processing facts and a philosopher\u2019s ability to dissect ideologies. Snyder has both.\u201d \u2014 The Economist \u201c The Road to Unfreedom is a rich and complex book, punctuated by epigrams that cast heroic clarity upon the disturbing distance the United States has already traveled to the sinister destination in Snyder\u2019s title. If some of Snyder\u2019s assessment seems overstated or premature, he can powerfully reply: He has perceived more accurately than his critics what has already happened. He has earned the right to be heard on what may lie ahead.\u201d \u2014 David Frum, The Atlantic \u201c The Road to Unfreedom offers a brief, potent and carefully documented history of Vladimir Putin\u2019s consolidation of power in Russia, Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, and Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.\u201d \u2014 The\u00a0Chicago Tribune \u201cWe are living in dangerous times, Timothy Snyder argues forcefully and eloquently in his new book. . . . To understand Putin, Snyder argues persuasively, you must understand his ideas. . . . The Road to Unfreedom is a good wake-up call.\u201d \u2014 Margaret MacMillan, The New York Times Book Review \u201cDeluged by ugly headlines, readers need books that force us to pause, step back and understand how America arrived at this chaotic moment. One of the best such books this year is historian Timothy Snyder\u2019s essential, penetrating look at how toxic ideas, autocratic power and fake news spread from Russia into Ukraine, Western Europe and now to the White House. At a time when the politics of apocalypse haunt American democracy, Snyder helps unpack how we got here\u2014and, maybe, how we can get out.\u201d \u2014 Lucas Wittmann, TIME \"Snyder\u2019s horror at what has happened in Russia \u2014 and at the risks to the US and Europe \u2014 gives his writing energy and passion. He is unsparing in his indictment of Putin\u2019s Russia. . . .But he is also clear-eyed about the weaknesses of American society that have made the US vulnerable to Russian intervention and domestic populism.\" \u2014 Gideon Rachman, The Financial Times \"Essential reading. . . . Chilling and unignorable.\" \u2014 The Guardian \u201cOf all the books that seek to explain the current crisis of Western liberal democracy, none is more eloquent or frightening than Snyder\u2019s The Road to Unfreedom .\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Foreign Affairs \u201cBrilliant. . . . Bleak and eloquent. . . . Snyder\u2019s account of the Trump ascendancy, and the many helping hands given from Russia, is vividly and insightfully told.\u201d \u2014Edward Lucas, The Times (London)Praise for Timothy Snyder\u2019s On Tyranny \u201cWe are rapidly ripening for fascism. This American writer leaves us with no illusions about ourselves.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Svetlana Alexievich, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature \u201cA slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital. . . . Grounded in history yet imbued with the fierce urgency of what now.\u201d \u2014Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post \u201cSnyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.\u201d \u2014 Masha Gessen, author of The Future Is History \u201cAs Timothy Snyder explains in his fine and frightening On Tyranny , a minority\u00a0party now has near-total power and is therefore understandably frightened of awakening the actual will of the people.\u201d \u2014 Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker \u201cSnyder knows this subject cold. . . . It is impossible to read aphorisms like \u2018post-truth is pre-fascism\u2019 and not feel a small chill about the current state of the Republic.\u201d \u2014 Daniel W. Drezner, The New York Times Book Review \u201cSnyder draws an unbroken line between the darkest events and personalities of the past and the ones that confront us in the here and now. . . . As he did in On Tyranny , Snyder argues that we are facing a challenge of potentially catastrophic proportions, but he refuses to despair.\u201d \u2013Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal About the Author Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of\u00a0the books On Tyranny , Black Earth , and Bloodlands . His work has received the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter ONEIndividualism or Totalitarianism (2011)With law our land shall rise, but it will perish with lawlessness.\u2014Njal\u2019s Saga, c. 1280He who can make an exception is sovereign.\u2014Carl Schmitt, 1922The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The clich\u00e9 of the politics of inevitability is that \u201cthere are no alternatives.\u201d To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a premarked grave in a prepurchased plot.Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power.Russia reached the politics of eternity first, and Russian leaders protected themselves and their wealth by exporting it. The oligarch-in-chief, Vladimir Putin, chose the fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin as a guide. The poet Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz wrote in 1953 that \u201conly in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate.\u201d Some of the philosophy books that matter today were written by Ilyin, who died the year after Mi\u0142osz wrote those lines. Ivan Ilyin\u2019s revival by official Russia in the 1990s and 2000s has given his work a second life as the fascism adapted to make oligarchy possible, as the specific ideas that have helped leaders shift from inevitability to eternity.The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s, Ilyin\u2019s era, had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems. Revived in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes.History always continues, and alternatives always present themselves. Ilyin represents one of these. He is not the only fascist thinker to have been revived in our century, but he is the most important. He is a guide on the darkening road to unfreedom, which leads from inevitability to eternity. Learning of his ideas and influence, we can look down the road, seeking light and exits. This means thinking historically: asking how ideas from the past can matter in the present, comparing Ilyin\u2019s era of globalization to our own, realizing that then as now the alternatives were real and more than two. The natural successor of the veil of inevitability is the shroud of eternity, but there are alternatives that must be found before the shroud drops. If we accept eternity, we sacrifice individuality, and will no longer see possibility. Eternity is another idea that says that there are no ideas.When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, American politicians of inevitability proclaimed the end of history, while some Russians sought new authorities in an imperial past. When founded in 1922, the Soviet Union inherited most of the territory of the Russian Empire. The Tsar\u2019s domain had been the largest in the world, stretching west to east from the middle of Europe to the shores of the Pacific, and north to south from the Arctic to Central Asia. Though largely a country of peasants and nomads, its middle classes and intellectuals considered, as the twentieth century began, how a empire ruled by an autocrat might become more modern and more just.Ivan Ilyin, born to a noble family in 1883, was typical of his generation as a young man. In the early 1900s, he wanted Russia to become a state governed by laws. After the disaster of the First World War and the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Ilyin became a counterrevolutionary, an advocate of violent methods against revolution, and with time the author of a Christian fascism meant to overcome Bolshevism. In 1922, a few months before the Soviet Union was founded, he was exiled from his homeland. Writing in Berlin, he offered a program to the opponents of the new Soviet Union, known as the Whites. These were men who had fought against the Bolsheviks\u2019 Red Army in the long and bloody Russian Civil War, and then made their way, like Ilyin, into political emigration in Europe. Ilyin later formulated his writings as guidance for Russian leaders who would come to power after the end of the Soviet Union. He died in 1954.After a new Russian Federation emerged from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991, Ilyin\u2019s short book Our Tasks began to circulate in new Russian editions, his collected works were published, and his ideas gained powerful supporters. He had died forgotten in Switzerland; Putin organized a reburial in Moscow in 2005. Ilyin\u2019s personal papers had found their way to Michigan State University; Putin sent an emissary to reclaim them in 2006. By then Putin was citing Ilyin in his annual presidential addresses to the general assembly of the Russian parliament. These were important speeches, composed by Putin himself. In the 2010s, Putin relied upon Ilyin\u2019s authority to explain why Russia had to undermine the European Union and invade Ukraine. When asked to name a historian, Putin cited Ilyin as his authority on the past.The Russian political class followed Putin\u2019s example. His propaganda master Vladislav Surkov adapted Ilyin\u2019s ideas to the world of modern media. Surkov orchestrated Putin\u2019s rise to power and oversaw the consolidation of media that ensured Putin\u2019s seemingly eternal rule. Dmitry Medvedev, the formal head of Putin\u2019s political party, recommended Ilyin to Russian youth. Ilyin\u2019s name was on the lips of the leaders of the fake opposition parties, the communists and (far-right) Liberal Democrats, who played a part in creating the simulacrum of democracy that Ilyin had recommended. Ilyin was cited by the head of the constitutional court, even as his idea that law meant love for a leader ascended. He was mentioned by Russia\u2019s regional governors as Russia became the centralized state that he had advocated. In early 2014, members of Russia\u2019s ruling party and all of Russia\u2019s civil servants received a collection of Ilyin\u2019s political publications from the Kremlin. In 2017, Russian television commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution with a film that presented Ilyin as a moral authority.Ilyin was a politician of eternity. His thought held sway as the capitalist version of the politics of inevitability collapsed in the Russia of the 1990s and 2000s. As Russia became an organized kleptocracy in the 2010s, as domestic inequality reached stupefying proportions, Ilyin\u2019s influence peaked. The Russian assault on the European Union and the United States revealed, by targeting them, certain political virtues that Ilyin the philosopher ignored or despised: individualism, succession, integration, novelty, truth, equality.Ilyin first proposed his ideas to Russians a century ago, after the Russian Revolution. And yet he has become a philosopher for our time. No thinker of the twentieth century has been rehabilitated in such grand style in the twenty-first, nor enjoyed such influence on world politics. If this went unnoticed it was because we are in the thrall of inevitability: we believe that ideas do not matter. To think historically is to accept that the unfamiliar might be significant, and to work to make the unfamiliar the familiar. Our politics of inevitability echo those of Ilyin\u2019s years. Like the period between the late 1980s to the early 2010s, so the period between late 1880s to the early 1910s was one of globalization. The conventional wisdom of both eras held that export-led growth would bring enlightened politics and end fanaticism. This optimism broke during the First World War and the revolutions and counterrevolutions that followed. Ilyin was himself an early example of this trend. A youthful supporter of the rule of law, he shifted to the extreme Right while admiring tactics he had observed on the extreme Left. The former leftist Benito Mussolini led his fascists in the March on Rome soon after Ilyin was expelled from Russia; the philosopher saw in the Duce hope for a corrupted world.Ilyin regarded fascism as the politics of the world to come. In exile in the 1920s, he was troubled that Italians had arrived at fascism before Russians. He consoled himself with the idea that the Russian Whites were the inspiration for Mussolini\u2019s coup: \u201cthe White movement as such is deeper and broader than [Italian] fascism.\u201d The depth and breadth, Ilyin explained, came from an embrace of the sort of Christianity that demanded the blood sacrifice of God\u2019s enemies. Believing in the 1920s that Russia\u2019s White exiles could still win power, Ilyin addressed them as \u201cmy White brothers, fascists.\u201dIlyin was similarly impressed by Adolf Hitler. Although he visited Italy and vacationed in Switzerland, Ilyin\u2019s home between 1922 and 1938 was Berlin, where he worked for a government-sponsored scholarly institute. Ilyin\u2019s mother was German, he undertook psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in German, he studied German philosophy, and he wrote in German as well and as often as he did in Russian. In his day job he edited and wrote critical studies of Soviet politics (A World at the Abyss in German and The Poison of Bolshevism in Russian, for example, just in the year 1931). Ilyin saw Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism: the F\u00fchrer, he wrote, had \u201cperformed an enormous service for all of Europe\u201d by preventing further revolutions on the Russian model. Ilyin noted with approval that Hitler\u2019s antisemitism was derivative of the ideology of Russian Whites. He bemoaned that \u201cEurope does not understand the National Socialist movement.\u201d Nazism was above all a \u201cSpirit\u201d of which Russians must partake.In 1938, Ilyin left Germany for Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1954. He was supported financially in Switzerland by the wife of a German-American businessman, and also earned some money by giving public lectures in German. The essence of these lectures, as a Swiss scholar noted, was that Russia should be understood not as present communist danger but as future Christian salvation. According to Ilyin, communism had been inflicted upon innocent Russia by the decadent West. One day Russia would liberate itself and others with the help of Christian fascism. A Swiss reviewer characterized his books as \u201cnational in the sense of opposing the entire West.\u201dIlyin\u2019s political views did not change as the Second World War began. His contacts in Switzerland were men of the Far Right: Rudolf Grob believed that Switzerland should imitate Nazi Germany; Theophil Spoeri belonged to a group that banned Jews and Masons; Albert Riedweg was a right-wing lawyer whose brother Franz was the most prominent Swiss citizen in the Nazi extermination apparatus. Franz Riedweg married the daughter of the German minister of war and joined the Nazi SS. He took part in the German invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, the last of which Ilyin saw as a trial of Bolshevism in which the Russian nation might prevail.When the Soviet Union won the war and extended its empire westward in 1945, Ilyin began to write for future generations of Russians. He characterized his work as shining a small lantern in a great darkness. With that small flame, Russian leaders of the 2010s have begun a conflagration.Ilyin was consistent. His first major work of philosophy, in Russian (1916), was also his last major work of philosophy, in its edited German translation (1946).The one good in the universe, Ilyin maintained, had been God\u2019s totality before creation. When God created the world, he shattered the single and total Truth that was himself. Ilyin divided the world into the \u201ccategorical,\u201d the lost realm of that single perfect concept; and the \u201chistorical,\u201d human life with its facts and passions. For him, the tragedy of existence was that facts could not be reassembled into God\u2019s totality, nor passions into God\u2019s purpose. The Romanian thinker E. M. Cioran, himself once an advocate of Christian fascism, explained the concept: before history, God is perfect and eternal; once he begins history, God seems \u201cfrenetic, committing error upon error.\u201d As Ilyin put it: \u201cWhen God sank into empirical existence he was deprived of his harmonious unity, logical reason, and organizational purpose.\u201dFor Ilyin, our human world of facts and passions is senseless. Ilyin found it immoral that a fact might be grasped in its historical setting: \u201cthe world of empirical existence cannot be theologically justified.\u201d Passions are evil. God also erred in his creation by releasing \u201cthe evil nature of the sensual.\u201d God yielded to a \u201cromantic\u201d impulse by making beings, ourselves, who are moved by sex. And so \u201cthe romantic content of the world overcomes the rational form of thought, and thought cedes its place to unthinking purpose,\u201d physical love. God left us amidst \u201cspiritual and moral relativism.\u201dBy condemning God, Ilyin empowered philosophy, or at least one philosopher: himself. He preserved the vision of a divine \u201ctotality\u201d that existed before the creation of the world, but left it to himself to reveal how it might be regained. Having removed God from the scene, Ilyin himself could issue judgments about what is and what ought to be. There is a Godly world and it must be somehow redeemed, and this sacred work will fall to men who understand their predicament\u2014thanks to Ilyin and his books.The vision was a totalitarian one. We should long for a condition in which we think and feel as one, which means not to think and feel at all. We must cease to exist as individual human beings. \u201cEvil begins,\u201d Ilyin wrote, \u201cwhere the person begins.\u201d Our very individuality only proves that the world is flawed: \u201cthe empirical fragmentation of human existence is an incorrect, a transitory, and a metaphysically untrue condition of the world.\u201d Ilyin despised the middle classes, whose civil society and private life, he thought, kept the world broken and God at bay. To belong to a layer of society that offered individuals social advancement promise of movement was to be the worst kind of human being: \u201cthis estate constitutes the very lowest level of social existence.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "0063021420", "title": "Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution", "author": "R. F. Kuang", "description": "Review \u201c Babel has earned tremendous praise and deserves all of it. It\u2019s Philip Pullman\u2019s The Golden Compass by way of N.K. Jemisin\u2019s The Fifth Season : inventive and engaging, passionate and precise. Kuang is fiercely disciplined even when she\u2019s playful and experimental \u2026 Like the silver bars at its heart\u2014like empires and academic institutions both\u2014 Babel derives its power from sustaining a contradiction, from trying to hold in your head both love and hatred for the charming thing that sustains itself by devouring you.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cA fantastical takedown of 19th-century imperialism that\u2019s as meaty as its title. R.F. Kuang proved her prowess at blending history and magic with her debut series, The Poppy War , and she\u2019s done it once again in this sweeping novel that blends historical fantasy and dark academia\u2026If, as Babel suggests, words contain magic, then Kuang has written something spellbinding.\u201d \u2014 Oprah Daily \u201cAbsolutely phenomenal. One of the most brilliant, razor-sharp books I've had the pleasure of reading that isn't just an alternative fantastical history, but an interrogative one; one that grabs colonial history and the Industrial Revolution, turns it over, and shakes it out.\u201d \u2014 S.A. Chakraborty, bestselling author of The City of Brass \u201cA fantastically made work, moving and enraging by turns, with an ending to blow down walls.\u201d \u2014 The Guardian \"Kuang follows her award-winning Poppy War trilogy with an engaging fantasy about the magic of language. Her richly descriptive stand-alone novel about an ever-expanding, alternate-world empire powered by magically enhanced silver talismans scrutinizes linguistics, history, politics, and the social customs of Victorian-era Great Britain.\" \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \"It's ambitious and powerful while displaying a deep love of language and literature...Dark academia as it should be.\"  \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cThe true magic of Kuang\u2019s novel lies in its ability to be both rigorously academic and consistently welcoming to the reader, making translation on the page feel as enchanting and powerful as any effects it can achieve with the aid of silver.\u201d \u2014 Oxford Review of Books \u201cR.F. Kuang has written a masterpiece. Through a meticulously researched and a wholly impressive deep dive into linguistics and the politics of language and translation, Kuang weaves a story that is part love-hate letter to academia, part scathing indictment of the colonial enterprise, and all fiery revolution.\u201d  \u2014 Rebecca Roanhorse, New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun \" Babel is a masterpiece. A stunningly brilliant exploration of identity, belonging, the cost of empire and revolution\u2014and the true power of language. Kuang has written the book the world has been waiting for.\" \u2014 Peng Shepherd, bestselling author of The Cartographers \"Kuang has outdone herself. Babel is brilliant, vicious, sensitive, epic, and intimate; it's both a love letter and a declaration of war. It's a perfect book.\"  \u2014 Alix E. Harrow, bestselling author of A Mirror Mended \u201cA brilliant and often harrowing exploration of violence, etymology, colonialism, and the intersections that run between them. Babel is as profound as it is moving.\u201d  >\u00a0 \u2014 Alexis Henderson, author of The Year of the Witching \u201cAn astonishing mix of erudition and emotion. What Kuang has done here, I have never before seen in literature.\u201d \u2014 Tochi Onyebuchi, author of Goliath \u201cIf you only read one book this year, read this one. Through the incredibly believable alternative HF, Kuang has distilled the truth about imperialism and colonization in our world. Kuang\u2019s depth of knowledge of history and linguistics is breathtaking. This book is a masterpiece in every sense of the word, a true privilege to read.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Jesse Sutanto, author of Dial A for Aunties \"A book that confirms Kuang as a major talent.\" \u2014 SFX \"BABEL is one of the finest standalone novels I\u2019ve read. It is a victory for literature, and its quality is what every other dark academia novel should strive to be. Paying homage to the importance of languages, translations, identity, and ethnicities, BABEL is one of the most important works of the year.\" \u2014 Novel Notions \" Babel is ambitious, engaging, impactful, and executed with brutal effectiveness.\" \u2014 reader@work About the Author Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times bestselling and Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of Babel , the Poppy War trilogy, and the forthcoming Yellowface . She is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.35}, {"asin": "1501134639", "title": "Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster", "author": "Adam Higginbotham", "description": "Review \"\u00a0Superb, enthralling and necessarily terrifying . . . the accident unfurls with a horrible inevitability. Weaving together the experiences of those who were there that night, Higginbotham marshals the details so meticulously that every step feels spring-loaded with tension. . . . Amid so much rich reporting and scrupulous analysis, some major themes emerge. . . . Higginbotham\u2019s extraordinary book is another advance in the long struggle to fill in some of the gaps, bringing much of what was hidden into the light.\" \u2014Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times \"A\u00a0compelling, panoramic account.\" \u2014 The Christian Science Monitor \u201cAn account that reads almost like the script for a movie\u00a0. . . Mr. Higginbotham has captured the terrible drama.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \" Midnight in Chernobyl is top-notch historical narrative: a tense, fast-paced, engrossing, and revelatory product of more than a decade of research. . . . A\u00a0stunningly detailed account . . . For all its wealth of information, the work never becomes overwhelming or difficult to follow. Higginbotham humanizes the tale, maintaining a focus on the people involved and the choices, both heroic and not, they made in unimaginable circumstances. This is an essential human tale with global consequences.\" \u2014 Booklist , Starred Review \"Written with authority, this superb book reads like a classic disaster story and reveals a Soviet empire on the brink. . . . [A] vivid and exhaustive account.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus , Starred Review \"This is a highly detailed, carefully documented, beautifully narrated telling of this breathtakingly complex accident and its mitigation. Higginbotham\u2019s handling of the sociopolitical context is also deft.\" \u2014Nature \"In fascinating detail, Higginbotham chronicles how the drama played out, showing that Soviet hubris in part led to the accident and Soviet secrecy compounded it.\" \u2014 Newsday \" Midnight in Chernobyl is wonderful and chilling. . . .\u00a0Adam Higginbotham tells the story of the disaster and its gruesome aftermath with thriller-like flair. . . .\u00a0It is a tale of hubris and doomed ambition, featuring Communist party bosses and hapless engineers, victims and villains, confusion and cover-up.\" \u2014 The Guardian \"More harrowing than any horror movie and more gripping than any thriller. . . Higginbotham creates a history book with the headlong pacing of fiction. . . .\u00a0Read it to be scared. Read it to be angry. Read it because Higginbotham is a great writer in total control of his material. Just read it. This book will haunt you forever.\" \u2014 The Oklahoman \"Highly readable . . . Higginbotham [is] a skilled science writer. . . . Mr. Higginbotham\u2019s book reflects extensive on-the-scene research. . . . Disaster was inevitable, and Mr. Higginbotham vividly describes the futile attempts of engineers to bring a runaway reactor under control.\" \u2014The Washington Times \u201cThe book reads like an adventure novel, but it\u2019s a richly researched non-fiction work by a brilliant storyteller. . . . Get and read this gripping account to understand why people are still so afraid of nuclear power.\u201d \u2014 Skeptic Magazine 's Science Salon \u201cHigginbotham\u2019s scrupulously reported book catalogues the chain of events that occasionally reads as stranger than fiction. The book is more than a gripping history that recounts in great detail events at the reactors; it also offers contextual insights into the Soviet era that help to explain how such a failure could occur. . . . As is the case with many great nonfiction books, it has the urgency and intrigue of the very best thrillers.\u201d \u2014 Wired \u201cAdam Higginbotham's brilliantly well-written Midnight In Chernobyl draws on new sources and original research to illuminate the true story of one of history\u2019s greatest technological failures\u2014and, along with it, the bewildering reality of everyday life during the final years of the Soviet Union.\u201d \u2014 Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History and Red Famine: Stalin\u2019s War On Ukraine \u201cA masterpiece of reporting and storytelling that puts us on the ground for one of the most important events of the twentieth century. Adam Higginbotham opens a world nearly impossible to penetrate, then finds truths inside we weren\u2019t supposed to discover. As readers, we could not hope for a more thrilling and visceral adventure. As citizens of the world, we ignore Midnight in Chernobyl at our peril.\u201d \u2014 Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Rocket Men \u201cHere is a triumph of investigative reportage, exquisite science writing, and heart-pounding storytelling. With Midnight in Chernobyl , Adam Higginbotham gives us a glimpse of Armageddon, but carries it off with such narrative verve that he somehow makes it entertaining . One thing is assured: After reading this astonishing, terrifying book, you will never think of nuclear power in quite the same way again.\u201d \u2014Hampton Sides, author of In the Kingdom of Ice and On Desperate Ground About the Author Adam Higginbotham writes for The New Yorker , The New York Times Magazine , Wired , GQ , and Smithsonian . The author of Midnight in Chernobyl , he lives in New York City. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Midnight in Chernobyl Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Engineering"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.69}, {"asin": "0399588744", "title": "The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II", "author": "Svetlana Alexievich", "description": "Review \u201cA monument to courage . . . It would be hard to find a book that feels more important or original. . . . [Svetlana] Alexievich\u2019s account of the second world war as seen through the eyes of hundreds of women is an extraordinary thing. . . . Her achievement is as breathtaking as the experiences of these women are awe-inspiring.\u201d \u2014 The Guardian \u201cMagnificent . . . After decades of the war being remembered by \u2018men writing about men,\u2019 she aims to give voice to an aging generation of women who found themselves dismissed not just as storytellers but also as veterans, mothers and even potential wives. . . . Alexievich presents less a straightforward oral history of World War II than a literary excavation of memory itself.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cCould not have appeared at a more opportune time . . . Women did everything\u2014this book reminds and reveals. They learned to pilot planes and drop bombs, to shoot targets from great distances. . . . Alexievich has turned their voices into history\u2019s psalm.\u201d \u2014 The\u00a0Boston Globe \u201cHarrowing and moving . . . Alexievich did an enormous service, recovering these stories. . . . The Unwomanly Face of War tells the story of these forgotten women, and its great achievement is that it gives credit to their contribution but also to the hell they endured.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cWe should resolve to read this book alongside the world news report. . . . \u00a0Ms. Alexievich never tries to simplify. . . . Refusing to pass judgment, crediting all, she listens, suffers and brings to life. . . . It took years and many miles of traveling to find and capture all the testimonies here. . . . We still end up feeling that we have been sitting at her side. With her, we hear the memories of partisans, guerrilla fighters trapped behind the lines.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \u201cAlexievich has forged her own distinctive identity: as a witness to witnesses who usually go unheard. . . . In a \u2018post-truth\u2019 era when journalism is under pressure\u2014susceptible to propaganda, sensationalism, and \u2018alternative facts\u2019\u2014the power of documentary literature stands out more clearly than ever. . . . Listen to Alexievich.\u201d \u2014 The Atlantic \u201c[A] remarkable collection of testimonies . . . Sitting at kitchen tables, Alexievich coaxes out of the women stories that describe a reality vastly different from the officially sanctioned version. . . . They speak guardedly but vividly of fleeting encounters, deep relationships, unexpressed feelings.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker \u201cContinually shocking and tearjerking . . . The introductory materials here, in which Alexievich quotes from the journals she kept while working on the project and from her later reflections and dealings with censors, are as compelling as the primary text.\u201d \u2014 The Christian Science Monitor \u201cAlexievich gives us an idea of how the army women were perceived by society, during the war and afterwards. . . . These voices, thanks to Alexievich, have themselves become part of history.\u201d \u2014 Financial Times About the Author Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature \u201cfor her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.\u201d Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. \u201cI Don\u2019t Want to Remember .\u2008.\u2008.\u201dAn old three-\u00adstory house on the outskirts of Minsk, one of those built hastily just after the war and, as it then seemed, not meant to last, now cozily overgrown with old jasmine bushes. With it began a search that went on for seven years, seven extraordinary and tormenting years, during which I was to discover for myself the world of war, a world the meaning of which we cannot fully fathom. I would experience pain, hatred, temptation. Tenderness and perplexity .\u2008.\u2008. I would try to understand what distinguishes death from murder and where the boundary is between the human and the inhuman. How does a human being remain alone with the insane thought that he or she might kill another human being? Is even obliged to? And I would discover that in war there is, apart from death, a multitude of other things; there is everything that is in our ordinary life. War is also life. I would run into countless human truths. Mysteries. I would ponder questions the existence of which I had never suspected. For instance, why is it that we are not surprised at evil, why this absence in us of surprise in the face of evil?A road and many roads .\u2008.\u2008. Dozens of trips all over the country, hundreds of recorded cassettes, thousands of yards of tape. Five hundred meetings, after which I stopped counting; faces left my memory, only voices remained. A chorus resounds in my memory. An enormous chorus; sometimes the words almost cannot be heard, only the weeping. I confess: I did not always believe that I was strong enough for this path, that I could make it. Could reach the end. There were moments of doubt and fear, when I wanted to stop or step aside, but I no longer could. I fell captive to evil, I looked into the abyss in order to understand something. Now I seem to have acquired some knowledge, but there are still more questions, and fewer answers.But then, at the very beginning of the path, I had no suspicion of that .\u2008.\u2008.What led me to this house was a short article in the local newspaper about a farewell party given at the Udarnik automobile factory in Minsk for the senior accountant Maria Ivanovna Morozova, who was retiring. During the war, the article said, she had been a sniper, had eleven combat decorations, and her total as a sniper was seventy-\u00adfive killings. It was hard to bring together mentally this woman\u2019s wartime profession with her peacetime occupation. With the routine newspaper photograph. With all these tokens of the ordinary..\u2008.\u2008. A small woman with a long braid wound in a girlish crown around her head was sitting in a big armchair, covering her face with her hands.\u201cNo, no, I won\u2019t. Go back there again? I can\u2019t .\u2008.\u2008. To this day I can\u2019t watch war movies. I was very young then. I dreamed and grew, grew and dreamed. And then\u2014\u00adthe war. I even feel sorry for you .\u2008.\u2008. I know what I\u2019m talking about .\u2008.\u2008. Do you really want to know that? I ask you like a daughter .\u2008.\u2008.\u201dOf course she was surprised.\u201cBut why me? You should talk to my husband, he likes to remember .\u2008.\u2008. The names of the commanders, the generals, the numbers of units\u2014\u00adhe remembers everything. I don\u2019t. I only remember what happened to me. My own war. There were lots of people around, but you were always alone, because a human being is always alone in the face of death. I remember the terrifying solitude.\u201dShe asked me to take the tape recorder away.\u201cI need your eyes in order to tell about it, and that will hinder me.\u201dBut a few minutes later she forgot about it .\u2008.\u2008.Maria Ivanovna Morozova (Ivanushkina)corporal, sniperThis will be a simple story .\u2008.\u2008. The story of an ordinary Russian girl, of whom there were many then .\u2008.\u2008.The place where my native village, Diakovskoe, stood is now the Proletarian District of Moscow. When the war began, I was not quite eighteen. Long, long braids, down to my knees .\u2008.\u2008. Nobody believed the war would last, everybody expected it to end any moment. We would drive out the enemy. I worked on a kolkhoz, then finished accounting school and began to work. The war went on .\u2008.\u2008. My girlfriends .\u2008.\u2008. They tell me: \u201cWe should go to the front.\u201d It was already in the air. We all signed up and took classes at the local recruitment office. Maybe some did it just to keep one another company, I don\u2019t know. They taught us to shoot a combat rifle, to throw hand grenades. At first .\u2008.\u2008. I\u2019ll confess, I was afraid to hold a rifle, it was unpleasant. I couldn\u2019t imagine that I\u2019d go and kill somebody, I just wanted to go to the front. We had forty people in our group. Four girls from our village, so we were all friends; five from our neighbors\u2019; in short\u2014\u00adsome from each village. All of them girls .\u2008.\u2008. The men had all gone to the war already, the ones who could. Sometimes a messenger came in the middle of the night, gave them two hours to get ready, and they\u2019d be carted off. They could even be taken right from the fields. (Silence.) I don\u2019t remember now\u2014\u00adwhether we had dances; if we did, the girls danced with girls, there were no boys left. Our villages became quiet.Soon an appeal came from the central committee of Komsomol for the young people to go and defend the Motherland, since the Germans were already near Moscow. Hitler take Moscow? We won\u2019t allow it! I wasn\u2019t the only one .\u2008.\u2008. All our girls expressed the wish to go to the front. My father was already fighting. We thought we were the only ones like that .\u2008.\u2008. Special ones .\u2008.\u2008. But we came to the recruitment office and there were lots of girls there. I just gasped! My heart was on fire, so intensely. The selection was very strict. First of all, of course, you had to have robust health. I was afraid they wouldn\u2019t take me, because as a child I was often sick, and my frame was weak, as my mother used to say. Other children insulted me because of it when I was little. And then, if there were no other children in a household except the girl who wanted to go to the front, they also refused: a mother should not be left by herself. Ah, our darling mothers! Their tears never dried .\u2008.\u2008. They scolded us, they begged .\u2008.\u2008. But in our family there were two sisters and two brothers left\u2014\u00adtrue, they were all much younger than me, but it counted anyway. There was one more thing: everybody from our kolkhoz was gone, there was nobody to work in the fields, and the chairman didn\u2019t want to let us go. In short, they refused us. We went to the district committee of Komsomol, and there\u2014\u00adrefusal. Then we went as a delegation from our district to the regional Komsomol. There was great inspiration in all of us; our hearts were on fire. Again we were sent home. We decided, since we were in Moscow, to go to the central committee of Komsomol, to the top, to the first secretary. To carry through to the end .\u2008.\u2008. Who would be our spokesman? Who was brave enough? We thought we would surely be the only ones there, but it was impossible even to get into the corridor, let alone to reach the secretary. There were young people from all over the country, many of whom had been under occupation, spoiling to be revenged for the death of their near ones. From all over the Soviet Union. Yes, yes .\u2008.\u2008. In short, we were even taken aback for a while .\u2008.\u2008.By evening we got to the secretary after all. They asked us: \u201cSo, how can you go to the front if you don\u2019t know how to shoot?\u201d And we said in a chorus that we had already learned to shoot .\u2008.\u2008. \u201cWhere?\u2008.\u2008.\u2008. How?\u2008.\u2008.\u2008. And can you apply bandages?\u201d You know, in that group at the recruiting office our local doctor taught us to apply bandages. That shut them up, and they began to look at us more seriously. Well, we had another trump card in our hands, that we weren\u2019t alone, there were forty of us, and we could all shoot and give first aid. They told us: \u201cGo and wait. Your question will be decided in the affirmative.\u201d How happy we were as we left! I\u2019ll never forget it .\u2008.\u2008. Yes, yes .\u2008.\u2008.And literally in a couple of days we received our call-\u00adup papers .\u2008.\u2008.We came to the recruiting office; we went in one door at once and were let out another. I had such a beautiful braid, and I came out without it .\u2008.\u2008. Without my braid .\u2008.\u2008. They gave me a soldier\u2019s haircut .\u2008.\u2008. They also took my dress. I had no time to send the dress or the braid to my mother .\u2008.\u2008. She very much wanted to have something of mine left with her .\u2008.\u2008. We were immediately dressed in army shirts, forage caps, given kit bags and loaded into a freight train\u2014\u00adon straw. But fresh straw, still smelling of the field.We were a cheerful cargo. Cocky. Full of jokes. I remember laughing a lot.Where were we going? We didn\u2019t know. In the end it was not so important to us what we\u2019d be. So long as it was at the front. Everybody was fighting\u2014\u00adand we would be, too. We arrived at the Shchelkovo station. Near it was a women\u2019s sniper school. It turned out we were sent there. To become snipers. We all rejoiced. This was something real. We\u2019d be shooting.We began to study. We studied the regulations: of garrison service, of discipline, of camouflage in the field, of chemical protection. The girls all worked very hard. We learned to assemble and disassemble a sniper\u2019s rifle with our eyes shut, to determine wind speed, the movement of the target, the distance to the target, to dig a foxhole, to crawl on our stomach\u2014\u00adwe had already mastered all that. Only so as to get to the front the sooner. In the line of fire .\u2008.\u2008. Yes, yes .\u2008.\u2008. At the end of the course I got the highest grade in the exam for combat and noncombat service. The hardest thing, I remember, was to get up at the sound of the alarm and be ready in five minutes. We chose boots one or two sizes larger, so as not to lose time getting into them. We had five minutes to dress, put our boots on, and line up. There were times when we ran out to line up in boots over bare feet. One girl almost had her feet frostbitten. The sergeant major noticed it, reprimanded her, and then taught us to use footwraps. He stood over us and droned: \u201cHow am I to make soldiers out of you, my dear girls, and not targets for Fritz?\u201d Dear girls, dear girls .\u2008.\u2008. Everybody loved us and pitied us all the time. And we resented being pitied. Weren\u2019t we soldiers like everybody else?Well, so we got to the front. Near Orsha .\u2008.\u2008. The 62nd Infantry Division .\u2008.\u2008. I remember like today, the commander, Colonel Borodkin, saw us and got angry: \u201cThey\u2019ve foisted girls on me. What is this, some sort of women\u2019s round dance?\u201d he said. \u201cCorps de ballet! It\u2019s war, not a dance. A terrible war .\u2008.\u2008.\u201d But then he invited us, treated us to a dinner. And we heard him ask his adjutant: \u201cDon\u2019t we have something sweet for tea?\u201d Well, of course, we were offended: What does he take us for? We came to make war .\u2008.\u2008. And he received us not as soldiers, but as young girls. At our age we could have been his daughters. \u201cWhat am I going to do with you, my dears? Where did they find you?\u201d That\u2019s how he treated us, that\u2019s how he met us. And we thought we were already seasoned warriors .\u2008.\u2008. Yes, yes .\u2008.\u2008. At war!The next day he made us show that we knew how to shoot, how to camouflage ourselves in the field. We did the shooting well, even better than the men snipers, who were called from the front for two days of training, and who were very surprised that we were doing their work. It was probably the first time in their lives they saw women snipers. After the shooting it was camouflage in the field .\u2008.\u2008. The colonel came, walked around looking at the clearing, then stepped on a hummock\u2014\u00adsaw nothing. Then the \u201chummock\u201d under him begged: \u201cOw, Comrade Colonel, I can\u2019t anymore, you\u2019re too heavy.\u201d How we laughed! He couldn\u2019t believe it was possible to camouflage oneself so well. \u201cNow,\u201d he said, \u201cI take back my words about young girls.\u201d But even so he suffered .\u2008.\u2008. Couldn\u2019t get used to us for a long time.Then came the first day of our \u201chunting\u201d (so snipers call it). My partner was Masha Kozlova. We camouflaged ourselves and lay there: I\u2019m on the lookout, Masha\u2019s holding her rifle. Suddenly Masha says: \u201cShoot, shoot! See\u2014\u00adit\u2019s a German .\u2008.\u2008.\u201dI say to her: \u201cI\u2019m the lookout. You shoot!\u201d\u201cWhile we\u2019re sorting it out,\u201d she says, \u201che\u2019ll get away.\u201dBut I insist: \u201cFirst we have to lay out the shooting map, note the landmarks: where the shed is, where the birch tree .\u2008.\u2008.\u201d\u201cYou want to start fooling with paperwork like at school? I\u2019ve come to shoot, not to mess with paperwork!\u201dI see that Masha is already angry with me.\u201cWell, shoot then, why don\u2019t you?\u201dWe were bickering like that. And meanwhile, in fact, the German officer was giving orders to the soldiers. A wagon arrived, and the soldiers formed a chain and handed down some sort of freight. The officer stood there, gave orders, then disappeared. We\u2019re still arguing. I see he\u2019s already appeared twice, and if we miss him again, that will be it. We\u2019ll lose him. And when he appeared for the third time\u2014\u00adit was just momentary; now he\u2019s there, now he\u2019s gone\u2014\u00adI decided to shoot. I decided, and suddenly a thought flashed through my mind: he\u2019s a human being; he may be an enemy, but he\u2019s a human being\u2014\u00adand my hands began to tremble, I started trembling all over, I got chills. Some sort of fear .\u2008.\u2008. That feeling sometimes comes back to me in dreams even now .\u2008.\u2008. After the plywood targets, it was hard to shoot at a living person. I see him in the telescopic sight, I see him very well. As if he\u2019s close .\u2008.\u2008. And something in me resists .\u2008.\u2008. Something doesn\u2019t let me, I can\u2019t make up my mind. But I got hold of myself, I pulled the trigger .\u2008.\u2008. He waved his arms and fell. Whether he was dead or not, I didn\u2019t know. But after that I trembled still more, some sort of terror came over me: I killed a man?! I had to get used even to the thought of it. Yes .\u2008.\u2008. In short\u2014\u00adhorrible! I\u2019ll never forget it .\u2008.\u2008.When we came back, we started telling our platoon what had happened to us. They called a meeting. We had a Komsomol leader, Klava Ivanova; she reassured me: \u201cThey should be hated, not pitied .\u2008.\u2008.\u201d Her father had been killed by the fascists. We would start singing, and she would beg us: \u201cNo, don\u2019t, dear girls. Let\u2019s first defeat these vermin, then we\u2019ll sing.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0393330494", "title": "When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery", "author": "Frank T. Vertosick Jr., MD", "description": "Review \"Dramatic, moving, and utterly fascinating.\" \u2015 New York Times Book Review \"By turns comic and tragic, this memoir\u2026is a must-read for neurosurgeons but also of interest to most clinicians.\" \u2015 Chris Barrett, The BMJ \"Dr. Frank Vertosick provides an amusing, insightful and honest inside view of the training of the neurosurgeon. This highly readable account of daily life on the wards shows all the humility, fortitude, and humanity that genuinely underlies this sometimes not well-understood but genuinely wonderful profession.\" \u2015 Dr. David W. Roberts, professor of surgery (neurosurgery), Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center \" When the Air Hits Your Brain lets you feel the pain, grief and joy of practicing medicine. This book should be read by every medical student, doctor and present or potential patient. In other words, by all of us.\" \u2015 Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine and Miracles \"Writing with humor and compassion, but without sentimentality, Vertosick shows us that neurosurgeons, those gods of the operating room, are humans, too.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Frank Vertosick Jr., MD , is the author of Why We Hurt and When the Air Hits Your Brain . He retired from surgery due to Parkinson\u2019s disease in 2002, but he still treats office patients in Washington, Pennsylvania.", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "0829745149", "title": "Sobreviviendo un yugo desigual en el matrimonio (Spanish Edition)", "author": null, "description": "From the Back Cover Someone came between Lee and Leslie Strobel, threatening to shipwreck their marriage. No, it wasn't an old flame. It was Jesus Christ.Leslie's decision to become a follower of Jesus brought heated opposition from her skeptical husband. They began to experience conflict over a variety of issues, from finances to child-rearing. But over time, Leslie learned how to survive a spiritual mismatch. Today they're both Christians--and they want you to know that there is hope if you're a Christian married to a nonbeliever. In their intensely personal and practical book, they reveal:* Surprising insights into the thinking of non-Christian spouses* A dozen steps toward making the most of your mismatched marriage* Eight principles for reaching out to your partner with the gospel* Advice for raising your children in a spiritually mismatched home* How to pray for your spouse--plus a 30-day guide to get you started* What to do if you're both Christians but one lags behind spiritually* Advice for single Christians to avoid the pain of a mismatch. About the Author Lee Strobel es\u00a0el galardonado editor legal de The Chicago Tribune y es autor best seller de El caso de Cristo , El caso de la fe , El caso del creador y El caso de la gracia . Posee una licenciatura en periodismo otorgada por la Universidad de Missouri y un master de estudios en leyes otorgado por la Universidad de Yale, Lee ha ganado cuatro medallones de oro por la excelencia en la publicaci\u00f3n y es coautor del libro cristiano del a\u00f1o. Se desempe\u00f1a como profesor de pensamiento cristiano en la Universidad Bautista de Houston Baptist. Su historia ahora se revela en la pelicula cinamatogr\u00e1fica The Case for Christ. Para m\u00e1s informaci\u00f3n visita el sitio web: leestrobel.com Leslie Strobel ha estado participando en los ministerios de mujeres y en consejer\u00eda personal en las iglesias donde los Strobels ha servido. Ella y Lee residen en Orange County, CA y son padres de dos hijos mayores. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Sobreviviendo un yugo desigual en el matrimonio By LEE STROBEL LESLIE STROBEL Zondervan Copyright \u00a9 2008 Lee StrobelAll right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8297-4514-6 Contents Cmo Leslie y yo escribimos este libro.................................................................91. Entramos en la desigualdad..........................................................................132. En palabras de Leslie: Una historia de soledad, temor, perseverancia y fe...........................313. En palabras de Lee: Una historia de ira, resentimiento, conviccin y renovacin.....................454. Los jugadores: Dios, tu cnyuge y un mentor.........................................................635. Da a tu cnyuge lo que Dios te dio..................................................................896. El enfriamiento, los hijos y la pregunta ms desafiante.............................................1117. Antes de hablarle de Dios a tu cnyuge..............................................................1338. Qu decir cuando las palabras son difciles de encontrar............................................1559. El poder de un cnyuge que ora......................................................................17910. Cmo evitar las trampas de las citas...............................................................20311. Cuando los cristianos no estn sincronizados.......................................................229Conclusin: Hacia el futuro de tu desigualdad..........................................................249Notas..................................................................................................257Apndice 1: Tu aventura de oracin durante treinta das................................................269Apndice 2: Gua de aplicacin.........................................................................287Apndice 3: Gua de recursos...........................................................................299Apndice 4: Una carta a tu cnyuge.....................................................................301 Chapter One Entramos en la desigualdad La temperatura estaba fresca y el da claro, despus de la Navidad de 1966 cuando mi amigo Pete y yo tomamos el tren desde nuestros hogares suburbanos hasta el centro de Chicago. Durante un rato paseamos alrededor de Loop, divirtindonos con el bullicio de la ciudad, pero luego me lleg la hora de traerlo a un peregrinaje que yo haca tan a menudo como poda. Recorrimos a pie el puente de la Avenida Michigan y nos detuvimos frente al edificio Wrigley. All estuvimos con las manos en los bolsillos buscando calor, mientras que contemplbamos, al otro lado de la calle, el majestuoso gtico de la Torre Tribune. No puedo recordar si pronunci la palabra en voz alta o si meramente hizo eco en mi mente: \" Algn da \". Pete estaba quieto. Los estudiantes de primer ao de la escuela secundaria estn autorizados para soar. Nos quedamos durante unos cuantos minutos y observamos cmo las personas entraban y salan de la oficina del peridico. Eran los reporteros cuyos artculos yo estudiaba cada maana? O los editores que los despachaban alrededor del mundo? O los impresores que manejaban las prensas gigantescas? Di rienda suelta a mi imaginacin hasta que se agot la paciencia de Pete. Dimos la vuelta y caminamos calle arriba por la Milla Magnfica, pasando por las tiendas pretenciosas y de precios muy altos hasta que decidimos emprender la caminata de veinte minutos de regreso a la estacin de trenes. Cuando pasbamos frente al Teatro Cvico de la Opera, me pareci escuchar una voz familiar llamndome desde la multitud. \"Oye, Lee, qu ests haciendo aqu?\" llam Clay, otro estudiante de la escuela secundaria que viva en mi vecindario. No le contest enseguida. Me cautiv la muchacha que tena a su lado, sosteniendo su mano y usando su brazalete de identificacin de oro. Su cabello castao le caa sobre los hombros, su sonrisa era ya tmida, ya confiada. \"Oh, bueno, oh ... solo haciendo nada\", me las arregl para decirle a Clay, aunque mis ojos estaban clavados en su novia. Cuando por fin l nos present a Leslie, ya yo no estaba pensando mucho en Clay ni en Pete ni en el hecho de que mis manos estuvieran entumecidas por el fro y que yo estuviera parado en la nieve incrustada de holln que me llegaba a los tobillos. Sin embargo, cuando Clay pronunci el nombre de Leslie, me asegur de estar muy atento porque saba que necesitara deletrear el apellido para buscarlo en la gua de telfonos. Despus de todo, en el amor y en la guerra todo es lcito. De un cuento de hadas a una pesadilla En cuanto a Leslie, descubr ms adelante que ella no estaba pensando en Clay cuando esa tarde los dos subieron al tren de regreso a sus casas. Ella lleg a su hogar en la suburbana Palatine, fue a la cocina y encontr a su madre, una escocesa casada con un soldado americano que conoci durante la guerra y que estaba apurada preparando la comida. Leslie anunci: \"Mam, hoy conoc al joven con quien me voy a casar!\" La respuesta no fue la que ella esperaba. Su madre escasamente la mir desde el caldero que estaba revolviendo. Con una voz mezclada de condescendencia y escepticismo, le replic dando por terminado el asunto: \"Qu bueno, querida\". Pero en la mente de Leslie no haba duda. Ni tampoco en la ma. Cuando la llam a la noche siguiente desde un telfono pblico en el exterior de una estacin de gasolina cerca de mi casa (con cuatro hermanos y hermanas, esa era la nica manera de conseguir alguna privacidad), hablamos como si nos hubiramos conocido durante aos. A la gente le gusta debatir si hay algo como el amor a primera vista, pero para nosotros, el problema se haba resuelto de una vez y por todas. Leslie y yo nos veamos en la escuela casi continuamente, y cuando yo me fu a estudiar periodismo en la Universidad de Missouri, ella se mud all de modo que pudiramos estar cerca el uno del otro. Nos casamos cuando yo tena veinte aos y ella diecinueve. Despus de graduarme nos mudamos a Chicago, donde se realiz el sueo de toda mi vida de llegar a ser un reportero del Chicago Tribune . Leslie, mientras tanto, comenz su carrera en una asociacin de ahorros y prstamos al cruzar la calle de mi oficina en el Chicago Tribune . Vivamos una vida de cuentos de hadas. Disfrutbamos la alegra y el reto de subir la escalera corporativa mientras residamos en un emocionante vecindario de gente acomodada. Leslie qued encinta de nuestra primera hija, una nia a quien llamamos Alison, y despus dio a luz a un hijo, Kyle. Animados por nuestro profundo amor del uno hacia el otro, nuestro matrimonio estaba fuerte y seguro, hasta que alguien se meti en medio de nosotros, amenazando con hacer naufragar nuestra relacin y lanzarnos al tribunal para divorcios. No era una relacin ilcita. No era el resurgir de un antiguo amor. En lugar de eso, el alguien que casi hace naufragar nuestro matrimonio no era ningn otro sino el mismo Dios. Al final era a l a quien yo culpaba en ese tiempo. Irnicamente, fue la fe en Jesucristo -la que muchas parejas acreditan que contribuye a la fortaleza de su matrimonio- la que por poco destruye nuestra relacin y nos hubiera separado para siempre. Todo por causa de una desigualdad espiritual. Un matrimonio sin Dios Puedo describir el papel de Dios en nuestra relacin y al principio del matrimonio con una oracin: Sencillamente l no apareca en la pantalla de nuestro radar. En otras palabras, l era irrelevante. Personalmente, me consideraba ateo. Rechac la idea de Dios desde que en la escuela secundaria me ensearon la teora de la evolucin de Darwin explicando el origen y el desarrollo de la vida. Me figur que Darwin le haba quitado el trabajo a Dios. Libre de responsabilidad, decid vivir completamente para mi persona y para mi bsqueda de placer. En cuanto a los cristianos, tenda a rechazarlos como ingenuos y pensadores faltos de sentido crtico que necesitaban la muleta de una deidad imaginaria para que los llevara a travs de la vida. Por otro lado, es posible que Leslie se autoconsiderara agnstica. Mientras que yo tenda a reaccionar con antagonismo hacia las personas de fe, ella era ms neutral espiritualmente hablando. Durante su crecimiento recibi poca influencia de la iglesia, aunque guardaba recuerdos agradables de su niez cuando su madre suavemente le cantaba himnos mientras la arropaba para dormir en las noches. Para Leslie, sencillamente Dios era una idea abstracta que nunca se haba tomado el tiempo de explorar. Sin Dios en mi vida, yo careca de una brjula moral. La mentalidad del xito a todo costo lentamente corroa mi carcter. Mi ira se encenda a causa de mi frustracin al ser incapaz de encontrar la satisfaccin que apeteca. Mis juergas de bebida muy a menudo se vean fuera de control, trabajaba arduamente en mi trabajo, haciendo, en efecto, un dios de mi carrera. A pesar de todo eso, nuestro matrimonio permaneca estable. Nuestro amor mutuo suavizaba muchos filos speros. Cuando estbamos juntos, ramos felices. Es decir, hasta que todo explot en el otoo de 1979. Aqu fue cuando la armona se convirti en hostilidad. La razn: Leslie anunci que despus de un largo perodo de investigacin y bsqueda haba decidido convertirse en seguidora de Jesucristo. Para m, esa fue la peor noticia posible. Tena miedo de que se volviera una mojigata reprimida sexual y que abandonara nuestro estilo de vida ascendente en favor de emplear todo su tiempo libre sirviendo a los pobres en alguna clase de ministerio a los desamparados. \"Mira, si necesitas esa clase de muleta\", le dije en un tono condescendiente y sarcstico, \"si no puedes sostenerte por ti misma sobre tus pies y enfrentar la vida sin poner tu fe en algn dios imaginario y en un libro de mitologa y leyenda, entonces sigue adelante. Pero recuerda dos cosas: no des a la iglesia nuestro dinero, porque eso es lo nico que les interesa, y no trates de sacarme de la cama para ir a algn lugar los domingos por la maana. Soy demasiado inteligente para esa bobera!\" Qu tipo tan agradable!, verdad? \"Yo no firm para esto\" As fue la salva de apertura de lo que sera la fase agitada por la emocin turbulenta, llena de lucha, de nuestro matrimonio. Nuestros valores comenzaron a chocar, nuestras actitudes comenzaron a entrar en conflicto y nuestras prioridades y deseos repentinamente estuvieron disparejos. Surgieron peleas, la frialdad reemplaz a la calidez, y ms de una vez yo dej que mi frustracin y mi ira se derramaran en un disparo de eptetos y tirones de puerta. Recuerdo cuando todo culmin en un da caluroso y hmedo mientras estaba cortando el csped despus de una de nuestras peleas. Mi sangre estaba ardiendo. \"Basta ya!\", refunfu mientras araba en medio de sus flores en un despliegue de ira infantil pasiva/agresiva. \"Yo no necesito ms de eso. Esto no es lo que yo firm. Tal vez ya sea tiempo de salir de este matrimonio\". Ese fue el punto bajo. Nuestro futuro colgaba de un hilo. Quiz te puedas relacionar con esa clase de agitacin emocional. O quiz te asuste el futuro de tu propio matrimonio porque tu fe est creando una divisin cada vez ms profunda entre t y tu cnyuge. A travs de los aos Leslie y yo hemos aconsejado a muchos cristianos quienes con lgrimas nos han contado cmo su unin con un incrdulo los ha llevado cada vez ms a la angustia, la ira y las peleas. Una vez Leslie y yo recibimos una llamada telefnica a las 3:30 p.m., el Da de Resurreccin: \"Los das festivos son siempre los peores\", dijo ella entre sollozos. \"Pero realmente hoy fue demasiado lejos. Se ha estado burlando de m, diciendo que soy dbil, que creo cosas ridculas, que la iglesia est tratando de conseguir mi dinero. Estoy cansada de defenderme. No s lo que debo hacer. Por qu no me deja creer lo que yo quiera? Por qu tiene que arruinarlo todo? No era ya suficientemente malo tener que ir a los servicios de Resurreccin sola? Por qu tiene que tambin destruir el resto de mi da?\" Teresa no est sola, el esposo de Rita es un abogado abiertamente antagonista a cualquier cosa cristiana. \"l le dijo a nuestro hijo que la iglesia es donde estn los malos, que si t vas a la iglesia tratarn de hacerte pensar como ellos, a esos niitos que van a la iglesia los molestan, y si mami trata alguna vez de llevarte a la iglesia otra vez, dile que t no vas a ir\". O considera a Catalina. Ella dijo que la angustia por su situacin marital solo se ha amplificado por su iglesia y los amigos cristianos que sin darse cuenta empeoran las cosas. Hay esa implicacin subyacente de que todo sera mejor si solo fuera una mejor testigo, si orara con ms intensidad, si consiguiera que l viniera a los servicios de Navidad, si le diera a leer el libro correcto o una cinta adecuada para or, de alguna manera todo cooperar. Luego agreg: \"Ellos no vienen directamente y te dicen eso, pero tengo la impresin de ser la nica culpable y eso duele\". Linda Davis, que durante aos vivi en un yugo desigual hasta que su esposo se convirti a Cristo, dijo que nicamente la muerte de un cnyuge se puede comparar con la situacin de soledad que es mayor a la de una persona unida en yugo desigual. Aadi: \"Dudo, sin embargo, que aun la viudez fsica haga a una mujer sentirse tan rechazada e inadecuada como lo es la viudez espiritual\". La viuda espiritual no recibe flores ni tarjetas de simpata. Simplemente sufre en silencio por una unin que nunca fue. No pierdas las esperanzas Ms de una vez, cuando Leslie y yo estbamos espiritualmente desiguales, predije que nuestro matrimonio terminara en divorcio. Mentalmente yo haba tirado la toalla. Pero por medio de una variedad de circunstancias fuimos rescatados de esa suerte. Antes de que fuera demasiado tarde, Leslie se las arregl para vivir su fe de una manera que comenz a atraerme antes de repelerme. Ella aprendi cmo crecer y hasta florecer en su relacin con Cristo a pesar de mi oposicin. Aunque sera la primera en admitir que cometa errores de vez en cuando, ella era capaz de restaurar el equilibrio en nuestra relacin. Gentil y amablemente, comenz a sealarme a Cristo y, en ltima instancia, Dios la us para abrirme los ojos a mi necesidad de un Salvador. Hoy estamos celebrando veinte aos como pareja cristiana y treinta aos de matrimonio. En un despliegue asombroso de la gracia de Dios, l no solo me perdon mi pasado inmoral y ateo, sino que me dio un ministerio como pastor y evangelista. Juntos, Leslie y yo, estamos experimentando una profundidad de intimidad, aventura y satisfaccin que no podamos haber imaginado durante aquellos frvolos aos que pasamos sin Dios. Ahora bien, es importante destacar que, desdichadamente, no toda desigualdad espiritual terminar con los dos cnyuges sirviendo a Cristo con gozo. La verdad es que algunas parejas pasan el resto de sus vidas viajando por senderos espirituales diferentes. Esa es la realidad. No importa cunto t lo quieras, no puedes forzar a tu cnyuge a ser cristiano. Pero es igualmente importante destacar que si te encuentras en un matrimonio espiritualmente disparejo, hay esperanzas. No te desesperes. Puedes aprender a florecer a pesar de tus diferencias. Puedes aprender a estimular a tu cnyuge en su peregrinaje espiritual sin espantarlo, sin que te des cuenta. Puedes aprender a buscar con fervor lo mejor para tu compaero sin cargarte injustamente con la responsabilidad indebida de su salvacin. En resumen, una desigualdad espiritual no tiene que ser una sentencia de muerte para un matrimonio. Eso puede parecer difcil de creer si actualmente ests enredado en un conflicto con tu cnyuge acerca de diferentes puntos de vista en cuanto a Dios. Pero ese es el motivo por el cual Leslie y yo estamos escribiendo este libro, para ayudarte a reconocer lo que nosotros hicimos bien y mal en este perodo escabroso de nuestra relacin. Creme, fuimos torpes manejando nuestro paso, pero salimos con algunas lecciones difcilmente aprendidas que esperamos que al mismo tiempo te estimulen y te den a tomar pasos concretos, prcticos y bblicos. Ms importante an, necesitas recordarte regularmente que Dios no te ha olvidado. l no te est castigando con jbilo por estar casada con un incrdulo. De hecho, todo el cielo te est saludando mientras tratas de humillarte y de vivir sinceramente en un medio ambiente a menudo extenueante y difcil. Tu Padre celestial con gracia te quiere ofrecer valor ante la lucha, paz en medio de la confusin y optimismo cuando todas las cosas parecen cubiertas de oscuridad. Con su ayuda, realmente t puedes aprender a sobrevivir una desigualdad espiritual. El \"por qu\" detrs del mandamiento de Dios Si has experimentado la angustia de ser un cristiano casado con una incrdula, entonces comprenders enseguida por qu Dios ha prohibido que sus seguidores se casen fuera de la fe. l nos ama tanto que quiere librarnos de la angustia emocional, el choque de valores y el conflicto continuo que puede resultar cuando un cnyuge es cristiano pero el otro no lo es. Su meta no es limitar innecesariamente nuestra eleccin de las parejas en perspectiva sino escudarnos amorosamente de la clase de dificultades que Leslie y yo enfrentamos durante los casi dos aos en que estuvimos espiritualmente disparejos. Pablo, en 2 Corintios 6:14-16, escribi: \"No formen yunta con los incrdulos. Qu tienen en comn la justicia y la maldad? O qu comunin puede tener la luz con la oscuridad? Qu armona tiene Cristo con el diablo? Qu tiene en comn un creyente con un incrdulo? En qu concuerdan el templo de Dios y los dolos? Porque nosotros somos templo del Dios viviente\". Pablo no est emitiendo una prohibicin global en contra de que los cristianos tengan asociacin alguna con los no creyentes, l era demasiado realista para esperar eso. En sntesis, observ un erudito, Pablo estaba diciendo: <>. (Continues...) Excerpted from Sobreviviendo un yugo desigual en el matrimonio by LEE STROBEL LESLIE STROBEL Copyright \u00a9 2008 by Lee Strobel. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 12.21}, {"asin": "184780182X", "title": "The Little Tim Collection: With Exclusive Audio CD Read by Stephen Fry", "author": "Edward Ardizzone", "description": "Review \"[Tim's] maritime experiences are those a child might dream of \u2014 full of storms, shipwrecks, and fascinating knots. He deals doggedly with dangers, never stints on chores below deck, and always gets home after the voyage.\u201d\u2014 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up About the Author Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979) was born in 1900. In 1905 his family moved to Ipswich, where he learned to know and love the little coastal steamers that he was to draw so often in the Little Tim books. Illustrator of more than 170 much-loved children's books, Edward Ardizzone was awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1956 and the CBE in 1971. He died in 1979. Stephen Fry is a national treasure and was born in 1957 in London and brought up in Norfolk.\u00a0Memorable television appearances included Blackadder, A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. Big screen outings included Wilde, Gosford Park and Peter\u2019s Friends. He also read all of the Harry Potter books for the unabridged audiobook edtions. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Tim and GingerTim was a small boy who lived in a house by the sea.Every day, when the weather was fine, he and his best friend, Ginger, would play on the beach.When the tide was high and the sea came right up to the steep shingle bank, Tim and Ginger would play ducks and drakes by throwing flat pebbles so they skipped across the water.Ginger was very good at this.When the tide was low and the sea went far out, they would dig in the sand for lug worms which they sold to the fishermen for bait.Tim, because he worked harder, always found more worms than Ginger.However, what Tim liked to do best was to sit and talk with the old boatman who would tell him all about the sea and ships.This sometimes bored Ginger, who thought he knew everything , though of course he did not.\u201cPoof!\u201d he would say. \u201cI have been a sailor boy and know all about the silly old sea.\u201dThen he would go off and practise playing ducks and drakes and get even better at it than before.One day, they found the old boatman looking sad and serious.\u201cAh!\u201d he said. \u201cHave you heard about poor Tom, the baker\u2019s son? Went shrimping he did among the rocks under the high chalk cliffs and was caught by the tide. He will never come home no more.\u201dThen he went on to say that tides were dangerous and that, if they would stop and listen, he would tell them why.Tim stayed to listen, but Ginger only said, \u201cPoof! I know all about the silly old tides,\u201d and went off to play ducks and drakes again. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 205.01}, {"asin": "1426308469", "title": "National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs (National Geographic Little Kids First Big Books)", "author": "Catherine D. Hughes", "description": "About the Author Catherine D. Hughes is the author of several books in the National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book series, including Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs , Little Kids First Big Book of Space , and Little Kids First Big Book of the Ocean . She also has a degree in early childhood development. Franco Tempesta is an illustrator who specializes in the depiction of dinosaurs and other primitive mammals. A member of the Italian Illustrators Association, he has worked with National Geographic Children\u2019s Books, Random House, and the Smithsonian Institution. His work can be seen in titles such as Little Kids First Big Book of Dinosaurs . Tempesta lives in Verona, Italy. To learn more, visit francotempesta.eu.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0393330494"}
{"user_id": "AFW5LFVMNYRPKY5AIBHUNKSFEGRQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1905297238", "title": "Hekate Liminal Rites: A Study of the rituals, magic and symbols of the torch-bearing Triple Goddess of the Crossroads", "author": "David Rankine", "description": "Review Extracts from Reviews: \"I found every chapter interesting but my favourites were 'Hymns' which includes Prayer to Selene for any operation, 'Invocation' which includes a description of a summoning of Hekate, 'Defixiones'-a detailed description of binding curses and 'Charms from the PGM' which includes a list of charms in the Greek Magical Papyri'. There are some great mini-chapters regarding Hekate's followers including Medea, Circe and The Witches of Thessaly. I only wish some of the chapters had been a bit longer though it does contain an extensive bibliography which has introduced me to some books on Hekate that i had not discovered before.\" C Norris, Amazon Reviewer \"'Hekate Liminal Rites' is a truly fascinating read. The authors' writing is extremely well researched, and draws upon both accurate and historical material throughout this work. However, unlike so many other historical studies, this little book also manages to evoke such a presence of Hekate that it is almost experiential; and I found it impossible to continue reading without first lighting a candle (or three!!) for this deity.\" Vikki Bramshaw, author of Craft of the Wise \"As with other works by these authors it is clear that their intent is to illuminate the subject for the reader. The book is clear and intelligible but does not seek to simplify the subtleties of history nor to disguise interpretation as truth.\" Magin Rose, Artist and Amazon Reviewer \"It seems like someone should have done a book like this before, but the thing is they have not. The research goes into areas that other books on Hekate does not, and its clear that the authors must have been familiar with the other key works and instead of producing something to rival it they produced this book, which clearly compliments the work presented in the other books. It focusses on the areas of spiritual and magical practice, therefore making this a perfect book not only for scholars and students interested in learning more about the Goddess Hekate, but also for practitioners of magic today who want to be able to take inspiration from the ancient practices.\" Scarlet River, Amazon Reviewer About the Author Sorita d'Este is an author, researcher and publisher who manifests her knowledge and passion for the Mysteries through her work. Her research and writing pushes at the boundaries of Western Esoterica and beyond, often questioning and challenging the status quo and inspiring others towards experiential mysticism with firm foundations built on lessons learned from history, standing positively in today and looking with enthusiasm towards the future. She passionately believes that it is possible to manifest creativity, positivity, love and enchantment through the creation of independent, free-thinking and more spiritual communities, with firm foundations in truth, natural balance and generosity.David Rankine is an occult scholar and author of more than 20 books on the subject of magic, the western esoteric traditions, folklore and mythology. Since the 1970's he has been researching and exploring magical and spiritual practices throughout history; a journey which has taken him from ancient Sumeria, Babylonia and Egypt through Greece, Rome and Britain through the middle ages and renaissance and the modern Western Mystery Traditions. With Stephen Skinner he has produced works such as The Veritable Key of Solomon and the Goetia of Dr Rudd, both highly regarded groundbreaking works which make available previously unpublished source materials for the first time.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 22.49}, {"asin": "1905297491", "title": "The Temple of Hekate: Exploring the Goddess Hekate Through Ritual, Meditation and Divination", "author": null, "description": "Review This book was recommended to me by the author of Her Sacred Fires, Sorita De Estes who also has a Youtube channel by that name. I am extremely pleased by the content of this book. Even though a few of the chapters review various forms of exercises relating to the basics of ritual preparation predominantly of Greek antiquity origin (setting up altars, various info on the elements, winds, Hecate incense formulas, the bulk of the book is written in an almost scholarly format including footnotes concerning who the Goddess is, various origins possibilities, many great devotional exercises and even ancient hand gestures relating to Hecate. It is one of the few credible books on Hecate in my opinion. mainly because most of the book is NOIT the authors opinions and assumptions. Sanchez pretty much sticks to actual historical/cultural/ mythical information which is well documented by her research. I especially value the exercises and authentic devotional practices meant to enhance and further develop your own relationship and interaction with the Goddess Hecate. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is sincerely interested in this Goddess. - michele braun, Amazon reviewer About the Author Once upon a time there was a little girl who took all the other children in the street seriously when they said that if you went to the playground at midnight and skipped around the swings backwards three times the fairies would appear. So she set her alarm, snuck out the house and did as she had been instructed, the other children never did believe her when she recounted her tale. But as a result that little girl grew up to be only a slightly bigger girl with very wild hair and sometimes rather wild eyes who never stopped searching for fairies in the playground and trolls under bridges, and who harkened to things that went bump in the night and often pondered the source of those half whispered secrets in the quiet time just between wakefulness and sleep. In her twenties she embarked on a quest to find the meaning of life the universe and everything and was rather alarmed to discover that indeed one answer could be the number 42, it has been pretty much downhill since then. Although Kentish Maid by birth (NOT a Maid of Kent) Tara currently resides on the Cheshire/Derbyshire border with her long suffering husband, beautiful and precocious daughter and a gaggle of cats and can often be discovered getting pixie led in the peaks or spinning on her beloved spinning wheel, one day she may actually get some proper work done. She is always happy to correspond with anybody genuinely interested in the Mysteries and can be contacted by email at the following address: enquiries@templeofhekate.net", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 24.99}, {"asin": "0811833704", "title": "The Stretch Deck: 50 Stretches", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Olivia H. Miller is a freelance writer and has been a student of yoga for twenty-five years. She lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.Nicole Kaufman is a freelance illustrator whose work has appeared in several publications and books. She lives with her family in Sonoma County's beautiful wine country.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Exercise & Fitness"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.51}, {"asin": "1840240849", "title": "Fence", "author": "Geoff Thompson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Automotive"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.65}, {"asin": "9802658995", "title": "Manual esote\u0301rico: Una nueva dimensio\u0301n de nuestro folkore : sus mitos, leyendas y la magia (Spanish Edition)", "author": "Celia Blanco", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Libros en espa\u00f1ol"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1785351613", "title": "Pagan Portals - Hekate: A Devotional", "author": "Vivienne Moss", "description": "About the Author Vivienne Moss is a Solitary Witch, Mystic, and Priestess of Hekate who resides in a small Indiana town. She spends her days brewing up trouble with her boyfriend and two daughters, and her nights dreaming the enchanted life. When she\u2019s not writing, you\u2019ll find her taking long walks in the forest or strolling through the local cemetery. A lover of all things occult, Vivienne dedicates her time to the study of esoteric knowledge. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Pagan Portals Hekate A Devotional By Vivienne Moss John Hunt Publishing Ltd. Copyright \u00a9 2015 Vivienne MossAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-78535-161-7 Contents Introduction \u2013 Into the Storm, Chapter 1 \u2014 In the House of Hekate, Chapter 2 \u2014 At the Crossroads We Meet, Chapter 3 \u2014 At the Gates of Death, Chapter 4 \u2014 To Embrace the Muse, Chapter 5 \u2014 Our Lady of the Witches' Craft, Chapter 6 \u2014 The Breath of Life, Chapter 7 \u2014 Hekate \u2014 She Who Is All, Chapter 8 \u2014 The Cunning Way, Conclusion, Recommended Reading, CHAPTER 1 In the House of Hekate Hekate, You are the allure of Autumn and the madness of Winter. You are the smell of damp earth after the passing of storms. You are the Raven's flight and the Owl's call. You are the soft glow of Sunset and the hoary light of the Moon. You are the crisp breath of a Midwinter morn and the soft sigh of Spring's awakening. You are the silence of Death and the enchantment of Life. Hekate, My Queen, You are..... [Vivienne Moss] She Whispers in my Dreams I first heard Her in the realm of my dreams. She was softly calling to me, beckoning me to follow. I silently shadowed Her, unsure of where we were headed. I heard birdsong in the distance and the crashing of waves. She led me to a seashore where we stopped by the entrance of a secluded cave. As I stepped into the cave a soft glow of welcoming light enveloped me. There were ancient markings on the stone walls, symbols both arcane and unfamiliar. On the floor of the cave was a small altar decorated with skulls, feathers and all manner of found baubles. Fruit, honey, and wine were laid out pleasingly, ready for this shrouded figure to consume. I looked deeply into Her primeval eyes, knowing instantly who She was. Hekate, Queen of Witches. She had claimed me as Her own. I awaken from my slumber, embracing my new self. Hekate, I whisper, I am Yours.... Many times I have traveled to Hekate's cave in Spirit Flight. She is always shrouded, Her features hidden. Only the depths of Her eyes can be seen. They go on for eternity, full of knowledge and, sometimes, sadness. She has seen all; the beginning of Earth and the slow destruction of these sacred lands. Hekate is one of the first of many Gods to inhabit this world. She is as ancient as the Starry Heavens and Her reach is far. She dwells on the borders of this world and the Shadow-Lands, Her cave safely hidden at an ancient Crossroads. It is so ancient that no memory of it survives. You can only find it during Spirit-Flight, or Hedge-Riding, much like the Witch's Mountain or Benevento. She visits my Dream-World often, leaving hints of Her esoteric knowledge in Her wake. As I ride the currents of eternity to Her hidden cave, I feel the rush of Death pass me by. The once hidden Shadow-Lands materialize, figures emerging, both uncanny and obscene. Feeling the tug of forgetfulness, I steady my senses, bracing for the Night Queen to arrive ... And arrive She does. With each visit to Her Cave of Dreams, I grow closer to the Pale Mother \u2014 She Who is Born of Stars. For it is the stardust of dreams that gather at the tides of the seasons, bringing the Spirits of the Shadow-Lands closer to our waking world. Hekate \u2014 I Dream with You tonight May I elude the Spirit of Forgetfulness ... The Hearth of Remembrance The Shadow-Lands, or Otherworlds as they are more often called, are just beyond our Earthly realm. Spirits dwell there. Some were once human, our Ancestors, but many are Spirits who have never had a human form. They have been here from the beginning, much like our Gods. Hekate, a psychopomp, is an intermediary between the living and the dead, the Spirits and mankind. She protects the home from wayward Spirits and ghosts, and guides lost souls back to their Underworld home. Much of my work with Hekate includes my Ancestors and the Mighty Dead. A shrine dedicated to them is a main focal point in my home. It cannot be missed. When you walk into my home you can sense the uncanny, yet welcoming, feel of enchantment. Oddments of witchcraft can be found throughout my home. A feather here, a solitary stone there, an old and weathered bone tucked neatly beside a candle. The hearth houses my Ancestor shrine, candles are lit daily, fresh water offered at first light. Prayers of gratitude and reverence are whispered on hallowed breath. Trinkets of loved ones are placed lovingly on the shrine. Pictures, a pipe, a shell casing from my brother's funeral and a rose for my grandmother are but a few of the items to be found on the shrine. I can often be found reading next to the hearth, feeling comforted by the presence of my loved ones who have passed beyond the veil. This is the heart of my home. With the help of Hekate, magic is woven through the fibers of my home, enchantment and mystery live within these walls. The voices of my Ancestors are heard within my dreams. Hekate, Lady of the Home, As I wake in the morning I feel blessed knowing You are here. Your essence and magic can be found in the laughter of my children who sleep safely under Your roof. It is You who watches over us as we sleep, sending away unruly Spirits who may cause us harm. Hekate, Queen of the Dead, As I lay down to sleep I thank you for bringing me closer to my Ancestors. I know they are safe in the Realm of the Dead under Your loving embrace. As the candles are spent, Your Torches burn, guiding them home ... She Who Guards the Threshold On the threshold of my home hangs a solitary skeleton key. This is Hekate's Key, She who Guards the Gate. With the presence of this Key only those who mean no harm may enter. It has been charged with protective charms and blessed on the altar of Hekate. Hekate is very protective of those who show Her devotion. One of Her earliest manifestations is as a Household Goddess. She was called upon to protect the home and those living within. Hekate was invoked to protect loved ones while traveling and small shrines were erected in Her honor outside the home's entrance. Every Full Moon I recharge Hekate's Key for the protection of my home as well as my loved ones. It has not failed me nor do I predict it ever will. Her Key is a very potent tool in that it helps to avert evil from entering my home. And believe me, there is evil out there. Not only in Spirit form, but also humans who can be one of the vilest of entities. I am a very protective mother of two daughters. There are those out there who can and will, if given a chance, harm them. I will do anything to stop that from happening. Knowing Hekate is there to help protect them eases my mind. Hekate can be a fearsome Goddess. She is Brimo, The Terrifying One, causing strife to those who cross Her. She is Deinos, The Dread Goddess, Bringer of Death and Destruction. Her Hell Hounds are known to prowl the night, hunting malevolent Spirits and people. She is not one to be taken lightly. She will strike you down, leaving your rotting carcass for Her Hell Hounds to devour. Beware Deinos \u2014 The Dread Goddess from the Worlds Below She who is Brimo of the Crackling Flame Hekate of the Night She is called, She who leaves Death and Destruction in Her wake ... Hekate Brimo, I beseech thee, lay waste to those of evil nature Bring them to their knees, destroy them all! Hekate Deinos, I implore thee, strike fear in the hearts of evil-doers Shred them to pieces, feed them to Your Hounds! Beware Deinos, The Dread Goddess of the Worlds Below She who is Brimo of the Crackling Flame Hekate of the Night She is called, She who leaves Death and Destruction in Her wake ... At the Altar of Hekate I Stand Once more I stand at the entrance to Hekate's Cave. The scent of incense floats softly on the ocean breeze. The sound of the crashing surf fills my head with whispers of magic. I feel Her presence within and silently step across the threshold of Her seaside home. I find Her kneeling at Her altar, arcane chants rising from Her lips. She sips some wine, relishing its exquisite flavor. She turns to me and smiles, a hint of mischief in Her eyes. She has plans for me, I feel. Am I ready? Can I rise to the challenge? I smile back at Her, the same mischief in my eyes. I'll give it one Hell of a try ... My ever-changing altar reflects the seasons and sometimes my moods. Always present is Hekate, for it is Her altar. Here I pray and make offerings to my Queen. The lighting of Her candles and incense are a sacred event. My morning and nightly devotionals are done here, they change from day to day. I speak from the heart when addressing Her at these moments. The events of the day reflect the sacred words I express to Hekate. Some are pleads of mercy for the wrongdoing to innocents, others are prayers of gratitude for the Blessings She bestows on my family. When weather or time do not permit me to leave offerings for Hekate at a crossroads, I make use of my outdoor altar. It sits low to the ground like most altars for Chthonic Deities. Here I carve a crossroads into the ground, placing my offering near it. Leaving it overnight, I then bury the offering the next day. The erecting of altars is a sacred and hallowed act. It is a gift to the Gods, one that you put your heart and soul into constructing. The objects that we place on them hold special meaning to both us and our Gods. The making of charms are done there. Prayers are raised to the Starry Heavens. We cry, pouring our hearts out to the Spirits and Ancestors. Reading of runes and scrying for remnants of the past and snippets of the future are done at this sacred space. Enchanted waters and potions of healing are left on altars for the Gods to bless. All manner of witchery is done here, making this one of the most magical spaces of my home. Hekate, My Queen At Your altar I stand Offering You prayers and admiration Hekate, Queen of Witchery These charms and enchantments are Yours to bless May the Spirit of Magic be present in their making. Hekate Daidalos, Cunning One By the Hiss of Serpents You call Your Children of the Night May we hear Your whispered enchantments. Hekate, Dark Muse May I continue to be inspired By the mystery that is You ... My home has been filled with the enchantment that only Hekate can bring. She inspires me to be myself, to follow my dreams and fly on the wings of magic. I adore both the light and dark aspects of Her, for I am much the same. I can feel Her, even in this mundane world. She is just a breath away, waiting for us to awaken from the Slumber of Forgetfulness. Hekate ... Awaken my mind so I may Dream ... CHAPTER 2 At the Crossroads We Meet I am standing at a Crossroads, tendrils of fog caressing me. I call for Her, Hekate, She of the Crossroads. In the distance I hear the barking of dogs. She has arrived! Shivers of excitement run through my body. I ready myself, knowing that a magnificent journey is about to begin. She gestures to the three pathways of the Crossroads, signifying that I must choose my own way \u2014 my own Destiny. On baited breath I take my first step \u2014 into the unknown ... In the Scottish Ballad Thomas Rymer, The Queen of Elphame explains to True Thomas the meaning of the Three Paths of Faery. O see not ye yon narrow road, So thick beset wi thorns and briars? That is the path of righteousness, Tho after it but few enquires. And see not ye that braid braid road, That lies across the lillie leven? That is the path to wickedness, Tho some call it the road to heaven. And see not ye that bonny road, Which winds about the fernie brae? That is the road to fair Elfland, Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae. [From English and Scottish Popular Ballads by F.J. Child] The many paths that we may choose to take in life are much the same as those shown to True Thomas. Though some may lead to trouble and conflict, others will lead to love and happiness. It is Hekate, Lady of the Crossroads, who guides us on our chosen paths. Yes, we choose the paths we take, but Hekate is there to shine a light on the choices we make. She is there as a gentle reminder that we are never truly alone, no matter how solitary we choose to be. Hekate, as a Goddess of Solitude, knows all too well why some may choose to walk alone in their spiritual paths. Knowing She is just a breath away eases my mind and makes me more confident in my decision to walk the solitary path of a Hedge Witch. It is but one of the paths I have chosen to take in this journey called life. As I take a step toward my destiny I know that there is power in wisdom; the wisdom to understand that, though I may not know where the path will lead, I trust in my instinct to choose the path I am fated to follow. Hekate, Lady of the Crossroads, as You light the many paths of Destiny I stand ready to step into the unknown. I hear the Screech Owl's call, luring me in \u2014 enticing me with its peculiar cry. Suspended in the twilight air, whispers from the past try to deceive me. Ignoring the pull, I move forward \u2014 my Destiny awaits ... Through the Briar Patch The tangled web of life's challenges can be overwhelming and solemn. There are many times that I have regretted a choice I have made only to realize that without that particular journey I would not be where I am today, nor would some of my loved ones be in my life. Like the Faery-worlds, my life has been both enchanting and peculiar. The land of Shades and Shadows has beckoned for me to walk the path of Solitude, working with the Spirits and Fae of the Dark and Shadowy realms. Though foreboding at times, those of the Shadow-Lands have proven to be beneficial in my spiritual path. It is Hekate, the Night Wandering Queen, who first showed me the Lands of Shadow. A tangled mass of briar patches guard the entrance to the Shadow-Lands, causing those who wish to enter to find their own way through. Coming out with scrapes and bruises is all part of the adventure. The roads to Faery are no different than the roads to Life. It's how we come out on the other side that matters. Resilient and full of wisdom from the trials we go through shows that we are victorious. Hekate, my Queen, through the Briar Patch I step, ready to walk with You in the Shadow Realms. The glow of Your torches lights the way, guiding me as I fight through the tangled briars of my mind. Hekate, Light Bringer, as I clear the webs of deceit from my path I arm myself with the Power of Wisdom. The inky shadows of deception creep into the distant corners of Life, tempting me to stray from Destiny's Path. Hekate Skotia, Lady of the Gloom, it is You who pulls me from the deep, showing the way to salvation and freedom. Hekate, my Queen, with You by my side I walk the Shadow Realms with integrity and respect, coming through a stronger woman ... Paradise Lost I stand on the horizon of Eternity waiting for The Dread Goddess to appear. Surrounded by a shroud-like mist, the feeling of vulnerability overcomes me. I take in my surroundings, noticing the distinct scent of decay. There is a death-like feel to the air, causing me to shudder with trepidation. I know She is near, I can feel Her \u2014 The Pale Mother. A sense of calm settles over me, wrapping me in its warm embrace. I hear Her soft voice, She whispers the secrets I long to know, revealing what once was ... Seduced by the promise of Paradise, we sometimes turn a blind eye to the darkness that looms over our realm. We long for the days of Eden and Avalon, when our world was pure and innocent. There are those of us who wish to re-enchant this planet we call Earth. What some of us do not realize is that it has always been enchanted, we have just lost the ability to see and feel the magic that lives and breathes alongside us. Paradise is not lost, it is being destroyed by the greed and lust of mankind. When we come to realize that Paradise is still here, still with us, we decide to reclaim this world as our own. We learn to fight for what is right, true, and just. It is when I meet Hekate at the Crossroads that I learn what is truly going on in this world. I recognize all the destruction and turmoil that consumes the Realm of the Living. There is more that goes on than we know. Hekate knows all and sees all, She opens the gate to True-Sightedness. It is at Her Crossroads that we are introduced to the hidden dangers of our world. There are those who belong in the brighter Summer-Lands, but others, like myself, feel at home surrounded by the grim shadows of the darker realms. There is an ethereal tranquility about the Shadow-Lands that call to me. I find solace in the wildness of these lands. It is untamed and free here, full of beauty and splendor. Autumn is ever-present, the twilight air chilled to perfection. As the mists of uncanny magic swirl about me I feel empowered and free to be who I am meant to be. It is here that I reclaim my inner power and employ it in the Living World to fight against the ones who wish to destroy the worlds, both mundane and Other. The ShadowLands are Hekate's realm. She who is Queen of Ghosts and Shadows haunts the darker realms with the other Under-World Gods and Spirits. This is the Paradise of the Un-Seelie and Spirits of Shadow. Those who hide in the background doing all the dirty work that needs to be done in order for Hekate's light to shine through to the Land of the Living. Hekate Noctiluca, Light of the Night, it is You who shines the Light of Truth upon the Land of the Living. Our world would be cast into eternal darkness without Your Unconquerable Flame. Anassa Hekate, Nourisher of Life, I ask You to Guide us, show us the way to Freedom. Hekate, the Truth is revealed through You my Queen \u2014 may I serve You well in the Shadow-Lands ... (Continues...) Excerpted from Pagan Portals Hekate by Vivienne Moss . Copyright \u00a9 2015 Vivienne Moss. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "1925429032", "title": "Buddha Wisdom Cards: Divine Feminine: The Heart of Kwan Yin (Inspiration Cards)", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Sofan Chan grew up in Hong Kong, studied art at The School of Art Institute of Chicago, and now lives in Australia. Her original oil paintings and prints are displayed in a variety of collections around the world.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Buddhism"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.73}, {"asin": "0804820740", "title": "Hapkido: Korean Art of Self-Defense", "author": "Scott Shaw", "description": "Review \"In this book, Scott Shaw takes the reader to the heart of Hapido.\"\u2014John Corcoran, editor, Inside Taekwondo From the Inside Flap About the Author Scott Shaw is a master instructor in the Korean matrial arts of Hapkido and Taekwondo. He is certified as a seventh degree black belt by the prestigious Korea Hapkido Federation, and frequently travels to Korea to train directly under the art's top masters. Shaw has published articles in a number of international magazines, including Black Belt, Inside Karate, Inside Taekwondo, Karate/Kung-fu Illustrated, Martial Arts Masters, and Taekwondo Times. He is also the star of the four-part instructional video series on Hapkido by Unique Publications Video. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Individual Sports"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 15.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0071354484", "title": "Advanced In-Line Skating", "author": "Liz Miller", "description": "From the Back Cover Park Your Car and Take to the Streets Whether you want to skate backcountry roads, get unbelievably fit, dance, get acrobatic, join a competitive hockey or basketball league, or just run errands, here's the key to expanding your skating horizons. Liz Miller, author of the best-selling Get Rolling: The Beginner's Guide to In-Line Skating , delivers everything you need to live in-line skating. This fun and inviting, step-by-step, clearly illustrated lesson plan is easy to use and accessible. From tips to terms to techniques, Advanced In-Line Skating covers everything you need to explore the ever-widening world of rolling opportunities, including Moving safely in traffic and on hills Moving safely in traffic and on hills Racing, touring, fitness, and cross training Racing, touring, fitness, and cross training Participating in games, including roller hockey, soccer, and basketball, roller dancing, and figure skating Participating in games, including roller hockey, soccer, and basketball, roller dancing, and figure skating Launch ramp and half pipe techniques Launch ramp and half pipe techniques What to look for in gear and supplies for long-distance skating What to look for in gear and supplies for long-distance skating Tips on everything from foot care to treating \"road rash\" \"For the athlete looking for information on in-line skating, this book is the source. It's a very useful tool if you want to learn in-line sports of all types.\"--Bobby Hull Jr. Tips on everything from foot care to treating \"road rash\" \"For the athlete looking for information on in-line skating, this book is the source. It's a very useful tool if you want to learn in-line sports of all types.\"--Bobby Hull Jr. About the Author Liz Miller is an International In-Line Skating Association certified instructor and the author of Get Rolling , a widely praised introduction to in-line skating.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Coaching"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "1911173294", "title": "EXPLAINING The Amazing Story of Jesus", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 5.49}, {"asin": "0446574759", "title": "Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes", "author": "Edith Hamilton", "description": "Review \"Edith Hamilton retells the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths with a sure taste and scholarship that help to restore their quality as perennial and refreshing fables about human nature, including our own.\"\u2015 The New Yorker \"No one in modern times has shown us more vividly than Edith Hamilton 'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.' Filtering the golden essence from the mass of classical literature, she proved how applicable to our daily lives are the humor and wisdom of more than 2,000 years ago.\"\u2015 New York Times About the Author Edith Hamilton (1868-1963) was born of American parents in Dresden, Germany, and grew up in Indiana. Through the first quarter of the twentieth century she was the headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. Upon retiring, she began to write about the civilizations of the ancient world and soon gained world renown as a classicist. Her celebrated and bestselling books include Mythology, The Greek Way, The Roman Way, and The Echo of Greece. She regarded as the high point of her life a 1957 ceremony in which King Paul of Greece named her an honorary citizen of Athens.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.49}, {"asin": "B08Q6KKFKL", "title": "The Stuffing", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Entertaining & Holidays"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 7.25}], "target_asin": "0071354484"}
{"user_id": "AF454A5KXD3QBYD2JCIOBLGGVORA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0618946314", "title": "Crisis Intervention Case Book (HSE 225 Crisis Intervention)", "author": "Alan A. Cavaiola", "description": "About the Author Dr. Cavaiola is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Counseling at Monmouth University West Long Branch, New Jersey. He began doing crisis intervention work 1975 while working in the outpatient mental health services at Monmouth Medical Center. He later went on to become Clinical Director of the substance abuse treatment programs at Monmouth Medical Center. Dr. Cavaiola has published extensively in the field of addictions and has presented at many national and international conferences. Dr. Cavaiola has co-authored three books: Toxic Co-workers (which has been translated into six languages), Assessment and Treatment of the DWI Offender, and more recently a textbook entitled, A Practical Guide to Crisis Intervention published by Lahaska Press (now Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning). In addition to his teaching, Dr. Cavaiola is a Licensed Psychologist, a Licensed Clinical Alcohol/Drug Counselor, a Licensed Professional Counselor and a New Jersey certified Disaster Response Crisis Counselor. Dr. Cavaiola has a private practice in Fair Haven, NJ.Joseph E. Colford, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Psychology Department of Georgian Court University in Lakewood, New Jersey, and is the Director of the Graduate Program in School Psychology. He has had extensive experience in public education as a school psychologist, in private practice, and in higher education as associate professor. His experiences in working with school-age children in the aftermath of a variety of crisis types lead to his collaboration with Dr. Cavaiola in this casebook and in their earlier work, A Practical Guide to Crisis Intervention (Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning). Dr. Colford also created a graduate-level course, School Crisis Prevention and Intervention, for his program, incorporating sound practices for crisis prevention and for crisis intervention with children, adolescents, their schools and families. The political and social landscape of the 21st century convinced him that such a casebook was important for mental health professionals who work in a variety of settings.", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 45.09}, {"asin": "0761961062", "title": "The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process", "author": "Michael Crotty", "description": "Review Choosing a research method can be bewildering. How can you be sure which methodology is appropriate, or whether your chosen combination of methods is consistent with the theoretical perspective you want to take? This book links methodology and theory with great clarity and precision, showing students and researchers how to navigate the maze of conflicting terminology. About the Author Michael Crotty is in the Department of Public Health at The Flinders University of South Australia.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.82}, {"asin": "1449977529", "title": "Silver Spoons: Hemodialysis Cookbook", "author": "Dave Capper", "description": "From the Author It is estimated that there are over 350,000 dialysis patients in America. That number is believed t triple in the next few years. With the baby boomers coming of age, their kidneys are failing and the need for treatment and diet changes is going to change as well. If you, or someone you know,\u00a0has kidney failure, please remember that diet is a very important part of\u00a0any treatment plan. This is not a one size fits all cook book. The recipes that work best for you today may not be the same ones that work best for you next week or next month. The right recipes for you will likely change as your body's needs change. With kidney failure, you will find the blood tests that are performed at the dialysis center change. Those test results will determine your diet. One month you may need more or less potassium, for example. As your needs change, so\u00a0should your diet.\u00a0The foods you eat and the way you prepare them will make a difference in those test results. Your dietitian can explain more about this to you. I have friend and family who take dialysis treatments and some are permitted certain foods and others are restricted. The foods or restrictions on the diet are based on the individual and their own blood test results and so for any person to write a book that meets the needs of everyone on any given day is just not possible. As you read the book, and find recipes you like, always check with your dietitian to determine your own needs at that time. Be safe in trying these, or any, recipes. When writing this book, I wanted to write not only recipes, but information about the kidneys and dialysis. It was very confusing when a loved one learned they would require dialysis. It was a life changing decision.\u00a0Making the information available to those who are faced with the decision of what to do now that their kidneys have failed was important.\u00a0I thought the book itself would be\u00a0a great way to introduce them to kidney failure, dialysis, and diet changes all in one. It would be my hope that this book, and others like it, would make its way to the hands of those who are facing the same challenges my loved one faced. And that by giving it to them at the time they are going through this same thing would help them to understand dialysis and treatment options and that their love of food is not something in the past. That is a pretty big order, I must admit, but it is one that I believe would benefit\u00a0kidney dialysis patients, those who care for their friends and loved ones\u00a0and those about to become dialysis patitents. About the Author The author has been a caregiver for nearly 25 years. Most recently to a family member with kidney failure. During the illness, information was, at best, confusing. In this book, he tries to make sense of the differen types of dialysis, diet, kidney functions and more. While this book may be titled Cookbook, it is so much more than cooking. It is understanding the body, and the options available. The author writes this book to provide much needed information to the million people who have, or are expected to, experience kidney failure. In just a few short years, it is estimated there will be over a million people in the United States alone with kidney failure. Many will choose\u00a0dialysis as their treatment option. Having been through the uncertainties with a loved one, the author wanted to make this information available to those\u00a0who may need it. Remember the two main causes of kidney failure\u00a0are high blood pressure and diabetes. Eat healthy and stay healthy as long as you can.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Special Diet"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 12.47}, {"asin": "0073382825", "title": "Understanding Human Sexuality, 11th Edition", "author": "Janet Shibley Hyde", "description": "About the Author Janet Shibley Hyde, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology, and Evjue-Bascom Professor of Women\u2019s Studies at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, received her education at Oberlin College and the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught a course in human sexuality since 1974, first at Bowling Green State University, then at Denison University, and now at the University of Wisconsin. Her research interests are in gender differences and gender-role development in children. Author of the textbook Half the Human Experience: The Psychology of Women, she is currently President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. She has received many other honours, including an award for excellence in teaching at Bowling Green State University, the Chancellor\u2019s Award for teaching at the University of Wisconsin, and the Kinsey Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality for career contributions to sex research. She is married to John DeLamater.ohn D. DeLamater, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, received his education at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan. He created the Human Sexuality course at the University of Wisconsin in 1975 and has taught it regularly since then. His research and writing are focused on social and psychological influences on human sexuality; his recent work is in the areas of HIV/AIDs and STD prevention. He is the coauthor of the textbook Social Psychology. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and Editor of The Journal of Sex Research. He has received awards for excellence in teaching from the Department of Sociology and Interfraternity Council-Panhellenic Association and is a member of the Teaching Academy at the University of Wisconsin. He regularly teaches a seminar for graduate students on teaching undergraduate courses. He is married to Janet Hyde.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Psychology & Counseling"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 15.3}, {"asin": "0970161700", "title": "Cooking for David: A Culinary Dialysis Cookbook", "author": "Sara Colman", "description": "Review ...this wonderful resource not only gives great taste tempting recipes but also very thoughtful renal nutrition guidance. -- Debbie Benner, MA, RD, CSR, Director of Nutrition Services, Davita, Inc. Using their extensive knowledge, the authors have perfected recipes that combine appropriate dietary requirements with good taste for dialysis patients. -- N.D. Vazari, MD, MACP, Professor of Medicine, Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, University of California, Irvine From the Author Why \"Cooking for David\" was written: Writing the cookbook was an adventure in putting into practice day to day preparation of meals, based on the dietary requirements, for those on kidney dialysis. David Gordon is one of many people faced with the difficult life changes that dialysis requires. He has been on hemodialysis since 1997. The treatment entails sitting in a recliner for 4 hours 3 times a week while his blood is filtered through a dialysis machine. This is uncomfortable as well as boring and leaves David feeling tired after the treatment. The required diet restrictions are another equally irksome aspect of kidney failure. As a talented cook, Dorothy\u0092s heart went out to David every time she prepared and shared unseasoned bland meals from the restricted renal diet. She began to work in more satisfying variations of the recipes she had been using. Her objective was to create recipes tasty enough to replace the foods her husband loves and can no longer eat. These same recipes are now included in social eating events with family and friends. With medical nutritional guidance from renal dietitian Sara Colman, \"Cooking for David: A Culinary Dialysis Cookbook\" was created. Our hope is to help others dealing with the complexities and challenges of following a renal diet. Dorothy Gordon BS, RN Sara Colman RD, CDE, Renal Dietitian, Nutrition Educator", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0738205192", "title": "Field Guide To The American Teenager: A Parent's Companion", "author": "Joseph Di Prisco", "description": "Review \"Wise and sensitive.\" -- -Time About the Author Michael Riera, Ph.D. , is one of the country's foremost authorities on understanding children and teenagers. Mike has written or cowritten five books related to teenagers and their parents. Currently, he is the head of the Brentwood School, an independent K-12 day school in Los Angeles.  Website: MikeRiera.com Joseph Di Prisco, Ph.D. , is an educator and writer who has taught for more than twenty years in public, independent, and Catholic schools, middle school through college. He lives in Berkeley, California.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Psychology & Counseling"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 21.99}, {"asin": "1412956617", "title": "Counseling and Educational Research: Evaluation and Application", "author": "Rick Houser", "description": "About the Author Rick Houser is currently Professor and Department Head in Educational Studies in Psychology, Research Methodology, and Counseling at The University of Alabama. He has been Associate Dean in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Also, he was a professor and department chair for several years at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Rick Houser has taught graduate-level research courses for more than 25 years. He received his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh in rehabilitation counseling with a minor in research methodology. He conducts research in ethical decision making, stress and coping, educational neuroscience, and neuroscience and counseling.", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0761941088", "title": "Doing Counselling Research", "author": "John McLeod", "description": "About the Author John McLeod has held appointments in universities in the UK, New Zealand and Italy, and is currently Professor of Counselling at the Institute for Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy, Dublin, and Professor of Psychology, University of Oslo. He is committed to promoting the relevance of research as a means of informing therapy practice and improving the quality of services that are available to clients, and has received an award from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy for his exceptional contribution to research. His writing has influenced a generation of trainees in the field of counselling, counselling psychology and psychotherapy, and his books are widely adopted on training programmes across the world.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 8.57}, {"asin": "1958771007", "title": "Albert the Sheep: and the Very Eventful Day", "author": "Cameron Johnson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "0307346617", "title": "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War", "author": "Max Brooks", "description": "Review \u201cAn \u2018oral history\u2019 of the global war the evil brain-chewers came within a hair of winning. Zombies are among us\u2014turn on your television if you don\u2019t believe it. But, Brooks reassures us, even today, human fighters are hunting down the leftovers, and we\u2019re winning. [His] iron-jaw narrative is studded with practical advice on what to do when the zombies come, as they surely will. A literate, ironic, strangely tasty treat.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cMax Brooks has charted the folly of a disaster response based solely on advanced technologies and brute force in this step-by-step guide to what happened in the Zombie War. He details with extraordinary insight how in the face of institutional missteps and greed, people in unexpected ways achieve unique, creative, and effective strategies to survive and fight back. Brooks\u2019s account of the path to recovery and reconstruction after the war is fascinating, too. World War Z provides us with a starting point, at least, a basic blueprint from which to build a popular understanding of how, when, and why such a disaster came to be, and how small groups and individuals survived.\u201d \u2014Jeb Weisman, Ph.D.,Director of Strategic Technologies, National Center for Disaster Preparedness \u201cPossesses more creativity and zip than entire crates of other new fiction titles. Think Mad Max meets The Hot Zone . . . It\u2019s Apocalypse Now , pandemic-style. Creepy but fascinating.\u201d \u2014USA Today \u201cPrepare to be entranced by this addictively readable oral history of the great war between humans and zombies. . . . Will grab you as tightly as a dead man\u2019s fist. A.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly, EW Pick \u201cProbably the most topical and literate scare since Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast. . . . This is action-packed social-political satire with a global view.\u201d \u2014 Dallas Morning News \u201cBrooks [is] America\u2019s most prominent maven on the living dead. . . . Chilling. . . . It is gripping reading and a scathing indictment of weak responses to crises real and over-hyped.\u201d \u2014 Hartford Courant \u201cA sober, frequently horrifying and even moving account. . . . Brooks has delivered a full-blown horror novel, laced with sharp social and political observations and loads of macabre, gruesome imagery. . . . The real horror of World War Z comes from the all-too-plausible responses of human beings and governments to the menace.\u201d \u2014 Fangoria \u201cA horror fan\u2019s version of Studs Terkel\u2019s The Good War . . . . Like George Romero\u2019s Dead trilogy, World War Z is another milestone in the zombie mythology.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cBrooks commits to detail in a way that makes his nightmare world creepily plausible. . . . Far more affecting than anything involving zombies really has any right to be. . . . The book . . . opens in blood and guts, turns the world into an oversized version of hell, then ends with and affirmation of humanity\u2019s ability to survive the worst the world has to offer. It feels like the right book for the right times, and that\u2019s the eeriest detail of all.\u201d \u2014The A.V. Club \u201cThe best science fiction has traditionally been steeped in social commentary. World War Z continues that legacy. . . . We haven\u2019t been this excited about a book without pictures since\u2013well, since ever.\u201d \u2014 Metro \u201cEach story locks together perfectly to create a wonderful, giddy suspense. Brooks also has the political savvy to take advantage of any paranoia a modern reader might feel. . . . The perfect book for all us zombie junkies.\u201d \u2014 Paste \u201cThis infectious and compelling book will have nervous readers watching the streets for zombies. Recommended.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal About the Author Max Brooks is an author, public speaker, and nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. His bestselling books include Minecraft: The Island, The Zombie Survival Guide . and World War Z , which was adapted into a 2013 movie starring Brad Pitt.\u00a0His graphic novels i nclude The Extinction Parade, G.I. Joe: Hearts & Minds, and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Harlem Hellfighters . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. WARNINGS GREATER CHONGQING, THE UNITED FEDERATION OF CHINA [At its prewar height, this region boasted a population of over thirty-five million people. Now, there are barely fifty thousand. Reconstruction funds have been slow to arrive in this part of the country, the government choosing to concentrate on the more densely populated coast. There is no central power grid, no running water besides the Yangtze River. But the streets are clear of rubble and the local \"security council\" has prevented any postwar outbreaks. The chairman of that council is Kwang Jingshu, a medical doctor who, despite his advanced age and wartime injuries, still manages to make house calls to all his patients.] The first outbreak I saw was in a remote village that officially had no name. The residents called it \"New Dachang,\" but this was more out of nostalgia than anything else. Their former home, \"Old Dachang,\" had stood since the period of the Three Kingdoms, with farms and houses and even trees said to be centuries old. When the Three Gorges Dam was completed, and reservoir waters began to rise, much of Dachang had been disassembled, brick by brick, then rebuilt on higher ground. This New Dachang, however, was not a town anymore, but a \"national historic museum.\" It must have been a heartbreaking irony for those poor peasants, to see their town saved but then only being able to visit it as a tourist. Maybe that is why some of them chose to name their newly constructed hamlet \"New Dachang\" to preserve some connection to their heritage, even if it was only in name. I personally didn't know that this other New Dachang existed, so you can imagine how confused I was when the call came in. The hospital was quiet; it had been a slow night, even for the increasing number of drunk-driving accidents. Motorcycles were becoming very popular. We used to say that your Harley-Davidsons killed more young Chinese than all the GIs in the Korean War. That's why I was so grateful for a quiet shift. I was tired, my back and feet ached. I was on my way out to smoke a cigarette and watch the dawn when I heard my name being paged. The receptionist that night was new and couldn't quite understand the dialect. There had been an accident, or an illness. It was an emergency, that part was obvious, and could we please send help at once. What could I say? The younger doctors, the kids who think medicine is just a way to pad their bank accounts, they certainly weren't going to go help some \"nongmin\" just for the sake of helping. I guess I'm still an old revolutionary at heart. \"Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people.\" Those words still mean something to me . . . and I tried to remember that as my Deer bounced and banged over dirt roads the government had promised but never quite gotten around to paving. I had a devil of a time finding the place. Officially, it didn't exist and therefore wasn't on any map. I became lost several times and had to ask directions from locals who kept thinking I meant the museum town. I was in an impatient mood by the time I reached the small collection of hilltop homes. I remember thinking, This had better be damned serious. Once I saw their faces, I regretted my wish. There were seven of them, all on cots, all barely conscious. The villagers had moved them into their new communal meeting hall. The walls and floor were bare cement. The air was cold and damp. Of course they're sick, I thought. I asked the villagers who had been taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn't \"safe.\" I noticed that the door had been locked from the outside. The villagers were clearly terrified. They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and prayed. Their behavior made me angry, not at them, you understand, not as individuals, but what they represented about our country. After centuries of foreign oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as humanity's middle kingdom. We were the world's richest and most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from outer space to cyber space. It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as \"The Chinese Century\" and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Yangshao savages. I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine the first patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn't from an animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being. Although I hypothesized this to be the source of the infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean. I asked the villagers, again, who had been taking care of these people. Again, they told me no one. I knew this could not be true. The human mouth is packed with bacteria, even more so than the most unhygienic dog. If no one had cleaned this woman's wound, why wasn't it throbbing with infection? I examined the six other patients. All showed similar symptoms, all had similar wounds on various parts of their bodies. I asked one man, the most lucid of the group, who or what had inflicted these injuries. He told me it had happened when they had tried to subdue \"him.\" \"Who?\" I asked. I found \"Patient Zero\" behind the locked door of an abandoned house across town. He was twelve years old. His wrists and feet were bound with plastic packing twine. Although he'd rubbed off the skin around his bonds, there was no blood. There was also no blood on his other wounds, not on the gouges on his legs or arms, or from the large dry gap where his right big toe had been. He was writhing like an animal; a gag muffled his growls. At first the villagers tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him, that he was \"cursed.\" I shrugged them off and reached for my mask and gloves. The boy's skin was as cold and gray as the cement on which he lay. I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide and sunken back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast. Throughout the examination he was inexplicably hostile, reaching for me with his bound hands and snapping at me through his gag. His movements were so violent I had to call for two of the largest villagers to help me hold him down. Initially they wouldn't budge, cowering in the doorway like baby rabbits. I explained that there was no risk of infection if they used gloves and masks. When they shook their heads, I made it an order, even though I had no lawful authority to do so. That was all it took. The two oxen knelt beside me. One held the boy's feet while the other grasped his hands. I tried to take a blood sample and instead extracted only brown, viscous matter. As I was withdrawing the needle, the boy began another bout of violent struggling. One of my \"orderlies,\" the one responsible for his arms, gave up trying to hold them and thought it might safer if he just braced them against the floor with his knees. But the boy jerked again and I heard his left arm snap. Jagged ends of both radius and ulna bones stabbed through his gray flesh. Although the boy didn't cry out, didn't even seem to notice, it was enough for both assistants to leap back and run from the room. I instinctively retreated several paces myself. I am embarrassed to admit this; I have been a doctor for most of my adult life. I was trained and . . . you could even say \"raised\" by the People's Liberation Army. I've treated more than my share of combat injuries, faced my own death on more than one occasion, and now I was scared, truly scared, of this frail child. The boy began to twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely free. Flesh and muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the stump. His now free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged his body across the floor. I hurried outside, locking the door behind me. I tried to compose myself, control my fear and shame. My voice still cracked as I asked the villagers how the boy had been infected. No one answered. I began to hear banging on the door, the boy's fist pounding weakly against the thin wood. It was all I could do not to jump at the sound. I prayed they would not notice the color draining from my face. I shouted, as much from fear as frustration, that I had to know what happened to this child. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.35}, {"asin": "178488524X", "title": "Pasta Grannies: Comfort Cooking: Traditional Family Recipes From Italy\u2019s Best Home Cooks", "author": "Vicky Bennison", "description": "Review \"The grannies are back in a follow-up to Vicky Bennison\u2019s award-winning cookbook with 60 more family-friendly Italian recipes, like thick pizza from Sicily and chestnut gnocchi from Liguria.\" -- Jacqueline Raposo, Epicurious\u00a0?\"Complete with stunning location and recipe photography throughout, and a clear guide to pasta making by hand and the best tools and ingredients, Pasta Grannies: Comfort Cooking is not only a celebration of cooking and feasting together, it\u2019s an insight into their lives, and a joyous slice of Italian life. Buon appetito!\" -- The West Country Foodlover\"Complete with stunning location and recipe photography throughout, and a clear guide to pasta making by hand and the best tools and ingredients, Pasta Grannies: Comfort Cooking is not only a celebration of cooking and feasting together, it\u2019s an insight into their lives, and a joyous slice of Italian life. Buon appetito!\" -- The West Country Foodlover About the Author Vicky Bennison is the creator of the highly successful 'Pasta Grannies', which has nearly two million followers across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Vicky's first book, based on its success, has been translated into 6 languages; it won a James Beard Award, the equivalent of the food Oscars in America, for Best Single Subject in 2019; and the German translation was awarded Silver medal by the prestigious Gastronomischen Akadamie Deutschlands. Vicky has made live TV appearances on the Rachael Ray Show in America and BBC Breakfast in the UK, and been profiled in the New York Times, Financial Times and Sunday Times among many others. Disney Pixar asked Vicky to support the global launch of their animation Luca , a story of friendship and shared love of pasta. When not travelling through Italy filming grandmothers, Vicky likes gardening and spending time with her family and grandson, Raff.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 20.6}], "target_asin": "0761941088"}
{"user_id": "AHGB3PR2CXZYU4HC2TETUAZEF3WA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1594831963", "title": "It's Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy", "author": "D. Michael Abrashoff", "description": "About the Author Captain D. Michael Abrashoff is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, and was a military assistant to the former secretary of defense, the Honorable Dr. William J. Perry. Abrashoff left the Navy in 2001 and became the founder and CEO of Grassroots Leadership, Inc., in Boston. You can visit his website at www.grassrootsleadership.com. From AudioFile Part leadership lesson and part memoir, this compact audio is a testament to the author's understanding of leadership in any large organization. His message is about helping people engage with their mission, which in his case was operating the 8,600-ton guided missile destroyer he commanded in the late 1990s. He advocates respecting people at every level, providing personalized training, and having an orderly system for rewarding high performers with more responsibility. Abrashoff is definitely in command and proud of his story but not lacking in humility and human perspective. Leaders of fast food restaurants and warships alike will be uplifted by his relentless efforts to care for the 310 men and women under his command. T.W. \u00a9 AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright \u00a9 AudioFile, Portland, Maine", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 34.97}, {"asin": "0071479236", "title": "The One-Minute Guide to the Nautical Rules of the Road (United States Power Squadrons Guides)", "author": "Charles Wing", "description": "From the Publisher Charlie Wing has written top-selling books on home maintenance and remodeling as well as boating. Wing lived aboard a cruising sailboat for six years. About the Author Charlie Wing has written top-selling books on home maintenance and remodeling as well as boating. Wing lived aboard a cruising sailboat for six years.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Water Sports"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 21.69}, {"asin": "0226580997", "title": "Among Giants: A Life with Whales", "author": "Flip Nicklin", "description": "Review \u201cThis is not only a book of extraordinary pictures, which it is, and the story of an extraordinary life, which it is; this is the story of the man who opened the window on a world we barely knew existed before his work. A compelling, engaging adventure story, well told. I can\u2019t recommend it highly enough.\u201d -- Christopher Moore, author of Fluke \u201cFlip Nicklin\u2019s work reaches us on a profound level: his images inspire . They make us feel hopeful, passionate, engaged, transported, alive. He takes us under the surface with him, into a universe where we have front row seats to the most magical and wonderful giants on our planet, allowing us to witness an otherwise unimaginable marine world. With his talent and vision, Flip singlehandedly took underwater photography\u2014and marine mammal photojournalism in general\u2014to an entirely new level. Flip is, simply, the best of the very best.\u201d -- Paul Nicklen, photographer and author of Polar Obsession \u201cFlip Nicklin is my favorite marine mammal, and one to whom I am grateful beyond measure. As a colleague on National Geographic assignments, he guided me down into the underwater realm and shared the secrets he has spent so many years uncovering there. As an author, he does the same for readers in this revelatory tale of a life like no other among the biggest and most mysterious beings on the planet.\u201d--Douglas Chadwick, author of The Wolverine Way -- Douglas Chadwick \u201cFlip Nicklin is one of the great names in nature photography--someone who has turned photography of marine mammals into art and inspired a generation. What\u2019s surprising is that this is the first major collection of his work. It contains his classics, often the first-ever picture of a species or a behaviour--many of which are still the best pictures of their kind--but also new images, often thought-provoking compositions of gatherings of great whales. With his text, the book also tells a story of discovery and the growth of our understanding of whale behaviour. The salutary reminder of how little we know about whales is that some of the pictures that Flip has taken are of individuals that were alive long before (modern) whale biology was born.\u201d--Rosamund Kidman Cox -- Rosamund Kidman Cox\"In Among Giants , Flip Nicklin's fabulous photographs and his captivating text combine to give us a true feeling for the animals of the interface between land and water (and sometimes ice). The world of whales is brought into focus by the world's best cetacean photographer, and his deeply personal story expresses his love and admiration for these marvelous and mysterious creatures. You will hold your breath as you descend into the depths with dolphins, belugas, sperm whales, and humpbacks, and exhale with sheer delight at the experience of diving with Flip and his enchanting companions.\" -- Richard Ellis, author of The Great Sperm Whale \" 'Flip' Nicklin is National Geographic's 'whale guy.' Any time the magazine runs a story on whales, Nicklin is the photographer sent to illustrate the story. It all began in 1963, when the author's father was running a dive shop in San Diego. When the father and\u00a0 a couple of buddies discovered a Bryde's whale tangled in a gill net, they photographed the whale and then freed it. Inspired by both photography and diving, Nicklin bummed around until he got a chance to work as an assistant with humpback-whale research in Maui. There he got an iconic photograph of a male whale head down in the water, singing, and he was on his way. Nicklin has created an exciting tale combining the adventure (and drudgery) of field research and the discovery of what whales do and why. Humpbacks in Hawaii, narwhals and belugas in the Arctic, killer whales in Canada, sperm whales in Sri Lanka, and dolphins in Galveston Bay all tell their stories in Nicklin\u2019s marvelous images.\" \u2015 Booklist About the Author Widely regarded as the world\u2019s leading cetacean photographer, Charles \"Flip\" Nicklin grew up around his father\u2019s small dive shop on the California coas t. He went on to become National Geographic\u2019s premiere whale photographer and marine mammal specialist. Over the last quarter century Flip has photographed more than thirty species of whales and dolphins, some so endangered their very survival is in question. In 2001 he co-founded Whale Trust, a non-profit organization dedicated to research and public education.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Photography & Video"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 6.13}, {"asin": "0735624089", "title": "MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-622): Supporting and Troubleshooting Applications on a Windows Vista Client for Enterprise Support Technicians (Pro - Certification)", "author": "J. C. Mackin", "description": "From the Publisher Key Book Benefits: In-depth coverage of exam objectives and sub-objectives--plus instructive case studies and troubleshooting scenarios to enhance your performance on the job 425+ practice and review questions Test engine that enables customized testing, pre-assessment and post-assessment, and automated scoring and feedback Complete objective-by-objective review section, plus a handy exam-mapping grid Evaluation version of Windows Vista 15 percent exam-discount voucher from Microsoft (limited-time offer) Entire study guide in searchable eBook format About the Author Tony Northrup, MCTS, MCSE, CISP, MVP, is a networking consultant and coauthor of Windows Server 2008 Networking and Network Access Protection (NAP) . J.C. Mackin, MCITP, MCSE, MCT, has 10+ years' experience with Microsoft networks and is an IT consultant, trainer, and author.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Networking & Cloud Computing"], "average_rating": 3.4, "price": 16.43}, {"asin": "0245603557", "title": "Harrap's Shorter French and English Dictionary", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Dictionaries & Thesauruses"], "average_rating": 2.0, "price": 12.0}, {"asin": "B0043RT8BI", "title": "Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo", "author": "Vanessa Woods", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fianc\u00e9, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos' only known habitat\u2014civil war\u2013torn Congo. Woods's plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple's work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko's weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine Andr\u00e9, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals' trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods's personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans. (Apr.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Woods was an Australian primate lover, flitting from job to job while she tried to decide what to do with her life. Brian Hare was a newly minted American PhD. They met at a chimpanzee sanctuary in Uganda, fell in love, and a year later were on a plane to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which had suffered a decade-long war, fought over its vast resources of diamonds, gold, cobalt, and other minerals, and in which more than five million died. The human suffering had fostered a rise in the bush-meat trade, and one of the prime targets was bonobos, the \u201cother\u201d chimpanzee. The story of Woods\u2019 and Hare\u2019s research at the only bonobo sanctuary in the world mixes the intimacy of memoir with the science of behavioral research. As Woods comes to know her new husband, she also begins to know the resident bonobos. Bonobos share, use sex to settle arguments, and possess almost 99 percent of our DNA. This mostly joyous book is not afraid to talk about the terrible recent history of the Congo, but ultimately it comes down on the side of hope\u2014for the Congo and the bonobos. --Nancy Bent Review \"Funny, adventurous, and heartbreaking, Woods takes us with her to darkest Africa to meet our nearest relative, the nearly extinct bonobo. This must-read book illuminates extraordinary courage in both people and animals.\"  -Sara Gruen, bestselling author of Water for Elephants \"Gain insights into both the darkness and altruistic sides of our own emotions by getting to know chimpanzees and bonobos in an African sanctuary. This book is both shocking and hilarious.\" ,BR> -Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human \"Don't think that this is just a book about apes. It's a love story, an adventure story, and a political education about a country that has seen more tragedy and inhumanity than you can imagine. Above all, it's an introduction to creatures who have every claim to being more human, in the best sense of the word, than we are.\"  -Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost ,BR> \"This is a startling book. Page after page astonished me. A beautifully written journey into the tangled jungle of the human mind, it also brings us movingly into intimate, loving contact with our extraordinary cousins. This is a compelling story, told with striking honesty, humor, and intelligence.\"  -Alan Alda, author of New York Times bestsellers Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself and Never Have Your Dog Stuffed About the Author Vanessa Woods is a research scientist, journalist, and author of children's books. A member of the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, she works with Duke University as well as Lola Ya Bonobo in Congo. She is also a feature writer for the Discovery Channel, and her writing has appeared in publications such as BBC Wildlife and Travel Africa . Her first book, It's Every Monkey for Themselves , was published in Australia in 2007. Woods lives in North Carolina with her husband, scientist Brian Hare. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.76}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1560025018", "title": "A Voice for the Future", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "B00BCFYN50", "title": "The Highway: A Cody Hoyt/Cassie Dewell Novel (Highway (feat. Cody Hoyt / Cassie Dewell) Book 2)", "author": "C. J. Box", "description": "Review \u201cThat The Highway is read by the incomparable Holter Graham makes it all the more scary\u2026If you like your audiobooks creepy and riveting this is for you. But I wouldn't advise listening to it on a long stretch of unpatrolled road.\u201d \u2015 The Star-Ledger \u201cNarrator Holter Graham creates a frantic, exhilarating pace as Box continues the story of police detective Cody Hoyt.\u201d \u2015 AudioFile Magazine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Reviewing Back of Beyond (2011), we wrote that Box\u2019s short-fused Montana cop, Cody Hoyt, had series potential. Well, he\u2019s back, along with other characters from that book, for a creepy thriller about a serial killer whose job as a long-haul trucker provides the perfect cover for his crimes. Cody has just been fired for planting evidence, and it was his own partner, Cassandra Dewell, who caught him. But then teenagers Danielle and Gracie Sullivan\u2014the same girls he helped rescue the last time out\u2014are abducted en route to a Thanksgiving reunion with Cody\u2019s son, Justin. Can Cody and Cassie work together to find the girls in time? Box\u2019s Joe Pickett series has, over 13 installments, been nearly perfect. But his stand-alones have been a mixed bag, from the stellar Blue Heaven (2008) to the forgettable Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (2009). This one\u2019s somewhere in the middle: Box handles his large cast of characters capably, but, despite the chilling and timely scenario, the usually sure-handed author never quite gets our hearts racing. --Keir Graff --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author C. J. Box is the author of over twenty Joe Pickett novels, as well as several stand-alone novels and a story collection. He has won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe, and Barry Awards, as well as the French Prix Calibre .38, and has been a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. A Wyoming native, Box has also worked on a ranch and as a small-town newspaper reporter and editor. He lives with his wife on their ranch in Wyoming. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. He\u2019s an executive producer of ABC TV\u2019s Big Sky , which is based on his Cody Hoyt/Cassie Dewell novels, and executive producer of the Joe Pickett television series for Spectrum Originals. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Artist C.J. Box; Read by Holter Graham --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cFilled with believable characters and hard, realistic dialogue, Edgar winner Box\u2019s perfectly paced novel offers a suspenseful story laced with more than a few shockingly unexpected plot twists.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly (signature review)\u201cA nonstop, action-filled race against time. Rolling down the superhighway of suspense, this thriller will leave readers breathless.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal (starred review)\u201cBe warned: This is one scary novel.\u201d \u2015 Toronto Globe and Mail \u201cThe Highway is the summer's most terrifying novel...Prepare to be scared.\u201d \u2015 Orlando Sentinel \u201cGet off the genre interstate and take The Highway .\u201d \u2015 Billings Gazette --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1.\u00a04:03 P.M., Tuesday, November 20HE CALLED HIMSELF THE LIZARD King. The prostitutes known as lot lizards feared him. More precisely, they feared his legend, the idea of him . None of them who\u2019d ever seen his face up close lived to describe it.He was parked in the back row of trucks with his diesel engine idling, his running lights muted, his hair slicked back, and a bundle of tools on the floorboard on the right side of his seat within easy reach. He was hunting but there was no need to go after his prey. The lot lizards would come to him.The truck stop was four miles west of Billings, Montana, off I-90. A cold mist hung in the air and moisture beaded on the windows and the paint jobs of more than seventy big trucks. The black asphalt lot shined as if freshly varnished between the rows of semis, reflecting the lighted highway signs and hundreds of streams of horizontal running lights from the parked trucks themselves. The air outside hummed with rumbling engines. Tendrils of steam rose from beneath the engines and combined with the undulating waves of heated exhaust that rose from beneath the big rigs.From his high perch in the dry and warm cab, his sight lines were clear. The truck plaza itself was filled with activity and he noted it carefully. Vehicles entered and exited the long banks of fuel pumps in front of the garish low-slung building a hundred yards away. Professional truckers filled 150-gallon aluminum tanks with diesel fuel on one side of the lot, passenger cars and vans filled up with gasoline on the other.Inside the truck stop restaurant, waitresses served the $10.95 T-bone special advertised on the marquee near the exit. Drivers lounged in the \u201ctrucker\u2019s only\u201d section checking e-mail, comparing road conditions, or drinking coffee. Truck stop employees cooked up fried chicken and potato wedges for the lighted bins at the front counter and manned the cash registers selling salted snacks, energy boosters, beef jerky, and drinks.This was the way it was on the open road; islands of lighted activity in a sea of prairie darkness. Cars and families on one side, truckers on the other, but sharing the same facility. Two vastly different worlds that met only at places like this. Inside, truck drivers and citizens barely acknowledged each other and the modern truck stop was designed so there would be little interaction. Sure, the drivers would get on their radios and laugh at the rubes they\u2019d run into inside and mock their looks or stupid conversations, but inside they were segregated between the amateurs and the professionals, the clueless consumers\u2014the civilians, the amateurs\u2014and the cloistered universe of the providers.He was on the road so much his outlook on it had changed completely over the years. It no longer seemed like he was moving, for one thing. Now he felt as if he were stationary while the road rolled under him and the scenery flowed by. The world came to him .Like the captain of a large ocean vessel, a large swath of the landscape was off-limits to him, as he was confined by the shipping lanes that were interstate highways. When he parked his truck at a rest area or truck stop for the night he couldn\u2019t venture into town because he had no way to get there unless he walked. It was like a captain who had to anchor his boat and take a dinghy to shore.Oh, how he resented the smug people in those towns. They thought their food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and electronics simply appeared at stores or on their front doorsteps. They didn\u2019t stop to think that every item they ate or wore or used was likely transported across the nation in the trailer of his truck or those like him, or that the hardworking blue-collar rednecks they avoided in real life and despised on the road were the conduits of their comfort and the pipeline of their wealth.*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, so there was more traffic on the highways than usual. It would be much worse the next day as families moved across the country with a lull on Thanksgiving and another spike on Sunday as people returned home. He was used to it. The rhythms of the road were like rivers that flooded and receded in perpetuity.The Beartooth Mountains to the south were light blue with new snow and the lack of stars indicated heavy cloud cover. It was still warm enough on the valley floor that the moisture hadn\u2019t turned to snowflakes, but there was a snap in the air outside and he watched as travelers left their cars and zipped up coats on their way into the truck stop. He snorted at an overweight family of fools wearing T-shirts and shorts who practically ran from their passenger van to the door that led to the restrooms. Fucking idiots . What if they broke down wearing clothes like that? Who would they look for to rescue them? Me, he thought. The invisible, faceless trucker.In the darkened cab of his eighteen-speed Model 379 Peterbilt, the Lizard King was alone, quiet and still, the cab perched over 550 horses of steel muscle under the iconic squared-off snout. The truck was flat black, stripped of chrome, and as subtle as a fist. It was a trucker\u2019s truck the way a Harley-Davidson was a biker\u2019s bike. He\u2019d even painted the twin stacks with black chimney paint to eliminate any hint of flash.Without looking down, he let his right hand slip down on the side of the seat until he could find the string that held his bundle together. He pulled the cord and the bundle unrolled. His fingertips traced each item. Everything had been wiped clean and sterilized since its last use: the tire thumper, which was a short lead-filled wooden baton used to check the pressure of his eighteen wheels, the pliers and wire cutters, two pairs of handcuffs, four knives\u2014the heavy hunting Buck, the short folding Spyderco, the long thin filet knife, and the stainless-steel hatchet. His lightweight Taurus 738 TCP semiauto in .380 ACP. In an oblong, hard, and hinged box once used for sunglasses was a syringe filled with Rohypnol. And his vintage fourteen-inch long Knapp butcher saw with the aluminum T-grip and both bone and wood teeth on opposite sides of the blade. It was designed for the rapid field butchering of big game. He ran his thumb gently along the bone teeth.Satisfied that everything was in order, he removed the tire thumper and placed it on the dashboard next to his roll of one hundred-mile-an-hour brown Gorilla tape. Both were standard items used by every trucker and they wouldn\u2019t draw a second glance. He bundled the rest of the tools and reached under his seat for the satchel, which contained heavy plastic bags, the wire ties, his folding shovel, the 300,000 volt Stun Master stun gun, and the three-inch-wide roll of duct tape. He put the bundle of tools back into the satchel and zipped it closed.If things went well, he wouldn\u2019t even need to reach for the satchel. If things went well\u00a0\u2026 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*The Lizard King glanced around the cab to make sure he\u2019d completed all the items on his mental checklist. The carpeted floormats had been pulled and stashed, leaving a bare metal floor. Both seats were fitted with clear plastic covers. All logbooks, maps, and other paperwork\u2014anything that could absorb fluid\u2014had been stashed away. He turned in his seat. The cloth drapes separating the cab from the sleeping cabin had long ago been replaced by clear shower curtains that allowed him to see clearly into the back. On his bunk was a specially adapted cover made from blue tarpaulin, and plastic sheeting lined the walls. The single small window of the sleeper was blacked out.He\u2019d forgotten nothing. There was no cloth or porous surface for blood, hair, or fiber to cling to inside, and the cab and cabin could be hosed clean in a few minutes by a power washer.He was ready.*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*He waited for the segregation between the professionals and the amateurs to breach. It did when a rusted-out van cruised the trucking lanes and parked in shadow on the side of the truck stop. North Dakota plates.Two lot lizards got out and the van drove away. That meant they had thumbed a ride or made arrangements for a pickup later. Meaning there would be no telltale vehicle left at the truck stop to raise any alarm. That was good.What wasn\u2019t so good was that there were two of them. It wasn\u2019t unusual; they tended to partner up to some extent. Which meant if one of them vanished the other would know.One lot lizard, who was short and heavy and dark\u2014maybe an Indian from the res to the south\u2014started off for the far corner of the lot. She\u2019d work that side first, he guessed. He breathed a sigh of relief.The other one put her hands on her hips and looked in his direction.She looked thin and gaunt and had long stringy blondish hair haloed by the blue overhead lamps and the mist. He couldn\u2019t see her face yet because of the darkness. A long sweater or shawl-like cape hid her figure, which was one of the tricks of the trade. She teetered on high heels and held her hands out to her sides as if for balance and she baby-stepped toward the parked lines of trucks.Perfect.He stubbed his cigarette out and squinted through the curl of smoke and the rain-smeared windshield. He could feel his insides start to knot.*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*Since that morning outside of Chicago the Lizard King had been planning the hunt. He\u2019d awakened in his bunk thinking about it, and at breakfast he\u2019d gone through his mental checklist. It had been several weeks, and he was due.He pulled a fifty-three-foot trailer known as a \u201creefer,\u201d meaning the inside of the box was controlled by a separate diesel refrigeration-slash-heating unit mounted on the front. Depending on the contents of his load, he could keep the box cool to freezing, and his loads were primarily pallets of fresh or frozen food. He ran coast-to-coast, picking up apples in Yakima, Washington, and delivering them to Boston, and completing the circuit with yogurt from Connecticut or potatoes from New Jersey to be delivered in the west. The loads and destinations varied from circuit to circuit, and sometimes he forgot what he was hauling. It took him four and a half days to run from one coast to the other, and he generally completed two full laps of the nation before returning home. His life was a rhythm of three weeks on the road, a week at home to recuperate and get repairs, then three more weeks of running. He was on his way home after nineteen straight days on the road; meaning no more than eleven hours of driving in any fourteen-hour period, and ten hours of rest in order to legally drive another eleven.The Lizard King knew mileposts on every highway in America and knew which truck stops to fuel up and which ones to avoid. He timed his routes to avoid as many weigh scales\u2014called \u201cchicken coops\u201d\u2014as possible and he\u2019d rather use his piss-jug than be forced to stop at highway rest areas frequented by homosexuals known as \u201cpickle parks.\u201d Like all truckers, he did his best to avoid states with overbearing troopers and stupid regulations like Minnesota, Ohio, California, Oregon, and Washington, and he gave a wide berth to other trucks from companies known for poorly trained drivers.*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*It had taken just one glimpse of a young woman the night before, red-haired and college-age, her car filled with boxes and clothes she was taking home for Thanksgiving break, who passed him on an incline and swung back into his lane so recklessly that he had to tap his brakes and lean on his horn. When he was able to catch back up with her in the passing lane she looked up and their eyes met for a brief second. Then she flipped him off with dismissive contempt. That\u2019s all it took. Rage blasted through him and orange spangles erupted in front of his eyes.Before he could swing his rig over into her lane and force her off the highway she stomped on her accelerator and shot ahead. Their bumpers almost kissed but she gained distance. He cursed the half-load in his trailer that held him back. It was like dragging an anchor behind him. He cursed that red-haired girl until her taillights faded away in the dark.He\u2019d kept an eye out for her all the way to Janesville, Wisconsin. But by the time he got to Chippewa Falls he\u2019d lost her somewhere. She\u2019d either continued to speed home straight ahead or she\u2019d taken an exit off the interstate.She had no idea, he thought, how lucky she was. Outside West Fargo, he\u2019d barely slept and he thought of what she\u2019d look like bound in cuffs and tape with a whole new attitude toward him.So after breakfast, in light rain outside of Mandan, he parked at a rest area and pulled on his raincoat. The first thing to do was to make his loaded eighty-thousand-pound truck invisible. He did it by covering the transmittal dome of his Qualcomm unit with a shower cap lined with aluminum foil and sealing the bottom with tape. This way, neither his employers nor curious troopers could track his movements or his speed.His anticipation built throughout the day as he rolled west. He paid special attention to the radio and slowed in advance of the speed traps or scales outside Wibaux and Bad Route, Montana, and he didn\u2019t stop for lunch or mandatory rest periods although he lied in his logs to say he did. He shot across I-94 in Montana maintaining the perfect speed of sixty-three miles per hour for maximum fuel efficiency for his Caterpillar C15 motor to get as far ahead of schedule as possible. They shouldn\u2019t expect him before 10:00 P.M. If the dispatcher, that bitch, said she had trouble tracking him via his Qualcomm, he\u2019d curse and say it must have malfunctioned again like the last time.He gained four hours, he figured, by the time he hit Miles City, Montana. Four hours of free time, where no one would be watching. He\u2019d carry that four free hours with him as he pounded west, and not withdraw a minute of it until he got to the truck stop outside Billings.Four hours was more than enough time to do what he needed to do. He\u2019d done it in two, so he was sure of it.*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*He\u2019d arrived early to the truck stop, an hour before dark. At that time there was plenty of room in the back row of the trucker\u2019s lot when he arrived, and he took a middle space without neighbors on either side.Choosing the back row meant something to other truckers. Either the driver wanted to get some real sleep in his cabin behind the seat, or he wanted privacy to rest or do paperwork, or, in this case, he was sending a signal that he was available to the truck stop prostitutes who worked the facility. The lot lizards.He carried a duffel bag across the lot in the dusk and went straight to the trucker\u2019s entrance of the building. Inside, he paid eleven dollars for a shower. He shaved and changed into a disposable one-piece Tyvek jumpsuit with elastic bands on the sleeves and cuffs. The jumpsuit got no strange looks in the trucker\u2019s lounge because truckers wore all kinds of strange clothing. A driver with a full beard, a multicolored serape, and flip-flops sat at a table reviewing his logbook. The man didn\u2019t even look up. One driver he knew drove in his underwear with the heat on high.Still, though, when he became the Lizard King he knew his presence made a statement. People shied away from him when they saw him coming. Conversations stopped as he passed by, like there was some kind of malevolent black cloud hanging over his head. And when he stared at others they tended to quickly look away. It used to bother him, but now he took a kind of perverse pride in it. He didn\u2019t want to make new friends, anyway. What was the point?The Lizard King had never felt brotherhood toward other drivers. In fact, he found many of them as disgusting as the amateurs on the road. He noted how many piss-jars and urine bombs had been tossed on the side of the road, how many Walmart bags of feces. He\u2019d seen the cutaways in the floorboards of some trucks, and he cringed when he witnessed fat truckers parking as close as possible to the truck stop restaurant so they wouldn\u2019t have to waddle far to eat. And then there were the Bible-thumpers\u00a0\u2026 He avoided the public retail section of the truck stop, and took a long route back to his Peterbilt through dozens of idling trucks so no one would track where he went. As he passed between two semis in the first row he was dismayed to find a small knot of five drivers shooting the breeze back and forth. Three men leaned against the fuel tank of a blue Mack on the left and two others mirrored their posture against a red Kenworth on the right. He had no choice but to walk right through them and to betray no surprise or caution. To his chagrin, they were arguing about a Bible passage.\u201cThat ain\u2019t what it means,\u201d one of them said. The man was tall and well built and clean-shaven. He wore a yellow chamois shirt and a ball cap that read TRUCKING FOR JESUS. His Mack truck had the same logo painted on its door behind him. He said, \u201cListen: \u2018The discretion of a man defers his anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression.\u2019 That\u2019s in Proverbs. It means look the other way.\u201dThe driver he was arguing with leaning against the Kenworth had bushy muttonchop sideburns and wore a cowboy hat. He shook his head and said, \u201cNo, you listen. Romans 12:20 says, \u2018If your enemy hungers, feed him; if he thirsts, give him drink; for in doing so you shall heap coals of fire on his head.\u2019 That says to me God will get your revenge for you so you don\u2019t need to do any thumpin\u2019. That says God don\u2019t look the other way but you should.\u201d\u201cGod doesn\u2019t do revenge,\u201d the man in the chamois shirt said, rolling his eyes. \u201cHe does love and forgiveness. Maybe you ought to do the same.\u201d\u201cAnd I will if I know God will do the thumpin\u2019. But if he\u2019s just going to let the bad man get away with it\u2014naw, that don\u2019t seem right.\u201d\u201cYou\u2019re readin\u2019 it wrong, friend,\u201d Chamois said. \u201cRemember that later in Proverbs\u2026\u201d\u201cExcuse me,\u201d the Lizard King said, \u201cjust passing through.\u201d He wanted to get by them as quickly as possible. He hoped they were so deep into their discussion they wouldn\u2019t even recall him later if asked. The front row truckers weren\u2019t all Christians, but many of them were. They\u2019d park next to each other in their sanctimony and self-righteousness and spout verses and lessons to each other while looking down on people like him. He avoided them whenever possible.The Bible-thumpers sometimes hung bras out their drivers\u2019 side windows at night as a way of warding off the prostitutes since it suggested a husband and wife driving team inside. It was a message known well among truckers, but not all the whores knew what it meant, which caused great consternation among the faithful.\u201cHey, you look familiar,\u201d the muttonchop driver said to the Lizard King.Since he couldn\u2019t just charge through now without making more of an impression than he wanted to, he glanced up at Muttonchops and said, \u201cSorry, I don\u2019t recall.\u201dBut he did. The truck stop out of Amarillo. Muttonchips had been down there, parked in his Kenworth the row in front of the Lizard King, when that fat lot lizard in the Ugg boots and micromini waddled her way to his Peterbilt. The Lizard King was ready\u2014 oh, he was ready \u2014but as he reached down to let her in he looked up to see Muttonchops watching him through his side sleeper window.It ruined the moment, and destroyed his plans. If Muttonchops was later questioned and could say he saw the fat lizard get into the Peterbilt\u00a0\u2026 So instead of inviting her in and starting the process, he\u2019d opened the door and as she reached up for his hand to climb inside greeted her face with a kick from his size twelve hunting boot. She fell in a heap on the pavement, blood streaming out of her nose. She was angry but not nearly as angry as he was as he slammed the door shut. He hoped like hell Muttonchops didn\u2019t get a clear look at his face that night when he opened his door.\u201cMcAllen, Texas, then?\u201d Muttonchops said, not sure. \u201cThe Flying J down there?\u201dThe Lizard King shrugged. \u201cNope,\u201d he lied. \u201cI ain\u2019t been down there in years.\u201dThe McAllen truck stop was one of the better locations for lot lizards in the country. It ranked right up there with the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike or any truck stop in Gary, Indiana. Other infamous lot lizard high spots included El Paso, Detroit, and the Port of Albany in New York. Although truckers rarely used CB radios anymore, they still had them. Lot lizards knew it, and he\u2019d hear his radio crackle with, \u201cAnybody need company tonight? If you do, take it to 21. This is Barbie Doll\u2026\u201dOnce the lot lizard and the trucker switched to the other channel\u2014along with everyone else parked at the stop who wanted to listen in\u2014there would be a discussion of services, prices, and the location of the man who wanted company. The Lizard King didn\u2019t ever respond. He waited for them to come to his door.\u201cFeel free to join us, brother,\u201d Chamois said. \u201cYou\u2019re more\u2019n welcome. You don\u2019t have to know nothing about the Bible. My friend here doesn\u2019t, either.\u201dMuttonchops said, \u201cHey,\u201d as if offended and a couple of the others laughed.\u201cThanks,\u201d the Lizard King said, waving over his shoulder but not looking back.\u201cYou a Christian, son?\u201d Chamois asked.\u201cSure,\u201d he said without conviction.\u201cGod bless you, buddy,\u201d Chamois said. \u201cWhatever you are. Whatever the deal is with you.\u201dAnd one of the others said, \u201cHe needs it.\u201dThe Lizard King didn\u2019t stop or turn around to see who said it. Was it Muttonchops? Did Muttonchops just remember where they\u2019d met and what nearly happened?As he reached the back bumper of the trucks and turned left, he shot a quick look over his shoulder at the Bible-thumpers. They were still looking in his direction, and Muttonchops was in the middle of them, talking low.*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0* \u201cHe needs it\u201d stuck in his craw as he watched the skinny blond lot lizard climb up into a cab ten trucks away. Who were they to judge him, those bastards? he thought. Weren\u2019t they supposed to show some tolerance? Wasn\u2019t their whole act about forgiveness?She was making her way toward him, truck by truck. Most calls were refusals, but four trucks away he saw a hairy arm reach down from a cab and a big hand grasp hers and pull her up. The lights in the cab went out and he saw cheap curtains pulled sharply across the sleeper cab window. He\u2019d gotten a glimpse of her thin and haggard face from the interior dome light of the cab before it went out, and it wasn\u2019t a face to write home about. But it would do, he thought. He slid the elastic cuff up over his wristwatch and checked the time. In about five minutes she\u2019d be done. It rarely took longer than that. Truckers wanted blow jobs and not much conversation. Rarely did they want anything else that would take more time. Five minutes tops, and the lot lizards backed out, usually grasping stained and crumpled tissue.He hoped she had all her teeth but if she didn\u2019t, he hoped she had none. He remembered that one in Utah after he\u2019d knocked all her teeth out\u00a0\u2026 There were more and more semis entering the truck stop by the minute, and more cars. They were pouring in. He couldn\u2019t account for the sudden traffic, but the more chaos and confusion on the lot, the better for hunting.He sat back, trying to stay calm until she reached him.He visualized the dispatcher, that dried-up old crow, trying to track him by his Qualcomm and flipping out because she couldn\u2019t locate him or his truck.His ears hummed with tension and he was so preoccupied he almost didn\u2019t hear the rapping on his driver\u2019s door. The sound jerked him out of his internal debate, and suddenly all was quiet and he was focused.He wondered how the hell she\u2019d gotten there so fast. Had everyone else rejected her? Or was there a new one, a new lot lizard he hadn\u2019t seen?He reached over and grasped the door handle and opened it a few inches. It was that damned Chamois and Muttonchop.He didn\u2019t open his door more than two inches, so they couldn\u2019t see inside.\u201cHey, buddy,\u201d Chamois said, \u201cWe just heard I-90 West will likely be closed all night.\u201d\u201cWhy?\u201d\u201cBig propane truck jackknifed a few miles past Laurel. The Montana State Patrol shut down both lanes.\u201dThat explained the sudden arrival of traffic, he thought.\u201cNo shit?\u201d he said, angry they were there but assuming they\u2019d interpret his curse being about the highway.\u201cYeah,\u201d Chamois said, \u201cWe\u2019re likely to be here all night. The Montana state boys are taking every precaution that jackknifed truck don\u2019t blow up.\u201dHe looked down through the gap between the door and the frame. Muttonchop stood shoulder to shoulder with Chamois but he couldn\u2019t see his face. The Lizard King wanted them to leave. Their presence might spook the lot lizard working her way to him. Or they might turn on her, the Bible-thumping bastards.\u201cWell,\u201d the Lizard King said, \u201cthanks for letting me know. I may give it a try later, though. I\u2019m not that far from home base and there are a few other routes I can take.\u201d\u201cWhere\u2019s home?\u201d Chamois asked. \u201cLivingston, Montana?\u201dHe was taken aback that they knew, but then realized they\u2019d read it on his door.\u201cYeah.\u201d\u201cThat ain\u2019t that far.\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s what I\u2019m sayin\u2019.\u201d\u201cWell,\u201d Chamois said, as if killing time for a reason the Lizard King couldn\u2019t discern, \u201cyou\u2019ll have to decide for yourself which road you take.\u201dHe said it in a way that caused the Lizard King to think it had nothing to do with the highway.\u201cThat I\u2019ll do,\u201d he answered, trying to keep his rage from overtaking him. These bastards were mocking him . \u201cIn fact, I\u2019ll do whatever the hell I want and I don\u2019t need any help or advice from you,\u201d he said, slamming the door shut.As he watched them walk away toward their trucks in the front row, he saw Muttonchop playfully punch Chamois in the shoulder as if they were sharing a joke. He thought of shoving his gearshift into second and mowing them down.Then he saw her, the blond one. She was descending from the cab four trucks away. The lights inside came back on. And she was teetering toward him on her high heels.Everything was set up perfectly, but too many factors nagged at him. The closed road, for one. And all the attention the Bible-thumpers had paid him. One of the beauties of the road was its anonymity. The Bible-thumpers would likely be five states away by morning. Still, though, they\u2019d seen his face. They knew his rig. If they were somehow found and questioned later\u00a0\u2026 A voice in the back of his head squawked: Abort-abort-abort .But the closer she got, the more his entire body coursed with electricity and it seemed like his nerve endings were firing, shooting sparks. It had been so long, and he was ready to explode. He thought of that red-haired girl calling him a loser. Those Bible-thumpers mocking him. His perfect, perfect plan and preparation.He almost felt sorry for the lot lizard because she had no idea what kind of hell she was getting herself into.\u00a0Copyright \u00a9 2013 by C. J. Box --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0770435629", "title": "Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle", "author": "The Countess of Carnarvon", "description": "Review A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER \u201cAlmina was a woman of great charm and courage.\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cThe more interesting and entertaining book is Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle . Written by the castle's current countess, Lady Fiona Carnarvon, the Eighth Countess of Carnarvon and great-granddaughter-in-law of Lady Almina, the book is a fascinating look at the woman of the house who turned her castle into a hospital for wounded British soldiers returning from World War I. (It corresponds perfectly with this season's war story line on Downton Abbey .)\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cGives the juicy backstory behind last year's Emmy-winning 'Masterpiece Theater' drama.\u201d \u2014 New York Times \u201cIf you can\u2019t wait for the new season of \u2018Downton Abbey\u2019...this one\u2019s for you....a revealing portrait of the changing times.\u201d \u2014 New York Post \u201c[A] fascinating insight into how the seriously rich once lived.\u201d \u2014 Newsweek Daily Beast \u201cThe present Lady Carnarvon, who tapped the family archives for her comprehensive research, dramatically captures the estate during the pre-war and war years, and paints a compelling...portrait of Lady Almina.\u201d \u2014 Newark Star-Ledger About the Author FIONA , New York Times bestselling author and the 8th Countness of CARNARVON, married Geordie, the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, in 1999, and\u00a0aceded to\u00a0Highclere ten years ago upon the death of Geordie's father.\u00a0Highclere has become one of the most famous houses in England as the location for the PBS series Downton Abbey. She is also the author of the companion piece, Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PrologueThis is a book about an extraordinary woman called Almina Carnarvon, the family into which she married, the Castle that became her home, the people who worked there, and the transformation of the Castle when it became a hospital for wounded soldiers during the First World War.It is not a history, although it is set against the exuberance of the Edwardian period, the sombre gravity of the Great War and the early years of recovery after the conflict.It is neither a biography nor a work of fi ction, but places characters in historical settings, as identifi ed from letters, diaries, visitor books and household accounts written at the time.Almina Carnarvon was an enormously wealthy heiress, the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild. She was contracted in marriage to the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, a key player in Edwardian society in Britain. His interests were many and eclectic. He loved books and travel and pursued every opportunity to explore the technologies that were transforming his age. Most famously he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun with Howard Carter.Almina was an unbelievably generous woman in spirit and with her money. She was a guest at some of the greatest royal pageants, until\u2014as it did for so many people\u2014the\u00a0First World War transformed her life, involving her in running hospitals instead of great house parties and showing her to be an adept nurse and skilled healer.Highclere Castle is still home to the Earls of Carnarvon. Via its television alter ego, Downton Abbey, it is known to millions of people as the setting for a drama that has thrilled viewers in more than a hundred countries around the world.\u00a0Living here for the past twelve years, I have come to know the bones and stones of the Castle. My research has revealed some of the stories of the fascinating people who lived here, but there is so much more. My journey has just started.The Countess of Carnarvon Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.66}, {"asin": "0970350430", "title": "The Mirror Looks Back", "author": null, "description": "Review This collection is well worth a look from anyone who appreciates the art of poetry practiced at a high level. -- Writer's Digest 2001 Self Published Book Awards From the Publisher From a poetry judge at Writer's Digest...'This is an excellent collection of poetry written by ten women with superb poetic voices. The title reflects the introspective theme of the book and is set up well by the cover design, cover page and literary quotes, and supported by the fine quality of personal glimpses into these poets' lives. The reader is privileged to share the view in these reflections... it has been produced by poets who are obviously accomplished writers comfortable with their voices and willing to share their visions...a wonderful book.' Lynne Nelsen's touching poem 'The Quilted Schnauzer' is one that dog owners (and anyone who has ever loved a dog) will identify with. Her 'My September 11th Hero' is a remarkable poem about a special young man. And more... Peggy Goetz' vivid word pictures of \"Svetla\" and \"Tio\" will give you insight into worlds you've never known. Her poem \"In the Attic Heart\" will give you a chill. And more.... Mary Marsicano's never-to-be-forgotten poems 'Every Inch New Yorkers' and 'Conversation with the Towers' take the reader with her to Ground Zero, where she found herself on the morning of September 11th. 'A Grandmother's Mirror' speaks about the special joy that transcends generations. And more... Dolly Hawkin's poem 'Reunion,' describing unidentified relatives in an old family album is a reminder to all of us of the importance of identifying family treasures. 'Rim Thoughts' is a majestic nature poem. And more... Diane Belleville's creative word picture allows readers to imagine what it would be like if Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King would be able to discuss the macabre together in 'Artists Time Travel Cafe.' 'Hope I Die Before I Get Old' will strike a note with anyone over thirty. And more... Bonnie Gary's vision of an Alaskan glacier, captured in her poem 'Arctic Blues' will put you on the ship beside her. 'Storm' shows another chilling facet of September 11. And more... Ann Malokas' collection of poetry includes a reflection on that first cup of coffee in the morning and a poem which reflects 'It's never long enough, the life of one we love.' And more... Judy Roney's touching family portraits include 'My Boy' and 'Jeni.' 'Tennessee Memories' is a remarkable piece which offers a fascinating closeup of growing up in Tennessee. And more... Diane Truswell's poem 'If We Hide Our Faces' asks a thought-provoking question which deserves an answer. You'll never think of beauty in exactly the same way once you've read 'Beautiful People.' And more.... Mary Kling's 'Puzzle' is a commentary on life and how pieces can be rearranged. 'Who Will Listen' reflects on the stories we all have inside. And more..... About the Author THE SKYWRITERS\u0092 MIRROR REVEALS ... DIANE BELLEVILLE, a woman whose mirror experiences reflect the fun house mirrors. Some days she's fat, wrinkled, stressed, worried looking. Some days she's curvy, has laugh lines and crows feet and looks happy and content. BONNIE GARY, who sees the mirrors in her life form a vast prism reflecting a tapestry of diverse women; each one aiding in the journey. Her wish is that when the last prism is in place, and she sees the other side, she'll be able to say, 'Job Well Done.' PEGGY GOETZ, who sees the mirror as a lens looking at the world. She thinks that who we are is reflected in everything we see. DOLLY HAWKINS, who sees the structure of her poetry, and of the homes she designs, as quite similar, both being elemental and familiar. Her mirror reflects a life spent in introspection, while eating dark chocolates. MARY KLING, who smiles youthfully into the truth-mirror, is amazed to see a face etched with five decades of memories and dreams. The mirror penetrates and reveals all layers, reflects the obvious and the obscure. She winks and whirl-steps into the day. ANN MALOKAS, who has covered all of her mirrors in kicky plaids and paisleys. In a reckless search for inner beauty, she has succumbed to an attitude tuck and an outlook lift, ever on the prowl for good words and good works to keep spirit in fighting trim. MARY MARSICANO, who writes so that the reader might see that which is revealed when the mirror looks back. Primarily she writes because there are so many stories begging to be told. LYNNE NELSEN, who favors the mirrors of nature - reflections from a drop of dew, a small lake, eyes of a loved one, tears of a stranger - connecting her to the past and present like nothing else. JUDY RONEY, who sees: The past - a little girl, a mother, and a wife. The present - a courageous woman looking back at her now. The future - discovering possibilities as she looks forward to the next half century. DIANE TRUSWELL, who tends to see only the good in her mirror, though sometimes she is forced to confront camera images that do not flatter or lie. She longs for more mirrors than cameras in life. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PHOENIX Poised for flight she takes to the air glides on currents updrafts bobs and weaves tries her wings discovers strings she\u0092s a kite not a bird far below he controls her. -- Diane Belleville AGELESS Old man sits by big oak tree lonely heartsick rejected dejected Little boy runs by stops short looks at old man curiously Little boy asks what\u0092s wrong Old man replies 'Nothing just old older than this tree' Little boy takes old man\u0092s hand trembling unsteady unsure cold Old man stands they walk the path to each others dreams -- Bonnie Gary PAINTED LADIES They flew in one day, the painted ladies, an animated bouquet thousands of hundreds of them twirling like autumn leaves in a silent storm plitting now softly against my window as I pulled over to the roadside. Stopped by a butterfly cloud. -- Peggy Goetz BOOMER Bald guy, gray suit, glasses waits patiently for the light in black 2001 Beetle, polished one tall silk sunflower in the vase painted plastic hula girl in green cellophane skirt on the dash sways to In a Gadda Da Vida  booming from surround sound stereo. In his mind, he's made it back there. Not even close. -- Dolly Hawkins CONVERSATION I ask a question you answer  happy to share your experience your thoughts your wisdom then your silence you\u0092ve finished I reflect on your words question more you add detail elaborate I invite you to explain you answer smile silence again then you ask is there anything else  you\u0092d like to know? -- Mary Kling SIX Big bad men have stolen Mom, a child's nightmare come to life. Death took mom. Big bad men snatched thought of her. On September 11, 2001 big bad men buried fresh personal loss under broken lives, crushed futures. Big bad men took away my time to cry to remember. I can't see Mom\u0092s face, can't hear her story, can't feel her presence. Big bad men have stolen Mom. The dark is shivery. -- Ann Malokas Excerpt from EVERY INCH NEW YORKERS I will remember them as I last saw them at sunset from the bow of the Staten Island Ferry I will remember them as the magnificent symbols of freedom dreams of a free world blazing columns of copper and bronze reminding me of what is possible why I came to New York why I stay in New York All my dreams rising as they rise  standing tall standing proud.  Every Inch New Yorkers -- Mary Marsicano, September 11, 2001 Excerpt from EVENING SYMPHONY Luna marks time, while she grants autonomy to her symphony. With a hoot and a blink, the owl swoops  for his supper. Luna nods to the evensong finale as mist whispers across her face.  My soaring spirit basks in her afterglow -- Lynne Nelsen Excerpt from AUTUMN'S QUILT The morning sun exposes A patchwork of splattered paint Brown, yellow, red, and orange Blanketing the mountain range Gray rocks, mountain laurel, and Boulders secure the boundaries Of this colorful patchwork quilt This model of fall grandeur The ball begins  A kaleidoscope of changing colors Shadows and light slow dance across  Ridges as the sun creeps west -- Judy Roney GREAT EGRET graceful catatonic capturer in mirrored marsh statue still serene stalker silent startles swift assault stab  indifferent precision stab stab stab gores beyond lifeless stabs again triumphantly gulps prey a single swallow -- Diane Truswell Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Poetry"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "\u2014"}], "target_asin": "1560025018"}
{"user_id": "AH2UA3QMLSKJK667AIILI4GRZMKA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1250189969", "title": "The Shadows Between Us", "author": "Tricia Levenseller", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 9 Up\u2014Lady Alessandra Stathos aims to woo the Shadow King, marry him, and then kill him to take the kingdom for herself. Alessandra is no stranger to murder\u2014in the opening of the book she admits to killing her first love after he rejects her\u2014and shows no remorse for what she has done. She has all the details thought out regarding how she can gain the king's attention, make him fall in love with her, and carry out her plan. However, she does not anticipate enjoying the king's company, helping protect him from assassination attempts, or having to work around the shadows and rules that surround him. Alessandra is hardly likable\u2014she is cunning and deceitful, and she loves to toy with others\u2014yet readers will root for her. The ending ties up a bit too quickly and predictably, but this is a satisfying and engaging tale. VERDICT Hand this fantasy to readers who want a fun read with villains as the stars.\u2014Megan Huenemann, Norris High School, Firth, NE Review \" The Shadows Between Us is my favorite kind of fantasy: dark, mesmerizing, and completely addictive. With a gripping mystery and layered characters, it's a glittering tale of love and the pursuit of power. Put simply: it's the Slytherin romance we've all been waiting for.\" \u2015Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Stalking Jack the Ripper \u201cTricia Levenseller\u2019s latest, The Shadows Between Us, is a decadent and wickedly addictive fantasy, full of schemes and court intrigue, and delightful descriptions of food, which I am always a fan of.\u201d \u2015Kendare Blake, #1 New York Times\u2013bestselling author of the Three Dark Crowns series\u201cA wickedly fun romp with corsets and jeweled daggers, Levenseller drops us into a competitive royal court, led there by Alessandra, an unapologetically ruthless and self-confident courtier who aims to overthrow the Shadow King and become queen. The king\u2019s mysterious abilities and dark secrets complicate her passion to rule, all building to a sizzling, unbidden romance. The Shadows Between Us will heat up the page\u2015and your heart.\u201d \u2015Emily R. King, author of The Hundredth Queen series\"A viciously satisfying romance featuring two well-matched opponents.\" \u2015 Booklist Praise for Tricia Levenseller: \"One of my favourite YA books ever. The action! The world-building! The voice! This book kicks so much ass.\" -- Cale Dietrich, author of The Love Interest, on Warrior of the Wild \"Rasmira's quest is thrilling, her emotional journey compelling; this adventure sings.\" -- Booklist on Warrior of the Wild \"This high-octane novel is filled with mythical creatures and showcases a heroine who wants to be a warrior, a woman, and a leader.\" -- School Library Journal, on Warrior of the Wild \"The real gratification lies in Rasmira\u2019s transformation from broken, betrayed, girl to resourceful, confident victor. Her final clash with the god is heart pounding, and her triumph in front of her village and father is satisfyingly righteous.\" -- The Bulletin for the Center for Children's Books, on Warrior of the Wild \"Levenseller has created a formidable female character who can take care of herself as she makes some hard decisions.\u201d \u2015 School Library Journal on Daughter of a Pirate King \u201c[Levenseller\u2019s] words will pull you in, and there's no escaping them.\" \u2015Charlie N. Holmberg, author of The Paper Magician Series, on Daughter of the Siren Queen \u201cWith a cunning plot, robust writing, and complicated characters, any reader will enjoy being manipulated in Levenseller's capable hands.\u201d \u2015Anna Banks, author of the New York Times Bestseller Of Triton, on Daughter of the Pirate King About the Author Tricia Levenseller , New York Times -bestselling author of several YA fantasy novels, including Daughter of the Pirate King and The Shadows Between Us, grew up in Oregon, where she spent her childhood climbing trees and playing make believe. She now lives in Utah with her bossy dog, Rosy, where she writes full time. When she\u2019s not writing or reading, Tricia enjoys putting together jigsaw puzzles, playing Overwatch and Sea of Thieves on her Xbox, and finding tasty restaurants to frequent. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 10.07}, {"asin": "1733613005", "title": "A Walk with Cooper (Cooper Book)", "author": "Debbie Gonzalez", "description": "Review Reviewed by\u00a0Emily-Jane Hills Orford\u00a0for Readers' Favorite \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50Through the eyes of a dog, life is full of simple pleasures: ...Debbie Gonzalez's picture book story, A Walk With Cooper, is a charming story that will appeal to young readers as they snuggle up next to their favorite person, be it Mommy, Daddy, Grandma or Grandpa. With its bright and cheery illustrations and simple language, this book makes a great learning-to-read, early reader...Full review on readersfavorite.com About the Author Debbie Gonzalez is the proud mama of Cooper. After years of service to families in crisis, Debbie finds happiness being in the moment. Time spent with Cooper and her husband inspire her to share comfort with others. They reside in the Greater NYC area.Kate Fallahee has always had a strong passion for drawing. She currently works as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. Kate loves bringing her illustrations to life through use of color, expression, and movement.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1534439412", "title": "Winterwood", "author": "Shea Ernshaw", "description": "Review Kirkus Reviews \"Falls Biggest YA Books of 2019\" B&N Teen Blog \"Most Anticipated Fantasy YA of 2019\" B&N Teen Blog \"10 of the Biggest Fall Fantasies\" B&N Teen Blog \"Our Most Anticipated Sophomore Novels of 2019\" B&N Teen Blog \"Our Most Anticipated Sophomore Novels of 2019\" \"A delectably immersive, eerie experience.\" -- Kirkus \"A spellbinding tale of witchery, deadly secrets, and woods that hold grudges. Winterwood is immersive, atmospheric, and bewitching. -- Stephanie Garber , #1 New York Times & international bestselling author ofthe Caraval series . \" Winterwood casts a deliciously dark spell with a rich lineage of witches, secretive boys, and a sinister forest that will pull in any reader and never let them go.\" -- Megan Shepherd, New York Times bestselling author of Grim Lovelies \" Winterwood casts a deliciously dark spell with a rich lineage of witches, secretive boys, and a sinister forest that will pull in any reader and never let them go.\" -- Megan Shepherd, New York Times bestselling author of Grim Lovelies \u201cShea Ernshaw spins yet another haunting tale in Winterwood . Mythic prose and atmospheric storytelling will leave readers spellbound and hungry for more of Ernshaw\u2018s witchy worlds.\" --Adrienne Young, New York Time s bestselling author of Sky in the Deep . \u201cThe beauty and mystery of the natural world infuse every moment in this lush, spellbinding story that weaves romance with witchcraf t \u2014a seductive , lyrical tale of lost boys, old legends and haunted woods.\u201d \u2013Lexa Hillyer, author of Spindle Fire \"Lyrical , magical and mysterious, Winterwood left me intoxicated, dancing beneath an endless moon.\" -- Dawn Kurtagich, author of Teeth in the Mist \"Ernshaw weaves an irresistible spell, entwining nature, romance, and magic through a lyrical text.\" -- Booklist \"A vivid fantasy world and a dark, thrilling atmosphere that drives the biting cold of Winterwood deep into readers\u2019 bones.\" --Publishers Weekly \"A dynamic thriller for fans of paranormal fiction.\" -- SLJ About the Author Shea Ernshaw is the author of A History of Wild Places , the New York Times bestseller The Wicked Deep , Winterwood , and A Wilderness of Stars . She is the winner of the 2019 Oregon Book Award. She lives in a small mountain town in Oregon and is happiest when lost in a good book, lost in the woods, or writing her next novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1: Nora NORA  N ever waste a full moon, Nora, even in winter , my grandmother used to say. We\u2019d wander up the Black River under a midnight sky, following the constellations above us like a map I could trace with my fingertips\u2014imprints of stardust on my skin. She would hum a melody from deep within her belly, gliding sure-footed across the frozen river to the other side. Can you hear it? she\u2019d ask. The moon is whispering your secrets. It knows your darkest thoughts. My grandmother was like that\u2014strange and beautiful, with stories resting just behind her eyelids. Stories about moonlight and riddles and catastrophes. Dreadful tales. But bright, cheery ones too. Walking beside her, I mirrored each step she took into the wilderness, in awe of how swiftly she avoided stinging nettles and poison buckthorns. How her hands traced the bark of every tree we passed, knowing its age just by touch. She was a wonder\u2014her chin always tilted to the sky, craving the anemic glow of moonlight against her olive skin, a storm always brewing along her edges. But tonight, I walk without her, chasing that same moon up the same dark, frozen river\u2014hunting for lost things inside the cold, mournful forest. Tree limbs sag and drip overhead. An owl hoots from a nearby spruce. And Fin and I slog deeper into the mountains, his wolf tail slashing above him, nose to the air, tracking some unknown scent to the far side of the riverbank. Two weeks have passed since the storm blew over Jackjaw Lake. Two weeks since the snow fell and blocked the only road out of the mountains. Two weeks since the electricity popped and died. And two weeks since a boy from the camp across the lake went missing. A boy whose name I don\u2019t even know. A boy who ran away or got lost or simply vanished like the low morning fog that rises up from the lake during autumn rainstorms. Who crept from his bunk inside one of the camp cabins and never returned. A victim of the winter cold. Of madness or desperation. Of these mountains that have a way of getting inside your head\u2014playing tricks on those who dare to walk among the pines long after the sun has set. These woods are wild and rugged and unkind. They cannot be trusted. Yet, this is where I walk: deep into the mountains. Where no others dare to go. Because I am more darkness than girl. More winter shadows than August sunlight. We are the daughters of the wood , my grandmother would whisper. So I push farther up the shore of the Black River, following the map made by the stars, just like she taught me. Just like all Walkers before me. Until I reach the place . The place where the line of trees breaks open to my right, where two steep ridges come together to form a narrow passage into a strange, dark forest to the east\u2014a forest that is much older than the pines along the Black River. Trees that are bound in and closed off and separate from the rest. The Wicker Woods. A mound of rocks stands guard ahead of me: flat stones pulled up from the riverbed and stacked four feet high beside the entrance to the wood. It\u2019s a warning. A sign to turn back. Only the foolish enter here. Miners who panned for gold along the riverbank built the cairn to steer away those who would come later, those who might wander into this swath of land, unaware of the cruel dark that awaited them. The rocks that mark the entrance have never toppled, never collapsed under the weight of snow or rain or autumn winds. This is the border. Only enter under a full moon , Grandma cautioned, eyes like watery pools dewing at the edges. Inside this hallowed wood, I will find lost items, but only beneath a full moon\u2014when the forest sleeps, when the pale glow of moonlight lulls it into slumber\u2014can I slip through unnoticed. Unharmed. A sleeping forest will allow safe passage. But if it wakes, be prepared to run. Each month, when the swollen moon rises in the sky, I enter the Wicker Woods in search of lost things hidden among the greening branches and tucked at the base of trees. Lost sunglasses, rubber flip-flops, cheap plastic earrings in the shape of watermelons and unicorns and crescent moons. Toe rings and promise rings given to girls by lovesick boys. The things that are lost at Jackjaw Lake in summers past are once again found in the woods. Appearing as if the forest is giving them back. But sometimes, under a particularly lucky full moon, I find items much older\u2014long forgotten things, whose owners fled these mountains a century ago. Silver lockets and silver buttons and silver sewing notions. Toothbrushes made of bone, medicine bottles with labels long since worn away, cowboy boots and tin cans once filled with powdered milk and black coffee grounds. Watch fobs and doorknobs. And from time to time, I even find gold itself: crude coins hammered into a disc, gold nuggets tangled in moss, flakes that catch in my hair. Lost things found. By magic or maleficence, these things appear in the woods. Returned. Fin sniffs the air, hesitant. And I draw in a breath, spinning the thin gold ring around my index finger. A habit. A way to summon the courage of my grandmother, who gave me the ring the night she died. \u201cI am Nora Walker,\u201d I whisper. Let the forest know your name. It had seemed stupid once\u2014to speak aloud to the trees. But after you step into the dark and feel the cold pass through you\u2014the trees swallowing all memory of light\u2014you\u2019ll tell the Wicker Woods all manner of secrets. Stories you\u2019ve kept hidden inside the cage of your chest. Anything to lull the forest\u2014to keep it in slumber. I pinch my eyes closed and step over the threshold, through the line of tall soldier trees standing guard, into the dark of the forest. Into the Wicker Woods. Nothing good lives here. The air is cold and damp, and the dark makes it hard to see anything beyond your toes. But it always feels this way\u2014each time colder and darker than the last. I breathe slowly and move forward, stepping carefully, deliberately, over fallen logs and dewdrop flowers frozen in place. In winter, these woods feel like a fairy tale suspended in time\u2014the princess forgotten, the hero eaten whole by a noble fir goblin. The story ended, but no one remembered to burn the haunted forest to the ground. I duck beneath an archway of thorny twigs and dead cypress vines. Keeping my gaze at my feet, I\u2019m careful to never linger long on a single shadow, a thing skittering just beyond my vision\u2014my mind will only make it worse. Twist it into something with horns and fangs and copper eyes. The dead stir inside this ancient wood. They claw their fingernails along the bark of hemlock trees, they wail up through the limbs, searching for the moonlight\u2014for any sliver of the sky. But there is no light in this place. The Wicker Woods are where old, vengeful things lurk\u2014things much older than time itself. Things you don\u2019t want to meet in the dark. Get in. Get the hell out. Fin follows close at my heels, no longer leading the way\u2014so close his footsteps match mine. Human shadow. Dog shadow. I am a Walker , I remind myself when the thorn of fear begins to wedge itself along my spine, twisting between flesh and bone, prodding me to run. I belong in these trees. Even if I\u2019m not as formidable as my grandmother or as fearless as my mom, the same blood swells through my veins. Black as tar. The blood that gives all Walkers our nightshade, our \u201cshadow side.\u201d The part of us that is different\u2014odd, uncommon. Grandma could slip into other people\u2019s dreams, and Mom can lull wild honeybees into sleep. But on nights like this, venturing into the cruelest part of the forest, I often feel terrifyingly ordinary and I wonder if the trees can sense it too: I am a girl barely able to call herself descended from witches. Barely able to call myself a Walker. Yet, I press forward, squinting through the dark and scanning the exposed roots poking up through the snow, searching for hidden things wedged among the lichen and rocks. Something shiny or sharp-cornered or rusted with time. Something man-made\u2014something that\u2019s value is measured by weight. We pass over a dried creek bed, and the wind changes direction from east to north. The temperature dips. An owl cries in the distance, and Fin stops beside me\u2014nose twitching in the air. I touch his head gently, feeling the quick pace of his breathing. He senses something. I pause and listen for the snapping of branches underfoot, for the sounds of a wolf stalking through the trees, watching us. Hunting. But a moth skims past my shoulder\u2014white wings beating against the cold, flitting toward a sad, spiny-looking hemlock tree, leaving imprints of dust wherever it lands. It looks as if it\u2019s just come through a storm, wings torn at the edges. Shredded. A moth who\u2019s faced death. Who\u2019s seen it up close. My heartbeat sinks into my toes and my eyelashes twitch, certain I\u2019m not seeing it right. Just another trick of the woods. But I know what it is\u2014I\u2019ve seen sketches of them before. I\u2019ve even seen one pressed against the window while my grandmother coughed from her room down the hall, hands clasping the bedsheets. Blood in her throat. A bone moth. The worst kind. The bringer of portents and warnings, of omens that should never be ignored. Of death. My fingers again touch the gold moonstone ring weighted heavy on my finger. Every part of me that had felt brave, had felt the courage of my grandmother pulsing through me, vanishes. I squeeze my eyes closed, then open them again, but the moth is still there. Zigzagging among the trees. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be here,\u201d I whisper to Fin. We need to run. I release my hand from Fin\u2019s head, and my heart scrapes against my ribs. I glance over my shoulder, down the narrow path we followed in. Run, run, run! my heart screams. I take a careful step back, away from the moth, not wanting to make a sound. But the moth circles overhead, bobbing quickly out over the trees\u2014called forth by something. Back into the dark. Relief settles through me\u2014my heart sinking back into my chest\u2014but then Fin breaks away from my side. He darts around a dead tree stump and into the brush, chasing after the moth. \u201cNo!\u201d I shout\u2014 too loud , my voice echoing over the layer of snow and bouncing through the treetops. But Fin doesn\u2019t stop. He tears around a cluster of spiny aspens and vanishes into the dark. Gone. Shit, shit, shit. If it were anything else, a different kind of moth, or another wolf he will chase deep into the snowy mountains only to return home in a day or two, I\u2019d let him go. But a bone moth means something else\u2014something cruel and wicked and bad\u2014so I run after him. I sprint around the clot of trees and follow him into the deepest part of the forest, past elms that grow at odd angles, down steep, jagged terrain I don\u2019t recognize\u2014where my boots slip beneath me, where my hands press against tree trunks to propel me forward, and where each footstep sounds like thunder against the frozen ground. I\u2019m making too much noise. Too loud. The woods will wake. But I don\u2019t slow down; I don\u2019t stop. I lose sight of him beyond two fallen trees, and little stabs of pain cut through me. \u201cFin, please!\u201d I call in a near hush, trying to keep my voice low while the sting of tears presses against my eyes, blurring my vision. Panic leaps into my throat and I want to scream, shout Fin\u2019s name louder, but I bite back the urge. No matter what, I can\u2019t wake the woods, or neither Fin nor I will make it out of here. And then I see him: tail wagging, stopped a few yards away between a grove of hemlocks. My heart presses against my ribs. He\u2019s led us farther into the Wicker Woods than I\u2019ve ever been before. And the moth\u2014frayed body, white wings with holes torn along the edges\u2014flutters among the falling snowflakes, slow and mercurial, as if it were in no great hurry. It moves upward toward the sky, a speck of white among the black canopy of trees, and then vanishes into the dark forest to the north. I step carefully toward Fin and touch his ear to keep him from running after it again. But he bares his teeth, growling. \u201cShhh,\u201d I say softly. His ears shift forward, his breathing quick as he sucks in bursts of air, and a low guttural growl rises up from deep within his chest. Something\u2019s out there. A beast or shadow with hooked claws and grim pinhole eyes. A thing the forest keeps, a thing it hides\u2014something I don\u2019t want to see. My fingers twitch, and dread rises up at the base of my throat. It tastes like ash. I hate this feeling building inside me. This awful fear. I am a Walker. I am the thing whispered about, the thing that conjures goose bumps and nightmares. I swallow and stiffen my jaw into place, taking a step forward. The moth led us here. To something just beyond my vision. I scan the dark, looking for eyes\u2014something blinking out from the trees. But there\u2019s nothing. I shake my head and let out a breath, about to turn back to Fin, when my left foot thuds against something on the ground. Something hard. I squint down at my feet, trying to focus in the dark. A mound of snow. A coat sleeve, I think. The tip of a boot. A thing that doesn\u2019t belong. And then I see. See. Hands. There, lying beneath a dusting of snowfall, in the middle of the Wicker Woods, is a body. Snowflakes have gathered on stiff eyelashes. Eyes shuttered closed like two crescent moons. Pale lips parted open, waiting for the crows. Even the air between the trees has gone still, a tomb, as if the body is an offering that shouldn\u2019t be disturbed. I blink down at the corpse and a second passes, followed by another, my heart clawing silently upward into my windpipe. But no sound escapes my lips, no cry for help. I stare in stupefied inaction. My mind slows, my ears buzz\u2014an odd crackle crack crack, as if a radio were pressed to my skull. I inch closer and the trees quiver overhead. For a second I wonder if the entire forest might snap at the roots and upend itself\u2014trunks to the sky and treetops to the ground. I\u2019ve seen dead birds in the woods before, even a dead deer with the antlers still attached to the hollowed-out skull. But never anything like this. Never a human body. Fin makes a low whine behind me. But I don\u2019t look back. I don\u2019t take my eyes off the corpse, like it might vanish if I look away. I swallow and crouch down, my knees pressing into the snow. Eyes watering from the cold. But I need to know. Is it him? The boy who went missing from the camp? His face is covered by a dusting of snow, dark hair frozen in place. There are no injuries that I can see. No trauma, no blood. And he hasn\u2019t been here long, or he wouldn\u2019t be here at all. The dead don\u2019t last in the mountains, especially in winter. Birds pick apart what they can before the wolves close in, scattering the bones across miles of terrain, leaving barely an imprint of what once had been. The forest is efficient at death, a swift wiping away. No remains to bury or burn or mourn. A soft wind stirs through the trees, blowing away the snow from his forehead, his cheekbones, his pale lips. And the hairs along the base of my neck prick on end. I lift my hand from the snow, my fingers hovering over his open palm, trembling, curious. I shouldn\u2019t touch him \u2014but I lower my hand anyway. I want to feel the icy skin, the heaviness of death in his limbs. My skin meets his. But his hand isn\u2019t rigid or still. It twitches against my fingertips. Not dead. Still alive. The boy\u2019s eyes flinch open\u2014forest green, gray green, alive-green. He coughs at the same moment his fingers close around mine, gripping tightly. I scream\u2014a strangled sound, swallowed by the trees\u2014but Fin immediately springs up next to me, tail raised, nose absorbing the boy\u2019s newly alive scent. I yank my arm away and try to stand, to scramble back, but my legs stumble beneath me and I fall backward onto the snow. Run! my spiking heartbeat yells. But before I can push myself up, the boy is rolling onto his side, coughing again, touching his face with his hands. Trying to breathe. Alive. Not dead. Gasping for air, warm skin, grabbing my hand, kind-of-alive. My throat goes dry and my eyes refuse to blink. I\u2019m certain he\u2019s not real. But he draws in deep, measured breaths between each cough, as if his lungs were full of water. I sling my backpack off one shoulder and reach inside for the canteen of hot juniper tea. It will save your life if you ever get lost , my grandmother would say. You can live off juniper tea for weeks. I hold the canteen out to him, and he lowers his hand from his face, his eyes meeting mine. Dark sleepy eyes, deep heavy inhales making his chest rise and fall as if it\u2019s never known air before this moment. He doesn\u2019t take the canteen, and I lean forward, drawing in a breath. \u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d I ask, my voice broken. His gaze roves the ground, then moves up to the sky, like he\u2019s searching for the answer\u2014his name lost somewhere in the woods. Taken from him. Snatched while he slept. His eyes settle back on me. \u201cOliver Huntsman.\u201d \u201cAre you from the boys\u2019 camp?\u201d An icy wind sails over us, kicking up a layer of snow. His mouth opens, searching for the words, and then he nods. I found him. The Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys is not an elite facility, not a place where the wealthy send their sons. It\u2019s a meager collection of cabins, a mess hall, and several neglected administration buildings\u2014most of which were once the homes of early miners who panned the Black River for gold. Now it\u2019s a place where desperate parents send their headstrong boys to have their minds and hearts reshaped, to turn them into docile, obedient sons. The worst come here, the ones who have used up their last chances, their last I\u2019m sorry s, their last detentions or visits to the principal\u2019s office. They come and they go. Each season a new batch\u2014except for the few who spend their entire high school years at the camp. They learn how to survive in the woods, to make fire from flint, to sleep in the cold under the stars, to behave. Two weeks earlier, the morning after the snowstorm had rolled down from the mountains, I woke to find my house draped in snow. Ice coated the windows, the roof moaned from the weight, and the walls bowed inward as if nails were being pushed free from the wood. The radio had said we\u2019d get twelve to eighteen inches of snow. We got nearly four feet\u2014in a single night. I crawled from bed, the cold leeching up from the floorboards, and went outside into the snow. The landscape had changed overnight. I walked down to the lake\u2019s edge and found the forest dripping in white marshmallow fluff. But it wasn\u2019t quiet and still like most winter mornings. Voices echoed across the frozen lake, coming from the boys\u2019 camp. They shouted up into the trees. They stomped around in their heavy snow boots and sent birds screeching unhappily into the bleak morning sky. \u201cMorning!\u201d Old Floyd Perkins called, waving a hand in the air as he trudged up the shore, head bowed away from the blowing wind, shoulders bent and stooped with time and age and gravity. When he reached me, he squinted as if he couldn\u2019t see me clearly\u2014cataracts clouding his already failing vision. \u201cA bad winter,\u201d he said, tilting his gaze upward, soft flakes falling over us. \u201cBut not as bad as some.\u201d Mr. Perkins has lived at Jackjaw Lake most of his life. He knew my grandmother when she was still alive, and he lives at the far south end of the lake in a small cabin beside the boathouse store that he runs during the summer months\u2014renting out canoes and paddleboats and selling ice cream sandwiches to the tourists under the hot, wavy sun. And every morning, he walks the shore of the lake, his gait slow and labored, long arms swinging at his sides, arthritis creaking in his joints. Even in the snow, he makes his morning rounds. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening over at the camp?\u201d I asked. \u201cA boy went missing last night.\u201d He rubbed a knuckled hand across the back of his neck, gray hair poking out from his wool cap. \u201cVanished from his bunk during the storm.\u201d I looked past him up the shore to the camp. A few boys were shoveling snow away from their cabin doorways, while most of the others moved up into the forest, calling out a name I couldn\u2019t make out. \u201cTalked to one of the counselors,\u201d Mr. Perkins continued, nodding grimly, considering the gravity of the situation. \u201cBoy might\u2019ve just run away, made it down the mountain before the snow fell last night.\u201d The wind roiled up from the surface of the frozen lake, and it made me shiver. \u201cBut they\u2019re looking for him up in the woods.\u201d I crossed my arms over my chest and nodded to the trees beyond the camp. \u201cThey have to be sure he didn\u2019t get lost, I suppose.\u201d He raised one thick gray eyebrow, his gaze solemn. \u201cBut if that boy went up into those woods last night, there\u2019s a good chance he won\u2019t make it back out. And they\u2019ll never find him.\u201d I understood what he meant. The snow was deep it continued to fall\u2014any tracks would be long buried by now. And the boy himself might be buried as well. Even Fin would have a hard time tracking his scent in this. \u201cI hope he did run away,\u201d I said. \u201cI hope he made it down the road.\u201d Because I knew the outcome if he hadn\u2019t. Even though the boys at camp learn wilderness skills and how to build snow shelters in tree wells, I doubted any of them could really survive a night out in the cold. During a blizzard. On their own. The lake creaked and snapped along the shore as the ice settled. And Mr. Perkins asked, \u201cYou lose power last night?\u201d He glanced behind me up into the trees, where my home sat hidden in the pines. I nodded. \u201cYou?\u201d \u201cYep,\u201d he answered, then cleared his throat. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a while before that road clears. Before the power\u2019s back on again.\u201d He looked back at me, and the soft squint of his eyes and the wrinkles lining his brow made me think of my grandmother. \u201cWe\u2019re on our own,\u201d he said finally. The only road down the mountain was blocked. And the nearest town of Fir Haven\u2014a forty-five-minute drive\u2014was too far away to walk. We were stuck. Mr. Perkins tipped his head at me, a grave gesture, a certainty that this was going to be another tough winter, before continuing up the edge of the lake toward the marina. Toward the boathouse and his home. I stood listening to the shouts of boys fanning out into the trees, the sky growing dark again, another storm settling over the lake. I knew how ruthless the forest could be, how unforgiving. If a boy was lost out there, he likely wouldn\u2019t survive the night. It\u2019s still dark\u2014the deepest kind of dark. Winter dark. The boy, Oliver Huntsman, follows me through the trees, stumbling over roots, coughing\u2014gasping for air. He might not make it out of the Wicker Woods; he might drop dead in the snow behind me. He stops to lean against a tree, his body trembling, and I walk back to his side and wrap an arm around him. He is taller than I am and broad in the shoulders, but together we continue through the dark. He smells like the forest, like green. And when we reach the border of the Wicker Woods, we step over the threshold and back out into the open. I release my hold on him, and he bends forward, gripping his knees and gasping for air. His lungs make a strange rasp sound with each breath. He\u2019s spent too many nights alone out here, in the forest, in the cold. Where the creeping, crawling sounds of unknowable things rest just out of sight, and fear becomes a voice in the back of his mind\u2014nagging and threading along sleepless thoughts. A person can go mad in these trees. Hatter mad. Beside us, the sound of rushing water beneath the frozen surface of the Black River is both palliative and eerie. Oliver glances up at the night sky, his expression slack, in awe, as if he hasn\u2019t seen the stars in weeks. \u201cWe need to keep moving,\u201d I say. His body shakes, skin pale and muted. I need to get him inside, out of this snow and wind. Or the cold could still kill him. I fold my arm around him again, hand against his ribs where I can feel the rise and fall of each breath, and we march downriver until Jackjaw Lake yawns open ahead of us\u2014frozen solid out to its center. \u201cWhere are we?\u201d he asks, his voice thin, a crisp edge to each word. \u201cWe\u2019re almost to my house,\u201d I tell him. And then because I think maybe he means something more\u2014his memory blotted over\u2014I add, \u201cWe\u2019re back at Jackjaw Lake.\u201d He doesn\u2019t nod and his eyes don\u2019t shimmer with recognition. He has no memory of this place, no idea where he is. \u201cMy house is close,\u201d I add. \u201cI\u2019ll take you back to camp in the morning. Right now, we just need to get you warm.\u201d I\u2019m not sure he\u2019d make it another mile around the lake to the boys\u2019 camp. And the nearest hospital is an hour down a road that\u2019s snowed in. I have no other option but to take him home. His hands tremble, his eyes skipping warily through the trees\u2014as if he sees something in the dark. A trick of shadow and moonlight. But the woods surrounding Jackjaw Lake are safe and docile, not nearly as ancient as the Wicker Woods where I found him. These trees are young, harvested over the years for lumber, and the pines that loom over my home were saplings not long ago\u2014still soft and green at their core. They have limbs that sway with the wind instead of moan and crack; they aren\u2019t old enough to hold grudges or memories. To grow hexes at their roots. Not like inside the Wicker Woods. We reach the row of log cabins that dot the shore, and Fin trots ahead through the snow. \u201cMy house is just there,\u201d I say, nodding up through the trees. Most of the cabins along the shore are summer homes, owned by people who only visit Jackjaw Lake when the weather warms and the lake thaws. But Mom and I have always been year-rounders, just like our ancestors before us. We remain at the lake through all the seasons, even the brutal ones\u2014 especially the brutal ones. Mom dislikes the tourists who come in summer, with their thumping music and fishing poles and beach towels. It grates on her. But the quiet of winter pacifies her\u2014calms her racing, fidgety mind. Our house is at the end of the row, closest to the mountains and the wilds of the forest beyond\u2014tucked back in the woods. Hidden. And tonight, it sits dark, no lights humming inside, no sputtering of electricity through the walls\u2014the power still out since the storm. I stomp the snow from my boots and push open the heavy log door, letting the cold air rush inside. Fin brushes past my legs into the living room, where he plops down on the rug beside the stove and begins chewing the snow from his paws. I drop my pack onto the faded olive-green sofa, its cushions sagging and slumped as if it were sinking into the wood floor. \u201cI\u2019ll start a fire,\u201d I say to Oliver, who still stands shivering in the entryway. Looking like a boy who\u2019s near death. Whose eyes have the hollow stare of someone who can already see the other side, only inches away. My grandmother would know the right herbs, the right words to whisper against his skin to warm the chill deep in his bones. To keep him rooted to this world before he slips into the next. But she\u2019s not here, and I only know the tiniest of remedies, the barest of spells. Not enough to conjure real magic. I clench my jaw, feeling an old familiar ache: the burden of uselessness I carry inside my chest. I can\u2019t help him, and I wish I could. I am a Walker whose grandmother died too soon and whose mother would rather forget what we really are. I am as helpless as a girl by any other name. I stoke the few embers that still glow among the ash, coaxing the fire back to life inside the old stove, while Oliver\u2019s jade-green eyes sweep slowly over the house: the log walls, the rotted wood beams that sag overhead, the faded floral curtains that have the rich scent of sage that\u2019s been burned thousands of times within the house to clear out the old stubborn spirits. But Oliver\u2019s eyes aren\u2019t caught on the curtains or the thick walls. Instead, they flicker over the odd collection of items crowding every shelf and cobwebbed corner of the aged house. Old pocket watches and wire-rimmed glasses, hundreds of silver buttons in glass jars, delicately carved silver spoons, and silver candlesticks with wax still hardened at the base. An ornate gold-rimmed jewelry box with only dust kept safely inside. All the things that we\u2019ve found inside the Wicker Woods over the years, the things we didn\u2019t sell down in Fir Haven to a man named Leon who owns a rare antique shop. These are the things that mean something\u2014that I can\u2019t part with. The ones that hide memories inside them, the stories they tell when you hold them in your palm. Just like most of the Walker women before me, I am a finder of lost things. And standing in the entryway is a boy named Oliver Huntsman. My latest found item. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "1733613005", "title": "A Walk with Cooper (Cooper Book)", "author": "Debbie Gonzalez", "description": "Review Reviewed by\u00a0Emily-Jane Hills Orford\u00a0for Readers' Favorite \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50Through the eyes of a dog, life is full of simple pleasures: ...Debbie Gonzalez's picture book story, A Walk With Cooper, is a charming story that will appeal to young readers as they snuggle up next to their favorite person, be it Mommy, Daddy, Grandma or Grandpa. With its bright and cheery illustrations and simple language, this book makes a great learning-to-read, early reader...Full review on readersfavorite.com About the Author Debbie Gonzalez is the proud mama of Cooper. After years of service to families in crisis, Debbie finds happiness being in the moment. Time spent with Cooper and her husband inspire her to share comfort with others. They reside in the Greater NYC area.Kate Fallahee has always had a strong passion for drawing. She currently works as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. Kate loves bringing her illustrations to life through use of color, expression, and movement.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1250189969", "title": "The Shadows Between Us", "author": "Tricia Levenseller", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 9 Up\u2014Lady Alessandra Stathos aims to woo the Shadow King, marry him, and then kill him to take the kingdom for herself. Alessandra is no stranger to murder\u2014in the opening of the book she admits to killing her first love after he rejects her\u2014and shows no remorse for what she has done. She has all the details thought out regarding how she can gain the king's attention, make him fall in love with her, and carry out her plan. However, she does not anticipate enjoying the king's company, helping protect him from assassination attempts, or having to work around the shadows and rules that surround him. Alessandra is hardly likable\u2014she is cunning and deceitful, and she loves to toy with others\u2014yet readers will root for her. The ending ties up a bit too quickly and predictably, but this is a satisfying and engaging tale. VERDICT Hand this fantasy to readers who want a fun read with villains as the stars.\u2014Megan Huenemann, Norris High School, Firth, NE Review \" The Shadows Between Us is my favorite kind of fantasy: dark, mesmerizing, and completely addictive. With a gripping mystery and layered characters, it's a glittering tale of love and the pursuit of power. Put simply: it's the Slytherin romance we've all been waiting for.\" \u2015Kerri Maniscalco, #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Stalking Jack the Ripper \u201cTricia Levenseller\u2019s latest, The Shadows Between Us, is a decadent and wickedly addictive fantasy, full of schemes and court intrigue, and delightful descriptions of food, which I am always a fan of.\u201d \u2015Kendare Blake, #1 New York Times\u2013bestselling author of the Three Dark Crowns series\u201cA wickedly fun romp with corsets and jeweled daggers, Levenseller drops us into a competitive royal court, led there by Alessandra, an unapologetically ruthless and self-confident courtier who aims to overthrow the Shadow King and become queen. The king\u2019s mysterious abilities and dark secrets complicate her passion to rule, all building to a sizzling, unbidden romance. The Shadows Between Us will heat up the page\u2015and your heart.\u201d \u2015Emily R. King, author of The Hundredth Queen series\"A viciously satisfying romance featuring two well-matched opponents.\" \u2015 Booklist Praise for Tricia Levenseller: \"One of my favourite YA books ever. The action! The world-building! The voice! This book kicks so much ass.\" -- Cale Dietrich, author of The Love Interest, on Warrior of the Wild \"Rasmira's quest is thrilling, her emotional journey compelling; this adventure sings.\" -- Booklist on Warrior of the Wild \"This high-octane novel is filled with mythical creatures and showcases a heroine who wants to be a warrior, a woman, and a leader.\" -- School Library Journal, on Warrior of the Wild \"The real gratification lies in Rasmira\u2019s transformation from broken, betrayed, girl to resourceful, confident victor. Her final clash with the god is heart pounding, and her triumph in front of her village and father is satisfyingly righteous.\" -- The Bulletin for the Center for Children's Books, on Warrior of the Wild \"Levenseller has created a formidable female character who can take care of herself as she makes some hard decisions.\u201d \u2015 School Library Journal on Daughter of a Pirate King \u201c[Levenseller\u2019s] words will pull you in, and there's no escaping them.\" \u2015Charlie N. Holmberg, author of The Paper Magician Series, on Daughter of the Siren Queen \u201cWith a cunning plot, robust writing, and complicated characters, any reader will enjoy being manipulated in Levenseller's capable hands.\u201d \u2015Anna Banks, author of the New York Times Bestseller Of Triton, on Daughter of the Pirate King About the Author Tricia Levenseller , New York Times -bestselling author of several YA fantasy novels, including Daughter of the Pirate King and The Shadows Between Us, grew up in Oregon, where she spent her childhood climbing trees and playing make believe. She now lives in Utah with her bossy dog, Rosy, where she writes full time. When she\u2019s not writing or reading, Tricia enjoys putting together jigsaw puzzles, playing Overwatch and Sea of Thieves on her Xbox, and finding tasty restaurants to frequent. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 10.07}, {"asin": "1534439412", "title": "Winterwood", "author": "Shea Ernshaw", "description": "Review Kirkus Reviews \"Falls Biggest YA Books of 2019\" B&N Teen Blog \"Most Anticipated Fantasy YA of 2019\" B&N Teen Blog \"10 of the Biggest Fall Fantasies\" B&N Teen Blog \"Our Most Anticipated Sophomore Novels of 2019\" B&N Teen Blog \"Our Most Anticipated Sophomore Novels of 2019\" \"A delectably immersive, eerie experience.\" -- Kirkus \"A spellbinding tale of witchery, deadly secrets, and woods that hold grudges. Winterwood is immersive, atmospheric, and bewitching. -- Stephanie Garber , #1 New York Times & international bestselling author ofthe Caraval series . \" Winterwood casts a deliciously dark spell with a rich lineage of witches, secretive boys, and a sinister forest that will pull in any reader and never let them go.\" -- Megan Shepherd, New York Times bestselling author of Grim Lovelies \" Winterwood casts a deliciously dark spell with a rich lineage of witches, secretive boys, and a sinister forest that will pull in any reader and never let them go.\" -- Megan Shepherd, New York Times bestselling author of Grim Lovelies \u201cShea Ernshaw spins yet another haunting tale in Winterwood . Mythic prose and atmospheric storytelling will leave readers spellbound and hungry for more of Ernshaw\u2018s witchy worlds.\" --Adrienne Young, New York Time s bestselling author of Sky in the Deep . \u201cThe beauty and mystery of the natural world infuse every moment in this lush, spellbinding story that weaves romance with witchcraf t \u2014a seductive , lyrical tale of lost boys, old legends and haunted woods.\u201d \u2013Lexa Hillyer, author of Spindle Fire \"Lyrical , magical and mysterious, Winterwood left me intoxicated, dancing beneath an endless moon.\" -- Dawn Kurtagich, author of Teeth in the Mist \"Ernshaw weaves an irresistible spell, entwining nature, romance, and magic through a lyrical text.\" -- Booklist \"A vivid fantasy world and a dark, thrilling atmosphere that drives the biting cold of Winterwood deep into readers\u2019 bones.\" --Publishers Weekly \"A dynamic thriller for fans of paranormal fiction.\" -- SLJ About the Author Shea Ernshaw is the author of A History of Wild Places , the New York Times bestseller The Wicked Deep , Winterwood , and A Wilderness of Stars . She is the winner of the 2019 Oregon Book Award. She lives in a small mountain town in Oregon and is happiest when lost in a good book, lost in the woods, or writing her next novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1: Nora NORA  N ever waste a full moon, Nora, even in winter , my grandmother used to say. We\u2019d wander up the Black River under a midnight sky, following the constellations above us like a map I could trace with my fingertips\u2014imprints of stardust on my skin. She would hum a melody from deep within her belly, gliding sure-footed across the frozen river to the other side. Can you hear it? she\u2019d ask. The moon is whispering your secrets. It knows your darkest thoughts. My grandmother was like that\u2014strange and beautiful, with stories resting just behind her eyelids. Stories about moonlight and riddles and catastrophes. Dreadful tales. But bright, cheery ones too. Walking beside her, I mirrored each step she took into the wilderness, in awe of how swiftly she avoided stinging nettles and poison buckthorns. How her hands traced the bark of every tree we passed, knowing its age just by touch. She was a wonder\u2014her chin always tilted to the sky, craving the anemic glow of moonlight against her olive skin, a storm always brewing along her edges. But tonight, I walk without her, chasing that same moon up the same dark, frozen river\u2014hunting for lost things inside the cold, mournful forest. Tree limbs sag and drip overhead. An owl hoots from a nearby spruce. And Fin and I slog deeper into the mountains, his wolf tail slashing above him, nose to the air, tracking some unknown scent to the far side of the riverbank. Two weeks have passed since the storm blew over Jackjaw Lake. Two weeks since the snow fell and blocked the only road out of the mountains. Two weeks since the electricity popped and died. And two weeks since a boy from the camp across the lake went missing. A boy whose name I don\u2019t even know. A boy who ran away or got lost or simply vanished like the low morning fog that rises up from the lake during autumn rainstorms. Who crept from his bunk inside one of the camp cabins and never returned. A victim of the winter cold. Of madness or desperation. Of these mountains that have a way of getting inside your head\u2014playing tricks on those who dare to walk among the pines long after the sun has set. These woods are wild and rugged and unkind. They cannot be trusted. Yet, this is where I walk: deep into the mountains. Where no others dare to go. Because I am more darkness than girl. More winter shadows than August sunlight. We are the daughters of the wood , my grandmother would whisper. So I push farther up the shore of the Black River, following the map made by the stars, just like she taught me. Just like all Walkers before me. Until I reach the place . The place where the line of trees breaks open to my right, where two steep ridges come together to form a narrow passage into a strange, dark forest to the east\u2014a forest that is much older than the pines along the Black River. Trees that are bound in and closed off and separate from the rest. The Wicker Woods. A mound of rocks stands guard ahead of me: flat stones pulled up from the riverbed and stacked four feet high beside the entrance to the wood. It\u2019s a warning. A sign to turn back. Only the foolish enter here. Miners who panned for gold along the riverbank built the cairn to steer away those who would come later, those who might wander into this swath of land, unaware of the cruel dark that awaited them. The rocks that mark the entrance have never toppled, never collapsed under the weight of snow or rain or autumn winds. This is the border. Only enter under a full moon , Grandma cautioned, eyes like watery pools dewing at the edges. Inside this hallowed wood, I will find lost items, but only beneath a full moon\u2014when the forest sleeps, when the pale glow of moonlight lulls it into slumber\u2014can I slip through unnoticed. Unharmed. A sleeping forest will allow safe passage. But if it wakes, be prepared to run. Each month, when the swollen moon rises in the sky, I enter the Wicker Woods in search of lost things hidden among the greening branches and tucked at the base of trees. Lost sunglasses, rubber flip-flops, cheap plastic earrings in the shape of watermelons and unicorns and crescent moons. Toe rings and promise rings given to girls by lovesick boys. The things that are lost at Jackjaw Lake in summers past are once again found in the woods. Appearing as if the forest is giving them back. But sometimes, under a particularly lucky full moon, I find items much older\u2014long forgotten things, whose owners fled these mountains a century ago. Silver lockets and silver buttons and silver sewing notions. Toothbrushes made of bone, medicine bottles with labels long since worn away, cowboy boots and tin cans once filled with powdered milk and black coffee grounds. Watch fobs and doorknobs. And from time to time, I even find gold itself: crude coins hammered into a disc, gold nuggets tangled in moss, flakes that catch in my hair. Lost things found. By magic or maleficence, these things appear in the woods. Returned. Fin sniffs the air, hesitant. And I draw in a breath, spinning the thin gold ring around my index finger. A habit. A way to summon the courage of my grandmother, who gave me the ring the night she died. \u201cI am Nora Walker,\u201d I whisper. Let the forest know your name. It had seemed stupid once\u2014to speak aloud to the trees. But after you step into the dark and feel the cold pass through you\u2014the trees swallowing all memory of light\u2014you\u2019ll tell the Wicker Woods all manner of secrets. Stories you\u2019ve kept hidden inside the cage of your chest. Anything to lull the forest\u2014to keep it in slumber. I pinch my eyes closed and step over the threshold, through the line of tall soldier trees standing guard, into the dark of the forest. Into the Wicker Woods. Nothing good lives here. The air is cold and damp, and the dark makes it hard to see anything beyond your toes. But it always feels this way\u2014each time colder and darker than the last. I breathe slowly and move forward, stepping carefully, deliberately, over fallen logs and dewdrop flowers frozen in place. In winter, these woods feel like a fairy tale suspended in time\u2014the princess forgotten, the hero eaten whole by a noble fir goblin. The story ended, but no one remembered to burn the haunted forest to the ground. I duck beneath an archway of thorny twigs and dead cypress vines. Keeping my gaze at my feet, I\u2019m careful to never linger long on a single shadow, a thing skittering just beyond my vision\u2014my mind will only make it worse. Twist it into something with horns and fangs and copper eyes. The dead stir inside this ancient wood. They claw their fingernails along the bark of hemlock trees, they wail up through the limbs, searching for the moonlight\u2014for any sliver of the sky. But there is no light in this place. The Wicker Woods are where old, vengeful things lurk\u2014things much older than time itself. Things you don\u2019t want to meet in the dark. Get in. Get the hell out. Fin follows close at my heels, no longer leading the way\u2014so close his footsteps match mine. Human shadow. Dog shadow. I am a Walker , I remind myself when the thorn of fear begins to wedge itself along my spine, twisting between flesh and bone, prodding me to run. I belong in these trees. Even if I\u2019m not as formidable as my grandmother or as fearless as my mom, the same blood swells through my veins. Black as tar. The blood that gives all Walkers our nightshade, our \u201cshadow side.\u201d The part of us that is different\u2014odd, uncommon. Grandma could slip into other people\u2019s dreams, and Mom can lull wild honeybees into sleep. But on nights like this, venturing into the cruelest part of the forest, I often feel terrifyingly ordinary and I wonder if the trees can sense it too: I am a girl barely able to call herself descended from witches. Barely able to call myself a Walker. Yet, I press forward, squinting through the dark and scanning the exposed roots poking up through the snow, searching for hidden things wedged among the lichen and rocks. Something shiny or sharp-cornered or rusted with time. Something man-made\u2014something that\u2019s value is measured by weight. We pass over a dried creek bed, and the wind changes direction from east to north. The temperature dips. An owl cries in the distance, and Fin stops beside me\u2014nose twitching in the air. I touch his head gently, feeling the quick pace of his breathing. He senses something. I pause and listen for the snapping of branches underfoot, for the sounds of a wolf stalking through the trees, watching us. Hunting. But a moth skims past my shoulder\u2014white wings beating against the cold, flitting toward a sad, spiny-looking hemlock tree, leaving imprints of dust wherever it lands. It looks as if it\u2019s just come through a storm, wings torn at the edges. Shredded. A moth who\u2019s faced death. Who\u2019s seen it up close. My heartbeat sinks into my toes and my eyelashes twitch, certain I\u2019m not seeing it right. Just another trick of the woods. But I know what it is\u2014I\u2019ve seen sketches of them before. I\u2019ve even seen one pressed against the window while my grandmother coughed from her room down the hall, hands clasping the bedsheets. Blood in her throat. A bone moth. The worst kind. The bringer of portents and warnings, of omens that should never be ignored. Of death. My fingers again touch the gold moonstone ring weighted heavy on my finger. Every part of me that had felt brave, had felt the courage of my grandmother pulsing through me, vanishes. I squeeze my eyes closed, then open them again, but the moth is still there. Zigzagging among the trees. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be here,\u201d I whisper to Fin. We need to run. I release my hand from Fin\u2019s head, and my heart scrapes against my ribs. I glance over my shoulder, down the narrow path we followed in. Run, run, run! my heart screams. I take a careful step back, away from the moth, not wanting to make a sound. But the moth circles overhead, bobbing quickly out over the trees\u2014called forth by something. Back into the dark. Relief settles through me\u2014my heart sinking back into my chest\u2014but then Fin breaks away from my side. He darts around a dead tree stump and into the brush, chasing after the moth. \u201cNo!\u201d I shout\u2014 too loud , my voice echoing over the layer of snow and bouncing through the treetops. But Fin doesn\u2019t stop. He tears around a cluster of spiny aspens and vanishes into the dark. Gone. Shit, shit, shit. If it were anything else, a different kind of moth, or another wolf he will chase deep into the snowy mountains only to return home in a day or two, I\u2019d let him go. But a bone moth means something else\u2014something cruel and wicked and bad\u2014so I run after him. I sprint around the clot of trees and follow him into the deepest part of the forest, past elms that grow at odd angles, down steep, jagged terrain I don\u2019t recognize\u2014where my boots slip beneath me, where my hands press against tree trunks to propel me forward, and where each footstep sounds like thunder against the frozen ground. I\u2019m making too much noise. Too loud. The woods will wake. But I don\u2019t slow down; I don\u2019t stop. I lose sight of him beyond two fallen trees, and little stabs of pain cut through me. \u201cFin, please!\u201d I call in a near hush, trying to keep my voice low while the sting of tears presses against my eyes, blurring my vision. Panic leaps into my throat and I want to scream, shout Fin\u2019s name louder, but I bite back the urge. No matter what, I can\u2019t wake the woods, or neither Fin nor I will make it out of here. And then I see him: tail wagging, stopped a few yards away between a grove of hemlocks. My heart presses against my ribs. He\u2019s led us farther into the Wicker Woods than I\u2019ve ever been before. And the moth\u2014frayed body, white wings with holes torn along the edges\u2014flutters among the falling snowflakes, slow and mercurial, as if it were in no great hurry. It moves upward toward the sky, a speck of white among the black canopy of trees, and then vanishes into the dark forest to the north. I step carefully toward Fin and touch his ear to keep him from running after it again. But he bares his teeth, growling. \u201cShhh,\u201d I say softly. His ears shift forward, his breathing quick as he sucks in bursts of air, and a low guttural growl rises up from deep within his chest. Something\u2019s out there. A beast or shadow with hooked claws and grim pinhole eyes. A thing the forest keeps, a thing it hides\u2014something I don\u2019t want to see. My fingers twitch, and dread rises up at the base of my throat. It tastes like ash. I hate this feeling building inside me. This awful fear. I am a Walker. I am the thing whispered about, the thing that conjures goose bumps and nightmares. I swallow and stiffen my jaw into place, taking a step forward. The moth led us here. To something just beyond my vision. I scan the dark, looking for eyes\u2014something blinking out from the trees. But there\u2019s nothing. I shake my head and let out a breath, about to turn back to Fin, when my left foot thuds against something on the ground. Something hard. I squint down at my feet, trying to focus in the dark. A mound of snow. A coat sleeve, I think. The tip of a boot. A thing that doesn\u2019t belong. And then I see. See. Hands. There, lying beneath a dusting of snowfall, in the middle of the Wicker Woods, is a body. Snowflakes have gathered on stiff eyelashes. Eyes shuttered closed like two crescent moons. Pale lips parted open, waiting for the crows. Even the air between the trees has gone still, a tomb, as if the body is an offering that shouldn\u2019t be disturbed. I blink down at the corpse and a second passes, followed by another, my heart clawing silently upward into my windpipe. But no sound escapes my lips, no cry for help. I stare in stupefied inaction. My mind slows, my ears buzz\u2014an odd crackle crack crack, as if a radio were pressed to my skull. I inch closer and the trees quiver overhead. For a second I wonder if the entire forest might snap at the roots and upend itself\u2014trunks to the sky and treetops to the ground. I\u2019ve seen dead birds in the woods before, even a dead deer with the antlers still attached to the hollowed-out skull. But never anything like this. Never a human body. Fin makes a low whine behind me. But I don\u2019t look back. I don\u2019t take my eyes off the corpse, like it might vanish if I look away. I swallow and crouch down, my knees pressing into the snow. Eyes watering from the cold. But I need to know. Is it him? The boy who went missing from the camp? His face is covered by a dusting of snow, dark hair frozen in place. There are no injuries that I can see. No trauma, no blood. And he hasn\u2019t been here long, or he wouldn\u2019t be here at all. The dead don\u2019t last in the mountains, especially in winter. Birds pick apart what they can before the wolves close in, scattering the bones across miles of terrain, leaving barely an imprint of what once had been. The forest is efficient at death, a swift wiping away. No remains to bury or burn or mourn. A soft wind stirs through the trees, blowing away the snow from his forehead, his cheekbones, his pale lips. And the hairs along the base of my neck prick on end. I lift my hand from the snow, my fingers hovering over his open palm, trembling, curious. I shouldn\u2019t touch him \u2014but I lower my hand anyway. I want to feel the icy skin, the heaviness of death in his limbs. My skin meets his. But his hand isn\u2019t rigid or still. It twitches against my fingertips. Not dead. Still alive. The boy\u2019s eyes flinch open\u2014forest green, gray green, alive-green. He coughs at the same moment his fingers close around mine, gripping tightly. I scream\u2014a strangled sound, swallowed by the trees\u2014but Fin immediately springs up next to me, tail raised, nose absorbing the boy\u2019s newly alive scent. I yank my arm away and try to stand, to scramble back, but my legs stumble beneath me and I fall backward onto the snow. Run! my spiking heartbeat yells. But before I can push myself up, the boy is rolling onto his side, coughing again, touching his face with his hands. Trying to breathe. Alive. Not dead. Gasping for air, warm skin, grabbing my hand, kind-of-alive. My throat goes dry and my eyes refuse to blink. I\u2019m certain he\u2019s not real. But he draws in deep, measured breaths between each cough, as if his lungs were full of water. I sling my backpack off one shoulder and reach inside for the canteen of hot juniper tea. It will save your life if you ever get lost , my grandmother would say. You can live off juniper tea for weeks. I hold the canteen out to him, and he lowers his hand from his face, his eyes meeting mine. Dark sleepy eyes, deep heavy inhales making his chest rise and fall as if it\u2019s never known air before this moment. He doesn\u2019t take the canteen, and I lean forward, drawing in a breath. \u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d I ask, my voice broken. His gaze roves the ground, then moves up to the sky, like he\u2019s searching for the answer\u2014his name lost somewhere in the woods. Taken from him. Snatched while he slept. His eyes settle back on me. \u201cOliver Huntsman.\u201d \u201cAre you from the boys\u2019 camp?\u201d An icy wind sails over us, kicking up a layer of snow. His mouth opens, searching for the words, and then he nods. I found him. The Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys is not an elite facility, not a place where the wealthy send their sons. It\u2019s a meager collection of cabins, a mess hall, and several neglected administration buildings\u2014most of which were once the homes of early miners who panned the Black River for gold. Now it\u2019s a place where desperate parents send their headstrong boys to have their minds and hearts reshaped, to turn them into docile, obedient sons. The worst come here, the ones who have used up their last chances, their last I\u2019m sorry s, their last detentions or visits to the principal\u2019s office. They come and they go. Each season a new batch\u2014except for the few who spend their entire high school years at the camp. They learn how to survive in the woods, to make fire from flint, to sleep in the cold under the stars, to behave. Two weeks earlier, the morning after the snowstorm had rolled down from the mountains, I woke to find my house draped in snow. Ice coated the windows, the roof moaned from the weight, and the walls bowed inward as if nails were being pushed free from the wood. The radio had said we\u2019d get twelve to eighteen inches of snow. We got nearly four feet\u2014in a single night. I crawled from bed, the cold leeching up from the floorboards, and went outside into the snow. The landscape had changed overnight. I walked down to the lake\u2019s edge and found the forest dripping in white marshmallow fluff. But it wasn\u2019t quiet and still like most winter mornings. Voices echoed across the frozen lake, coming from the boys\u2019 camp. They shouted up into the trees. They stomped around in their heavy snow boots and sent birds screeching unhappily into the bleak morning sky. \u201cMorning!\u201d Old Floyd Perkins called, waving a hand in the air as he trudged up the shore, head bowed away from the blowing wind, shoulders bent and stooped with time and age and gravity. When he reached me, he squinted as if he couldn\u2019t see me clearly\u2014cataracts clouding his already failing vision. \u201cA bad winter,\u201d he said, tilting his gaze upward, soft flakes falling over us. \u201cBut not as bad as some.\u201d Mr. Perkins has lived at Jackjaw Lake most of his life. He knew my grandmother when she was still alive, and he lives at the far south end of the lake in a small cabin beside the boathouse store that he runs during the summer months\u2014renting out canoes and paddleboats and selling ice cream sandwiches to the tourists under the hot, wavy sun. And every morning, he walks the shore of the lake, his gait slow and labored, long arms swinging at his sides, arthritis creaking in his joints. Even in the snow, he makes his morning rounds. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening over at the camp?\u201d I asked. \u201cA boy went missing last night.\u201d He rubbed a knuckled hand across the back of his neck, gray hair poking out from his wool cap. \u201cVanished from his bunk during the storm.\u201d I looked past him up the shore to the camp. A few boys were shoveling snow away from their cabin doorways, while most of the others moved up into the forest, calling out a name I couldn\u2019t make out. \u201cTalked to one of the counselors,\u201d Mr. Perkins continued, nodding grimly, considering the gravity of the situation. \u201cBoy might\u2019ve just run away, made it down the mountain before the snow fell last night.\u201d The wind roiled up from the surface of the frozen lake, and it made me shiver. \u201cBut they\u2019re looking for him up in the woods.\u201d I crossed my arms over my chest and nodded to the trees beyond the camp. \u201cThey have to be sure he didn\u2019t get lost, I suppose.\u201d He raised one thick gray eyebrow, his gaze solemn. \u201cBut if that boy went up into those woods last night, there\u2019s a good chance he won\u2019t make it back out. And they\u2019ll never find him.\u201d I understood what he meant. The snow was deep it continued to fall\u2014any tracks would be long buried by now. And the boy himself might be buried as well. Even Fin would have a hard time tracking his scent in this. \u201cI hope he did run away,\u201d I said. \u201cI hope he made it down the road.\u201d Because I knew the outcome if he hadn\u2019t. Even though the boys at camp learn wilderness skills and how to build snow shelters in tree wells, I doubted any of them could really survive a night out in the cold. During a blizzard. On their own. The lake creaked and snapped along the shore as the ice settled. And Mr. Perkins asked, \u201cYou lose power last night?\u201d He glanced behind me up into the trees, where my home sat hidden in the pines. I nodded. \u201cYou?\u201d \u201cYep,\u201d he answered, then cleared his throat. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a while before that road clears. Before the power\u2019s back on again.\u201d He looked back at me, and the soft squint of his eyes and the wrinkles lining his brow made me think of my grandmother. \u201cWe\u2019re on our own,\u201d he said finally. The only road down the mountain was blocked. And the nearest town of Fir Haven\u2014a forty-five-minute drive\u2014was too far away to walk. We were stuck. Mr. Perkins tipped his head at me, a grave gesture, a certainty that this was going to be another tough winter, before continuing up the edge of the lake toward the marina. Toward the boathouse and his home. I stood listening to the shouts of boys fanning out into the trees, the sky growing dark again, another storm settling over the lake. I knew how ruthless the forest could be, how unforgiving. If a boy was lost out there, he likely wouldn\u2019t survive the night. It\u2019s still dark\u2014the deepest kind of dark. Winter dark. The boy, Oliver Huntsman, follows me through the trees, stumbling over roots, coughing\u2014gasping for air. He might not make it out of the Wicker Woods; he might drop dead in the snow behind me. He stops to lean against a tree, his body trembling, and I walk back to his side and wrap an arm around him. He is taller than I am and broad in the shoulders, but together we continue through the dark. He smells like the forest, like green. And when we reach the border of the Wicker Woods, we step over the threshold and back out into the open. I release my hold on him, and he bends forward, gripping his knees and gasping for air. His lungs make a strange rasp sound with each breath. He\u2019s spent too many nights alone out here, in the forest, in the cold. Where the creeping, crawling sounds of unknowable things rest just out of sight, and fear becomes a voice in the back of his mind\u2014nagging and threading along sleepless thoughts. A person can go mad in these trees. Hatter mad. Beside us, the sound of rushing water beneath the frozen surface of the Black River is both palliative and eerie. Oliver glances up at the night sky, his expression slack, in awe, as if he hasn\u2019t seen the stars in weeks. \u201cWe need to keep moving,\u201d I say. His body shakes, skin pale and muted. I need to get him inside, out of this snow and wind. Or the cold could still kill him. I fold my arm around him again, hand against his ribs where I can feel the rise and fall of each breath, and we march downriver until Jackjaw Lake yawns open ahead of us\u2014frozen solid out to its center. \u201cWhere are we?\u201d he asks, his voice thin, a crisp edge to each word. \u201cWe\u2019re almost to my house,\u201d I tell him. And then because I think maybe he means something more\u2014his memory blotted over\u2014I add, \u201cWe\u2019re back at Jackjaw Lake.\u201d He doesn\u2019t nod and his eyes don\u2019t shimmer with recognition. He has no memory of this place, no idea where he is. \u201cMy house is close,\u201d I add. \u201cI\u2019ll take you back to camp in the morning. Right now, we just need to get you warm.\u201d I\u2019m not sure he\u2019d make it another mile around the lake to the boys\u2019 camp. And the nearest hospital is an hour down a road that\u2019s snowed in. I have no other option but to take him home. His hands tremble, his eyes skipping warily through the trees\u2014as if he sees something in the dark. A trick of shadow and moonlight. But the woods surrounding Jackjaw Lake are safe and docile, not nearly as ancient as the Wicker Woods where I found him. These trees are young, harvested over the years for lumber, and the pines that loom over my home were saplings not long ago\u2014still soft and green at their core. They have limbs that sway with the wind instead of moan and crack; they aren\u2019t old enough to hold grudges or memories. To grow hexes at their roots. Not like inside the Wicker Woods. We reach the row of log cabins that dot the shore, and Fin trots ahead through the snow. \u201cMy house is just there,\u201d I say, nodding up through the trees. Most of the cabins along the shore are summer homes, owned by people who only visit Jackjaw Lake when the weather warms and the lake thaws. But Mom and I have always been year-rounders, just like our ancestors before us. We remain at the lake through all the seasons, even the brutal ones\u2014 especially the brutal ones. Mom dislikes the tourists who come in summer, with their thumping music and fishing poles and beach towels. It grates on her. But the quiet of winter pacifies her\u2014calms her racing, fidgety mind. Our house is at the end of the row, closest to the mountains and the wilds of the forest beyond\u2014tucked back in the woods. Hidden. And tonight, it sits dark, no lights humming inside, no sputtering of electricity through the walls\u2014the power still out since the storm. I stomp the snow from my boots and push open the heavy log door, letting the cold air rush inside. Fin brushes past my legs into the living room, where he plops down on the rug beside the stove and begins chewing the snow from his paws. I drop my pack onto the faded olive-green sofa, its cushions sagging and slumped as if it were sinking into the wood floor. \u201cI\u2019ll start a fire,\u201d I say to Oliver, who still stands shivering in the entryway. Looking like a boy who\u2019s near death. Whose eyes have the hollow stare of someone who can already see the other side, only inches away. My grandmother would know the right herbs, the right words to whisper against his skin to warm the chill deep in his bones. To keep him rooted to this world before he slips into the next. But she\u2019s not here, and I only know the tiniest of remedies, the barest of spells. Not enough to conjure real magic. I clench my jaw, feeling an old familiar ache: the burden of uselessness I carry inside my chest. I can\u2019t help him, and I wish I could. I am a Walker whose grandmother died too soon and whose mother would rather forget what we really are. I am as helpless as a girl by any other name. I stoke the few embers that still glow among the ash, coaxing the fire back to life inside the old stove, while Oliver\u2019s jade-green eyes sweep slowly over the house: the log walls, the rotted wood beams that sag overhead, the faded floral curtains that have the rich scent of sage that\u2019s been burned thousands of times within the house to clear out the old stubborn spirits. But Oliver\u2019s eyes aren\u2019t caught on the curtains or the thick walls. Instead, they flicker over the odd collection of items crowding every shelf and cobwebbed corner of the aged house. Old pocket watches and wire-rimmed glasses, hundreds of silver buttons in glass jars, delicately carved silver spoons, and silver candlesticks with wax still hardened at the base. An ornate gold-rimmed jewelry box with only dust kept safely inside. All the things that we\u2019ve found inside the Wicker Woods over the years, the things we didn\u2019t sell down in Fir Haven to a man named Leon who owns a rare antique shop. These are the things that mean something\u2014that I can\u2019t part with. The ones that hide memories inside them, the stories they tell when you hold them in your palm. Just like most of the Walker women before me, I am a finder of lost things. And standing in the entryway is a boy named Oliver Huntsman. My latest found item. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "172381489X", "title": "The Dark Wood", "author": "Sydney Mann", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1250168481", "title": "The Girl the Sea Gave Back: A Novel (Sky and Sea, 2)", "author": "Adrienne Young", "description": "Review \"Lyrical prose ... and an evocative atmosphere elevate Young\u2019s tale of war, identity, and fate.\" - Publishers Weekly \"Young\u2019s lyrical writing and lush descriptions make this world of fjords and forest come alive.\" - Culturess\"A fast-paced and fierce atmospheric story with a heavy dose of fate and a light touch of romance.\" - Young Adult Book Central\"Gripping and exquisitely written. The Girl the Sea Gave Back tore at my heart strings until I was completely unraveled. Readers will fall in love with this story, whether they are fans of Sky in the Deep or new to Adrienne Young's breathtaking world.\" - Stephanie Garber, New York Times bestselling author of Caraval \"Eerie and beautiful, The Girl the Sea Gave Back is set in a world so vivid, you can almost touch it. I devoured this story of a lonely, powerful young woman with the ability to change the fate of her world, and the brave young chieftain who must stop her at all costs.\" - Kristen Ciccarelli, bestselling author of The Last Namsara \"Ignore this omen at your own peril--you will love this book! Perfect for fans of The Last Kingdom, it really immersed me in the Viking world that felt so mystical, complex, and fully formed. From the moment we first meet them, Tova and Halvard unravel the complicated threads of family, fate, and destiny.\" - A. C. Gaughen, author of Reign the Earth About the Author Adrienne Young is a foodie with a deep love of history and travel and a shameless addiction to coffee. When she\u2019s not writing, you can find her on her yoga mat, sipping wine over long dinners or disappearing into her favorite art museums. She lives with her documentary filmmaker husband and their four little wildlings in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Sky in the Deep duology and the World of the Narrows series.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.39}, {"asin": "1250168481", "title": "The Girl the Sea Gave Back: A Novel (Sky and Sea, 2)", "author": "Adrienne Young", "description": "Review \"Lyrical prose ... and an evocative atmosphere elevate Young\u2019s tale of war, identity, and fate.\" - Publishers Weekly \"Young\u2019s lyrical writing and lush descriptions make this world of fjords and forest come alive.\" - Culturess\"A fast-paced and fierce atmospheric story with a heavy dose of fate and a light touch of romance.\" - Young Adult Book Central\"Gripping and exquisitely written. The Girl the Sea Gave Back tore at my heart strings until I was completely unraveled. Readers will fall in love with this story, whether they are fans of Sky in the Deep or new to Adrienne Young's breathtaking world.\" - Stephanie Garber, New York Times bestselling author of Caraval \"Eerie and beautiful, The Girl the Sea Gave Back is set in a world so vivid, you can almost touch it. I devoured this story of a lonely, powerful young woman with the ability to change the fate of her world, and the brave young chieftain who must stop her at all costs.\" - Kristen Ciccarelli, bestselling author of The Last Namsara \"Ignore this omen at your own peril--you will love this book! Perfect for fans of The Last Kingdom, it really immersed me in the Viking world that felt so mystical, complex, and fully formed. From the moment we first meet them, Tova and Halvard unravel the complicated threads of family, fate, and destiny.\" - A. C. Gaughen, author of Reign the Earth About the Author Adrienne Young is a foodie with a deep love of history and travel and a shameless addiction to coffee. When she\u2019s not writing, you can find her on her yoga mat, sipping wine over long dinners or disappearing into her favorite art museums. She lives with her documentary filmmaker husband and their four little wildlings in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling Sky in the Deep duology and the World of the Narrows series.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.39}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "172381489X", "title": "The Dark Wood", "author": "Sydney Mann", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "0253214912", "title": "Christian Millenarianism: From the Early Church to Waco", "author": null, "description": "About the Author STEPHEN HUNT is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Reading, England.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Theology"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 24.0}, {"asin": "B0859L4KCQ", "title": "Married to the Don: A Dark Russian Mafia Romance (Kornilov Bratva Duet Book 1)", "author": "Nicole Fox", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1704976561", "title": "Easy Keyboard Songs For Beginners: 60 Fun & Easy To Play Keyboard Songs For Beginners (Easy Keyboard Sheet Music For Beginners)", "author": "Thomas Johnson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.99}], "target_asin": "172381489X"}
{"user_id": "AEZKP6QGKHTCMNWQ5AHQVMIRXXMA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0425265846", "title": "Dressed to Kilt (A Scottish Highlands Mystery)", "author": "Hannah Reed", "description": "Review Praise for the Scottish Highlands Mysteries \u201cReed writes an engaging tale full of belly laughs and white-knuckle moments.\u201d\u2014Jenn McKinlay, New York Times bestselling author of the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries \u00a0 \u201cWill please Scotophiles everywhere.\u201d\u2014Miranda James, New York Times bestselling author of the Cat in the Stacks Mysteries \u00a0 \u201c[Reed] captures the appeal of the Highlands, and features a plucky, determined heroine surrounded by a cast of quirky but believable characters.\u201d \u2014Sheila Connolly, New York Times bestselling author of the County Cork Mysteries \u00a0 \u201cA lively romp through the lush Scottish Highlands, complete with a strong protagonist and quirky supporting characters.\u201d\u2014Open Book Reviews \u00a0 \u201cRemarkable\u2026Reed gives cozy readers a mystery, a likable protagonist, her own view of the Scottish Highlands, plenty of adorable critters, and a sexy guy in a kilt.\u201d\u2014MyShelf.com About the Author Hannah Reed is the national bestselling author of the Scottish Highland Mysteries, including Off Kilter and Hooked on Ewe , and the Queen Bee Mysteries, including Beewitched and Beeline to Trouble. Her own Scottish ancestors were seventeenth- century rabble-rousers who were eventually shipped to the new world, where they settled in the Michigan Upper Peninsula. Hannah has happily traveled back to her homeland several times, and in keeping with family tradition, enjoyed causing mayhem in the Highlands.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0689817517", "title": "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-up", "author": "L. Frank Baum", "description": "Amazon.com Review To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz , master paper engineer Robert Sabuda has created a pop-up version of Dorothy's adventures in Oz that fans will find hard to resist. Modeling his depictions of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the rest after W. W. Denslow's original art, Sabuda adds a third dimension that would have rocked Denslow's--and Baum's--world. A rapidly spinning cyclone actually casts a breeze over the startled reader's face. Glorious red poppies wave seductively in a field. And the Emerald City positively glitters with green, especially when young readers try on the special tinted \"Spectacles for You\" provided in a pocket on the page. The abridged text, provided in minibooklets set onto each page, covers enough basics for the Oz novice, but we recommend a read-aloud of the original, as well, for all the glory and detail of Baum's fantastic tale. Sabuda's homage to the classic is truly spectacular; even purists will gasp in delight at the sight of the humbug wizard floating away in his shiny green, gold, and blue hot-air balloon. This great introduction to the story of Oz doubles as a fun collector's item. (Ages 3 to 7) --Emilie Coulter From School Library Journal Grade 2-5-This showstopping pop-up book celebrates the 100th birthday of The Wizard of Oz in a spectacular fashion; from the twister that spins up dizzyingly on the opening spread to the final \"And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!\" clinch, the array of special effects will wow even blas \"seen it all\" readers. Not only is Sabuda a wizardly paper engineer, able to pull off a bursting ball of flame, a melting witch, and a balloon rocking gently in the breeze, but he also shows a magic touch with pictorial art, creating colored lino-cut figures that strongly recall those of W. W. Denslow. The large central effects open up like stage settings, and are flanked with accordion-folded insets that contain even more pop-ups, along with an abbreviated text closely based on the original. Nor does the razzle-dazzle stop there, as Dorothy's silver shoes, the yellow brick road, and even the Emerald City are coated with shimmering foil, and by donning the included pair of tinted spectacles, readers are treated to a hidden message on one page. Sabuda's homage to an enduring classic captures its timeless sense of wonder, distinctive characters, and the flavor of its melodrama brilliantly. John Peters, New York Public Library Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Gr. 4-up, younger for reading aloud. As Mark Evan Swartz comments in Oz: Before the Rainbow [BKL O 15 00], L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz \"occupies a unique position in the cultural fabric of this country.\" Editor Peter Glassman ( Oz: The Hundredth Anniversary Celebration) calls the story \"quintessentially American.\" Yet it has a universal appeal--which may account for its translation into many different languages. Although children are often first introduced to the Land of Oz by the classic 1939 movie, the original novel and its many sequels have enchanted both young and old over the years. Published for the centennial, several new books commemorate the beloved story. Readers unacquainted with Oz are sure to find a pleasing version; readers who already know the story will find something to delight them all over again.In Oz: The Hundredth Anniversary Celebration, Peter Glassman presents art and words from children's book authors and illustrators who are big fans of Oz and here pay homage to \"the enchanted land that inspired them and helped shape their imaginations.\" The paintings, in each artist's recognizable style, lovingly convey the essence of Oz, making this truly wonderful. Contributions come from Tomie dePaola, who imagines himself going down the yellow brick road instead of Dorothy; Paul O. Zelinsky, who shared the Oz experience with his children; Uri Shulevitz, who escaped from hunger and war during the 1940s in the pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ; Richard Egielski, whose childhood defense against the ghastly flying monkeys was to lie absolutely still in bed; Natalie Babbitt, Peter Sis, Bruce Degen, Lloyd Alexander, and many others. Proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to Reading Is Fundamental (RIF).Then there's Robert Sabuda's extraordinary pop-up version. On the first double-page spread, the fearful cyclone whirls up to loom over the tiny farm house in Kansas; in the next spread, the house stands squarely on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. And so it goes, spread after spread. The story itself is condensed and told on foldout booklets attached to the pages. The standout pop-ups are prints created from cut blocks of linoleum, with sparkling touches of colored foil that add pizzazz. Sabuda's art evokes that of Denslow, including the silver, rather than ruby, slippers, and once again, his mastery of his craft enhances and enchants. A good selection for story hours.Also now available is Henry Holt's reissue of its 1982 version of the book, with artwork by the well-known children's book illustrator Michael Hague. It contains several new pictures and a slightly longer profile of Baum. It's certainly not an essential purchase, but it's a gorgeous edition for collections that don't have the earlier volume.Last, but certainly not least, is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the \"100th Anniversary Edition,\" part of the HarperCollins Books of Wonder imprint. For those who want the look and feel of the 1900 publication, this fills the bill. It's a very handsome facsimile, printed on high-quality paper and containing all of W. W. Denslow's 24 original colorplates and 130 two-color drawings. Long live Dorothy and her stalwart companions. Sally Estes Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Lyman Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, on May 15, 1856. Over the course of his life, Baum raised fancy poultry, sold fireworks, managed an opera house, opened a department store, and an edited a newspaper before finally turning to writing. In 1900, he published his best known book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Eventually he wrote fifty-five novels, including thirteen Oz books, plus four \u201clost\u201d novels, eighty-three short stories, more than two hundred poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings. Baum died on May 6, 1919. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California.Robert Sabuda is one of the most innovative and inventive children's book creators and is known worldwide for his amazing pop-up paper engineering. His books include Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Twelve Days of Christmas, The Night Before Christmas, The Winter's Tale, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, to name but afew, have garnered numerous awards and have made the New York Times bestseller lists on many occasions. He lives in New York City. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0425281280", "title": "Silence Fallen (A Mercy Thompson Novel)", "author": "Patricia Briggs", "description": "Review PRAISE FOR SILENCE FALLEN AND THE MERCY THOMPSON NOVELS \"Patricia Briggs is an incredible writer and Silence Fallen is simply fantastic. I love hanging out with the amazing characters in this series!\"\u2014Nalini Singh, New York Times bestselling author of the Psy-Changeling series\u201cPatricia Briggs never fails to deliver an exciting, magic and fable filled suspense story. Silence Fallen is one of her best.\u201d\u2014Erin Watt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Royals series\u201cI love these books.\u201d\u2014Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author\u00a0\u201cThe best new urban fantasy series I\u2019ve read in years.\u201d\u2014Kelley Armstrong, #1 New York Times bestselling author\u201cIt is always a joy to pick up a new Briggs novel, and she certainly doesn\u2019t disappoint with this latest Mercy Thompson book. . . . the character development is wonderful, not to mention there is plenty of action, humor and magic to satisfy readers\u2019 cravings! Briggs hits another one out of the park!\u201d \u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cPacked with an awesome mix of the supernatural, humor, romance, and action, topping itself off with one wallop of a surprise at the end that will knock you out of your armchair. If you haven\u2019t given this series a try, you\u2019re totally missing out!\u201d \u2014 The Independent (Utah)\u201cSilence Fallen . . . is now my favorite book in the series. There's no question that this series continues to get better with every book.\u201d \u2014Fresh Fiction\u201cBriggs\u2019 Mercy Thompson book series is one of the standard-bearers of the urban-fantasy subgenre.\u201d \u2014 Booklist About the Author Patricia Briggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series and the Alpha and Omega novels. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 Mercy This wasn't the first time chocolate got me in trouble. I died first, so I made cookies. They were popular fare on Pirate night, so I needed to make a lot. Darryl had gotten me a jumbo-sized antique mixing bowl last Christmas that probably could have held the water supply for an elephant for a day. I don't know where he found it. If I ever filled the bowl entirely, I'd have to have one of the werewolves move it. It ate the eighteen cups of flour I dumped into it with room for more. All the while, piratical howls rose up the stairway from the bowels of the basement. \"Jesse-\" Aiden began, raising his voice to carry over an enthusiastic if off-key whistling rendition of \"The Sailor's Hornpipe.\" \"Call me Barbary Belle,\" my stepdaughter, Jesse, reminded him. Aiden might have looked and sounded like he was a boy, but he hadn't been young for a very long time. We had assimilated him, rather than adopted him, as he was centuries older than Adam and me put together. He was still finding some things about modern life difficult to adjust to, like the live-action-role-playing (LARP) aspect of the computer-based pirate game they were playing. \"It only works right if you think of me as a pirate and not your sister,\" Jesse said patiently. Ignoring his response that she wasn't his sister, she continued, \"As long as you call me Jesse-that's who you think of when you interact with me. You have to believe I'm a pirate to make it a proper game. The first step is to call me by my game name-Barbary Belle.\" There was a pause as someone let out a full-throated roar that subsided into a groan of frustration. \"Eat clamshells, you sodding buffoon,\" Ben chortled. His game name was Sodding Bart, but I didn't have to think of him that way because I was dead, anyway. I got out my smaller mixing bowl, the one that had been perfectly adequate until I married into a werewolf pack. I filled it with softened butter, brown sugar, and vanilla. As I mixed them together, I decided that it wasn't that I was a bad pirate, it was that I had miscalculated. By baking sugar-and-chocolate-laden food whenever I died first, I'd succeeded in turning myself into a target. The oven beeped to tell me it was at temperature, and I found all four cookie sheets in the narrow cabinet that they belonged in-a minor miracle. I wasn't the only one who got KP duty in the house, but I seemed to be the only one who could put things in the same place (where they belonged) on a regular basis. The baking pans, in particular, got shoved all sorts of odd places. I had once found one of them in the downstairs bathroom. I didn't ask-but I washed that motherhumper with bleach before I used it to bake on again. \"Motherhumper\" was a word that was catching on in the pack with horrible efficiency after \"Sodding Bart\" Ben had started using it in his pirate role. I wasn't quite sure whether it was a real swearword that no one had thought up yet, one of those swearwords that were real swearwords in Ben's home country of Great Britain (like \"fanny,\" which meant something very different in the UK than it did here), or a replacement swearword like \"darn\" or \"shoot.\" In any case, I'd found myself using it on occasions when \"dang\" wasn't quite strong enough-like finding cookware in bathrooms. I thought I was good to go when I found the baking pans. But when I opened the cupboard where there should have been ten bags of chocolate chips, there were only six. I searched the kitchen and came up with another one (open and half-gone) in the top cupboard behind the spaghetti noodles, which made six and a half, leaner than I liked for a double-quadruple batch, but it would do. What would not do was no eggs. And there were no eggs. I scrounged through the fridge for the second time, checking out the back corners and behind the milk, where things liked to hide. But even though I'd gotten four dozen eggs two days ago, there was not an egg to be had. There were perils in living in the de facto clubhouse of a werewolf pack. Thawing roasts in the fridge required the concealment skills of a WWII French Underground spy working in Nazi headquarters. I hadn't hidden the eggs because, since they were neither sweet nor bleeding, I'd thought they were safe. I'd been wrong. The majority of the egg-and-roast-stealing werewolf pack was currently downstairs, enthralled in games of piracy on the high seas of the computer screen. There was irony in how much they loved the pirate computer game-werewolves are too dense to swim. Coyotes, even coyote shifters like me, can swim just fine-except, apparently, in The Dread Pirate's Booty scenarios, because I'd drowned four times this month. I hadn't drowned this time, though. This time, I'd died with my stepdaughter's knife in my back. Barbary Belle was highly skilled with knives. \"I'm headed to the Stop and Rob,\" I called downstairs. \"Does anyone need anything?\" The store wasn't really called that, of course; it had a perfectly normal name that I couldn't remember. \"Stop and Rob\" was more of a general term for a twenty-four-hour gas station and convenience store, a sobriquet earned in the days when the night-shift clerk had been left on his or her own with a till full of thousands of dollars. Technology-cameras, quick-drop safes that didn't open until daylight, and silent alarms-had made working the night shift safer, but they'd always be Stop and Robs to me. \"Argh,\" said my husband Adam's voice, traveling up the stairs. \"Gold and women and grog!\" He didn't play often, but when he did, he played full throttle and immersed. \"Gold and women and grog!\" echoed a chorus of men's voices. \"Would you listen to them?\" said Mary Jo scornfully. \"Give me a man who knows what to do with what the good Lord gave him instead of these clueless scallywags who run at the first sight of a real woman.\" \"Argh,\" agreed Auriele, while Jesse giggled. \"Swab the decks, ye lubbers, lest you slide in the blood and crack your four-pounders,\" I called. \"And whate'er ye do, don't trust Barbary Belle at your back.\" There was a roar of general agreement, and Jesse giggled again. \"And, Captain Larson,\" I said, addressing Adam-my mate had taken the name from Jack London's The Sea-Wolf-\"you can have gold, and you can have grog. You go after another woman, and you'll be pulling back a stub.\" There was a little silence. \"Argh,\" said Adam with renewed enthusiasm. \"I got me a woman. What do I need with more? The women are for my men!\" \"Argh!\" roared his men. \"Bring us gold, grog, and women!\" \"Men!\" said Auriele, sweet-voiced. \"Bring us a few good men.\" \"Stupidheads,\" growled Honey. \"Die!\" There was a general outcry because, apparently, several someones did. I laughed my way out the door. After a moment's thought, I took Adam's SUV. I was going to have to figure out what to do for a daily driver. My beloved Vanagon Syncro was getting far too many miles put on her, and her transmission was rare and more precious than gold on the secondary market. I'd been driving her ever since my poor Rabbit had been totaled, and the van was starting to need more and more repairs. I'd looked at an '87 Jetta with a blown engine a few days ago. They wanted too much for it, but maybe I'd just have to pony up. The SUV growled the couple of miles to the convenience store that was ten miles closer to home than any other store open at this hour of the night. The clerk was restocking cigarettes and didn't look up as I passed him. I picked up two dozen overpriced eggs and three equally overpriced bags of chocolate chips and set them on the counter. The clerk turned away from the cigarettes, looked at me, and froze. He swallowed hard and looked away-scanning the bar codes on the eggs with a hand that shook so much that he might save me the effort of cracking the shells myself. \"You must be new?\" I suggested, running my ATM card in the reader. He knew who I was without knowing the important things, I thought. I found the limelight disconcerting, but I was slowly getting used to it. My husband was Alpha of the local pack; he'd been a household name in the Tri-Cities since the werewolves first revealed their existence a few years ago. When we'd married, I'd gotten a little of his reflected glory, but after helping to fight a troll on the Cable Bridge a couple of months ago, I had become at least as well-known as Adam. People reacted differently to the reality of werewolves in the world. Sensible people stayed a certain length back. Others were stupidly friendly or not-so-stupidly afraid. The new guy obviously belonged to the latter group. \"Started last week,\" the clerk muttered as he bagged the chocolate chips and eggs as if they might bite him. \"I'm not a werewolf,\" I told him. \"You don't have anything to fear from me. And my husband has put a moratorium on killing gas-station clerks this week.\" The clerk blinked at me. \"None of the pack will hurt you,\" I clarified, reminding myself not to try to be funny around people who were too scared to know I was joking. \"If you have any trouble with a werewolf or something like that, you can call us\"-I found the card holder in my purse and gave him one of the pack's cards, printed on off-white card stock-\"at this number. We'll take care of it if we can.\" We all carried the cards now that we'd (my fault) taken on the task of policing the supernatural community of the Tri-Cities, protecting the human citizens from things that go bump in the night. We'd also been called in to find lost children, dogs, and, once, two calves and their guard llama. Zack had composed a song for that one. I hadn't even known he could play guitar. Sometimes the job of protecting the Tri-Cities was more glamorous than others. The livestock call, in addition to being musically commemorated, had actually been something of a PR coup: photos of werewolves herding small lost calves back home had gone viral on Facebook. The clerk took the card as if it were going to bite him. \"Okay,\" he lied. I couldn't do any better than that, so I left with my cookie-making ingredients. I hopped into the SUV and set the bag on the passenger seat as I backed out of the parking space. Frowning, I wondered if his strong reaction might be due to something that had happened to him-a personal incident. I looked both ways before heading out onto the road. Maybe I should go talk to him again. I was still worrying about the clerk when there was a loud noise that stole my breath. The bag with the eggs in it flew off the seat, and something hit me with a loud bang and a foul smell-and then there was a sharp pain, followed by . . . nothing. I think I woke up several times, for no more than a few minutes that ended abruptly when I moved. I heard people talking, mostly the voices of unfamiliar men, but I couldn\u00d5t understand what they were saying. Magic shimmered and itched. Then a warm breath of spring air drifted through the pain and took it all away. I slept, more tired than I ever remembered being. When I finally roused, awake and aware for real, I couldn't see anything. I might not have been a werewolf, but a shapeshifting coyote could still see okay in very dim light. Either I was blind, or wherever I was had no light at all. My head hurt, my nose hurt, and my left shoulder felt bruised. My mouth was dry and tasted bad, as if I'd gone for a week without brushing my teeth. It felt like I'd just been hit by a troll-though the left-shoulder pain was more of a seat-belt-in-a-car thing. But I couldn't remember . . . even as that thought started to trigger some panic, memories came trickling back. I'd been taking a run to our local Stop and Rob-the same all-night gas station slash convenience store where I'd first met lone and gay werewolf Warren all those years ago. Warren had worked out rather well for the pack . . . I gathered my wandering thoughts and herded them down a track that might do some good. The difficulty I had doing that-and the nasty headache-made me think I might have a concussion. I considered the loud bang and the eggs and realized that it hadn't been the eggs that had exploded and smelled bad, but the SUV's air bags. I was a mechanic. I knew what blown air bags smelled like. I didn't know what odd effect of shock made me think it might have been the eggs. The suddenness of the accident had combined the related events of the groceries' hitting me and the air bag's hitting me into a cause and effect that didn't exist. As my thoughts slowly achieved clarity, I realized that the SUV had been struck from the side, struck at speed to have activated the air bags. With that information, I reevaluated my situation without moving. My face was sore-a separate and lesser pain than the headache-and I diagnosed the situation as my having been hit with an air bag or two that hadn't quite saved me from a concussion or its near cousin. The sore left shoulder wasn't serious, nor was the general ache and horrible weariness. Probably all of my pain was from the accident . . . car wreck, I supposed, because I was pretty sure it hadn't been an accident. The vehicle that hit me hadn't had its headlights on-I would have remembered headlights. And if it had been a real accident, I'd be in the hospital instead of wherever I was. Under the circumstances, I wasn't too badly damaged . . . but that wasn't right. I had a sudden flash of seeing my own rib-but though I was sore, my chest rose and fell without complication. I pushed that memory back, something to be dealt with after I figured out where I was and why. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0451490614", "title": "Bewitched and Betrothed (Witchcraft Mystery)", "author": "Juliet Blackwell", "description": "Review Praise for the New York Times Bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries \u201cBlackwell sits firmly on my list of must-read authors!\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author Victoria Laurie \u201cExtraordinarily entertaining.\u201d\u2014 Suspense Magazine \u201cHard to put down, and wickedly fun.\u201d\u2014MyShelf.com \u201cJuliet Blackwell is a master\u2026Reading the entire series is a pleasure.\u201d\u2014Fresh Fiction \u201cAn excellent blend of mystery, paranormal, and light humor.\u201d\u2014The Romance Readers Connection About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the New York Times bestselling author who writes the Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series. She is also the author of Letters from Paris and The Paris Key . Together with her sister, Juliet wrote the Art Lover's Mystery series. The first in that series, Feint of Art , was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright \u00a9 2019 Juliet Blackwell Chapter One A salty, heavy shroud of fog obscures the night. Frigid waters close over my head. Sparks of silvery moonlight dance on the surface of the bay, calling to me. I flail and kick, struggling to lift myself, to breathe sweet air, my arms and legs numb with cold and exhaustion. The cheerful lights of San Francisco peek through the fog, tantalizingly far away; the island behind me is closer, but gleams and pulsates in the light of the full moon like a living, malevolent thing. The Golden Gate is the third point on the triangle, and I am in the center. A foghorn sounds in a mournful cry. Strong currents wrap around my legs, tugging at my feet, pulling me toward the Golden Gate and out to the vast Pacific Ocean. Lost at sea. Lost forever. I can\u2019t go on. I fear drowning, but remind myself: Witches don\u2019t sink. At least I don\u2019t. I had been in the bay once before and popped up like a cork. But\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. what about now? Icy fingers grip my ankles, drawing me down. The water closes over my head again, and I try to scream. \u201cMistress!\u201d I struggle toward the surface. Fighting, flailing. I have to. I have to. \u201cMistress!\u201d a gravelly voice called again. \u201cAre you all right? Why are you all wet?\u201d I opened my eyes. I was in my own home, in my own bed. Safe. Oscar, my ersatz witch\u2019s familiar\u2014a shape-shifting cross between a gargoyle and a goblin\u2014perched on my brass bedstead, leaning over to peer at me. His fearsome face was upside down and his breath smelled vaguely of cheese. Soaked and shivering, I let out a shaky sigh. I wasn\u2019t sweaty from fear, but dripping wet\u2014and smelling of brine\u2014as though I had, indeed, just emerged from the San Francisco Bay. \u201cI had a nightmare,\u201d I said. \u201cYeah, no kiddin\u2019. That\u2019s one heck of a nightmare if you\u2019re manifesting in your sleep. Were you swimming or something?\u201d Oscar waved a handful of travel brochures under my nose. \u201cHey, check these out. I think we should go to Barcelona first, maybe.\u201d \u201cOscar, I cannot discuss my honeymoon plans with you at the moment.\u201d My brain felt fuzzy. I sat up and glanced at my antique clock on the bedside table. Its hands glowed a mellow, comforting green that cut through the darkness. City lights sifted through my lace curtains, but even raucous Haight Street was hushed at three o\u2019clock in the morning. \u201cBut it\u2019s the witching hour,\u201d Oscar whined. \u201cIdeal for spellcasting, not for making travel plans.\u201d Oscar cocked his head. \u201cWhat better time is there?\u201d \u201cIn the morning. After coffee. When normal people are awake.\u201d \u201cBut we\u2019re not \u2018normal people\u2019\u2014like we\u2019d even want to be, heh!\u201d He chuckled, a raspy sound reminiscent of a rusty saw. I\u2019m Lily Ivory, a natural-born witch from West Texas who wandered the globe for years, searching for a safe place to settle down. On the advice of a parrot named Barnabas, whom I had met in a bar in Hong Kong, I had come to San Francisco\u2014specifically, to Haight Street\u2014where a witch like me could fit in. I love it here. For the first time in my life I have friends, a community, a home. If only the beautiful City by the Bay weren\u2019t so chock-full of murder and mayhem. Oscar was right, I thought, plucking the soggy nightgown away from my skin. It was unusual to manifest during a dream, to bring a physical object\u2014in this case, water from the bay\u2014from the realm of slumber into the waking world. I shivered again. \u201cJust saying, we\u2019re both awake right now,\u201d Oscar continued. \u201cAnd not for nothing, but you might want to dry off and maybe put a towel down before you ruin your mattress.\u201d Throwing back the covers, I hopped out of bed and headed to the bathroom to take a shower. Washing away the waters of the bay with lemon verbena soap, I lingered under the hot spray until warmth settled down deep in my core. I emerged from the bathroom to find that Oscar had gone. He had left the travel brochures fanned out in a semicircle atop my comforter, and on the nightstand was a steaming mug of chamomile tea. He had also managed to dry the bed, somehow, and to make it up with fresh sheets. Oscar might not be a typical (read: obedient) witch\u2019s familiar, but he definitely had his moments. Not to mention he had saved my life on more than one occasion. I sat on the side of the bed, sipped the tea, and picked up a brochure with a glossy photo of Barcelona\u2019s famous Sagrada Fam\u00edlia. The next brochure featured the Eiffel Tower, and the last the Voto Nacional de Quito, in Ecuador. I had promised Oscar he could tag along on my honeymoon so that we could search for his mother, a creature suffering under a curse that transformed her into a gargoyle. The problem was he had no idea where she might be, only that \u201cgargoyles live a long time.\u201d I reminded myself to discuss this with my fianc\u00e9, Sailor, so that we could come up with a targeted approach before Oscar whipped up an entire world tour for us. Recently it had been difficult for Sailor and me to find the time\u2014and the peace of mind\u2014to talk about much of anything, much less gargoyle-guided tours. I yawned. Speaking of honeymoons, I had a bucketload of decisions to make before the wedding, and more than a few wrinkles to iron out. My grandmother\u2019s eccentric coven had recently arrived in town; I was about to be married to a beautiful but secretive man\u2014an attachment to whom, I had been warned, might weaken my powers. Oscar kept disappearing to search for his mother even though he was supposed to be helping secure the perfect venue for my upcoming wedding, and recently I had come to realize that instead of one guiding spirit, I had two, and they weren\u2019t getting along, which was messing with my magic. And finally, my beloved adopted city of San Francisco was facing a frustratingly nonspecific existential threat that primarily involved a cupcake lady named Renee. I took another sip of tea. I also still needed to find just the right vintage bridesmaid dresses for my friends Bronwyn and Maya. Under any other circumstance I would have said \u201cWear what you like!\u201d but the style editor for the San Francisco Chronicle was planning to do a feature on our antique bridal wardrobe, which would be great publicity for my vintage clothing store, Aunt Cora\u2019s Closet. I may be a witch and a soon-to-be bride, but I\u2019m also a small-business owner vying for customers on increasingly competitive Haight Street. I needed the exposure. I also needed some rest. Grabbing an in fidem venire praesidii amulet off the dresser mirror, I held it in my right hand and walked the perimeter of the bedroom in a clockwise direction, chanting: I have done my day\u2019s work, I am entitled to sweet sleep. I am drawing a line on this carpet, over which you cannot pass. Powers of protection, powers who clear, remove all those who don\u2019t belong here. As I lay back down and switched off the light, waiting for sleep to take me, I couldn\u2019t shake the sensation of the waters closing over my head. It wasn\u2019t like me to have a nightmare. Much less a manifesting nightmare. It was enough to worry a weary witch like me. Chapter Two The next morning Aunt Cora\u2019s Closet was bursting at the seams with witches. Fourteen elderly women\u2014an entire West Texas coven, plus my mother\u2014crowded the aisles of my shop, searching for glittery garments to rival the silver bugle bead jacket my grandmother Graciela had nabbed from my inventory a few days ago. \u201cThe sparklier, the better,\u201d said Agatha, pawing through a rack of \u201980s-era, padded-shoulder flapper-revival tops. \u201cI want one exactly like Graciela\u2019s, except in blue,\u201d said Kay, her thick tortoiseshell glasses magnifying her rheumy eyes to a comical extent as she tilted her head back to examine a royal blue sequined jacket through the bottom of her bifocals. Her beaded glasses chain clicked. \u201cBlue brings out my eyes.\u201d \u201cNo two vintage items are the same, that\u2019s what makes them so special,\u201d MariaGracia said, then added in a loud whisper: \u201cIf you want that silver one you can win it from Graciela on pagan poker night.\u201d My mother, Maggie, was flipping listlessly through a rack of 1950s sundresses, listening to the goings-on with a slightly bewildered expression. Not only was my mother not part of the coven, she had only very recently come to approve of magic at all. I couldn\u2019t imagine what the long road trip from Texas had been like for her, given her boisterous, opinionated travel companions. \u201cThis one\u2019s nice,\u201d said Winona, holding up a bolero jacket encrusted with gemlike rhinestones known as crystal chatons. Their facets reflected the late-morning light streaming in through the store\u2019s street-front display windows. \u201cIt\u2019s purple, that\u2019s my color.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s not purple, it\u2019s eggplant,\u201d said Caroline in an imperious tone, tucking her subtly highlighted blond hair behind one ear as she studied a full-length silk charmeuse evening gown. \u201cPurple, eggplant, what\u2019s the difference?\u201d Winona shrugged. \u201cAnd that, my dear, is why you\u2019ve never mastered color magic,\u201d quipped Caroline. \u201cWell, at least I can work with a pendulum without breaking a black mirror,\u201d muttered Winona, slipping some cheesy crackers to Oscar, who was currently in his public guise as my pet Vietnamese miniature potbellied pig. The thirteen coven members were women of a certain age: Darlene, Winona, Betty, Caroline, Iris, Kay, MariaGracia, Nan, Pepper, Rosa, Viv, Agatha, and, of course, my grandmother Graciela. They represented all sizes and colors and temperaments; sort of a witchy United Nations drawn from the far-flung corners of our dusty West Texas county. I had grown up with and around these powerful, stubborn, quirky witches and was overjoyed to have them with me now. I needed them with me now, given everything I was facing in San Francisco. Even if they were helping themselves to some of my best sparkly inventory, for which I would not, of course, allow them to pay. \u201cMy mom\u2014Lucille\u2014can add a little bling to just about anything, if that\u2019s what you\u2019re after,\u201d offered Maya. \u201cHer shop\u2019s right next door; you could get things altered, or even custom-made. All the glitter you could ask for.\u201d A chorus of \u201coohs\u201d and \u201caahs\u201d greeted this suggestion. Graciela, secretly delighted that her discovery of the silver bugle bead jacket had caused such a sensation, was investigating a rack of gauzy negligees, muttering racy comments. She spoke in a spicy mixture of Spanish and English that I was unwilling to translate for my coworkers. Bronwyn and Maya were helping to rehang items, but were mostly, with good-natured fascination, observing the chaos on the shop floor. The coven had been hitting the touristy highlights when they stopped in for jackets to ward off the summer chill. Nan and Iris already had donned garish sweatshirts purchased from the ubiquitous street vendors that catered to the tourists who flocked to town, ready to enjoy all this city had to offer but ill-equipped for its microclimate. People often equated \u201cCalifornia\u201d with \u201cwarm,\u201d only to discover that San Francisco had little in common with Los Angeles or San Diego. Here, a day might start out chilly and damp, soar to eighty degrees by lunchtime, then plummet into the fifties with the arrival of a thick blanket of afternoon fog. Locals learned to dress in layers. I yawned. I\u2019m usually not bothered much by lack of sleep, but the memory of last night\u2019s dream troubled me. Could it have been a prophetic vision, or simply random snippets of worry and anxiety forming themselves into a story line? Or was someone\u2014or something\u2014harassing me by sending mares to disrupt my rest? I considered consulting the coven about it, but decided to wait for a more appropriate moment. As I fiddled with the antique engagement ring on my finger and watched the druzy stone glitter under the shop lights, I hoped that whatever the nightmare signaled wouldn\u2019t interfere with my upcoming wedding. Me. Betrothed. I still couldn\u2019t quite believe it. At last, their hands clutching purple Aunt Cora\u2019s Closet bags filled with new-to-them clothes, the coven\u2014and my mother\u2014clambered back aboard the ancient yellow school bus to resume their tour of the city. Wendy, Bronwyn\u2019s coven sister and a San Francisco native, had offered to be their tour guide on the condition that she pilot the old bus. Impressed but concerned that Agatha had managed to drive them all the way from Texas, Wendy had suggested tactfully that, since San Francisco\u2019s famously steep hills were a bit of a challenge for even the most skilled chauffeur, it might be best for a local\u2014and, as Wendy pointed out quietly to me, someone with 20/20 vision\u2014to be behind the wheel. \u201cI\u2019ll see you all tonight. I\u2019m bringing the pizza,\u201d I said. The coven was staying with my friend Calypso Cafaro, a botanical expert with a big old farmhouse near Bolinas, up the coast. Since Calypso had filled her home with air beds and cots for a drawn-out witchy slumber party, the least I could do was to provide the occasional dinner. Calypso\u2019s farm was where the handfasting would be held in a mere two weeks, assuming Oscar was able to broker an agreement with the woods spirits. This could be tricky, because I had received their help once in the recent past but had neglected to properly repay the favor. So there was that. \u201cMake sure there\u2019s a vegetarian option?\u201d Viv said, hanging out one of the windows of the old school bus. She was watching her cholesterol, but was very fond of cheese. \u201cGot it right here,\u201d I said, patting a pad of paper with thirteen special requests. The coven members were nothing if not opinionated. Some were vehemently anti-anchovy, others all-veggie, still others pro-pepperoni (\u201cA meat lover\u2019s version would be delightful!\u201d). I wondered if I should try to fit all their requests onto half a dozen pies or save myself time and trouble, and just order thirteen individual pizzas. \u201cI\u2019ll bring some snacks as well.\u201d \u201cOooh, garlicky knots?\u201d someone called out; I couldn\u2019t tell who. \u201cGarlicky knots.\u201d I nodded, jotting it down. \u201cAnything else?\u201d \u201cWith dipping sauce!\u201d Rosa said. \u201cKnots and dipping sauce. Got it.\u201d Seeing where this conversation was going, Bronwyn intervened to bring it to an end. \u201cNow, won\u2019t that just be lovely! Have a wonderful tour, ladies. Tomorrow, I\u2019ll bring the makings for margaritas! Bye-bye!\u201d Wendy closed the door, threw the bus in gear, and roared off in a cloud of diesel exhaust, carefully navigating the crowded streets of the Haight. Bronwyn and I waved until the bus disappeared, then turned to each other. \u201cPhew!\u201d Bronwyn said. \u201cYou can say that again,\u201d I said with a smile. \u201cPhew!\u201d Bronwyn was nothing if not obliging. A lovely, ample, fifty-something Wiccan, Bronwyn had been enjoying the opportunity to discuss the healing properties of botanical teas and tonics with Graciela\u2019s coven\u2014not to mention grilling them about details of my misspent youth. Still, she and I had businesses to run. Bronwyn had special-order herbal infusions to mix, and I\u2014well, I had laundry to do. Every garment that came into my store first had to be inspected and cleaned. As much as I disliked doing laundry per se, I adored sifting through the new acquisitions. Finding inventory was a perennial challenge in my line of work, so I made frequent visits to estate sales and garage sales, as well as the Bay Area\u2019s many charitable thrift stores and flea markets. Maya scoured the attics, basements, and closets of the people she met through her long-term pet project interviewing and recording the stories of elderly Bay Area residents. And sometimes the inventory came to me: As my shop gained a reputation and had become better known, I began fielding calls from those helping their elderly aunts, mothers, and grandmothers clean out their closets. Currently, half a dozen Hefty bags filled with Maya\u2019s latest acquisitions awaited me in the workroom at the back of the store, which was separated from the shop floor by a thick brocade curtain. I was eager to see what new treasures she had discovered. Opening one sack, I ran my hands along a cool satin aqua-colored poodle skirt from the mid-\u201950s, then brought out a 1960s lace cocktail-length gown with a pinch waist. Both items went into the hand-wash pile. Very few true vintage items could be run through the jumbo-sized washing machine that crowded the back room. Maya joined me, a cup of steaming chai tea in her hand. Maya was in her early twenties but seemed much older and wiser than a lot of people twice her age. She wore no makeup or jewelry, but her black hair was twisted into shoulder-length locks and decorated with beads and a single streak of bright blue. \u201cLily,\u201d Maya said, \u201cI wanted to ask you about something. I found a\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. well, a special item.\u201d \u201cI sure hope it\u2019s spangly, because the aunties snapped up most of our glittery goods,\u201d I replied as she lifted one of the Hefty bags onto the workroom table, a jade green Formica dinette set from the 1960s, and began searching through the bag. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say it\u2019s spangly, exactly. Here it is.\u201d Maya held up a man\u2019s long-sleeved blue chambray shirt. It was faded and old, and not at all attractive. Definitely no sparkles. But that\u2019s not what bothered me. Even from across the workroom I felt its vibrations: a low, malevolent hum. My eyes fell on a series of numbers stamped in black ink over the chest pocket: 258. That was one nasty shirt. Chapter Three \u201cWhat is that?\u201d I asked her. \u201cI think it\u2019s a genuine piece of history,\u201d said Maya, restrained excitement showing in her dark eyes. \u201cI already talked to Carlos\u2019s cousin Elena, who works on Alcatraz as a National Park Service ranger. We think it might be part of an inmate\u2019s uniform from the old prison.\u201d Carlos Romero was a San Francisco homicide inspector who had become a good friend over the course of several police investigations. I had met his cousin Elena a few months ago, at Carlos\u2019s birthday party. When she heard I\u2019d never been to Alcatraz, she\u2019d encouraged me to come for a visit and promised me a personal tour. I had demurred; I had no desire to visit a penitentiary bound to be full of angry ghosts and mournful spirits. Not to mention bad vibrations. \u201cA\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. real inmate\u2019s uniform?\u201d I asked. \u201cAre you sure?\u201d Along with selling gaudy sweatshirts, the city\u2019s sidewalk vendors peddled a vast array of Alcatraz-themed items, such as T\u2011shirts emblazoned with Alcatraz Swim Team or gangster Al Capone\u2019s mug shot. Black-and-white-striped infant onesies seemed a bit macabre to me, but then I\u2019ve never had my finger on the pulse of popular culture. \u201cI\u2019m not certain, but I think it might be,\u201d said Maya. \u201cDidn\u2019t the prisoners wear black-and-white stripes, like in the movies?\u201d asked Bronwyn, who had taken a break from straightening the racks and putting away the garments the coven had tried on and rejected. \u201cThat\u2019s what I thought, too!\u201d said Maya. \u201cBut apparently not, they wore jeans and blue chambray shirts like this one.\u201d \u201cJeans? How stylish,\u201d Bronwyn said. \u201cYou\u2019d think so, but not really,\u201d Maya said. \u201cBefore the rebellious youth of the 1950s made them cool, jeans were considered working-class clothing: sturdy and inexpensive, worn by farmers, construction workers, miners panning for gold\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cAnd prisoners?\u201d I asked. \u201cYep. I did a little research online last night. If the shirt is real, then the number over the pocket means it belonged to a prisoner who escaped from Alcatraz in 1937.\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t realize anyone actually escaped from the Rock,\u201d Bronwyn said. \u201cI thought that was the point of putting a federal penitentiary on an island in the middle of the bay\u2014it was considered escape-proof.\u201d \u201cI can see how being stuck on an island would slow an escaped prisoner down, since you can\u2019t just walk away,\u201d I said. \u201cBut Alcatraz Island is only, what, a mile offshore? Isn\u2019t there an annual swim contest from there\u2014called \u2018Escape from Alcatraz,\u2019 as a matter of fact?\u201d \u201cYes, but those are highly trained athletes competing in a triathlon,\u201d Maya said. \u201cKeep in mind that not everyone knows how to swim, especially not in the past, when swimming pools were few and far between. Plus, the currents in San Francisco Bay are very dangerous\u2014even good swimmers can get caught and swept out to sea.\u201d Once again, the memory of last night\u2019s nightmare washed over me. Currents tugging at my legs, pulling me toward the Golden Gate. \u201cBut you\u2019re suggesting someone did escape?\u201d I asked. \u201cApparently that\u2019s still up for debate.\u201d Maya consulted her notebook. \u201cLet\u2019s see: A total of thirty-six prisoners were involved in escape attempts. Most were foiled while still on the island; six inmates were shot and killed in the attempts, and five prisoners made it into the water but were never seen again. Since their bodies were never found, the authorities concluded they were swept out to sea and drowned; but because there\u2019s no proof of that, either, it\u2019s possible some actually made it to land. Over the years, there have been supposed sightings of the escaped prisoners reported in South America. \u201cThe number 258 on the pocket was Ray Perry\u2019s inmate identification number,\u201d continued Maya. \u201cIn 1937 he slipped into the water, never to be seen again.\u201d \u201cWhere did you find this shirt?\u201d I asked Maya. I hadn\u2019t gone near the thing, repelled by its vibrations. But now I stroked my medicine bag to center myself and held out my hands for the shirt. \u201cIt was in Mrs. Archer\u2019s attic, along with these other items,\u201d Maya said, gesturing to the contents of the Hefty bag and passing the shirt to me. \u201cWhat do you think, Lily?\u201d Bronwyn asked, sounding intrigued but concerned. \u201cDoes it feel like it could belong to an escaped prisoner?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d I held the chambray shirt close. The cotton fabric was soft with age, but its vibrations were pure malice. I sensed despair, rage, a bleak nothingness. \u201cI\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019s\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. genuine.\u201d I held it out, away from my core, and the three of us stared at it. \u201cDid Mrs. Archer say anything about it?\u201d I asked. Maya shook her head, the beads in her braided locks making a pleasant clacking sound. \u201cShe said it was there when she moved in, thirty years ago, in a bunch of boxes left behind by the previous homeowner. There were old photographs and that sort of thing up there, too.\u201d \u201cWhat was this Ray Perry in prison for?\u201d asked Bronwyn. \u201cKidnapping and bank robbery,\u201d Maya said. At least it wasn\u2019t murder, I thought, then reflected on how bizarre my life had become that I was afraid the spirit of a murderer might be lurking in the vintage items that passed through my hands. \u201cWhat do you think, Lily? Pretty interesting, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Maya asked. \u201cIt\u2019s fascinating, Maya, I agree. But we can\u2019t sell this. It could be dangerous to whoever wore it.\u201d \u201cDangerous how?\u201d Bronwyn asked. \u201cThe vibrations are\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. off.\u201d \u201cI guess that would make sense,\u201d Maya said. Unlike Bronwyn and me, Maya wasn\u2019t sure what to make of magic, and had a natural tendency toward skepticism. But she\u2019d been around me enough to know that I was tapped into something she didn\u2019t understand, and she respected it. \u201cPerry was a federal prisoner, after all, and if this really was his shirt, it\u2019s possible he survived a desperate swim in the cold waters of the bay. I imagine that experience would leave behind some bad juju.\u201d \u201cSome very bad juju,\u201d I said, retrieving a copper Sri Yantra talisman from my collection in the shop\u2019s glass display case. \u201cWear this for a few days, please, Maya, just in case. You\u2019ve been handling the shirt, and it\u2019s better to be safe than sorry.\u201d \u201cBe glad to. I\u2019ve been admiring this necklace for days,\u201d murmured Maya, studying the charm. \u201cWhat is it supposed to do?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s for good luck and protection,\u201d I explained. \u201cThe nine interlocking triangles form a total of forty-three smaller triangles. I\u2019m\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. feeling triangles lately.\u201d Recently, triangles and the number three had been coming to mind. In a way, that was no surprise: Three is a sacred number in many faiths and belief systems. But the moment I spoke, I realized something: Either I was intuiting more than ever before, or I was paying more attention to my insights. Maybe all that witchy training was finally paying off. \u201cCool,\u201d said Maya, slipping the amulet over her head and patting the copper sphere against her chest. \u201cWhat about you, Lily?\u201d Bronwyn said, looking worried. \u201cShouldn\u2019t you wear one, too?\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve got my medicine bag and guiding spirits, and my witch\u2019s intuition and what-all. I\u2019ll be fine.\u201d \u201cOkay, so what do we do now?\u201d Maya asked, nodding at the shirt. \u201cI think\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. maybe I should burn it. I\u2019ll have to give that some thought.\u201d \u201cWhat? You can\u2019t burn it, Lily,\u201d Maya protested. \u201cIt\u2019s a piece of history.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s horrifying.\u201d \u201cHorrifying, but historic.\u201d I wasn\u2019t convinced. \u201cBesides,\u201d continued Maya, \u201cI wasn\u2019t suggesting selling it. I\u2019ve already spoken with Elena Romero about it, remember? She\u2019s coming by the shop in an hour. She wants the shirt for the park service\u2019s museum\u2014assuming it\u2019s genuine, that is.\u201d Oh, it\u2019s genuine, I thought. \u201cThat might be a problem, Maya,\u201d Bronwyn said. \u201cLily thinks the shirt is dangerous.\u201d \u201cWell, we can\u2019t just burn it,\u201d Maya said. \u201cWhat would I tell Elena?\u201d \u201cCould you cleanse it of its evil vibrations, Lily? Or bind them, perhaps?\u201d suggested Bronwyn. I blew out a breath. \u201cAll right, let me think.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I suppose if I restrained the vibrations with a binding spell, and Elena immediately put it under glass in the museum, it would be safe enough. It\u2019s not as though she\u2019s going to wear it, after all. Right? I\u2019ll talk to her about it.\u201d \u201cGood,\u201d said Maya. \u201cI know it\u2019s creepy, but it\u2019s also fascinating. Like Alcatraz itself. You really should go visit it one day, Lily.\u201d The frigid bay waters, closing over my head. I took the shirt upstairs to my apartment over the store, and performed a hasty binding spell over it, using a small vial of saltwater from the bay to cleanse it. I was familiar with those waters; they had once cleansed me. But cleansing required harnessing the salts of the bay and concentrating them within a serenity spell. In last night\u2019s dream, the bay waters weren\u2019t cleansing as much as threatening. Once again, I shivered at the memory. My nightmare and today\u2019s appearance of the inmate\u2019s shirt from Alcatraz could be a simple coincidence. Except that I had learned the hard way that events in my life were rarely coincidental and almost never simple. I shook it off. This was no time to allow my mind to wander. Spellcasting was all about focusing one\u2019s intent. From the living room bookshelf I retrieved a smooth stone I had found in the Ruby River in Montana, and extracted a rusty, square-headed nail from my medicine bag. I had picked up the nail in an old silver mining ghost town in New Mexico, the site of a terrible mining tragedy that killed twenty-two men. I cast a quick salt circle, then set the nail upon the stone and struck it thrice with an iron hammer while intoning a spell in Latin. Finally, I scored the stone three times with the point of the rusty nail and returned the nail to my medicine bag. Later I would cast the stone into the bay, completing the circle, but for now I braided and knotted yard-lengths of orange, blue, and black yarn, focusing my intent while chanting: By knot of one, my spell\u2019s begun. By knot of two, the wish comes true. By knot of three, so mote it be. By knot of four, this charm is a door. By knot of five, my intent comes alive. By knot of six, the enchantment I fix. By knot of seven, the strength of eleven. By knot of eight, I cast this fate. By knot of nine, what\u2019s dreamt is mine. I wrapped the prisoner\u2019s shirt in brown paper and tied the whole thing with the braided strings. The shirt\u2019s vibrations were still bleak, but that was to be expected. It was no longer dangerous\u2014as long as no one put it on. It was too easy to forget the effect clothing can have upon a person; to change into a new set of clothes can, indeed, change the wearer, if only very subtly. Everyone is different, of course, and some need a touch of darkness in their clothes to highlight the sunshine in their lives. But not this shirt. Not #258. This shirt was too much of a burden for even the strongest among us to bear. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "B07HHHBVZF", "title": "Stitches and Witches: A Paranormal Cozy Mystery (Vampire Knitting Club Book 2)", "author": "Nancy Warren", "description": "About the Author Nancy Warren is the USA Today bestselling author of more than sixty novels, including the Take a Chance series and the Vampire Knitting Club series. She's appeared in the New York Times, is a three-time finalist for the RITA Award, was honored by Romantic Times magazine, and often shares her love of writing in her popular workshops. Nancy's originally from Vancouver, Canada, but she tends to wander. She currently lives in an eighteenth-century house in Bath, England, where she loves to pretend she's Jane Austen, or at least a character in a Jane Austen novel. Nancy Warren is the USA Today bestselling author of more than sixty novels, including the Take a Chance series and the Vampire Knitting Club series. She's appeared in the New York Times, is a three-time finalist for the RITA Award, was honored by Romantic Times magazine, and often shares her love of writing in her popular workshops. Nancy's originally from Vancouver, Canada, but she tends to wander. She currently lives in an eighteenth-century house in Bath, England, where she loves to pretend she's Jane Austen, or at least a character in a Jane Austen novel. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B078M3K4VN", "title": "Death and Daisies: A Magic Garden Mystery", "author": "Amanda Flower", "description": "Review Praise for Death and Daisies : \u201cA surprising killer, oodles of local color, and a touch of mysticism all add up to a charming read.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cThose with a taste for fantasy-tinged cozies will want to see more of the appealing Fiona.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \"A great series, this author continues to write stories that should not be missed!\"\u2014 Suspense Magazine \u201cFans of cozies with mystical elements will enjoy Fiona\u2019s visits to her magical garden.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \"Enchanting.\"\u2014 Woman\u2019s World \"If you love Hallmark Channel movies, seed catalogues, and very mild magical realism, Flower\u2019s (yes, that\u2019s her real name) Death and Daisies is made for you.\"\u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cIntroduce this series, with its charming characters and enchanting setting, to readers of other Scotland-set cozies, such as those by Paige Shelton and Molly MacRae. The magic realism aspect may appeal to fans of Ellery Adams and Sarah Addison Allen.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal \u201cAs you follow Fiona around as she opens the flower shop, hangs with her sister and friends, you can\u2019t help but feel like you, yourself are there in Scotland along side her...It will have you hooked!\u201d\u2014 Cozy Mystery Book Reviews \u201cAmanda Flower captures this quaint and lovely Scottish town...A sweet and charming follow up with magic, heart, and the bond between sisters.\u201d\u2014 Tulsa Book Review Praise for Flowers and Foul Play : \u201cAn enchanted garden in rural Scotland? Bestill my heart. Amanda Flower\u2019s latest, Flowers and Foul Play , is quirky, mysterious, magical fun. A delight from start to finish.\u201d\u2014Juliet Blackwell, New York Times bestselling author of the Witchcraft and Haunted Home Renovation mysteries Praise for the Magical Bookshop mysteries: \"An enchanting tale of mystery, magical books, and endearing characters. Prepare to be charmed.\" \u2014Heather Blake, national bestselling author of The Witch and the Dead on Crime and Poetry \u201cIn her page-turning style, Flower builds effective suspense.\u201d \u2014 Booklist About the Author Amanda Flower , a USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning mystery author, started her writing career in elementary school when she read a story she wrote to her sixth grade class and had the class in stitches with her description of being stuck on the top of a Ferris wheel. She knew at that moment she'd found her calling of making people laugh with her words. She also writes mysteries as USA Today bestselling author Isabella Alan. In addition to being an author, Amanda is a librarian in Northeast Ohio. This is her second Magic Garden mystery. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0986101761", "title": "A Call to Charms (Forever Charmed Mysteries)", "author": "Denise Swanson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.24}, {"asin": "B07S25DW1M", "title": "The Lake of Learning: A Cassiopeia Vitt Novella (Cassiopeia Vitt Adventure Series Book 2)", "author": "Steve Berry", "description": "About the Author Steve Berry is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of fourteen Cotton Malone and four stand-alone novels. He has over twenty-three million books in print, translated into forty languages. He is an emeritus member of the Smithsonian Libraries Advisory Board and a founding member of International Thriller Writers, formerly serving as its copresident. M. J. Rose is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels. She is a founding member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors, AuthorBuzz.com, as well as the cofounder of 1001DarkNights.com. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including RT's Best Historical Fiction and People Magazine Picks. The Fox TV series, Past Lives , was based on her novel The Reincarnationist . Natalie Ross is an actress and voice-over artist whose acting credits include multiple appearances in the television series All My Children , among others. She is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "B075QJ6C76", "title": "Flowers and Foul Play: A Magic Garden Mystery", "author": "Amanda Flower", "description": "Review Praise for Flowers and Foul Play : \u201c[A] superior series launch...The well-constructed plot, seasoned with humor, builds slowly toward a surprising conclusion. Cozy fans will look forward to Fiona\u2019s further adventures.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly starred review\u201c Flowers and Foul Play is a delightful mystery with a variety of characters to enjoy along with stunning Scotland scenery, history, and second chances.\u201d\u2014 Seattle Book Review five-star review\u201cAn enchanted garden in rural Scotland? Bestill my heart. Amanda Flower\u2019s latest, Flowers and Foul Play , is quirky, mysterious, magical fun. A delight from start to finish.\u201d\u2014Juliet Blackwell, New York Times bestselling author of the Witchcraft and Haunted Home Renovation mysteries\"[ Flowers and Foul Play ] smoothly paced series debut is layered with appealing characters and a well-plotted puzzle flavored with gentle magic and a whisper of romance. I look forward to many more stories from Amanda Flower and her heroine, Fiona.\"\u2014Bailey Cates, New York Times bestselling author of the Magical Bakery mysteries\"Delightful...Amanda Flower combines Scotland, mystery, romance, and just enough magic in this series debut to create a fun and engaging read!\"\u2014Dawn Eastman, national bestselling author of the Family Fortune mysteries\"Filled with Highland color and memorable characters, this mystery is a delightfully deadly read! Amanda Flower knows how to create pure magic.\"\u2014Hannah Reed, bestselling author of the Scottish Highlands mystery series\u201cA Magical secret garden, a picturesque Scottish village on the shores of the North Sea, and a cozy cottage inherited from a loving godfather\u2014a dream come true for American Fiona Knox. But dreams turn into nightmares when Fiona stumbles upon a dead body laying next to an ancient stone with mystical powers. Is her garden a curse or a blessing? Hopefully she\u2019ll find out before the killer strikes again. A fun whodunnit that will keep you guessing till the wee hours.\u201d\u2014Kathleen Bridge, author of the Hamptons Home and Garden and By the Sea mysteries About the Author Amanda Flower is a USA Today bestselling American writer of mystery novels under her real name and the pen name, \"Isabella Alan\". She writes for adults and children. She won the Agatha Award for Children's/Young Adult book in 2015 for Andi Unstoppable, and was nominated for an Agatha Award in 2010, 2013, and 2014. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1101970324", "title": "Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra", "author": "Christopher Rice", "description": "Review Praise for Anne Rice and Christopher Rice's RAMSES THE DAMNED \"It's got the Edwardian feel that we've come to expect of Anne Rice's best novels, and it's got something more ... Tying feudal pasts with modern passions, Anne Rice and Christopher Rice have crafted a supreme sequel.\" -- Mountain Times.com \"An entertaining soap opera replete with romantic alliances, betrayals, and ends left tantalizingly loose as grist for sequels. Fans of both authors' work will enjoy this one.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Mesmerizing ... mother and son have triumphed in their first team-up effort. ... An enthralling story rendered with the full flourish of a classic Rice tale ... a superb, philosophically deep sequel to 1989's The Mummy . This mother/son team-up is a resounding success and leaves us eager for more.\" --Andrea Sefler, Pop Mythology \"Rice ( Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis , 2016) continues the tale begun almost 30 years ago in The Mummy (1989) with the help of her novelist son, Christopher ( The Heavens Rise , 2013), and it has been worth the wait. This thrilling read blends historial fiction, fantasy, and romance into a book readers will not be able to put down.\" -- Booklist About the Author ANNE RICE\u00a0is\u00a0the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021.\u00a0CHRISTOPHER RICE is the author of twelve books. He lives in West Hollywood, California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Proem It was a tale told by the newspapers in 1914\u2014of a spectacular find by a British Egyptologist in an isolated tomb outside of Cairo\u2014a royal mummy of Egypt\u2019s greatest monarch and, beside his painted sarcophagus, a vast collection of ancient poisons and a journal in Latin, written in the time of Cleopatra, comprising some thirteen scrolls. Call me Ramses the Damned. For that is the name I have given myself. But I was once Ramses the Great of Upper and Lower Egypt, slayer of the Hittites, father of many sons and daughters, who ruled Egypt for sixty-four years. My monuments are still standing; the stele recount my victories, though a thousand years have passed since I was pulled, a mortal child, from the womb. Ah, fatal moment now buried by time, when from a Hittite priestess I took the cursed elixir. Her warnings I would not heed. Immortality I craved. And so I drank the potion in the brimming cup . . . . . . How can I bear this burden any longer? How can I endure the loneliness anymore? Yet I cannot die . . . So wrote a being who claimed to have lived a thousand years, slumbering in darkness when the great kings and queens of his realm had no need of him, ever ready to be resurrected at their command to offer wisdom and counsel\u2014until the death of Cleopatra and of Egypt itself drove him to an eternal rest. \u00a0 What was the world to make of this bizarre tale, or the fact that Lawrence Stratford, discoverer of the mystery, died in the tomb itself at the moment of his greatest triumph? \u00a0 Julie Stratford, daughter of the great Egyptologist and sole heiress to the Stratford Shipping fortune, brought the controversial mummy to London, along with the mysterious scrolls and poisons, to honor her father\u2019s discovery with a private exhibition in her home in Mayfair. Within days Julie\u2019s cousin, Henry, made frantic claims that the mummy had risen from its sarcophagus and tried to murder him, and talk of a mummy\u2019s curse astonished Londoners. Before rumors could die down, Julie appeared in public with a mysterious blue-eyed Egyptian named Reginald Ramsey, who then journeyed with Julie back to Cairo in the company of beloved friends Elliott, the Earl of Rutherford, and his young son, Alex Savarell, and the aggrieved Henry. \u00a0 More shocking events unfolded. \u00a0 An unidentified corpse stolen from the Cairo Museum, grisly murders amongst the European shopkeepers of the city, and Ramsey himself sought by the Cairo police, and the disappearance of Henry. Finally, a fiery explosion left baffled witnesses and a frantic Alex Savarell grieving for a nameless woman who had fled the Cairo Opera House in terror, driving her motorcar into the path of an oncoming train. \u00a0 Out of chaos and mystery, Julie Stratford emerged as the devoted fianc\u00e9e of the enigmatic Reginald Ramsey, traveling Europe with her beloved, while in England the Savarell family sought to understand the exile of the Earl of Rutherford and the grief of young Alex for the woman he had so tragically lost to the flames in the Egyptian desert. Gossip dies down; newspapers move on. \u00a0 As our story opens, the country estate of the Earl of Rutherford will soon be the location of the engagement party for Reginald Ramsey and Julie Stratford, as others far and wide hear echoes of the story of the immortal Ramses the Damned and his fabled elixir, though the mummified body itself, brought to London with such fanfare, has long since vanished. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.74}, {"asin": "1401310915", "title": "Witches of East End (Witches of East End, 1)", "author": "Melissa de la Cruz", "description": "Review \"A sexy, magical romp, sure to bring de la Cruz a legion of new fans.\"\u2015 Kelley Armstrong, New York Times bestselling author of The Otherworld series About the Author Melissa de la Cruz is the author of many bestselling novels, including all the books in the Blue Bloods series and Witches of East End . She lives in Los Angeles, California with her husband and daughter, and continues to be a hitmaker for both adult readers and her YA fans.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "145162610X", "title": "The White Princess (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels)", "author": "Philippa Gregory", "description": "Review \"Loyalties are torn, paranoia festers and you can almost hear the bray of royal trumpets as the period springs to life. It\u2019s a bloody irresistible read.\" \u2015 People Magazine \"Bring on the blood, sex and tears! . . . You name it, it's all here.\" \u2015 USA Today \u201cThis rich tapestry brings to vivid life the court of Henry and Elizabeth. Meticulously drawn characters with a seamless blending of historical fact and fiction combine in a page-turning epic of a story. Tudor-fiction fans can never get enough, and they will snap this one up.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal (starred review) \" The White Princess features one of the more intriguing theories about the possible fate of the princes.\" \u2015 The Washington Post \"This is the most fascinating and complex of the series--not only in history, but in the psychological makeup of the characters, the politics of the era and the blending of actual and reimagined history. Gregory makes everything come to life. . . . This is why Gregory is a queen of the genre.\" \u2015 Romantic Times \u201cAs usual, Gregory delivers a spellbinding . . . expos\u00e9.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cElizabeth must navigate the treacherous waters of marriage, maternity, and mutiny in an age better at betrayal than childbirth. . . . At this novel\u2019s core lies a political marriage seen in all its complexity.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Replete with intrigue and heartrending drama.\" \u2015 Booklist \u201cGregory returns with another sister act. The result: her best novel in years.\u201d \u2015 USA Today \u201cGregory delivers another vivid and satisfying novel of court intrigue, revenge, and superstition. Gregory\u2019s many fans as well as readers who enjoy lush, evocative writing, vividly drawn characters, and fascinating history told from a woman\u2019s point of view will love her latest work.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal \u201cGregory is one of historical fiction\u2019s superstars, and The Kingmaker\u2019s Daughter shows why . . . providing intelligent escape, a trip through time to a dangerous past.\u201d \u2015 Historical Novels Review (Editor's Choice Review) \u201cWielding magic again in her latest War of the Roses novel \u2026 Gregory demonstrates the passion and skill that has made her the queen of English historical fiction.\u2026Gregory portrays spirited women at odds with powerful men, endowing distant historical events with drama, and figures long dead or invented with real-life flaws and grand emotions. She makes history \u2026 come alive for readers.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cGregory ... always delivers the goods.\u201d \u2015 New York Post \u201cGorgeous fun.\u201d \u2015 New York Daily News About the Author Philippa Gregory is the author of many New York Times bestselling novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl , and is a recognized authority on women\u2019s history. Many of her works have been adapted for the screen\u00a0including The Other Boleyn Girl . She graduated from the University of Sussex and received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where she is a Regent. She holds honorary degrees from Teesside University and the University of Sussex. She is a fellow of the Universities of Sussex and Cardiff and was awarded the 2016 Harrogate Festival Award for Contribution to Historical Fiction. She is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She was awarded a CBE title for services to literature and charity in 2022. She welcomes visitors to her website PhilippaGregory.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Sheriff Hutton Castle, Yorkshire, Autumn 1485 I wish I could stop dreaming. I wish to God I could stop dreaming. I am so tired; all I want to do is sleep. I want to sleep all the day, from dawn until twilight that every evening comes a little earlier and a little more drearily. In the daytime, all I think about is sleeping. But in the night all I do is try to stay awake. I go to his quiet shuttered rooms to look at the candle as it gutters in the golden candlestick, burning slowly through the marked hours, though he will never see light again. The servants take a taper to a fresh candle every day at noon; each hour burns slowly away, although time means nothing to him now. Time is quite lost to him in his eternal darkness, in his eternal timelessness, though it leans so heavily on me. All day long I wait for the slow rolling in of the gray evening and the mournful tolling of the Compline bell, when I can go to the chapel and pray for his soul, though he will never again hear my whispers, nor the quiet chanting of the priests. Then I can go to bed. But when I get to bed I dare not sleep because I cannot bear the dreams that come. I dream of him. Over and over again I dream of him. All day I keep my face smiling like a mask, smiling, smiling, my teeth bared, my eyes bright, my skin like strained parch- ment, paper-thin. I keep my voice clear and mellow, I speak words that have no meaning, and sometimes, when required, I even sing. At night I fall into my bed as if I were drowning in deep water, as if I were sinking below the depths, as if the water were possessing me, taking me like a mermaid, and for a moment I feel a deep relief as if, submerged in water, my grief can drain away, as if it were the river Lethe and the currents can bring forgetfulness and wash me into the cave of sleep; but then the dreams come. I don\u2019t dream of his death\u2014it would be the worst of nightmares to see him go down fighting. But I never dream of the battle, I don\u2019t see his final charge into the very heart of Henry Tudor\u2019s guard. I don\u2019t see him hacking his way through. I don\u2019t see Thomas Stanley\u2019s army sweep down and bury him under their hooves, as he is thrown from his horse, his sword arm failing, going down under a merciless cavalry charge, shouting: \u201cTreason! Treason! Treason!\u201d I don\u2019t see William Stanley raise his crown and put it on another man\u2019s head. I don\u2019t dream any of this, and I thank God for that mercy at least. These are my constant daytime thoughts that I cannot escape. These are bloody daytime reveries that fill my mind while I walk and talk lightly of the unseasonal heat, of the dryness of the ground, of the poor harvest this year. But my dreams at night are more painful, far more painful than this, for then I dream that I am in his arms and he is waking me with a kiss. I dream that we are walking in a garden, planning our future. I dream that I am pregnant with his child, my rounded belly under his warm hand, and he is smiling, delighted, and I am promising him that we will have a son, the son that he needs, a son for York, a son for England, a son for the two of us. \u201cWe\u2019ll call him Arthur,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ll call him Arthur, like Arthur of Camelot, we\u2019ll call him Arthur for England.\u201d The pain, when I wake to find that I have been dreaming again, seems to get worse every day. I wish to God I could stop dreaming. My dearest daughter Elizabeth, My heart and prayers are with you, dear child; but now, of all the times in your life, you must act the part of the queen that you were born to be. The new king, Henry Tudor, commands you to come to me at the Palace of Westminster in London and you are to bring your sisters and cousins. Note this: he has not denied his betrothal to you. I expect it to go ahead. I know this is not what you hoped for, my dear; but Richard is dead, and that part of your life is over. Henry is the victor and our task now is to make you his wife and Queen of England. You will obey me in one other thing also: you will smile and look joyful as a bride coming to her betrothed. A princess does not share her grief with all the world. You were born a princess and you are the heir to a long line of courageous women. Lift up your chin and smile, my dear. I am waiting for you, and I will be smiling too. Your loving mother Elizabeth R Dowager Queen of England I read this letter with some care, for my mother has never been a straightforward woman and any word from her is always freighted with levels of meaning. I can imagine her thrilling at another chance at the throne of England. She is an indomitable woman; I have seen her brought very low, but never, even when she was widowed, even when nearly mad with grief, have I seen her humbled. I understand at once her orders to look happy, to forget that the man I love is dead and tumbled into an unmarked grave, to forge the future of my family by hammering myself into marriage with his enemy. Henry Tudor has come to England, having spent his whole life in waiting, and he has won his battle, defeated the rightful king, my lover Richard, and now I am, like England itself, part of the spoils of war. If Richard had won at Bosworth\u2014and who would ever have dreamed that he would not?\u2014I would have been his queen and his loving wife. But he went down under the swords of traitors, the very men who mustered and swore to fight for him; and instead I am to marry Henry and the glorious sixteen months when I was Richard\u2019s lover, all but queen of his court, and he was the heart of my heart, will be forgotten. Indeed, I had better hope that they are forgotten. I have to forget them myself. I read my mother\u2019s letter, standing under the archway of the gatehouse of the great castle of Sheriff Hutton, and I turn and walk into the hall, where a fire is burning in the central stone hearth, the air warm and hazy with woodsmoke. I crumple the single page into a ball and thrust it into the heart of the glowing logs, and watch it burn. Any mention of my love for Richard and his promises to me must be destroyed like this. And I must hide other secrets too, one especially. I was raised as a talkative princess in an open court rich with intellectual inquiry, where anything could be thought, said, and written; but in the years since my father\u2019s death, I have learned the secretive skills of a spy. My eyes are filling with tears from the smoke of the fire, but I know that there is no point in weeping. I rub my face and go to find the children in the big chamber at the top of the west tower that serves as their schoolroom and playroom. My sixteen-yearold sister Cecily has been singing with them this morning, and I can hear their voices and the rhythmic thud of the tabor as I climb the stone stairs. When I push open the door, they break off and demand that I listen to a round they have composed. My ten-year-old sister Anne has been taught by the best masters since she was a baby, our twelve-year-old cousin Margaret can hold a tune, and her ten-year-old brother Edward has a clear soprano as sweet as a flute. I listen and then clap my hands in applause. \u201cAnd now, I have news for you.\u201d Edward Warwick, Margaret\u2019s little brother, lifts his heavy head from his slate. \u201cNot for me?\u201d he asks forlornly. \u201cNot news for Teddy?\u201d \u201cYes, for you too, and for your sister Maggie, and Cecily and Anne. News for all of you. As you know, Henry Tudor has won the battle and is to be the new King of England.\u201d These are royal children; their faces are glum, but they are too well trained to say one word of regret for their fallen uncle Richard. Instead, they wait for what will come next. \u201cThe new King Henry is going to be a good king to his loyal people,\u201d I say, despising myself as I parrot the words that Sir Robert Willoughby said to me as he gave me my mother\u2019s letter. \u201cAnd he has summoned all of us children of the House of York to London.\u201d \u201cBut he\u2019ll be king,\u201d Cecily says flatly. \u201cHe\u2019s going to be king.\u201d \u201cOf course he\u2019ll be king! Who else?\u201d I stumble over the question I have inadvertently posed. \u201cHim, of course. Anyway, he has won the crown. And he will give us back our good name and recognize us as princesses of York.\u201d Cecily makes a sulky face. In the last weeks before Richard the king rode out to battle, he ordered her to be married to Ralph Scrope, a next-to-nobody, to make sure that Henry Tudor could not claim her as a second choice of bride, after me. Cecily, like me, is a princess of York, and so marriage to either of us gives a man a claim to the throne. The shine was taken off me when gossip said that I was Richard\u2019s lover, and then Richard demeaned Cecily too by condemning her to a lowly marriage. She claims now that it was never consummated, now she says that she does not regard it, that Mother will have it annulled; but presumably she is Lady Scrope, the wife of a defeated Yorkist, and when we are restored to our royal titles and become princesses again, she will have to retain his name and her humiliation, even if no one knows where Ralph Scrope is today. \u201cYou know, I should be king,\u201d ten-year-old Edward says, tugging at my sleeve. \u201cI\u2019m next, aren\u2019t I?\u201d I turn to him. \u201cNo, Teddy,\u201d I say gently. \u201cYou cannot be king. It\u2019s true that you are a boy of the House of York and Uncle Richard once named you as his heir; but he is dead now, and the new king will be Henry Tudor.\u201d I hear my voice quaver as I say \u201che is dead,\u201d and I take a breath and try again. \u201cRichard is dead, Edward, you know that, don\u2019t you? You understand that King Richard is dead? And you will never be his heir now.\u201d He looks at me so blankly that I think he has not understood anything at all, and then his big hazel eyes fill with tears, and he turns and goes back to copying his Greek alphabet on his slate. I stare at his brown head for a moment and think that his dumb animal grief is just like mine. Except that I am ordered to talk all the time, and to smile all the day. \u201cHe can\u2019t understand,\u201d Cecily says to me, keeping her voice low so his sister Maggie cannot hear. \u201cWe\u2019ve all told him, over and over again. He\u2019s too stupid to believe it.\u201d I glance at Maggie, quietly seating herself beside her brother to help him to form his letters, and I think that I must be as stupid as Edward, for I cannot believe it either. One moment Richard was marching at the head of an invincible army of the great families of England; the next they brought us the news that he had been beaten, and that three of his trusted friends had sat on their horses and watched him lead a desperate charge to his death, as if it were a sunny day at the joust, as if they were spectators and he a daring rider, and the whole thing a game that could go either way and was worth long odds. I shake my head. If I think of him, riding alone against his enemies, riding with my glove tucked inside his breastplate against his heart, then I will start to cry; and my mother has commanded me to smile. \u201cSo we are going to London!\u201d I say, as if I am delighted at the prospect. \u201cTo court! And we will live with our Lady Mother at Westminster Palace again, and be with our little sisters Catherine and Bridget again.\u201d The two orphans of the Duke of Clarence look up at this. \u201cBut where will Teddy and me live?\u201d Maggie asks. \u201cPerhaps you will live with us too,\u201d I say cheerfully. \u201cI expect so.\u201d \u201cHurrah!\u201d Anne cheers, and Maggie tells Edward quietly that we will go to London, and that he can ride his pony all the way there from Yorkshire like a little knight at arms, as Cecily takes me by the elbow and draws me to one side, her fingers nipping my arm. \u201cAnd what about you?\u201d she asks. \u201cIs the king going to marry you? Is he going to overlook what you did with Richard? Is it all to be forgotten?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I say, pulling away. \u201cAnd as far as we are concerned, nobody did anything with King Richard. You, of all people, my sister, would have seen nothing and will speak of nothing. As for Henry, I suppose whether he is going to marry me or not is the one thing that we all want to know. But only he knows the answer. Or perhaps two people: him\u2014and that old crone, his mother, who thinks she can decide everything.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 4.01}, {"asin": "0425281302", "title": "Storm Cursed (A Mercy Thompson Novel)", "author": "Patricia Briggs", "description": "Review PRAISE FOR THE MERCY THOMPSON NOVELS \u201cI love these books.\u201d\u2014Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author \u00a0 \u201cAn excellent read with plenty of twists and turns\u2026It left me wanting more.\u201d\u2014Kim Harrison, #1 New York Times bestselling author \u00a0 \u201cThe best new urban fantasy series I\u2019ve read in years.\u201d\u2014Kelley Armstrong, #1 New York Times bestselling author \u00a0 \u201cPatricia Briggs never fails to deliver an exciting, magic and fable filled suspense story.\u201d\u2014Erin Watt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Royals series \u00a0 \u201cIn the increasingly crowded field of kick-ass supernatural heroines, Mercy stands out as one of the best.\u201d\u2014 Locus \u201cAction-packed and with more than a few satisfying emotional payoffs...Patricia Briggs at the top of her game.\u201d\u2014The Speculative Herald \u00a0 \u201cThe characters are all realistic and vibrant.\u201d\u2014 The Independent \u201cThese are fantastic adventures, and Mercy reigns.\u201d\u2014SFRevu \u00a0 \u201cThe world building is incredibly lush and subsuming...a fantastic urban fantasy adventure.\u201d\u2014Fresh Fiction \u00a0 \u201cOutstanding.\u201d\u2014Charles de Lint, Fantasy & Science Fiction About the Author Patricia Briggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series ( Silence Fallen , Fire Touched ) and the Alpha and Omega novels ( Burn Bright , Dead Heat ). Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 \"So what did you do, Mary Jo?\" called Ben in his crisp British accent. Mary Jo shut her car door and started toward us and toward the mountainous metal barn that Ben and I waited beside. She gave Ben a quelling frown, and waited to speak until she had come up to us. She asked, \"What do you mean, what did I do?\" It was a little chilly, made more so by a brisk wind that blew a bit of hair I'd failed to secure in my braid into my eyes. The Tri-Cities don't cool off at night with quite the thoroughness that the Montana mountains I'd grown up with did, but night usually still kills the heat of day. Ben bounced a little on his toes--a sign that he was ready and eager for violence. I could sense that his attention, like mine, was mostly on the barn, even though his eyes were on Mary Jo. \"I killed Mercy three times in a single session of Pirate's Booty the night before last. I think that's why she woke me up to come out hunting tonight.\" He glanced at me and raised an eyebrow in an open invitation to address the situation. Okay, that's not exactly what he said. As usual he spiced his language with profanity, but unless he spouted something truly amazing I mostly edited it out. \"You passed up the opportunity to gain a hundred Spanish doubloons in order to kill me that last time,\" I told him, unable, even days later, to keep the indignation out of my voice. In the fierce high-seas computer-generated battles the werewolf pack delighted in, a hundred Spanish doubloons was a treasure trove of opportunity for more or better weapons, supplies, and ship repairs. Only a homicidal maniac would give up a hundred doubloons to kill someone. Ben gave me a wicked grin, an expression mostly empty of the bitter edge all of his expressions had once contained. \"I was merely staying in character. Sodding Bart enjoys killing more than money, love. That's why his kill score is third on the board, just behind Captain Wolf and Lady Mockingbird.\" Captain Wolf Larsen, stolen from the titular character of Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, is the nom de guerre of my mate and the pack Alpha. Lady Mockingbird, who was up by fifteen kills on everybody, teaches high school chemistry in her alter ego as Auriele Zao. She is a scary, scary woman. I've been told her high school students think so, too. Ben's gaze, swinging back to Mary Jo, paused on the dark maw that gaped in the front of the huge metal barn, the only building within a mile of where we stood. It was either very late at night or very early in the morning, depending on which side of sleep you were on. Dawn wasn't yet a possibility, but the waxing moon was strong in the night sky. The entrance to the barn was big enough to drive a pair of school buses through at the same time, and at least some of the ambient light should have made its way into the interior of the barn. Ben considered the barn for a second or two, then turned a sharp grin on Mary Jo. \"Mercy just confirmed why I'm here. What did you do to win the crappy job lottery?\" \"Hey,\" I said, \"before you all feel too sorry for yourselves, remember I'm out here, too.\" \"That's because you're in charge,\" Mary Jo said, her voice distracted, her eyes on the barn. \"Bosses need to jump in the outhouse with the grunts occasionally. It's good for morale.\" Mary Jo wore a T-shirt that read Firefighters Like It HOT, the last word written in red and gold flames. The shirt was loose like the sleep pants she wore, but her clothes didn't disguise her muscular warrior's body. She looked away from the barn, turning her attention to Ben. \"Maybe I owe this . . . opportunity to the way I treated her before Adam put his foot down.\" She tilted her head toward me, a gesture that, like Ben's raised eyebrow, asked for my input. She didn't meet my eyes as she once would have. I was growing resigned to the way the pack dealt with me since my mate had declared me off-limits to anything but the utmost of respect on pain of death. By consensus, they mostly deferred to me, as if I were a wolf dominant to them. It felt wrong and awkward, and it made the back of my neck itch. What did it say about me, I wondered, that I was more comfortable with all the snide comments and personal attacks than with gracious subservience? \"Wrong,\" I told her. I pointed at Ben. \"Killing me instead of getting rich is bad. Consider yourself punished.\" I looked back at Mary Jo. \"Ben is a simple problem with a simple solution. You are a stickier mess and this is not punishment. Or not really punishment. This\"-I waved around us at the early-morning landscape-\"is so you quit apologizing about the past for something you meant wholeheartedly at the time. And would do again under the same circumstances. Your apology is suspect-and annoying.\" Ben made an amused sound, sounding relaxed and happy-but he was bouncing on the balls of his feet again. \"That sounds about right, Mary Jo. If she were really getting back at you for all the trouble you caused her-it might land you on the List of Mercy's Epic Revenge. Like the Blue Dye Solution or the Chocolate Easter Bunny Incident. Getting called out at the butt-crack of dawn doesn't make the grade.\" \"So all I have to do is quit apologizing and you'll stop calling me out at three in the morning to chase goblins or hunt down whatever that freak thing we killed last week was?\" she asked skeptically. \"I can't promise that,\" I told her. Mary Jo was one of the few wolves I could count on not to increase the drama or violence of a situation. \"But it will . . .\" Must be truthful. I gave her a rueful shrug. \"It might mean I stop calling you first.\" \"Epic,\" she said with a wry glance at Ben. \"Epic it is. I think I will probably quit apologizing.\" Then she said, \"I suppose I'll find some other way to irritate you.\" Hah! I'd been right-her apologies had been suspect. I had always liked Mary Jo-even if the reverse was not true. She looked at the barn again and sighed heavily. \"Have you spotted the goblin in there?\" She didn't bother trying to be quiet-none of us had been. Our prey could hear at least as well as any of us. If he was in there, he'd have heard us drive up. I was still learning about the goblins and what they could do, but I did know that much. \"No,\" I said. \"Do you think he's still in there?\" she asked. \"He's still in there,\" I said. I held out my arm so they could see the hair rise as I moved it closer to the barn. \"If he weren't, there wouldn't be so much magic surrounding it.\" Mary Jo grunted. \"Is it my imagination, or is it too dark in the barn?\" \"I think I remember this,\" said Ben thoughtfully, peering into the barn. His clear British accent had the weird effect of making everything he said sound a little more intelligent than it really was, an effect that he conscientiously-I was convinced-canceled by adding the kinds of words responsible for whole generations of people who knew what soap tasted like. \"You know-the whole seeing-fuck-all-in-the-dark thing?\" \"I never was human,\" I told him. \"I've always been able to see pretty well in the dark.\" After I said it, I had a thought. There was a faint chance that the goblin's magic was affecting our eyesight rather than just spreading an illusion of darkness over the interior of the barn. I looked away from the barn to make sure my eyes were functioning as they should. There was nothing but open fields around us, a couple of old wooden posts set into the ground as if they had once been part of a fence, and in the distance, a few miles away, I could see the new neighborhood of McMansion farmettes that I'd passed driving here. Mesa, where we all now stood, was a little town of about five hundred people that was in real danger of being swallowed in the outward creep of Pasco's ever-growing population. It is flatter than most of the area around the Tri-Cities, with an economy primarily based in growing dryland wheat, hay, and cattle. The town name is pronounced Meesa, not Maysa-which, even after all the years I've lived in the Tri-Cities, still strikes me as wrong. With so many Hispanic people living here, you'd think we would be capable of pronouncing a Spanish word correctly instead of borrowing from the ridiculous dialogue of a Star Wars character, right? But Meesa it is. \"Cain's hairy titties,\" muttered Ben, joining me in my observation of the rural setting. \"What hermit was so misguided in life that he was hanging around this peopleless landscape at the bell end of the night and happened to see a freaking goblin disappear into a hay barn? And for that matter, goblins are city denizens like me. What the shagging hell is it doing out here?\" \"No one living was here when it came,\" I told him in a sinister voice. He gave me a look. In a confidential whisper I said, \"I talk to dead people.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0451473701", "title": "Letters from Paris", "author": "Juliet Blackwell", "description": "Review Praise for Letters from Paris \"Best-selling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light....this romantic and picturesque novel shows us that even the most broken people can find what makes them whole again.\u2014 Booklist \"Blackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh...A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.\"\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"Blackwell has woven a great tale of mystery, artistry, history, and a little romance. With plenty of backstory and tidbits about Parisian life in the 19th century, there\u2019s something for everyone in this recommended read.\"\u2014 Library Journal Praise for The Paris Key \u201cA charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Lights.\u201d\u2014Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I\u2019ll See You in Paris \u201cA gorgeously-plotted novel woven with luminescent charm.\u201d\u2014Rachael Herron, author of Splinters of Light \u201c[A] witty, warm, winsome novel...[Blackwell\u2019s] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail.\u201d\u2014Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One \u201cBlackwell's novel has all of the components that the best novels are made of: an intriguing and compelling storyline, an extremely likable protagonist, a dreamy location and a small dash of suspense and mystery.\u201d\u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cBetter than a travel guide because it carries the essence of friendship, food, drink, story, and history that one can only convey through Parisian residents. Delightful and highly recommended!\u201d\u2014The Best Reviews About the Author Juliet Blackwell was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the youngest child of a jet pilot and an editor. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master\u2019s degrees in anthropology and social work. While in graduate school, she published several articles based on her research with immigrant families from Mexico and Vietnam, as well as one full-length translation: Miguel Le\u00f3n-Portilla\u2019s seminal work, Endangered Cultures . Juliet taught medical anthropology at SUNY\u2013Albany, was producer for a BBC documentary, and worked as an elementary school social worker. Upon her return to California, she became a professional artist and ran her own decorative painting and design studio for more than a decade. In addition to mainstream novels, Juliet pens the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha Award\u2013nominated Art Lover\u2019s Mysteries series. She makes her home in northern California, but spends as much time as possible in Europe and Latin America. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***Copyright \u00a9 2016 Juliet Blackwell Prologue Sabine February 27, 1898 He sleeps. Sabine creeps across the dark studio before dawn, beseeching the silent faces not to betray her. They watch her every move, mute witnesses to her crime. Slipping through the door, she winces at the scraping sound of metal on metal as she pauses to latch it behind her. Fog envelops her, the mist cutting through her threadbare blouse and underthings, wet needles of cold air piercing her skin. Sabine thinks longingly of the two dresses she left behind in the cupboard. He\u2019d bought them for her. They are the finest garments she has ever worn: one blue, one green. Made of the softest lawn, a material so lush and supple it beckoned to her the first time she donned the garments; often she would caress the skirt, reveling in the sumptuous sensations that tickled her palm. He teased her for that. Take nothing with you. She has donned the heavy black skirt and thin gray blouse she wore when they\u2019d met in the square in Pigalle. When she thought he was her salvation. Before. Her feet are clad in her ancient black boots. The dove gray shawl her mother had knit for her sixteenth Christmas is her only defense against the night\u2019s chill. She wears her hair pinned back in the style he likes: an old-fashioned twist on either side of her head. As though she stepped out of another time. Also abandoned is a gold armband, still in its nest of fine black velvet, in a blue box upon the nightstand. The tortoiseshell comb for her hair. Her little hand mirror. The candle stubs and pocket-sized book of sonnets, her sketchbook and charcoal. She even leaves behind the pillowcase in which she had packed her few belongings when she\u2019d fled her childhood home in the countryside so long ago. Before Paris. Before she was an artist\u2019s model. Before Maurice. Before. The damp air stings her cheeks with cold kisses. Dim light from the gas streetlamps casts an amber glow on the cobblestones, glinting off puddles from last night\u2019s rain. They seem to flash a warning: You will never get away with it. You will never get away. Sabine keeps her head down, walking as quickly as she dares. Listening. She hears water dripping from a gargoyle at the side of the church. A horse whinnying a block or two away. A dog barking behind a stout wooden door. The tapping of her boots on the paving stones, echoing the pounding of her heart. Her own harsh breathing is the loudest sound. And\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. something else? She freezes. Holds her breath. Listens. Footsteps. Sabine runs. Runs for her life. She makes it as far as the quai du Louvre. To the Pont Neuf. The bridge that crosses the Seine. Chapter One This was probably a mistake, Claire thought to herself as she wrestled her luggage cart\u2014why did she always choose the one with a wobbly wheel?\u2014out the exit of the New Orleans airport. The sliding glass doors whooshed closed behind her, cutting her off from the terminal\u2019s unnatural coolness and leaving her mired in the soupy atmosphere of July, Louisiana-style. Louisiana. It occurred to Claire that had she been blindfolded and her ears covered, she would still know where she was. She could feel it, smell something achingly familiar in the air. Humid tendrils of heat reached out and wrapped around her, dampness whispering along her skin, greeting her like an old lover. A lover she\u2019d left many years ago with a mix of regret and relief, an abstract fondness tangled up with the fervent desire to move on. Claire took a deep breath of the hot, moist air, blew it out slowly, and searched the vehicles vying for curb access outside of baggage claim. When she\u2019d cosigned the loan for her cousin Ty\u2019s new rig, he\u2019d told her it was \u201chuge, black, and shiny.\u201d One good thing about having more cousins in Plaquemines Parish than she could count: there was always someone to give her a ride to or from the airport. A small group of already inebriated twentysomething tourists, apparently intent on finding Mardi Gras out of season, jostled Claire on their jocular way to the taxi stand; she barely managed to grab her computer case as it was knocked from her shoulder. A drip of sweat rolled down the small of her back. She stood with one hand on her luggage; other than a few boxes of books and souvenirs she had sent through the mail, the two big suitcases, one duffel bag, and huge purse were all she owned in the world. She\u2019d sold or given away the rest before leaving Chicago. This was probably a mistake, Claire thought again. The phrase had become something of a mantra ever since her cousin Jessica had phoned the week before last to say their grandmother was at death\u2019s door. \u201cMammaw needs you, Chance,\u201d Jessica had said. Claire\u2019s relatives knew her as Chance; their grandmother went by Mammaw. \u201cShe\u2019s speaking in Cajun; no one can understand her but Uncle Remy. And you know how he is.\u201d When Claire received the call, she had been sitting in her climate-controlled office in Chicago, wondering what a person wore to the opera. Was her standard black office garb\u2014perhaps dressed up with some chunky ethnic jewelry and a colorful pashmina\u2014enough, or was this more of a sparkles-and-tulle situation? From the vantage point of her desk she could see acres of taupe carpeting and a maze of cubicles, old brick factory walls chicly renovated with skylights, and steel-and-glass dividers for \u201cNo-Miss Systems: A Software Company.\u201d She looked out over the muted officescape, imagining Mammaw\u2019s house and thinking: If Jessica\u2019s was a voice from her past, what was her future? A night at the opera? Really? You\u2019re getting pretty big for your britches, Chance Broussard. As her newly ex-boyfriend Sean would say: in this, as in most things, Claire was just the teensiest bit conflicted. Claire finally spotted Ty\u2019s truck, looming large and new in a sea of smaller cars and dented pickups. Ignoring the blare of horns, he double-parked, hopped out, gave Claire a bear hug, then tossed her leaden bags in the bed of the truck like so much kindling. Ty drove toward the small town in Plaquemines Parish where they had been raised. They chatted a little about her life in the \u201cbig city,\u201d his new truck, the job situation out on the oil rigs, and the precarious state of Mammaw\u2019s health, but further conversation soon fizzled out. Claire\u2019s relatives worked hard, disdained complainers, saluted the flag, and enjoyed their football. When they started drinking, the young men might get raucous and the old folks were prone to spinning long, involved tales in which layers of fact and fiction, history and fantasy merged and overlapped. But unless they were in storytelling mode, her cousins remained largely silent, their thoughts and hopes and dreams kept locked away under sweat-stained New Orleans Saints or Ragin\u2019 Cajuns ball caps. So Claire was free to watch the scenery\u2014flat, full of brush and low trees and crisscrossed by creeks and bayous\u2014and to ponder. After hanging up with Jessica, Claire had finished up the day\u2019s work, talked to her team supervisor, and hurried to meet Sean for a drink at the latest trendy lounge, a former dive bar that had been revamped with an ironically 1950s d\u00e9cor \u00e0 la Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. They ordered craft cocktails made with locally sourced ingredients that took about ten minutes apiece for the bewhiskered \u201cmixologists\u201d to produce and that cost easily four times as much as the drinks had in the bar\u2019s former incarnation. After their cocktails arrived, they settled in at a table and Claire told Sean she had given notice at No-Miss and was going home to take care of her grandmother. \u201cJust like that?\u201d Sean asked, a stunned look on his handsome face, grapefruit-bitters-inspired cocktail held aloft halfway to his mouth. \u201cWell, as soon as they can replace me at work.\u201d \u201cBut\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. what about me? What about us?\u201d \u201cI\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d Claire trailed off. The sorry truth was, she hadn\u2019t thought much about Sean\u2019s reaction to her sudden news. Of course he was important to her. Claire cared for Sean. A lot. They\u2019d met not long after graduating college, and Sean\u2014an Evanston native\u2014had introduced Claire to the wonders of city life. Sean took her to fancy restaurants and cocktail parties; he taught her how to hail a cab and gripe about the El and stroll through the Museum of Art while making the appropriately erudite comments. With Sean by her side, Claire developed a taste for Thai food and Ethiopian food and learned to eat raw fish\u2014who knew?\u2014at sushi bars. She even became accustomed to paying the equivalent of an entire breakfast back home for a simple cup of French roast at the chic caf\u00e9 on the corner near her downtown office. They were young and well paid; it was fun. But lately Sean had been pushing for more. Their friends were starting to marry, settle down and buy houses, have children. Claire liked Sean and enjoyed being with him. But there was something lacking. For years she\u2019d been driven: first to get out of her small hometown, then to finish college, then to get a job, then to make more money. Now what? Sitting hunched over her keyboard ten hours a day, going out to trendy clubs on the weekend, able to afford a nice place to live and new clothes, and getting her hair done in a salon\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Was this what she had worked so hard to attain? Claire used to be able to lose herself down the rabbit hole of her work: writing code, beta testing, and resolving glitches. But now she wondered: Did any of it matter in the long run? Is this all there is? And when she tried to picture herself settling down with Sean and starting a family, she felt the waters closing over her head, her lungs screaming for air. She felt like she was drowning. \u201cTell me what\u2019s going on, Claire.\u201d Sean had covered Claire\u2019s hand with his, squeezed gently. \u201cYou get one phone call and suddenly you\u2019re ready to give up your whole life here in Chicago? I\u2019m sorry your grandmother\u2019s not doing well, but she\u2019s getting up there in age, right? It\u2019s not unexpected, is it? Couldn\u2019t you just go for a visit, like\u00a0a.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0?\u201d Like a normal person, Claire finished his thought in her mind. But no matter how much she might enjoy expensive cocktails, Claire had never felt normal in Chicago. When she\u2019d first arrived at the University of Chicago, a scholarship kid fresh off the plane from Louisiana, Chance had stuck out like a sore thumb. She wore the wrong clothes, sported a frizzy home perm two decades out of fashion (according to the blunt but sympathetic assessment of her roommate Zoey, who was from New York City and knew about such things), and spoke with an accent as thick as a cloud of moustiques over the bayou on a warm summer evening. At first she had found everything\u2014the chatty students, the scholarly professors, the city traffic\u2014intimidating. Just as she had at home, she spent her nights hiding in her room or studying in the library. But after a few lonely weeks Chance had made a decision. After all, she hadn\u2019t fought her way out of Plaquemines Parish just to let life pass her by. So she applied her formidable study skills to observing the behavior of the other girls: their wardrobes, their intonations, the way they giggled and joked about boys, and about life in general. How easily they reneged on promises, how they said yes when they meant no and no when they meant yes. How they never sat down for a full meal but ate only stalks of celery with peanut butter one day, huge bowls of ice cream the next. She started introducing herself as Claire instead of Chance, and learned to drink and smoke, to flirt and \u201cparty.\u201d She told long, rambling stories about her hometown that her friends found hysterical, and made a feature of her \u201cquaint\u201d bayou accent. For the first time in her life, Claire succeeded socially as well as academically. The poor little Cajun girl managed to make some friends, attract a few boys, and still graduate cum laude. She landed a good job as a software engineer in Chicago with a starting salary that was more than she had ever thought possible, a small fortune by the standards of Plaquemines Parish, where everyone had said: That Chance! Just look at her now! She\u2019s the American Dream, that one\u2014coming from nothing and making something of herself. But it had been years now, and Claire no longer felt like she was living the dream. Claire used to ask why she hadn\u2019t died alongside her mother when she was little, when Lizzie Broussard\u2019s ten-year-old Ford veered off the road and landed upside down on its roof in the bayou. And Mammaw always said: The Lord\u2019s got something special planned for you, sha, you mark my words. Your mother\u2019s voice reached out to rescue you\u2014it was a miracle. But now Claire asked herself: other than the size of her paycheck, was she really better off than if she had taken that refinery job back home straight out of high school and grabbed a beer with the gang down at Charlie Bob\u2019s after work? Claire knew what Sean\u2019s answer would be: a resounding yes. And yet. \u201cMammaw isn\u2019t just a grandmother,\u201d Claire found herself saying to Sean. Trying her best to explain. \u201cShe raised me. She saved my life.\u201d \u201cI know how important she is to you,\u201d he said, his voice gentle. \u201cAnd, of course, you should absolutely go see her. Take a couple of weeks, claim some family time. In fact, I could do the same and go with you.\u201d Claire smiled and sipped her cocktail. \u201cYou said my hometown reminded you of that movie Deliverance.\u201d Claire had never seen the film but she understood the reference. \u201cFor you, I\u2019d be willing to risk it,\u201d Sean said with a chuckle. Claire knew he was glad to see her smile, that he assumed he\u2019d won the argument. Sean was a nice man, easygoing and thoughtful. But he was used to Claire accommodating his desires. Honestly, she didn\u2019t much care whether they went to the symphony or the opera, or ate Vietnamese or Thai food for dinner, or went to the museum gala or the festival of lights at the harbor. In all these things, Claire was happy to let him choose. But this was different. \u201cI\u2019m not happy in Chicago, Sean. It\u2019s not enough, somehow. It\u2019s hard to explain, but\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I want something else.\u201d \u201cSo you\u2019re going to move back to Plaquemines Parish?\u201d He was getting angry now, pressing his lips together, his words taking on a clipped edge. \u201cYou hate it there. How many times have you told me that you never fit in, that you wanted something more out of life? You worked so hard to escape\u2014how can you even think about going back?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s just for a while, so I can be with Mammaw. Jessica says it probably won\u2019t be long now. I\u2019ll figure out something from there. I might even come back to Chicago\u2014I really don\u2019t know. I\u2019m sorry, Sean. You\u2019re a wonderful man. I just\u2014\u201d \u201cThis is a mistake, Claire,\u201d Sean cut her off. \u201cYou\u2019re making a mistake.\u201d \u201cYou may be right,\u201d she\u2019d conceded. Probably it was a mistake. But it was her mistake to make. Ten days later Claire boarded a plane and headed to Plaquemines Parish, where they drank cheap coffee laced with chicory, no one even thought about attending the opera, and Claire\u2014with her fancy college education and big-city ways\u2014now stuck out like a sore thumb. Chapter Two \u201cWhy is there a tree on the roof?\u201d Claire asked as Ty pulled up in front of Mammaw\u2019s house. \u201cStorm came through coupla days ago,\u201d said Ty, peering at the greenery atop the little white clapboard bungalow. \u201cAnyway, it\u2019s just a branch.\u201d \u201cStill,\u201d Claire said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very large branch.\u201d \u201cFirst I seen it,\u201d said Ty with a shrug. \u201cI\u2019d take care of it now but gotta get back to work. Prob\u2019ly Remy\u2019s on it.\u201d Uncle Remy came out of the house at that moment, smiling, gray haired and slightly stooped. In photos of him as a young man in his uniform, Remy had a broad smile and kind brown eyes. He had been a gifted mechanic, could fix anything ever since he was a very young boy; everyone said so. But he\u2019d returned from Vietnam with a head injury, and even though it seemed like he\u2019d healed on the outside, inside he had changed. He\u2019d moved in with Mammaw and never left. Mammaw always called him \u201cslow.\u201d She said it right in front of him, and Remy never seemed to take offense. It wasn\u2019t until Claire had gone off to Chicago that she started to think there might be something wrong with saying things like that. Remy\u2019s \u201cslowness\u201d had always seemed a fact of life, like being tall or having curly hair; she had never thought much about it as a girl. He was Chance\u2019s best childhood friend\u2014her only real friend. He was a hide-and-seek champion, and could even be talked into playing Barbies if she promised to play checkers in return. \u201cHey!\u201d Remy called out, shuffling down the broken concrete path. \u201cCome see! It\u2019s my Chance! We missed you, Chance!\u201d She jumped out of the truck and ran to give Remy a hug, holding on for a long time. He smelled slightly of mothballs and spices, an achingly familiar scent that spoke to her of home and gumbo and family. Sean was probably right; this whole idea was likely a mistake. But this\u2014this moment\u2014was worth the trip. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna have to call someone \u2019bout that roof,\u201d Uncle Remy fretted as soon as she pulled away. So much for the welcome home. Claire wasn\u2019t surprised; Remy lived in the present. He started wringing his hands and shifting from one foot to the other. \u201cBranch went clear through the tar paper, and what if it rains again?\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t worry, Remy,\u201d Claire said. \u201cI\u2019ll take care of it. Isn\u2019t cousin Hog in construction?\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s on the shrimpers now,\u201d Remy said, grabbing the duffel bag from the back of the truck. Ty brought the heavier suitcases in through the front door, bade them farewell, and hurried back to work. \u201cThey\u2019re all on the shrimpers these days,\u201d Remy continued. \u201cThem that\u2019s not on the rigs.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll call someone else, then. Don\u2019t worry.\u201d \u201cJessica\u2019ll know what to do. She knows everything.\u201d \u201cGood idea. Let me say hello to Mammaw, and then we\u2019ll figure it out. Okay?\u201d \u201cOkay.\u201d He nodded and seemed to physically relax. \u201cGlad you\u2019re home, Chance. Sure enough glad you\u2019re home.\u201d As always when stepping through Mammaw\u2019s yellow door, Claire was filled with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia mixed with a panicky urge to flee, to run back to her urban life of overpriced drinks and refined beauty and people who followed the international news. Mammaw had quit smoking a decade ago, but still the house smelled of stale cigarette smoke, old books, and Dr Pepper. An ancient window-mounted air-conditioning unit rattled and spewed out enough cool to take the edge off the heat, but nonetheless the small living room, crowded with furniture and bookshelves, was stuffy. Beyond the front room was the kitchen, and to one side were two bedrooms and a bath. That was it. After Chance had come to live here, she had slept on the couch or, sometimes, with Mammaw in her bed. \u201cShe\u2019s awake and waitin\u2019 on you,\u201d said Remy. \u201cShe\u2019s only speakin\u2019 Cajun, so it\u2019s good you come. You want a pop?\u201d \u201cNo, thanks. I\u2019m okay for now.\u201d Claire was struck with a vivid memory of the first time she had walked into this house, age six, knowing she would be staying. That she wouldn\u2019t have to go back to her father\u2019s. That she was safe. Mammaw had been making salmon croquettes; she met Chance at the door while wiping her hands on a towel, then escorted her into the kitchen, lifted her onto the counter, and poured her a Dixie cup of sweet tea. She\u2019d declared to Chance that, starting the next day, they would speak only Cajun in her home. \u201cBut\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I don\u2019t speak Cajun,\u201d protested Chance, nervous at the thought. \u201cYou\u2019ll learn, just like I learned English. When I was little we spoke Cajun at home, and when I went to school they wanted me to speak English, \u2019cept I didn\u2019t speak no English. If the teachers heard me speakin\u2019 my language they\u2019d make me kneel on rice.\u201d \u201cKneel on rice?\u201d \u201cYup,\u201d she said, her gnarled, capable hands mixing canned fish, chopped onions, bread crumbs, egg, and spices for salmon croquettes in a huge periwinkle blue ceramic bowl. Chance watched as the pink goo squeezed through her grandmother\u2019s fingers like lumpy Play-Doh. \u201cGo on now and wash your hands. He\u2019p me make these patties.\u201d \u201cBut\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. isn\u2019t rice soft?\u201d Chance had asked, jumping off the counter and pulling the stepstool to the old porcelain farmer\u2019s sink, reaching up to turn on the ancient brass tap, wetting her hands. She picked up the huge bar of strong lye soap Mammaw bought down at the Piggly Wiggly and rubbed it between her hands while she sang the entire song of \u201cHappy Birthday to You\u201d in her mind, the way she\u2019d been taught. Chance was always careful to do as she\u2019d been taught. She rinsed her hands, then dried them on a faded towel, stiff from line-drying. It chafed, and the strong soap made her hands feel dry and raw. Clean, through and through. \u201cI\u2019m not talkin\u2019 \u2019bout kneelin\u2019 in no cooked rice like in jambalaya, sha,\u201d Mammaw said with a laugh. \u201cThat\u2019d be like a pillow. This was raw, hard grains. They dig into your skin, feel like they goin\u2019 right up on under your kneecap. You try it, see how you like it.\u201d \u201cNo, thank you, ma\u2019am.\u201d Mammaw laughed again and scooped out a ball of the salmon mixture, slapping it in the palm of her hands to form the croquette. \u201cYou a good girl, Chance. Yup, the good Lord\u2019s got somethin\u2019 special in mind for you, sha, mark my words. That\u2019s how come he spared you, helped your mama to speak from beyond the veil.\u201d Claire reached into the bowl, took a handful of the goo, and concentrated on forming it into a patty. She tried as hard as she could, but when she set it on the platter it looked like a raggedy-edged lump next to her grandmother\u2019s smooth discs. Her eyes flew to Mammaw\u2019s. \u201cNow, you hadn\u2019t ought to be so skeered all the time, sha,\u201d Mammaw said, picking up the misshapen wad and smoothing the sides with a quick, practiced movement. \u201cEverybody clumsy when they little. No shame in that. Takes time to learn to do things. Time and practice.\u201d Chance tried harder with the second patty, her tongue planted firmly at the corner of her mouth. \u201c\u2019Sides,\u201d Mammaw continued. \u201cI don\u2019t \u2019spect the Lord saved you to make you good at cookin\u2019. There\u2019s the rest of us for that. He had \u2019nother purpose for you. \u2019Nother purpose entirely.\u201d \u201cWhat is it?\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t rightly know, sha. None my business, when it come right down to it. But it\u2019s somethin\u2019 special. Mark my words.\u201d Claire stepped into Mammaw\u2019s sky blue room. It was so small it barely fit the double bed with its chunky bedstead, World\u2019s Best Mammaw in childish needlepoint covering one garishly colored pillow. And Mammaw. Jessica had warned Claire that Mammaw wasn\u2019t eating much, but nonetheless it was a shock to see her so tiny, as though she were shrinking in on herself, would continue dissipating until she disappeared into her smooth white sheets. She always used to be stout, her chubby arms and generous bosom a welcome refuge for a scared little girl. Still, Mammaw\u2019s light sherry brown eyes were sharp as always, her smile unwavering. \u201cAin\u2019t you a sight for sore eyes, sha?\u201d Claire perched on the edge of the bed and hugged her grandmother, afraid to squeeze too tight. She could feel Mammaw\u2019s bones and the rapid thudding of her pulse through the thin pink cotton of her nightgown. Once, in the third grade, Claire found an injured bird on the way home from school. It felt like this in the palm of her hand: tiny, fragile, heart beating wildly. Remy had helped her build a little nest out of newspaper and leaves; they dug up some earthworms but the poor frightened creature ignored their offerings. It hadn\u2019t lasted the day. They buried it in a shoe box behind the old Ford sitting, rusting and useless, next to the garage for as long as she could remember. Remy marked the spot with a crude wooden cross that still stood. Mammaw pulled away, and Claire felt the sting of tears in her eyes. \u201cDon\u2019t you dare be sad for me now, sha,\u201d said Mammaw in Cajun, waving a finger. \u201cI\u2019m \u2019bout ready to go. All I need is two things: to finish up a few letters, and make the plans for my funeral. And I want to die here at home, ya hear? Don\u2019t take me to no hospital. Promise me.\u201d Claire nodded, unable to speak. Mammaw had never spent much time on sentiment. She took care of business; this was as much a part of her as her quick laugh, the way she ate with her mouth open and believed (and repeated and expounded upon) everything she read in the tabloid newspapers and\u2014as she got older and had trouble moving around\u2014how she would roll across the kitchen linoleum in an office chair, pushing herself off from the table to the counter and back again. \u201cI got some specifications for my funeral,\u201d Mammaw continued. \u201cBut first, go help Remy with that tree what fell on the roof so he\u2019ll stop talkin\u2019 about it. I swear that boy could worry the birds out the trees. Move any of my treasures that might be in the way up there, will you, sha?\u201d \u201cOf course I will,\u201d Claire said. \u201cI\u2019ll get right on it. But can\u2019t I get you something first, though? Something to eat, maybe?\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve got a hankerin\u2019 for some gumbo. Maybe you could get the fixin\u2019s for it for tomorrow supper.\u201d \u201cI will. Nothing right now?\u201d She shook her head. \u201cI\u2019m gonna take me a nap. You go on now.\u201d Claire kissed her grandmother\u2019s soft cheek\u2014it smelled almondy, a mix of Jergens lotion and baby powder\u2014and did as she was told. First she called a roofing company that agreed to come out the next day. Then she changed into old jeans and pulled on a T\u2011shirt. Claire met Remy in his bedroom and asked for his help. She stepped into his closet, shoved her way past the musty army uniforms and the dark blue suit Mammaw insisted he keep for weddings and funerals, and, using her fingertips, pushed gently on one of the panels at the back of the closet until it popped open, revealing a wooden ladder bolted to the rear wall. Claire wondered how she had managed to spend time up in this attic when she was young. It was sweltering. Sweat beaded on her forehead within minutes; it was so hot and close it was hard to breathe as she started moving boxes to the undamaged section of the attic. A few\u2014the ones with correspondence and photographs\u2014she handed down to Remy to stack in a corner of his bedroom. She worked as fast as she could, driven to escape the heat. But when Claire got to a crate shoved up under the eaves, she slowed her frenetic pace. \u201cWhat\u2019s this old wooden crate from Paris, Remy? Do you know?\u201d she called down the ladder. His head popped up through the trapdoor. \u201cI don\u2019t rightly know. I don\u2019t come up here much. You should ask Mammaw.\u201d As soon as Claire approached the crate, the memories came flooding back. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "B09WSWN56N", "title": "Vampire Knitting Club Boxed Set Books 7-9: Paranormal Cozy Mystery", "author": "Nancy Warren", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B08B5CWVZJ", "title": "Off the Wild Coast of Brittany", "author": "Juliet Blackwell", "description": "Review Praise for The Vineyards of Champagne \"A beautifully captivating story of wartime tenacity and tenderness that celebrates the sweetest bonds of human relationships and the courage to love again after loss. So exquisitely rich in detail, you'll feel bubbles on your tongue.\" --Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Last Year of the War \"Blackwell moves effortlessly between present-day France and the battlefields of WWI... The allure of the decades-old mystery of missing letters juxtaposed against the history of the caves of Champagne makes for a satisfying page-turner.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Blackwell's exquisite talent at interweaving the past with the present is on full display in her latest...telling the universal story of grief, loss, and human resilience.\" -- Booklist Praise for Juliet Blackwell \"Plan your trip to Provence now. In this meticulously researched novel, Juliet Blackwell deftly navigates three time periods, taking us from contemporary California to both the Belle \u00c9poque and Nazi-occupied France, as she spins a story as charming as an antique carousel.\" --Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise \"With crystalline imagery, vivid characters, and lively prose, Juliet Blackwell redefines what family means in a way that will touch readers long after they've read the last page....This novel should come with a warning: will cause enormous desire to travel to France.\" --Stephen P. Kiernan, author of The Baker's Secret \"Blackwell seamlessly incorporates details about art, cast making, and the City of Light...[and] especially stuns in the aftermath of the main story by unleashing a twist that is both a complete surprise and a point that expertly ties everything together.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Bestselling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light.\" -- Booklist \"A charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Light.\" --Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I'll See You in Paris --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the New York Times bestselling author of Letters from Paris and The Paris Key . In addition to writing the beloved Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series, she also coauthored the Agatha Award-nominated Art Lover's Mystery series with her sister. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Natalie And we're off, to continue our adventure on the \u00eble de Feme, renovating a historic guesthouse and opening a gourmet restaurant! Because when you grab life with both hands and hold on tight, you never know where it might lead: perhaps even to a rocky island off the Wild Coast of Brittany. Stay tuned. . . . This tale is not over. -last line of the international bestseller Pourquoi Pas? A Memoir of Life, Love, and Food by Natalie Morgen Things are not going according to plan. Natalie Morgen sat at a little metal caf\u017d table on the stone terrace outside her guesthouse, watching the latest herd of tourists surge off the ferry. An aroma of anise rose from her glass, melding with the smoke from her cigarette and the scent of the sea: a m\u017dlange of dead things and salt, of the abundant seaweed and muck that marred the shallows during low tide. Island sounds wafted over on the ocean breezes: the histrionic seagulls squabbling over a bucket of scraps Lo\u2022c had tossed out the back door of Pouce Caf\u017d, the rhythmic lapping of the waves in the snug harbor, the murmurs of visitors enjoying lunch at outdoor tables, the occasional clacking of a p\u017dtanque ball hitting its mark. Natalie imagined the newly arrived tourists mistook her for a native sipping her glass of pastis-though most of the actual natives preferred beer or hard cider-and enjoying a sunny day on the beautiful island. And sitting here like this, Natalie could almost convince herself that life was good. That everything was going according to her carefully thought-out plan. Lounging on the terrace of her ancient guesthouse, its rusted iron gates still secured with a heavy steel chain because the Bag-Noz was not yet open to guests even though accommodations were well-nigh impossible to come by on the \u00eble de Feme during tourist season. Bobox strutted by, clucking in contentment. The fluffy white hen had come with the house and had made herself a little nest in the shed. Ridiculously long snowy white feathers on the top of her head quivered and swayed with every confident step, reminding Natalie of stylish Parisian ladies in photographs of yore, parading along the Champs-\u0192lys\u017des in their feathered chapeaux. Paris. What had Audrey Hepburn said? \"Paris is always a good idea\"? Maybe for Audrey-she was rich and beautiful. Absentmindedly scratching at a mosquito bite, Natalie realized she was clenching her jaw, willed herself to relax, took another sip of pastis, and turned her attention back to the ferry passengers. Trying to get their bearings, the newcomers weren't talking much as they staggered along the walkway that hugged the thick stone seawall. Some carried inflatables and beach toys; others clutched scraps of paper with instructions directing them to their rented guesthouses or to the Ar-Men, the only hotel on the island. It must have been a rough crossing: Most of the children and more than a few of the adults were decidedly green around the gills. A storm had thrashed the region yesterday, and though to the unpracticed eye the sea today appeared calm, Natalie had lived on the island long enough to have learned a few things from the locals, such as how to read the water. Or, at the very least, when to ask a local to read the water for her. Even after a storm appeared to have passed, waves lingered and surged. The swells rippled out and down, the awesome energy of the sea needing time to settle, to balance, to find its footing once again, lulling sailors and landlubbers alike into a false sense of security only to slam them with choppy water if they dared venture too soon onto open sea. Sounds like a metaphor for life. Natalie made a mental note to post this, or some poetic version of it, on her social media accounts. She should post some photos as well. It had been a while. Too long. She had a lot of followers to keep happy. Her readers loved the snapshots of Natalie's life on an island off Brittany's C\u2122te Sauvage, or \"Wild Coast,\" where she was renovating an ancient guesthouse with the proceeds from her bestselling memoir. In fact, some of the new arrivals lurching off the ferry might well be women of a certain age who had read Natalie's inspirational tome about finding love and self-fulfillment through the art of French cooking, and had decided to come to the \u00eble de Feme in search of love and self-fulfillment themselves. But as Natalie had learned, in a most painful way, the \u00eble de Feme was still an \u201dle-an island-which meant that if you didn't bring it with you, you weren't likely to find it here. How could she explain that her Prince Charming-le prince charmant-the man she had fallen head over heels for, the reason she had come to Brittany in the first place, had turned out to be a lying, cheating, spendthrift schmuck who left her high and dry in the middle of their guesthouse renovation? Even his name was annoying. Fran\u008dois-Xavier. Being French, he insisted she say his entire name, every time: Fran-swah Ex-ah-vee-ay. A full six syllables. Six. She once made the mistake of addressing him simply as Fran\u008dois and he accused her of calling him by another man's name. A classic case of psychological transference, she thought with grim humor, knowing what she now knew. Fran\u008dois-Xavier claimed it was an American thing to give people nicknames. He was forever blaming her quirks on Natalie's being American, but in this case it might have been true. In college Natalie's roommate had introduced herself as Anastasia-a mere four syllables-and everyone on their hall immediately shortened it to Ana. Natalie had fought her entire childhood against being called Nat because it sounded like the bug, which her sister Alex insisted she was: Nat-the-Gnat, small and annoying, bouncing around ineffectually, her head in the clouds, endlessly searching for some unspecified thing. Natalie had tried to retaliate by calling Alex \"Al,\" but in that irksome way of smug elder sisters, Alex had embraced the name, stomping around the family compound, singing at the top of her lungs, loudly and proudly, the old Paul Simon song \"You Can Call Me Al.\" Which wasn't fair. Nobody wrote songs about gnats. Natalie never managed to outmaneuver her four older sisters, and Alex, the closest to her in age, had been by far the most difficult. Anyway. Fran\u008dois-Xavier. She supposed two names suited a man with two faces. Still . . . that gorgeous face flashed in her mind: the sloping, intensely blue eyes; the sensual, full lips; the hint of dark golden whiskers glistening along his strong jaw. The way he looked at her as if she were not merely desirable but that he had waited a lifetime to meet her, that he was ready to share his life with her, wanted to create a family with her right here on his native island, where they would play p\u017dtanque in the sunshine, drink ap\u017dro curled up in front of the hearth, and cook together, transforming classic ingredients into sumptuous dinners through the dedicated application of traditional French techniques. And then they would linger for hours over elaborate meals with friends and extended family and guesthouse visitors. That was the plan. At the moment her cupboard contained half a box of crackers, an open bag of dry-roasted peanuts, and a single fragrant cantaloupe well on its way to rotten. Natalie had forgotten to put an order in with the mainland store that shipped to the island, so today's ferry brought no bundle of supplies with her name on it. She supposed she could buy something from the island's small but well-stocked \"general store\" that primarily served the tourists, but if she did, then the shop's owner, Severine Menou, would know Natalie's business, which meant soon everyone on the island would know Natalie's business. Better to do what she usually did these days: eat the ample menu du jour at Milo's caf\u017d, blaming it on her torn-up kitchen, and stick to peanuts and stale crackers-and plenty of pastis-the rest of the time. Fran\u008dois-Xavier would be appalled. What was she going to do? Keep your head down and the pretense up. At least until she figured out her next steps. She had told everyone that Fran\u008dois-Xavier was on a business trip to Paris, scouting for kitchen help for the gourmet restaurant they were supposed to be opening in the large dining room of the Bag-Noz Guesthouse. No one was surprised; he traveled to Paris frequently, after all. This time, though, Fran\u008dois-Xavier had no intention of coming back. How long would it be until people started asking questions? Also, the construction workers hadn't shown up this week and Natalie was afraid to ask why. It might be because today was le quinze ao\u017et, a national holiday. Or just because it was August, and a lot of French people took the entire month off for vacation. Or maybe the workers hadn't shown up because Natalie hadn't paid her latest round of bills. When he left, Fran\u008dois-Xavier siphoned off the majority of their shared bank account, leaving her to get by on a few hundred euros and maxed-out credit cards until she received a check from her publisher for the book under contract, a follow-up to Pourquoi Pas? Her jaw tightened again. Her current work in progress was meant to be all about her perfect life with her perfect French chef fianc\u017d, and to be accompanied by a liberal smattering of recipes and mouthwatering photos of the meals she and Fran\u008dois-Xavier prepared-what her agent referred to as \"French food porn.\" Natalie took a deep quaff of her pastis, let out a long sigh, and watched as Bobox scratched the ground in her incessant search for something appetizing in the sandy soil of the weed-strewn courtyard. Fran\u008dois-Xavier was supposed to run the kitchen, and Natalie was supposed to run the guesthouse, and it was all supposed to be beautiful. But things had not gone according to plan. Chapter Two Alex Why in the world did Nat move to such a godforsaken island? The \u00eble de Feme revealed itself coquettishly, first appearing through the ocean mist like a vague mirage, the kind that shimmered along the highways on the hottest days in the remote Northern California mountains where they had grown up. Alex squinted as she tried to make out the strip of low gray land. On the map the distance between the island and the mainland didn't look that great, but she and her fellow passengers had left the dock at Audierne more than an hour ago. The bobbing ferry had headed north at first, turning to the west only as they passed the Pointe du Raz, no doubt fighting the channel's famous currents and avoiding the perilous reefs that lurked just below the surface, a vast underwater maze protecting the island. According to the travel guide-Alex always did her homework before beginning something new-the jagged rocks had brought catastrophe to legions of sailors and ships over the years. There had been 127 documented shipwrecks in this strait, and that was only since they'd started keeping track, back in the seventeenth century. The danger of shipwreck explained the multitude of lighthouses on the islands and along the coastline of the channel. Perched on rocky outcroppings, the towers appeared lonely and stoic. And hauntingly beautiful. Alex had also read in the travel guide that the French had two words for lighthouses: A phare was a true lighthouse, usually home to a keeper in the days before the lights were automated, while a feu-which meant \"fire\"-was a smaller tower with a smaller light. The mile-and-a-half-long \u00eble de Feme was equipped with one true lighthouse on its western tip, a large feu on the easternmost point, and two smaller feux dotting the southern coast. Clearly, this region was well acquainted with maritime disasters. Alex found that oddly comforting. She was a bit of a shipwreck herself, these days. Alex climbed the steep set of steps, clinging to the cold metal handrails as the boat pitched sharply. She would be windblown on the open upper deck, but breathing fresh air was preferable to being stuck in the crowded, too-warm cabin below. Upon boarding the ferry, Alex had needed to harness every bit of self-control not to climb onto one of the seats and order everyone to don one of the bright orange life vests stacked in a cupboard. Don't be weird, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. Act like the others. Besides, her very limited French didn't include the vocabulary for \"Safety first, folks!\" She had contented herself with grabbing a dozen seasickness bags from a little stand next to the first aid cabinet and making a mental note of the location of an inflatable life raft. Just in case. As soon as they left the shelter of the harbor, the sea had become choppy and the boat was tossed about like a child's toy, heaving this way and that, leaving its human inhabitants retching and grasping onto their molded plastic seats for dear life. Alex dug through her backpack for a package of wet wipes and handed them, along with a couple of the seasickness bags, to a young father whose little girl had lost her lunch all over the front of his sweater vest and jacket. She wasn't feeling all that chipper herself, but keeping busy helped. It always had. Father and child taken care of for the moment, Alex made her way to a seat and kept her eyes on the horizon, gazing at a fixed point to quell the nausea. But seriously. Setting aside the \"why\" for the moment, how had Nat even found this place? Her little sister was forever bragging on social media, posting photos of herself dancing in the clubs of Budapest or shopping the open-air markets of Marrakech as she traipsed around the world \"looking for herself.\" On her blog she posted rambling descriptions of how she spent her days learning classic French cooking, and her nights hobnobbing with chic Parisians in cinematic wine cellars and cabarets. And if all that weren't galling enough, irresponsible, carefree Nat had hit the jackpot when her memoir of finding herself and food-and love-became an international sensation, lingering at the top of the bestseller list week after exasperating week. Even the title annoyed Alex. Pourquoi Pas? Seriously? There were always plenty of reasons why not. But readers hadn't agreed. Which just went to show you that people today were pathetic, casting about for direction in their sad little lives. Was she now doing the very same thing? Alex's stomach heaved at that thought more than the seasickness. An island off the coast of Brittany had sounded so fantastical somehow when the thought first occurred to her back in dusty Albuquerque. It had seemed as if destiny had intervened. Anyway, she didn't need forever. Just a little while, time to regroup, to make a plan. A respite from the convoluted joke that her life had become. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0778319482", "title": "Darkest Journey (Krewe of Hunters, 20)", "author": "Lisa Scottoline", "description": "Review \"With an astonishing ease and facility, this talented writer can cast her stories in any genre.\" -Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels\"Graham is a master at world building and her latest is a thrilling, dark, and deadly tale of romantic suspense.\" -Booklist, starred review, on Haunted Destiny\"Intricate, fast-paced, and intense, this riveting thriller blends romance and suspense in perfect combination and keeps readers guessing and the tension taut until the very end.\" -Library Journal, starred review, on Flawless\"A masterfully created psychological thriller...leaving readers shocked and enthralled.\" -RT Book Reviews on The Hexed\"Dark, dangerous and deadly! Graham has the uncanny ability to bring her books to life, using exceptionally vivid details to add depth to all the people and places.\"-RT Book Reviews on Waking the Dead, Top Pick\"Murder, intrigue...a fast-paced read. You may never know in advance what harrowing situations Graham will place her characters in, but...rest assured that the end result will be satisfying.\"-Suspense Magazine on Let the Dead Sleep\"Graham deftly weaves elements of mystery, the paranormal and romance into a tight plot that will keep the reader guessing at the true nature of the killer's evil.\"-Publishers Weekly on The Unseen\"Suspenseful and dark.... The transitions between past and present flow seamlessly, and the main characters are interesting and their connection to one another is believable.\"-RT Book Reviews on The Unseen About the Author New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Heather Graham has written more than a hundred novels. She's a winner of the RWA's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Thriller Writers' Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. For more information, check out her websites: TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com, eHeatherGraham.com, and HeatherGraham.tv. You can also find Heather on Facebook.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 5.98}, {"asin": "0425282953", "title": "And Then There Were Nuns (League of Literary Ladies)", "author": "Kylie Logan", "description": "Review Praise for the National Bestselling League of Literary Ladies Mysteries \u201cLogan has fun with this unusual story, intimate setting, and feisty characters, and readers will, too.\u201d\u2014 Richmond Times-Dispatch \u201cThis highly addictive series continues with a clever storyline, quirky characters and an ideal island location. As the mystery evolves and the main character realizes the parallels to Agatha Christie\u2019s famous novel, the suspense intensifies, and the twists and turns keep on coming.\u201d\u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cWhat could be more fun that a mystery series that is about a reluctant book club? I love how the mysteries run parallel to the book the League of Literary Ladies are reading.\u201d\u2014MyShelf.com\u201cOne of my favorite cozy mystery writers...What great characters Kylie Logan has created.\u201d\u2014Fresh Fiction About the Author Kylie Logan is the national bestselling author of The League of Literary Ladies Mysteries, the Button Box Mysteries, the Chili Cook-Off Mysteries, and the Ethnic Eats Mysteries.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0451490657", "title": "The Vineyards of Champagne", "author": "Juliet Blackwell", "description": "Review \u201cA beautifully captivating story of wartime tenacity and tenderness that celebrates the sweetest bonds of human relationships and the courage to love again after loss. So exquisitely rich in detail, you\u2019ll feel bubbles on your tongue.\u201d\u2014Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Last Year of the War \u201cBlackwell moves effortlessly between present-day France and the battlefields of WWI\u2026 The allure of the decades-old mystery of missing letters juxtaposed against the history of the caves of Champagne makes for a satisfying page-turner.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cBlackwell\u2019s exquisite talent at interweaving the past with the present is on full display in her latest\u2026telling the universal story of grief, loss, and human resilience.\u201d\u2014 Booklist Praise for The Lost Carousel of Provence \"Blackwell uses an outsider\u2019s passion to shine a light into the dark past of a broken family and how a sweet, wooden rabbit can bring them together again.\"\u2014The Associated Press \u201cPlan your trip to Provence now. In this meticulously researched\u00a0novel, Juliet Blackwell deftly navigates three time periods, taking us from contemporary\u00a0California to both\u00a0The Belle \u00c9poque\u00a0and Nazi-occupied\u00a0France as she spins a story as charming as an antique carousel.\u201d\u2014Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise \u201cAn untrusting American orphan meets a dysfunctional French family\u2014and each turns out to possess wisdom that helps the other to heal from old, old wounds. With crystalline imagery, vivid characters and lively prose, Juliet Blackwell redefines what family means, in a way that will touch readers long after they've read the last page.\u00a0As Cady points her camera at one antique carousel after another, this novel should come with a warning: Will cause enormous desire to travel to France.\u201d\u2014Stephen P. Kiernan, author of The Baker\u2019s Secret \u201cNarrating from several perspectives, Blackwell weaves together a tale of love lost, repressed passion, and finding a sense of belonging that should utterly charm and delight readers new to her and current fans alike.\u201d\u2014 Booklist Praise for Letters from Paris \u201cBlackwell seamlessly incorporates details about art, cast making, and the City of Light...[and] especially stuns in the aftermath of the main story by unleashing a twist that is both a complete surprise and a point that expertly ties everything together.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cBest-selling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light....this romantic and picturesque novel shows us that even the most broken people can find what makes them whole again.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cBlackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh...A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA great tale of mystery, artistry, history, and a little romance. With plenty of backstory and tidbits about Parisian life in the 19th century, there's something for everyone in this recommended read.\"\u2014 Library Journal Praise for The Paris Key \u201cA charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Lights.\u201d\u2014Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I'll See You in Paris \u201c[A] witty, warm, winsome novel...[Blackwell's] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail.\u201d\u2014Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Carousel of Provence, Letters from Paris and The Paris Key . In addition to writing the beloved Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series, she also coauthored the Agatha Award-nominated Art Lover's Mystery series with her sister. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Rosalyn Napa, California Present day There's one major problem with your little plan,\" said Rosalyn, patting the dossier Hugh had dropped on the desk in front of her. According to the itinerary, she was booked on an AirFrance flight to Paris departing from San Francisco the day after Christmas. She was to stay a couple of nights in Paris, then pick up a rental car that had been reserved in her name and head for Champagne, less than a two-hour drive northeast.\"What problem? I booked it myself.\" Hugh nodded and gave her an exaggerated wink. \"First class-that's the ticket. Get it? The ticket?\"\"But I don't like France. Or the French. Or champagne, for that matter.\"\"Are you saying you dislike la Champagne, as in the region of France,\" asked Hugh, \"or le champagne, the bubbly nectar that is celebrated the world over?\"\"Both, as you very well know. Not a fan.\"Hugh's only reaction to her ill humor was a broad smile. Rosalyn's boss was a bear of a man who dwarfed the cramped winery/import office located in the lovingly renovated garage of his sprawling Napa Valley vineyard home. Standing several inches taller than six feet, the ironically named Hugh Small had the well-padded physique of a man who entertained frequently and enjoyed his own excellent cooking - and wine - a tad too much. His graying brown hair was wild and scruffy, and his clothes so sloppy that, if he hadn't been so well-known in the valley, the locals might have assumed he was one of the wanderers who camped among the vines, cruising the highways of Napa and Sonoma for dregs in bottles left on picnic tables by well-to-do tourists on wine-tasting jaunts.Ten years earlier, Hugh had fulfilled a lifelong fantasy by purchasing a vineyard in Napa. He quickly realized just how hard it was to get established in the wine-producing business, and branched out into importing and selling select vintages from France and Spain through his company, Small Fortune Wines.Hugh's favorite joke: \"How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start out with a large fortune.\"Today Hugh's light blue pullover sweater sported a moth-eaten hole over his heart. Rosalyn stared at it, pondering its significance. Hugh had more than enough heart for the both of them.\"Honestly, Hugh,\" Rosalyn persisted, trying to keep a lid on the vague panic simmering somewhere deep within her, \"I know most people would jump at the chance to go to Champagne, all expenses paid, but I really don't enjoy traveling. You're sure you need me to do this?\"He nodded. \"Andy's still at the hospital with his wife and their preemie; he couldn't possibly leave now.\"\"Couldn't you go? I could stay here and run the office.\"\"I need a wine rep in France,\" he said. \"And you're a wine rep.\"\"Just barely.\"\"And you speak French.\"\"Just barely.\"\"And you've got a palate. Better than mine. Besides,\" said Hugh as he sorted through a stack of mail, tossing several envelopes into the recycling bin, \"it's downright embarrassing that you've never been to France. What self-respecting wine rep has never been to France?\"\"I have been to France.\"\"Once. And if I'm not mistaken you went to Paris, which is no more representative of France than New York City is of the United States. And admit it: You enjoyed your time there.\"Snowflakes glittering on their scarves as they stood under the lamppost at the corner of Rue des Abbesses and Rue Lepic. Tipsy on wine and after-dinner cognac. Giggling as they watched a man slip silently down the snow-covered cobblestone streets of Montmartre, their breath coming out in wispy clouds, mingling in the frigid air.\"It's our laughter,\" says Rosalyn, lifting her mittened hand as if to capture the mist. \"Come back!\"Dash grabs her hand, warming it with both of his, kissing it. \"Plenty more where that came from, Rosie. A lifetime of laughter for my beautiful bride. I promise.\"Dash had lied.\"Of course I enjoyed it,\" Rosalyn said when she realized Hugh was still watching her, awaiting an answer. \"It was my honeymoon. That was different.\"\"Dash went to France many times,\" Hugh pointed out. \"He loved it there.\"Rosalyn felt the usual sharp stab in her gut at the sound of her husband's name. Still, she appreciated that Hugh never hesitated to speak it aloud. It muted the pain, ever so slightly, each time someone talked about Dash as though things were normal; as if invoking his spirit, inviting his presence into this world. Most people tried to avoid any reference to him, or acted chagrined, as though they'd done something awkward and embarrassing by bringing him up.\"I like it right here,\" insisted Rosalyn, gazing out the window at the twisty grapevines that marched along the rolling hills, their undulating lines interrupted only by an occasional oak tree. The sight of the parallel rows was soothing, as if a Zen master had pulled a giant rake through sand. \"I defy anyone to come up with a more beautiful place than Napa.\"\"There's nothing wrong with seeking a refuge for a while, Rosalyn,\" said Hugh, his voice dropping, its gentle sincerity grating on her nerves. \"But it isn't a life plan. If you decide to settle in Napa, it should be just that: a decision. Not an attempt to hide from life.\"Rosalyn's eyes stung; nausea surged at the base of her throat. One hand fiddled with the silver locket that hung around her neck while the other reached for the travel dossier as she pretended to study the itinerary, hoping to distract herself, to stem the tears, to quell the incipient panic.Breathe, she reminded herself. Ten slow, deep breaths . . . \"As you can see,\" said Hugh, his voice regaining its cheery tone as he pointed to a few items highlighted in bold script on the agenda, \"you'll be representing Small Fortune Wines in Champagne for the festival of Saint Vincent, patron saint of vintners, which is held on the twenty-second of January. Until then, you'll meet with vintners, make nice, tour the caves-\"\"Like I need to see any more wine caves in my life.\"\"You do need to see more wine caves in your life, Rosalyn,\" Hugh insisted. \"The champagne caves are unlike any you've seen before; there are two hundred kilometers worth of cray\u00e8res under Reims alone. An entire city, underground. Do you know the French moved whole schools and businesses down into the caves during the First World War?\"\"Fascinating,\" Rosalyn said. \"But is that why you want me to go? To attend a wine festival and tour some caves? That doesn't sound terribly cost-effective to me.\"\"No, no, no, you're also going to sign some new, smaller producers. It's the foundation of my vision.\"\"Your . . . what, now?\"Hugh returned her smile. \"My vision to get people to stop thinking of champagne as a luxury, get them to drink a glass with appetizers as they do in France. Americans equate champagne with the big, expensive houses, Mumm and Taittinger. I want you to find and sign a few of the small champagne houses, the ones that don't charge a fortune for their wine. Step one is reconfirming our commitment with Gaspard Bl\u00e9\u00a0- you'll be staying at his vineyard. I've known Bl\u00e9 for years, but I heard through the grapevine - get it? - that Bottle Rocket's sending someone to the festival. I wouldn't want to lose Bl\u00e9 to the competition.\"Bottle Rocket was the Big Bad Wolf, Hugh's biggest competitor for the products of family-run French wineries.Rosalyn nodded. Of course she would go to represent Small Fortune Wines in Champagne. She couldn't refuse Hugh anything; she owed him too much. Besides . . . maybe he was onto something. Maybe a change of pace was what she needed to pull out of the tailspin. Nothing else seemed to be working.\"So, how's Andy doing? And his wife?\" Rosalyn belatedly thought to ask. \"Is the baby out of the NICU yet?\"\"Baby and mamma are doing just fine,\" said Hugh. \"I brought them a gift basket yesterday, signed the card from all of us.\"\"That was nice of you.\" Rosalyn cringed inwardly. She used to be the one who bought the gifts, sent the cards, visited friends in the hospital. The Rosalyn-That-Was thought of other people, organized impromptu parties, never forgot a friend's birthday. Another unexpected indignity of grief: It had rendered her self-absorbed.\"It was no problem - any excuse to buy baby things,\" said Hugh. \"Those little outfits are so tiny; hard to believe a human can come in a package that small, isn't it? Did you know they arrive in this world complete with teensy fingernails?\"Rosalyn smiled at the note of wonder in his voice. \"I've heard that.\"\"Anyway, Andy's not happy that he's missing out on this trip - that's for sure.\"\"I'll bet. I'll give him a call and check in before I leave.\"Hugh tilted his head and fixed Rosalyn with a look. \"Make the most of this, Rosie. Seriously. Sometimes a trip can shake off the cobwebs, open your eyes to new possibilities.\"\"I just got back from Paso Robles, remember?\"\"Paso has its charm, but it's not exactly the French countryside.\"\"And yet Paso Robles has 7-Elevens, which, contrary to their name, are open twenty-four hours. That's a true gift to humankind, if you ask me.\"\"Champagne's the ticket, Rosie. Dash loved it there; I have a feeling you will, too.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.94}, {"asin": "B00CUEGU4E", "title": "Relatively Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 1)", "author": "Sheila Connolly", "description": "Review \"This book kept me hooked until the very end, and even then I wanted more of it. The storyline . . . is original and fun.\" ---Simply Bookish --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Sheila Connolly is the New York Times bestselling, Anthony and Agatha Award-nominated author of the Orchard Mysteries, the Museum Mysteries, and the County Cork Mysteries, in addition to several stand-alone titles. She is married and has one daughter and three cats. Visit her online at sheilaconnolly.com.Emily Durante has been narrating audiobooks for over ten years and is also an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook director. She has been acting since the age of seven and has performed in a number of stage productions at the professional, collegiate, and regional levels. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.99}, {"asin": "B07ZKX4MHD", "title": "THE MANOR HOUSE MURDER an addictive crime mystery full of twists (Monica Noble Detective Book 3)", "author": "Faith Martin", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1101990112", "title": "Gone With the Witch (Wishcraft Mystery)", "author": "Heather Blake", "description": "Review Praise for the Wishcraft Mysteries \u201cA charming story.\u201d\u2014Denise Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of the Scumble River Mysteries \u201cSuccessfully blends crime, magic, romance, and self-discovery.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201c[Blake] keeps the suspense high, your interest piqued, and your brain churning.\u201d\u2014Crimespree Magazine\u00a0\u201cCertainly spellbinding.\u201d\u2014Fresh Fiction\u00a0\u201cFull of charm, magic, and delightfully humorous and entertaining characters.\u201d\u2014Kings River Life Magazine About the Author Heather Blake is the national bestselling author of the Wishcraft mysteries as well as the Magic Potion mysteries. She\u2019s a total homebody who loves to be close to her family, read, watch cooking-competition TV shows, drink too much coffee, crochet, and bake cookies. Heather grew up in a suburb of Boston but currently lives in the Cincinnati area with her family.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.69}, {"asin": "1504001931", "title": "A Morbid Taste for Bones (The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael)", "author": "Ellis Peters", "description": "Review \u201cIrresistible and makes for compelling reading throughout. It is a delightful, pleasantly romantic medieval whodunit with a vein of humor underlying its quiet drama.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post Praise for the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael \u201cA pleasing, and unusual, mixture of suspense and historical fiction.\u201d \u2014 London Evening Standard \u201cCadfael must surely become a cult figure of crime fiction.\u201d \u2014 Financial Times \u201cYou\u2019ll love Brother Cadfael, wily veteran of the Crusades.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. This was England before the age of tea and crumpets.\u201d \u2014 Los Angeles Times About the Author Ellis Peters is a pseudonym of Edith Mary Pargeter (1913\u20131995), a British author whose Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are credited with popularizing the historical mystery. Cadfael, a Welsh\u00a0Benedictine\u00a0monk living at\u00a0Shrewsbury Abbey in the first half of the twelfth century, has been described as combining the curious mind of a scientist with the bravery of a knight-errant. The character has been adapted for television, and the books drew international attention to Shrewsbury and its history.\u00a0Pargeter won an Edgar Award\u00a0in 1963 for Death and the Joyful Woman , and in 1993 she won the\u00a0Cartier Diamond Dagger, an annual award given by the\u00a0Crime Writers\u2019 Association of Great Britain. She was appointed\u00a0officer of the Order of the British Empire\u00a0in 1994, and in 1999 the British\u00a0Crime Writers\u2019 Association\u00a0established the\u00a0Ellis Peters Historical Dagger\u00a0award, later called the Ellis Peters Historical Award.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 22.31}, {"asin": "B08FYNGCDZ", "title": "The Unforgiven (Krewe of Hunters Book 33)", "author": "Heather Graham", "description": "About the Author Heather Graham , also known as Shannon Drake, is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than two hundred novels and novellas. She is a recipient of the Romance Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Thriller Writers' Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. Roger Wayne served in the Air Force as a radio and television broadcast journalist in South Korea and won several awards before obtaining a BA degree in communications and journalism. He is an actor living in New York, narrating audiobooks, working on independent film projects, performing off Broadway, and auditioning for major network shows. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.49}, {"asin": "B06XFFHTHL", "title": "The New Witch", "author": null, "description": "Review \u201c The New Witch\" grabs you and lets you be that fly on the wall as the abused wife meticulously plots her escape and covers her trail on her way to her new hideout in New Orleans. Gibson is a master of engagement of the reader and will not turn you loose until she takes you on a ride. She is wonderful story teller who will throw you in the current of her words and wash you down- stream to the end of the book.\u201d\u2014 Chap Harper, author of Beer, Bait, and Ammo . \u201cIn The New Witch Nancy Smith Gibson stirs up a variety of fascinating characters to make the perfect blend of magic, romance and New Orleans soul.\u201d\u2014 Carole Katchen, Artist and author of The Menopause Murders and I Was a Lonely Teenager. \u201cThe New Witch by Nancy Gibson begins with an affluent lady with a plan \u2014 a plan to dump an abusive husband and leave him in the dust. Next, she introduces other characters; to me reminiscent of Carl Hiaasen\u2019s Stormy Weather \u2014 where he presents several seemingly unrelated threads and in the end skillfully ties them together in the plot tapestry. Get a good grip and hang on for the twists and turns Gibson provides.\u201d \u2014 John Achor, author of Casey Fremont mysteries and Alex Hilliard thrillers . \u201cNancy Gibson Smith has conjured up yet another great book in The New Witch . It is full of mystic, magic and love. The Good Witch is alive with the taste of New Orleans, flavored with a dash of mystic, a pinch of magic and stirred together with love.\u201d\u2014 Sherri McDuffie, author of An Unexpected Rescue. \u201cA masterfully woven tale, full of rich characters and language. The New Witch weaves together the everyday lives of its characters into this fascinating story. A great and fun read!\u201d\u2014 John E Seymore, filmmaker. Seymore Films. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1441324372", "title": "She Believed She Could, So She Did Insight Cards (Deck of 50 Empowering Inspirational Cards)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Personal Transformation"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1250122996", "title": "Of Blood and Bone: Chronicles of The One, Book 2 (Chronicles of The One, 2)", "author": "Nora Roberts", "description": "Review \"Roberts continues her apocalyptic Chronicles of The One with a mesmerizing follow-up that is bold and breathtaking...meeting the next generation and watching the heroine grow into her powers and leadership is enthralling.\" -- Kirkus \"[Of Blood and Bone] can be read on its own and will appeal to fans of fast-paced dystopian tales with a strong heroine.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Roberts narrates the tale with such passion, that you visualize every sentence you read. With the ability to transcend time and space, and with shadowy figures who may represent good or evil, it makes Of Blood and Bone the perfect book to advance this trilogy.\" - Shelf Life About the Author NORA ROBERTS is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 230 novels, including Legacy, The Awakening, Hideaway, Under Currents, The Chronicles of The One trilogy, and many more. She is also the author of the bestselling In Death series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Of Blood and Bone By Nora Roberts St. Martin's Press Copyright \u00a9 2018 Nora RobertsAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-12299-5 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, The Choice, Prologue, Becoming, Visions, The Sword And The Shield, Journeys, Epilogue, Titles by Nora Roberts, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 On the farm where she'd been born, Fallon Swift learned how to plant and grow and harvest, to respect and use the land. She learned how to move through fields and forests, silent as a shadow, to hunt and fish. To respect the game, and take no more than needed, to take none at all for sport. She learned to prepare food grown or taken from the land in her mother's kitchen or over a campfire. She learned food was more than eggs fresh from the henhouse or a well-grilled trout. Food meant survival. She learned to sew \u2014 though she disliked the time spent sitting still plying a needle. She learned how to tan leather, far from her favorite lesson, and could, if given no choice, spin yarn. Clothes, she learned, weren't simply something to wear. They protected the body, like a weapon. She respected weapons, and had learned from a young age how to clean a gun, sharpen a knife, string a bow. She learned how to build, with hammer and saw, to keep the fences in repair, to make repairs on the old farmhouse she loved as much as the woods. A strong fence, a sound wall, a roof that held back the rain offered more than a happy home. They, too, meant survival. And, though she often simply knew, she learned magicks. How to light the flame with a breath, how to cast a circle, how to heal a small wound with the light inside her, how to look, and how to see. She learned, though she often simply knew, magick was more than a gift to be treasured, a craft to be honed, a weapon to be used with great care. It was, and would be, survival. Even with food, with shelter, with clothing and weapons, even with magicks, not all had survived. Not all would in the times to come. She learned of a world that had existed before her birth. A world crowded with people, a world of huge cities with towering buildings where people had lived and worked. In that world people had traveled routinely by air and sea and road and track. Some had even traveled into space, and to the moon that hung in the sky. Her mother had lived in a great city, in the City of New York. Fallon knew from the stories told, from the books she devoured, it had been a place full of people and noise and light and dark. A wonder of a place to her, one she vowed to see someday. She imagined it often at night when she lay awake watching the faeries dance outside her window. There had been war in that world, and bigotry and cruelty, just as there was now. She knew of the wars that had been from the books, from the stories. And she knew of the wars that were still raging from visitors who stopped at the farm. Her father had been a soldier once. He had taught her to fight \u2014 with her hands, her feet, her mind. She learned how to read maps and how to make them, and imagined following them one day on the journeys she knew, had always known, she would take. She had no attachment, as her parents did, to the world that had been before the Doom had killed so many. Billions, it was said. Many remembered when those great cities fell to the burning, the mad things, the dark magicks. The cruelty and greed of men still swam in the minds and the blood of those who'd lived through it. When she caught glimpses of tomorrows, she knew there would be more burning, more blood, more death. And she would be part of it. So she often lay awake at night, cuddling her teddy bear, a gift from a man she'd yet to meet. If those tomorrows weighed too heavy, she sometimes slipped out of the house while her parents and siblings slept, to sit outside while the little faeries flickered like fireflies. Where she could smell the earth, the crops, the animals. Most often she slept the quiet and innocent sleep of a child with loving parents and three annoying little brothers, a healthy child with a questing mind and an active body. Sometimes she dreamed of her sire, the man her mother had lived with in New York, the man she'd loved. The man, Fallon knew, who had died so she would live. He'd been a writer, a leader, a great hero. She bore his name, just as she bore the name of the man who brought her into the world, who raised her, who taught her. Fallon for Max Fallon, her sire. Swift for Simon Swift, her father. Two names, Fallon thought, equally important. Just as her mother wore two rings, one from each man she'd loved. And though she loved her father as deeply and truly as any child could love, she wondered about the man who'd given her the color of her eyes and hair who, along with her mother, had passed powers to her with their mating. She read his books \u2014 all books were gifts \u2014 and studied the photo of him on the back of them. Once, when she was only six, she'd curled up in the library with one of Max Fallon's books. Though she couldn't understand all the words, she liked that it was about a wizard, one who used magicks and brains to fight against evil forces. When her father came in, a stab of guilt had her trying to hide the book. Her dad had no magicks, but he had a lot of brains. He'd plucked her and the book up, then sat to hold her on his lap. She loved how he smelled of the farm \u2014 the earth, the animals, the growing things. Sometimes she wished she had eyes like his that changed from sort of green to sort of gold or just mixed those colors together. When she wished it, she felt guilty about Max. \"It's a good book.\" \"You read it?\" \"Yeah. My mom really liked to read. It's why she and my dad made this room for books. You don't have to hide anything from me, baby. Not anything.\" \"Because you're my daddy.\" She turned into him, pressed her face to his heart. Beat, beat, beat. \"You're my daddy.\" \"I'm your daddy. But I wouldn't have gotten the chance to be if it wasn't for Max Fallon.\" He turned the book over so they could both look at the picture of the dark, handsome man with strong gray eyes. \"I wouldn't have my most beautiful girl if he hadn't loved your mom, and she hadn't loved him. If they hadn't made you. If he hadn't loved her and you enough, been brave enough, to give his life to protect you. I'm real grateful to him, Fallon. I owe him everything.\" \"Mama loves you, Daddy.\" \"Yeah, she does. I'm a lucky guy. She loves me, and she loves you, and Colin and Travis.\" \"And the new baby that's coming.\" \"Yeah.\" \"It's not a girl.\" This on a huge, sorrowful sigh. \"Is that so?\" \"She has a boy in her, again. Why can't she make a sister for me? Why does she always make brothers?\" She heard the laugh in his chest as he cuddled her. \"Actually, that's supposed to be my job. I guess it's the way it goes.\" He stroked her long black hair as he spoke. \"And I guess that means you'll just have to go on being my favorite girl. Have you told your mom it's a boy?\" \"She doesn't want to know which kind. She likes the wondering.\" \"Then I won't tell her, either.\" Simon kissed the top of her head. \"Our secret.\" \"Daddy?\" \"Hmm?\" \"I can't read all the words. Some are too hard.\" \"Well, why don't I read the first chapter to you before we go back to chores?\" He shifted her so she could curl up, then opened the book, turned to page one, and began. She hadn't known The Wizard King had been Max Fallon's first novel \u2014 or perhaps some part of her had. But she would remember, forever, that her father had read it to her, chapter by chapter, every night before bed. * * * So she learned. She learned about goodness from her father, generosity from her mother. She learned about love and light and respect from the home and family and life given to her. She learned of war and hardship and grief from travelers, many wounded, who came to the farm or to the village nearby. She had lessons on politics, and found them annoying, as people talked too much, did too little. And what good were politics when reports claimed the government \u2014 such a vague word to her \u2014 had begun to rebuild in the third year after the Doom, only to fall again before the end of Year Five? Now, in the twelfth year, the capital of the United States \u2014 which didn't seem united to Fallon, then or now \u2014 remained a war zone. Factions of the Raiders, groups of the Dark Uncanny, and those faithful to the cult of the Purity Warriors battled for power, for land, for the smell of blood. Against each other, it seemed, and against those who sought to rule or govern. Even though Fallon wanted peace, wanted to build, to grow, she understood the need, the duty to fight to protect and defend. More than once she'd seen her father arm himself and leave the farm to help protect a neighbor, to help defend the village. More than once she'd seen his eyes when he'd come home again, and had known there'd been blood, there'd been death. She'd been raised to fight, to defend, as had her brothers. Even as the farm basked in summer, as the crops ripened and fruit hung heavy, as the woods ran thick with game, bitter battles raged beyond the fields and hills of home. And her time, her childhood, she knew, was counting down like the ticks of a clock. She was The One. On days when her brothers deviled her \u2014 why had she been plagued with brothers? \u2014 when her mother understood nothing and her father expected too darn much, she wanted that countdown to hurry. Other times she raged. Why should she have no choice? No choice? She wanted to hunt and fish, to ride her horse, to run in the woods with her dogs. Even with her brothers. And often she grieved for what something beyond her, something beyond her parents, demanded she become. Grieved at the thought of leaving her family, her home. She grew tall and strong, and the light within her burned bright. The thought of her thirteenth birthday filled her with dread. She stewed about it \u2014 about all that was unfair in her world, all that was unfair in the world outside \u2014 as she helped her mother prepare the evening meal. \"We're going to get a storm tonight, I can feel it.\" Lana pushed at the butterscotch-blond hair she'd bundled on top of her head before cooking. \"But it's a perfect evening for eating outside. Go ahead and drain those potatoes I've got parboiling.\" Fallon sulked over to the stove. \"Why do you always have to do the cooking?\" Lana gently shook a covered bowl. Inside slices of peppers fresh from the garden marinated. \"Your dad's grilling tonight,\" she reminded Fallon. \"You made everything first.\" With that stuck in her craw, Fallon dumped chunks of potatoes into the colander in the sink. \"Why doesn't Dad or Colin or Travis make it all?\" \"They help, just like you. Ethan, too \u2014 he's learning. But to answer the point of your question: I like to cook. I enjoy making food, especially for my family.\" \"What if I don't?\" Fallon whirled around, a tall, long-limbed girl currently all stormy-gray eyes and defiant scowl. \"What if I just don't want to cook? Why do I have to do things I don't want to do?\" \"Because we all do. Lucky for you, on next week's rotation you move from under chef to cleanup. I need you to season those potatoes for the grill basket. I already chopped the herbs.\" \"Fine, great.\" She knew the drill. Olive oil, herbs, salt, pepper. Just as she knew they had the oil and spices because her mother and a witch from a neighboring farm had culled out three acres, and had cast a spell to turn it into the tropics. They'd planted olive trees, Piper nigrum for pepper, coffee beans, banana trees. Figs, dates. Her dad had worked with others to construct olive presses for the oils, dryers for the fruits. Everyone worked together, everyone benefited. She knew that. And still. \"Why don't you go ahead and take those out, tell your dad to start the chicken?\" Leading with her foul mood, Fallon stomped out of the house. Lana watched her daughter, her own summer-blue eyes clouding. She thought: More than one storm's coming. They ate at the big outdoor table her father had built, using colorful plates, with bright blue napkins and wildflowers in little pots. Her mother believed in setting a pretty table. She let Ethan light the candles with his breath because it always made him laugh. Fallon plopped down beside Ethan. She didn't consider him as much a pain in her butt as Colin or Travis. Then again, he was only six. He'd get there. Simon, his mop of brown hair streaked from the sun, took his seat, smiled at Lana. \"It looks great, babe.\" Lana lifted her wine, made from their own grapes. \"Credit to the grill master. We're grateful,\" she added, with a glance at her daughter, \"for the food grown and made by our own hands. We hope for the day when no one goes hungry.\" \"I'm hungry now!\" Colin announced. \"Then be grateful there's food on the table.\" Lana set a drumstick \u2014 his favorite \u2014 on his plate. \"I helped Dad with the grill,\" he claimed as he added potatoes, vegetables, an ear of just-shucked corn to his plate. \"So I shouldn't have to do the dishes.\" \"That's not going to fly, son.\" Simon filled Travis's plate as Lana did Ethan's. Colin waved his drumstick in the air before biting in. He had his father's eyes, that hazel that blurred gold and green, hair a few shades darker than his mother's going bright from the summer sun. As usual, it stood up in tufts that refused taming. \"I picked the corn.\" Travis, already eating steadily, elbowed Colin. \"We picked it.\" \"Irrelement.\" \" Vant, \" Simon corrected. \" Irrelevant \u2014 and it's not.\" \"I picked most of the corn. It should count.\" \"Instead of worrying about the dishes \u2014 which you will do \u2014 maybe you should eat the corn,\" Lana suggested as she helped Ethan butter his ear. \"In a free society, everybody has a vote.\" \"Too bad you don't live in one.\" Simon gave Colin a poke in the ribs that had Colin flashing a toothy grin. \"The corn is good!\" Ethan, though he'd lost a couple of baby teeth, bit his way enthusiastically down the ear. He had his mother's blue eyes, her pretty blond hair, and the sunniest of dispositions. \"Maybe I'll run for president.\" Colin, never one to be deterred, pushed forward. \"I'll be president of the Swift Family Farm and Cooperative. Then the village. I'll name it Colinville and never wash dishes again.\" \"Nobody'd vote for you.\" Travis, nearly close enough in looks to be Colin's twin, snickered. \"I'll vote for you, Colin!\" \"What if I ran for president, too?\" Travis asked Ethan. \"I'd vote for both of you. And Fallon.\" \"Leave me out of it,\" Fallon rebuked, poking at the food on her plate. \"You can only vote for one person,\" Travis pointed out. \"Why?\" \"Because.\" \"'Because' is dumb.\" \"This whole conversation is dumb.\" Fallon flicked a hand in the air. \"You can't be president because, even if there were any real structure of government, you're not old enough or smart enough.\" \"I'm as smart as you,\" Colin tossed back, \"and I'll get older. I can be president if I want. I can be anything I want.\" \"In your dreams,\" Travis added with a smirk. It earned him a kick under the table, which he returned. \"A president is a leader, and a leader leads.\" When Fallon surged to her feet, Simon started to speak, to shut things down, but caught Lana's eye. \"You don't know anything about being a leader.\" \"You don't know anything about anything,\" Colin shot back. \"I know a leader doesn't go around naming places after himself. I know a leader has to be responsible for people, make sure they have food and shelter, has to decide who goes to war, who lives and dies. I know a leader has to fight, maybe even kill.\" As she raged, shimmers of light sparked around her in angry red. \"A leader's who everybody looks to for answers, even when there aren't any. Who everyone blames when things go wrong. A leader's the one who has to do the dirty work, even if it's the damn dishes.\" She stalked away, trailing that angry light into the house. Slamming the door behind her. \"Why does she get to act like a brat?\" Colin demanded. \"Why does she get to be mean?\" Ethan, tears swirling in his eyes, turned to his mother. \"Is Fallon mad at us?\" \"No, baby, she's just mad. We're going to give her a little time alone, okay?\" She looked over at Simon. \"She just needs some space. She'll apologize, Colin.\" He only shrugged. \"I can be president if I want. She's not the boss of the world.\" Lana's heart tore a little. \"Did I mention I made peach pie for dessert?\" Pie, she knew, was a no-fail way to turn her boys' moods around. \"That is, for anyone who clears his plate.\" \"I know a good way to work off that pie.\" In tune with Lana, Simon went back to his meal. \"A little basketball.\" Since he'd created a half court on the side of the barn, basketball had become one of his boys' favorite pastimes. \"I wanna be on your team, Daddy!\" Simon grinned at Ethan, gave him a wink. \"We'll wipe the court with them, champ.\" \"No way.\" Colin dived back into the meal. \"Travis and I will crush.\" Travis looked at his mother, held her gaze a long moment. He knows, Lana thought. And so did Colin, even if anger and insult blocked it away. Their sister wasn't the boss of the world, but she carried the weight of it on her shoulders. * * * Fallon's temper burned out in a spate of self-pity tears. She flung herself on her bed to shed them \u2014 the bed her father had built to replicate one she'd seen in an old magazine. Eventually the tears died away into headachy sulks. It wasn't fair, nothing was fair. And Colin started it. He always started something with his big, stupid ideas. Probably because he didn't have any magicks. Probably because he was jealous. (Continues...) Excerpted from Of Blood and Bone by Nora Roberts . Copyright \u00a9 2018 Nora Roberts. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.98}, {"asin": "1683834593", "title": "Harry Potter: The Dark Arts (Tiny Book)", "author": "Insight Editions", "description": "About the Author Celebrated for its unwavering dedication to quality, Insight Editions is a publisher of innovative books, journals, and collectibles that push the boundaries of creativity, design, and production. Through its acclaimed film, television, and gaming program, Insight strives to produce unique books and products that provide new ways to engage with fan-favorite characters and stories. Under the program, Insight has published books covering the worlds of Star Wars, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Destiny, Assassin's Creed, Halo, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and the Harry Potter films, among many others. Insight's award-winning art, photography, and sports titles celebrate the artistry and legacy of a wide range of subjects that include John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Cash, and The Rolling Stones. By combining rich subject matter, striking visuals, and exclusive content with imaginative design and production, Insight Editions strives to create unique keepsakes that celebrate the best in pop culture and make one-of-a-kind gifts for fans of all ages.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Movies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.13}, {"asin": "0778324206", "title": "The Reincarnationist", "author": "M. J. Rose", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Best known as an author of erotic thrillers, Rose ( Lip Service ) delves into religious myth and past-life discovery in her well-paced ninth novel. In present-day Rome, a terrorist bomb explosion triggers flashbacks of pre-Christian Italy in photographer Josh Ryder. Josh experiences the memories as Julius, a pagan priest defending the sacrosanct monuments of his gods and the life of his vestal virgin lover against the emperor-mandated onslaught of Christianity in A.D. 391. Six months later, Josh has teamed with the Phoenix Foundation, an institute specializing in past-life memories in children, to explore a newly excavated tomb that may contain pagan memory stones that incite past-life regressions and will, by proving the existence of reincarnation, challenge the church. The stakes rise after it becomes clear that dangerous outside forces also want the stones. In a series of memory lurches, the narratives of Josh and Julius slowly wind together to reveal a Da Vinci Code \u2013esque tale of intrigue that's more believably plotted and better meets its ambitions than Dan Brown's ubiquitous book. (Sept.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist After a bomb explosion nearly kills photojournalist Josh Ryder, he begins experiencing flashbacks\u0097or, perhaps, memories\u0097of events that seem to have happened to him 1,600 years earlier, in another life. Convinced these episodes aren't figments of his imagination, he enlists the aid of the Phoenix Foundation, a group that specializes in past-life research. Later, when he becomes involved in the unearthing of an ancient tomb\u0097and experiences a connection with its long-buried resident\u0097Josh realizes he has a chance to right a wrong that happened a millennium and a half ago, not to mention an opportunity to solve a\u00a0series of modern-day murders. This is one of those books that succeeds in spite of itself: even though the writing is merely competent, the story itself is so appealing that you\u00a0can't stop\u00a0reading. Josh Ryder is a difficult character to pull off (among other things, he's a man in love with a woman who lived 1,600 years ago), and at\u00a0times he comes off a little loopy. But for the most part he, like the novel itself, is surprisingly well grounded in the real world. Pitt, David Review \"A breakneck chase across the centuries. Fascinating and fabulous.\" -- David Morrell, author of Creepers \"A compelling, ferocious read, an intelligent thrill ride, intricately plotted, with enough twists to keep the reader firmly in M.J. Rose's grasp.\" -- Robert Ferrigno, author of Prayers for the Assassin \"One of the most original and exciting novels I've read in a long time, with a premise so delicious I'm sick with envy I didn't think of it myself. It will open your mind to some of the incredible mysteries of the past and the greatest secrets of existence. The Reincarnationist is more than a page-turner-it's a page-burner. Don't miss it.\" -- Douglas Preston, author of The Book of the Dead \"Packed with unforgettable characters, breath-taking drama, and fascinating research, The Reincarnationist cements M.J. Rose's reputation as a master storyteller. Pick your millennium, folks. You're in for a timeless ride.\" -- Gayle Lynds, author of The Last Spymaster Starred Review. The exploding bomb in Rome that nearly took news photographer Josh Ryder's life triggered in him a series of wildly strange historical flashbacks. Determined to find the cause, he turned to the New York-based Phoenix Foundation, a scientific group dedicated to the possibilities of reincarnation. Memories of his past lives in ancient Rome as Julius, a pagan priest in a desperate mission to save his love, and in Victorian New York as Percy Talmage, son of the Phoenix Foundation founder, haunt Josh as he tries to bring his episodes under control. The foundation's interest in the excavation of a fourth-century tomb sends him back to Rome. But at the tomb, the Memory Stones are stolen, flinging Josh and archaeology professor Gabriella Chase into a race to recover these powerful artifacts. Rose's engrossing thriller effortlessly leaps to and fro through the centuries. Dramatic suspense and intriguing characters expertly set the stage for this first in a series. Strongly recommended for all popular fiction collections. -- From Library Journal About the Author M.J. Rose is the international bestselling author of eleven novels, including The Reincarnationist , The Memorist , and The Hypnotist . She is a founding member and board member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors: AuthorBuzz.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. They will come back, come back again, As long as the red earth rolls.He never wasted a leaf or a tree.Do you think he would squander souls? ?Rudyard Kipling Rome, Italy?sixteen months ago Josh Ryder looked through the camera's viewfinder, focusing on the security guard arguing with a young mother whose hair was dyed so red it looked like she was on fire. The search of the woman's baby carriage was quickly becoming anything but routine, and Josh moved in closer for his next shot.He'd just been keeping himself busy while awaiting the arrival of a delegation of peacekeepers from several superpowers who would be meeting with the pope that morning, but like several other members of the press and tourists who'd been ignoring the altercation or losing patience with it, he was becoming concerned. Although searches went on every hour, every day, around the world, the potential for danger hung over everyone's lives, lingering like the smell of fire.In the distance the sonorous sound of a bell ringing called the religious to prayer, its echo out of sync with the woman's shrill voice as she continued to protest. Then, with a huge shove, she pushed the carriage against the guard's legs, and just as Josh brought the image into that clarity he called \"perfect vision,\" the kind of image that the newspaper would want, the kind of conflict they loved captured on film, he heard the blast.Then a flash of bluish white light.The next moment, the world exploded.In the protective shadows of the altar, Julius and his brother whispered,reviewing their plans for the last part of the rescue and recovery. Each of them kept a hand on his dagger, prepared in case one of the emperor's soldiers sprang out of the darkness. In Rome, in theYear of their Lord 391, temples were no longer sanctuaries for pagan priests. Converting to Christianity was not a choice, but an official mandate. Resisting was a crime punishable by death. Blood spilled in the name of the Church was not a sin, it was the price of victory.The two brothers strategized?Drago would stay in the temple for an hour longer and then rendezvous with Julius at the tomb by the city gates. As a diversion, that morning's elaborate funeral had been a success, but they were still worried. Everything depended on this last part of their strategy going smoothly.Julius drew his cape closed, touched his brother's shoulder, bidding him goodbye and good luck, and skulked out of the basilica, keeping to the building's edge in case anyone was watching. He heard approaching horses and the clatter of wheels. Flattening himself against the stone wall, Julius held his breath and didn't move. The chariot passed without stopping.He'd finally reached the edge of the porch when, behind him, like a sudden avalanche of rocks, he heard an angry shout split open the silence: \"Show me where the treasury is!\"This was the disaster Julius and his brother had feared and discussed, but Drago had been clear?even if the temple was attacked, Julius was to continue on. Not turn back. Not try to help him. The treasure Julius needed to save was more important than any one life or any five lives or any fifty lives.But then a razor-sharp cry of pain rang out, and ignoring the plan, he ran back through the shadows, into the temple and up to the altar.His brother was not where he'd left him. \"Drago?\"No answer. \"Drago?\"Where was he?Julius worked his way down one of the dark side aisles of the temple and up the next. When he found Drago, it wasn't by sound He pulled him closer to the flickering torches. Drago's skin was already deathly pale, and his torn robe revealed a six-inch horizontal slash on his stomach crossing a vertical gash that cut him all the way down to his groin.Julius gagged. He'd seen eviscerated carcasses of both man and beast before and had barely given them a passing glance. Sacrifices, felled soldiers or punished criminals were one thing. But this was Drago. This blood was his blood.\"You weren't?supposed to come back,\" Drago said, dragging every syllable out as if it was stuck in his throat. \"I sent him?to look in the loculi?for the treasures. I thought?Stabbed me, anyway. But there's time?for us to get out?now?now!\" Drago struggled to raise himself up to a sitting position, spilling his insides as he moved.Julius pushed him down. \"Now?we need?to go now.\" Drago's voice was weakening. Trying to staunch the blood flow, Julius put pressure on the laceration, willing the intestines and nerves and veins and skin to rejoin and fuse back together, but all he accomplished was staining his hands in the hot, sticky mess.\"Where are the virgins?\" The voice erupted like Vesuvius without warning and echoed through the interior nave. Raucous laughter followed.How many soldiers were there? \"Let's find the booty we came here for,\" another voice chimed in. \"Not yet, first I want one of the virgins. Where are the virgin whores?\"\"The treasury first, you lecherous bastard.\"More laughter.So it wasn't one man; a regiment had stormed the temple. Shouting, demanding, blood-lust coating their words. Let them pillage this place, let them waste their energy, they'd come too late: there were no pagans to convert, no treasure left to find and no women left to rape, they'd all already been killed or sent into hiding.\"We have to go?\"Drago whispered as once again he fought to rise.He'd stayed behind to make sure everyone else got out safely. Why him, why Drago?\"You can't move, you've been hurt?\" Julius broke off, not knowing how to tell his brother that half of his internal organs were \"Then leave me.You need to get to her?Save her and the treasures?. No one?no one but you?\"It wasn't about the sacred objects anymore. It was about two people who both needed him desperately: the woman he loved and his brother, and the fates were demanding Julius sacrifice one of them for the other. I can't let her die and I can't leave you to die. No matter which one he chose,how would he live with the decision? \"Look what I found,\" one of the soldiers shouted.Screams of vengeance reverberated through the majestic hall. A shriek rang out above all the other noise. A woman's cry.Julius crawled out, hid behind a column and peered into the nave. thrashing under the brute as the soldier pumped away so roughly that blood pooled under her. Who was the poor woman? Had she wandered in thinking she'd find a safe haven in the old temple, only to find she'd descended into hell? Could Julius help her? Take the men by surprise? No, there were too many of them. At least eight he could see. By now the rape had attracted more attention, drawing other men who forgot about their search to crowd around and cheer on their compatriot.And what would happen to Drago if he left his side?Then the question didn't matter because beneath his hands, Julius felt his brother's heart stop. He felt his heart stop. Julius beat Drago's chest, pumping and trying, trying but failing to stimulate the beating. Bending down, he breathed into his brother's mouth,forcing his own air down his throat,waiting for any sign of life.Finally, his lips still on his brother's lips, his arm around his brother's neck, he wept, knowing he was wasting precious seconds but unable to stop. Now he didn't have to choose between them?he could go to the woman who was waiting for him at the city gates. He must go to her. backed up, found the wall and started crawling. There was a break in the columns up ahead; if he could get to it undetected, he might make it out.And then he heard a soldier shout for him to halt.If he couldn't save her, Julius would at least die trying, so, ignoring the order, he kept moving.Outside, the air was thick with the black smoke that burned his lungs and stung his eyes. What were they incinerating now? No time to find out. Barely able to see what lay ahead of him, he kept running down the eerily quiet street. After the cacophony of the scene he'd just left, it was alarming to be able to hear his own footsteps. If someone was on the lookout the sound would give him away, but he needed to risk it.Picturing her in the crypt, crouched in the weak light, counting the minutes, he worried that she would be anxious that he was late and torment herself that something had gone dangerously wrong. Her bravery had always been as steadfast as the stars; it was difficult even now to imagine her afraid. But this was a far different situation than anything she'd ever faced, and it was all his fault, all his shame.They'd risked too much for each other. He should have been stronger, should have resisted.And now, because of him, everything they treasured, especially their lives, was at stake.Tripping over the uneven, cracked surfaces, he stumbled. The muscles in his thighs and calves screamed, and every breath irritated his lungs so harshly he wanted to cry out. Tasting dirt and grit mixed with his salty sweat as it dripped down his face and wet his lips, he would have given anything for water?cold, sweet water from the spring, not this alkaline piss. His feet pounded the stones and more pain shot up through his legs, but still he ran.Suddenly, raucous shouting and thundering footfalls filled the air. The ground reverberated, and from the intensity he knew the marauders were coming closer. He looked right, left. If he could find a sheltered alcove, he could flatten himself against the wall and pray they'd run past and miss him. As if that would help. He knew all about praying. He'd relied on it, believed in it. But the prayers he'd offered up might as well have been spit in the gutter for the good they'd done.\"The sodomite is getting away!\"\"Scum of the earth.\"\"Scared little pig.\"\"Did you defecate yourself yet, little pig?\"They laughed,trying to outdo each other with slurs and accusations. Their chortles echoed in the hollow night, lingered on the hot wind, and then, mixed in with their jeers, another voice broke through.\"Josh?\" No,don't listen.Keep going.Everything depends on getting to her in time. A heavy fog was rolling in. He stumbled, then righted himself. He took the corner.On both sides of him were identical colonnades with dozens of doors and recessed archways. He knew this place! He could hide here in plain sight and they would run by and?\"Josh?\"The voice sounded as if it was coming to him from a great bluegreen distance, but he refused to stop for it. She was waiting for him?to save her?to save their secrets?and treasures?. \"Josh?\"The voice was pulling him up, up through the murky, briny heaviness.\"Josh?\"Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and took in the room, the equip and blood pressure monitor flashing its LED numbers, the IV drip and the EKG machine, he saw a woman's worried face watching him. But it was the wrong face.This wasn't the woman he'd been running to save. \"Josh? Oh, thank God, Josh. We thought?\"He couldn't be here now. He needed to go back.The taste of sweat was still on his lips; his lungs still burned. He could hear them coming for him under the steady beat of the machines, but all he could think about was that somewhere she was alone, in the encroaching darkness, and yes, she was afraid, and yes, she was going to suffocate to death if he didn't reach her. He closed his eyes against the onslaught of anguish. If he didn't reach her, he would fail her. And something else, too. The treasures? No. Something more important, something just beyond his consciousness, what was it?\"Josh?\"Grief ripped through him like a knife slitting open his chest, exposing his heart to the raw, harsh reality of having lost her. This wasn't possible. This wasn't real. He'd been remembering the chase and the escape and the rescue as if they had happened to him. But they hadn't. Of course they hadn't.He wasn't Julius.He was Josh Ryder. He was alive in the twenty-first century. This scene belonged sixteen hundred years in the past.Then why did he feel as if he'd lost everything that had ever mattered to him? Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 20.72}, {"asin": "B00NSWX5Z4", "title": "Seeing the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 2)", "author": "Sheila Connolly", "description": "About the Author Sheila Connolly is a New York Times bestselling author and the Anthony and Agatha Awardnominated author of over thirty titles, including the Museum Mysteries, the Orchard Mysteries, and the County Cork Mysteries as well as a number of short stories in various anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three cats, and visits Ireland as often as she can. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Review Seeing the Dead is an engaging story that's easy to become absorbed in.-- \"Crime Fiction Lover\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "B00C2WDD5I", "title": "The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller (The Origin Mystery, Book 1)", "author": "A.G. Riddle", "description": "Review \"...reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton.\"--The Guardian on Pandemic An Exclusive Excerpt From The Atlantis Gene PROLOGUE Research Vessel Icefall Atlantic Ocean 88 Miles off the Coast of AntarcticaKarl Selig steadied himself on the ship's rail and peered through the binoculars at the massive iceberg. Another piece of ice crumbled and fell, revealing more of the long black object. It looked almost like... a submarine. But it couldn't be.\"Hey Steve, come check this out.\"Steve Cooper, Karl's grad-school friend, tied off a buoy and joined Karl on the other side of the boat. He took the binoculars, scanned quickly, then stopped. \"Whoa. What is it? A sub?\"\"Maybe--\"\"What's under it?\"Karl grabbed the binoculars. \"Under it...\" He panned to the area under the sub. There was something else. The sub, if it was a sub, was sticking out of another metallic object, this one gray and much larger. Unlike the sub, the gray object didn't reflect light; it looked more like heat waves, the kind that shimmer just over the horizon of a warm highway or a long stretch of desert. It wasn't warm, though, or at least it wasn't melting the ice around it. Just above the structure, Karl caught a glimpse of some writing on the sub: U-977 and Kriegsmarine . A Nazi sub. Sticking out of... a structure of some sort.Karl dropped the binoculars to his side. \"Wake Naomi up and prepare to dock the boat. We're going to check it out.\"Steve rushed below deck, and Karl heard him rousing Naomi from one of the small boat's two cabins. Karl's corporate sponsor had insisted he take Naomi along. Karl had nodded in the meeting and hoped she wouldn't get in the way. He had not been disappointed. When they had put to sea five weeks ago in Cape Town, South Africa, Naomi had brought aboard two changes of clothes, three romance novels, and enough vodka to kill a Russian army. They had barely seen her since. It must be so boring for her out here , Karl thought. For him, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.Karl raised the binoculars and looked again at the massive piece of ice that had broken off from Antarctica nearly a month ago. Almost ninety percent of the iceberg was underwater, but the surface area still covered forty-seven square miles--one and a half times the size of Manhattan.Karl's doctoral thesis focused on how newly calved icebergs affected global sea currents as they dissolved. Over the last four weeks, he and Steve had deployed high-tech buoys around the iceberg that measured sea temp and salt-water/fresh-water balance as well as took periodic sonar readings of the iceberg's changing shape. The goal was to learn more about how icebergs disintegrated after leaving Antarctica. Antarctica held ninety percent of the world's ice, and when it melted in the next few centuries, it would dramatically change the world. He hoped his research would shed light on exactly how.Karl had called Steve the minute he found out he was funded. \"You've got to come with me--No, trust me.\" Steve had reluctantly agreed, and to Karl's delight, his old friend had come alive on the expedition as they took readings by day and discussed the preliminary findings each night. Before the voyage, Steve's academic career had been as listless as the iceberg they were following, as he floated from one thesis topic to another. Karl and their other friends had wondered if he would drop out of the doctoral program altogether.The research readings had been intriguing, and now they had found something else, something remarkable. There would be headlines. But what would they say? \"Nazi Sub Found in Antarctica\"? It wasn't inconceivable.Karl knew the Nazis had been obsessed with Antarctica. They'd sent expeditions there in 1938 and 1939 and even claimed part of the continent as a new German province--Neuschwabenland. Several Nazi subs were never recovered during World War II and were not known to have been sunk. The conspiracy theorists claimed that a Nazi sub left Germany just before the fall of the Third Reich, carrying away the highest ranking Nazis and the entire treasury, including priceless artifacts that had been looted and top-secret technology.At the back of Karl's mind, a new thought emerged: reward money. If there was Nazi treasure on the sub, it would be worth a huge amount of money. He would never have to worry about research funding again.The more immediate challenge was docking the boat to the iceberg. The seas were rough, and it took them three passes, but they finally managed to tie off a few miles from the sub and the strange structure under it.Karl and Steve bundled up and donned their climbing gear. Karl gave Naomi some basic instructions, the long and short of which were \"don't touch anything,\" and then he and Steve lowered themselves to the ice shelf below the boat and set off.For the next forty-five minutes, neither man said anything as they trudged across the barren ice mountain. The ice was rougher toward the interior, and their pace slowed; Steve's more than Karl's.\"We need to pick it up, Steve.\"Steve made an effort to catch up. \"Sorry. A month on the boat has got me out of shape.\"Karl glanced up at the sun. When it set, the temperature would plummet and they would likely freeze to death. The days were long here. The sun rose at 2:30 A.M. and set after 10 P.M., but they only had a few more hours. Karl picked up his pace a little more.Behind him, he heard Steve shuffling his snow-shoes as fast as he could, trying desperately to catch up. Strange sounds echoed up from the ice: first a low drone, then a rapid hammering, like a thousand woodpeckers assaulting the ice. Karl stopped and listened. He turned to Steve and their eyes met just as a spider web of tiny cracks shot out across the ice below Steve's feet. Steve looked down in horror, and then ran as hard as he could toward Karl and the untouched ice.For Karl, the scene was surreal, unfolding almost in slow motion. He felt himself run toward his friend and throw a rope from his belt. Steve caught the rope a split second before a loud crack filled the air and the ice below him collapsed, forming a giant chasm.The rope instantly pulled tight, jerking Karl off his feet and slamming him belly first into the ice. He was going to follow Steve into the ice canyon. Karl scrambled to get his feet under him, but the tug of the rope was too strong. He relaxed his hands, and the rope slid through them, slowing his forward motion. He planted his feet in front of him, and the crampons beneath his boots bit into the ice, sending shards of ice at his face as he came to a halt. He squeezed the rope, and it pulled tight against the ledge, making a strange vibrating sound almost like a low violin.\"Steve! Hang on! I'm going to pull you up--\"\"Don't!\" Steve yelled.\"What? Are you crazy--\"\"There's something down here. Lower me, slowly.\"Karl thought for a moment. \"What is it?\"\"Looks like a tunnel or a cave. It's got gray metal in it. It's blurry.\"\"Okay, hold on. I'm going to let some slack out.\" Karl let about ten feet of rope out, and when he heard nothing from Steve, another ten feet.\"Stop,\" Steve called.Karl felt the rope tugging. Was Steve swinging? The rope went slack.\"I'm in,\" Steve said.\"What is it?\"\"Not sure.\" Steve's voice was muffled now.Karl crawled to the edge of the ice and looked over.Steve stuck his head out of the mouth of the cave. \"I think it's some kind of cathedral. It's massive. There's writing on the walls. Symbols--like nothing I've ever seen. I'm going to check it out.\"\"Steve, don't--\"Steve disappeared again.A few minutes passed. Was there another slight vibration? Karl listened closely. He couldn't hear it, but he could feel it. The ice was pulsing faster now. He stood up and took a step away from the edge. The ice behind him cracked, and then there were cracks everywhere--and spreading quickly. He ran full speed toward the widening fissure. He jumped--and almost made it to the other side but came up short. His hands caught on the ice ledge, and he dangled there for a long second. The vibrations in the ice grew more violent with each passing second. Karl watched the ice around him crumble and fall, and then the shard that held him broke free, and he was plummeting down into the abyss.* * *On the boat, Naomi watched the sun set over the iceberg. She picked up the satellite phone and dialed the number the man had given her.\"You said to call if we found anything interesting.\"\"Don't say anything. Hold the line. We'll have your location within two minutes. We'll come to you.\"She set the phone on the counter, walked back to the stove, and continued stirring the pot of beans.* * *The man on the other end of the satellite phone looked up when the GPS coordinates flashed on his screen. He copied the location and searched the satellite surveillance database for live feeds. One result.He opened the stream and panned the view to the center of the iceberg, where the dark spots were. He zoomed in several times, and when the image came into focus, he dropped his coffee to the floor, bolted out of his office, and ran down the hall to the director's office. He barged in, interrupting a gray-haired man who was standing and speaking with both hands held up.\"We've found it.\" From the Inside Flap About the Author A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting internet companies before retiring to pursue his true passion: writing fiction.His debut novel, The Atlantis Gene , is the first book in The Origin Mystery , the trilogy that has sold over two million copies in the US, has been translated into 23 languages, and is in development to be a major motion picture.His recently released fourth novel, Departure , follows the survivors of a flight that takes off in the present and crash-lands in a changed world. HarperCollins published Departure in hardcover in the fall of 2015, and 20th Century Fox is developing the novel for a feature film.\u00a0Riddle grew up in a small town in North Carolina (Boiling Springs) and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. During his sophomore year of college, he started his first company with a childhood friend. He currently lives in\u00a0Raleigh, North Carolina\u00a0with his wife, who endures his various idiosyncrasies in return for being the first to read his new novels.\u00a0They welcomed their first child, a daughter, on September 2, 2016.No matter where he is, or what's going on, he tries his best to set aside time every day to answer emails and messages from readers. You can reach him at: ag@agriddle.com ** For a sneak peek at new novels, free stories, and more, join the email list at: agriddle.com/email If you don't want to miss any Riddle news, you can:Like the A.G. Riddle Facebook page: facebook.com/agriddleFollow A.G. Riddle on Twitter: twitter.com/riddlistFor more, please visit:AGRiddle.com* * * Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1402241372", "title": "The Winter Sea (The Scottish series, 1)", "author": "Susanna Kearsley", "description": "Review \"The story was deliciously romantic and the writing style matched the brooding, haunting tale very well. Definitely well worth reading!\" \u2015 All About Romance \"Kearsley\u2019s novel is highly reminiscent of Barbara Erskine\u2019s Lady of Hay and Mary Stewart\u2019s works: evocative novels that lift readers straight into another time and place to smell the sea, feel the castle walls, see history and sense every emotion. These are marks of a fantastic storyteller. 4 1/2 Stars, Top Pick of the Month\" \u2015 RT Book Reviews \"The rich history and the historical aspect of this novel made it a book that was hard to put down. \" \u2015 The Romance Studio \"Skillful writing and research... Readers will not be disappointed in Sophia\u2019s enthralling story. Highly recommended.\" \u2015 Historical Novels Review \"Reading this book was pure magic. \" \u2015 Queen of Happy Endings \"I loved The Winter Sea . It drew me in from the start and I found myself reading faster and faster just to find out what would happen next... \" \u2015 Starting Fresh \"A creative tour de force... Brilliant!\" \u2015 New York Journal of Books \"Scotland past and present comes vividly alive in this superior piece of historical fiction - the rugged countryside, salty sea air and rich heritage are the perfect setting for this tale of love, loss and destiny. \" \u2015 Thoughts From Lady Tess \"This is historical fiction at its best!\" \u2015 Library of Clean Reads \"Vivid... One of those books that you remember long after the last page has been turned.\" \u2015 Debbie\u2019s Book Bag \" A perfect blend of romance, real history and what if... \" \u2015 At Home with a Good Book and the Cat \"A beautiful work of historical fiction .\" \u2015 Rundpinne \"The Winter Sea is a beautiful story... It will transport you to another time and place. \" \u2015 A Buckeye Girl Reads \"This book has everything: historical romance, contemporary romance, rebellion, tragedy. All the good stuff... A+ storytelling!\" \u2015 Readin\u2019 and Dreamin\u2019 \"From the moment I picked up this novel I was intoxicated by the idea of finding not just a muse but true love by pure accident.. A book not to be missed.\" \u2015 Pencil Pushers and Ink Splotches \"An excellent \"time-travel\" story with alternating chapters set in modern time and in the past. I would definitely recommend this book to those who love an epic story rich in historical detail. \" \u2015 In the Hammock \"A wonderful book to escape into for a couple of days with fabulous characters, and an engaging story.\" \u2015 In Spring it is the Dawn \"A well written, engaging historical novel with a dash of romance... it\u2019s a page turner. \" \u2015 A Work in Progress \"Beautiful, clear writing, a believable storyline, adventure and romance.\" \u2015 Bookfoolery and Babble \"A breathtaking novel... Kearsley\u2019s writing style beautifully spells out the mood for this novel. \" \u2015 Luxury Reading \"One of the most enchanting romance novels of the decade, The Winter Sea will find a home on everyone's bookshelf. \" \u2015 Romance Fiction on Suite101.com \"Each page I devoured only made me want to read the next one and the next one... highly engaging. \" \u2015 The Royal Reviews \"Absolutely phenomenal... A stunning, gorgeous and heart-wrenching tale. \" \u2015 Psychotic State \"The Winter Sea was an emotionally poignant, gripping tale of adventure both in the past and the present with characters full of life, and conflicts that tug at the heart strings. A definite read!\" \u2015 History Undressed \"If you are a fan of Mary Stewart and Barbara Erskine, this is a must for your bookcase.\" \u2015 Celtic Lady\u2019s Reviews \"What a gifted writer Ms. Kearsley is! This is one book that I wish had gone on... T\" \u2015 Books by the Willow Tree \"This book had it all: romance, intrigue, mystery, historical fiction, kick-ass location, and a storyline that made me not want to put the book down.\" \u2015 Life in the Thumb \"A beautiful and engrossing story... The Winter Sea will appeal in spades to fans of Mary Stewart and Diana Gabaldon. \" \u2015 Angieville \" I loved how the author wove the past and the present together as Carrie dreamed of the Jacobite invasion, finding inspiration for her novel, and then in her research discovered that her dreams were more than just dreams.\" \u2015 Let Them Read Books \"Marvelous and flawless... \" \u2015 Read All Over Reviews \"Beautifully written... A book to be read carefully and savored.\" \u2015 DearAuthor.com \"The Winter Sea is one of those novels that a reader doesn't come across too often.\" \u2015 Midwest Book Review About the Author New York Times , USA Today , and Globe and Mail bestselling author Susanna Kearsley is a former museum curator who loves restoring the lost voices of real people to the page, often in twin-stranded stories that interweave present and past. Her award-winning novels have been published in translation in more than 25 countries. She lives near Toronto. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Chapter 1 It wasn't chance. There wasn't any part of it that happened just by chance. I learned this later; though the realization, when it came, was hard for me to grasp because I'd always had a firm belief in self-determination. My life so far had seemed to bear this out\u2015I'd chosen certain paths and they had led to certain ends, all good, and any minor bumps that I had met along the way I could accept as not bad luck, but simply products of my own imperfect judgment. If I'd had to choose a creed, it would have been the poet William Henley's bravely ringing lines: I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. So on that winter morning when it all began, when I first took my rental car and headed north from Aberdeen, it never once occurred to me that someone else's hand was at the helm. I honestly believed it was my own decision, turning off the main road for the smaller one that ran along the coastline. Not the wisest of decisions, maybe, seeing as the roads were edged with what I'd been assured was Scotland's deepest snow in forty years, and I'd been warned I might run into drifting and delays. Caution and the knowledge I was running on a schedule should have kept me to the more well-traveled highway, but the small sign that said 'Coastal Route' diverted me. My father always told me that the sea was in my blood. I had been born and raised beside it on the shores of Nova Scotia, and I never could resist its siren pull. So when the main road out of Aberdeen turned inland I turned right instead, and took the way along the coast. I couldn't say how far away I was when I first saw the ruined castle on the cliffs, a line of jagged darkness set against a cloud-filled sky, but from the moment I first saw it I was captivated, driving slightly faster in the hope I'd reach it sooner, paying no attention to the clustered houses I was driving past, and feeling disappointment when the road curved sharply off again, away from it. But then, beyond the tangle of a wood, the road curved back again, and there it was: a long dark ruin, sharp against the snowbound fields that stretched forbiddingly between the cliff 's edge and the road. I saw a parking lot ahead, a little level place with logs to mark the spaces for the cars, and on an impulse I pulled in and stopped. The lot was empty. Not surprising, since it wasn't even noon yet, and the day was cold and windy, and there wasn't any reason anyone would stop out here unless they wanted to walk out to see the ruin. And from looking at the only path that I could see that led to it\u2015a frozen farm lane drifted deep with snow that would have risen past my knees\u2015I guessed there wouldn't be too many people stopping here today. I knew I shouldn't stop, myself. There wasn't time. I had to be in Peterhead by one o'clock. But something in me felt a sudden need to know exactly where I was, and so I reached to check my map. I'd spent the past five months in France; I'd bought my map there, and it had its limitations, being more concerned with roads and highways than with towns and ruins. I was looking so hard at the squiggle of coastline and trying to make out the names in fine print that I didn't see the man till he'd gone past me, walking slowly, hands in pockets, with a muddy-footed spaniel at his heels. It seemed a strange place for a man on foot to be, out here. The road was busy and the snow along the banks left little room to walk beside it, but I didn't question his appearance. Any time I had a choice between a living, breathing person and a map, I chose the person. So I scrambled, map in hand, and got my car door open, but the salt wind blowing off the sea across the fields was stronger than I'd thought it would be. It stole my voice. I had to try again. 'Excuse me...' I believe the spaniel heard me first. It turned, and then the man turned too, and seeing me, retraced his steps. He was a younger man than I'd expected, not much older than myself\u2015mid-thirties, maybe, with dark hair whipped roughly by the wind and a close-trimmed dark beard that made him look a little like a pirate. His walk, too, had a swagger to it, confident. He asked me, 'Can I help you?' 'Can you show me where I am?' I held the map towards him. Coming round to block the wind, he stood beside me, head bent to the printed coastline. 'Here,' he said, and pointed to a nameless headland. 'Cruden Bay. Where are ye meant to be?' His head turned very slightly as he asked that, and I saw his eyes were not a pirate's eyes. They were clear grey, and friendly, and his voice was friendly too, with all the pleasant, rolling cadence of the northern Scot. I said, 'I'm going north, to Peterhead.' 'Well, that's not a problem.' He pointed it out on the map. 'It's not far. You just keep on this road, it'll take you right up into Peterhead.' Close by his knee the dog yawned a complaint, and he sighed and looked down. 'Half a minute. You see that I'm talking?' I smiled. 'What's his name?' 'Angus.' Bending, I scratched the dog's hanging ears, spattered with mud. 'Hello, Angus. You've been for a run.' 'Aye, he'd run all the day if I'd let him. He's not one for standing still.' Neither, I thought, was his master. The man had an aura of energy, restlessness, and I'd delayed him enough. 'Then I'll let you get going,' I said as I straightened. 'Thank you for your help.' 'Nae bother,' he assured me, and he turned and started off again, the spaniel trotting happily ahead. The hardened footpath stretched ahead of them, towards the sea, and at its end I saw the castle ruin standing stark and square and roofless to the swiftly running clouds, and as I looked at it I felt a sudden pulling urge to stay\u2015to leave the car parked where it was and follow man and dog where they had gone, and hear the roaring of the sea around those crumbled walls. But I had promises to keep. So with reluctance, I got back into my rental car, turned the key and started off again towards the north. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.0}, {"asin": "125010078X", "title": "Wind Rider: Tales of a New World (Tales of a New World, 3)", "author": "P. C. Cast", "description": "Review \"...Series fans will be happy to read this entry and hang on for more.\" \u2013 Booklist on Wind Rider \"A mind-blowing and imaginative story ...Cast\u2019s imagination knows no bounds and it will be interesting to see what new ideas arise when she puts pen to paper next.\" -- Romantic Times on Sun Warrior \u201cCast\u2019s spectacular new series kicks off with a unique tale suitable for fans of fantasy both young and old. Earth has completely changed, and the author grants readers a chance to use their imagination as the engaging storyline rapidly unfolds.\u201d \u2013 Romantic Times, 4 stars! \"While many fantasy series style themselves as epic, this one may actually be worthy of the description. Fantasy lovers who are fans of Cinda Williams Chima's \"Seven Realms\" novels will fall in love with Mari and Nik.\" \u2013 School Library Journal \u201cCast's fans should find much to be pleased with in this new venture\u201d \u2013 Kirkus \u201c\u2026engaging characters and a fast-paced narrative\u201d \u2013 Publishers Weekly About the Author P.C. Cast is the author of the House of Night novels, including Marked , Betrayed , Chosen , and Untamed . Ms. Cast is a #1 New York Times and USA Today Best-Selling author and a member of the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. With more than 20 million copies in print in over 40 countries, her novels have been awarded the prestigious Oklahoma Book Award, YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, Romantic Times Reviewers\u2019 Choice Award, the Prism, Holt Medallion, Daphne du Maurier, Booksellers\u2019 Best, and the Laurel Wreath. Ms. Cast was born in the Midwest and grew up being shuttled back and forth between Illinois and Oklahoma, which is where she fell in love with Quarter Horses and mythology. After high school she joined the United States Air Force and began public speaking and writing. After her tour in the USAF, she taught high school for 15 years before retiring to write full time. She now lives in Oregon surrounded by beloved cats, dogs, horses, and family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Wind Rider Tales of a New World By P. C. Cast St. Martin's Press Copyright \u00a9 2018 P. C. CastAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-10078-8 CHAPTER 1 THREE YEARS IN THE PAST \u2014 PLAINS OF THE WIND RIDERS \u2014 RENDEZVOUS SITE Dawn was teasing the horizon and causing the sky to blush when River made her way silently from the crowded tent she shared with her mother, her two aunts, five cousins, three younger sisters, her mother's mare and the two geldings who had many years ago chosen her aunts as their Riders. As Rider of the Lead Mare of Herd Magenti, her mother's tent was situated close to the center of the spiral of stone monoliths that marked the Rendezvous Site as a place of layline power, but even had the stones not been there, positioned like ancient, mute guardians, the cavernous underground opening that lay in the center of them was evidence of the destructive power of the sun that was so great that centuries ago it had opened the earth and utterly changed the world. River glanced at the mouth of the cave, trying to get a glimpse of the herd of weanlings that waited within, but all she could see were shadows thrown by torches, though she could hear their restless nickers and nervous movements. River resisted the draw of the weanlings. It was against Herd law for any Candidate to interact with the young horses after they'd arrived at the Rendezvous Site \u2014 one reason they remained hidden away in the cave that usually housed entire Herds within the safety of its depths. Today is the Choosing. I only have a couple of hours left to wait for something I've been dreaming about since I was old enough to dream. River felt light-headed with nervous excitement. Even this early in the glooming before sunrise the huge campsite was already beginning to hum with activity. She turned her back on the cave and continued to wind her way through camp quickly, keeping her head ducked down \u2014 hoping not to be recognized. \"A mare's luck to you today, River!\" called a vaguely familiar voice. River didn't pause, but she did wave briefly in acknowledgment as she picked up her pace. She wanted just a few moments to herself before the day began and she became the center of attention. Don't be so dramatic. Not everyone will be watching you \u2014 just everyone from your Herd, River chided herself with silent sarcasm as she wove her way through the rest of the bright purple tents that spiraled from her mother's and marked the boundary of Herd Magenti. Her Herd. Her life. And, today, the source of her nervousness. Purple tents gave way to the differing shades of blue that marked Herd Indigo. River smiled to herself. Unlike her Herd, who valued one true, deep shade of purple to represent them, the Indigo Riders took pride in how many different blues they could create. It annoyed her mother, but River thought the variety was refreshing and beautiful. This early morning she didn't stop to admire the array of colors as she would normally, but instead skirted Herd Indigo. She turned to her left and kicked into a jog, passing the yellow and red tents of Herds Jonquil and Cinnabar until she came to a gentle rise in the land as prairie met the cross timber line that meant a creek was nearby. Relieved that this section of the clear, swiftly moving Weanling Creek was currently empty of other visitors, River rushed down the grassy rise to the sandy bank. She used one of the long, purple strips of cloth she'd grabbed from the pile of specially dyed and decorated ribbons that would very shortly be woven into her hair, and used it to tie back her unruly mass of ebony curls. Then she knelt in the soft sand and dipped her hands in the creek, ladling the crystal water over her face. River sucked in her breath at how cold it was, as it was too early in the spring for the prairie to have heated up enough to take any of the chill off the mountain-fed creek. But River ignored the cold and washed her face carefully before pulling off her nightdress and, naked, wading into the creek, carefully choosing her steps over the smooth rocks, until she was waist deep. Without hesitation, she submerged herself to her neck and closed her eyes. Wash away my nervousness and doubts. Help me to make Herd Magenti and my mother proud. Great Mother Mare and Father Stallion, please let me be found worthy and Chosen as a Rider today. Chosen today ... Those two words filled River's mind as she remained submerged, ignoring the cold of the water. It was finally the day, and if it happened \u2014 if she was Chosen \u2014 after today her life would irrevocably change. And, of course, should she not be Chosen her life would change as well. Oh, there would be other Rendezvous. Every child of the Herd who had known sixteen winters was Presented at a Rendezvous three times \u2014 given three opportunities to be Chosen in consecutive years \u2014 and those who were never Chosen were still valuable members of their Herd. But they were not Wind Riders. Sure, they could ride \u2014 everyone born into the Herd could ride \u2014 but there was a vast difference between being seated on the back of a horse as a passenger and being bonded mind, body, and spirit to a horse who Chose you as his or her Rider, Companion, and life partner. River had grown up observing the bond between her mother and her beautiful mare, Echo, and she craved that incredible, unbreakable, indescribable connection. Preparing herself for today had been her focus for as much of her sixteen years of life as she could remember, and for the last year it had been her obsession. \"I don't care if the weanling who Chooses me is a contender for Lead Mare or Herd Stallion. I'd be happy with any horse \u2014 a sweet gelding would be wonderful. Just please, please let me belong to one of them. Let me be a weanling's Choice today.\" \"You shouldn't be worried. You know you have your mother's seat, and Echo Chose her at the very first Rendezvous she was Presented.\" Slowly, River turned to face the voice behind her that drifted across the creek. He was standing on the bank, holding her nightdress and smiling at her. His hair had gotten so long! And it was braided with scarlet ribbons that matched his vest, which left his wide, muscular chest mostly bare and made him look more than just two short years older than her. River felt a rush of happiness that surprised her \u2014 she hadn't realized she'd missed him that much. \"Clayton! When I didn't see you the past few days I thought you wouldn't make the Rendezvous. I'm glad you did \u2014 even if it means you eavesdropped on my prayers.\" \"I didn't eavesdrop. I just showed up and you were already praying \u2014 loudly.\" \"Riiiight. I'll try to remember next time to pray more quietly. What are you doing out here anyway?\" She grinned mischievously at him. \"Want to join me bathing?\" Clayton snorted. \"No! I missed you and I was out here looking for you, but I choose to bathe like civilized people \u2014 in a tub heated by a hearth-fire \u2014 or, better yet, in a steaming hot spring.\" \"Still a baby,\" River teased, her full lips turning up. \"Still a brat,\" Clayton countered. \"You should come out of there before you turn blue and have to petition Herd Indigo to join them. Plus, I have a good luck gift for you \u2014 though you don't really need it.\" \"A gift?\" With no sense of modesty or seduction, River stood and made her way to the bank and Clayton, who handed her the abandoned nightdress. She dried herself using the end of the skirt as she looked up at her friend. \"You got tall.\" \"Tall er, \" he corrected. \"And vain er as well?\" \"Nah. I'm pretty sure I'm still as vain as I've always been,\" he teased. She slid the nightdress on and studied him. \"You look stronger, too. I think you have more muscles. Herd Cinnabar must have kept you and Bard busy this winter. Where is your colt?\" River glanced behind Clayton, expecting the three-year-old to be waiting in the lightening shadows that clung stubbornly to the grassy area beneath the verdant post oaks and willows that lined Weanling Creek. \"My mother insisted on taking out the red ribbons from his mane and tail and is currently braiding them with what she calls the proper color. \" \"Herd Magenti's purple, of course.\" \"None other.\" \"Um, did she not see that you're wearing these?\" River reached up and tugged on one of the scarlet ribbons in his hair. \"Or this?\" And tapped a finger on the blood-colored vest. This close to him she could see that it was intricately decorated with rearing horses in a deep sorrel thread made from a horse's mane. \"She did. She told me to take them out and change into a decent vest and then she shooed me away when she began cooing to Bard about how much she missed him and how it was well past time his mane was braided properly.\" \"Hey, want to see real cooing? Watch how everyone treats Echo.\" She laughed softly as she rolled her eyes. But instead of laughing with her, Clayton's expression sobered. \"Well, sure, everyone coos over Echo. She's Lead Mare, the wisest, strongest, soundest, most beautiful equine in Herd Magenti \u2014 many say in all the Five Great Herds.\" River's shoulders slumped. \"You're right. I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to sound bitter about Echo. She is magnificent and I love her as much as I love Mother.\" \"Then who did you mean to sound bitter about?\" She answered his question with two of her own. \"Clayton, would you say Echo is an extension of my mother? That Mother reflects Echo's qualities?\" He didn't hesitate with his answer. \"Yes, I would. Everyone would \u2014 in our Herd and the others.\" \"I would, too. My fear is that I don't.\" \"You don't what?\" \"Reflect her qualities.\" She met Clayton's gaze. \"I don't want to disappoint Mother or our Herd.\" \"You won't. You couldn't. Unless you've changed drastically over the six months I was gone?\" His raised brows challenged her. \"No. I'm still me.\" \"Then you're the most dedicated Rider I know. Hey, don't let all the people and the talk get inside your head. You know weanlings can sense your nerves. Focus on being yourself and on being open to accepting any horse that comes to you today \u2014 that's all you need to do.\" \"Oh, that's all ?\" River rolled her eyes. \"Well, almost all. If you're Chosen you'll have the weight of the Herd's expectations on your shoulders, especially if a filly chooses you. And if you don't get Chosen you'll have the weight of the Herd's expectations on your shoulders as they worry about who will be Rider to our next Lead Mare ...\" He grinned at her. \"There. Did that help?\" \"Absolutely not,\" she said. Then the two friends grinned at each other and Clayton opened his arms. \"Come here, worrier. I missed you a lot.\" River stepped into his embrace, finding it strange and familiar at the same time. He hugged her tightly and she clung to him as well. Then, as was her right as a daughter of the Herd, River chose to break the embrace, stepping back to look up at Clayton. \"I hoped you missed me, too,\" he said. \"I did!\" She could see in his eyes that he wanted to say more and she held her breath, hoping he wouldn't make their reunion awkward. And, thankfully, he didn't. Instead he reached into his pocket and took out something concealed in his fisted hand. \"For you.\" She opened her hand and Clayton dropped the crystal into her palm. It fitted perfectly there \u2014 a long finger of glistening quartz. It was warm from his touch, but as it connected with her skin it heated even further, syncing with the Magenti Crystal Seer blood that ran strong through her veins. River could feel it \u2014 feel the sleeping power of the crystal \u2014 and though she wasn't even a Wind Rider yet, the stone began to wake and harmonize with her, calming the firefly-like thoughts that had nervously been flitting through her mind since she'd arrived at the Rendezvous Site two days before. Instinctively, her breathing slowed and her shoulders relaxed, and for the first time in days they stopped burning with tension. River opened her mouth to thank Clayton for the amazing gift, and then her thanks turned into a shocked gasp as the soft light of dawn caught the crystal's faceted surface, revealing what was within. \"Clayton! It's a phantom!\" \"Keep looking. It's not just a phantom.\" River lifted the crystal, squinting to study it, and her eyes widened. \"Oh, Mother Mare! It's an amethyst phantom! Clayton, I can't accept this. It's way too valuable.\" Clayton gently closed her hand around the crystal. \"Not to me it isn't. To me it's just beautiful. It takes a female Wind Rider of Herd Magenti to wake its secrets.\" \"You could trade this for so many things \u2014 a whole tent of your own. Seriously, Clayton, take it back.\" \"I believe it's too late for that. You look relaxed \u2014 or at least you did before you noticed it was a phantom. It woke for you, didn't it?\" River couldn't help herself. She opened her palm and stared at the glistening gift. She could feel the rhythm of her heartbeat echoing through the crystal. \"Well? It's awake, isn't it?\" he prodded. \"Yes.\" She couldn't take her eyes from the stone. \"It's definitely awake.\" \"I knew it! You have more than your mother's seat. You're also a Crystal Seer!\" Her gaze snapped up from the crystal. She glanced around them as she told him, \"Ssh! We can't know that for sure unless I'm Chosen by a weanling. You know it would be looked at as pure arrogance if anyone heard either of us say something like that.\" \"But it's the truth \u2014 you're holding the proof in your hand.\" \"All I'm holding in my hand is an extremely unusual, powerful crystal that recognized and resonated with my blood.\" \"Blood that has a history of producing powerful Seers,\" Clayton added. \"Do you know what property the amethyst phantom signifies? After I found it I didn't want to ask anyone. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I knew it was a phantom and that was enough to make me keep it hidden until I got it to you.\" River's gaze went back to the crystal, warm and pulsing in her open palm. \"The amethyst phantom allows Seers to see the beginnings of each life cycle.\" \"Wow. But, uh, what does that mean?\" \"It means that this crystal can be used to see what life lessons a person was meant to learn each life cycle, and knowing that, the Seer can help the person understand what he or she was meant to accomplish.\" River looked from the crystal into Clayton's dark eyes. \"For instance, if you were depressed \u2014 I mean really depressed, not just a little sad \u2014 a Seer could use this phantom to look at your lives and see what it is that you haven't accomplished in this life that your soul is aching for.\" Clayton nodded. \"There was a girl in Herd Cinnabar who was like that. So, so sad. She and her mare went over a cliff \u2014 purposefully. No one could stop them. No one could help her. Do you mean this crystal could've saved her?\" \"In the hands of a Crystal Seer, yes, probably. But don't be too hard on yourself. You didn't have any way of knowing that.\" \"It happened before I found the crystal. But I'm glad I know now, and I'm glad I found the stone and put it in your hands.\" Clayton reached out and cupped one of those hands in both of his, rubbing his thumb in a slow, sensual caress across the skin of her wrist. \"Use it to help others, Crystal Seer.\" \"I'm not a Seer,\" she said automatically, though she could feel the crystal echoing her heartbeat. \"Not yet you aren't. Let's see what happens later this morning, though. At least it has helped relax you a little.\" \"More than a little,\" River said. Impulsively she tiptoed, hugged him, and then kissed him softly on his cheek. \"Thank you! This is a wonderful gift.\" As she pulled away he caught her face in his hands gently. \"River, I thought about you every day I was gone.\" \"Every day for six months is a lot of thinking,\" she said. \"I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating.\" \"I'm not exaggerating and I'm also not kidding around. I'd show you how serious I am if you'd give me the chance.\" Slowly, River stepped back so that Clayton had to stop cupping her face. \"Clayton, all I'm thinking about right now is the Choosing.\" \"That's all you ever think about.\" Her gaze remained steady on his. \"You're right. Becoming a Wind Rider is now, and has been for as long as I have memories, the most important thing in my life.\" (Continues...) Excerpted from Wind Rider by P. C. Cast . Copyright \u00a9 2018 P. C. Cast. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "B08KLVX6L9", "title": "The Forbidden (Krewe of Hunters Book 34)", "author": "Heather Graham", "description": "About the Author Heather Graham, also known as Shannon Drake, is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than two hundred novels and novellas. She is a recipient of the Romance Writers of Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and the Thriller Writers Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.49}, {"asin": "0307452808", "title": "Queen Hereafter: A Novel of Margaret of Scotland", "author": "Susan King", "description": "Review \u201cPowerful and lyrically written . . . with riveting authenticity, King weaves a tapestry of love, friendship, and the eternal search for truth.\u201d \u2014Mary Jo Putney, New York Times bestselling author of Never Less Than a Lady \u201cKing is adept at pulling the reader into uncharted historical territory and making it real.\u00a0 A story of love, women\u2019s friendship, and suspense\u2014this epic tale and its larger-than-life characters linger in the mind and heart.\u201d \u2014Karen Harper, author of Mistress Shakespeare \u201cA captivating tale of the devout girl forced by fate to become queen to a passionate king.\u00a0 As successor to Lady Macbeth and the most powerful woman in Scotland, Margaret earns love, hate\u2014and lasting friendships. Susan Fraser King carries her readers through the Scots courts as if she\u2019d lived there herself.\u201d \u2014Patricia Rice, New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked Wyckerly \u201cThrough a combination of assured scholarship and powerful storytelling, Susan Fraser King brings\u00a0alive the complex, vivid\u00a0world of Margaret of Scotland. With vibrant characters and lyrical description, this is a wonderful evocation of eleventh-century Britain in all its fierce splendor.\u201d \u2014Nicola Cornick, USA Today bestselling author \u00a0 \u201cShe: a pious, educated foreigner; he: a hirsute warrior king\u2014yoked together in matrimony for political expedience. Based on actual events, Susan Fraser King paints a vivid portrait of Margaret and Malcolm, a forced royal marriage that beat all odds and developed into one of mutual love and respect.\u201d \u2014Leslie Carroll, author of Notorious Royal Marriages \u201cSusan Fraser King\u2019s books, Lady Macbeth and now Queen Hereafter , are such delights\u2014she lets us explore where normally we historians are not permitted to go. And what a wonderful pleasure that is, for she brings the scholar\u2019s eye for authentic detail and evokes all the smoky atmosphere of medieval Scotland. Oh, I am jealous\u2014and grateful.\u201d \u2014John C. Hartsock, professor of literary journalism and author of Seasons of a Finger Lakes Winery \u201cSusan Fraser King\u2019s Queen Hereafter transports the reader back to through the mists of Celtic history to the people behind the legends. In this story, as in the historical reality, love and romance jostle side by side with political manipulation and the horrors of war.\u00a0 Ms. King presents a human Queen Margaret of Scotland and places her believably in a world known to us only through brief anecdotes in ancient manuscripts.\u00a0Based on her extensive research, the author takes us back to early Scotland with its royal court, habitu\u00e9s, and their schemes.\u201d \u2014Ben Hudson, Ph.D., professor of Celtic and medieval studies, Penn State About the Author With graduate degrees in art and art history, former college lecturer SUSAN FRASER KING is the author of several bestselling novels praised for lyrical style and historical accuracy. Raised in upstate New York and a frequent visitor to Scotland, she lives in Maryland with her family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One\u00a0\u00a0My lady mother was so sure the English king planned to be rid of us the moment we set foot on his Saxon shores that she refused to sail there from Denmark. But we had been journeying for months after leaving Hungary, the lot of us: Papa, Mama, my sister and small brother, and a few servants. We were exhausted and sore in need of a home. Papa said we belonged in England, after all. I heard my parents arguing it at night.\u00a0\u00a0My father, born a prince of England, had been exiled to the kingdom of Hungary as a small boy. Lately King Edward, his royal andchildless uncle, had summoned Papa-another Edward-home to England to restore his birthright and name him heir to the throne. Mama groused that while our uncle-king had beckoned, he would not pay our traveling costs, and she feared he might lay claim to the priceless treasures we hauled about in crates and chests. My mother, Agatha, was Russian and Hungarian by birth and blood, and little liked the English. Her warrior husband she excused; he had left England at a young age.\u00a0\u00a0My father was Saxon royalty of the old Wessex line, and so were his children, harking back to wise King Alfred, to unready Aethelred and stubborn Edmund Ironside, my grandfather. Our brighter future lay in England. Lady Agatha would be queen there, according to both Edwards. Dignified if stubborn, she acquiesced.\u00a0\u00a0The year I turned ten, we left Hungary, where my two siblings and I had been born. Traveling with a Magyar escort over high mountains into Russia, carrying heavy packed chests in carts the whole way, we stayed weeks in Kiev with my mother's kin, then sailed northward to winter among the Danes, my father's cousins. That place was dull and smoky indoors, but splendid outside. I saw how much we resembled the Danes and the Rus, too, for we were long limbed and golden fair, with taut cheekbones and sky-colored eyes. Only my sister Cristina took after the dark and stocky Magyars, the tough bloodline of our mother's maternal kin; she had a bold temperament, too, outspoken where I was acquiescent, hot and impulsive where I was cool and devout as I tried to emulate my pious mother and grandmother.\u00a0\u00a0We crossed the wide, pitching North Sea, while my mother murmured of impending doom and prayed over her black-beaded rosary. Despite her worrying, the Danish vessel skimmed the waves like a winged dragon and brought us swiftly to English shores.\u00a0\u00a0In London town, we were welcomed by lords who spoke the Saxon language that my father knew and we did not. The king was away, but we were housed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke German, our preferred tongue, with us. We were dined, entertained, and assessed by a parade ofbishops, priests, and notable lords and ladies; servants, too, I suppose. Assured that he would be king eventually, my father gently teased his wife that her fears were unfounded.\u00a0\u00a0A week after our arrival, he fell dead at my feet.\u00a0\u00a0A few of us were walking in the archbishop's gardens after supper with some of England's earls and thanes when my father collapsed on a path. We could not rouse him. To this day, years on, I can recall my disbelief and shock, my father's gray face, my mother's paleness, and the scents of calendula and thyme.\u00a0\u00a0Poison was the rumor, denied and dismissed. The king's physician said Edward Aetheling had a weak heart, though my father had been a lion of a warrior, with spare habits and good health. Tainted food was suggested by others, though no one else had fallen sick that night.\u00a0\u00a0Taint or poison, I alone knew the truth: I had killed him.\u00a0\u00a0At my insistence, he had eaten sweetmeats from a golden tray set on the table before him. At first he had refused, intent on his discussion with a Saxon bishop. But with girlish silliness, I pushed the tray toward him, saying he must obey Princess Margaret. Distracted, smiling, he downed the treats in a fistful or two. Within the half hour, he was dead. Likely there was strong poison in those honeyed almonds and hazelnuts-and my father would not have eaten them that night but for my urging.\u00a0\u00a0Mea culpa, mea culpa, but I never confessed my deed to a priest, only adding to the heinous sin. Fear kept me silent. I wore bruises into my knees praying self-imposed penances, while my lady mother approved my pious grieving, mistaking what moved me so. I could not tell her and hurt her even more.\u00a0\u00a0At court, some whispered of the ambitious men who would have benefitted from the death of Edward the Exile: Harold Godwinson was one, brother of the queen and son of an ambitious Saxon earl, and William of Normandy was another. King Edward, rumor said, had bargained his crown to both men secretly and then gave the heir's right to my father. Whether one of them had ordered Edward the Exile killed or some other had done it, my own hand had aided the killer. I shared the sin.\u00a0\u00a0That gnawed at me, crept into my dreams, perched on my shoulder like a demon.\u00a0\u00a0Overnight we transformed from exalted royal family to the\u00a0foreign wards of a king who took little interest in us yet would not permit usto return to Hungary. My siblings and I were educated as befitted our status in that formal, refined court. But we were in effect hostages housed as king's wards, our little freedom spent witnessing the hunt, hawking, or taking the short and frequent journey between the London and Winchester palaces. Often my sister and I refused to ride in the canopied van that carried the women, delighting in a chance for the saddle. We had been partly raised by Magyar kin,after all.\u00a0\u00a0At five years old, my brother Edgar was named king's heir in a ceremony, while the other claimants for the English throne remained avid and interested. The year I turned twenty and Edgar thirteen, our aged royal uncle died, leaving Edgar the Aetheling, Harold Godwinson, and William of Normandy each believing in his own right to be king.\u00a0\u00a0Harold was quickly chosen by the witanagemot and duly crowned. England needed a warrior-king, not a stripling boy, that year. Had Harold taken hawk's wings to soar over the cliffs of England, he would have seen two threats at once: the Danes sweeping in from the east and the Normans coming from the south.\u00a0\u00a0Within months, in the autumn of anno domini 1066, the mail-clad warriors of Normandy slid their boats, silent and lethal, onto our English shore. Harold died on Hastings field and William took us for his wards-but as soon as we could get away, my kin and I fled. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 15.0}, {"asin": "B01N2ZV4MN", "title": "A Secret History of Witches: A Novel", "author": "Louisa Morgan", "description": "Review \" I loved it. A beautiful generational tale, reminiscent of Practical Magic if it had been set in various time periods, but much more expansive in scope. Grounded and real, painful and hopeful at the same time.\" - Laure Eve, author of The Graces \" Historical fiction at its absolute finest .... Deliciously absorbing.\" - Boston Globe\"At once sprawling and intimate, A Secret History of Witches deftly captures the greatest magic of all: the love between mothers and daughters .\" - Jordanna Max Brodsky, author of The Wolf in the Whale\" Fresh and unpredictable.... [Morgan] depicts with visceral impact the roles of women in a male-centered world.\" - Historical Novel Society \" A moving multigenerational saga about strong women who work behind the scenes to save the world from tyranny. A deeply satisfying and magical work of great craft.\" - Carol Goodman, author of The Lake of Dead Languages\" Epic in scope and heartbreakingly tender in its portrayal of mothers and daughters... Recommended for fans of Nora Roberts and readers of feminist fantasy. \" - Booklist \"A Secret History of Witches examines the bonds between mothers and daughters, and the power of hidden magic to quietly save the world, particularly as the world braces for another global war.\" - Brit + Co\" A Secret History of Witches is an epic family saga that speaks to the strength of all women and the difference that one true heart can make, not only for herself, but for the world.\" - Marci Jefferson, author of Girl on the Golden Coin\"Morgan's transportive words will sweep you away to a time of magic, love, and loss. Simply hold on and enjoy this mesmerizing ride. \" - Tish Thawer, award-winning author of The Witches of BlackBrook series \"Epic relay race that gripped me from start to finish . Fiercely uncompromising and unsentimentally poignant, A Secret History of Witches will transfix you.\" - Michael Bishop About the Author Louisa Morgan is a pseudonym for award-winning author Louise Marley. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she and her Border Terrier, Oscar, ramble the beaches and paths of Washington State. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "B071ZM6F6C", "title": "Death at an English Wedding: An English Village Murder Mystery (Murder on Location Book 7)", "author": "Sara Rosett", "description": "About the Author Sara Rosett is the author of the Ellie Avery mystery series. She is a military spouse and a professional organizer who finds mystery and mayhem as she moves around the country. Her articles and essays have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Military Wifes Soul, Georgia Magazine, Mystery Scene Magazine, and RT Book Reviews. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "0307465381", "title": "Antiquarian Bookplates: 55 Bookplates to Personalize Your Library", "author": "Potter Gift", "description": "About the Author Potter Style , an imprint of the Crown Publishing group, is a high-end gift book and stationery line, specializing in lifestyle, design, art, fashion, humor, and DIY.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0738758841", "title": "Witches' Wisdom Oracle Cards", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 22.07}, {"asin": "0062325418", "title": "Depraved Heart: A Scarpetta Novel (Kay Scarpetta)", "author": "Patricia Cornwell", "description": "Review \u201cDr. Kay Scarpetta, who keeps us coming back to Patricia Cornwell\u2019s sprawling crime novels, is one tough broad. \u2026 Once Scarpetta decides to ferret out Lucy\u2019s secrets, the novel becomes more of a psychological thriller.\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cScarpetta\u2019s current case, Lucy\u2019s troubles with the Feds, and Carrie\u2019s spooky blast from the past are all on an inevitable collision course, and Cornwell shows surprising restraint in reining in her plot and keeping it tightly focused on her well-developed core characters.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cAnother gritty, world-weary tale of mayhem by masterful mysterian Cornwell. . . . Terse and tangled, messy and body-fluidy, and altogether satisfying.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cDark and cleverly plotted.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cCornwell\u2019s demonic plot shifts and changes almost page by page, so the reader\u2019s spun round not knowing what to believe\u2026 This intense rush of a mystery will keep you guessing up until the very scary conclusion.\u201d \u2014 Providence Journal \u201cAnother gritty, world-weary tale of mayhem by masterful mysterian Cornwell. . . . Terse and tangled, messy and body-fluidy, and altogether satisfying.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cDr. Kay Scarpetta, who keeps us coming back to Patricia Cornwell\u2019s sprawling crime novels, is one tough broad. . . . Once Scarpetta decides to ferret out Lucy\u2019s secrets, the novel becomes more of a psychological thriller\u2026\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cHeart-stopping, paranoia-fueled, propulsively readable, viscerally suspenseful, disconcertingly shifty\u2026 Cornwell\u2019s demonic plot shifts and changes almost page by page, so the reader\u2019s spun round not knowing what to believe\u2026 This intense rush of a mystery will keep you guessing up until the very scary conclusion.\u201d \u2014 Providence Journal From the Back Cover Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a highly suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link seems to be from her niece Lucy. But how can it be? It\u2019s clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago. As Scarpetta watches she comes to grips with frightening secrets about her niece. That first clip and others sent soon after raise dangerous implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused, alarmed, and not knowing where to turn. The diabolical presence and singularly \u201cdepraved heart\u201d behind what unfolds seems obvious\u2014but strangely, not to the FBI. Certainly that\u2019s the message they send when they start harassing Lucy and begin building a case that could send her to prison for the rest of her life. In the latest novel in her bestselling series featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell captivates readers again with the jolting twists, high-wire tension, and cutting-edge forensic detail for which she is renowned, proving yet again why she is the world\u2019s number one bestselling crime writer. About the Author Patricia Cornwell is recognized as one of the world\u2019s top bestselling crime authors with novels translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. Her novels have won numerous prestigious awards including the Edgar, the Creasey, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Prix du Roman d\u2019Aventure. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Patricia has written a definitive book about Jack the Ripper, a biography, and three more fiction series among others. Cornwell, a licensed helicopter pilot and scuba diver, actively researches the forensic technologies that inform her work. She was born in Miami, grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 7.48}, {"asin": "0152938230", "title": "A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers", "author": "Nancy Willard", "description": "From Publishers Weekly The Newbery Medal-winning, Caldecott Honor book about an imaginary inn belonging to William Blake, where remarkable guests are attended by an even more remarkable staff. Ages 4-8. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Nancy Willard has loved William Blake\u2019s poetry from the day she first heard it. While writing the poems in this book, she built a six-foot model of the inn, decorating it with moons, suns, stars, and prints of Blake\u2019s paintings. The model with its residents\u2014the characters that appear in this volume\u2014stands in her living room. Nancy Willard published her first book when a high school senior\u2014an inset in the Horn Book, which was called A Child\u2019s Star. Formerly a lecturer in the English department at Vassar College, she is the author of a number of well-received children\u2019s books, including Sailing to Cythera: And Other Anatole Stories and The Island of the Grass King: The Further Adventures of Anatole, both winners of a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Alice and Martin Provensen have been honored by the Art Books for Children Citation of the Brooklyn Museum, by the Gold Medal for illustration of the Society of Illustrators, by exhibitions at the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and by being included on the New York Times Best Illustrated Children\u2019s Books of the Year list on nine occasions.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B08KPGNJ4Z", "title": "Synchronized Sorcery (Witchcraft Mystery Book 11)", "author": "Juliet Blackwell", "description": "About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the author of several historical novels, including The Vineyards of Champagne, The Lost Carousel of Provence, Letters from Paris, and The Paris Key. In addition to writing the beloved Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series, she also coauthored the Agatha Award-nominated Art Lover's Mystery series. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master's degrees in anthropology and social work. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Review Lind deftly combines a smart and witty sleuth with entertaining characters. -- \"Romantic Times, praise for the seires\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 \"I'm worried about Oscar,\" I said, twisting in my seat as I tried to get settled. The San Francisco-bound flight was still loading passengers, and the newest arrivals were doing that crablike shuffle down the narrow center aisle that was unique to modern air travel. The aisle seat to my right was occupied by a polite Parisian woman whose headphones discouraged conversation, at least with this chatty Texan. Fortunately for me, sitting on my left, by the window, was a sexy psychic named Sailor. Even though we in economy class were jammed elbow-to-elbow into cramped spaces with inadequate leg room, I didn't mind. I would have happily rested in Sailor's lap all the way from Paris, so enamored was I with my new husband. Husband. I still found that hard to believe. \"And exactly why are you worried about Oscar?\" Sailor asked with the strained patience of a private school headmaster. I gave him credit for refraining from rolling his dark, beautiful eyes. Sailor had been less than enthusiastic that Oscar, a shapeshifting pig and my ersatz witch's familiar, had accompanied us on our honeymoon. There was a reason I had invited Oscar along, of course: I had promised to help him search for his mother, who suffered under a curse that had turned her into a stone gargoyle. It's a long story, but the upshot was that I spent my honeymoon traipsing around Europe, checking out gargoyles adorning castles and cathedrals and manors, and mediating between the two most important fellas in my life-who had a habit of vying for my attention. \"How is he going to get home?\" I asked. \"I would imagine the same way he got to Barcelona, to Paris, and to Budapest, as well as every other destination on our mind-bogglingly complicated honeymoon itinerary.\" Sailor intertwined his long, graceful fingers with mine, and I took a moment to gaze at our interlocked hands. The crystals in my antique druzy engagement ring sparkled, and our matching wedding bands-wrought of tiny intertwined vines of silver-gleamed in the overhead lights. \"Hey, wife,\" Sailor said in a low, grumbly voice. \"Remember Prague?\" \"Prague,\" I breathed, closing my eyes. \"And the turret room?\" \"The turret room,\" I repeated, blushing at the memory of the beautiful, round room at the top of the medieval castle, with its ancient stone walls, plush window seat, and tall windows looking out across the red-tiled roofs of Prague. Not to mention what all had gone on beneath the down comforter in the turret's king-sized canopy bed. \"Not easy cleaning up all those rose petals you manifested.\" Sailor gave me a barely-there smile and a smoldering look, and for a moment I forgot all about Oscar and the hustle and bustle of the boarding airplane. He continued, \"Or that tapas bar in the market in Barcelona our first night?\" \"What about last night in Paris, in that little bistro with the carousel on the corner . . . ?\" I sighed. \"I loved everything we saw, and ate . . .\" \"And ate, and ate . . .\" I laughed. Having spent several weeks touring Europe, I truly understood the phrase \"the honeymoon period.\" It had been a glorious, romantic, blissful adventure to start our new life as a married couple. We weren't technically married, at least as far as the law was concerned, because my friend Bronwyn had not been able to get licensed in time to officiate, and Sailor's several-years-in-the-making divorce had not yet been finalized. But our handfasting, held in a redwood fairy circle, had been witnessed by our closest friends and family and sanctified by the woods-folk. We would legalize our union at city hall eventually, but regardless, ours was a true marriage in my witchy book. \"It was a great honeymoon,\" I said. \"It was. Would have been better without our porcine companion, but otherwise . . .\" Sailor let out a soft \"oof\" as I poked him in the ribs. He chuckled. \"All I'm saying is that it would have been nice not having to explain the presence of our 'pet pig' everywhere we went. I thought that poor bellboy at the Parador in Spain was going to run right off the parapet.\" The Parador was a tenth-century Moorish fortress turned castle turned hotel, perched atop a hill overlooking the city of Tortosa and the Ebro River. We stayed at a number of wonderful old castles in our travels, and the experience never lost its charm. Each and every one had made me feel like a princess. Except for the annoyance of lingering ghosts haunting those stone walls, but that was par for the course for me. My paranormal skill set does not include the ability to communicate with spirits, but they tend to sense my presence and often reach out. It's disconcerting for me, and I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for them. \"It's hard to believe we're heading back to real life,\" I said. \"I guess this means the honeymoon's over. Shall I start to nag you now?\" \"I think it's required. And I'll start scratching and making weird bodily noises.\" \"Please don't.\" \"I won't if you won't.\" \"Deal.\" We kissed and sealed the deal. \"I wonder how Calypso has handled things in my absence . . .\" I said. \"I sure hope Aidan is doing better.\" My last encounter with Aidan Rhodes, the head of the San Francisco Bay Area's magical community, had been horrifying: He had been covered in blood from terrible injuries sustained in a fight with a demon, wounds that required the kind of treatment modern medicine could not provide. I forced myself to take a deep breath and concentrate on the positives: Aidan was now under the care of my grandmother's skilled colleagues near Michoac\u2021n, Mexico, his recuperation aided by drawing upon the energy of the salt caves. Or at least I hoped so. Aidan and I did not always see eye to eye on things, but he understood my complicated past in a way few could, and had become a true friend. \"Your grandmother told us last week that he's healing well, so it shouldn't be too much longer,\" said Sailor. Unlike me, Sailor carried a cell phone, which had made it possible for us to enjoy the occasional FaceTime with friends and colleagues while we were in Europe. \"And just think: In the meantime you get to fulfill your egomaniacal ambition to be the Grand Poobah of Bay Area witches.\" \"I have no such ambition,\" I scoffed. He raised one eyebrow. \"I'm serious. I have no desire, none at all, to be a Grand whatever-you-said. I have no interest in being in charge. Really.\" I could hear that I protesteth a mite too much and added: \"I do think I might handle certain things better than Aidan, but that's not the same thing as wanting to take over.\" \"Sure about that?\" Sailor looked amused. \"Positive.\" I paused. \"It's just that . . . running the San Francisco Bay Area magical community seems like a job for a woman.\" Sailor raised his eyebrow again. \"Resorting to sexist arguments now, are we?\" \"No. But there's a reason the vast majority of witches are women,\" I said. \"It's an energy thing. I simply think a woman should be in charge, that's all.\" \"Well, that's good, because it seems you've inherited the job.\" \"Temporarily inherited the job. I'm just filling in, remember.\" I sighed. \"The worst part is there's always a lot of bureaucratic paperwork, and people wanting me to fix things all the time.\" \"Repeat after me: 'I'll see what I can do.' Works every time.\" I laughed. \"I'll keep that in mind.\" \"And just for the record: When you do become the Bay Area's Grand Poobah, I'll be happy to fulfill my obligations as First Gentleman. I imagine there will be a lot of cocktail parties involved. I'm quite partial to a lovely platter of canap\u017ds.\" I ignored that. \"Anyway, I can't wait to see Selena, and Bronwyn, and Maya, and Conrad, and all the others. . . . I wonder how business has been.\" \"Didn't Bronwyn say your grandmother's coven has been helping out at the shop?\" \"She did, and that's what worries me,\" I said with a smile. \"What do you want to bet there's not a sparkly garment left on the racks? Those old women are a flock of magical magpies.\" Most of the passengers had finally finished stowing their luggage and taken their seats, and the flight attendants began one last sweep through the cabins, shutting the overhead bin doors and soothing nervous fliers. I was reaching for the in-flight magazine in the seat pocket in front of me when the medicine bag I always wore around my waist started to hum. I looked up to see a late arrival burst onto the airplane. He was of average height and weight, with an olive complexion, dark eyes, and longish near-black hair, approximately my age. He wore a gleaming gold earring in his left ear, but otherwise there was nothing especially remarkable about him, certainly nothing to explain the sudden conviction that I knew him from somewhere. I wondered whether I might have met him years ago in Germany when I visited my father-a visit I could still only vaguely recall. If this fellow were somehow connected to my father, he might very well spell trouble. Our eyes locked as he proceeded down the aisle. He was some form of magical practitioner, I would bet my boots on it. My heart started to pound, the tingling at my waist still issuing its warning. Not that it was all that unusual for me to encounter another witch; after all, there were a lot more of my ilk walking around than most cowans-nonmagical folk-realized. But there was something about this mystery man that put me on edge. He averted his intense gaze as he passed our row. I craned my neck to follow his progress down the aisle, but there was nothing more of note: he proceeded to the rear of the plane, stowed his bag in an overhead compartment, and took a seat, disappearing from view. \"Everything okay?\" Sailor asked, following my gaze. He didn't miss much. \"Sure,\" I said, and shook my head as if to clear my thoughts. By now the aircraft door had been shut, the flight attendants were in the aisle doing a choreographed dance demonstrating the use of seatbelts and flotation devices (\"in the unlikely event of a water landing\"), and the pilots behind the cockpit door were spinning up the engines as they prepared the airplane for departure. \"Why do flight attendants always demonstrate how to put on a seatbelt?\" I asked. \"Is there a person alive who doesn't know how to operate a seatbelt?\" \"Hard to imagine, but once it's a rule, I guess they're compelled to tell us.\" Sailor glanced at me. \"Feeling antsy?\" \"A bit. As anxious as I am to get back, it will be hard to return to real life.\" \"We have a lot to do,\" agreed Sailor. \"But we're very fortunate, all things considered.\" \"Oh, I agree,\" I said. \"Still. It's much more fun to travel and be waited on in restaurants and sleep in castles than to go to work and do laundry and pay bills.\" \"Can't argue with you there. Among other things, we need to address the living situation, you and I.\" \"And Oscar.\" \"And Oscar,\" Sailor agreed in a weary voice. \"Poor guy still hasn't found his mother, despite all those gargoyles we saw. I wonder if he'll ever stop looking.\" \"All in good time, as your grandmother Graciela would say.\" \"She also says: 'Just 'cause you put your boots in the oven don't make 'em biscuits.' I never figured out what that meant, either.\" He chuckled, and as the plane taxied into position on the runway I tried, without luck, to catch another glimpse of the mystery man. So I gazed instead at Sailor's hand, intertwined with mine, and wondered what our return to \"real life\" in San Francisco might hold, and how Sailor and I, as a couple, would transition from our glorious, carefree honeymoon back to real life, with all its cares and responsibilities. The plane's engines roared as we started down the runway and picked up speed, the rumbling of the wheels suddenly going silent as we lifted off of European soil. \u00d2What is that?\u00d3 I asked eleven hours later as we circled San Francisco, preparing to land. \"What 'that'?\" \"That shape, down there,\" I said, pointing at a brightly lit rectangle in the dark expanse of the bay waters below us. Sailor and I had exchanged seats halfway through the flight, so now he had to lean over me to look out the small window. \"Must be a cargo ship of some kind,\" he said. \"It's too big to be a cargo ship-look at it in comparison to the others. It looks more like an island, but which could it be?\" \"It's not Alcatraz, that's for sure,\" said Sailor, and our eyes met. Not long ago we had survived a series of harrowing encounters within the walls of the old federal penitentiary on the island. Both of us preferred not to be reminded of those experiences. I knew there were other islands in San Francisco Bay: Angel Island, Yerba Buena Island, Station Island, Belvedere, Alameda, plus a few lesser-known rocks poking out of the water. But none of them resembled what I was looking at. \"Besides,\" I said. \"Why would a cargo ship be lit up like a Christmas tree?\" \"All good questions,\" said Sailor, wrapping an arm around me and giving me a hug. \"Perhaps you could look it up on the Internet, if you ever learn how to use the computer. So, how does it feel to come back to the City by the Bay?\" \"Truthfully? Like coming home.\" \"Even though it's not Europe?\" \"Do I sound silly?\" \"Not at all,\" Sailor continued. \"It sounds like you love where you live, and your friends and community. I'd say you're very lucky.\" \"We're very lucky.\" I laid my head on his shoulder and gazed out the window as we flew past the city, skirted the bay, and finally set down on the soil of my adopted state. I was coming home to good friends and family. To my Haight Street vintage clothing shop, Aunt Cora's Closet, and to the temporary (I hoped) role as the head of the San Francisco Bay Area magical community. I was returning with scads of gifts for everyone, a few spellcasting items and souvenirs for myself, and one disappointed familiar. As well as a mysterious fellow passenger, a dozen rows behind us, who might just spell trouble. My medicine bag had continued to hum throughout the flight. The man with one gold earring might be out of sight, but he was most definitely not out of mind. --This text refers to the mass_market edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0062381784", "title": "Crucible: A Thriller (Sigma Force, 14)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.98}, {"asin": "B095L6F5XP", "title": "Buttons and Blows: A Ghostly Fashionista Mystery (Ghostly Fashionista Mystery Series Book 4)", "author": "Gayle Leeson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "1561706124", "title": "Power Thought Cards: A 64 Card Deck (Box Set)", "author": "Louise L. Hay", "description": "About the Author Louise Hay was an inspirational teacher, incredible visionary, and self-help pioneer who educated millions since the 1984 publication of her bestseller, You Can Heal Your Life , which has more than 50 million copies in print worldwide and spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and many other TV and radio programs both in the U.S. and abroad. Renowned for demonstrating the power of affirmations to bring about self-healing and positive change, Louise was the author of more than 30 books, including the bestsellers The Power Is Within You and Heal Your Body . In addition to her books, Louise produced numerous audio and video programs, card decks, online courses, and other resources for leading a healthy, joyous, and fulfilling life. Louise was dubbed \u201cthe closest thing to a living saint\u201d by the Australian media and in 1985, Louise began her famous support group, \u201c The Hayride ,\u201d with six men diagnosed with AIDS. By 1988, the group had grown to a weekly gathering of 800 people and had moved to an auditorium in West Hollywood. In 1987, what began as a small venture in the living room of her home turned into Hay House, Inc. : the largest publisher of self-help books, events, and courses. Hay House has sold millions of books and products worldwide and now has offices in California, New York, London, Sydney, Johannesburg, and New Delhi. The non-profit Hay Foundation , established by Louise in 1986, continues to support organizations that enhance the quality of life for people, animals, and our environment. Websites: www.louisehay.com, www.hayhouse.com, and www.hayfoundation.org Facebook page: www.Facebook.com/LouiseLHayInstagram page: @hayhouseinc", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "1984804723", "title": "Buried to the Brim (A Hat Shop Mystery)", "author": "Jenn McKinlay", "description": "Review \u201cFancy hats and British aristocrats make this my sort of delicious cozy read.\u201d \u2014Rhys Bowen , New York Times bestselling author of the Royal Spyness Mysteries, on the Hat Shop Mysteries \u00a0 \u201cA delicious romp through my favorite part of London with a delightful new heroine.\u201d \u2014Deborah Crombie , New York Times bestselling author, on the Hat Shop Mysteries \u00a0 \u201cThe sharp writing and smart plotting are outstanding, and the surprising reveal and even more suspenseful chase will have readers at the edge of their seats. This stellar mystery sets a high bar for mysteries.\u201d \u2014 Kings River Life Magazine , on the Hat Shop Mysteries \u00a0 \u201cBrimming with McKinlay\u2019s trademark wit and snappy one-liners, Anglophiles will love this thoroughly entertaining new murder mystery series. A hat trick of love, laughter, and suspense, and another feather in [Jenn McKinlay\u2019s] cap.\u201d \u2014Hannah Dennison , author of the Vicky Hill Exclusive! Mysteries, on the Hat Shop Mysteries About the Author A true Anglophile, New York Times bestselling author Jenn McKinlay loves all things British. In her idea of a perfect world, every day would include high tea or wearing a fabulous hat, or both. This adoration of all things U.K. inspired her to write the Hat Shop Mysteries, which are set in London, one of her most favorite cities in the world. She now gets to visit there regularly--for research purposes, of course. In addition to being the author of the Hat Shop Mysteries, Jenn also writes the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries, the Library Lover's Mysteries, the Bluff Point Romances, and the Happily Ever After Romances. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1  If I held my left hand just so, I could see the diamonds catch and scatter the light, even the dreary February light in London, into a million tiny rainbows. I, Scarlett Parker, was engaged to be married. Harry, excuse me, my fianc\u00e9, Harrison Wentworth, proposed to me a few months ago when we were visiting my parents in Connecticut, and I don't think my feet have touched terra firma ever since. And it's not just because of my spectacular ring, although this cushion cut Harry Winston did add a little something to the proposal, but rather because after dating all the wrong men, I finally found my Mr. Right.I held my hand over my heart and sighed.\"She's doing it again,\" Fee said. She was standing behind the counter in the middle of the hat shop.\"It's like a trance,\" Viv said. \"Or perhaps a fit. It'll pass.\"I turned away from the front window, where I'd been arranging a new display of spring hats before I got distracted by my ring, and glanced at my cousin, Vivian Tremont, and her assistant, Fiona (Fee) Felton. They were both looking at me as if they were convinced I'd lost my mind.Viv's blue eyes, the only feature we shared, were narrowed and her lips pursed. Her long blond curls were piled on top of her head in a messy bun and she was dressed for warmth in a long pale green tunic sweater over charcoal tights and black boots. If I didn't love her so much, I'd loathe her for being so fairy-tale-princess pretty, but I did love her. She was the closest thing I had to a sister and when my life had imploded a few years ago, she was the one who sent for me, insisting I take my place as her partner in the hat shop that our grandmother Mim had bequeathed to us.Fee, Viv's assistant, had her head tipped to the side. Her chin-length corkscrew curls, highlighted with vibrant streaks of purple, bounced as she nodded in agreement with Viv's assessment. A beautiful woman, Fee was tall and lithe, with dark eyes and skin, and cheekbones you could slice cucumbers on. She'd been Viv's millinery apprentice while in fashion school but had become a full-time employee once she graduated. It was a good thing I adored her, too, because honestly, hanging out with these two knockouts could damage even the most well-adjusted girl's self-esteem.Despite a rocky start, I'd been in London for almost three years, and I couldn't imagine spending my days anywhere but our quaint little hat shop, Mim's Whims, on Portobello Road in Notting Hill. Being an American, the hat thing had always been a curiosity for me. Even when I came over to stay with Mim during my school holidays, I never quite understood the passion for hats that exists in Britain. Mim told me that wearing a hat is woven into the social fabric of being British. For the royal family, in particular, protocol dictates that they wear hats to all royal occasions. Royal and upper-class women rarely showed their hair in public before the 1950s, Mim explained, and so the hat remains relevant in British society.Personally, even though I love the beautiful hats Viv and Fee create, I still don't quite get it. Although, I have to admit, there is no better cure for a bad-hair day than one of Viv's exceptional designs.\"I'm not having a fit,\" I protested. I tossed my straight red hair over my shoulder in my most diva manner and tipped my nose up in the air. \"I'm just happy. Can't a girl be happy without everyone thinking she's bonkers?\"Viv and Fee exchanged a glance and then they broke into matching grins.\"We're just teasing you, yeah?\" Fee said. Her nose ring caught the light as she turned her head to the side. She jerked her chin in the direction of the front door and said, \"And if I'm not mistaken, here comes the reason you're so daft.\"I whirled around and my heart gave a flutter at the sight of the tall man with wavy brown hair and bright green eyes who was approaching our shop. Harry! I was so delighted to see my fianc\u00e9; I didn't realize he had someone with him until Viv let out a huff of disgust.\"Is that a dog?\" she cried. \"Is he bringing it into our shop?\"Harry grinned at me as he pulled open the door, and it took all of my brain power to glance away from him and take in the petite woman and the adorable corgi who had entered the shop beside him.\"Yes, that's definitely a dog,\" Fee said. \"Aw. Look. It's wearing galoshes and a mac.\"I glanced down. It was! As giddy as I was about seeing Harry, the sight of the stubby-legged canine in a raincoat about did me in. Totes adorbs! I hurried from the window and dropped to the floor beside the pup.\"Well, aren't you just the cutest thing?\" I asked. I held out my hand so we could become acquainted and a cold, wet nose nuzzled my fingers.\"She used to greet me like that,\" Harry said. His tone was dry, and when I glanced up he was smiling ruefully at the woman beside him.\"By letting you sniff her hand?\" the woman asked. She grinned. \"That's odd. Is that a new thing you young kids do?\"Harry laughed. \"You're a regular card, Aunt Betty.\"Aunt Betty! I'd heard stories about her from Harry's parents. Mostly his father since Betty was his little sister. Everyone doted on Aunt Betty.She was a petite woman but very stylish in a later-year Audrey Hepburn sort of way with her long burgundy wool coat, a jaunty navy and white polka-dot scarf and large sunglasses. Harry gave her a one-armed hug. The obvious affection between them made me smile.\"Aunt Betty, may I introduce you to my friends? Vivian Tremont and Fiona Felton.\" He gestured to Viv and Fee behind the counter and then said, \"And this is my beautiful fianc\u00e9e, Scarlett Parker. Ginger, this is my absolute favorite aunt in the whole wide world, Betty Wentworth.\"\"Delightful to meet you,\" I said. I stood up and shook her gloved hand.Aunt Betty gave Harry a side-eye. \"I'm your only aunt.\"\"That doesn't make it not true,\" he said. She laughed and swatted his arm.\"And who is your handsome companion?\" I asked.\"She's not talking about me,\" Harry said. He sounded aggrieved.\"Well, you can't honestly expect to compete with my Freddy, now, can you, dear?\" Aunt Betty asked Harrison. \"I mean, look at his bum, it's shaped like a heart.\"A laugh came out my nose. I took a discreet peek at Freddy's behind underneath the bright yellow raincoat-yup, definitely in the shape of a fuzzy heart. Aw. I felt Harry's gaze upon me and tried to save myself.\"Let me clarify to salvage your self-esteem.\" I winked at him and turned to Betty. \"Who is your handsome four-legged companion?\"Aunt Betty smiled and turned to Harry. \"I like her.\"\"Everyone does,\" Harry said.\"His full name is Freddy Darling Wentworth, and he is handsome, isn't he?\" Aunt Betty asked. \"I mean, just look at him, all honey-colored with ears and a good snout. He's a perfect specimen of a corgi. He's descended from the same line as the Queen's dogs, you know.\"\"Is he?\" Fee asked. She came out from behind the counter and knelt in front of Freddy. A cold wet nose poked out from under the large yellow rain hat, and Freddy licked her fingers.\"Yes, he's a Pembroke Welsh corgi from the same lineage as the Queen's beloved Susan,\" Aunt Betty said.\"That's incredible,\" I said. \"It's like having royalty in the shop. Last time we were so graced was when the Duchess of Sussex and the Duchess of Cambridge came for wedding hats.\"\"You did not just compare a dog to the royals,\" Viv said. She looked utterly appalled.Viv is a monarchist and the royal family is sacrosanct. Probably because they buy a lot of her hats. Not that I'm saying her loyalty could be bought but there was definitely a fiscal relationship there, if you know what I mean. After all, when the Duchess of Sussex wore a particularly cute confection of Viv's, a pale pink cap with matching feathers and Swarovski crystals, the shop got hammered with orders for the same. I swear Viv made that identical hat for a month straight.\"No,\" I protested. I glanced at the others-only Harry looked like he was trying not to laugh. \"Of course not. I just meant he's very much like a royal-you know, he's royal adjacent given that his family tree forks right into Buckingham Palace and all.\" They stared at me, not moved by my argument in the least. I felt compelled to add, \"You know Queen Elizabeth would agree with me.\"Fee blew an errant curl out of her eyes. \"She does have a point there. The Queen is absolutely mad about her dogs.\"\"Howling mad, you might say,\" Harrison said with a mischievous grin.That seemed to break the tension.\"Pawsitively smitten.\" Viv chortled.\"She absolutely hounds people about them.\" Fee laughed.The three of them were in stitches while Aunt Betty looked at them in dismay. Naturally, I felt obliged to contribute, too, because I can be punny.\"We should call her Queen Elizabark,\" I said. I chuckled pretty hard. No one else did. Instead, they all went serious. Viv shook her head and Fee sighed. I glanced at Harry, the man who is supposed to have my back, and he winked at me. It was a pity wink. Honestly!\"Nice effort, Ginger,\" he said.\"Nice effort?\" I planted my hands on my hips. \"Queen Elizabark-aw, come on, you know that's funny.\"Harry looked at Aunt Betty and said, \"Americans.\" Then he shrugged. I swatted his shoulder, knowing it was all in good fun. At least, I'm pretty sure it was. I'd been trying to mix it up in their oh-so-droll British puns for years but with no real success as yet.\"There, there, dear.\" Aunt Betty patted my arm. \"Not everyone has the gift of humor.\"I rolled my eyes. Someday I was going to have the last laugh.\"This is all very . . . whatever it is,\" Viv said. She gestured to us and then to Freddy. \"But why is there a dog in my shop, potentially getting hair on my hats?\"\"Funny you should ask, Viv,\" Harry said.I glanced at him. I knew that tone. This was the voice he used when he was feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Of course, being British, this meant most of the time. I honestly think part of the reason Harry loved me so much was because, being American, I do not have the same overdeveloped sense of unease about all things social.\"The thing is . . .\" he began and paused. He put his hand on the back of his neck. I knew this tactic. It was a stalling maneuver Harry used when he was trying to think of exactly how to say something so that it wouldn't come out the wrong way. I crossed my arms. This was sure to be good. \"The fact of the matter is, well, we were-\"\"The point, dear,\" Aunt Betty said to Harry. \"Get to the point.\"Harry looked from her to Viv. \"Aunt Betty was hoping you could help Freddy out with his next run at the PAWS dog show.\"\"The what?\"\"PAWS dog show,\" Aunt Betty repeated. \"Freddy's a contender.\"Viv frowned. She glanced down at the dog, who was looking up at her from under the brim of his bright yellow hat. \"Me? Help Freddy?\"\"That's right,\" Aunt Betty said. She nodded and clapped her hands in front of her chest. Her soft brown eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. \"Harry says you're the best milliner in London.\"\"Well, it would be bad form to argue with the truth, wouldn't it?\" Viv asked.She attempted to look modest but it was a wasted effort. If there was one thing that was true about Viv, it was that she really was the best milliner in London, and I'm not biased because I'm her cousin and we're in business together. She really is extra special. And I can say this as the person who works with the clients and has to convince them that the giant birdcage Viv put on their Ascot hat really will light up their mentions in the society pages in the best possible way.\"Freddy has been runner-up in the PAWS dog show for three years running,\" Aunt Betty said. \"This is his year, I know it. But he needs a little boost.\"\"Well, given the lack of length in his legs, I can see that,\" Viv said. \"But I'm not sure where I come in.\"Fee blew a curl out of her eyes and said, \"Don't be thick, Viv, they clearly want you to design a hat for Freddy.\"\"What?\" Viv asked. Her frown stretched into a look of surprise. \"I've never designed a hat for a dog before. I don't even know how it would stay on his head.\"\"Chin strap,\" I said. She glanced at me. \"Sorry, just thinking out loud.\"\"I don't make hats with chin straps,\" Viv said. She looked insulted at the thought.\"Sure you do,\" Fee said. \"Remember the darling lace-trimmed bonnets for the youngest flower girls in the royal . . .\"Fee's voice trailed off under the power of Viv's glare.I figured I'd better mediate the situation before Viv hurt Aunt Betty's feelings and we ended up in an incident. I swear, my job was mostly to mitigate \"incidents,\" which was ironic because it was an incident of my own that landed me here. Thankfully, I wasn't worried about Freddy's feelings, figuring he had enough self-esteem to manage a rejection from Viv.\"Come and sit down,\" I said to Harry and Aunt Betty. \"Maybe if we hear more about what you need, we can help you.\"Viv shot me a dark look, which I ignored. I led both Harry and Aunt Betty over to the dark blue easy chairs we had grouped around a glass coffee table on the far side of the shop. This was where Viv did her consultations with clients, over tea and scones, going through our catalog to see what they required for an upcoming event, be it a wedding, funeral, graduation, garden party, you name it.Freddy trotted after his mama, sitting right at Aunt Betty's feet when she sat on the love seat. Harry sat beside her while Viv and I took the remaining chairs. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1402258704", "title": "The Shadowy Horses", "author": "Susanna Kearsley", "description": "Review \"If you'd like a book to put you in mind of the Mary Stewarts of yesteryear, but which has a poetic style and energy all its own, I recommend The Shadowy Horses . Lass, I don't ken what more you could ask for.\" \u2015 All About Romance \"This was a fun enjoyable read, that sucked me on the first few pages. Easy to lose yourself in, and nicely paced.\" \u2015 Jenny Loves to Read \"If you have read Kearsley's books before and enjoyed them, you will enjoy this one as well. It is an entertaining book that I had a hard time putting down. For those who have not read a book by Susanna Kearsley yet, I highly recommend starting with this one, it is a great book!\" \u2015 The Book Garden \"The last 30 pages were intense, heartbreaking, and wonderfully satisfying; I couldn\u2019t have asked for a better conclusion.\" \u2015 Luxury Reading \"This one is going in my keeper pile\" \u2015 Burton Book Review \"Research, detailing, description, and dialogue blend together seamlessly, none intrudes on the other, but each enriches the storytelling style of author Susanna Kearsley. I'm pleased to give this book five stars!\" \u2015 Between the Pages \"THE SHADOWY HORSES is going on my favorites list for this year, and I'm so pleased to have discovered Susanna Kearsley's amazing writing talent.\" \u2015 Book of Secrets \"The characters are well rounded, from the mad Quinnell to Verity herself, as the \u2018looking for adventure\u2019 girl.\" \u2015 Stephen C. Ormsby \"One of the loveliest books ever written. Susanna Kearsley is a gifted story teller who will leave readers wanting more.\" \u2015 Cayocosta72 Book Reviews \"This story will not disappoint.\" \u2015 Historical Novel Review Blog \"The Shadowy Horses unfolds slowly and beautifully, combining mystery, history, romance, and the supernatural into an entrancing novel.\" \u2015 Independent Publisher \"I\u2019ll be sure to read more books by her in the near future!\" \u2015 Quirky-Gurl Media \"This is an author who is very talented with crafting believable characters, with creating an atmospheric setting, and with making the past come to life. Well done and I can't wait for my next Kearsley read!\" \u2015 Ageless Pages Reviews \"A bit of everything, romance and a ghost that can't rest in peace.\" \u2015 Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell \"This plot is superbly constructed with wonderful prose.\" \u2015 La Deetda Reads \"I loved it.\" \u2015 Kaetrin\u2019s Musings \"Ms. Kearsley writes in a very easy to read style that brings her places very much to life.\" \u2015 Broken Teepee \"I recommend this one without hesitation\" \u2015 The Eclectic Reader \"This poetic novel will seduce readers with its beautiful prose and lush, vivid descriptions of the Scotland shore.\" \u2015 RT Book Reviews \"Kearsley\u2019s tale is lush with romantic and ghostly threads.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"I have enjoyed Ms. Kearsley\u2019s books and this one did not disappoint.\" \u2015 My Book Addiction Reviews \"Kearsley\u2019s The Shadowy Horses is a decadent treat which goes down smoothly and leaves you begging for more.\" \u2015 The Modern Mnauscript \"Do you love romantic suspense? Do you ever feel nostalgic about the Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart books you read in your girlhood? Are you apt to re-read Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca once a year? If so, you will very likely enjoy Susanna Kearsley's fine new novel, The Shadowy Horses .\" \u2015 The Romance Reader \"The Shadowy Horses is a great novel and one that I wouldn\u2019t hesitate to recommend to my friends! I can\u2019t wait to read more from Susanna Kearsley!\" \u2015 Peeking Between the Pages \"So a smooth, descriptive style, characters who breathe on the page, attention paid to the details of the action and the characters\u2019 professions, a little humor, an intense growing love, a willingness on my part to believe the paranormal, they all lead to a great reading experience.\" \u2015 Dear Author \"I look forward to reading it and collecting this author's back list\" \u2015 Obsessed with Books \"The story was captivating, the plot intriguing, and I could not put it down.\" \u2015 Laugh Love Write \"Kearsley\u2019s lyrical prose brings the pages vividly alive with a breathtaking view into history and a captivating tale of romance, mystery, and ghostly apparitions\" \u2015 sherimelnick \"You could probably call me a Kearsley fangirl, and this is the best one yet in my opinion.\" \u2015 Lunatic Ramblings \"Kearsley hooked me with just a few lines this spring when I read Mariana and it was the same with Shadowy Horses . She does an amazing job building the tension and suspense in her plots, setting up a gothically tinged atmosphere, spicing it up with a little romance, and completely enthralling the reader in the tale.\" \u2015 No More Grumpy Bookseller \"If you\u2019re looking for an enjoyable, historical read with an equally good plot, give this book a try.\" \u2015 Dear Olympia \"One of the loveliest books ever written. Susanna Kearsley is a gifted story teller who will leave readers wanting more.\" \u2015 Caycosta 72 - Book Reviews \"I eagerly anticipated this novel and was not disappointed.\" \u2015 Under the Boardwalk \"I really liked the writing style in this book. Kearsley paints a vivid picture of the setting.\" \u2015 Palmer\u2019s Picks for Reading \"The Shadowy Horses is a keeper that can be enjoyed again and again. It has layers and layers of actions, relationships, and emotions to be pondered.\" \u2015 Long and Short Reviews About the Author New York Times , USA Today , and Globe and Mail bestselling author Susanna Kearsley is a former museum curator who loves restoring the lost voices of real people to the page, often in twin-stranded stories that interweave present and past. Her award-winning novels have been published in translation in more than 25 countries. She lives near Toronto. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The bus had no business stopping where it did. We should have gone straight on across the Coldingham Moor, with Dunbar to the back of us and the English border drawing ever nearer, but instead we stopped, and the shaggy-faced cattle that lifted their heads on the far side of the fence appeared to share my surprise when the driver cut the engine to an idle. A fierce blast of wind rocked the little ten-seater bus on its tires and drove a splattering of cold spring rain against the driver's windshield, but he took no notice. He shook out a well-thumbed newspaper and settled back, humming tunelessly to himself. Curious, I shifted in my seat to peer out my own fogging window. There seemed, at first glance, nothing to stop for, only the cattle and a few uninterested sheep, picking their way across a ragged landscape that was turning green reluctantly, as if someone had told it only yesterday that spring had come. Beyond the moor, lost somewhere in the impenetrable mist, rose the wild, romantic Lammermuir Hills I'd read about as a child. And in the opposite direction, although I couldn't see it either, the cold North Sea bit deep into the coastal line of cliffs. The wind struck again, broadside, and the little bus shuddered. I sighed, and watched my breath condense upon the chattering window glass. Impulsiveness, my mother always said, was one of my worst flaws, second only to my habit of speaking to strangers. After twenty-nine years I'd grown accustomed to her heavy sighs and shaking head, and to her firm conviction I'd end up a sad statistic on the nightly news. But now, as I squinted out at the bleak, unwelcoming scenery, I grudgingly admitted that my mother had a point. It had been impulse, after all, that had brought me from my London flat to Scotland in the first place. Impulse, and the slick, persuasive writing style of Adrian Sutton-Clarke. He knew me too well, did Adrian, and he had phrased his summons craftily\u2015his promise of \"the perfect job\" set like a jewel at the center of a long letter that was so deliciously mysterious, so full of hints of grand adventure, that I couldn't possibly resist it. Adrian, for all his faults, had rarely steered me wrong. And if today was anything to go by, I decided, he hadn't been lying about the adventure. Not that one could really blame British Rail for what had happened. My train had certainly set out from King's Cross cheerily enough, and even after we'd spent twenty minutes on a siding waiting for a points failure to be corrected, the engine had pushed ahead with vigor, determined to make up the time. It was only after our second delay north of Darlington, because of sheep on the line, that the train had begun to show signs of weariness, creaking and rolling from side to side in a rocking motion that lulled me instantly to sleep. I had stayed sleeping right through Durham, then Newcastle, and finally Berwick upon Tweed, where I was meant to get off. When the train lurched to a stop at Dunbar, I'd scrambled down onto the platform with the familiar resigned feeling that told me I was lost. Well, not so much lost, really, as diverted. And the fact that my train had been an hour late coming into Dunbar proved something of a complication. \"You might have taken the 5:24,\" the stationmaster had informed me, in an effort to be helpful, \"or the 5:51. But they've both gone. There'll not be another train to Berwick now till 7:23.\" \"I see.\" Nearly an hour and a half to wait. I hated waiting. \"I don't suppose there's a bus?\" \"To Berwick? Aye, there is, at...\" he'd searched his clockwork memory for the time, \"...6:25. Just round the corner, there, and up the road a ways\u2015that's where it stops.\" And so I'd wrestled my suitcase round the corner and up the road to the small bus shelter, my spirits lifting somewhat as I read the posted timetable telling me the bus to Berwick traveled via Cockburnspath and Coldingham and Eyemouth. Eyemouth, Adrian had written in his letter, pronounced just as it looks, and not like Plymouth, if you please. You'd love it here, I think\u2015I remember how you waxed rhapsodic about the north coast of Cornwall, and this is rather better, a real old-fashioned fishing town with smugglers' ghosts round every corner and the added lure of... but no, I shan't give the secret away. You'll just have to come and find out for yourself. I'd have been only too happy to oblige, I thought wryly, but for the fact that I was now stuck in the middle of Coldingham Moor, with the bus idling on and the driver still reading his newspaper. There seemed little point in questioning the stop; apart from a couple of love-struck kids fondling each other at the rear of the bus, I was the only passenger. And the driver was bigger than me. Still, my curiosity had almost reached breaking point when he finally folded his paper with a decisive rattle, sat himself upright, and pulled on the lever to open the door. A man was coming across the moor. It might have been the fogged window, or the wild weather, or the rough and rolling landscape that, like all the Scottish Borderlands, held traces of the harsh and violent past\u2015the echoed din of charging hooves, of chilling battle-cries and clashing broadswords. Whatever it was, it tricked my senses. The man, to my eyes, looked enormous, a great dark giant who moved over bracken and thorn with an effortless stride. He might have been a specter from a bygone age, a fearless border laird come to challenge our rude intrusion on his lands\u2015but the illusion lasted only a moment. The stranger pulled his collar tighter against another punishing blast of wind and rain and jogged the final few steps to the bus door. No border laird, just a rather ordinary-looking man in his mid-thirties, fit and broad-shouldered and thoroughly modern in jeans and a leather jacket. Well, I amended as he smoothed back his curling black hair and grinned at the bus driver, maybe not exactly ordinary-looking... \"Heyah,\" he greeted the driver, swinging himself up the final step. \"Saw me coming, did you?\" \"Aye, well, ye do stick out, lad. Thought I might as well wait for ye, save ye the walk back.\" The doors swung shut and, joy of joys, the bus sprang forward once again as the new passenger dropped into the seat across from me, planting his feet wide apart on the floor to brace himself. He and the driver chatted on like old friends, which I supposed they were, about the state of the weather and the latest rebellion of the bus driver's daughter and the health of the younger man's mother. It had been some years since I'd spent time in Scotland, and I'd forgotten just how musical the accent was. This was a thicker accent than I was accustomed to, and I couldn't catch each word as it was spoken, but I did my level best to follow the conversation. Just for practice, I told myself. Not because I was interested. The bus rattled noisily over the moor, dipped into Coldingham town and stopped for a moment to let off the teenagers. Shifting round in his seat, the bus driver sent me a courteous glance. \"You're for Eyemouth, lass, aren't ye?\" \"Yes, that's right.\" The man from the moor lifted an eyebrow at my accent, and glanced over. For a moment, my mother's face rose sternly in my mind. Never talk to strangers... But I pushed the image back and sent the man a friendly smile. The bus driver carried on speaking, over his shoulder. \"Are ye up here on holiday?\" Having received little response from the man opposite, I turned my smile on the driver instead. \"Interviewing for a job, actually.\" \"Oh, aye?\" He'd politely modified his speech, as most Scots did when talking to a non-Scot, and though the accent was still there I found him easier to understand. \"What kind of job?\" Well, that was just the question, wasn't it? I didn't really know, myself. \"Museum work, of sorts,\" I hedged. \"I'm interviewing with a man just outside Eyemouth\u2015\" The dark man from the moor cut me off. \"Not Peter Quinnell, surely?\" \"Well, yes, but...\" \"Christ, you don't mean to say you're Adrian's wee friend from London?\" He did smile then, and the simple act transformed his rugged face. \"We'd not expected you till tomorrow. David Fortune,\" he held out his hand by way of introduction. \"I work with Quinnell as well.\" I shook his hand. \"Verity Grey.\" \"Aye, I ken fine who you are. I must say,\" he confessed, leaning back again, \"you're not at all as I pictured you.\" Everyone said that. Museum workers, I had learned, were supposed to be little old ladies in spectacles, not twenty-nine-year-olds in short skirts. I nodded patiently. \"I'm younger, you mean?\" \"No. It's only that, with Adrian recommending you, I'd have thought to find someone... well, someone...\" \"Tall, blonde, and beautiful?\" \"Something like that.\" I couldn't help smiling. I was, to my knowledge, the only dark-haired woman who'd ever received so much as a dinner invitation from Adrian Sutton-Clarke, and I'd held his interest only until the next blonde came along. But while our romance had proved temporary, our separate paths, by virtue of our work, kept crossing and re-crossing like some fatalistic web. Truth be told, I probably saw more of Adrian now than I had when we were dating. When one wasn't actually in love with the man, he could be a quite enjoyable companion. Adrian, at least, understood the restless, independent streak that had made me chuck my British Museum job and strike out on my own to freelance. And he'd learned I never could resist a challenge. I studied the man across from me with interest, bringing all my powers of deduction to bear. I had already assumed, since Adrian was involved, that the job for which I was being interviewed involved some sort of archaeological dig. Adrian was one of the best surveyors in the business. I glanced at David Fortune's hands, and ventured to test my theory. \"How large is the excavation, then?\" I asked him. \"How many field crew members are on site?\" \"Just the four of us, at the moment.\" \"Oh.\" For a moment I was tempted to ask what they were all digging for, and why, but I held my tongue, not eager to let on that I'd come all this way not knowing. He looked down, at my single suitcase. \"You've just come up from London, then?\" \"Yes. I'm a day early, I know, but the job did sound intriguing and I really couldn't see the point in waiting down in London when I could be waiting here, if you know what I mean...\" His eyes held understanding. \"Aye. I wouldn't worry. Quinnell's an impatient man himself.\" The sea was close beside us now. I could see the choppy froth of waves beyond the thinning wall of mist, and the jutting silhouettes of jagged rocks. The rain had stopped. Between the racing clouds a sudden gleam of sunlight flashed, and disappeared, and flashed again, and finally stretched a searching finger out to touch the clustered houses curving round the coast ahead of us. The town of Eyemouth looked to me like a postcard view of a fishing village, its buildings tumbling in a tight cascade down to the sea wall while a gathering of gulls wheeled and dipped above the rooftops, marking the place where the harbor, yet unseen, cut back into the greening cliffs. The sunbeam, I decided, held a pleasant sort of promise. And somewhere, not too far away, the mysterious Peter Quinnell was looking forward to meeting me. I leaned forward as the bus dived in among the houses. \"Where would you recommend I stay?\" I asked my new acquaintance. \"Is there a guest house, or a nice hotel?\" \"You'll not be staying in the town?\" He raised his eyebrows, clearly shocked. \"Christ, Quinnell wouldn't hear of it. He's had a room made up for you at Rosehill, at the house.\" I stared at him. \"Oh, but I couldn't...\" \"You want the job?\" \"Yes.\" \"Then don't offend the management,\" was his advice. He softened it with a smile. \"Don't worry. They're all nice people, out at Rosehill. They'll make you feel at home.\" The bus driver flicked a glance up at his mirror, met my eyes, but didn't say anything. I frowned. \"It's just that I prefer to stay on my own, that's all. I don't like to impose...\" \"You'll not be imposing. Quinnell loves his company.\" \"I'm sure he does. But if he doesn't hire me, it might prove awkward.\" \"Oh, he'll hire you,\" said David Fortune, with a nod of certainty. \"That is, he'll offer you the job, make no mistake. Whether you accept or not, well... that's for you to say.\" Something in the offhand way he said that made me tilt my head, suspicious. \"Why wouldn't I accept?\" \"Have you eaten, yet?\" he asked, as if I hadn't spoken. \"You haven't, have you? And it's Thursday night, this\u2015Jeannie's night off. There'll be no supper on at the house.\" He turned to the bus driver, who was following our exchange with interest. \"Danny, do us a favor, will you, and drop us at the harbor road?\" \"The Ship Hotel?\" the driver checked, and glanced again at me. \"Aye, it'd be no trouble. It widnae do for the lass to face old Quinnell on an empty stomach.\" My suspicions growing, I slowly turned to look at David Fortune, but his expression was charmingly innocent. So charming, in fact, that I scarcely noticed when the bus stopped moving. It wasn't until I felt the sudden blast of chill from the open door that I finally stirred in my seat. Gathering up my suitcase, I tossed a word of thanks to the driver and clambered down the steps to solid ground. The wind had grown colder. It struck me like a body blow and might have knocked me over if the man at my side hadn't taken the suitcase from me, placing a large hand at my back to guide me up along the harbor's edge. The tide was very high, and the fishing boats creaked at their moorings, masts and rigging swaying with the motion of the water. If my mother saw me now she'd have a heart attack, I thought. She'd always had a thing about the seamy side of harbor life\u2015a half-imagined paranoiac world of smugglers, cutthroats, pirates, and white-slavers. I took another look up at the great dark figure walking at my shoulder. David Fortune did look a shade piratical, come to think of it, with his black unruly hair curling in the wind and the flat gray light of early evening sharpening the line of his stubborn jaw. His nose, in profile, was not quite straight, as though it had been broken in a fight. And I had only his word for it, after all, that he had anything to do with Peter Quinnell, or with Adrian Sutton-Clarke, or with... \"Here we are,\" he told me, as a sprawling white pub rose at the next corner to welcome us. He had leaned down so that his voice would carry through the wind, and I caught the swift warmth of his cheek close by my face. Oh, well, I thought. Pirate or no, he was easy to look at, and I was, to be honest, in need of a drink and a plate of hot food. There were two doorways into the Ship Hotel\u2015one that led into the main public bar, and the other to the dining lounge. David Fortune steered me through the latter. I felt instantly warmer, out of the wind, with the light bursting clear and inviting from rose-tinted fixtures hung high on the cream stuccoed walls. Round wooden tables hugged the wainscoting and nestled in padded alcoves that enticed one to sit and relax. Through an open door behind the bar I could just glimpse a larger, less fancified room where coarse cheerful voices competed with piped-in music, but on this side of the door even the bar held a touch of elegance, its gleaming rows of bottles artistically illumined by a line of recessed lights. A few of the tables were already occupied. David Fortune plucked a menu from the bar and chose a table for us in a window alcove. Leaning back against the padded bench, he stretched his legs out so his feet disappeared under the bench on my side. \"Take a look at that, then,\" he offered, handing the menu over. \"And order what you like; the bill's on Quinnell. He'd not want to see you starve.\" The mention of Peter Quinnell's name brought my earlier misgivings sharply into focus. \"Listen,\" I began, frowning slightly, \"there isn't anything wrong with the job, is there?\" He raised his eyebrows, but before he could respond the barmaid came through from the other side and sent us a welcoming smile. \"Heyah, Davy. How's your mum?\" \"As much of a witch as she ever was.\" His tone was indulgent. \"Is Adrian about?\" \"Upstairs, I think. Do you want me to fetch him?\" \"Aye, if you would. But first, give us a...\" He paused, looked at me, eyes enquiring. \"What'll you have?\" \"Dry white wine, please.\" \"And a pint of Deuchers for me, there's a love.\" As the barmaid departed, I gave in to my curiosity. \"Adrian's upstairs?\" \"Oh, aye. We both have rooms here. There's just the one spare room at Rosehill, and Quinnell wanted to save that for you, so he's put us both up here instead.\" Our drinks arrived. I watched him down a mouthful of the dark foaming beer, and frowned again. \"Isn't that rather inconvenient?\" He shook his head. \"It's only a mile out to the house. I like the walk.\" I tried to imagine Adrian Sutton-Clarke walking a country mile to work each morning, and failed. Adrian, I knew, would use his car. A door from the corridor opened and closed and a tall, lean-faced man with mahogany hair shook his head and came, smiling, toward us. \"Verity, my dear, you really must learn some respect for schedules,\" he teased me, bending down to brush my cheek with an affectionate kiss of greeting. \"Friday, last time I checked, comes after Thursday, and you did say Friday.\" \"Hello, Adrian.\" It always took me a moment to adjust to the sheer impact of his handsome face, even now. Each time I met up with him I kept hoping, rather foolishly, that he'd have chipped one of his teeth, or that his dark, long-lashed eyes would be puffy and bloodshot, but each time he turned up just as perfect as ever, a six-foot-two package of pure sex appeal, and invariably knocked me off center. Only for a moment, and then memory reasserted itself and I was fine. David Fortune had misinterpreted the involuntary change in my expression. He drained his pint and rose politely. \"Look, I'll leave you to it, shall I? I could do with a shower and a lie-down, myself. See you both tomorrow.\" Slanting a brief look down at me, he stabbed the menu with a knowing finger. \"Try the lemon sole, it's magic.\" Adrian slid into the vacant seat opposite and favored me with a curious stare. \"Just how,\" he asked me, when we were alone, \"did you come to meet Fortune? Or do I want to know?\" \"We were on the same bus. We got talking.\" \"Ah.\" He nodded. \"The bus from Berwick.\" \"Dunbar, actually.\" The waitress came. I closed my menu, and ordered the lemon sole. Adrian leaned back, contentedly. \"I know I'm going to regret asking this,\" he said. \"But how, if you came up from London, presumably on the train, did you end up on a Berwickshire bus from Dunbar?\" I explained. It took some time, and I was nearly finished with my meal by the time I'd told him everything, beginning with the sheep on the line at Darlington. Adrian shook his head in disbelief and reached for his cup of coffee. \"You see? If you'd waited until tomorrow, like you were supposed to, none of that would have happened.\" I shrugged. \"Something worse might have happened. You never know.\" \"True. Confusion does rather seem to follow you around, doesn't it?\" \"So tell me,\" I changed the subject, balancing my knife and fork on my empty plate, \"what exactly is this job you've recommended me for?\" Adrian folded his arms and smiled like the devil. \"As I recall, I told you I'd explain everything on Friday.\" \"When I arrived, you said.\" \"On Friday. And today's only Thursday.\" \"Oh, give it up...\" \"But I'm sure Quinnell will be happy to tell you anything you want to know, when you meet him.\" \"That's hardly fair,\" I pointed out. \"I'm meeting him tonight.\" \"So you are. Finished with that, have you? Good. Then let's get you out to Rosehill so you can settle in.\" \"Rat,\" I called him, holding back my smile. Ten minutes later, seated in his car and speeding inland from the harbor, I tried again. \"The least you can do,\" I said evenly, \"is tell me what's wrong with the job.\" \"Wrong with the job?\" He flashed me a quick sideways glance, eyebrows raised. \"Nothing's wrong with the job. It's a great opportunity, wonderful benefits\u2015Quinnell's a disgustingly wealthy man, so the pay is obscene. And you get room and board with it, holidays, travel allowances... it's a marvelous job.\" \"You're certain of that?\" \"Lord, yes. You don't think I'd have lured you up here otherwise, do you?\" Again the rapid glance. \"Why the sudden lack of trust?\" I shrugged. \"Just something your Mr. Fortune said, in passing.\" \"Oh, yes?\" \"He was sure that I'd be offered the job,\" I explained. \"He wasn't so sure I'd accept.\" Adrian digested this thoughtfully. We were well out of town, now, and the road was dark. I couldn't see his eyes. \"I suppose,\" he said slowly, \"that he might have been thinking of Quinnell himself. Of how you'd react.\" \"React to what?\" \"To Quinnell.\" I sighed, tight-lipped. \"Adrian...\" \"Peter Quinnell,\" he told me, \"is a fascinating old character\u2015well-read, intelligent, one of a kind.\" He turned his head so I could see the half-apologetic smile. \"But I'm afraid that he's also quite mad.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "B07WP55T14", "title": "THE VICARAGE MURDER an addictive crime mystery full of twists (Monica Noble Detective Book 1)", "author": "Faith Martin", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1250118220", "title": "The Cracked Spine: A Scottish Bookshop Mystery (A Scottish Bookshop Mystery, 1)", "author": "Paige Shelton", "description": "Review \u201cMove over Claire Fraser; American bibliophile Delaney Nichols is about to take Scotland-and legions of cozy mystery readers-by storm! As warm and inviting as a cup of tea and a serving of fresh-from-the-oven shortbread. Readers will fall in love with The Cracked Spine .\u201d \u2015 Ellery Adams, New York Times bestselling author of the Books By The Bay Mysteries \u201cShelton pens a perfectly twisty-turny puzzler of a mystery in The Cracked Spine . With the engagingly bookish, amateur sleuth Delaney Nichols leading the way around the richly detailed city of Edinburgh, the reader is fully immersed in her world as she tries to expose the lies and deceptions that hide the brutal truth behind a murder. Full of wit and whimsy, with a clever plot and delightful characters, this mystery is a fantastic read!\u201d \u2015 Jenn McKinlay, New York Times bestselling author of the Cupcake Mysteries \u201cA great read for book lovers, mystery seekers, and anyone who enjoys a determined new heroine. Sure to be a winning series.\u201d \u2015 Erika Chase, nationally bestselling author of Read and Buried \u201cKilts, killers, and a keen sleuth ... oh my! Ms. Shelton has crafted a foolproof plot, endearing characters, and prose that immediately transports readers to enchanting Edinburgh ... and leaves them eager for a return trip. Readers will be delighted with this new series.\u201d \u2015 Lucy Arlington, New York Times bestselling author of the Novel Idea Mysteries \u201cWith a wee bit of the brogue, Paige Shelton weaves a Scottish tale of mystery and intrigue filled with a quirky cast of characters, including the clever Delaney Nichols, an American fish-out-of-water who believes in the magic of books. You will want to make repeat visits to The Cracked Spine .\u201d \u2015 Daryl Wood Gerber, nationally bestselling author of The Cookbook Nook Mysteries About the Author PAIGE SHELTON had a nomadic childhood, as her father's job as a football coach took her family to seven different towns before she was even twelve years old. After college at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, she moved to Salt Lake City. She thought she'd only stay a couple years, but instead she fell in love with the mountains and a great guy who became her husband. After many decades in Utah, she and her family moved to Arizona. She writes the Scottish Bookshop Mystery series and the Alaska Wild series. Her other series include the Farmers\u2019 Market, Cooking School, and Dangerous Type mystery series.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 8.3}, {"asin": "B06Y2BFDJD", "title": "A Killer Keepsake (Antiques & Collectibles Mysteries Book 6)", "author": "Ellery Adams", "description": "About the Author Ellery Adams is the New York Times bestselling author of the Books by the Bay Mysteries and the Charmed Pie Shoppe Mysteries. Ellery has held many jobs, including caterer, retail clerk, car salesperson, teacher, tutor, and tech writer, all while penning poems, childrens books, and novels. She now writes full-time from her home in Virginia. Parker Riggs love of writing began as a teenager growing up in New Jersey penning short stories and poetry. Her dream to be a published author got set aside for a career in Washington, D.C. where, for two decades, she supported politicians and lawyers. Yet the dream never died. Pursuing her passion for mysteries, Parker is the author of the mystery novel Finding Jessica. She is also co-author of A Treacherous Trader , A Devious Lot , and A Killer Keepsake , the fourth, fifth, and sixth books in New York Times bestselling author Ellery Adams Collectible Mystery series. Parker lives in New Hampshire with her husband and an adorable mini-dachshund named Clarice. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "0451490630", "title": "The Lost Carousel of Provence", "author": "Juliet Blackwell", "description": "Review Praise for The Lost Carousel of Provence \"Blackwell uses an outsider\u2019s passion to shine a light into the dark past of a broken family and how a sweet, wooden rabbit can bring them together again.\"\u2014The Associated Press\u201cPlan your trip to Provence now. In this meticulously researched\u00a0novel, Juliet Blackwell deftly navigates three time periods, taking us from contemporary\u00a0California to both\u00a0The Belle \u00c9poque\u00a0and Nazi-occupied\u00a0France as she spins a story as charming as an antique carousel.\u201d\u2014Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise \u201cAn untrusting American orphan meets a dysfunctional French family\u2014and each turns out to possess wisdom that helps the other to heal from old, old wounds. With crystalline imagery, vivid characters and lively prose, Juliet Blackwell redefines what family means, in a way that will touch readers long after they've read the last page.\u00a0As Cady points her camera at one antique carousel after another, this novel should come with a warning: Will cause enormous desire to travel to France.\u201d\u2014Stephen P. Kiernan, author of The Baker\u2019s Secret \u201cNarrating from several perspectives, Blackwell weaves together a tale of love lost, repressed passion, and finding a sense of belonging that should utterly charm and delight readers new to her and current fans alike.\u201d\u2014 Booklist Praise for Letters from Paris \u201cBlackwell seamlessly incorporates details about art, cast making, and the City of Light...[and] especially stuns in the aftermath of the main story by unleashing a twist that is both a complete surprise and a point that expertly ties everything together.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cBest-selling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light....this romantic and picturesque novel shows us that even the most broken people can find what makes them whole again.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cBlackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh...A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA great tale of mystery, artistry, history, and a little romance. With plenty of backstory and tidbits about Parisian life in the 19th century, there's something for everyone in this recommended read.\"\u2014 Library Journal Praise for The Paris Key \u201cA charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Lights.\u201d\u2014Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I'll See You in Paris \u201c[A] witty, warm, winsome novel...[Blackwell's] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail.\u201d\u2014Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One About the Author Juliet Blackwell was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the youngest child of a jet pilot and an editor. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master\u2019s degrees in anthropology and social work. While in graduate school, she published several articles based on her research with immigrant families from Mexico and Vietnam, as well as one full-length translation: Miguel Le\u00f3n-Portilla\u2019s seminal work, Endangered Cultures . Juliet taught medical anthropology at SUNY\u2013Albany, was producer for a BBC documentary, and served as an elementary school social worker. Upon her return to California, she became a professional artist and ran her own decorative painting and design studio for more than a decade. In addition to mainstream novels, Juliet pens the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha Award\u2013nominated Art Lover\u2019s Mystery series She makes her home in northern California, but spends as much time as possible in Europe and Latin America. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright \u00a9 2018 Juliet Blackwell Chapter 1 1901 Ch\u00e2teau Clement, Provence, France Josephine No one has seen. The ch\u00e2teau\u2019s usual ranks of gardeners and servants, grape pickers and kitchen staff, have been joined by Monsieur Bayol\u2019s crew of men hammering, sawing, sanding, and painting the newly arrived carousel. The cats, dogs, pigs, and rabbits were carved, painted, and gilded in Bayol\u2019s factory in Angers, but it has taken nine men to transport the pieces by rail, then by steam traction engine from the station to the ch\u00e2teau, and then to assemble the machine on-site. It will take another two weeks, perhaps a month, to complete the elaborately decorated salon that will house the carousel. Josephine wishes it would take longer. She would be happy if they stayed forever. Especially the carver\u2019s apprentice. She and the apprentice have placed confidence in each other; they will keep each other\u2019s confidences. Josephine knows her neighbors think of her as secretive and scheming because she was not born here. She comes from faraway Bretagne, and yet she stole the heart of their local favorite, the eligible Yves Paul Clement, heir to Ch\u00e2teau Clement. Bretagne and Provence were meant to be part of France now, but deep-seated regional stereotypes and allegiances do not respect random borders. She understands. After all, before Yves brought her to Ch\u00e2teau Clement as a young bride, Josephine had always believed the Proven\u00e7al people to be lazy, unfriendly, and afflicted with a harsh accent. She has found the accent and unfriendliness to be apt, but though her husband is accustomed to taking a sieste every afternoon, he is anything but lazy. Yves rises early to capture the light of dawn on his camera; he works late into the night in his darkroom. He is an educated gentleman: He reads in his library, he composes poetry, he draws. Unlike most in the region, he does not hunt. Instead, he observes and makes note of the birds that perch on the limbs of the plane trees and olive orchards: the short-toed lark and tawny pipit in spring, the red-crested pochard and moustached warbler in fall. Yves\u2019s keen eyes observe the forest creatures, the turning of the leaves, the changing quality of the light throughout the day, throughout the seasons. By virtue of the incessant clicking of his cameras, he records the world around him. And yet, he does not see. Chapter 2 Present day Oakland Cady Anne Drake Cady had never realized how many empty platitudes people voiced when confronted with grief, how they felt compelled to say something, to say anything, in response to a situation that had no answer, no response. No solution. In point of brutal fact, there was nothing to say. Maxine had died. One moment she was there, Cady\u2019s ever-present rock in the shifting sands of life. And the next she had fallen to the floor behind the register, struck down by a sudden heart attack. Maxine had disappeared into the ether, just like that, along with her snarky comments and wise eyes and calm, slightly haughty demeanor that never failed to assuage Cady\u2019s inner demons. She was gone. No one else in this life would be lucky enough to know Maxine Caroline Clark. All that remained of the old woman was her shop, called Maxine\u2019s Treasures, its junky (or artsy, depending on your perspective) inventory, and the back room, where Cady had set up her photography studio and darkroom. Even though Cady had no intention of taking over and managing Maxine\u2019s antiques store, she wasn\u2019t ready to give up her studio. Not to mention that she\u2019d been living in the back room of the shop\u2014which was not strictly legal\u2014since she\u2019d lost her relatively affordable apartment to a condo development several months ago. What now? Where would she go? What would she do? Maxine was family. She was all Cady had. A desperate, breathless weariness reached out its icy fingers to grip Cady\u2019s bones. And it wasn\u2019t the strain of carrying her wooden carousel figure, Gus. She saw reproach in the rabbit\u2019s glass eyes as she maneuvered him into the shop; could this last shred of hope gone be her comeuppance for having tried to sell him? Maxine had given Gus to her ten years ago, on Cady\u2019s wedding day. The marriage hadn\u2019t lasted long, and the only thing Cady took from it\u2014besides bitter experience\u2014was Gus-the-rabbit. It was embarrassing to admit, but Gus had always made her feel\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. loved. According to Maxine, Gus was a genuine piece of carousel history, hand-carved by the famous French sculptor Gustave Bayol. Which would have meant he was worth thousands\u2014maybe tens of thousands. But this morning Cady\u2019s last-ditch financial dreams had been dashed by an earnest young man named Scott Ripley. Peering through a huge magnifying glass, the Antique Forum\u2019s acknowledged expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European carvings had examined the rabbit\u2019s loosening joints, noting how the bands of basswood had pulled away from one another at the tops of the legs, and the gap where the neck section met the body. Carousel figures are hollow, built like boxes with slats of wood joined, laminated, then carved, and primed to conceal the joints. Not only were the sections falling apart\u2014Gus\u2019s ears were now barely connected to his slightly tilted head\u2014but the bright paint and gold gilding were flaking off, with gesso primer showing through in patches. At long last Ripley had straightened, shrugged, and pronounced: \u201cIt\u2019s not a Bayol.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re wrong,\u201d Cady said. \u201cLook again.\u201d \u201cYour rabbit is most probably European, and from Bayol\u2019s era, at the turn of the twentieth century. In some ways, it is very much in his style; Bayol carved farmyard animals with sweet expressions like this one, so that fits. But a hallmark of Bayol\u2019s carvings was their simplicity. His work almost never included flourishes like the lily of the valley here,\u201d he said, pointing to the offending flower. \u201cAnd this rose carved in high relief, with the detailed thorns? I don\u2019t even know what to say about that.\u201d \u201cBut Bayol did custom work, right?\u201d Cady replied. \u201cCouldn\u2019t a client have asked for the flowers?\u201d He shook his head. \u201cI know Bayol\u2019s work well; I\u2019m also very familiar with the American carvers Dentzel, Looff, and Carmel. Like all artists, carousel carvers leave their imprints on their work, like signatures. Also, Bayol nearly always attached a small plaque to the saddles of his carved animals, and yours doesn\u2019t have one. Your rabbit might have been carved by one of Bayol\u2019s apprentices, or a competitor\u2014if you could establish its provenance, it would be worth more.\u201d Cady\u2019s impulse was to argue with Ripley, to rail at him and cast aspersions on his professional qualifications, not to mention his parentage. But it wasn\u2019t his fault. Maxine had been wrong. It wasn\u2019t surprising: Maxine always had insisted upon seeing possibilities in the junk other people threw away. So Cady had concentrated on reining in her emotions, fighting an almost overwhelming, and wholly uncharacteristic, urge to burst into tears. Get it together, Drake, she had scolded herself. We\u2019ve been in worse situations than this one. Much, much worse. We\u2019ll just have to come up with another plan. As a child Cady had developed the quirk of using the royal \u201cwe\u201d when talking to herself; otherwise the only \u201cwe\u201d in her world was wishful thinking. Later, the \u201cwe\u201d came to mean Cady and Maxine, and finally, now, Cady and Gus-the-rabbit. It was a silly, childish habit, but Cady had more important things to worry about these days, such as where she was going to get the money to escape the wildly expensive San Francisco Bay Area, to move to a town where normal people could work a regular job and afford a decent place to live, and where she could become a foster mom, or maybe even adopt a child. The thought of change terrified her, but she was desperate to create the sort of family that she\u2019d always wanted for herself. True, being a photographer wasn\u2019t the best career option in a small town, but she didn\u2019t care what she did for a living. She wasn\u2019t proud. The important thing was to start over. To reinvent herself. Cady yearned for the anonymity of a second chance, a clean slate, a tabula rasa. To make a home someplace where no one knew where she came from, where no one knew she had nothing and no one. No family connections, no Maxine, no\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. baby. Without volition her hand went to her stomach. The only bump there now was from stress-eating her way through countless bags of potato chips and boxes of Petit \u00c9colier cookies\u2014scraping off the chocolate in an embarrassingly juvenile ritual\u2014as she sat on the couch for weeks, watching endless reruns of Hoarders. The nurse in the emergency room had smelled of antiseptic and was very nice in the impersonal way of a kindhearted person saddled with far too much to do. She had instructed Cady to finish the round of prophylactic antibiotics, to abstain from sex for six weeks (no problem there\u2014Cady couldn\u2019t imagine being intimate, ever again, with anyone), to get plenty of rest, and to be prepared for sudden hormonal shifts as her body adjusted to what her medical chart referred to as an \u201cSAB\u201d: spontaneous abortion. The baby Cady had accidentally conceived in an exceedingly rare one-night stand, then after weeks of fear and trembling had decided to keep and come to love, had been lost in a gruesome rush of pain and cramps and blood, a gutting experience referred to simply as an SAB. An SAB. Cady\u2019s appalling, alien urge to cry must be due to shifting hormones. Nothing more. Surely. First Maxine had died. Then Cady\u2019s own body had betrayed her. And now, even her precious carousel rabbit had turned out not to be who she\u2019d always thought he was. Cady was on a merry-go-round, and no matter how fast she galloped, she kept winding up at the same place. Her eyes stung, tears threatening. So\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. okay. Maybe she would allow herself a few quick minutes of weeping in the back of the shop, while cursing Mr. Scott Ripley of the Antiques Forum and his so-called expertise. Then she would come up with a new plan. Chapter 3 Present day Oakland Cady The banging on the door wouldn\u2019t stop. Cady had hung the Closed sign on the window of the shop door, alongside a note about Maxine\u2019s death. But some of Maxine\u2019s regular customers could be as persistent and annoying as a broken tooth. \u201cGo away!\u201d she yelled from the back room. The banging continued. She turned the television volume up. \u201cCady?\u201d A woman\u2019s voice. Olivia. Cady often thought of Maxine as the only person in the world who loved her, but there was also Olivia Gray. They had met years ago, right after Cady got divorced, in an adult education course on photography\u2014genuine, old-fashioned photography and film development, taught by a cranky old man who didn\u2019t take to what he called \u201cthat modern digital crap.\u201d Olivia was everything Cady wasn\u2019t but had always wanted to be: pretty, petite, quick to smile at others and to laugh at herself. It was the first time Cady had understood the concept of a girl crush; she was enamored, sneaking glances under her bangs during class, following Olivia out to the vending machines during break. One night the machine ate Olivia\u2019s rumpled dollar. She banged on it ineffectually and yelled, \u201cGol-darn it!\u201d Cady had never heard anyone say something like that except on television. \u201cEarly training,\u201d Olivia explained to Cady, with an embarrassed smile and a chagrined little shrug. \u201cMy mom\u2019s a stickler for polite language. If she gets really, really mad she might say, \u2018Dammit!\u2019 But then she always follows it up with: \u2018Pardon my French!\u2019\u201d Cady smiled, hitting the machine just so while reaching in the back, the way she had learned to do as a bad kid with no spending money. The mechanism started to hum and a PayDay bar banged down into the metal trough. \u201cThere you go.\u201d \u201cThanks! That\u2019s a neat trick. So, what\u2019s your name?\u201d Olivia didn\u2019t even know her name? It figured. Stuck-up jerk. But nipping at the heels of anger was shame: Try as she might, Cady just didn\u2019t pick up on social cues like other people did. She wondered whether it was something integral to her\u2014some mysterious bit of genetic code she had inherited from her unknown parents\u2014or if it derived from her detached, frenetic childhood. Ultimately it didn\u2019t matter. She had always known she wasn\u2019t\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. likable. She turned on her heel and stalked back to the classroom. After class, as Cady was gathering her things, Olivia made a beeline across the room. \u201cSo, I\u2019m an idiot in general. And I can never remember names.\u201d Cady shrugged and zipped up the battered leather backpack she had scored at the flea market for five dollars. \u201cI\u2019m a bit of a sleuth, though. Not to mention stubborn,\u201d Olivia said, holding out her hand. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to officially meet you, Cady Drake. I\u2019m Olivia Gray. How do you do?\u201d Cady stared at her hand for a beat. \u201cLike I said, I know I\u2019m clueless,\u201d Olivia continued. \u201cBut since we\u2019re the only two people in this class under the age of forty, I was wondering, do you want to go grab a drink?\u201d Maxine\u2019s voice whispered in her mind: \u201cGet over yourself, girl. Don\u2019t assume everyone\u2019s out to get you.\u201d So Cady nodded, and they stopped by George O\u2019s. It was a seedy dive bar, typical for this part of Oakland, but when they walked in, Olivia\u2019s eyes lit up like a child\u2019s on Christmas morning. \u201cThis is great,\u201d she announced, taking in the dartboard, out-of-date Halloween decorations, and half a dozen men slouched over the bar. She ordered bourbon on the rocks, and Cady did the same. \u201cSo,\u201d Olivia said as they took their drinks to a table. \u201c\u2018Cady\u2019 is a pretty name. I saw on the roster that you don\u2019t spell it the traditional way, K-A-T-Y.\u201d \u201cYeah,\u201d said Cady. \u201cI mean, I came with it.\u201d Olivia smiled. \u201cI always hated my name.\u201d \u201cWhy?\u201d \u201cThe kids used to taunt me at school, calling me Olive Oyl,\u201d she said in a low voice, as though confiding a shameful secret. \u201cGee,\u201d said Cady after a beat, \u201cthat must have been very traumatic for you.\u201d Olivia looked surprised, then started laughing. \u201cYou just made a joke! And here I thought you were serious all the time.\u201d She held up her glass. \u201cLet\u2019s have a toast. To quote Humphrey Bogart in that movie: \u2018I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.\u2019\u201d And oddly enough, it was. After the photography class ended, they enrolled in French language courses, then Thai cooking, then botany. Olivia and her boyfriend, Sebastian, had Cady and Maxine over for dinner, and when they married, Cady stood up with them at City Hall. Olivia loved to tag along at antiques flea markets, asking questions, and furnishing her falling-down West Oakland Victorian one piece at a time. Eventually she landed a job at Sunset magazine, and steered the occasional freelance photography job Cady\u2019s way. Through the years they joked about who had the upper hand in the \u201cTrauma Olympics,\u201d and whenever she invoked her childhood, Cady was the hands-down winner. But Olivia had struggles of her own. \u201cCady!\u201d Olivia called again through the door of Maxine\u2019s Treasures. \u201cOpen up. I brought coffee, made with my very own hands.\u201d With reluctance, Cady emerged from the back room and crossed the crowded shop floor. \u201cI don\u2019t want any,\u201d Cady said through the glass pane of the front door. \u201cToo bad. Open up.\u201d Cady undid the dead bolt and crouched down to remove the rubber stopper she always shoved under the door. It made her feel secure. \u201cHere,\u201d Olivia said as soon as the door was open, holding out a commuter mug and pushing past Cady into the store. \u201cIt\u2019s French roast, your favorite. You\u2019re welcome.\u201d \u201cI was sleeping.\u201d \u201cNo you weren\u2019t,\u201d Olivia said, raising one eyebrow as she looked over the jumble of inventory. \u201cAnd you obviously haven\u2019t been spending a lot of time cleaning.\u201d \u201cNot my strong suit.\u201d \u201cSo, have you been working?\u201d \u201cA little.\u201d Olivia led the way into the back room, where they sat down at the little table by the kitchenette. Belatedly, Cady realized there was plentiful evidence of her recent dissolute lifestyle: crumpled Cheetos bags and cookie packages; old Chinese food takeout boxes, an empty vodka bottle. \u201cLiar,\u201d said Olivia, taking in the scene. \u201cWhat have you really been doing?\u201d \u201cCrying.\u201d Cady collapsed onto the sofa. \u201cBut that\u2019s good, right?\u201d Olivia said, sympathy shining in her big chocolate-colored eyes. \u201cYou never used to cry. I count that as personal growth.\u201d Cady let out a humorless bark. \u201cOnly you could see crying as a positive.\u201d \u201cSo, I was thinking,\u201d Olivia said, fiddling with her coffee mug, which boasted the garish orange-and-black logo of the San Francisco baseball team. \u201cThere are a lot of merry-go-rounds in Paris. Loads of them. I remember from when Sebastian and I went there on our honeymoon. A carousel in every public square, it seemed like.\u201d \u201cAnd?\u201d \u201cYou love photographing carousels. Have you ever thought of doing a book of photographs?\u201d \u201cOf Parisian carousels?\u201d \u201cYes! Why have we been studying French all these years if you\u2019re not going to put the language to good use? And you never know what you might find. The food, the wine, the cobblestone streets .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d She let out a sigh. \u201cC\u2019est magique!\u201d Cady managed a small smile. \u201cYou think everything is magical.\u201d \u201cAnd you think nothing is. But you\u2019re wrong.\u201d Olivia took another sip and let out a long, contented sigh. She had a way of savoring her coffee as though it were the elixir of life, the cure for maladies, the font of all contentment. And perhaps it was: Olivia was the sunniest person Cady had ever known. Before she met Olivia, Cady had believed sustained happiness was the stuff of fiction, found only in fairy tales. \u201cWhen did you become a San Francisco Giants fan?\u201d Cady asked in a blatant bid to change the subject. Olivia laughed, holding her mug out and inspecting the logo as though she\u2019d never seen it before. \u201cI have no idea where this came from. It just appeared, as things are wont to do around my house. But I like the way it feels in my hands.\u201d Random items \u201cappeared\u201d at Olivia\u2019s place because people were forever passing through for dinners and parties, spending the night or staying for weeks at a time on the couch, leaving behind towels, a hairbrush, a coffee mug. But Olivia took the ever-shifting landscape of her home in stride, as though things appeared and disappeared by some enchanting sort of magic. That would drive me crazy, Cady thought. She liked things organized, predictable. Even in the apparent muddle of Maxine\u2019s shop, Cady knew where each and every item was. \u201cAnyway, stop trying to change the subject because I\u2019m not falling for it,\u201d Olivia said as she set the mug down. \u201cMaybe a change of scenery is exactly what you need. And you\u2019ve photographed our local carousels enough.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re forgetting our road trip to see the world\u2019s largest carousel at House on the Rock.\u201d \u201cNot that I have anything against Wisconsin, but I was thinking Paris might be a slightly more dramatic change of scene.\u201d Cady shrugged. \u201cI\u2019ll think about it.\u201d \u201cHere\u2019s the thing, Cady: My mother always told me not to offer unsolicited advice. But I\u2019m going to anyway, because I love my mama, but I love you, too, and you haven\u2019t had anyone besides Maxine to give you the advice you need.\u201d \u201cYou do realize,\u201d Cady said, \u201cthat you are not required to fix my life. I\u2019m\u2014\u201d \u201cExcuse me,\u201d interrupted Olivia. \u201cWhen I was in the hospital, who brought me Thai noodles and Cherry Garcia Ice Cream?\u201d \u201cYou could have gotten as much from a delivery person.\u201d \u201cIs that right? And would this alleged delivery person have given me her absolute devotion and forced me to survive chemotherapy, not to mention surgery? Would said delivery person have read the entirety of 84, Charing Cross Road to me when I was in the hospital, then popped the cork on a bottle of champagne when I finished my chemo? Would she also have watched endless rounds of basketball with Sebastian to keep him from going crazy from worry?\u201d \u201cThat was selfish on my part,\u201d said Cady. \u201cYou\u2019re my only friend.\u201d With gut-wrenching clarity, Cady remembered the moment, three years ago, when Olivia divulged she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. In that instant Cady came to understand the true danger of loving someone: the absolute panic at the thought of her leaving this earth. Olivia\u2019s only response was a gentle smile. \u201cAnd where would I even get the money to go?\u201d Cady wondered aloud. She glared at her disappointing rabbit, propped in the corner. Olivia perked up, sensing a potential victory. \u201cYour landlord has been offering you cash to buy out the shop lease, right? And you can liquidate the inventory, which will add up to something. And I\u2019ll lend you enough for the plane ticket.\u201d Cady snorted. \u201cLike you and Sebastian have so much to spare?\u201d \u201cWe have some savings set aside for a rainy day; and in case you hadn\u2019t noticed, my friend, it\u2019s raining cats and dogs. Metaphorically speaking.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s my rainy day, not yours.\u201d \u201cDetails.\u201d She waved off Cady\u2019s concern. \u201cWhat good is money if I can\u2019t help a friend? And I believe in your art. What\u2019s that old saying? \u2018Anonymous was a woman\u2019?\u201d \u201cWhat does that have to do with anything?\u201d \u201cBecause you\u2019re bound to remain anonymous if you don\u2019t get your art out there for people to see. Taking student portraits might pay the bills, but you\u2019re an artist. And I can be your patron! Sort of. At least I can manage a plane ticket.\u201d As photographers went, Cady did pretty well. She hauled her heavy camera bag all over the Bay Area, from Marin to Morgan Hill, from the beaches of the Pacific Ocean to the Tahoe ski slopes, and never turned down a job. She photographed weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, first communions, anniversaries, birthdays, and family reunions. She had regular gigs taking yearbook portraits at local schools, including the Berkeley French American International School. And she did occasional shoots for Sunset magazine, and a few home design catalogs. Still, paying her bills every month was one thing, but putting aside a nest egg was something else altogether. \u201cThanks, Olivia, but running away to Paris for a couple of weeks isn\u2019t going to solve anything.\u201d \u201cThink of it as running to something. Anyway, I have to get back to the office. But just promise me this,\u201d Olivia said, as she gathered her things to leave. \u201cYou won\u2019t close yourself off to possibility. If something exciting falls in your lap, you\u2019ll take it.\u201d \u201cExciting? Like what?\u201d Cady demanded, irked. She loved Olivia, but when was the last time something great had \u201cfallen into her lap\u201d? That was the kind of thing that happened to charmed, suburban-grown people like Olivia, not unwanted orphans like Cady. Cady had had to work and scheme\u2014and occasionally steal\u2014to get anything she had. But Olivia lifted her eyebrows and flashed a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. \u201cOne never knows what the future might bring.\u201d Cady laughed in spite of herself, gave her friend a hug, and watched as Olivia ambled back to her car, turning her face up to the morning sun, taking time to wave at a passing bicyclist. Olivia saw the beauty in everything: the sunrise, the city lights twinkling off the bay, a stranger on a bike. Whereas Cady, when faced with the same scene, saw the smog, the congestion of the freeway, a traffic hazard. Cady leaned her head against the doorjamb for a moment, ignoring the dust collecting on the shop\u2019s inventory, trying not to look at the spot behind the register where Maxine had fallen. She wasn\u2019t doing right by Maxine\u2014or even by her landlord, for that matter. She wasn\u2019t doing right by herself, or Olivia, or anyone. She didn\u2019t think of herself as a true artist, as Olivia had suggested. But\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. surely Cady Anne Drake had something to offer this world? If only she knew what it was. Chapter 4 1915 Ch\u00e2teau Clement, Provence Yves Clement She\u2019s out there again, riding that cursed carousel machine. It is a ghostly sight: a grown woman riding a children\u2019s toy, bathed in silver moonlight, her white dress floating out behind her, like a creature out of time. What does she think? What does she want? Josephine is a puzzle Yves has never solved, would never be able to solve. Perhaps she was too young when they married, or he was too old. Their age difference didn\u2019t seem to bother her, but it gave him pause. Increasingly so with the passage of time. Yves thinks back to his father\u2019s pear orchard. Workers would fit bottles over budding branches in early spring, so that the fruit would grow to full size while captured inside the glass, as poires prisonni\u00e8res, imprisoned pears. Once the pear matured, the bottle would be filled with brandy, called eau de vie, water of life. And at long last it would be set on a high shelf and brought out on special occasions, leaving everyone to wonder how the miracle had occurred, how the pear came to be within the bottle. For the rest of his life, the sound of wind chimes would remind Yves of the glinting glass bottles hanging from those tree branches, clinking together in the famous winds that swept over the fields and orchards of Provence. His Josephine is like a bud in a bottle, a prisoner of the glass, awaiting her eau de vie. \u201cWhat is she looking for?\u201d His thoughts, voiced by another. Marc-Antoine, their beloved son, joins Yves at the library window and gazes through the leaded glass at Josephine, as perplexed as his father. Yves places his hand on his son\u2019s newly muscular shoulder, missing the sharp feeling of delicate little-boy wing bones under his palm. Marc-Antoine\u2019s dark hair and eyes favor his mother\u2019s secretive features, and unlike Yves, Marc-Antoine has always been large for his age, overtaking Yves in height two years ago, when he was but twelve years old. Our boy is becoming a young man, Yves thinks as fear pierces his heart. All too soon, Marc-Antoine will leave him alone here in this once-grand ch\u00e2teau, with only Josephine\u2014a pale imitation of the woman he had married\u2014as company. \u201cWhat is it she is looking for, riding that ridiculous merry-go-round at night?\u201d Marc-Antoine asks the question for the hundredth time. Yves does not answer. There is no answer, just the darkness of the night and the eerie song of the carousel. Chapter 5 Present day Oakland Cady Cady was two drinks in when she bashed her toe, hard, on a leg of the couch. Whirling around in a fit of anger and frustration, she kicked Gus. Harder than she\u2019d intended. The carved rabbit fell over onto its side, slamming against the granite edge of an end table. Several already loosened joints gave up, and chunks of carved wood scattered on the floor like so many Tinker Toys: the ears, two slats from one side, the front legs. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m sorry.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d Shame engulfed her. This was the sort of thing she would have done as a child. Cady had pursued counseling, attended mindfulness classes, and read dozens of self-help books to learn to stifle her violent impulses. She took a moment to close her eyes, take a breath for the count of four, hold it for seven, and release it for eight, as Maxine had taught her to do. And then she grabbed her camera. She perceived more clearly when she peered through the lens. It allowed her to concentrate, to sink into herself and tune out the external world. Like peering through a pair of corrective glasses, looking through the camera lens allowed her to see in a way she couldn\u2019t with the bare eye. Now, Cady realized: there was something hidden in the cavity of the rabbit\u2019s belly. A bundle wrapped in pink fabric. Crouching down, she tried to pull it out, but it was stuck tight. She would have to dislodge another of the laminated wood slats to get it out. After a moment\u2019s hesitation, Cady decided that poor, broken Gus was in for some heavy repair work in any case, so she carefully pried the torso apart. The rosy silk material was incredibly soft to the touch and reflected the overhead lights with a slight sheen. Her heart hammering in anticipation, Cady pushed aside the fabric. Inside was a carved wooden box. A breathtaking box. A work of art. Made of pale ash wood, it had been carved with acanthus leaves, flowers, and swirls; it was lacquered, polished, and sealed with a brass lock. Who would hide a box within a carousel rabbit? And why? If she broke the lock, would she be destroying a piece of history? Or\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. could there be something inside that was worth real money? Something that might finance a trip to Paris, or even allow her to move and reestablish herself, as she\u2019d hoped selling Gus would do? Could this be the little piece of magic Olivia insisted Cady would find someday? No, she reminded herself. Things like that don\u2019t happen to me. To hell with history. Cady grabbed a spackling knife, shoved it into the seam of the lock, and tapped the end of it with a hammer. She had to pry the box in several locations before the lock finally snapped. She opened the lid. A childish part of her hoped for a cache of jewels or gold, as though a pirate might have concealed his booty within this children\u2019s amusement. Instead, she found an ancient, sepia-toned photograph of a woman; a tightly braided plait of dark brown hair; an intricately carved wooden rose; and a note written in slanted letters. The ink had faded to a light brown and the script was hard to read, but she made out: Je t\u2019aime toujours, et encore. Souviens-toi de moi. \u201cI love you forever, and still,\u201d Cady translated aloud. \u201cRemember me.\u201d She checked the box for a false bottom, just in case, but there was nothing else. Certainly no treasure. Disappointment washed over her. \u201cThat was it? That\u2019s your big secret?\u201d Cady glared at the rabbit. \u201cI gotta tell you, Gus, after all these years you\u2019re really letting me down.\u201d Still, she snapped several more photos of the hidden cache. Unless\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. the man at the antiques fair had told her establishing a provenance might increase Gus\u2019s value. Were there clues that could reveal where the rabbit figure had come from? Stroking the silky plait of hair, Cady inspected the intricately carved wooden rose, complete with tiny thorns. It reminded her of the flower on Gus\u2019s side that had so offended Scott Ripley. There was no signature or marking of any kind, certainly no brass plaque indicating provenance. She picked up the photograph. The woman stood stiffly in front of a carousel, unsmiling, looking directly into the camera. She appeared to be young, probably in her early twenties. Her hair was piled on her head, with several strands escaping to frame a heart-shaped face. She wore a dark, high-necked dress that fell to her ankles, topped by a work apron. No visible lace or other embellishment. Cady was hardly a fashion expert, but she guessed it was from around the turn of the twentieth century, certainly before World War I. The photograph was slightly fuzzy and crooked, as though taken by an amateur. But a professional-looking photographic stamp on the right lower corner read: Ch\u00e2teau Clement. Cady opened her computer and searched, but she found no results for that name. She read that only a few dozen historic ch\u00e2teaux still existed in good repair; most had been too expensive to renovate after being abandoned during the French Revolution and then further damaged over the course of the two World Wars. The great majority had fallen into ruin. The woman didn\u2019t appear to be the lady of the manor\u2014surely she would have donned her finest gown for a photo session? In fact, with the apron and the messy hair, she looked like a servant. Which led to the next obvious question: Who would have taken a servant\u2019s photograph and then tucked it away in a box along with a love note? And why? Cady brought out her photographer\u2019s loupe to study the fuzzy details of the carousel in the background. She made out two carved horses, a carriage, and a rabbit that looked a little like Gus. Gus. She gazed at her poor gutted rabbit. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, little guy. Let\u2019s see what we can do about fixing you up.\u201d She lifted him onto the big project table and turned on some Edith Piaf to get in the mood. When Cady first started working for Maxine to repay her for items she had pilfered from the shop, she had simply cleaned and straightened and organized. But over time Maxine taught Cady how to do some basic repairs on antiques and how to make new things look old with crackle paint and sandpaper, using the contents of the vacuum bag to rub into crevices and voids. She learned how to apply gold and silver gilt, how to execute a proper French polish, and how to use glazes to suggest antiquity and increase value. At the flea market on weekends, Maxine pointed out what was valuable, what was a cheap imitation, and how to tell the difference. Still, Cady wasn\u2019t a trained conservator, so she had always hesitated to work on the rabbit, afraid her efforts at repairing him would decrease, rather than add to, his value. But now, since Gus wasn\u2019t who she\u2019d thought he was anyway, she figured she could at least piece him back together. Cady enjoyed using her hands and getting back to basics: sanding and scraping and laminating. The process was calming, healing. As Piaf crooned her love for Paris, Cady\u2019s mind cast about, pondering the woman in the photograph. Was the note written for her, or by her? And how could Cady track down Ch\u00e2teau Clement? Might it be the name of an old photography studio, rather than a true \u201cch\u00e2teau\u201d per se? The phone rang. Lately Cady had been ignoring phone calls, but this was from Olivia. If she ignored her calls, Olivia would show up in person. \u201cHey,\u201d Cady answered. \u201cWhat\u2019s up?\u201d \u201cRemember a couple of days ago, how I was saying you should hold out for a little magic in your life?\u201d \u201cYeah\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. why?\u201d Had Olivia somehow intuited what Cady had found in Gus\u2019s belly? \u201cAddison Avenue Books wants to offer you a contract for a photo book of Parisian carousels.\u201d \u201cWhat are you talking about?\u201d \u201cWhich part didn\u2019t you understand?\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re offering me a book contract? Who are these people?\u201d \u201cThey\u2019re a small press based in San Francisco, but they\u2019ve been around for a long time. They publish big, glossy coffee-table books. It\u2019s a niche market, but a profitable one. One of the senior editors plays golf with Sebastian, and he pitched her the idea. I sent her a link to your website, and she checked out your online portfolio. I told her the magazine loves working with you, you\u2019re so professional and exclusive and very much in demand, blah blah blah.\u201d \u201cBasically, you lied.\u201d \u201cI did not lie. I enhanced. Anyway, since you don\u2019t have an agent, I told her to send me the contract so I could look it over for you. Legalese and all that.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I mean\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I really don\u2019t know\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cCady, the universe is handing you a huge gift. Accept your landlord\u2019s offer to take over the lease, sell off Maxine\u2019s inventory, store your stuff in my garage, and go to Paris.\u201d \u201cSpeaking of gifts from the universe, listen to this: Gus fell over\u2014to be honest, I kicked him\u2014and broke open, and\u2014\u201d \u201cYou kicked him? Poor Gus.\u201d \u201cYes, but listen: There was a box hidden inside.\u201d \u201cWhat was in it? Gold coins? Diamonds? Scads of old-fashioned currency?\u201d \u201cNo, unfortunately. Just a photograph and a lock of hair. And a love note, and a wooden rose.\u201d \u201cHow cool! Are there any clues about where Gus came from?\u201d \u201cNot right off the bat, but I did find the name of a ch\u00e2teau. I have no idea where it is, though. It doesn\u2019t come up on the Internet.\u201d \u201cWell, the book offer specifies photos of Parisian carousels, but there\u2019s no reason you can\u2019t wander a little farther afield once you\u2019re in the country,\u201d said Olivia. \u201cYou could track down that ch\u00e2teau. You and I both know you\u2019re going to become obsessed with your mystery box, anyway. It\u2019s what you do.\u201d It was true: Cady was already reading and rereading the note, gazing at the photo, stroking the plait of hair, wondering about the significance of the rose. Maxine used to say that once something had caught Cady\u2019s interest, she was like a dog with a bone. On the one hand, her single-mindedness had helped her in her photography; on the other, her obsessions sometimes drove a further wedge between her and others. \u201cSeriously, Cady,\u201d Olivia continued. \u201cTake the leap. You know what they say: The world\u2019s your oyster.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t like oysters.\u201d \u201cHave you ever tried oysters?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d Cady liked things to be predictable. Running off to Paris for a photography assignment felt\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. reckless. Just the prospect gave her a dizzying sensation, like the first time she had seen the ocean, standing on the edge of a very steep cliff. \u201cThe pay\u2019s not great, but you\u2019re not a big spender, so it\u2019ll be enough. Honestly, Cady, what do you have to lose?\u201d Cady gripped the telephone so tightly that her knuckles hurt. Even she had to admit: It felt like the universe was giving her a big old shove in the direction of La Belle France. \u201cYou don\u2019t have any room in your garage,\u201d Cady said. \u201cEveryone else\u2019s stuff is jammed in there already.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll make room,\u201d Olivia answered, a triumphant tone to her voice. \u201cSo, is that a yes?\u201d \u201cMais oui,\u201d Cady said, surprising them both. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.91}, {"asin": "0763629324", "title": "The Egyptology Handbook: A Course in the Wonders of Egypt (Ologies)", "author": "Emily Sands", "description": "From the Publisher From the author of the #1 New York Times best-selling EGYPTOLOGY. Inside this indispensable and beautifully illustrated workbook is everything you need to know to become an esteemed Egyptologist. Among the book\u0092s delightful novelty elements are: * An envelope containing Miss Emily Sands\u0092s Top Ten Things to See in Egypt * Flaps to lift, revealing hidden treasure in the desert sands * A four-page foldout section full of stickers featuring treasures from King Tut\u0092s tomb and other ancient Egyptian artifacts * About the Author Dugald Steer has written many books for children including the best-selling DRAGONOLOGY and its companion, THE DRAGONOLOGY HANDBOOK, as well as the forthcoming WIZARDOLOGY. For ten years he was an editor at Templar Publishing in England, but he now devotes himself full-time to writing. Other books he has written include, THE NIGHT TIGER, JUST ONE MORE STORY, and PICTURE THIS . . . (with Alison Jay). For the moment, though, it seems more \"ologies\" are in the offing.Nghiem Ta, Artistic Direction: Nghiem Ta works as a designer and paper-engineer at Templar where she has overseen the creation of the best-selling DRAGONOLOGY and EGYPTOLOGY, as well as the forthcoming WIZARDOLOGY. Prior to working with Templar, she spent four years with pop-up maestro Ron van der Meer. Her current projects include more books with \"ology\" in the title.Ian Andrew, Artist: Ian Andrew created the black and white pencil illustrations for EGYPTOLOGY and THE EGYPTOLOGY HANDBOOK. He is an accomplished animator having worked on the animated film, \"Dolphins\" which won several awards including Best Newcomer at the Zagreb Film Festival. He has illustrated many books for children including JIM'S LION by Russell Hoban and TELL ME ONE THING, DAD by Tom Pow. Nick Harris, Artist: Nick Harris created the large color illustrations in EGYPTOLOGY on his computer. In addition to forays into animated TV advertising, he spent a spell working in the background department on the feature film, \"Who Framed Roger Rabbit?\" He has illustrated many books for children including the Smarties book Prize-winning FIREWORK MAKER'S DAUGHTER by Phillip Pullman. Helen Ward, Artist: Helen Ward, who also worked on DRAGONOLOGY, painted the many color recreations of Ancient Egyptian statues, wall paintings, and antiquities as well as the 1920s memorabilia that appear in EGYPTOLOGY. Helen has also written a number of successful children's books including THE TIN FOREST and THE DRAGON MACHINE, both illustrated by Wayne Anderson.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.26}, {"asin": "1501137476", "title": "The Rules of Magic: A Novel (2) (The Practical Magic Series)", "author": "Alice Hoffman", "description": "From School Library Journal The gray-eyed Owens children have always been strange, and not just because they like black clothing and are oddly buoyant. Frances, the oldest, can communicate with birds; shy and beautiful middle sibling Bridget (nicknamed Jet for her black hair) can read minds; and the youngest, Vincent, is so winsome and irresistible that his obstetric nurse attempted to kidnap him. Growing up in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s, the children never fit in, until they visit Aunt Isabelle in Massachusetts and discover they are bloodline witches. Full of gifts and potential, the siblings are cursed with knowing too much about fate and the future. Though this coming-of-age tale is a prequel to Hoffman's Practical Magic, readers need not have read the earlier book\u2014but they'll eagerly seek out the author's other work. The clever Owenses handle major crises such as the Vietnam War, first loves, and the death of family members, all while learning how to cope with their special abilities in a world that doesn't always value those who are different. Fans of magical realism and lyrical novels, such as Leslye Walton's The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender and Mo\u00efra Fowley-Doyle's The Accident Season, will appreciate Hoffman's descriptive and succinct way with words. VERDICT Give to sophisticated teens who enjoy a bit of magic in their love stories.\u2014Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL Review PRAISE FOR THE RULES OF MAGIC BY ALICE HOFFMAN **INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** **OFFICIAL REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK** BEST FALL BOOKS SELECTION BY * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * NEW YORK POST * POPSUGAR * \u201cHoffman has conjured up another irresistible novel in The Rules of Magic . This is the kind of book you race through, then pause at the last 40 pages, savoring your final moments with the characters.\u201d\u2014 USA Today (4/4 Stars) \u201c[T]his is a novel that begins with the words, \u2018Once upon a time,\u2019 and its strength is a Hoffman hallmark: the commingling of fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle. The Owens children can\u2019t escape who they are. Like the rest of us, they have to figure out the best way to put their powers to use.\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cIn this prequel to Practical Magic , Hoffman, a master of magical realism, draws us back into the spellbinding universe of the Owens family with gorgeous prose set against a backdrop of vivid imagery.\u201d\u2014 Marie Claire \u201cThe story unfolds in romantic and magical ways against the backdrop of 1960s, with the Stonewall riot, LSD in Central Park, Bob Dylan and Vietnam all making appearances. Hoffman will keep you guessing until the very end of the book how the Practical Magic generation fits in, a clever, heartbreaking finale.\u201d \u2014 Newsday \"Hoffman delights in this prequel to Practical Magic as three siblings discover both the power and curse of their magic. Hoffman\u2019s novel is a coming-of-age tale replete with magic and historical reference to the early witch trials. The spellbinding story, focusing on the strength of family bonds through joy and sorrow, will appeal to a broad range of readers. Fans of Practical Magic will be bewitched.\u201d \u2014Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cHoffman weaves a spell\u2026.Readers who enjoy a little magic mixed in with their love stories\u2026will relish this book.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \"It\u2019s clear why Hoffman is a favorite for fantasy readers: She creates interesting mythologies; she\u2019s able to weave magic into the modern world; and she alludes to the magical properties of herbs and everyday items without overexplaining them and overcomplicating her narratives.\"\u2014 Bookpage \"Reading [ The Rules of Magic ] was like being caught in a current, floating along with a river's twists and turns, glimpsing familiarity and difference in varied measure before tumbling into something like the sea. I kept reading, not because I wanted to reach the end, but because I wanted to dwell in the honey-light of Hoffman's words. I wanted to hold these characters' hands... Hoffman's prose is as tender, dreamy and sweet as ever, laced with the sting of vinegar and broken glass.\"\u2014 NPR Books \u201cJust in time for Halloween, Alice Hoffman brings us back to the world of the Owens family, whom we first met in Practical Magic . It's a world where magic exists and love is a curse. The Rules of Magic will transport you. An utter delight.\u201d\u2014 Popsugar (Best 2017 Fall Books) \"[ The Rules of Magic is] a novel readers didn\u2019t know they were waiting for until it arrived.\" \u2014 Bustle \"Reading an Alice Hoffman book is like falling into a deep dream where senses are heightened and love reigns supreme. The Rules of Magic is no exception\u2014as I tumbled into the story of three siblings desperate for and cursed by love, I never wanted to awaken.\" \u2014Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things \"No one's more confident or entertaining than Hoffman at putting across characters willing to tempt fate for true love. Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot twist\u2014delivering everything fans of a much-loved book could hope for in a prequel.\" \u2014Kirkus Reviews About the Author Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons , The World That We Knew , Practical Magic , The Rules of Magic , the Oprah\u2019s Book Club selection Here on Earth , The Red Garden , The Dovekeepers , The Museum of Extraordinary Things , The Marriage of Opposites , and Faithful . She lives near Boston. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.52}, {"asin": "0723259925", "title": "Flower Fairies of the Spring", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 2.49}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0B1QDY1HY", "title": "Karma Camellia: A Village Flower Shop Paranormal Cozy Mystery", "author": "Nancy Warren", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B003XT60JK", "title": "Follow the River: A Novel", "author": "James Alexander Thom", "description": "From the Inside Flap Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women, then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom--an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people. From the Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Back Cover Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women, then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom--an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1 \u00a0 Sunday, July 8, 1755 \u00a0 She shivered, despite the heat of the hearth, and glanced again toward the sunny rectangle of the cabin door. No one was there, not a shadow. But she felt that same uneasiness that had returned to her several times this morning: a sense that if she had looked a second sooner there would have been a figure in the doorway. \u00a0 It was not the nature of Mary Draper Ingles to be afraid in the daytime. Sometimes in the deep wilderness nights, when the wolves wailed and the owls conspired high on the Blue Ridge east of the valley, when the dying fire made shapes move on the ceiling and the restless sleeping children rustled their corn-shuck mattresses, Mary Ingles would feel frightened. But seldom was she fearful in bright daylight like this, when the valley was familiar and peaceful and the locusts unreeled their eternal dry shrills under the summer sun. \u00a0 Mary turned back to the cookfire. Its heat baked her sweaty face. The little black iron stewpot with the rabbit in it was almost bubbling over now. She pulled it across the iron arm a little, moving it away from the hottest coals, so that the stew might simmer the afternoon away and be at its tenderest when William came back up from the fields. The old clock at the far end of the room ticked slowly. \u00a0 She brushed a strand of sweat-damp auburn hair back away from her cheek. She braced her palms on her knees to help lift her weight from the low puncheon stool and stood up, wheezing with the effort. Her swollen belly, firm and turgid with life, tugged down at all the strong young muscles of her torso. She smoothed the faded homespun cloth of her dress down over the mound and cupped her palms underneath, a caress and an appraisal. It would be happening any day now; she could feel that. \u00a0 She paused there, looking through the sunny doorway, out at the lush meadows, over the dark green treetops, toward the ranks of somber Allegheny mountains marching away to the west where no one except Indians lived. \u00a0 This little group of cabins at Draper\u2019s Meadows was deeper into the mountains than any other white community in Virginia. It was the first settlement west of what her husband Will called the Allegheny \u201cdivide.\u201d She and Will had been, indeed, the first white people wed on this wild side of the Blue Ridge. Five years ago, it had been: a pastoral wedding between the blue mountains with God seeming to breathe through the whole vast stillness of it. And they had lived prosperously and happily and in peace those five years. Their health was robust and both of their first two children had lived. The valley, fertile with limestone-rich soil where dense bluegrass grew and rippled, was irrigated by never-failing limestone springs, whose waters flowed down crystalline creeks into the lovely, twisting New River and thence out of their valley into the uncharted west. It was a place for health and high spirits, where one\u2019s first look out the cabin door every morning made the heart swell up. So, surely her uneasiness of this morning would pass. \u00a0 Of course, Mary Ingles knew, a woman\u2019s feelings are at their most unsettled, their most skittish, when she is full of the humors of childbearing. She tried to smile away her anxiety. Even William had made light of it this morning, as he often made light of women\u2019s fears. This morning he had passed it off just that way, as the spookishness of a mother-to-be. \u00a0 \u201cMust\u2019ee go?\u201d she had asked him after their Sunday morning prayers, when the valley had still been full of the shadow of the ridge. \u201cI \u2026\u00a0I be afraid, a wee bit. And William Ingles had hesitated here in this cabin door with his cradle scythe over one shoulder, a bag of hoecake and a watergourd over the other. He had never before heard Mary profess fear in the daytime. \u201cWhy afraid?\u201d he had said then, with that joshing smile of his, looking down at her swollen middle. \u201cWhen Tommy an\u2019 Georgie come, y\u2019 squzz \u2019em oot slick as a grape-pip. And your ma\u2019s here to help. Bettie\u2019s here, too, who wasna before. And if \u2019ee start birthin\u2019, why, only send down for me, and y\u2019 know I\u2019ll come a-runnin\u2019, Mary darlin\u2019.\u201d \u00a0 So she had smiled him away down toward the grainfield, that great, dear, strong, hairy man whom she loved till her heart ached with the sweetness of loving, that man who kept her from being as fearful as she might have been here in the wilds with a lesser man. She had not tried to explain to him this morning that it was not the birthing she feared. Nor, really, was it anything else she could name. She had stood in the doorway and watched him join her brother Johnny Draper at the edge of the meadow, strong Johnny with his own scythe over his shoulder, and they both had turned to wave back at her as they disappeared\u2014seemed to sink\u2014below the rippling grass at the brow of the meadow. \u00a0 They would have been working four hours in the barley by now, she reckoned\u2014scarcely ever pausing, shirtless, pouring sweat, probably singing to give a cadence to the sweep of their scythes. She knew how they looked working because she had always worked beside them. This was the first year she had not helped with the harvest; her term was too close. But she could envision them as clearly as if she were down there. Those two were durable men and could work all day long, even in this July sun. \u00a0 Her eye somehow went to William\u2019s long rifle, which lay across its two pegs on the far wall, beside the grandfather clock, a powder horn and bullet bag hanging under it, and again she felt the foreboding. Should not he have carried the gun down to the fields with him, as he had done in the first few years? Lately he had simply dismissed it as extra weight. \u00a0 The Indians who had passed up and down through Draper\u2019s Meadows since their arrival here in 1748 had never annoyed them nor given them cause for alarm. Usually they were parties from north of the distant O-y-o River, going down to raid their enemies, the Catawbas, who lived farther south. For centuries they had used the New River as their war road through the mountains. They had caves in its cliffs and canoes secreted in its tributaries. But even in their war paint, they had always been friendly with this little vanguard of white families here in the valley. They would always drink spring water offered them in gourd dippers, smacking their lips and smiling, apparently trying to dispel any uneasiness their war-painted faces and their bristling weaponry might be causing. Sometimes they would take bread that was offered to them, eat it while nodding in appreciation, and then stand and raise their hands in a peaceful salute and continue down the ridges. And then the white people who had remained hidden inside the cabins with their flintlocks cocked, ready for the first unfriendly move, would ease forward the hammers of their guns and exhale in relief, hang up the guns and come out to resume their work or to watch the savages fade into the woods. Only twice had Indians caused any mischief in this valley: in 1749 when a band had raided the cabin of Adam Harmon to steal furs, and in 1753 when another party had stolen skins from George Hoopaugh and Jacob Harmon and killed their barking dogs. Those were old and negligible incidents. So William Ingles had got out of the habit of taking his gun with him to the fields. \u201cMore sensible, I\u2019d say, to leave it here for your peace o\u2019 mind,\u201d he had joked to her once this summer. \u00a0 True, there was war in the land now, in distant places along the frontier, war against the French and their Indian allies. And once, a few months ago, a young Virginia lieutenant-colonel named Washington, a serious-looking giant of a fellow but a gentleman withal, had passed through this valley with a small escort of horsemen, talking to Colonel James Patton, the valley\u2019s militia leader, about what was happening in the distant conflict. Colonel Washington had advised Patton to have his people on their guard for armed Indian bands with Frenchmen among them. \u00a0 But the people of Draper\u2019s Meadows had seen no Frenchmen, and only friendly Indians; and the weeks had rolled on, and the plantings had been done; the crops had grown, and edibles from the woods had been gathered and preserved, and Bettie Draper\u2019s infant son had learned to crawl, and Mary Ingles\u2019 baby had made movements inside her; those were the main concerns of the people in this isolated valley where war surely had no reason to come. Their King was two thousand miles away in London Town and surely gave no more thought to these distant subjects of his than they gave to him. If he was at war with France, how could it affect them here in this valley His Majesty had never even heard of? --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author James Alexander Thom was a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. His books include Panther in the Sky, for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Historical Novel.David Drummond has narrated over seventy audiobooks for Tantor, in genres ranging from current political commentary to historical nonfiction, from fantasy to military, and from thrillers to humor. He has garnered multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie Award nomination. Visit him at drummondvoice.com. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0451196716", "title": "The Long Walk", "author": "Stephen King", "description": "Review \"A master storyteller.\" - Houston Chronicle \"An illusionist extraordinaire.\" - Publishers Weekly About the Author Stephen King, the world's bestselling novelist, was educated at the University of Maine at Orono. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, and their children in Bangor, Maine. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Part One - STARTING OUT Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Part Two - GOING DOWN THE ROAD Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Part Three - THE RABBIT Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Only death can keep you from the finish line\u2014in the ultimate competition of the all-too-near future. . . . THE LONG WALK Every year, on the first day of May, one hundred teenage boys meet for an event known throughout the country as \u201cThe Long Walk.\u201d Among this year\u2019s chosen crop is sixteen-year-old Ray Garraty. He knows the rules: that warnings are issued if you fall under speed, stumble, sit down. That after three warnings . . . you get your ticket. And what happens then serves as a chilling reminder that there can be only one winner in the Walk\u2014the one that survives. . . . WORKS BY STEPHEN KING NOVELS Carrie \u2019Salem\u2019s Lot The Shining The Stand The Dead Zone Firestarter Cujo THE DARK TOWER I: The Gunslinger Christine Pet Sematary Cycle of the Werewolf The Talisman (with Peter Straub) It Eyes of the Dragon Misery The Tommyknockers THE DARK TOWER II: The Drawing of the Three THE DARK TOWER III: The Waste Lands The Dark Half Needful Things Gerald\u2019s Game Dolores Claiborne Insomnia Rose Madder Desperation The Green Mile THE DARK TOWER IV: Wizard and Glass Bag of Bones AS RICHARD BACHMAN Rage The Long Walk Roadwork The Running Man Thinner The Regulators COLLECTIONS Night Shift Different Seasons Skeleton Crew Four Past Midnight Nightmares and Dreamscapes NONFICTION Danse Macabre SCREENPLAYS Creepshow Cat\u2019s Eye Silver Bullet Maximum Overdrive Pet Sematary Golden Years Sleepwalkers The Stand The Shining SIGNET Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First printing, July 1979 First printing (with King introduction), April 1999 ISBN: 9781101138182 Copyright \u00a9 Richard Bachman, 1979 Introduction copyright \u00a9 Stephen King, 1996 All rights reserved Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from \u201dSubterranean Homesick Blues\u201d by Bob Dylan. \u00a9 1965 Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. REGISTERED TRADEMARK\u2014MARCA REGISTRADA Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. PUBLISHER\u2019S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author\u2019s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014. The Importance of Being Bachman by Stephen King This is my second introduction to the so-called Bachman Books\u2014a phrase which has come to mean (in my mind, at least) the first few novels published with the Richard Bachman name, the ones which appeared as unheralded paperback originals under the Signet imprint. My first introduction wasn\u2019t very good; to me it reads like a textbook case of author obfuscation. But that is not surprising. When it was written, Bachman\u2019s alter ego (me, in other words) wasn\u2019t in what I\u2019d call a contemplative or analytical mood; I was, in fact, feeling robbed. Bachman was never created as a short-term alias; he was supposed to be there for the long haul, and when my name came out in connection with his, I was surprised, upset, and pissed off. That\u2019s not a state conducive to good essay-writing. This time I may do a little better. Probably the most important thing I can say about Richard Bachman is that he became real . Not entirely, of course (he said with a nervous smile); I am not writing this in a delusive state. Except . . . well . . . maybe I am. Delusion is, after all, something writers of fiction try to encourage in their readers, at least during the time that the book or story is open before them, and the writer is hardly immune from this state of . . . what shall I call it? How does \u201cdirected delusion\u201d sound? At any rate, Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early works which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer\u2019s imagination so frequently do. I began to imagine his life as a dairy farmer . . . his wife, the beautiful Claudia Inez Bachman . . . his solitary New Hampshire mornings, spent milking the cows, getting in the wood, and thinking about his stories . . . his evenings spent writing, always with a glass of whiskey beside his Olivetti typewriter. I once knew a writer who would say his current story or novel was \u201cputting on weight\u201d if it was going well. In much the same way, my pen-name began to put on weight. Then, when his cover was blown, Richard Bachman died. I made light of this in the few interviews I felt required to give on the subject, saying that he\u2019d died of cancer of the pseudonym, but it was actually shock that killed him: the realization that sometimes people just won\u2019t let you alone. To put it in more fulsome (but not at all inaccurate) terms, Bachman was the vampire side of my existence, killed by the sunlight of disclosure. My feelings about all this were confused enough (and fertile enough) to bring on a book (a Stephen King book, that is), The Dark Half . It was about a writer whose pseudonym, George Stark, actually comes to life. It\u2019s a novel my wife has always detested, perhaps because, for Thad Beaumont, the dream of being a writer overwhelms the reality of being a man; for Thad, delusive thinking overtakes rationality completely, with horrific consequences. I didn\u2019t have that problem, though. Really. I put Bachman aside, and although I was sorry that he had to die, I would be lying if I didn\u2019t say I felt some relief as well. The books in this omnibus were written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and deeply infatuated with the art and craft of writing. They weren\u2019t written as Bachman books per se (Bachman hadn\u2019t been invented yet, after all), but in a Bachman state of mind: low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair. Ben Richards, the scrawny, pre-tubercular protagonist of The Running Man (he is about as far from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get), crashes his hijacked plane into the Network Games skyscraper, killing himself but taking hundreds (maybe thousands) of Free-Vee executives with him; this is the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending. The conclusions of the other Bachman novels are even more grim. Stephen King has always understood that the good guys don\u2019t always win (see Cujo, Pet Sematary, and\u2014perhaps\u2014 Christine ), but he has also understood that mostly they do. Every day, in real life, the good guys win. Mostly these victories go unheralded (MAN ARRIVES HOME SAFE FROM WORK YET AGAIN wouldn\u2019t sell many papers), but they are nonetheless real for all that . . . and fiction should reflect reality. And yet . . . In the first draft of The Dark Half, I had Thad Beaumont quote Donald E. Westlake, a very funny writer who has penned a series of very grim crime novels under the name Richard Stark. Once asked to explain the dichotomy between Westlake and Stark, the writer in question said, \u201cI write Westlake stories on sunny days. When it rains, I\u2019m Stark.\u201d I don\u2019t think that made it into the final version of The Dark Half, but I have always loved it (and related to it, as it has become fashionable to say). Bachman\u2014a fictional creation who became more real to me with each published book which bore his byline\u2014was a rainy-day sort of guy if ever there was one. The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 X 2. But I know something else as well: there\u2019s a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. In Thinner, Bachman spoke for the first time on his own\u2014it was the only one of the early Bachman novels that had his name on the first draft instead of mine\u2014and it struck me as really unfair that, just as he was starting to talk with his own voice, he should have been mistaken for me. And a mistake was just what it felt like, because by then Bachman had become a kind of id for me; he said the things I couldn\u2019t, and the thought of him out there on his New Hampshire dairy farm\u2014not a best-selling writer who gets his name in some stupid Forbes list of entertainers too rich for their own good or his face on the Today show or doing cameos in movies\u2014quietly writing his books gave him permission to think in ways I could not think and speak in ways I could not speak. And then these news stories came out saying \u201cBachman is really King,\u201d and there was no one\u2014not even me\u2014to defend the dead man, or to point out the obvious: that King was also really Bachman, at least some of the time. Unfair I thought then and unfair I think now, but sometimes life bites you a little, that\u2019s all. I determined to put Bachman out of my thoughts and my life, and so I did, for a number of years. Then, while I was writing a novel (a Stephen King novel) called Desperation, Richard Bachman suddenly appeared in my life again. I was working on a Wang dedicated word processor at that time; it looked like the visiphone in an old Flash Gordon serial. This was paired with a marginally more state-of-the-art laser printer, and from time to time, when an idea occurred to me, I would write down a phrase or a putative title on a scrap of paper and Scotch-tape it to the side of the printer. As I neared the three-quarter mark on Desperation, I had a scrap with a single word printed on it: REGULATORS. I had had a great idea for a novel, something that had to do with toys, guns, TV, and suburbia. I didn\u2019t know if I would ever write it\u2014lots of those \u201cprinter notes\u201d never came to anything\u2014but it was certainly cool to think about. Then, one rainy day (a Richard Stark sort of day), as I was pulling into my driveway, I had an idea. I don\u2019t know where it came from; it was totally unconnected to any of the trivia tumbling through my head at the time. The idea was to take the characters from Desperation and put them into The Regulators . In some cases, I thought, they could play the same people; in others, they would change; in neither case would they do the same things or react in the same ways, because the different stories would dictate different courses of action. It would be, I thought, like the members of a repertory company acting in two different plays. Then an even more exciting idea struck me. If I could use the rep company concept with the characters, I could use it with the plot itself as well\u2014I could stack a good many of the Desperation elements in a brand-new configuration, and create a kind of mirror world. I knew even before setting out that plenty of critics would call this twinning a stunt . . . and they would not be wrong, exactly. But, I thought, it could be a good stunt. Maybe even an illuminating stunt, one which showcased the muscularity and versatility of story, its all but limitless ability to adapt a few basic elements into endlessly pleasing variations, its prankish charm. But the two books couldn\u2019t sound exactly the same, and they couldn\u2019t mean the same, any more than an Edward Albee play and one by William Inge can sound and mean the same, even if they are performed on successive nights by the same company of actors. How could I possibly create a different voice? At first I thought I couldn\u2019t, and that it would be best to consign the idea to the Rube Goldberg bin I keep in the bottom of my mind\u2014the one marked INTERESTING BUT UNWORKABLE CONTRAPTIONS. Then it occurred to me that I had had the answer all along: Richard Bachman could write The Regulators . His voice sounded superficially the same as mine, but underneath there was a world of difference\u2014all the difference between sunshine and rain, let us say. And his view of people was always different from mine, simultaneously funnier and more cold-hearted (Bart Dawes in Roadwork, my favorite of the early Bachman books, is an excellent example). Of course Bachman was dead, I had announced that myself, but death is actually a minor problem for a novelist\u2014just ask Paul Sheldon, who brought Misery Chastain back for Annie Wilkes, or Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought Sherlock Holmes back from Reichenbach Falls when fans all over the British Empire clamored for him. I didn\u2019t actually bring Richard Bachman back from the dead, anyway; I just visualized a box of neglected manuscripts in his basement, with The Regulators on top. Then I transcribed the book Bachman had already written. That transcription was a little tougher . . . but it was also immensely exhilarating. It was wonderful to hear Bachman\u2019s voice again, and what I had hoped might happen did happen: a book rolled out that was a kind of fraternal twin to the one I had written under my own name (and the two books were quite literally written back-to-back, the King book finished on one day and the Bachman book commenced on the very next). They were no more alike than King and Bachman themselves. Desperation is about God; The Regulators is about TV. I guess that makes them both about higher powers, but very different ones just the same. The importance of being Bachman was always the importance of finding a good voice and a valid point of view that were a little different from my own. Not really different; I am not schizo enough to believe that. But I do believe that there are tricks all of us use to change our perspectives and our perceptions\u2014to see ourselves new by dressing up in different clothes and doing our hair in different styles\u2014and that such tricks can be very useful, a way of revitalizing and refreshing old strategies for living life, observing life, and creating art. None of these comments are intended to suggest that I have done anything great in the Bachman books, and they are surely not made as arguments for artistic merit. But I love what I do too much to want to go stale if I can help it. Bachman has been one way in which I have tried to refresh my craft, and to keep from being too comfy and well-padded. These early books show some progression of the Bachman persona, I hope, and I hope they also show the essence of that persona . Dark-toned, despairing even when he is laughing (despairing most when he\u2019s laughing, in fact), Richard Bachman isn\u2019t a fellow I\u2019d want to be all the time, even if he were still alive . . . but it\u2019s good to have that option, that window on the world, polarized though it may be. Still, as the reader works his or her way through these stories, he/she may discover that Dick Bachman has one thing in common with Thad Beaumont\u2019s alter ego, George Stark: he\u2019s not a very nice guy. And I wonder if there are any other good manuscripts, at or near completion, in that box found by the widowed Mrs. Bachman in the cellar of their New Hampshire farmhouse. Sometimes I wonder about that a lot . \u2014Stephen King Lovell, Maine April 16, 1996 This is for Jim Bishop and Burt Hatlen and Ted Holmes. \u201cTo me the Universe was all void of Life, or Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?\u201d \u2014Thomas Carlyle \u201cI would encourage every American to walk as often as possible. It\u2019s more than healthy; it\u2019s fun.\u201d \u2014John F. Kennedy (1962) \u201cThe pump don\u2019t work \u2019Cause the vandals took the handle.\u201d \u2014Bob Dylan Part One STARTING OUT Chapter 1 \u201cSay the secret word and win a hundred dollars. George, who are our first contestants? George . . . ? Are you there, George?\u201d \u2014Groucho Marx You Bet Your Life An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run. One of the guards, an expressionless young man in a khaki uniform and a Sam Browne belt, asked to see the blue plastic ID card. The boy in the back seat handed it to his mother. His mother handed it to the guard. The guard took it to a computer terminal that looked strange and out of place in the rural stillness. The computer terminal ate the card and flashed this on its screen: GARRATY RAYMOND DAVIS RD 1 POWNAL MAINE ANDROSCOGGIN COUNTY ID NUMBER 49-801-89 OK-OK-OK The guard punched another button and all of this disappeared, leaving the terminal screen smooth and green and blank again. He waved them forward. \u201cDon\u2019t they give the card back?\u201d Mrs. Garraty asked. \u201cDon\u2019t they\u2014\u201d \u201cNo, Mom,\u201d Garraty said patiently. \u201cWell, I don\u2019t like it,\u201d she said, pulling forward into an empty space. She had been saying it ever since they set out in the dark of two in the morning. She had been moaning it, actually. \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d he said without hearing himself. He was occupied with looking and with his own confusion of anticipation and fear. He was out of the car almost before the engine\u2019s last asthmatic wheeze\u2014a tall, well-built boy wearing a faded army fatigue jacket against the eight o\u2019clock spring chill. His mother was also tall, but too thin. Her breasts were almost nonexistent: token nubs. Her eyes were wandering and unsure, somehow shocked. Her face was an invalid\u2019s face. Her iron-colored hair had gone awry under the complication of clips that was supposed to hold it in place. Her dress hung badly on her body as if she had recently lost a lot of weight. \u201cRay,\u201d she said in that whispery conspirator\u2019s voice that he had come to dread. \u201cRay, listen\u2014\u201d He ducked his head and pretended to tuck in his shirt. One of the guards was eating C rations from a can and reading a comic book. Garraty watched the guard eating and reading and thought for the ten thousandth time: It\u2019s all real . And now, at last, the thought began to swing some weight. \u201cThere\u2019s still time to change your mind\u2014\u201d The fear and anticipation cranked up a notch. \u201cNo, there\u2019s no time for that,\u201d he said. \u201cThe backout date was yesterday.\u201d Still in that low conspirator\u2019s voice that he hated: \u201cThey\u2019d understand, I know they would. The Major\u2014\u201d \u201cThe Major would\u2014\u201d Garraty began, and saw his mother wince. \u201cYou know what the Major would do, Mom.\u201d Another car had finished the small ritual at the gate and had parked. A boy with dark hair got out. His parents followed and for a moment the three of them stood in conference like worried baseball players. He, like some of the other boys, was wearing a light packsack. Garraty wondered if he hadn\u2019t been a little stupid not to bring one himself. \u201cYou won\u2019t change your mind?\u201d It was guilt, guilt taking the face of anxiety. Although he was only sixteen, Ray Garraty knew something about guilt. She felt that she had been too dry, too tired, or maybe just too taken up with her older sorrows to halt her son\u2019s madness in its seedling stage\u2014to halt it before the cumbersome machinery of the State with its guards in khaki and its computer terminals had taken over, binding himself more tightly to its insensate self with each passing day, until yesterday, when the lid had come down with a final bang. He put a hand on her shoulder. \u201cThis is my idea, Mom. I know it wasn\u2019t yours. I\u2014\u201d He glanced around. No one was paying the slightest attention to them. \u201cI love you, but this way is best, one way or the other.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not,\u201d she said, now verging on tears. \u201cRay, it\u2019s not, if your father was here, he\u2019d put a stop to\u2014\u201d \u201cWell, he\u2019s not, is he?\u201d He was brutal, hoping to stave off her tears . . . what if they had to drag her off? He had heard that sometimes that happened. The thought made him feel cold. In a softer voice he said, \u201cLet it go now, Mom. Okay?\u201d He forced a grin. \u201cOkay,\u201d he answered for her. Her chin was still trembling, but she nodded. Not all right, but too late. There was nothing anyone could do. A light wind soughed through the pines. The sky was pure blue. The road was just ahead and the simple stone post that marked the border between America and Canada. Suddenly his anticipation was greater than his fear, and he wanted to get going, get the show on the road. \u201cI made these. You can take them, can\u2019t you? They\u2019re not too heavy, are they?\u201d She thrust a foil-wrapped package of cookies at him. \u201cYeah.\u201d He took them and then clutched her awkwardly, trying to give her what she needed to have. He kissed her cheek. Her skin was like old silk. For a moment he could have cried himself. Then he thought of the smiling, mustachioed face of the Major and stepped back, stuffing the cookies into the pocket of his fatigue jacket. \u201cG\u2019bye, Mom.\u201d \u201cGoodbye, Ray. Be a good boy.\u201d She stood there for a moment and he had a sense of her being very light, as if even the light puffs of breeze blowing this morning might send her sailing away like a dandelion gone to seed. Then she got back into the car and started the engine. Garraty stood there. She raised her hand and waved. The tears were flowing now. He could see them. He waved back and then as she pulled out he just stood there with his arms at his sides, conscious of how fine and brave and alone he must look. But when the car had passed back through the gate, forlornness struck him and he was only a sixteen-year-old boy again, alone in a strange place. He turned back toward the road. The other boy, the dark-haired one, was watching his folks pull out. He had a bad scar along one cheek. Garraty walked over to him and said hello. The dark-haired boy gave him a glance. \u201cHi.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m Ray Garraty,\u201d he said, feeling mildly like an asshole. \u201cI\u2019m Peter McVries.\u201d \u201cYou are ready?\u201d Garraty asked. McVries shrugged. \u201cI feel jumpy. That\u2019s the worst.\u201d Garraty nodded. The two of them walked toward the road and the stone marker. Behind them, other cars were pulling out. A woman began screaming abruptly. Unconsciously, Garraty and McVries drew closer together. Neither of them looked back. Ahead of them was the road, wide and black. \u201cThat composition surface will be hot by noon,\u201d McVries said abruptly. \u201cI\u2019m going to stick to the shoulder.\u201d Garraty nodded. McVries looked at him thoughtfully. \u201cWhat do you weigh?\u201d \u201cHundred and sixty.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m one-sixty-seven. They say the heavier guys get tired quicker, but I think I\u2019m in pretty good shape.\u201d To Garraty, Peter McVries looked rather more than that\u2014he looked awesomely fit. He wondered who they were that said the heavier guys got tired quicker, almost asked, and decided not to. The Walk was one of those things that existed on apocrypha, talismans, legend. McVries sat down in the shade near a couple of other boys, and after a moment, Garraty sat beside him. McVries seemed to have dismissed him entirely. Garraty looked at his watch. It was five after eight. Fifty-five minutes to go. Impatience and anticipation came back, and he did his best to squash them, telling himself to enjoy sitting while he could. All of the boys were sitting. Sitting in groups and sitting alone; one boy had climbed onto the lowest branch of a pine overlooking the road and was eating what looked like a jelly sandwich. He was skinny and blond, wearing purple pants and a blue chambray shirt under an old green zip sweater with holes in the elbows. Garraty wondered if the skinny ones would last or burn out quickly. The boys he and McVries had sat down next to were talking. \u201cI\u2019m not hurrying,\u201d one of them said. \u201cWhy should I? If I get warned, so what? You just adjust, that\u2019s all. Adjustment is the key word here. Remember where you heard that first.\u201d He looked around and discovered Garraty and McVries. \u201cMore lambs to the slaughter. Hank Olson\u2019s the name. Walking is my game.\u201d He said this with no trace of a smile at all. Garraty offered his own name. McVries spoke his own absently, still looking off toward the road. \u201cI\u2019m Art Baker,\u201d the other said quietly. He spoke with a very slight Southern accent. The four of them shook hands all around. There was a moment\u2019s silence, and McVries said, \u201cKind of scary, isn\u2019t it?\u201d They all nodded except Hank Olson, who shrugged and grinned. Garraty watched the boy in the pine tree finish his sandwich, ball up the waxed paper it had been in, and toss it onto the soft shoulder. He\u2019ll burn out early, he decided. That made him feel a little better. \u201cYou see that spot right by the marker post?\u201d Olson said suddenly. They all looked. The breeze made moving shadow-patterns across the road. Garraty didn\u2019t know if he saw anything or not. \u201cThat\u2019s from the Long Walk the year before last,\u201d Olson said with grim satisfaction. \u201cKid was so scared he just froze up at nine o\u2019clock.\u201d They considered the horror of it silently. \u201cJust couldn\u2019t move. He took his three warnings and then at 9:02 AM they gave him his ticket. Right there by the starting post.\u201d Garraty wondered if his own legs would freeze. He didn\u2019t think so, but it was a thing you wouldn\u2019t know for sure until the time came, and it was a terrible thought. He wondered why Hank Olson wanted to bring up such a terrible thing. Suddenly Art Baker sat up straight. \u201cHere he comes.\u201d A dun-colored jeep drove up to the stone marker and stopped. It was followed by a strange, tread-equipped vehicle that moved much more slowly. There were toy-sized radar dishes mounted on the front and back of this halftrack. Two soldiers lounged on its upper deck, and Garraty felt a chill in his belly when he looked at them. They were carrying army-type heavy-caliber carbine rifles. Some of the boys got up, but Garraty did not. Neither did Olson or Baker, and after his initial look, McVries seemed to have fallen back into his own thoughts. The skinny kid in the pine tree was swinging his feet idly. The Major got out of the jeep. He was a tall, straight man with a deep desert tan that went well with his simple khakis. A pistol was strapped to his Sam Browne belt, and he was wearing reflector sunglasses. It was rumored that the Major\u2019s eyes were extremely light-sensitive, and he was never seen in public without his sunglasses. \u201cSit down, boys,\u201d he said. \u201cKeep Hint Thirteen in mind.\u201d Hint Thirteen was \u201cConserve energy whenever possible.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 6.91}, {"asin": "1616085436", "title": "Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book: The Boston Cooking School", "author": "Fannie Merritt Farmer", "description": "About the Author Fannie Farmer (1857\u20131915) came to cooking due to a stroke at the age of sixteen that forced her to remain homebound for over a decade. She took up cooking so thoroughly that she turned her mother\u2019s home into a boardinghouse known for its uncommonly delicious meals. Once she was able to walk again, Farmer attended the Boston Cooking School in the late 1880s and learned to approach cooking as a domestic science, as was popular then. The cookbook she eventually published under the school\u2019s name in 1896 became unexpectedly famous, thanks to its system of standardized measuring vessels and level measurements. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book The Boston Cooking-School By Fannie Merritt Farmer Skyhorse Publishing Copyright \u00a9 2011 Fannie Merritt FarmerAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-61608-543-8 Contents CHAPTER I. Food, CHAPTER II. Cookery, CHAPTER III. Beverages, CHAPTER IV. Bread and Bread Making, CHAPTER V. Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, and Shortcakes Batters, Sponges, and Doughs, CHAPTER VI. Cereals, CHAPTER VII. Eggs, CHAPTER VIII. Soups, CHAPTER IX. Soups without Stock, CHAPTER X. Soup Garnishings and Force\u2013Meats, CHAPTER XI. Fish, CHAPTER XII. Bdeef, CHAPTER XIII. Lamb and Mutton, CHAPTER XIV. Veal, CHAPTER XV. Sweetbreads, CHAPTER XVI. Pork, CHAPTER XVII. Poultry and Game, CHAPTER XVIII. Fish and Meat Sauces, CHAPTER XIX. Vegetables, CHAPTER XX. Potatoes, CHAPTER XXI. Salad Dressings and Salads, CHAPTER XXII. Entrees, CHAPTER XXIII. Hot Puddings, CHAPTER XXIV. Pudding Sauces, CHAPTER XXV. Cold Desserts, CHAPTER XXVI. Ces, Ice Creams, and other Frozen Desserts, CHAPTER XXVII. Pastry, CHAPTER XXVIII. Pies, CHAPTER XXIX. Pastry Desserts, CHAPTER XXX. Gingerbreads, Cookies, and Wafers, CHAPTER XXXI. Cake, CHAPTER XXXII. Cake Fillings and Frostings, CHAPTER XXXIII. Fancy Cakes and Confections, CHAPTER XXXIV. Sandwiches and Canap\u00e9s, CHAPTER XXXV. Recipes for the Chafing-dish, CHAPTER XXXVI. Cooking, Preserving, and Canning Fruits, CHAPTER XXXVII. Recipes Especially Prepared for the Sick, CHAPTER XXXVIII. Helpful Hints to the Young Housekeeper, CHAPTER XXXIX. Suitable Combinations for Serving, Breakfast Menus, Luncheon Menus, Dinner Menus, Menu for Thanksgiving Dinner, Menu for Christmas Dinner, A Full Course Dinner, Menus for Full Course Dinners, Necessary Utensils and Stores for Furnishing School, Kitchen for a Class Of Twenty-Four, Glossary, Course of Instruction as Given at the Boston Cooking School, Practice Lessons, CHAPTER 1 FOOD. Food is anything which nourishes the body. Thirteen elements enter into the composition of the body: oxygen, 62 %; carbon, 21 %; hydrogen, 10%; nitrogen, 3%; calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, iron, and fluorine the remaining 3%. Others are found occasionally, but, as their uses are unknown, will not be considered. Food is necessary for growth, repair, and energy; therefore the elements composing the body must be found in the food. The thirteen elements named are formed into chemical compounds by the vegetable and animal kingdoms to support the highest order of being, man. All food must undergo chemical change after being taken into the body, before it can be utilized by the body; this is the office of the digestive system. Food is classified as follows: \u2014 I. Organic 1. Proteid (nitrogenous or albuminous). 2. Carbohydrates (sugar and starch). 3. Fats and oils. II. Inorganic 1. Mineral matter. 2. Water. The chief office of proteids is to build and repair tissues. They can furnish energy, but at greater cost than carbohydrates, fats, and oils. They contain nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulphur or phosphorus, and include all forms of animal foods (excepting fats and glycogen) and some vegetable foods. Examples: milk, cheese, eggs, meat, fish, cereals, peas, beans, and lentils. The principal constituent of proteid food is albumen. Albumen as found in food takes different names, but has the same chemical composition; as, albumen in eggs, fibrin in meat, casein in milk and cheese, vegetable casein or legumen in peas, beans, and lentils; and gluten in wheat. To this same class belongs gelatine. The chief office of the carbohydrates is to furnish energy and maintain heat. They contain carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and include foods containing starch and sugar. Examples: vegetables, fruits, cereals, sugars, and gums. The chief office of fats and oils is to store energy and heat to be used as needed, and constitute the adipose tissues of the body. Examples: butter, cream, fat of meat, fish, cereals, nuts, and the berry of the olive-tree. The chief office of mineral matter is to furnish the necessary salts which are found in all animal and vegetable foods. Examples: sodium chloride (common salt); carbonates, sulphates and phosphates of sodium, potassium, and magnesium; besides calcium phosphates and iron. Water constitutes about two-thirds the weight of the body, and is in all tissues and fluids; therefore its abundant use is necessary. One of the greatest errors in diet is neglect to take enough water; while it is found in all animal and vegetable food, the amount is insufficient. CORRECT PROPORTIONS OF FOOD. Age, sex, occupation, climate, and season must determine the diet of a person in normal condition. Liquid food (milk or milk in preparation with the various prepared foods on the market) should constitute the diet of a child for the first eighteen months. After the teeth appear, by which time ferments have been developed for the digestion of starchy foods, entire wheat bread, baked potatoes, cereals, meat broths, and occasionally boiled eggs may be given. If mothers would use Dr. Johnson's Educators in place of the various sweet crackers, children would be as well pleased and better nourished; with a glass of milk they form a supper suited to the needs of little ones, and experience has shown children seldom tire of them. The diet should be gradually increased by the addition of cooked fruits, vegetables, and simple desserts; the third or fourth year fish and meat may be introduced, if given sparingly. Always avoid salted meats, coarse vegetables (beets, carrots, and turnips), cheese, fried food, pastry, rich desserts, confections, condiments, tea, coffee, and iced water. For school children the diet should be varied and abundant, constantly bearing in mind that this is a period of great mental and physical growth. Where children have broken down, supposedly from over-work, the cause has often been traced to impoverished diet. It must not be forgotten that digestive processes go on so rapidly that the stomach is soon emptied. Thanks to the institutor of the school luncheon-counter! The daily average ration of an adult requires 3\u00bd oz. proteid. 3 oz. fat. 10 oz. starch. 1 oz. salt. 5 pints water. About one-third of the water is taken in our food, the remainder as a beverage. To keep in health and do the best mental and physical work, authorities agree that a mixed diet is suited for temperate climates, although sound arguments appear from the vegetarian. Women, even though they do the same amount of work as men, as a rule require less food. Brain workers should take their proteid in a form easily digested. In consideration of this fact, fish and eggs form desirable substitutes for meat. The working man needs quantity as well as quality, that the stomach may have something to act upon. Corned beef, cabbage, brown-bread, and pastry will not overtax his digestion. In old age the digestive organs lessen in activity, and diet should be almost as simple as that of a child, increasing the amount of carbohydrates and decreasing the amount of proteids and fat. WATER ([H.sub.2O). Water is a transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid. It is derived from five sources, \u2014 rains, rivers, surface-water or shallow wells, deep wells, and springs. Water is never found pure in nature; it is nearly pure when gathered in an open field, after a heavy rainfall, or from springs. For town and city supply, surface-water is furnished by some adjacent pond or lake. Samples of such water are carefully and frequently analyzed, to make sure that it is not polluted with disease germs. The hardness of water depends upon the amount of salts of lime and magnesia which it contains. Soft water is free from objectionable salts, and is preferable for household purposes. Hard water may be softened by boiling, or by the addition of a small amount of bicarbonate of soda (NaHCO). Water freezes at a temperature of 32\u00ba F., boils at 212\u00ba F.; when bubbles appear on the surface and burst, the boiling-point is reached. In high altitudes water boils at a lower temperature. From 32\u00ba to 65\u00ba F. water is termed cold; from 65\u00ba to 92\u00ba F. tepid; 92\u00ba to 100\u00ba F. warm; over that temperature, hot. Boiled water is freed from all organic impurities, and salts of lime are precipitated; it does not ferment, and is a valuable antiseptic. Hot water is more stimulating than cold, and is of use taken on an empty stomach, while at a temperature of from 60\u00ba to 95\u00ba F. it is used as an emetic; 90\u00ba F. being the most favorable temperature. Distilled water is chemically pure and is always used for medicinal purposes. It is flat and insipid to the taste, having been deprived of its atmospheric gases. There are many charged, carbonized, and mineral spring waters bottled and put on the market; many of these are used as-agreeable table beverages. Examples: Soda water, Apollinaris, Poland, Seltzer, and Vichy. Some contain minerals of medicinal value. Examples: Lithia, saline, and sulphur waters. SALTS. Of all salts found in the body, the most abundant and valuable is sodium chloride (NaCl), common salt; it exists in all tissues, secretions, and fluids of the body, with exception of enamel of the teeth. The amount found in food is not always sufficient; therefore salt is used as a condiment. It assists digestion, inasmuch as it furnishes chlorine for hydrochloric acid found in gastric juice. Common salt is obtained from evaporation of spring and sea water, also from mines. Our supply of salt obtained by evaporation comes chiefly from Michigan and New York; mined salt from Louisiana and Kansas. Salt is a great preservative; advantage is taken of this in salting meat and fish. Other salts \u2014 lime, phosphorus, magnesia, potash, sulphur, and iron \u2014 are obtained in sufficient quantity from food we eat and water we drink. In young children, perfect formation of bones and teeth depends upon phosphorus and lime taken into the system; these are found in meat and fish, but abound in cereals. STARCH ([C.sub.6][H.sub.10][O.sub.5]). Starch is a white, glistening powder; it is largely distributed throughout the vegetable kingdom, being found most abundantly in cereals and potatoes. Being a force-producer and heat-giver, it forms one of the most important foods. Alone it cannot sustain life, but must be taken in combination with foods which build and repair tissues. Test for Starch . A weak solution of iodine added to cold cooked starch gives an intense blue color. Starch is insoluble in cold water, almost soluble in boiling water. Cold water separates starch-grains, boiling water causes them to swell and burst, thus forming a paste. Starch subjected to heat is changed to dextrine ([C.sub.6][H.sub.10][O.sub.5]), British gum. Dextrine subjected to heat plus an acid or a ferment is changed to dextrose ([C.sub.6][H.sub.12][O.sub.6]). Dextrose occurs in ripe fruit, honey, sweet wine, and as a manufactured product. When grain is allowed to germinate for malting purposes, starch is changed to dextrine and dextrose. In fermentation, dextrose is changed to alcohol ([C.sub.2][H.sub.5]HO) and carbon-dioxide (C[O.sub.2]). Examples; Bread-making, vinegar, and distilled liquors. Glycogen, animal starch, is found in many animal tissues and in some fungi. Examples: In liver of meat and oysters. Raw starch is not digestible; consequently all foods containing starch should be subjected to boiling water, and thoroughly cooked. Starch is manufactured from wheat, corn, and potatoes. Corn-starch is manufactured from Indian corn. Arrowroot , the purest form of starch, is obtained from two or three species of the Maranta plant, which grows in the West Indies and other tropical countries. Bermuda arrowroot is most highly esteemed. Tapioca is starch obtained from tuberous roots of the bitter cassava, native of South America. Sago is starch obtained from sago palms, native of India. SUGAR ([C.sub.12][H.sub.22][O.sub.11]). Sugar is a crystalline substance, differing from starch by its sweet taste and solubility in cold water. As food, its uses are the same as starch; all starch must be converted into sugar before it can be assimilated. The principal kinds of sugar are: Cane sugar or sucrose, grape sugar or glucose ([C.sub.6][H.sub.12][Q.sub.6]), milk sugar or lactose ([C.sub.12][H.sub.22][O.sub.11]), and fruit sugar or levulose ([C.sub.6][H.sub.12][O.sub.6]). Cane sugar is obtained from sugar cane, beets, and the palm and sugar-maple trees. Sugar cane is a grass supposed to be native to Southern Asia, but now grown throughout the tropics, a large amount coming from Cuba and Louisiana; it is the commonest and sweetest of all, and in all cases the manufacture is essentially the same. The products of manufacture are: Molasses, syrup, brown sugar, loaf, cut, granulated, powdered, and confectioners' sugar. Brown sugar is cheapest, but is not so pure or sweet as white grades; powdered and confectioners' sugars are fine grades, pulverized, and, although seeming less sweet to the taste, are equally pure. Confectioners' sugar when applied to the tongue will dissolve at once; powdered sugar is a little granular. Cane sugar when added to fruits, and allowed to cook for some time, changes to grape sugar, losing one-third of its sweetness; therefore the reason for adding it when fruit is nearly cooked. Cane sugar is of great preservative value, hence its use in preserving fruits and milk; also, for the preparation of syrups. Three changes take place in the cooking of sugar: First, barley sugar; second, caramel; third, carbon. Grape sugar is found in honey and all sweet fruits. It appears on the outside of dried fruits such as raisins, dates, etc., and is only two-thirds as sweet as cane sugar. As a manufactured product it is obtained from the starch of corn. Milk sugar is obtained from the milk of mammalia, but unlike cane sugar does not ferment. Fruit sugar is obtained from sweet fruits, and is sold As diabetin, is sweeter than cane sugar, and is principally used by diabetic patients. GUM, PECTOSE AND CELLULOSE. These compounds found in food are closely allied to the carbohydrates, but are neither starchy, saccharine, nor oily. Gum exists in the juices of almost all plants, coming from the stems, branches, and fruits. Examples: Gum arabic, gum tragacanth, and mucilage. Pectose exists in the fleshy pulp of unripe fruit; during the process of ripening it changes to pectin; by cooking, pectin is changed to pectosic acid, and by longer cooking to pectic acid. Pectosic acid is jelly-like when cold; pectic acid is jelly-like when hot or cold. Cellulose constitutes the cell-walls of vegetable life; in very young vegetables it is possible that it can be acted upon by the digestive ferments; in older vegetables it becomes woody and completely indigestible. FATS AND OILS. Fats and oils are found in both the animal and vegetable kingdom. Fats are solid; oils are liquid; they may be converted into a liquid state by application of heat; they contain three substances, stearin (solid), olein (liquid), palmitin (semi-solid). Suet is an example where stearin is found in excess; lard where olein is in excess, and butter where palmitin is in excess. Margarin is a mixture of stearin and palmitin. The fatty acids are formed of stearin, olein, and palmitin, with glycerine as the base. Examples: stearic, palmitic, and oleic acid. Butyric acid is acid found in butter. These are not sour to the taste, but are called acids on account of their chemical composition. Among animal fats cream and butter are of first importance as foods, on account of their easy assimilation. Other examples are: The fat of meats, bone-marrow, suet (the best found around the loin and kidneys of the beef creature), lard, cottolene, coto-suet, cocoanut butter, butterine and oleomargarine. The principal animal oils are cod liver oil and oil found in the yolk of egg; principal vegetable oils are olive, cotton-seed, poppy, and cocoanut oil, and oils obtained from various nuts. Oils are divided into two classes, essential and fixed. Essential oils are volatile and soluble in alcohol. Examples: Clove, rose, nutmeg, and violet. Fixed oils are non-volatile and soluble in ether, oil or turpentine. Examples: Oil of nuts, corn-meal, mustard, and glycerine. Fats may be heated to a high temperature, as considered in cookery they have no boiling-point. When appearing to boil, it is evident water has been added, and the temperature lowered to that of boiling water, 212\u00b0 F. MILK. COMPOSITION. Proteid, 3.4%. Fat, 4%. Mineral matter, .7%. Water, 87%. Lactose, 4.9%. Boston Chemist. The value of milk as a food is obvious from the fact that it constitutes the natural food of all young mammalia during the period of their most rapid growth. There is some danger, however, of overestimating its value in the dietary of adults, as solid food is essential, and liquid taken should act as a stimulant and a solvent rather than as a nutrient. One obtains the greatest benefit from milk when taken alone at regular intervals between meals, or before retiring, and sipped, rather than drunk. Hot milk is often given to produce sleep. When milk is allowed to stand for a few hours, the globules of fat, which have been held in suspension throughout the liquid, rise to the top in the form of cream; this is due to their lower specific gravity. The difference in quality of milk depends chiefly on the quantity of fat therein: casein, lactose, and mineral matter being nearly constant, water varying but little unless milk is adulterated. Why Milk Sours . A germ found floating in the air attacks a portion of the lactose in the milk, converting it into lactic acid; this, in turn, acts upon the casein (proteid) and precipitates it, producing what is known as curd and whey. Whey contains water, salts, and some sugar. Milk is preserved by sterilization, pasteurisation, and evaporation. Fresh condensed milk, a form of evaporized milk, is sold in bulk, and is preferred by many to serve with coffee. Various brands of condensed milk and cream are on the market in tin cans, hermetically sealed. Examples: Nestle's Swiss Condensed Milk, Eagle Condensed Milk, Daisy Condensed Milk, Highland Evaporated Cream, Borden's Peerless Evaporated Cream. Malted milk \u2014 evaporized milk in combination with extracts of malted barley and wheat \u2014 is used to a considerable extent; it is sold in the form of powder. Thin, or strawberry, and thick cream may be obtained from almost all creameries. Devonshire, or clotted cream, is cream which has been removed from milk allowed to heat slowly to a temperature of about 150\u00b0 F. In feeding infants with milk, avoid all danger of infectious germs by sterilization. By this process milk can be kept for many days, and transported if necessary. To prevent acidity of the stomach, add from one to two teaspoonfuls of lime water to each half pint of milk. Lime water may be bought at any druggist's, or easily prepared at home. Lime Water . Pour two quarts boiling water over an inch cube unslacked lime; stir thoroughly and stand over night; in the morning pour off the liquid that is clear, and bottle for use. Keep in a cool place. (Continues...) Excerpted from Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer . Copyright \u00a9 2011 Fannie Merritt Farmer. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.99}], "target_asin": "B0B1QDY1HY"}
{"user_id": "AGF23L2D2RCU6E7BGQG2X752VOWQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0439708702", "title": "Can You See What I See? On a Scary Scary Night: Picture Puzzles to Search and Solve", "author": "Walter Wick", "description": "About the Author Walter Wick is the photographer of the international bestselling I Spy series as well as the author and photographer of the acclaimed Can You See What I See? series. He lives with his wife, Linda, in Miami Beach, Florida.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.96}, {"asin": "067973886X", "title": "Kentucky Straight: Stories", "author": "Chris Offutt", "description": "From Publishers Weekly The stories in this debut collection share more than a setting in poor and sparsely populated Kentucky; they share a certainty and frankness of language that renders them powerful. When a young boy's grandfather presents himself after an extended absence, the boy wonders if he should believe that he's his grandfather: \"Grandfathers whittled a lot and taught their grandsons how to fish. Lije was just old.\" Offutt's visual imagery is equally strong and direct. After a man loses a leg in a construction accident and is taken to the hospital, one of his colleagues carries the severed limb around for a while, unsure of what to do with it. Many of the stories center on the isolation underlying social relationships. A pool-playing young man who longs to escape the grim hog farm that is his home is distracted from his game only by his seductive sister, who drunkenly visits strange men in their vans. At a poker game held in a smokehouse, an eager gambler stakes a bet on the size of his penis, and wins, but ends up feeling humiliated anyway. Offutt, who grew up in the Kentucky Appalachians, offers taut stories filled with strained relationships and unarticulated desires; his characters deceive themselves into believing that their lives are simpler than they are. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \"From the hills and tough as oak, in his best stories Offutt bring to mind D. H. Lawrence, blood-driven and holy. His people have an heroic dignity.\u201d\u2014James Salter \u00a0 \u201cThese are wild, tough, magical stories, often as shocking as real life, and every one a heartbreaker. Chris Offutt plainly loves the English language and knows how to make it do wondrous things.\u201d\u2014Josephine Humphreys From the Inside Flap ten heartbreaking stories that take readers through country that is figuratively and literally unmapped. These stories are set in a nameless community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation. Offutt has received a James Michener Grant and a Kentucky Arts Council Award. About the Author Chris Offutt is an award-winning author and screenwriter. He worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds . His books include Kentucky Straight , The Same River Twice , The Good Brother , Out of the Woods , and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home . His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies. He lives near Oxford, Mississippi. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 15.0}, {"asin": "0545078873", "title": "Can You See What I See? Christmas Read-and-Seek", "author": "Walter Wick", "description": "About the Author Walter Wick is the photographer of the international bestselling I Spy series as well as the author and photographer of the acclaimed Can You See What I See? series. He lives with his wife, Linda, in Miami Beach, Florida.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0764973657", "title": "2017 Edward Gorey Wall Calendar", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Calendars", "Arts"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "1607109018", "title": "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Germophobia", "author": "Bathroom Readers' Institute", "description": "About the Author The Bathroom Readers' Institute is a tight-knit group of loyal and skilled writers, researchers, and editors who have been working as a team for years. The BRI understands the habits of a very special market--Throne Sitters--and devotes itself to providing amazing facts and conversation pieces.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.0}, {"asin": "0679890068", "title": "The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural", "author": "Fred McKissack", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In these stories?\"haunting in both senses of the word,\" said PW's starred review?ghosts exact vengeance for lynchings, and slaves use ancient magic to ensure their freedom; historical backdrops run from the Underground Railroad to 1960s activism. Ages 8-up. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \"...a stellar collection...\"-- School Library Journal , starred review\"These original, short and ghostly stories, which come with brief historical introductions placing them in the American South, are grand for reading aloud.\"-- The New York Times Book Review From the Inside Flap This Newbery Honor- and Coretta Scott King Award-winning book is now available in Knopf Paperback, reformatted to digest size with the complete text and illustrations of the original edition. The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural is a collection of ten spine-tingling tales, all with a foundation in African-American culture and history, from the time of slavery through the civil rights era. A Newbery Honor BookA Coretta Scott King Award WinnerAn ALA Notable Children's BookA Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social StudiesAn IRA Teachers' ChoiceA Hungry Mind Review Children's Book of Distinction From the Back Cover When it is neither day nor night, when shadows lurk and play tricks on the mind, storytelling takes on a spectral cast. In that special half hour of twilight -- the dark-thirty -- you'll feel the spine-tingling horror of these tales: -- When a retired Pullman porter hears a ghostly whistle, he knows it's the last train he'll ever ride.-- Phantom pictures appear on a windowpane -- and expose a man's guilt in a lynching.-- An ex-slave reveals how a straw doll and an ancient chant helped him gain his freedom. Haunting and original, these ten stories are inspired by African American history, from the time of slavery to the civil rights era. With her extraordinary gift for suspense, Patricia C. McKissack has created a heart-stopping, award-winning collection. About the Author Patricia C. McKissack lives in St. Louis, Missouri.Brian Pinkney lives in Brooklyn, New York. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0804115613", "title": "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe", "author": "Fannie Flagg", "description": "Review \"A REAL NOVEL AND A GOOD ONE . . . [FROM] THE BUSY BRAIN OF A BORN STORYTELLER.\"--The New York Times\"IT'S VERY GOOD, IN FACT, JUST WONDERFUL.\"--Los Angeles Times\"COURAGEOUS AND WISE.\"--Houston Chronicle From the Inside Flap Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the now-classic novel of two women in the 1980s: of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women--of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth--who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present--for Evelyn and for us--will never be quite the same again. . . . From the Back Cover \"A REAL NOVEL AND A GOOD ONE . . . [FROM] THE BUSY BRAIN OF A BORN STORYTELLER.\"--The New York Times\"IT'S VERY GOOD, IN FACT, JUST WONDERFUL.\"--Los Angeles Times\"COURAGEOUS AND WISE.\"--Houston Chronicle About the Author Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. Her first novel, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, was a New York Times bestseller as was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Caf\u00e9, which was produced by Universal Pictures as Fried Green Tomatoes. Ms. Flagg's script was nominated for both the Academy and Writers Guild of America Awards and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. Her current acclaimed novel, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, is also a New York Times bestseller. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. THE WEEMS WEEKLY(WHISTLE STOP, ALABAMA'S WEEKLY BULLETIN)June 12, 1929 Cafe Opens The Whistle Stop Cafe opened up last week, right nextdoor to me at the post office, and owners IdgieThreadgoode and Ruth Jamison said business has beengood ever since. Idgie says that for people who knowher not to worry about getting poisoned, she is notcooking. All the cooking is being done by two coloredwomen, Sipsey and Onzell, and the barbecue is beingcooked by Big George, who is Onzell's husband.If there is anybody that has not been there yet, Idgiesays that the breakfast hours are from 5:30-7:30, and youcan get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham andred-eye gravy, and coffee for 25 [cts.].For lunch and supper you can have: fried chicken;pork chops and gravy; catfish; chicken and dumplings;or a barbecue plate; and your choice of threevegetables, biscuits or cornbread, and your drink anddessert--for 35 [cts.].She said the vegetables are: creamed corn; fried greentomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyedpeas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans.And pie for dessert.My other half, Wilbur, and I ate there the other night,and it was so good he says he might not ever eat at homeagain. Ha. Ha. I wish this were true. I spend all my timecooking for the big lug, and still can't keep him filledup.By the way, Idgie says that one of her hens laid an eggwith a ten-dollar bill in it.... Dot Weems ...ROSE TERRACE NURSING HOMEOLD MONTGOMERY HIGHWAYBIRMINGHAM, ALABAMADECEMBER 15, 1985Evelyn Couch had come to Rose Terrace with her husband, Ed,who was visiting his mother, Big Momma, a recent but reluctantarrival. Evelyn had just escaped them both and had gone into thevisitors' lounge in the back, where she could enjoy her candy bar inpeace and quiet. But the moment she sat down, the old womanbeside her began to talk ...\"Now, you ask me the year somebody got married ... who theymarried ... or what the bride's mother wore, and nine times out of tenI can tell you, but for the life of me, I cain't tell you when it was Igot to be so old. It just sorta slipped up on me. The first time Inoticed it was June of this year, when I was in the hospital for mygallbladder, which they still have, or maybe they threw it out bynow ... who knows. That heavyset nurse had just given me anotherone of those Fleet enemas they're so fond of over there when Inoticed what they had on my arm. It was a white band that said:Mrs. Cleo Threadgoode ... an eighty-six-year-old woman.Imagine that!\"When I got back home, I told my friend Mrs. Otis, I guess theonly thing left for us to do is to sit around and get ready to croak....She said she preferred the term pass over to theother side. Poor thing, I didn't have the heart to tell her that nomatter what you call it, we're all gonna croak, just the same ...\"It's funny, when you're a child you think time will never go by,but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you're on the fasttrain to Memphis. I guess life just slips up on everybody. It suredid on me. One day I was a little girl and the next I was a grownwoman, with bosoms and hair on my private parts. I missed thewhole thing. But then, I never was too smart in school or otherwise ...\"Mrs. Otis and I are from Whistle Stop, a little town about tenmiles from here, out by the railroad yards.... She's lived down thestreet from me for the past thirty years or so, and after her husbanddied, her son and daughter-in-law had a fit for her to come and liveat the nursing home, and they asked me to come with her. I toldthem I'd stay with her for a while--she doesn't know it yet, but I'mgoing back home just as soon as she gets settled in good.\"It's not too bad out here. The other day, we all got Christmascorsages to wear on our coats. Mine had little shiny red Christmasballs on it, and Mrs. Otis had a Santy Claus face on hers. But I wassad to give up my kitty, though.\"They won't let you have one here, and I miss her. I've alwayshad a kitty or two, my whole life. I gave her to that little girl nextdoor, the one who's been watering my geraniums. I've got me fourcement pots on the front porch, just full of geraniums.\"My friend Mrs. Otis is only seventy-eight and real sweet, butshe's a nervous kind of person. I had my gallstones in a Mason jarby my bed, and she made me hide them. Said they made herdepressed. Mrs. Otis is just a little bit of somethin', but as you cansee, I'm a big woman. Big bones and all.\"But I never drove a car ... I've been stranded most all my life.Always stayed close to home. Always had to wait for somebody tocome and carry me to the store or to the doctor or down to thechurch. Years ago, you used to be able to take a trolley toBirmingham, but they stopped running a long timeago. The only thing I'd do different if I could go back would be toget myself a driver's license.\"You know, it's funny what you'll miss when you're away fromhome. Now me, I miss the smell of coffee ... and bacon frying in themorning. You cain't smell anything they've got cooking out here,and you cain't get a thing that's fried. Everything here is boiled up,with not a piece of salt on it! I wouldn't give you a plugged nickelfor anything boiled, would you?\"The old lady didn't wait for an answer \".... I used to lovemy crackers and buttermilk, or my buttermilk and cornbread,in the afternoon. I like to smash it all up in my glass and eatit with a spoon, but you cain't eat in public like you can at home... can you? ... And I miss wood.\"My house is nothing but just a little old railroad shack of ahouse, with a living room, bedroom, and a kitchen. But it's wood,with pine walls inside. Just what I like. I don't like a plaster wall.They seem ... oh, I don't know, kinda cold and stark-like.\"I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in aswing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, tohang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked fromthe waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picturefor fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, Idon't think the old men they've got here can see well enough tonotice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, soshe's in the closet with my gallstones.\"I'll be glad to get home.... Of course, my house is a mess. Ihaven't been able to sweep for a while. I went out and threw mybroom at some old, noisy bluejays that were fighting and, wouldn'tyou know it, my broom stuck up there in the tree. I've got to getsomeone to get it down for me when I get back.\"Anyway, the other night, when Mrs. Otis's son took us homefrom the Christmas tea they had at the church, he drove us over therailroad tracks, out by where the cafe used to be, and on up FirstStreet, right past the old Threadgoode place. Of course, most of thehouse is all boarded up and falling down now, but when we camedown the street, the headlights hit thewindows in such a way that, just for a minute, that house looked tome just like it had so many of those nights, some seventy yearsago, all lit up and full of fun and noise. I could hear peoplelaughing, and Essie Rue pounding away at the piano in the parlor;`Buffalo Gal, Won't You Come Out Tonight' or `The Big Rock CandyMountain,' and I could almost see Idgie Threadgoode sitting in thechinaberry tree, howling like a dog every time Essie Rue tried tosing. She always said that Essie Rue could sing about as well as acow could dance. I guess, driving by that house and me being sohomesick made me go back in my mind ...\"I remember it just like it was yesterday, but then I don't thinkthere's anything about the Threadgoode family I don't remember.Good Lord, I should, I've lived right next door to them from the dayI was born, and I married one of the boys.\"There were nine children, and three of the girls, Essie Rue andthe twins, were more or less my own age, so I was always overthere playing and having spend-the-night parties. My own motherdied of consumption when I was four, and when my daddy died, upin Nashville, I just stayed on for good. I guess you might say thespend-the-night party never ended...\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Classics"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "0395300843", "title": "The Tailypo: A Ghost Story (Paul Galdone Classics) (Paul Galdone Nursery Classic)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 7.95}, {"asin": "0140558772", "title": "The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree: An Appalachian Story (Picture Puffin Books)", "author": "Gloria Houston", "description": "About the Author Gloria Houston is an internationally known educator and author of \u00a0several award-winning, best-selling books for young readers.Barbara Cooney illustrated over 100 books for children.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Holidays & Celebrations"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0977021580", "title": "Meet the Sight Words - Flashcards", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "0486401650", "title": "The Story of an African Farm (Dover Thrift Editions)", "author": "Olive Schreiner", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 5.38}, {"asin": "0064431835", "title": "The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything: A Halloween Book for Kids", "author": "Megan Lloyd", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In this just-spooky-enough tale, an old lady puts to good use some animated objects that are trying to frighten her. Ages 3-7. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \u201cA splendiferous Halloween story. A sure-fire winner with gloriously noisy actions for storytelling and just shivery enough.\u201d \u2014 The Horn Book \u201cA great purchase for Halloween or any time of the year.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal (starred review) From the Back Cover Once upon a time, there was a little old lady who was not afraid of anything! But one autumn night, while walking in the woods, the little old lady heard . . . clomp, clomp, shake, shake, clap, clap. And the little old lady who was not afraid of anything had the scare of her life! About the Author Linda Williams is the director of a child development center. The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything is her first book for children. Megan Lloyd has illustrated more than forty books for children, including The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams, Thanksgiving at the Tappletons' by Eileen Spinelli, and The Mixed-Up Rooster by Pamela Duncan Edwards. She lives with her husband on a farm in Pennsylvania, where she raises sheep, chickens, and cows. Some of the rabbits from her vegetable garden have even been kind enough to allow Ms. Lloyd to sketch them as models for this book. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.5}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1590170474", "title": "Jenny and the Cat Club: A Collection of Favorite Stories about Jenny Linsky (Jenny's Cat Club)", "author": "Esther Holden Averill", "description": "Review \"Esther Averill's collection of Jenny Linsky books deserves special mention. ...Told in clear, simple language that will appeal to younger children, all of these stories are delightful and festooned with simple illustrations every few pages that enhance, but never dominate, the melodious text.\" \u2014The San Francisco Chronicle \"Averill colors her stories with abundant flights of clever fancy\u2026 But the nonchalance with which she delivers these makes them as real as her grounding details\u2026Children will find Jenny\u2019s lessons about emotions and behavior helpful and reassuring.\" \u2014Christina Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly \"The grace and charm of these little books are not only for children. In wording, illustration, and design they offer to people of all ages a short interview of pure delight.\" \u2014 The Saturday Review \"There is a realness about Jenny, as well as a demure charm, that gives these annals of her doings a distinction lacking in many a more pretentious effort.\" \u2014 The New Yorker \"In Jenny readers meet the perfect friend\u2014an honest, fun-loving, and loyal playfellow and comrade-in-arms. How good to have Jenny back in print.\u201d \u2014Leonard S. Marcus, author of Storied City: A Children\u2019s Book Walking Tour Guide to New York City From the Inside Flap \"Jenny Linsky, the gallant heroine of these perenially endearing tales, pads through life balancing many of the same emotional ups and downs that crowd every schoolchild\u0092s day. Being a cat, Jenny does it all with enviable aplomb, and with a keen eye for her surroundings--the colorful back alleys and gardens of Greenwich Village. In Jenny readers meet the perfect friend--an honest, fun-loving, and loyal playfellow and comrade-in-arms. How good to have Jenny back in print--and the august Cat Club back in session again!\" --Leonard S. Marcus, author of Storied City: A Children\u0092s Book Walking Tour Guide to New York City About the Author Esther Averill (1902-1992) began her career as a storyteller drawing cartoons for her local newspaper. After graduating from Vassar College in 1923, she moved first to New York City and then to Paris, where she founded her own publishing company. The Domino Press introduced American readers to artists from all over the world, including Feodor Rojankovsky, who later won a Caldecott Award. In 1941, Esther Averill returned to the United States and found a job in the New York Public Library while continuing her work as a publisher. She wrote her first book about the red-scarfed, mild-mannered cat Jenny Linsky in 1944, modeling its heroine on her own shy cat. Esther Averill would eventually write twelve more tales about Miss Linsky and her friends (including the I Can Read Book, The Fire Cat ), each of which was eagerly awaited by children all over the United States (and their parents, too). Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "061577847X", "title": "Do You Love Me?: An Exploration of Our Relationship With God and Others", "author": "Debbie Swindoll", "description": "About the Author Debbie is currently serving as the Executive Director for the Evangelical Center for Spiritual Wisdom. She enjoys the challenge of casting the vision and focusing the mission of ECSW in the midst of overseeing the day-to-day activities. She serves as the producer and teacher of ECSW\u2019s curriculum Life with God: A Journey of Relationship. Additionally, Debbie writes, speaks, and consults on issues of relational theology and serves as a spiritual director for both individuals and group.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 6.75}, {"asin": "B07P4LBXYW", "title": "Hollywood Story The Ultimate Guide To BATMAN 80th anniversary special", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "1590593898", "title": "Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity", "author": "Joel Spolsky", "description": "From the Publisher Announcing a new book from Apress: Read Joel Spolsky's unique and humourous insights. About the Author Joel Spolsky is a globally recognized expert on the software development process. His web site Joel on Software (JoelonSoftware.com) is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over 30 languages. As the founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City, he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams. Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed Visual Basic for Applications as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions. He has written two books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001) and Joel on Software (Apress, 2004). Joel holds a bachelor's of science degree in computer science from Yale University. Before college, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Programming"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.4}], "target_asin": "1590170474"}
{"user_id": "AGWJHDID4MUHJ2BZFJ3PPLU6QAVQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B0B3N2GPP3", "title": "DAD, I WANT TO TELL YOU./DAILY MESSAGES TO DAD/FATHER'S DAY JOURNAL/FATHER'S DAY GIFT/BIRTHDAY GIFT FOR DAD/KEEPSAKE FOR DADS", "author": "Book Lover", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Holidays & Celebrations"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 7.4}, {"asin": "B0B3VN8CM7", "title": "TENNIS PLAYBOOK/FOR COACHES,PLAYERS,AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION TEACHERS/GIFT FOR WOMEN, KIDS AND MEN/GIFT FOR COACHES,PLAYERS,AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION ... TOTAL SCORE, NOTES, DAY, DATE, LOCATION, TIME", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Coaching"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 6.68}, {"asin": "B0C2S7VK74", "title": "CLASS OF 2023 GUESTBOOK/GRADUATION GUESTBOOK/GIFT FOR WOMEN, MEN, TEENS AND KIDS/GIFT FOR GRADUATES/KEEPSAKE MEMORY BOOK/GRADUATION GIFT/FOR ELEMENTARY, HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS", "author": "Book Lover", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 8.25}, {"asin": "B0B3DHMXCQ", "title": "FATHER''S DAY NOTEBOOK/GIFT FOR DADS OF ALL AGES/USE FOR SCHOOL|HOME|OFFICE/FATHER''S DAY JOURNAL/FATHER'S DAY THEMED BOOK/FATHER''S DAY GIFT/NOTEBOOK FOR DADS", "author": "Book Lover", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Holidays & Celebrations"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 7.4}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0B3PGVY5G", "title": "GRADUATION GUEST BOOK/GIFT FOR WOMEN, MEN, TEENS AND KIDS/GIFT FOR GRADUATES/KEEPSAKE MEMORY BOOK/GRADUATION GIFT/INTRODUCTION PAGE/PROMPTS FOR ... ELEMENTARY, HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS", "author": "Book Lover", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Large Print", "Children's Books"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 8.25}, {"asin": "B07773G9YL", "title": "Like a Bat Out of Hell: The Larger Than Life Story of Meat Loaf", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature", "Composers & Musicians"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1571200258", "title": "From Fiber to Fabric: The Essential Guide to Quiltmaking Textiles", "author": "Harriet Hargrave", "description": "From Library Journal This book is based on the author's popular \"Stretching Traditions\" workshop, during which she guides students in manipulating traditional quilt blocks to create striking and innovative variations. A gallery of more than 200 color illustrations demonstrates how \"playing with blocks\" by rotating, staggering, squeezing, blending, and merging elements can resulting in gorgeous quilts that build on their classic origins. Quilting teachers using this work as a resource for quilting classes will appreciate the \"Activities and Extended Learning\" sections at the end of each chapter. Recommended for quilting collections.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review An abundance of books on how to quilt are available, and Hargrave starts an interesting new thread, with this guide to textiles. Written for those already involved in home sewing and quilting, the guide provides extensive details on every aspect of the world of fabric. You'll learn about the history of textiles, how fabrics are manufactured, prepared, and dyed; and how they are printed and finished. Particularly useful for the careful and cost-conscious consumer is the information on the pros and cons of pre-washing and how to test fabric. Indeed, the book offers numerous tests to help you determine the quality and consistency of your purchase, thus avoiding such problems as fabric shrinkage and color changes. You'll also learn about different types of threads, how to avoid stitching problems, and how batting is made, and how to care for your finished quilts. -- From Independent Publisher", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 22.11}, {"asin": "0399165487", "title": "Three-Martini Lunch", "author": "Suzanne Rindell", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In Rindell's second novel (after The Other Typist), the lives of three young people intersect over literature and ambition during the height of the beatnik era in Greenwich Village. Cliff Nelson, the son of a powerful New York editor, wants to be a famous writer but spends less time writing than emulating Hemingway's drinking. Eden Katz, a transplant from Indiana who remakes herself in the style of Holly Golightly, has her sights set on being an editor at a big New York publishing house. After Eden is hired as a secretary to Cliff's father, she and Cliff secretly elope. Meanwhile, the literary ambitions of Miles Tillman, a quiet, gay, black Columbia graduate from Harlem, are repeatedly tested by personal and societal road blocks. After Miles is attacked at a party hosted by Cliff and Eden, he heads to San Francisco, where he finds his father's WWII journal. The journal\u00e2\u0080\u0094along with his relationship with the man who helped him find it\u00e2\u0080\u0094provides Miles with plenty of fodder for writing, but he becomes inexorably tangled in Cliff and Eden's struggles for literary success. With its vivid historical setting and the narrators' distinct voices, this ambitious novel is both an homage to the beatnik generation and its literature, as well as an evocative story of the price one pays for going after one's dreams. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. (Apr.)\\n Review Praise for Three-Martini Lunch \u201cThink of it as the publishing industry\u2019s take on Mad Men : a gripping fictional dispatch from the world of talented writers and editors with big dreams, secrets, and booze bills.\u201d\u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cPacked with narrative surprises... Rindell keeps the suspense strong as we wonder if Eden and Cliff and Miles are fated for success or doomed to failure.\u201d\u2014 CT Post \u201cA rollicking period piece that builds to a magnificent crescendo. With an excellent ear for the patter and cadence of the time, Rindell expertly brings a bygone era to life, though the struggles of her trio feel anything but dated. While blackmail and backstabbing keep things suitably scandalous, Rindell also explores deeper issues of race, sexuality, class and gender in ways that feel vital and timely. The end result is a moving novel that proves provocative in more ways than one.\u201d\u2014 BookPage \u201cSprawling across more than 500 pages, the new novel Three-Martini Lunch captures the excesses as well as the inhibitions of New York City in 1958, from the eponymous meals of the big Manhattan publishing houses, to wild drinking-and-drug bouts in Greenwich Village, to the lingering paranoia of McCarthyism, to the casual racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism among the professional class. \u201d\u2014New York Journal of Books \u201cCompulsively readable melodrama about life in the Manhattan publishing world of the 1950s\u2026 [Rindell] does it with such high style and draped in such alluring, gin-soaked detail that we overcome our critical selves and root like hell for Eden to become an editor, for Miles to accept his love for Joey, and for Cliff to quit being a jerk.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201c[ Three-Martini Lunch ] offers a captivating look into the vibrancy of mid-20th-century New York City through the eyes of three flawed and therefore, fascinating young characters.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal \u201cWith its vivid historical setting and the narrators' distinct voices, this ambitious novel is both an homage to the beatnik generation and its literature, as well as an evocative story of the price one pays for going after one's dreams.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cSuzanne Rindell\u2019s latest novel is a riveting account of three young adults struggling to define themselves against issues of family, race, and sexual identity in the intolerant world of the '50s. Three-Martini Lunch is a gripping study of the ways in which people betray others and themselves in an effort to carve out places for themselves in a competitive and unforgiving world.\u201d\u2014Sara Gruen, New York Times -bestselling author of Water for Elephants and At the Water\u2019s Edge \u201cSet in New York City's Beat Generation, a skillfully crafted story of three young professionals trying to make it big in publishing: This is Three-Martini Lunch .\u00a0 Their choices and sacrifices ripple out from the pages and shake our hearts. A gripping read.\u201d\u2014Sarah McCoy, New York Times -bestselling author of The Mapmaker's Children \u201c Three-Martini Lunch does for publishing what Mad Men did for advertising. It takes you back in time and then proceeds to etch in a whole world, stroke by stroke. This fast-moving novel is rich with incident and wonderfully conflicted characters.\u201d\u2014James Magnuson, author of Famous Writers I Have Known About the Author Suzanne Rindell is the author of two novels, The Other Typist and Three-Martini Lunch . \u00a0Rindell spent most of her life in Northern California (Sacramento and San Francisco), but currently lives in New York City, where she is at work on a third novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***Copyright\u00a0\u00a9 2016 Suzanne Rindell Cliff 1 Greenwich Village in \u201858 was a madman\u2019s paradise.\u00a0 In those days a bunch of us went aroundtogether drinking too much coffee and smoking too much cannabis and talking allthe time about poetry and Nietzsche and bebop.\u00a0I had been running around with the same guys I knew from Columbia \u2013 giveor take a colored jazz musician here or a benny addict there \u2013 and together wewould get good and stoned and ride the subway down to Washington Square.\u00a0 I guess you could say I liked my Columbiabuddies all right.\u00a0 They were swellenough guys but when you really got down to it they were a pack of poserwannabe-poets in tweed and I knew it was only a matter of time before I outgrewthem.\u00a0 Their fathers were bankers andlawyers and once their fascination with poetic manifestos wore off they wouldsettle down and become bankers and lawyers, too, and marry a nicedebutante.\u00a0 I was different from theseguys because even before I went to college I knew I was meant to be an artist,even if I didn\u2019t know just yet exactly what form I wanted my creativity totake.\u00a0 As far as I was concerned academiawas for the birds anyhow, and the more I spent time below 14thStreet, the more I realized that the Village was my true education. When I finally threw in the towel and dropped my last classat Columbia, My Old Man came poking around my apartment in MorningsideHeights.\u00a0 He ahemmed quietly to himself and fingered the waxy leaves of theplants in the window and finally sat with his rump covering a water-stain on ahand-me-down Louis XVI sofa my great-aunt had deemed too ugly to keep in herown apartment.\u00a0 Together we drank acouple of fingers of bourbon neat, and then he shook my hand in a dignified wayand informed me the best lesson he could teach me at this point in my life was self-reliance .\u00a0 His plan mainly involved cutting me off fromthe family fortune and making long speeches on the superior quality of earned pleasures . Once My Old Man broke the news about how I was going tohave to pave my own road it was all over pretty quickly after that.\u00a0 I threw a couple of loud parties and didn\u2019tpay my rent and then the landlord had me out lickety-split and I had to golooking for a new place. Which is how, as I entered into mystudy of the relative value of earned pleasures, I found myself renting aone-room studio in the Village with no hot water and a toilet down thehall.\u00a0 The lid was missing on the tank ofthat toilet and I remember the worst thing I ever did to my fellow hall-mateswas to get sick after coming home drunk one night and mistake the open tank forthe open bowl.\u00a0 But even without mywhiskey-induced embellishments the building was a dump.\u00a0 It was a pretty crummy apartment and when itrained the paint on the walls bubbled something awful, but I liked being nearthe basement caf\u00e9s where people were passionate about trying out new thingswith the spoken word, which was still pretty exciting to me at the time.\u00a0 In those days you could walk the streets allaround Washington Square and plunge down a narrow stairway here and there tofind a room painted all black with red light bulbs screwed into the fixturesand there\u2019d be someone standing in front of a crowd telling America to go tohell or maybe acting out the birth of a sacred cow in India.\u00a0 It was all kind of bananas and you were neversure what you were going to see, but after a while you started to come acrossthe same people mostly. I had seen Miles, Swish, Bobby, and Pal around theVillage, of course, and they had seen me, too.\u00a0We were friendly enough with one another, all of us being artytypes.\u00a0 I knew their faces and I knewtheir names but the night I really entered the picture I was in such a sorrystate it was a real act of mercy on their part.\u00a0I was slated to read my poems for the first time ever at a place calledThe Sweet Spot. Earlier that afternoon I had been looking over my pages when itsuddenly struck me they were no good.\u00a0The discovery had me seized me up with fear until my whole body wasparalyzed and I sensed I was rank with the stench of my impending failure.\u00a0 The poems were bad and that was the truth ofit.\u00a0 My solution was whiskey, and by sixo\u2019clock I had managed to put down half a bottle before the poems finallystarted to look better than they had at three p.m.\u00a0 In my foolish state I decided finishing theother half of the bottle would be the key to gaining at least a few moreincrements of poetic improvement.\u00a0 By thetime I took the stage I could barely hold myself upright.\u00a0 Somehow I managed to get off two poems\u2026 moreor less\u2026 before I heard the wooden stool next to me clatter to the ground as itfell over and I felt the cold sticky black-painted floor rise up like aswelling wave to my hip and shoulder and, seconds later, my face. When I came to I was lying on a couch in Swish\u2019s apartmentwith the whole gang sitting around the kitchen table talking in loud voicesabout Charlie Parker while a seminal record of his spun on a turntable near myhead.\u00a0 After a few minutes Pal came overand handed me a cool washcloth for my bruised face.\u00a0 Then Bobby whistled and commented that I had\u201c some kind of madman style\u201d in anadmiring tone of voice that made me think perhaps the two poems I couldremember getting off hadn\u2019t been so bad after all and maybe it was even truethat in getting wasted I had actually made the truest choice an artist couldmake, like Van Gogh and his absinthe.\u00a0 Icould see they were all deciding whether I was a hack or a genius and the factthey might be open to the second possibility being true fortified me and filledme with a kind of dopey pride.\u00a0 ThenSwish boiled some coffee on the stove and brought it over to me.\u00a0 He told me his religion was coffee and hecouldn\u2019t abide his guests adding milk or sugar and so I shouldn\u2019t ever expecthim to offer any of that stuff.\u00a0 Thecoffee was so thick you could have set a spoon in the center of the mug and itwould\u2019ve stood up straight and never touched the sides.\u00a0 Later when I learned more about Swish he toldme that was how you made it when you were on the road and once you\u2019d had yourcoffee like that everything else tasted like water.\u00a0 I guess some of Swish\u2019s romantic passionabout cowboy coffee wore off on me, because after that night I sneered atanything someone brought me that happened to have a creamy shade or sweetenedtaste. Swish\u2019s given name was Stewart and he was nicknamed Swishbecause he was always in a hurry.\u00a0 He wasone of those wiry, nervous guys with energy to spare.\u00a0\u00a0 After I\u2019d taken a few sips of Swish\u2019s coffeeand managed to work my forehead over some more with the washcloth I was feelingwell enough to join them at the kitchen table and dive into the talk aboutDizzy Gilespie and Charlie Parker, and all of a sudden it was like I had alwayshad a seat at that table and had just never known it.\u00a0 The frenzied tempo of their chatter wascontagious.\u00a0 They conversed likemusicians improvising jazz and I hoped some of this would find its way into mywriting.\u00a0 Between the five of us wefinished off a pot of coffee and two packs of cigarettes and fourteen bottlesof beer and shared the dim awareness that a small but sturdy union had beenformed. Swish regaled us with his adventures riding the railsacross America like a hobo and about the year he\u2019d spent in the MerchantMarines.\u00a0 Even though he\u2019d never finishedhigh school he had still managed to feed his mind all sorts of good solid stuffand in talking to Swish I realized all those guys at Columbia who thought theyhad the edge over you because they went to Exeter or Andover were all prettymuch full of horseshit because here was Swish and he was better-read thananybody and his education had been entirely loaned out to him from the publiclibrary for no money at all.\u00a0 There was amoment when I worried that maybe I\u2019d offended Swish because I said something toset him off and he went on to give a big argumentative lecture all about JohnLocke and Mikhail Bakunin and about Thoreau.\u00a0But my worries about having offended him were unfounded because I laterrealized Swish was one of those guys with a naturally combative disposition. After he\u2019d finished harping on old Mikhail\u2019s theoriesabout anarchy I asked Swish what he did for a living now his hobo days wereover. \u201cBicycle messenger,\u201d he replied.\u00a0 \u201cMiles here is, too.\u201d I regarded Miles, who seemed like an odd fit for thisgroup.\u00a0 He was a slender,athletic-looking Negro with sharp cheekbones that would\u2019ve made him appearhaughty if they had not been offset by his brooding eyes.\u00a0 He wore the kind of horn-rimmed glasses thatwere popular all over the Village just then.\u00a0He nodded but didn\u2019t comment further and I gathered that being a bicyclemessenger wasn\u2019t his primary passion and figured him for a jazz musician.\u00a0 He had the name and the look for it, afterall. Anyway, the topic of conversation turned to me and what myambitions were and sitting there at the table I already felt so comfortable andeverything seemed so familiar I found myself confessing to the fact I\u2019drecently come to the conclusion that I\u2019d decided to become a writer.\u00a0 Only problem was, ever since I\u2019d arrived atthis decision, I\u2019d been having a spell of writer\u2019s block. \u201cI\u2019ll tell you what you do,\u201d Swish said, his wiry bodytensing up with conviction. \u201cYou hop on the next boxcar and ride until you\u2019refull up with so many ideas you feel your fingers twitching in your sleep.\u201d \u201cWell, I for one think a good old-fashioned roll in thehay would do the trick,\u201d Bobby chimed in.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s important to keep the juices flowing.\u201d \u201cSays the fella who\u2019s so busy balling two girls at once hecan\u2019t make it to any of his auditions,\u201d said Swish.\u00a0 I asked them what they meant.\u00a0 It turned out Bobby wanted to be an actor buthis great obstacle in achieving this ambition was his overwhelming beauty.\u00a0 Under ordinary circumstances this wouldn\u2019t bea problem for an actor but in Bobby\u2019s case it kept him far too busy to getonstage much.\u00a0 Wherever he wentloud-shrieking girls and soft-spoken men alike tried their best to bed him andbecause Bobby liked to make everyone happy he went along with all of it and wasloath to turn anyone down.\u00a0 He waspresently keeping two girls in particular happy.\u00a0 One girl lived with a roommate over on MortonStreet and the other lived in the Albert Hotel on East 11th and this left Bobbyconstantly hustling from one side of the Village to the other. Bobby\u2019s recommendation that I ought to ball a girl (or twoor three) to get over my writer\u2019s block appeared to disturb Pal\u2019s sense ofchivalry and make him shy: He shifted in his chair and set about studying thelabel on his beer.\u00a0 He was by far thequietest and most difficult guy to read of the pack.\u00a0 Later I found out Pal\u2019s real name was Eugeneand he was named after the town in Oregon where he was born and as far as firstimpressions go he often struck people as something of a gentle giant.\u00a0 He was a couple of inches over six feet andhad the sleepy blue eyes of a child just woken up from a nap and when he readpoetry or even when he just spoke his voice was always full of a kind ofreverence that made you think he was paying closer attention to the world thanyou were. \u201cHow \u2018bout it, Miles?\u201d Swish said, continuing theconversation.\u00a0 \u201cWhat do you think helpswith writer\u2019s block?\u201d I didn\u2019t know why Swish had directed the question toMiles.\u00a0 It unnerved me that after Imentioned dropping out of Columbia, Bobby had let it slip that Miles was due tograduate from that very institution come June.\u00a0The lenses of Miles\u2019s glasses flashed white at us as he looked up insurprise. \u201cWell,\u201d he said, considering carefully, \u201cI suppose readingalways helps.\u00a0 They say in order to writeanything good, you ought to read much more than you write.\u201d \u201cOh, I don\u2019t know about all that,\u201d I said.\u00a0 I was suddenly in an ornery, contrarymood.\u00a0 The way he had spoken withauthority on the subject antagonized me somehow.\u00a0 \u201cThe most important thing a writer\u2019s gotta dois stay true to his own ideas and write.\u00a0I don\u2019t read other people\u2019s books when I try to write, I just read myown stuff over and over and I think that\u2019s the way the real heavyweight authorsdo it.\u201d Miles didn\u2019t reply to this except to tighten his mouth andnod.\u00a0 It was a polite nod and I sensedthere was a difference of opinion behind it and I was suddenly annoyed. \u201cAnyway, fellas, I think I\u2019ve given you the wrong ideaabout me because I\u2019m not really all that stuck,\u201d I said, deciding it was timefor a change of topic.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ve writtenpiles and piles of stuff and I\u2019m always getting new ideas.\u201d This was mostly true, and the more I thought about it nowthe more I began to think perhaps it wasn\u2019t writer\u2019s block at all but more acase of my energies needing to build up in order to reach a kind of criticalmass.\u00a0 Back then everyone in theneighborhood was talking about a certain famous hipster who had written anentire novel in three weeks on nothing but coffee and bennies and about how hehad let it build up until it had just come pouring out of him and about how theresult had been published by an actual publisher and I thought maybe that washow it might work for me, too.\u00a0 If I justsoaked up the nervous energy of my generation and let it accumulate inside meuntil it spilled over the top I was sure eventually a great flood wouldcome.\u00a0 Swish and Bobby and Pal all seemedlike part of this process and I was very glad they had inducted me into thegroup.\u00a0 Even Miles was all right in theway that a rival can push you to do better work.\u00a0 Perhaps it was the mixture of the whiskey andcoffee and beer and bennies but I suddenly had that high feeling you get whenyou sense you are in the middle of some kind of important nerve center.\u00a0 I closed my eyes and felt the pulse of theVillage thundering through my veins and all at once I was very confident aboutall I was destined to accomplish. 2 Looking back on it now, I see that New York in the 50\u2019smade for a unique scene.\u00a0 If you lived inManhattan during that time you experienced the uniqueness in the colors andflavors of the city that were more defined and more distinct from one anotherthan they were in other cities or other times.\u00a0If you ask me, I think it was the war that had made things thisway.\u00a0 All the energy of the war effortwas now poured into the manufacture of neon signs, shiny chrome bumpers, brightplastic things and that meant all of a sudden there was a violent shade ofFormica to match every desire.\u00a0 All of itwas for sale and people had lots of dough to spend and to top it off the atombomb was constantly hovering in the back of all our minds, its bright whiteflash and the shadow of its mushroom cloud casting a kind of imaginary yeturgent light over everything that surrounded us. Shortly after the fellas revived me at Swish\u2019s apartment,I fell in regularly with the gang and soon enough I found out Miles was awriter, too.\u00a0 I should\u2019ve known all alongbecause everyone who was young and hip and living in New York at that time allwanted to do the same thing and that was to try and become a writer.\u00a0 Years later they would want to become folkmusicians or else potters who threw odd-shaped clay vases but in \u201958 everyonestill wanted to be a writer and in particular they wanted to write somethingtruer and purer than everything that had come before. There were a lot of different opinions as to what it tookto make yourself a good writer.\u00a0 Thepeople in the city were always looking to get out and go West and the peopleout West were always looking to get into the city.\u00a0 Everybody felt like they were on the outsidelooking in all the time when really it was just that the hipster scene tendedto turn everything inside out and the whole idea was that we were all outsiderstogether. I had always scribbled here and there but I didn\u2019t try towrite in earnest until I left Columbia and got cut off and moved to the Villageand this was maybe a little ironic because My Old Man was an editor at a bigpublishing house.\u00a0 He had wanted to be awriter himself but had gone a different way with that and had become an editorinstead, although he never said it that way to people who came for dinner.\u00a0 When people came over for dinner he mostlyjust told jokes about writers.\u00a0 It turnsout there are lots of jokes you can tell about writers. I had a lot of funny feelings about My Old Man.\u00a0 On the one hand, there was some pretty lousybusiness he\u2019d gotten into in Brooklyn that he didn\u2019t think I knew about.\u00a0 But on the other hand he was one of thoselarger-than-life types you can\u2019t help but look up to in spite of yourself.\u00a0 He had a magnetic personality.\u00a0 Back in those days My Old Man was king ofwhat they called the three-martini lunch.\u00a0\u00a0This meant that in dimly lit steakhouses all over Manhattan my fathermade bold, impetuous deals over gin and oysters.\u00a0 That was how it was done.\u00a0 Publishing was a place for men with ferocityand an appetite for life.\u00a0 Sure, the shy,tweedy types survived in the business all right but it was the garrulous bon vivants who really thrived and lefttheir mark on the world.\u00a0 Lunches werelong, expense accounts were generous, and the martinis often fueled tremendousquantities of flattery and praise.\u00a0 Ofcourse all that booze fueled injuries too and the workday wasn\u2019t really overuntil someone had been insulted by Norman Mailer or pulled out the old boxinggloves in one way or another. I was passionate about being a writer and My Old Man waspassionate about being an editor and you would think between the two of us this would make for a bang-upcombination, but my big problem was that My Old Man and I had our issues and Ihadn\u2019t exactly told him about my latest ambitions.\u00a0 He\u2019d always expressed disappointment over mylackluster performance in school and now that I\u2019d dropped out was spending allmy time in the Village he thought I was a jazz-crazed drunkard.\u00a0 His idea of good jazz was Glenn Miller and itwas his personal belief that if you listened to any other kind you were adope-fiend of some sort. But whether or not My Old Man ever helped me out, I wasdetermined to make it as a writer.\u00a0 Infact, sometimes it was more satisfying to think about becoming a writer withoutMy Old Man even knowing.\u00a0 I\u2019d written acouple of short stories that, in my eyes, were very good and it was onlylogical that in time I would write a novel and that would be good, too.\u00a0 I thought a lot about what it would be likeonce I made it, the swell reviews I would get in the Times and the Herald Tribune aboutmy novel, the awards I\u2019d probably win, and how all the newspaper men would wantto interview me over martinis at the 21 Club.\u00a0But the problem with this is sometimes I got so caught up in my headwriting imaginary drafts of the good reviews I was bound to receive it made itdifficult to write the actual novel. On days when I was having trouble punching the typewriterI began to find little errands to run in the evenings that usually involved goingdown to the caf\u00e9s in order to tell Swish and Bobby and Pal something importantI had discovered that day about writing and being and existence.\u00a0 After I had delivered this message of courseit was necessary to stay and enjoy a beer together and toast the fact we hadbeen born to be philosophers and therefore understood what it was to really be .\u00a0Sometimes Miles was there and sometimes he was not and I didn\u2019t alwaysnotice the difference because he was so reserved and only hung around our groupin a peripheral way. But Miles was there one afternoon when I went to a caf\u00e9 to write.\u00a0 I had decided my crummy studio apartment waspartly to blame for my writer\u2019s block and that I ought to try writing in acaf\u00e9.\u00a0 After all, Hemingway had writtenin caf\u00e9s when he was just starting out in Paris and if that method had workedfor Hemingway then I supposed it was good enough for me.\u00a0 The caf\u00e9 I happened to choose was verycrowded that day and the tables were all taken when I got there but I spiedMiles at a cozy little table in the far corner of the room and just as Ispotted him he looked up and saw me too. \u201cMiserable day outside,\u201d I said, referring to therain. \u201cYes.\u201d Miles and I had never spent time together on our own andnaturally now that were alone there was an awkwardness between us and it dawnedon both of us how little we truly knew each other.\u00a0 I squinted at the items on the table in anattempt to surmise what he had been up to before I had come in. \u201cAre you writing something too?\u201d I asked, seeing thenotebook and the telltale ink stain on his thumb and forefinger. \u201cI\u2019m only fooling around,\u201d Miles answered, but I couldtell this was a lie because peeking out of his notebook were a few typewrittenpages, which meant whatever Miles was working on he cared about enough to takethe trouble to type it up. \u201cI see you own a typewriter,\u201d I said, pointing to thepages. \u201cThe library does,\u201d he said, looking embarrassed.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t tell whether the embarrassment wasdue to the fact he was too poor to own a typewriter or because it was obvioushe took his writing more seriously than he\u2019d wanted to let on. \u201cThey charge you for that?\u201d I asked, trying to makeconversation. He nodded.\u00a0 \u201cTencents a half hour.\u00a0 It\u2019s not toobad.\u00a0 I\u2019ve taught myself to type at a fairlygood speed now.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s swell,\u201d I said.\u00a0\u201cSay, do you mind if I settle in here and do a little scribbling of myown?\u201d I asked, finally getting to my point. \u201cOf course not,\u201d Miles said, pushing a coffee mug and somepapers out of the way on the table.\u00a0 Hehad a very polite, formal way about him and it was difficult to tell whether hetruly minded.\u00a0 But whether he did or notdidn\u2019t matter because after all he\u2019d said yes and I needed to write and therereally weren\u2019t any other tables and I wasn\u2019t going to go look for another caf\u00e9because by then it was really coming down cats and dogs outside.\u00a0 I pulled out my composition book and fountainpen and set to work staring at the thin blue lines that ran across the whitepaper.\u00a0 About ten or so minutes passedand I had made a very good study of the blank page.\u00a0 Then my nose started to itch and my kneebegan to bounce under the table.\u00a0 Ilooked up at Miles and watched him scrawling frantically in his notebook.\u00a0 I was curious what it was that had gotten himworked up in a torrent like that.\u00a0 He wasso absorbed in his writing he didn\u2019t notice me staring at him.\u00a0 Finally, I asked him what he was working on.\u00a0 The first time I asked he did not hear me soI cleared my throat and asked again, more loudly.\u00a0 He jumped as if I\u2019d woken him out of a tranceand blinked at me. \u201cIt\u2019s a short story, I suppose\u2026\u201d he said.\u00a0 This was news to me because, like I said,nobody had bothered to tell me Miles wrote anything at all, let alonefiction.\u00a0 Between his attending Columbiaand writing, I was beginning to feel a little unsettled by all the things wehad in common.\u00a0 Something about Miles wasmaking me itchy around the collar. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s any good,\u201d he said. \u201cSay, why don\u2019t you let me have a look at it?\u201d I replied,catching him off guard and reaching for the notebook before he could put up afight.\u00a0 \u201cI know good fiction.\u00a0 My Old Man is an editor at Bonwright.\u201d\u00a0 His eyes widened at this and I knew it hadtemporarily shut him up.\u00a0 I flipped thenotebook open and moved my eyes over the tidy cursive on the page. It wasn\u2019t terrible.\u00a0Miles was a decent enough writer, all right \u2013 save for the fact that hewrote in a careful, old-fashioned voice, and that was probably on account ofhim being an educated Negro.\u00a0 All theeducated Negroes I\u2019d ever known were always a little stiff and took theireducations a little too seriously in my opinion.\u00a0 But all and all, I could see he had a waywith words and it wasn\u2019t half-bad. \u00a0I hadto admit I liked the story okay.\u00a0 It wasabout two boys on the warfront who discover they\u2019re half-brothers but they\u2019vealways been competitors and don\u2019t like each other.\u00a0 When they get into a real bad scrape one hasthe option to let the other die and be off the hook for the death, but hehesitates. \u201cHow are you going to end it?\u201d I said, coming to the placewhere the cursive trailed off.\u00a0 Milesshrugged. \u201cMaybe just like that,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cIt was the hesitation that interestedme.\u201d I shook my head.\u00a0\u201cHe should hesitate all right,\u201d I said.\u00a0\u201cAnd decide against his better sense to save his brother.\u00a0 But then when he does, the other fellowshoots him with the dead German\u2019s gun, like the sucker he is.\u201d\u00a0 Miles looked at me with raised eyebrows.\u00a0 I could see my suggestion was unexpected. \u201cI suppose that would\u2026 make quite a statement.\u201d \u201cExactly,\u201d I said, feeling magnanimous for loaning out mysuperior creativity, \u201cIt\u2019s not worth writing if it doesn\u2019t make astatement.\u201d\u00a0 Miles looked at me and Icould already see he wasn\u2019t going to write it the way I suggested, which was amistake.\u00a0 It was a good twist and I hadmade a nice gift out of it for him and it was awfully annoying that he wasn\u2019tgoing to take the wonderful gift I had just bestowed upon him. \u201cWell, anyway,\u201d I said, \u201csuit yourself with theending.\u201d I handed the journal back to him and attempted to get backto work.\u00a0 Miles sat there a momentlooking at me with a wary expression on his face.\u00a0 Then he turned back to his own work.\u00a0 We were silent together and all at once thewords started coming and I found I could write and for several minutes the onlysound you could hear at our table came from the scratching of our duelingfountain pens. But it was no good.\u00a0I had helped Miles along with his plot and now I couldn\u2019t get it out ofmy head.\u00a0 I was off and running andwriting something but soon enough I realized I was just writing his story allover again, but better.\u00a0 The thing thatreally got to me as I wrote was that it really ought to have been my story in the first place.\u00a0 You shouldalways write what you know and I was something of an authority on unwantedrelatives, but of course Miles couldn\u2019t know that.\u00a0 Now that he had started writing that story Icouldn\u2019t go and write anything similar, even if he was going to botch the ending. \u201cHow\u2019d you come up with the idea for that story anyway?\u201d Iasked, feeling irritated that I hadn\u2019t thought of it first.\u00a0 Miles looked up. \u201cI was trying to remember some of my father\u2019s storiesabout the Battle of the Marne; that\u2019s why I picked the setting.\u00a0 And the idea of brothers and all the rest ofit\u2026\u201d he shrugged, \u201c\u2026just came out of my imagination.\u00a0 Like I said, I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s any good.\u00a0 I usually can\u2019t tell about my own work untilseveral drafts and a few months later.\u201d \u201cWell, it has potential.\u00a0I wouldn\u2019t take it too hard,\u201d I said. \u201cYou strike me as a guy who workspretty hard at it, and that\u2019s what counts, right?\u201d Miles looked at me, not saying anything. \u201cSay, I\u2019m thirsty,\u201d I said.\u00a0 \u201cWhy don\u2019t we order up something strongerthan coffee?\u201d After a brief bout of resistance he could see I wasn\u2019tgoing to take no for an answer.\u00a0 We spentthe afternoon drinking and talking about the Pulitzer and the Nobel and thedifferences between French writers and Russian writers and to tell the truth Ihad a decent enough time talking to Miles.\u00a0I decided it would be fine if we ran into each other on our own again,so long as I didn\u2019t have to sit across from him as he scribbled away in hisnotebook, writing the kind of stories I should\u2019ve been writing but with all the wrong endings. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 29.39}], "target_asin": "B0B3PGVY5G"}
{"user_id": "AHK3UD3H3HPVPFUHKS4CHV35WIYA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0374283354", "title": "A Very Long Engagement", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 16.44}, {"asin": "0230239862", "title": "War and Revolution in Russia, 1914-22: The Collapse of Tsarism and the Establishment of Soviet Power (European History in Perspective)", "author": "Christopher Read", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 45.0}, {"asin": "0691118450", "title": "How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton Paperbacks)", "author": "Steven G. Marks", "description": "Review \"[Marks] examines the way that Russian ideas, social models and political programs have spread across the wider world. . . . The coverage is broad: from Marx to Marks, so to speak. The book is clear, often understated and always unpretentious; it contains several refreshingly sane and lucid accounts of complex and emotive subjects. It also managed not to be bland.\" ---Stephen Lovell, Times Literary Supplement \"A valuable, accessible, and comprehensive guide. . . . A rich example of the capacity of intellectual history to carry us across borders and over centuries. . . . It is highly recommended for a broad readership.\" ---Anne Gorsuch, History Today \"A scholarly and thought-provoking book.\" \u2015 Choice \"A number of books have explored the West's long and controversial influence on Russia. Few, however, have explored the reverse flow of ideas, and none better than this concise, graceful, amazingly wide-ranging book.\" ---Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs \"An extraordinarily wide-ranging and exhaustively researched study of Russia's influence on the world from the 1880s to the present. . . . [A] fascinating, complex, and rich text that makes compelling arguments about Russia's influence upon the world. This work should be of interest not only to many Russianists, but also to a more general audience with little or no background in Russia.\" ---Rebecca Epstein Matveyev, Slavic and East European Journal \"This is an imaginative, synthetic, and stimulating exploration of one of the major phenomena of our world, the Russian contribution to the revolt against the modern west. . . . [It] is a marvelous introduction to that antimodern revolution for the general reader, the student, and even the specialist.\" ---Robert C. Williams, Slavic Review Review \"Deep, perceptive, and thought provoking, this is a work of breathtaking sweep and imagination, massive learning, and unflagging interest. It is also beautifully written\u2015flowing and full of intellectual excitement.\" \u2015Richard Stites, Georgetown University \"This is an astonishingly broad and ambitious project, one that at first seems impossible but then slowly grows on the reader\u2015in plausibility, synthesizing intelligence, and explanatory power. Marks seems to know the contours of everything relating to Russian ideas, their politics as well as their expression through literature, visual art, dance, theater, both in domestic contexts and around the world. His thesis will cause a stir. But Russian culture has rarely appeared as monumentally integrated and influential as within the pages of this book.\" \u2015Caryl Emerson, Princeton University From the Back Cover \"Deep, perceptive, and thought provoking, this is a work of breathtaking sweep and imagination, massive learning, and unflagging interest. It is also beautifully written--flowing and full of intellectual excitement.\" --Richard Stites, Georgetown University \"This is an astonishingly broad and ambitious project, one that at first seems impossible but then slowly grows on the reader--in plausibility, synthesizing intelligence, and explanatory power. Marks seems to know the contours of everything relating to Russian ideas, their politics as well as their expression through literature, visual art, dance, theater, both in domestic contexts and around the world. His thesis will cause a stir. But Russian culture has rarely appeared as monumentally integrated and influential as within the pages of this book.\" --Caryl Emerson, Princeton University About the Author Steven G. Marks is Professor of History at Clemson University and the author of Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850 -1917 . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Russia"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 39.94}, {"asin": "B0083D28IS", "title": "Crows of the Desert: The Memoirs of Levon Yotnakhparian", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 19.95}, {"asin": "1569000255", "title": "Occupational Therapy: The First 30 Years 1900 to 1930", "author": "Virginia Anne Metaxas Quiroga", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Allied Health Professions"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 71.95}, {"asin": "0748665781", "title": "Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914-1939", "author": "Y\u00fccel Yanikda\u011f", "description": "Review 'Weaved together in a comprehensive work with inquisitive reasoning and clever writing style, [ Healing the Nation ] deserves a warm welcome to historiography.' -- Sanem G\u00fcven\u00e7 Salg\u0131rl\u0131, Insight Turkey 'This is a fascinating study, readable, always interesting, well written and set out and based on extensive primary research in the Ottoman archives, in the Public Record Office, in the US national archives, in the camp newspapers and drawing on a host of other material. As a study of the health consequences of war, Healing the Nation should appeal to doctors and psychiatrists as well as students of late Ottoman and early republican Turkish history.' -- Jeremy Salt, Bilkent University, Social History of Medicine, vol 27, no 3 'Yanikdag (Univ. of Richmond) has written a fascinating book about Ottoman prisoners of war during WW I and the development of the Republic of Turkey and Turkish identity...A very valuable study for all interested in military and medical history as well as the development of nation-states.' -- R. W. Zens Le Moyne College, Choice 'The original sources and new insights offered by Healing the Nation gives scholars of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the modern Middle East much to consider. Few, if any, works preceding this study have considered the history and legacy of wartime internment, thus adding considerably to the breadth of our understanding of World War I.' -- Ryan Gingeras, The American Historical Review Review This highly original and impeccably researched study helps us understand not only the workings of the Ottoman military establishment but also the state formation in the late Ottoman Empire and the influence of German theories of medicine, psychiatry and eugenics in this complex process. -- M. \u015e\u00fckr\u00fc Hanio\u011flu, Princeton University From the Back Cover \u2018This highly original and impeccably researched study helps us understand not only the workings of the Ottoman military establishment but also the state formation in the late Ottoman Empire and the influence of German theories of medicine, psychiatry and eugenics in this complex process.\u2019 M. \u015e\u00fckr\u00fc Hanio\u011flu, Garrett Professor in Foreign Affairs, Near Eastern Studies Department, Princeton University Unique sources reveal how the Great War and its psychological fallout influenced the construction of Turkish identity and nationalism What did Ottoman prisoners of war imprisoned in Russia and Egypt during the Great War understand of nation, culture and Islam? And what role did science play in the imagined future of the nation for the Ottoman-Turkish psychiatrists who diagnosed prisoners following post-war repatriation? Doctors\u2019 interpretation of prisoners\u2019 health issues led to far-reaching questions about the relationship between the prisoners\u2019 physical bodies and mental states on the one hand, and the body politic and collective mentality of the Turkish Republic during the interwar period, on the other. During the interwar years, when the military\u2019s vigour was still taken to be a reflection of the nation's health, doctors projected the worrisome picture of the shattered nerves of both prisoner and non-prisoner alike onto the nation at large. The Great War revealed the poor health of the nation and gave medical men the chance to regenerate it through eugenics. Just as officer prisoners in the camps excluded ignorant peasants from their discursive construction of the nation, the psychiatrists disqualified those seen to threaten the nation\u2019s body. Key Features \u2022 Uses previously untapped sources to reveal a new story of prisoners, medicine and nationalism \u2022 Broadens the discussion of nationalism to include both ideological and biological factors \u2022 Explores the social, demographic, psychological and medical impact of the Great War on the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey Y\u00fccel Yan\u0131kda\u011f is Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond. Cover image: Vaveyla, Prisoner of War newspaper masthead, hand-drawn image, Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, image courtesy of Library of the Turkish Parliament (TBMM), Ankara. The Campaign in Mesopotamia during the First World War: a group of Turkish prisoners captured during the action of Tuz Khurmatli, Varges Ariel, catalogue number: Q 24659 \u00a9 Imperial War Museum. Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com About the Author Y\u00fccel Yan\u0131kda\u011f is Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond. Born in Istanbul, he received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. A Fulbright-Hays scholar, his research interests include: social and cultural history of the Great War, social history of medicine, and Turkish nationalism. His articles have appeared in Journal of Contemporary History, Middle Eastern Studies, and The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Mediterranean. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Humanities"], "average_rating": 3.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0226482537", "title": "War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America", "author": "Beth Linker", "description": "Review \u201cBeth Linker has deftly and expertly woven together numerous historical strands to produce an important book deserving of a wide readership. Basing her work on a review of official government documents, popular literature, professional medical and military journals, and, where possible, the voices of soldier-patients themselves, Linker presents a thoughtful and balanced account of the origin, development, and legacies of army rehabilitation policies, practices, and programs. Because of its broad historical scope coupled with its probing scholarly analysis, War\u2019s Waste ought to be rewarding for medical and military historians; historians of disability studies, gender, and technology; health and welfare policy analysts; American Studies scholars (especially those focused on the Progressive Era); and physical rehabilitation specialists\u2014along with orthopedic surgeons and physiatrists who may be interested in the vocational roots of their respective professions.\u201d -- J. T. H. Connor \u2015 Isis \u201cIn an erudite and gracefully written first book entitled War\u2019s Waste , Beth Linker explores the cultural, political, and medical meanings ascribed to the rehabilitation of disabled soldiers and veterans during the World War I era. . . . Deftly wielding insights from the history of medicine, gender analysis, and historical institutionalism . . . War\u2019s Waste will be standard reading for those interested in many different fields of historical analysis: modern medicine, the Progressive Era, disability, and the veterans\u2019 welfare system. At a time when thousands of American veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan struggle with disability and rehabilitation, the cultural, political, and institutional foundations of their care\u2014and its inadequacies\u2014deserve this special attention.\u201d -- Stephen R. Ortiz \u2015 Journal of American History \u201c War\u2019s Waste is a well researched and deeply rewarding history of soldiers\u2019 rehabilitation, noteworthy for both the clarity of the author\u2019s prose and the persuasiveness of her arguments. . . . Beth Linker has written an invaluable and all too timely study, one that will interest historians of medicine, policy historians and disability scholars.\u201d -- John M. Kinder, Oklahoma State University \u2015 Social History of Medicine \u201cReading Beth Linker\u2019s excellent book on rehabilitation of American soldiers disabled in World War I is a thrilling experience.\u201d -- Leo van Bergen \u2015 Medicine, Conflict, and Survival \u201cThis pathbreaking study opens up exciting avenues for future research.\u201d -- Jennifer D. Keene, Chapman University \u2015 American Historical Review \u201cRecommended.\u201d -- R. D. Arcari, University of Connecticut School of Medicine \u2015 Choice \u201c[A] compelling study. . . . War\u2019s Waste offers important insights into the developments of the ethic of rehabilitation in the Progressive Era and would be useful to any historian of the period.\u201d -- Kathleen Brian \u2015 H-Net \u201cA useful addition to the work undertaken in the study of disability as it relates to the First World War. Linker\u2019s book is timely. It not only reveals a little-known area of history and war, but also highlights historical continuities surrounding concerns over the levels of support of those who were sent away to fight and returned maimed.\u201d -- Julie Anderson, University of Kent \u2015 Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era \u201c War\u2019s Waste is a fine book. Linker has laid down her marker as an important scholar of keen ability and judgment in the field of medical history.\u201d -- Christine Hallett, University of Manchester \u2015 Nursing History Review \u201cThe rich and important history presented in War\u2019s Waste is relevant to readers wishing to understand the roots of the specialty of rehabilitation medicine but more broadly will likewise be relevant to those interested in the influence of social and political factors on medical practices.\u201d -- Elliot J. Roth, Northwestern University \u2015 Journal of the American Medical Association \u201cThis book is not merely the latest contribution to the ever-growing body of scholarship on disabled soldiers and their rehabilitation. It is one of the most important and readable studies to appear in recent years. . . . War\u2019s Waste plainly deserves to become core reading among scholars and to be read by a wider, nonacademic audience interested in learning about the social and cultural history of America during the Great War.\u201d \u2015 Bulletin of the History of Medicine \u201cWounded and dismembered soldiers have always excited anxieties among citizens, as well as governmental officials. Beth Linker\u2019s history of the rehabilitation of American men wounded during World War I focuses on the politics of rehabilitation. Reconstructing men\u2019s sense of their own manliness turns out to be as important as ensuring that they remain useful as workers and patriots. War\u2019s Waste is a persuasive and eloquent account of personal and political struggles in the aftermath of war. A must-read for anyone curious about what happens when mutilated soldiers return home.\u201d -- Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London\u201cCarefully researched and compellingly argued, this is an important contribution to our understanding of the complicated relationships among public policy, orthopedic and rehabilitative medicine, and social values. Its relevance to today\u2019s challenging realities makes Linker\u2019s penetrating study of an earlier war relevant to a wide spectrum of potential readers.\u201d -- Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University\u00a0\u201c War\u2019s Waste describes the transformation of America\u2019s veterans\u2019 policy from pensions to rehabilitation. Beth Linker convincingly argues that the rise of orthopedics, physiotherapy, prosthetics, and the modern army hospital during World War I were all part of an ideological and policy backlash against the Civil War veterans pension system, and aimed to turn wounded soldiers into productive members of the labor force. Combining sophisticated analysis with highly readable prose, War\u2019s Waste will appeal to historians and scholars of medicine, policy, disability, the body, gender studies, and World War I and military history.\u201d -- Beatrix Hoffman, Northern Illinois University\u201cThis thoughtful, provocative, deeply researched and beautifully written study shows how the US government took responsibility for soldiers who were physically injured and maimed in World War I, and why there was support for government intervention. Linker\u2019s answer, superbly dissected and presented,\u00a0is\u00a0that there was a brew of intersecting motives: from American ideals of masculinity, modernity, and militarism to work and self-reliance.\u201d -- Rosemary A. Stevens, Weill Cornell Medical College\u201c War\u2019s Waste is far more than a work of medical history. It is also an important contribution to the political and social history of the United States. Linker\u2019s account combines larger political and cultural issues with a careful description and analysis of day-to-day medical practices.\u201d -- Thomas Schlich, author of The Origins of Organ Transplantation Surgery and Laboratory Science, 1880\u20131930\u201c War\u2019s Waste connects the history of medicine to the historical experience of disability. Beth Linker shows that World War I doctors developed new rehabilitation technologies they hoped would cure disability in response to the vast human and economic costs of the war\u2019s new technologies of mass carnage. But soldiers with disabilities also played a key role in this medicalization. They rejected claims that rehabilitation produced quick cures, and they demanded additional medical and nursing treatment. Linker\u2019s sensitive and moving examples bring to life the economic, gender, and race conflicts that shaped the first generation to experience twentieth-century rehabilitation.\u201d -- Martin S. Pernick, University of Michigan About the Author Beth Linker is associate professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 99.0}, {"asin": "0700619577", "title": "Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (Modern War Studies (Hardcover))", "author": "Jeffrey T. Sammons", "description": "Review \"The single most comprehensive and scholarly account of the 369th Infantry Regiment to date and covers the unit's creation, wartime service, and postwar attempts at recognition. . . . brings a welcome and much needed clarity to the suffering, sacrifices, and heroics of some of America's finest military men.\"-- Journal of African American History \"As the centennial of World War I continues, much more is being written about that horrific conflict, and this book reminds us of the significant but often forgotten African American contributions to Allied victory.\"-- On Point \"An outstanding work.\"-- New York Military Affairs Symposium \"This book is the definitive history of the 369th Regiment in World War I, an outstanding black infantry regiment comprised of 3,000 men led by a white command element. It is the most complete, scholarly, and fully documented account of this famous (and underpublicized) unit, unlikely to be superseded. The authors, both prominent historians, are renowned experts in their fields.\"-- Joint Force Quarterly \"A book that readers of military history will cherish and general readers and lovers of history will find informative. It is both a reference book and an important historical narrative that lays the ground for the civil rights movement.\"-- New World Review \"The authors mesh the military history of the regiment with the social history of the general movement for African-American equality. They analyze nonfiction and fictional works that tell the story of the regiment in such a way as to convey a vision of the African-American struggle for true freedom.\"-- Key Reporter \"Belongs on the shelf of any serious student of the 15th/369th Regiment, American involvement in World War I, race relations in the early twentieth century, and African American history.\"-- Journal of Military History \"Librarians need to make room for Sammons and Morrow's study because their work delves quite deeply into the background of the regiment's formation, the culture of the early-20th-century Harlem, and the complex issues surrounding the formation of an African American fighting unit in an era when Jim Crow was a dominant feature of the US and supported by the federal government from its president on down. Essential.\"-- Choice \"From a literary viewpoint, [the book] is a masterpiece of scholarly research. . . . A pleasurable read. Like a vintage wine, Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War is a reading experience to be savored.\"-- African American Golfer's Digest \"A thoroughly researched, carefully argued, and lucidly written history. By examining the challenges faced by this African American regiment on World War battlefields and in the arenas of political power in New York City, Albany, and Washington, D.C., the authors provide important insights not only into the black experience but also into the military history of the nation. This is undoubtedly one of the best books published in recent years on American military history.\"-- Robert A. Doughty , author of Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War \"The history of the 369th Infantry Regiment has finally been told. Jeffrey T. Sammons and John H. Morrow, Jr., with this remarkable work of collaborative scholarship and meticulous research, have produced the definitive account of the most famous African American fighting unit in World War I.\"-- Chad Williams , author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era About the Author Jeffrey T. Sammons is professor in the Department of History at New York University and the author of Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. John H. Morrow, Jr., Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia, is the author of several books, including The Great War: An Imperial History.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 64.75}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0195173996", "title": "Over Here: The First World War and American Society", "author": "David M. Kennedy", "description": "Review \"Kennedy analyzes American' bitter domestic fight \"for the character of American economic, social, and political life.\" Wars on the American homefront haven't received their proper historical treatment, but Kennedy's seminal work begins to fill that void.\" -- Chronicles About the Author David Kennedy is Donald J. MacLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom From Fear , a volume in the Oxford History of the United States series.", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Humanities"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.25}, {"asin": "141694091X", "title": "Glass", "author": "Ellen Hopkins", "description": "About the Author Ellen Hopkins is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of fourteen young adult novels, as well as the adult novels Triangles,\u00a0Collateral , and Love Lies Beneath . She lives with her family in Carson City, Nevada, where she has founded Ventana Sierra, a nonprofit youth housing and resource initiative. Visit her at EllenHopkins.com and on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter at @EllenHopkinsLit.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.79}, {"asin": "1592442080", "title": "Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium", "author": "Francis Aloysius Sullivan", "description": "About the Author Rev. Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. taught ecclesiology at the Gregorian University in Rome for 35 years until 1993. Since then he has taught in the Theology Department at Boston College. His other books include 'Creative Fidelity', 'Charisms and Charismatic Renewal', 'The Church We Believe In' (Paulist Press), and 'From Apostles to Bishops' (Paulist Press).", "categories": ["Books", "History", "World"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 29.0}, {"asin": "0425245152", "title": "Confessions of a Surgeon: The Good, the Bad, and the Complicated...Life Behind the O.R. Doors", "author": "Paul A. Ruggieri", "description": "From Booklist The life of a general surgeon is more guts than glamour. Often sleep-deprived and standing on his feet for hours, this physician-author navigates anatomical intricacies and deals with unexpected bleeding. Not to mention the pressure of a full bladder midway through an operation or worrying about a potential malpractice lawsuit. The job requirements of his profession include good judgment, an ability to think and act quickly, self-reliance, and a fondness for using one\u2019s hands. The job description sounds stringent: \u201cShow me where the problem is so I can fix it, remove it, rearrange it, drain it, or pass you on to someone else.\u201d Yet in a series of sentimental clinical vignettes, the doctor divulges a wide range of feelings: pride, guilt, humility, regrets, failure, and, ultimately, burnout. His patients teach him many lessons. Trust makes the physician-patient relationship work. Detachment can be difficult. Imperfection is inevitable. Survival (of patients as well as the doctor) is the bottom line. Honest and angry, this cutting memoir by a midcareer surgeon feels like an act of penitence. --Tony Miksanek About the Author Paul A. Ruggieri, M.D. , is a practicing board-certified general/laparoscopic surgeon who has been operating for over 20 years. Dr. Ruggieri performed his surgical training at the world-renowned Washington University School of Medicine, Barnes Hospital, in St. Louis. He then spent three years as an active duty general surgeon in the U.S. Army. Currently, he is former chief of the department of surgery at a large community hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts, the very hospital he helped build as an ironworker before attending medical school nearly 30 years ago. Dr. Ruggieri has written several books for patients. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife and three stepsons. Visit his website at www.paulruggieri.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0195173996"}
{"user_id": "AGTD4AEX7BDUA3PU2ZUYB2HF2UDQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "013040652X", "title": "The Dark Side of Valuation: Valuing Old Tech, New Tech, and New Economy Companies", "author": "Aswath Damodaran", "description": "Amazon.com Review If the tech-stock swoon merely whets your appetite for this roller coaster of a market sector, and your eyes don't glaze over at the very sight of formulas like \"Return on Capital = EBIT (1 - t) / Capital Invested,\" then The Dark Side of Valuation is the investment guide you've been waiting for. Whether considering New Economy firms at their peak or their valley, writes Aswath Damodaran, the problem has always been determining their true value with equitable dispassion. A leading expert on the topic, Damodaran begins by noting that standard corporate valuations are determined by four factors: cash flow from existing investments, growth expected from this cash flow, length of time this growth is sustained, and cost of capital to sustain it. In what he admits is not always an easy read, Damodaran then details various ways to adapt conventional valuation methods for companies that lack key traditional variables (such as profits, track records, and even competitors with which they can be compared) in order to arrive at realistic valuations. Those not scared off by charts comparing the historical risk for T-bills and T-bonds since 1928 will find this book worth a look. --Howard Rothman From the Inside Flap Preface Do the old rules still apply? Do we need new valuation metrics, or are the old metrics flexible enough to deal with the companies that constitute the new economy? Can you value a company that has no earnings, no history, and no comparable firms? These are the questions that I have heard repeatedly over the last few years. I have always believed the fundamentals that determine value are the same, no matter what company you value and what market it is in. Increasingly, though, I have faced skeptical audiences who are unwilling to take this belief at face value and have demanded proof that America Online, Amazon, or Priceline can be valued with traditional models. The genesis for this book was a paper I did on valuing Amazon in March 2000, where a discounted cash flow model yielded a value of $34 per share. Since the stock was trading at $80 at that time, there were many who viewed the valuation as either excessively pessimistic or as missing something. The interest in the paper led me to think about writing a book, but I expanded it to cover both new technology and old technology firms. While there are differences in estimation that arise across these firms, I believe that they have far more in common. Why technology firms? I believe that traditional valuation books and models (and I count my book on investment valuation among the culprits) have tended to concentrate on valuing manufacturing or traditional service firms. Technology firms are different. They expand by investing in research and through acquisitions and not by building plant and equipment. Many of them have astronomical growth rates in revenues and often, very little in current earnings. Their assets are often patents, technology, and skilled employees. I look at how the notions of capital expenditures, operating income, and working capital have to be redefined for these firms. I begin this book by laying out the facts on the growth of technology and, in particular, new technology stocks in the equity market and argue that although the principles of valuation might not shift, the focus can change as firms move through their life cycles. This discussion is followed by an extended section (Chapters 2-7) on applying traditional discounted cash flow models to value technology stocks, with an emphasis on the estimation of cash flows, growth, and discount rates for these firms. In the next three chapters, I look at the use of relative valuation to value technology companies, both in terms of adapting existing multiples (such as price-earnings and price-to-sales ratios) and developing new ones (value per Web site visitor, for instance). In Chapter 11, \"Real Options in Valuation,\" I consider an argument made by many for the large premiums paid on technology stocks (i.e., they represent real options to expand into a potentially huge e-commerce market), and consider some questions that a skeptic should ask before accepting this argument. In Chapter 12, \"Value Enhancement,\" I consider how managers of technology firms can enhance the value of their firms through better investment and financing decisions. The book is structured around the valuations of five technology firms-Motorola, Cisco, Amazon, Ariba, and Rediff. The first three are household names but represent three different points in the technology spectrum. Motorola is an old technology firm with substantial investments in existing assets. It is also a firm that has fallen on hard times in the last few years, largely as a consequence of poor investments and strategic choices. Cisco is one of the great success stories of the 1990s, but a great deal of the market value of the firm reflects expectations about the future. It is also a firm that has chosen to grow through acquisitions and has done it very well. Amazon is the poster child (for better or worse) for the new economy stocks that have entered the market in recent years, and the popular press has documented its ups and downs in extensive detail. Ariba and Rediff are more recent entrants into the new economy, with Ariba representing the promise (and peril) of the Business-to-Business (B2B) Internet model, and Rediff the potential of an Internet portal serving a market (India) that could be a huge market in the future. One of the limitations of valuing real companies is that your mistakes are there on the printed page for all to see over time, but that prospect does not bother me. At the risk of giving away the punch line, I do find discounted cash flow values for all five companies: Motorola ($32.39), Cisco ($44.92), Amazon ($34.37), Ariba ($72.13), and Rediff ($19.05). For what it is worth, at the time that I did the valuations in June 2000, I found Amazon to be overvalued at $48 per share and Cisco to be overvalued at $64.88. Motorola at $34.25 per share and Ariba at $75 per share were fairly valued, and Rediff was significantly undervalued at $10 per share. By the time I finished the book, Amazon had dropped in value to $30 per share, and Cisco was trading at $51. Motorola had gone from being fairly valued to undervalued, Ariba saw its stock price double, and Rediff remained undervalued. I have no doubt that you will disagree with me on some of the inputs I have used, and the values that you assign these firms will be different from mine. What I would emphasize, therefore, is not the values that I arrive at for these firms, but the process by which I got there. Finally, I want this book to be useful to a wide audience: individual investors who hold technology stocks in their portfolios, equity research analysts, venture capitalists, and managers at technology firms. There are portions of the book that I must confess are not easy reading, but I have tried as much as I can to provide an intuitive rationale for everything that I do. Technology firms, notwithstanding the back and forth of markets, are here to stay, and valuing them is something we all need to grapple with. I hope you find this book useful in that endeavor. From the Back Cover The comprehensive guide to valuing technology companies The comprehensive guide to valuing technology companies Projections for future revenues, earnings, cash flows, the impact of stock options, and more Projections for future revenues, earnings, cash flows, the impact of stock options, and more 5 detailed case studies cover the entire tech lifecycle: Amazon.com, Ariba, Cisco, Motorola, and a new IPO 5 detailed case studies cover the entire tech lifecycle: Amazon.com, Ariba, Cisco, Motorola, and a new IPO Presented by one of the world's leading experts in valuation Presented by one of the world's leading experts in valuation State-of-the-art tools for assessing the value of any technology company State-of-the-art tools for assessing the value of any technology company Technology companies have exploded in importance, yet investors and analysts face unprecedented challenges in valuing them. In The Dark Side of Valuation, one of the world's leading valuation experts reviews every approach, demonstrating exactly how to adapt traditional techniques to minimize risks and maximize returns. Aswath Damodaran begins with an overview of the markets' dramatic shift towards technology stocks ? specifically new technology stocks. He then identifies key valuation principles and techniques, demonstrating them through five case studies that encompass the entire technology company lifecycle: Amazon.com, Ariba, Cisco, Motorola, and a new IPO-ready startup. Coverage includes: Adaptation of discounted cash flow models for tech companies with limited histories, shifting business mixes, and volatile stock prices Adaptation of discounted cash flow models for tech companies with limited histories, shifting business mixes, and volatile stock prices The limitations of traditional accounting definitions in measuring technology company cash flows The limitations of traditional accounting definitions in measuring technology company cash flows Superior processes for estimating future revenues, earnings, and cash flows Superior processes for estimating future revenues, earnings, and cash flows Evaluation of the impact of management and employee stock options on share value and earnings multiples Evaluation of the impact of management and employee stock options on share value and earnings multiples An in-depth assessment of PEG and price-to sale ratios An in-depth assessment of PEG and price-to sale ratios Relative valuation: fundamentals, earnings multiples, and revenue multiples Relative valuation: fundamentals, earnings multiples, and revenue multiples \"What a refreshing book to read! Damodaran's book is essential if capital markets are going to accurately gauge the contributions of emerging companies...His insights are illuminating and his mastery of financial analysis is unmatched.\" ?Louis Columbus Director of Marketing, Linksys About the Author Aswath Damodaran is Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and equity valuation. Damodaran has written two books on equity valuation ( Damodaran on Valuation and Investment Valuation ), as well as two books on corporate finance ( Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice and Applied Corporate Finance: A User's Manual ). He also published widely in leading journals of finance, including The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis , The Journal of Finance , The Journal of Financial Economics , and the Review of Financial Studies . Damodaran received the Stern School of Business Excellence in Teaching Award in 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1999. In 1194, he was profiled in Business Week as one of the top 12 U.S. business school professors. Damodaran holds M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles. Prior to joining NYU, he served as visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkley from 1984 to 1986, where he received the Earl Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award in 1985. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Preface Do the old rules still apply? Do we need new valuation metrics, or are the old metrics flexible enough to deal with the companies that constitute the new economy? Can you value a company that has no earnings, no history, and no comparable firms? These are the questions that I have heard repeatedly over the last few years. I have always believed the fundamentals that determine value are the same, no matter what company you value and what market it is in. Increasingly, though, I have faced skeptical audiences who are unwilling to take this belief at face value and have demanded proof that America Online, Amazon.com, or Priceline.com can be valued with traditional models. The genesis for this book was a paper I did on valuing Amazon.com in March 2000, where a discounted cash flow model yielded a value of $34 per share. Since the stock was trading at $80 at that time, there were many who viewed the valuation as either excessively pessimistic or as missing something. The interest in the paper led me to think about writing a book, but I expanded it to cover both new technology and old technology firms. While there are differences in estimation that arise across these firms, I believe that they have far more in common. Why technology firms? I believe that traditional valuation books and models (and I count my book on investment valuation among the culprits) have tended to concentrate on valuing manufacturing or traditional service firms. Technology firms are different. They expand by investing in research and through acquisitions and not by building plant and equipment. Many of them have astronomical growth rates in revenues and often, very little in current earnings. Their assets are often patents, technology, and skilled employees. I look at how the notions of capital expenditures, operating income, and working capital have to be redefined for these firms. I begin this book by laying out the facts on the growth of technology and, in particular, new technology stocks in the equity market and argue that although the principles of valuation might not shift, the focus can change as firms move through their life cycles. This discussion is followed by an extended section (Chapters 2-7) on applying traditional discounted cash flow models to value technology stocks, with an emphasis on the estimation of cash flows, growth, and discount rates for these firms. In the next three chapters, I look at the use of relative valuation to value technology companies, both in terms of adapting existing multiples (such as price-earnings and price-to-sales ratios) and developing new ones (value per Web site visitor, for instance). In Chapter 11, \"Real Options in Valuation,\" I consider an argument made by many for the large premiums paid on technology stocks (i.e., they represent real options to expand into a potentially huge e-commerce market), and consider some questions that a skeptic should ask before accepting this argument. In Chapter 12, \"Value Enhancement,\" I consider how managers of technology firms can enhance the value of their firms through better investment and financing decisions. The book is structured around the valuations of five technology firms-Motorola, Cisco, Amazon.com, Ariba, and Rediff.com. The first three are household names but represent three different points in the technology spectrum. Motorola is an old technology firm with substantial investments in existing assets. It is also a firm that has fallen on hard times in the last few years, largely as a consequence of poor investments and strategic choices. Cisco is one of the great success stories of the 1990s, but a great deal of the market value of the firm reflects expectations about the future. It is also a firm that has chosen to grow through acquisitions and has done it very well. Amazon.com is the poster child (for better or worse) for the new economy stocks that have entered the market in recent years, and the popular press has documented its ups and downs in extensive detail. Ariba and Rediff.com are more recent entrants into the new economy, with Ariba representing the promise (and peril) of the Business-to-Business (B2B) Internet model, and Rediff the potential of an Internet portal serving a market (India) that could be a huge market in the future. One of the limitations of valuing real companies is that your mistakes are there on the printed page for all to see over time, but that prospect does not bother me. At the risk of giving away the punch line, I do find discounted cash flow values for all five companies: Motorola ($32.39), Cisco ($44.92), Amazon.com ($34.37), Ariba ($72.13), and Rediff.com ($19.05). For what it is worth, at the time that I did the valuations in June 2000, I found Amazon to be overvalued at $48 per share and Cisco to be overvalued at $64.88. Motorola at $34.25 per share and Ariba at $75 per share were fairly valued, and Rediff.com was significantly undervalued at $10 per share. By the time I finished the book, Amazon had dropped in value to $30 per share, and Cisco was trading at $51. Motorola had gone from being fairly valued to undervalued, Ariba saw its stock price double, and Rediff remained undervalued. I have no doubt that you will disagree with me on some of the inputs I have used, and the values that you assign these firms will be different from mine. What I would emphasize, therefore, is not the values that I arrive at for these firms, but the process by which I got there. Finally, I want this book to be useful to a wide audience: individual investors who hold technology stocks in their portfolios, equity research analysts, venture capitalists, and managers at technology firms. There are portions of the book that I must confess are not easy reading, but I have tried as much as I can to provide an intuitive rationale for everything that I do. Technology firms, notwithstanding the back and forth of markets, are here to stay, and valuing them is something we all need to grapple with. I hope you find this book useful in that endeavor. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.82}, {"asin": "1401324266", "title": "The Homesick Texan Cookbook", "author": "Lisa Fain", "description": "Review \"Finally, the voice and the down-home Texas cooking I love on the Homesick Texan blog is now between hard covers! Lisa Fain has an original voice, and I love her food-completely accessible, honest and delicious.\"-- Michael Ruhlman, author of Ratio and The Elements of Cooking \"The sometimes funny and sometimes poignant memories of this seventh-generation Texan pining for the cooking of her homeland bring The Homesick Texan Cookbook to life. Lisa Fain's move to Manhattan has given Texans everywhere a great new resource for surefire recipes and Lone Star lore.\"-- Robb Walsh, author of Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook and The Tex-Mex Cookbook \"Written with equal parts humor and tenderness, Lisa Fain's book makes it easy to imagine your kitchen lies deep in the heart of Texas. Her enticing recipes for a wealth of toothsome Texas favorites prove once and for all that nothing soothes the homesick soul like good old Texas cooking.\"-- Rebecca Rather, author of Pastry Queen Parties \"You don't have to be a homesick Texan to appreciate Lisa Fain's evocative, unpretentious prose and her accompanying seriously delicious (and easy to make) recipes.\"-- Ed Levine, founder, SeriousEats.com About the Author Lisa Fain is a seventh-generation Texan her formative years were spent on the outskirts of Houston, with crude-oil tanks and barbecue stands nearby her summers were spent outside Dallas, driving a tractor, picking black-eyed peas, and shucking corn at her grandparents' farm. At the age of 25, she moved to Manhattan for work. In 2005, she began the Homesick Texan website, which has won many awards and has grown to 175,000 unique visitors per month. This is her first book.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 22.89}, {"asin": "0544824245", "title": "All Grown Up", "author": "Jami Attenberg", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of March 2017: A friend came to my apartment for the first time recently, frowning at the futon in the living room. \u201cA futon?! You\u2019re not in your 20s anymore!\u201d Evidently a couch, an actual couch, is an indicator of adulthood\u2014as is marriage, and the requisite 2.5 kids. By those standards, thirty-nine-year-old Andrea Bern, the unapologetically single and childless protagonist of Jami Attenberg\u2019s bitingly funny and heartrending All Grown Up doesn\u2019t fit the bill, and she\u2019s fine with that (if her mother and much of society is not). But while living a life according to one\u2019s own playbook has its perks, it also has pitfalls, and Andrea isn\u2019t immune to a little existential crisis. Cue the passive aggressive trips to her therapist, a revolving door of unsuitable suitors, and the near-abandonment of one of the true loves of her life: her art. So steeped in ennui is she that Andrea (almost) fails to register when life tries to yank her from it; Her best friend\u2019s seemingly perfect marriage is imploding, as well as her brother and sister-in-law\u2019s\u2014the result of trying to cope with their child\u2019s precarious, and incurable illness. And they need Andrea, something that takes a little while to sink in, but once it does, she realizes that the road to adulthood is not paved with \u201creal\u201d furniture. It\u2019s an epiphany that will punch you in the heart, and Attenberg has perfect aim. --Erin Kodicek, The Amazon Book Review Review A National Bestseller An LA Times Bestseller A New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Bestseller A Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Bestseller A Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Bestseller An IndieNext List Pick An Amazon Top 100 Best Book of 2017 A Kirkus Best Fiction of 2017 Pick \u201cDeeply enjoyable.\u201d\u2014 Marisa Meltzer, Elle \u201cBravo to Attenberg, who, with hilarity and honesty, tells the story of an adult woman who wants what she wants, not what she\u2019s supposed to want.\u201d\u2014 Marie Claire \u201c All Grown Up [is] a smart, funny/sad and unflinchingly honest novel about a single New Yorker. . . . In sparkling prose, [Attenberg] brings this wonderful character so fully to life that after the book ended, I found myself wishing Andrea well as if she were a good friend and wondering what she would do next.\u201d \u2014 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \u201cI read it twice, laughing, cringing, and even tearing up.\u201d \u2014Judy Blume, New York Times \u201cAddicting and incredibly refreshing\u2026. Attenberg brings the often upsetting, often comedic realities of life across in poignant, astute vignettes that will live in the reader\u2019s heart for a long, long time.\u201d \u2014 Travel and Leisure \u201cThank you, Jami Attenberg, for pushing back against society\u2019s assumptions about what is allowed to matter in our lives. For giving us a different kind of narrative. All Grown Up is not all fluffy and lovely. It turns out that we have other stories \u2014 we single people. We human beings.\u201d \u2014 Bustle \u201cRevolutionary\u2026. [A] perceptive study of love, sacrifice, and what it really means to be an adult.\u201d \u2014 Tablet \u201cJami Attenberg deftly travels inside the head of a 39-year-old woman who has no interest in doing what she\u2019s supposed to do and follows her heart instead of her mind\u2014a story that\u2019s sexy, charming, and impossible to put down.\u201d \u2014 Newsweek \u201cPowerful\u2026 All Grown Up is so intimately [and] sharply observed.\u201d \u2014 Vogue \u201cAttenberg is one of our finest contemporary storytellers, and here, with her trademark clever, witty voice, she tackles the age-old question plaguing people of all ages: When do we know if we\u2019re actually all grown up?\u201d \u2014Nylon, \u201c50 Books We Can\u2019t Wait to Read in 2017\u201d \u201cSmart, heartfelt, and really freakin\u2019 funny.\u201d \u2014Sara Novi\u0107, Elle.com, \u201c25 Most Anticipated Books by Women for 2017\u201d \u201cAttenberg knows how to make a reader laugh and feel . This novel takes a hard look at what it means to be a woman living on her own terms.\u201d \u2014Lisa Lucas, Martha Stewart Living , \u201cPage Turners for 2017\u201d \u201cI read it start to finish in one go, I can\u2019t think of another book I\u2019ve done that about recently.\u201d \u2014Mary Louise Kelly, NPR\u2019s Weekend Edition Sunday \"Attenberg\u2019s fifth novel is her best yet. It\u2019s a super-smart, often extremely funny, sometimes heartbreaking portrait of a 39-year-old, single, child-free heroine in New York City who\u2019s taking her very best shot at living life on her own terms. . . . As angry, sad and raw as it is astute, hilarious and hopeful, All Grown Up puts other novels in this vein to shame.\u201d \u2014 The Observer \u201cThere\u2019s something fresh and enquiring in Attenberg's writing; a gloriously technicolor quality to the voice of her anti-heroine. As is often the hallmark of these projects, much of the humour comes from a wicked brew of truth-telling, honesty and bravery. Of saying the unsayable. In this respect, Attenberg writes with a scalpel, and has presented one of the finest, and most unexpected, character studies you're likely to read all year.\u201d \u2014 The Irish Independent \u201cJami Attenberg will have you laughing, cursing, and ranting right along with her book's vibrant main character, Andrea \u2014 a 39-year-old single New Yorker trying to figure out how hold her life together. (And trying to figure out what 'having your life together' even means.) This book has got serious spunk.\u201d \u2014Bustle, \u201cThe 9 Best Fiction Books Coming Out in March\u201d \u201cAmidst the gems of mordant wit, All Grown Up plumbs deeper, darker veins, the ready ease with which sex (and drugs and alcohol) can become coping mechanisms, the specter of being stuck forever as everyone else moves on, \u201carchitecting new lives.\u201d Do yourself a favor and buy this book.\u201d \u2014Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed Books \u201cTold in smart and funny vignettes, All Grown Up is an examination of what it means to be a woman and a grown-up in today's times. This deceptively short novel will stay with you long after finishing the last page.\u201d \u2014Popsugar, \u201c26 Hot New Books You'll Want to Get Your Hands On This Spring\u201d \u201cWith a flair for understatement and crack timing, she makes Andrea Bern immensely flawed but highly resilient and self-aware, capable of reflecting on the lack of ballast in her life without drowning in clich\u00e9s or Issues. It\u2019s essential to the story that Andrea is unreservedly single; what makes it so good is that she\u2019s absolutely singular .\u201d\u2014 Vulture , \"8 Books You Need to Read This March\" \u201cWith a satirical voice and astounding pathos, Attenberg\u2019s latest protagonist draws readers into the enthralling and thought-provoking world she inhabits, against the backdrop of an important social conversation about contemporary gender roles.\u201d \u2014 Harpers Bazaar \u201cFantastic\u2013and wholly unlike anything else she\u2019s written.\u201d \u2014 Vol.1 Brooklyn \u201cAttenberg\u2019s latest takes on the ridiculous standards we set for ourselves, all with humor and aching relatability.\u201d \u2014 PureWow \u201cFunny, insightful.\u201d \u2014 Dallas Morning News \u201cThis is a novel about how to step up when your smug married friend suddenly gets divorced, or when your annoying mum really needs you; about \u2018being there\u2019 for people when you don\u2019t even know where \u2018there\u2019 is. It has hope, in spades.\u201d \u2014 The Guardian \u201c All Grown Up is a smart, addictive, hilarious and relevant novel.\u201d \u2014Meredith Maran, Washington Post \u201cAndrea, 39, is totally single. No kids, no men, nothing keeping her from living her life to its full potential, which she does. Until her niece is born with a tragic illness, and Andrea's whole family is forced to confront their values, their lifestyles, and their choices. Told in vignettes, All Grown Up asks what happens after you've got the whole \"adult\" thing under control.\u201d \u2014Glamour, \u201cBest Books to Read in 2017\u201d \"This is where Attenberg\u2019s brilliance lies: in her ability to mix tenderness with tragicomedy; to find what\u2019s funny in the funereal; to render the dignity of those who fear they\u2019ve lost it. . . . Outstanding.\u201d \u2014 Haaretz \u201cFunny, tragic and delightful.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cAttenberg captures the kaleidoscopic flow of Andrea\u2019s life in spare and witty vignettes that build to a surprising and moving conclusion.\u201d \u2014Jane Ciabattari, \u201cTen Books You Should Read in March,\u201d BBC.com \u201cHilarious, courageous and mesmerizing from page one, ALL GROWN UP is a little gem that packs a devastating wallop. \u00a0It\u2019s that rare book I\u2019m dying to give all my friends so we can discuss it deep into the night. \u00a0I\u2019m in awe of Jami Attenberg.\u201d \u2014Maria Semple, author of Where\u2019d You Go, Bernadette? \u201cJami Attenberg's sharply drawn protagonist, Andrea, has such a riveting, propulsive voice that ALL GROWN UP is hard to put down, but I urge you to resist reading it in one sitting. Both the prose and the author\u2019s knowing excavation of one woman\u2019s desires, compromises, strengths and fears deserve closer attention. Like Andrea herself, this novel is beautiful and brutal, intelligent and funny, frank and sexy.\u201d \u2014Cynthia D\u2019Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest \"Jami Attenberg's Andrea is the most addicting female protagonist voice I have read in years, with her cutting observations on human relationships. This witty journey through a mess of men, female friendships, family and boozy urban existence positions the single girl not as object to be fixed but as contemporary sage and seer: the ultimate witness of truth in love today.\" \u2014Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today \u201cJami Attenberg has written her frankest, funniest, and most riveting and heartbreaking book yet. In Andrea, she has created a character women will be talking about for years; she has opened the door for us to see ourselves in literature in a new way, writing with skill and fearlessness few others can match.\u201d \u2014Emily Gould, author of Friendship \u201cWhat a voice. Honest and hilarious, unflinching and unapologetic, Jami Attenberg writes what it is to be single, sexual, and childfree by choice. I read the first page of ALL GROWN UP and knew the novelist was going to outdo herself. I am happy to report that she most certainly did.\u201d \u2014Helen Ellis, author of American Housewife \u201cJami Attenberg\u2019s ALL GROWN UP is one\u00a0part Denis Johnson, one part Grace Paley, but\u00a0all her. Every sentence pulls\u00a0taut and glows--electric, gossipy, searing\u00a0fun that is also a map to how to be more human.\u201d \u2014Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night \u201cIs all life junk - sparkly and seductive and devastating - just waiting to be told correctly by someone who will hold our hand and walk with us a while confirming that what we\u2019re living is true. This is a good proud urban book, a sad and specific blast for the fearless to read. Thank you Jami.\u201d \u2014Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls \u201cAll Grown Up is one of those rare books \u2013even the greatest writers often only get one or two in their careers\u2014 in which an author\u2019s unique sensibility meets with the story she was born to tell.\u00a0This fractured, soulful portrait of a determinedly independent woman \u2013a woman whose radical independence often puts her at odds with a misunderstanding society\u2014 is vital reading for women and men alike.\u201d \u2014Stefan Merrill Block, author of The Story of Forgetting and The Storm at the Door About the Author JAMI ATTENBERG is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All Grown Up. She has contributed essays to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, and Longreads, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 9.81}, {"asin": "0131403125", "title": "Investment Fables: Exposing the Myths of \"Can't Miss\" Investments Strategies", "author": "Aswath Damodaran", "description": "From the Back Cover The truth about 13 of today's most widely touted investment strategies. 10 powerful lessons for every investor 10 powerful lessons for every investor Overcoming the enduring myths about markets Overcoming the enduring myths about markets High dividend stocks: better and safer than bonds--or not? High dividend stocks: better and safer than bonds--or not? Cheap stocks: cheap for a reason? Cheap stocks: cheap for a reason? Should you invest in quality? Momentum? The next big thing? Or what? Should you invest in quality? Momentum? The next big thing? Or what? You've heard 'em. (Maybe even from your broker!) They're the \"can't lose\" investment stories that promise you a no-risk path to profits \u2026 \"Buy companies trading below book value.\" \"Buy companies trading below book value.\" \"Follow the momentum.\" \"Follow the momentum.\" \"Buy stocks with low P/Es.\" \"Buy stocks with low P/Es.\" \"Stick with quality.\" \"Stick with quality.\" \"Buy after bad news.\" \"Buy after bad news.\" \"Buy after good news.\" \"Buy after good news.\" \"Follow the insiders.\" \"Follow the insiders.\" \"Do whatever Warren Buffett's doing.\" \"Do whatever Warren Buffett's doing.\" And on, and on, and on \u2026 They sound good. But do they really work? You're about to find out. In Investment Fables, one of the world's leading investment researchers runs the numbers on 13 of today's most widely touted strategies, objectively answering the questions your broker can't answer. Has it worked over the long term? Over the short term? If it made sense once, does it still make sense? Are the promised benefits a statistical mirage? Could it work, as one part of your investment strategy? What are the downsides\u2014and how can you mitigate them? If you want to make smarter investment decisions, you'll find this book utterly indispensable. About the Author Aswath Damodaran is Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and equity valuation in the MBA program. He has published widely in the field, for leading journals such as The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, and The Review of Financial Studies. He has also authored several books, including The Dark Side of Valuation (Financial Times Prentice Hall) and two books on corporate finance. With Peter Bernstein, he co-authored Investment Management. He received the Stern School of Business Excellence in Teaching Award in 1988, 1991, 1992, 1999, and 2001. In 1994, he was profiled in Business Week as one of the top 12 U.S. business school professors. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. As investors, you have all been on the receiving end of sales pitches from brokers, friends and investment advisors about stocks that they claim will deliver spectacular returns. These stories not only sound persuasive and reasonable but are also backed up by evidence-anecdotal, in some cases, and statistical, in others-that the strategies work. When you try to implement them for your investments, though, you seldom can match their success on paper. All too often, you end up with buyer\u2019s remorse, poorer for the experience and promising yourselves that you will not fall for the allure of these stories again. All too often, you forget the lessons of past mistakes and are easy prey for the next big stock story. While there are literally hundreds of schemes to beat the market in circulation, they are all variants of about a dozen basic themes that have been around for as long as there have been stocks to buy and sell. These broad themes are modified, given new names and marketed as new and different investment strategies by salespeople to a new generation of investors. There must be something in these stories that appeals to investor instincts and to human weaknesses- greed, fear and hubris, to name but three-to give them the staying power that they do. This book is an exploration of the appeal of these stories, why so many investors fall for them and fail with them, and what it may take to win with each of them. As you will see, with each story, there is a kernel of truth that makes it believable and a base in financial theory that allows proponents to claim to have a solid rationale. Each chapter begins with an examination of the basis for each investment story and the theory that would justify its adoption. Why bother with the theory? Not only will it give you perspective on what makes each story work, but it will also allow you to identify potential weaknesses with the story. If you have been on the receiving end of one of these investment stories, you probably have also been told of studies that back them up and you are offered evidence of their potency. It should come as no surprise, given the source, that most of these studies give you only a portion of the truth. As you will see in this book, every investment strategy ever devised has succeeded for some periods and with some stocks, but the complete picture requires an assessment of whether it works over long periods and with a wide cross section of stocks. That is why you will see a review of the existing empirical evidence, drawn from both believers and skeptics, on each strategy and some of the potential problems with each. With every investment strategy, investors also grapple with the question of what adopting that strategy will mean in terms of investment choices. If you adopt a strategy of buying \"low\" PE stocks, you have to judge what represents a low PE ratio and what types of stocks have low PE ratios. If you believe that your best investments are in small companies, you have to decide how to measure the size of companies -sales, market capitalization, etc.-and what level would represent a small company. You will be presented with rules of thumb, that a PE of 8 is cheap or that a company with a market capitalization less than $100 million is small, but these rules of thumb can be dangerous as markets themselves change over time. To provide a frame of reference, this book examines the distribution of various measures- PE, price-to-book ratio and market capitalization, to name a few- across the entire market. This should then allow you to get a sense of differences across the market and to develop portfolio standards. The best test of any strategy is to apply it to the market and to peruse the portfolio that you would have ended up with as a result of following it. This book attempts to do this with each of the broad strategies examined, and you can ask yourself whether you would be comfortable investing in the stocks that make up this portfolio. If you are not, it is a warning sign that this strategy may not be appropriate for you. If you are a careful investor, putting this portfolio under a microscope will allow you to study the strategy for weaknesses and examine what you can do to minimize the damage. It is worth emphasizing what this book is about and what it does not try to do. It is not about promoting or debunking investment strategies, since there are plenty of analysts and brokers who do the former and lots of cynics, many from academia, who do the latter. But it is about providing a full picture of each investment strategy so that you can make your own judgments about what works and what does not. It is not about answering every investment question that has ever been asked; no one can have the foresight to do this. But it is about providing you with the ammunition to ask the right questions when confronted with promoters of these strategies. It is not a book for pessimists who are convinced that picking stocks is an exercise in futility, but it is a book for optimists who want to figure out how to make active strategies pay off and how to use them prudently. It is not about things you cannot and should not do while investing, but it is about things you can and should do as an investor to improve your odds for success. As long as there have been financial markets, there have been mountebanks and frauds luring investors into get-rich schemes that ultimately fail. In the aftermath of these failings, you are often tempted to turn to the courts and to governments to protect you from yourself. The best antidote, though, to an unscrupulous sales pitch about \"stocks that cannot lose\" or to a \"get rich quickly\" scheme is a skeptical and informed investor. I hope this book helps you become one. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Economics"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 47.98}, {"asin": "047004389X", "title": "The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns", "author": "Mohnish Pabrai", "description": "Review \"Today's greatest rising investor\"--Motley Fool \"How to invest the way an Indian migrant with little money would do - by looking for companies with little downside\u2026\" ( Financial Times , Tues 26th February) From the Inside Flap All investors are told that if you want to earn high rates of returns, you must take on greater risk. Of course, the groundbreaking value investing strategies of Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, and Charlie Munger have shown that it is indeed possible to keep risk to a minimum while still making a reasonable profit. The Dhandho method takes their successful approach to investing one step further and shows how you can actually maximize rewards while minimizing risk. Dhandho (pronounced dhun-doe), literally translated, means \"endeavors that create wealth.\" In The Dhandho Investor, Mohnish Pabrai demonstrates how the powerful Dhandho capital allocation framework of India's business-savvy Patels can be successfully applied and replicated by individual value investors in the stock market. The Patels, a small ethnic group from India, first began arriving in the United States in the 1970s as refugees with little education or capital. Today, they own over $40 billion in motel assets in the United States, pay over $725 million a year in taxes, and employ nearly a million people. How did this small, impoverished group come out of nowhere and end up accumulating such vast resources? The answer lies in their low-risk, high-return approach to business: Dhandho. This book will show you how to use that same technique to generate high returns in the stock market. Pabrai's hedge funds, Pabrai Investment Funds, have outperformed all of the major indices and over 99% of other managed funds. $100,000 invested with Pabrai in 1999 was worth over $659,000 by 2006\u0097an annualized return of over 28% after all fees and expenses. In this book, Pabrai distills the methods of Buffett, Graham, and Munger into a user-friendly approach applicable to individual investors. Combining their legendary investing wisdom with the business acumen of the Patels, Pabrai lays out the Dhandho framework in an easy-to-use format that will help any investor significantly improve on their results and soundly beat the markets\u0097as well as most professionals. Pabrai also details each deceptively simple Dhandho concept in a straightforward, entertaining fashion, with individual chapters that explain why you should: Invest in Simple Businesses, Fixate on Arbitrage, Invest in the Copy Cats Rather than the Innovators, and other simple but proven concepts for low-risk, high-reward Dhandho investing. From the Back Cover Praise for The Dhandho Investor \"Mohnish Pabrai is a relentlessly insightful thinker who delights in decoding the esoteric world of finance and also knows how to tell a good yarn. Whether you're mystified by what drives stock prices up and down on Wall Street or you're sure you know, you'll understand better when you read this book. Pabrai's tales of high finance and his clever examination of the core principles of deep value are packed with handy ideas you should use in your own investing.\" \u2015Stephane Fitch, European Bureau Chief, Forbes \"I read The Dhandho Investor from start to finish in one sitting\u2015I couldn't put it down. Mohnish shares the 'secrets' of his extraordinary success and has made a significant contribution to the literature on value investing.\" \u2015Whitney Tilson, General Partner and founder of T2 Partners LLC Managing Editor and founder of Value Investor Insight Chairman of Value Investing Congress \"All of the techniques you need to attain high returns on your investments are here, explained through the examples of successful entrepreneurs and of Pabrai, himself an accomplished prodigy of Buffett's methods. Everyone must understand this methodology if they are to do well in the stock market.\" \u2015Timothy Vick, Senior Portfolio Manager, The Sanibel Captiva Trust Co., author of How to Pick Stocks Like Warren Buffett \"The Dhandho Investor has nailed it! Pabrai has simplified the strategy for successful investing. 'Heads, I win; tails, I don't lose much!' I don't have to buy a whole business, just purchase the publicly traded stocks of a few 'right' businesses. I suggest this book to anyone looking to hone their investment skills.\" \u2015Patrick Fitzgerald, President, Fitzgerald Management About the Author Mohnish Pabrai is the Managing Partner of Pabrai Investment Funds, an investment group modeled after the original 1950s Buffett Partnerships. Since its inception in 1999, Pabrai Funds have delivered annualized returns of over 28% (net to investors). He has been favorably profiled by Forbes and Barron's and has made guest appearances on CNBC and Bloomberg TV and Radio. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Investing"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 24.87}, {"asin": "B007OWRCAI", "title": "The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds", "author": "Maneet Ahuja", "description": "Amazon.com Review Guest Review of The Alpha Masters by Ben Mezrich \"Maneet Ahuja's The Alpha Masters is a must-read for anyone working on Wall Street--or anyone planning to work on Wall Street. Getting even one of these titans of the industry to talk on record would be an impressive feat (and I know this because I've tried unsuccessfully to interview at least two of the people featured in here!), but getting all of them together in one place is simply herculean. Maneet quite clearly has the magic touch, and The Alpha Masters kept me busy on a round trip to Vegas, with a few extra hours on the tarmac. Great work, fun read, and a unique, fresh voice.\" --Ben Mezrich is the author of twelve books including the New York Times best sellers Bringing Down the House , which was adapted into the movie 21 , and The Accidental Billionaires , which was adapted into the Oscar-winning movie The Social Network . Ben Mezrich Q & A with Maneet Ahuja, author of The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds Maneet Ahuja What is The Alpha Masters about? The Alpha Masters lifts the curtain on the notoriously private hedge fund industry and reveals valuable stories, secrets and lessons directly from the world's top investors. I wrote the book during one of the most volatile years in the U.S. markets. Through firsthand interviews and unprecedented access, each chapter profiles one of the biggest and most successful names in the industry, specifically including Ray Dalio, John Paulson, David Tepper, Bill Ackman, Marc Lasry and Sonia Gardner, Dan Loeb, Jim Chanos, Boaz Weinstein, Pierre LaGrange and Tim Wong. You had unprecedented access to these managers through the course of writing The Alpha Masters . Why do you think you were able to \"go behind the curtain\"? As any good journalist will tell you, when you focus on the facts and developing your story, the rest will follow. My objective in writing The Alpha Masters was to dig deep into the backgrounds and investment philosophies of some of the world's greatest investors in order to really tell their stories for the first time. As a producer at CNBC for over four years, I have slowly built strong relationships and trust with these investors which I have now taken several steps further with the publishing of The Alpha Masters . I believe I was able to \"go behind the curtain,\" so to speak, because all of my subjects believed there were extremely valuable lessons to be learned from their extensive experiences and insights. Hopefully readers of the book will agree and be able to put some of the philosophies shared in the book into practice in their own lives and portfolios! Why are hedge funds such a mystery? There are a few key reasons, but foremost, the general public doesn't have the ability to invest in hedge funds because they are restricted to \"accredited investors\" under Regulation D of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This usually means an individual with net worth of at least $1 million or annual income over $200,000. Also, hedge funds have only been around for less than a century. While there are a lot of mixed opinions--even among the investors profiled in the book--about what actually constitutes a hedge fund, the investment strategies are complex and believed by many to contain marks of genius. Thus, hedge fund managers have historically shied away from publicly explaining their methods, not only because they are difficult to understand, but from fear of giving away the secret sauce. Who should read this book? This book is for investors, market participants, business students, and anyone curious about the markets and interested in a \"hedge- ucation.\" You interviewed some of the top hedge fund managers in the world. What defining characteristic do you think stands out among them? In one word? Drive. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \u201cThis is one of the very few books I know of that crawls inside the minds of today\u2019s most brilliant investors to get the play-by-play of their best (and sometimes worst) investments. You feel as though you are sitting across from the likes of John Paulson and David Tepper as they share their most sought-after techniques and analysis. This book will pay for itself and then some for those who are smart enough to pick it up.\u201d \u2014Nouriel Roubini, Cofounder and Chairman, Roubini Global Economics, Professor of Economics, NYU Stern School of Business \u201cManeet Ahuja knows well the stars of the hedge fund universe. She has written a really very interesting book that provides insights into the industry, its rapid evolution, and its adaptability to a constantly shifting investment landscape. But, most of all, she introduces us to its fascinating leaders, in depth. From their backgrounds, values, and modes of thought, she gives us insight into what it takes to be successful in this most demanding profession.\u201d \u2014Michael Spence, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, former Dean of Stanford Business School \u201cHedge funds carry a range of connotations for investors, both good and bad. Maneet\u2019s demystification of this increasingly important sector of the financial world provides a valuable service for investors, as they look for alternatives to the financial institutions\u2014and investing tenets\u2014that failed them during the financial crisis.\u201d \u2014Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and U.S. Trust \u201cNo one has the type of access to this elite class of hedge fund managers as Maneet Ahuja does. The Alpha Masters provides the type of in-depth insight and advice that only comes from countless conversations and time spent one-on-one with these managers. The Alpha Masters is bound to be a classic.\u201d \u2014Leon G. Cooperman, Chairman and CEO, Omega Advisors, Inc. \u201cThe Alpha Masters has captured the background, the ideas, and the money-making cutting-edge strategy of today\u2019s drivers of financial thought, analysis, and action. It is a great read for those who track the capital market and the tug-of-war between creativity, ideas, and capital market stress.\u201d \u2014Mario J. Gabelli, Chief Investment Officer, GAMCO Investors, Inc. \u201cThe great cultural divide in journalism has always been between access and accountability reporting. But, in the end, it\u2019s really just a division of labor; readers need both. Ahuja works the access side of the street, and gets people to talk as few others can. The result is a surprisingly absorbing book about people who you can\u2019t help but be curious about.\u201d \u2014Dean Starkman, Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist and Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review \u2019s \u201cThe Audit\u201d \u201cManeet presents clear and thoughtful studies of some of the most successful investors of recent years. The Alpha Masters is highly recommended as an excellent guide to what has worked best recently in the rapidly changing and sometimes secretive world of hedge funds.\u201d \u2014Jim McCaughan, Chief Executive, Principal Global Investors \u201cWith great insight and clarity, Maneet Ahuja distills the essence of what makes hedge fund managers successful.\u00a0 The leading \u2013 and legendary \u2013 figures in the business provide her with their recipes for the \u201csecret sauce\u201d that puts them ahead of the rest.\u00a0 This book is a must read for anyone considering investing in, working in, or just plain interested in the hedge fund industry.\u201d \u2014Randall S. Kroszner, Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and former Governor of the Federal Reserve --This text refers to the paperback edition. From the Back Cover Praise for THE ALPHA MASTERS \" The Alpha Masters is a must-read for those who want to grasp the interaction of hedge fund investment strategies and overall market performance. Maneet Ahuja brings her unique perspective from her perch as a major player in daily market reporting.\" \u2014Alan Greenspan, Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman \"This is one of the very few books I know of that crawls inside the minds of today's most brilliant investors to get the play-by-play of their best (and sometimes worst) investments. You feel as though you are sitting across from the likes of John Paulson and David Tepper as they share their most sought-after techniques and analysis. This book will pay for itself and then some for those who are smart enough to pick it up.\" \u2014Nouriel Roubini, cofounder and Chairman, Roubini Global Economics; Professor of Economics, NYU Stern School of Business \"Maneet Ahuja knows well the stars of the hedge fund universe. She has written a very interesting book that provides insights into the industry, its rapid evolution, and its adaptability to a constantly shifting investment landscape. But, most of all, she introduces us to its fascinating leaders, in depth. From their backgrounds, values, and modes of thought, she gives us insight into what it takes to be successful in this most demanding profession.\" \u2014Michael Spence, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, former dean of Stanford Business School \"Hedge funds carry a range of connotations for investors, both good and bad. Maneet's demystification of this increasingly important sector of the financial world provides a valuable service for investors as they look for alternatives to the financial institutions\u2014and investing tenets\u2014that failed them during the financial crisis.\" \u2014Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and U.S. Trust \"No one has the type of access to this elite class of hedge fund managers that Maneet Ahuja does. The Alpha Masters provides the type of in-depth insight and advice that only comes from countless conversations and time spent one-on-one with these managers. The Alpha Masters is bound to be a classic.\" \u2014Leon G. Cooperman, Chairman and CEO, Omega Advisors, Inc. \" The Alpha Masters has captured the background, the ideas, and the money-making strategy of today's cutting-edge drivers of financial thought, analysis, and action. It is a great read for those who track the capital market and the tug-of-war between creativity, ideas, and capital market stress.\" \u2014Mario J. Gabelli, Chief Investment Officer, GAMCO Investors, Inc. \"The great cultural divide in journalism has always been between access and accountability reporting. But, in the end, it's really just a division of labor; readers need both. Ahuja works the access side of the street and gets people to talk as few others can. The result is a surprisingly absorbing book about people who you can't help but be curious about.\" \u2014Dean Starkman, Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist and Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review's \"The Audit\" --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Maneet Ahuja (New York, NY) is a producer on \"Squawk Box,\" specializing in hedge funds and alternative investments. She was awarded CNBC's prestigious Enterprise Award in 2009 for her groundbreaking coverage of the ultra-secretive hedge fund industry for the network. Prior to joining CNBC in 2008, she was a part of the Wall Street Journal 's Money & Investing team. She began her career on Wall Street in 2002 at age 17 in Citigroup's Corporate & Investment Banking division as a credit risk analyst.?In 2010, she was nominated for Crain's NY Business Forty Under 40 Rising Stars. --This text refers to the paperback edition. From the Inside Flap Praise for THE ALPHA MASTERS \" The Alpha Masters is a must-read for those who want to grasp the interaction of hedge fund investment strategies and overall market performance. Maneet Ahuja brings her unique perspective from her perch as a major player in daily market reporting.\" \u2014Alan Greenspan, Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman \"This is one of the very few books I know of that crawls inside the minds of today's most brilliant investors to get the play-by-play of their best (and sometimes worst) investments. You feel as though you are sitting across from the likes of John Paulson and David Tepper as they share their most sought-after techniques and analysis. This book will pay for itself and then some for those who are smart enough to pick it up.\" \u2014Nouriel Roubini, cofounder and Chairman, Roubini Global Economics; Professor of Economics, NYU Stern School of Business \"Maneet Ahuja knows well the stars of the hedge fund universe. She has written a very interesting book that provides insights into the industry, its rapid evolution, and its adaptability to a constantly shifting investment landscape. But, most of all, she introduces us to its fascinating leaders, in depth. From their backgrounds, values, and modes of thought, she gives us insight into what it takes to be successful in this most demanding profession.\" \u2014Michael Spence, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, former dean of Stanford Business School \"Hedge funds carry a range of connotations for investors, both good and bad. Maneet's demystification of this increasingly important sector of the financial world provides a valuable service for investors as they look for alternatives to the financial institutions\u2014and investing tenets\u2014that failed them during the financial crisis.\" \u2014Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and U.S. Trust \"No one has the type of access to this elite class of hedge fund managers that Maneet Ahuja does. The Alpha Masters provides the type of in-depth insight and advice that only comes from countless conversations and time spent one-on-one with these managers. The Alpha Masters is bound to be a classic.\" \u2014Leon G. Cooperman, Chairman and CEO, Omega Advisors, Inc. \" The Alpha Masters has captured the background, the ideas, and the money-making strategy of today's cutting-edge drivers of financial thought, analysis, and action. It is a great read for those who track the capital market and the tug-of-war between creativity, ideas, and capital market stress.\" \u2014Mario J. Gabelli, Chief Investment Officer, GAMCO Investors, Inc. \"The great cultural divide in journalism has always been between access and accountability reporting. But, in the end, it's really just a division of labor; readers need both. Ahuja works the access side of the street and gets people to talk as few others can. The result is a surprisingly absorbing book about people who you can't help but be curious about.\" \u2014Dean Starkman, Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist and Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review's \"The Audit\" --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review ?This is one of the very few books I know of that crawls inside the minds of today?s most brilliant investors to get the play-by-play of their best (and sometimes worst) investments. You feel as though you are sitting across from the likes of John Paulson and David Tepper as they share their most sought-after techniques and analysis. This book will pay for itself and then some for those who are smart enough to pick it up.? ?Nouriel Roubini, Cofounder and Chairman, Roubini Global Economics, Professor of Economics, NYU Stern School of Business ?Maneet Ahuja knows well the stars of the hedge fund universe. She has written a really very interesting book that provides insights into the industry, its rapid evolution, and its adaptability to a constantly shifting investment landscape. But, most of all, she introduces us to its fascinating leaders, in depth. From their backgrounds, values, and modes of thought, she gives us insight into what it takes to be successful in this most demanding profession.? ?Michael Spence, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, former Dean of Stanford Business School ?Hedge funds carry a range of connotations for investors, both good and bad. Maneet?s demystification of this increasingly important sector of the financial world provides a valuable service for investors, as they look for alternatives to the financial institutions?and investing tenets?that failed them during the financial crisis.? ?Sallie Krawcheck, former CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and U.S. Trust ?No one has the type of access to this elite class of hedge fund managers as Maneet Ahuja does. The Alpha Masters provides the type of in-depth insight and advice that only comes from countless conversations and time spent one-on-one with these managers. The Alpha Masters is bound to be a classic.? ?Leon G. Cooperman, Chairman and CEO, Omega Advisors, Inc. ?The Alpha Masters has captured the background, the ideas, and the money-making cutting-edge strategy of today?s drivers of financial thought, analysis, and action. It is a great read for those who track the capital market and the tug-of-war between creativity, ideas, and capital market stress.? ?Mario J. Gabelli, Chief Investment Officer, GAMCO Investors, Inc. ?The great cultural divide in journalism has always been between access and accountability reporting. But, in the end, it?s really just a division of labor; readers need both. Ahuja works the access side of the street, and gets people to talk as few others can. The result is a surprisingly absorbing book about people who you can?t help but be curious about.? ?Dean Starkman, Pulitzer Prize?winning journalist and Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review ?s ?The Audit? ?Maneet presents clear and thoughtful studies of some of the most successful investors of recent years. The Alpha Masters is highly recommended as an excellent guide to what has worked best recently in the rapidly changing and sometimes secretive world of hedge funds.? ?Jim McCaughan, Chief Executive, Principal Global Investors ?With great insight and clarity, Maneet Ahuja distills the essence of what makes hedge fund managers successful. The leading ? and legendary ? figures in the business provide her with their recipes for the ?secret sauce? that puts them ahead of the rest. This book is a must read for anyone considering investing in, working in, or just plain interested in the hedge fund industry.? ?Randall S. Kroszner, Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and former Governor of the Federal Reserve --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Investing"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0471133930", "title": "Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset", "author": "Aswath Damodaran", "description": "From the Back Cover INVESTMENT VALUATION Tools and techniques for determining the value of any asset BusinessWeek named him one of the top business school professors in the United States. MBA students pack his lectures and savvy investors eagerly read his enlightening articles on the valuation process. Now, with the publication of this book, Aswath Damodaran provides a practical, comprehensive guide to valuing almost any asset. Investment Valuation offers expert instruction on determining the value of companies as well as equities, bonds, options, futures, real estate, and more. Using real-world examples of companies and securities, this user-friendly book clarifies the entire process of valuation, describing the underlying principles of valuation as well as the unique information required for different types of assets. It guides the reader through the theory and application of difficult valuation models and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each. An invaluable resource for authoritative information, analysis, and insight, Investment Valuation covers all the key topics in asset valuation, including: Choosing the right valuation model for any situation Choosing the right valuation model for any situation Risk and return\u2014theory and models Risk and return\u2014theory and models Estimation of discount rates, cash flow, and growth rates Estimation of discount rates, cash flow, and growth rates Definition and tests of market efficiency Definition and tests of market efficiency Price/earnings multiples, price/book value multiples, and price/sales multiples Price/earnings multiples, price/book value multiples, and price/sales multiples A book that offers the insight and advice of one of today's keenest business minds, Investment Valuation is an indispensable guide for investors, analysts, researchers, and others who must undertake the challenging task of valuing assets. From a recognized authority on the valuation process\u2014a powerful guide to valuing private companies, equities, bonds, options, futures, and more INVESTMENT VALUATION Tools and techniques for determining the value of any asset In this indispensable book, noted valuation authority and acclaimed NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran gives you expert instruction on how to value virtually any type of asset\u2014private companies, bonds, stocks, real estate, and derivatives. Using real-world examples, he guides you through the theory and application of valuation models and highlights their strengths and weaknesses. He examines cases where the direct application of typical models often breaks down, including high growth, distressed, and private firms. A perfect guide for those who need to know more about the tricky business of valuation, Investment Valuation will be a valuable asset to everyone learning about this important investment process. About the Author ASWATH DAMODARAN is Associate Professor of Finance at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He has been the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding teaching, including the NYU university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, and was recently named one of the nation's top business school teachers by BusinessWeek. In addition, Mr. Damodaran teaches training courses in corporate finance and valuation at Deutsche Bank, Swiss Bank, Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, and Smith Barney. His publications include Damodaran on Valuation: Security Analysis for Investment and Corporate Finance, also published by Wiley.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "0321869257", "title": "Photographic Atlas for Anatomy & Physiology, A", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Nora Hebert, Ph.D. teaches undergraduate courses in Anatomy and Physiology at Red Rocks Community College near Denver, Colorado. Although most of her students are undergraduates, primarily interested in the allied health professions, Nora has also taught graduate-level Human Physiology for the College\u2019s Physician Assistant Program. Nora is an active faculty member at Red Rocks, serving on the faculty senate, the honors program committee, and the admissions and executive committees for the Physician Assistant Program. She is also part of the College\u2019s Campus Green Initiative. Among her many academic projects, Nora has consulted in the development of an interactive virtual knee, known as the Explorable Virtual Human, with the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. She has also been involved with the Visible Human Dissector program, advising K-12 teachers and postsecondary instructors on how best to implement the Dissector in their classrooms. Nora has been deeply involved in the development of Practice Anatomy Lab , as coauthor of versions 2.0 and 3.0. She is also the author of over 60 A&P Flix animations covering muscle physiology, neurophysiology, and muscle origins, actions, insertions, and innervations. Nora received a Ph.D. in Endocrinology from the University of California at Berkeley. Ruth E. Heisler is a senior instructor in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she teaches and coordinates several courses, including Human Anatomy, Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, and Forensic Biology. She has been an instructor at the University of Colorado for more than 15 years. At the University of Colorado, Ruth has worked extensively with the Science Education Initiative to improve both the teaching and understanding of scientific material at the undergraduate level. In addition, she has been involved in academic outreach through workshops with the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the Biological Sciences Initiative. She has been a consultant on projects with the Center for Human Simulation, working with data generated through the Visible Human Project. Ruth has been deeply involved in the development of Practice Anatomy Lab , as coauthor of versions 2.0 and 3.0. She is also author of a custom laboratory manual developed for a large, cadaver-based human anatomy lab. Ruth received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Minnesota, and her M.A. in Biology from the University of Colorado. Jett Chinn is an instructor of Human Anatomy in the Science and Technology Division of Ca\u00f1ada College (Redwood City, CA) and also the Life and Earth Sciences Department at the College of Marin (Kentfield, CA). Jett has more than 20 years of experience teaching Human Anatomy at institutions including San Francisco State University, California College of Podiatric Medicine, and Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine. He has also taught first-year dental students at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine. Jett received a B.A. in general biology from San Francisco State University. Karen M. Krabbenhoft, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. During her 20-year career, Karen\u2019s focus has been on teach", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 42.76}, {"asin": "B01LZZGJ2C", "title": "Executive Order (Reeder and Rogers Thriller)", "author": "Max Allan Collins", "description": "About the Author Max Allan Collins received the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2017, considered the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing. He has earned an unprecedented twenty-threePrivate Eye Writers of America (PWA) Shamus Award Nominations, winning three times, twice for his Nathan Heller novels True Detective and Stolen Away . Collins is also the recipient of a PWA lifetime achievement award. His graphic novel Road to Perdition was the basis for the 2002 Academy Award\u2013winning film. His suspense series include Nolan, Mallory, Jack and Maggie Starr, Eliot Ness, and Quarry, the latter now a Cinemax TV series. A cofounder of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, Collins has written numerous film and TV tie-in novels for series including CSI , Dark Angel , and Criminal Minds . Comics credits include the syndicated Dick Tracy strip, Batman , and his own Ms. Tree and Wild Dog . Collins lives in Muscatine, Iowa, with his wife, writer Barbara Collins. They have collaborated on twelve novels, including the popular Trash 'n' Treasures Mystery series.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0062570420", "title": "Little House 4-Book Box Set: Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks of Plum Creek", "author": "Laura Ingalls Wilder", "description": "About the Author Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867\u20131957) was born in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. With her family, she pioneered throughout America\u2019s heartland during the 1870s and 1880s, finally settling in Dakota Territory. She married Almanzo Wilder in 1885; their only daughter, Rose, was born the following year. The Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where they established a permanent home. After years of farming, Laura wrote the first of her beloved Little House books in 1932. The nine Little House books are international classics. Her writings live on into the twenty-first century as America\u2019s quintessential pioneer story. Garth Williams is the renowned illustrator of almost one hundred books for children, including the beloved Stuart Little by E. B. White, Bedtime for Frances by Russell Hoban, and the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. He was born in 1912 in New York City but raised in England. He founded an art school near London and served with the British Red Cross Civilian Defense during World War II. Williams worked as a portrait sculptor, art director, and magazine artist before doing his first book Stuart Little , thus beginning a long and lustrous career illustrating some of the best known children's books. In addition to illustrating works by White and Wilder, he also illustrated George Selden\u2019s The Cricket in Times Square and its sequels (Farrar Straus Giroux). He created the character and pictures for the first book in the Frances series by Russell Hoban (HarperCollins) and the first books in the Miss Bianca series by Margery Sharp (Little, Brown). He collaborated with Margaret Wise Brown on her Little Golden Books titles Home for a Bunny and Little Fur Family, among others, and with Jack Prelutsky on two poetry collections published by Greenwillow: Ride a Purple Pelican and Beneath a Blue Umbrella . He also wrote and illustrated seven books on his own, including Baby Farm Animals (Little Golden Books) and The Rabbits\u2019 Wedding (HarperCollins).", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0471133930"}
{"user_id": "AFVK7TASBWIIN4THOWDDQFBJAVLA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0545261244", "title": "The Wonky Donkey", "author": "Craig Smith", "description": "About the Author Craig Smith is the recipient of the 2008 APRA Children's Song of the Year for The Wonky Donkey . When not writing, Craig works as a musician and entertainer. Visit him at craigsmith.co.nz.  Katz Cowley is an illustrator and teacher who leads workshops in drawing, creative journaling, and self-expression.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.28}, {"asin": "1250058902", "title": "Humans of New York : Stories", "author": "Brandon Stanton", "description": "Review \"I ended up reading Stories cover-to-cover in one sitting. The powerful storytelling Stanton does on his blog translates seamlessly into book form.\" \u2015Elise De Los Santos, Chicago Tribune \u201cAs the quotes grew longer, and the interviews deeper, Stanton developed a signature storytelling style\u2015one that blends the lure of urban voyeurism with an eye for the extraordinary detail in seemingly ordinary subjects. What makes these photographs compelling is their sincerity, their air of authenticity. All are taken on the spot of first contact.\u201d \u2015 The Economist \u201cA wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews, starred review \u201cSome street photographers hide behind phone booths like paparazzi so their subject won't be aware of their presence, but for Stanton it's precisely that awkward interaction, the tearing down of the wall between strangers, that he covets.\u201d \u2015 The Huffington Post \u201cThere's no judgment, just observation and in many cases reverence, making for an inspiring reading and visual experience.\u201d \u2015 Publisher\u2019s Weekly About the Author BRANDON STANTON is the creator of the #1 New York Times bestselling books Humans, Humans of New York, and Humans of New York: Stories as well as the children's book, Little Humans. His photography and storytelling blog is followed by a global audience of over thirty million people across several social media platforms. In addition to sharing thousands of stories from around the world, the blog has raised over $30 million for featured individuals and nonprofits. Stanton is a graduate of the University of Georgia and lives in New York City.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Photography & Video"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.5}, {"asin": "0525539794", "title": "Eternal", "author": "Lisa Scottoline", "description": "Review \"An accomplished historical novel that is both steeped in period detail and full of relatable characters.... Scottoline is a master at ramping up the suspense.\"-- Washington Post \"In this book of her heart, Lisa Scottoline delivers what her readers expect and so much more, fast-paced intrigue, but also an authentic, tender coming of age tale of three best friends navigating the complexities of fascism, war, political and family strife and romantic competition.\"-- Lisa Wingate, author of Before We Were Yours and The Book Of Lost Friends \"Eternal feels so real you can almost taste the cappelletti, as you get lost in the pages on your glorious and heart-wrenching trip to Italy.\"-- Martha Hall Kelly, author of Lilac Girls and Sunflower Sisters \u201cPowerful and absorbing\u2026at the heart of the novel is an enduring message, that what\u2019s perhaps most heroic in any life is to love fiercely and completely, in spite of loss and betrayal, and even beyond death.\u201d-- Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark \u201cWith characters who change and grow and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing, Eternal is a blockbuster with cinematic intensity.\u201d-- Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train and The Exiles \"Make a plate of fettuccine, pour a glass of red wine, and settle in with this captivating tale. You will cry tears of sadness and joy. Scottoline\u2019s Italian heritage combined with all her diligent research will keep this story in readers\u2019 hearts.\" - -Library Journal (starred review) \u201cA beautiful, heartbreaking, wrenching love story set in the Second World War. It\u2019s alive with characters I cared about deeply - including the remarkable city of Rome, itself - and their courage in the face of Fascism.\u201d-- Chris Bohjalian, author of Midwive s and The Flight Attendant \"This nuanced take on WWII Italy offers a variety of perspectives, but at its heart, this is a love story, with heroes lost being warmly remembered and love conquering all\u2026.Best-selling crime writer Scottoline successfully changes course in a coming-of-age WWII love story that will entrance fans and newcomers alike.\"-- Booklist \u201cScottoline\u2019s admirable foray into historical fiction\u2026expertly brings historical events to life. Fans of WWII fiction will be drawn to this immersive, emotional novel.\u201d-- Publishers Weekly \u201cQuite a change from Scottoline\u2019s bestselling contemporary thrillers: an ambitious, deeply researched historical account of three Roman families caught in the meltdown of Fascist Italy...Heartfelt.\u201d -- Kirkus Reviews \u201cA powerfully moving story of loss, loyalty, family and love.\u201d-- Woman's World \u201cAs Americans go through huge growing pains (hopefully leading to something positive) in terms of their own racist pasts, Eternal offers us hope. Somehow love really can save the day--romantic love, brotherhood, spiritual love, love for a good nation and the democratic process. May the scholarship and literary invention of this extraordinary novel find a home in the hearts of readers everywhere.\u201d-- Bookreporter.com \"I absolutely loved this page-turning novel. The writing is superb, and the historical research is outstanding. Eternal is an important book about the Holocaust and fascist Italy, and tells a story that needs to be told. As a Holocaust educator and a Child Refugee Survivor of the Holocaust, I strongly recommend everyone read this book.\"-- Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff, Director, The Holocaust Teacher Institute, University of Miami \" Eternal is remarkable historical fiction that brings to life Rome in the years leading up to and during WWII on the shoulders of unforgettable characters caught up on all sides of terrible events spinning beyond their control. Scottoline\u2019s research is impeccable, her storytelling is propulsive, and the emotional times she describes are deep, moving, and yes, eternal.\"\u00a0-- Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky \"The master storyteller Lisa Scottoline is at the height of her powers with Eternal. This magnificent epic is the story of\u00a0 three childhood friends who come of age during World War II Italy.\u00a0You are with them in the worst of times as they navigate their lost dreams. You will root for their\u00a0survival as they find redemption\u00a0in a post-war world they must build with hope. Love. Faith. Friendship.\u00a0Courage. It's all\u00a0here and it is essential reading.\" --Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Lucia, Lucia and The Shoemaker's Wife \"In Eternal , Lisa Scottoline expands her formidable talents to World War II Italy and the heartwarming tale of three families whose intersecting worlds are torn apart. Scottoline captures the tragic beauty of wartime Rome through the eyes of unforgettable characters with whom readers will hope and mourn and cheer. A passionate story of friendship, loyalty, and unbridled heroism.\"-- Pam Jenoff, bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris \u201c Eternal is a gripping story of suffering and survival.\u00a0 It unspools at a heart-stopping pace,\u00a0 yet each page resonates with emotions: fear, hope, sorrow, yearning, love, empathy, sympathy, and, ultimately, joy.\u00a0 The book lives up to its title.\u00a0 It will echo in the minds of readers for a long time.\u201d- -Sandra Brown \"What Elena Ferrante did with her Neapolitan Quartet, Scottoline does for war-time Rome: brings it to life as the city is ripped apart by men in power and barely held together by the courage and decency of those who stand against them. Eternal is a must read.\" --Lorenzo Carcaterra \u201cAt its heart, Eterna l is a beautiful, heartbreaking, yet ultimately uplifting love story. Meticulously researched, this riveting World War II-era novel explores what happens when beautiful Elisabetta must choose between lifelong best friends Sandro and Marco. As they get caught up in the madness that overtakes Italy when it becomes a satellite of Hitler and the Third Reich,\u00a0each must make a gut-wrenching choice that determines the course of the rest of their lives. Action-packed and haunting, Eternal will stay with you for a long time after you finish reading it. I loved this book!\u201d-- Karen Robards, author of The Black Swan of Paris \"Lisa Scottoline is a magnificent storyteller. Eternal is a triangular story of first love, told against the backdrop of WWII in Rome, that is both terrifying and magical; three young people at one of the worst times in history are filled with love, hate, fear, rage, and at the end, survival and hope. Eternal is brilliantly written. Scottoline hits new heights in this spellbinding tale of decades-old family secrets and rips apart the fragility of first loves. I was pulled in from the first page by the lives of Scottoline\u2019s characters as they tried to make their way through events beyond their control in this richly detailed story that makes you feel like you\u2019re right alongside them.\"\u00a0- -Andrew Mayne, author of The Naturalist and The Girl Beneath the Sea About the Author Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times -bestselling author of thirty-two novels. She has thirty million copies of her books in print in the United States and has been published in thirty-five countries. Scottoline also writes a weekly column with her daughter for The Philadelphia Inquirer . Lisa has served as President of Mystery Writers of America and has taught a course she developed, \"Justice in Fiction\" at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. She lives in the Philadelphia area. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Elisabetta May 1937 Elisabetta made up her mind. Marco Terrizzi would be her first kiss. She watched him doing bicycle tricks by the river, riding on his back tire, his head thrown back in laughter, his teeth white against his tanned face. His thick, dark hair shone with pomade in the sun, and his legs were knotted with muscles inside the baggy shorts of his uniform. He rode with joy and athleticism, achieving a masculine grace. Marco Terrizzi had sprezzatura, a rare and effortless charm that made him irresistible. Elisabetta couldn't take her eyes from him, and neither could the others. They had grown up together, but somewhere along the line, he had gone from boyhood to manhood, from Marco to Marco. That he was terribly handsome there could be no doubt. He had large, walnut-brown eyes, a strong nose, a square jaw, and a broad neck marked by a prominent Adam's apple. He was the most popular boy in their class, and everything about him seemed more vivid than everyone else. Even now, the sun drenched him in gold, as if Nature herself gilded him. Elisabetta wondered what it would be like to kiss him. She guessed it would be exciting, even delicious, like biting into a ripe tomato and letting its juices run down her chin. She had never kissed a boy, though she was already fifteen years old, and at night she practiced kissing on her pillow. Her tabbycat, Rico, with whom she slept, had grown accustomed to her routine, as cats endure the silliness of young girls. Elisabetta had no idea how to make Marco think of her as more than a friend. She usually achieved what she set her mind to, getting good grades and such, but this was different. She was too blunt to flirt. She lacked feminine wiles. She had been a maschiaccio, a tomboy, when she was little, which was how she had grown close with Marco. She was trying to become more womanly, but she still didn't wear a brassiere. Her mother said she didn't need one, but the other girls made fun of her, talking behind their hands. \"Elisabetta, help, I'll drown!\" Marco raced toward the river, and she was about to call to him, but stopped herself. She had read in a female advice column that denying men the attention they craved drove them mad with desire, so she ignored him, while the other girls responded. \"Marco, no!\" Livia called back. \"Marco, be careful!\" Angela gasped. The boys waited to see if calamity befell Marco, but he cranked the handlebars, veering away from the river's edge. They laughed and returned to their textbooks, spread out on the grass. They were doing homework, having come from their Balilla meeting, the party's compulsory youth group. They all wore their uniforms, the boys in their black shirts and gray shorts, and the girls in white muslin shirts and black skirts. This quiet spot on the riverbank, just north of the Ponte Palatino, had become a hangout of her classmates after school, though Elisabetta typically sat with Marco or Sandro, apart from the other girls. Somehow she had missed her chance to become their girlfriend, and it was too late now, for they rebuffed her overtures. Perhaps they had judged her as preferring the boys, which wasn't true, and she would have loved to have had a good girlfriend. Whatever the reason, Angela and the other girls kept her at a distance, and she tried not to let it bother her. \"Look, Betta!\" Marco called again, using her childhood nickname. \"Use my proper name!\" Elisabetta called back, from behind her newspaper. She did prefer her full name, as she hoped to become a journalist someday. She practiced her byline at night, too. By Elisabetta D'Orfeo. \"Elisabetta!\" Marco rode over, sliding to a stop on the grass. \"Hop on my handlebars. Let's go for a ride.\" \"No, I'm reading.\" Elisabetta hid her smile behind the newspaper. Angela rose, brushing grass from her skirt. \"Marco, I'll go, take me!\" \"Okay!\" Marco extended his hand, Angela clambered onto his handlebars, and the two rode off together. Elisabetta lowered her newspaper, wondering if the female advice column had been wrong. If she wanted Marco, she would have to attract him another way. She sensed she was pretty enough, now that she had grown into her features, according to her mother. Her large, round eyes were greenish-brown, and her shoulder-length hair was a rich brunette, wavy and abundant. Her nose was strong, but proportional to her prominent cheekbones, and her lips were full. Her problem was her bocca grande, big mouth, which proved a disadvantage when it came to boys, her Latin teacher, and that old bitch at the newsstand. Elisabetta leaned back on her elbows, breathing in the odors of the Tiber, its water a milky jade with wavelets topped with ivory foam. Swallows skimmed the surface for a drink, cicadas rasped, and dragonflies droned. Pink oleander bushes, umbrella pines, and palm trees lined the riverbank, and the natural oasis was shielded from the hustle-bustle of the city by gray stone walls. Elisabetta's gaze found the Ponte Rotto in the middle of the river, a bizarre sight. Centuries ago, the stone bridge had connected the riverbanks, but time had reduced it to only a single arch rising from the water, leading nowhere. Romans called it the broken bridge, but she thought that it was a survivor, standing despite the elements and the Tiber itself, which sent blackish-green vines up its sides, as if trying to pull it underwater. Beyond the Ponte Rotto was Tiber Island, the only island in the river, barely large enough to contain the Basilica di San Bartolomeo all'Isola with its faded-brick belfry, the Church of San Giovanni Calibita, and the hospital, Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, with its rows of green-shuttered windows. Across from the hospital was Bar GiroSport, which Marco's family owned and lived above. Elisabetta lived only a few blocks away from him in Trastevere, the bohemian neighborhood that she and her father loved. Unfortunately, her mother had ceased loving anything. It was then that Elisabetta spotted Sandro Simone striding toward her and the others. Sandro was her other best friend, and Marco's, too, as the three of them had been a trio since childhood. Sandro walked with his characteristically lanky stride, and his light brown curls blew back from his long, lean face. He was handsome in his own way, his features more refined than Marco's and his build like a sharpened pencil, slim but strong, the way a wire cable supports a modern bridge. \"Ciao, Elisabetta!\" Sandro reached her, smiling and taking off his fez. He wiped the sweat from his brow, slid off his backpack, and sat down. His eyes, a brilliant azure color with long eyelashes like awnings, narrowed against the sunlight. His nose was long and aquiline, and his lips finely etched into his face. Sandro lived on the east side of the river in the Jewish quarter, called the Ghetto, and throughout their childhood, Elisabetta, Sandro, and Marco had traveled back and forth on an axis from Trastevere to Tiber Island and the Ghetto, riding bikes, playing football, and generally acting as if Rome were their private playground. \"Ciao, Sandro.\" Elisabetta smiled, happy to see him. \"I stopped to get us a snack. Have one.\" Sandro produced a paper bag from his backpack and opened its top, releasing the delicious aroma of suppl\u201c, rice croquettes with tomato sauce and mozzarella. \"Grazie!\" Elisabetta picked up a suppl\u201c and took a bite. The breading was light, the tomato sauce perfectly salty, and the mozzarella hot enough to melt on her tongue. \"Where's Marco? I brought some for him, too.\" \"Off with Angela.\" \"Too bad.\" Sandro chewed a suppl\u201c and glanced at her newspaper. \"What are you reading?\" \"Nothing.\" Elisabetta used to love reading the newspaper, but her favorite columnists were gone, and she suspected they had been fired. Benito Mussolini and the Fascists had been in power for fifteen years, and censorship had become the order of the day. \"All the articles are the same, about how great the government is, or they reproduce ridiculous posters like this one.\" \"Let me see.\" Sandro wiped his hands on a napkin. \"Here.\" Elisabetta showed him a picture of an Italian peasant woman in traditional dress, holding babies in each arm. She read him the caption. \"'The ideal Fascist woman is to bear children, knit, and sew, while men work or go to war.' It's propaganda, not news, and anyway, not all women are the same.\" \"Of course they aren't. The newspaper isn't always right.\" \"No, it's not.\" Elisabetta thought of the female advice column. Marco and Angela still weren't back. \"Don't let it bother you.\" \"But it does.\" Elisabetta disagreed with the Fascists, though she didn't discuss it with anyone other than Sandro and Marco. Those who spoke against the government could be arrested and sent into confino, exile, far from their homes. Informers abounded in Rome, even in Trastevere, and though Elisabetta's family wasn't committed to any particular political party, as artists they were congenitally leftist. \"You don't like being told what to do.\" \"Who does? Do you?\" \"No, but I don't take it so much to heart as you.\" Sandro leaned over. \"Guess what, I have amazing news. I was accepted to an internship with Professor Levi-Civita at La Sapienza.\" \"Davvero?\" Elisabetta asked, astonished. \"You, a high school student? At the university?\" \"Yes, it will be an independent study.\" Sandro beamed with pride. \"Congratulations!\" Elisabetta felt delighted for him. He was a mathematical prodigy, and his preternatural talent had been plain since primary school, so she shouldn't have been surprised that he would be at La Sapienza, the city campus of the University of Rome. \"And this professor is the one you always talk about, right? Levi-Civita?\" \"Yes, and I can't wait to meet him. He's one of the greatest mathematicians of our time. He developed tensor calculus, which Einstein used in his theory of relativity. In fact, he just got back from seeing him in America.\" \"How wonderful. How did this come about, anyway? For you?\" \"Professoressa Longhi recommended me, and I've been waiting to hear. I just stopped by the hospital to tell my mother.\" \"She must be so proud.\" Elisabetta admired Sandro's mother, who was one of the few female doctors she had ever heard of, an obstetrician at Ospedale Fatebenefratelli. \"She was, but she was surprised I hadn't told her I was being considered.\" \"I am, too. Why didn't you tell us?\" Elisabetta meant her and Marco. \"I didn't want you to know if I failed.\" \"Oh, Sandro.\" Elisabetta felt a rush of affection for him. \"You never fail, and Levi-Civita is lucky to have you. You'll be a famous mathematician someday.\" Sandro grinned. \"And you'll be a famous journalist.\" \"Ha!\" Elisabetta didn't know what Marco would become, but dismissed the thought. \"How can you read in the sunlight?\" Sandro squinted at her newspaper. \"It's so bright.\" \"It is, I know.\" \"Allow me.\" Sandro slid the newspaper page from her hand and stood up. \"No, give me that back.\" Elisabetta rose, reaching, but Sandro turned away, doing something with the newspaper. \"It's only the obituaries.\" \"I like the obituaries.\" Elisabetta always read the obituaries, as each one was a wonderful life story, except for the endings. \"Ecco.\" Sandro held out a hat of folded newspaper, then popped it on her head. \"This will keep the sun from your eyes.\" \"Grazie.\" Elisabetta smiled, delighted, and all of a sudden, Sandro kissed her. She found herself kissing him back, tasting warm tomato sauce on his lips until he pulled away, smiling down at her, with a new shine in his eyes that confused her. She had just decided that Marco would be her first kiss. \"Sandro, why did you do that?\" Elisabetta glanced around, wondering if the others had seen. Her classmates were bent over their homework, and though Marco was approaching with Angela on his handlebars, he was too far away. Sandro grinned. \"Isn't it obvious why?\" \"But you never kissed me before.\" \"I never kissed anybody before.\" Elisabetta felt touched. \"So why me? Why now?\" Sandro laughed. \"Who asks such questions? Only you!\" \"But I thought we were just friends.\" \"Are we? I-\" Sandro started to say, but Marco interrupted them, shouting from a distance. \"Ciao, Sandro!\" \"Ciao, Marco!\" Sandro called back, waving. Elisabetta blinked, and the moment between her and Sandro vanished, so quickly that she wondered if it had happened at all. Chapter Two Marco May 1937 Marco pedaled home from the river on the Lungotevere dei Pierleoni, the wide boulevard that ran along its east side. The sun had dipped behind the trees, shooting burnished rays through the city, which had come to boisterous life as the workday ended. Cars honked, drivers cursed, and exhaust fogged the air. The sidewalks thronged with people, and businessmen hustled to catch trams. Marco accelerated, preoccupied with Elisabetta. He was in love with her, but she treated him as a pal, the way she always did. She hadn't even cared when he had taken Angela on his bike. He felt stumped, which never happened to him with girls. He could have his pick, but he wanted Elisabetta. She was beautiful, which was reason enough alone, but he loved her passion, her strength, her fire. She had thoughts about everything, and though her intelligence was superior, she treated him as if he were equally intelligent. Marco would stop at nothing to win her over. He was love's captive. He flashed on seeing Sandro by the river today, standing oddly close to her, as if they had been having a great discussion or even sharing a secret. Anxiety gnawed at Marco, and he experienced a flicker of envy at the bond that Sandro and Elisabetta shared, for they were always talking about books or the like. But Marco knew that Sandro and Elisabetta were only friends, and Sandro had no female experience whatsoever. Marco turned onto the Ponte Fabricio, his tires bobbling on the worn travertine. The footbridge was the oldest in Rome, walled on both sides-and since it connected to Tiber Island, it was essentially the street on which he lived. He dodged businessmen and veered smoothly around a cat that darted in front of him. He reached the top of the gentle span and saw that his father, Beppe, wasn't standing outside his family's bar, Bar GiroSport, as he usually did. It meant that Marco was late to dinner. He sped to the foot of the bridge, passed the bar, and steered around to its side entrance on Piazza San Bartolomeo all'Isola. He jumped off his bicycle, slid it into the rack, then flew inside the crowded bar. He scooted upstairs, dropped his backpack, and entered a kitchen so small that one pot of boiling water could fill it with steam. On the wall hung framed photos of his father in the Giro d'Italia and a calendar featuring Learco Guerra, the great Italian bicycle racer. A small shelf held a framed photo of Pope Pius XI, a crucifix of dried palm, and a plaster statue of the Virgin. Marco's mother worshipped Christ; his father worshipped cycling. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.5}, {"asin": "0689033672", "title": "Shadow Children Boxed Set: Among the Hidden, Among the Impostors, Among the Betrayed, and Among the Barons", "author": "Margaret Peterson Haddix", "description": "Review Booklist Among the Betrayed Plenty of suspense...lots of thrilling twists and turns. School Library Journal Among the Barons Haddix is a superb storyteller and her view of a future world...is both scary and plausible. About the Author Margaret Peterson Haddix is the author of many critically and popularly acclaimed YA and middle grade novels, including the Children of Exile series, The Missing series, the Under Their Skin series, and the Shadow Children series. A graduate of Miami University (of Ohio), she worked for several years as a reporter for The Indianapolis News . She also taught at the Danville (Illinois) Area Community College. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. Visit her at HaddixBooks.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Boxed Sets", "Children's Books"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 30.14}, {"asin": "0545392551", "title": "Giraffes Can't Dance (Board Book)", "author": null, "description": "Review \"Andreae's rhyming text has a jaunty rhythm that's likely to spark interest in the read-aloud crowd.\" -Publishers Weekly About the Author Giles Andreae is the author of the international bestseller Giraffes Can't Dance , as well as many other books for children. Giles lives with his wife, Victoria, and their four children in the United Kingdom.  Guy Parker-Rees is one of today's bestselling children's book illustrators. He is the illustrator of the international bestseller Giraffes Can't Dance , as well as Dinosaurumpus! , both written by Giles Andreae. Guy lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and three sons. Visit him online at guyparkerrees.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.94}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0374360979", "title": "The Pout-Pout Fish", "author": "Deborah Diesen", "description": "Review \"Younger kids will love the repetition of the verses in this tale of a pout-pout fish.\" --\"TIME \"magazine, from its Top 10 Childrens' Books of 2008 List\"Winning artwork...Hanna's cartoonish undersea world swims with hilarious bug-eyed creatures that ooze personality\" --\"Kirkus Reviews\"\"\" \"Appealing...the cartoon illustrations of undersea life are bright and clean and the protagonist's exaggerated expressions are entertaining.\" \"--School Library Journal\"\"\" \"Diesen's clever rhymes are playful and fun and are sure to keep children's imaginations swimming from page to page.\" \"--Times Record News\" \u201cYounger kids will love the repetition of the verses in this tale of a pout-pout fish.\u201d \u2014\"TIME \"magazine, from its Top 10 Childrens\u2019 Books of 2008 List\"Winning artwork...Hanna\u2019s cartoonish undersea world swims with hilarious bug-eyed creatures that ooze personality\" \u2014\"Kirkus Reviews\"\"\" \"Appealing...the cartoon illustrations of undersea life are bright and clean and the protagonist's exaggerated expressions are entertaining.\" \"\u2014School Library Journal\"\"\" \"Diesen's clever rhymes are playful and fun and are sure to keep children's imaginations swimming from page to page.\" \"\u2014Times Record News\"\"Younger kids will love the repetition of the verses in this tale of a pout-pout fish.\" --\"TIME \"magazine, from its Top 10 Childrens' Books of 2008 List\"Winning artwork...Hanna's cartoonish undersea world swims with hilarious bug-eyed creatures that ooze personality\" --\"Kirkus Reviews\"\"\" \"Appealing...the cartoon illustrations of undersea life are bright and clean and the protagonist's exaggerated expressions are entertaining.\" \"--School Library Journal\"\"\" \"Diesen's clever rhymes are playful and fun and are sure to keep children's imaginations swimming from page to page.\" \"--Times Record News\"\"Winning artwork...Hanna's cartoonish undersea world swims with hilarious bug-eyed creatures that ooze personality\" --\"Kirkus Reviews\"\"\" \"Appealing...the cartoon illustrations of undersea life are bright and clean and the protagonist's exaggerated expressions are entertaining.\" \"--School Library Journal\"\"\" \"Diesen's clever rhymes are playful and fun and are sure to keep children's imaginations swimming from page to page.\" \"--Times Record News\" About the Author Deborah Diesen has worked as a bookseller, bookkeeper, and reference librarian. Her first book, The Pout-Pout Fish , was a New York Times bestseller and one of Time magazine\u2019s Top 10 Children\u2019s Books of the Year. She lives in Michigan with her family. Dan Hanna has over ten years\u2019 experience in the animation industry, and his work has appeared on BBC America and the Cartoon Network. He lives in Oxnard, California.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 4.98}, {"asin": "B00DTUHI2Q", "title": "NYPD Red 2", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "Review \"In the case of NYPD RED, there is simply too much fun --- in the form of inventive murder, sex, chemistry, investigation, more murder, more sex, and the like. Potboiler? Yes. Wonderfully told? Indeed.\"\u2015 bookreporter.com PRAISE FOR JAMES PATTERSON:\"The prolific Patterson seems unstoppable.\"\u2015 USA Today \"James Patterson knows how to sell thrills and suspense in clean, unwavering prose.\"\u2015 People \"Patterson's novels are sleek entertainment machines, the Porsches of commercial fiction, expertly engineered and lightning fast.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author James Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records . Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977 James Patterson's books have sold more than 300 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels , the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider . He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B00N67159E", "title": "Tropical Trauma", "author": "Ben Abix", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0394604016", "title": "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I: 180 A.D. -- 395 A.D.", "author": "Edward Gibbon", "description": "Review (in full The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) Historical work by Edward Gibbon, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. A continuous narrative from the 2nd century AD to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it is distinguished by its rigorous scholarship, its historical perspective, and its incomparable literary style. The Decline and Fall is divided into two parts, equal in bulk but different in treatment. The first half covers about 300 years to the end of the empire in the West, about 480 AD; in the second half nearly 1,000 years are compressed. Gibbon viewed the Roman Empire as a single entity in undeviating decline from the ideals of political and intellectual freedom that had characterized the classical literature he had read. For him, the material decay of Rome was the effect and symbol of moral decadence. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0374360979"}
{"user_id": "AEQH3ZSTDXKH6L4VGQQQXJKXR3JA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0743488636", "title": "Conrad Stargard: The Radiant Warrior", "author": "Leo A. Frankowski", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 49.99}, {"asin": "098584082X", "title": "Lisa's Counter Culture : Pickles and Other Well Bred Foods", "author": "Lisa Herndon", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 39.95}, {"asin": "1416509194", "title": "Conrad's Lady (The Conrad Stargard)", "author": "Leo A. Frankowski", "description": "About the Author Leo Frankowski is widely known for the popular \"Cross-Time Engineer\" series, which has gone through six novels to date, with translated editions in Italy, Spain, and Poland. Frankowski was nominated for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer. He has held more than a hundred different positions, ranging from scientist in an electro-optical research lab to chief engineer to company president. His work in chemical and optical instrumentation has earned him several patents. Currently a writer and consulting engineer, he lives with his new Russian wife and teenage daughter in Tver, Russia.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 103.06}, {"asin": "098584082X", "title": "Lisa's Counter Culture : Pickles and Other Well Bred Foods", "author": "Lisa Herndon", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 39.95}, {"asin": "0743488636", "title": "Conrad Stargard: The Radiant Warrior", "author": "Leo A. Frankowski", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 49.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1416509194", "title": "Conrad's Lady (The Conrad Stargard)", "author": "Leo A. Frankowski", "description": "About the Author Leo Frankowski is widely known for the popular \"Cross-Time Engineer\" series, which has gone through six novels to date, with translated editions in Italy, Spain, and Poland. Frankowski was nominated for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer. He has held more than a hundred different positions, ranging from scientist in an electro-optical research lab to chief engineer to company president. His work in chemical and optical instrumentation has earned him several patents. Currently a writer and consulting engineer, he lives with his new Russian wife and teenage daughter in Tver, Russia.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 103.06}, {"asin": "3899559215", "title": "The Monocle Travel Guide to San Francisco: The Monocle Travel Guide Series (Monocle Travel Guide, 26)", "author": "gestalten", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.39}, {"asin": "0877938946", "title": "Meditation Chants of Hildegard Von Bingen", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 3.6, "price": 9.0}, {"asin": "1535910933", "title": "Becoming Elisabeth Elliot", "author": "Ellen Vaughn", "description": "Review \"In this striking biography, Vaughn ( Time Peace ) sets out to discover the heart and soul of missionary and author Elisabeth Elliot (1926\u20132015). In the 1950s, Elliot served as a missionary to the Waodani tribe of Ecuador after her husband, Jim Elliot, and four others were killed by the tribe while trying to make contact. Vaughn recounts that story, bringing to light the deep desires, anguish, and imperfect life of Elliot, including her tense relationship with Rachel Saint, sister to another one of the missionaries who had died, who isolated herself from other missionaries among the Waodani. A deep thinker and lover of poetry who wanted nothing more than to do God\u2019s will, Elliot eventually found her calling in ministry to Christians rather than to those outside the faith.\u00a0 The biography\u2019s second half largely deals with challenges of navigating a life of biblical faith at odds with cultural Christianity: Elliot 'chafed at the disparity between what she saw in the gospel and what she saw in the organized church,' Vaughn writes. 'She was quick to pick up the scent of hypocrisy and legalism, but she always applied such analysis to herself first.' Even those well-acquainted with Elliot\u2019s works will find fresh perspective and revealing insights here.\" - Publisher's Weekly Review About the Author Ellen Vaughn is a New York Times bestselling author and speaker who has written or co-written 23 books.\u00a0 Former vice president of executive communications at Prison Fellowship, she collaborated with the late Chuck Colson on a number of his seminal works.\u00a0 She speaks at conferences, often travels to interview Christ-followers in hostile parts of the world, and serves on the board of directors for ICM, the global church developer.\u00a0 With degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Richmond, Ellen lives in northern Virginia with husband Lee, a regional pastor for McLean Bible Church, a daughter and two grandchildren, and one clueless dog. She enjoys reading, hiking, drinking coffee, and staring pensively at the ocean.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.89}], "target_asin": "1416509194"}
{"user_id": "AHQ6SXYVP7O64DSO7JSAUGHOSBDA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1423137604", "title": "One Special Day: A Story for Big Brothers and Sisters (A Story for Big Brothers and Sisters, 1)", "author": "Lola M. Schaefer", "description": "Review Praise for One Special Day : An ALA Notable Children's Book Bank Street Best Books of the Year CCBC Choices Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Books for Kids About the Author LOLA M. SCHAEFER (www.lolaschaefer.com) is the author of more than 200 books for children. Her book Frankie Stein was awarded the Children's Choice Book Award and the Mockingbird Award. Lola lives with her husband, Ted, in the mountains of north Georgia. JESSICA MESERVE (www.www.jessicameserve.com) is the author-illustrator of Small Sister and Can Anybody Hear Me? She was born in Maine, studiedillustration in Scotland, and worked in publishing as achildren's book designer before pursuing a career as an illustrator. Her two young children helpedinspire her artwork in this book.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.29}, {"asin": "0736429220", "title": "Finding Nemo Big Golden Book (Disney/Pixar Finding Nemo)", "author": "RH Disney", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 32.98}, {"asin": "0448483521", "title": "Octonauts and the Colossal Squid", "author": "Rosemary Wells", "description": "About the Author Grosset & Dunlap creates high-quality books for young readers of any level. Focused on books for ages 0\u201312, Grosset offers a wide range of original fiction series, nonfiction titles, leveled readers, and licensed tie-ins to captivate every reader.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.0}, {"asin": "0803735650", "title": "Squid and Octopus: Friends for Always", "author": "Tao Nyeu", "description": "About the Author Tao Nyeu is the creator of Wonder Bear , which won the Founder's Award from the Society of Illustrators and a Marion Vannett Ridgway Award Honor; and Bunny Days , which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and a Golden Kite Award Honor. Tao was born in Ohio and grew up in New York. She earned a BFA from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She now lives in Southern California.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 19.27}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0142405809", "title": "The Snail and the Whale", "author": "Julia Donaldson", "description": "Review \"Along with providing a resonant environmental message, the story lightly demonstrates that friendships come in all shapes and sizes.\u201d \u2014Publishers Weekly, starred review About the Author Julia Donaldson is the internationally bestselling author of many popular books for children. Her Smarties Prize-winning modern classic, The Gruffalo , has sold more than 13.5 million copies worldwide, and the Halloween favorite Room on the Broom is a perennial best seller. In addition to children's books, she has written many children's plays and songs and runs regular storytelling workshops. She was the Waterstones Children's Laureate from 2011-2013. Axel Scheffler is an award-winning, internationally-acclaimed illustrator of some of the most well-loved children\u2019s books, including Julia Donaldson\u2019s best-selling modern classic The Gruffalo, which has sold millions of copies worldwide. He lives in London.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.79}, {"asin": "0374103828", "title": "Hooking Up", "author": "Tom Wolfe", "description": "Amazon.com Review Tom Wolfe's name is now so well known that the cover of his new collection bears just that: Tom Wolfe's name. No title, no picture, just the name, with an elegant design twining through it. Flip the thing on its side and you'll find that its title, Hooking Up , gives little idea of its function. But investigation soon reveals an oleo of reportage, fiction, and acrimonious name-calling. The latter, of course, makes for the best reading. In \"My Three Stooges,\" Wolfe reviles the three big men of American letters--Updike, Mailer, and Irving--who cast aspersions on his second novel. Apparently, \"the allergens for jealousy were present. Both Updike and Mailer had books out at the same time as A Man in Full , and theirs had sunk without a bubble. With Irving there was the Dickens factor.\" Wolfe gets in a lot of figures about what a big hit his book was with the reading public, and a few gentle reminders about other writers who were big hits of their times--little guys like Twain and Tolstoy. Equally bitter fun are his two famous 1965 satires from the New York Herald Tribune . As always, Wolfe's titles lead you a good way into the actual stories: \"Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!\" and \"Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker .\" Wolfe, clotheshorse of note, gets off some of his best cracks at the expense of New Yorker editor William Shawn's fashion sense: \"He always seems to have on about twenty layers of clothes, about three button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and white cotton socks.\" The rest of the reported pieces are unexceptional, and while the novella Ambush at Fort Bragg makes the most of its setting--a Dateline -like newsmagazine--it lacks the irresistible momentum required to drag most readers into a novella. Still, it's fun to watch the author reprise his lifelong role of unlikely underdog: between his sniping at the literary elite and his mocking of the precious New Yorker set, Tom Wolfe makes like a defender of the common man. --Claire Dederer From Publishers Weekly Arch, vengeful and incisive as ever, the standard bearer for the chattering classes is back, this time with a collection of nine previously published essays, one new one and a reprinted novella. Ranging from the spectacular innovations of neuroscience to the preposterous horrors of the contemporary art world to a bare-knuckled assessment of the critical reception to his novel A Man in Full (an essay that appears for the first time in this collection, and that will set tongues wagging), the pieces run the gamut of Wolfe's signature obsessions. Fans of his character sketches will relish \"Two Young Men Who Went West,\" a revelatory profile of Robert Noyce, a key innovator of the microchip who founded Intel in 1968, where the midwestern Congregationalist values he shared with his former mentor, William Shockley (founder of the original Silicon Valley startup, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory), grew into a business philosophy that's now so pervasive it's practically in the ether. Also included are Wolfe's infamous, irreverent profiles of New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, originally published in 1968. Lopped off of Wolfe's most recent fiction opus, the novella \"Ambush in Fort Bragg\" concerns a \"TV sting\" run amok, and sits easily next to his journalism. However, Wolfe's meticulous eye for detail shows signs of jaundice in his hectoring anti-Communist tirades and in the title essay, which turns a snide backward glance on the turn of the millennium. Still, his fans will find plenty of evidence that Wolfe remains willing to plunge into \"the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic typanum all around [him]\" and thatDespecially in his nonfictionDhe can still grab the brass ring. Agent, Janklow & Nesbitt Associates. (Oct..--\" and thatDespecially in his nonfictionDhe can still grab the brass ring. Agent, Janklow & Nesbitt Associates. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Wolfe-man steps up to bat again, this time with a collection of essays. Although these essays are not as fully provocative as his novels, they are still quite demonstrative of his feistiness. One of the most inciting is \"My Three Stooges,\" in which Wolfe discusses the writing of and critical and popular response to his novel A Man in Full. Wolfe takes out after three eminent novelists--John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving--who had bad things to say about this particular work. He refers to them as his three stooges, a stooge being \"literally a straight man who feeds lines to the lead actor in a play. My three stooges were so upset by A Man in Full , they were feeding me lines I couldn't have dreamed up if they had asked me to write the script for them.\" In another essay, \"Hooking Up,\" Wolfe ponders America's obsession with youth and American youth's sexual precocity. The early part of the Silicon Valley story is told in \"Two Young Men Who Went West.\" These and other essays are not simply brief exercises but well-developed, factual, and informative narratives on a wide range of cultural topics. Appearing here, too, is a novella, \"Ambush at Fort Bragg,\" about a military gay-bashing incident and how a TV show is investigating it; the novella is not any less pungent a piece of writing than the essays. Expect demand for this book by a very popular or at least much-talked-about author. Brad Hooper Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review \u201cAt heart he is and always will be a terrific reporter. Hooking Up provides a great introduction to Wolfe the nonfiction stylist: the peerless portraitist, the contrarian social critic and the literary bomb thrower. The book's title is a sexual metaphor, but in Wolfe's hands, it means making connections among the culture's disparate corners. And nobody hooks up better than he does.\u201d \u2015 Malcolm Jones, Newsweek \u201cThe rich retrospective of one of America's finest writers.\u201d \u2015 Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun \u201cThe publication of Hooking Up , Wolfe's first book of short pieces in 20 years, is reason enough for celebration . . . Delicious.\u201d \u2015 Benjamin Svetkey, Entertainment Weekly \u201cTurn to the three essays grouped under the title \"The Human Beast,\" and you will be in Wolfe heaven. The first of these--is an exuberant history of the birth of Silicon Valley...'Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill' moves from the semiconductor industry to the Internet and then, by a kind of intuitive leap, to neuroscience and sociobiology. 'Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died' delves into brain imaging and the genetic determination of character. Jesuit priest Piere Teilhard de Chardin, closet Catholic Marshall McLuhan, and scientist Edmund O. Wilson are the pivotal figures of these two essays.\u201d \u2015 Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times \u201cI love Tom Wolfe 'Whenever some big bizarro thing happens' I want the man in the white suit to do his usual exhausting reporting, turn the labels inside out and the hypocrites upside down . . .and tell me what's what in one of those jittering, dazzling riffs of his.\u201d \u2015 Maureen Dowd, The New York Times \u201cHis fans will find plenty of evidence that Wolfe remains willing to plunge into 'the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic typanum all around [him]' and that--especially in his nonfiction--he can still grab the brass ring.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred) About the Author Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , The Right Stuff , and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers , as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities , A Man in Full , and I Am Charlotte Simmons . As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post , the New York Herald Tribune , Esquire , and New York magazine, and is credited with coining the term, \u201cThe Me Decade.\u201d Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University, graduating cum laude, and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lived in New York City. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 10.74}, {"asin": "0814251595", "title": "American Husband (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)", "author": "Kary Wayson", "description": "About the Author Kary Wayson, winner of the Pushcart Prize for \u201cI Turn My Silence Over,\u201d lives and writes in Seattle, Washington.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Poetry"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 17.95}, {"asin": "0924357207", "title": "Robert Ruark's Africa", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Robert Ruark is a writer and African hunter who specialized in stories about the African wilderness.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Africa"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 39.77}], "target_asin": "0142405809"}
{"user_id": "AFEHV2KCMSBSZFBPQXDQXUAEUFKA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0738719315", "title": "The Heart Tarot", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Maria Di Stefano\u00a0is an artist based in New York. Lo Scarabeo's Tarot decks have been acclaimed all over the world for originality and quality. With the best Italian and international artists, each Lo Scarabeo deck is an exceptional artistic value. Committed to developing innovative new decks while preserving the rich tradition of Tarot, Lo Scarabeo continues to be a favorite among collectors and readers. Llewellyn is the exclusive distributor of Lo Scarabeo products in North America.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0738727849", "title": "Tarot Spreads: Layouts & Techniques to Empower Your Readings", "author": "Barbara Moore", "description": "About the Author Barbara Moore (Saint Paul, MN) has studied and read tarot since the early 1990s. She wrote the bestselling Tarot for Beginners and more than a dozen other books, and she has contributed to many bestselling tarot kits, including Mystical Manga Tarot and Shadowscapes Tarot . Barbara also works with clients and leads retreats and workshops all over the world.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "0738737909", "title": "Tarot Illuminati Kit", "author": "Kim Huggens", "description": "About the Author Kim Huggens has been studying Tarot since the age of 9, and is the co-author of Sol Invictus: The God Tarot (Schiffer Publications, 2007) and in-progress companion deck Pistis Sophia: The Goddess Tarot. She lives in Cardiff, UK, where she works as a veterinary receptionist part-time to fund her university studies in Ancient History. She moved to Cardiff in 2002 for her undergraduate degree in Philosophy, and also graduated with an MA in Religion in Late Antiquity from Cardiff University in 2007. Kim has given numerous talks and workshops on the subject of Tarot, divination, Paganism and mythology in the UK, and regularly runs Tarot courses. She is a practicing Vodouisante and Thelemite, and a member of the OTO. She lives with her partner and cat, and in her spare time plays Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons, writes short fiction, goes for walks in graveyards and wishes she could translate Sumerian. Erik C. Dunne is an artist who works on commisioned projects. He's traveled extensively, retracing the footsteps of legendary kings and queens, riding camels across the dunes of Persia, and galloping heavy steeds across fields of gold. A classically trained artist, his medium of choice is digital, where he has allowed his passion for costume design and his roots in the theater to lend their resounding voices to each and every card he creates.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 31.95}, {"asin": "0448415992", "title": "Bugs (Sticker Stories)", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Sonja Lamut is an award-winning painter, printmaker, illustrator, and author of children\u2019s books. Her writing credits include Too Noisy! and Christmas Rhyme Time , and her illustrating credits include Thanksgiving Is for Giving Thanks! , a #1 New York Times children\u2019s books bestseller. Lamut teaches illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology and\u00a0lives in New York City with her family.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.78}, {"asin": "0738737445", "title": "Illuminati Satin Bag", "author": "Lo Scarabeo", "description": "About the Author Lo Scarabeo's Tarot decks have been acclaimed all over the world for originality and quality. With the best Italian and international artists, each Lo Scarabeo deck is an exceptional artistic value. Committed to developing innovative new decks while preserving the rich tradition of Tarot, Lo Scarabeo continues to be a favorite among collectors and readers. Llewellyn is the exclusive distributor of Lo Scarabeo products in North America.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.95}, {"asin": "0525947779", "title": "Three Weeks in October", "author": "Charles Fleming", "description": "From Publishers Weekly During the first three weeks of October 2002, 14 random people were gunned down in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C., setting off the largest manhunt in American history. Through it all, Montgomery County Police Chief Moose was the face America watched. He was comfortingly there, on television, before people went to work in the morning and when they got home at night. But as soon as the snipers were no longer generating news, Chief Moose began making news himself. And when he decided to write a book about those three notorious weeks, a full-scale controversy erupted over the propriety of \"exploiting\" these events for financial gain. Eventually, he decided to resign from the police department. Written in short, awkward sentences, his book lacks polish, but its raw honesty and idiosyncratic charm more than compensate for the hurried prose. Despite the title, Moose adds very little to the story of the shootings he lets you know what he did and how he felt about it, but there are no sizzling revelations. Most of the book tells his own remarkable story in a gutsy, endearing, no-nonsense way, from growing up in an all-black neighborhood in North Carolina in the 19TKs to his unlikely entry into law enforcement and his even more unlikely rise to the top of the profession. Moose writes unapologetically about his mistakes and personal hardships, his views on leadership and his struggles with racial prejudice, and about his loving wife and how he keeps his uniform looking so sharp. Moose also takes up his own defense, cutting through all the hubbub to show that behind the provocative headlines was little more than a simple, heartfelt man just trying to do the best job he could. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Charles A. Moose is the chief of police in Montgomery County. Charles Fleming is the author of the national bestseller High Concept and the New York Times bestseller The Goomba's Guide to Life . Fleming has worked as a staff reporter for Variety and Newsweek , and has been a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, Playboy, Time , the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times , and other publications.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 19.8}, {"asin": "0769644287", "title": "The Beautiful Bee Book (Beautiful Bug)", "author": "Sue Unstead", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 14.26}, {"asin": "1402721501", "title": "Five Little Ducks (Floaties)", "author": "Pamela Paparone", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.98}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0738751391", "title": "Forest of Enchantment Tarot", "author": "Lunaea Weatherstone", "description": "Review \"Inspired by trees, birds, witches, elves, fairies, and flower blossoms, this beautiful deck will enchant you and entice you into it's world. This is a Rider-Waite-Smith based deck, entwined with magic, and will suit a beginner or more seasoned reader.\"\u2015 Esotoracle About the Author Lunaea Weatherstone\u00a0(Portland, Oregon) has been working with the tarot for nearly half a century. She is the author of Mystical Cats Tarot , Victorian Fairy Tarot , and Tending Brigid's Flame , as well as her own Full Moon Dreams Tarot collage deck, a favorite among collectors. Lunaea is a priestess, teacher, writer, and jewelsmith. Meraylah Allwood (Suffolk, UK) has worked professionally as an artist since1996 when she painted the popular jacket artwork for Tree Wisdom by Jacqueline Memory Paterson. She has since worked with many authors and publishers in the U.K., Germany, and the U.S., illustrating books on subjects such as natural history, healing, ancient landscapes, folklore and fantasy, and Celtic, Druidic, and Wiccan traditions. Meraylah is an Associate Member of the Royal Miniature Society, and exhibits her paintings at their annual exhibition in London. The original paintings for this tarot deck are only slightly bigger than the cards themselves.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 28.79}, {"asin": "B000S2TJHK", "title": "Five Stars"}, {"asin": "B0BCHJRHTC", "title": "Devil of Dublin: A Dark Irish Mafia Romance", "author": "BB Easton", "description": "Review \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u00a0\"This has taken a spot at the top of my favorite books EVER!\" - Jules Reads Romance \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50 \"One of the best books I have ever read. Legendary!\" - Jill Silva \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50 \"10/10 would sell my soul to Kellen Donovan.\" - Jamie Shaw, International Bestselling Author \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u00a0\"This is my favorite and top read of 2022 by far!\"\u00a0- Paniolo Books\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50 \"This is the kind of fated devotion I'm here for. I loved this book!\" - Merced Alaida, Reviewer \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50 \"Definitely one of my favorite books of the year. Thank you BB Easton for taking me on such an incredible journey.\" - Brittney, Goodreads Reviewer \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50 \"I would have given this book 10 stars if I could have.\" - Nicole Collins \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50 \"Absolutely AMAZING! My favorite this year!\" - Frances, Goodreads Reviewer \u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50\u2b50 \"I tried to savor every word of this story. Forcing myself to stop after every chapter....until I couldn't. The emotions in this story are so well written, they're almost tangible. The goosebumps that riddled my body during scenes, the quickness of my heart near the end, the tears that pricked my eyes. I just can't even put into words how magical this is. Gah! I feel like each page was sprinkled in fairy dust. Maith sibh, BB Easton, Maith sibh!\" - Panic at the Book Nook About the Author BB Easton is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 44 CHAPTERS ABOUT 4 MEN, the hilarious, steamy, tell-all memoir that inspired the Netflix Original Series, SEX/LIFE. Within the first month, SEX/LIFE was viewed by 67 million households worldwide, making it the 3rd Most-Watched Netflix Original Series of all time. BB was a stressed-out school psychologist and mother of two when the inspiration to write 44 CHAPTERS ABOUT 4 MEN struck. Through that process, she rediscovered her passion for writing, became dangerously sleep-deprived, and finally mustered enough courage to quit her job and become a full-time author. BB went on to publish four more wickedly funny, shockingly steamy, and heartwarmingly autobiographical books in the 44 CHAPTERS series: SKIN, SPEED, STAR, and SUIT. Since then, she's been hard at work writing fictional stories that appeal to her love for us-against-the-world romance, including a dystopian trilogy (PRAYING FOR RAIN), a psychologist-client romantic comedy (GROUP THERAPY), and a dark mafia romance (DEVIL OF DUBLIN). Please visit artbyeaston.com for more info.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.49}, {"asin": "B005U1SO84", "title": "Critical Error", "author": "Murray McDonald", "description": "Review \" Controversial - hell yeah - Enjoyable - absolutely! A fast paced exciting story that will certainly leave you thinking what if...\"-\"Just could not put this down; wonderful political thriller! \"-\"Murray McDonald never lets the fast pace of this book slack off. It's right up there with Ludlum, Baldacci, and Vince Flynn for surprising twists and turns that holds the interest right up to the last page.\"-\"I stumbled across this title and based on the good reviews, decided to buy it. I'm a huge fan of this genre, and I wasn't disappointed in the least . Interesting characters and nonstop action help the plot move along smoothly.\"-\" such a great read. its fast moving whilst maintaining twists within the plot you wont see coming. highly recommend it .\"-\"Couldn't put it down, I just had to keep reading, to find out what happened. Fast paced page turner.\" -\"What can I say? One of those books that you can't put down!!! \"-\"From the explosive start to the shocking ending, I couldn't put this book down. \"-\"Its real thrilling! I can recommend the book t\u00f3 anyone loving Clancy et al .\"", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0738751391"}
{"user_id": "AG3FMMAG25C7EV2SQFHC22VBD6CA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1851496092", "title": "The Golden Age of Japanese Okimono", "author": "Laura Bordignon", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "1851496092", "title": "The Golden Age of Japanese Okimono", "author": "Laura Bordignon", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0374168288", "title": "The Hare with Amber Eyes (Illustrated Edition): A Hidden Inheritance", "author": "Edmund De Waal", "description": "Review \u201c Enthralling . . . Belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory .\u201d \u2015 Michael Dirda, The Washington Post \u201c Absorbing . . . In this book about people who defined themselves by the objects they owned, de Waal demonstrates that human stories are more powerful than even the greatest works of art.\u201d \u2015 Adam Kirsch, The New Republic \u201cAt one level [Edmund de Waal] writes in vivid detail of how the fortunes were used to establish the Ephrussis' lavish lives and high positions . . . And, as Jews, of their vulnerability: the Paris family shaken by turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism surging out of the Dreyfus affair; the Vienna branch utterly destroyed in Hitler's 1937 Anschluss . . . At a deeper level, though, Hare is about something more, just as Marcel Proust's masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As with Remembrance of Things Past , it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony.\u201d \u2015 Richard Eder, The Boston Sunday Globe \u201cTo be handed a story as durable and exquisitely crafted as this is a rare pleasure . . . You have in your hands a masterpiece .\u201d \u2015 Frances Wilson, The Sunday Times (London) \u201cA family memoir written with a grace and modesty that almost belie the sweep of its contents: Proust, Rilke, Japanese art, the rue de Monceau, Vienna during the Second World War. The most enchanting history lesson imaginable .\u201d \u2015 Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker \u201c The book not only of the year, but of the decade .\u201d \u2015 Michael Howard, The Times Literary Supplement \u201c Elegant. Modest. Tragic. Homeric .\u201d \u2015 Stephen Frears, The Guardian \u201cAs full of beauty and whimsy as a netsuke from the hands of a master carver. Buy two copies of his book; keep one and give the other to your closest bookish friend .\u201d \u2015 The Economist \u201cWise, strange, and gripping.\u201d \u2015 A.S. Byatt, The Guardian About the Author Edmund de Waal is an artist who has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. His bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes , has won many prizes and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. The White Road , a journey into the history of porcelain, was published in 2015. He lives in London with his family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Hare with Amber Eyes (Illustrated Edition) A Hidden Inheritance By Edmund de Waal Farrar, Straus and Giroux Copyright \u00a9 2012 Edmund de WaalAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780374168285 The Hare with Amber Eyes 1. LE WEST END One sunny April day I set out to find Charles. Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off towards the boulevard Pereire. It is a hill of golden stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, caryatids and cartouches. Number 81 rue de Monceau, the H\u00f4tel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill. I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door, there it is. It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance. It is utterly beautiful. As a boy I used to draw buildings like this, spending afternoons carefully inking in shadows so that you could see the rise and fall of the depth of the windows and pillars. There is something musical in this kind of elevation. You take classical elements and try to bring them into rhythmic life: four Corinthian pilasters rising up to pace the fa\u00e7ade, four massive stone urns on the parapet, five storeys high, eight windows wide. The street level is made up of great blocks of stone worked to look as if they have been weathered. I walk past a couple of times and, on the third, notice that there is the double back-to-back E of the Ephrussi family incorporated into the metal grilles over the street windows, the tendrils of the letters reaching into the spaces of the oval. It is barely there. I try to work out this rectitude and what it says about their confidence. I duck through the passageway to a courtyard, then through another arch to a stable block of red brick with servants\u2019 quarters above; a pleasing diminuendo of materials and textures. A delivery man carries boxes of Speedy-Go Pizza into the medical insurers. The door into the entrance hall is open. I walk into the hall, its staircase curling up like a coil of smoke through the whole house, black cast iron and gold filigree stretching up to a lantern at the top. There is a marble urn in a deep niche, chequerboard marble tiles. Executives are coming down the stairs, heels hard on marble, and I retreat in embarrassment. How can I start to explain this idiotic quest? I stand in the street and watch the house and take some photographs, apologetic Parisians ducking past me. House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces. Number 81, for instance, is a house that cannily disappears into its neighbours: there are other houses that are grander, some are plainer, but few are more discreet. I look up at the second-floor windows where Charles had his suite of rooms, some of which looked across the street to the more robustly classical house opposite, some across the courtyard into a busy roofscape of urns and gables and chimneypots. He had an antechamber, two salons \u2013 one of which he turned into his study \u2013 a dining-room, two bedrooms and a \u2018petite\u2019. I try to work it out; he and his older brother Ignace must have had neighbouring apartments on this floor, their elder brother Jules and their widowed mother Mina below, with the higher ceilings and grander windows and the balconies on which, on this April morning, there are now some rather leggy red geraniums in plastic pots. The courtyard of the house was glazed, according to the city records, though all that glass is long gone. And there were five horses and three carriages in these stables which are now a perfect bijou house. I wonder if that number of horses was appropriate for a large and social family wanting to make the right kind of impression. It is a huge house, but the three brothers must have met every day on those black-and-gold winding stairs, or heard each other as the noise of the carriage being readied in the courtyard echoed from the glazed canopy. Or encountered friends going past their door on the way up to an apartment above. They must have developed a way of not seeing each other, and not hearing each other, too: to live so close to your family takes some doing, I think, reflecting on my own brothers. They must have got on well. Perhaps they had no choice in the matter. Paris was work, after all. The H\u00f4tel Ephrussi was a family house, but it was also the Parisian headquarters of a family in its ascendancy. It had its counterpart in Vienna, the vast Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse. Both the Parisian and Viennese buildings share a sense of drama, of a public face to the world. They were both built in 1871 in new and fashionable areas: the rue de Monceau and the Ringstrasse were so of-the-minute that they were unfinished, untidy, loud and dusty building sites. They were still spaces that were inventing themselves, competitive with the older parts of town with their narrower streets, and spikily arriviste. If this particular house in this particular streetscape seems a little stagey, it is because it is a staging of intent. These houses in Paris and Vienna were part of a family plan: the Ephrussi family was \u2018doing a Rothschild\u2019. Just as the Rothschilds had sent their sons and daughters out from Frankfurt at the start of the nineteenth century to colonise European capital cities, so the Abraham of my family, Charles Joachim Ephrussi, had masterminded this expansion from Odessa in the 1850s. A true patriarch, he had two sons from his first marriage, Ignace and L\u00e9on. And then when he remarried at fifty he had continued producing children: two more sons, Michel and Maurice, and two daughters, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se and Marie. All of these six children were to be deployed as financiers or married into suitable Jewish dynasties. Odessa was a city within the Pale of Settlement, the area on the western borders of imperial Russia in which Jews were allowed to live. It was famous for its rabbinical schools and synagogues, rich in literature and music, a magnet for the impoverished Jewish shtetls of Galicia. It was also a city that doubled its population of Jews and Greeks and Russians every decade, a polyglot city full of speculation and traders, the docks full of intrigues and spies, a city on the make. Charles Joachim Ephrussi had transformed a small grain-trading business into a huge enterprise by cornering the market in buying wheat. He bought the grain from the middlemen who transported it on carts along the heavily rutted roads from the rich black soil of the Ukrainian wheat fields, the greatest wheat fields in the world, into the port of Odessa. Here the grain was stored in his warehouses before being exported across the Black Sea, up the Danube, across the Mediterranean. By 1860 the family had become the greatest grain-exporters in the world. In Paris, James de Rothschild was known as the le Roi des Juifs, the King of the Jews. The Ephrussi were les Rois de Bl\u00e9, the Kings of Grain. They were Jews with their own coat of arms: an ear of corn and a heraldic boat with three masts and full sails. Their motto, Quod honestum, unfurled below the ship: We are above reproach. You can trust us. The masterplan was to build on this network of contacts and finance huge capital projects: bridges across the Danube, railways across Russia and across France, docks and canals. Ephrussi et Cie would change from being a very successful commodity trading house into an international finance house. It would become a bank. And each helpful deal struck with a government, each venture with an impoverished archduke, each client drawn into serious obligation with the family would be a step towards even greater respectability, a step further from those wagons of wheat creaking in from the Ukraine. In 1857 the two elder sons and their families were sent out from Odessa to Vienna, the capital city of the sprawling Hapsburg Empire. They bought a huge house in the city centre, and for ten years this was home to a shifting population of grandparents, children and grandchildren as the family moved backwards and forwards between the two cities. One of the sons, my great-great-grandfather Ignace, was tasked with handling Ephrussi business in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from this Vienna base. Paris came next: L\u00e9on, the older son, was tasked with establishing the family and business here. I\u2019m standing outside L\u00e9on\u2019s outpost on a honey-coloured hill in the 8th arrondissement. Actually I am leaning against the house opposite and thinking of that fiercely hot summer of 1871 when they arrived from Vienna to this newly built, golden mansion. It was a city still in trauma. The siege by the Prussian army had only ended a few months before with the defeat of France and the declaration of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The new Third Republic was shaky, assailed by communards on the street and by factionalism in government. The H\u00f4tel Ephrussi in the rue de Monceau Their house may have been finished, but all the neighbouring buildings were still under construction. The plasterers had only just left, the gilders were lying uncomfortably on the shallow stairs burnishing the finials on the handrail. Furniture, pictures, crates of crockery are shifted slowly up to their apartments. There is noise inside and noise outside, and all the windows are open onto the street. L\u00e9on is unwell with a heart complaint. And the family have a terrible start to their life in this beautiful street. Betty, the youngest of L\u00e9on and Mina\u2019s four children, married to a young Jewish banker of unimpeachable suitability, dies within weeks of giving birth to a daughter, Fanny. They have to build a family tomb in the Jewish section of the cemetery in Montmartre in their newly adopted city. It is Gothic, large enough for the whole clan, a way of making it clear that they are staying here, whatever is going to happen. I finally find it. The gates are gone and it has caught drifts of autumn\u2019s chestnut leaves. This hill was the perfect setting for the Ephrussi family. Just as the Ringstrasse in Vienna, where the other half of the family lives, was acerbically known as \u2018Zionstrasse\u2019, so Jewish money was a key denominator of life here in the rue de Monceau. The area was developed in the 1860s by Isaac and Emile Pereire, two Sephardic brothers who had made their fortunes as financiers, railroad-builders and property magnates, creating colossal developments of hotels and department stores. They acquired the plaine Monceau, a large nondescript area that was originally beyond the city limits, and set to work developing houses for the burgeoning financial and commercial elite, an appropriate landscape for the newly arrived Jewish families from Russia and the Levant. These streets became a virtual colony, a complex of intermarriage, obligation and religious sympathy. The Pereires relandscaped the existing eighteenth-century park in order to improve the views of the new houses around it. New cast-iron gates with gilded emblems of the Pereires\u2019 activities now led into it. There was an attempt to call the area around the parc Monceau Le West End. If you are asked where the boulevard Malesherbes leads, a contemporary journalist wrote, \u2018answer boldly: to Le West End\u2026One could give it a French name, but that would be vulgar; an English name was far more fashionable.\u2019 This was the park in which, according to a waspish journalist, you could watch \u2018the great dames of the noble Faubourg\u2026the female \u201cillustrations\u201d of \u201cLa Haute Finance\u201d and \u201cLa Haute Colonie Isra\u00e9lite\u201d promenade\u2019. The park had sinuous paths and flowerbeds in the new English style with displays of colourful annuals that had to be constantly renewed, far removed from the grey, clipped formalities of the Tuileries. As I walk down the hill from the H\u00f4tel Ephrussi at what I consider to be a good flaneurial pace, slower than usual, weaving from one side of the road to the other to check on details of the mouldings of windows, I\u2019m conscious that many of the houses I pass have these stories of reinvention embedded in them. Almost everyone who built them started somewhere else. Ten houses down from the Ephrussi household, at number 61, is the house of Abraham de Camondo, with his brother Nissim at 63 and their sister Rebecca over the street at number 60. The Camondos, Jewish financiers like the Ephrussi, had come to Paris from Constantinople by way of Venice. The banker Henri Cernuschi, a plutocratic supporter of the Paris Commune, had come to Paris from Italy and lived in chilly magnificence with his Japanese treasures on the edge of the park. At number 55 is the H\u00f4tel Cattaui, home to a family of Jewish bankers from Egypt. At number 43 is the palace of Adolphe de Rothschild, acquired from Eug\u00e8ne Pereire and rebuilt with a glass-roofed exhibition room for his Renaissance art collection. But nothing compares to the mansion built by the chocolate magnate \u00c9mile-Justin Menier. It was a building so splendidly excessive, so eclectic in its garnished decorations, glimpsed above its high walls, that Zola\u2019s description of it as \u2018an opulent bastard of every style\u2019 still seems about right. In his dark novel of 1872, La cur\u00e9e, Saccard \u2013 a rapacious Jewish property magnate \u2013 lives here on the rue de Monceau. You feel this street as the family move in: it is a street of Jews, a street full of people on display in their lavish golden houses. Monceau is slang in Paris for nouveau riche, newly arrived. This is the world in which my netsuke first settled. On this street down the hill I feel this play between discretion and opulence, a sort of breathing-in and breathing-out of invisibility and visibility. Charles Ephrussi was twenty-one when he came to live here. Paris was being planted with trees, and wide pavements were taking the place of the cramped interstices of the old city. There had been fifteen years of constant demolition and rebuilding under the direction of Baron Haussmann, the civic planner. He had razed medieval streets and created new parks and new boulevards. Vistas were opened up with extraordinary velocity. If you want to taste this moment, taste the dust sweeping along the newly paved avenues and across the bridges, look at two paintings of Gustave Caillebotte. Caillebotte, a few months older than Charles, lived around the corner from the Ephrussi family in another grand hotel. You see in his Le pont de l\u2019Europe a young man, well dressed in his grey overcoat and black top hat, maybe the artist, walking over the bridge along the generous pavement. He is two steps ahead of a young woman in a dress of sedate frills carrying a parasol. The sun is out. There is the glare of newly dressed stone. A dog passes by. A workman leans over the bridge. It is like the start of the world: a litany of perfect movements and shadows. Everyone, including the dog, knows what they are doing. Gustave Caillebotte, Le pont de l\u2019Europe, 1876 The streets of Paris have a calmness to them: clean stone fa\u00e7ades, rhythmic detailing of balconies, newly planted lime trees appear in his painting Jeune homme \u00e0 sa fen\u00eatre, shown in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Here Caillebotte\u2019s brother stands at the open window of their family apartment looking out onto the intersection of the rue de Monceau\u2019s neighbouring streets. He stands with his hands in his pockets, well dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him. Everything is possible. This could be the young Charles. He was born in Odessa and spends the first ten years of his life in a yellow-stuccoed palais on the edge of a dusty square fringed with chestnut trees. If he climbs to the attics of the house he can see all the way across the masts of the ships in the port to the sea. His grandfather occupies a whole floor and all the space. The bank is next door. He cannot move along the promenade without someone stopping his grandfather or father or uncles to ask them for information, a favour, a kopek, something. He learns, without knowing it, that to move in public means a series of encounters and avoidances; how to give money to beggars and pedlars, how to greet acquaintances without stopping. Then Charles moves to Vienna, living there for the next decade with his parents, his siblings, his uncle Ignace and glacial aunt \u00c9milie, and his three cousins \u2013 Stefan (haughty), Anna (acerbic) and the little boy Viktor. A tutor comes each morning. They learn their languages: Latin, Greek, German and English. They are always to speak French at home, and are allowed to use Russian amongst themselves, but must not be caught speaking the Yiddish that they picked up in the courtyards in Odessa. All these cousins can start a sentence in one language and finish it in another. They need these languages, as the family travels to Odessa, to St Petersburg, to Berlin and Frankfurt and Paris. They also need these languages as they are denominators of class. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. They visit Breughel\u2019s Hunters in the Snow with its patchwork of dogs busy on the ridge. They open the cabinets of drawings in the Albertina, the watercolours by D\u00fcrer of the trembling hare, the outstretched wing of a lapidary bird. They learn to ride in the Prater. The boys are taught to fence and all the cousins take dance lessons. All the cousins dance well. Charles, at eighteen, has a family nickname, le Polonais, the Pole, the waltzing boy. It is in Vienna that the oldest boys, Jules, Ignace and Stefan, are taken to the offices off the Ringstrasse on the Schottenbastei. It is a forbidding building. This is where the Ephrussi conduct business. The boys are told to sit quietly as shipments of grain are discussed and percentages on stock are queried. There are new possibilities in oil in Baku and gold near Lake Baikal. Clerks scurry. This is where they are blooded in the sheer scale of what will be theirs, taught the catechism of profit from the endless columns in the ledgers. This is when Charles sits with his youngest cousin Viktor and draws Laoco\u00f6n and the snakes, the statue he loved in Odessa, making the coils extra specially tight around muscly shoulders to impress the boy. It takes a long time to draw each of those snakes well. He sketches what he has seen in the Albertina. He sketches the servants. And he talks to his parents\u2019 friends about their pictures. It is always pleasing to have your paintings discussed by such a knowledgeable young man. And then at last there is the long-planned move to Paris. Charles is good-looking, slightly built with a neatly trimmed dark beard, which has a haze of red in particular lights. He has an Ephrussi nose, large and beaked, and the high forehead of all the cousins. His eyes are dark grey and alive, and he is charming. You see how well dressed he is, with his cravat beautifully folded, and then you hear him talk: he is as good a talker as a dancer. Charles is free to do what he wants. I want to think this is because he was the youngest son and the third son and, as in all good children\u2019s stories, it is always the third son who gets to leave home and go adventuring \u2013 pure projection, as I am a third son. But I suspect that the family know this boy is not cut out for the life of the Bourse. His uncles Michel and Maurice have moved to Paris: perhaps there were enough sons for the offices of Ephrussi et Cie at 45 rue de l\u2019Arcade not to miss this pleasant bookish one, with his habit of withdrawing when money comes up and that aptitude for losing himself in conversation. Charles has his new apartment in the family house, gilded and clean, and empty. He has somewhere to come back to, a new house on a newly paved Parisian hill. He has languages, he has money and he has time. So now he sets off wandering. Like a well-brought-up young man, Charles goes south. He goes to Italy.\u00a0Copyright \u00a9 2010 by Edmund de WaalAll rights reservedOriginally published in 2010 by Chatto & Windus, Great Britain,as The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden InheritancePublished in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Continues... Excerpted from The Hare with Amber Eyes (Illustrated Edition) by Edmund de Waal Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Edmund de Waal. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 18.51}, {"asin": "083480056X", "title": "Collectors' Netsuke", "author": "Raymond Bushell", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Decorative Arts & Design"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 19.6}, {"asin": "1588860337", "title": "Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 120.34}, {"asin": "083480056X", "title": "Collectors' Netsuke", "author": "Raymond Bushell", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Decorative Arts & Design"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 19.6}, {"asin": "1588860337", "title": "Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 120.34}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0374168288", "title": "The Hare with Amber Eyes (Illustrated Edition): A Hidden Inheritance", "author": "Edmund De Waal", "description": "Review \u201c Enthralling . . . Belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory .\u201d \u2015 Michael Dirda, The Washington Post \u201c Absorbing . . . In this book about people who defined themselves by the objects they owned, de Waal demonstrates that human stories are more powerful than even the greatest works of art.\u201d \u2015 Adam Kirsch, The New Republic \u201cAt one level [Edmund de Waal] writes in vivid detail of how the fortunes were used to establish the Ephrussis' lavish lives and high positions . . . And, as Jews, of their vulnerability: the Paris family shaken by turn-of-the-century anti-Semitism surging out of the Dreyfus affair; the Vienna branch utterly destroyed in Hitler's 1937 Anschluss . . . At a deeper level, though, Hare is about something more, just as Marcel Proust's masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As with Remembrance of Things Past , it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony.\u201d \u2015 Richard Eder, The Boston Sunday Globe \u201cTo be handed a story as durable and exquisitely crafted as this is a rare pleasure . . . You have in your hands a masterpiece .\u201d \u2015 Frances Wilson, The Sunday Times (London) \u201cA family memoir written with a grace and modesty that almost belie the sweep of its contents: Proust, Rilke, Japanese art, the rue de Monceau, Vienna during the Second World War. The most enchanting history lesson imaginable .\u201d \u2015 Claudia Roth Pierpont, The New Yorker \u201c The book not only of the year, but of the decade .\u201d \u2015 Michael Howard, The Times Literary Supplement \u201c Elegant. Modest. Tragic. Homeric .\u201d \u2015 Stephen Frears, The Guardian \u201cAs full of beauty and whimsy as a netsuke from the hands of a master carver. Buy two copies of his book; keep one and give the other to your closest bookish friend .\u201d \u2015 The Economist \u201cWise, strange, and gripping.\u201d \u2015 A.S. Byatt, The Guardian About the Author Edmund de Waal is an artist who has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. His bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes , has won many prizes and has been translated into twenty-nine languages. The White Road , a journey into the history of porcelain, was published in 2015. He lives in London with his family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Hare with Amber Eyes (Illustrated Edition) A Hidden Inheritance By Edmund de Waal Farrar, Straus and Giroux Copyright \u00a9 2012 Edmund de WaalAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780374168285 The Hare with Amber Eyes 1. LE WEST END One sunny April day I set out to find Charles. Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off towards the boulevard Pereire. It is a hill of golden stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, caryatids and cartouches. Number 81 rue de Monceau, the H\u00f4tel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill. I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door, there it is. It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance. It is utterly beautiful. As a boy I used to draw buildings like this, spending afternoons carefully inking in shadows so that you could see the rise and fall of the depth of the windows and pillars. There is something musical in this kind of elevation. You take classical elements and try to bring them into rhythmic life: four Corinthian pilasters rising up to pace the fa\u00e7ade, four massive stone urns on the parapet, five storeys high, eight windows wide. The street level is made up of great blocks of stone worked to look as if they have been weathered. I walk past a couple of times and, on the third, notice that there is the double back-to-back E of the Ephrussi family incorporated into the metal grilles over the street windows, the tendrils of the letters reaching into the spaces of the oval. It is barely there. I try to work out this rectitude and what it says about their confidence. I duck through the passageway to a courtyard, then through another arch to a stable block of red brick with servants\u2019 quarters above; a pleasing diminuendo of materials and textures. A delivery man carries boxes of Speedy-Go Pizza into the medical insurers. The door into the entrance hall is open. I walk into the hall, its staircase curling up like a coil of smoke through the whole house, black cast iron and gold filigree stretching up to a lantern at the top. There is a marble urn in a deep niche, chequerboard marble tiles. Executives are coming down the stairs, heels hard on marble, and I retreat in embarrassment. How can I start to explain this idiotic quest? I stand in the street and watch the house and take some photographs, apologetic Parisians ducking past me. House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces. Number 81, for instance, is a house that cannily disappears into its neighbours: there are other houses that are grander, some are plainer, but few are more discreet. I look up at the second-floor windows where Charles had his suite of rooms, some of which looked across the street to the more robustly classical house opposite, some across the courtyard into a busy roofscape of urns and gables and chimneypots. He had an antechamber, two salons \u2013 one of which he turned into his study \u2013 a dining-room, two bedrooms and a \u2018petite\u2019. I try to work it out; he and his older brother Ignace must have had neighbouring apartments on this floor, their elder brother Jules and their widowed mother Mina below, with the higher ceilings and grander windows and the balconies on which, on this April morning, there are now some rather leggy red geraniums in plastic pots. The courtyard of the house was glazed, according to the city records, though all that glass is long gone. And there were five horses and three carriages in these stables which are now a perfect bijou house. I wonder if that number of horses was appropriate for a large and social family wanting to make the right kind of impression. It is a huge house, but the three brothers must have met every day on those black-and-gold winding stairs, or heard each other as the noise of the carriage being readied in the courtyard echoed from the glazed canopy. Or encountered friends going past their door on the way up to an apartment above. They must have developed a way of not seeing each other, and not hearing each other, too: to live so close to your family takes some doing, I think, reflecting on my own brothers. They must have got on well. Perhaps they had no choice in the matter. Paris was work, after all. The H\u00f4tel Ephrussi was a family house, but it was also the Parisian headquarters of a family in its ascendancy. It had its counterpart in Vienna, the vast Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse. Both the Parisian and Viennese buildings share a sense of drama, of a public face to the world. They were both built in 1871 in new and fashionable areas: the rue de Monceau and the Ringstrasse were so of-the-minute that they were unfinished, untidy, loud and dusty building sites. They were still spaces that were inventing themselves, competitive with the older parts of town with their narrower streets, and spikily arriviste. If this particular house in this particular streetscape seems a little stagey, it is because it is a staging of intent. These houses in Paris and Vienna were part of a family plan: the Ephrussi family was \u2018doing a Rothschild\u2019. Just as the Rothschilds had sent their sons and daughters out from Frankfurt at the start of the nineteenth century to colonise European capital cities, so the Abraham of my family, Charles Joachim Ephrussi, had masterminded this expansion from Odessa in the 1850s. A true patriarch, he had two sons from his first marriage, Ignace and L\u00e9on. And then when he remarried at fifty he had continued producing children: two more sons, Michel and Maurice, and two daughters, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se and Marie. All of these six children were to be deployed as financiers or married into suitable Jewish dynasties. Odessa was a city within the Pale of Settlement, the area on the western borders of imperial Russia in which Jews were allowed to live. It was famous for its rabbinical schools and synagogues, rich in literature and music, a magnet for the impoverished Jewish shtetls of Galicia. It was also a city that doubled its population of Jews and Greeks and Russians every decade, a polyglot city full of speculation and traders, the docks full of intrigues and spies, a city on the make. Charles Joachim Ephrussi had transformed a small grain-trading business into a huge enterprise by cornering the market in buying wheat. He bought the grain from the middlemen who transported it on carts along the heavily rutted roads from the rich black soil of the Ukrainian wheat fields, the greatest wheat fields in the world, into the port of Odessa. Here the grain was stored in his warehouses before being exported across the Black Sea, up the Danube, across the Mediterranean. By 1860 the family had become the greatest grain-exporters in the world. In Paris, James de Rothschild was known as the le Roi des Juifs, the King of the Jews. The Ephrussi were les Rois de Bl\u00e9, the Kings of Grain. They were Jews with their own coat of arms: an ear of corn and a heraldic boat with three masts and full sails. Their motto, Quod honestum, unfurled below the ship: We are above reproach. You can trust us. The masterplan was to build on this network of contacts and finance huge capital projects: bridges across the Danube, railways across Russia and across France, docks and canals. Ephrussi et Cie would change from being a very successful commodity trading house into an international finance house. It would become a bank. And each helpful deal struck with a government, each venture with an impoverished archduke, each client drawn into serious obligation with the family would be a step towards even greater respectability, a step further from those wagons of wheat creaking in from the Ukraine. In 1857 the two elder sons and their families were sent out from Odessa to Vienna, the capital city of the sprawling Hapsburg Empire. They bought a huge house in the city centre, and for ten years this was home to a shifting population of grandparents, children and grandchildren as the family moved backwards and forwards between the two cities. One of the sons, my great-great-grandfather Ignace, was tasked with handling Ephrussi business in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from this Vienna base. Paris came next: L\u00e9on, the older son, was tasked with establishing the family and business here. I\u2019m standing outside L\u00e9on\u2019s outpost on a honey-coloured hill in the 8th arrondissement. Actually I am leaning against the house opposite and thinking of that fiercely hot summer of 1871 when they arrived from Vienna to this newly built, golden mansion. It was a city still in trauma. The siege by the Prussian army had only ended a few months before with the defeat of France and the declaration of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. The new Third Republic was shaky, assailed by communards on the street and by factionalism in government. The H\u00f4tel Ephrussi in the rue de Monceau Their house may have been finished, but all the neighbouring buildings were still under construction. The plasterers had only just left, the gilders were lying uncomfortably on the shallow stairs burnishing the finials on the handrail. Furniture, pictures, crates of crockery are shifted slowly up to their apartments. There is noise inside and noise outside, and all the windows are open onto the street. L\u00e9on is unwell with a heart complaint. And the family have a terrible start to their life in this beautiful street. Betty, the youngest of L\u00e9on and Mina\u2019s four children, married to a young Jewish banker of unimpeachable suitability, dies within weeks of giving birth to a daughter, Fanny. They have to build a family tomb in the Jewish section of the cemetery in Montmartre in their newly adopted city. It is Gothic, large enough for the whole clan, a way of making it clear that they are staying here, whatever is going to happen. I finally find it. The gates are gone and it has caught drifts of autumn\u2019s chestnut leaves. This hill was the perfect setting for the Ephrussi family. Just as the Ringstrasse in Vienna, where the other half of the family lives, was acerbically known as \u2018Zionstrasse\u2019, so Jewish money was a key denominator of life here in the rue de Monceau. The area was developed in the 1860s by Isaac and Emile Pereire, two Sephardic brothers who had made their fortunes as financiers, railroad-builders and property magnates, creating colossal developments of hotels and department stores. They acquired the plaine Monceau, a large nondescript area that was originally beyond the city limits, and set to work developing houses for the burgeoning financial and commercial elite, an appropriate landscape for the newly arrived Jewish families from Russia and the Levant. These streets became a virtual colony, a complex of intermarriage, obligation and religious sympathy. The Pereires relandscaped the existing eighteenth-century park in order to improve the views of the new houses around it. New cast-iron gates with gilded emblems of the Pereires\u2019 activities now led into it. There was an attempt to call the area around the parc Monceau Le West End. If you are asked where the boulevard Malesherbes leads, a contemporary journalist wrote, \u2018answer boldly: to Le West End\u2026One could give it a French name, but that would be vulgar; an English name was far more fashionable.\u2019 This was the park in which, according to a waspish journalist, you could watch \u2018the great dames of the noble Faubourg\u2026the female \u201cillustrations\u201d of \u201cLa Haute Finance\u201d and \u201cLa Haute Colonie Isra\u00e9lite\u201d promenade\u2019. The park had sinuous paths and flowerbeds in the new English style with displays of colourful annuals that had to be constantly renewed, far removed from the grey, clipped formalities of the Tuileries. As I walk down the hill from the H\u00f4tel Ephrussi at what I consider to be a good flaneurial pace, slower than usual, weaving from one side of the road to the other to check on details of the mouldings of windows, I\u2019m conscious that many of the houses I pass have these stories of reinvention embedded in them. Almost everyone who built them started somewhere else. Ten houses down from the Ephrussi household, at number 61, is the house of Abraham de Camondo, with his brother Nissim at 63 and their sister Rebecca over the street at number 60. The Camondos, Jewish financiers like the Ephrussi, had come to Paris from Constantinople by way of Venice. The banker Henri Cernuschi, a plutocratic supporter of the Paris Commune, had come to Paris from Italy and lived in chilly magnificence with his Japanese treasures on the edge of the park. At number 55 is the H\u00f4tel Cattaui, home to a family of Jewish bankers from Egypt. At number 43 is the palace of Adolphe de Rothschild, acquired from Eug\u00e8ne Pereire and rebuilt with a glass-roofed exhibition room for his Renaissance art collection. But nothing compares to the mansion built by the chocolate magnate \u00c9mile-Justin Menier. It was a building so splendidly excessive, so eclectic in its garnished decorations, glimpsed above its high walls, that Zola\u2019s description of it as \u2018an opulent bastard of every style\u2019 still seems about right. In his dark novel of 1872, La cur\u00e9e, Saccard \u2013 a rapacious Jewish property magnate \u2013 lives here on the rue de Monceau. You feel this street as the family move in: it is a street of Jews, a street full of people on display in their lavish golden houses. Monceau is slang in Paris for nouveau riche, newly arrived. This is the world in which my netsuke first settled. On this street down the hill I feel this play between discretion and opulence, a sort of breathing-in and breathing-out of invisibility and visibility. Charles Ephrussi was twenty-one when he came to live here. Paris was being planted with trees, and wide pavements were taking the place of the cramped interstices of the old city. There had been fifteen years of constant demolition and rebuilding under the direction of Baron Haussmann, the civic planner. He had razed medieval streets and created new parks and new boulevards. Vistas were opened up with extraordinary velocity. If you want to taste this moment, taste the dust sweeping along the newly paved avenues and across the bridges, look at two paintings of Gustave Caillebotte. Caillebotte, a few months older than Charles, lived around the corner from the Ephrussi family in another grand hotel. You see in his Le pont de l\u2019Europe a young man, well dressed in his grey overcoat and black top hat, maybe the artist, walking over the bridge along the generous pavement. He is two steps ahead of a young woman in a dress of sedate frills carrying a parasol. The sun is out. There is the glare of newly dressed stone. A dog passes by. A workman leans over the bridge. It is like the start of the world: a litany of perfect movements and shadows. Everyone, including the dog, knows what they are doing. Gustave Caillebotte, Le pont de l\u2019Europe, 1876 The streets of Paris have a calmness to them: clean stone fa\u00e7ades, rhythmic detailing of balconies, newly planted lime trees appear in his painting Jeune homme \u00e0 sa fen\u00eatre, shown in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Here Caillebotte\u2019s brother stands at the open window of their family apartment looking out onto the intersection of the rue de Monceau\u2019s neighbouring streets. He stands with his hands in his pockets, well dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him. Everything is possible. This could be the young Charles. He was born in Odessa and spends the first ten years of his life in a yellow-stuccoed palais on the edge of a dusty square fringed with chestnut trees. If he climbs to the attics of the house he can see all the way across the masts of the ships in the port to the sea. His grandfather occupies a whole floor and all the space. The bank is next door. He cannot move along the promenade without someone stopping his grandfather or father or uncles to ask them for information, a favour, a kopek, something. He learns, without knowing it, that to move in public means a series of encounters and avoidances; how to give money to beggars and pedlars, how to greet acquaintances without stopping. Then Charles moves to Vienna, living there for the next decade with his parents, his siblings, his uncle Ignace and glacial aunt \u00c9milie, and his three cousins \u2013 Stefan (haughty), Anna (acerbic) and the little boy Viktor. A tutor comes each morning. They learn their languages: Latin, Greek, German and English. They are always to speak French at home, and are allowed to use Russian amongst themselves, but must not be caught speaking the Yiddish that they picked up in the courtyards in Odessa. All these cousins can start a sentence in one language and finish it in another. They need these languages, as the family travels to Odessa, to St Petersburg, to Berlin and Frankfurt and Paris. They also need these languages as they are denominators of class. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. They visit Breughel\u2019s Hunters in the Snow with its patchwork of dogs busy on the ridge. They open the cabinets of drawings in the Albertina, the watercolours by D\u00fcrer of the trembling hare, the outstretched wing of a lapidary bird. They learn to ride in the Prater. The boys are taught to fence and all the cousins take dance lessons. All the cousins dance well. Charles, at eighteen, has a family nickname, le Polonais, the Pole, the waltzing boy. It is in Vienna that the oldest boys, Jules, Ignace and Stefan, are taken to the offices off the Ringstrasse on the Schottenbastei. It is a forbidding building. This is where the Ephrussi conduct business. The boys are told to sit quietly as shipments of grain are discussed and percentages on stock are queried. There are new possibilities in oil in Baku and gold near Lake Baikal. Clerks scurry. This is where they are blooded in the sheer scale of what will be theirs, taught the catechism of profit from the endless columns in the ledgers. This is when Charles sits with his youngest cousin Viktor and draws Laoco\u00f6n and the snakes, the statue he loved in Odessa, making the coils extra specially tight around muscly shoulders to impress the boy. It takes a long time to draw each of those snakes well. He sketches what he has seen in the Albertina. He sketches the servants. And he talks to his parents\u2019 friends about their pictures. It is always pleasing to have your paintings discussed by such a knowledgeable young man. And then at last there is the long-planned move to Paris. Charles is good-looking, slightly built with a neatly trimmed dark beard, which has a haze of red in particular lights. He has an Ephrussi nose, large and beaked, and the high forehead of all the cousins. His eyes are dark grey and alive, and he is charming. You see how well dressed he is, with his cravat beautifully folded, and then you hear him talk: he is as good a talker as a dancer. Charles is free to do what he wants. I want to think this is because he was the youngest son and the third son and, as in all good children\u2019s stories, it is always the third son who gets to leave home and go adventuring \u2013 pure projection, as I am a third son. But I suspect that the family know this boy is not cut out for the life of the Bourse. His uncles Michel and Maurice have moved to Paris: perhaps there were enough sons for the offices of Ephrussi et Cie at 45 rue de l\u2019Arcade not to miss this pleasant bookish one, with his habit of withdrawing when money comes up and that aptitude for losing himself in conversation. Charles has his new apartment in the family house, gilded and clean, and empty. He has somewhere to come back to, a new house on a newly paved Parisian hill. He has languages, he has money and he has time. So now he sets off wandering. Like a well-brought-up young man, Charles goes south. He goes to Italy.\u00a0Copyright \u00a9 2010 by Edmund de WaalAll rights reservedOriginally published in 2010 by Chatto & Windus, Great Britain,as The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden InheritancePublished in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Continues... Excerpted from The Hare with Amber Eyes (Illustrated Edition) by Edmund de Waal Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Edmund de Waal. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 18.51}, {"asin": "1636304257", "title": "A Commentary on the Revelation of John", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "B08GFJ715S", "title": "Her Killer Confession: An unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Carolina McKay Thriller Book 2)", "author": "Tony Urban", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1365226654", "title": "The Mo B. Dickapedia: Life, Language, & Lyrics", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Follow the author on https: //www.instagram.com/mobdickofficial/ http: //www.tiktok.com/@mobdickofficial https: //www.facebook.com/MoBDickBeatsByThePound https: //mobile.twitter.com/mobdickofficial https: //youtube.com/channel/UCBLelfJhPeV-ZyjUce1YTWg", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0374168288"}
{"user_id": "AG2RECFNS5OYXJHEFCFWELG7WENA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B011G3HI9U", "title": "Lilac Girls: A Novel", "author": "Martha Hall Kelly", "description": "Review \u201cHarrowing . . . Lilac illuminates.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cA compelling, page-turning narrative . . . Lilac Girls falls squarely into the groundbreaking category of fiction that re-examines history from a fresh, female point of view. It\u2019s smart, thoughtful and also just an old-fashioned good read.\u201d \u2014 Fort Worth Star-Telegram \u201cA powerful story for readers everywhere . . . Martha Hall Kelly has brought readers a firsthand glimpse into one of history\u2019s most frightening memories. A novel that brings to life what these women and many others suffered. . . . I was moved to tears.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Book Review \u201c[A] compelling first novel . . . This is a page-turner demonstrating the tests and triumphs civilians faced during war, complemented by Kelly\u2019s vivid depiction of history and excellent characters.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cKelly vividly re-creates the world of Ravensbr\u00fcck.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cInspired by actual events and real people, Martha Hall Kelly has woven together the stories of three women during World War II that reveal the bravery, cowardice, and cruelty of those days. This is a part of history\u2014women\u2019s history\u2014that should never be forgotten.\u201d \u2014Lisa See, New York Times bestselling author of China Dolls \u201cThis is the kind of book I wish I had the courage to write\u2014a profound, unsettling, and thoroughly captivating look at sisterhood through the dark lens of the Holocaust. Lilac Girls is the best book I\u2019ve read all year. It will haunt you.\u201d \u2014Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet \u201cRich with historical detail and riveting to the end, Lilac Girls weaves the lives of three astonishing women into a story of extraordinary moral power set against the harrowing backdrop of Europe in thrall to Nazi Germany. Martha Hall Kelly moves effortlessly across physical and ethical battlegrounds, across the trajectory of a doomed wartime romance, across the territory of the soul. I can\u2019t remember the last time I read a novel that moved me so deeply.\u201d \u2014Beatriz Williams, New York Times bestselling author of A Hundred Summers and The Secret Life of Violet Grant Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1CarolineSeptember 1939If I\u2019d known I was about to meet the man who\u2019d shatter me like bone china on terra-cotta, I would have slept in. Instead, I roused our florist, Mr. Sitwell, from his bed to make a boutonni\u00e8re. My first consulate gala was no time to stand on ceremony.I joined the riptide of the great unwashed moving up Fifth Avenue. Men in gray-felted fedoras pushed by me, the morning papers in their attach\u00e9s bearing the last benign headlines of the decade. There was no storm gathering in the east that day, no portent of things to come. The only ominous sign from the direction of Europe was the scent of slack water wafting off the East River.As I neared our building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, I felt Roger watching from the window above. He\u2019d fired people for a lot less than being twenty minutes late, but the one time of year the New York elite opened their wallets and pretended they cared about France was no time for skimpy boutonni\u00e8res.I turned at the corner, the morning sun alive in the gold-leaf letters chiseled in the cornerstone: la maison fran\u00e7aise. The French Building, home to the French Consulate, stood side by side with the British Empire Building, facing Fifth Avenue, part of Rockefeller Center, Junior Rockefeller\u2019s new complex of granite and limestone. Many foreign consulates kept offices there then, resulting in a great stew of international diplomacy.\u201cAll the way to the back and face the front,\u201d said Cuddy, our elevator operator.Mr. Rockefeller handpicked the elevator boys, screening for manners and good looks. Cuddy was heavy on the looks, though his hair was already salt-and-peppered, his body in a hurry to age.Cuddy fixed his gaze on the illuminated numbers above the doors. \u201cYou got a crowd up there today, Miss Ferriday. Pia said there\u2019s two new boats in.\u201d\u201cDelightful,\u201d I said.Cuddy brushed something off the sleeve of his navy-blue uniform jacket. \u201cAnother late one tonight?\u201dFor the fastest elevators in the world, ours still took forever. \u201cI\u2019ll be gone by five. Gala tonight.\u201dI loved my job. Grandmother Woolsey had started the work tradition in our family, nursing soldiers on the battlefield at Gettysburg. But my volunteer post as head of family assistance for the French Consulate wasn\u2019t work really. Loving all things French was simply genetic for me. My father may have been half-Irish, but his heart belonged to France. Plus, Mother had inherited an apartment in Paris, where we spent every August, so I felt at home there.The elevator stopped. Even through the closed doors, we could hear a terrific din of raised voices. A shiver ran through me.\u201cThird floor,\u201d Cuddy called out. \u201cFrench Consulate. Watch your\u2014\u201dOnce the doors parted, the noise overpowered all polite speech. The hallway outside our reception area was packed so tightly with people one could scarcely step through. Both the Normandie and the Ile de France, two of France\u2019s premier ocean liners, had landed that morning in New York Harbor, packed with wealthy passengers fleeing the uncertainty in France. Once the all-clear horn signaled and they were free to disembark, the ships\u2019 elite streamed to the consulate to iron out visa problems and other sticky issues.I squeezed into the smoky reception area, past ladies in Paris\u2019s newest day dresses who stood gossiping in a lovely cloud of Arp\u00e8ge, the sea spray still in their hair. The people in this group were accustomed to being shadowed by a butler with a crystal ashtray and a champagne flute. Bellboys in scarlet jackets from the Normandie went toe-to-toe with their black-jacketed counterparts from the Ile de France. I wedged one shoulder through the crowd, toward our secretary\u2019s desk at the back of the room, and my chiffon scarf snagged on the clasp of one ravishing creature\u2019s pearls. As I worked to extract it, the intercom buzzed unanswered.Roger.I pressed on through, felt a pat on my behind, and turned to see a midshipman flash a plaquey smile.\u201cGardons nos mains pour nous-m\u00eames,\u201d I said. Let\u2019s keep our hands to ourselves.The boy raised his arm above the crowd and dangled his Normandie stateroom key. At least he wasn\u2019t the over-sixty type I usually attracted.I made it to our secretary\u2019s desk, where she sat, head down, typing.\u201cBonjour, Pia.\u201dRoger\u2019s cousin, a sloe-eyed boy of eighteen, was sitting on Pia\u2019s desk, legs crossed. He held his cigarette in the air as he picked through a box of chocolates, Pia\u2019s favorite breakfast. My inbox on her desk was already stacked with case folders.\u201cVraiment? What is so good about it?\u201d she said, not lifting her head.Pia was much more than a secretary. We all wore many hats, and hers included signing in new clients and establishing a folder for each, typing up Roger\u2019s considerable correspondence, and deciphering the massive flood of daily Morse-code pulses that was the lifeblood of our office.\u201cWhy is it so hot in here?\u201d I said. \u201cThe phone is ringing, Pia.\u201dShe plucked a chocolate from the box. \u201cIt keeps doing that.\u201dPia attracted beaux as if she emitted a frequency only males could detect. She was attractive in a feral way, but I suspected her popularity was due in part to her tight sweaters.\u201cCan you take some of my cases today, Pia?\u201d\u201cRoger says I can\u2019t leave this chair.\u201d She broke the shell of the chocolate\u2019s underside with her manicured thumb, stalking the strawberry cr\u00e8mes. \u201cHe also wants to see you right away, but I think the woman on the sofa slept in the hallway last night.\u201d Pia flapped one half of a one-hundred-dollar bill at me. \u201cAnd the fatty with the dogs says he\u2019ll give you the other half if you take him first.\u201d She nodded toward the well-fed older couple near my office door, each holding a brace of gray-muzzled dachshunds.Like Pia\u2019s, my job description was wide-ranging. It included attending to the needs of French citizens here in New York\u2014often families fallen on hard times\u2014and overseeing my French Families Fund, a charity effort through which I sent comfort boxes to French orphans overseas. I\u2019d just retired from an almost two-decade-long stint on Broadway, and this felt easy by comparison. It certainly involved less unpacking of trunks.My boss, Roger Fortier, appeared in his office doorway.\u201cCaroline, I need you now. Bonnet\u2019s canceled.\u201d\u201cYou can\u2019t be serious, Roger.\u201d The news came like a punch. I\u2019d secured the French foreign minister as our gala keynote speaker months before.\u201cIt\u2019s not easy being the French foreign minister right now,\u201d he called over his shoulder as he went back inside.I stepped into my office and flipped through the Wheeldex on my desk. Was Mother\u2019s Buddhist-monk friend Ajahn Chah free that night?\u201cCaroline\u2014\u201d Roger called. I grabbed my Wheeldex and hurried to his office, avoiding the couple with the dachshunds, who were trying their best to look tragic.\u201cWhy were you late this morning?\u201d Roger asked. \u201cPia\u2019s been here for two hours already.\u201dAs consul general, Roger Fortier ruled from the corner suite with its commanding view of Rockefeller Plaza and the Promenade Cafe. Normally the famous skating rink occupied that sunken spot, but the rink was closed for the summer, the space now filled with caf\u00e9 tables and tuxedoed waiters rushing about with aprons to their ankles. Beyond, Paul Manship\u2019s massive golden Prometheus fell to earth, holding his stolen fire aloft. Behind it, the RCA Building shot up seventy floors into the sapphire sky. Roger had a lot in common with the imposing male figure of Wisdom chiseled above the building\u2019s entrance. The furrowed brow. The beard. The angry eyes.\u201cI stopped for Bonnet\u2019s boutonni\u00e8re\u2014\u201d\u201cOh, that\u2019s worth keeping half of France waiting.\u201d Roger bit into a doughnut, and powdered sugar cascaded down his beard. Despite what might kindly be called a husky figure, he was never at a loss for female companions.His desk was heaped with folders, security documents, and dossiers on missing French citizens. According to the French Consulate Handbook, his job was \u201cto assist French nationals in New York, in the event of theft, serious illness, or arrest and with issues related to birth certificates, adoption, and lost or stolen documents; to plan visits of French officials and fellow diplomats; and to assist with political difficulties and natural disasters.\u201d The troubles in Europe provided plenty of work for us in all those categories, if you counted Hitler as a natural disaster.\u201cI have cases to get back to, Roger\u2014\u201dHe sent a manila folder skidding across the polished conference table. \u201cNot only do we have no speaker; I was up half the night rewriting Bonnet\u2019s speech. Had to sidestep Roosevelt letting France buy American planes.\u201d\u201cFrance should be able to buy all the planes they want.\u201d\u201cWe\u2019re raising money here, Caroline. It\u2019s not the time to annoy the isolationists. Especially the rich ones.\u201d\u201cThey don\u2019t support France anyway.\u201d\u201cWe don\u2019t need any more bad press. Is the U.S. too cozy with France? Will that push Germany and Russia closer? I can barely finish a third course without being interrupted by a reporter. And we can\u2019t mention the Rockefellers .\u2008.\u2008. Don\u2019t want another call from Junior. Guess that\u2019ll happen anyway now that Bonnet canceled.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s a disaster, Roger.\u201d\u201cMay need to scrap the whole thing.\u201d Roger raked his long fingers through his hair, digging fresh trenches through the Brylcreem.\u201cRefund forty thousand dollars? What about the French Families Fund? I\u2019m already operating on fumes. Plus, we\u2019ve paid for ten pounds of Waldorf salad\u2014\u201d\u201cThey call that salad?\u201d Roger flipped through his contact cards, half of them illegible and littered with cross-outs. \u201cIt\u2019s pathetique .\u2008.\u2008. just chopped apples and celery. And those soggy walnuts .\u2008.\u2008.\u201dI scoured my Wheeldex in search of celebrity candidates. Mother and I knew Julia Marlowe, the famous actress, but she was touring Europe. \u201cHow about Peter Patout? Mother\u2019s people have used him.\u201d\u201cThe architect?\u201d\u201cOf the whole World\u2019s Fair. They have that seven-foot robot.\u201d\u201cBoring,\u201d he said, slapping his silver letter opener against his palm.I flipped to the L\u2019s. \u201cHow about Captain Lehude?\u201d\u201cOf the Normandie? Are you serious? He\u2019s paid to be dull.\u201d\u201cYou can\u2019t just discount every suggestion out of hand, Roger. How about Paul Rodierre? Betty says everyone\u2019s talking about him.\u201dRoger pursed his lips, always a good sign. \u201cThe actor? I saw his new play in previews. He\u2019s good. Tall and attractive, if you go for that look. Fast metabolism, of course.\u201d\u201cAt least we know he can memorize a script.\u201d\u201cHe\u2019s a bit of a loose cannon. And married too, so don\u2019t get any ideas.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m through with men, Roger,\u201d I said. At thirty-seven, I\u2019d resigned myself to singledom.\u201cNot sure Rodierre\u2019ll do it. See who you can get, but make sure they stick to the script. No Roosevelt\u2014\u201d\u201cNo Rockefellers,\u201d I finished.Between cases, I called around to various last-minute possibilities, ending up with one option, Paul Rodierre. He was in New York appearing in a new American musical revue at the Broadhurst Theatre, The Streets of Paris, Carmen Miranda\u2019s cyclonic Broadway debut.I phoned the William Morris Agency and was told they\u2019d check and call me back. Ten minutes later, M. Rodierre\u2019s agent told me the theater was dark that night and that, though his client did not own evening clothes, he was deeply honored by our request to host the gala that evening. He\u2019d meet me at the Waldorf to discuss details. Our apartment on East Fiftieth Street was a stone\u2019s throw from the Waldorf, so I rushed there to change into Mother\u2019s black Chanel dress.I found M. Rodierre seated at a caf\u00e9 table in the Waldorf\u2019s Peacock Alley bar adjacent to the lobby as the two-ton bronze clock sounded its lovely Westminster Cathedral chime on the half hour. Gala guests in their finest filtered in, headed for the Grand Ballroom upstairs.\u201cM. Rodierre?\u201d I said.Roger was right about the attractive part. The first thing a person notices about Paul Rodierre, after the initial jolt of his physical beauty, is the remarkable smile.\u201cHow can I thank you for doing this so last minute, Monsieur?\u201dHe unfolded himself from his chair, presenting a build better suited to rowing crew on the Charles than playing Broadway. He attempted to kiss my cheek, but I extended my hand to him, and he shook it. It was nice to meet a man my height.\u201cMy pleasure,\u201d he said.His attire was the issue: green trousers, an aubergine velvet sports jacket, brown suede shoes, and worst of all, a black shirt. Only priests and fascists wore black shirts. And gangsters, of course.\u201cDo you want to change?\u201d I resisted the urge to tidy his hair, which was long enough to pull back with a rubber band. \u201cShave perhaps?\u201d According to his agent, M. Rodierre was a guest at the hotel, so his razor sat just a few stories overhead.\u201cThis is what I wear,\u201d he said with a shrug. Typical actor. Why hadn\u2019t I known better? The parade of guests en route to the ballroom was growing, the women stunning in their finery, every man in tails and patent leather oxfords or calf opera pumps.\u201cThis is my first gala,\u201d I said. \u201cThe consulate\u2019s one night to raise money. It\u2019s white tie.\u201d Would he fit into Father\u2019s old tux? The inseam would be right, but it would be much too tight in the shoulders.\u201cAre you always this, well, energized, Miss Ferriday?\u201d\u201cWell, here in New York, individuality is not always appreciated.\u201d I handed him the stapled sheets. \u201cI\u2019m sure you\u2019re eager to see the script.\u201dHe handed it back. \u201cNo, merci.\u201dI pushed it back into his hands. \u201cBut the consul general himself wrote it.\u201d\u201cTell me again why I\u2019m doing this?\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s to benefit displaced French citizens all year and my French Families Fund. We help orphans back in France whose parents have been lost for any number of reasons. With all the uncertainty abroad, we\u2019re one reliable source of clothes and food. Plus, the Rockefellers will be there tonight.\u201dHe paged through the speech. \u201cThey could write a check and avoid this whole thing.\u201d\u201cThey\u2019re among our kindest donors, but please don\u2019t refer to them. Or President Roosevelt. Or the planes the U.S. sold France. Some of our guests tonight love France, of course, but would rather stay out of a war for now. Roger wants to avoid controversy.\u201d\u201cDancing around things never feels authentic. The audience feels that.\u201d\u201cCan you just stick to the script, Monsieur?\u201d\u201cWorrying can lead to heart failure, Miss Ferriday.\u201dI pulled the pin from the lily of the valley. \u201cHere\u2014a boutonni\u00e8re for the guest of honor.\u201d\u201cMuguet?\u201d M. Rodierre said. \u201cWhere did you find that this time of year?\u201d\u201cYou can get anything in New York. Our florist forces it from pips.\u201dI rested my palm against his lapel and dug the pin deep into the French velvet. Was that lovely fragrance from him or the flowers? Why didn\u2019t American men smell like this, of tuberose and wood musk and\u2014\u201cYou know lily of the valley is poisonous, right?\u201d M. Rodierre said.\u201cSo don\u2019t eat it. At least not until you\u2019ve finished speaking. Or if the crowd turns on you.\u201d --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Martha Hall Kelly is a native New Englander now living in Atlanta, Georgia, where she\u2019s writing the prequel to Lilac Girls . This is her first novel. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B00BIOG1ZU", "title": "Killing Jesus: A History (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)", "author": "Bill O'Reilly", "description": "About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa , and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Killing Jesus A History By Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard Henry Holt and Company Copyright \u00a9 2013 Bill O'Reilly and Martin DugardAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8050-9854-9 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, A Note to Readers, Book I: The World of Jesus, Book II: Behold the Man, Book III: If You Are the Son of God, Take Yourself Off This Cross, Afterword, Postscript, Notes, Sources, Acknowledgments, Illustration Credits, Index, About the Authors, Copyright, Also by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, CHAPTER 1 BETHLEHEM, JUDEA MARCH, 5 B.C. MORNING The child with thirty-six years to live is being hunted. Heavily armed soldiers from the capital city of Jerusalem are marching to this small town, intent on finding and killing the baby boy. They are a mixed-race group of foreign mercenaries from Greece, Gaul, and Syria. The child's name, unknown to them, is Jesus, and his only crime is that some believe he will be the next king of the Jewish people. The current monarch, a dying half-Jewish, half-Arab despot named Herod, is so intent on ensuring the baby's death that his army has been ordered to murder every male child under the age of two years in Bethlehem. None of the soldiers knows what the child's mother and father look like, or the precise location of his home, thus the need to kill every baby boy in the small town and surrounding area. This alone will guarantee the extermination of the potential king. It is springtime in Judea, the peak of lambing season. The rolling dirt road takes the army past thick groves of olive trees and shepherds tending their flocks. The soldiers' feet are clad in sandals, their legs are bare, and they wear the skirtlike pteruges to cover their loins. The young men sweat profusely beneath the plates of armor on their chests and the tinned bronze attic helmets that cover the tops of their heads and the sides of their faces. The soldiers are well aware of Herod's notorious cruelty and his penchant for killing anyone who would try to threaten his throne. But there is no moral debate about the right or wrong of slaughtering infants. Nor do the soldiers question whether they will have the nerve to rip a screaming child from his mother's arms and carry out the execution. When the time comes, they will follow orders and do their jobs \u2014 or risk being immediately killed for insubordination. The sword's blade is how they plan to dispatch the babies. All soldiers are armed with the Judean version of the razor-sharp pugio and gladius preferred by the Roman legions, and they wear their weapons attached to the waist. Their method of murder, however, will not be restricted to the dagger or sword. Should they wish, Herod's soldiers can also use a skull-crushing stone, hurl the baby boys off a cliff en masse, or just wrap their fists around the infants' windpipes and strangle them. The cause of death is not important. What matters most is one simple fact: king of the Jews or not, the infant must die. * * * Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, King Herod gazes out a palace window toward Bethlehem, anxiously awaiting confirmation of the slaughter. In the cobbled streets below him, the Roman-appointed king sees the crowded bazaars, where vendors sell everything from water and dates to tourist trinkets and roast lamb. The walled city of some eighty thousand residents packed into less than a single square mile is a crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean. With one sweep of his eyes, Herod can s --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Review \u201cO'Reilly is the natural choice to narrate this work\u2026 he carries the work along and the audiobook is a good introduction to the Synoptic Gospels.\u201d \u2015 AudioFile Magazine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "World"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B005M4W22I", "title": "The Abduction of Mary Rose: 2nd Edition 2020", "author": "Joan Hall Hovey", "description": "Review \"...what a great story! Couldn't put it down... An exciting and suspenseful\u00a0 ending wraps up this incredible novel.\" Lynn Demsky: Book Reporter About the Author Hovey is a writing instructor and novelist. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "B016ZNRC0Q", "title": "The Butterfly Garden (The Collector Book 1)", "author": "Dot Hutchison", "description": "From the Publisher Sometimes a story is powerful enough\u2014and horrifying enough\u2014to instantly transfix us and forever change the way we look at a simple object. In The Silence of the Lambs , it\u2019s the lotion in the basket. In this gruesome crime novel, it\u2019s butterflies.  Maya, a fierce survivor, leads us through the aftermath of a brutal event as she recounts her tale to the FBI, but her story keeps us at the edges, letting the questions simmer, bubbling up small answers that beg new, bigger questions in their wake: How did Maya escape captivity? Did the other girls survive? What happened to the garden\u2014and the Gardener?  Maya reveals a vivid dimension to the twisted puzzle and raises larger questions about her own motives. As the truth slowly emerges from a carefully constructed cocoon, author Dot Hutchison has us questioning whether this is a tale of terrible beauty or a beautiful tale of terror.  The frantic rustling of a butterfly\u2019s wings against a collector\u2019s net seems futile\u2014but when many butterflies flock together, they become much harder to pin down. For us, this innocuous symbol of transformative beauty will forever be a perverse reminder of the Gardener, a depraved man with his magnificent, grotesque collection of butterflies. - Alison Dasho and JoVon Sotak, Editors About the Author Dot Hutchison is the author of A Wounded Name , a young adult novel based on Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet , and the adult thriller The Butterfly Garden . With past experience working at a Boy Scout camp, a craft store, a bookstore, and the Renaissance Faire (as a human combat chess piece), Hutchison prides herself on remaining delightfully in tune with her inner young adult. She loves thunderstorms, mythology, history, and movies that can and should be watched on repeat. For more information on her current projects, visit www.dothutchison.com or check her out on Tumblr (www.dothutchison.tumblr.com), Twitter (@DotHutchison), or Facebook (www.facebook.com/DotHutchison).", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B003JBICPC", "title": "The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam", "author": "Chris Ewan", "description": "Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Good Thief's Guide to AmsterdamONE\"I want you to steal something for me.\"It wasn't the first time I'd heard those words, though usually the person saying them liked to warm up to it first. Not the American. He got straight to the point, casual as you like. If I was a lesser writer, I'd tell you it set alarm bells ringing inside my head or that a chill ran down my spine. In truth, it just made me listen a little harder.\"You've made a mistake,\" I told him. \"I'm a writer, not a burglar.\"\"Some writer. I've been following your work. You're good.\"I smiled. \"A hack with a pricey education, nothing more.\"\"Oh sure, as a writer. But as a thief, now that's a different story. You've got talent, kid, and that ain't easy to find around here.\"Around here was Amsterdam. To be exact, around here was a dim-lit brown bar on a northern stretch of the Keizersgracht canal, a twenty minute stroll or a ten minute bicycle ride from my apartment. It was a cramped space, warmed more by the closeness of the walls than the fading embers in the fire across from our table. I'd been here before, though only in passing, and the name had meant nothing to me when the American suggested it as a meeting point. Now here I was again, a glass of Dutch beer in front of me and a tricky proposition beyond that.The American had contacted me through my website. Most suspense writers have a website nowadays and you can go there to find all kinds of information about me and my writing. There's a page for each of the burglar books I've written to date and a News section with details of any readings I'm involved in, as well as some personal stuff my fans might care to know, such as where I happento be living while I'm writing my latest novel. There's also a link that allows readers to e-mail me and that was how the American had been in touch. A job for you, he'd written. Name your price. Hear me out at Caf\u00e9 de Brug. 10pm Thursday (tomorrow). I had no idea who the American was, of course, and far less reason to trust him, but then again, the lure of a new job was something I'd long since given up trying to fight. Because the truth, in case you haven't already guessed, is that I don't just write books about a career thief - I also happen to be one.\"This talent you're referring to,\" I said. \"Supposing it did exist.\"\"Supposing, I like that.\"\"Well, just supposing, then, that I really do have this talent - I'm curious how you'd like me to use it.\"The American checked over my shoulder, towards the doorway, then over his own shoulder, towards the rear of the bar. When he was satisfied that his neck worked just fine and that nobody was eavesdropping on our conversation, he reached inside the front pouch of his windbreaker and removed a small object that he placed on the wooden table before me. The object, it turned out, was a monkey figurine, about the size of my thumb. The monkey was sat on his haunches, knees up around his chest, with his front paws covering his eyes and his mouth wide open, as if in shock at whatever it was he'd just seen inside the windbreaker.\"See no evil,\" I said, half to myself, and the American nodded and crossed his arms in front of his chest.I picked up the monkey for a closer look. From the weight and the dry, gritty feel of it, I could tell the figurine had been rendered in plaster of Paris, which went some way to explaining why the finish was not very precise. The look of astonishment I'd read on the monkey's mouth could just as easily have been intended to show fear or even dumb joy by its maker. All things considered, it was hard to imagine it was worth more than a handful of pounds, or even dollars or euros for that matter.\"There are two more of these monkeys,\" the American said, not altogether surprising me. \"One covering his ears, the other covering his mouth.\"\"You don't say.\"\"I want you to steal them.\"I tilted my head to one side. \"Supposing I could ... obtain them for you. I'm not sure it would be worth my while.\"The American leaned towards me and cocked an eyebrow. \"How much to make it worth your while?\"I thought about a figure, then doubled it.\"Ten thousand euros.\"\"You want it tonight?\"I laughed. \"But this is worthless,\" I said, tossing the figurine back to the American, who scrambled to catch it before it struck the table.\"Not to me, kid,\" he told me, carefully dusting the monkey down and then placing it back inside the pouch of his windbreaker. \"What do you say?\"\"I'll think about it. Another beer?\"I stood and picked up our glasses without waiting for his answer and crossed to the bar, where a not unattractive blonde was filling some finger dishes with cashew nuts. She was tall and lean and tanned in that year-round Scandinavian way that never fails to make me feel impossibly English. You could tell she was used to fools like me hitting on her and when her eyes met my own, it was with a look that was like a ready apology.\"Twee pils astublieft,\" I managed, meanwhile holding up two fingers just in case the fact I was stood before a beer tap at a bar with two empty beer glasses left her in any doubt as to what I was aiming to buy.\"Of course,\" she said, in clipped English.She pushed her hair behind her ear, then took one of the glasses and began to fill it, and meanwhile I tried to think about something other than the freckles on her neck and ended up considering how the American had found out about me instead. It was intriguing, alright, because I was always careful to keep my thieving a secret, and that was one of the reasons I travelled around so much. The only person I talked about that side of my character with at all was back in London and here in Amsterdam I'd carried out just three jobs in the past four months, none of them the type of thefts to drawmuch attention. True, one of the jobs had been a commission, but the man who'd hired me was a Belgian who passed his instructions through a Parisian fence I happened to trust and it seemed unlikely the Belgian would have told the American about me, given we'd never actually met. So how had the American known to contact me? And why on earth did he want me to steal two worthless figurines?\"Your beers,\" the blonde said, scraping the froth from the top of the half-pint glasses with a plastic spatula and placing them in front of me.\"That man,\" I said, indicating the American with a nod of my head. \"Has he been in here before?\"\"Yes. He is an American.\"\"Does he come here a lot?\"She pouted. \"Many times, I think.\"\"You know his name?\"\"No,\" she said, shaking her head. \"But he is polite, always tipping\"Of course he was. I laid a few extra notes on the table and collected our beers.The American was in his late fifties, I guessed, though it was hard to gather much else about him. He had a thick head of grey hair, cut in a jagged, youthful style, and he looked relatively fit for his age. The windbreaker suited him, making him appear sporty, like the type of guy who enjoyed sailing in his spare time, and I had it in mind to pay attention to his hands and look for signs of rope chaffing when he pulled me out of my thoughts by saying, \"You want to know my name, all you gotta do is ask. It's Michael.\"\"Michael ...\"\"You don't have to say it so slow.\"\"I was waiting for your surname.\"\"Now that could be a long wait. The monkeys,\" he went on, \"are in two locations. It's important to me that you take them both. It's also important that you take them on the same night.\"\"Two separate locations?\"\"Uh huh.\"\"In Amsterdam?\"\"That's right. Two places, fifteen minutes apart by foot.\"\"And these places are private dwellings?\"\"Private dwellings,\" he echoed. \"Jeez. One's an apartment and the other's a houseboat, alright? You don't have to worry about alarms and you don't have to worry about being disturbed because the night you do this, both places'll be empty.\"\"How come?\"\"Because the men that live in these two dwellings will be having dinner. Here. With me.\"I gave this some thought. I wasn't crazy about what I was hearing.\"Sounds complicated,\" I said. \"Why don't you take the monkeys yourself? I can't imagine they'll be missed.\"\"For one,\" he said, hitching an eyebrow, \"the guy in the houseboat has a safe and he's kind of guarded about the combination. The other guy, he has an apartment in the Jordaan - it's on the top floor of a five storey building and he happens to have three door locks I know of.\"\"But no alarms.\"\"None.\"\"You're sure?\"\"Listen, you can't have an alarm on a houseboat - you get a storm or a barge goes by too fast, the movement of the canal water'll trigger it.\"\"And the apartment?\"\"Like I said, it's on the fifth floor. Way I see it, the guy figures he don't need no alarm.\"\"These locks ...\"\"Won't be a problem for you. Me, I don't have the keys or your talent, which is how come we're having this conversation.\"\"Something else occurs to me,\" I said. \"Supposing these two men value their figurines in the same way you do, well, what if they go home after your meal and notice the figurines are gone - they'll suspect you.\"He shook his head. \"They trust me.\"\"Maybe. But if they do suspect you and they come looking for you, well, you can see how my name is liable to crop up.\"\"Not from these lips.\"\"You say. But I don't like it.\"\"Well try this for size - I don't plan on being any place they can find me. We meet at seven and we'll be done eating by ten - that gives you three hours to do your job, which I figure is plenty of time. The bar here closes at eleven and I have it in mind for you to meet me with the figurines at a half after ten. If all goes to schedule, I'll be out of Amsterdam before midnight. And I ain't coming back.\"\"You're leaving the Netherlands?\"\"Well now, there's no need for you to know that, is there?\"I paused, tried something else.\"The timing's kind of tight. Say I can't get into this safe.\"\"You'll get in.\"\"Or I can't find the figurine in the apartment.\"\"Guy keeps it under his pillow.\"I frowned. \"He sleeps on it?\"\"Sleeps with it for all I care. But you'll find it under his pillow.\"I backed away from him and looked about the room. The blonde was wiping down the bar with a damp cloth, her hair dancing around her face. The only other customers were three Dutch men drinking beer at a table near the front door. They were laughing and clapping one another on the back, grinning toothily as if life simply didn't get any better. Behind them, sheet rain blasted against the picture window, blurring the outline of the lighted canal bridge I could see on the other side of the glass. I sighed, and gave it to him straight.\"Listen,\" I said, \"I'm going to have to say no. I don't know how you found me and that's part of the problem. The other thing is you want this done tomorrow night and that's a concern for me. I like to look around a job before I get inside of it and you're not giving me the time I need.\"The American laced his hands together on the table and tapped his thumbs against one another.\"Say we double your fee?\"\"It's funny,\" I told him, \"that just makes me more nervous. See, I have to think it's vital to you now, for whatever reason, that this thing is done tomorrow night. And the fact you'd pay me twentythousand makes me think there's twice the risk I'd considered in the first place.\"\"Risk is a part of it. So's the reward.\"\"It's still a no.\"The American grimaced, shook his head wearily. Then he reached inside the sleeve of his windbreaker and removed a square of paper. He hesitated for a moment, looking me in the eyes once more, before sliding the paper across to me.\"Kid, I'm gonna take a chance. These here are the addresses. I want you to keep them. Say tomorrow night comes around and it gets to seven o'clock and you change your mind.\"\"That's not going to happen.\"\"And you're confident about that. But why don't we leave ourselves open to the possibility that you just might reconsider your attitude? This way, you have the details you need and everything's in your control. You make the decision.\"I held his gaze, and, fool that I was, reached out and took the piece of paper.\"That's right, kid,\" he told me. \"All I'm asking you to do is think about it.\"THE GOOD THIEF'S GUIDE TO AMSTERDAM. Copyright \u00a9 2007 by Chris Ewan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author CHRIS EWAN is a lawyer specializing in the film industry. The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam, his debut novel, was recommended as one of the \"books for grownups\" by the editors of Publishers Weekly and AARP The Magazine . He lives on the Isle of Man. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. This impressive debut, a comic whodunit from British entertainment lawyer Ewan, owes much of its charm and success to its compelling antihero, Charles Howard. An established author of mysteries featuring a burglar-detective, Howard himself is a successful burglar. While finishing his latest novel in Amsterdam, Howard receives a cryptic invitation via his Web site and follows his curiosity to a meeting with a mysterious American who somehow knows of the author's secret profession. Howard initially declines the commission to steal two small plaster monkeys, but when he succeeds in his assignment, he finds his client has been brutally bludgeoned. After becoming a suspect, Howard scrambles to understand the link between the monkeys and a diamond heist over a decade earlier. The ease with which Ewan creates a memorable protagonist and pits him against a plausible and tricky killer will be the envy of many more established authors. The detection is first-rate, and Howard is a fresh, irreverent creation who will make readers eager for his next exploit. (Nov.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cThis [is an] impressive debut, a comic whodunit. . . . Howard is a fresh, irreverent creation who will make readers eager for his next exploit.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cCharlie is agreeable company, producing that stream of witty patter that seems quintessentially British as he narrates his own skilled thievery and flights of quick thought . . . seeing the pieces fly together at the end without a single missing bit is pretty fun.\u201d \u2015 Houston Chronicle \u201cEwan's droll, funny, noirish style, cleverly drawn central character, and great descriptions of locale will make this a popular new series.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "B004U2USMY", "title": "The Red Rooster", "author": "Michael Wallace", "description": "From the Author Perhaps nothing else I've written has engrossed me like The Red Rooster. As I dove into the world of Occupied France, I found myself dreaming in French, imagining myself a zazou, hunted by fascists and Gestapo agents, and of course, thinking about gold coins.I found a\u00a0challenge in\u00a0writing my German characters. It was important that my Gestapo agent be a real character, not a cardboard cutout of imagined evil. What drives a man like Colonel Hoekman, how does he justify his behavior? And for Helmut and Alfonse, what price do they pay for their nation's descent into madness?And what did it mean to be living under\u00a0occupation? After the war, the occupied people of Europe often crafted a heroic narrative, where they resisted the Nazis as partisans and guerrillas, but the truth is always more complex and interesting than the myth. People were not divided neatly into resistance\u00a0and collaboration. Most simply tried to survive.Of course, as the tragedy of the zazous showed, there was no way to escape the war entirely. Sooner or later, you had to choose sides.Michael Wallace, 2011 From the Inside Flap This new historical thriller by top 20 Amazon bestseller Michael Wallace will be enjoyed by fans of Alan Furst and Ken Follett. From the Back Cover Praise for Michael Wallace's novels: Mighty and Strong \"A chilling window into life in a polygamist Utah town, where prophets still walk and\u00a0nobody sits and waits for the Second Coming. Wallace masterfully captures the desperation, hope, and triumph of the world of the Mighty and Strong.\" Jeffrey Anderson, National bestselling, International Thriller Award nominated author of Sleeper Cell. Praise for The Righteous \"Deeply engrossing! Michael Wallace delivers the thinking man's thriller while establishing one of the freshest male leads in crime fiction--Jacob Christianson, an aspiring doctor and cult elder's favored son. Jacob's analytic nature has him questioning everything, including the nature of God and the sexist politics of polygamy.\" Lisa Gardner, Multiple New York Times bestselling author of Live to Tell About the Author MICHAEL WALLACE has trekked across the Sahara on a camel, ridden an elephant through a tiger preserve in Southeast Asia, eaten fried guinea pig, and been licked on the head by a skunk. In a previous stage of life he programmed nuclear war simulations, smuggled refugees out of a war zone, and milked cobras for their venom. He speaks Spanish and French and grew up in a religious community in the desert. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Military History Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and his novels include The Righteous, The Devil's Deep, and Mighty and Strong. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0050DIWFC", "title": "Defending Jacob: A Novel", "author": "William Landay", "description": "Amazon.com Review Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2012 : A fast, compelling, and compulsively readable courtroom drama, Defending Jacob tells the story of a district attorney's son who is accused of killing a classmate. As the father attempts to prove his son's innocence, Landay explores uncomfortable territory. Can a tendency toward violence be inherited? Is the capacity for murder a genetic disposition? The author, a former district attorney, gets the taut nuances just right, capturing the subtleties of a trial in a packed courtroom, where a small rustle or murmur can signify a lot. In the end Landay pulls off a clever plot device that doesn't reveal itself until the final pages. -- Neal Thompson Review \u201cGripping, emotional murder saga . . . The shocking ending will have readers pulling up their bedcovers to ward off the haunting chill.\u201d \u2014 People \u201cLanday turns out to be creating a clever blend of legal thriller and issue-oriented family implosion . . . nothing is predictable. All bets are off.\u201d \u2014Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201cWilliam Landay makes bold use of his genuine storytelling gift, his amazing ability to craft believable dialogue, and, above all, his extraordinary understanding of what it means to be a husband and father to present us with an unforgettable tale of an ordinary marriage and family in crisis.\u201d \u2014Nicholas Sparks \u201cA page-turning, stomach-clenching exploration of family.\u201d \u2014Chevy Stevens \u201cA stunning novel that will be compared to classic courtroom thrillers like Presumed Innocent and Anatomy of a Murder .\u201d \u2014Phillip Margolin \u201cSo well-written, every character so movingly and convincingly drawn, the plot so utterly enthralling . . . Defending Jacob is absolutely stellar, first-rate fiction\u2014human, sensitive, and gripping in the extreme.\u201d \u2014Lisa Unger \u201cMore than a terrific legal thrill ride, Defending Jacob is an unflinching appraisal of the darkest, most poignant consequences of the love that binds, and blinds, families. It\u2019s one of those rare books that call for contemplation and insight along with every breathtaking surprise.\u201d \u2014Stephen White \u201cLanday spins a tale of such complexity and emotion that you don\u2019t even realize you\u2019re spiraling deep into his world until he spits you out at his shocking, shattering conclusion.\u201d \u2014Carla Buckley \u201cSensational . . . one of the best books of the year.\u201d \u2014John Lutz \u201cBrilliantly conceived . . . combines a harrowing family drama with riveting courtroom scenes that make readers feel they are actually witnessing the trial unfold.\u201d \u2014Stephen Frey \u201cA carefully plotted and precisely written thriller about a family put to the ultimate test . . . Defending Jacob is bound to enthrall.\u201d \u2014Thomas H. Cook \u201cDo you like a mystery with a good twist at the end?\u00a0 How about one with the literary equivalent of skating\u2019s triple axel? . . . Hang on for that shocking and yet believable ending\u2014with a triple twist you won\u2019t see coming.\u201d \u2014 Portland Oregonian \u201cLike John Grisham and Scott Turow, Landay is a lawyer with a solid grasp of how to use courtroom scenes to advance his jigsaw-puzzle story. . . . With a grabby premise and careful plotting, he keeps you turning the pages through the shocking gut-punch of an ending.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201c[Landay] reaches a new level of excellence with this riveting, knock-your-socks-off legal thriller.\u00a0 With its masterfully crafted characterizations and dialogue, emotional depth, and frightening implications, the novel rivals the best of Scott Turow and John Grisham.\u00a0 Don\u2019t miss it.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201cHarrowing . . . This searing narrative proves the ancient Greek tragedians were right: the worst punishment is not death but living with what you\u2014knowingly or unknowingly\u2014have done.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cEven with unexpected twists and turns, the two narratives interlock like the teeth of a zipper, building to a tough and unflinching finale.\u00a0 This novel has major motion picture written all over it.\u201d \u2014 The Boston Globe \u201c Defending Jacob is a novel that comes to you out of the blue and manages to keep you reading feverishly until the whole thing is completed. . . . Landay has written a stunning novel and it is one that should draw attention to the possibilities it raises.\u201d \u2014 Huffington Post \u201cThe hype is justified. . . . Exceptionally serious, suspenseful, engrossing.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post From AudioFile About the Author WILLIAM LANDAY is the author of The Strangler , a Los Angeles Times Favorite Crime Book of the Year, and Mission Flats , winner of the Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel and a Barry Award nominee. A former district attorney who holds degrees from Yale and Boston College of Law, he lives in Boston. --This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. From Booklist *Starred Review* A 14-year-old boy is stabbed to death in the park near his middle school in an upper-class Boston suburb, and Assistant District Attorney Andy Barber takes the case, despite the fact that his son, Jacob, was a classmate of the victim. But when the bloody fingerprint on the victim\u2019s clothes turns out to be Jacob\u2019s, Barber is off the case and out of his office, devoting himself solely to defending his son. Even Barber\u2019s never-before-disclosed heritage as the son and grandson of violent men who killed becomes potential courtroom fodder, raising the question of a \u201cmurder gene.\u201d Within the structure of a grand jury hearing a year after the murder, Landay gradually increases apprehension. As if peeling the layers of an onion, he raises personal and painful ethical issues pertaining to a parent\u2019s responsibilities to a child, to a family, and to society at large. Landay\u2019s two previous novels (Mission Flats, 2003; The Strangler, 2007) were award winners, but he reaches a new level of excellence in this riveting, knock-your-socks-off legal thriller. With its masterfully crafted characterizations and dialogue, emotional depth, and frightening implications, the novel rivals the best of Scott Turow and John Grisham. Don\u2019t miss it. --Michele Leber --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 | In the Grand Jury Mr. Logiudice: State your name, please.Witness: Andrew Barber.Mr. Logiudice: What do you do for work, Mr. Barber?Witness: I was an assistant district attorney in this county for 22 years.Mr. Logiudice: \u201cWas.\u201d What do you do for work now?Witness: I suppose you\u2019d say I\u2019m unemployed.In April 2008, Neal Logiudice finally subpoenaed me to appear before the grand jury. By then it was too late. Too late for his case, certainly, but also too late for Logiudice. His reputation was already damaged beyond repair, and his career along with it. A prosecutor can limp along with a damaged reputation for a while, but his colleagues will watch him like wolves and eventually he will be forced out, for the good of the pack. I have seen it many times: an ADA is irreplaceable one day, forgotten the next.I have always had a soft spot for Neal Logiudice (pronounced la-JOO-dis). He came to the DA\u2019s office a dozen years before this, right out of law school. He was twenty-nine then, short, with thinning hair and a little potbelly. His mouth was overstuffed with teeth; he had to force it shut, like a full suitcase, which left him with a sour, pucker-mouthed expression. I used to get after him not to make this face in front of juries\u2014nobody likes a scold\u2014but he did it unconsciously. He would get up in front of the jury box shaking his head and pursing his lips like a schoolmarm or a priest, and in every juror there stirred a secret desire to vote against him. Inside the office, Logiudice was a bit of an operator and a kiss-ass. He got a lot of teasing. Other ADAs tooled on him endlessly, but he got it from everyone, even people who worked with the office at arm\u2019s length\u2014cops, clerks, secretaries, people who did not usually make their contempt for a prosecutor quite so obvious. They called him Milhouse, after a dweeby character on The Simpsons , and they came up with a thousand variations on his name: LoFoolish, LoDoofus, Sid Vicious, Judicious, on and on. But to me, Logiudice was okay. He was just innocent. With the best intentions, he smashed people\u2019s lives and never lost a minute of sleep over it. He only went after bad guys, after all. That is the Prosecutor\u2019s Fallacy\u2014They are bad guys because I am prosecuting them\u2014and Logiudice was not the first to be fooled by it, so I forgave him for being righteous. I even liked him. I rooted for him precisely because of his oddities, the unpronounceable name, the snaggled teeth\u2014which any of his peers would have had straightened with expensive braces, paid for by Mummy and Daddy\u2014even his naked ambition. I saw something in the guy. An air of sturdiness in the way he bore up under so much rejection, how he just took it and took it. He was obviously a working-class kid determined to get for himself what so many others had simply been handed. In that way, and only in that way, I suppose, he was just like me.Now, a dozen years after he arrived in the office, despite all his quirks, he had made it, or nearly made it. Neal Logiudice was First Assistant, the number two man in the Middlesex District Attorney\u2019s Office, the DA\u2019s right hand and chief trial attorney. He took over the job from me\u2014this kid who once said to me, \u201cAndy, you\u2019re exactly what I want to be someday.\u201d I should have seen it coming.In the grand jury room that morning, the jurors were in a sullen, defeated mood. They sat, thirty-odd men and women who had not been clever enough to find a way out of serving, all crammed into those school chairs with teardrop-shaped desks for chair arms. They understood their jobs well enough by now. Grand juries serve for months, and they figure out pretty quickly what the gig is all about: accuse, point your finger, name the wicked one.A grand jury proceeding is not a trial. There is no judge in the room and no defense lawyer. The prosecutor runs the show. It is an investigation and in theory a check on the prosecutor\u2019s power, since the grand jury decides whether the prosecutor has enough evidence to haul a suspect into court for trial. If there is enough evidence, the grand jury grants the prosecutor an indictment, his ticket to Superior Court. If not, they return a \u201cno bill\u201d and the case is over before it begins. In practice, no bills are rare. Most grand juries indict. Why not? They only see one side of the case.But in this case, I suspect the jurors knew Logiudice did not have a case. Not today. The truth was not going to be found, not with evidence this stale and tainted, not after everything that had happened. It had been over a year already\u2014over twelve months since the body of a fourteen-year-old boy was found in the woods with three stab wounds arranged in a line across the chest as if he\u2019d been forked with a trident. But it was not the time, so much. It was everything else. Too late, and the grand jury knew it.I knew it too.Only Logiudice was undeterred. He pursed his lips in that odd way of his. He reviewed his notes on a yellow legal pad, considered his next question. He was doing just what I\u2019d taught him. The voice in his head was mine: Never mind how weak your case is. Stick to the system. Play the game the same way it\u2019s been played the last five-hundred-odd years, use the same gutter tactic that has always governed cross-examination\u2014lure, trap, f**k.He said, \u201cDo you recall when you first heard about the Rifkin boy\u2019s murder?\u201d\u201cYes.\u201d\u201cDescribe it.\u201d\u201cI got a call, I think, first from CPAC\u2014that\u2019s the state police. Then two more came in right away, one from the Newton police, one from the duty DA. I may have the order wrong, but basically the phone started ringing off the hook.\u201d\u201cWhen was this?\u201d\u201cThursday, April 12, 2007, around nine a.m., right after the body was discovered.\u201d\u201cWhy were you called?\u201d\u201cI was the First Assistant. I was notified of every murder in the county. It was standard procedure.\u201d\u201cBut you did not keep every case, did you? You did not personally investigate and try every homicide that came in?\u201d\u201cNo, of course not. I didn\u2019t have that kind of time. I kept very few homicides. Most I assigned to other ADAs.\u201d\u201cBut this one you kept.\u201d\u201cYes.\u201d\u201cDid you decide immediately that you were going to keep it for yourself, or did you only decide that later?\u201d\u201cI decided almost immediately.\u201d\u201cWhy? Why did you want this case in particular?\u201d\u201cI had an understanding with the district attorney, Lynn Canavan: certain cases I would try personally.\u201d\u201cWhat sort of cases?\u201d\u201cHigh-priority cases.\u201d\u201cWhy you?\u201d\u201cI was the senior trial lawyer in the office. She wanted to be sure that important cases were handled properly.\u201d\u201cWho decided if a case was high priority?\u201d\u201cMe, in the first instance. In consultation with the district attorney, of course, but things tend to move pretty fast at the beginning. There isn\u2019t usually time for a meeting.\u201d\u201cSo you decided the Rifkin murder was a high-priority case?\u201d\u201cOf course.\u201d\u201cWhy?\u201d\u201cBecause it involved the murder of a child. I think we also had an idea it might blow up, catch the media\u2019s attention. It was that kind of case. It happened in a wealthy town, with a wealthy victim. We\u2019d already had a few cases like that. At the beginning we did not know exactly what it was, either. In some ways it looked like a schoolhouse killing, a Columbine thing. Basically, we didn\u2019t know what the hell it was, but it smelled like a big case. If it had turned out to be a smaller thing, I would have passed it off later, but in those first few hours I had to be sure everything was done right.\u201d\u201cDid you inform the district attorney that you had a conflict of interest?\u201d\u201cNo.\u201d\u201cWhy not?\u201d\u201cBecause I didn\u2019t have one.\u201d\u201cWasn\u2019t your son, Jacob, a classmate of the dead boy?\u201d\u201cYes, but I didn\u2019t know the victim. Jacob didn\u2019t know him either, as far as I was aware. I\u2019d never even heard the dead boy\u2019s name.\u201d\u201cYou did not know the kid. All right. But you did know that he and your son were in the same grade at the same middle school in the same town?\u201d\u201cYes.\u201d\u201cAnd you still didn\u2019t think you were conflicted out? You didn\u2019t think your objectivity might be called into question?\u201d\u201cNo. Of course not.\u201d\u201cEven in hindsight? You insist, you\u2014Even in hindsight, you still don\u2019t feel the circumstances gave even the appearance of a conflict?\u201d\u201cNo, there was nothing improper about it. There was nothing even unusual about it. The fact that I lived in the town where the murder happened? That was a good thing. In smaller counties, the prosecutor often lives in the community where a crime happens, he often knows the people affected by it. So what? So he wants to catch the murderer even more? That\u2019s not a conflict of interest. Look, the bottom line is, I have a conflict with all murderers. That\u2019s my job. This was a horrible, horrible crime; it was my job to do something about it. I was determined to do just that.\u201d --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Praise for Defending Jacob \u201cWilliam Landay makes bold use of his genuine storytelling gift, his amazing ability to craft believable dialogue, and, above all, his extraordinary understanding of what it means to be a husband and father to present us with an unforgettable tale of an ordinary marriage and family in crisis. On the surface this novel reads like a first-rate thriller, but at its heart it\u2019s a love story.\u00a0 It\u2019s the story of a man who adores his wife and child, but more than that, it\u2019s a novel that describes the fine edge between love and madness, and the lies we sometimes tell ourselves. Landay has proven himself to be an extraordinary writer, and Defending Jacob is an amazing novel. Do yourself a favor and read it. It\u2019s that good.\u201d\u2014Nicholas Sparks\u00a0\u201c Defending Jacob is smart, sophisticated, and suspenseful\u2014capturing both the complexity and stunning fragility of family life.\u201d\u2014Lee Child\u00a0\u201cPowerful . . . leaves you gasping breathlessly at each shocking revelation.\u201d\u2014Lisa Gardner\u00a0\u201cA page-turning, stomach-clenching exploration of family.\u201d\u2014Chevy Stevens\u00a0\u201cA stunning novel that will be compared to classic courtroom thrillers like Presumed Innocent and Anatomy of a Murder .\u201d\u2014Phillip Margolin\u00a0\u201cSo well-written, every character so movingly and convincingly drawn, the plot so utterly enthralling . . . Defending Jacob is absolutely stellar, first-rate fiction\u2014human, sensitive, and gripping in the extreme.\u201d\u2014Lisa Unger\u201cMore than a terrific legal thrill ride, Defending Jacob is an unflinching appraisal of the darkest, most poignant consequences of the love that binds, and blinds, families. It\u2019s one of those rare books that call for contemplation and insight along with every breathtaking surprise.\u201d\u2014Stephen White\u00a0\u201cLanday spins a tale of such complexity and emotion that you don\u2019t even realize you\u2019re spiraling deep into his world until he spits you out at his shocking, shattering conclusion.\u201d\u2014Carla Buckley\u00a0\u201cSensational . . . one of the best books of the year.\u201d\u2014John Lutz \u201cA novel like this comes along maybe once a decade . . . a tour de force, a full-blooded legal thriller about a murder trial and the way it shatters a family. With its relentless suspense, its mesmerizing prose, and a shocking twist at the end, it\u2019s every bit as good as Scott Turow\u2019s great Presumed Innocent . But it\u2019s also something more: an indelible domestic drama that calls to mind Ordinary People and We Need to Talk About Kevin . A spellbinding and unforgettable literary crime novel.\u201d\u2014Joseph Finder\u00a0\u00a0\u201cPowerful, disturbing, complex, and gripping, Defending Jacob is impossible to put down. William Landay is a stunning talent.\u201d\u2014Carla Neggers \u201cRiveting, suspenseful, and emotionally searing.\u201d\u2014Linwood Barclay\u00a0\u201cBrilliantly conceived . . . combines a harrowing family drama with riveting courtroom scenes that make readers feel they are actually witnessing the trial unfold.\u201d\u2014Stephen Frey\u201cA carefully plotted and precisely written thriller about a family put to the ultimate test . . . Defending Jacob is bound to enthrall.\u201d\u2014Thomas H. Cook\u201cHarrowing . . . This searing narrative proves the ancient Greek tragedians were right: the worst punishment is not death but living with what you\u2014knowingly or unknowingly\u2014have done.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review)\u201c[Landay] reaches a new level of excellence with this riveting, knock-your-socks-off legal thriller.\u00a0 With its masterfully crafted characterizations and dialogue, emotional depth, and frightening implications, the novel rivals the best of Scott Turow and John Grisham.\u00a0 Don\u2019t miss it.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Booklist (starred review)\u201cGripping, emotional murder saga\u2026.The shocking ending will have readers pulling up their bedcovers to ward off the haunting chill.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 People Magazine (three of four stars)\u00a0\u201cLanday has written a legal thriller that\u2019s comparable to classics such as Scott Turow\u2019s Presumed Innocent\u2026.Tragic and shocking, Defending Jacob is sure to generate buzz.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Associated Press \u201cDo you like a mystery with a good twist at the end?\u00a0 How about one with the literary equivalent of skating\u2019s triple axel?....Hang on for that shocking and yet believable ending\u2014with a triple twist you won\u2019t see coming.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Portland Oregonian \u201cLike John Grisham and Scott Turow, Landay is a lawyer with a solid grasp of how to use courtroom scenes to advance his jigsaw-puzzle story\u2026.with a grabby premise and careful plotting, he keeps you turning the pages through the shocking gut-punch of an ending.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201c[Landay] reaches a new level of excellence with this riveting, knock-your-socks-off legal thriller.\u00a0 With its masterfully crafted characterizations and dialogue, emotional depth, and frightening implications, the novel rivals the best of Scott Turow and John Grisham.\u00a0 Don\u2019t miss it.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Booklist (starred review)\u201cNot since the novels of Scott Turow has a crime thriller\u2014and thriller, though this too happens to be a literary legal thriller\u2014shaken me by the throat like this.\u00a0 It\u2019s a stunning, shocking, emotionally harrowing ride in which the reader is plunged into a riveting but terrible murder trial and the heartbreaking implosion of a loving family.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Daily Mail \u201cEven with unexpected twists and turns, the two narratives interlock like the teeth of a zipper, building to a tough and unflinching finale.\u00a0 This novel has major motion picture written all over it.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 The Boston Globe \u201cLanday turns out to be creating a clever blend of legal thriller and issue-oriented family implosion\u2026nothing is predictable.\u00a0 All bets are off.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201c Defending Jacob is a novel that comes to you out of the blue and manages to keep you reading feverishly until the whole thing is completed\u2026.Landay has written a stunning novel and it is one that should draw attention to the possibilities it raises.\u00a0 In the next few weeks, Defending Jacob is the novel most readers are going to be discussing.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Huffington Post \u201cThe hype is justified\u2026exceptionally serious, suspenseful, engrossing.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 The Washington Post --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0321693620", "title": "Elementary Statistics: Picturing the World (5th Edition)", "author": "Ron Larson", "description": "About the Author Ron Larson received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Colorado in 1970. At that time he accepted a position with Penn State University, and he currently holds the rank of professor of mathematics at the University. Dr. Larson is the lead author of more than two dozen mathematics textbooks that range from sixth grade through calculus levels. Betsy Farber received her Bachelor's degree in mathematics form Penn State University and Master's degree in mathematics from the College of New Jersey. Since 1976, she has been teaching all levels of mathematics at Bucks County Community College in Newton, Pennsylvania, where she currently holds the rank of professor. She is particularly interested in developing new ways to make statistics relevant and interesting to her students and has been teaching statistics in many different modes - with TI-83/84, with MINITAB, and by distance learning as well as in the traditional classroom.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Mathematics"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.07}, {"asin": "0851518788", "title": "Troubled Journey", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Faith Cook was born in China, the daughter of OMF missionaries, and now lives in Derbyshire, England. She is married to Paul, who has served as a pastor to churches in Northallerton, Shepshed and Hull in England.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Ministry & Evangelism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.0}, {"asin": "8497646932", "title": "Orgullo y prejuicio (Cl\u00e1sicos de la literatura series) (Spanish Edition)", "author": "Jane Austen", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": "from 4.40"}], "target_asin": "B0050DIWFC"}
{"user_id": "AFRJCBFYNJSJM7SZ6UI65QPT4YWQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0545812321", "title": "Interference", "author": "Kay Honeyman", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 9 Up\u2014Kate Hamilton believes her family is leaving Washington, DC, for Texas because of a scandal with her ex-boyfriend and her father's failing Senate race. Once she arrives, she discovers that her parents haven't given up on politics; her father is running in a special election in the hometown he's not visited in years. Kate is obliged to make friends, finish her photo portfolio for college admissions, and figure out how to beat her ex for a coveted college recommendation, all while not causing any problems for the political race. She gets off on the wrong foot with Hunter, a local boy who helps out at her aunt's animal shelter. Sparks fly between them even when their tempers flare. Kate tries to help her new friend Anna Gomez (a well-rounded secondary character and the only person of color in the work's cast), and things don't go well. Maybe what Kate thinks of as helping is just interference. Major themes of politics and football tie the narrative together as the compelling protagonist navigates high school, boy problems, and life. The issues are realistic, and the character-driven plot will have strong appeal for many. The relationship between Kate and her parents is authentically difficult at times, though Honeyman manages to bring the family together without compromising the personalities of her characters. VERDICT A fun read with interesting themes likely to please most fans of realistic fiction.\u2014Genevieve Feldman, San Francisco Public Library Review Praise for Interference : \"I loved reading about Kate, who uses her street smarts and political know-how to go after what she knows is right. With its winning combination of football, politics, and a swoony small-town romance, this story stole my heart.\" -- Miranda Kenneally, author of Catching Jordan and Defending Taylor \"If you've ever messed up big time and yearned to hit restart, you must read Interference . Kay Honeyman's big-hearted exploration of life after a scandal reveals the true meaning of love, forgiveness, and courage.\" -- Justina Chen, author of North of Beautiful and A Blind Spot for Boys \"Kay Honeyman scores a touchdown with Interference , a fabulous read about new beginnings and family politics, freshly spun with humor, scandal, football, and a little romance.\" -- Elizabeth Eulberg, author of The Lonely Hearts Club and Better Off Friends \"This light romance gives plenty of nods to Emma , including its flawed but well-intentioned protagonist, while taking a fresh approach to the story... Perfect for readers wanting an update of an Austen classic.\" -- Booklist \"The character-driven plot will have strong appeal... A fun read with interesting themes likely to please most fans of realistic fiction.\" -- School Library Journal Praise for The Fire Horse Girl : *\"First-time author Honeyman has researched the history of Angel Island and early twentieth century San Francisco carefully, yet the ultimate strength of this story is in her character Jade Moon. Her voice, authentic and consistent, transcends this historical fiction/adventure/love story to embrace every young woman who has ever searched for the real person hidden under the veneer of society's expectations.\" -- Booklist , starred review\"Historical details create a strong sense of setting, and readers will recognize (well before Jade Moon does) that her inner fire is an asset, and that she's much more than the sign under which she was born.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"In a defiant first-person voice, Jade Moon describes the desperate lives of Chinese immigrant women as she relies on her Fire Horse persona to save herself... Perilous, page-turning adventure in old Chinatown.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \"Jade Moon is a complex heroine and this book offers fascinating discussion points for the themes of feminism, gender roles, and diversity. Adult fans of Amy Tan may also enjoy this thoughtful, well-crafted story.\" -- Voice of Youth Advocates From the Inside Flap I will not get involved.I will not get involved.I will not get involved... As a congressman's daughter in Washington, DC, Kate Hamilton always pushes to make things right. But when a scandal sends her family to Red Dirt, Texas, she decides to st From the Back Cover Advance Praise for Interference \"I loved reading about Kate, who uses her street smarts and political know-how to go after what she knows is right. With its winning combination of football, politics, and a swoony small-town romance, this story stole my heart.\" -- Miranda Kenneally, author of Catching Jordan and Defending Taylor \"If you've ever messed up big time and yearned to hit restart, you must read Interference . Kay Honeyman's big-hearted exploration of life after a scandal reveals the true meaning of love, forgiveness, and courage.\" -- Justina Chen, author of North of Beautiful and A Blind Spot for Boys \"Kay Honeyman scores a touchdown with Interference , a fabulous read about new beginnings and family politics, freshly spun with humor, scandal, football, and a little romance.\" -- Elizabeth Eulberg, author of The Lonely Hearts Club and Better Off Friends About the Author Kay Honeyman grew up in Texas, where she followed football and politics with equal passion. Her first novel, The Fire Horse Girl , was nominated for three state awards. Kay now teaches language arts in Dallas, where she lives with her family. Please visit her website at www.kayhoneyman.com and follow her on Twitter at @kayhoneyman. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. \"I don't know how to drive.\"He slammed on the brakes. \"You're kidding, right?\"\"My parents just never had time to teach me. We're always busy campaigning. And in D.C. we have this thing called public transportation.\"Hunter put the truck in park and got out.\"What are you doing?\" I yelled through the open back window. \"We're in the middle of the road. Get back in the car.\"He strolled to my door and pulled it open. \"Move over.\"\"Why?\"\"I'm teaching you how to drive.\"I shook my head. \"I can't.\"\"Come on, you have to let me make up for being such an idiot,\" he said. I slumped against the seat and stared out the window. \"No, you still don't get it. I'll hit something,\" I said. \"Then people will find out that I hit something, and my dad will get furious, not because the car is wrecked, not because his insurance goes up, but because the talk shows will start asking him questions about teenage drivers. He'll be asked if texting on the road should be illegal, and as a father, does he support a curfew for teens. They won't ask about me, but it will be a barrage of questions that surround me, and he'll have to field every one. Then they'll start looking at Kyle Stone's driving record, which is probably perfect, and Dad will come home at the end of the day, and I'll get that look. The look you saw today.\" Hunter pointed out the front window. \"What are you going to hit?\" I looked across an empty desert to the horizon. The sky stretched for miles in front of me. It felt more part of the landscape than the sky in D.C., like you could touch it. \"And if it helps,\" Hunter said, \"Kyle drives like a blind monkey.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "1698844654", "title": "Murder: Above Top Secret", "author": "J. L. Hodges", "description": "Review \"MurderAbove Top Secret\" could have only been written by one person and that isJ.L.Hodges.\u00a0 \u00a0He is the only one with the knowledge and willingnessto step forward and tell the tale of Donald C. Neil's murder. Neil, a divorcedfather of one worked for a NASA contracted firm in the late seventies.\u00a0 Hehad also worked on other top-secret, government programs before his death.Although an odd sort, he by no means deserved his ending. J.L. Hodges was thelead investigator on the case for the Webster, Texas Police Department. Thedetective soon found out that there were others out there that did not want thetruth to be told.\u00a0Hodgesleads the investigation methodically and in the best manner of experienceddetectives but is continually stymied by unknown agencies within the federalgovernment, as well as foreign spies and contract intelligence operators, evento the point of evidence being stolen and the body tampered with. In thiscurrent day of governmental overreach coming to light and daily reminders of thelies we have been told, this book is certainly timely, especially given thestate of divisiveness this country is experiencing.\u00a0DonaldNeil deserves justice and has for decades. Read the book and get upset aboutthings done in the name of national secrecy.\u00a0Richard D. Rowland,AuthorUnspoken Messages richarddrowlandbooks.com/\u00a0RichardD. Rowland is an accomplished author, and dedicated public servant. He is atwo-tour Vietnam War veteran, and served 28 years with the Kentucky StatePolice. He knows the rigors and disappointments of these types ofinvestigations that haunt detectives to the end of their lives. About the Author Many Men In One, is the title of this man, according to those who knowhim best. Jim has lived many parallel lives, and invested a half-century in high-risk public service assignments including that of a covertintelligence operator, a highly decorated detective, and a two-time lawenforcement officer of the year, licensed law enforcement instructor,licensed professional security instructor, a ground combat veteran ofthe Vietnam War, Inventor, and personal defense expert. Parallel to his tactical life, Jim grew up in Texas as a cowboy and horsetrainer and owned his own livestock business. He also founded and ran an invention design company, as well as a national tactical sales andtraining company. As a historian of the Vietnam War, and also cowboy and ranching history, he has appeared in numerous films and photoshoots and is a nationally respected public speaker.Now, Jim enjoys authoring books from these experiences and sharing stories with audiences from many corners of the world.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 19.5}, {"asin": "1790916526", "title": "Duct Tape is Flammable: & Other Life Lessons from a Car Guy", "author": "Zachary Dillinger", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Memoirs"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 4.83}, {"asin": "1931626065", "title": "American Wrench Makers 1830-1930", "author": "Kenneth L. Cope", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Antiques & Collectibles"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 29.95}, {"asin": "1606525131", "title": "North American Wildlife: An Illustrated Guide to 2,000 Plants and Animals", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 76.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0552995045", "title": "Lila an Inquiry Into Morals", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Philosophy"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.08}, {"asin": "B00J8YSAHE", "title": "If I Were in the Circus: ...a rhyming picture book for children ages 0-6", "author": "Barb Asselin", "description": "Review \"Sitting with my granddaughter and having her read it to me was such a wonderfultime for me!\" - Midge\"...the story and the vibrant artwork is perfect for classic bedtime and road tripadventures for all.\" - Nick S.\"I downloaded this for my 4 year old and she loved it!!!\" - Amazon customer About the Author Barb Asselin is a college professor and best-selling author who is published in many different genres including education, law, real estate, writing, online business, golfing, crafting, parenting, internet marketing, entrepreneurship, baby sign language, fitness, office administration, children's fiction and children's non-fiction. She is an avid reader of many different genres and has been passionate about writing since grade school when she wrote her first short story about vampires. This was in the 1980s....way before Twilight! Barb has been creating and administering websites and social media accounts since 2006. She loves to learn and apply the latest traffic techniques and online sales strategies to see what works best. Her daughters call her a \"computer geek\" and she is OK with that. She loves to teach through her courses, books, and textbooks, and strives to make a connection with each student and reader. Barb lives in Canada with her husband, Mike, and two adorable daughters, Casey and Jamie. They enjoy music, skiing, golfing, running, and mixed martial arts. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1457649950", "title": "From Critical Thinking to Argument", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Sylvan Barnet , professor of English and former director of writing at Tufts University, is the most prolific and consistently successful college English textbook author in the country. His several texts on writing and his numerous anthologies for introductory composition and literature courses have remained leaders in their field through many editions. Hugo Bedau , professor of philosophy at Tufts University, has served as chair of the philosophy department and chair of the university\u0092s committee on College Writing. An internationally respected expert on the death penalty, and on moral, legal, and political philosophy, he has written or edited a number of books on these topics. He is the author of Thinking and Writing about Philosophy , Second Edition (Bedford/St. Martin\u0092s).", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Words, Language & Grammar"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 11.97}, {"asin": "0922273227", "title": "Pro-Knot Outdoor Knots - Portable Waterproof Knot Book", "author": "John E. Sherry", "description": "Review Even if you already have a good knot book, the PROKNOT cards make a great field reference that is waterproof and nearly indestrucable! These cards are used for training by the US Departmant of Defense, Municipal Fire Departments, Boy Scout Troops, and Search and Rescue groups. Even arborist companies (for their tree climbers) use them! Being able to take these little cards out into the elements to refer to them when you need to know that knot is a real benefit. --From the PublisherEven if you already have a good knot book, the PROKNOT cards make a great field reference that is waterproof and nearly indestrucable! These cards are used for training by the US Departmant of Defense, Municipal Fire Departments, Boy Scout Troops, and Search and Rescue groups. Even arborist companies (for their tree climbers) use them! Being able to take these little cards out into the elements to refer to them when you need to know that knot is a real benefit. --From the PublisherPROKNOT summarizes essential outdoor knots on six plastic cards that weigh less than an ounce for the set. --Backpacker Magazine, September, 2000 From the Publisher Even if you already have a good knot book, the PROKNOT cards make a great field reference that is waterproof and nearly indestrucable! These cards are used for training by the US Departmant of Defense, Municipal Fire Departments, Boy Scout Troops, and Search and Rescue groups. Even arborist companies (for their tree climbers) use them! Being able to take these little cards out into the elements to refer to them when you need to know that knot is a real benefit. About the Author John Sherry has been illustrating knots and writing about knots for more than 25 years. His knot illustrations are used for training by the US Department of Defense, US Customs and Border Protection, municipal fire departments, scout troops, sailing schools, utility companies and many search and rescue organizations. He is president of Pro-Knot, a company that publishes waterproof plastic knot cards for boaters, campers, survivalists, fishermen and anyone that finds themselves with a rope in hand, and has sold over one million of the popular knot card sets. Sherry is a member of the International Guild of Knot Tyers and lives in Bend Oregon with his wife and daughter, where he enjoys fly fishing, hiking, camping and boating. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 6.75}], "target_asin": "0552995045"}
{"user_id": "AGFFWV6NE7G2HBLKK5L4MPIPJU6A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B007HACDLK", "title": "The Last Man: A Novel (Mitch Rapp Book 13)", "author": "Vince Flynn", "description": "Review \"Flynn is a master--maybe the master--of thrillers in which the pages seem to turn themselves.\" (Book Reporter)\"Flynn has never been better.\" (Providence Journal)\u201c The Last Man is arguably Flynn's best work yet. Tight, right and dynamite.\u201d (Minneapolis Star Tribune)\"Certainly, The Last Man is one of Flynn\u2019s most complex installments in the Rapp canon to date. And Flynn, master storyteller that he is, skillfully navigates the reader through the twists and turns of the tale to a conclusion that puts the main plot elements to rest while setting up the next intriguing volume.\" (Bookreporter)\"Flynn fans will not be disappointed. Absolutely first rate.\" (Men Reading Books blog) About the Author #1 New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn (1966\u20132013) created one of contemporary fiction\u2019s most popular heroes: CIA counterterrorist agent Mitch Rapp, featured in thirteen of Flynn\u2019s acclaimed political thrillers. All of his novels are New York Times bestsellers, including his stand-alone debut novel, Term Limits . The Mitch Rapp story begins with American Assassin , followed by Kill Shot , Transfer of Power , The Third Option , Separation of Power , Executive Power , Memorial Day , Consent to Kill , Act of Treason , Protect and Defend , Extreme Measures , Pursuit of Honor , The Last Man , The Survivor, Order to Kill, and Enemy of the State. American Assassin will be released as a major film in 2017. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Last Man CHAPTER 1 JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN THE four dead men were lined up on the living room floor of the safe house. Mitch Rapp started with the one on the left. The bearded face, the dark, lifeless eyes, and the dime-sized bullet hole that marked the center of the man\u2019s forehead were all expected. One bullet, nice and neat\u2014the way Rapp would have done it. The next two bodyguards looked the same, including red pucker marks in the center of their brows. The fourth Afghani was a different story. He\u2019d been shot through the back of the head. A quarter of his face was now a jagged crater of flesh, blood, and bone. The exit wound told him the man had been shot by something a lot bigger than a 9mm\u2014probably a .45 caliber with ammunition that pancaked and tumbled for maximum damage. There was nothing about this mess to give Rapp any assurance that things would be fine, but this last little twist cracked open the door on something he did not want to consider. Rapp set the troubling thought aside for a second, tried to imagine how it had gone down. The early signs pointed toward a well-coordinated assault. The perimeter security had been breached; phone line, cameras, motion sensors, heat sensors, and even the pressure pads had all been taken off-line. The backup connection through the satellite dish on the roof had also been disabled. Whoever had attacked the safe house had the knowledge and skill to hit the place without setting off a single alarm and alerting the quick-reaction force less than a mile away at the air base. According to the experts at Langley this was never supposed to happen. Four years earlier they had claimed the safe house was impregnable against any threat that the Taliban or any other local group could come up with. Rapp had told those same experts that they were full of shit. He\u2019d never seen an impregnable safe house for the simple reason that people had to come and go. As with most CIA safe houses, this one was intentionally bland. There was no American flag flown out front and there were no snappy Marines standing post at the main gate. This was a black site where the more unpleasant aspects of the war had been coordinated. Langley didn\u2019t want any official records of the comings and goings of the drug dealers, warlords, arms dealers, local politicians, police, and Afghan Army officers who were on the take. The house looked like your run-of-the-mill two-story blockhouse in Jalalabad. There were quite a few upgrades that made it unique, but from the outside it looked dingy and run-down just like all the other houses in the neighborhood. The cinderblock wall that surrounded the property was coated with a special resin designed to prevent it from exploding into a million pieces and shredding the house in the event of a car bomb. The simple-looking front door contained a one-inch steel plate and a reinforced steel frame. All of the windows were bulletproof Plexiglas and the high-tech security cameras and sensors were concealed so as to not attract the attention of the neighbors. Langley had even taken the unusual precaution of buying the houses on each side and moving in the bodyguards and their families. All to protect one man. Joe Rickman was the most cunning and brilliant operative Rapp had ever worked with. They\u2019d known each other for sixteen years. At first Rapp didn\u2019t know what to think of him. Rickman was pure vanilla. There wasn\u2019t a single physical characteristic about him that was memorable. At five-feet-ten he was neither tall nor short. His mousy brown hair matched his dull brown eyes, and his weak chin completed the bland lines of his roundish face. On the rare occasion that you heard him speak, he was never animated and his voice was pure monotone\u2014the kind of thing that could put the most restless baby to sleep. Rickman\u2019s forgettable face allowed him to blend in and those who met him were almost underwhelmed by his presence. For Rickman that was just fine. Much of his success was built on fools underestimating him. He\u2019d worked for the CIA for twenty-three years and it was rumored that he had never set foot inside headquarters. Only a few months earlier Rapp had asked him if the rumor was true. Rickman responded with a soft smile and said that he\u2019d never been invited. At the time, Rapp took the comment as a self-deprecating attempt at a little levity. Later he realized Rickman was dead serious. Rickman was one of those people who were tolerated only during tough times\u2014usually war. For the last eight years he\u2019d run America\u2019s clandestine war in Afghanistan. More than a billion dollars in cash had passed through his hands. Most of it was used to bribe people into playing on the right team, but a fair amount of the money was used to kill enemies and for a laundry list of other unpleasant things that went with the territory. People back at Langley didn\u2019t want to know what Rickman was up to. They only wanted results, and that was something Rickman was exceedingly good at. Underneath Rickman\u2019s bland fa\u00e7ade was a cunning mind that was perfectly suited to the duplicitous, infinitely complicated world of espionage. Rapp understood the tinge of fear in his boss\u2019s voice when she\u2019d called him a little over two hours ago. When the morning guards showed up, they had discovered the bodies and the absence of Joe Rickman and had immediately alerted John Hubbard, the CIA\u2019s Jalalabad base chief. Hubbard rang his boss in Kabul and the shit rolled uphill from there. Rapp received a call from CIA Director Irene Kennedy while he was sitting down for breakfast in the big mess hall at Bagram Air Force Base. He had just arrived in-country the previous evening on a high-priority mission that was now on hold. Kennedy passed along what little information she knew and ordered Rapp to grab the next Blackhawk to Jalalabad. Rapp didn\u2019t argue. He and four of his team members made the trip and were on the ground in Jalalabad before nine in the morning. Hubbard met them with a three-SUV convoy and a security detail and they rolled to the house. Langley would want Rickman back, but Rapp got the strange feeling that all things considered, they would prefer the black-ops boss delivered in a body bag. It would be impossible to keep the kidnapping a secret. Rickman\u2019s operational knowledge and reach was too vast to ignore. Entire teams would already be gathered at Langley, working around the clock to assess the damage. If Rapp didn\u2019t find Rickman quickly, then complex, expensive operations would have to be unwound or assets would start showing up in morgues all across the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and beyond. Sooner or later Congress would get wind of the disaster and they would want answers. For a good number of people back at Langley, the only thing worse than Rickman spilling the Company secrets to an enemy would be Rickman testifying before Congress. Rapp had a long and somewhat complicated history with Rickman. He respected the man, but it had taken a while. Rapp was considering how he would handle a possible order to eliminate Rickman when the towering Hubbard approached. \u201cThis shit is really bad.\u201d Rapp nodded. \u201cIt\u2019s about as bad as it could get.\u201d Hubbard rubbed his bald head and asked, \u201cHow in the hell are we going to find him?\u201d \u201cAt this point I\u2019m not sure.\u201d Rapp knew their chances for success were remote, but they had to start somewhere. \u201cThis is going to get really nasty, and if you don\u2019t have the stomach for it, Hub, I suggest you go back to the base and lock yourself in your office.\u201d Hubbard studied Rapp for a moment and then nodded. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to worry about me getting all sensitive on you. I\u2019ve been over here for two years. I\u2019ve seen all kinds of crazy shit.\u201d Most of that \u201ccrazy shit\u201d was stuff done by the enemy. This time they would be the ones crossing the line. \u201cI know you have,\u201d Rapp said, \u201cbut trust me, if we\u2019re going to get him back we are going to have to be more ruthless than you can imagine, and if at any point you start to have doubts, that\u2019s fine, step aside, but I need you to promise me you\u2019ll stick your head in the sand and keep your mouth shut.\u201d Hubbard gave him a nervous smile. \u201cI can do a Sergeant Schultz when I need to.\u201d \u201cGood,\u201d Rapp replied, even though he had his doubts. \u201cSo where do you want to start?\u201d Rapp returned his attention to the row of dead men. \u201cThe bodyguards.\u201d Hubbard turned his six-foot-five-inch frame toward the row of men and pursed his lips. \u201cI think we can rule these four out.\u201d Rapp focused on the man with the cratered face. An inside job was the obvious conclusion, but the bodyguards were all hardened Northern Alliance types. It was possible that one of them could have been bribed into giving up the crucial information on the security system, but unlikely. If one of them had turned, however, it was also possible that the Taliban, or whoever was responsible for this, had decided to kill the inside man as soon as they got what they wanted. The wrench in the works was that Rapp was pretty certain the Taliban had nothing to do with this. He pointed at the man missing part of his face. \u201cFocus on this one. I want to know everything there is to know about him\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. especially his family. Do his parents or wife or kids have medical problems? Does he have a drug problem? Anything you can find.\u201d \u201cAnd the other eight?\u201d A team of interrogation experts from D.C. were in flight but not expected to land for another thirteen hours. \u201cIf you have the manpower, you can get started with them, but I doubt they\u2019d hang around after something like this. What would you do if someone gave you a pile of cash to betray your buddies and a man like Rick?\u201d Rickman\u2019s first name was Joe, but everyone who worked with him called him Rick. \u201cI\u2019d run.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d Rapp pointed to the man who\u2019d been shot with a .45 caliber. \u201cFocus on this one for now.\u201d \u201cSo you think the Taliban turned him?\u201d Rapp ignored the question for the moment and asked, \u201cWho moved these bodies?\u201d \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d \u201cThe bodies,\u201d Rapp said as he pointed at the row of four. \u201cThey weren\u2019t shot here. Look at the blood on the floor. They were dragged here after they were killed.\u201d Rapp pointed at the stairs. \u201cOne of them was dragged down from the second story.\u201d Hubbard shrugged. \u201cThey were lined up like this when I got here.\u201d \u201cDid the bodyguards move them?\u201d \u201cNot that I know of. Do you want me to find out?\u201d \u201cIn a minute.\u201d Rapp looked toward the front door where one of the bodyguards was standing post with an AK-47 gripped in both hands. \u201cThe neighbors\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. did they hear or see anything last night?\u201d \u201cNo. Not a thing.\u201d \u201cNo signs of forced entry?\u201d \u201cNot that we\u2019ve discovered, but they wouldn\u2019t need to force their way in if one of these guys were helping them.\u201d \u201cSo no forced entry\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. four bodyguards\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. four headshots\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. four dead men. Anything about that seem unusual to you?\u201d Hubbard thought about it for a moment and said, \u201cNot sure what you\u2019re driving at.\u201d Rapp pointed at the bodies one after another, saying, \u201cNine-millimeter, nine-millimeter, nine-millimeter, .45 caliber, and my bet is they were all fired from suppressed weapons. Pretty accurate work. Good fire discipline. Look at the walls.\u201d Hubbard did a 360-degree turn and said, \u201cWhat about them?\u201d \u201cYou see anything?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s the point. You ever seen the Taliban operate like this? Four shots, four hits, and not a shot more. The Taliban likes to get the lead out. You know their MO. They would have rolled up on this place with three or four trucks and started unloading RPG rounds at all three buildings. This place would be riddled with bullets. This was done by pros.\u201d Hubbard made a sour face and then nodded. \u201cYeah\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. you\u2019re right. The towelheads like to blow shit up. This is more like something our guys would do\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d Hubbard kept talking, but Rapp had stopped listening. The idea that U.S. Special Operators had been involved was something he hadn\u2019t considered and something he didn\u2019t want to consider. From the moment Rapp had heard Rickman was missing, there was a gnawing fear that he was about to head down the rabbit hole. Rickman excelled at his job for the simple reason that he could think five, ten, fifteen, even twenty steps ahead of the enemy, and everyone else, for that matter. There had been many times when Rapp didn\u2019t understand what the man was up to because he wasn\u2019t smart enough to follow Rick\u2019s thinking. \u201cHow about those assholes from the ISI?\u201d Hubbard asked. Rapp had considered the less-than-loyal members of the Pakistani Intelligence Service. They would be on the list as well as others. \u201cDon\u2019t forget the Iranians, the Russians, and the Chinese.\u201d And there was one other possibility that Rapp wasn\u2019t quite prepared to mention. \u201cMy money\u2019s on the ISI. This is just the kind of bullshit they\u2019d pull.\u201d A thought occurred to Rapp. \u201cWhere\u2019s the dog? That big frickin\u2019 Rottweiler that never left Rick\u2019s side?\u201d \u201cAjax\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. he died a month ago.\u201d Rapp was surprised by the news. \u201cWhat was wrong with him?\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t know. Rick was pretty bummed out, though. Dog got sick, he took him to the vet and had to put him down. I think Rick said it was cancer or something like that.\u201d One of Rapp\u2019s team members came down the stairs with a disturbed look on his face. The man had blond hair and blue eyes and was pushing fifty. \u201cNot good,\u201d was all he had to say. Rapp looked at Scott Coleman and said, \u201cPlease tell me you\u2019re talking about something other than the safe. Tell me the safe is untouched and all the cash, drives, and laptop are safely tucked inside.\u201d Coleman shook his head. \u201cAll gone. Completely cleaned out.\u201d Even though Rapp had expected it, he had held out some hope that he could give his boss a piece of good news. \u201cShit, I need to call Irene and let her know.\u201d Rapp reached for his phone, but stopped upon hearing a commotion at the front door. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1939889014", "title": "Leaving Annalise (What Doesn't Kill You, #2): A Katie Romantic Mystery", "author": "Pamela Fagan Hutchins", "description": "Review \"An exciting tale . . . twisting investigative and legal subplots . . . a character seeking redemption . . . an exhilarating mystery with a touch of voodoo.\" -- Midwest Book Review Bookwatch\"A lively romantic mystery.\" -- Kirkus Reviews\"A riveting drama . . . exciting read, highly recommended.\" -- Small Press Bookwatch\"\"Katie is the first character I have absolutely fallen in love with since Stephanie Plum!\" -- Stephanie Swindell, Bookstore Owner About Pamela: 2020 Amazon Top 15 Best Seller2020 Amazon Top 100 Author2018 USA Today Best Seller 2017 Silver Falchion Award, Best Mystery2016 USA Best Book Award, Cross-Genre Fiction2015 USA Best Book Award, Cross-Genre Fiction2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarter-finalist, Romance Praise for Pamela's other books: What Doesn't Kill You: Emily Bernal Texas-to-New Mexico Romantic Mysteries \"You won't be able to put it down.\" -- Ken Oder, author of Old Wounds to the Heart\"Full of heart, humor, vivid characters, and suspense.\" -- Gay Yellen, author ofThe Body Business\"Hutchins is a master of tension.\" -- R.L. Nolen, author of Deadly Thyme\"Intriguing mystery . . . captivating romance.\" -- Patricia Flaherty Pagan, author of Trail Ways Pilgrim\"Everything about it shines: the plot, the characters and the writing.\" -- Marcy McKay, author of Pennies from Burger Heaven What Doesn't Kill You: Michele Lopez Hanson Texas Romantic Mysteries \"Immediately hooked.\" -- Terry Sykes-Bradshaw, author of Sibling Revelry\"Spellbinding.\" -- Jo Bryan, Dry Creek Book Club\"Fast-paced mystery.\" -- Deb Krenzer, Book Reviewer\"Can't put it down.\" -- Cathy Bader, Reader What Doesn't Kill You: Maggie Killian Texas-to-Wyoming Romantic Mysteries \"Maggie's gonna break your heart-one way or another.\" Tara Scheyer, Grammy-nominated musician, Long-Distance Sisters Book Club\"Nails that Wyoming scenery and captures the atmosphere of the people there.\" -- Ken Oder, author of Old Wounds to the Heart\"I thought I had it all figured out a time or two, but she kept me wondering right to the end.\" -- Ginger Copeland, power reader What Doesn't Kill You: Ava Butler Caribbean Romantic Mysteries \"Just when I think I couldn't love another Pamela Fagan Hutchins novel more, along comes Ava.\" -- Marcy McKay, author of Stars Among the Dead\"Ava personifies bombshell in every sense of word. -- Tara Scheyer, Grammy-nominated musician, Long-Distance Sisters Book Club\"Entertaining, complex, and thought-provoking.\" -- Ginger Copeland, power reader The Patrick Flint Series Transports readers deep into the mountains of Wyoming for a thriller that has it all--wild animals, criminals, and one family willing to do whatever is necessary to protect its own. Hutchins writes with the authority of a woman who knows this world. She weaves the story with both nail-biting suspense and a healthy dose of humor. You won't want to miss it.\" -- Danielle Girard, Wall Street Journal-bestselling author of White Out\"As many twists and turns as a high-country trail. Every parent's nightmare is the loss or injury of a child, and this powerful novel taps into that primal fear.\" -- Reavis Z. Wortham, two time winner of The Spur and author of Hawke's Prey\"Starts at a gallop and had me holding on with both hands until the riveting finish. Highly atmospheric and nearly crackling with suspense. Highly recommend!\" -- Libby Kirsch, Emmy awardwinning reporter and author of the Janet Black Mystery Series\"Best book I've read in a long time!\" -- Kiersten Marquet, author of Reluctant Promises What Amazon readers are saying: \"A Bob Ross painting with Alfred Hitchcock hidden among the trees.\"\"Edge-of-your seat nail biter.\"\"Unexpected twists!\"\"Wow! Wow! Highly entertaining!\"\"Beautifully descriptive, with an underlying story of human connection and family.\"\"Well drawn characters, great scenery, and a kept-me-on-the-edge-of-my-seat story!\"\"Absolutely unputdownable wonder of a story.\"\"Must read!\"\"Gripping story. Looking for book two!\"\"Intense!\" About the Author If you like Sandra Brown or Janet Evanovich, you will love USA Today Best Seller Pamela Fagan Hutchins. A former attorney and native Texan, Pamela lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands for nearly ten years. She refuses to admit to taking notes for this series during that time.\u00a0If you'd like Pamela to speak to your book club, women's club, or writers group, by streaming or in person, shoot her an e-mail. She's very likely to say yes. You can connect with Pamela via her website (pamelafaganhutchins.com) or e-mail (pamela@pamelafaganhutchins.com).", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 16.99}, {"asin": "0988234807", "title": "Saving Grace (What Doesn't Kill You, #1): A Katie Romantic Mystery", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 17.24}, {"asin": "0345803485", "title": "Fifty Shades Of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy (Fifty Shades of Grey Series, 1)", "author": "E. L. James", "description": "Review A GoodReads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Romance \"In a class by itself.\" - Entertainment Weekly About the Author E L James is an incurable romantic and a self-confessed fangirl. After twenty-five years of working in television, she decided to pursue a childhood dream and write stories that readers could take to their hearts. The result was the controversial and sensuous romance Fifty Shades of Grey and its two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed . In 2015, she published the #1 bestseller Grey , the story of Fifty Shades of Gre y from the perspective of Christian Grey, and in 2017, the chart-topping Darker , the second part of the Fifty Shades story from Christian\u2019s point of view. She followed with the #1 New York Times bestseller The Mister in 2019. In 2021, she released the #1 New York Times , USA Today , Wall Street Journal , and international bestseller Freed , the third novel in the As Told by Christian trilogy. Her books have been published in fifty languages and have sold more than 165 million copies worldwide. E L James has been recognized as one of Time Magazine \u2019s Most Influential People in the World and Publishers Weekly \u2019s Person of the Year. Fifty Shades of Grey stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 133 consecutive weeks. Fifty Shades Freed won the Goodreads Choice Award (2012), and Fifty Shades of Grey was selected as one of the 100 Great Reads, as voted by readers, in PBS\u2019s The Great American Read (2018). Darker was longlisted for the 2019 International DUBLIN Literary Award. She was a producer on each of the three Fifty Shades movies, which made more than a billion dollars at the box office. The third installment, Fifty Shades Freed , won the People\u2019s Choice Award for Drama in 2018. E L James is blessed with two wonderful sons and lives with her husband, the novelist and screenwriter Niall Leonard, and their beloved dogs in the leafy suburbs of West London. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair\u2015it just won't behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the pale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes too big for her face staring back at me, and give up. My only option is to restrain my wayward hair in a ponytail and hope that I look semi-presentable. Kate is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu. Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she'd arranged to do, with some mega-industrialist tycoon I've never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for and one essay to finish, and I'm supposed to be working this afternoon, but no\u2015today I have to drive 165 miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our university, his time is extraordinarily precious\u2015much more precious than mine\u2015but he has granted Kate an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extracurricular activities. Kate is huddled on the couch in the living room. \"Ana, I'm sorry. It took me nine months to get this interview. It will take another six to reschedule, and we'll both have graduated by then. As the editor, I can't blow this off. Please,\" Kate begs me in her rasping, sore throat voice. How does she do it? Even ill she looks gamine and gorgeous, strawberry blond hair in place and green eyes bright, although now red rimmed and runny. I ignore my pang of unwelcome sympathy. \"Of course I'll go, Kate. You should get back to bed. Would you like some NyQuil or Tylenol?\" \"NyQuil, please. Here are the questions and my digital recorder. Just press record here. Make notes, I'll transcribe it all.\" \"I know nothing about him,\" I murmur, trying and failing to suppress my rising panic. \"The questions will see you through. Go. It's a long drive. I don't want you to be late.\" \"Okay, I'm going. Get back to bed. I made you some soup to heat up later.\" I stare at her fondly. Only for you, Kate, would I do this. \"I will. Good luck. And thanks, Ana\u2015as usual, you're my lifesaver.\" Gathering my backpack, I smile wryly at her, then head out the door to the car. I cannot believe I have let Kate talk me into this. But then Kate can talk anyone into anything. She'll make an exceptional journalist. She's articulate, strong, persuasive, argumentative, beautiful\u2015and she's my dearest, dearest friend.  The roads are clear as I set off from Vancouver, Washington, toward Interstate 5. It's early, and I don't have to be in Seattle until two this afternoon. Fortunately, Kate has lent me her sporty Mercedes CLK. I'm not sure Wanda, my old VW Beetle, would make the journey in time. Oh, the Merc is a fun drive, and the miles slip away as I hit the pedal to the metal. My destination is the headquarters of Mr. Grey's global enterprise. It's a huge twenty-story office building, all curved glass and steel, an architect's utilitarian fantasy, with GREY HOUSE written discreetly in steel over the glass front doors. It's a quarter to two when I arrive, greatly relieved that I'm not late as I walk into the enormous\u2015and frankly intimidating\u2015glass, steel, and white sandstone lobby. Behind the solid sandstone desk, a very attractive, groomed, blonde young woman smiles pleasantly at me. She's wearing the sharpest charcoal suit jacket and white shirt I have ever seen. She looks immaculate. \"I'm here to see Mr. Grey. Anastasia Steele for Katherine Kavanagh.\" \"Excuse me one moment, Miss Steele.\" She arches her eyebrow as I stand self-consciously before her. I'm beginning to wish I'd borrowed one of Kate's formal blazers rather than worn my navy-blue jacket. I have made an effort and worn my one and only skirt, my sensible brown knee-length boots, and a blue sweater. For me, this is smart. I tuck one of the escaped tendrils of my hair behind my ear as I pretend she doesn't intimidate me.  \"Miss Kavanagh is expected. Please sign in here, Miss Steele. You'll want the last elevator on the right, press for the twentieth floor.\" She smiles kindly at me, amused no doubt, as I sign in. She hands me a security pass that has \"visitor\" very firmly stamped on the front. I can't help my smirk. Surely it's obvious that I'm just visiting. I don't fit in here at all. Nothing changes . I inwardly sigh. Thanking her, I walk over to the bank of elevators and past the two security men who are both far more smartly dressed than I am in their well-cut black suits. The elevator whisks me at terminal velocity to the twentieth floor. The doors slide open, and I'm in another large lobby\u2015again all glass, steel, and white sandstone. I'm confronted by another desk of sandstone and another young blonde woman, this time dressed impeccably in black and white, who rises to greet me. \"Miss Steele, could you wait here, please?\" She points to a seated area of white leather chairs. Behind the leather chairs is a spacious glass-walled meeting room with an equally spacious dark wood table and at least twenty matching chairs around it. Beyond that, there is a floor-to-ceiling window with a view of the Seattle skyline that looks out through the city toward the Sound. It's a stunning vista, and I'm momentarily paralyzed by the view. Wow . I sit down, fish the questions from my backpack, and go through them, inwardly cursing Kate for not providing me with a brief biography. I know nothing about this man I'm about to interview. He could be ninety or he could be thirty. The uncertainty is galling, and my nerves resurface, making me fidget. I've never been comfortable with one-on-one interviews, preferring the anonymity of a group discussion where I can sit inconspicuously at the back of the room. To be honest, I prefer my own company, reading a classic British novel, curled up in a chair in the campus library. Not sitting twitching nervously in a colossal glass-and-stone edifice. I roll my eyes at myself. Get a grip, Steele . Judging from the building, which is too clinical and modern, I guess Grey is in his forties: fit, tanned, and fair-haired to match the rest of the personnel. Another elegant, flawlessly dressed blonde comes out of a large door to the right. What is it with all the immaculate blondes? It's like Stepford here. Taking a deep breath, I stand up. \"Miss Steele?\" the latest blonde asks. \"Yes,\" I croak, and clear my throat. \"Yes.\" There, that sounded more confident. \"Mr. Grey will see you in a moment. May I take your jacket?\" \"Oh, please.\" I struggle out of the jacket. \"Have you been offered any refreshment?\" \"Um\u2015no.\" Oh dear, is Blonde Number One in trouble? Blonde Number Two frowns and eyes the young woman at the desk. \"Would you like tea, coffee, water?\" she asks, turning her attention back to me. \"A glass of water. Thank you,\" I murmur. \"Olivia, please fetch Miss Steele a glass of water.\" Her voice is stern. Olivia scoots up and scurries to a door on the other side of the foyer. \"My apologies, Miss Steele, Olivia is our new intern. Please be seated. Mr. Grey will be another five minutes.\" Olivia returns with a glass of iced water. \"Here you go, Miss Steele.\" \"Thank you.\" Blonde Number Two marches over to the large desk, her heels clicking and echoing on the sandstone floor. She sits down, and they both continue their work. Perhaps Mr. Grey insists on all his employees being blonde. I'm wondering idly if that's legal, when the office door opens and a tall, elegantly dressed, attractive African American man with short dreads exits. I have definitely worn the wrong clothes. He turns and says through the door, \"Golf this week, Grey?\" I don't hear the reply. He turns, sees me, and smiles, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners. Olivia has jumped up and called the elevator. She seems to excel at jumping from her seat. She's more nervous than me! \"Good afternoon, ladies,\" he says as he departs through the sliding door. \"Mr. Grey will see you now, Miss Steele. Do go through,\" Blonde Number Two says. I stand rather shakily, trying to suppress my nerves. Gathering up my backpack, I abandon my glass of water and make my way to the partially open door. \"You don't need to knock\u2015just go in.\" She smiles kindly.  I push open the door and stumble through, tripping over my own feet and falling headfirst into the office. Double crap\u2015me and my two left feet! I am on my hands and knees in the doorway to Mr. Grey's office, and gentle hands are around me, helping me to stand. I am so embarrassed, damn my clumsiness. I have to steel myself to glance up. Holy cow\u2015he's so young. \"Miss Kavanagh.\" He extends a long-fingered hand to me once I'm upright. \"I'm Christian Grey. Are you all right? Would you like to sit?\" So young\u2015and attractive, very attractive. He's tall, dressed in a fine gray suit, white shirt, and black tie with unruly dark copper-colored hair and intense, bright gray eyes that regard me shrewdly. It takes a moment for me to find my voice.  \"Um. Actually\u2015\" I mutter. If this guy is over thirty, then I'm a monkey's uncle. In a daze, I place my hand in his and we shake. As our fingers touch, I feel an odd exhilarating shiver run through me. I withdraw my hand hastily, embarrassed. Must be static. I blink rapidly, my eyelids matching my heart rate. \"Miss Kavanagh is indisposed, so she sent me. I hope you don't mind, Mr. Grey.\" \"And you are?\" His voice is warm, possibly amused, but it's difficult to tell from his impassive expression. He looks mildly interested but, above all, polite. \"Anastasia Steele. I'm studying English literature with Kate, um . . . Katherine . . . um . . . Miss Kavanagh, at WSU Vancouver.\" \"I see,\" he says simply. I think I see the ghost of a smile in his expression, but I'm not sure. \"Would you like to sit?\" He waves me toward an L-shaped white leather couch. His office is way too big for just one man. In front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, there's a modern dark wood desk that six people could comfortably eat around. It matches the coffee table by the couch. Everything else is white\u2015ceiling, floors, and walls, except for the wall by the door, where a mosaic of small paintings hang, thirty-six of them arranged in a square. They are exquisite\u2015a series of mundane, forgotten objects painted in such precise detail they look like photographs. Displayed together, they are breathtaking. \"A local artist. Trouton,\" says Grey when he catches my gaze.  \"They're lovely. Raising the ordinary to extraordinary,\" I murmur, distracted both by him and the paintings. He cocks his head to one side and regards me intently. \"I couldn't agree more, Miss Steele,\" he replies, his voice soft, and for some inexplicable reason I find myself blushing.  Apart from the paintings, the rest of the office is cold, clean, and clinical. I wonder if it reflects the personality of the Adonis who sinks gracefully into one of the white leather chairs opposite me. I shake my head, disturbed at the direction of my thoughts, and retrieve Kate's questions from my backpack. Next, I set up the digital recorder and am all fingers and thumbs, dropping it twice on the coffee table in front of me. Mr. Grey says nothing, waiting patiently\u2015I hope\u2015as I become increasingly embarrassed and flustered. When I pluck up the courage to look at him, he's watching me, one hand relaxed in his lap and the other cupping his chin and trailing his long index finger across his lips. I think he's trying to suppress a smile. \"S-sorry,\" I stutter. \"I'm not used to this.\" \"Take all the time you need, Miss Steele,\" he says. \"Do you mind if I record your answers?\" \"After you've taken so much trouble to set up the recorder, you ask me now?\" I flush. He's teasing me? I hope. I blink at him, unsure what to say, and I think he takes pity on me because he relents. \"No, I don't mind.\" \"Did Kate, I mean, Miss Kavanagh, explain what the interview was for?\" \"Yes. To appear in the graduation issue of the student newspaper as I shall be conferring the degrees at this year's graduation ceremony.\" Oh! This is news to me, and I'm temporarily preoccupied by the thought that someone not much older than me\u2015okay, maybe six years or so, and okay, mega-successful, but still\u2015is going to present me with my degree. I frown, dragging my wayward attention back to the task at hand. \"Good.\" I swallow nervously. \"I have some questions, Mr. Grey.\" I smooth a stray lock of hair behind my ear. \"I thought you might,\" he says, deadpan. He's laughing at me. My cheeks heat at the realization, and I sit up and square my shoulders in an attempt to look taller and more intimidating. Pressing the start button on the recorder, I try to look professional.  \"You're very young to have amassed such an empire. To what do you owe your success?\" I glance up at him. His smile is rueful, but he looks vaguely disappointed.  \"Business is all about people, Miss Steele, and I'm very good at judging people. I know how they tick, what makes them flourish, what doesn't, what inspires them, and how to incentivize them. I employ an exceptional team, and I reward them well.\" He pauses and fixes me with his gray stare. \"My belief is to achieve success in any scheme one has to make oneself master of that scheme, know it inside and out, know every detail. I work hard, very hard to do that. I make decisions based on logic and facts. I have a natural gut instinct that can spot and nurture a good solid idea and good people. The bottom line is it's always down to good people.\" \"Maybe you're just lucky.\" This isn't on Kate's list\u2015but he's so arrogant. His eyes flare momentarily in surprise. \"I don't subscribe to luck or chance, Miss Steele. The harder I work the more luck I seem to have. It really is all about having the right people on your team and directing their energies accordingly. I think it was Harvey Firestone who said, 'The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.' \" \"You sound like a control freak.\" The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. \"Oh, I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele,\" he says without a trace of humor in his smile. I look at him, and he holds my gaze steadily, impassive. My heartbeat quickens, and my face flushes again. Why does he have such an unnerving effect on me? His overwhelming good looks maybe? The way his eyes blaze at me? The way he strokes his index finger against his lower lip? I wish he'd stop doing that. \"Besides, immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control things,\" he continues, his voice soft. \"Do you feel that you have immense power?\" Control freak . \"I employ over forty thousand people, Miss Steele. That gives me a certain sense of responsibility\u2015power, if you will. If I were to decide I was no longer interested in the telecommunications business and sell, twenty thousand people would struggle to make their mortgage payments after a month or so.\" My mouth drops open. I am staggered by his lack of humility. \"Don't you have a board to answer to?\" I ask, disgusted. \"I own my company. I don't have to answer to a board.\" He raises an eyebrow at me. Of course, I would know this if I had done some research. But holy crap, he's arrogant. I change tack. \"And do you have any interests outside your work?\" \"I have varied interests, Miss Steele.\" A ghost of a smile touches his lips. \"Very varied.\" And for some reason, I'm confounded and heated by his steady gaze. His eyes are alight with some wicked thought. \"But if you work so hard, what do you do to chill out?\" \"Chill out?\" He smiles, revealing perfect white teeth. I stop breathing. He really is beautiful. No one should be this good-looking. \"Well, to 'chill out,' as you put it\u2015I sail, I fly, I indulge in various physical pursuits.\" He shifts in his chair. \"I'm a very wealthy man, Miss Steele, and I have expensive and absorbing hobbies.\" I glance quickly at Kate's questions, wanting to get off this subject. \"You invest in manufacturing. Why, specifically?\" I ask. Why does he make me so uncomfortable? \"I like to build things. I like to know how things work: what makes things tick, how to construct and deconstruct. And I have a love of ships. What can I say?\" \"That sounds like your heart talking rather than logic and facts.\" His mouth quirks up, and he stares appraisingly at me.  \"Possibly. Though there are people who'd say I don't have a heart.\" \"Why would they say that?\" \"Because they know me well.\" His lip curls in a wry smile. \"Would your friends say you're easy to get to know?\" And I regret the question as soon as I say it. It's not on Kate's list. \"I'm a very private person, Miss Steele. I go a long way to protect my privacy. I don't often give interviews . . .\" \"Why did you agree to do this one?\" \"Because I'm a benefactor of the university, and for all intents and purposes, I couldn't get Miss Kavanagh off my back. She badgered and badgered my PR people, and I admire that kind of tenacity.\" I know how tenacious Kate can be. That's why I'm sitting here squirming uncomfortably under his penetrating gaze, when I should be studying for my exams. \"You also invest in farming technologies. Why are you interested in that area?\" \"We can't eat money, Miss Steele, and there are too many people on this planet who don't have enough to eat.\" \"That sounds very philanthropic. Is it something you feel passionately about? Feeding the world's poor?\" He shrugs noncommittally. \"It's shrewd business,\" he murmurs, though I think he's being disingenuous. It doesn't make sense\u2015feeding the world's poor? I can't see the financial benefit of this, only the virtue of the ideal. I glance at the next question, confused by his attitude. \"Do you have a philosophy? If so, what is it?\" \"I don't have a philosophy as such. Maybe a guiding principle\u2015Carnegie's: 'A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.' I'm very singular, driven. I like control\u2015of myself and those around me.\" \"So you want to possess things?\" You are a control freak . \"I want to deserve to possess them, but yes, bottom line, I do.\" \"You sound like the ultimate consumer.\" \"I am.\" He smiles, but the smile doesn't touch his eyes. Again, this is at odds with someone who wants to feed the world, so I can't help thinking that we're talking about something else, but I'm mystified as to what it is. I swallow hard. The temperature in the room is rising, or maybe it's just me. I just want this interview to be over. Surely Kate has enough material now. I glance at the next question. \"You were adopted. How much do you think that's shaped the way you are?\" Oh, this is personal. I stare at him, hoping he's not offended. His brow furrows.  \"I have no way of knowing.\" My interest is piqued. \"How old were you when you were adopted?\" \"That's a matter of public record, Miss Steele.\" His tone is stern. Crap . Yes, of course\u2015if I'd known I was doing this interview, I would have done some research. Flustered, I move on quickly. \"You've had to sacrifice family life for your work.\" \"That's not a question.\" He's terse. \"Sorry.\" I squirm; he's made me feel like an errant child. I try again. \"Have you had to sacrifice family life for your work?\"  \"I have a family. I have a brother and a sister and two loving parents. I'm not interested in extending my family beyond that.\" \"Are you gay, Mr. Grey?\" He inhales sharply, and I cringe, mortified. Crap . Why didn't I employ some kind of filter before I read this straight out? How can I tell him I'm just reading the questions? Damn Kate and her curiosity! \"No, Anastasia, I'm not.\" He raises his eyebrows, a cool gleam in his eyes. He does not look pleased. \"I apologize. It's, um . . . written here.\" It's the first time he's said my name. My heartbeat has accelerated, and my cheeks are heating up again. Nervously, I tuck my loosened hair behind my ear. He cocks his head to one side. \"These aren't your own questions?\" The blood drains from my head. \"Er . . . no. Kate\u2015Miss Kavanagh\u2015she compiled the questions.\" \"Are you colleagues on the student paper?\" Oh no . I have nothing to do with the student paper. It's her extracurricular activity, not mine. My face is aflame. \"No. She's my roommate.\" He rubs his chin in quiet deliberation, his gray eyes appraising me. \"Did you volunteer to do this interview?\" he asks, his voice deadly quiet. Hang on, who's supposed to be interviewing whom? His eyes burn into me, and I'm compelled to answer with the truth. \"I was drafted. She's not well.\" My voice is weak and apologetic. \"That explains a great deal.\" There's a knock at the door, and Blonde Number Two enters. \"Mr. Grey, forgive me for interrupting, but your next meeting is in two minutes.\" \"We're not finished here, Andrea. Please cancel my next meeting.\" Andrea hesitates, gaping at him. She appears lost. He turns his head slowly to face her and raises his eyebrows. She flushes bright pink. Oh, good. It's not just me . \"Very well, Mr. Grey,\" she mutters, then exits. He frowns, and turns his attention back to me. \"Where were we, Miss Steele?\" Oh, we're back to \"Miss Steele\" now . \"Please, don't let me keep you from anything.\" \"I want to know about you. I think that's only fair.\" His eyes are alight with curiosity. Double crap. Where's he going with this? He places his elbows on the arms of the chair and steeples his fingers in front of his mouth. His mouth is very . . . distracting. I swallow. \"There's not much to know.\" \"What are your plans after you graduate?\" I shrug, thrown by his interest. Move to Seattle with Kate, find a job . I haven't really thought beyond my finals. \"I haven't made any plans, Mr. Grey. I just need to get through my final exams.\" Which I should be studying for right now, rather than sitting in your palatial, swanky, sterile office, feeling uncomfortable under your penetrating gaze. \"We run an excellent internship program here,\" he says quietly. I raise my eyebrows in surprise. Is he offering me a job? \"Oh. I'll bear that in mind,\" I murmur, confounded. \"Though I'm not sure I'd fit in here.\" Oh no. I'm musing out loud again. \"Why do you say that?\" He tilts his head to one side, intrigued, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. \"It's obvious, isn't it?\" I'm uncoordinated, scruffy, and I'm not blonde . \"Not to me.\" His gaze is intense, all humor gone, and strange muscles deep in my belly clench suddenly. I tear my eyes away from his scrutiny and stare blindly down at my knotted fingers. What's going on? I have to go\u2015now. I lean forward to retrieve the recorder. \"Would you like me to show you around?\" he asks. \"I'm sure you're far too busy, Mr. Grey, and I do have a long drive.\" \"You're driving back to Vancouver?\" He sounds surprised, anxious even. He glances out of the window. It's begun to rain. \"Well, you'd better drive carefully.\" His tone is stern, authoritative. Why should he care? \"Did you get everything you need?\" he adds. \"Yes, sir,\" I reply, packing the recorder into my backpack. His eyes narrow, speculatively. \"Thank you for the interview, Mr. Grey.\" \"The pleasure's been all mine,\" he says, polite as ever. As I rise, he stands and holds out his hand. \"Until we meet again, Miss Steele.\" And it sounds like a challenge, or a threat, I'm not sure which. I frown. When will we ever meet again? I shake his hand once more, astounded that that odd current between us is still there. It must be my nerves. \"Mr. Grey.\" I nod at him. Moving with lithe athletic grace to the door, he opens it wide. \"Just ensuring you make it through the door, Miss Steele.\" He gives me a small smile. Obviously, he's referring to my earlier less-than-elegant entry into his office. I blush. \"That's very considerate, Mr. Grey,\" I snap, and his smile widens. I'm glad you find me entertaining , I glower inwardly, walking into the foyer. I'm surprised when he follows me out. Andrea and Olivia both look up, equally surprised. \"Did you have a coat?\" Grey asks. \"A jacket.\" Olivia leaps up and retrieves my jacket, which Grey takes from her before she can hand it to me. He holds it up and, feeling ridiculously self-conscious, I shrug it on. Grey places his hands for a moment on my shoulders. I gasp at the contact. If he notices my reaction, he gives nothing away. His long index finger presses the button summoning the elevator, and we stand waiting\u2015awkwardly on my part, coolly self-possessed on his. The doors open, and I hurry in, desperate to escape. I really need to get out of here. When I turn to look at him, he's gazing at me and leaning against the doorway beside the elevator with one hand on the wall. He really is very, very good-looking. It's unnerving. \"Anastasia,\" he says as a farewell. \"Christian,\" I reply. And mercifully, the doors close. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Women's Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "1453718516", "title": "The Man Without A Country and Other Tales: (Timeless Classic Books)", "author": "Edward Everett Hale", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 9.95}, {"asin": "1932887342", "title": "Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words", "author": "David Whyte", "description": "Review We think we know what we are talking about, the meaning of things, the basic rules of language, until we read David Whyte's Consolations; where we are forced to reassess everything and begin again. Such an essential and beautiful book. --Nick CaveBeautiful, elegant, tiny essays on the consoling power of words, written by one of my favorite living poets. I think Whyte is as much a mystic as an author, and this book proves it. Beautiful, soulful, thoughtful. --Elizabeth GilbertConsolations remains one of the most luminous books I've ever encountered. --Maria Popova About the Author David Whyte grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father's Yorkshire. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.The author of seven books of poetry and four books of prose, David Whyte holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has trav- eled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops.His life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literate world of readings that most poets inhabit, the psychological and theological worlds of philosophical enquiry and the world of vocation, work and organizational leadership.An Associate Fellow at Said Business School at the University of Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity into the field of organizational development, where he works with many Europen, American and international companies. In spring 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Neumann College, Pennsylvania.In organizational settings, using poetry and thoughtful commentary, he illustrates how we can foster qualities of courage and engagement; qualities needed if we are to respond to today's call for increased creativity and adaptability in the workplace. He brings a unique and important contribution to our understanding of the nature of individual and organizational change, particularly through his unique perspectives on Conversational Leadership.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Philosophy"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 19.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0615534120", "title": "Okinawa No Bushi No Te The Hands Of The Okinawan Bushi", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Ronald L. Lindsey is a American Martial Artist who has devoted his entire adult life to the study, practice and teaching of the one of the original styles of Okinawan Karate. He is also one of the American military servicemen who brought Okinawan Karate to the United States. His specialty is teaching Shorin Ryu Matsumura Seito (orthodox) Karate/Kobujutsu. Mr. Lindsey learned his art from six Okinawan Teachers; five of which became Grandmasters. Mr. Lindsey holds teaching licenses from four of these Okinawan Masters. Mr. Lindsey does not teach sport karate; rather he has earned International Renown as an authority and teacher of \"Okinawan no Bushi no Te\" which is one of the old names for the karate of the Okinawan Samurai.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Individual Sports"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 59.99}, {"asin": "0615659543", "title": "This is a great kid's book"}, {"asin": "B00MSYOCC8", "title": "All the Old Knives: A Novel", "author": "Olen Steinhauer", "description": "Review \u201cA sneaky little gem... Steinhauer sustains the difficult balancing act of melding a heart-racing espionage plot with a credible dinner table conversation.\u201d \u2015 The New York Times \u201cA splendid tour de force...without neglecting the turmoil of the geopolitical landscape, the novel focuses more intensely on the equally treacherous landscapes of the human heart.\u201d \u2015 The Washington Post \u201cIt's not news that Olen Steinhauer is among the best contemporary espionage writers, and All the Old Knives confirms it. If you're a fan of intelligent spy novels that don't need much bang-bang, details about ordnance, or people who save the world single-handedly, this one's for you.\u201d \u2015 Seattle Times \u201cMost of All the Old Knives revolves around Pelham and Favreau's dinner, and the fact that the book moves so swiftly and alluringly is a testament to Steinhauer's skills as an entertainer. He stretches considerable tension across an entire book, rather than a handful of swift scenes, and it's gratifying to watch him do something so daringly retro and contrary to what we've come to expect in a thriller.\u201d \u2015 The Richmond Times-Dispatch \u201cTerrific standalone thriller...There's great narrative energy in the thrust and counterthrust of the dinner conversation, as well as in the re-creation of the Viennese events; Steinhauer is a very fine writer and an excellent observer of human nature, shrewd about the pleasures and perils of spying.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cMasterfully plotted and suspenseful stand-alone...Steinhauer expertly shifts perspectives between the two spies in both their present and past lives, when Henry was a rough-and-tumble field agent and Celia wielded power behind a desk. It's an understatement to say that nothing is as it seems, but even readers well-versed in espionage fiction will be pleasantly surprised by Steinhauer's plot twists and double backs.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cA compelling spy story that takes place at a restaurant table...It delivers intrigue, suspense, and a heart-stopping finale. In his acknowledgments, Steinhauer tells us he wrote it in one month. You'll devour it in one night.\u201d \u2015 Booklist (starred review) \u201cThis genre-bending spy novel takes Hitchcockian suspense to new heights. Over the course of a meal with flashbacks, the eternal questions of trust, loyalty, and authentic love are deftly dissected. Readers drawn to the story of a loving couple trapped in a terrible embrace will be thrilled to follow Henry and Celia's tortured pas de deux.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal (starred review) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Artist Olen Steinhauer; Read by Ari Fliakos and Juliana Francis Kelly --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015: All the Old Knives has a disarmingly quiet start, but good spy novels are like good spies: they draw you in, earn your trust, and then grab hold with both hands. In Vienna during the mid-2000s Henry and Celia were intelligence agents and lovers who witnessed a terrorist hijacking as it took a shocking turn. Five years later, the two meet over dinner at a restaurant in Carmel-by-the-Sea where Celia now lives as a civilian, to recall the events of the past. As the remembrances overlap with the present moment, tension mounts and questions of who did what to whom, and why, become increasingly urgent. By the last 100 pages Steinhauer\u2019s hook is firmly embedded and it\u2019s hard not to race to the finish. And the ending? I can sum it up in one word--brilliant. \u2013 Seira Wilson --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author OLEN STEINHAUER, the \"New York Times\" bestselling author of nine previous novels, is a Dashiell Hammett Award winner, a two-time Edgar award finalist, and has also been shortlisted for the Anthony, the Macavity, the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, and the Barry awards. Raised in Virginia, he lives in New York and Budapest, Hungary. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Review Praise for \"The Cairo Affair \"\"Stunning...It has become de rigeur to compare Steinhauer to le Carre, but it's nearly time to pass the torch: for the next generation, it's Steinhauer who will become the standard by which others are measured.\"--\"Booklist\" (starred) \"Elaborate, sophisticated...A long, twisty road full of cleverly placed potholes and unexpected turns...Mr. Steinhauer draws his spies as flesh-and-blood characters.\"--Janet Maslin, \"The New York Times \"Praise for \"The Tourist\" series \"Not since le Carre has a writer so vividly evoked the multilayered, multifaceted, deeply paranoid world of espionage, in which identities and allegiances are malleable and ever shifting, the mirrors of loyalty and betrayal reflecting one another to infinity. In this intensely clever, sometimes baffling book, it's never quite clear who is manipulating whom, and which side is up.\"--\"The New York Times Book Review \"\"Stunning...Readers are irresistibly drawn into Weaver's dogged struggle to unravel a complicated game of cat and mouse...Steinhauer is at the top of his game--but when isn't he?\"--\"USA Today \"\"Here's the best spy novel I've ever read that wasn't written by John le Carre.\"--Stephen King, \"Entertainment Weekly\" --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "0446515701", "title": "Yamato: A Rage in Heaven", "author": "Ken Kato", "description": "From Publishers Weekly This debut novel, the first of a projected series of five, recasts the defeat of the Spanish Armada with a Japanese motif in a World War II-like setting that takes place in a putative 25th century. Here sailing ships, cannons and gold have become space ships, beam weapons and aurium; and Sir Francis Drake, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and the Pope have their counterparts also. Each former Earth power occupies one of the Hours of Heaven, clock-shaped sectors in space. England is now known as Amerika, Spain has turned into Yamato (Japan) and the Netherlands is Korea; in this space grid the Neutral Zone physically takes the place of what in the 15th century was the New World. What little plot exists is skewed to accommodate historical parallels, so that neither political infighting nor military conflict holds surprises for the reader. Adding to the difficulties of Kato's inert prose are too many offstage scenes, destroying both continuity and any hope of providing motivation for the individual characters. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal As overtures of war break out between sectors of space colonized by America and Japan, the fortunes of two brothers mirror the complexities of diverse cultures in a 24th century characterized by the politics of power. This first in a five-volume series chronicling humanity's far future combines military sf and sf adventure with a tribute to James Clavell's Shogun . Less convincing in its political maneuverings than in its gripping battle scenes, this belongs in large sf collections.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.2}], "target_asin": "0615534120"}
{"user_id": "AH3IZ4VYRSNCN4PIGKVELV7CBDRA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B01B1ZCG8G", "title": "The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military", "Weapons & Warfare", "Nuclear"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1480435481", "title": "Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination", "author": "Anthony Summers", "description": "Review \u201cFresh and important\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. We rush on through [Summers\u2019s] narrative as if we were reading an artful thriller.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \u201c Not in Your Lifetime is what some refer to as the Bible of JFK literature. It shows us how to look at both sides of the assassination debate with a critical eye.\u201d \u2014Jacob Carter, Before History Dies About the Author Anthony Summers is the bestselling author of ten works of nonfiction. His investigative books include Not in Your Lifetime , the critically acclaimed account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover ; Goddess , a biography of Marilyn Monroe; and most recently The Eleventh Day , on the 9/11 attacks\u2014a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for History.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 30.99}, {"asin": "0578407612", "title": "Keep Your Sexy Sacred: Winning the War Between the Flesh and the Spirit", "author": "Sabrina Universal Lawton", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "New Age & Spirituality"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 5.73}, {"asin": "1732212252", "title": "Meditations on Awareness Itself", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "0140246967", "title": "Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific", "author": "Eric M. Bergerud", "description": "About the Author Eric M. Bergerud is an author and professor of military and American history at Lincoln University in San Francisco. His works include Red Thunder Tropic Lightning and Touched with Fire .", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 20.0}, {"asin": "044658438X", "title": "The Executioner's Song", "author": "Norman Mailer", "description": "About the Author Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of the Village Voice . He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead ; The Armies of the Night , for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner's Song , for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot's Ghost ; Oswald's Tale ; The Gospel According to the Son , The Castle and the Forest and On God . He died in 2007. Dave Eggers is the award-winning and bestselling author of many books, including the National Book Award finalist A Hologram for the King , as well as books for younger readers including What Can a Citizen Do?, Her Right Foot, This Bridge Will Not Be Gray , and The Lifters . He is the founder of the independent publishing company McSweeney's and the nonprofit organization ScholarMatch, in addition to cofounding The International Congress of Youth Voices and 826 Valencia, which has inspired similar organizations worldwide. Eggers lives in Northern California.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "0446674249", "title": "L.A. Confidential", "author": "James Ellroy", "description": "Amazon.com Review James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential is film-noir crime fiction akin to Chinatown , Hollywood Babylon , Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. It's about three tortured souls in the 1950s L.A.P.D.: Ed Exley, the clean-cut cop who lives shivering in the shadow of his dad, a legendary cop in the same department; Jack Vincennes, a cop who advises a Police Squad - like TV show and busts movie stars for payoffs from sleazy Hush-Hush magazine; and Bud White, a detective haunted by the sight of his dad murdering his mom. Ellroy himself was traumatized as a boy by his party-animal mother's murder. (See his memoir My Dark Places for the whole sordid story.) So it is clear that Bud is partly autobiographical. But Exley, whose shiny reputation conceals a dark secret, and Vincennes, who goes showbiz with a vengeance, reflect parts of Ellroy, too. L.A. Confidential holds enough plots for two or three books: the cops chase stolen gangland heroin through a landscape littered with not-always-innocent corpses while succumbing to sexy sirens who have been surgically resculpted to resemble movie stars; a vile developer--based (unfairly) on Walt Disney-- schemes to make big bucks off Moochie Mouse; and the cops compete with the crooks to see who can be more corrupt and violent. Ellroy's hardboiled prose is so compressed that some of his rat-a-tat paragraphs are hard to follow. You have to read with attention as intense as his\u0097and that is very intense indeed. But he richly rewards the effort. He may not be as deep and literary as Chandler, but he belongs on the same top-level shelf.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "0393353028", "title": "Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties", "author": "Kevin M. Schultz", "description": "Review \"Brings alive two talented, tireless characters\u2026Schultz weave[s] their contrasting public lives together in a way that helps to make sense of an era.\" \u2015 Aram Bakshian Jr., Wall Street Journal \"[A] perceptive dual portrait\u2026Schultz does a superb job of contextualizing their differing positions.\" \u2015 Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune \"A largely respectful portrait, but Schultz doesn\u2019t sugarcoat his subjects\u2019 failings\u2026Flawed these men were for sure. But\u2026it\u2019s good to remember pundits who thought big, fought big, had something to say and said it with hellacious verve.\" \u2015 Chris Tucker, Dallas Morning News \"Illuminate[s], often entertainingly, the cultural and political upheaval of the sixties.\" \u2015 Barbara Spindel, Christian Science Monitor \"Schultz brings a good-natured, entertaining and, rare in academe, highly readable style to his treatment of two 20th century America patriots whose lives enriched us all.\" \u2015 John R. Coyne Jr., Washington Times \"[A] provocative and thorough . . . social and political history of the sixties, among the very best we have had.\" \u2015 Mark Levine, Booklist (starred review) \"Deliciously entertaining and insightful, Buckley and Mailer uses the strange yet meaningful friendship between its combustible protagonists to illuminate its real subject: America\u2019s most tumultuous decade.\" \u2015 Matthew Stewart, author of Nature\u2019s God \"One might think that Bill Buckley and Norman Mailer were not at all alike, but Kevin M. Schultz, in his very entertaining book, reminds us to think again. In fact, despite their complicated political differences, these two American originals liked each other, tried to understand each other, and discovered that that they had much in common: a passion for engagement, for literate expression, and perhaps above all the pleasure they took in playing their outsize selves.\" \u2015 Jeffrey Frank, best-selling author of Ike and Dick \"Riveting. In this superbly written account of two of the most fascinating and important 20th-century American intellectuals, Kevin M. Schultz not only brings the spirits of William Buckley and Norman Mailer back to life, he endows us with a subtle yet profound analytical framework for understanding the massive social changes set off during the Sixties. Anyone who wants to understand contemporary American political culture needs to read this book.\" \u2015 Andrew Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America About the Author Kevin M. Schultz holds a PhD in history from Berkeley and teaches twentieth-century American history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He lives in Chicago.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.53}, {"asin": "0143034758", "title": "Alexander Hamilton", "author": "Ron Chernow", "description": "Review \". . . [N]obody has captured Hamilton better than Chernow . . .\"\u00a0\u2014 The New York Times Book Review \". . . [A] biography commensurate with Hamilton's character, as well as the full, complex context of his unflaggingly active life.... This is a fine work that captures Hamilton's life with judiciousness and verve.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly \"A splendid life of an enlightened reactionary and forgotten Founding Father. Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of the biographer\u2019s art.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred) \"A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.\" \u2014 Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation \"A brilliant historian has done it again! The thoroughness and integrity of Ron Chernow\u2019s research shines forth on every page of his Alexander Hamilton. He has created a vivid and compelling portrait of a remarkable man\u2014and at the same time he has made a monumental contribution to our understanding of the beginnings of the American Republic.\u201d \u2014Robert A. Caro, author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson \"Alexander Hamilton was one of the most brilliant men of his brilliant time, and one of the most fascinating figures in all of American history. His rocketing life-story is utterly amazing. His importance to the founding of the new nation, and thus to the whole course of American history, can hardly be overstated. And so Ron Chernow's new Hamilton could not be more welcome. This is grand-scale biography at its best\u2014thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written. It clears away more than a few shop-worn misconceptions about Hamilton, gives credit where credit is due, and is both clear-eyed and understanding about its very human subject. Its numerous portraits of the complex, often conflicting cast of characters are deft and telling. The whole life and times are here in a genuinely great book.\" \u2014David McCullough, author of John Adams About the Author Ron Chernow\u00a0is the prizewinning author of seven books and the recipient of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. His first book, The House of Morgan , won the National Book Award; Washington: A Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; and Alexander Hamilton\u2014 the inspiration for the Broadway musical\u2014won the\u00a0George Washington\u00a0Book Prize. His other books include The Warburgs, The Death of the Banker, Titan, and Grant .\u00a0A past president of PEN America, Chernow has been the recipient of eight honorary doctorates. He resides in Brooklyn, New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. On the night of April 18, 1775, 800 British troops marched out of Boston to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize a stockpile of patriot munitions in Concord, Massachusetts. As they passed Lexington, they encountered a motley battalion of militia farmers known as Minutemen, and in the ensuing exchange of gunfire the British killed 8 colonists and then 2 more in Concord. As the redcoats retreated helter-skelter to Boston, they were riddled by sniper fire that erupted from behind hedges, stone walls, and fences, leaving a bloody trail of 273 British casualties versus 95 dead or wounded for the patriots.The news reached New York within four days and a mood of insurrection promptly overtook the city. People gathered at taverns and street corners to ponder events while Tories quaked. The newly emboldened Sons of Liberty streamed down to the East River docks, pilfered ships bound for British troops in Boston, then emptied the city hall arsenal of its muskets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes, grabbing a thousand weapons in all.Armed with this cache, volunteer militia companies sprang up overnight. However much the British might deride these ragtag citizen-soldiers, they conducted their business seriously. Inflamed by the astonishing news from Massachusetts, Alexander Hamilton, then a student at King\u2019s College (later Columbia University), was that singular intellectual who picked up a musket as fast as a pen. Nicholas Fish recalled that \u201cimmediately after the Battle of Lexington, [Hamilton] attached himself to one of the uniform companies of militia then forming for the defence of the country by the patriotic young men of this city under the command of Captain Fleming.\u201d Fish and Robert Troup, both classmates of Hamilton, were among the earnest cadre of King\u2019s College volunteers who drilled before classes each morning in the churchyard of nearby St. Paul\u2019s Chapel. The fledgling volunteer company was named the Hearts of Oak. The young recruits marched briskly past tombstones with the motto of \u201cLiberty or Death\u201d stitched across their round leather caps. On short, snug green jackets they also sported, for good measure, red tin hearts that announced \u201cGod and our Right.\u201dHamilton approached this daily routine with the same perfectionist ardor that he exhibited in his studies. Troup stressed the \u201cmilitary spirit\u201d infused into Hamilton and noted that he was \u201cconstant in his attendance and very ambitious of improvement.\u201d Never one to fumble an opportunity, Hamilton embarked on a comprehensive military education. With his absorbent mind, he mastered infantry drills, pored over volumes on military tactics and learned the rudiments of gunnery and pyrotechnics from a veteran bombardier. There was a particular doggedness about this young man, as if he were already in training for something far beyond lowly infantry duty.On April 24, a huge throng of patriots massed in front of city hall. While radicals grew giddy with excitement, many terrified Tory merchants began to book passage for England. The next day, an anonymous handbill blamed Myles Cooper, the Tory president of King\u2019s College, and four other \u201cobnoxious gentlemen\u201d for patriotic deaths in Massachusetts and said the moment had passed for symbolic gestures. \u201cThe injury you have done to your country cannot admit of reparation,\u201d these five loyalists were warned. \u201cFly for your lives or anticipate your doom by becoming your own executioners.\u201d A defiant Myles Cooper stuck to his post.After a demonstration on the night of May 10, hundreds of protesters, armed with clubs and heated by a heady brew of political rhetoric and strong drink, descended on King\u2019s College, ready to inflict rough justice on Myles Cooper. Hercules Mulligan recalled that Cooper \u201cwas a Tory and an obnoxious man and the mob went to the college with the intention of tarring and feathering him or riding him upon a rail.\u201d Nicholas Ogden, a King\u2019s alumnus, saw the angry mob swarming toward the college and raced ahead to Cooper\u2019s room, urging the president to scramble down a back window. Because Hamilton and Troup shared a room near Cooper\u2019s quarters, Ogden also alerted them to the approaching mob. \u201cWhereupon Hamilton instantly resolved to take his stand on the stairs [the outer stoop] in front of the Doctor\u2019s apartment and there to detain the mob as long as he could by an harangue in order to gain the Doctor the more time for his escape,\u201d Troup recorded.After the mob knocked down the gate and surged toward the residence, Hamilton launched into an impassioned speech, telling the boisterous protesters that their conduct, instead of promoting their cause, would \u201cdisgrace and injure the glorious cause of liberty.\u201d One account has the slightly deaf Cooper poking his head from an upper-story window and observing Hamilton gesticulating on the stoop below. He mistakenly thought that his pupil was inciting the crowd instead of pacifying them and shouted, \u201cDon\u2019t mind what he says. He\u2019s crazy!\u201d Another account has Cooper shouting at the ruffians: \u201cDon\u2019t believe anything Hamilton says. He\u2019s a little fool!\u201d The more plausible version is that Cooper had vanished, having scampered away in his nightgown once Ogden forewarned him of the approaching mob.Hamilton knew he couldn\u2019t stop the intruders but he won the vital minutes necessary for Cooper to clamber over a back fence and rush down to the Hudson. Of all the incidents in Hamilton\u2019s early life in America, his spontaneous defense of Myles Cooper was probably the most telling. It showed that he could separate personal honor from political convictions and presaged a recurring theme of his career: the superiority of forgiveness over revenge. Most of all, the episode captured the contradictory impulses struggling inside this complex young man, an ardent revolutionary with a profound dread that popular sentiment would boil over into dangerous excess. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.64}, {"asin": "0802124658", "title": "The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom", "author": "James Green", "description": "Review \u201cAn ambitious, vivid account . . . A vital and anecdotally rich history of the struggle to organize coal miners in West Virginia . . . Green presents readers with a refreshingly nuanced and fuller depiction of this class of workers than previously conceived . . . The Devil Is Here in These Hills is ambitious in scope [and] fast-moving.\u201d \u2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cThe story James Green has to tell in The Devil Is Here in These Hills . . . is among the best and largely forgotten American stories.\u201d \u2014 New York Times \u201cJames Green provides what could be the best history of events in West Virginia from 1892 to 1933, especially in the coalfields.\u201d \u2014 Charleston Gazette (West Virginia) \u201c The Devil is Here in These Hills provides much needed perspective on the economic, social and political issues that still confound the Mountaineer State. . . . The author\u2019s nuanced treatment . . . is the way history should be written. . . . Mr. Green\u2019s thorough research and steady analysis . . . gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. He tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today.\u201d \u2014 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette \u201cDeepens our understanding of . . . well-known labor conflicts . . . The Devil Is Here in These Hills not only succeeds in bringing together heretofore disparate episodes in coal miners\u2019 struggles for social justice but convincingly connects these moments and movements to a central theme: \u2018a people\u2019s fight to exercise freedom of speech and freedom of association in the workplaces where the rights of property owners had reigned supreme.\u2019\u201d \u2014 Journal of American History \u201cA lively and accessible history of the West Virginia mine wars and the struggle for the United Mine Workers of America union from the 1890s through the 1920s. This is the most authoritative book written on this bloody and turbulent chapter of US history since David Allan Corbin\u2019s 1981 Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields .\u201d \u2014 Choice \u201cJames Green has resurrected an important, searing piece of our heritage\u2014and just the kind of thing your high school American History teacher didn\u2019t teach you. His lively and moving account of the West Virginia mine wars is a reminder of how painfully long people in this country had to fight to gain even barely decent wages and working conditions. And, as today\u2019s gap between the 1% and everyone else grows ever wider, the era of the robber barons he evokes so well doesn\u2019t seem that far away.\u201d \u2014Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold\u2019s Ghost \u201cIn James Green\u2019s capable hands, the bloody Appalachian mine wars become an important national story of the forces of corporate greed met with the indomitable power of the human spirit. Insightful, eloquent\u2014 The Devil is Here in These Hills will forever change the way we think of the miners\u2019 role in early twentieth century history.\u201d \u2014Philip Dray, author of There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America \u201c The Devil is in These Hills is the most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I've ever read. James Green has made sense of a half century of violent confrontation.\u201d \u2014John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan \u201cGreen mines the historically dark seams of the sanguinary Mountain State coal wars that raged in the early decades of the 20th century. . . . Green opens our eyes with his assiduous research and steady storytelling.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cGreen . . . has assembled a gritty cast of characters in this fact-rich recounting of the West Virginia mine war . . . These events, until now with Green\u2019s account, have been largely forgotten, in some instances suppressed. Green gives the troubling era rebirth.\u201d \u2014Bookreporter \u201cGreen does an outstanding job here of bringing this period to life, giving readers a vivid picture of the hardscrabble Appalachian miners\u2019 day-to-day existence and their frequent bloody skirmishes with coal company hired guns . . . A thoroughly documented and masterfully written account of a little-remembered but critical period in U.S. history, when unions scored a major victory for workers\u2019 rights.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cThere are many fine photos of the struggles in West Virginia, but Green gives us a full-length feature film, telling the fifty-year-long saga of the fight against greed and exploitation. An excellent book.\u201d \u2014Elliott Gorn, professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and author of Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America \u201cJames Green\u2019s The Devil is Here in These Hills brilliantly locates the West Virginia Mine Wars within the contexts of West Virginia and American history and portrays this story as a basic struggle for the freedoms Americans have always expected as their birthright. Green personifies this class struggle in a panorama of heroes, antiheroes, and the mass of ordinary people doing unordinary things to achieve a better life. This is an outstanding book which, undoubtedly, will stand for a long time to come as the best single volume on the subject.\u201d \u2014Ronald L. Lewis, Professor of History Emeritus, West Virginia University \u201cJames Green\u2019s astonishing book deftly depicts a multinational and interracial group of hard-bitten men, rallied by an Irish-born grandmother, who waged a war for democracy that lasted forty years. As this masterful history demonstrates, the South was often a hotbed of unionism, poor women proved feisty and enduring adversaries, and remote \u2018hillbillies\u2019 lived in one of the most industrialized regimes in the world. . . . As Americans grow increasingly concerned about global capital\u2019s oppression of workers, we would do well to understand how and why it happened here and what it took to stop it.\u201d \u2014Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University \u201cEngaging and easy to follow. [Green] is a gifted storyteller who manages to weave a fascinating narrative that is both scholarly and fun to read. . . . Another strength of Green\u2019s book is his ability to put the labor strife in broader contexts, specifically that of Appalachian culture, and the labor strife prominent in much of the U.S. . . . I would recommend The Devil is Here in These Hills to anyone with an interest in American history, mining, or Appalachian studies. James Green has written an enlightening, accessible tome that should become the standard history of mining unionization in America.\u201d \u2014Appalachian History \u201cA story full of pathos and amazing characters that seem invented for a novel or film and become larger than life in Green\u2019s deft hands . . . Green . . . plumbs much of the little-known scholarly work on various aspects of these years to give us a new and compelling accessible synthesis.\u201d \u2014 West Virginia History \u201cCelebrated labor historian James Green tells the story of West Virginia and coal like never before.\u201d \u2014 Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota) \u201c[A] captivating new book . . . Aside from telling riveting stories of labor battles, Green also dissects how the mine wars are interpreted today . . . [A] beautifully written account.\u201d \u2014Truthout \u201cJames Green brings to light a little-known labor battle that never garnered the same fame as the automotive and steel industry tussles, yet exceeds those scraps in the depths of its brutality and inhumanity . . . This engaging account mirrors many economic issues of the present day.\u201d \u2014 Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star About the Author James Green is the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America . Green received his PhD in history from Yale University and is a professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Industries"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0743276965", "title": "The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World", "author": "Lynne McTaggart", "description": "Review \"If you want to explore the latest science behind The Secret , look no further. Science and wisdom collide and make friends in this real-world adventure that is ultimately a guidebook for living.\" -- Drew Heriot, director of The Secret\"Lynne McTaggart has zeroed in on a wonderful collection of experiments and events that shatters our normal materialistic assumptions of time, space, and everything in between (if there is an in-between). It's as mind-bending as it's meant to be.\" -- William Arntz, producer, writer, and director of What the BLEEP Do We Know!?\"Very few books are able to transform information into inspiration\u2014concepts into action\u2014word into deed. The Intention Experiment does exactly that. In a style that is highly entertaining and accessible, McTaggart reminds us of an eternal truth too often overlooked: Each of us possesses the power of the Universe WITHIN. Now that is a transformational read!\" -- Ward M. Powers, filmmaker and director of ONE: The Movie\" The Intention Experiment is an extraordinary advance in our understanding of consciousness as a field of all possibilities where intention orchestrates its own fulfillment. If you want to empower yourself and use the laws of intention to manifest your material reality, read this book.\" -- Deepak Chopra, author of Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment About the Author Lynne McTaggart, one of the central authorities on the new science of consciousness, is the award-winning author of seven books, including the internationally bestselling The Intention Experiment and The Field . She is also editorial director of What Doctors Don\u2019t Tell You , one of the world\u2019s most respected health magazines, and architect of the Intention Experiments, a web-based \u201cglobal laboratory.\u201d A highly sought-after public speaker, Lynne is consistently listed as one of the world\u2019s 100 most spiritually influential people. Lynne and her husband, author and WDDTY co-founder Bryan Hubbard, who live in London, have two adult daughters.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Occult & Paranormal"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0307717089", "title": "UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record", "author": "Leslie Kean", "description": "Review \"At last, a serious and thoughtful book about this controversial subject. Skeptics and true believers will find a treasure trove of insightful and eye opening information. This book is bound to set the gold standard for UFO research.\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2014Michio Kaku, Ph.D.\u00a0Author of Physics of the Impossible and host of Sci Fi Science on the Science Channel \u201cI was astonished by the care and precision of Leslie Kean\u2019s research in this terrific book.\u00a0 Her analysis is carefully reasoned and to the point; her craftsmanship in organization and writing are superb.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Her expose' raises important questions: Why does the US government create public distrust by neglecting this important topic? Why do its agencies avoid investigating cases of interference with flight operations and instead issue absurd cover-up stories?\u00a0 This book is ultimately an appeal to all scholars for an \"extraordinary investigation of an extraordinary phenomenon.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Rudy Schild, Ph.D., Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics\u00a0\u201cLike me, Leslie Kean is an agnostic on the issue of UFOs.\u00a0 Her book is a fine piece of journalism - not about beliefs, but about facts.\u00a0 Kean presents the most accurate, most credible reports on UFO's you will ever find.\u00a0 She has fought long and hard to discover the facts and let the chips fall where they may . She may not have the final smoking gun, but I smell the gunpowder.\u201d \u2014Miles O'Brien, former CNN space/science correspondent \u00a0\u201cI find explanations offered by UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists to be implausible, but I also have little patience with \"deniers\" who ridicule credible reports. \u00a0Leslie Kean has found a thoughtful path between extreme views, documenting the UFO mystery with intelligence and insight. She makes a strong case for U.S. participation in official, international UFO investigations and for public dissemination of the results.\u00a0\u00a0The fascinating first-hand accounts make this a thought-provoking book, even for those of us who don\u2019t know much about UFOs.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u2014Neal Lane, Ph.D., Rice University; former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy \u00a0\u201cIf you don't know much about UFOs, you must read this book. If you think that UFO reports are nonsense,\u00a0this book will disabuse you of that notion. Leslie Kean's UFOs informs readers at every level of knowledge and belief.\u00a0 It could, and should, become the \"tipping point\" that leads to public acceptance of\u00a0the reality of UFOs and all of its implications.\u201d \u2014Don Donderi, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, McGill University (Ret.) \u00a0\u201cIn an area of study where there aren\u2019t many, this is a serious book.\u00a0 It is credible, clear, and compelling, without any farfetched jumps in logic and assumption.\u00a0 Its credibility begins on the first page with John Podesta and continues with case studies of extraordinary quality to the very end.\u00a0 Leslie Kean not only makes the case for, but calls for, a whole new concrete and realistic perspective on UFOs that has more honesty and integrity than any other that I have read.\u00a0 This is a book for anyone with an open mind.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014John L. Petersen, Founder & President of The Arlington Institute\u00a0\u201cIn these pages we are confronted head-on by the UFO phenomenon as revealed firsthand by highly credible government officials and military aviation experts. Their credibility and integrity cannot be questioned, and their firsthand observations cannot be ignored.\u00a0 Leslie Kean provides a challenging\u00a0analysis and she writes with penetrating depth and insight. The revelations in this book constitute a watershed event in lifting the taboo against rational discourse about this controversial subject.\u201d\u2014Harold E. Puthoff, Ph.D., Director of The Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin\u00a0\u201cWhen I started reading Leslie Kean\u2019s UFOs , I found it very difficult to stop. This is an unprecedented assessment of what may be the greatest challenge ever presented to mankind . In an outstanding piece of investigative journalism , Kean provides a well-written and convincing appeal for change in dealing with a phenomenon that can no longer be ignored.\u201d \u00a0\u2014Jean-Claude Ribes, Ph.D., Paris Observatory (Ret.)\u00a0\u201cFor anyone who questions why - after more than fifty\u00a0 years of denial, ridicule, and dismissal - many scientists, academics, political figures, and military personnel still insist that the subject of UFOs should be taken seriously, this book provides the answer.\u00a0 Leslie Kean offers compelling documentation that physical objects, with flight characteristics not yet achievable by known technology, are being routinely reported in our skies.\u00a0 They represent a mystery that needs to be solved.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Stuart Appelle, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Science and Mathematics, State University of New York, Brockport\"Leslie Kean\u2019s astonishing book is the finest piece of investigative journalism ever written on this subject. \u00a0She has an incomparable ability to \u2018give voice\u2019 to a constituency of exceptionally qualified and unbiased first-hand observers. They are not from the fringe, not groupies, and not delusional. \u00a0Rather, they are high-level military, intelligence, aerospace, and government officials who speak with authority while providing reports that document actual, physical craft. Kean\u2019s book represents the first important step toward a new U.S. government openness about UFOs.\u00a0 It brings forward a reality otherwise buried for far too long inside official mystery, and elevates the discourse above that of small-minded public discussions.\"\u2014Christopher C. Green,\u00a0MD, Ph.D., Harper University Hospital, Wayne State University School of Medicine About the Author Leslie Kean is an investigative journalist who has been published internationally and nationally in the Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Providence Journal, The Nation, International Herald Tribune, Globe and Mail, and Journal of Scientific Exploration, among other publications. She is coauthor of Burma\u2019s Revolution of the Spirit and cofounder of the Coalition for Freedom of Information. She lives in New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1  Majestic Craft with Powerful Beaming Spotlights  \u00a0 We begin this exploration on very solid ground, with a Major General\u2019s firsthand chronicle of one of the most vivid and well- documented UFO cases ever. What you are about to read will demonstrate the dramatic, and very mysterious, physicality of UFOs\u2014 in this case, ones that were unusually bold. Although parts may sound like science fiction, they are not. The fact is that silent gliding or hovering objects, usually triangular, were seen by thousands of people and investigated by university scientists and government officials, yet they could never be explained. They left imprints on film, and although virtually impossible to detect on radar, they triggered the launching of Air Force F- 16s in anxious pursuit. The sightings occurred in a more than two- year \u201cwave\u201d over Belgium, beginning in late 1989. \u00a0 To launch this book\u2019s exploration into the UFO phenomenon, Belgian Major General Wilfried De Brouwer, now retired, has provided an exclusive account that includes some personal responses he has never expressed before. As chief of the Operations Division in the Air Staff, then Colonel De Brouwer played a prominent role, along with officials from other branches of government, in mobilizing various departments to try to identify the strange intruders that kept showing up unannounced over cities and countryside. \u201cHundreds of people saw a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately a hundred and twenty feet and powerful beaming spotlights, moving very slowly without making any significant noise but, in several cases, accelerating to very high speeds,\u201d De Brouwer stated publicly a few years ago, describing only the first night of the wave. Numerous police officers were among the initial group of witnesses, reporting from different locations as the multiple flying craft hovered and glided and lit up fields along their routes\u2014 the same officers who had joked dismissively when first receiving radio calls about the sightings. And the strange objects kept returning, for some unfathomable reason, to display themselves over the otherwise quiet territory of Belgium. \u00a0 Colonel De Brouwer was tasked to handle the UFO wave by his country\u2019s defense minister, Guy Co\u00ebme. After spending twenty years as a fighter pilot in the Belgian Air Force, De Brouwer had been appointed to the Strategic Planning Branch in NATO in 1983, while a colonel. He then became Wing Commander of the Belgian Air Force Transport Wing and, in 1989, chief of the Operations Division in the Air Staff. Promoted to Major General in 1991, he became Deputy Chief of Staff of the Belgian Air Force, in charge of operations, planning, and human resources. Beginning in 1995, after his retirement from the Air Force, he worked for more than ten years as a consultant for the United Nations to improve the UN Logistics rapid- response capabilities during emergencies. A man of great integrity and responsibility, De Brouwer was determined to do everything he could to find out what was invading Belgian airspace and repeatedly committing infractions of basic aviation rules. \u00a0 I first came to know General De Brouwer personally when arranging his trip to Washington, D.C., in November 2007 to speak at an international press conference I organized with filmmaker James Fox. We brought together a panel of former high- ranking government, aviation, and military officials from seven countries to speak to the press about UFO incidents and investigations, which was filmed for a new documentary. We also wanted to give these courageous speakers the opportunity to meet their counterparts from other countries and talk privately over a period of days. Many of the contributors to this book met then for the first time. \u00a0 General De Brouwer is extremely concerned about factual accuracy, conservative in his estimations, and meticulous in his attention to detail. He is a man who does not jump to conclusions, nor is he prone to exaggeration or embellishment. His concern for safeguarding the accurate record of events in Belgium has not let up, despite the passage of time. \u201cRecently, when on the Internet, I discovered an accumulation of misinformation about the Belgian UFO wave,\u201d he wrote me in an e- mail while we worked on editing his extensive text. \u201cThis incited me to react; I cannot accept that so- called researchers come forward with assumptions that are based on incorrect information. Testimonies of hundreds of people are neglected and attempts are made to convince outsiders that the observations were nothing more than misperceptions of ordinary craft. Also, the official statements of the Minister of Defense and the Air Force have been neglected or misinterpreted by these \u2018researchers.\u2019 \u201d \u00a0 In one of our more recent conversations, I asked the general to refl act back on his experience during the Belgian UFO wave twenty years ago\u2014which he says was unique but also frustrating, since they were unable to identify the trespassing craft. What impressed him most was the utmost sincerity of the witnesses he spoke to, many of whom were \u201chighly qualified intellectuals genuinely overwhelmed by what they had seen and convinced that they were not dealing with conventional technology.\u201d Unfortunately, they were often afraid to come forward because of the stigma attached to UFOs. \u201cOne person I had known for many years worked within NATO at the time,\u201d De Brouwer said. \u201cHe was so astonished that he didn\u2019t dare to mention it to anyone, not even to his wife. He only conveyed his experience to me on condition that I wouldn\u2019t reveal his name.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1541600509", "title": "The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism", "author": "Matthew Continetti", "description": "Review \u201cA superb work of scholarship and a delight to read. Conservatives will relish the anecdotes, the explanations of half-remembered books; liberals will learn something about their adversaries\u2026.invaluable clarity.\u201d\u2015 Wall Street Journal, Best Politics Books of 2022 \u201cSuperb\u2026.[Continetti] brings an insider\u2019s nuance and a historian\u2019s dispassion to the ambitious task of writing the American right\u2019s biography, and he adds a journalist\u2019s knack for deft portraiture and telling details.\u201d\u00a0\u2015 Jonathan Rauch , New York Times \u201cMr. Continetti captures beautifully the ad hoc, rearguard nature of American conservatism.\u201d\u2015 Wall Street Journal \u201c The Right is readable and relatable, well-written and engaging. The author\u2019s command of facts is impressive.\"\u2015 The Guardian \u201c[A] sturdy account of the many divisions within modern conservatism\u2026 Rational, well thought out, and impeccably argued\u2014of interest to all students of politics.\u201d\u2015 Kirkus, Starred \u201cMatthew Continetti\u2019s The Right is a rich and detailed survey from the 1920s to now.\u201d\u2015 Financial Times \u201cThoroughly researched.\u201d\u2015 The Economist \u201cContinetti\u2019s experiences have given him a valuable perspective on his subject\u2026 His description of life in the conservative machine has the feel of an eyewitness account.\u201d\u2015 The New Republic \u201cMatthew Continetti applies what scholars of all persuasions should do with American conservatism, treating it as a complex, contradictory movement, often at war between its populists and its intellectual elite wings\u2026 Continetti is skilled in going places and making conclusions other rightists don\u2019t.\u201d \u00a0\u2015 The Federalist \u201cAn authoritative account of the complex interplay between conservative ideas, politics, and policy over the past century\u2026 Continetti is particularly well-positioned to tackle the topic.\u201d\u2015 The Public Discourse \"A compelling analysis...\"\u2015 City Journal \u201cA much more nuanced and satisfying portrait of the American right than is offered by most other journalists and historians.\u201d\u2015 Reason \"Continetti\u2019s perspective is that of a consummate insider\u2026 He is, as a result, better attuned than most to the role of elites in the conservative ecosystem, as well as to the limits of their power.\u201d\u2015 Unherd \u201cContinetti\u2019s book is an excellent primer for understanding key aspects of the last century of American politics, and many of the author\u2019s recommendations are very shrewd. He covers a tremendous amount of ground with lucidity and panache.\u201d\u2015 American Purpose \"Important\u2026 Superior to any previous volume on this critical subject.\"\u2015 Quillette \"Well-researched, lucidly presented, and evenhanded.\"\u2015 Commentary \u201cMatthew Continetti has written a superb history of the conservative movement.\u201d\u2015 World Magazine \u201c[Continetti] skillfully leads us through the pulsing, fractious, improbable story of American conservatism all the way to today\u2019s fractured Republican party\u2026\"\u2015 Mosaic \u201cWith The Right , Matthew Continetti has written a fine, comprehensive, and readable narrative of the rip-roaring history of American conservatism with its amazing repertory company of statesmen, philosophers, and eccentrics. It\u2019s a remarkable achievement and a great read\u2026\u201d\u2015 Claremont Review of Books \"A worthy analysis.\u201d\u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cMatthew Continetti has earned his luminous reputation as the foremost contemporary chronicler of American conservatism\u2019s path to today\u2019s problematic condition. He traces conservatism\u2019s rich intellectual pedigree, from the founders\u2019 classical liberalism through twentieth-century conservatives\u2019 responses to the challenges of progressivism. The result is a thinking person\u2019s map for the road ahead.\u201d\u2015 George F. Will, author of The Conservative Sensibility \u201cMatthew Continetti has written an instant classic, sure to become the essential one-volume history of modern American conservatism. Balanced and subtle, it offers an engaging combination of intellectual and political history that makes sense of the immensely complicated story of the Right.\u201d\u2015 Yuval Levin, author of A Time to Build \u201cDeft and authoritative, Matthew Continetti illuminates conservatism\u2019s present through its long and often tumultuous past. The Right isn\u2019t just an engaging history and incisive analysis of the intra-conservative debate, but an essential contribution to it.\u201d\u2015 Rich Lowry, editor in chief of National Review \u201cAn immensely useful contribution.\u201d\u2015 Jonah Goldberg, editor in chief of The Dispatch \u201cA brilliant synthesis of political and intellectual history, and it captures several themes essential in this moment.\u201d\u2015 Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute About the Author Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow and the Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon and a columnist for Commentary magazine. The author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin and The K Street Gang , he lives in Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 20.21}, {"asin": "0670026190", "title": "A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel", "author": "Amor Towles", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2016: A Gentleman in Moscow is the utterly entertaining second novel from the author of Rules of Civility . Amor Towles skillfully transports us to The Metropol, the famed Moscow hotel where movie stars and Russian royalty hobnob, where Bolsheviks plot revolutions and intellectuals discuss the merits of contemporary Russian writers, where spies spy, thieves thieve and the danger of twentieth century Russia lurks outside its marbled walls. It\u2019s also where wealthy Count Alexander Rostov lives under house arrest for a poem deemed incendiary by the Bolsheviks, and meets Nina. Nina is a precocious and wide-eyed young girl who holds the keys to the entire hotel, wonders what it means to be a princess, and will irrevocably change his life. Despite being confined to the hallway of the hotel, the Count lives an absorbing, adventure-filled existence, filled with capers, conspiracies and culture. Alexander Rostov is a character for the ages--like Kay Thompson\u2019s Eloise and Wes Anderson\u2019s M. Gustav, he is unflinchingly (and hilariously for readers) devoted to his station, even when forced to wait tables, play hide and seek with a young girl, or confront communism. Towles magnificently conjures the grandeur of the Russian hotel and the vibrancy of the characters that call it home. --Al Woodworth, The Amazon Book Review Review \"The novel buzzes with the energy of numerous adventures, love affairs, [and] twists of fate.\" \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \"If you're looking for a summer novel, this is it. Beautifully written, a story of a Russian aristocrat trapped in Moscow during the tumult of the 1930s. It brims with intelligence, erudition, and insight, an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of the term.\" \u2014Fareed Zakaria, \"Global Public Square,\" CNN \"Fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat . . . A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story because it manages to be a little bit of everything. There\u2019s fantastical romance, politics, espionage, parenthood and poetry. The book is technically historical fiction, but you would be just as accurate calling it a thriller or a love story.\u201d \u2014Bill Gates \u201cThe book is like a salve. I think the world feels disordered right now. The count\u2019s refinement and genteel nature are exactly what we\u2019re longing for.\u201d \u2014 Ann Patchett \u201cHow delightful that in an era as crude as ours this finely composed novel stretches out with old-World elegance.\u201d \u2014The Washington Post \u201c[A]\u00a0wonderful book at any time . . . [I]t brought home to me how people find ways to be happy, make connections, and make a difference to one another\u2019s lives, even in the strangest, saddest and most restrictive circumstances.\u201d \u2014Tana French, author of The Searcher \u201cMarvelous.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cThe novel buzzes with the energy of numerous adventures, love affairs, twists of fate and silly antics.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \u201cA winning, stylish novel.\u201d \u2014NPR.org \u201cEnjoyable, elegant.\u201d \u2014 Seattle Times \u201cThe perfect book to curl up with while the world goes by outside your window.\u201d \u2014Refinery29 \u201cWho will save Rostov from the intrusions of state if not the seamstresses, chefs, bartenders and doormen? In the end, Towles\u2019s greatest narrative effect is not the moments of wonder and synchronicity but the generous transformation of these peripheral workers, over the course of decades, into confidants, equals and, finally, friends. With them around, a life sentence in these gilded halls might make Rostov the luckiest man in Russia.\u201d \u2014 The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0Book Review \u201cThis is an old fashioned sort of romance, filled with delicious detail. Save this precious book for times you really, really want to escape reality.\u201d \u2014Louise Erdrich \u201cTowles gets good mileage from the considerable charm of his protagonist and the peculiar world he inhabits.\u201d \u2014 The New Yorker \u201cIrresistible . . . In his second elegant period piece, Towles continues to explore the question of how a person can lead an authentic life in a time when mere survival is a feat in itself . . . Towles\u2019s tale, as lavishly filigreed as a Faberg\u00e9 egg, gleams with nostalgia for the golden age of Tolstoy and Turgenev.\u201d \u2014 O, The Oprah Magazine \u201c\u2018The Grand Budapest Hotel\u2019 and \u2018Eloise\u2019 meets all the Bond villains.\u201d \u2014TheSkimm \u201cAnd the intrigue! . . . [ A Gentleman in Moscow ] is laced with sparkling threads (they will tie up) and tokens (they will matter): special keys, secret compartments, gold coins, vials of coveted liquid, old-fashioned pistols, duels and scars, hidden assignations (discreet and smoky), stolen passports, a ruby necklace, mysterious letters on elegant hotel stationery . . . a luscious stage set, backdrop for a downright Casablanca -like drama.\u201d \u2014 The San Francisco Chronicle \u201cThe same gorgeous, layered richness that marked Towles\u2019 debut, Rules of Civility , shapes [ A Gentleman in Moscow ].\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly Praise for Rules of Civility \u201cAn irresistible and astonishingly assured debut.\" \u2014 O, the Oprah Magazine \u201cWith this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age\u2026[his] characters are youthful Americans in tricky times, trying to create authentic lives.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cSharp [and] sure-handed.\u201d \u2014 Wall Street Journal \u201cPut on some Billie Holiday, pour a dry martini and immerse yourself in the eventful life of Katey Kontent.\" \u2014 People \u201c[A] wonderful debut novel.\u201d \u2014 The Chicago Tribune \u201cGlittering\u2026filled with snappy dialogue, sharp observations and an array of terrifically drawn characters\u2026Towles writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.\u201d \u2014NPR.org \u201cA book that enchants on first reading and only improves on the second.\u201d \u2014 The Philadelphia Inquirer About the Author Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow . The two novels have collectively sold more than four million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with\u00a0his wife and two children. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From A Gentleman in Moscow : There were two restaurants in the Hotel Metropol: the Boyarsky, that fabled retreat on the second floor that we have already visited, and the grand dining room off the lobby known officially as the Metropol, but referred to affectionately by the Count as the Piazza.Admittedly, the Piazza could not challenge the elegance of the Boyarsky\u2019s d\u00e9cor, the sophistication of its service, or the subtlety of its cuisine. But the Piazza did not aspire to elegance, service, or subtlety. With eighty tables scattered around a marble fountain and a menu offering everything from cabbage piroghi to cutlets of veal, the Piazza was meant to be an extension of the city\u2014of its gardens, markets, and thorough fares. It was a place where Russians cut from every cloth could come to linger over coffee, happen upon friends, stumble into arguments, or drift into dalliances\u2014and where the lone diner seated under the great glass ceiling could indulge himself in admiration, indignation, suspicion, and laughter without getting up from his chair.And the waiters? Like those of a Parisian caf\u00e9, the Piazza\u2019s waiters could best be complimented as \u201cefficient.\u201d Accustomed to navigating crowds,they could easily seat your party of eight at a table for four. Having noted your preferences over the sound of the orchestra, within minutes they would return with the various drinks balanced on a tray and dispense them round the table in rapid succession without misplacing a glass. If, with your menu in hand, you hesitated for even a second to place your order, they would lean over your shoulder and poke at a specialty of the house. And when the last morsel of dessert had been savored, they would whisk away your plate, present your check, and make your change in under a minute. In other words, the waiters of the Piazza knew their trade to the crumb, the spoon, and the kopek.At least, that was how things were before the war. . . .Today, the dining room was nearly empty and the Count was being\u00a0served by someone who appeared not only new to the Piazza, but new to the art of waiting. Tall and thin, with a narrow head and superior demeanor, he looked rather like a bishop that had been plucked from a chessboard. When the Count took his seat with a newspaper in hand\u2014the international symbol of dining alone\u2014the chap didn\u2019t bother to clear the second setting; when the Count closed his menu and placed it beside his plate\u2014the international symbol of readiness to order\u2014the chap needed to be beckoned witha wave of the hand; and when the Count ordered the okroshka and filet of sole, the chap asked if he might like a glass of Sauterne. A perfect suggestion, no doubt, if only the Count had ordered foie gras!\u201cPerhaps a bottle of the Ch\u00e2teaude Baudelaire,\u201d the Count corrected politely.\u201cOf course,\u201d the Bishop replied with an ecclesiastical smile.Granted, a bottle of Baudelaire was something of an extravagance for a solitary lunch, but after spending another morning with the indefatigable Michel de Montaigne, the Count felt that his morale could use the boost. For several days, in fact, he had been fending off a state of restlessness. On his regular descent to the lobby, he caught himself counting the steps. As he browsed the headlines in his favorite chair, he found he was lifting his hands to twirl the tips of moustaches that were no longer there. He found he was walking through the door of the Piazza at 12:01 for lunch. And at 1:35, when he climbed the 110 steps to his room, he was already calculating the minutes until he could come back downstairs for a drink. If he continued along this course, it would not take long for the ceiling to edge downward, the walls to edge inward, and the floor to edge upward, until the entire hotel had been collapsed into the size of a biscuit tin.As the Count waited for his wine, he gazed around the restaurant, but his fellow diners offered no relief. Across the way was a table occupied by two stragglers from the diplomatic corps who picked at their food while they awaited an era of diplomacy. Over there in the corner was a spectacled denizen of the second floor with four enormous documents spread across his table, comparing them word for word. No one appeared particularly gay; and no one paid the Count any mind. That is, except for the young girl with the penchant for yellow who appeared to be spying on him from her table behind the fountain. According to Vasily, this nine-year-old with straight blond hair was\u00a0the daughter of a widowed Ukrainian bureaucrat. As usual, she was sitting with her governess. When she realized the Count was looking her way, she disappeared behind her menu.\u201cYour soup,\u201d said the Bishop.\u201cAh. Thank you, my good man. It looks delicious. But don\u2019t forget the wine!\u201d\u201cOf course.\u201dTurning his attention to his okroshka, the Count could tell at a glance that it was a commendable execution\u2014a bowl of soup that any Russian inthe room might have been served by his grandmother. Closing his eyes in order to give the first spoonful its due consideration, the Count noted asuitably chilled temperature, a tad too much salt, a tad too little kvass, but a perfect expression of dill\u2014that harbinger of summer which brings to mind the songs of crickets and the setting of one\u2019s soul at ease. But when the Count opened his eyes, he nearly dropped his spoon. For standing at the edge of his table was the young girl with the penchant for yellow\u2014studying him with that unapologetic interest peculiarto children and dogs. Adding to the shock of her sudden appearance was the fact that her dress today was in the shade of a lemon.\u201cWhere did they go?\u201d she asked, without a word of introduction.\u201cI beg your pardon. Where did who go?\u201dShe tilted her head to take a closer look at his face.\u201cWhy, your moustaches.\u201dThe Count had not much cause to interact with children, but he had been raised well enough to know that a child should not idly approach a stranger, should not interrupt him in the middle of a meal, and certainly should not ask him questions about his personal appearance. Was the minding of one\u2019s own business no longer a subject taught in schools?\u201cLike swallows,\u201d the Count answered, \u201cthey traveled elsewhere for the summer.\"Then he fluttered a hand from the table into the air in order to both mimic the flight of the swallows and suggest how a child might follow suit.She nodded to express her satisfaction with his response.\u201cI too will be traveling elsewhere for part of the summer.\u201dThe Count inclined his head to indicate his congratulations.\u201cTo the Black Sea,\u201d she added.Then she pulled back the empty chair and sat.\u201cWould you like to join me?\u201d he asked.By way of response, she wiggled back and forth to make herself comfortable then rested her elbows on the table. Around her neck hung a small pendant on a golden chain, some lucky charm or locket. The Count looked toward the young lady\u2019s governess with the hopes of catching her attention, but she had obviously learned from experience to keep her nose in her book.The girl gave another canine tilt to her head.\u201cIs it true that you are a count?\u201d\u201c\u2019Tis true.\u201dHer eyes widened.\u201cHave you ever known a princess?\u201d\u201cI have known many princesses.\u201dHer eyes widened further, then narrowed.\u201cWas it terribly hard to be a princess?\u201d\u201cTerribly.\u201dAt that moment, despite the fact that half of the okroshka remained in its bowl, the Bishop appeared with the Count\u2019s filet of sole and swapped one for the other.\u201cThank you,\u201d said the Count, his spoon still in hand.\u201cOf course.\u201dThe Count opened his mouth to inquire as to the whereabouts of the Baudelaire, but the Bishop had already vanished. When the Count turned back to his guest, she was staring at his fish.\u201cWhat is that?\u201d she wanted to know.\u201cThis? It is filet of sole.\u201d\u201cIs it good?\u201d\u201cDidn\u2019t you have a lunch of your own?\u201d\u201cI didn\u2019t like it.\u201dThe Count transferred a taste of his fish to a side plate and passed it across the table. \u201cWith my compliments.\u201dShe forked the whole thing in her mouth.\u201cIt\u2019s yummy,\u201d she said, which if not the most elegant expression was at least factually correct. Then she smiled a little sadly and let out a sigh as she directed her bright blue gaze upon the rest of his lunch.\u201cHmm,\u201d said the Count.Retrieving the side plate, he transferred half his sole along with an equal share of spinach and baby carrots, and returned it. She wiggled back and forth once more, presumably to settle in for the duration. Then, having carefully pushed the vegetables to the edge of the plate, she cut her fish into four equal portions, put the right upper quadrant in her mouth, and resumed her line of inquiry.\u201cHow would a princess spend her day?\u201d\u201cLike any young lady,\u201d answered the Count.With a nod of the head, the girl encouraged him to continue.\u201cIn the morning, she would have lessons in French, history, music. After her lessons, she might visit with friends or walk in the park. And at lunch she would eat her vegetables.\u201d\u201cMy father says that princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era.\u201dThe Count was taken aback.\u201cPerhaps a few,\u201d he conceded. \u201cBut not all, I assure you.\u201dShe waved her fork.\u201cDon\u2019t worry. Papa is wonderful and he knows everything there is to know about the workings of tractors. But he knows absolutely nothing about the workings of princesses.\u201dThe Count offered an expression of relief.\u201cHave you ever been to a ball?\u201d she continued after a moment of thought.\u201cCertainly.\u201d\u201cDid you dance?\u201d\u201cI have been known to scuff the parquet.\u201d The Count said this with the renowned glint in his eye\u2014that little spark that had defused heated conversations and caught the eyes of beauties in every salon in St. Petersburg.\u201cScuff the parquet?\u201d\u201cAhem,\u201d said the Count. \u201cYes, I have danced at balls.\u201d\u201cAnd have you lived in a castle?\u201d\u201cCastles are not as common in our country as they are in fairy tales,\u201d the Count explained. \u201cBut I have dined in a castle. . . .\u201dAccepting this response as sufficient, if not ideal, the girl now furrowed\u00a0her brow. She put another quadrant of fish in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. Then she suddenly leaned forward.\u201cHave you ever been in a duel?\u201d\u201cAn affaire d\u2019honneur?\u201d The Count hesitated. \u201cI suppose I have been in a duel of sorts. . . .\u201d\u201cWith pistols at thirty-two paces?\u201d\u201cIn my case, it was more of a duel in the figurative sense.\u201dWhen the Count\u2019s guest expressed her disappointment at this unfortunate clarification, he found himself offering a consolation:\u201cMy godfather was a second on more than one occasion.\u201d\u201cA second?\u201d\u201cWhen a gentleman has been offended and demands satisfaction on the field of honor, he and his counterpart each appoint seconds\u2014in essence, their lieutenants. It is the seconds who settle upon the rules of engagement.\u201d\u201cWhat sort of rules of engagement?\u201d\u201cThe time and place of the duel. What weapons will be used. If it is to be pistols, then how many paces will be taken and whether there will be more than one exchange of shots.\u201d\u201cYour godfather, you say. Where did he live?\u201d\u201cHere in Moscow.\u201d\u201cWere his duels in Moscow?\u201d\u201cOne of them was. In fact, it sprang from a dispute that occurred in this hotel\u2014between an admiral and a prince. They had been at odds for quite some time, I gather, but things came to a head one night when their paths collided in the lobby, and the gauntlet was thrown down on that very spot.\u201d\u201cWhich very spot?\u201d\u201cBy the concierge\u2019s desk.\u201d\u201cRight where I sit!\u201d\u201cYes, I suppose so.\u201d\u201cWere they in love with the same woman?\u201d\u201cI don\u2019t think a woman was involved.\u201dThe girl looked at the Count with an expression of incredulity.\u201cA woman is always involved,\u201d she said.\u201cYes. Well. Whatever the cause, an offense was taken followed by a demand for an apology, a refusal to provide one, and a slap of the glove.\u00a0At the time, the hotel was managed by a German fellow named Keffler, who was reputedly a baron in his own right. And it was generally known that he kept a pair of pistols hidden behind a panel in his office, so that when an incident occurred, seconds could confer in privacy, carriages could be summoned, and the feuding parties could be whisked away with weapons in hand.\u201d\u201cIn the hours before dawn . . .\u201d\u201cIn the hours before dawn.\u201d\u201cTo some remote spot . . .\u201d\u201cTo some remote spot.\u201dShe leaned forward.\u201cLensky was killed by Onegin in a duel.\u201dShe said this in a hushed voice, as if quoting the events of Pushkin\u2019s poem required discretion.\u201cYes,\u201d whispered back the Count. \u201cAnd so was Pushkin.\u201dShe nodded in grave agreement.\u201cIn St. Petersburg,\u201d she said. \u201cOn the banks of the Black Rivulet.\u201d\u201cOn the banks of the Black Rivulet.\u201dThe young lady\u2019s fish was now gone. Placing her napkin on her plate and nodding her head once to suggest how perfectly acceptable the Count had proven as a luncheon companion, she rose from her chair. But before turning to go, she paused.\u201cI prefer you without your moustaches,\u201d she said. \u201cTheir absence improves your . . . countenance.\u201dThen she performed an off-kilter curtsey and disappeared behind the fountain. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.93}, {"asin": "0394720245", "title": "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York", "author": "Robert A. Caro", "description": "Review PULITZER PRIZE WINNER \"Surely the greatest book ever written about a city.\" \u2014David Halberstam, Pulitzer\u2013Prize winning journalist and author of The Best and the Brightest \"I think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was twenty-two years old and just being mesmerized, and I'm sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.\" \u2014President Barack Obama \"The most absorbing, detailed, instructive, provocative book ever published about the making and raping of modern New York City and environs and the man who did it, about the hidden plumbing of New York City and State politics over the last half-century, about the force of personality and the nature of political power in a democracy. A monumental work, a political biography and political history of the first magnitude.\" \u2014Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York \"One of the most exciting, un-put-downable books I have ever read. This is definitive biography, urban history, and investigative journalism. This is a study of the corruption which power exerts on those who wield it to set beside Tacitus and his emperors, Shakespeare and his kings.\" \u2014Daniel Berger, Baltimore Evening Sun \"Simply one of the best nonfiction books in English of the past 40 years . . . There has probably never been a better dissection of political power . . . From the first page . . . you know that you are in the hands of a master . . . Riveting . . . Superb . . . Not just a stunning portrait of perhaps the most influential builder in world history . . . but an object lesson in the dangers of power. Every politician should read it.\" \u2014Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times \"A study of municipal power that will change the way any reader of the book hereafter peruses his newspaper.\" \u2014Philip Herrera, Time \"A triumph, brilliant and totally fascinating. A majestic, even Shakespearean, drama about the interplay of power and personality.\" \u2014Justin Kaplan \"In the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort.\" \u2014Richard C. Wade, The New York Times Book Review \"The feverish hype that dominates the merchandising of arts and letters in America has so debased the language that, when a truly exceptional achievement comes along, there are no words left to praise it. Important, awesome, compelling--these no longer summon the full flourish of trumpets this book deserves. It is extraordinary on many levels and certain to endure.\" \u2014William Greider, The Washington Post Book World \"A modern Machiavelli's Prince. \" \u2014 The Guardian \"One of the great biographies of all time . . . [by] one of the great reporters of our time . . . and probably the greatest biographer. He is also an extraordinary writer. After reading page 136 of his book The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done . . . One of the greatest nonfiction works ever written . . . Every MP, wonk and would-be wonk in Westminster has read [Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson], because they think it is the greatest insight into power ever written. They're nearly right: it's the second greatest after The Power Broker. \" \u2014Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times \"Apart from the book's being so good as biography, as city history, as sheer good reading, The Power Broker is an immense public service.\" \u2014Jane Jacobs \"Required reading for all those who hope to make their way in urban politics; for the reformer, the planner, the politician and even the ward heeler.\" \u2014Jules L. Wagman, Cleveland Press \"An extraordinary study of the workings of power, individually, institutionally, politically, and economically in our republic.\" \u2014 Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal \"Caro has written one of the finest, best-researched and most analytically informative descriptions of our political and governmental processes to appear in a generation.\" \u2014Nicholas Von Hoffman, The\u00a0Washington Post \"This is irresistibly readable, an outright masterpiece and unparalleled insight into how power works and perhaps the greatest portrait ever of a world city.\" \u2014David Sexton, The Evening Standard \"Caro's achievement is staggering. The most unlikely subjects--banking, ward politics, construction, traffic management, state financing, insurance companies, labor unions, bridge building--become alive and contemporary. It is cheap at the price and too short by half. A milestone in literary and publishing history.\" \u2014Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post \"A masterpiece of American reporting. It's more than the story of a tragic figure or the exploration of the unknown politics of our time. It's an elegantly written and enthralling work of art.\" \u2014Theodore H. White \"A stupendous achievement . . . Caro's style is gripping, indeed hypnotic, and he squeezes every ounce of drama from his remarkable story . . . Can a democracy combine visionary leadership with effective checks and balances to contain the misuse of power? No book illustrates this fundamental dilemma of democracy better than The Power Broker . . . Indeed, no student of government can regard his education as complete until he has read it.\" \u2014Vernon Bogdanor, The Independent \"Irresistible reading. It is like one of the great Russian novels, overflowing with characters and incidents that all fit into a vast mosaic of plot and counterplot. Only this is no novel. This is a college education in power corruption.\" \u2014George McCue, St. Louis Post-Dispatch From the Inside Flap One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today. In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own. From the Back Cover This is the first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man-an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. About the Author For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, ROBERT A. CARO has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, has three times won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor, including the National Book Award, the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that best \u201cexemplifies the union of the historian and the artist.\u201d In 2010 President Barack Obama awarded Caro the National Humanities Medal, stating at the time: \u201cI think about Robert Caro and reading The Power Broker back when I was twenty-two years old and just being mesmerized, and I\u2019m sure it helped to shape how I think about politics.\u201d In 2016 he received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. The London Sunday Times has said that Caro is \u201cThe greatest political biographer of our times.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Caro\u2019s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, everywhere acclaimed as a modern classic, was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century.\u00a0It is, according to David Halberstam, \u201cSurely the greatest book ever written about a city.\u201d And The New York Times Book Review said: \u201cIn the future, the scholar who writes the history of American cities in the twentieth century will doubtless begin with this extraordinary effort.\u201d\u00a0The first volume of\u00a0The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power , was cited by The Washington Post as \u201cproof that we live in a great age of biography . . . [a book] of radiant excellence . . . Caro\u2019s evocation of the Texas Hill Country, his elaboration of Johnson\u2019s unsleeping ambition, his understanding of how politics actually work, are\u2014let it be said flat out\u2014at the summit of American historical writing.\u201d Professor Henry F. Graff of Columbia University called the second volume, Means of Ascent , \u201cbrilliant. No review does justice to the drama of the story Caro is telling, which is nothing less than how present-day politics was born.\u201d The London Times hailed volume three, Master of the Senate , as \u201ca masterpiece . . . Robert Caro has written one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age.\u201d The Passage of Power, volume four, has been called \u201cShakespearean . . . A breathtakingly dramatic story [told] with consummate artistry and ardor\u201d ( The New York Times ) and \u201cas absorbing as a political thriller . . . By writing the best presidential biography the country has ever seen, Caro has forever changed the way we think about, and read, American history\u201d (NPR). On the cover of The New York Times Book Review, President Bill Clinton praised it as \u201cBrilliant . . . Important . . . Remarkable. With this fascinating and meticulous account Robert Caro has once again done America a great service.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u201cCaro has a unique place among American political biographers,\u201d The Boston Globe said . . . \u201cHe has become, in many ways, the standard by which his fellows are measured.\u201d And Nicholas von Hoffman wrote: \u201cCaro has changed the art of political biography.\u201dBorn and raised in New York City, Caro graduated from Princeton University, was later a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and worked for six years as an investigative reporter for Newsday . He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, the historian and writer. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpted from the Introduction Wait Until the Evening \u201cOne must wait until the evening To see how splendid the day has been.\u201d \u2014SOPHOCLES\u00a0  As THE CAPTAIN \u00a0of the Yale swimming team stood beside the pool, still dripping after his laps, and listened to Bob Moses, the team's second-best freestyler, he didn't know what shocked him more\u2014the suggestion or the fact that it was Moses who was making it. \u00a0 Ed Richards knew that Moses was brilliant\u2014even \"Five A\" Johnson, who regularly received the top grade in every course he took each term, said that Moses could have stood first in the Class of 1909 if he hadn't spent so much time reading books that had nothing to do with his assignments\u2014but the quality that had most impressed Richards and the rest of '09 was his idealism. The poems that the olive-skinned, big-eyed Jew from New York wrote for the Yale literary magazines, sitting up late at night, his bedroom door closed against the noise from the horseplay in the dormitory, were about Beauty and Truth. When the bull sessions got around, as they did so often, now that the Class was in its senior year, to the subject of careers, Moses was always talking\u2014quite movingly, too\u2014about dedicating his life to public service, to helping the lower classes. And just the other evening, in the midst of a desultory discussion about which fraternity's nominee should be elected class treasurer, Moses had jumped to his feet and argued so earnestly that class officers should be chosen on merit rather than fraternity affiliation, that the criterion shouldn't be who a man's friends were but what he could do, that Johnson had said to Richards afterwards, \"I feel as if I've had an awakening tonight.\" And now, Richards realized, this same Bob Moses was suggesting that they get money for the swimming team by deliberately misleading Og Reid. \u00a0 Ogden Mills Reid was the best thing that had ever happened to swimming at Yale. Since the legendary Walter Camp, athletic director as well as football coach, was hoarding the football receipts for a new stadium, there \u00a0was no money to replace the dank, low-ceilinged pool, which wasn't even the right length for intercollegiate swimming events. There was no allocation from the university for travel expenses or even for a coach. But Reid, who had been Yale's first great swimmer, not only paid the team's expenses but, week after week, traveled up to New Haven from New York to do the coaching himself. This year, after a long fight, Moses had succeeded in organizing the wrestling, fencing, hockey, basketball and swimming teams into a \"Minor Sports Association\" which would conduct a general fund-raising effort and divide the money among the teams, in the hope that the existence of such a formal organization would coax new contributions from alumni. The theory was good, Richards had thought at the time, but there was one hitch: any money contributed specifically to one of the teams also had to go into the general fund. Richards doubted that Reid, who was interested only in swimming, would want to contribute to a general fund and he wondered if the swimmers might not end up with even less money than before. But Moses had seemed to have no fears on that score. And now, standing beside the pool, Richards was beginning to understand why. Moses, dressed in suit, vest and a high collar that was wilting in the dampness, had just announced that he was skipping practice to go to New York and see Reid, and when Richards had expressed his doubts that the alumnus would contribute, Moses had smiled and said, \"Oh, that's all right. I just won't tell him it's going to an association. He'll think it's the regular contribution to the swimming team.\" \u00a0 Now Richards said slowly, \"I think that's a little bit tricky, Bob. I think that's a little bit smooth. I don't like that at all.\" \u00a0 With astonishing rapidity, the face over the high collar turned pale, almost white. Moses' fists came up for a moment before he lowered them. \"Well, you've got nothing to say about it,\" he said. \u00a0 \"Yes, I do,\" Richards said. \"I'm the captain. I'm responsible. And I'm telling you not to do it.\" \u00a0 \"Well, I'm going to do it anyway,\" Moses said. \u00a0 \"If you do,\" Richards said, \"I'll go to Og and tell him that the money isn't going where he thinks it is.\" \u00a0 Moses' voice suddenly dropped. His tone was threatening. \"If you don't let me do it,\" he said, \"I'm going to resign from the team.\" \u00a0 He thought he was bluffing me, Richards would recall later. He thought I wouldn't let him resign. \"Well, Bob,\" Richards said, \"your resignation is accepted.\" \u00a0 Bob Moses turned and walked out of the pool. He never swam for Yale again. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Forty-five years later, a new mayor of New York was being sworn in at City Hall. Under huge cut-glass chandeliers Robert F. Wagner, Jr., took the oath of office and then, before hundreds of spectators, personally administered the oath, and handed the coveted official appointment blanks, to his top appointees. \u00a0 But to a handful of the spectators, the real significance of the ceremony \u00a0was in an oath not given. When Robert Moses came forward, Wagner swore him in as City Park Commissioner and as City Construction Coordinator\u2014and then, with Moses still waiting expectantly, stopped and beckoned forward the next appointee. \u00a0 To those spectators, Wagner's gesture signaled triumph. They were representatives of the so-called \"Good Government\" organizations of the city: the Citizens Union, the City Club, liberal elements of the labor movement. They had long chafed at the power that Moses had held under previous mayors as Park Commissioner, Construction Coordinator and\u00a0 member of the City Planning Commission. They had determined to try to curb his sway under Wagner and they had decided to make the test of strength the Planning Commission membership. This, they had decided after long analysis and debate, was Moses' weak point: As Park Commissioner and Construction Coordinator he proposed public works projects, and the City Charter had surely never intended that an officeholder who proposed projects should sit on the Planning Commission, whose function was to pass on the merits of those projects. For nine weeks, ever since Wagner's election, they had been pressing him not to reappoint Moses to the commission. Although Wagner had told them he agreed fully with their views and had even hinted that, on Inauguration Day, there would be only two jobs waiting for Moses, they had been far from sure that he meant it. But now they realized that Wagner had in fact not given Moses the third oath\u2014and the Planning Commission job. And, looking at Moses, they could see he realized it, too. His face, normally swarthy, was pale with rage. \u00a0 The more observant among these spectators, however, noticed that after the ceremonies Moses followed Wagner into his inner office. They knew all too well what he would be saying to the new mayor; he had said it often enough, publicly and privately, orally and in writing, to Wagner's predecessors, Vincent R. Impellitteri and William O'Dwyer, and, even earlier, to the great La Guardia. \"He's threatening to resign,\" they whispered to one another. \u00a0 They were right. Behind the closed doors of the inner office, Moses was putting it to Wagner straight: If he didn't get the third post, he would quit the other two. And he'd do it right now. Wagner tried frantically to stall. The Planning Commission oath? The Mayor said. There must have been an oversight. Some clerk must have forgotten to fill out the appointment blank. Nothing to worry about. He'd see to it in a few days. Moses walked out of the Mayor's office and into the little room down the hall where a deputy mayor and his assistant were filing the appointment blanks. Snatching an unused blank off a sheaf on a table, he sat down at the table and filled it out himself. Then he walked back to Wagner's office and, without a word, laid the paper on the Mayor's desk. \u00a0 Without a word, the Mayor pulled the paper toward him and signed it. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Robert Moses possessed at the time of his confrontation with Ed Richards an imagination that leaped unhesitatingly at problems insoluble to other men\u2014the problem of financing minor sports had been tormenting Yale \u00a0deans for two decades\u2014and that, seemingly in 4he very moment of the leap, conceived of solutions. He possessed an iron will that put behind his solutions and dreams a determination to let nothing stand in their way\u2014to form the Minor Sports Association he, only an undergraduate, had faced up to, and had finally faced down, Walter Camp, who was implacably opposed to its formation. And he possessed an arrogance which made him conceive himself so indispensable that, in his view, his resignation was the most awful threat he could think of. \u00a0 Robert Moses possessed the same qualities during his confrontation with Robert Wagner. But by then he also possessed something more. He possessed power. \u00a0 Power is the backdrop against which both confrontation scenes should be played. For power was the reason for the contrast in their denouements. \u00a0 The whole life of Robert Moses, in fact, has been a drama of the interplay of power and personality. For a time, standing between it and him was an interceding force, the passionate idealism he had expressed in the Yale bull sessions. Dedicating his life to public service, he remained, during the first years of that service, the idealist of those bull sessions, an idealist possessed, moreover, of a vision of such breadth that he was soon dreaming dreams of public works on a scale that would dwarf any yet built in the cities of America. He wandered tirelessly around New York, and a woman who occasionally wandered with him said he was \"burning up with ideas, just burning up with them,\" ideas for great highways and parks circling the city's waterfront and for more modest projects that he thought would also improve the quality of life for the city's people\u2014little shelters, for instance, in Central Park so that mothers could change their babies' diapers without having to go all the way home. And when he argued for his ideas before the Good Government organization for which he worked and before the Board of Estimate, he was very careful always to have his facts ready, never to exaggerate them and always to draw from them logical conclusions, for he believed that Truth and Logic would prevail. When hexlecided to specialize, the area he chose\u2014civil service reorganization\u2014was one based on the same principle with which he had \"awakened\" \"Five A\" Johnson, the principle that jobs should be given and promotions based on merit rather than patronage. And he dedicated himself to that principle with the devotion of the acolyte. Brought into the administration of reforming Mayor John Purroy Mitchel in 1914, Moses devised, in a year of unremitting labor, a system that made every aspect of a city employee's performance\u2014including facets of his personality\u2014subject to a numerical grade. And for three additional years he fought for adoption of his system, battling a Board of Estimate dominated by one of the most corrupt political machines the United States had ever known, speaking night after night\u2014a tall, very slim, very handsome young man with deep, burning eyes, dressed, often and appropriately, in a white suit, clutching a bulging briefcase and introduced to audiences as \"Dr. Moses\" in recognition of his Ph.D.\u2014into hails of abuse from furious municipal employees who owed their jobs not to merit but to Tammany Hall, and observers said that the viciousness of the jeering crowds seemed to make no impression on him, so deeply did he believe that if only they could be made to understand how good his system was, they would surely support it. In those pre-World War I years of optimism, of reform, of idealism, Robert Moses was the optimist of optimists, the reformer of reformers, the idealist of idealists. \u00a0 So great a nuisance did he make of himself that in 1918 Tammany Hall decided it had to crush him. It did so with efficiency. At the age of thirty, with the grading papers for his system being used as scrap paper, the Central Park shelters and great highways unbuilt, Robert Moses, Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, honors man at Oxford, lover of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, was out of work and, with a wife and two small daughters to support, was standing on a line in the Cleveland, Ohio, City Hall, applying for a minor municipal job\u2014a job which, incidentally, he didn't get. \u00a0 When the curtain rose on the next act of Moses' life, idealism was gone from the stage. In its place was an understanding that ideas\u2014dreams\u2014were useless without power to transform them into reality. Moses spent the rest of his life amassing power, bringing to the task imagination, iron will and determination. And he was successful. The oath that was administered to Robert Wagner in City Hall on January 1, 1954, should have given Wagner supreme power in New York. That was the theory. In democratic America,supposedly, ultimate power rests in the voters, and the man for whom a majority of them cast their votes is the repository of that power. But Wagner knew better. The spectators may have thought that he had a choice in dealing with Moses. He knew that he did not. Why, when Moses pushed the appointment blank across his desk, did the Mayor say not a word? Possibly because there was nothing to say. Power had spoken.  \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 With his power, for twenty years prior to the day he strode out of City Hall in triumph (and for an additional fourteen years thereafter), Robert Moses shaped a city and its sprawling suburbs\u2014and, to an extent that would have astonished analysts of urban trends had they measured the implications of his decades of handiwork, influenced the destiny of all the cities of twentieth century America. \u00a0 The city in which the shaping by his hand is most evident is New York, Titan of cities, colossal synthesis of urban hope and urban despair. It had become a cliche by the mid-twentieth century to say that New York was \"ungovernable,\" and this meant, since the powers of government in the city had largely devolved on its mayor, that no mayor could govern it, could hope to do more than merely stay afloat in the maelstrom that had engulfed the vast metropolis. In such a context, the cliche was valid. No mayor shaped New York; no mayor\u2014not even La Guardia\u2014left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest of lasting imprints. \u00a0 But Robert Moses shaped New York.  \u00a0 Physically, any map of the city proves it. The very shoreline of metropolis was different before Robert Moses came to power. He rammed bulkheads of steel deep into the muck beneath rivers and harbors and crammed into the space between bulkheads and shore immensities of earth and stone, shale and cement, that hardened into fifteen thousand acres of new land and thus altered the physical boundaries of the city. \u00a0 Standing out from the map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. He built the Major Deegan Expressway, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Sheridan Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway. He built the Gowanus Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Whitestone Expressway, the Clearview Expressway and the Throgs Neck Expressway. He built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Nassau Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Long Island Expressway. He built the Harlem River Drive and the West Side Highway. \u00a0 Only one borough of New York City\u2014the Bronx\u2014is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. Those bridges are the Triborough, the Verrazano, the Throgs Neck, the Marine, the Henry Hudson, the Cross Bay and the Bronx-Whitestone. Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. \u00a0 Scattered throughout New York stand clusters of tall apartment houses built under urban renewal programs and bearing color, splashed on terraces and finials, that in the twentieth-century American cityscape marks them as luxury dwellings. Alongside some of these clusters stand college lecture halls and dormitories. Alongside one stand five immense dingy white expanses of travertine that are Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome (feeling later that he could make the comparison even more exact, he built Shea Stadium, remarking when it was completed, \"When the Emperor Titus opened the Colosseum in 80 A.D. he could have felt no happier\"). Once the sites of the clusters contained other buildings: factories, stores, tenements that had stood for a century, sturdy, still serviceable apartment houses. Robert Moses decided that these buildings would be torn down and it was Robert Moses who decided that the lecture halls and the dormitories and the cultural \u00a0center\u2014and new apartment houses\u2014would be erected in their place. \u00a0 The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. Northward from the bulge of Corlears Hook looms a long line of apartment houses devoid of splashes of color, hulking buildings, utilitarian, drab, unadorned, not block after block of them but mile after mile, appearing from across the East River like an endless wall of dull brick against the sky. Almost all of them\u2014ninety-five looming over the river in the first two miles north of Corlears Hook\u2014are public \u00a0housing. They\u2014and hundreds of similar structures huddled alongside the expressways or set in rows beside the Rockaway surf\u2014contain 148,000 apartments and 555,000 tenants, a population that is in itself a city bigger than Minneapolis. These buildings were constructed by the New York City Housing Authority, 1,082 of them between 1945 and 1958. Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 20.42}, {"asin": "0809230410", "title": "Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court", "author": "John Wooden", "description": "Amazon.com Review Coach Wooden's remarkable 10 national basketball championships in 12 years at UCLA speak for themselves. In Wooden , the coach--quiet, thoughtful, and introspective throughout his distinguished career--finally speaks for himself , and he's well worth hearing. Wooden is a modern chapbook of inspiration and good sense that reveals the hard-court philosopher behind it as a man of character, conviction, decency, and straightforwardness. There are no complex ideas, just little beams of light filtered through anecdotes that project the kinds of simple, immutable truths that in the end touch nothing but net. From Library Journal As stated in the introduction, this book is \"neither a conventional narrative, a biography, nor a how-to book on basketball.\" It is instead a compilation of the tenets and teachings of arguably the greatest basketball coach of all time. Wooden's codes are of the traditional kind, centering on family, faith, friends off the court and organization, dedication, and preparation on the hardwood. Still, he is not stuck in the past. His observation that basketball is first and foremost a game of quickness revolutionized the tactical approach to the sport. The former UCLA coach is above all a teacher, and the lessons he imparts here are derived from a lifetime of learning and achievement. Recommended for adult and young adult collections.?William H. Hoffman, Ft. Myers-Lee Cty. P.L., Ft. Myers, Fla.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Publisher Author Profiles John Wooden (1910-2010) , guided the UCLA Bruins to ten NCAA basketball championships over a 12-year period, including four perfect seasons and an 88-game winning streak. He was named ESPN\u2019s \u201cGreatest Coach of the 20th Century\u201d and voted \u201c#1 Coach of All Time\u201d by The Sporting News . Sports Illustrated said it best when they said: \u201cThere\u2019s never been a finer man in American sports than John Wooden, or a finer coach.\u201d In 2003 John Wooden was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Steve Jamison is America's foremost author and authority on the life and philosophy of John Wooden. Mr. Jamison is a consultant to the UCLA Anderson Scool of Business\u2019 John Wooden Global Leadership Program. He has collaborated with Coach Wooden on an award-winning PBS presentation as well as several books, including his final book, The Wisdom of Wooden: My Century On and Off the Court . From the Back Cover \"I am just a common man who is true to his beliefs.\"--John Wooden Evoking days gone by when coaches were respected as much for their off-court performances as for their success on the court, this unique and intimate work presents the timeless wisdom of legendary basketball coach John Wooden. In honest and telling passages about virtually every aspect of life, Wooden shares his personal philosophy on family, achievement, success, and excellence. Raised on a small farm in south-central Indiana, Wooden learned a great deal from his parents--lessons that stayed with him not only throughout his unparalleled career at UCLA, but also as dedicated husband, father, and teacher. These lessons, along with personal letters from Bill Walton, Denny Crum, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bob Costas, among others, mark Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and off the Court as an inspirational classic. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Wooden A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court By John Wooden Steve Jamison McGraw-Hill Copyright \u00a9 1997 Steve Jamison and John WoodenAll right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-80-923041-9 Contents Chapter One Part I Families, Values, Virtues I am just a common man who is true to his beliefs. \u2014John Wooden My Roots Go Deep in America I was born on a Friday morning in a little place called Hall, Indiana. It was just after the turn of the twentieth century\u2014October 14, 1910. Dad and Mother raised my three brothers and me on a small farm in the south-central part of the state, until hard times forced our family to move into the nearby town of Martinsville. What I learned back there during those early years in Indiana\u2014the training I got from my father and mother\u2014 has stayed with me all my life. That training started with the kind of people my parents were. Nothing Is Stronger than Gentleness My dad, Joshua Wooden, was a strong man in one sense, but a gentle man. While he could lift heavy things men half his age couldn't lift, he would also read poetry to us each night after a day working in the fields raising corn, hay, wheat, tomatoes, and watermelons. We had a team of mules named Jack and Kate on our farm. Kate would often get stubborn and lie down on me when I was plowing. I couldn't get her up no matter how roughly I treated her. Dad would see my predicament and walk across the field until he was close enough to say \"Kate.\" Then she'd get up and start working again. He never touched her in anger. It took me a long time to understand that even a stubborn mule responds to gentleness. My Mother's Great Example My mother, Roxie Anna, had a hard life living and working and raising a family in our little white farmhouse outside Martinsville. She did the washing, scrubbing, ironing, cooking, mending, and canning with no electricity and no inside plumbing. She did it all herself without any modern conveniences while helping with the farming and bringing up four rambunctious young sons: Maurice, me, Daniel, and William. At night, during the heat of the Indiana harvest season, Mother would offer us cool slices of watermelon as we sat out on our front porch looking up into the stars. She gave me my first \"basketball,\" a wobbly thing sewed together using rolled-up rags she had stuffed into some black cotton hose. Dad nailed an old tomato basket with the bottom knocked out to one end of the hayloft in the barn. That's how I got started playing the game of basketball. Each day my mother demonstrated great patience and the ability and eagerness to work very hard without complaint. I learned from her what hard work really means and that it's part of life. Hard work comes with the territory. She always knew what had to be done and she did it. Mother provided a model for how to do my job regardless of the particular circumstances. The Real Coaches and Teachers A father and mother must be there to set an example for their children, strong and positive models of what to be and how to behave when the youngsters grow up. Being a role model is the most powerful form of educating. Youngsters need good models more than they need critics. It is one of a parent's greatest responsibilities and opportunities. Too often fathers neglect it because they get so caught up in making a living they forget to make a life. Strong Inside My father had great inner strength. He was strong in his moral principles, values, and ideals, and like any good father he wanted to instill them in his four sons. He did that in the manner by which he lived his life. Life's Game Plan Starts Early Dad was one of the wisest people I have ever known, in spite of the fact that both he and Mother had only high-school educations. My father created a desire in us to learn to read (including some of the Bible every day). He was a very religious man without being overt about it. Like Mother, he believed in hard work. He was a good man, strong and positive, who wouldn't speak ill of anyone. Dad was quiet, but when he did say something, he said something. He was the kind of man I set out to be. He was the model. Two Sets of Threes My father had what he called his \"two sets of threes.\" They were direct and simple rules aimed at how he felt we should conduct ourselves in life. The first set was about honesty: Never lie. Never cheat. Never steal. It required no explanation. My brothers and I knew what it meant and that he expected us to abide by it. The second set of threes was about dealing with adversity: Don't whine. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Some people today may think these are naive or kind of corny. But think a moment about what they mean and who you become if you abide by them. That isn't naive. You don't become corny. Dad's two sets of threes were a compass for me in trying to do the right thing and behaving in a proper manner. Pride or Punishment Joshua Wooden was a disciplinarian, but not from a physical point of view. I'd almost rather have taken a whipping than hear him say he was disappointed in something I'd done. I wanted to please him and not let him down with my behavior. It wasn't a fear of punishment that motivated me. It was my desire to live up to his model and expectations. Later, as a teacher, I wanted those under my own supervision to be motivated in the same way, to strive to be their best because I believed in them rather than from any fear of punishment. The Gift of a Lifetime When I graduated from our little three-room grade school in Centerton, Indiana, I got dressed up in clean overalls for the big event. For my graduation present Dad gave me an old, wrinkled two-dollar bill that he probably had been hanging onto for some time. He said, \"Johnny, as long as you have this you'll never be broke,\" and he was pretty close to right. Eventually I gave it to my own son Jim. Dad also gave me something that day that would shape my entire life: my work, my marriage, my goals, my entire philosophy. It was a card on which he had written a few guidelines. I still carry it with me. On one side was this verse by the Reverend Henry Van Dyke: Four things a man must learn to do \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If he would make his life more true: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To think without confusion clearly, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To love his fellow-man sincerely, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To act from honest motives purely, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To trust in God and Heaven securely. The little verse was straightforward but profound: think clearly, have love in your heart, be honest, and trust in God. On the other side of the paper, Dad had written out his creed. At the top of the paper, it said \"Seven Things to Do.\" It read as follows: 1. Be true to yourself. 2. Help others. 3. Make each day your masterpiece. 4. Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible. 5. Make friendship a fine art. 6. Build a shelter against a rainy day. 7. Pray for guidance and count and give thanks for your blessings every day. All he said when he gave me the little note he had written was, \"Son, try and live up to these things.\" I wish I could say I have lived up to them. I have tried. Over the years, as I've attempted to follow his creed, I've gained a deeper understanding of it. Let me share what it means to me after all these years. Be True to Yourself If we are not true to ourselves, we cannot be true to others\u2014our wife or husband, our family, our profession and colleagues. As Polonius said to his son Laertes in William Shakespeare's Hamlet , \"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.\" This is so true, and I believe it is the first point in Dad's creed for a reason. You must know who you are and be true to who you are if you are going to be who you can and should become. You must have the courage to be true to yourself. Help Others Oh, the great joy there is in helping others, perhaps the greatest joy! You cannot have a perfect day without helping others with no thought of getting something in return. When we are helping others with the thought of getting something back, it's not the same at all. Sharing and giving of yourself is joyous. James Russell Lowell wrote: It's not what we give but what we share, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For the gift without the giver is bare. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Who gives of himself of his alms feeds three, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me. The basic precept of all the great religions is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Simply stated, it means, \"Help others.\" Jesus said, \"It is more blessed to give than to receive.\" We say those words, but how often do we really believe them? They are always true. You can never acquire happiness without giving of yourself to someone else without the expectation of getting something back. When it comes to giving, I remind myself what Ralph Waldo Emerson said: \"Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only true gift is a portion of thyself.\" Make Each Day Your Masterpiece When I was teaching basketball, I urged my players to try their hardest to improve on that very day, to make that practice a masterpiece. Too often we get distracted by what is outside our control. You can't do anything about yesterday. The door to the past has been shut and the key thrown away. You can do nothing about tomorrow. It is yet to come. However, tomorrow is in large part determined by what you do today. So make today a masterpiece. You have control over that. This rule is even more important in life than basketball. You have to apply yourself each day to become a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better. Only then will you be able to approach being the best you can be. It begins by trying to make each day count and knowing you can never make up for a lost day. If a player appeared to be taking it easy in practice, I told him, \"Don't think you can make up for it by working twice as hard tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, why aren't you doing it now?\" If you sincerely try to do your best to make each day a masterpiece, angels can do no better. Drink Deeply from Good Books, Including the Bible Poetry, biographies, and all the other great books will greatly enrich your life. There are so many that are so good, and they are all available to you. The poetry Dad read to us when we were kids instilled a love of reading, English, books, and knowledge. It was a priceless gift and one that has enhanced my own life so much. Drink deeply from those great books of your own choosing and you will enrich yourself. Make Friendship a Fine Art Don't take friendship for granted. Friendship is giving and sharing of yourself. If just one side works at it, it isn't friendship. You must work at friendship. Make it a fine art. Go more than halfway. It is two-sided, just like marriage. Someone is not a good friend because he or she does good things for you all the time. It's friendship when you do good things for each other. It's showing concern and consideration. Friendship is so valuable and so powerful. We take it for granted, but we shouldn't. At times when I am feeling low, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I hear from a friend and then \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My worries start to go away \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And I am on the mend.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In spite of all that doctors know, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And their studies never end, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The best cure of all when spirits fall \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Is a kind note from a friend.  \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2014 John Wooden The first and most important step in friendship is being a friend. Build a Shelter Against a Rainy Day This is not necessarily a material shelter. Your faith, whatever it may be, is the greatest shelter of all. In many ways we've been taken in by materialism. I'm not saying possessions are unimportant, but we often put them out of proportion, ahead of family, faith, and friends. Pray for Guidance and Count and Give Thanks for Your Blessings Every Day So often we fail to acknowledge what we have because we're so concerned about what we want. We fail to give real thanks for the many blessings for which we did nothing: our life itself, the flowers, the trees, our family and friends. This moment. All of our blessings we take for granted so much of the time. A wise person once observed, \"How much more pleasant this world would be if we magnified our blessings the way we magnify our disappointments.\" And, of course, with that we must also pray for guidance. One of my players at UCLA once told me he was embarrassed to have anyone know that he prayed. There's no shame in praying for guidance. It's a sign of strength. Living Up to Dad's Creed I am now in my eighth decade and I would like to be able to tell you that I lived up to Dad's creed, but I am more like the fellow who said: I am not what I ought to be, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Not what I want to be, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Not what I am going to be, \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But I am thankful that \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I am better than I used to be. It's important to keep trying to do what you think is right no matter how hard it is or how often you fail. You never stop trying. I'm still trying. Give It Away to Get It Back There is a wonderful, almost mystical, law of nature that says three of the things we want most\u2014happiness, freedom, and peace of mind\u2014are always attained when we give them to others. Six of Life's Puzzlers ? Why is it easier to criticize than to compliment? ? Why is it easier to give others blame than to give them credit? ? Why is it that so many who are quick to make suggestions find it so difficult to make decisions? ? Why can't we realize that it only weakens those we want to help when we do things for them that they should do for themselves? ? Why is it so much easier to allow emotions rather than reason to control our decisions? ? Why does the person with the least to say usually take the longest to say it? Trusting Others It has been said that you will be hurt occasionally if you trust too much. This may be true, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough. Trusting is part of our higher nature. Doubting is a lower instinct. The latter is easy to do, the former more difficult\u2014but so much more rewarding. Politeness and Courtesy You've heard the expression \"Politeness and courtesy are a small price to pay for the goodwill of others.\" In fact, I've used it myself from time to time even though I don't really agree with it. Being polite and courteous isn't paying a price any more than smiling or being happy is paying a price. You get more than you give when you are polite and courteous. You don't pay. You are paid. What You Are A favorite observation of my dad's was the following: \"Never believe you're better than anybody else, but remember that you're just as good as everybody else.\" That's important: No better, but just as good! I attempted to keep that in mind both when we weren't winning national championships and when we were. It helped me avoid getting carried away with myself. It goes back to the importance of having strong guidance and role models in the home. That's where the standards are set. Nellie and I Agreed to Be Agreeable Nellie Riley caught my eye the first time I ever saw her back at Martinsville High School in Indiana. It was on a warm star-filled night at the carnival during the summer of my freshman year. I think we probably fell in love right away and didn't even know it. Folks think Nellie and I had a perfect marriage, but it was because we worked at it. There are rough patches in any marriage. Very early we understood that there would be times when we disagreed but there would never be times when we had to be disagreeable. We kept to that rule for over half a century. Nellie and I have a great love for one another, but we understood that even love takes some work. Passion Isn't Love Love is more than passion. Passion is temporary. It isn't lasting. Love, real love, lasts. Love and Marriage Love means many things. It means giving. It means sharing. It means forgiving. It means understanding. It means being patient. It means learning. And you must always consider the other side, the other person. You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving. (Continues...) Excerpted from Wooden by John Wooden Steve Jamison Copyright \u00a9 1997 by Steve Jamison and John Wooden. Excerpted by permission of McGraw-Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "McGraw-Hill Engineering Store", "Architectural Engineering"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.19}, {"asin": "1577312295", "title": "Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life", "author": "Shakti Gawain", "description": "From Library Journal Gawain's self-help title has sold more than three million copies in English and another three million in the more than 30 languages into which it has been translated. According to the publisher, this revised anniversary edition contains additional \"meditations, exercises, and techniques that can become part of your everyday routine.\" The author asserts that people can achieve an ideal existence simply through mental visualization. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \"I do believe, and I have seen in my own life, that creative visualization works.\" About the Author Shakti Gawain is the bestselling author of Creative Visualization, Living in the Light, The Path of Transformation, Creating True Prosperity, Developing Intuition, and several other books. Her books have sold more than six million copies in thirty languages worldwide. A warm, articulate, and inspiring teacher, Shakti leads workshops internationally. For more than thirty years, she has facilitated thousands of people in learning to trust and act on their own inner truth, thus releasing and developing their creativity in every area of their lives. Shakti has appeared on such nationally syndicated shows as Oprah, Good Morning America, Sonya Live, Larry King Live, and New Dimensions Radio, and she has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Body Mind & Spirit, and Time magazine. Shakti Gawain was cofounder of New World Library along with Marc Allen. Shakti and her husband, Jim Burns, also cofounded Nataraj Publishing Company, which New World Library acquired in 1998. They make their home in Mill Valley, California. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Alternative Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 27.37}, {"asin": "B0017VYMLE", "title": "The Pearl Lagoon", "author": "Charles Nordhoff", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 25.23}, {"asin": "0446618128", "title": "The Black Dahlia", "author": "Hyman", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0385540450", "title": "The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--a Tragedy in Three Acts", "author": "Scott Anderson", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2020: Scott Anderson\u2019s The Quiet Americans is a deeply-researched history that reads like a character driven novel. At the end of World War II, the United States began turning its attention to the Soviet Union, and the relatively new CIA became integral to the covert effort to confront the Soviets. Much as he did in his epic Lawrence in Arabia , Anderson focuses on the experiences of a handful of men in order to tell the wider story. The result is both intimate and sweeping. Anderson follows four agents whose work was spread across the globe, initially directed at maintaining American ideals, but eventually decaying under the weight of politics, myopia, and overreach. Each of these men bore great costs for the work they did in the CIA. As they were altering the course of world events, the work was altering\u2014sometimes quite severely\u2014the courses of their lives. \u2013 Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review Review A New York Times Notable Book\u201c ENTHRALLING ...Lying and stealing and invading, it should be said, make for captivating reading, especially in the hands of a storyteller as skilled as Anderson...the climate of fear and intolerance that it describes in Washington also feels uncomfortably timely. \"\u2014 Kevin Peraino, The New York Times Book Review \u201cAnderson\u2019s look at four men who ran covert operations around the globe after World War II is AS THRILLING AS IT IS TRAGIC , as each man confronts the moral compromises he made in the name of democracy.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cA DARKLY ENTERTAINING tale about American espionage, set in an era when Washington\u2019s fear and skepticism about the agency resembles our climate today.\u201c \u2014 The New York Times \u201cIn his skillful and fascinating \u201cThe Quiet Americans\u201d\u2026Mr. Anderson ingeniously tells his story through the entwined sagas of four of the secret service\u2019s most adept and intrepid operatives\u201d \u2014Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal \u201cThis intriguing\u00a0book is an indictment. From its first page it argues that the\u00a0CIA\u00a0lost its way, in all senses, in the first decade of the cold war. Its witnesses are four courageous and initially idealistic patriots. Frank Wisner oversaw some of the earliest efforts to \u201croll back\u201d communism in Europe. Michael Burke was a daredevil figure in the same game. Edward Lansdale was an\u00a0\u00e9minence grise\u00a0in the Far East. Peter Sichel, a German-born Jewish wine-merchant and\u00a0Wunderkind\u2014and the only one of the four still alive\u2014held his nose as he co-opted former Nazis into the agency, an initiative cited as one of its original sins....Many of the CIA\u2019s\u00a0failures stemmed from familiar shortcomings. \u2018We all have this tendency to look for information that confirms our beliefs and to ignore what conflicts with them,\u201d explains Mr Sichel. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to give somebody information he doesn\u2019t want to hear, and the more senior they are, the worse it is. \u2019 \u2014 The Economist \"In this sweeping, vivid, beautifully observed book, Scott Anderson unearths the devastating secret history of how the Unites States lost the plot during the Cold War. By focusing on the twisty, colorful lives of four legendary spies, Anderson distills the larger geopolitical saga into an intimate story of flawed but talented men, of the 'disease of empires,' and of the inescapable moral hazard of American idealism and power. It's a hell of a book, with themes about the unintended consequences of espionage and interventionism that still resonate, powerfully, today.\"\u00a0  \u2014 Patrick Radden Keefe , author of SAY NOTHING\u201c[A] highly entertaining history of four Cold War spies...\u201d \u2014 Evan Thomas, Air Mail \u201cAnderson delivers a complex, massively scaled narrative, balancing prodigious research with riveting storytelling skills\u2026Over the course of the narrative, the author amply shows how the CIA was increasingly pushed to function as an instrument of politically charged ambitions. An engrossing history of the early days of the CIA.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Review (Starred) \u00a0\"Anderson notes the harrowing emotional cost on his subjects\u2026as the U.S. threw its support behind autocratic leaders and missed opportunities to aid legitimate liberation movements such as the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Such blunders, Anderson writes, recast the U.S. from WWII savior to \u201cone more empire in the mold of all those that had come before.\u201d Laced with vivid character sketches and vital insights into 20th-century geopolitics, this stand-out chronicle helps to make sense of the world today.\" \u2014 Publisher\u2019s Weekly (Starred)\"Anderson weaves his narrative among the lives of his subjects, highlighting aspects of their livelihoods as American spies that were at times equally frustrating, ridiculous, and chillingly dangerous\u2026A fascinating and compulsively readable account of wartime spying.\" \u2014 Library Journal About the Author SCOTT ANDERSON is the author of two novels and four works of nonfiction, including Lawrence of Arabia, an international bestseller which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. A veteran war correspondent, he is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1OPERATION DOGWOODAs Frank Wisner watched from a dark corner of the nightclub, the diverted stage spotlight swept over the crowd until it found the man who had just stepped through the entranceway. He was in his mid-forties, bespectacled and wore a well-tailored suit. He was also clearly well known at the Park Hotel for, along with drawing the spotlight, his arrival caused the nightclub band to slide into a different jazzy number.I\u2019m involved in a dangerous game,Every other day I change my name,The face is different, but the body\u2019s the same,Boo boo, baby, I\u2019m a spy!Wisner felt a growing irritation, directed less at the song than at the man being serenaded. His name was Lanning \u201cPacky\u201d Macfarland, and he was, in fact, a spy, the head of the Istanbul branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America\u2019s wartime intelligence agency. He was also the man that Frank Wisner, a fellow OSS officer, had made the 1,400-mile overland journey from Cairo to meet.You have heard of Mata Hari,We did business cash and carry,Papa caught us and we had to marry,Boo boo, baby, I\u2019m a spy!\u201cBoo Boo, Baby, I\u2019m a Spy\u201d was a popular ditty in Istanbul in the spring of 1944, and with no group more so than the habitu\u00e9s of the Park Hotel bar. Located near the sprawling German consulate in neutral Turkey\u2019s largest city, the bar was the favored watering hole for officials of the Abwehr, the Nazi military intelligence agency. Naturally, that status also made it a destination spot for all the other spies circulating through wartime Istanbul, along with the assorted lowlifes\u2014con men and arms merchants, prostitutes and pimps\u2014inevitably drawn to such an underworld. Wisner had arrived early for his rendezvous with Macfarland and situated himself in a dark corner of the bar so as to avoid notice, a pointless precaution judging by the extravagant welcome given the American spy chief.Now, as a lad, I\u2019m not so bad,In fact, I\u2019m a darn good lover.But look, my sweet, let\u2019s be discreet,And do this undercover.In Macfarland\u2019s defense, he may have simply accepted as absurd any notion that his Axis counterparts didn\u2019t know exactly who he was; as author Barry Rubin notes, World War II\u2013era Istanbul practically survived on espionage: \u201cWould-be spies for rent strolled up and down Istiklal Boulevard and around Taksim Square with its neo-baroque monument to the republic. They lounged in Istanbul\u2019s bars, dining places, nightclubs, and dance halls. . . . \u200bThe music from the cafes and the bells of the crowded trolleys played accompaniment as men weaved through the streets trying to follow or evade each other.\u201dI\u2019m so cocky, I could swagger.The things I know would make you stagger.I\u2019m ten percent cloak and ninety percent dagger,Boo boo, baby, I\u2019m a spy!Certainly, Macfarland\u2019s own OSS colleagues had been little help in maintaining his cover as a banker with the U.S. government\u2019s Lend-Lease program, the wartime structure that funneled American weapons and mat\u00e9riel to its allies. Soon after setting up shop in the Istanbul Lend-Lease office, the frustrated spymaster had fired off a despairing cable to OSS Cairo: \u201cPlease, please, please! Instruct everyone to leave out any reference whatsoever to Office of Strategic Services in addressing envelopes. Today there came two more that bear this inscription.\u201dThe element of farce aside, the mission of the OSS in wartime Istanbul was deadly serious\u2014so deadly serious, in fact, that by the time of Wisner\u2019s arrival in the city, Packy Macfarland had managed to compromise a whole series of intelligence missions and may have been instrumental in prolonging the course of World War II. Indeed, so calamitous was the workings of his Operation Dogwood, a spy network that extended throughout Eastern Europe but which had been thoroughly infiltrated by Nazi agents, that many details of the story still remain classified. What is known is that by the late spring of 1944, OSS leadership in Washington had become so alarmed by the dire news coming out of Istanbul on Dogwood that they scrambled to find an operative close at hand who might be brought in to stanch the bleeding. The man they chose was a thirty-four-year-old naval officer attached to OSS Cairo, Frank Gardiner Wisner.It was a call Wisner had been awaiting ever since joining the military three years earlier. In that time, his lot had been to look over legal briefs and shuffle paper, to sit in a back-base office and collate the fieldwork of others. Now, by being dispatched to Istanbul, he was finally going into the field with the opportunity to accomplish something tangible, and he set to the housecleaning mission in Istanbul with a zeal. OSS higher-ups swiftly took note of the contrast between their two men in Turkey; just days after his arrival, Wisner was made head of the Secret Intelligence branch of OSS Istanbul, then shortly after named chief of the entire mission, with Macfarland bundled off to a posting in Yugoslavia where he could do little harm. At long last, Frank Wisner had arrived. The inauspicious trappings of his meeting with Macfarland at the Park Hotel notwithstanding, he was now on his way to becoming one of the most important and powerful figures of the American intelligence community in the twentieth century.Childhood acquaintances of Frank Gardiner Wisner rarely recalled seeing him walk; he seemed to run everywhere. Even as a boy, he fairly crackled with a kind of impatient energy. In a photograph taken of him around the age of eight or nine and in which he is posing with two other boys, he appears to be practically bursting out of his Sunday suit, as if clothes are just another thing getting in his way, slowing him down.Wisner was born in the town of Laurel, in the swampy, yellow pinelands of southeastern Mississippi. Even today, Laurel dubs itself \u201cthe town that lumber built,\u201d although \u201clumber\u201d might more accurately be traded out for \u201cthe Iowans.\u201d In the early 1890s, a group of prospectors from eastern Iowa moved into the economically moribund Deep South town, and proceeded to both buy up vast tracts of the surrounding yellow pine forest, and then to build a state-of-the-art lumber mill. Among the newcomers was Frank Wisner\u2019s father, Frank George.Their timing was propitious, for within a few years the lumbering of Southern Yellow Pine was experiencing a nationwide boom, making the Midwestern transplants in Laurel\u2014along with the Wisners, there were the Gardiners and Eastmans\u2014fabulously wealthy. According to one local historian, by the 1920s Laurel boasted more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation, and had converted the once scrubby little town in the pinelands into an unlikely architectural showcase, with a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and mansions lining its own Fifth Avenue.At its heart, Laurel was a boomtown. As such, it had far more in common with, say, the mining settlements of Montana or the oilfields of California than with its Mississippi counterparts. In this most rigidly segregated state of the Deep South, blacks and whites worked alongside each other in Laurel\u2019s Eastman-Gardiner lumber mill, and there was a degree of racial intermingling virtually unheard-of elsewhere in Mississippi. In the black sections of town, the Iowans funded parks and streetlights and, in 1926, one of the first high schools for black children in the state, a development regarded as shocking, even subversive, by many Mississippi whites at the time.All of this made Frank Wisner, born in Laurel in 1909, something of an oddity, a hybrid of two very different cultures. While his childhood bore all the hallmarks of the privileged white Southerner\u2014he was raised by a black nanny, and black housekeepers tended to the expansive Wisner home on Fifth Avenue\u2014his family had little in common with the Mississippi \u201caristocracy,\u201d those wealthy landowning families who traced their roots back to pre\u2013Civil War days and who remained steeped in nostalgic notions of the Old South. Instead, from a very early age, Frank Wisner had his sights set beyond Mississippi. After graduating from the local high school at sixteen, he was dispatched to one of the South\u2019s better preparatory boarding schools, Woodberry Forest in Virginia, then sent on the obligatory grand tour of Europe prior to going to college. For his part, Frank Wisner never truly regarded himself as a Southerner except, his middle son, Ellis, recalled, on those occasions when outsiders denigrated the region. \u201cThat\u2019s when he got his back up,\u201d Ellis Wisner recalled. \u201cIf people made fun of it, that\u2019s when he became a Southerner.\u201dThis was a distinction lost on most of his future CIA associates. To them, Frank Wisner seemed the very epitome of the Southern gentleman\u2014his colleagues invariably remarked upon his politeness and good manners, his soft rounded drawl\u2014and, as a result, often ascribed stereotypes to him which didn\u2019t really apply.Perhaps the most inapt was the stereotype of Southerners being laid-back, even a bit slow. Much to the contrary, by his adolescence, Wisner seemed propelled by a kind of edgy anxiety, the need to prove something to himself and to others. Along with being quite small for his age, he suffered a series of childhood illnesses that left him bedridden for weeks or even months at a time. This was undoubtedly an enormous worry to his parents\u2014they had lost two children in infancy prior to Frank, and would lose another afterward\u2014and might easily have resulted in a cosseted youth. Instead, these frailties appeared to spur a fierce self-discipline. On his college track team at the University of Virginia, Wisner was such a standout sprinter and broad jumper that he was invited to try out for the American Olympic team. \u201cAnd that\u2019s where you see the conservativeness of the family come in,\u201d said Graham Wisner, the youngest of Wisner\u2019s three sons. \u201cMy dad was, I don\u2019t know, maybe the second or third fastest runner in the country, but his father said no. \u2018A gentleman does not do athletics when he should be going to law school and starting a career. A gentleman is serious.\u2019\u2009\u201dWisner obeyed his father\u2019s dictate, and instead turned his fire-at-the-heels sensibility to academics. After receiving his undergraduate degree at Virginia, he went on to its law school, one of the most demanding and select in the nation. There, he sat on the Law Review, finished third in his graduating class, and was inducted into UVa\u2019s most exclusive secret club, the Seven Society. To the surprise of no one, within weeks of his graduation in 1934, the newly minted attorney was hired on by a prestigious Wall Street law firm, Carter Ledyard.At that juncture, it seemed Frank Wisner was determined to check off all the requisite boxes that marked the rites of passage of the successful, if utterly conventional, American man\u2014albeit to do so a bit faster than most. Two years after he joined Carter Ledyard, he married his girlfriend, Mary \u201cPolly\u201d Ellis Knowles. Moving into a spacious apartment on Manhattan\u2019s East 57th Street, the couple soon had the first of what would ultimately be four children. By 1938, the twenty-nine-year-old corporate lawyer\u2014most of his work was for the American Express Company\u2014was already highly regarded in the tightknit Wall Street legal community, and well on his way to becoming a Carter Ledyard partner.\u201cHe came up with very defined parameters of his own behavior,\u201d Graham Wisner explained. \u201cThis is what men of his class, of his time, did, what was expected of them.\u201dAnd yet, for all his life\u2019s ease and privilege, it somehow didn\u2019t satisfy. Always keenly interested in politics and world affairs, Wisner closely monitored the march to war in Europe and, after the fall of France to the German war machine in 1940, became convinced the United States would eventually intervene. But \u201ceventually\u201d wasn\u2019t a word that sat well with the hard-driving lawyer; in early 1941, he told his startled Carter Ledyard colleagues of his plan to take a leave of absence from the firm and join the Navy. No doubt those colleagues tried to talk him out of the idea\u2014after all, Wisner had a wife and now two young children to support\u2014but instead, and under the weight of his considerable persuasive skills, ended up writing Wisner glowing letters of recommendation.By that spring, the lawyer from Mississippi had received his naval commission\u2014lieutenant, junior grade\u2014and was assigned to the New York branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI. He was there when Pearl Harbor was attacked that December.But if Wisner had been prescient in enlisting before the United States came into the war, he quickly discovered the downside of leading a life of advantage. Taking note of his academic and professional pedigree, his ONI superiors immediately shunted Wisner into a managerial role\u2014and in 1941, just as today, \u201cmanagerial\u201d was usually shorthand for sitting behind a desk. Matters didn\u2019t improve when he was transferred to the naval cable and radio censorship office for the New York district. While that posting came with the benefit of allowing Wisner to continue to live with his family, it was also mind-numbingly dull. \u201cHe had a joke about it,\u201d his eldest son, Frank Wisner Jr., recalled, \u201cthat in the Navy, they gave him command of a cutter. A paper cutter, that is, chopping up documents.\u201dAfter enduring the censorship office for nearly two years and seeing no end in sight, Wisner desperately looked to transfer to any military branch that might offer something more interesting. His lucky break came when an old Carter Ledyard colleague passed his name on to another former corporate lawyer who had joined in the war effort, William Donovan. As unpromising as that might sound, Donovan was no typical lawyer and neither was the wartime agency that he headed. Instead, the sixty-year-old attorney from Buffalo, New York, had earned his nickname, \u201cWild Bill,\u201d through heroism on the battlefields of World War I Europe, and he was now President Roosevelt\u2019s handpicked spymaster, the director of the Office of Strategic Services.The adjectives used to describe William J. Donovan tend to run to hyperbole: brilliant, charismatic, fearless, larger-than-life. A former CIA officer based in postwar Berlin offered a different one: \u201cExhausting. He was a wonderful man, with an extraordinary mind, but he just never damn stopped.\u201d Donovan occasionally visited Berlin in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and sometimes stayed in the CIA officer\u2019s home. \u201cHe\u2019d keep you up till one or two in the morning peppering you with questions, and then he\u2019d be up at seven and he would start in all over again.\u201dBy the time Frank Wisner\u2019s r\u00e9sum\u00e9 landed on his desk in October 1943, Wild Bill Donovan had been a prominent figure on the American political landscape for the previous quarter-century. A very successful Ivy League\u2013educated lawyer, he had first garnered notice in the early days of World War I when he vigorously lobbied for the United States to join the military alliance of Great Britain, France and Russia; what made this noteworthy was that, as an Irish Catholic Republican, Donovan was from an ethnic group that overwhelmingly favored neutrality in the conflict. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "0345476093", "title": "The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I", "author": "Barbara Wertheim Tuchman", "description": "Review \u201cA brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill\u2019s statement that the first month of World War I was \u2018a drama never surpassed.\u2019\u201d \u2014 Newsweek \u201cMore dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative\u2014beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cA fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \u201c[ The Guns of August ] has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal About the Author Barbara W. Tuchman (1912\u20131989) achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August \u2014a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, and The First Salute . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 A Funeral So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens\u2014four dowager and three regnant\u2014and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history\u2019s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again. In the center of the front row rode the new king, George V, flanked on his left by the Duke of Connaught, the late king\u2019s only surviving brother, and on his right by a personage to whom, acknowledged The Times, \u201cbelongs the first place among all the foreign mourners,\u201d who \u201ceven when relations are most strained has never lost his popularity amongst us\u201d\u2014William II, the German Emperor. Mounted on a gray horse, wearing the scarlet uniform of a British Field Marshal, carrying the baton of that rank, the Kaiser had composed his features behind the famous upturned mustache in an expression \u201cgrave even to severity.\u201d Of the several emotions churning his susceptible breast, some hints exist in his letters. \u201cI am proud to call this place my home and to be a member of this royal family,\u201d he wrote home after spending the night in Windsor Castle in the former apartments of his mother. Sentiment and nostalgia induced by these melancholy occasions with his English relatives jostled with pride in his supremacy among the assembled potentates and with a fierce relish in the disappearance of his uncle from the European scene. He had come to bury Edward his bane; Edward the arch plotter, as William conceived it, of Germany\u2019s encirclement; Edward his mother\u2019s brother whom he could neither bully nor impress, whose fat figure cast a shadow between Germany and the sun. \u201cHe is Satan. You cannot imagine what a Satan he is!\u201d This verdict, announced by the Kaiser before a dinner of three hundred guests in Berlin in 1907, was occasioned by one of Edward\u2019s continental tours undertaken with clearly diabolical designs at encirclement. He had spent a provocative week in Paris, visited for no good reason the King of Spain (who had just married his niece), and finished with a visit to the King of Italy with obvious intent to seduce him from his Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria. The Kaiser, possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe, had worked himself into a frenzy ending in another of those comments that had periodically over the past twenty years of his reign shattered the nerves of diplomats. Happily the Encircler was now dead and replaced by George who, the Kaiser told Theodore Roosevelt a few days before the funeral, was \u201ca very nice boy\u201d (of forty-five, six years younger than the Kaiser). \u201cHe is a thorough Englishman and hates all foreigners but I do not mind that as long as he does not hate Germans more than other foreigners.\u201d Alongside George, William now rode confidently, saluting as he passed the regimental colors of the 1st Royal Dragoons of which he was honorary colonel. Once he had distributed photographs of himself wearing their uniform with the Delphic inscription written above his signature, \u201cI bide my time.\u201d Today his time had come; he was supreme in Europe. Behind him rode the widowed Queen Alexandra\u2019s two brothers, King Frederick of Denmark and King George of the Hellenes; her nephew, King Haakon of Norway; and three kings who were to lose their thrones: Alfonso of Spain, Manuel of Portugal and, wearing a silk turban, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria who annoyed his fellow sovereigns by calling himself Czar and kept in a chest a Byzantine Emperor\u2019s full regalia, acquired from a theatrical costumer, against the day when he should reassemble the Byzantine dominions beneath his scepter. Dazzled by these \u201csplendidly mounted princes,\u201d as The Times called them, few observers had eyes for the ninth king, the only one among them who was to achieve greatness as a man. Despite his great height and perfect horsemanship, Albert, King of the Belgians, who disliked the pomp of royal ceremony, contrived in that company to look both embarrassed and absentminded. He was then thirty-five and had been on the throne barely a year. In later years when his face became known to the world as a symbol of heroism and tragedy, it still always wore that abstracted look, as if his mind were on something else. The future source of tragedy, tall, corpulent, and corseted, with green plumes waving from his helmet, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir of the old Emperor Franz Josef, rode on Albert\u2019s right, and on his left another scion who would never reach his throne, Prince Yussuf, heir of the Sultan of Turkey. After the kings came the royal highnesses: Prince Fushimi, brother of the Emperor of Japan; Grand Duke Michael, brother of the Czar of Russia; the Duke of Aosta in bright blue with green plumes, brother of the King of Italy; Prince Carl, brother of the King of Sweden; Prince Henry, consort of the Queen of Holland; and the Crown Princes of Serbia, Rumania, and Montenegro. The last named, Prince Danilo, \u201can amiable, extremely handsome young man of delightful manners,\u201d resembled the Merry Widow\u2019s lover in more than name, for, to the consternation of British functionaries, he had arrived the night before accompanied by a \u201ccharming young lady of great personal attractions\u201d whom he introduced as his wife\u2019s lady in waiting with the explanation that she had come to London to do some shopping. A regiment of minor German royalty followed: rulers of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Waldeck-Pyrmont, Saxe-Coburg Gotha, of Saxony, Hesse, W\u00fcrttemberg, Baden, and Bavaria, of whom the last, Crown Prince Rupprecht, was soon to lead a German army in battle. There were a Prince of Siam, a Prince of Persia, five princes of the former French royal house of Orl\u00e9ans, a brother of the Khedive of Egypt wearing a gold-tasseled fez, Prince Tsia-tao of China in an embroidered light-blue gown whose ancient dynasty had two more years to run, and the Kaiser\u2019s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, representing the German Navy, of which he was Commander in Chief. Amid all this magnificence were three civilian-coated gentlemen, M. Gaston-Carlin of Switzerland, M. Pichon, Foreign Minister of France, and former President Theodore Roosevelt, special envoy of the United States. Edward, the object of this unprecedented gathering of nations, was often called the \u201cUncle of Europe,\u201d a title which, insofar as Europe\u2019s ruling houses were meant, could be taken literally. He was the uncle not only of Kaiser Wilhelm but also, through his wife\u2019s sister, the Dowager Empress Marie of Russia, of Czar Nicolas II. His own niece Alix was the Czarina; his daughter Maud was Queen of Norway; another niece, Ena, was Queen of Spain; a third niece, Marie, was soon to be Queen of Rumania. The Danish family of his wife, besides occupying the throne of Denmark, had mothered the Czar of Russia and supplied kings to Greece and Norway. Other relatives, the progeny at various removes of Queen Victoria\u2019s nine sons and daughters, were scattered in abundance throughout the courts of Europe. Yet not family feeling alone nor even the suddenness and shock of Edward\u2019s death\u2014for to public knowledge he had been ill one day and dead the next\u2014accounted for the unexpected flood of condolences at his passing. It was in fact a tribute to Edward\u2019s great gifts as a sociable king which had proved invaluable to his country. In the nine short years of his reign England\u2019s splendid isolation had given way, under pressure, to a series of \u201cunderstandings\u201d or attachments, but not quite alliances\u2014for England dislikes the definitive\u2014with two old enemies, France and Russia, and one promising new power, Japan. The resulting shift in balance registered itself around the world and affected every state\u2019s relations with every other. Though Edward neither initiated nor influenced his country\u2019s policy, his personal diplomacy helped to make the change possible. Taken as a child to visit France, he had said to Napoleon III: \u201cYou have a nice country. I would like to be your son.\u201d This preference for things French, in contrast to or perhaps in protest against his mother\u2019s for the Germanic, lasted, and after her death was put to use. When England, growing edgy over the challenge implicit in Germany\u2019s Naval Program of 1900, decided to patch up old quarrels with France, Edward\u2019s talents as Roi Charmeur smoothed the way. In 1903 he went to Paris, disregarding advice that an official state visit would find a cold welcome. On his arrival the crowds were sullen and silent except for a few taunting cries of \u201cVivent les Boers!\u201d and \u201cVive Fashoda!\u201d which the King ignored. To a worried aide who muttered, \u201cThe French don\u2019t like us,\u201d he replied, \u201cWhy should they?\u201d and continued bowing and smiling from his carriage. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0393322238", "title": "Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders", "author": "Vincent Bugliosi", "description": "Review \"One of the best crime stories ever written.\" \u2015 Chicago Sun-Times \"[A] social document of rare importance.\" \u2015 The New Republic About the Author Vincent Bugliosi (1934\u20152015), was the prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Helter Skelter , Outrage , and other #1 bestselling books. Curt Gentry (1931-2014), an Edgar winner, was the author of J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets , Frame-Up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings , and co-author of Helter Skelter with Vincent Bugliosi.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.29}, {"asin": "0544944437", "title": "Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises", "author": "Lesley M. M. Blume", "description": "Review A New York Times Bestseller\u00a0 A Washington Post Notable Book of 2016? \"The story behind Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is totally captivating, smartly written, and provocative.\" \u2014 Glamour \"Meticulously document[ed] ... pacily written ... Ms. Blume has drawn deeply upon many sources, particularly Hemingway\u2019s own correspondence, to deftly portray the cast of lost characters, their thin-skinned vanities and their quarrelsome insecurities.\" \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \"Fiendishly readable ... a deeply, almost obsessively researched biography of a book, supported by a set of superb endnotes worth reading in their own right.\" \u2014 Washington Post \"Masterfully told ... \u201cEverybody Behaves Badly\u201d is deeply evocative and perceptive, and every page has a Hemingway-like ring of unvarnished truth.\" \u2014 Christian Science Monitor \"[A] must-read ... In Lesley M.M. Blume's latest release, escape to the real-life world of Hemingway's groundbreaking piece of modern literature, The Sun Also Rises. The boozy, rowdy nights in Paris, the absurdities at Pamplona's Running of the Bulls and the hungover brunches of the true Lost Generation come to life in this intimate look at the lives of the author's expatriate comrades.\" \u2014 Harper's Bazaar \"[An] impeccably researched and resonant account of the true story behind The Sun Also Rises ... Everybody Behaves Badly breaks ground by stressing how important The Sun Also Rises was in bringing modernist literature to a commercial audience and, especially, the part Fitzgerald played in helping to encourage Hemingway and shape his manuscript.\" \u2014 The Financial Times \u201cWithout sounding unduly disapproving or moralistic, Blume gives us a portrait of the artist as a young opportunist \u2026 [an] excellent book.\u201d \u2014 The Times Literary Supplement \u201cMy favorite book of 2016 ... a fascinating recreation of one of the most mythic periods in American literature\u2014the one set in Paris in the \u201920s\u2014and about the writers and artists who were drawn there: Hemingway\u2019s friends, mentors, lovers, and enemies. Everyone behaved badly indeed, Hemingway worst of all, which is one reason it\u2019s hard to stop reading.\u201d \u2014 Jay McInerney \"As meticulous a history of the early 20th Century as it is a true drama-fueled page-turner starring characters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Everybody Behaves Badly ticks both beach read and academic columns.\" \u2014 Tory Burch Daily \"A spirited account of a spirited age, when writers saw an opportunity to change the culture ... Blume presents a sharp portrait of a young nobody desperately, sometimes maliciously, trying to become a great \u2014 if not the great \u2014 writer of his time.\u00a0 Despite the wobbly tower of books about Hemingway, it seems we can\u2019t keep from returning to him, and writers like Blume make it worth our while.\" \u2014 Los Angeles Review of Books \"Thick with juicy details...[with] a fascinating epilogue ... Blume writes that the outline alone for her book ran to 1,400 pages. And every page of that labor is visible.\" \u2014 Dallas Morning News \u201c[A] vivid character- and fact-filled book \u2026 One of the distinguishing features of Everybody Behaves Badly is just ho \u2014 About the Author LESLEY M. M. BLUME is an award-winning journalist, author, and cultural historian. She contributes regularly to Vanity Fair, and her work has appeared in\u00a0many other publications , including the New York Times , The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Town & Country, and The Paris Review Daily. She is a New Yorker currently based in Los Angeles.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 14.29}, {"asin": "0802127908", "title": "Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam", "author": "Mark Bowden", "description": "Review Praise for Hue 1968 One of the Wall Street Journal 's top 10 nonfiction books of 2017 One of the Washington Post \u2019s 50 notable works of nonfiction in 2017 An Amazon Top 100 book of the year Longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for excellence in nonfiction An ALA Notable Book of the Year A Christian Science Monitor , Kirkus Reviews , Military Times , Hudson Booksellers, and Chicago Public Library best book of the year \"An extraordinary feat of journalism . . . Through his scrupulous day-by-day reconstruction of this battle, Bowden encapsulates the essential lessons of the Vietnam War . . . Hue 1968 is also an exploration of what is common to all wars: humankind's capacity for violence, cruelty, self-sacrifice, bravery, cowardice and love. Mr. Bowden undertakes this task with the talent and sensibility of a master journalist who is also a humanist and an honest man . . . the book is full of emotion and color . . . You will find the reading gripping.\" \u2015Karl Marlantes, Wall Street Journal \"A remarkable book.\" \u2015Dave Davies, NPR's Fresh Air \u201c[A] magnificent and meticulous history, which tells, with excruciating detail, a story that is both inspiring and infuriating . . . Bowden\u2019s interviews, almost half a century on, with those who fought, on both sides, have produced unexampled descriptions of small-unit combat.\u201d \u2015George F. Will, Washington Post \"Bowden . . . applies his signature blend of deep reportage and character-driven storytelling to bring readers a fresh look at the 1968 battle in the Vietnamese city of Hue . . . [A] compelling and highly readable narrative . . . A meticulous and vivid retelling of an important battle.\" \u2015Linda Robinson, New York Times Book Review \"An instantly recognizable classic of military history . . . Bowden tells this story with a power and a wealth of detail that no previous history of this offensive has approached.\" \u2015Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor \"A gripping, and timely, history . . . powerful . . . [ Hue 1968 ] is likely to claim a place on the shelf of essential books about the Vietnam War. Based on hundreds of interviews, news accounts, histories and military archives, the book combines intensive research with Bowden's propulsive narrative style and insightful analysis . . . What sets Bowden's account of the battle apart is his skill at moving from the macro\u2015the history of the war, the politics surrounding it, the tactics of the battle\u2015to the micro: the individuals, American and Vietnamese, who fought it and tried to survive it.\" \u2015Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times \"Bowden is one of the great journalists of our generation, and with this book he provides a captivating account of the pivotal battle that did so much to alter the trajectories of not just the Vietnam War, but also American politics and our nation's global posture. With its capacious research that includes the perspectives of combatants and civilians, Vietnamese and Americans, presidents and privates, it epitomizes what a definitive account should be.\" \u2015 Foreign Policy \u201cAn engrossing, fair-minded, up-close account of one of the great battles in the long struggle for Vietnam.\u201d \u2015 Washington Post , \u201c50 notable works of nonfiction in 2017\u201d \"A masterful blood-and-guts account of the decisive battle in the Vietnam War . . . The heart and soul of Hue 1968 lies with its vivid and often wrenching descriptions of the 'storm of war' as soldiers and South Vietnamese citizens experienced it.\" \u2015 Minneapolis Star-Tribune \"Bowden's excellent Hue 1968 . . . gives us the clearest picture yet of what happened in Vietnam and in Hue, where today tourists casually shoot pictures where murderous shots once were fired.\" \u2015George Petras, USA Today , 4 out of 4 stars \u201cIn a 539-page narrative, Bowden delivers a work of grand ambition: impassioned, powerful and revelatory at its best, and the most comprehensive yet on the Tet Offensive\u2019s bloodiest confrontation.\u201d \u2015Gregg Jones, Dallas Morning News \u201cMark Bowden\u2019s book Hue 1968 is a must-read. Many lessons, including how government can lie and [the] role of an effective media in finding truth. Timely.\u201d \u2015Michael Morell, former acting director of the CIA \"For readers who enjoy learning about battle tactics and bloody encounters, Bowden delivers, as he did in Black Hawk Down . The book offers so much more than that, however. For readers who care little about military strategy or precisely how each combatant died, Bowden offers copious context about why it matters what occurred in Vietnam at the beginning of 1968\u2015why it mattered so much then, and why it matters so much in 2017 . . . Bowden is masterful in introducing characters whose names have often never appeared in the news but whose actions help explain the complications for the United States of becoming involved in faraway wars involving nearly invisible enemies.\" \u2015Steve Weinberg, Philadelphia Inquirer \"Dazzling . . . Bowden's account of the battle delivers gut punches from start to finish . . . Most impressive of all, Bowden deftly blends clear descriptions of complex troop movements with careful attention to the human impact of the fighting . . . Bowden deserves enormous credit for calling new attention to an often-overlooked battle and especially for recovering the experiences of those who fought amid otherworldly horrors.\" \u2015Mark Atwood Lawrence, Boston Globe \u201cSearing . . . Bowden revisits the historic battle with the same character-driven, grunt-level reporting style that made Black Hawk Down a bestseller. He lends a sympathetic ear to surviving soldiers on both sides, as well as guerrillas and civilians, and gives a vivid account of courage and cowardice, heroism and slaughter.\u201d \u2015Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times \u201cA powerful account of a critical battle in Vietnam . . . Bowden\u2019s attention to detail is flawless . . . This kind of fine-tuned detail\u2015and sense of mystery\u2015is the soul of a good historical account . . . The book is a mighty piece of work, and as fine an account of a battle as you will likely read. Hell, I wish I had written it.\u201d \u2015Anthony Loyd, Times (UK) \"Nearly 50 years after the battle for the city of Hue, this history reads as fresh as today's news . . . every page merits reading.\" \u2015 Military Times \u201cAn unsparing look at the Vietnam War and how it changed America.\u201d \u2015Monte Whaley, Denver Post , \u201cStaff pick\u201d \u201cSmart, well-reported and hypnotic in spots.\u201d \u2015Joe Gross, American-Statesman \u201c Hue 1968 pulls off a rare feat: it takes a conflict of terrible scale and consequence, and allows us to see it unfold at the street level, through the eyes of Vietnamese and American soldiers engaged in the struggle, journalists and activists observing the chaos, and the civilians caught in the crossfire . . . His emphasis on firsthand accounts gives a vital heart to the unfolding events . . . Not only are the personal stories Bowden uncovers at turns deeply moving and horrifying, but they also pose uncomfortable parallels with current events in the Middle East and Afghanistan.\u201d \u2015Sebastien Roblin, National Interest \u201cThoroughly researched and compelling . . . This is as much a book about what happens to peoples\u2019 hearts, minds, and bodies in the swirling chaos of urban combat as it is a history of a specific battle and an assessment of its strategic significance. We come to know a fair number of the participants quite well by the end of the story\u2015one source of the book\u2019s unusual power and authenticity . . . With a novelist\u2019s eye for evoking the grim atmospherics of a hellish locale and the characters within it, Bowden reconstructs dozens of scenes of heart-pounding combat . . . Bowden\u2019s coverage of the \u2018other side\u2019 . . . gives this book a richer texture, and more balance, than any of the earlier books on Hue . . . Anyone looking to understand what Vietnam was all about would do well to read Hue 1968 . Without a doubt, it\u2019s one of the very best books to be written about Vietnam in the last decade.\u201d \u2015James A. Warren, Daily Beast \u201cI am still recovering from the astonishment and appreciation of the reporting and writing in Mark Bowden\u2019s latest book: Hue 1968 , a story of a single battle that encompassed so much of what occurred in that epic year of our history.\u201d \u2015Mike Barnicle, Politico \"A relentlessly immediate chronicle of the bloody, month-long centerpiece of the Tet Offensive . . . This is the definitive account of a turning point in America's Vietnam strategy and in public opinion about the war.\u201d \u2015 Wall Street Journal , \u201ctop 10 nonfiction books of 2017\u201d \u201c[A] skillful, gripping account of the turning point of the Vietnam War.\u201d \u2015 Christian Science Monitor , \u201c30 best books of 2017\u201d \u201cBowden confronts head-on the horrific senselessness of battle and the toll it takes on people, and he grants Hue the regard it deserves as a defining moment in a war that continues to influence how America views its role in the world.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"This Vietnam story reads like a movie but it's all true.\" \u2015 Courier-Journal (Louisville) \"An extraordinary account of the most important and costly battle of the Vietnam War.\" \u2015Don McCullin, legendary photojournalist who covered the Battle of Hue \"In this meticulous retelling of one critical battle, Mark Bowden captures the nuanced and often invisible threads of America's political, military and cultural blindness in Vietnam. Hue 1968 is the new classic about America's Vietnam War.\" \u2015Elizabeth Becker, author of When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution \"A detailed, multifaceted account.\" \u2015Tirdad Derakhsani, Philadelphia Inquirer \u201cThoroughly researched, this epic chronicle takes the reader back to a time when America still saw itself as invincible\u2015and acted that way . . . fast-paced . . . A powerful piece of journalism.\u201d\u2015 David Kindy, Providence Journal \u201cAn outstanding work of reportage and storytelling.\u201d\u2015 Paul Davis, Washington Times \"[A] master storyteller.\u201d \u2015John David, Decatur Daily \u201cBowden interviewed people on both sides, to great effect, and weaves a dense but compelling narrative about a battle that was a microcosm of the entire conflict.\u201d \u2015Alex Prud\u2019homme, Omnivoracious , favorite reads of 2017 \"A stirring history of the 1968 battle that definitively turned the Vietnam War into an American defeat . . . Building on portraits of combatants on all sides, Bowden delivers an anecdotally rich, careful account of the complex campaign to take the city. One of the best books on a single action in Vietnam, written by a tough, seasoned journalist who brings the events of a half-century past into sharp relief.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \"An epic masterpiece of heroism and sacrifice, and a testament to the tragic futility of the American experience in Vietnam.\" \u2015 Booklist (starred review) \u201cThe best history of the battle for Vietnam\u2019s imperial city of Hue.\u201d \u2015William D. Bushnell, Military Officer Magazine \"In his monumental new book, Bowden . . . gives voice to dozens, including Nguyen Quang Ha, whose five-man team emerged from underground caves to strike the first blow for North Vietnamese forces, Bob Thompson, a career marine officer charged with taking back the US stronghold at the Citadel, President Lyndon Johnson and General William Westmoreland in Washington, DC and reporters David Halberstam, Michael Herr, Gene Roberts, Walter Cronkite and others who changed the way Americans perceived the war.\" \u2015Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com \" Hue 1968 unravels one of the great mysteries of our time\u2015how a puny force of North Vietnam regulars and local sympathizers could without warning occupy South Vietnam's second largest city, hold it for a month, then disappear into the mountains, beyond reach and largely unbloodied. It turns out the force wasn't puny, but fanatical warriors who gripped their prey by the throat and wouldn't let go. They were unfazed by waves of counter-attackers, Vietnamese and American soldiers, but mostly Marines rushed in to defeat them. Hue 1968 shows the enormous challenges facing both sides and how they overcame them, or tried to. Did the Battle of Hue end up as a victory or defeat? The answer depends on who's asking and who's telling. Bowden takes on both roles and does it well.\" \u2015Lieutenant Colonel Charles A. Krohn (ret.), author of The Lost Battalion of Tet \" Hue 1968 is, by far, the most comprehensive (and balanced) coverage on this battle I've seen. Like never before, I've come to realize how narrow a perspective we low-level participants unavoidably had. While giving due respect to the abilities, actions and fighting spirit of the U.S. and ARVN Marines and soldiers who participated, Mark Bowden brought clarity to the larger intelligence, political and strategic shortcomings that made the prosecution of this battle so much more challenging and costly than it needed to be.\" \u2015Brigadier General Mike Downs, USMC (ret.) \"The longest and fiercest fighting of the Tet Offensive took place in and around Hue in early 1968 where Communist North Vietnam suffered a terrible military defeat. Yet the fight for Hue became a political victory for the leaders of North Vietnam and a turning point for US involvement and support for the war. Through searing personal accounts of many on both sides who were there, Mark Bowden reveals the intensity of the fighting. Relying on archival documents now available after 50 years, he also examines the considerations and decisions of political and military leaders at the highest levels. This book is a tragic tale of misunderstanding but also one of great heroism and sacrifice by those who fought in the streets of Hue and in the nearby rice paddies and villages.\" \u2015Brigadier General Howard T. Prince II, USA (ret.), Commanding Officer, Bravo Company, 5/7 Cavalry, 1968 \"Mark Bowden uniquely describes the battle from both sides of the front lines and vividly captures the remarkable courage and valor of those that participated in the crucible of war that was Hue City in January to March 1968. Surely to be an historical standard for the recollection of that Tet 1968 battle.\" \u2015Colonel Chuck Meadows, USMC (ret.), Former Commanding Officer of Golf Company 2ndBn 5thMar \"I am a US Marine Vietnam veteran who participated as a tank crewmen in the Tet 1968 battle for Hue City. I have read just about every written account of the month-long battle, and I have to say that all of the other well-written, well-documented accounts of the battle pale in comparison to Mark Bowden's Hue 1968 . There is no more complete, accurate and detailed book. It reads like a novel even though is it made up almost exclusively of very personal accounts.\" \u2015John Wear, president of the USMC Vietnam Tankers Association \"Powerfully told, and a vivid depiction of individual courage and national hubris.\u201d \u2015William J. Burns, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace \u201cThe definitive history of the battle for Hue . . . It is a riveting account . . . of valor, heroism, rank foolhardiness, and unshakable camaraderie . . . More than anything, Hue 1968 is the story of the entire Vietnam War in microcosm.\u201d \u2015Michael M. Rosen, Claremont Review of Books About the Author Mark Bowden is the author of thirteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down . He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for the Atlantic , Vanity Fair , and other magazines. He is also the writer in residence at the University of Delaware. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Word passed quickly from foxhole to foxhole that they were going. DiLeo felt\u2015what?\u2015relief wasn't a strong enough word. He felt a stab of hope, of exhilarating hope. He had seen so much in the past two days. He had helped carry the shattered bodies of the wounded to the helicopters for evacuation. He had seen the man whose warmth comforted him in his hole through a freezing wet night lying stiff and dead. He had seen two men, one of them his good friend, simply erased from existence in an instant. He had been shot, albeit not badly. It had made him feel, not imagine or think, but feel how temporary was his life, and how, from one breath to the next, it could end. This shift in his thinking was subtle but profound. It moved him from fear to acceptance. At a certain point he stopped fearing death or horrible maiming, he just expected it. And now came this: They might get away! It was the first glimmer of hope in two days. He knew that any attempt to move would be dangerous, probably fatal, but that was okay with him. He had come to grips with that. This was a chance. Anything was better than waiting in that hole trying to figure out what to think about in his last moments on earth. He'd rather die trying to live. *** On the appointed day, early in January, Quang left the city with Ngu to supervise the loading. Into the bottom went piles of AK47s, bazooka tubes, and grenades. The egg baskets were planted with ammo. He stayed behind as Ngu set off. Quang could see how nervous he was, so he suggested that he drink some of the moonshine. \"Not enough to get drunk,\" he said, \"but enough to look drunk.\" Ngu's face flushed whenever he drank even a little alcohol. So he looked the part as he approached the checkpoints, and played it up. He staggered and bellowed and waved to the guards, offering them his presents, and pleading with them to let him pass quickly, \"Because I am drunk and I'm worried I'm not going to get to Hue on time, and my wife will kill me.\" Quang waited back in Kim Do through that entire day. He did not learn until the following afternoon that his \"Uncle\" had made the trip safely, and that his men had picked up the shipment. His force now was ready, armed. He could hardly believe it. As he saw it, the miracle proved the truth of Ho's teachings, that the Party and the army were not enough. Real victory could only come from the people. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Asia"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.39}, {"asin": "0307742482", "title": "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI", "author": "David Grann", "description": "Review NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER \u2022 A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, GQ, Time,\u00a0Newsday, Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine, NPR, Vogue,\u00a0Smithsonian, Cosmopolitan,\u00a0Seattle Times, Bloomberg, Lit Hub, and Slate \u201cDisturbing and riveting. . . . Grann has proved himself a master of spinning delicious, many-layered mysteries that also happen to be true. . . . It will sear your soul.\u201d \u2014Dave Eggers, New York Times Book Review \u201cA marvel of detective-like research and narrative verve.\u201d\u2014 Financial Times \u201cA shocking whodunit. . . . What more could fans of true-crime thrillers ask?\u201d\u2014 USA Today \u201cA master of the detective form. . . . Killers is something rather deep and not easily forgotten.\u201d\u2014 Wall St. Journal \u201cThe best book of the year so far.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cDavid Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon is unsurprisingly extraordinary.\" \u2014 Time \u201cA masterful work of literary journalism crafted with the urgency of a mystery. . . . Contained within Grann's mesmerizing storytelling lies something more than a brisk, satisfying read. Killers of the Flower Moon offers up the Osage killings as emblematic of America's relationship with its indigenous peoples and the 'culture of killing' that has forever marred that tie.\u201d \u2014 The Boston Globe \u201c[C]lose to impeccable. It's confident, fluid in its dynamics, light on its feet. . . . The crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains. It will make you cringe at man's inhumanity to man.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times About the Author DAVID GRANN is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers KILLERS OF THE\u00a0FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of THE WHITE DARKNESS and the collection THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES. Grann\u2019s storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award.\u00a0He lives with his wife and children in New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The VanishingIn April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-\u00adjump-\u00adups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the \u201cgods had left confetti.\u201d In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-\u00adeyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-\u00adkilling moon.On May 24, 1921, Mollie Burkhart, a resident of the Osage settlement town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, began to fear that something had happened to one of her three sisters, Anna Brown. Thirty-\u00adfour, and less than a year older than Mollie, Anna had disappeared three days earlier. She had often gone on \u201csprees,\u201d as her family disparagingly called them: dancing and drinking with friends until dawn. But this time one night had passed, and then another, and Anna had not shown up on Mollie\u2019s front stoop as she usually did, with her long black hair slightly frayed and her dark eyes shining like glass. When Anna came inside, she liked to slip off her shoes, and Mollie missed the comforting sound of her moving, unhurried, through the house. Instead, there was a silence as still as the plains.Mollie had already lost her sister Minnie nearly three years earlier. Her death had come with shocking speed, and though doctors had attributed it to a \u201cpeculiar wasting illness,\u201d Mollie harbored doubts: Minnie had been only twenty-\u00adseven and had always been in perfect health.Like their parents, Mollie and her sisters had their names inscribed on the Osage Roll, which meant that they were among the registered members of the tribe. It also meant that they possessed a fortune. In the early 1870s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties. In the early twentieth century, each person on the tribal roll began receiving a quarterly check. The amount was initially for only a few dollars, but over time, as more oil was tapped, the dividends grew into the hundreds, then the thousands. And virtually every year the payments increased, like the prairie creeks that joined to form the wide, muddy Cimarron, until the tribe members had collectively accumulated millions and millions of dollars. (In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.) The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world. \u201cLo and behold!\u201d the New York weekly Outlook exclaimed. \u201cThe Indian, instead of starving to death\u2008.\u2008.\u2008.\u2008\u200benjoys a steady income that turns bankers green with envy.\u201dThe public had become transfixed by the tribe\u2019s prosperity, which belied the images of American Indians that could be traced back to the brutal first contact with whites\u2014\u00adthe original sin from which the country was born. Reporters tantalized their readers with stories about the \u201cplutocratic Osage\u201d and the \u201cred millionaires,\u201d with their brick-\u00adand-\u00adterra-\u00adcotta mansions and chandeliers, with their diamond rings and fur coats and chauffeured cars. One writer marveled at Osage girls who attended the best boarding schools and wore sumptuous French clothing, as if \u201cune tr\u00e8s jolie demoiselle of the Paris boulevards had inadvertently strayed into this little reservation town.\u201dAt the same time, reporters seized upon any signs of the traditional Osage way of life, which seemed to stir in the public\u2019s mind visions of \u201cwild\u201d Indians. One article noted a \u201ccircle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire, where the bronzed and brightly blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style.\u201d Another documented a party of Osage arriving at a ceremony for their dances in a private airplane\u2014\u00ada scene that \u201coutrivals the ability of the fictionist to portray.\u201d Summing up the public\u2019s attitude toward the Osage, the Washington Star said, \u201cThat lament, \u2018Lo the poor Indian,\u2019 might appropriately be revised to, \u2018Ho, the rich redskin.\u2019\u2009\u201dGray Horse was one of the reservation\u2019s older settlements. These outposts\u2014\u00adincluding Fairfax, a larger, neighboring town of nearly fifteen hundred people, and Pawhuska, the Osage capital, with a population of more than six thousand\u2014\u00adseemed like fevered visions. The streets clamored with cowboys, fortune seekers, bootleggers, soothsayers, medicine men, outlaws, U.S. marshals, New York financiers, and oil magnates. Automobiles sped along paved horse trails, the smell of fuel overwhelming the scent of the prairies. Juries of crows peered down from telephone wires. There were restaurants, advertised as caf\u00e9s, and opera houses and polo grounds.Although Mollie didn\u2019t spend as lavishly as some of her neighbors did, she had built a beautiful, rambling wooden house in Gray Horse near her family\u2019s old lodge of lashed poles, woven mats, and bark. She owned several cars and had a staff of servants\u2014\u00adthe Indians\u2019 pot-\u00adlickers, as many settlers derided these migrant workers. The servants were often black or Mexican, and in the early 1920s a visitor to the reservation expressed contempt at the sight of \u201ceven whites\u201d performing \u201call the menial tasks about the house to which no Osage will stoop.\u201dMollie was one of the last people to see Anna before she vanished. That day, May 21, Mollie had risen close to dawn, a habit ingrained from when her father used to pray every morning to the sun. She was accustomed to the chorus of meadowlarks and sandpipers and prairie chickens, now overlaid with the pock-\u00adpocking of drills pounding the earth. Unlike many of her friends, who shunned Osage clothing, Mollie wrapped an Indian blanket around her shoulders. She also didn\u2019t style her hair in a flapper bob, and instead let her long, black hair flow over her back, revealing her striking face, with its high cheekbones and big brown eyes.Her husband, Ernest Burkhart, rose with her. A twenty-\u00adeight-\u00adyear-\u00adold white man, he had the stock handsomeness of an extra in a Western picture show: short brown hair, slate-\u00adblue eyes, square chin. Only his nose disturbed the portrait; it looked as if it had taken a barroom punch or two. Growing up in Texas, the son of a poor cotton farmer, he\u2019d been enchanted by tales of the Osage Hills\u2014\u00adthat vestige of the American frontier where cowboys and Indians were said to still roam. In 1912, at nineteen, he\u2019d packed a bag, like Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory, and gone to live with his uncle, a domineering cattleman named William K. Hale, in Fairfax. \u201cHe was not the kind of a man to ask you to do something\u2014\u00adhe told you,\u201d Ernest once said of Hale, who became his surrogate father. Though Ernest mostly ran errands for Hale, he sometimes worked as a livery driver, which is how he met Mollie, chauffeuring her around town.Ernest had a tendency to drink moonshine and play Indian stud poker with men of ill repute, but beneath his roughness there seemed to be a tenderness and a trace of insecurity, and Mollie fell in love with him. Born a speaker of Osage, Mollie had learned some English in school; nevertheless, Ernest studied her native language until he could talk with her in it. She suffered from diabetes, and he cared for her when her joints ached and her stomach burned with hunger. After he heard that another man had affections for her, he muttered that he couldn\u2019t live without her. It wasn\u2019t easy for them to marry. Ernest\u2019s roughneck friends ridiculed him for being a \u201csquaw man.\u201d And though Mollie\u2019s three sisters had wed white men, she felt a responsibility to have an arranged Osage marriage, the way her parents had. Still, Mollie, whose family practiced a mixture of Osage and Catholic beliefs, couldn\u2019t understand why God would let her find love, only to then take it away from her. So, in 1917, she and Ernest exchanged rings, vowing to love each other till eternity.By 1921, they had a daughter, Elizabeth, who was two years old, and a son, James, who was eight months old and nicknamed Cowboy. Mollie also tended to her aging mother, Lizzie, who had moved in to the house after Mollie\u2019s father passed away. Because of Mollie\u2019s diabetes, Lizzie once feared that she would die young, and beseeched her other children to take care of her. In truth, Mollie was the one who looked after all of them.May 21 was supposed to be a delightful day for Mollie. She liked to entertain guests and was hosting a small luncheon. After getting dressed, she fed the children. Cowboy often had terrible earaches, and she\u2019d blow in his ears until he stopped crying. Mollie kept her home in meticulous order, and she issued instructions to her servants as the house stirred, everyone bustling about\u2014\u00adexcept Lizzie, who\u2019d fallen ill and stayed in bed. Mollie asked Ernest to ring Anna and see if, for a change, she\u2019d come over to help tend to Lizzie. Anna, as the oldest child in the family, held a special status in their mother\u2019s eyes, and even though Mollie took care of Lizzie, Anna, in spite of her tempestuousness, was the one her mother spoiled.When Ernest told Anna that her mama needed her, she promised to take a taxi straight there, and she arrived shortly afterward, dressed in bright red shoes, a skirt, and a matching Indian blanket; in her hand was an alligator purse. Before entering, she\u2019d hastily combed her windblown hair and powdered her face. Mollie noticed, however, that her gait was unsteady, her words slurred. Anna was drunk.Mollie couldn\u2019t hide her displeasure. Some of the guests had already arrived. Among them were two of Ernest\u2019s brothers, Bryan and Horace Burkhart, who, lured by black gold, had moved to Osage County, often assisting Hale on his ranch. One of Ernest\u2019s aunts, who spewed racist notions about Indians, was also visiting, and the last thing Mollie needed was for Anna to stir up the old goat.Anna slipped off her shoes and began to make a scene. She took a flask from her bag and opened it, releasing the pungent smell of bootleg whiskey. Insisting that she needed to drain the flask before the authorities caught her\u2014\u00adit was a year into nationwide Prohibition\u2014\u00adshe offered the guests a swig of what she called the best white mule.Mollie knew that Anna had been very troubled of late. She\u2019d recently divorced her husband, a settler named Oda Brown, who owned a livery business. Since then, she\u2019d spent more and more time in the reservation\u2019s tumultuous boomtowns, which had sprung up to house and entertain oil workers\u2014\u00adtowns like Whizbang, where, it was said, people whizzed all day and banged all night. \u201cAll the forces of dissipation and evil are here found,\u201d a U.S. government official reported. \u201cGambling, drinking, adultery, lying, thieving, murdering.\u201d Anna had become entranced by the places at the dark ends of the streets: the establishments that seemed proper on the exterior but contained hidden rooms filled with glittering bottles of moonshine. One of Anna\u2019s servants later told the authorities that Anna was someone who drank a lot of whiskey and had \u201cvery loose morals with white men.\u201dAt Mollie\u2019s house, Anna began to flirt with Ernest\u2019s younger brother, Bryan, whom she\u2019d sometimes dated. He was more brooding than Ernest and had inscrutable yellow-\u00adflecked eyes and thinning hair that he wore slicked back. A lawman who knew him described him as a little roustabout. When Bryan asked one of the servants at the luncheon if she\u2019d go to a dance with him that night, Anna said that if he fooled around with another woman, she\u2019d kill him.Meanwhile, Ernest\u2019s aunt was muttering, loud enough for all to hear, about how mortified she was that her nephew had married a redskin. It was easy for Mollie to subtly strike back because as one of the servants attending to the aunt was white\u2014\u00ada blunt reminder of the town\u2019s social order.Anna continued raising Cain. She fought with the guests, fought with her mother, fought with Mollie. \u201cShe was drinking and quarreling,\u201d a servant later told authorities. \u201cI couldn\u2019t understand her language, but they were quarreling.\u201d The servant added, \u201cThey had an awful time with Anna, and I was afraid.\u201dThat evening, Mollie planned to look after her mother, while Ernest took the guests into Fairfax, five miles to the northwest, to meet Hale and see Bringing Up Father, a touring musical about a poor Irish immigrant who wins a million-\u00addollar sweepstakes and struggles to assimilate into high society. Bryan, who\u2019d put on a cowboy hat, his catlike eyes peering out from under the brim, offered to drop Anna off at her house.Before they left, Mollie washed Anna\u2019s clothes, gave her some food to eat, and made sure that she\u2019d sobered up enough that Mollie could glimpse her sister as her usual self, bright and charming. They lingered together, sharing a moment of calm and reconciliation. Then Anna said good-\u00adbye, a gold filling flashing through her smile.With each passing night, Mollie grew more anxious. Bryan insisted that he\u2019d taken Anna straight home and dropped her off before heading to the show. After the third night, Mollie, in her quiet but forceful way, pressed everyone into action. She dispatched Ernest to check on Anna\u2019s house. Ernest jiggled the knob to her front door\u2014it was locked. From the window, the rooms inside appeared dark and deserted.Ernest stood there alone in the heat. A few days earlier, a cool rain shower had dusted the earth, but afterward the sun\u2019s rays beat down mercilessly through the blackjack trees. This time of year, heat blurred the prairies and made the tall grass creak underfoot. In the distance, through the shimmering light, one could see the skeletal frames of derricks.Anna\u2019s head servant, who lived next door, came out, and Ernest asked her, \u201cDo you know where Anna is?\u201dBefore the shower, the servant said, she\u2019d stopped by Anna\u2019s house to close any open windows. \u201cI thought the rain would blow in,\u201d she explained. But the door was locked, and there was no sign of Anna. She was gone.News of her absence coursed through the boomtowns, traveling from porch to porch, from store to store. Fueling the unease were reports that another Osage, Charles Whitehorn, had vanished a week before Anna had. Genial and witty, the thirty-\u00adyear-\u00adold Whitehorn was married to a woman who was part white, part Cheyenne. A local newspaper noted that he was \u201cpopular among both the whites and the members of his own tribe.\u201d On May 14, he\u2019d left his home, in the southwestern part of the reservation, for Pawhuska. He never returned. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.51}, {"asin": "1400078458", "title": "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon", "author": "David Grann", "description": "Review \u201cSuspenseful. . . . Rollicking. . . . Reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller. . . . The Lost City of Z is at once a biography, a detective story and a wonderfully vivid piece of travel writing that combines Bruce Chatwinesque powers of observation with a Waugh-like sense of the absurd. Mr. Grann treats us to a harrowing reconstruction of Fawcett\u2019s forays into the Amazonian jungle, as well as an evocative rendering of the vanished age of exploration.\u201d \u2014Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times \u201cBreathtaking. . . . Grann brings Fawcett\u2019s remarkable story to a beautifully written, perfectly paced fruition. . . . Any writer who can breathe life into letters written by scientists in the early 1900s deserves more than a hat tip.\u201d \u2014 The Los Angeles Times \u201cBrilliant. . . . Impressively researched and skillfully crafted. . . . Grann makes abundantly clear in this fascinating, epic story of exploration and obsession, [that] the lethal attraction of the Amazon mystery remains strong.\u201d \u2014 The Boston Globe \u201cA smart biographical page-turner.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cGrann escapes death and tracks down Z, giving the reader the kind of Indiana Jones kicks best experienced vicariously.\u201d \u2014 Details \u201cA riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure.\u201d \u2014John Grisham, internationally acclaimed #1 bestselling author \u201cThoroughly researched, vividly told. . . . Grann recounts Fawcett\u2019s expeditions with all the pace of a white-knuckle adventure story. . . . A thrill ride from start to finish.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cThe story of Z goes to the heart of the central questions of our age. In the battle between man and a hostile environment, who wins? A fascinating and brilliant book.\u201d \u2014Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Talking to Strangers \u201cA spellbinding tale that produces fresh surprises around each turn. . . . An amazing story.\u201d \u2014 Dallas Morning News \u201cA fascinating yarn that touches on science, history, and some truly obsessive personalities.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cThere is something about Fawcett\u2019s spirit and self-assurance that captivates. . . . To read The Lost City of Z is to feel grateful that Grann himself bothered to set out for the Amazon in search of the bones of an explorer whose body was long ago reclaimed by the jungle.\u201d \u2014 Christian Science Monitor \u201cIn a hyperconnected and exhaustively charted world, here is a revelation about wildness and the mad desire to plunge into it. . . . Unfathomably riveting. . . . Grann wildly delivers the goods.\u201d \u2014 GQ \u201cA blockbuster tale of adventure.\u201d \u2014 New York Observer \u201cMarvelous. . . . [Grann] combines a colorful narrative of Fawcett\u2019s early life, military career, jungle treks, theories and even conversations with a biography of an extraordinary man and an overview of the last great and highly competitive age of exploration.\u201d \u2014 Bloomberg News \u201cA blood-stirring reading experience.\u201d \u2014 The Denver Post \u201cA deeply satisfying revelation. . . . What could be better\u2014obsession, mystery, deadly insects, shrunken heads, suppurating wounds, hostile tribesmen\u2014all for us to savor in our homes, safely before the fire.\u201d \u2014Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile and The Devil in the White City \u201cWhat makes Mr. Grann\u2019s telling of the story so captivating is that he decides not simply to go off in search of yet more relics of our absent hero\u2014but to go off himself in search of the city that Fawcett was looking for so heroically when he suddenly went AWOL.\u201d \u2014Simon Winchester, The Wall Street Journal \u201cFast-paced adventure. . . . Grann delights us with the lure of obsession under a canopy of trees.\u201d \u2014 Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cAbsorbing and fair-minded. . . . In restoring a life that history has swallowed from general view, and vindicating a crackpot theory, Mr. Grann has also exposed the toll that explorers often took on those who loved or depended on them.\u201d \u2014Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times \u201cAn engrossing book, whose protagonist could outmarch Lara Croft and out-think Indiana Jones. . . . It\u2019s almost enough to make you reach for a backpack.\u201d \u2014 The Daily Telegraph (London) \u201cA riveting adventure-mystery in the tradition of Conan Doyle\u2019s The Lost World , said to be inspired by Fawcett.\u201d \u2014 The Toronto Star \u201cPerfect for armchair travelers and readers with fond childhood memories of books recounting tales of adventure in the dark wild. . . . What [Grann] found should help change how we think about the Amazon. . . . Read it, shiver with delight and thank your lucky stars you\u2019re never going to get as close to a candir\u00fa as Fawcett and Grann did. (Look it up on Wikipedia, if you dare.)\u201d \u2014 Richmond Times-Dispatch \u201cThrilling. . . . What a story. . . . The beauty is that as incredible as it is, it\u2019s true.\u201d \u2014 Daily News \u201cOutstanding. . . . A powerful narrative, stiff lipped and Victorian at the center, trippy at the edges, as if one of those stern men of Conrad had found himself trapped in a novel by Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez.\u201d \u2014Rich Cohen, The New York Times Book Review \u201cDid Grann find the lost city? . . . It\u2019s worth reading every page of this marvelous book to find out.\u201d \u2014 Houston Chronicle \u201cGrann is no hard-as-nails explorer, and his self-deprecating personal narrative . . . serves as a comic counterpoint to the superhuman exploits of Fawcett. Grann may not be able to hack the wilderness very well, but as a storyteller he\u2019s first-rate.\u201d \u2014Outside \u201cGrann has an extraordinary sense of pacing, and his scenes of forest adventure are dispatched in passages of swift, arresting simplicity. . . . A splendid, suspenseful book.\u201d \u2014 Bookforum \u201cWith this riveting work, David Grann emerges on our national landscape as a major new talent. His superb writing style, his skills as a reporter, his masterful use of historical and scientific documents, and his stunning storytelling ability are on full display here, producing an endlessly absorbing tale about a magical subject that captivates from start to finish. This is a terrific book.\u201d \u2014Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-wiining author \u201cA thrilling yarn. . . . What [Grann] finds is what makes The Lost City of Z so gratifying, and in the end he, and we along with him, find ourselves stunned by what Percy Fawcett discovered.\u201d \u2014 The Oregonian \u201cGrann paints a vivid picture of the final days of trail-blazing, Earth-bound grand exploration, before airplanes and radios began stripping the mystery from the unknown parts of the world.\u201d \u2014 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA) \u201cMeticulously researched and spellbinding. . . . Reads like a cross between an Indiana Jones adventure and a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. . . . Gripping.\u201d \u2014 The Ottawa Citizen \u201cIrresistible. . . . At once a biography of Fawcett, a history of the era of exploration, a science book on the nature and ethnography of the Amazon and a thrilling armchair adventure. . . . [It] has everything to fire the imagination: Romance, nostalgia, bravery, monomania, hardship, adventure, science, tragedy, mystery.\u201d \u2014 South Florida Sun Sentinel \u201c The Lost City of Z is meticulously researched, riveting and horrifying, guided by a core mystery that seems unimaginable and an author driven into the depths of the jungle by his daring to imagine it.\u201d \u2014 Philadelphia City Paper \u201cAbsorbing. . . . A wonderful story of a lost age of heroic exploration.\u201d \u2014 The Sunday Times (London) \u201cTantalizing. . . . Grann gives us a glimpse of the vanished age of exploration [as well as] a suspenseful, often very funny account of his own trek as a complete amateur into the \u2018green hell\u2019 of the Amazon. . . . Immensely entertaining.\u201d \u2014 The Gazette (Montreal) \u201cThankfully, for those of us who secretly live and breath for the swashbuckling adventure tale, every now and then a book comes along that renews our faith in the epic quest narrative, its ability to inform and enlighten even as it feeds our most primal need for dramatic amusement. [The Lost City of Z] succeeds tremendously in these pursuits.\u201d \u2014 The Globe and Mail (Canada) About the Author DAVID GRANN is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z. KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON was a finalist for The National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of THE WHITE DARKNESS and the collection THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES. Grann's storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1WE SHALL RETURNOn a cold January day in 1925, a tall, distinguished gentleman hurried across the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey, toward the S.S. Vauban, a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot ocean liner bound for Rio de Janeiro. He was fifty-seven years old, and stood over six feet, his long arms corded with muscles. Although his hair was thinning and his mustache was flecked with white, he was so fit that he could walk for days with little, if any, rest or nourishment. His nose was crooked like a boxer's, and there was something ferocious about his appearance, especially his eyes. They were set close together and peered out from under thick tufts of hair. No one, not even his family, seemed to agree on their color-some thought they were blue, others gray. Yet virtually everyone who encountered him was struck by their intensity: some called them \"the eyes of a visionary.\" He had frequently been photographed in riding boots and wearing a Stetson, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, but even in a suit and a tie, and without his customary wild beard, he could be recognized by the crowds on the pier. He was Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, and his name was known throughout the world. He was the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose. For nearly two decades, stories of his adventures had captivated the public's imagination: how he had survived in the South American wilderness without contact with the outside world; how he was ambushed by hostile tribesmen, many of whom had never before seen a white man; how he battled piranha, electric eels, jaguars, crocodiles, vampire bats, and anacondas, including one that almost crushed him; and how he emerged with maps of regions from which no previous expedition had returned. He was renowned as the \"David Livingstone of the Amazon,\" and was believed to have such unrivaled powers of endurance that a few colleagues even claimed he was immune to death. An American explorer described him as \"a man of indomitable will, infinite resource, fearless\"; another said that he could \"outwalk and outhike and outexplore anybody else.\" The London Geographical Journal, the pre-eminent publication in its field, observed in 1953 that \"Fawcett marked the end of an age. One might almost call him the last of the individualist explorers. The day of the aeroplane, the radio, the organized and heavily financed modern expedition had not arrived. With him, it was the heroic story of a man against the forest.\" In 1916, the Royal Geographical Society had awarded him, with the blessing of King George V, a gold medal \"for his contributions to the mapping of South America.\" And every few years, when he emerged from the jungle, spidery thin and bedraggled, dozens of scientists and luminaries would pack into the Society's hall to hear him speak. Among them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was said to have drawn on Fawcett's experiences for his 1912 book The Lost World, in which explorers \"disappear into the unknown\" of South America and find, on a remote plateau, a land where dinosaurs have escaped extinction. As Fawcett made his way to the gangplank that day in January, he eerily resembled one of the book's protagonists, Lord John Roxton:Something there was of Napoleon III, something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman._._._._He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous because they are held in leash. None of Fawcett's previous expeditions compared with what he was about to do, and he could barely conceal his impatience, as he fell into line with the other passengers boarding the S.S. Vauban. The ship, advertised as \"the finest in the world,\" was part of the Lamport & Holt elite \"V\" class. The Germans had sunk several of the company's ocean liners during the First World War, but this one had survived, with its black, salt-streaked hull and elegant white decks and striped funnel billowing smoke into the sky. Model T Fords shepherded passengers to the dock, where longshoremen helped cart luggage into the ship's hold. Many of the male passengers wore silk ties and bowler hats; women had on fur coats and feathered caps, as if they were attending a society event, which, in some ways, they were-the passenger lists of luxury ocean liners were chronicled in gossip columns and scoured by young girls searching for eligible bachelors. Fawcett pushed forward with his gear. His trunks were loaded with guns, canned food, powdered milk, flares, and handcrafted machetes. He also carried a kit of surveying instruments: a sextant and a chronometer for determining latitude and longitude, an aneroid for measuring atmospheric pressure, and a glycerin compass that could fit in his pocket. Fawcett had chosen each item based on years of experience; even the clothes he had packed were made of lightweight, tear-proof gabardine. He had seen men die from the most innocuous seeming oversight-a torn net, a boot that was too tight. Fawcett was setting out into the Amazon, a wilderness nearly the size of the continental United States, to make what he called \"the great discovery of the century\"-a lost civilization. By then, most of the world had been explored, its veil of enchantment lifted, but the Amazon remained as mysterious as the dark side of the moon. As Sir John Scott Keltie, the former secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and one of the world's most acclaimed geographers at the time, noted, \"What is there no one knows.\" Ever since Francisco de Orellana and his army of Spanish conquistadores descended the Amazon River, in 1542, perhaps no place on the planet had so ignited the imagination-or lured men to their death. Gaspar de Carvajal, a Dominican friar who accompanied Orellana, described woman warriors in the jungle who resembled the mythical Greek Amazons. Half a century later, Sir Walter Raleigh spoke of Indians with \"their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts\"-a legend that Shakespeare wove into Othello: Of the Cannibals that each other eat,The Anthropophagi and men whose headsDo grow beneath their shoulders.What was true about the region-serpents as long as trees, rodents the size of pigs-was sufficiently beyond belief that no embellishment seemed too fanciful. And the most entrancing vision of all was of El Dorado. Raleigh claimed that the kingdom, which the conquistadores had heard about from Indians, was so plentiful in gold that its inhabitants ground the metal into powder and blew it \"thorow hollow canes upon their naked bodies untill they be al shining from the foote to the head.\" Yet each expedition that had tried to find El Dorado ended in disaster. Carvajal, whose party had been searching for the kingdom, wrote in his diary, \"We reached a [state of] privation so great that we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so great was our weakness that we could not remain standing.\" Some four thousand men died during that expedition alone, of starvation and disease, and at the hands of Indians defending their territory with arrows dipped in poison. Other El Dorado parties resorted to cannibalism. Many explorers went mad. In 1561, Lope de Aguirre led his men on a murderous rampage, screaming, \"Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to_._._._destroy the world?\" Aguirre even stabbed his own child, whispering, \"Commend thyself to God, my daughter, for I am about to kill thee.\" Before the Spanish crown sent forces to stop him, Aguirre warned in a letter, \"I swear to you, King, on my word as a Christian, that if a hundred thousand men came, none would escape. For the reports are false: there is nothing on that river but despair.\" Aguirre's companions finally rose up and killed him; his body was quartered, and Spanish authorities displayed the head of the \"Wrath of God\" in a steel cage. Still, for three centuries, expeditions continued to search, until, after a toll of death and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most archeologists had concluded that El Dorado was no more than a delusion.Fawcett, however, was certain that the Amazon contained a fabulous kingdom, and he was not another soldier of fortune or a crackpot. A man of science, he had spent years gathering evidence to prove his case-digging up artifacts, studying petroglyphs, and interviewing tribes. And after fierce battles with skeptics Fawcett had received funding from the most respected scientific institutions, including the Royal Geographical Society, the American Geographical Society, and the Museum of the American Indian. Newspapers were proclaiming that Fawcett would soon startle the world. The Atlanta Constitution declared, \"It is perhaps the most hazardous and certainly the most spectacular adventure of the kind ever undertaken by a reputable scientist with the backing of conservative scientific bodies.\" Fawcett had concluded that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas. He had christened this lost world the City of Z. \"The central place I call 'Z'-our main objective-is in a valley_._._._about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barreled roadway of stone,\" Fawcett had stated earlier. \"The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple.\" Reporters on the dock in Hoboken, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, shouted questions, hoping to learn the location of Z. In the wake of the technological horrors of the Great War, and amid the spread of urbanization and industrialization, few events so captivated the world. One newspaper exulted, \"Not since the days when Ponce de Le\u2014n crossed the unknown Florida in search of the Waters of Perpetual Youth_._._._has a more alluring adventure been planned.\" Fawcett welcomed \"the fuss,\" as he described it in a letter to a friend, but he was careful about how he responded. He knew that his main rival, Alexander Hamilton Rice, a multimillionaire American doctor who commanded vast resources, was already entering the jungle with an unprecedented array of equipment. The prospect of Dr. Rice finding Z terrified Fawcett. Several years earlier, Fawcett had watched as a colleague from the Royal Geographical Society, Robert Falcon Scott, had set out to become the first explorer to reach the South Pole, only to discover, shortly before he froze to death, that his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen, had beaten him by thirty-three days. In a recent letter to the Royal Geographical Society, Fawcett wrote, \"I cannot say all I know, or even be precise as to locality, for these things leak out, and there can be nothing so bitter to the pioneer as to find the crown of his work anticipated.\" He was also afraid that if he released details of his route, and others attempted to find Z or rescue him, it would result in countless deaths. An expedition of fourteen hundred armed men had previously vanished in the same region. A news bulletin telegraphed around the globe declared, \"Fawcett Expedition_._._._to Penetrate Land Whence None Returned.\" And Fawcett, who was resolved to reach the most inaccessible areas, did not intend, like other explorers, to go by boat; rather, he planned to hack straight through the jungle on foot. The Royal Geographical Society had warned that Fawcett \"is about the only living geographer who could successfully attempt\" such an expedition and that \"it would be hopeless for any people to follow in his footsteps.\" Before he left England, Fawcett confided to his younger son, Brian, \"If with all my experience we can't make it, there's not much hope for others.\" As reporters clamored around him, Fawcett explained that only a small expedition would have any chance of survival. It would be able to live off the land, and not pose a threat to hostile Indians. The expedition, he had stated, \"will be no pampered exploration party, with an army of bearers, guides and cargo animals. Such top-heavy expeditions get nowhere; they linger on the fringe of civilization and bask in publicity. Where the real wilds start, bearers are not to be had anyway, for fear of the savages. Animals cannot be taken because of lack of pasture and the attack of insects and bats. There are no guides, for no one knows the country. It is a matter of cutting equipment to the absolute minimum, carrying it all oneself, and trusting that one will be able to exist by making friends with the various tribes one meets.\" He now added, \"We will have to suffer every form of exposure._._._._We will have to achieve a nervous and mental resistance, as well as physical, as men under these conditions are often broken by their minds succumbing before their bodies.\" Fawcett had chosen only two people to go with him: his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, and Jack's best friend, Raleigh Rimell. Although they had never been on an expedition, Fawcett believed that they were ideal for the mission: tough, loyal, and, because they were so close, unlikely, after months of isolation and suffering, \"to harass and persecute each other\"-or, as was common on such expeditions, to mutiny. Jack was, as his brother Brian put it, \"the reflection of his father\": tall, frighteningly fit, and ascetic. Neither he nor his father smoked cigarettes or drank. Brian noted that Jack's \"six feet three inches were sheer bone and muscle, and the three chief agents of bodily degeneration-alcohol, tobacco and loose living-were revolting to him.\" Colonel Fawcett, who followed a strict Victorian code, put it slightly differently: \"He is_._._._absolutely virgin in mind and body.\" Jack, who had wanted to accompany his father on an expedition since he was a boy, had spent years preparing-lifting weights, maintaining a rigid diet, studying Portuguese, and learning how to navigate by the stars. Still, he had suffered little real deprivation, and his face, with its luminescent skin, crisp mustache, and slick brown hair, betrayed none of the hardness of his father's. With his stylish clothes, he looked more like a movie star, which is what he hoped to become upon his triumphant return. Raleigh, though smaller than Jack, was still nearly six feet tall and muscular. (A \"fine physique,\" Fawcett told the R.G.S.) His father had been a surgeon in the Royal Navy and had died of cancer in 1917, when Raleigh was fifteen. Dark-haired, with a pronounced widow's peak and a riverboat gambler's mustache, Raleigh had a jocular, mischievous nature. \"He was a born clown,\" said Brian Fawcett, the \"perfect counterpart of the serious Jack.\" The two boys had been virtually inseparable since they roamed the Devonshire countryside around Seaton, England, where they grew up, riding bicycles and shooting rifles in the air. In a letter to one of Fawcett's confidants, Jack wrote, \"Now we have Raleigh Rimell on board who is every bit as keen as I am._._._._He is the only intimate friend I have ever had. I knew him before I was seven years old and we have been more or less together ever since. He is absolutely honest and decent in every sense of the word and we know each other inside out.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0786888628", "title": "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War", "author": "David Halberstam", "description": "Review \"An instant classic look at the people, power and politicsthat created a dangerous stage...and then acted on it.\"-- Chicago Sun-Times \"Halberstam is at his very best.\"-- The Wall Street Journal \"He is a peerless reporter of events and facts--with a signature human touch.\"-- The Seattle Times \"His most operatic war story.\"-- The New York Times Book Review \"I could hardly put this book down. Meticulously and thoroughly researched, it is splendidly compelling reading. The Coldest Winter is a superb conjoining of all the factors of this tragic war: the military tactics and strategy of both sides; the international diplomacy; the internal politics; the personalities of the various players. A great work.\"-- Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.), co-author of We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young \"In a grand gesture of reclamation and remembrance. Mr. Halberstam has brought the war back home.\"-- The New York Times About the Author David Halberstam (1934-2007) was the author of twenty-two books, including fifteen bestsellers. Born in New York City, Halberstam spent much of the 1960s as a reporter for the New York Times , covering the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. His Vietnam reporting earned him both a George C. Polk Award and a 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Vanity Fair dubbed Halberstam \"the Moses of American journalism,\" and the subjects of his books reflect his passion and range: war, foreign policy, history, and sports. The Best and the Brightest (1962), his sixth book, a critique of the Kennedy administration's Vietnam policy, became a #1 bestseller. His next book, The Powers that Be , a study of four American media companies, was hailed by the New York Times as a \"prodigy of research.\" Many of Halberstam's books explored themes in professional sports, including bestsellers The Teammates , a portrait of the friendship between baseball players Ted Williams, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr, and The Education of a Coach , a profile of New England Patriots' Coach Bill Belichick.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.69}, {"asin": "0553593315", "title": "Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific", "author": "Robert Leckie", "description": "Review \u201c Helmet for My Pillow is a grand and epic prose poem. \u00a0Robert Leckie\u2019s theme is the purely human experience of war in the Pacific, written in the graceful imagery of a human being who\u2014somehow\u2014survived.\u201d\u2014Tom Hanks\u201cOne hell of a book! The real stuff that proves the U.S. Marines are the greatest fighting men on earth!\u201d\u2014Leon Uris, author of Battle Cry About the Author Robert Leckie was the author of more than thirty works of military history as well as Marines , a collection of short stories, and Lord, What a Family! , a memoir. Raised in Rutherford, New Jersey, he started writing professionally at age sixteen, covering sports for The Bergen Evening Record of Hackensack. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on the day following the attack on Pearl Harbor, going on to serve as a machine gunner and as an intelligence scout and participating in all 1st Marine Division campaigns except Okinawa.\u00a0 Leckie was awarded five battle stars, the Naval Commendation Medal with Combat V, and the Purple Heart. Helmet for My Pillow (Random House, 1957) was his first book; it received the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association award upon publication. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneBoot A cutting wind slanted up Church Street in the cheerless dawn of January 5, 1942. That day I departed for the United States Marines.The war with Japan was not yet four weeks old, Wake Island had fallen. Pearl Harbor was a real tragedy, a burning bitter humiliation. Hastily composed war songs were on the lips of everyone, their heavy patriotism failing to compensate for what they lacked in tune and spirit. Hysteria seemed to crouch behind all eyes.But none of this meant much to me. I was aware of my father beside me, bending into the wind with me. I could feel the wound in my lower regions, still fresh, still sore. The sutures had been removed a few days earlier.I had sought to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor, but the Marines had insisted that I be circumcised. It cost me a hundred dollars, although I am not sure to this day whether I paid the doctor or not. But I am certain that few young men went off to war in that fateful time so marked.We had come across the Jersey meadows, riding the Erie commuter line, and then on the ferry over the Hudson River to downtown New York. Breakfast at home had been subdued. My mother was up and about; she did not cry. It was not a heart-rending leave-taking, nor was it brave, resolute\u2014any of those words that fail to describe the thing.It was like so much else in this war that was to produce unbounded heroism, yet not a single stirring song: it was resigned. She followed me to the door with sad eyes and said, \u201cGod keep you.\u201dIt had been a silent trip across the meadows and it was a wordless good-by in front of the bronze revolving doors at Ninety, Church Street. My father embraced me quickly, and just as quickly averted his face and left. The Irish doorman measured me and smiled.I went inside and joined the United States Marines.The captain who swore us in reduced the ceremony to a jumble. We all held up our hands. We put them down when he lowered his. That way we guessed we were marines.The master gunnery sergeant who became our momentary shepherd made the fact plainer to us. Those rich mellow blasphemous oaths that were to become so familiar to me flowed from his lips with the consummate ease of one who had spent a lifetime in vituperation. I would meet his masters later. Presently, as he herded us across the river to Hoboken and a waiting train, he seemed to be beyond comparison. But he was gentle and kind enough when he said good-by to the thirty or forty of us who boarded the train.He stood at the head of our railroad car\u2014a man of middle age, slender, and of a grace that was on the verge of being ruined by a pot belly. He wore the Marine dress blues. Over this was the regulation tight-fitting overcoat of forest green. Green and blue has always seemed to me an odd combination of colors, and it seemed especially so then; the gaudy dark and light blue of the Marine dress sheathed in sedate and soothing green.\u201cWhere you are going it will not be easy,\u201d the gunnery sergeant said. \u201cWhen you get to Parris Island, you\u2019ll find things plenty different from civilian life. You won\u2019t like it! You\u2019ll think they\u2019re overdoing things. You\u2019ll think they\u2019re stupid! You\u2019ll think they\u2019re the cruelest, rottenest bunch of men you ever ran into! I\u2019m going to tell you one thing. You\u2019ll be wrong! If you want to save yourself plenty of heartache you\u2019ll listen to me right now: you\u2019ll do everything they tell you and you\u2019ll keep your big mouths shut!\u201dHe could not help grinning at the end. No group of men ever had a saner counselor, and he knew it; but he could not help grinning. He knew we would ignore his every word.\u201cOkay, Sarge,\u201d somebody yelled. \u201cThanks, Sarge.\u201dHe turned and left us.We called him \u201cSarge.\u201d Within another twenty-four hours we would not dare address a lowly Pfc. without the cringing \u201csir.\u201d But today the civilian shine was still upon us. We wore civvies; Hoboken howled around us in the throes of trade; we each had the citizen\u2019s polite deprecation of the soldier, and who among us was not certain that he was not long for the ranks?Our ride to Washington was silent and uneventful. But once we had arrived in the capital and had changed trains the atmosphere seemed to lift. Other Marine recruits were arriving from all over the east. Our contingent was the last to arrive, the last to be crammed aboard the ancient wooden train that waited, puffing, dirty-in-the-dark, smelling of coal\u2014waited to take us down the coast to South Carolina. Perhaps it was because of the dilapidated old train that we brightened and became gay. Such a dingy, tired old relic could not help but provoke mirth. Someone pretended to have found a brass plate beneath one of the seats, and our car rocked with laughter as he read, \u201cThis car is the property of the Philadelphia Museum of American History.\u201d We had light from kerosene lamps and heat from a potbellied stove. Draughts seemed to stream from every angle and there was a constant creaking and wailing of wood and wheels that sounded like an endless keening. Strange old train that it was, I loved it.Comfort had been left behind in Washington. Some of us already were beginning to revel in the hardship of the train ride. That intangible mystique of the marine was somehow, even then, at work. We were having it rough, which is exactly what we expected and what we had signed up for. That is the thing: having it rough. The man who has had it roughest is the man to be most admired. Conversely, he who has had it the easiest is the least praiseworthy.Those who wished to sleep could cat-nap on the floor while the train lurched down through Virginia and North Carolina. But these were few. The singing and the talk were too exciting.The boy sitting next to me\u2014a handsome blond-haired youth from south Jersey\u2014turned out to have a fine high voice. He sang several songs alone. There being a liberal leavening of New York Irish among us, he was soon singing Irish ballads.Across the aisle there was another boy, whom I shall call Armadillo because of his lean and pointed face. He was from New York and had attended college there. Being one of the few college men present, he had already established a sort of literary clique.The Armadillo\u2019s coterie could not equal another circle farther down the car. This had at its center a stocky, smiling redhead. Red had been a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and had once hit a home run at the Polo Grounds off the great Carl Hubbell.There was no measuring the impact of such a celebrity on our group, composed otherwise of mediocrities like myself. Red had been in the big time. He had held daily converse with men who were nothing less than the idols of his newfound comrades. It was quite natural they should ring him round; consult him on everything from pitching form to the Japanese General Staff.\u201cWhaddya think it\u2019ll be like at Parris Island, Red?\u201d\u201cHey, Red\u2014you think the Japs are as tough as the newspapers say they are?\u201dIt is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political rallies; athletes tell us what brand of cigarette to smoke. But the redhead was equal to it. It was plain in his case what travel and headlines can do. He was easily the most poised of us all.But I suspect even Red\u2019s savoir-faire got a rude jolt when we arrived in Parris Island. We had been taken from the railroad station by truck. When we had dismounted and had formed a motley rank in front of the red brick mess hall, we were subjected to the classic greeting.\u201cBoys,\u201d said the sergeant who would be our drill instructor. \u201cBoys\u2014Ah want to tell yawl something. Give youah hearts to Jesus, boys\u2014cause youah ass belongs to me!\u201dThen he fell us in after our clumsy civilian fashion and marched us into the mess hall.There were baloney and lima beans. I had never eaten lima beans before, but I did this time; they were cold.The group that had made the trip from New York did not survive the first day in Parris Island. I never saw the blond singer again, nor most of the others. Somehow sixty of us among the hundreds who had been aboard that ancient train, became a training platoon, were assigned a number and placed under the charge of the drill sergeant who had delivered the welcoming address.Sergeant Bellow was a southerner with a fine contempt for northerners. It was not that he favored the southerners; he merely treated them less sarcastically. He was big. I would say six feet four inches, two hundred thirty pounds.But above all he had a voice.It pulsed with power as he counted the cadence, marching us from the administration building to the quartermaster\u2019s. It whipped us, this ragged remnant, and stiffened our slouching civilian backs. Nowhere else but in the Marine Corps do you hear that peculiar lilting cadence of command.\u201cThrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.\u201dIt sounds like an incantation; but it is merely the traditional \u201cthree-four-your-left\u201d elongated by the southern drawl, made sprightly by being sung. I never heard it done better than by our sergeant. Because of this, and because of his inordinate love of drill, I have but one image of him: striding stiff-backed a few feet apart from us, arms thrust out, hands clenched, head canted back, with the whole body following and the great voice ceaselessly bellowing, \u201cThrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.\u201dSergeant Bellow marched us to the quartermaster\u2019s. It was there we were stripped of all vestiges of personality. It is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie. My socks henceforth will be tan. They will neither be soiled, nor rolled, nor gaudy, nor restrained, nor holey. They will be tan. The only other thing they may be is clean.So it is with it all, until one stands naked, struggling with an embarrassment that is entirely lost on the laconic shades who work in quartermaster sheds.Within\u2014in the depths the psychiatrists call subliminal\u2014a human spark still sputters. It will never go quite out. Its vigor or its desuetude is in exact proportion to the number of miles a man may put between himself and his camp. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0802145310", "title": "Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War", "author": "Karl Marlantes", "description": "Review \"Here is storytelling so authentic, so moving and so intense, and so intense, and so relentlessly dramatic, that there were times I wasn't sure I could stand to turn the page. ... There has never been a more realistic portrait or eloquent tribute to the nobility of men under fire.\" -Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down \"I wouldn't be surprised if Matterhorn becomes for the Vietnam War what All Quiet on the Western Front was to World War I.\" -James Patterson \"One of the most profound and devastating novels to come out of Vietnam - or any war.\" -Sebastian Junger \"I've laughed at Catch-22 and wept at The Thin Red Line , but I've never encountered a war novel as stark, honest, and wrenching as Matterhorn . ... I found it nearly impossible to stop reading.\" -Michael Schaub, NPR \"Unforgettable ... A beautifully crafted novel of unrivaled authenticity and power, filled with jungle heroism, crackerjack inventiveness, mud, blood, brotherhood, hatred, healing, terror, bureaucracy, politics, unfathmomable waste, and unfathomable love.\" -Christina Robb \"A powerhouse: tense, brutal, honest.\" - TIME About the Author A graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, KARL MARLANTES served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. He is the author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War . He lives in rural Washington.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.38}, {"asin": "0679763880", "title": "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration", "author": "Isabel Wilkerson", "description": "Review ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times \u2022 USA Today \u2022 O: The Oprah Magazine \u2022 Publishers Weekly \u2022 Salon \u2022 Newsday \u2022 The Daily Beast ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0\u2022 The Economist \u2022\u00a0Boston Globe \u2022 San Francisco Chronicle \u2022\u00a0 Chicago\u00a0Tribune \u2022 Entertainment\u00a0Weekly\u00a0\u2022 Philadelphia Inquirer\u00a0\u2022\u00a0The Guardian \u2022 The Seattle Times \u2022 St. Louis Post-Dispatch\u00a0 \u2022 The Christian Science Monitor MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE WINNER \u2022 HEARTLAND AWARD WINNER \u2022 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST \u201cA landmark piece of nonfiction .\u00a0. .\u00a0sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience\u2026.A mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann\u2019s study of the Great Migration\u2019s early phase, and Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas\u2019s great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston\u2026.[Wilkerson\u2019s] closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection.\u201d \u2014Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201c The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration\u2026 Wilkerson combines impressive research\u2026with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath ; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.\u201d \u2014 The Wall Street Journal \u201c[A] massive and masterly account of the Great Migration\u2026.A narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah\u2019s couch.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review (Cover Review) \u201c[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book. . .\u00a0.Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century\u2014a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar\u2014and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of\u2026.This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn\u2019t argument at all; it\u2019s compassion. Hush, and listen.\u201d \u2014Jill Lepore, The New Yorker \" The Warmth of Other Suns is epic in its reach and in its structure. Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s collected oral histories, Wilkerson\u2019s book pulls not just the expanse of the migration into focus but its overall impact on politics, literature, music, sports \u2014 in the nation and the world.\" \u2014 Los Angeles Times \u201cOne of the most lyrical and important books of the season.\" \u2014 Boston Globe \u201c[An] extraordinary and evocative work.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cMesmerizing. . .\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cScholarly but very readable, this book, for all its rigor, is so absorbing, it should come with a caveat: Pick it up only when you can lose yourself entirely.\u201d \u2014O, The Oprah Magazine \"[An] indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly ( Grade: A) \u201cAn astonishing work. . . . Isabel Wilkerson delivers! . . . With the precision of a surgeon, Wilkerson illuminates the stories of bold, faceless African-Americans who transformed cities and industries with their hard work and determination to provide their children with better lives.\u201d \u2014Essence \u201cIsabel Wilkerson\u2019s majestic The Warmth of Other Suns shows that not everyone bloomed, but the migrants\u2014Wilkerson prefers to think of them as domestic immigrants\u2014remade the entire country, North and South. It\u2019s a monumental job of writing and reporting that lives up to its subtitle: The Epic Story of America\u2019s Great Migration .\u201d \u2014USA Today \u201c[A] sweeping history of the Great Migration. . . . The Warmth of Other Suns builds upon such purely academic works to make the migrant experience both accessible and emotionally compelling.\u201d \u2014NPR.org \u201c The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written, in-depth analysis of what Wilkerson calls \u201cone of the most underreported stories of the 20th century. . . \u00a0A masterpiece that sheds light on a significant development in our nation\u2019s history.\u201d \u2014The San Jose Mercury News \u201c The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written book that, once begun, is nearly impossible to put aside. It is an unforgettable combination of tragedy and inspiration, and gripping subject matter and characters in a writing style that grabs the reader on Page 1 and never let\u2019s go. . . . Woven into the tapestry of [three individuals] lives, in prose that is sweet to savor, Wilkerson tells the larger story, the general situation of life in the South for blacks. . . . If you read one only one book about history this year, read this. If you read only one book about African Americans this year, read this. If you read only one book this year, read this.\u201d \u2014The Free Lance Star, Fredericksburg, Va. \"A truly\u00a0auspicious debut. . . . The author deftly intersperses\u00a0[her characters']\u00a0stories with short vignettes about other individuals and consistently provides the bigger picture without interrupting the flow of the narrative\u2026Wilkerson\u2019s focus on the personal aspect lends her book a markedly different, more accessible tone. Her powerful storytelling style, as well, gives this decades-spanning history a welcome novelistic flavor. An impressive take on the Great Migration.\" \u2014 Kirkus, Starred Review \u201c[A] magnificent , extensively researched study of the great migration\u2026 The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly , Starred Review \u201cNot since Alex Haley\u2019s Roots has there been a history of equal literary quality where the writing surmounts the rhythmic soul of fiction, where the writer\u2019s voice sings a song of redemptive glory as true as Faulkner\u2019s southern cantatas.\u201d \u2014 The San Francisco Examiner \u201cProfound, necessary and an absolute delight to read.\u201d \u2014Toni Morrison \u201c The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America\u2019s hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.\u201d \u2014Tom Brokaw \u201cA seminal work of narrative nonfiction. . . . You will never forget these people.\u201d \u2014Gay Talese \u201cWith compelling prose and considered analysis, Isabel Wilkerson has given us a landmark portrait of one of the most significant yet little-noted shifts in American history: the migration of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West.\u00a0 It is a complicated tale, with an infinity of implications for questions of race, power, politics, religion, and class\u2014implications that are unfolding even now.\u00a0 This book will be long remembered, and savored.\u201d \u2014Jon Meacham \u201cIsabel Wilkerson\u2019s The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation\u2014the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west.\u201d \u2014David Levering Lewis \u201cIsabel Wilkerson\u2019s book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people.\u00a0 Don\u2019t miss it!\u201d \u2014Cornel West About the Author Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration. She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. In the Land of the ForefathersOur mattresses were made of corn shucksand soft gray Spanish moss that hung from the trees. . . .From the swamps we got soup turtles and baby alligatorsand from the woods we got raccoon, rabbit and possum.\u2014Mahalia Jackson, Movin\u2019 On UpLeavingThis land is first and foremosthis handiwork.It was he who brought orderout of primeval wilderness . . . Wherever one looks in this land,whatever one sees that is the work of man,was erected by the toilingstraining bodies of blacks.\u2014David L. Cohn, God Shakes CreationThey fly from the land that bore them.\u2014W. H. Stillwell1Chickasaw County, Mississippi, Late October 1937ida mae brandon gladneythe night clouds were closing in on the salt licks east of the oxbow lakes along the folds in the earth beyond the Yalobusha River. The cotton was at last cleared from the field. Ida Mae tried now to get the children ready and to gather the clothes and quilts and somehow keep her mind off the churning within her. She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets. Her husband was settling with Mr. Edd over the worth of a year\u2019s labor, and she did not know what would come of it. None of them had been on a train before\u2014not unless you counted the clattering local from Bacon Switch to Okolona, where, \u201cby the time you sit down, you there,\u201d as Ida Mae put it. None of them had been out of Mississippi. Or Chickasaw County, for that matter.There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. Things had to look normal, like any other time they might ride into town, which was rare enough to begin with.Velma was six. She sat with her ankles crossed and three braids in her hair and did what she was told. James was too little to understand. He was three. He was upset at the commotion. Hold still now, James. Lemme put your shoes on, Ida Mae told him. James wriggled and kicked. He did not like shoes. He ran free in the field. What were these things? He did not like them on his feet. So Ida Mae let him go barefoot.Miss Theenie stood watching. One by one, her children had left her and gone up north. Sam and Cleve to Ohio. Josie to Syracuse. Irene to Milwaukee. Now the man Miss Theenie had tried to keep Ida Mae from marrying in the first place was taking her away, too. Miss Theenie had no choice but to accept it and let Ida Mae and the grandchildren go for good. Miss Theenie drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter\u2019s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car.\u201cMay the Lord be the first in the car,\u201d she prayed, \u201cand the last out.\u201dWhen the time had come, Ida Mae and little James and Velma and all that they could carry were loaded into a brother-in-law\u2019s truck, and the three of them went to meet Ida Mae\u2019s husband at the train depot in Okolona for the night ride out of the bottomland.2Wildwood, Florida, April 14, 1945george swanson starlinga man named roscoe colton gave Lil George Starling a ride in his pickup truck to the train station in Wildwood through the fruit-bearing scrubland of central Florida. And Schoolboy, as the toothless orange pickers mockingly called him, boarded the Silver Meteor pointing north.A railing divided the stairs onto the train, one side of the railing for white passengers, the other for colored, so the soles of their shoes would not touch the same stair. He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.He was getting out alive. So he didn\u2019t let it bother him. \u201cI got on the car where they told me to get on,\u201d he said years later.He hadn\u2019t had time to bid farewell to everyone he wanted to. He stopped to say good-bye to Rachel Jackson, who owned a little caf\u00e9 up on what they called the Avenue and the few others he could safely get to in the little time he had. He figured everybody in Egypt town, the colored section of Eustis, probably knew he was leaving before he had climbed onto the train, small as the town was and as much as people talked.It was a clear afternoon in the middle of April. He folded his tall frame into the hard surface of the seat, his knees knocking against the seat back in front of him. He was packed into the Jim Crow car, where the railroad stored the luggage, when the train pulled away at last. He was on the run, and he wouldn\u2019t rest easy until he was out of range of Lake County, beyond the reach of the grove owners whose invisible laws he had broken.The train rumbled past the forest of citrus trees that he had climbed since he was a boy and that he had tried to wrestle some dignity out of and, for a time, had. They could have their trees. He wasn\u2019t going to lose his life over them. He had come close enough as it was.He had lived up to his family\u2019s accidental surname. Starling. Distant cousin to the mockingbird. He had spoken up about what he had seen in the world he was born into, like the starling that sang Mozart\u2019s own music back to him or the starling out of Shakespeare that tormented the king by speaking the name of Mortimer. Only, George was paying the price for tormenting the ruling class that owned the citrus groves. There was no place in the Jim Crow South for a colored starling like him.He didn\u2019t know what he would do once he got to New York or what his life would be. He didn\u2019t know how long it would take before he could send for Inez. His wife was mad right now, but she\u2019d get over it once he got her there. At least that\u2019s what he told himself. He turned his face to the North and sat with his back to Florida.Leaving as he did, he figured he would never set foot in Eustis again for as long as he lived. And as he settled in for the twenty-three-hour train ride up the coast of the Atlantic, he had no desire to have anything to do with the town he grew up in, the state of Florida, or the South as a whole, for that matter. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 12.19}, {"asin": "0760345201", "title": "Bomber Command (Zenith Military Classics)", "author": "Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins", "description": "Book Description Bomber Command\u2019s air offensive against the cities of Nazi Germany was one of the most epic campaigns of World War II. More than 56,000 British and Commonwealth aircrew and 600,000 Germans died in the course of the RAF\u2019s attempt to win the war by bombing. In Bomber Command , originally published to critical acclaim in the U.K., famed British military historian Sir Max Hastings offers a captivating analysis of the strategy and decision-making behind one of World War II\u2019s most violent episodes. With firsthand descriptions of the experiences of aircrew from 1939 to 1945\u2014based on one hundred interviews with veterans\u2014and a harrowing narrative of the experiences of Germans on the ground during the September 1944 bombing of Darmstadt, Bomber Command is widely recognized as a classic account of one of the bloodiest campaigns in World War II history. Now back in print in the U.S., this book is an essential addition to any history reader\u2019s bookshelf. From the Back Cover Sir Max Hastings, recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, has written one of the classic accounts of World War II.\u00a0\u00a0Upon publication, Bomber Command , winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize , attracted controversy but today is widely considered a classic account of one of the longest and bloodiest campaigns of World War II. \u00a0This work, in Hastings\u2019s characteristic prose, profiles the harrowing experiences of Bomber Command\u2019s aircrew from 1939\u201345, the entire length of the air war of Europe, as well as the controversy surrounding the development and implementation of area bombing.\u00a0Written from a vast collection of documents, letters, diaries, and interviews from many surviving senior officers, Bomber Command remains an important contribution toward understanding one of the most violent struggles of the war. About the Author Sir Max Hastings is a famed British journalist and military historian who has served as a foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard and as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph . Currently, he writes columns for the New York Review of Books , the Daily Mail , the Guardian , and the Sunday Times and is also the bestselling author of numerous history books on World War II, the Korean War, and the Falkland Islands.www.maxhastings.com Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0345405013", "title": "The Proud Tower A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890 1914", "author": "Barbara Wertheim Tuchman", "description": "Review \u201c[Barbara W. Tuchman\u2019s] Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning The Guns of August was an expert evocation of the first spasm of the 1914\u20131918 war. She brings the same narrative gifts and panoramic camera eye to her portrait of the antebellum world.\u201d \u2014 Newsweek \u201cA rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish . . . It would be impossible to read The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \u201cAn exquisitely written and thoroughly engrossing work . . . The author\u2019s knowledge and skill are so impressive that they whet the appetite for more.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201c[Tuchman] tells her story with cool wit and warm understanding.\u201d \u2014 Time From the Publisher THE PROUD TOWER by Barbara Tuchman examines the Western World of approximately 100 years ago. Technologically the world was a very different from today, but the strifes between economic groups and among nations bears many similarities to our own time. Tuchman examines the economic, social, political, and technological world of the period 1890-1914. By this period, the United States had become an important player in world affairs. The Haymarket Affair in Chicago fueled the development of international anarchism which led to the assasinations of political figures in Russia, Italy, France and lastly President McKinley in the United States. Tuchman's unraveling of the the Dreyfus Affair is, in itself, worth the price of the book. In THE PROUD TOWER Tuchman describes the western world that exploded into The Great War (which she describes in THE GUNS OF AUGUST).Randy Hickernell, Ballantine Sales Rep. From the Inside Flap \"The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it.\"--Barbara W. TuchmanThe fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was a time when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate. The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman bings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the Anarchists of Europe and America, who voiced the protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed through the figure of the self-depicted Hero, Richard Strauss; the sudden gorgeous blaze of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet and Stravinsky's music; the Dreyfus Affair; the two Peace Conferences at the Hague; and, finally, the youth, ideals, enthusiasm, and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized in the moment when the heroic Jean Jaur\u00e8s was shot to death on the night the War began and an epoch ended.\"Tuchman [was] a distinguished historian who [wrote] her books with a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish. . . . It would be impossible to read The Proud Tower without pleasure and admiration.\"--The New York Times\"Tuchman proved in The Guns of August that she could write better military history than most men. In this sequel, she tells her story with cool wit and warm understanding, eschewing both the sweeping generalizations of a Toynbee and the minute-by-minute simplicisms of a Walter Lord.\"--Time About the Author Barbara W. Tuchman (1912\u20131989) achieved prominence as a historian with The Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August \u2014a huge bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Bible and Sword, The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (for which Tuchman was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize), Notes from China, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, and The First Salute . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IThe PatriciansThe last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition took office in England in June of 1895. Great Britain was at the zenith of empire when the Conservatives won the General Election of that year, and the Cabinet they formed was her superb and resplendent image. Its members represented the greater landowners of the country who had been accustomed to govern for generations. As its superior citizens they felt they owed a duty to the State to guard its interests and manage its affairs. They governed from duty, heritage and habit\u2014and, as they saw it, from right.The Prime Minister was a Marquess and lineal descendant of the father and son who had been chief ministers to Queen Elizabeth and James I. The Secretary for War was another Marquess who traced his inferior title of Baron back to the year 1181, whose great-grandfather had been Prime Minister under George III and whose grandfather had served in six cabinets under three reigns. The Lord President of the Council was a Duke who owned 186,000 acres in eleven counties, whose ancestors had served in government since the Fourteenth Century, who had himself served thirty-four years in the House of Commons and three times refused to be Prime Minister. The Secretary for India was the son of another Duke whose family seat was received in 1315 by grant from Robert the Bruce and who had four sons serving in Parliament at the same time. The President of the Local Government Board was a pre-eminent country squire who had a Duke for brother-in-law, a Marquess for son-in-law, an ancestor who had been Lord Mayor of London in the reign of Charles II, and who had himself been a Member of Parliament for twenty-seven years. The Lord Chancellor bore a family name brought to England by a Norman follower of William the Conqueror and maintained thereafter over eight centuries without a title. The Lord Lieutenant for Ireland was an Earl, a grandnephew of the Duke of Wellington and a hereditary trustee of the British Museum. The Cabinet also included a Viscount, three Barons and two Baronets. Of its six commoners, one was a director of the Bank of England, one was a squire whose family had represented the same county in Parliament since the Sixteenth Century, one\u2014who acted as Leader of the House of Commons\u2014was the Prime Minister\u2019s nephew and inheritor of a Scottish fortune of \u00a34,000,000, and one, a notable and disturbing cuckoo in the nest, was a Birmingham manufacturer widely regarded as the most successful man in England.Besides riches, rank, broad acres and ancient lineage, the new Government also possessed, to the regret of the Liberal Opposition and in the words of one of them, \u201can almost embarrassing wealth of talent and capacity.\u201d Secure in authority, resting comfortably on their electoral majority in the House of Commons and on a permanent majority in the House of Lords, of whom four-fifths were Conservatives, they were in a position, admitted the same opponent, \u201cof unassailable strength.\u201dEnriching their ranks were the Whig aristocrats who had seceded from the Liberal party in 1886 rather than accept Mr. Gladstone\u2019s insistence on Home Rule for Ireland. They were for the most part great landowners who, like their natural brothers the Tories, regarded union with Ireland as sacrosanct. Led by the Duke of Devonshire, the Marquess of Lansdowne and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, they had remained independent until 1895, when they joined with the Conservative party, and the two groups emerged as the Unionist party, in recognition of the policy that had brought them together. With the exception of Mr. Chamberlain, this coalition represented that class in whose blood, training and practice over the centuries, landowning and governing had been inseparable. Ever since Saxon chieftains met to advise the King in the first national assembly, the landowners of England had been sending members to Parliament and performing the duties of High Sheriff, Justice of the Peace and Lord Lieutenant of the Militia in their own counties. They had learned the practice of government from the possession of great estates, and they undertook to manage the affairs of the nation as inevitably and unquestionably as beavers build a dam. It was their ordained role and natural task.But it was threatened. By a rising rumble of protest from below, by the Radicals of the Opposition who talked about taxing unearned increment on land, by Home Rulers who wanted to detach the Irish island from which so much English income came, by Trade Unionists who talked of Labour representation in Parliament and demanded the legal right to strike and otherwise interfere with the free play of economic forces, by Socialists who wanted to nationalize property and Anarchists who wanted to abolish it, by upstart nations and strange challenges from abroad. The rumble was distant, but it spoke with one voice that said Change, and those whose business was government could not help but hear.Planted firmly across the path of change, operating warily, shrewdly yet with passionate conviction in defence of the existing order, was a peer who was Chancellor of Oxford University for life, had twice held the India Office, twice the Foreign Office and was now Prime Minister for the third time. He was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, ninth Earl and third Marquess of his line.Lord Salisbury was both the epitome of his class and uncharacteristic of it\u2014except insofar as the freedom to be different was a class characteristic. He was six feet four inches tall, and as a young man had been thin, ungainly, stooping and shortsighted, with hair unusually black for an Englishman. Now sixty-five, his youthful lankiness had turned to bulk, his shoulders had grown massive and more stooped than ever, and his heavy bald head with full curly gray beard rested on them as if weighted down. Melancholy, intensely intellectual, subject to sleepwalking and fits of depression which he called \u201cnerve storms,\u201d caustic, tactless, absent-minded, bored by society and fond of solitude, with a penetrating, skeptical, questioning mind, he had been called the Hamlet of English politics. He was above the conventions and refused to live in Downing Street. His devotion was to religion, his interest in science. In his own home he attended private chapel every morning before breakfast, and had fitted up a chemical laboratory where he conducted solitary experiments. He harnessed the river at Hatfield for an electric power plant on his estate and strung up along the old beams of his home one of England\u2019s first electric light systems, at which his family threw cushions when the wires sparked and sputtered while they went on talking and arguing, a customary occupation of the Cecils.Lord Salisbury cared nothing for sport and little for people. His aloofness was enhanced by shortsightedness so intense that he once failed to recognize a member of his own Cabinet, and once, his own butler. At the close of the Boer War he picked up a signed photograph of King Edward and, gazing at it pensively, remarked, \u201cPoor Buller [referring to the Commander-in-Chief at the start of the War], what a mess he made of it.\u201d On another occasion he was seen in prolonged military conversation with a minor peer under the impression that he was talking to Field Marshal Lord Roberts.For the upper-class Englishman\u2019s alter ego, most intimate companion and constant preoccupation, his horse, Lord Salisbury had no more regard. Riding was to him purely a means of locomotion to which the horse was \u201ca necessary but extremely inconvenient adjunct.\u201d Nor was he addicted to shooting. When Parliament rose he did not go north to slaughter grouse upon the moors or stalk deer in Scottish forests, and when protocol required his attendance upon royalty at Balmoral, he would not go for walks and \u201cpositively refused,\u201d wrote Queen Victoria\u2019s Private Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, \u201cto admire the prospect or the deer.\u201d Ponsonby was told to have his room in the dismal castle kept \u201cwarm\u201d\u2014a minimum temperature of sixty degrees. Otherwise he retired for his holidays to France, where he owned a villa at Beaulieu on the Riviera and where he could exercise his fluent French and lose himself in The Count of Monte Cristo, the only book, he once told Dumas fils, which allowed him to forget politics.His acquaintance with games was confined to tennis, but when elderly he invented his own form of exercise, which consisted in riding a tricycle through St. James\u2019s Park in the early mornings or along paths cemented for the purpose in the park of his estate at Hatfield. Wearing for the occasion a kind of sombrero hat and a short sleeveless cloak with a hole in the middle in which he resembled a monk, he would be accompanied by a young coachman to push him up the hills. At the downhill slopes, the young man would be told to \u201cjump on behind,\u201d and the Prime Minister, with the coachman\u2019s hands on his shoulders, would roll away, cloak flying and pedals whirring.Hatfield, twenty miles north of London in Hertfordshire, had been the home of the Cecils for nearly three hundred years since James I had given it, in 1607, to his Prime Minister, Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, in exchange for a house of Cecil\u2019s to which the King had taken a fancy. It was the royal residence where Queen Elizabeth had spent her childhood and where, on receiving news of her accession, she held her first council, to swear in William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as her chief Secretary of State. Its Long Gallery, with intricately carved paneled walls and gold-leaf ceiling, was 180 feet in length. The Marble Hall, named for the black and white marble floor, glowed like a jewel case with painted and gilded ceiling and Brussels tapestries. The red King James Drawing Room was hung with full-length family portraits by Romney and Reynolds and Lawrence. The library was lined from floor to gallery and ceiling with 10,000 volumes bound in leather and vellum. In other rooms were kept the Casket Letters of Mary Queen of Scots, suits of armor taken from men of the Spanish Armada, the cradle of the beheaded King, Charles I, and presentation portraits of James I and George III. Outside were yew hedges clipped in the form of crenelated battlements, and the gardens, of which Pepys wrote that he never saw \u201cso good flowers, nor so great gooseberries as big as nutmegs.\u201d Over the entrance hall hung flags captured at Waterloo and presented to Hatfield by the Duke of Wellington, who was a constant visitor and devoted admirer of the Prime Minister\u2019s mother, the second Marchioness. In her honor Wellington wore the hunt coat of the Hatfield Hounds when he was on campaign. The first Marchioness was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and hunted till the day she died at eighty-five, when, half-blind and strapped to the saddle, she was accompanied by a groom who would shout, when her horse approached a fence, \u201cJump, dammit, my Lady, jump!\u201dIt was this exceptional person who reinvigorated the Cecil blood, which, after Burghley and his son, had produced no further examples of superior mentality. Rather, the general mediocrity of succeeding generations had been varied only, according to a later Cecil, by instances of \u201cquite exceptional stupidity.\u201d But the second Marquess proved a vigorous and able man with a strong sense of public duty who served in several mid-century Tory cabinets. His second son, another Robert Cecil, was the Prime Minister of 1895. He in turn produced five sons who were to distinguish themselves. One became a general, one a bishop, one a minister of state, one M.P. for Oxford, and one, through service to the government, won a peerage in his own right. \u201cIn human beings as in horses,\u201d Lord Birkenhead was moved to comment on the Cecil record, \u201cthere is something to be said for the hereditary principle.\u201dAt Oxford in 1850 the contemporaries of young Robert Cecil agreed that he would end as Prime Minister either because or in spite of his remorselessly uncompromising opinions. Throughout life he never bothered to restrain them. His youthful speeches were remarkable for their virulence and insolence; he was not, said Disraeli, \u201ca man who measures his phrases.\u201d A \u201cSalisbury\u201d became a synonym for political imprudence. He once compared the Irish in their incapacity for self-government to Hottentots and spoke of an Indian candidate for Parliament as \u201cthat black man.\u201d In the opinion of Lord Morley his speeches were always a pleasure to read because \u201cthey were sure to contain one blazing indiscretion which it is a delight to remember.\u201d Whether these were altogether accidental is open to question, for though Lord Salisbury delivered his speeches without notes, they were worked out in his head beforehand and emerged clear and perfect in sentence structure. In that time the art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman and anyone reading from a written speech would have been regarded as pitiable. When Lord Salisbury spoke, \u201cevery sentence,\u201d said a fellow member, \u201cseemed as essential, as articulate, as vital to the argument as the members of his body to an athlete.\u201dAppearing in public before an audience about whom he cared nothing, Salisbury was awkward; but in the Upper House, where he addressed his equals, he was perfectly and strikingly at home. He spoke sonorously, with an occasional change of tone to icy mockery or withering sarcasm. When a recently ennobled Whig took the floor to lecture the House of Lords in high-flown and solemn Whig sentiments, Salisbury asked a neighbor who the speaker was and on hearing the whispered identification, replied perfectly audibly, \u201cI thought he was dead.\u201d When he listened to others he could become easily bored, revealed by a telltale wagging of his leg which seemed to one observer to be saying, \u201cWhen will all this be over?\u201d Or sometimes, raising his heels off the floor, he would set up a sustained quivering of his knees and legs which could last for half an hour at a time. At home, when made restless by visitors, it shook the floor and made the furniture rattle, and in the House his colleagues on the front bench complained it made them seasick. If his legs were at rest his long fingers would be in motion, incessantly twisting and turning a paper knife or beating a tattoo on his knee or on the arm of his chair.He never dined out and rarely entertained beyond one or two political receptions at his town house in Arlington Street and an occasional garden party at Hatfield. He avoided the Carlton, official club of the Conservatives, in favor of the Junior Carlton, where a special luncheon table was set aside for him alone and the library was hung with huge placards inscribed silence. He worked from breakfast to one in the morning, returning to his desk after dinner as if he were beginning a new day. His clothes were drab and often untidy. He wore trousers and waistcoat of a dismal gray under a broadcloth frock coat grown shiny. But though careless in dress, he was particular about the trimming of his beard and carefully directed operations in the barber\u2019s chair, indicating \u201cjust a little more off here\u201d while \u201cartist and subject gazed fixedly in the mirror to judge the result.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 18.59}, {"asin": "1982106409", "title": "The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future", "author": "Chris Whipple", "description": "Review New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice \u201c The best book about the CIA I\u2019ve ever read. Its revelations are eye-popping, alternately exhilarating and depressing\u2026How Whipple managed to pull so much history together, how he extracted such a wealth of detail from his principal sources\u2014the CIA leaders themselves\u2014is quite simply mind-boggling. This is an important book. And one hell of a story.\u201d \u2014Christopher Buckley, New York Times bestselling author of The White House Mess and Thank You for Smoking \u201cA genial, engaging portrait of the men and one woman who have run the C.I.A. over the past six decades\u2026.[Contains] a richly textured account of the operation targeting the Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyah\u2026.In weighing success and failure, Whipple offers measured, sympathetic, on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand tallies of the merits and demerits for each of his spymasters.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times \u201cA study of how the C.I.A. has at different times over the decades been both a target of presidential animus and a clandestine presidential plaything\u2026.All of this can make for some great reading\u2026.Whipple\u2019s interviews give plenty of rope for some of the former spy chiefs to hang themselves.\u201d \u2014 Mark Mazzetti, Washington investigative correspondent for The New York Times and author of The Way of the Knife, writing in the digital weekly Air Mail \" A page-turner. Chris Whipple gives the reader tales of intrigue and masterfully tells the history of the nation\u2019s spymasters and their relationships to presidents, and how those interactions shaped history\u2026..An engaging read of politics, off-the-books plots, and struggles for CIA identity and access\u2026Rating: 3.5 out of 4 trench coats.\" \u2014The Cipher Brief \u201cIf you\u2019re an American, The Spymasters is required reading.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Review of Books \u201cWhipple\u2019s access and interviews are impressive [and his] exploration of the different dynamics of the directors themselves, the presidents they served, and the challenges each faced is fascinating\u2026.[The] writing is breezy, accessible, and compelling.\u201d \u2014The Diplomatic Courier \u201cCompelling\u2026Chris Whipple does for the CIA and Washington DC what Plutarch did for those whose job it was to expand and defend the glory of Rome\u2014paint an indelible portrait of how the servants of government seek to know and control the world\u2026.One theme emerges from the career of each director\u2014how difficult it is to tell presidents anything they don\u2019t want to hear.\u201d \u2014Thomas Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA \"An expert chronicle of the CIA through the actions of its directors\u2026.This lively, opinionated history makes it clear that presidents and CIA directors sometimes deserve each other.\u201d \u2014Kirkus Reviews \u201cRiveting\u2026a timely reminder of the outsized influence of our nation\u2019s intelligence bureaucracy\u2014and the men and women who live in this wilderness of mirrors. \u2018They were all asked to do things they shouldn\u2019t do,\u2019 says Cynthia Helms, wife of the legendary CIA Director Richard Helms. Whipple explores these ethical quandaries with nuance and fairness.\u201d \u2014Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames \u201cFascinating\u2026Whipple parts the curtains on the dark art to show the triumphs and failures, the personalities and rivalries of those who work in the shadows of espionage.\u201d \u2014Tom Brokaw, Special Correspondent for NBC News and bestselling author of The Greatest Generation \u201cChris Whipple is an accomplished historian, hard-nosed journalist, and master storyteller\u2026A must-read for anyone interested in America\u2019s intelligence gathering and national security.\u201d \u2014James A. Baker, III, 61st U.S. Secretary of State \u201cWhipple makes excellent use of insider accounts and provides enough color to keep readers turning the pages. This well-written and accessible survey illuminates a neglected role in American history.\u201d \u2014Publishers Weekly \u201cProvides astute profiles of the men, and one woman, in charge of the modern Central Intelligence Agency, and the presidents for whom they have worked\u2026Accurate, fair and informative.\u201d \u2014John W. Dean, Nixon Administration White House Counsel and bestselling author of Conservatives Without Conscience \u201cBetter than anyone, Chris Whipple knows how to root out the secrets buried deeply in the federal bureaucracy\u2026When he gives the most secret of our agencies a good shaking the headline stories and secrets come tumbling out\u2026This is the CIA with the bark off, and Washington reporting at its best.\u201d \u2014Bob Schieffer, CBS News \u201cEngrossing\u2026Whipple is at once clear-eyed and fair-minded while giving us a riveting read.\u201d \u2014Evan Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA \u201cA highly readable, fair, and well researched history of the CIA over the past fifty years. Whipple comes neither to pillory the CIA nor to praise it but, rather, to understand it\u2014and he fully succeeds.\u201d \u2014Max Boot, New York Times bestselling author The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam About the Author Chris Whipple is an author, political analyst, and Emmy Award\u2013winning documentary filmmaker. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and has contributed essays to The New York Times , The Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , and Vanity Fair . His first book, The Gatekeepers , an analysis of the position of White House Chief of Staff, was a New York Times bestseller. His follow-up, The Spymasters , was based on interviews with nearly every living CIA Director and was critically acclaimed. Whipple lives in New York City with his wife Cary. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1: \u201cStay the hell away from the whole damned thing.\u201d CHAPTER ONE \u201cStay the hell away from the whole damned thing.\u201d Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon At his transition headquarters on the thirty-ninth floor of New York City\u2019s Pierre Hotel, in a suite with a panoramic view of Central Park, Richard M. Nixon was preparing to become president of the United States. It was Friday, November 15, 1968, and Nixon had been huddling with his closest advisers, meeting with candidates for his cabinet, plotting to bend the Washington establishment to his will. The president-elect was \u201cin the mood of a general about to occupy an enemy town,\u201d wrote author Thomas Powers, \u201cbringing with him a visceral dislike and suspicion of the federal bureaucracy\u2026 because it was in his character to see himself always as surrounded by Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0394747909", "title": "Huey Long", "author": "Thomas Harry Williams", "description": "Review \"A brilliant, bawdy, unforgettable picture of the most colorful, as well as the most dangerous man to engage in American politics.\"\u00a0\u2014 Washington Post From the Inside Flap Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this work describes the life of one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history. From the Back Cover Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this work describes the life of one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history. About the Author T. Harry Williams was born in Vinegar Hill, Illinois, in 1909. He taught at the universities of Wisconsin, Omaha, and West Virginia before becoming Professor of History of Louisiana State University, and was the author of many books on military and political history. The T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History was established at Louisiana State University in 1992. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 26.0}, {"asin": "1771641258", "title": "The Obesity Code - Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss (Book 1)", "author": "Dr. Jason Fung", "description": "Review \u201cNot only full of insights but also surprisingly funny. Read it to understand why the world became fat, how to reverse the epidemic\u2014and how to stay thin yourself.\u201d\u2014 Andreas Eenfeldt , MD, Founder of Dietdoctor.com\u201cDr. Jason Fung\u2019s explanation of insulin resistance and the accompanying insulin model of obesity is original, brilliant and game changing.\u201d\u2014 Zo\u00eb Harcombe , Obesity researcher, author of The Harcrombe Diet \u201cA fantastic book that exposes some of the world's most pervasive myths about obesity and weight management. A must read for anyone interested in the science of diet.\u201d\u2014 Kris Gunnars , nutrition researcher\u201cIn The Obesity Code , Dr. Jason Fung triumphs in explaining the core underlying causes of obesity and manages to simplify it in a way that anybody can understand. If more doctors and people were able to understand these causes and implement Dr. Fung's actionable advice then we would be able to start reversing the obesity epidemic tomorrow.\u201d\u2014 Sam Feltham , USA Today World Fitness Elite Trainer of the Year About the Author Dr. Jason Fung is a New York Times -bestselling author whose books include The Obesity Code , The Diabetes Code , The Obesity Code Cookbook , The PCOS Plan , Life in the Fasting Lane , and The Complete Guide to Fasting . Dr. Fung completed medical school at the University of Toronto and a fellowship in nephrology at the University of California. Dr. Fung is also the co-founder of The Fasting Method, a program to help people lose weight and reverse Type 2 Diabetes naturally with fasting. He lives in Toronto. Timothy Noakes is Professor of Exercise and Sports Science at the University of Cape Town, a marathon runner, and the author of the bestseller The Lore of Running . After discovering research supporting a high fat, low carb diet as the healthiest option for many people, he started the Noakes Foundation in 2012, and has dedicated his life to opening people's eyes to the myth of low-fat eating and the nutritional and environmental crisis it has led us to.", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.39}, {"asin": "1439195269", "title": "Lonesome Dove: A Novel", "author": "Larry McMurtry", "description": "Review \u201cIf you read only one western novel in your life, read Lonesome Dove .\u201d\u2014 USA Today \u201cEverything about Lonesome Dove feels true . . . These are real people, and they are still larger than life.\u201d\u2014Nicholas Lemann, The New York Times Book Review \u201c Lonesome Dove is Larry McMurtry\u2019s loftiest novel.\"\u2014 Los Angeles Times \"A marvelous novel . . . moves with joyous energy . . . amply imagined and crisply, lovingly written. I haven't enjoyed a book more this year . . . a joyous epic.\"-- Newsweek \"The finest novel that McMurtry has yet accomplished . . . Lonesome Dove has all the action anyone could possibly imagine . . . [and] both in general and in details, the authority of exact authenticity . . . superb.\"-- Chicago Tribune About the Author Larry McMurtry (1936\u20132021)\u00a0was\u00a0the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning Lonesome Dove , three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1. WHENAUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rat-tlesnake\u2014not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail.\u201cYou pigs git,\u201d Augustus said, kicking the shoat. \u201cHead on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.\u201d It was the porch he begrudged them, not the snake. Pigs on the porch just made things hotter, and things were already hot enough. He stepped down into the dusty yard and walked around to the springhouse to get his jug. The sun was still high, sulled in the sky like a mule, but Augustus had a keen eye for sun, and to his eye the long light from the west had taken on an encouraging slant.Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day\u2014and most of the months of the year\u2014the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices\u2014if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices\u2014of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, half of which Augustus owned.His stubborn partner, Captain W. F. Call, maintained that there was excellent shade as close as Pickles Gap, only twelve miles away, but Augustus wouldn\u2019t allow it. Pickles Gap was if anything a more worthless community than Lonesome Dove. It had only sprung up because a fool from north Georgia named Wesley Pickles had gotten himself and his family lost in the mesquites for about ten days. When he finally found a clearing, he wouldn\u2019t leave it, and Pickles Gap came into being, mainly attracting travelers like its founder, which is to say people too weak-willed to be able to negotiate a few hundred miles of mesquite thicket without losing their nerve.The springhouse was a little lumpy adobe building, so cool on the inside that Augustus would have been tempted to live in it had it not been for its popularity with black widows, yellow jackets and centipedes. When he opened the door he didn\u2019t immediately see any centipedes but he did immediately hear the nervous buzz of a rattlesnake that was evidently smarter than the one the pigs were eating. Augustus could just make out the snake, coiled in a corner, but decided not to shoot it; on a quiet spring evening in Lonesome Dove, a shot could cause complications. Everybody in town would hear it and conclude either that the Comanches were down from the plains or the Mexicans up from the river. If any of the customers of the Dry Bean, the town\u2019s one saloon, happened to be drunk or unhappy\u2014which was very likely\u2014they would probably run out into the street and shoot a Mexican or two, just to be on the safe side.At the very least, Call would come stomping up from the lots, only to be annoyed to discover it had just been a snake. Call had no respect whatsoever for snakes, or for anyone who stood aside for snakes. He treated rattlers like gnats, disposing of them with one stroke of whatever tool he had in hand. \u201cA man that slows down for snakes might as well walk,\u201d he often said, a statement that made about as much sense to an educated man as most of the things Call said.Augustus held to a more leisurely philosophy. He believed in giving creatures a little time to think, so he stood in the sun a few minutes until the rattler calmed down and crawled out a hole. Then he reached in and lifted his jug out of the mud. It had been a dry year, even by the standards of Lonesome Dove, and the spring was just springing enough to make a nice mud puddle. The pigs spent half their time rooting around the springhouse, hoping to get into the mud, but so far none of the holes in the adobe was big enough to admit a pig.The damp burlap the jug was wrapped in naturally appealed to the centipedes, so Augustus made sure none had sneaked under the wrapping before he uncorked the jug and took a modest swig. The one white barber in Lonesome Dove, a fellow Tennessean named Dillard Brawley, had to do his barbering on one leg because he had not been cautious enough about centipedes. Two of the vicious red-legged variety had crawled into his pants one night and Dillard had got up in a hurry and had neglected to shake out the pants. The leg hadn\u2019t totally rotted off, but it had rotted sufficiently that the family got nervous about blood poisoning and persuaded he and Call to saw it off.For a year or two Lonesome Dove had had a real doctor, but the young man had lacked good sense. A vaquero with a loose manner that everybody was getting ready to hang at the first excuse anyway passed out from drink one night and let a blister bug crawl in his ear. The bug couldn\u2019t find its way out, but it could move around enough to upset the vaquero, who persuaded the young doctor to try and flush it. The young man was doing his best with some warm salt water, but the vaquero lost his temper and shot him. It was a fatal mistake on the vaquero\u2019s part: someone blasted his horse out from under him as he was racing away, and the incensed citizenry, most of whom were nearby at the Dry Bean, passing the time, hung him immediately.Unfortunately no medical man had taken an interest in the town since, and Augustus and Call, both of whom had coped with their share of wounds, got called on to do such surgery as was deemed essential. Dillard Brawley\u2019s leg had presented no problem, except that Dillard screeched so loudly that he injured his vocal cords. He got around good on one leg, but the vocal cords had never fully recovered, which ultimately hurt his business. Dillard had always talked too much, but after the trouble with the centipedes, what he did was whisper too much. Customers couldn\u2019t relax under their hot towels for trying to make out Dillard\u2019s whispers. He hadn\u2019t really been worth listening to, even when he had two legs, and in time many of his customers drifted off to the Mexican barber. Call even used the Mexican, and Call didn\u2019t trust Mexicans or barbers.Augustus took the jug back to the porch and placed his rope-bottomed chair so as to utilize the smidgin of shade he had to work with. As the sun sank, the shade would gradually extend itself across the porch, the wagon yard, Hat Creek, Lonesome Dove and, eventually, the Rio Grande. By the time the shade had reached the river, Augustus would have mellowed with the evening and be ready for some intelligent conversation, which usually involved talking to himself. Call would work until slap dark if he could find anything to do, and if he couldn\u2019t find anything he would make up something\u2014and Pea Eye was too much of a corporal to quit before the Captain quit, even if Call would have let him.The two pigs had quietly disregarded Augustus\u2019s orders to go to the creek, and were under one of the wagons, eating the snake. That made good sense, for the creek was just as dry as the wagon yard, and farther off. Fifty weeks out of the year Hat Creek was nothing but a sandy ditch, and the fact that the two pigs didn\u2019t regard it as a fit wallow was a credit to their intelligence. Augustus often praised the pigs\u2019 intelligence in a running argument he had been having with Call for the last few years. Augustus maintained that pigs were smarter than all horses and most people, a claim that galled Call severely.\u201cNo slop-eating pig is as smart as a horse,\u201d Call said, before going on to say worse things.As was his custom, Augustus drank a fair amount of whiskey as he sat and watched the sun ease out of the day. If he wasn\u2019t tilting the rope-bottomed chair, he was tilting the jug. The days in Lonesome Dove were a blur of heat and as dry as chalk, but mash whiskey took some of the dry away and made Augustus feel nicely misty inside\u2014foggy and cool as a morning in the Tennessee hills. He seldom got downright drunk, but he did enjoy feeling misty along about sundown, keeping his mood good with tasteful swigs as the sky to the west began to color up. The whiskey didn\u2019t damage his intellectual powers any, but it did make him more tolerant of the raw sorts he had to live with: Call and Pea Eye and Deets, young Newt, and old Bolivar, the cook.When the sky had pinked up nicely over the western flats, Augustus went around to the back of the house and kicked the kitchen door a time or two. \u201cBetter warm up the sowbelly and mash a few beans,\u201d he said. Old Bolivar didn\u2019t answer, so Augustus kicked the door once or twice more, to emphasize his point, and went back to the porch. The blue shoat was waiting for him at the corner of the house, quiet as a cat. It was probably hoping he would drop something\u2014a belt or a pocketknife or a hat\u2014so he could eat it.\u201cGit from here, shoat,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cIf you\u2019re that hungry go hunt up another snake.\u201d It occurred to him that a leather belt couldn\u2019t be much tougher or less palatable than the fried goat Bolivar served up three or four times a week. The old man had been a competent Mexican bandit before he ran out of steam and crossed the river. Since then he had led a quiet life, but it was a fact that goat kept turning up on the table. The Hat Creek Cattle Company didn\u2019t trade in them, and it was unlikely that Bolivar was buying them out of his own pocket\u2014stealing goats was probably his way of keeping up his old skills. His old skills did not include cooking. The goat meat tasted like it had been fried in tar, but Augustus was the only member of the establishment sensitive enough to raise a complaint. \u201cBol, where\u2019d you get the tar you fried this goat in?\u201d he asked regularly, his quiet attempt at wit falling as usual on deaf ears. Bolivar ignored all queries, direct or indirect.Augustus was getting about ready to start talking to the sow and the shoat when he saw Call and Pea Eye walking up from the lots. Pea Eye was tall and lank, had never been full in his life, and looked so awkward that he appeared to be about to fall down even when he was standing still. He looked totally helpless, but that was another case of looks deceiving. In fact, he was one of the ablest men Augustus had ever known. He had never been an outstanding Indian fighter, but if you gave him something he could work at deliberately, like carpentering or blacksmithing, or well-digging or harness repair, Pea was excellent. If he had been a man to do sloppy work, Call would have run him off long before.Augustus walked down and met the men at the wagons. \u201cIt\u2019s a little early for you two to be quittin\u2019, ain\u2019t it, girls?\u201d he said. \u201cOr is this Christmas or what?\u201dBoth men had sweated their shirts through so many times during the day that they were practically black. Augustus offered Call the jug, and Call put a foot on a wagon tongue and took a swig just to rinse the dry out of his mouth. He spat a mouthful of perfectly good whiskey in the dust and handed the jug to Pea Eye.\u201cGirls yourself,\u201d he said. \u201cIt ain\u2019t Christmas.\u201d Then he went on to the house, so abruptly that Augustus was a little taken aback. Call had never been one for fine manners, but if the day\u2019s work had gone to his satisfaction he would usually stand and pass the time a minute.The funny thing about Woodrow Call was how hard he was to keep in scale. He wasn\u2019t a big man\u2014in fact, was barely middle-sized\u2014but when you walked up and looked him in the eye it didn\u2019t seem that way. Augustus was four inches taller than his partner, and Pea Eye three inches taller yet, but there was no way you could have convinced Pea Eye that Captain Call was the short man. Call had him buffaloed, and in that respect Pea had plenty of company. If a man meant to hold his own with Call it was necessary to keep in mind that Call wasn\u2019t as big as he seemed. Augustus was the one man in south Texas who could usually keep him in scale, and he built on his advantage whenever he could. He started many a day by pitching Call a hot biscuit and remarking point-blank, \u201cYou know, Call, you ain\u2019t really no giant.\u201dA simple heart like Pea could never understand such behavior. It gave Augustus a laugh sometimes to consider that Call could hoodwink a man nearly twice his size, getting Pea to confuse the inner with the outer man. But of course Call himself had such a single-track mind that he scarcely realized he was doing it. He just did it. What made it a fascinating trick was that Call had never noticed that he had a trick. The man never wasted five minutes appreciating himself; it would have meant losing five minutes off whatever job he had decided he wanted to get done that day.\u201cIt\u2019s a good thing I ain\u2019t scairt to be lazy,\u201d Augustus told him once.\u201cYou may think so. I don\u2019t,\u201d Call said.\u201cHell, Call, if I worked as hard as you, there\u2019d be no thinking done at all around this outfit. You stay in a lather fifteen hours a day. A man that\u2019s always in a lather can\u2019t think nothin\u2019 out.\u201d\u201cI\u2019d like to see you think the roof back on that barn,\u201d Call said.A strange little wind had whipped over from Mexico and blown the roof off clean as a whistle, three years before. Fortunately it only rained in Lonesome Dove once or twice a year, so the loss of the roof didn\u2019t result in much suffering for the stock, when there was stock. It mostly meant suffering for Call, who had never been able to locate enough decent lumber to build a new roof. Unfortunately a rare downpour had occurred only about a week after the wind dropped the old roof in the middle of Hat Creek. It had been a real turd-floater, and also a lumber-floater, washing much of the roof straight into the Rio Grande.\u201cIf you think so much, why didn\u2019t you think of that rain?\u201d Call asked. Ever since, he had been throwing the turd-floater up to Augustus. Give Call a grievance, however silly, and he would save it like money.Pea Eye wasn\u2019t spitting out any mash whiskey. He had a skinny neck\u2014 his Adam\u2019s apple bulged so when he drank that it reminded Augustus of a snake with a frog stuck in its gullet.\u201cCall looks mad enough to kick the stump,\u201d Augustus said, when Pea finally stopped to breathe.\u201cShe bit a hunk out of him, that\u2019s why,\u201d Pea said. \u201cI don\u2019t know why the Captain wants to keep her.\u201d\u201cFillies are his only form of folly,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cWhat\u2019s he doing letting a horse bite him? I thought you boys were digging the new well?\u201d\u201cHit rock,\u201d Pea said. \u201cAin\u2019t room for but one man to swing a pick down in that hole, so Newt swung it while I shod horses. The Captain took a ride. I guess he thought he had her sweated down. He turned his back on her and she bit a hunk out.\u201dThe mare in question was known around town as the Hell Bitch. Call had bought her in Mexico, from some caballeros who claimed to have killed an Indian to get her\u2014a Comanche, they said. Augustus doubted that part of the story: it was unlikely one Comanche had been riding around by himself in that part of Mexico, and if there had been two Comanches the caballeros wouldn\u2019t have lived to do any horse trading. The mare was a dapple gray, with a white muzzle and a white streak down her forehead, too tall to be pure Indian pony and too short-barreled to be pure thoroughbred. Her disposition did suggest some time spent with Indians, but which Indians and how long was anybody\u2019s guess. Every man who saw her wanted to buy her, she was that stylish, but Call wouldn\u2019t even listen to an offer, though Pea Eye and Newt were both anxious to see her sold. They had to work around her every day and suffered accordingly. She had once kicked Newt all the way into the blacksmith\u2019s shop and nearly into the forge. Pea Eye was at least as scared of her as he was of Comanches, which was saying a lot.\u201cWhat\u2019s keeping Newt?\u201d Augustus asked.\u201cHe may have went to sleep down in that well,\u201d Pea Eye said.Then Augustus saw the boy walking up from the lots, so tired he was barely moving. Pea Eye was half drunk by the time Newt finally made the wagons.\u201c\u2019I god, Newt, I\u2019m glad you got here before fall,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cWe\u2019d have missed you during the summer.\u201d\u201cI been throwin\u2019 rocks at the mare,\u201d Newt said, with a grin. \u201cDid you see what a hunk she bit out of the Captain?\u201dNewt lifted one foot and carefully scraped the mud from the well off the sole of his boot, while Pea Eye continued to wash the dust out of his throat.Augustus had always admired the way Newt could stand on one leg while cleaning the other boot. \u201cLook at that, Pea,\u201d he said. \u201cI bet you can\u2019t do that.\u201dPea Eye was so used to seeing Newt stand on one leg to clean his boot that he couldn\u2019t figure out what it was Gus thought he couldn\u2019t do. A few big swigs of liquor sometimes slowed his thinking down to a crawl. This usually happened at sundown, after a hard day of well-digging or horseshoeing; at such times Pea was doubly glad he worked with the Captain, rather than Gus. The less talk the Captain had to listen to, the better humor he was in, whereas Gus was just the opposite. He\u2019d rattle off five or six different questions and opinions, running them all together like so many unbranded cattle\u2014it made it hard to pick out one and think about it carefully and slowly, the only ways Pea Eye liked to think. At such times his only recourse was to pretend the questions had hit him in his deaf ear, the left one, which hadn\u2019t really worked well since the day of their big fight with the Keechis\u2014what they called the Stone House fight. It had been pure confusion, since the Indians had been smart enough to fire the prairie grass, smoking things up so badly that no one could see six feet ahead. They kept bumping into Indians in the smoke and having to shoot point-blank; a Ranger right next to Pea had spotted one and fired too close to Pea\u2019s ear.That was the day the Indians got away with their horses, which made Captain Call about as mad as Pea had ever seen him. It meant they had to walk down the Brazos for nearly two hundred miles, worrying constantly about what would happen if the Comanches discovered they were afoot. Pea Eye hadn\u2019t noticed he was half deaf until they had walked most of the way out.Fortunately, while he was worrying the question of what it was he couldn\u2019t do, old Bolivar began to whack the dinner bell, which put an end to discussion. The old dinner bell had lost its clapper, but Bolivar had found a crowbar that somebody had managed to break, and he laid into the bell so hard that you couldn\u2019t have heard the clapper if there had been one.The sun had finally set, and it was so still along the river that they could hear the horses swishing their tails, down in the lots\u2014or they could until Bolivar laid into the bell. Although he probably knew they were standing around the wagons, in easy hearing distance, Bolivar continued to pound the bell for a good five minutes. Bolivar pounded the bell for reasons of his own; even Call couldn\u2019t control him in that regard. The sound drowned out the quiet of sunset, which annoyed Augustus so much that at times he was tempted to go up and shoot the old man, just to teach him a lesson.\u201cI figure he\u2019s calling bandits,\u201d Augustus said, when the ringing finally stopped. They started for the house, and the pigs fell in with them, the shoat eating a lizard he had caught somewhere. The pigs liked Newt even better than Augustus\u2014when he didn\u2019t have anything better to do he would feed them scraps of rawhide and scratch their ears.\u201cIf them bandits were to come, maybe the Captain would let me start wearing a gun,\u201d Newt said wistfully. It seemed he would never get old enough to wear a gun, though he was well into his teens.\u201cIf you was to wear a gun somebody would just mistake you for a gunfighter and shoot you,\u201d Augustus said, noting the boy\u2019s wistful look. \u201cIt ain\u2019t worth it. If Bol ever calls up any bandits I\u2019ll lend you my Henry.\u201d\u201cThat old man can barely cook,\u201d Pea Eye remarked. \u201cWhere would he get any bandits?\u201d\u201cWhy, you remember that greasy bunch he had,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cWe used to buy horses from \u2019em. That\u2019s the only reason Call hired him to cook. In the business we\u2019re in, it don\u2019t hurt to know a few horsethieves, as long as they\u2019re Mexicans. I figure Bol\u2019s just biding his time. As soon as he gains our trust his bunch will sneak up some night and murder us all.\u201dHe didn\u2019t believe anything of the kind\u2014he just liked to stimulate the boy once in a while, and Pea too, though Pea was an exceptionally hard man to stimulate, being insensitive to most fears. Pea had just sense enough to fear Comanches\u2014that didn\u2019t require an abundance of sense. Mexican bandits did not impress him.Newt had more imagination. He turned and looked across the river, where a big darkness was about to settle. Every now and then, about sundown, the Captain and Augustus and Pea and Deets would strap on guns and ride off into that darkness, into Mexico, to return about sunup with thirty or forty horses or perhaps a hundred skinny cattle. It was the way the stock business seemed to work along the border, the Mexican ranchers raiding north while the Texans raided south. Some of the skinny cattle spent their lives being chased back and forth across the Rio Grande. Newt\u2019s fondest hope was to get old enough to be taken along on the raids. Many a night he lay in his hot little bunk, listening to old Bolivar snore and mumble below him, peering out the window toward Mexico, imagining the wild doings that must be going on. Once in a while he even heard gunfire, though seldom more than a shot or two, from up or down the river\u2014it got his imagination to working all the harder.\u201cYou can go when you\u2019re grown,\u201d the Captain said, and that was all he said. There was no arguing with it, either\u2014not if you were just hired help. Arguing with the Captain was a privilege reserved for Mr. Gus.They no sooner got in the house than Mr. Gus began to exercise the privilege. The Captain had his shirt off, letting Bolivar treat his mare bite. She had got him just above the belt. Enough blood had run down into his pants that one pants leg was caked with it. Bol was about to pack the bite with his usual dope, a mixture of axle grease and turpentine, but Mr. Gus made him wait until he could get a look at the wound himself.\u201c\u2019I god, Woodrow,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cAs long as you\u2019ve worked around horses it looks like you\u2019d know better than to turn your back on a Kiowa mare.\u201dCall was thinking of something and didn\u2019t answer for a minute. What he was thinking was that the moon was in the quarter\u2014what they called the rustler\u2019s moon. Let it get full over the pale flats and some Mexicans could see well enough to draw a fair bead. Men he\u2019d ridden with for years were dead and buried, or at least dead, because they\u2019d crossed the river under a full moon. No moon at all was nearly as bad: then it was too hard to find the stock, and too hard to move it. The quarter moon was the right moon for a swing below the border. The brush country to the north was already thick with cattlemen, making up their spring herds and getting trail crews together; it wouldn\u2019t be a week before they began to drift into Lonesome Dove. It was time to go gather cattle.\u201cWho said she was Kiowa?\u201d he said, looking at Augustus.\u201cI\u2019ve reasoned it out,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cYou could have done the same if you ever stopped working long enough to think.\u201d\u201cI can work and think too,\u201d Call said. \u201cYou\u2019re the only man I know whose brain don\u2019t work unless it\u2019s in the shade.\u201dAugustus ignored the remark. \u201cI figure it was a Kiowa on his way to steal a woman that lost that mare,\u201d he said. \u201cYour Comanche don\u2019t hunger much after se\u00f1oritas. White women are easier to steal, and don\u2019t eat as much besides. The Kiowa are different. They fancy se\u00f1oritas.\u201d\u201cCan we eat or do we have to wait till the argument\u2019s over?\u201d Pea Eye asked.\u201cWe starve if we wait for that,\u201d Bolivar said, plunking a potful of sowbelly and beans down on the rough table. Augustus, to the surprise of no one, was the first to fill his plate.\u201cI don\u2019t know where you keep finding these Mexican strawberries,\u201d he said, referring to the beans. Bolivar managed to find them three hundred and sixty-five days a year, mixing them with so many red chilies that a spoonful of beans was more or less as hot as a spoonful of red ants. Newt had come to think that only two things were certain if you worked for the Hat Creek Cattle Company. One was that Captain Call would think of more things to do than he and Pea Eye and Deets could get done, and the other was that beans would be available at all meals. The only man in the outfit who didn\u2019t fart frequently was old Bolivar himself\u2014he never touched beans and lived mainly on sourdough biscuits and chickory coffee, or rather cups of brown sugar with little puddles of coffee floating on top. Sugar cost money, too, and it irked the Captain to spend it, but Bolivar could not be made to break a habit. Augustus claimed the old man\u2019s droppings were so sugary that the blue shoat had taken to stalking him every time he went to shit, which might have been true. Newt had all he could do to keep clear of the shoat, and his own droppings were mostly bean.By the time Call got his shirt on and came to the table, Augustus was reaching for a second helping. Pea and Newt were casting nervous glances at the pot, hoping for seconds themselves but too polite to grab before everyone had been served. Augustus\u2019s appetite was a kind of natural calamity. Call had watched it with amazement for thirty years and yet it still surprised him to see how much Augustus ate. He didn\u2019t work unless he had to, and yet he could sit down night after night and out-eat three men who had put in a day\u2019s labor.In their rangering days, when things were a little slow the boys would sit around and swap stories about Augustus\u2019s eating. Not only did he eat a lot, he ate it fast. The cook that wanted to hold him at the grub for more than ten minutes had better have a side of beef handy.Call pulled out a chair and sat down. As Augustus was ladling himself a big scoop of beans, Call stuck his plate under the ladle. Newt thought it such a slick move that he laughed out loud.\u201cMany thanks,\u201d Call said. \u201cIf you ever get tired of loafing I guess you could get a job waiting tables.\u201d\u201cWhy, I had a job waiting tables once,\u201d Augustus said, pretending he had meant to serve Call the beans. \u201cOn a riverboat. I wasn\u2019t no older than Newt when I had that job. The cook even wore a white hat.\u201d\u201cWhat for?\u201d Pea Eye asked.\u201cBecause it\u2019s what real cooks are supposed to wear,\u201d Augustus said, looking at Bolivar, who was stirring a little coffee into his brown sugar. \u201cNot so much a hat as a kind of big white cap\u2014it looked like it could have been made out of a bedsheet.\u201d\u201cI\u2019d be damned if I\u2019d wear one,\u201d Call said.\u201cNobody would be loony enough to hire you to cook, Woodrow,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cThe cap is supposed to keep the cook\u2019s old greasy hairs from falling into the food. I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if some of Bol\u2019s hairs have found their way into this sow bosom.\u201dNewt looked at Bolivar, sitting over by the stove in his dirty serape. Bolivar\u2019s hair looked like it had had a can of secondhand lard poured over it. Once every few months Bol would change clothes and go visit his wife, but his efforts at improving his appearance never went much higher than his mustache, which he occasionally tried to wax with grease of some kind.\u201cHow come you to quit the riverboat?\u201d Pea Eye asked.\u201cI was too young and pretty,\u201d Augustus said. \u201cThe whores wouldn\u2019t let me alone.\u201dCall was sorry it had come up. He didn\u2019t like talk about whores\u2014not anytime, but particularly not in front of the boy. Augustus had little shame, if any. It had long been a sore spot between them.\u201cI wish they\u2019d drownt you then,\u201d Call said, annoyed. Conversation at the table seldom led to any good.Newt kept his eyes on his plate, as he usually did when the Captain grew annoyed.\u201cDrown me?\u201d Augustus said. \u201cWhy, if anybody had tried it, those girls would have clawed them to shreds.\u201d He knew Call was mad, but wasn\u2019t much inclined to humor him. It was his dinner table as much as Call\u2019s, and if Call didn\u2019t like the conversation he could go to bed.Call knew there was no point in arguing. That was what Augustus wanted: argument. He didn\u2019t really care what the question was, and it made no great difference to him which side he was on. He just plain loved to argue, whereas Call hated to. Long experience had taught him that there was no winning arguments with Augustus, even in cases where there was a simple right and wrong at issue. Even in the old days, when they were in the thick of it, with Indians and hardcases to worry about, Augustus would seize any chance for a dispute. Practically the closest call they ever had, when the two of them and six Rangers got surprised by the Comanches up the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red and were all digging holes in the bank that could have turned out to be their graves if they hadn\u2019t been lucky and got a cloudy night and sneaked away, Augustus had kept up a running argument with a Ranger they called Ugly Bobby. The argument was entirely about coon dogs, and Augustus had kept it up all night, though most of the Rangers were so scared they couldn\u2019t pass water.Of course the boy lapped up Augustus\u2019s stories about riverboats and whores. The boy hadn\u2019t been anywhere, so it was all romance to him.\u201cListening to you brag about women don\u2019t improve the taste of my food,\u201d he said, finally.\u201cCall, if you want better food you have to start by shooting Bolivar,\u201d Augustus said, reminded of his own grievance against the cook.\u201cBol, I want you to quit whackin\u2019 that bell with that crowbar,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can do it at noon if you want to but let off doin\u2019 it at night. A man with any sense can tell when it\u2019s sundown. You\u2019ve spoilt many a pretty evening for me, whackin\u2019 that bell.\u201dBolivar stirred his sugary coffee and held his peace. He whacked the dinner bell because he liked the sound, not because he wanted anybody to come and eat. The men could eat when they liked\u2014he would whack the bell when he liked. He enjoyed being a cook\u2014it was a good deal more relaxing than being a bandit\u2014but that didn\u2019t mean that he intended to take orders. His sense of independence was undiminished.\u201cGen-eral Lee freed the slaves,\u201d he remarked in a surly tone.Newt laughed. Bol never had been able to get the war straight, but he had been genuinely sorry when it ended. In fact, if it had kept going he would probably have stayed a bandit\u2014it was a safe and profitable profession with most of the Texans gone. But the ones who came back from the war were mostly bandits themselves, and they had better guns. The profession immediately became overcrowded. Bolivar knew it was time to quit, but once in a while he got the urge for a little shooting.\u201cIt wasn\u2019t General Lee, it was Abe Lincoln who freed the slaves,\u201d Augustus pointed out.Bolivar shrugged. \u201cNo difference,\u201d he said.\u201cA big difference,\u201d Call said. \u201cOne was a Yankee and one wasn\u2019t.\u201dPea Eye got interested for a minute. The beans and sowbelly had revived him. He had been very interested in the notion of emancipation and had studied over it a lot while he went about his work. It was obviously just pure luck that he himself hadn\u2019t been born a slave, but if he had been unlucky Lincoln would have freed him. It gave him a certain admiration for the man.\u201cHe just freed Americans,\u201d he pointed out to Bolivar.Augustus snorted. \u201cYou\u2019re in over your head, Pea,\u201d he said. \u201cWho Abe Lincoln freed was a bunch of Africans, no more American than Call here.\u201dCall pushed back his chair. He was not about to sit around arguing slavery after a long day, or after a short one either.\u201cI\u2019m as American as the next,\u201d he said, taking his hat and picking up a rifle.\u201cYou was born in Scotland,\u201d Augustus reminded him. \u201cI know they brought you over when you was still draggin\u2019 on the tit, but that don\u2019t make you no less a Scot.\u201dCall didn\u2019t reply. Newt looked up and saw him standing at the door, his hat on and his Henry in the crook of his arm. A couple of big moths flew past his head, drawn to the light of the kerosene lamp on the table. With nothing more said, the Captain went out the door.\u00a9 1985 Larry McMurtry Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 16.29}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0141001461", "title": "Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire", "author": "Richard B. Frank", "description": "Review Praise for Guadalcanal \"Brilliant . . . an enormous work based on the most meticulous research. Here is everything you might want to know about Guadalcanal.\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0  -- Los Angeles Times Book Review \"Richard Frank has produced what will surely become the standard history of the U.S. Navy's most important campaign. . . . A stunning debut by a major new talent in American letters.\"\u00a0\u00a0 --Tom Clancy\"Guadalcanal is a masterly account of what happened and why. . . . Books of this quality are rare, and Richard B. Frank should be commended for his authoritative\u00a0\u00a0inaugural work.\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0-- Chicago Tribune \"Mr. Frank's book is impressive in virtually all respects--a vividly and carefully crafted monument that is worthy of the Americans and Japanese who collided . . . on a little-known island named Guadalcanal.\"-- The New York Times Book Review From the Back Cover Downfall opens with a vivid portrayal of the catastrophic fire raid on Tokyo in March 1945 -- which was to be followed by the utter destruction of almost every major Japanese city -- and ends with the anguished vigil of American and Japanese leaders waiting to learn if Japan's armed forces would obey the Emperor's order to surrender. America's use of the atom bomb has generated more heated controversy than any other event of the whole war: -- Did nuclear weapons save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans poised to invade Japan.?-- Did U.S. leaders know that Japan was urgently seeking peace and needed only assurance about the Emperor's safety to end the war swiftly?-- Was the bomb really used to intimidate the Russians?-- Why wasn't the devastating power of the weapon demonstrated first before being unleashed on a city? Richard B. Frank has brought to life these critical times, working from primary documents, reports, diaries, and newly declassified records. These pages present the untold story of how American leaders learned in the summer of 1945 that their compromise strategy to end the war by blockade and bombardment, followed by invasion, had been shattered; radio intelligence had unmasked a massive Japanese buildup on Kyushu designed to turn the initial invasion into a bloody shambles. Meanwhile, the text and analysis of diplomatic intercepts depicted sterile prospects for negotiation before a final clash of arms. Here also, for the first time, is a full and balanced account of how Japan's leaders risked annihilation by gambling on a military strategy aimed at securing political bargaining leverage to preserve the old order in Japan. Downfall replacesthe myths that now surround the end of the war and the use of the bomb with the stark realities of this great historical controversy. About the Author Richard B. Frank was born in Kansas in 1947. He served for almost four years in the United States Army, including a tour of duty in Vietnam as an aerorifle platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division. He is the author of Guadalcanal . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Tokyo Burns:\u00a0\u00a0Raid of March 9-10\"A silver curtain falling\"With the night came north winds, blowing bitter and cold across the uneasy city. By 8:00 p.m., great shuddering gusts, at 45 to 67 miles per hour, \"violent as a spring typhoon,\" shoved against the wooden walls and pried at the doors and windows of the dwellings of Tokyo's 4.3 million citizens. Elsewhere, the winds toppled or jammed radar antennas and made mischief with communications. On the pitching seas to the south, picket-boats raised frantic alerts of many approaching bombers, but faulty radio reception--and faulty organization--muffled the alarms.On radios throughout the capital, the voice of Hidetoshi Matsumura, the spokesman for Imperial General Headquarters, hailed the coming day, March 10, as Army Day. His oration ended in the weary clich\u00e9: \"The darkest hour is just before dawn.\" His words had barely faded when, at 10:30 p.m., sirens sounded the long, steady wail warning of distant but potentially threatening aircraft. In contrast to the pervasive disorder that had invaded and overwhelmed all aspects of daily life in the capital, the air-raid alert system that roused many from mid-slumber was still respected for its efficiency. With electric lights forbidden after nightfall and cooking gas nonexistent, most families now habitually prepared and ate meals at twilight and then retired early. But even in repose, Tokyo's denizens remained partly dressed, usually in shapeless, loose monpe trousers.Near midnight, coast watchers reported droning noises that were likely from B-29s. The listeners could speak with authority, for the dreaded Superfortresses--known to the Tokyoites as \"bikko,\" \"B-san,\" \"Lord B.,\" \"okyakusama\" (visitors), and \"regular mail\"--had come many times to the capital, though only once at night, and never in such numbers or so low. Surprised and confused, civil-defense authorities hesitated, and the sirens did not exclaim the sharp, broken notes of the air-raid alarm, signifying an imminent attack, until 12:15 a.m. By then, bombs had been falling for seven minutes, and rusty red-yellow roses of flame already flowered across eastern Tokyo.A Danish diplomat, Lars Tillitse, dutifully ventured outside to make sure that his property betrayed no light. A \"terrific noise\" assailed him as the four-motored bombers thundered by overhead. Another Western observer, Robert Guillain, was more exact: A B-29 passed with \"an odd, rhythmic buzzing that filled the night with deep, powerful pulsation and made my whole house vibrate.\" Tillitse observed his neighbors erupting from their homes, animating the dark narrow streets, the men in helmets, everyone else in padded air-raid hoods. \"Radios were going full blast and doors and windows were open, so that people in the street could keep informed,\" recalled Tillitse. \"Already we could see fires.\"Radios proclaimed the approach of another wave of bombers, and Tillitse stayed outside to watch. Energetic searchlight crews fanned the slender, probing white columns of their beams from horizon to zenith. As the diplomat gazed upward, six or seven times a bomber punctured a column of illumination, whereupon five or six other lights converged to hold it. Centered in an aura, the silvery body became the target for gunners, who sent shells skyward. But in each case, the shiny cross glided on unhurt. Then Tillitse heard the crowd cheer and swiveled his head to behold one B-29 alight. The whole body glowed red, but the plane continued its flight until, like lightning, white flames burst from the sides. Enveloped in fire, the Superfortress plummeted to the ground.Everywhere across Tokyo, the night teemed with citizens scurrying from their houses clutching sleeping mats and carefully culled possessions--pots and pans and, above all, treasured hoards of rice and soya paste--seeking refuge. The entire city had only eighteen satisfactory concrete shelters, with a total capacity of five thousand, little more than one space for every thousand persons. The next-best shelters comprised the basements of the relatively few Western-style buildings, constructed to resist earthquakes, and some equally sparse cave shelters. But the mass of citizens lacked any adequate haven. Some families gathered in clothes cupboards within their homes, as the government recommended. Most citizens, however, headed for their bokugo, little holes that had been bored beside their houses or in the little ribbon of earth between street and sidewalk. These were typically crude, two to five meters long, one meter across, and one and one-half to two meters deep, covered with a roof made with a few poles, bamboo rafters, and a thin crust of earth. The citizens provided these rudimentary protections themselves, chanting \"oh, one, two, oh, one, two\" as they dug, around which many then planted flowers, and into which many a man or woman tripped, breaking bones. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1565842715", "title": "Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement", "author": "Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw", "description": "Review \"As of the publication of Critical Race Theory it will be unwise, if not impossible, to do any serious work on race without referencing this splendid collection.\"\u2015Toni Morrison\"A fundamental reference guide to any serious work on race.\"\u2015 Amsterdam News \" Critical Race Theory is a compilation of provocative writings that challenges us to consider the relationship between race, the legal system, and society at large.\"\u2015Senator Bill Bradley About the Author Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia School of Law in New York. Neil Gotanda is a professor of law at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton, California. Gary Peller is a professor of law at Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C. Kendall Thomas is a professor of law at Columbia School of Law in New York.", "categories": ["Books", "Law", "Law Practice"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 28.06}, {"asin": "0147509459", "title": "Groundhog Weather School: Fun Facts About Weather and Groundhogs", "author": "Joan Holub", "description": "Review \u201cThe amusing illustrations, colorful paintings digitally collaged with found objects and papers, set the tone for this inviting introduction to groundhogs and the holiday named for them.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \"[G]ood fun that will subtly teach in between laughs.\"\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"Each turn of the page provides another surprise.\"\u2014 SLJ About the Author Joan Holub is the author and/or illustrator of many books for children. She lives in North Carolina, where the famous groundhog Sir Walter Wally helps watch the weather at the Museum of Natural Sciences. You can visit Joan at www.joanholub.com.\u00a0Kristin Sorra studied illustration at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, she now lives just a few miles north of New York City, where she is regularly visited by local groundhogs. You can visit Kristin at www.kristinsorra.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.95}, {"asin": "1735077801", "title": "The Tickle Squid", "author": "Amy Oettle", "description": "Review The Tickle Squid is a recipient of the prestigious Mom's Choice Award. The Mom's Choice Awards\u00ae (MCA) evaluates products and services created for parents and educators and is globally recognized for establishing the benchmark of excellence in family-friendly media, products and services. Using a rigorous evaluation process, entries are scored on a number of elements including production quality, design, educational value, entertainment value, originality, appeal and cost. Around the world, parents, educators, retailers and members of the media trust the MCA Honoring Excellence seal when selecting quality products and services for families and children. About the Author Amy Oettle wrote \"The Tickle Squid\" in the wee hours of the morning while she was up with her first daughter. She is an author, artist and business leader, but most importantly, she is the mother of two little girls who love to laugh. She currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.Delphine Pag\u00e8s is French and has lived in London and now Austin; traveling is a constant in her life. She loves drawing happy animals with rosy cheeks and when she's not playing with colors, you can find her eating cheese. Follow her @maskedcheesemonster on Instagram!", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 11.99}], "target_asin": "0141001461"}
{"user_id": "AG6LO4J7VK3NWR4CANFRN2Z6AJ5Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0393307867", "title": "The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka", "author": "Josef Skvorecky", "description": "From the Back Cover A pensive, conscience-stricken man driven to melancholy by the fiendish truths of murder, the Czechoslovak policeman Lieutenant Boruvka is a notable new member of the brilliant-eccentric-detective literary tradition. Twelve bizarre tales--to be read as a continuous account--involve theatrical people, musicians, and mountaineers, who lead the lieutenant, and the reader, on an ingenious chase through the paths of crime. About the Author George (Jir\u00ed ) Theiner (b. 1926 - d. 1988) was a Czechoslovak journalist, editor, and translator.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 14.69}, {"asin": "125075593X", "title": "The Eighth Detective: A Novel", "author": "Alex Pavesi", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of August 2020: Thirty years ago, mathematician Grant McAllister applied the laws of mathematics to detective fiction and deduced that there were seven basic mystery plots. To illustrate, he wrote seven murder mysteries and published them under the title The White Murders . Then he took himself off to a remote island in the Mediterranean and was never heard from again. When The Eighth Detective opens, Julia, an editor with Blood Type Books, has made her way to Grant\u2019s island to intrude on his exile with a plan to re-edit and re-issue The White Murders . But as the two of them re-read the seven mysteries, curious typos\u2014inconsistent with the precise nature of a mathematician\u2014strike Julia and she grows uneasy. Grant tells her that when it comes to detective fiction, \u201cThe possibilities are presented to the reader up front. The ending just comes back and points to one of them.\u201d Julia begins to wonder if the seven stories aren\u2019t themselves possibilities, containing clues to a bigger mystery that may have happened off the page. Trying to reason along with Julia\u2014and tease out the possibilities\u2014will alternately drive readers mad and keep them endlessly entertained. Aficionados of puzzles, misdirection, contradiction, red herrings, twists, jaw-dropping reveals, and nesting doll plots: this book is for you. \u2014Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Book Review Review \"The reader understands that the book is a meta-story about the nature of mystery writing itself, but it\u2019s a sign of Pavesi\u2019s skill that we fall headlong into each of his stories. If that means we\u2019re pawns in his grand chess game, so be it. His revelations are completely unexpected, right up to the end.\" - The New York Times \"Dizzying, dazzling \u2015 a potent potion of a thriller, a brew of bibliophilia (think The Shadow of the Wind ), wire-taut tension ( The Talented Mr. Ripley ), and plot swerves so sharp and sudden you risk whiplash with each turn of the page, as bold as the best of Michael Connelly and Lisa Gardner. When did you last read a genuinely original thriller? The wait is over.\" \u2015 A.J. Finn, #1 N ew York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window \u201cIt's rare for me to read a book in a single day, but I couldn't put The Eighth Detective down. Compelling, clever, and beautifully-constructed. It deserves to be huge. I genuinely wanted to applaud at the end.\u201d \u2015 Alex North, New York Times bestselling author of The Whisper Man \u201cAn absolute triumph of a novel. I read it in two greedy gulps. Intelligent and compelling storytelling. Utterly brilliant\u201d \u2015 Ali Land, bestselling author of Good Me Bad Me \"In The Eighth Detective , Alex Pavesi constructs a remarkable puzzle that turns readers into literary detectives with every new twist. Both a celebration and a reinvention of mystery fiction.\" \u2015 Matthew Pearl, New York Times bestselling author of The Dante Chamber and The Dante Club \u201cSo, so clever. A twisty story and an education in the math of murder mysteries. Agatha Christie would take her hat off to this one. Bravo!\u201d \u2015 Sarah Pinborough, New York Times bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes \u201cAlex Pavesi has written one of the most creative detective novels of the year\u2026if not of all time. Sharp writing, crisp dialogue, and the end will leave you reeling. An incredible debut novel!\u201d \u2015 Samantha Downing, International bestselling author of My Lovely Wife \"Inventive. . . . Pavesi\u2019s language immerses readers in mid-twentieth-century England and in the struggles, cruelties, and oddities of his multitude of carefully portrayed characters. Give this atmospheric puzzle to fans of short stories and of the American Mystery Classics series.\" \u2015 Booklist, starred review \"The book abounds with complications and twists, and puzzle lovers will have fun predicting the endings of the stories...A satisfying mystery for the casual reader, even more so for the careful one.\" \u2015 K irkus \"Ingenius. . . Pavesi is a writer to watch.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author A former bookseller for Waterstones, Alex Pavesi holds a PhD in mathematics and is currently a software engineer for Microsoft in London. His first book, The Eighth Detective , was named a New York Times Top Ten Thriller of 2020. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "006074068X", "title": "Death at La Fenice: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery", "author": "Donna Leon", "description": "Review \u201cDonna Leon\u2019s Venetian mysteries never disappoint, calling up the romantic sights and sounds of La Serenissima even as they acquaint us with the practical matters that concern the city\u2019s residents.\u201d \u2014 Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review \u201c[A] piquant mixture of opera, food and Venetian scenery.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cGuido Brunetti can ride in my gondola anytime. What a splendid detective.\u201d \u2014 Susan Isaacs, author of After All These Years \u201cDonna Leon has given fans of subtle, clever and literate mysteries something to cheer about...A wonderful read.\u201d \u2014 Tony Hillerman \u201cWhat a gripping first mystery, as beguiling and secretly sinister as Venice herself. Sparkling and irresistible.\u201d \u2014 Rita Mae Brown \u201cA challenging mystery, a sophisticated drama, and a unique glimpse of a medieval society that stilll flourishes.\u201d \u2014 St Louis Post-Dispatch \u201c[B]reathless...lively launch of a series.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly From the Inside Flap There is little violent crime in Venice, a serenely beautiful floating city of mystery and magic, history and decay. But the evil that does occasionally rear its head is the jurisdiction of Guido Brunetti, the suave, urbane vice-commissario of police and a genius at detection. Now all of his admirable abilities must come into play in the deadly affair of Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor who died painfully from cyanide poisoning during an intermission at La Fenice. But as the investigation unfolds, a chilling picture slowly begins to take shape--a detailed portrait of revenge painted with vivid strokes of hatred and shocking depravity. And the dilemma for Guido Brunetti will not be finding a murder suspect, but rather narrowing the choices down to one. . . . --Tony Hillerman From the Back Cover There is little violent crime in Venice, a serenely beautiful floating city of mystery and magic, history and decay. But the evil that does occasionally rear its head is the jurisdiction of Guido Brunetti, the suave, urbane vice-commissario of police and a genius at detection. Now all of his admirable abilities must come into play in the deadly affair of Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor who died painfully from cyanide poisoning during an intermission at La Fenice. But as the investigation unfolds, a chilling picture slowly begins to take shape\u2014a detailed portrait of revenge painted with vivid strokes of hatred and shocking depravity. And the dilemma for Guido Brunetti will not be finding a murder suspect, but rather narrowing the choices down to one. . . . About the Author Donna Leon has written four previous Guido Brunetti novels, Death and Judgment, Dressed for Death, Death in a Strange Country, and Death at La Fenice , which won the Suntory Prize for the best suspense novel of 1991. She teaches English at the University of Maryland extension at a U.S. Air Force base near Venice Italy, where she has lived for over twenty years. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Death at La Fenice A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery By Leon, Donna Dark Alley ISBN: 006074068X Chapter One The third gong, announcing that the opera was about to continue, sounded discreetly through the lobbies and bars of Teatro La Fenice. In response, the audience stabbed, out cigarettes, finished drinks and conversations, and started to filter back into the theater. The hall, brightly lit between acts, hummed with the talk of those returning to their seats. Here a jewel flashed, there a mink cape was adjusted over a naked shoulder or an infinitesimal speck of dust was flicked from a satin lapel. The upper galleries filled up first, followed by the orchestra seats and then the three rows of boxes. The lights dimmed, the hall grew dark, and the tension created by an ongoing performance mounted as the audience waited for the conductor to reappear on the podium. Slowly the hum of voices faded, the members of the orchestra stopped fidgeting in their seats, and the universal silence announced everyone's readiness for the third and final act. The silence lengthened, grew heavy. From the first gallery, there came a burst of coughing; someone dropped a book, perhaps a purse; but the door to the corridor behind the orchestra pit remained dosed. The first to talk were the players in the orchestra. A second violinist leaned over to the woman next to him and asked if she had made her vacation plans. In the second row, a bassoonist told an oboist that the Benetton sales were starting next day. The people in the first tiers of boxes, who could best see the musicians, soon imitated their soft chatter. The galleries joined in, and then those in orchestra seats, as though the wealthy would be the last to give in to this sort of behavior. The hum grew to a murmur. Minutes passed. Suddenly the folds of the dense green velvet curtain were pulled back and Amadeo Fasini, the theater's artistic director, stepped awkwardly through the narrow opening. The technician the light box above the second gallery, with on, decided to center a hot on the man at center stage Blinded, Fasini shot up his a arm to shield his eyes. Still holding his arm raised in front of him, as if to protect himself from a blow, he began to speak: \"Ladies and gentlemen,\"and then he stopped, gesturing wildly with his left hand to the technician, who, realizing his error, switched off the light. Released from his temporary blindness, the man onthe stage started again. \"Ladies and gentlemen, I regret toinform you that Maestro Wellauer is unable to performance.\" Whispers, questions, rose from the audience, silk rustled as heads turned, but he continued to speak above the noise. \"His place will be taken by Maestro Longhi.\" Before the hum could rise to drown him out, he asked, voice insistently calm,\"Is there a doctor in the audience?\" His question met a long pause, then people began to look around them: who would be the one to present himself? Almost a full minute passed. Finally, a hand rose slowly in one of the first rows of the orchestra, and a woman got out of her seat. Fasini waved a hand to one of the uniformed ushers at the back of the house, and the young man hurried to the end, of the row where the woman now stood. \"If you would, Dottoressa,\" Fasini said, sounding as if he were in pain and needed the doctor for himself, \"Please go backstage with the usher.\" He glanced up into the horseshoe of the still darkened hall, tried to smile, failed, and abandoned the attempt. \"Excuse, ladies and, gentlemen, the difficulty. The opera will now continue.\" Turning, the artistic director fumbled at the curtain, unable for a moment to find the opening through which he had come. Disembodied hands parted the curtain from behind, and he slipped through, finding himself in the bare garret where Violetta was soon to die. From out in front, he heard the tentative. applause that greeted the substitute conductor as he took his place on the podium. Singers, chorus members, stagehands appeared from all around him, as curious as the audience had been but far more vocal. Though the power of his position usually protected him from contact with members of the company as low in standing as these, the director could not now avoid them, their questions, their whispers. \"It's nothing, nothing,\" he said to no one in particular, then he waved at them all, trying to clear them, with that gesture, from the stage upon which they flocked. The music of the prelude was drawing to a close; soon the curtain would open on the evening's Violetta, who now sat nervously on the edge of the cot at the center of the stage. Fasini redoubled the intensity of his gestures, and singers and stagehands began to move off to the wings, where they continued to whisper among themselves. He snarled a furious \"Silenzio\" and waited for it to take effect. When he saw the curtains inching apart to reveal the stage, he hurried to join the stage manager, who stood off to stage right, beside the doctor. A short, dark woman, she stood directly under a No Smoking sign, with an unlighted cigarette in, her hand. \"Good evening, Doctor,\" Fasini said, forcing himself to smile. She dropped the cigarette into the pocket of herjacket and shook his hand. \"What is it?\" she finally asked as, from behind them, Violetta began to read the letter from Germont p\u00e9re. Fasini rubbed his hands together briskly, as if the gesture would help him decide what to say. \"Maestro Wellauer has been . . . \" he began, but he found no satisfactory way to finish the sentence. \"Is he sick?\" asked the doctor impatiently. \"No, no, he's not sick,\" Fasini said, and then words left him. He returned to rubbing his hands together. \"Perhaps I had better see him,\" she said, making it a question. \"Is he here in the theater?\" Continues... Excerpted from Death at La Fenice by Leon, Donna Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.82}, {"asin": "0143186426", "title": "The Beggar's Opera (Inspector Ramirez)", "author": "Peggy J. Blair", "description": "From Booklist *Starred Review* Not only does Canadian Blair\u2019s exciting new series take place in contemporary Havana\u2014a slam dunk of a setting for crime fiction\u2014but it also boasts an unusual and unusually intriguing premise: Inspector Ricardo Ramirez, head of Havana\u2019s Major Crimes Unit, sees dead bodies, the ghosts of the victims of his unsolved cases. But this isn\u2019t another paranormal wrinkle in a realistic crime series (like Charles Todd\u2019s Inspector Rutledge novels); no, Ramirez may have inherited something called Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), in which the victim suffers from vivid hallucinations. But he hardly has time to worry about his dead companions at the moment, as a Canadian policeman, Mike Ellis, is being held on suspicion of the rape and murder of a young Cuban boy, and the police have 72 hours to formally charge or release him. Meanwhile, a Canadian lawyer, Celia Jones, arrives to help Ellis negotiate the formidable Cuban bureaucracy. Each of the three major characters could hold up a crime novel on his or her own, and Blair interweaves their stories beautifully; she also invests Havana geography (with its decaying buildings and rusting American cars) with new vigor by focusing not only on photo-worthy street scenes but also on the complex lives of the people who live inside the broken buildings. A fine novel and the launch of what looks to be a superb series. --Bill Ott Review \u201c[An] impressive debut novel ... [the] book itself unfolds with an artless ease: the investigation and its developments are both compelling and convincing, a genuinely mysterious mystery that manages to both surprise and maintain its internal integrity... The Beggar\u2019s Opera is a well-crafted, genuinely satisfying mystery.\u201d \u2013 The National Post \u201cGripping\u2026Passion, corruption, danger: it\u2019s a Cuba-set mystery that satisfyingly delivers all the compelling characteristics of its setting.\u201d -Andrew Pyper, NTY bestselling author of The Guardians \u201c An impressive police procedural\u2026 Blair keeps the tension high, even as she paints a comprehensive, sensitively detailed picture\u2026\u201d -Sarah Weinman, in the Quill and Quire \u201cAn impressive debut\u2026compelling and convincing\u2026 T he Beggar\u2019s Opera is a well-crafted, genuinely satisfying mystery that bodes well for future novels featuring Ricardo Ramirez.\u201d - The National Post \u201cA fast-paced, well-plotted mystery.\u201d - Vancouver Sun \u201c Blair\u2019s Havana is a steamy, twisted locale and her Inspector Ramirez is just the kind of dogged detective you want to root for.\u201d -Robert Rotenburg, author of Old City Hall and The Guilty Plea \u201cA riveting story that kept me reading late into the night. Peggy Blair combines masterful writing with a clever plot and an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of Havana.\u201d -D.J. McIntosh, author of the bestseller The Witch of Babylon \u201cI have a penchant for smart, dark, literary crime fiction, and The Beggar\u2019s Opera is all of that: an excellent book.\u201d -Alan Guthrie, author of Two-Way Split About the Author Peggy Blair was a lawyer for more than thirty years. A recognized expert in Aboriginal law, she worked as both a criminal defence lawyer and Crown prosecutor. Her critically acclaimed mystery The Beggar\u2019s Opera , won the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize Readers' Choice award and was selected as one of Amazon's best books in 2012. She lives in Ottawa. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.8}, {"asin": "1590172620", "title": "The Post-Office Girl (New York Review Books Classics)", "author": "Stefan Zweig", "description": "Review \u201cIs it possible to have a realist fairy story? If so, this is it. The characters are so well realised and observed, and there are passages of such imaginative immersion, that we owe its publisher our gratitude for bringing it into English for the first time. What a treat this book is\u201d . --The Spectator (UK)\u201cAn exhilarating ski run of poverty, joy and misery... it is the girl's ecstatic naivety and Zweig's sparkling prose that makes the old stories so sweetly fresh and, when the whole dream collapses, so devastatingly sad\u201d. --The Sunday Times (UK) \"In The Post-Office Gir l Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart...The story is poignant, painful, and must be one of fiction\u2019s darkest indictments of how poverty destroys hope, enjoyment, beauty, brightness and laughter, and how money, no matter how falsely, provides ease and delight.\" -- The Spectator (UK)\"This is a fascinating depiction of the effects of history on individual lives.\" -- The Financial Times \" The Post Office Girl is a fine novel and an excellent place to start if you are new to this great Austrian novelist. It is a powerful social history, describing in moving detail the social impact of the First World War, and the extreme poverty in which so many people were forced to live. It shows up the challenge to European civilisation of the early Thirties and the failure of humanism, in which Zweig believed until the end of his life. And it is remarkable for the bleak interior worlds it depicts of anxiety, self-doubt, depression and disintegration. Zweig succeeded in taking the most complex concepts of psychoanalysis and bringing them vividly to life.\" -- The Telegraph \"Stefan Zweig was a late and magnificent bloom from the hothouse of fin de siecle Vienna...The posthumous publication of a Zweig novel affords an opportunity to revisit this gifted writer... The Post-Office Girl is captivating.\" - -The Wall Street Journal \"... nowhere else in his fiction does Zweig confront the legacy of the Great War with as deep a social reach or as detailed a human sympathy as he does in The Post-Office Girl ... we are lucky to have the book, not only for its devastating picture of postwar Austrian life but also because it represents so radical a departure from Zweig's other fiction as to signal the existence of a hitherto unsuspected literary personality...\" \u2014William Deresiewicz, The Nation \"[In this] ... beautiful translation by Joel Rotenberg.... Stefan Zweig finds a universal story of psychological struggle and spiritual testing in a bitter but humane indictment of class inequality. He finds a love story, of a sort, in a quest story, and a quest story in a love story. He finds anger in compassion, and compassion in anger; beauty in suffering, and suffering in beauty.\" -- The New York Observer \"[Zweig is a] writer who understands perfectly the life he is describing, and who has great analytic gifts . . . \" \u2013Stephen Spender, The New York Review of Books \"Always [Zweig] remains essentially the same, revealing in all . . . mediums his subtlety of style, his profound psychological knowledge and his inherent humaneness.\" \u2013Barthold Fles, The New Republic \"His writing reveals his sympathy for fellow human beings.\" \u2013Ruth Franklin, London Review of Books \u201cThe experience of reading Zweig is not so much of entering the world of the story as of plunging inward and dreaming the story.\u201d \u2013Rachel Cohen, Bookforum \u201cA brilliant writer.\u201d \u2013Louis Kronenberger, The New York Times \u201cAdmired by readers as diverse as Freud, Einstein, Toscanini, Thomas Mann and Herman Goering.\u201d \u2013Edwin McDowell, The New York Times About the Author Stefan Zweig (1881\u20141942) spent his youth studying philosophy and the history of literature in Vienna and belonged to a pan-European cultural circle that included Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. In 1934, under National Socialism, Zweig fled Austria for England, where he authored several novels, short stories, and biographies. In 1941 Zweig and his second wife traveled to Brazil, where they both committed suicide. NYRB Classics published his novels Chess Story and Beware of Pity . Joel Rotenberg has produced NYRB original translations for Stefan Zweig\u2019s Chess Story and Hugo von Hofmannsthal\u2019s The Lord Chandos Letter .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 16.79}, {"asin": "1617752398", "title": "Prison Noir (Akashic Noir)", "author": "Joyce Carol Oates", "description": "About the Author Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Award. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys , Blonde , and The Falls . She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and is the editor of New Jersey Noir and Prison Noir .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Short Stories & Anthologies"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 13.72}, {"asin": "0143131052", "title": "Close to Home: A Novel (A DI Adam Fawley Novel)", "author": "Cara Hunter", "description": "Review \"Cara Hunter has written like a pro,\u00a0with admirable command of pace and rising tension.\"\u00a0\u2015 The Times (London) \u201cHunter does a masterly job of building tension and keeping the reader guessing to the very end.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cThis well-written psychological drama will keep you guessing until the very end.\u201d \u2014Book Reporter \"In this gripping mystery, Hunter\u00a0keeps her readers guessing\u00a0about Daisy's fate until the last page. \"\u2015 Daily Express (London) \u201c[A] mazey, gripping story.\u201d \u2014Ian Rankin , New York Times bestselling author of the Inspector Rebus series\u201c Close to Home is an utterly immersive story that pulls you into the heart of a search for a missing child. Compulsive, with an ending you will not see coming.\u201d \u2014Emma Kavanagh , author of After We\u00a0Fall \u201cAn amazing, fast-paced thrill-ride and one of the best crime thrillers I have ever read! An exciting plot combined with top quality writing\u2014just perfect!\u201d \u2014Kathryn Croft , author of The Girl with No Past and While You Were Sleeping \u201cGreat characters, engrossing story and a twist at the end I did not see coming.\u201d \u2014Marika Cobbold , author of Frozen Music \u201c Close to Home hit the ground running and didn\u2019t stop right until the final page . . . the last [twist] was a genuine stroke of genius . . . told in a unique, modern way that sets the bar for new crime writers . . . the last time I felt that excited by a book was A Kind Worth Killing .\u201d \u2014John Marrs , author of When You Disappeared and The One \u201cThis book won\u2019t let you off the hook. Once you open it and start reading, forget about doing much else at all.\u201d \u2014Adele Geras , author of Troy \u201c[I] finished Close to Home in one sitting! Such a cleverly written, chilling and twisty read.\u201d \u2014Nuala Ellwood , author of My Sister\u2019s\u00a0Bones About the Author Cara Hunter lives and works in Oxford. She also studied for a degree and PhD in English literature at Oxford University. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I'm going to say this now, before we get started. You won't like it, but trust me, I've done this more times than I care to punish myself remembering. In a case like this - a kid - nine times out of ten it's someone close to home. Family, friend, neighbour, someone in the community. Don't forget that. However distraught they look, however unlikely it seems, they know who did it. Perhaps not consciously, and perhaps not yet. But they know. They know. *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 * 20 July 2016, 2.05 a.m. Canal Manor estate, Oxford They say homebuyers make up their mind about a house within thirty seconds of going inside. Well, take it from me, the average police officer takes less than ten. In fact, most of us have come to judgement long before we're through the door. Only it's the people we're judging, not the property. So when we pull up outside 5 Barge Close, I have a pretty good idea what to expect. It's what used to be called an 'Executive Home'. Perhaps still is, for all I know. They have money, these people, but not as much as they'd like, or else they'd have bought a genuine Victorian house and not this reproduction version on a raw new estate the wrong side of the canal. It's the same red brick, the same bay windows, but the gardens are small and the garages huge - not so much fake as downright forgery. The uniform posted at the front door tells me the family have already done the obligatory search of the house and garden. You'd be amazed how many times we find kids under beds or in wardrobes. They're not lost, they're just hiding. And most of those stories don't have happy endings either. But it seems that's not what we're dealing with here. As the Duty Inspector told me an hour ago when he woke me up, 'I know we wouldn't normally call you in this early, but this late at night, a kid that young, it feels all wrong. And the family were having a party so people had started looking for her long before they called us. I decided pissing you off was the least of our worries.' I'm not, actually. Pissed off, that is. And to be honest, I'd have done the same. 'Out the back's a bombsite, I'm afraid, sir,' says the PC at the door. 'People must've been traipsing up and down all night. Bits of dead firework everywhere. Kids. Can't see forensics getting sod all out there, sir.' Great, I think. Effing fantastic. Gislingham rings the bell and we stand at the door, waiting. He's shifting nervously from one foot to the other. Doesn't matter how many times you do it, you never get used to it. And when you do, it's time to quit. I take a few last gasps of fag and look back round the close. Despite the fact that it's two in the morning, almost every house is glaring with light, and there are people at several of the upstairs windows. Two patrol cars are parked on the scrubby bike-tracked grass opposite, their lights throbbing, and a couple of tired PCs are trying to keep the rubberneckers at a decent distance. There are half a dozen other officers on doorsteps, talking to the neighbours. Then the front door opens and I swing round. 'Mrs Mason?' She's heavier than I'd expected. Jowls already forming and she can't be more than, what, mid-thirties? She has a cardigan on over a party dress - a halter-neck leopard-print job in a dull orangey colour that doesn't go with her hair. She glances down the street and then wraps the cardy tighter about herself. But it's hardly cold. It touched ninety today. 'DI Adam Fawley, Mrs Mason. May we come in?' 'Can you take your shoes off? The carpet's only just been cleaned.' I've never understood why people buy cream carpet, especially if they have children, but it hardly seems the moment to argue. So we bend over like a couple of schoolkids, undoing our laces. Gislingham flashes me a look: there are hooks by the door labelled with the family's names, and their shoes are lined up by the mat. By size. And colour. Jesus. Odd, though, what exposing your feet does to your brain. Padding about in socks makes me feel like an amateur. It's not a good start. The sitting room has an archway through to a kitchen with a breakfast bar. There are some women in there, whispering, fussing about the kettle, their party make-up bleak in the unflinching neon light. The family are perched on the edge of a sofa far too big for the space. Barry Mason, Sharon and the boy, Leo. The kid stares at the floor, Sharon stares at me, Barry's all over the place. He's got up like the identikit hipster dad - cargo pants, slightly too spiky hair, slightly too garish floral shirt not tucked in - but if the look is landlocked at thirty-five, I'm guessing from the grey he's actually a good ten years older than his wife. Who evidently buys the trousers in this house. You get all sorts of emotions when a kid goes missing. Anger, panic, denial, guilt. I've seen them all, alone and in combination. But there's a look on Barry Mason's face I've not seen before. A look I can't define. As for Sharon, her fists are clenched so rigid her knuckles are white. I sit down. Gislingham doesn't. I think he's worried the furniture might not take his weight. He eases his shirt collar away from his neck, hoping no one notices. 'Mrs Mason, Mr Mason,' I begin. 'I understand this must be a difficult time, but it's vital we gather as much information as we can. I'm sure you know this already, but the first few hours really are crucial - the more we know, the more likely it'll be that we find Daisy safe and well.' Sharon Mason pulls at a loose thread on her cardigan. 'I'm not sure what else we can tell you - we already spoke to that other officer - ' 'I know, but perhaps you can just talk me through it again. You said Daisy was at school today as usual and after that she was here in the house until the party started - she didn't go out to play?' 'No. She was in her bedroom upstairs.' 'And the party - can you tell me who came?' Sharon glances at her husband, then at me. 'People from the close. The children's classmates. Their parents.' Her kids' friends then. Not hers. Or theirs. 'So, what - forty people? Would that be fair?' She frowns. 'Not so many. I have a list.' 'That would be very helpful - if you could give it to DC Gislingham.' Gislingham looks up briefly from his notebook. 'And you last saw Daisy when exactly?' Barry Mason still hasn't said anything. I'm not even sure if he heard me. I turn to him. He's got a toy dog in his hands and keeps twisting it. It's distress, I know, but it looks unnervingly like he's wringing its neck. 'Mr Mason?' He blinks. 'I dunno,' he says dully. 'Elevenish maybe? It was all a bit confused. Busy. You know, lots of people.' 'But it was midnight when you realized she was missing.' 'We decided it was time the kids went to bed. People were starting to leave. But we couldn't find her. We looked everywhere. We called everyone we could think of. My little girl - my beautiful little girl - ' He starts to cry. I still find that hard to handle, even now. When men weep. I turn to Sharon. 'Mrs Mason? What about you? When did you last see your daughter? Was it before or after the fireworks?' Sharon shivers suddenly. 'Before, I think.' 'And the fireworks started when?' 'Ten. As soon as it got dark. We didn't want them going on too late. You can get in trouble. They can report you to the council.' 'So you last saw Daisy before that. Was it in the garden or in the house?' She hesitates, frowning. 'In the garden. She was running about all night. Quite the belle of the ball.' I wonder, in passing, how long it is since I've heard anyone use that phrase. 'So Daisy was in good spirits - nothing worrying her, as far as you knew?' 'No, nothing. She was having a lovely time. Laughing. Dancing to the music. What girls do.' I glance at the brother, interested in his reaction. But there is none. He is sitting remarkably still. Considering. 'When did you last see Daisy, Leo?' He shrugs. He doesn't know. 'I was watching the fireworks.' I smile at him. 'Do you like fireworks?' He nods, not quite meeting my eye. 'You know what? So do I.' He glances up and there's a little flutter of connection, but then his head drops again and he starts pushing one foot across the rug, making circles in the shagpile. Sharon reaches out and taps him on the leg. He stops. I turn to Barry again. 'And the side gate to the garden was open, I believe.' Barry Mason sits back, suddenly defensive. He sniffs loudly and wipes his hand across his nose. 'Well, you can't be up and down opening the door every five minutes, can you? It was easier to have people come in that way. Less mess in the house.' He glances at his wife. I nod. 'Of course. I see the garden backs on to the canal. Do you have a gate on to the towpath?' Barry Mason shakes his head. 'Fat chance - council won't let you. There's no way he got in that way.' 'He?' He looks away again. 'Whoever it was. The bastard who took her. The bastard who took my Daisy.' I write 'my' on my notepad and put a question mark next to it. 'But you didn't actually see a man?' He takes a deep breath that breaks into a sob, and he looks away, tears starting again. 'No. I didn't see anyone.' I shuffle through my papers. 'I have the photo of Daisy you gave Sergeant Davis. Can you tell me what she was wearing?' There's a pause. 'It was fancy dress,' says Sharon eventually. 'For the children. We thought that would be nice. Daisy was dressed as her name.' 'I'm sorry, I'm not with you - ' 'A daisy. She was dressed as a daisy.' I sense Gislingham's reaction, but don't allow myself to look at him. 'I see. So that was - ' 'A green skirt, green tights and shoes. And a headdress with white petals and a yellow centre. We got it from that shop on Fontover Street. It cost a fortune, even just to hire it. And we had to leave a deposit.' Her voice falters. She gasps, then clenches her hand into a fist and pushes it against her mouth, her shoulders shaking. Barry Mason reaches across and puts an arm round his wife. She's whimpering, rocking backwards and forwards, telling him it's not her fault, that she didn't know, and he starts to stroke her hair. There's another silence, then suddenly Leo edges forward and slips off the sofa. All his clothes seem slightly too big for him; you can barely see his hands for his sleeves. He comes over to me and gives me his phone. It's showing a still from a video. A still of Daisy in her green skirt. She's a beautiful child, no doubt about that. I press Play and watch for about fifteen seconds as she dances for the camera. She's brimming with confidence and exuberance - it radiates off her even on a two-inch screen. When the video stops, I check the tag - it's only three days old. Our first piece of luck. We don't always get something as up to date as this. 'Thank you, Leo.' I look up at Sharon Mason, who's now blowing her nose. 'Mrs Mason, if I give you my mobile number can you send this to me?' She waves her hands helplessly. 'Oh, I'm hopeless with those things. Leo can do it.' I glance at him and he nods. His fringe is a bit too long, but he doesn't seem to mind it in his eyes. They're dark, his eyes. Like his hair. 'Thanks, Leo. You must be good with phones for someone your age. How old are you?' He blushes, just a little. 'Ten.' I turn to Barry Mason. 'Did Daisy have her own computer?' 'No way. The things you hear about with kids online these days. I let her use my PC sometimes as long as I'm in the room with her.' 'So no email?' 'No.' 'What about a mobile?' This time it's Sharon who answers. 'We thought she was too young. I said she could have one for Christmas. She'll be nine by then.' So that's one less chance of tracking her down. But this I do not say. 'Did you see anyone with Daisy last night, Leo?' He starts, then shakes his head. 'Or before that - was there anyone hanging around? Anyone you saw going to or from school?' 'I drive them to school,' says Sharon sharply. As if that settles it. And then the doorbell rings. Gislingham flips his notebook shut. 'That'll be SOCO. Or whatever we're supposed to call them now.' Sharon looks at her husband, bewildered. 'He means forensics,' says Barry. Sharon turns to me. 'What are they here for? We haven't done anything.' 'I know that, Mrs Mason. Please don't be alarmed. It's standard procedure in a - when a child goes missing.' Gislingham opens the front door and lets them in. I recognize Alan Challow straight away. He started on the job a few months after I did. Hasn't aged that well. Too little on top, too much round the waist. But he's good. He's good. He nods to me. We don't need the pleasantries. 'Holroyd's just getting the kit from the car,' he says briskly. His paper suit is creaking. It's going to be hell in that thing when the sun comes up. 'We'll go upstairs first,' he says, pulling on his gloves. 'Then start outside as soon as it's light. No press yet, I see. Praise be for small mercies.' Sharon Mason has got unsteadily to her feet. 'I don't want you poking about in her room - touching her things - treating us like criminals - ' 'It's not a full forensic search, Mrs Mason - we won't be making any mess. We don't even need to go into her room. We just need to take her toothbrush.'Because it\u2019s the best source for DNA. Because we might need that to match to her body. But this, again, I do not say. \u2018We will be making a more extensive search in the garden, in case her abductor has left any physical evidence that might help us identify him. I trust we have your agreement to do that?\u2019 Barry Mason nods, then reaches up and touches his wife\u2019s elbow. \u2018Best we just let them do their job, eh?\u2019 \u2018And we\u2019ll be arranging for a Family Liaison Officer to attend as soon as possible.\u2019 Sharon turns to me. \u2018What do you mean, attend ?\u2019 \u2018They\u2019ll be here to make sure you\u2019re kept informed as soon as we get any news, and to be on hand in case you need anything.\u2019 Sharon frowns. \u2018What here? In the house ?\u2019 \u2018Yes, if that\u2019s OK with you. They\u2019re fully trained \u2013 there\u2019s nothing to worry about, they won\u2019t be at all intrusive \u2013 \u2019 But she\u2019s already shaking her head. \u2018No. I don\u2019t want anyone here. I don\u2019t want you people spying on us. Is that clear?\u2019  I glance at Gislingham, who gives a minute shrug. I take a deep breath. \u2018That is, of course, your right. We will designate a member of our team to be your point of contact, and if you change your mind \u2013 \u2019 \u2018No,\u2019 she says quickly. \u2018We won\u2019t.\u2019 Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 7.26}, {"asin": "1423152883", "title": "Code Name Verity", "author": "Elizabeth E. Wein", "description": "About the Author Elizabeth Wein (www.elizabethwein.com) was born in New York City, grew up abroad, and currently lives in Scotland with her husband and two children. She is an avid flyer of small planes and is the editor of the Scottish Aero Club\u2019s newsletter. She also holds a PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 17.89}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1934733369", "title": "Cheese Deluxe", "author": "Greg Palmer", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Memoirs"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "from 12.49"}, {"asin": "1583718761", "title": "Social Studies Alive! America's Past", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.02}, {"asin": "1401689795", "title": "An Amish Garden", "author": "Beth Wiseman", "description": "Review Each author brings her uniqueness to her novella, and they blend well into a great read.\u00a0 \u00a0 ~ Romantic Times Magazine", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 4.59}, {"asin": "1681141973", "title": "Something Is Rotten in Fettig: A Satire", "author": "Jere Krakoff", "description": "Review The uproarious novel is first and foremost a comedy, rife withabsurdist humor...enough jabs\u00a0at law and criminal justice to make apoint, all packaged in a courtroom drama that's pure\u00a0entertainment.\" -Kirkus\u00a0Reviews \"Something Is Rotten In Fettig wittily satirizes a legal system that is verysimilar to our own...this fast-paced work is filled with good writing,presented in highly readable prose...characters are well developed...veryenjoyable...\"- Midwest Review (Posted on Compulsive Reader) \"Delightfully satirical, the author takes a jab at everything from judges to juries,to lawyers, to public manipulation and ignorance, oftentimes withhilarious results.\" - Manhattan Book Review\u00a0 \"The novel is sort of Dickens by way of Woody Allen.\" - Pittsburgh City Paper From the Back Cover Before writing Something Is Rotten in Fettig, Jere Krakoff was a civil rights attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project.\u00a0 The novel was inspired by people and events he encountered while litigating and a lifetime of observing the best and the worst of the human condition.\"[T]he uproarious novel is first and foremost a comedy, rife with absurdist humor./Enough jabs at law and criminal justice to make a point, all packaged in a courtroom drama that's pure entertainment.\" -- Kirkus Reviews", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Humor & Satire"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 8.0}], "target_asin": "1934733369"}
{"user_id": "AHBO4UAV2XCG6OLNKUTWC7QKWETQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "080185590X", "title": "The Ogre", "author": "Barbara Bray", "description": "Review Engrossing, poetic, and profoundly eventful.\u2015 Washington Post Book World The Ogre . . . is, quite simply, a great novel . . . [It] bears patently the marks of greatness. It relentlessly pushes individual idiosyncrasy to\u2015and even beyond\u2015the point of universality. It covers simultaneously the events inside one head and one continent. It uses documentary knowledge\u2015minute and encyclopedic knowledge of photography, history, zoology, anthropometry, weaponry\u2015to illustrate the otherwise undocumentable progress of a human obsession.\u2015 New Yorker Barbara Bray's translation does justice to the original . . . Abel Tiffauges is as complex and dangerous in English as he is in French; his themes are eternal and disturbing. To follow his dark path is a magnificent experience.\u2015 New York Times Book Review The Ogre is a very clever book in its belletristic way, and the translation reads very well . . . Tiffauges's obsessions\u2015a cornucopia of the ocular, the cloacal, of celibacy, heraldry, therapies, wounds, beats, boys, and twins\u2015are conveyed in an alliterative rhetoric of rare words and allusions.\u2015 New York Review of Books Tournier's achievement rests in his remarkable blend of myth with realism.\u2015 Newsweek Book Description A highly praised novel from the author of Gemini \u2015now in a new paperback edition From the Back Cover An international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to \"ogre\" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum. About the Author Born in 1924, Michel Tournier studied philosophy and then became a journalist and a writer. He is the author of several novels, including The Ogre, Friday, and Gemini . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 31.0}, {"asin": "0192892894", "title": "The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (OPUS)", "author": null, "description": "About the Author T. S. Ashton was Professor of Economic History at the University of London from 1944 to 1954, and Emeritus Professor until his death in 1968. Pat Hudson is Professor Economic and Social History at the University of Liverpool.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "039309183X", "title": "The Age of Nationalism and Reform, 1850-1890 (The Norton History of Modern Europe)", "author": "Norman Rich", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Humanities"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 15.94}, {"asin": "1537400282", "title": "Rust + Moth: Autumn 2016", "author": "Rust and Moth", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Poetry"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 7.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0393091430", "title": "Age of Revolution and Reaction 1789-1850", "author": "Charles Breunig", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 10.63}, {"asin": "1845769287", "title": "Creative Illustration", "author": "Andrew Loomis", "description": "Review \u201c Creative Illustration is a 300 page tome bursting at the seams with essentials of image creation and Andrew Loomis\u2019 beautiful work, sage advice and straightforward instruction.\u201d \u2013 Lines and Colors About the Author Andrew Loomis was born in 1892. After studying art, he moved to Chicago where he eventually opened his own studio - working in editorial and advertising for most of the top clients of the time, including Kellog's, Coca Cola, Lucky Strike and many others.He also became renowned as an art teacher and his instructional books on illustration and art are acclaimed classics in the field. He died in 1959.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Graphic Design"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 25.49}, {"asin": "0736423907", "title": "My Best Friend is Belle", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.49}, {"asin": "1571200061", "title": "Trapunto by Machine", "author": "Hari Walner", "description": "Amazon.com Review Trapunto, the technique used to produce raised quilting designs, is traditionally a time-consuming, labor-intensive task. Tiny holes must be made in the back of the quilt, stuffing added, then the holes stitched closed. But this handsome book demonstrates a different method that produces the same beautiful results with much less work. (One of the secrets to this approach is water-soluble basting thread.) In six easy lessons, we learn stipple quilting, machine trapunto, backtracking over stitches, shading with stitches, two-layer trapunto, and shadow trapunto. All of this is prefaced by a section on tools, accessories, choosing batting, and the basics of free-motion stitching. There are plenty of tips and helpful hints scattered throughout, and many lovely full-size trapunto patterns interspersed with color photos of finished quilts utilizing these patterns.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 5.98}], "target_asin": "0393091430"}
{"user_id": "AHNWQRU453QVWBN67JYB4KJRNGBQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0132993600", "title": "MyFinanceLab for Corporate Finance Access code", "author": "Jonathan Berk", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 3.2, "price": 138.47}, {"asin": "1111222282", "title": "Introduction to Corporate Finance: What Companies Do (with CourseMate, 1 term (6 months) Printed Access Card and Thomson ONE Business School Edition 6-month Printed Access Card)", "author": null, "description": "About the Author John Graham is the D. Richard Mead Professor of Finance at Duke University where he also serves as the Director of the CFO Global Business Outlook survey. He is coeditor of the Journal of Finance. Professor Graham is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Vice President of the Western Finance Association, and been recognised for outstanding teaching and faculty contributions at Duke and the University of Utah.John Graham is the D. Richard Mead Professor of Finance at Duke University where he also serves as the Director of the CFO Global Business Outlook survey. He is coeditor of the Journal of Finance. Professor Graham is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Vice President of the Western Finance Association, and been recognised for outstanding teaching and faculty contributions at Duke and the University of Utah.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 13.93}, {"asin": "1285423712", "title": "Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases", "author": null, "description": "Review \"I believe this author and this book to be one of the best in the industry. Each new edition appears to adequately cover all new and emerging topics.\" -Victor Lipe, Trident Technical College About the Author O. C. Ferrell is the James T. Pursell Sr. Eminent Scholar Chair in Ethics and director of the Center for Ethical Organizational Cultures in the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business at Auburn University. He served as the Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Belmont University and University Distinguished Professor of Marketing in the Anderson School of Management at University of New Mexico. He also taught at University of Wyoming, Colorado State University, University of Memphis, Texas A&M University, Illinois State University and Southern Illinois University. Dr. Ferrell received his Ph.D. in marketing from Louisiana State University. He is a past president of the Academic Council of the American Marketing Association and previously chaired the American Marketing Association Ethics Committee that developed the AMA Code of Ethics and the AMA Code of Ethics for Marketing on the Internet. In addition, Dr. Ferrell is past president of the Academy of Marketing Science, where he also served as vice president of publications. He is a member of the Academy of Marketing Science Board of Governors and is a Society of Marketing Advances and Southwestern Marketing Association Fellow and an Academy of Marketing Science Distinguished Fellow. Dr. Ferrell has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Macromarketing Society, an Southeast Doctoral Consortium award for service to doctoral students as well as the Harold Berkman Lifetime Service Award and the Cutco Vector Distinguished Marketing Educator Award -- both from the Academy of Marketing Science. Dr. Ferrell has co-authored 20 books and more than 100 articles and papers in journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing.John Fraedrich is the Jannetides Professor of Business Ethics at Southern Illinois University. He received his B.S. from Brigham Young and M.S. and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. He has written more than 50 books, articles and proceedings, primarily related to the application of ethics and values. He has also represented academia at the ambassador level in Washington D.C. Considered one of the world's top ethics researchers, Dr. Fraedrich was among 50 marketing ethics professors selected to participate in the International Consortium on Ethics and Social Responsibility. On a global level, Dr. Fraedrich has helped affect business ethics dialogue as the only ethics professor invited by a former U.S. Secretary of State to participate in an executive seminar on globalization and its implications and challenges for societies, corporate responsibility and public policy. This seminar included ambassadors and economic ministers from Argentina, Australia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Germany, the Republic of Georgia, Lesotho, Mexico, Peru and Poland, as well as Fortune 100 firms such as Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin and Sumitomo Corporation. Dr. Fraedrich has also taught for the Department of the Army at the Brigadier General Officer-level concerning \"The Consequences of Power.\" He is also author of an integrated application-oriented ethics software for academics and Fortune 500 corporations.Linda Ferrell is Roth Professor of Marketing and Business Ethics at Auburn University, having previously served as chair of the marketing department. She was formerly the Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Business Ethics at Belmont University. She earned her Ph.D. in business administration with a concentration in management from the University of Memphis. She has also taught at the University of Tampa, Colorado State University, University of Northern Colorado, University of Memphis and University of Wyoming. In addition, she team-taught marketing strategy classes at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand for 16 years. Dr. Ferrell's work experience as an account executive for McDonald\ufffds and Pizza Hut\ufffds advertising agencies supports her teaching of advertising, marketing strategy, marketing ethics and marketing principles. She has written for numerous professional publications, including the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Ethics, AMS Review, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, Journal of Academic Ethics, Journal of Marketing Education, Marketing Education Review, Journal of Teaching Business Ethics, Marketing Management Journal and Case Research Journal. She has co-authored numerous books including BUSINESS ETHICS: ETHICAL DECISION MAKING AND CASES, BUSINESS AND SOCIETY and INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS. Dr. Ferrell is a past president of the Academy of Marketing Science and past president of the Marketing Management Association. She serves on the college advisory board for Cutco/Vector. She is also on the board, executive committee and academic advisory committee of the Direct Selling Education Foundation. She has served as an expert witness in cases related to advertising, business ethics and consumer protection.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.75}, {"asin": "1111222282", "title": "Introduction to Corporate Finance: What Companies Do (with CourseMate, 1 term (6 months) Printed Access Card and Thomson ONE Business School Edition 6-month Printed Access Card)", "author": null, "description": "About the Author John Graham is the D. Richard Mead Professor of Finance at Duke University where he also serves as the Director of the CFO Global Business Outlook survey. He is coeditor of the Journal of Finance. Professor Graham is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Vice President of the Western Finance Association, and been recognised for outstanding teaching and faculty contributions at Duke and the University of Utah.John Graham is the D. Richard Mead Professor of Finance at Duke University where he also serves as the Director of the CFO Global Business Outlook survey. He is coeditor of the Journal of Finance. Professor Graham is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Vice President of the Western Finance Association, and been recognised for outstanding teaching and faculty contributions at Duke and the University of Utah.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 13.93}, {"asin": "1285423712", "title": "Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and Cases", "author": null, "description": "Review \"I believe this author and this book to be one of the best in the industry. Each new edition appears to adequately cover all new and emerging topics.\" -Victor Lipe, Trident Technical College About the Author O. C. Ferrell is the James T. Pursell Sr. Eminent Scholar Chair in Ethics and director of the Center for Ethical Organizational Cultures in the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business at Auburn University. He served as the Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Belmont University and University Distinguished Professor of Marketing in the Anderson School of Management at University of New Mexico. He also taught at University of Wyoming, Colorado State University, University of Memphis, Texas A&M University, Illinois State University and Southern Illinois University. Dr. Ferrell received his Ph.D. in marketing from Louisiana State University. He is a past president of the Academic Council of the American Marketing Association and previously chaired the American Marketing Association Ethics Committee that developed the AMA Code of Ethics and the AMA Code of Ethics for Marketing on the Internet. In addition, Dr. Ferrell is past president of the Academy of Marketing Science, where he also served as vice president of publications. He is a member of the Academy of Marketing Science Board of Governors and is a Society of Marketing Advances and Southwestern Marketing Association Fellow and an Academy of Marketing Science Distinguished Fellow. Dr. Ferrell has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Macromarketing Society, an Southeast Doctoral Consortium award for service to doctoral students as well as the Harold Berkman Lifetime Service Award and the Cutco Vector Distinguished Marketing Educator Award -- both from the Academy of Marketing Science. Dr. Ferrell has co-authored 20 books and more than 100 articles and papers in journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing.John Fraedrich is the Jannetides Professor of Business Ethics at Southern Illinois University. He received his B.S. from Brigham Young and M.S. and Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. He has written more than 50 books, articles and proceedings, primarily related to the application of ethics and values. He has also represented academia at the ambassador level in Washington D.C. Considered one of the world's top ethics researchers, Dr. Fraedrich was among 50 marketing ethics professors selected to participate in the International Consortium on Ethics and Social Responsibility. On a global level, Dr. Fraedrich has helped affect business ethics dialogue as the only ethics professor invited by a former U.S. Secretary of State to participate in an executive seminar on globalization and its implications and challenges for societies, corporate responsibility and public policy. This seminar included ambassadors and economic ministers from Argentina, Australia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Germany, the Republic of Georgia, Lesotho, Mexico, Peru and Poland, as well as Fortune 100 firms such as Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin and Sumitomo Corporation. Dr. Fraedrich has also taught for the Department of the Army at the Brigadier General Officer-level concerning \"The Consequences of Power.\" He is also author of an integrated application-oriented ethics software for academics and Fortune 500 corporations.Linda Ferrell is Roth Professor of Marketing and Business Ethics at Auburn University, having previously served as chair of the marketing department. She was formerly the Distinguished Professor of Leadership and Business Ethics at Belmont University. She earned her Ph.D. in business administration with a concentration in management from the University of Memphis. She has also taught at the University of Tampa, Colorado State University, University of Northern Colorado, University of Memphis and University of Wyoming. In addition, she team-taught marketing strategy classes at Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand for 16 years. Dr. Ferrell's work experience as an account executive for McDonald\ufffds and Pizza Hut\ufffds advertising agencies supports her teaching of advertising, marketing strategy, marketing ethics and marketing principles. She has written for numerous professional publications, including the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Ethics, AMS Review, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, Journal of Academic Ethics, Journal of Marketing Education, Marketing Education Review, Journal of Teaching Business Ethics, Marketing Management Journal and Case Research Journal. She has co-authored numerous books including BUSINESS ETHICS: ETHICAL DECISION MAKING AND CASES, BUSINESS AND SOCIETY and INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS. Dr. Ferrell is a past president of the Academy of Marketing Science and past president of the Marketing Management Association. She serves on the college advisory board for Cutco/Vector. She is also on the board, executive committee and academic advisory committee of the Direct Selling Education Foundation. She has served as an expert witness in cases related to advertising, business ethics and consumer protection.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.75}, {"asin": "1111530262", "title": "Intermediate Financial Management (with Thomson ONE - Business School Edition Finance 1-Year 2-Semester Printed Access Card)", "author": "Eugene F. Brigham", "description": "Review \"I like to use the same text in Intermediate and Advanced, but it is not necessary. I guess my reasoning is that I find Brigham and Daves works well in both courses. I use the Web Chapters and Web Extensions very much in the Capstone course, which I find to be a great selling point to using that text for the capstone. I am also very happy in using the text for Intermediate, so it is a winner for me.\"\"I currently am using the Brigham/Daves text [and] I especially like the coverage of finance topics in this textbook. It is timely and provides a lot of material not found in other intermediate finance textbooks.\ufffd\" About the Author Dr. Eugene F. Brigham is Graduate Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, where he has taught since 1971. He received his MBA and Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina. Prior to joining the University of Florida, Dr. Brigham held teaching positions at the University of Connecticut, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles. A former president of the Financial Management Association, he has written many journal articles on the cost of capital, capital structure and other aspects of financial management. He has authored or co-authored 10 textbooks on managerial finance and managerial economics that are used at more than 1,000 universities in the United States and have been translated into 11 languages worldwide. In addition to his academic writing, Dr. Brigham continues to teach, consult and complete research. He has served as a consultant to many corporations and government agencies, including the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the U.S. Office of Telecommunications Policy and the RAND Corp., and he has testified as an expert witness in numerous electric, gas and telephone rate cases at both federal and state levels. Dr. Brigham spends his spare time on the golf course, enjoying time with his family and dogs, and tackling outdoor adventure activities, such as biking through Alaska.Dr. Phillip R. Daves is Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His research interests encompass health care finance, asset pricing, derivative securities, and dividend policy. He has published papers in THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE, THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FINANCE, APPLIED FINANCIAL ECONOMICS, JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL PRACTICE AND EDUCATION, and THE JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL AND STRATEGIC DECISIONS. Dr. Daves' special interests in teaching include health care finance, investments, financial management, and asset pricing--which he teaches at the undergraduate, M.B.A., and Ph.D. levels. Consulting for a range of large and small companies as well as the state of Tennessee, he focuses on business valuation, compensation, value based management, and health care policy. He received his B.A. in economics from Davidson College, his M.S. in mathematics, and his Ph.D. in finance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 14.98}, {"asin": "1111530262", "title": "Intermediate Financial Management (with Thomson ONE - Business School Edition Finance 1-Year 2-Semester Printed Access Card)", "author": "Eugene F. Brigham", "description": "Review \"I like to use the same text in Intermediate and Advanced, but it is not necessary. I guess my reasoning is that I find Brigham and Daves works well in both courses. I use the Web Chapters and Web Extensions very much in the Capstone course, which I find to be a great selling point to using that text for the capstone. I am also very happy in using the text for Intermediate, so it is a winner for me.\"\"I currently am using the Brigham/Daves text [and] I especially like the coverage of finance topics in this textbook. It is timely and provides a lot of material not found in other intermediate finance textbooks.\ufffd\" About the Author Dr. Eugene F. Brigham is Graduate Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, where he has taught since 1971. He received his MBA and Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina. Prior to joining the University of Florida, Dr. Brigham held teaching positions at the University of Connecticut, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Los Angeles. A former president of the Financial Management Association, he has written many journal articles on the cost of capital, capital structure and other aspects of financial management. He has authored or co-authored 10 textbooks on managerial finance and managerial economics that are used at more than 1,000 universities in the United States and have been translated into 11 languages worldwide. In addition to his academic writing, Dr. Brigham continues to teach, consult and complete research. He has served as a consultant to many corporations and government agencies, including the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the U.S. Office of Telecommunications Policy and the RAND Corp., and he has testified as an expert witness in numerous electric, gas and telephone rate cases at both federal and state levels. Dr. Brigham spends his spare time on the golf course, enjoying time with his family and dogs, and tackling outdoor adventure activities, such as biking through Alaska.Dr. Phillip R. Daves is Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His research interests encompass health care finance, asset pricing, derivative securities, and dividend policy. He has published papers in THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE, THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FINANCE, APPLIED FINANCIAL ECONOMICS, JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL PRACTICE AND EDUCATION, and THE JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL AND STRATEGIC DECISIONS. Dr. Daves' special interests in teaching include health care finance, investments, financial management, and asset pricing--which he teaches at the undergraduate, M.B.A., and Ph.D. levels. Consulting for a range of large and small companies as well as the state of Tennessee, he focuses on business valuation, compensation, value based management, and health care policy. He received his B.A. in economics from Davidson College, his M.S. in mathematics, and his Ph.D. in finance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 14.98}, {"asin": "1118122674", "title": "Operations Management", "author": "Nada R. Sanders", "description": "Review A very clean and scuff free book. No annotations, no markings, clean throughout. --SellerCopyright 2013 --Seller", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 33.2}, {"asin": "111994189X", "title": "Contemporary Strategy Analysis: Text and Cases", "author": "Robert M. Grant", "description": "From the Back Cover \"In the strategic management textbook jungle, Contemporary Strategy Analysis stands up by its clarity and completeness. Its fluid style and vivid case examples will help students at all levels to easily grasp even the most complex issues.\" \u2014Olivier Furrer, Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands \"I read a few strategy books but put them all down after I bought this one. This is a clearly written, well-crafted book that eloquently combines theory with real-world examples in an easy-to-understand and compelling way.\" \u2014Amazon student review of the 7th edition Robert M. Grant combines a highly accessible writing style with a concentration on the fundamentals of value creation and an emphasis on practicality. In this eighth edition, he includes an even greater focus on strategy implementation that reflects the needs of firms to reconcile scale economies with entrepreneurial flexibility, innovation with cost efficiency, and globalization with local responsiveness.\u00a0 The latest edition also incorporates some of the key strategic challenges of today including: post-financial crisis adjustment; the continuing rise of China, India, and Brazil; and the increased emphasis on ethics and sustainability.\u00a0 Additional coverage is provided on strategy adopted by not-for-profit organizations. This text and cases combined volume includes over twenty full-length cases all written by Robert Grant, enabling students to apply concepts and techniques of strategy analysis to real-life situations. The cases, which have been completely updated, include several entirely new to this edition. Contemporary Strategy Analysis , Eighth Edition, is suitable for both MBA and advanced undergraduate students. The textbook has been adopted by leading business schools all across the world. Visit www.contemporarystrategyanalysis.com to access your free interactive e-book, including case and author video clips, quizzes, and glossary flashcards. Resources for instructors include an instructor\u2019s manual, case teaching notes, test bank, teaching slides, case video clips, and extra cases. About the Author Robert M. Grant is the Eni Professor of Strategic Management at Bocconi University in Milan, and a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and City University, London.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.51}, {"asin": "1118122674", "title": "Operations Management", "author": "Nada R. Sanders", "description": "Review A very clean and scuff free book. No annotations, no markings, clean throughout. --SellerCopyright 2013 --Seller", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 33.2}, {"asin": "111994189X", "title": "Contemporary Strategy Analysis: Text and Cases", "author": "Robert M. Grant", "description": "From the Back Cover \"In the strategic management textbook jungle, Contemporary Strategy Analysis stands up by its clarity and completeness. Its fluid style and vivid case examples will help students at all levels to easily grasp even the most complex issues.\" \u2014Olivier Furrer, Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands \"I read a few strategy books but put them all down after I bought this one. This is a clearly written, well-crafted book that eloquently combines theory with real-world examples in an easy-to-understand and compelling way.\" \u2014Amazon student review of the 7th edition Robert M. Grant combines a highly accessible writing style with a concentration on the fundamentals of value creation and an emphasis on practicality. In this eighth edition, he includes an even greater focus on strategy implementation that reflects the needs of firms to reconcile scale economies with entrepreneurial flexibility, innovation with cost efficiency, and globalization with local responsiveness.\u00a0 The latest edition also incorporates some of the key strategic challenges of today including: post-financial crisis adjustment; the continuing rise of China, India, and Brazil; and the increased emphasis on ethics and sustainability.\u00a0 Additional coverage is provided on strategy adopted by not-for-profit organizations. This text and cases combined volume includes over twenty full-length cases all written by Robert Grant, enabling students to apply concepts and techniques of strategy analysis to real-life situations. The cases, which have been completely updated, include several entirely new to this edition. Contemporary Strategy Analysis , Eighth Edition, is suitable for both MBA and advanced undergraduate students. The textbook has been adopted by leading business schools all across the world. Visit www.contemporarystrategyanalysis.com to access your free interactive e-book, including case and author video clips, quizzes, and glossary flashcards. Resources for instructors include an instructor\u2019s manual, case teaching notes, test bank, teaching slides, case video clips, and extra cases. About the Author Robert M. Grant is the Eni Professor of Strategic Management at Bocconi University in Milan, and a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and City University, London.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.51}, {"asin": "1259573540", "title": "Marketing - Standalone book", "author": "Roger A. Kerin", "description": "About the Author Steven W. Hartley is Professor of Marketing in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. He holds a bachelor\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Hartley was formerly the chair of the Department of Marketing at the University of Denver and has taught at the University of Colorado, the University of Minnesota, and in several executive development programs. His teaching interests include principles of marketing, marketing research, and marketing planning. Dr. Hartley's research has appeared in many leading marketing publications. He is an active consultant to several prominent U.S. corporations and is active in many professional organizations including the American Marketing Association, the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Marketing Educators' Association.Roger A. Kerin is the Harold C. Simmons Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Edwin L. Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University. Professor Kerin received a BA (magna cum laude), MBA and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. He is the co-author of Strategic Marketing Problems: Cases and Comments, 13th ed. which also has Portuguese, Chinese, and Spanish editions, and Contemporary Perspectives on Strategic Market Planning. He is a co-author with Steven Hartley of Marketing, 16th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2023), which has been translated into 11 languages, and Marketing: The Core 10th ed (McGraw Hill, 2024). Professor Kerin also co-edited Marketing Decision Making: New Perspectives and Practices and the Encyclopedia of Marketing Strategy. He has authored over 70 scholarly articles appearing in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Retailing, Strategic Management Journal, and Decision Sciences as well as numerous book chapters and conference papers. He is a former editor of the Journal of Marketing and has served on a dozen journal editorial review boards over his career.Professor Kerin has engaged in consulting, executive development, and litigation support work in the area of marketing planning and strategy for numerous Fortune 1000 companies. Professor Kerin has served on the American Marketing Association Board of Directors, American Marketing Association Foundation Board of Advisors, and the Board of Governors of the Academy of Marketing Science.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Marketing & Sales"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 10.66}, {"asin": "0470106727", "title": "Etiquette For Dummies", "author": "Sue Fox", "description": "Review \"provides comprehensive advice on practising every-day good behaviour, including 'do's and don'ts' on the use of wireless technology such as Blackberrys and iPods.\"\u00a0 ( Publishing News (Main) Friday 18th May) From the Inside Flap Covers e-etiquette \u2014 blogging, cell phones, MP3 players, e-mail, and more The fun and easy way \u00ae to say and do the right thing in every situation Want to practice proper etiquette \u2014 and deal with others who don't? This no-nonsense guide provides timely guidance in good manners, no matter the situation. You get expert advice on being courteous to friends and family, dating, working well with colleagues, correspondence, entertaining, tipping, traveling overseas, and much more. THE DUMMIES WAY Explanations in plain English  \"Get in, get out\" information Icons and other navigational aids  Online cheat sheet  Top ten lists  A dash of humor and fun Discover how to: Dress and groom yourself properly Dress and groom yourself properly Engage in polite conversation Engage in polite conversation Eat meals elegantly Eat meals elegantly Celebrate events with class Celebrate events with class Be a gracious guest Be a gracious guest Teach kids good manners Teach kids good manners Get smart! @wwwdummies.com Find listings of all our books Find listings of all our books Choose from many different subject categories Choose from many different subject categories Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com From the Back Cover Covers e-etiquette \u0097 blogging, cell phones, MP3 players, e-mail, and more The fun and easy way \u00ae to say and do the right thing in every situation Want to practice proper etiquette \u0097 and deal with others who don't? This no-nonsense guide provides timely guidance in good manners, no matter the situation. You get expert advice on being courteous to friends and family, dating, working well with colleagues, correspondence, entertaining, tipping, traveling overseas, and much more. THE DUMMIES WAY Explanations in plain English  \"Get in, get out\" information Icons and other navigational aids  Online cheat sheet  Top ten lists  A dash of humor and fun Discover how to: Dress and groom yourself properly Dress and groom yourself properly Engage in polite conversation Engage in polite conversation Eat meals elegantly Eat meals elegantly Celebrate events with class Celebrate events with class Be a gracious guest Be a gracious guest Teach kids good manners Teach kids good manners Get smart! @wwwdummies.com Find listings of all our books Find listings of all our books Choose from many different subject categories Choose from many different subject categories Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com About the Author Sue Fox is the author of Business Etiquette For Dummies and a Professional Member of the International Association of Protocol Consultants. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Job Hunting & Careers"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 17.3}, {"asin": "1259573540", "title": "Marketing - Standalone book", "author": "Roger A. Kerin", "description": "About the Author Steven W. Hartley is Professor of Marketing in the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. He holds a bachelor\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Hartley was formerly the chair of the Department of Marketing at the University of Denver and has taught at the University of Colorado, the University of Minnesota, and in several executive development programs. His teaching interests include principles of marketing, marketing research, and marketing planning. Dr. Hartley's research has appeared in many leading marketing publications. He is an active consultant to several prominent U.S. corporations and is active in many professional organizations including the American Marketing Association, the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Marketing Educators' Association.Roger A. Kerin is the Harold C. Simmons Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Edwin L. Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University. Professor Kerin received a BA (magna cum laude), MBA and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. He is the co-author of Strategic Marketing Problems: Cases and Comments, 13th ed. which also has Portuguese, Chinese, and Spanish editions, and Contemporary Perspectives on Strategic Market Planning. He is a co-author with Steven Hartley of Marketing, 16th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2023), which has been translated into 11 languages, and Marketing: The Core 10th ed (McGraw Hill, 2024). Professor Kerin also co-edited Marketing Decision Making: New Perspectives and Practices and the Encyclopedia of Marketing Strategy. He has authored over 70 scholarly articles appearing in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Retailing, Strategic Management Journal, and Decision Sciences as well as numerous book chapters and conference papers. He is a former editor of the Journal of Marketing and has served on a dozen journal editorial review boards over his career.Professor Kerin has engaged in consulting, executive development, and litigation support work in the area of marketing planning and strategy for numerous Fortune 1000 companies. Professor Kerin has served on the American Marketing Association Board of Directors, American Marketing Association Foundation Board of Advisors, and the Board of Governors of the Academy of Marketing Science.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Marketing & Sales"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 10.66}, {"asin": "0470106727", "title": "Etiquette For Dummies", "author": "Sue Fox", "description": "Review \"provides comprehensive advice on practising every-day good behaviour, including 'do's and don'ts' on the use of wireless technology such as Blackberrys and iPods.\"\u00a0 ( Publishing News (Main) Friday 18th May) From the Inside Flap Covers e-etiquette \u2014 blogging, cell phones, MP3 players, e-mail, and more The fun and easy way \u00ae to say and do the right thing in every situation Want to practice proper etiquette \u2014 and deal with others who don't? This no-nonsense guide provides timely guidance in good manners, no matter the situation. You get expert advice on being courteous to friends and family, dating, working well with colleagues, correspondence, entertaining, tipping, traveling overseas, and much more. THE DUMMIES WAY Explanations in plain English  \"Get in, get out\" information Icons and other navigational aids  Online cheat sheet  Top ten lists  A dash of humor and fun Discover how to: Dress and groom yourself properly Dress and groom yourself properly Engage in polite conversation Engage in polite conversation Eat meals elegantly Eat meals elegantly Celebrate events with class Celebrate events with class Be a gracious guest Be a gracious guest Teach kids good manners Teach kids good manners Get smart! @wwwdummies.com Find listings of all our books Find listings of all our books Choose from many different subject categories Choose from many different subject categories Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com From the Back Cover Covers e-etiquette \u0097 blogging, cell phones, MP3 players, e-mail, and more The fun and easy way \u00ae to say and do the right thing in every situation Want to practice proper etiquette \u0097 and deal with others who don't? This no-nonsense guide provides timely guidance in good manners, no matter the situation. You get expert advice on being courteous to friends and family, dating, working well with colleagues, correspondence, entertaining, tipping, traveling overseas, and much more. THE DUMMIES WAY Explanations in plain English  \"Get in, get out\" information Icons and other navigational aids  Online cheat sheet  Top ten lists  A dash of humor and fun Discover how to: Dress and groom yourself properly Dress and groom yourself properly Engage in polite conversation Engage in polite conversation Eat meals elegantly Eat meals elegantly Celebrate events with class Celebrate events with class Be a gracious guest Be a gracious guest Teach kids good manners Teach kids good manners Get smart! @wwwdummies.com Find listings of all our books Find listings of all our books Choose from many different subject categories Choose from many different subject categories Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com Sign up for eTips at etips.dummies.com About the Author Sue Fox is the author of Business Etiquette For Dummies and a Professional Member of the International Association of Protocol Consultants. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Job Hunting & Careers"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 17.3}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0132993600", "title": "MyFinanceLab for Corporate Finance Access code", "author": "Jonathan Berk", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 3.2, "price": 138.47}, {"asin": "0449816818", "title": "The Christmas Wish (A Wish Book)", "author": "Lori Evert", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 1-Anja longs to be one of Santa's elves. Dressed in full Nordic regalia complete with red gnomic hat, she certainly looks the part. A thoughtful and helpful child, she acts the part as well. When she skis off in her quest to find Santa, a bird, horse, musk ox, polar bear, and reindeer show her the way. The full-page photographs look like they could be movie stills, so sharp and seamless are the figures that Anja and the animals cut against the winter landscape of Northern lights, glaciers, and snowy pine trees. While the scenes of Anja offering an apple to the reindeer or curled up next to the sleeping polar bear are whimsical and look unaltered, other images are obviously manipulated. Further, the story reads as if it were written around the pictures, rather than the other way around. Nonetheless, the striking winter visuals and the adorable heroine carry the day.-Joanna Fabicon, Los Angeles Public Library \u03b1(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \"A captivating Christmas story with a magic all its own.\u201d --Starred, Kirkus Reviews \"\u2026rosy-cheeked Anja looks like she\u2019s stepped out of a fairy tale, and Breiehagen\u2019s delicious (and, necessarily, digitally altered) photographs of her riding on the back of a polar bear and meeting Santa amid the snowy pines of the North Pole create the sense that magic is very real.\" -- Starred, Publishers Weekly \"[The Christmas Wish] points to both the timelessness and the otherworldliness of a child's Christmastime wonder.\" --The Horn Book \"\u2026this cozy Nordic tale filled with extraordinary photographs will have readers of all ages believing in the magic of Christmas. This is one to pull out every year and savor.\" -- The Children's Book Review \"Dreams have never been so photogenic.\" -- USA Today About the Author LORI EVERT is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Christmas Wish , The Tiny Wish , The Reindeer Wish and The Brave Puppy .\u00a0She and her family created The Wish books together. They split their time between Minnesota and Norway.PER BREIEHAGEN is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed photographer from Norway. His credits include National Geographic , Audubon , and The New York Times Magazine .\u00a0He created the images for The Wish Books with his daughter, Anja, and wife, Lori Evert. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0978924614", "title": "Behold the Dawn", "author": "K. M. Weiland", "description": "About the Author K.M. Weiland lives in make-believe worlds, talks to imaginary friends, and survives primarily on chocolate truffles and espresso. She is the internationally published author of the Amazon bestsellers Outlining Your Novel and Structuring Your Novel, as well as the dieselpunk adventure Storming and the portal fantasy Dreamlander. When she's not making things up, she's busy mentoring other authors on her site helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com. She makes her home in western Nebraska. Find out more about her fiction at kmweiland.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 13.03}, {"asin": "B08SWMYKD6", "title": "Heartstopper #4: A Graphic Novel", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}], "target_asin": "0132993600"}
{"user_id": "AFLGU4JUBA2ERTQCF4BBFQ7ZL62Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "089815961X", "title": "That Gunk on Your Car: A Unique Guide to the Insects of North America", "author": "Mark E. Hostetler", "description": "Amazon.com Review That Gunk on Your Car is a seriously funny book filled with fascinating information about common insects, especially the ones you are most likely to find splattered on your windshield. Chapters are organized around the individual insects--ants, mosquitoes, grasshoppers, butterflies, crickets, midges--and include information on the natural history and life cycles of each and fun things you can do with the insects. That Gunk on Your Car would be an excellent parent/child participatory book: the lively text is easy to read and scientifically accurate.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 21.4}, {"asin": "0190252944", "title": "In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett", "author": "Tony Fletcher", "description": "Review \"Fletcher's account [...] is enthralling and rigorously researched ... [A] captivating book.\" --Mark Ellen, The Sunday Times \"Fletcher's vibrant book brings Pickett and his music to glorious life.\"-- Publishers Weekly \"Throughout the book, Fletcher ably explores [the] dichotomy in Pickett's character... [ In the Midnight Hour is] a layered portrait of the legendary singer.\"-- Kirkus \"This biography of soul singer Wilson Pickett is distinctive for its voluminous and nonjudgmental accounting of his life, from early childhood on, and of the complex early days of rhythm and-blues recording... In a book remarkable for its copious family research, Fletcher, a true devotee of the music, gives us the complete Pickett, more so than Mark Ribowsky did for Otis Redding, or James McBride has done for James Brown.\"-- Booklist \"[ In the Midnight Hour ] is biography at its best: anecdotal, comprehensive, captivating and concise.\"-- Shelf Awareness \"Fletcher's brilliant little book shines a light on the good, bad, and ugly of Pickett's life, as it illustrates just how vital his music is to the history of soul and rock and roll.\"-- No Depression \"Tony Fletcher has written the first full biography of Pickett, presenting his story with engaging prose rooted in solid research. \"-- Shepherd Express \"Journalists who write about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll often find it easier to focus on the sensational aspects of the industry than on the music itself, but Mr. Fletcher... gets it right.\"-- Wall Street Journal \"[A] richly detailed new biography of the singer. This book is a reminder of just how powerful a presence Pickett was, especially throughout the 1960s, as African-American music migrated from churches and black radio stations into the mainstream, and as America itself underwent dramatic social changes.\"-- Seattle Times \"Insightful and informative.\"-Billy Heller, New York Post \"From his fiery rise to fame to his slow sips to death, Tony Fletcher's In the Midnight Hour captures the essence of soul singer Wilson Pickett and tells a tale that reads with the anticipation of a murder mystery novel... [Fletcher] sets the detailed scene of an era in musical history that is filled with racism, segregation, violence, shady business dealings, and recordings that touched the world.\"-- Chronogram Magazine \"[Tony Fletcher] provides the most complete picture, warts and all, of this singular soul artist-and he doesn't pull any punches... [written] with clarity and a wealth of fascinating information.\"-- Paste Magazine \"Those curious about the dynamic tension that gave one of the great American soul men his unique sound and power will enjoy Tony Fletcher's thorough [book].\"-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette \"A compulsory read tinged with tragedy and triumph that resurrects the genius of a forgotten icon.\"-- Alive Magazine \"A vivid, detailed, and insightful portrait.\"--Popmatters \"Tony Fletcher's research is impeccable, his sources are unimpeachable, and his style is thoroughly engaging.\"-- Arts Fuse \"The unique performer, the complicated man and the brute bully all come together in one here. Wilson Pickett gets his R-E-S-P-E-C-T in book form, finally.\"-- Houston Press \"[In the Midnight Hour] has a subtle way with modern American history, and character, as well as great character studies of Duane Allman, James Brown, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Lloyd Price, Jerry Wexler, and the monumental Bobby Womack.\"-- Woodstock Times \"As any good biography of a musician should, In the Midnight Hour sends us back to the recordings, the best of which have not lost one iota of their power.\"-- New York Times Book Review \"Fletcher offers a detailed and perceptive account of Pickett's life, and his rise and fall within the world of popular music... Fletcher has given us a good understanding of this talented but a flawed man.\"-- IASPM Journal About the Author Tony Fletcher is the bestselling author of major biographies on Keith Moon, the Smiths, and R.E.M., as well as a memoir, a novel, and a history of the New York City music scene. Born in northern England, and raised in South London, where he started his own music magazine at the age of thirteen, he emigrated to New York City in the late 1980s. When not traveling with his family, he makes his home near Woodstock in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. A contributor to Salon and the Wall Street Journal , his writing has also appeared in Mojo , Rolling Stone , the New York Times , Spin , and Newsday , and he has contributed to a host of other publications, radio, and television shows worldwide.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 25.49}, {"asin": "0786495375", "title": "J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy (Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 47)", "author": "Deke Parsons", "description": "Review \u201cElegant and thought provoking...recommended for readers interested in the fantasy genre, as well as those who wish to learn more about literary criticism and pop culture\u201d\u2015 Library Journal ; \u201ca very enjoyable read...recommend\u201d\u2015 SFRevu ; \u201cfascinating\u201d\u2015 Beyond Bree . About the Author Deke Parsons has a Ph.D. in English, specializing in 20th century British literature and in film, from Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 29.95}, {"asin": "1592988776", "title": "Bullseye Breach: Anatomy of an Electronic Break-In", "author": "Greg Scott", "description": "Review ''A Michael Crichton-like whirlwind story that's very hard to put down once you pick it up. Part mystery, part suspense, part education, part technology, and all entertainment.'' --Ken Steinhardt, computer scientist and retired former VP, EMC Corporation''A perfect foray into how things can go terribly wwrrroonnggg... And all it took to get started was One Thoughtless 'Click'.'' --Winn Schwartau, CEO of The Security Awareness Company and author of Information Warfare and Pearl Harbor Dot Com (Die Hard IV) ''After reading the book, I actually have a better idea of how a multi-vector compromise happens, and how the little signs that should have been caught were missed. Hits the nail squarely.'' --Al Gillen, program VP, Servers and System Software, IDC About the Author Greg Scott is a veteran of the tumultuous IT industry, and the founder of Infrasupport Corporation, with a laser focus on infrastructure and security. In the 1990s, he was a popular columnist for magazines ENT and Enterprise Linux . He currently lives in the Twin Cities with his wife, daughter, and two grandchildren.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.82}, {"asin": "098836400X", "title": "The Story of Rex of White Way, The Blizzard King", "author": "Jim Cheskawich", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 94.0}, {"asin": "1530962005", "title": "Tovi the Penguin: goes trick-or-treating", "author": "Janina Rossiter", "description": "Review \"Another fantastic story about Tovi the Penguin! My girls really adore this series with its gorgeous colours and the cute adventures that this trio of penguins get up to. In this book, it's time to go trick or treating, but will Tovi and his friends get up to any mischief or get lots of candy?I think each book in this series has been read and reread 50 times in our household. My 8 year old reads them to her 5 year old sister and then the 4 year old pretends to read them to her stuffed animals.It's a charming series for kids with a sense of adventure and humour that parents enjoy too!\"-\u00a0Lizzie Harwood, author of Triumph: Collected Stories and Xamnesia: Everything I Forgot in my Search for an Unreal Life Close to Destiny \"Engaging illustrations and an enjoyable and gentle story about Halloween. Guaranteed to delight young readers!\"-Charlotte Debeugny, author of 5:2 Lifestyle\"I'm a fan of Tovi. I used to read them for my ESL students when I was still teaching. Now I send the German versions to my niece. This one is done in the same tradition of cute dialogue and little surprises that are sure to please the young crowd. It's also a perfect seasonal book if you want to explain the concept of Halloween to little children.\" - Jennie Goutet is the author of romancenovel, The Viscount of Maisons-Laffitte and the award-winning memoir StarsUpside Down (formerly called A Lady in France).\"Another delightful addition to the Tovi series... My daughter loves the adorable images as well as the fun adventures found in each of the Tovi books. This is absolutely a book we will be rereading on Halloween, and the rest of the year!\"-Adria J. Cimino is the author of Amazon Best-Selling novel Paris, Rue des Martyrs and Close to Destiny, as well as The Creepshow and A Perfumer's Secret.\"Another delightful Tovi book! My kids love penguins so it's no wonder they enjoy the Tovi the Penguin series. Tovi always gets into some fun adventure, and this Halloween book is yet another great example of that. Get this book for your kids or give it as a gift! They'll definitely love it!\"- Vicki Lesage, author of Confessions of a Paris Potty Trainer From the Back Cover It's autumn and Tovi and his friends are getting ready to celebrate Halloween.After Tovi's decorated his house, the friends all meet at the farm to pickpumpkins. But what a surprise they get while they're there! It givesthem a good idea for a Halloween trick! Will their trick work? And willthey get treats? Let's find out .... About the Author Amazon bestselling author Janina Rossiter loves three things: design, France and her little family. She studied communication & illustration design at university, and haslived in Germany (her home country), England (where she met herhusband), and now France (where she vows to stay). After graduating with a degree from university she worked as a packaging designer for a fewyears before setting off on her own and expanding into freelance design. She enjoys the creative energy of Paris, where she lives with herEnglish husband and her two daughters.With the arrival ofher first daughter, Janina's love for painting and drawing found a newlease on life and, before long, she combined her passion forillustration with the wonderfully inspiring world of children. Afterthat, it was simply a matter of time before Tovi the Penguin was born... . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 4.97}, {"asin": "1419699148", "title": "Sorrows Fall", "author": "Davonne Burns", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": "from 75.00"}, {"asin": "1618216805", "title": "Designing Gifted Education Programs and Services: From Purpose to Implementation", "author": "Scott J. Peters", "description": "Review Prufrock Press has once again published another [g]reat work to assist educators in doing their jobs in educating students . . . This work should be in every district resource library and in every school media center for educators to gather information from.,Lewie Dunn,Georgia Military College, 2/1/18Rather than being a compendium of all possible topics, this slim volume provides high-level perspective with encouragement for further study. That makes it particularly helpful to administrators new in their roles or to those who serve in multiple roles within their districts and cannot devote their full time and energies to improving their district's gifted services.,Kay Shurtleff And Anne N. Rinn,Teachers College Record, 3/22/18 About the Author Scott J. Peters, Ph.D., is assistant professor of educational foundations at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he teaches courses related to measurement and assessment, research methodology, and gifted education. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University specializing in gifted and talented education with secondary areas in applied research methodology and English education. His research work focuses on educational assessment with regard to policy and practice, identification of student exceptionalities\u2015particularly those from low-income or underrepresented groups\u2015and gifted and talented programming outcomes. He has published in Teaching for High Potential , Gifted Child Quarterly , Journal of Advanced Academics , Gifted and Talented International , Gifted Children , Journal of Career and Technical Education Research , Ed Leadership , and Pedagogies . He is the past recipient of the Feldhusen Doctoral Fellowship in Gifted Education, the NAGC Research and Evaluation Network Dissertation Award, the NAGC Doctoral Student of the Year Award, and the UW-Whitewater College of Education Innovation Award. He has served as the assistant program chair and program chair of the AERA Research on Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent SIG, on the board of directors of the Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted, and as the National Association for Gifted Children Research and Evaluation network secretary. Dina Brulles, Ph.D., is the Director of Gifted Education at Paradise Valley Unified School District, Gifted Program Coordinator at Arizona State University, and serves on the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) Board of Directors.", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 35.92}, {"asin": "0984002618", "title": "Buying Time: An Aspen Moore Novel", "author": "Kelly Cochran", "description": "Review \"In Buying Time, author Kelly Cochran manages to keep her readers on the edge of their seats and in stitches as they laugh their way through this fun, fast-paced murder mystery novel. Ms. Cochran's wry sense of humor is perfect for Aspen, the main character who shows just the right combination of strength and vulnerability to make this story seem real. Cochran's tone is similar to Carol Higgins Clark, author of Snagged (murder at a pantyhose convention) and the rest of the Regan Reilly mystery series.\u00a0- Judge, 22nd Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards. FINALIST - 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Award, Mystery QUARTER FINALIST - 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award About the Author A geographic mutt, Kelly Cochran has lived on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in many places in between. During her childhood, she attended thirteen different schools, in twelve years, all before going off to college at the age of seventeen. To her surprise, she turned out somewhat normal and went on to have a 20-year career in information technology.Currently she lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and three dogs. Her son lives in the Washington, D.C. area where he never tires of Kelly's efforts to get him to move closer.When she isn't writing, she divides her time between managing Internet-based retail businesses, talking to her mother, using her mini iPad to play MonkeyWrench and Candy Crush, and wondering why she doesn't have enough time to finish writing her next novel.Kelly is a member of Sisters in Crime. Find out more at KellyCochran.com", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1590583760", "title": "Eye for Murder, An: An Ellie Foreman Mystery (Ellie Foreman Series)", "author": "Libby Fischer Hellmann", "description": "Review \"Libby Fischer Hellmann has written a wonderful thriller. Triggered by a seemingly trivial exchange of intelligence in Prague near the end of World War II, the story quickly moves to contemporary Chicago, where the already harried life of Ellie Foreman is turned upside down by the death of an elderly man she can't recall ever even meeting. An Eye For Murder is a clever mystery puzzle within a beautifully wrought novel.\" -Jeremiah Healy author of the John Francis Cuddy mysteries \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"A masterful blend of politics, history, and suspense, this novel is well worth reading.\" -Publishers Weekly \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\"Complicated, fascinating. Hellmann has a beautifully tuned ear, which makes many of her scenes seriously funny. Her film-editor instincts tell her when to let a scene run on and when to cut away.\" -Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune From the Author An Eye For Murder was a personal journey for me. Not so much because it was the first Ellie Foreman mystery, but because of its backstory which involves my late mother and father in law.My husband's parents were \"off the boat\" from Germany-- his mother, Lucy, in 1938, his father, Fred, in 1939. His mother cleaned houses in New York while she learned English. She used to tell us how she scrubbed Danny Kaye's floors.Fred, the sole survivor of his family, was drafted six months after he arrived in the US. But instead of going to boot camp, he was shipped up to Canada where he trained with William Stephenson ( A Man Called Intrepid ) who, as many of you know, was one of the founders of the OSS. Then Fred was sent back behind German lines to do intelligence work for the Allies. He came home in 1945.Their story was so remarkable I knew I had to write about it. I hope you enjoy the result.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 5.97}, {"asin": "146420375X", "title": "Resorting to Murder: A Collection of Holiday Mysteries (British Library Crime Classics)", "author": "Martin Edwards", "description": "Review It is rare to find a Golden Age anthology in which the majority of the short stories have not been published, multiple times, in other sources. I was delighted to find that this collection was completely fresh, to me, and full of lovely surprises; the humor of Helen Simpson's \"A Posteriori\" was an especial treat. Highly recommended for all lovers of British mysteries, particularly if planning a holiday! ( NetGalley ) What a fun book! Fourteen stories focused on the Golden Age of British crime writing, the series includes works by both recognized authors such as Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton. Many of the stories are quite rare, seldom reprinted, including those by Phyllis Bentley and Helen Simpson. Holidays seem to call for new mystery books, whether it's a trip to the beach in the summer or a trip to grandparents for Christmas. Holiday\u00a0mysteries were a great love of Christie and an excellent way to get away whether by train, boat, or a comfortable chair by the fire....The settings for these stories reveal the unexpected ways in which crime writers use holidays as a theme. Markedly different from each other, the stories range from a golf course in the English seaside, a pension (budget friendly accommodation) in Paris, and a Swiss mountain resort, to the cliffs of Normandy....This special book follows on the footsteps of two others in the Crime Classics series published by Poisoned Pen Press: Murder in Piccadilly by Charles Kingston and The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude. Eleven additional titles are set for release in late 2015. And if that isn't exciting enough, beginning in 2016, one title is slated to be released each month! ( The Book Breeze ) Fourteen reprints from England's golden age of detection (here, 1910-1953) show that although favorite sleuths may go on vacation, murder never does. The very first story, Arthur Conan Doyle's \"The Adventure of the Devil's Foot,\" sets the pattern: rarely reprinted lesser tales that have been neglected for good reason. After Sherlock Holmes untangles \"the Cornish horror,\" Doyle's brother-in-law E.W. Hornung sends Dr. John Dollar to Switzerland to determine why a doctor prescribed his patient a lethal dose of strychnine in \"A Schoolmaster Abroad\"; Paul Beck, closer to home, confronts the killer of a man unlucky in love in M. McDonnell Bodkin's \"The Murder on the Golf Links\"; G.K. Chesterton sends poet Gabriel Gale to southern France to reveal the fate of a heterodox fossil scientist in \"The Finger of Stone\"; H.C. Bailey's Reggie Fortune is on hand to unravel a double attack in the Swiss Alps in \"The Hazel Ice\"; Dr. John Thorndyke minutely reconstructs the appearance of a seaside victim and his killer in R. Austin Freeman's \"A Mystery of the Sand-Hills\"; Anthony Berkeley shows Roger Sheringham performing remarkably similar offices on Penhampton Beach in \"Razor Edge\"; and Sgt. Beef divines how the new governor of a Normandy prison was killed in his car without ever getting clocked out of his office in Leo Bruce's \"Holiday Task.\" Less formulaic but equally routine are Arnold Bennett's \"Murder!,\" set on the Channel Coast, and a pair of stories - Basil Thomson's \"The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser\" and Michael Gilbert's businesslike \"Cousin Once Removed\" - that rehash well-worn patterns. The most original entries here are Gerald Findler's haunted-house tale \"The House of Screams\"; Phyllis Bentley's spooky, twisty \"Where is Mr. Manetot?\"; and, best of all, \"A Posteriori,\" Helen Simpson's unexpectedly funny crossing of prim Miss Charters with a spy whose work leaves unforgettable traces. One truth emerges unchallenged: when English detectives go on holiday, they really do seem to relax a bit, or at least their creators do. ( Kirkus Reviews ) For anyone who is a fan of stories set in the era of top hats and long dresses would love it. Short stories that are ideal reading for a summer's day. It is of course not very difficult to figure out the endings but it is the language and the nuances of these gems that bring a smile to your face. ( NetGalley ) About the Author Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime writer best known for two series of novels set in Liverpool and the Lake District. He is series consultant for British Library Crime Classics, the Vice Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, and President of the Detection Club. The Golden Age of Murder, his study of the Detection Club, was published in 2015 to international acclaim, and has been nominated for both the Edgar and Agatha awards for the year's best book about the genre. He received the CWA 2020 Diamond Dagger Award for sustained excellence in crime writing and significant contributions to the genre, joining the ranks of Sue Grafton, Ian Rankin, and Lee Child.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1557134332", "title": "Novel Explosives", "author": "Jim Gauer", "description": "From the Back Cover \"An amazing novel, a literary masterpiece that reads like a thriller, propelled by its narrative ingenuity, outlandish erudition, and jacked-up prose style.. the most fun reading I've had in ages.\"\u00a0\u00a0 -- Steven Moore, author of The Novel: An Alternative History About the Author Jim Gauer is a mathematician, poet, and possibly the world's only Marxist Venture Capitalist. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Novel Explosives A Novel in 3 Parts By Jim Gauer Zerogram Press Copyright \u00a9 2016 Jim GauerAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-55713-433-2 CHAPTER 1 The story of how I came to live in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, is a fascinating one, fascinating. It is not, however, it should be noted, right up front, a story that I am in any way well-equipped to tell, in the sense, in the very real sense, in the I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you sense, that I myself have no idea how I came to live in Guanajuato. In some such sense of the word, I found myself one day, living in Guanajuato, as though I'd picked up a curious object while walking a mountain trail, with no conception whatsoever of how I'd come to be living here, apparently some time ago, no recollection of whatever chain of events I was myself at the end of, and no sense at all of having led a prior life. I certainly had a prior life; I am, after all, in all probability, somewhere in my mid-fifties, and no one comes to be living somewhere in his mid-fifties without having had a prior life; it takes time in any case to become of a certain age, time in which events would no doubt have taken place, even if one can't recall them, and these events would have made up what amounts to my prior life, so I had no doubt that I had one, whatever it had amounted to. The fine lines and wrinkles that appear on one's face, with the passage of time and exposure to sunlight and the gradual accumulation of certain habitual facial expressions, don't just appear out of nowhere one day, and assume their positions around the downturned mouth, or the worry-furrowed eyebrow, or the scrutinizing eyes; I had no doubt that time, and the pressure of events, and the long narrative chain of time-sensitive circumstance, had produced these lines and wrinkles I could read on my own face, even if I myself was unable to recreate them. Somewhere along the way, however, the narrative chain had come unlinked, the chain of cause and effect by which one set of circumstances gives rise to the next set of circumstances. I myself was a link that was both the end of one chain, one I had no recollection of, and the beginning of another chain, of whatever would happen next. While I don't doubt for a moment that my story must be a fascinating one, I, to put it bluntly, do not know a word of it; I found myself one day, like finding a link of anchor chain in the mountains of central Mexico, and not only was this chain link me, but I had no way on earth of explaining how I'd come to be here; as far as I could tell, as I stood there trailside, I might as well have appeared out of thin mountain air. I woke up one morning in a room, as it would soon turn out, in a small hotel, with no clue at all as to my identity or whereabouts. I showered, shaved, dressed, using clothing I found lying in a comfortable-looking chair, went down to what was recognizably a hotel lobby, and was told by the desk clerk, a man almost certainly of Indian and perhaps Spanish descent, that the town I was in was called Guanajuato. I looked around the room, at its warm terracotta flooring tiles, covered with blue, yellow, magenta, purple, and white woven rugs, at its rough-hewn wooden seating, its paintings, of wildly colored mythic birds, hung somewhat erratically on whitewashed plaster walls, its glassed-in display cases of hand-painted ceramic plates, its front door facing a narrow cobblestone street, a street I almost certainly must have walked upon previously, and found nothing at all that I recognized, nothing that served to trigger even the faintest of memories, of drinking too late, say, at a local bar, of a wild night of revelry, of buying one too many rounds for newfound companions who were enjoying my company, of discovering to my amazement the lateness of the hour, my state of inebriation, my need for a good night's sleep, and having to seek therefore shelter from the cool air of the night. Nothing, as they say, came back to me. There was nothing whatsoever here in this room, however warm and authentic it appeared to be when I looked around at the room's belongings, which reminded me of anything of a personal nature; as far as personal reminders go, the room might as well have been empty. The room itself, however, far from being empty, held beautiful weavings and hand-painted ceramics and rough-hewn wooden furniture and wild mythic birds, things that I could see with my own two eyes, or perhaps I should say the eyes that, for the sake of simplicity, would need be thought of as my very own two eyes. To be clear, it's not that these objects lacked associations; they were not in any way cut off from the rest of history and somehow stranded here. I knew, for example, that one of the painted mythic birds was Quetzalcoatl, sacred god of the Aztecs, god of sky and creation, patron of the priesthood, of learning and knowledge, this bird had lost nothing of its history and associations, but this had nothing to do with me, there was nothing about the bird that I could associate with personally, it was the same bird to me that it would have been to any other man, any man with a knowledge of Quetzalcoatl, except that any other man would find, in addition to his knowledge, a connection to himself, a set of associations he took personally and therefore regarded as properly his. These associations did not, in any sense, belong to me; they belonged, properly, to the bird. I don't want to convey the impression that I was uninformed or ignorant. To the contrary, I seemed to know quite a lot of things, it's just that none of the things I knew belonged to me; my own knowledge was not in any way a personal possession, it could just as well have belonged to anyone. I knew, to give another example, simply by looking at them, that the colorful rugs on the square-tiled floor were hand-woven on a loom, as was indicated by the manner in which they lay on the floor, not quite flat, with small bubbles and waves caused by the uneven weaving, an effect that is not normally produced by a machine. I also knew that they were, in all likelihood, colored with natural dyes, indigo from the Anil plant, deep magenta from the cochineal insect, the yellow of rock moss, the sea snail purple, the very sea snail, purpura pansa, from the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca that was so prized by the Europeans after their invasion of the New World, these were all things I knew, I just didn't know them personally, they could just as well have been known by someone else. I had knowledge, in other words, I was clearly the sort of man in possession of a set of facts, but there are, after all, all sorts of men in possession of facts, so what sort of man was I? I had no idea. I left the front desk, climbed the stairs back up to my room on the third floor, used the key that I had somehow acquired to enter the room, and made a conscious decision to take a good look around. The room itself was spacious and light-filled, once I'd opened the shutters, situated as it was at the front of the building, with two tall windows sunk deep into thick whitewashed walls, overlooking what appeared to be a large town or small city, set between steep hillsides in an undulating ravine, filled with church spires topped with crosses and weathervanes, and the basilica domes of nearby cathedrals, and closer to the earth, a winding maze of narrow streets. From my perspective, on first sight, I mean really and truly on first sight, since I had no impressions at all that would have preceded these first impressions, I appeared to be situated on a hillside just above the center of the city, a conclusion I drew no doubt tentatively from the evidence gathered by my eyes, evidence that the buildings grew more dense and somewhat taller around a plaza just below me and perhaps twenty degrees to my left. The hillside opposite was jammed with box-shaped houses in every imaginable hue, forest green and royal purple and orange and pink flamingo, stacked up the slope above the city center, with a large stone statue at the hill's highest point. The heart of the city, I concluded, lay at the bottom of a valley between these two hillsides, the one I resided on, and the one rising opposite me, with a statue at its peak. The city center itself struck me as genuinely beautiful, though in fact I had nothing other than impersonal images, like pictures in books, to compare it to, deep yellow and pale green and dusty-rose-colored buildings, interspersed with townhouses with wrought-iron balconies and window boxes filled with red and yellow flowers, and here and there, laundry hung out on a balcony railing to dry; the sun was out, as might be expected, on the sort of day when people put out laundry on a railing, at least assuming they were expecting their laundry to dry. The narrow streets were filled with scores of people, walking from one place to another, on their own two feet, the way people could be expected to walk, on a day when the sun is out, in order to get from here to there, from one point to another point, from where, in some sense, they are already, to somewhere, altogether, elsewhere instead. The first order of business, now that I had my physical bearings, though to tell the truth, I had been uncomfortable with the idea, when speaking with the desk clerk, of asking him directly \"What is Guanajuato?\" as it seemed to me that such a question might have struck him as somewhat odd, as odd perhaps as asking him a question like \"Who am I?\" and I was not as yet convinced that it was a good idea to begin striking people as odd; I mean, let's face it, at this point, while I had my physical bearings, I had no idea where I was, since it was apparent, if the clerk could be believed, that I was in Guanajuato, but the truth is I had no idea where or what Guanajuato was, it was almost certainly in Mexico, if Quetzalcoatl could be relied upon, but otherwise, what and where was it? ... in any case, to get to the point, the first order of business was to examine my belongings, or at least to look at the things in my room, assuming that they belonged to me, assuming that I was the one to whom they could best be said to belong. In the closet of the room, I found several linen shirts hung neatly on hangers, two pairs of well-pressed slacks, a pair of dark loafers, and a large green duffel bag that I could only assume was mine. In a chest of drawers along one wall, I found boxer shorts, pairs of black dress socks and clean white athletic socks, two pairs of folded jeans, and a stack of short-sleeved knit shirts, clothing that I would, from this point forward, unless and until someone else came forward to claim them, regard as belonging to me, and therefore among my belongings. The bathroom proved to be a far easier undertaking: it contained a hairbrush, toothbrush, razor, and toothpaste, things that could have belonged to anyone; frankly, if someone had come forward to claim them, I would have simply handed them over, I really didn't care to whom they in fact belonged; if someone had identified them as theirs, I was prepared to identify them as theirs. With the possible exception, then, of the items in the bathroom, I now had a set of personal belongings, whether borrowed or owned, I had certain things to begin with, it was a good place to start, and I clearly needed to start somewhere, so I began right here, by assuming that I was the sort of man who would be in possession of just these items. At least for now, these things were mine, they were already taking on this association, and if turned out later I had borrowed them, I would have to deal with that when the time came. I sat down on the edge of the bed, taking stock of my situation. I had, on the one hand, a roof over my head, clothing to wear, toiletry items, at least for the time being, and the name of a location. I had a native tongue, American-accented English; when speaking with the desk clerk, it had quickly become apparent that I possessed only the most rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, the sort of Spanish one might acquire from a few carelessly attended courses in secondary school, words of basic courtesy to be used in initiating and concluding a brief conversation conducted primarily in English, words for where and why, words for how much, the ability to conjugate the verb \"to be\" in the present tense, and a miscellaneous collection of curse words like \"puta\" and \"swate\" and \"ojete\" and \"pendejo,\" words that would indicate some previous association with native language speakers under circumstances outside the boundaries of basic human courtesy. A brief review of my facial features while shaving had revealed that I was deeply tanned and therefore dark-skinned from sun exposure, my face was in fact as dark as the desk clerk's, and judged by color alone, I could have passed for a Native American, I was in fact so deeply tanned that it was something to be accounted for, I looked like a man who might have washed ashore on a beach and found no place to take shelter from the sun for quite some time, perhaps the victim of a shipwreck, or some foul play at sea, it was apparent that left unchecked my mind was prone to wandering off into romantic and adventuresome fantasies, I took note of this propensity, and brought these speculations to a halt. I was an American with little Spanish and a deep, inexplicable, tan. I was slightly taller than medium height for an American. I was lean, whether from some hardship or natural body-type. I wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses. My hair, bleached from the sun, had not been recently cut. And I had a large painful knot, the size of a baseball cut in half, on the back right center of the top of my head. And on the other hand, I seemed to be in possession of a large collection of facts, none of them personal, and I seemed to be capable of producing, as I sat there taking inventory, a great many thoughts on a variety of subjects, but had no personal context for any of these thoughts. Other than their variety, there was nothing to distinguish them from the thoughts of any number of reasonably well-educated men. I could, for example, explain to myself how Riemannian geometry laid the foundations for General Relativity, I could briefly describe Green's Theorem, and place it as the two-dimensional limited case of Stokes' Theorem, but I couldn't tell myself if any of this mattered to me, and it was apparent that beyond a certain point, my knowledge of Riemannian geometry became vague and unstable. I could recite quite a number of poems, the way a man might do when attempting to distract himself from some uncomfortable dental procedure, but I identified more with the man seeking distraction from the drilling of teeth than with anything to do with the poetry itself. If I'd been told that I was the sort of man who had memorized poetry as a means of distracting himself from some sort of unpleasantness, I couldn't have disputed this. I seemed to know the names and models of a great many automobiles. Did this mean I'd been an auto salesman? And so on. Without any organizing principle, my thoughts were just thoughts. When I searched around in my thinking for something I took pride in, for example, as a means of providing context, and organizing my thoughts, I could find nothing at all that gave me a sense of pride. I went category by category among a large number of subjects, looking for something that might signal a growing sense of self-esteem, and nothing I could think of gave rise to a sense of esteem, all of my thoughts seemed more or less equivalent, they didn't seem to be organized around the rising and falling of some sense of myself as someone to be esteemed. Perhaps I'd done nothing in my prior life that I was proud of, perhaps I was the sort of person for whom knowledge itself was a form of distraction from unpleasantness, but one might think, under the circumstances, that I'd at least feel some sense of pride regarding the depth and variety of the knowledge I could make use of in order to distract myself. I was like a man sitting in the attic of another man's home, finding objects that have been stored away, as having value for another day, and feeling only a mild sense of amusement over what the other finds valuable. It was with some difficulty, I must admit, that I came to recognize that I was, evidently, precisely that other, and that while I might find him amusing, he was, after all, evidently me. (Continues...) Excerpted from Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer . Copyright \u00a9 2016 Jim Gauer. Excerpted by permission of Zerogram Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.62}, {"asin": "0965798577", "title": "Up To My Armpits: Adventures Of A West Texas Veterinarian", "author": "Charles W. Edwards", "description": "About the Author Doc Edwards graduated from Texas A&M in 1949 with his degree in veterinary medicine. He set up practice in Marfa, Texas later that year. He worked out of his clinic there in the heart of Big Bend country for over 50 years, ranging far an wide to serve his clients, mostly cattlemen operators of large ranches in the beautiful rangeland of West Texas. Doc served in the Marine Corps in WWII. He was wounded in Iwo Jima and spent the last several months of the War recovering from his wounds. In 2005 Doc Edwards was honored as a distinguished alumnus of the School of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University. After retirement, Doc lived with his wife, JoAnn, in Marfa until his death in early 2006.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Regional U.S."], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 112.32}, {"asin": "1629722278", "title": "Frontier Grit: The Unlikely True Stories of Daring Pioneer Women", "author": "Marianne Monson", "description": "Review Nominated for the 2017 American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Award recognizing books that ''affirm positive roles for girls and women.'' - Amelia Bloomer Project An invaluable contribution to American History shelves and utterly absorbing from cover to cover. Highly recommended, especially for public and college library collections. -Midwest Book Review --Amelia Bloomer Project''Worthy compilation...Many sources and references listed for those who wish to discover more.'' -Historical Novel Society ''This little nugget is a delightful find and carries quite a punch for a small book. The stories of 12 fascinating women will captivate you while exposing you to the history they did not teach us in school. The author purposefully chose 12 women of different nationalities, ethnic backgrounds, and socioeconomic status, to illustrate the diversity of the American West. Contrary to what our history textbooks and the Hollywood movies claim, white males were not even half the true story of the West much less the whole story. Monson wants to help correct that distortion. She hopes that by understanding the severe restrictions on women in the 19th century, modern women will understand how much we owe those who came before us, and understand what they were risking by pursuing their goals.'' -- -Coastal Breeze News, Florida ''Monson reimagines the campfire tall tale by introducing readers to overlooked talks of many forgotten heroines of the American West. Each biographical story defines perseverance, and there are inspiring examples of courage on each page as well as new lessons in how to live. Monson succinctly portrays a pioneering suffragette, a Sioux writer, and the most celebrated stagecoach driver in the West, who hid her gender most of her life. Another impressive pioneer is Clara Brown, a former slave who helped others make their ways from bondage to a better life in Colorado. Monson's accounts of these women who defied gender roles, who lived and breathed feminism, will resonate with all interested in the long-hidden chapters in American history. A compact, informative, briskly paced, emotionally rich, and eye-opening set of micro-biographies that will change truncated views of the West.'' - --Booklist About the Author Marianne Monson is a writer and professor of English with a strong interest in the relationship between literature and history. She teaches Creative Writing at Portland Community College and regularly speaks at writing conferences.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.29}, {"asin": "159558949X", "title": "Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past", "author": "Ray Raphael", "description": "Review Praise for the tenth-anniversary edition of Founding Myths :\"A persuasive argument in favor of evidence-based history, even if it means surrendering some of our cherished fabrications.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews Praise for the original edition :\"Ray Raphael's engaging and eye-opening book doesn't merely debunk historical fallacies. Using the best modern historical writing and his own research, the author also explains why and to what purpose these myths were created and then offers well-argued alternative explanations.\"\u2015 Sacramento Bee \"Raphael relays so much forgotten or never-known history and argues so well why it, not the legends, should be remembered that virtually any Americans will profit from reading this lively, intelligent book.\"\u2015 Booklist \"All students of American history will find Raphael's correction of the historical record instructive and enjoyable.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author Ray Raphael has taught at a one-room public high school, Humboldt State University, and College of the Redwoods. His seventeen books include A People's History of the American Revolution , The First American Revolution , Founders , and Constitutional Myths (all available from The New Press). Currently a senior research fellow at Humboldt State University, he lives in northern California, where he hikes and kayaks.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.39}, {"asin": "1683504003", "title": "Mehendi Tides", "author": "Siobhan Malany", "description": "Review From BlueInk Reviews-Author Siobhan Malany's first novel Mehendi Tides relates a multi-cultural story of friendship, romance and personal growth.The novel is told from the perspective Kate, who, at 16, accompanies her two friends, a Muslim-American and a Hindu-American, as they visit their extended families in Pakistan and India. The trip introduces Kate to their familial customs and spiritual practices--and to an intoxicating male cousin, Tariq, who Kate becomes romantically involved with. The experiences the girls share on their trip and at home shape the women they become.Chapters of their teenage adventure are intertwined with passages set a decade later, as Kate is driven to pursue a PhD in biochemistry by her mother's death from breast cancer, experiences ongoing tension over her situation with Tariq, and watches\u00a0as her friends make their own difficult choices in balancing career and family, guided by different cultural expectations and internal conflicts.Malany's story has some drawbacks: Characters are too frequently depicted as shocked, startled or surprised, reducing the emotional impact when details of higher importance (such as a hidden rape or medical emergency) are disclosed. Also, plot points are often revisited--including Kate's recent breakup or difficulties in graduate school--without any added nuance. And the arc of the central romance is rather predictable.Nonetheless, Kate's search for a meaningful life carries readers right to the end, and Malany beautifully depicts cultural landmarks and traditions, interweaving her familiarity with Asia throughout. For example, she vividly details the preparation of paan from betel nuts, a mixture chewed for its stimulating effects, and explores attractions in the city Hyderabad. For readers planning to travel in India, this narrative serves as an enjoyable guide, including a map of Hyderabad in the front, while also telling a layered story.A novel that would be of most interest to Indiaphiles, this book is a pleasant read filled with generally credible characters and richly depicted settings.From Kirkus Reviews-A debut novel tells the story of three friends growing into themselves across two timelines.Hyderabad, India, 1987: 16-year-old Kate McKenna is on an eight-week trip with her friends Nasreen Abdel, a Muslim, and Krishna Desai, a Hindu. On the cusp of adulthood, the three Americans are acutely aware of their new sexuality, particularly as the older women of Nasreen's family attempt to arrange marriages for the next generation. Nasreen is heartbroken by the fact that her beloved cousin is about to get married and ashamed that she slept with him not long before finding out. Kate, whose own mother is dead and who feels disconnected from her family, finds herself drawn to another of Nasreen's cousins, the adventurous Tariq. Cut to Chicago, 1998: Kate, now a 27-year-old graduate student,has recently been dumped by her boyfriend and is beginning to regret the decisions she's made in her life. Nasreen is married but has found out she can't have children, and she is plagued by the trauma of a sexual assault that she's kept hidden for years. Krishna doubts her decision to go to medical school even before her doctor mother slips into acoma and is also coming into a sexuality much different than that of her friends. In chapters alternating between the timelines, the three girls--and three women--attempt to navigate love, family, tradition, and independence while remaining true to themselves and one another. The story is told from Kate's perspective, and it is through her outsider'seyes that the reader encounters the Indian culture of Hyderabad; Karachi, Pakistan; and the immigrant community in Chicago. Malany writes in a lush, detailed prose that captures Kate's wonder: \"The older women were already surrounded by flowing waves of silk and chiffon as the shop owners spun bolt after bolt in a fly-fishing motion. Each bolt of material streamed in a wave of illuminated elegance.\" While Malany does not completely nail the two-timeline structure--the 1998 sections suck most of the mystery and urgency out of the 1987 parts--the friendship of Kate,Nasreen, and Krishna is well drawn and genuinely affecting.An uneven but engaging tale of cross-cultural bonds About the Author Siobhan Malany is a Ph.D. molecular pharmacologist. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles and has been featured in the Orlando Sentinel, Upward Magazine and Faces of Technology. Mehendi Tides is her debut novel inspired by her experience in India and Pakistan as a teenager.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": "from 8.50"}, {"asin": "1544240031", "title": "WATERSHED - a novel", "author": "Colin Dodds", "description": "About the Author Colin Dodds is a writer. He grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He is the author of several novels, including WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing \"something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.\" His poetry has appeared in more than two hundred seventy publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology. The poet and songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Actual Air) said of Dodds' poetry: \"These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.\" His book-length poem That Happy Captive was named a finalist in both the Trio House Press Louise Bogan Award and the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award. And his screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. Colin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "0963979817", "title": "A Bucket of Bones: Stories from a Game Warden", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.16}, {"asin": "0316315370", "title": "Confidential Source Ninety-Six: The Making of America's Preeminent Confidential Informant", "author": "Roman Caribe", "description": "Review \"Reads like a breathless, big-hearted, high-stakes, life-or-death thriller--and it's all absolutely true.\"\u2015 Lee Child Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 \"In this thrilling firsthand look at the drug underworld, Roman Caribe doesn't just expose how the Cartels have wreaked havoc on our nation; he also shows the incredible lengths that Americans go to every day to end their lethal game. Make Confidential Source Ninety-Six your own informant and have the ride of your life.\"\u2015 Charles Brandt, #1 NewYork Times bestselling author of I Heard You Paint Houses \"Whether you're an undercover agent or a confidential informant, the path you walk is dangerous-and not just for you, but for your whole family. You're going to root for Roman Caribe at every turn, and you're going to hold your breath and thank God that you will never have to walk the incredible path he has.\"\u2015 William \"Billy\" Queen, ATF Special Agent ret. and New York Times bestsellingauthor of Under and Alone \"It is hard to imagine a more dangerous job than being a high-level confidential informant....[T]hey are integral to law enforcement in solving crimes, seizing narcotics, infiltrating gangs and preventing terrorist attacks. This book takes us into a world of darkness, danger, skullduggery, and betrayal that few people could fathom, much less believe. It is a wild ride; certainly not for the faint of heart.\"\u2015 Robert Mladinich, former NYPD detective, authorof From the Mouth of the Monster: The Joel Rifkin Story, and coauthor ofUndisclosed Files of the Police: Cases from the Archives of the NYPD from1831 to the Present \" Confidential Source Ninety-Six takes the reader on a scary ride into the dark underworld of high level drug kingpins and their henchmen. This is real life drama that is fast paced, informative, and entertaining.\"\u2015 Charles Campisi, former Chief of NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau andauthor of Blue on Blue: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops \"This book combines the adrenaline-rush pacing of pulp fiction with a memoir's grounding in truth....a suitably grim inside look at the front lines of the drug war.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Roman Caribe's success as an informant is astonishing--until, that is, you see what he and his law enforcement partners did to crack every case they worked on and track down the crooks funneling drugs into our country. You've got to read this to believe it.\"\u2015 Tommy Dades, coauthor of Friends of the Family: The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case About the Author Roman Caribe is the most successful confidential informant in U.S. law enforcement history in terms of dollars of narcotics whose seizure he has helped facilitate. The onetime mastermind of an illegal drug distribution ring, he abandoned the drug trade after being given an opportunity to flip in the wake of a drug bust. He is an ordained Christian minister. Robert Cea , a former New York City police officer and detective who was the recipient of 136 commendations for bravery, courage under fire, and meritorious police actions, is the author of the memoir No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop . He has worked as the writer and producer for television series including Discovery Channel's Flipped: A Mobster Tells All and feature films including The Day the Ponies Come Back .", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 10.0}, {"asin": "0963979809", "title": "A Deer Gets Revenge (Stories from a Game Warden)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "0399175830", "title": "Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens", "author": "Eddie Izzard", "description": "Review \u201cIf you are a fan of Eddie Izzard, then you will love this book. If you are not a fan of Eddie Izzard, then there is a good chance that this book will make you one. The experience is akin to him sitting down and having a chat with you, which, we can all agree, sounds delightful.\u201d \u2014Thomas Burns Scully, Popdust.com \u201c[A] candid new book...The comedic tour de force\u00a0[Eddie Izzard]\u00a0opens up about his mother's death, coming out as transgender, and his quest for romantic love.\u201d \u2014Catie Lazarus, Out Magazine \u201cBeloved British comedian Eddie Izzard [writes] with the same wit and candor that characterizes his stand-up [and]\u00a0tackles\u00a0his sexuality, his troubled childhood, and the tumultuous early days of his career, even as he recounts his many excellent roles, albums, and tours.\u201d \u2014Maris Kreizman, Vulture \u201cWhat [ Believe Me ] adds is the larger context of the life\u2014not just what thrills [Eddie Izzard], but what wounds him and what drives him...There is more to it than sadness, however. Izzard\u2019s chronicle is reminiscent of his shows, a stream of surprising associations, full of footnotes and copious asides on subjects like NASA and Action Man.\u201d \u2014Nick A. Zaino III, The Boston Globe \u201cGetting a peek behind the curtain with regards to a guy like this is a rare treat. Believe Me is that peek, a glimpse at the inner workings, the gears and cogs that make a unique personality such as Eddie Izzard tick...All of it is engaging and heartfelt and unwaveringly honest. And oh yeah\u2014it\u2019s pretty freaking funny too.\u201d \u2014 The Maine Edge \u201cLaughter trumps sorrow in candid comedian Eddie Izzard\u2019s Believe Me .\u201d \u2014Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair \u201cBeloved comedian, actor, and writer Izzard\u2026shares intimate details about his life and is emotionally transparent throughout this splendid memoir\u2026The book is both funny and painful, and ultimately uplifting.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cA wicked, beautiful man has written a wicked, beautiful book about his (kind of?) messed up life and it\u2019s...perfect.\u201d \u2014Patton Oswalt \u201cThis book is a raw, honest exploration of what it means to live your truth, to be unapologetically ambitious, and to walk through fear over and over again. It\u2019s about being brave. And hilarious. It reminded me that walking through fear almost always leads to happiness.\u201d \u2014Chelsea Handler \u201cI had never heard of Eddie Izzard before, but judging by this delightful memoir, he has a glittering career ahead of him. I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of working in a Vatican slaughterhouse, acting as Deputy Foreign Minister in Gladstone\u2019s first administration, his whacky exploits at his uncle\u2019s Taxidermy Cafe, and his tragic death at the age of only eight at the Morris Dancing Finals in Bruges.\u201d \u2014John Cleese \u201cEddie Izzard is my favorite stand-up chameleon.\u201d \u2014Eric Idle About the Author Eddie Izzard is a world-renowned comedian, actor, writer, runner, and activist. He made his West End debut in 1993 in a one-man show called Live at the Ambassadors , for which he received an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement. He recently appeared on television as Dr. Abel Gideon in Hannibal , and he produced and starred in the FX Networks series The Riches . His films include Valkyrie ; Ocean\u2019s Thirteen and Ocean\u2019s Twelve ; Across the Universe ; Mystery Men ; Shadow of the Vampire ; The Cat\u2019s Meow ; Lost Christmas ; Castles in the Sky ; and Whisky Galore . His stage appearances include David Mamet\u2019s Race and The Cryptogram ; the title role in Marlowe\u2019s Edward II ; 900 Oneonta ; and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in London and on Broadway, which garnered him a Tony nomination for Best Actor. Izzard\u2019s hit one-man shows include Dress to Kill , Stripped , and Force Majeure . His performance in Dress to Kill earned him two Emmy Awards. In 2010, the documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story received an Emmy nomination. In 2009, Izzard ran forty-three marathons in fifty-one days throughout the United Kingdom, and in 2016, he ran twenty-seven marathons in twenty-seven days across South Africa in honor of Nelson Mandela\u2019s twenty-seven years in prison. By running these seventy marathons he has helped raise \u00a34.8 million ($6 million) for the UK charity Sport Relief. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright \u00a9 2017 Eddie Izzard I N T R O D U C T I O N I always thought I\u2019d write a book about my life toward the end of my life, like Ulysses S. Grant did. Or Chaplin did. But I have noticed\u00a0that a number of people (maybe lots of people) have done autobiographies in the middle of their lives, or even several autobiographies over different slices of their lives. I came to the conclusion that I don\u2019t really know what the rules are for this. I think I\u2019m a really boring person. I think I am naturally boring. Probably most of us are. Interesting people, too, probably decided at some point in life that they were boring and wanted to be more interesting. Like Che Guevara, who was a medical student, then threw on a beret, became a revolutionary, and became way more interesting. Billy Connolly, the Scottish comedian, who really influenced my work, used to say in his stand\u2011up material that he did certain things to make him\u2011 self \u201cwindswept and interesting.\u201d I identify with that. It\u2019s bonkers that in this world some people are just trying to live and exist while I\u2019m sit\u2011 ting here thinking, Ooh! I\u2019ve done some interesting things and now I\u2019m going to write an autobiography! But that is the situation I find myself in. I\u2019ve done a certain number of things in my life and have now reached an age and a state of mind where I\u2019ve come to reflect on those things. And some people want me to write them down. It was at the end of the documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story when Sarah Townsend, the director, who had been shooting interviews with me for some time, said that I never really \u201csay\u201d anything. I thought, Well, I\u2019m up for saying lots of things. But maybe I was being guarded, or trying to make everything very palatable, or funny, and therefore I never seemed to say anything that really cut through the mist of being a performer, an actor, and a personality of some sort. Then, toward the end of the film, I started talking about my mother, who died when I was six. And that\u2019s when I said something revelatory: \u201cI know why I\u2019m doing all this,\u201d I said. \u201cEverything I do in life is trying to get her back. I think if I do enough things . . . that maybe she\u2019ll come back.\u201d I remember that when I said those words in the film it didn\u2019t feel like it was really me talking. Because it wasn\u2019t my conscious brain talking. It was my subconscious brain. And for some reason it was saying: Here\u2019s what\u2019s really going on. Here\u2019s a note to yourself . Something like that. I think it\u2019s true. I think trying to bring my mother back is at the base of everything I\u2019m doing, and everything I\u2019ve ever done. On top of that, of course, there is also ego and a love of adventure and trying to be, as Billy C. would say, \u201cwindswept and interesting.\u201d But it\u2019s quite a moment in the film. And it was quite a moment in my life. So this book is intended to give you a chance to sit inside my head, behind my eyes, for a bit. I\u2019m trying to share thoughts and feelings that I may not have covered in the documentary and that I don\u2019t normally talk about in my stand\u2011up. In a way, I\u2019ve tried to live my life like a film. I\u2019m trying to do interesting things so that somebody notices or so that maybe my mother notices, from beyond the mists of the living. Real life is actually a lot of boring things with occasional spikes of interest. If you look at films of people\u2019s lives, they tend to focus on only one aspect of it because the whole life doesn\u2019t quite work as a story. We know how we like our stories, and they have to go down to the bottom at the end of the second act, and then come back up and win at the end of the third act. Stories don\u2019t really have to be like that, but that does get our motors going. Real life doesn\u2019t play that way, which is why I\u2019d like to thank Sarah Townsend for making my life look interesting in the documentary, even though my life is lots of boring bits with occasional spikes of interestingness. She took all the boring bits out. She got an Emmy nomination for Best Documentary for the film. Which means that my life story got a nomination for trying to be \u201cinteresting,\u201d even though I know the truth. So this is it\u2014an autobiography\u2014a walk through my life\u2014in a non\u2011linear way. Belief or, more likely, self\u2011belief, is central to what I have done, and that probably applies to anyone whose life could be deemed \u201cunusual.\u201d But I do also know self\u2011belief can be used in a good or a bad way: Some people with tremendous self\u2011belief are complete psychotic mass murderers. So if you have a negative heart, then please don\u2019t read this book. But if you have a positive heart, then please do read this book. Because I have worked certain things out in life. I think there are certain patterns to the way human beings behave and I believe if you have analysis in one hand and instinct in the other hand, you can go a long way and live a life that is truly memorable. Anyway. Have a read. Here we go. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 19.0}, {"asin": "0385737653", "title": "These Shallow Graves", "author": "Jennifer Donnelly", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 9 Up\u2014It's September 1890, and Josephine \"Jo\" Montfort has been called home from Miss Sparkwell's School for Young Ladies upon her father's death. The police said it was an accident, but Jo knows her father would never have been so careless as to clean a loaded gun. When rumors of suicide reach her ears, she feels compelled to discover the truth of what happened that night in her father's study. Risking her reputation, the teen searches for answers wherever the clues take her, even to the dangerous slums and docks of New York City. With a handsome and nosy newsman as her reluctant guide, Jo begins to learn more about her family's murky history. Each secret she uncovers leads to another, stirring up her past and threatening her future. Donnelly's latest is a glimpse into the changing societal structure of turn-of-the-century New York City, personified by Jo Montfort. She is a girl trapped by her family's expectations and yearning for a different life, sentiments that will resound with today's teens. She and her co-amateur detective and forbidden romantic interest, Eddie Gallagher, are likable, well-drawn, and interesting. While there may not be many surprises for discerning readers, interest is maintained as they unravel the puzzle through Jo's naive eyes. The plot moves forward at steady pace and short chapters break the novel up into easily devourable pieces. VERDICT A beautifully written mystery that will appeal to a variety of readers.\u2014Heather Miller Cover, Homewood Public Library, AL Review Praise for These Shallow Graves : An Amelia Bloomer Project Award Book \u2605 \u201c These Shallow Graves succeeds as a wonderfully paced thriller, a heart-pounding romance and an unflinching look at the hard choices one young woman must make when society disparages her dreams.\u201d - Shelf Awareness , Starred Review\u2605 \"Fast-paced and thrilling... a smart, insightful, timely depiction of a young woman poised on the brink of a new world after the shattering of another.\"- Booklist , Starred Review \u2605 \" Action-packed chapters propel this compelling mystery ...[and] the injustices Donnelly highlights remain all too relevant.\"- Publishers Weekly , Starred Review \" A beautifully written mystery. \"- SLJ \"[A] fast-paced thriller...the story races to its surprising conclusion .\"- Kirkus Reviews \" A heroine you can't help cheering on. \"- The Horn Book \" A twisted tale of secrets, murder, love, and revenge. This historical thriller delivers. ..[and] Donnelly will keep you on the edge of your seat with this fast-paced, tightly written page turner.\"-USAToday.com\"Donnelly returns with a powerhouse of a whodunit. Her eighth novel strikes hard against poverty, sexism, classism, and gree, driving as relentlessly as Jo in her pursuit of truth and freedom.\"-BookPage.com \" These Shallow Graves delivered all that I adore: lovely prose, historical intrigue, unique characters and setting . I devoured this book!\"-Ruta Sepetys, New York Times bestselling author of Between Shades of Gray and Salt to the Sea \" An intelligent, personable heroine -Jo Montfort's hopes for an enlightened future uncover a dark past, resulting in a splendidly hair-raising tour of the brightest and darkest corners of Victorian New York.\"-Elizabeth Wein, New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Verity and Black Dove, White Raven \"Jo Montfort is a gutsy modern heroine in a beguiling tale of old New York . Money, murder, betrayal, and family secrets....I loved spending time in this world!\"-Elizabeth Ross, author of William C. Morris Award finalist Belle Epoque \" A fast-paced Gilded Age crime thriller that plunges its intrepid investigative-journalist heroine into the sordid underworld of nineteenth-century New York City and into her own family's dark secrets.\"-Julie Berry, award-winning author of All the Truth That's In Me About the Author Jennifer Donnelly is the author of three adult novels, The Tea Rose , The Winter Rose , and The Wild Rose , as well as the young adult novels These Shallow Graves , Revolution , and A Northern Light , winner of Britain's prestigious Carnegie Medal, the L.A. Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature, and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award. She lives and writes full-time in upstate New York. You can visit her at jenniferdonnelly.com or find @JenWritesBooks on Twitter. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Miss Sparkwell\u2019s School for Young LadiesFarmington, ConnecticutSeptember 17, 1890\u201cTrudy, be a dear and read these stories for me,\u201d said Jo Montfort, laying out articles for her school\u2019s newspaper on a tea table. \u201cI can\u2019t abide errors.\u201dGertrude Van Eyck, all blond curls and dimples, stopped dead in the middle of the common room. \u201cHow did you know it was me? You didn\u2019t even look up!\u201d\u201cDuke told me,\u201d Jo replied. Duke\u2019s Cameos were Trudy\u2019s favorite brand of cigarette.Trudy sniffed her sleeve. \u201cDo I smell?\u201d\u201cYou positively reek. What does Gilbert Grosvenor think of you smoking cigarettes?\u201d\u201cGilbert Grosvenor doesn\u2019t know. Not about the ciggies, or the bottle of gin under my bed, or that utterly swell boy who delivers apples,\u201d Trudy said, winking.\u201cSlang does not become a Farmington girl, Gertrude,\u201d sniffed Libba Newland, seated nearby with her friend, May Delano.\u201cNeither does that fringe, Lib,\u201d said Trudy, eyeing Libba\u2019s badly curled bangs.\u201cWell, I never!\u201d Libba huffed.\u201cAnd I\u2019m sure you never will,\u201d Trudy said archly.\u201cStop being awful and read these, Tru,\u201d Jo scolded. \u201cMy deadline\u2019s tomorrow.\u201dTrudy sat down at the table and helped herself to a jam tart from Jo\u2019s plate. It was three o\u2019clock--teatime at Miss Sparkwell\u2019s--and the common room was crowded with students on break. Everyone was chatting and eating except Jo, who was busy finalizing the layout for the second edition of the Jonquil.\u201cWhat do we have this week?\u201d Trudy asked. \u201cThe usual tripe?\u201dJo sighed. \u201cI\u2019m afraid so,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a piece on the proper way to brew tea, a poem about kittens, Miss Sparkwell\u2019s impressions of the Louvre, and advice on how to fade freckles.\u201d\u201cYe gads. Anything else?\u201dJo hesitated, working up her nerve. \u201cAs a matter of fact, yes. A story on the abuse of girl laborers at Fenton\u2019s Textile Mill,\u201d she said, handing one of the articles to her friend.\u201cHa! So funny, my darling!\u201d Trudy said, smiling. Her smile faded as she read the first lines. \u201cOh dear God. You\u2019re serious.\u201dTrudy kept reading, riveted, and Jo watched her, thrilled. Jo was a senior at Miss Sparkwell\u2019s and had written for the Jonquil during her three previous years at the school, but this was the first important story she\u2019d written. She\u2019d worked hard to get it. She\u2019d taken risks. Just like a real reporter.\u201cWhat do you think?\u201d she asked eagerly when Trudy finished reading.\u201cI think you\u2019ve lost your mind,\u201d Trudy replied.\u201cBut do you think it\u2019s good?\u201d Jo pressed.\u201cVery.\u201dJo, who\u2019d been perched on the edge of her seat, shot forward and hugged Trudy, a huge grin on her face.\u201cBut that\u2019s entirely beside the point,\u201d Trudy said sternly as Jo sat down again. \u201cIf you hand in the layout to Sparky with that story in it, you\u2019re done for. Detention for a week and a letter home.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s not that bad. Nellie Bly\u2019s pieces are far more provocative,\u201d said Jo.\u201cYou\u2019re comparing yourself to Nellie Bly?\u201d Trudy asked, incredulous. \u201cNeed I remind you that she\u2019s a scandalous lady reporter who meddles in other people\u2019s business and has no hope of marrying a decent man? You, in contrast, are a Montfort, and Montforts marry. Early and well. And that is all.\u201d\u201cWell, this Montfort\u2019s going to do a bit more,\u201d Jo declared. \u201cLike write stories for newspapers.\u201dTrudy raised a perfectly arched eyebrow. \u201cIs that so? Have you informed your mother?\u201d\u201cActually, no. Not yet,\u201d Jo admitted.Trudy laughed. \u201cNot ever, you mean. Unless you want to find yourself locked away in a convent until you\u2019re fifty.\u201d\u201cTru, this is a story that must be told,\u201d Jo said, her passion clear in her voice. \u201cThose poor girls are being mistreated. They\u2019re worked hard and paid little. They\u2019re practically slaves.\u201d\u201cJo. How on earth do you know this?\u201d\u201cI spoke with some of them.\u201d\u201cYou didn\u2019t,\u201d Trudy said.\u201cI did. On Sunday. After services.\u201d\u201cBut you went straight to your room after services. You said you had a headache.\u201d\u201cAnd then I climbed out of my window and went down to the river. To one of the boardinghouses there,\u201d Jo said, lowering her voice. She didn\u2019t want anyone to overhear her. \u201cA farmer gave me a ride in his wagon. I spoke with three girls. One was seventeen. Our age, Tru. The others were younger. They work ten-hour days standing at these hellish looms. Injuries are common. So is exposure to coarse language and .\u2008.\u2008. and situations. I was told that some of the girls fall in with bad sorts and become wayward.\u201dTrudy\u2019s eyes widened. \u201cJosephine Montfort. Do you really think that Mr. Abraham Aldrich wants his future wife to even know that wayward girls exist, much less write about them? The future Mrs. Aldrich must be pure in mind as well as body. Only men are supposed to know about\u201d--Trudy lowered her voice, too--\u201cabout sex. If news of what you\u2019ve done gets around, not only will you lose your place here, you\u2019ll lose the most eligible bachelor in New York. For goodness\u2019 sake, be sensible! No mill girl, wayward or otherwise, is worth the Aldrich millions!\u201dMay Delano looked up from her book. \u201cWhat\u2019s a wayward girl?\u201d she asked.Jo groaned.\u201cNever mind,\u201d Trudy said.\u201cTell me,\u201d May whined.\u201cVery well,\u201d Trudy replied, turning to look at May. \u201cA girl who is with child but without a husband.\u201dMay laughed. \u201cShows what you know, Trudy Van Eyck. The stork brings babies after you\u2019re married, not before.\u201d\u201cCome, May, we\u2019re leaving\u201d said Libba Newland, shooting Trudy a dirty look. \u201cThe common room is getting a bit too common.\u201d\u201cI\u2019ll bet you a dollar Lib tattles to Sparky,\u201d Trudy said darkly, watching them go. \u201cI just finished my detention for smoking. Now you\u2019ve earned me some more!\u201dDisappointed by Trudy\u2019s lack of enthusiasm for her story, Jo snatched it back. She wished Trudy understood her. Wished someone did. She\u2019d read Bly\u2019s Ten Days in a Mad-House and Jacob Riis\u2019s How the Other Half Lives, and they\u2019d touched her deeply. She\u2019d been appalled to learn how the poor suffered and felt compelled to follow the examples those two reporters set, if only in some small way.She thought about the mill girls she\u2019d spoken with. They\u2019d looked so crushingly tired. Their faces were as pale as milk, except for the dark smudges under their eyes. They\u2019d been taken out of school and made to work. They weren\u2019t allowed to talk or to go to the bathroom until their lunch breaks. One told her she could barely walk home at the end of the day, her legs hurt so badly from standing.Their stories had made Jo sad--and blisteringly angry. \u201cTrudy, why did I become editor of the Jonquil?\u201d she suddenly asked.\u201cI have no idea,\u201d Trudy replied. \u201cYou should\u2019ve joined the glee club. Even you can\u2019t get into trouble singing \u2018Come into the Garden, Maud.\u2019\u2009\u201d\u201cI shall tell you.\u201d\u201cI had a feeling you would,\u201d Trudy said dryly.\u201cI did it because I want to inform my readers. Because I wish to draw back the veil that hides the injustices that surround us,\u201d Jo said, her voice rising. \u201cWe who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither. Yet how can we help them if we don\u2019t even know about them? And how can we know about them if no one writes about them? Is it so wrong to want to know things?\u201dHeads turned as Jo finished speaking. Girls stared. She glared back at them until they turned away. \u201cThey suffer, those mill girls,\u201d she said, her voice quieter, but her heart still full of emotion. \u201cThey are so terribly unfortunate.\u201dTrudy took her hand. \u201cMy darling Jo, there is no one more unfortunate than we ourselves,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are not engaged yet, you and I. We\u2019re spinsters. Pathetic nobodies. We can go nowhere on our own. We must not be too forward in speech, dress, or emotion lest we put off a potential suitor. We are allowed no funds of our own, and most of all\u201d--she squeezed Jo\u2019s hand for emphasis--\u201cno opinions.\u201d\u201cDoesn\u2019t it bother you, Tru?\u201d Jo asked, frustrated.\u201cOf course it does! Which is why I intend to marry as soon as I can,\u201d Trudy said.She jumped up, snapped open an imaginary fan, and strode about the room imitating a society lady. \u201cWhen I am Mrs. Gilbert Grosvenor and happily installed in my grand Fifth Avenue mansion, I shall do exactly as I please. I shall say what I like, read what I like, and go out every evening in silks and diamonds to smile at my beaux from my box at the Met.\u201dIt was Jo\u2019s turn to raise an eyebrow. \u201cAnd Mr. Gilbert Grosvenor? Where will he be?\u201d she asked.\u201cAt home. Sulking by the fire with a copy of The Wall Street Journal,\u201d Trudy said, imitating Gilbert\u2019s eternally disapproving expression.Jo laughed despite herself. \u201cI\u2019ll never understand how you were passed over for the lead in the school play. You belong on stage,\u201d she said.\u201cI wasn\u2019t passed over, thank you. I was offered the lead and declined it. Mr. Gilbert Grosvenor frowns upon theatricals.\u201dFor a moment, Jo forgot about her own worries. She knew Gilbert. He was smug and disapproving, an old man at twenty. He was also stinking rich.\u201cWill you really marry him?\u201d she asked. She could no more see beautiful, lively Trudy married to Gilbert than she could picture a hummingbird paired with a toad.\u201cI mean to. Why shouldn\u2019t I?\u201d\u201cBecause you .\u2008.\u2008. You\u2019ll have to .\u2008.\u2008.\u201d She couldn\u2019t say it.\u201cGo to bed with him?\u201d Trudy finished.Jo blushed. \u201cThat is not what I was going to say!\u201d\u201cBut it\u2019s what you meant.\u201dTrudy looked out of a nearby window. Her eyes traveled over the lawns to the meadows, then farther still, to a place--a future--only she could see.\u201cA bit of nightly unpleasantness in exchange for days of ease. Not such a bad bargain,\u201d Trudy said, with a rueful smile. \u201cSome of us are not as well off as others. My papa can barely manage my school fees, never mind the dressmaker\u2019s bills. And anyway, it\u2019s not me I\u2019m worried about. It\u2019s you.\u201d Trudy turned her attention back to Jo. \u201cYou know the rules: get yourself hitched, then do what you like. But for heaven\u2019s sake, until you get the man, smile like a dolt and talk about tulips, not mill girls!\u201dDisappointment settled on Jo like a heavy woolen cloak. She knew Trudy was right. Sparky would be appalled if she ever found out what Jo had done. So would her parents, the Aldriches, and the rest of New York. Her New York, at least--old New York. Well-bred girls from old families came out, got engaged, and then went back--back to drawing rooms, dinner parties, and dances. They did not venture into the dangerous, dirty world to become reporters, or anything else.The boys got to, though. They couldn\u2019t become reporters either--that was too grubby an occupation for a gentleman--but they could own a newspaper, run a business, practice law, breed horses, have agricultural interests, or do something in government like the Jays and the Roosevelts. Jo knew this but couldn\u2019t accept it. It chafed at her spirit, as surely as the stays of her corset chafed her body.Why is it, she wondered now, that boys get to do things and be things and girls only get to watch?\u201cJo?\u201dJo looked up. It was Arabella Paulding, a classmate.\u201cSparky wants to see you in her office,\u201d she said. \u201cRight away.\u201d\u201cWhy?\u201d Jo asked.\u201cShe didn\u2019t say. She told me to find you and fetch you. I\u2019ve found you, so go.\u201d\u201cLibba tattled,\u201d Trudy said ominously.Jo gathered up her papers, dreading her interview with the headmistress.\u201cDon\u2019t worry, my darling,\u201d Trudy said. \u201cYou\u2019ll only get a few days\u2019 detention, I\u2019m sure. Unless Sparky expels you.\u201d\u201cYou\u2019re such a comfort,\u201d said Jo.Trudy smiled ruefully. \u201cWhat can I say? I merely wish to smoke. Sparky can forgive that. You, on the other hand, wish to know things. And no one can forgive a girl for that.\u201dChapter Two Jo hurried out of Hollister Hall, crossed the grassy quad, and entered Slocum, where the headmistress\u2019s office was. A tall gilt mirror stood in the foyer. It caught her image as she rushed by it--a slender girl wearing a long brown skirt, a pin-striped blouse, and lace\u2011up boots. Wavy black hair formed a widow\u2019s peak over a high forehead, and a pair of lively gray eyes stared out from an uncommonly pretty face.\u201cYou\u2019d be a beauty,\u201d her mother often told her, \u201cif only you\u2019d stop scowling.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m not scowling, Mama, I\u2019m thinking,\u201d Jo always replied.\u201cWell, stop. It\u2019s unappealing,\u201d her mother would say.Jo reached the door to Miss Sparkwell\u2019s office and paused, steeling herself for a thorough dressing down. She knocked.\u201cEnter!\u201d a voice called out.Jo turned the knob and pushed the door open, prepared to see the headmistress wearing a grave expression. She was not prepared, however, to see her standing by a window dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Had the mill girls story upset her that much?\u201cMiss Sparkwell, I don\u2019t know what Libba said to you, but the story has merit,\u201d Jo said, launching a preemptive strike. \u201cIt\u2019s high time the Jonquil offered its readers something weightier than poems about kittens.\u201d\u201cMy dear, I did not summon you here to talk about the Jonquil.\u201d\u201cYou didn\u2019t?\u201d Jo said, surprised.Miss Sparkwell passed a hand over her brow. \u201cMr. Aldrich, would you? I--I find I cannot,\u201d she said, her voice catching.Jo turned around and was astonished to see two of her oldest friends--Abraham Aldrich and his sister, Adelaide--seated on a divan. She\u2019d been so preoccupied with defending her story, she hadn\u2019t even noticed them.\u201cBram! Addie!\u201d she exclaimed, rushing to her friends. \u201cWhat a lovely surprise! But I wish you\u2019d have let me know you were coming. I would\u2019ve changed out of my uniform. I would have .\u2008.\u2008.\u201d Her words trailed off as she realized they were both dressed entirely in black. A cold dread gripped her.\u201cI\u2019m afraid we have some bad news, Jo,\u201d Bram said, rising.\u201cOh, Jo. Be brave, my darling,\u201d Addie whispered, joining him.Jo looked from one to the other, her dread growing. \u201cYou\u2019re frightening me,\u201d she said. \u201cFor goodness\u2019 sake, what is it?\u201d And then she knew. Mr. Aldrich had been in poor health for some time. \u201cOh, no. It\u2019s your father, isn\u2019t it?\u201d\u201cNo, Jo, not ours,\u201d said Addie quietly. She took Jo\u2019s hand.\u201cNot yours? I--I don\u2019t understand.\u201d\u201cJo, your father is dead,\u201d Bram said. \u201cIt was an accident. He was cleaning a revolver in his study last night and it went off. Addie and I have come to fetch you home. We\u2019ll get your things, and then .\u2008.\u2008.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 17.55}, {"asin": "1602392366", "title": "As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Escape from a Siberian Labor Camp and His 3-Year Trek to Freedom", "author": "Josef Martin Bauer", "description": "About the Author was a seminary student, editor, and writer. He produced stories, a radio play, and seven novels in a career spanning forty years.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 6.96}, {"asin": "1681570513", "title": "Once Upon A Time It Was Now: The Art & Craft of Writing Historical Fiction", "author": null, "description": "About the Author James Alexander Thom is an Indiana-born Marine veteran, and was a newspaperman, magazine freelance writer, and Indiana University Journalism School lecturer before he became a full-time historical novelist, known for his thorough research in archives and in the field. His American frontier and Indian war novels have won national awards and sold more than two million copies. Two were made into television films, by Hallmark and Ted Turner. Thom's family history drew him to the Civil War era. His namesake was killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg, and his great grandfather survived the deathly Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. Several years as Ohio River historical lecturer for the Delta Queen line provided technical knowledge and riverboat lore for this book. The author is also an artist and sculptor. James and his wife Dark Rain live in a 170-year-old log house near Bloomington, Indiana.", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "0684858681", "title": "White Line Fever", "author": "Janiss Garza", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 47.62}, {"asin": "194402011X", "title": "The Hidden Kingdom: The Nocturnals Book 4 (4)", "author": "Sarah Fieber", "description": "Review \u201cWacky illustrations and another plot that twists and turns and teeters with cliff-hangers will keep fans enthralled. Check out the website (NocturnalsWorld.com) for extensive activities for kids and support materials for educators.\u201d\u00a0 \u2015 Booklist \u201cFeaturing spirited animal characters who deal with real-life scenarios in a relatable way...the books celebrate the very meaningful idea of friendship and what it means to forge positive relationships.\u201d \u2015 Amy Poehler's Smart Girls \u201cThe series addresses bullying and empathy in an easy, accessible way, and the books are meant to be read aloud.\u201d \u2015 New York Post \u201c The Nocturnals is an enchanting story about a group of animals who band together to protect their friends and find adventure. The characters are delightful and the nighttime landscape is captivating. It was just as I expected\u2014because the best stories always take place in the dark!\u201d -- R.L. Stine, Author of Goosebumps\u201c The Hidden Kingdom is one of those books that children read without realizing how much they are actually learning.\u201d \u2015 Children\u2019s Book and Media Review About the Author Tracey Hecht is a writer and entrepreneur who created The Nocturnals , the critically acclaimed middle grade and early reader series. The American Booksellers Association chose her first book, The Nocturnals: The Mysterious Abductions , as a Kids\u2019 Indie Next List pick. In addition, her Grow & Read early reader book, The Chestnut Challenge , was given a Mom\u2019s Choice Gold Award. With the New York Public Library, she has also created a Read Aloud Writing Program that has since been conducted in over 150 schools, libraries, and bookstores. Other books in the Nocturnals middle grade series include The Ominous Eye, The Fallen Star , and The Hidden Kingdom . Tracey currently splits her time between New York City and Oquossoc, Maine, with her husband and four children. Kate Liebman is an artist who lives and works in New York City. She graduated from Yale University, contributes to the Brooklyn Rail, and has shown her work at multiple galleries. She grew up in Santa Monica, California.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.19}, {"asin": "1618972677", "title": "Gimme-Jimmy", "author": "Sherrill S. Cannon", "description": "Review A\u00a0delightful children's book...teach young children good manners...not to be selfish. Jimmy is a bully and demanding towards others...a great tool for teaching manners and get a point across to young children...this book will be a memorable story to help children remember not to be \"gimmes\" and follow the polite rule. - Readers FavoriteGimme-Jimmy had no friends...His favorite word was gimme...takes on Jimmy the bully, but concentrates more on his selfishness, it's-mine attitude, and his I-want-it-now greediness. To add to the fun, Elisabeth from The Magic Word appears on a page, as do the covers for two of the author's earlier books...This book is a keeper. -Kid-Lit Reviews From \"Gimme-Jimmy\" I learned to be nice to other people, otherwise you won't have very many friends and you will be kind of lonely. My favorite part...was when Jimmy started to be nice and when his hand got to be the same size as the other hand...and also the illustration of his new 'Polite Rule.' - \u00a0Cayden Aures (age 7.5) Reader ViewsDelightful, adorable and hilarious. .. will want to read them and have them read to them, time and time again. If you are looking for the best possible story books for your child or grandchildren you must look for her books! - GMTA, Kitty Bullard Delightful, adorable and hilarious. .. will want to read them and have them read to them, time and time again. If you are looking for the best possible story books for your child or grandchildren you must look for her books! - GMTA, Kitty Bullard From the Author Gimme-Jimmy is my fourth published rhyming book, and it also deals with manners and consideration for others. It's about how a bully learns to share.\u00a0Jimmy and his father work together to help Jimmy\u00a0learn to be polite, (since my previous book, The Magic Word, was about a mother and daughter).\u00a0I hope children learn the value of thinking of others, and learning to make friends. Gimme-Jimmy has won five awards: \u00a02012 Readers Favorite Silver Medal, 2012 NABE Pinnacle Achievement Award, Third Place in the 2013 Reader Views Awards, 2013 Global eBook Silver Medal, and National Indie Excellence Finalist. About the Author Sherrill S. Cannon is a former teacher, mother of four and a grandmother of ten, who is also an Award-Winning Best-Selling Author! In less than five years, her books My Fingerpaint Masterpiece , Manner-Man , Gimme-Jimmy, The Magic Word, Peter and the Whimper-Whineys and Santa's Birthday Gift have received twenty-eight 2011-14 National awards. She is also the author of seven published and internationally performed plays for elementary school children, produced in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom as well as Australia, Austria, Botswana, Cambodia, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Poland, Singapore, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates (so far).\u00a0 She is a resident of New Hope, PA and travels with her husband of 54 years throughout North America in their RV, sharing her books along the way! Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 13.0}, {"asin": "151226847X", "title": "On The Black", "author": "Theo Cage", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "0307271749", "title": "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Fifth Edition, Completely Updated and Expanded", "author": "David Thomson", "description": "Review \"America has given the world Emily Dickinson, \"Moby-Dick,\" jazz, Faulkner, Hollywood, rock 'n' roll, and this book.\" --Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune \"The best book on the movies ever written in English.\" \u2014The New Republic \u201cThomson proves anew that he is irreplaceable . . . His monologue has blossomed into an unlikely, searching dialogue about what to value in the movies\u2014how to love what\u2019s come before without nostalgia, and how to find the courage to demand more from the stuff being made right now . . . Deservedly treasured . . . One of the most probing accounts ever written of a human being\u2019s engagement with the movies.\u201d \u2014Sarah Kerr, The New York Times Book Review \u201cDelicious. One of the best and most useful books written about the movies.\u201d \u2014Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle \u201c The Dictionary is not only an indispensable book about cinema, but one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Geoff Dyer, Sight & Sound \u201cA marvel . . . Eccentric, audacious, sparkling . . . Probably the greatest living film critic and historian, Thomson writes the most fun and enthralling prose about the movies since Pauline Kael.\u201d \u2014Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic \u201cFrom Abbott and Costello to Crumb\u2019s Terry Zwigoff, David Thomson expertly caters the banquet of film history in the latest edition of this classic. One critics\u2019 poll called it the best movie book ever; it also has some of the finest, orneriest writing in the English language.\u201d\u2014 Time \u201cTruly, maddeningly, gloriously subjective . . . Buy this book for a friend, and bask in the pleasure of knowing that you have incalculably enriched his life. Buy it for yourself, and book some quality time with one of the finest writers the story of film has ever had.\u201d\u2014Saul Austerlitz, San Francisco Chronicle \u201c[A] mad and magnificent opus . . . Thomson is a great rhapsodist of how film acts on his, and therefore our, imagination. . . . Close viewing, and the insights that spring from rapt attention, are what Thomson\u2019s criticism is all about. Despite its seemingly straitlaced A-to-Z format, the \u2018Dictionary\u2019 is oddball and Borgesian, finding imaginative ecstasy in its encyclopedic tendency. The book crackles with epigram while often reaching for meanings that endow familiar subjects with a new reality. . . . It\u2019s an essential, loony, irresistible book, and scarcely a week passes when I don\u2019t submerge myself for an hour or two in its labyrinthine marvels.\u201d\u2014Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times \u201cEssential . . . Razor-sharp reviews are often commentaries on both the filmmaker and the audience. . . . We\u2019re always aware that we\u2019re engaging with a passionate educated human being. Isn\u2019t that more interesting and rewarding than marketing-driven Netflix summaries? Great critics are cinema\u2019s most inspiring enthusiasts. Four stars.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Jeffrey Overstreet, Books & Culture \u201cWitty, expasive, convincing, honest, more than a little mischievous and, so often, absolutely on the money. Thomson\u2019s voice is one of the most distinctive and enjoyable in film criticism. It leaps from the pages of this spruced up classic like flames from a bonfire. . . . Almost every page contains at least one unexpected nugget of information that you would struggle to come across by any other means. . . . However, the real value of this book lies not in facts, but in opinions. Thomson\u2019s views are so shrewd, so exquisitely stated that, more often than not, they feel like thoughts you already held but were never quite sure how to put into words. . .\u00a0 In a world awash with amateur pundits, the value of a genuine expert who knows his own mind has never been higher. . . . Dip into any entry and you will find irrefutable proof that his gaze remains as sharp as ever. For as long as there are films worth writing about, Thomson\u2019s opinions will remain worth reading.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Benjamin Secher, The Telegraph \u201cThe newest edition of David Thomson\u2019s New Biographical Dictionary of Film is 1,076 pages long. It weighs a ton. And yet, it\u2019s almost impossible to put down.\u201d\u2014 The New York Observer \u201cInvaluable and occasionally maddening.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Steven Rea, The Kansas City Star \u201cSkip the movie; read David Thomson instead. Addictive . . . his landmark work. You\u2019ll see how erudite, generous, cheeky, elegant and fascinating Thomson\u2019s writing is. Take any entry and it\u2019s impossible not to want to read to the finish.\u201d \u2014Kyle Smith, New York Post About the Author David Thomson has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and has been a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, The Nation, Movieline, The New Republic, and Salon. His other books include \u201cHave You Seen . . . ?\u201d: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films; Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick; and three works of fiction: Suspects, Silver Light, and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. Thomson lives in San Francisco with his family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONEAAbbott and Costello:Bud (William A.) Abbott (1895-74),b. Asbury Park, New Jersey; andLou Costello (Louis Francis Cristillo) (1906-59), b. Paterson, New JerseyThe marital chemistry (or the weird mix of blunt instrument and black hole) in coupling is one of the most persistent themes in tragedy and comedy. At their best, you can't have one without the other. More than fifty years after they first tried it, Abbott and Costello's \"Who's On First?\" sketch is about the best remedy I know for raising laughter in a mixed bag of nuts-or for making the collection of forlorn individuals a merry mob.Many people know the routine (written, like most of their stuff, by John Grant) by heart. Amateurs can get a good laugh out of it. But Bud and Lou achieve something lyrical, hysterical, and mythic. Watch them do the sketch and you feel the energy and hope of not just every comedian there ever was. You feel Beckett, Freud, and Wittgenstein (try it!). You see every marriage there ever was. You rejoice and despair at the impossibility of language. You wonder whether God believed in harmony, or in meetings that eternally proved our loneliness.Lou is the one who has blood pressure, and Bud hasn't. So they are together in the world, yet together alone, doomed to explain things to each other. They are companions, halves of a whole, chums, lovers if you like. But they are a raw display of hatred, opposition, and implacable difference. They are also far better than all the amateurs. And if Lou is the performer, the valiant seeker of order, while Bud is the dumb square peg, the one who seems oblivious of audience, still, nobody did it better. If I were asked to assemble a collection of things to manifest America for the stranger, \"Who's On First?\" would be there-and it might be the first piece of film I'd use.At the same time, they are not very good, rather silly, not really that far above the ocean of comedians. It isn't even that one can separate their good work from the poor. Nor is it that \"Who's On First?\" is simply and mysteriously superior to all the rest of their stuff. No, it's only that that routine feels an inner circle of dismay within all the others, the suffocating mantle next to Lou's heart. It isn't good, or superior; it's divine. Which is why no amount of repetition dulls it at all. I think I could watch it every day and feel the thrills and the dread as if for the first time.They bumped into each other. Bud was a theatre cashier where Lou was playing (around 1930), and he grudgingly took the job when Lou's partner was sick. They were doing vaudeville and radio for ten years before they got their movie break at Universal: One Night in the Tropics (40, A. Edward Sutherland) was their first film, but Buck Privates (41, Arthur Lubin) was the picture that made them. There were twenty-three more films in the forties, a period for which they were steadily in the top five box-office attractions. Buck Privates, and their whole appeal, reflected the unexpected intimacies of army life.They broke up in 1957, long since outmoded by the likes of Martin and Lewis. But there again, Abbott and Costello are the all-talking model (as opposed to the semi-silence of Laurel and Hardy) of two guys trapped in one tent.Costello made one film on his own-for he had great creative yearnings-The 30-Foot Bride of Candy Rock (59, Sidney Miller). He died of a heart attack, which had always seemed about to happen. Bud lived on, doing next to nothing.Ken (Klaus) Adam, b. Berlin, Germany, 1921At the age of thirteen, Adam came to Britain, and stayed: he would be educated as an architect at London University and the Bartlett School of Architecture, and he served in the RAF during the war. It was in 1947 that he entered the British picture business, doing set drawings for This Was a Woman (48, Tim Whelan). Thereafter, he rose steadily as an assistant art director on The Queen of Spades (48, Thorold Dickinson); The Hidden Room (49, Edward Dmytryk); Your Witness (50, Robert Montgomery); Captain Horatio Hornblower (51, Raoul Walsh); The Crimson Pirate (52, Robert Siodmak); Helen of Troy (56, Robert Wise); he did uncredited work on Around the World in 80 Days (56, Michael Anderson), and assistant work on Ben-Hur (59, William Wyler).Clearly, he was adept at getting hired by American directors, or on Hollywood productions, yet he did not seem overly interested in going to Hollywood. Indeed, he built a career as art director and then production designer in Britain, and he would be vitally associated with the design look and the huge, hi-tech interiors of the James Bond films: Soho Incident (56, Vernon Sewell); Night of the Demon (57, Jacques Tourneur); The Angry Hills (59, Robert Aldrich); The Rough and the Smooth (59, Siodmak); The Trials of Oscar Wilde (60, Ken Hughes); Dr. No (62, Terence Young); Sodom and Gomorrah (62, Aldrich); Dr. Strangelove (64, Stanley Kubrick); Woman of Straw (64, Basil Dearden); Goldfinger (64, Guy Hamilton); The Ipcress File (65, Sidney J. Furie); Thunderball (65, Young); Funeral in Berlin (66, Hamilton); You Only Live Twice (67, Lewis Gilbert); Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (68, Hughes); Goodbye, Mr. Chips (69, Herbert Ross); to America for The Owl and the Pussycat (70, Ross).An international figure now, he worked increasingly in America, while keeping his British attachment to Bond and Kubrick: Diamonds Are Forever (71, Hamilton); Sleuth (72, Joseph L. Mankiewicz); The Last of Sheila (73, Ross); winning an Oscar for Barry Lyndon (75, Kubrick); Madam Kitty (76, Tinto Brass); The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (76, Ross); The Spy Who Loved Me (77, Gilbert); Moonraker (79, Gilbert).Illness caused a significant gap in his work in the early eighties, at which time his only credit was as design consultant on Pennies from Heaven (81, Ross). Since his return, he has been based in America and Bond-less. He also seems to work on more modest projects, while staying loyal to Herb Ross: King David (85, Bruce Beresford); Crimes of the Heart (86, Beresford); The Deceivers (88, Nicholas Meyer); Dead Bang (89, John Frankenheimer); The Freshman (90, Andrew Bergman); The Doctor (91, Randa Haines); Undercover Blues (93, Ross); Addams Family Values (93, Barry Sonnenfeld); then back to Britain, with another Oscar, on The Madness of King George (94, Nicholas Hytner); Boys on the Side (95, Ross); Bogus (96, Norman Jewison); In & Out (97, Frank Oz); The Out-of-Towners (99, Sam Weisman).Isabelle Adjani, b. Paris, 1955There is something so frank, so modern in her feelings, yet so classical in her aura, so passionate and so wounded, that Isabelle Adjani seems made to play Sarah Bernhardt one day. Why not? She is a natural wearer of costume capable of making us believe that the \"period\" world we are watching is happening now. She is bold, a mistress of her career, and has been a fiercely equal partner in her romantic relationships with Bruno Nuytten, Warren Beatty, and Daniel Day-Lewis.Her mother was German, and her father Algerian and Turkish. When only a teenager, she was invited to join the Com\u00e9die Fran\u00e7aise, playing to great praise in Lorca and Moli\u00e8re. She has been making movies since the age of fourteen: Le Petit Bougnat (69, Bernard T. Michel); Faustine ou le Bel \u00e9t\u00e9 (71, Nina Companeez); La Gifle (74, Claude Pinoteau); and made an international impact as the love-crazed girl in L'Histoire d'Ad\u00e8le H. (75, Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut), for which she won an Oscar nomination.She was on the brink again in The Tenant (76, Roman Polanski); Barocco (76, Andr\u00e9 T\u00e9chin\u00e9); Violette et Fran\u00e7ois (76, Jacques Rouffio); made an uneasy American debut in The Driver (78, Walter Hill); as a woman infatuated with the vampire in Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (79, Werner Herzog); as Emily in The Bront\u00e9 Sisters (79, T\u00e9chin\u00e9); Possession (80, Andrzej Zulawski); and Clara et les Chics Types (80, Jacques Monnet).She played the central victim, a version of Jean Rhys, in Quartet (81, James Ivory); L'Ann\u00e9e Prochaine si tout va bien (81, Jean-Loup Hubert); Tout Feu, Toute Flamme (82, Jean-Paul Rappeneau); Mortelle Randonn\u00e9e (82, Claude Miller); Doktor Faustus (82, Frank Seitz); as Antonieta Rivas Mercadi, a melodramatic arts patron, in Antonieta (82, Carlos Saura); was stark naked for much of L'\u00e9t\u00e9 Meurtrier (82, Jean Becker), something between an erotic force of nature and a village idiot; Subway (85, Luc Besson); entirely wasted in Ishtar (87, Elaine May).She was the producer as well as the star of Camille Claudel (88, Bruno Nuytten), her most overwhelming and characteristic performance, as a woman in love with art, exhilaration, and danger. Once more, she was nominated for the Oscar. If only Warren Beatty could have given her a role as strong. After four years, she made La Reine Margot (94, Patrice Ch\u00e9reau). Granted that she does films so seldom, why do Diabolique (96, Jeremiah S. Chechik), with Sharon Stone, or La Repentie (02, Laetitia Masson)?Ben (Benjamin Geza) Affleck, b. Berkeley, California, 1972Here is a test of critical responsibility. On the one hand, I have a soft spot for Mr. Affleck in that he is the only actor who has played, or is ever likely to play, the man who founded the school I attended. I refer to Edward (or Ned) Alleyne, the Shakespearian actor-manager and founder of Dulwich College, as offered in Shakespeare in Love (98, John Madden). I daresay I would be joined in this sentiment by other Old Alleynians-Michael Powell, Clive Brook, Leslie Howard, Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse, Michael Ondaatje, and Paul Mayersberg, among others. But I have heard not one word from any of them, or from anyone, come to that, to dispute my other view that Mr. Affleck is boring, complacent, and criminally lucky to have got away with everything so far. If there was any doubt in my mind it was settled by the mere presence-and it wasn't anything more than mere-of Affleck in the travesty called Pearl Harbor (01, Michael Bay).Yet look what he has gotten away with: The Dark End of the Street (81, Jan Egleson); playing basketball in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (92, Fran Rubel Kuzui); School Ties (92, Robert Mandel); Dazed and Confused (93, Richard Linklater); Mallrats (95, Kevin Smith); the lead in Chasing Amy (97, Smith); Going All the Way (97, Mark Pellington); sharing in the script, and an Oscar, for Good Will Hunting (97, Gus Van Sant); Phantoms (98, Joe Chappelle); Armageddon (98, Michael Bay); 200 Cigarettes (99, Risa Bramon Garcia); Forces of Nature (99, Bronwen Hughes); Dogma (99, Smith); Boiler Room (00, Ben Younger); Reindeer Games (00, John Frankenheimer); Bounce (00, Don Roos); Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (00, Smith); Changing Lanes (02, Roger Michell); taking over as Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears (02, Phil Aldon Robinson).I note that, into his early thirties, he is still playing one of the lads, just as in Pearl Harbor he was too old to be the boyhood pal of Josh Hartnett.James Agee (1909-55), b. Knoxville, TennesseeJames Agee looked a lot like a young Robert Ryan; he behaved as self-destructively as Nicholas Ray; but he was only himself as a writer on film. As one of his biographers, Laurence Bergreen, has written, \"To Agee movies were not primarily a form of entertainment . . . they were . . . the indigenous art form. Good or bad, vulgar or exquisite, they were, more than any literary form, the mirror of American life. They were cheap, rude, hypocritical, democratic, occasionally inspired, usually humdrum-in short, they were American. For this reason he longed to find his way, however roundabout, into them.\"I take that last remark at face value: I think it was Agee's wish, not just to be involved with film people, in the making of the work, but-literally-to be in movies. That doesn't refer to some masked urge to act. It's something far more extensive: Agee wished to be perceived like a character from the best movies-intensely romantic, darkly handsome, and desirable, yet aloof, tough, moody, and doomed. Plainly, even if you know, intellectually, that some films are foolish, still, it follows that anyone wanting to live on the screen has to have faith in the grandeur and gravity of film. And so it follows that Agee's adult life coincides with the great age of self-belief in American cinema. Indeed, in 1945, he could write, in candor, \"I can think of very few contemporary books that are worth the jackets they are wrapped in; I can think of very few movies, contemporary or otherwise, which fail to show that somebody who has worked on them . . . has real life or energy or intensity or intelligence or talent.\"Happy days-even if from this moment in time it is easier to have more respect for books.Agee went to Harvard, edited the Advocate, and took up booze and poetry in quantity. He was always a womanizer, and a mess personally, but he found a journalistic voice that lasted for about twenty years. It extended to the text for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), that classic of the rural Depression and hard lives, where Agee's text went with the photographs of Walker Evans-and in which Evans's photography shines with a sensuality that Agee delivered personally to some of the poor women. It also equipped him to be a film critic at Time and The Nation for much of the forties.He was far from reliable-he could write off Kane as a reservoir of hackneyed tricks, and he was of the opinion that Chaplin and Huston were without equal in America. But he wrote like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it-out with it, as if it were a girl; drinking with it; driving in the night with it. That direct physical response was new, it was done with terrific dash and insight, and it surely intuited the way people responded to movies in the forties. It was also, it seems to me, a powerful influence on Pauline Kael-I have a fond dream of the two of them snarling at each other, like the characters in The African Queen.Which brings us to the vexed matter of Agee's scripts. From the mid forties on, Agee made a set at Huston-it was authentic admiration, or hero worship, but it was also a pioneering case of the movie critic lusting to sit at the all-night dinner with the big guys and walk away with a writing job. Agee worked on the script and commentary of The Quiet One (49, Sidney Meyers); he did a script for The African Queen (51, Huston), which was substantially redone by others; he did the \"Bride Comes to Yellow Sky\" episode from Face to Face (52, John Brahm and Bretaigne Windust), and he wrote the first screenplay for The Night of the Hunter (55, Charles Laughton). Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Movies"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "0982594712", "title": "Fish Tank: A Fable for Our Times (The Critter Chronicles)", "author": "Scott Bischke", "description": "Review FISH TANK is the ANIMAL FARM for our times. --Dr. Pete Coppolillo, Ecologist FISH TANK is a clever and fascinating fable that provides an insightful mirror on the folly of current human attitudes concerning climate change and global degradation. --Dr. Steven W. Running, Nobel Laureate as a member of the IPCC, University of Montana FISH TANK is a throw back to the times of Aesop...\u00a0 Take it as a great story, but know that it is real. --Conrad Anker, elite mountaineer Just as the \"Occupy\" movement has shouted its intolerance for corporate greed and corruption, it's time we do the same when it comes to climate. We need a revelation. FISH TANK forces you to realize just that. --Kelly Matheson, Program Manager for the Americas, WITNESS, New York City FISH TANK could benefit young adults in the same way LORD OF THE FLIES benefitted previous generations, helping them understand that bad things can happen when self interested people are not kept in check. --Peter Cook, high school teacher, Melbourne Australia From the Author I am most hopeful that you enjoy the book, and that it gives you pause to reflect. \u00a0If you enjoy FISHK TANK and believe it has a message for our society, I would be honored if you let other folks know. \u00a0Best regards, Scott Bischke From the Inside Flap MORE REVIEWS I liked [FISH TANK] ALOT. One of the things I saw was the school culture that exists both at the middle school and the high school--the bully behavior--the trust issues--the respect that is given and missing. It was all there.\u00a0 And on another level, I could see the whole creation, God care, expectation, loss and recovery. It would make a great book club read! Thanks for offering so many ways to reflect. --Nancy Jordheim, Assistant Superintendent, Fargo ND Public Schools I was really able to relate the issues and characters in FISH\u00a0 TANK to issues and people that I deal with in my life.\u00a0 FISH TANK leaves you thinking about the role you play in our society and challenging yourself do better. --Tessa Exley, student, age 14 I think that [FISH TANK] was a great read.\u00a0 The storyline was great and the conflict was interesting and made you think about what the creatures could've or should've done....For me the moral/message of the book was not to be greedy, to be aware of your surroundings. Greediness can never lead to happiness and if you're self centered it affects the people around you.\u00a0 To me, the book said that you need to listen to people.\u00a0 Being a know-it-all is never the way to go.\u00a0 Sometimes you're not always right. --Annie Lee, student, age 13 This is a great allegory--I can really see the political stereotypes and how they parallel our society.\u00a0 The characters are universally western, not just American. We all know people like the fish in FISH TANK.\u00a0 I really liked that the book did not leave you hopeless, that there is good that will last.\u00a0 I read the book very quickly because I could not put it down!\u00a0 I would love my friends to read it and think the book would be a good book club book. --Gwen Laurie, former book store owner from Canada, age 78 FISH TANK is an honest portrayal of the social dynamics that prevent us from confronting the problem of climate change. \u00a0The events in FISH TANK demonstrate that our instinct to survive as individuals is much stronger than our instinct to survive as a species. \u00a0The story challenges readers to rise above these base instincts and make the choice to face the problem together. --Natalie Meyer, Sustainability Director, City of Bozeman Montana I loved FISH TANK; I read it in one day! \u00a0The message is at once hopeful while realizing its impending tragedy. \u00a0It is regretful that everything must be so polarized, good versus evil with no room for cooperation. \u00a0Perhaps the\u00a0children of the\u00a021st\u00a0century will usher in a renewed sense of collaboration between environmentalists and industry. --Hattie Baker, Climate Change and Sustainability Consultant From the Back Cover MORE REVIEWS Bischke serves up a cautionary tale both entertaining and dire--a cast of characters we recognize, and a message we ignore at our peril. --Alan Kesselheim, author of LET THEM PADDLE: Coming of Age on the Water and ten other books An important story for our times. \u00a0Let he who doesn't live in a glass aquarium cast the first stone! --Otto Pohl, entrepreneur and international journalist FISH TANK is a real eye opener! \u00a0It depicts today's current social and environmental issues in a simplified way eliminating the confusing political and economic jargon which clouds the urgency of these concerns. \u00a0It truly is a book for all ages because the future of our planet depends on everyone, not just a single generation. --Brittney Iverson, Marine Biologist Not only is FISH TANK a page turner, it is an important wake-up call as we head towards catastrophe with our heads in the sand.\u00a0 Even sea-creatures have conflicts of interest, and in FISH TANK we see a story about how those that stood to make short-term gains endangered all life--surely this is the most important story of our modern society.\u00a0 By telling it as an allegory, and encouraging readers to see the parallels with humanity, Bischke's book could have a profound impact. --Dr. Raina Plowright, DVM and PhD Ecologist A fun, poignant exploration of human nature!\u00a0 Scott's allegory reaches beyond the story of climate change and invites readers to look at the human dynamics that drive so many of the challenges faced by society. --Kate Burnaby Wright, Ecologist While I was well aware of them, I found the political undertones of FISH TANK less important--I just liked the story and the emotions it brought forth.\u00a0 I found myself caught up in the story, saying things like, \"How selfish!\" when the [xxx] were screwing things up! --Chris Coppolillo, Consulting Teacher Trainer So Nina LOVED your book! \u00a0Read the first little bit on her own, then wanted to read it out loud with me. Which we did for a couple of chapters. \u00a0And then this morning she just got INTO it and she read it every chance she got today (and yes, she did have to go to school) and tonight she FINISHED it. \u00a0The allegory is mostly missed on her, but she loved the animal characters and said things like, \"Well people just believe what they want to believe, that's for sure!\" while reading it. --Nina Coppolillo, student, age 10 (as told by her Mom) About the Author SCOTT BISCHKE lives with his wife, Katie Gibson, in Bozeman, MT. \u00a0He previously published three books, allnon-fiction:\u00a0 \u00a0o TrumpelStiltskin -- A Fairy Tale (MountainWorks Press 2016)o Good Camel, Good Life -- Finding Enlightenment One Drop of Sweat at a Time (MountainWorks Press 2010);o Crossing Divides -- A Couples' Story of Cancer, Hope, and HikingMontana's Continental Divide (American Cancer Society 2002); and o Two Wheels Around New Zealand -- A Bicycle Journey on Friendly Roads (Pruett Publishing hardback 1992; Ecopress paperback 1996).\u00a0Along with his writing career, Scott has worked as a chemicalengineering science researcher at 3 national laboratories, as anenvironmental engineer for HP, as the lab director for theYellowstone Ecological Research Center, & as a science and technology writer&facilitator specializing in Greater Yellowstone Area science topics.\u00a0 Scott's professional life has touched broadly on issues of resource management& climate change.\u00a0 He has led programsfor materials reduction &recycling for a manufacturing plant, helped draftresearch plans &science agendas dealing with natural resource constraints & climate change, & completed projects scoped at reducing global warminggases from wafer fabrication processes.Most recently Scott served on the Mayor's Task Force to draft Bozeman'sClimate Action Plan.More personally, Scott & Katie have hiked, biked, and canoed in interestingplaces far & wide, including backpacking the length of the Continental Dividefrom Canada to Mexico, & hiking and canoeing the length of the YellowstoneRiver. \u00a0A common thread in all of Scottand Katie's travels has been their desire to immerse themselves in the peace,solitude, and tranquility of the natural world. \u00a0The couple seeks out people, places, andactivities that reinforce their desire to live a life filled with positiveenergy. \u00a0Perhaps more simply, they seekto live a life that reflects their gratitude for being alive each and everyday. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Literary"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 7.95}, {"asin": "1250148626", "title": "Joni: The Anthology", "author": "Barney Hoskyns", "description": "Review Selected by Harper's Bazaar as one of the \"Best New Books of 2017 (So Far)\"A Library Journal Fall Editors' Pick \"Nearly 50 years\u2019 worth of critical efforts to solve Mitchell\u2019s mysteries have now been rounded up in Barney Hoskyns\u2019s Joni: The Anthology ....what comes through most consistently is a possessive impulse, a desire to really know an artist whose fierce privacy has often seemed at odds with the impression of intimacy conveyed by her music.\" -- Jack Hamilton, The Atlantic \"Gemlike...true gold.\" -- O, The Oprah Magazine \"Amazing.\" --Noisey \"Some might say that the talent and virtuosity of Joni Mitchell are magical, even smacking of wizardry. For those of us who came upon her early works, when strong \u00adfemale voices were demanded and treasured, it seems only right to see her as editor Barney Hoskyns does: 'a towering troubadour and sometimes reckless daughter of America\u2019s folk-rock revolution.' We\u2019ve fallen in love with her.\" -- Library Journal \"A fascinating compendium of interviews with a legend, many never read before.\" --Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation \u201cLegendary music critic and archivist Barney Hosyns\u2019s JONI: The Anthology is a comprehensive, sensitive compilation.\u201d\u2015 Elle \"The least a reader can reasonably expect from the presentation of an anthology collecting criticism of and interviews with a legendary artist is a clear narrative path about the personality in question. Barney Hoskyn\u2019s Joni: The Anthology certainly provides that and much more in this compelling, highly readable, and at times emotionally gripping tale of this singular, idiosyncratic, determined musical and visual artist.\" -- PopMatters\" Joni: The Anthology celebrates the musical pioneer spirit that Mitchell exudes. This book...leaves no stone unturned, especially with early essays when Mitchell was coming onto the scene...One may want to read Joni more like a poetry book, experiencing different emotional beats within its articles.\" -- Edge Media Network \"A must for music lovers.\" -- Booklist \"Just when you think you know Joni Mitchell, you find such rare gems in Joni: the Anthology : 'It\u2019s good to be exposed to politics and what\u2019s going down here [the US], but it does damage to me. Too much of it can cripple me. And if I really let myself think about it - the violence, the sickness, all of it \u2015 I think I\u2019d flip out.' Joni Mitchell 1969.\" --Malka Marom, author of Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words \"The book inevitably creates a desire to hear Mitchell's music and perhaps try to track down some of her artwork, which at the end of the day are the reason the book exists in the first place.\" -- Kirkus Review \"Thorough...a solid introduction to listeners new to Mitchell.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Joni: The Anthology invites you to sit in on a photoshoot as Mitchell, dressed in all black, mourns the loss of Bluebird, her stolen Mercedes Benz, which she bought with her first royalty check in 1969; learn why she snubbed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame\u2019s invitation for her own induction, or why she chose to not play her hits on that 1998 tour with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison; understand just why her most appreciated compliment from a blind black piano player was that her music was raceless and genderless\u2015a corroboration to why American jazz pianist Charles Mingus invited Mitchell to pen words to his chops on Mingus .\" -- Elmore Magazine About the Author Barney Hoskyns is the cofounder and editorial director of the online rock-journalism library Rock\u2019s Backpages, and author of several books including Hotel California: the True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles, and their Many Friends (2005), Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (2009), Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock (2016), and Never Enough: A Way through Addiction (2017). A former U.S. correspondent for MOJO , Hoskyns has contributed to Vogue , Rolling Stone , The Guardian, GQ, and Uncut . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Joni The Anthology By Barney Hoskyns Picador Copyright \u00a9 2017 Backpages Ltd.All rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-14862-9 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Acknowledgements, Our Lady of Sorrows: An Introduction, Barney Hoskyns, Part One: Urges for Going (1943\u20131967), Part Two: Our Lady of the Canyon (1968\u20131972), Part Three: A Dream to Fly (1972\u20131977), Part Four: Singing Clear Notes Without Fear (1978\u20131988), Part Five: Doomsday Joan (1991\u20131998), Part Six: Both Sides, Then (2000\u20132014), Contributors, Index, About the Editor, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 Beginnings Nicholas Jennings, from Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 1997) In 1958, Joni Mitchell was still Joan Anderson, a fifteen-year-old living in Saskatoon. That year, she purchased her first instrument \u2013 a $36 baritone ukulele \u2013 with money she earned from modelling. The ukulele was an alternative to a guitar, which her mother had strictly forbidden. But it enabled her to accompany herself singing Kingston Trio songs and other folk material of the day. Coincidentally, Neil Young also received a ukulele from his parents around the same time, while living in Pickering, Ontario. The thirteen-year-old Young, who, like Mitchell, also suffered a childhood case of polio, had been inspired by seeing Elvis perform on TV's Ed Sullivan Show. As the only child born to William and Myrtle Anderson in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Roberta Joan had grown up in Saskatoon \u2013 not far from [Buffy] Sainte-Marie's own birthplace on the Cree Indian Piapot Reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley. A self-described 'good-time Charlie', Joni first wrecked her stockings dancing to the jukebox jive of Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and the Coasters. But at a certain point, like many teenagers in the early '60s, she traded rock's 'jungle rhythms' for the more cerebral qualities of folk music. 'Rock'n'roll went through a really dumb, vanilla period,' she recalled. 'And during that period, folk came in to fill the hole.' At parties, Anderson began to lead singalongs, accompanying herself on baritone ukulele with chords she'd learned from a Pete Seeger instruction record. While performing at a local wiener roast in 1961, the eighteen-year-old caught the fancy of some people connected with Prince Albert's TV station who promptly booked her as a onetime replacement for a late-night moose-hunting show. Two years later, while working as a waitress at Saskatoon's Louis Riel coffee house, Anderson ventured to the stage during one of the Riel's weekly 'hoot nights'. Sitting on a stool, the pigtailed performer screeched into the microphone and plunked away on her ukulele for some puzzled onlookers. Indeed, her developing taste for folk music left more than a few people bewildered. 'My friends who knew me as a rock'n'roll dancer found this change kind of hard to relate to,' she admitted recently. 'The songs at that time [were] folk songs and English ballads, and English ballads are always [about] \"the cruel mother\" and there's a lot of sorrow in them. But they had beautiful melodies, that was the thing, and I always loved melody. Melody is generally melancholy and sad and the text that accompanies it must be the same.' In the fall of '63, Anderson enrolled at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary to pursue her interest in painting. But she continued to entertain thoughts of becoming a folk singer and was soon showing up at Calgary's Depression coffee house. Will Millar, then a budding folk singer and later the leader of the Irish Rovers, recalls: 'Joni came with her uke and tormented us all with a shrill \"Sloop John B\" and \"I With I Wath an Apple on a Twee\".' But by the following year, Anderson had improved enough that the Depression paid her $15 to entertain weekend audiences of mostly fellow art students. She even got hired to perform at Edmonton's Yardbird Suite coffee house, which, along with the Depression and Vancouver's Bunkhouse, was a major stop on the folk circuit in Western Canada. With a guitar now in hand, Joni Anderson purchased a one-way train ticket from Calgary to Toronto and set out to attend Mariposa in July '64. She'd quit art college and, whether she knew it yet or not, was a couple of months pregnant \u2013 the result of a love affair with fellow art student Brad MacMath. Somewhere between the Prairies and the Lakehead, she penned her first song, 'Day by Day', a bluesy piece written to the rhythm of the train wheels that she later described as a 'feeling-sorry-for-myself' song. Joni arrived in Toronto and took a bus up to Orillia only to find that Mariposa was in trouble. The previous year's festival had attracted such an unexpected flood of people that the town of Orillia had been overwhelmed. Although it was hardly a disaster of Woodstock proportions, there had been complaints of traffic jams, inadequate facilities and well-publicised acts of drunken debauchery. The local police chief claimed that the festival had given Orillia 'the worst forty-eight hours in its history'. So even though Mariposa had been granted permission to use nearby farmland for the '64 festival, a nervous town council blocked the move at the last minute \u2013 and the courts upheld the decision just one day before the festival was scheduled to open. When Anderson and other early birds showed up, organisers were in complete chaos, faced with the monumental task of packing up and moving several tons of equipment and supplies back to Toronto, where the Maple Leaf baseball stadium had been lined up as a last-minute venue. According to the festival's Martin Onrot, Joni helped to load trucks along with other volunteers. Then, at the stadium by Lake Ontario, she and others braved the rain and cold temperatures to watch performances by blues legends Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt and others. In particular, Anderson studied the distinctive vibrato style of Sainte-Marie, who enjoyed no fewer than four standing ovations. After the festival, the new girl in town had to find a place to crash. She discovered a rooming house in the Annex neighbourhood of the city and to make ends meet landed herself a sales job in ladies' wear at the Simpson's department store. Although Anderson must have figured it out by then, her pregnancy was still not evident. Eventually, her weekly wage would enable her to pay the dues required to join the Musicians' Union. In the meantime, she settled for playing several non-union coffee houses in Yorkville. The first to hire her was the Penny Farthing, which featured novice folk singers in its basement. That same month, February '65, Joni Anderson gave birth to a daughter. A month earlier, she had moved out of the Annex rooming house and into an apartment above the nearby Lickin' Chicken restaurant with Vicky Taylor, another folk singer. Taylor remembers that Joni brought the baby girl home for a couple of weeks. But when she realised she could neither support the child financially nor get on with her singing career, she made the wrenching decision to place her daughter with foster parents. 'That really tore her apart,' recalls Taylor. 'She knew that she couldn't be a single mum and do anything with her music. It was a really hard decision for her to make.' The decision haunted Joni for many years. She left clues about the baby, whom she had named Kelly, in some of her songs, including 'Little Green' from her Blue album. In a fairy-tale ending worthy of a Disney movie, Mitchell and her daughter, whose adoptive name is Kilauren Gibb, met each other again in March 1997 in an extraordinary, media-hyped reunion. Above the Lickin' Chicken Joni began writing songs in earnest. Taylor remembers her getting up in the middle of the night and working, sometimes until dawn. 'One morning,' says Taylor, 'she told me that she'd woken up with a tune going around in her head and couldn't go back to sleep until she worked it all out.' That song turned out to be 'Here Today and Gone Tomorrow', one of several that she later described as 'lost-love pieces for a wandering Australian who really did me in'. By the spring of '65, Joni Anderson was back struggling to find work as a folk singer. She landed gigs at the Half Beat and the New Gate of Cleve, where Mariposa's Estelle Klein saw her for the first time. 'She wasn't doing all her own material,' recalled Klein, 'but she was a nice singer and had a very charming manner.' Bernie Fiedler [owner of the Riverboat coffeehouse] was not so quickly impressed, offering the folk singer a job in the kitchen when she first inquired about work at the Riverboat. She turned it down. (Fiedler has always denied this story, but she insists it's true.) Fiedler says he does remember saying to Joni, 'So, Miss Anderson, I see you're going for the Baez sound,' a comment that surely must have rankled her. Truth was, the more she wrote her own material, the less derivative she sounded. 'Once I began to write,' she admitted, 'my vocal style changed. My Joan Baez/Judy Collins influence disappeared. Almost immediately, when I had my own words to sing, my own voice appeared.' You might say Joni Anderson was on the rebound from losing her daughter or maybe it was the wandering Australian. But when the older and wiser Chuck Mitchell blew into town that June she was clearly vulnerable. He was the 'star' folk singer from Detroit, performing upstairs at the Penny Farthing while she was the local girl on the basement stage. When he turned on the charm, the impressionable Joni found him hard to resist. 'I was at an indecisive time in my life,' she later admitted, 'and he was a strong force. He decided he was gonna marry me. So he dragged me across the border, got me some work and we were quickly married.' Quickly is right. Vicky Taylor remembers the courtship as lasting all of thirty-six hours. The two were married in Mitchell's parents' backyard in Rochester, Michigan. 'I was totally shocked,' says Taylor, 'but I figured Joni knew what she was doing.' She and Chuck moved into a cheap fifth-floor apartment on Detroit's Wayne university campus and Joni moved into her husband's world. Chuck was well known on the coffee house circuit and soon their apartment became a crash pad for visiting folkies, from Gordon Lightfoot and Buffy Sainte-Marie to Tom Rush and Eric Andersen. Andersen taught Joni some unusual open tunings on the guitar, which she quickly used to write new songs. Chuck and Joni began touring together, playing Detroit's Chess Mate coffee house and New York's Gaslight Caf\u00e9. Recalled Joni, 'I wasn't very good, and I had a lot of trouble with the audience booing and hissing and saying, \"Take your clothes off, sweetheart.\" Things like that really shook me up because I didn't know how to counter or act. I thought I'd bombed.' Larry LeBlanc, writing in Rolling Stone in 1971, described the Chuck and Joni show as a variety act, with him performing very theatrical Brechtian shtick and Joni doing her own folky thing. When they did team up on duets the songs they sang were often Lightfoot's. During the spring of '65, while Chuck and Joni were touring the 4D Club circuit, Joni started adding some of her own material into her sets, including 'Both Sides Now', a song she'd written about growing up. One night, after playing at Winnipeg's 4D, a tall kid with a Beatle haircut shuffled up, introduced himself as Neil Young and told her he'd written his own coming-of-age song. Later, as the caf\u00e9 was closing, Neil played Joni the bittersweet 'Sugar Mountain', which he'd written on his nineteenth birthday. Moved by its tale of a boy too old for the fairground, Joni wrote a response \u2013 'The Circle Game'. In her song, which cleverly echoes the carnival imagery of 'Sugar Mountain', she assures the boy that 'there'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty'. In August 1965 Joni took her new material to Mariposa, held for the first time at Innis Lake north-west of Toronto. On a weekend hit by heavy thunderstorms, she made her last appearance as Joni Anderson, sharing the stage with Ian & Sylvia, Phil Ochs, bluesman Son House and the Dirty Shames (during a power failure one night, Ochs had to sing through a megaphone while illuminated by car headlights). Joni went over well, both in concert and at a songwriters' workshop. But she insisted on singing only her own songs, which at that point were precious few apart from 'Both Sides Now' and 'The Circle Game'. Some people complained, Estelle Klein recalled. 'They said, \"She's really nice, but she's singing the same thing over and over again.\" So when I invited her back for the next year, I said, \"Joni, I really like what you do, but could you expand your repertoire a little?\"' In the car ride back to Toronto from Mariposa in August 1965, Joni wrote a new lyric: 'It's like running for a train that left the station hours ago/I've got the urge for going.' Although she has explained that the song was written about the changing folk scene and the need for moving on, it also reflected what was happening in her relationship with Chuck. 'It was not a marriage made in heaven,' she admitted. 'He was relatively well-educated and in contempt of my lack of education. I was developing as an original, unschooled thinker [with] the gift of the blarney [and] the gift of metaphor. But he ridiculed me in the same way that Pierre Trudeau ridiculed his wife Margaret when she wrote her book. [Trudeau] said, \"My wife is the only writer I know who's written more books than she's read.\" So there was this educated pride versus the uneducated and the marriage didn't last very long.' Still, Chuck did give Joni something other than a married name. He advised her to protect her songwriting by forming her own publishing company, something she still gives him credit for. Her marriage on the rocks, Mitchell ran into more chauvinism in October when she appeared on CTV's Let's Sing Out program with US folk singers Dave Van Ronk and Patrick Sky. Mitchell felt inferior alongside these experienced performers and was looking to them for encouragement. But as she recalled, she didn't get it. 'Van Ronk was saying things like, \"Joni, you've got groovy taste in clothes, why don't you become a fashion model?\"' she said. 'And Sky was saying, \"It sucks.\"' But, she added, 'David did like \"Urge for Going\" and he asked me for it, I remember. I wondered what ulterior motive he had in mind after saying all those dreadful things to me. I thought, he must just want to laugh at it or something. I was that insecure about my writing.' Despite that insecurity \u2013 or maybe because of it \u2013 Mitchell threw herself into songwriting with a vengeance. At the same time, other artists began recording her songs. First 'Urge for Going' got a country treatment by George Hamilton IV, followed by versions by Tom Rush, Judy Collins and Van Ronk. Then Ian & Sylvia and Buffy Sainte-Marie covered 'The Circle Game'. Suddenly, Joni Mitchell's name was known on the US coffee house circuit and her songs were earning her a tidy income to boot. Joni Mitchell faced a much more receptive crowd at Mariposa that summer (1966). In fact, Mitchell returned to the festival as one of its most popular attractions, joining a line-up that included Gordon Lightfoot, Doc Watson and the New Lost City Ramblers. Dressed in paisley and accompanied by guitarist David Rea, Mitchell captivated audiences at both her evening and afternoon performances. This time she brought a suitcase full of new songs, including 'Both Sides Now' and 'Night in the City', which she told her audience was inspired by Yorkville. 'Music comes spilling out into the street,' she sang. 'Colours go flashing in time.' Mitchell's appearance was a resounding triumph. 'This girl has everything,' enthused Ruth Jones (the Mariposa founder) in Hoot, the Canadian folk magazine; 'looks, charm, personality, an inventive mind, excellent guitar and, above all, a voice which ranges from gutsy to sublime. My guess is that she will be a name to reckon with \u2013 and soon.' Only two years earlier, Mitchell had come to Mariposa to hear her heroine Buffy Sainte-Marie. Now she was one of the festival's major stars. In November '66, Joni Mitchell made her debut at Bernie Fiedler's Riverboat \u2013 on the stage, not in the kitchen. It was a triumphant performance, establishing Mitchell as an artist in her own right and a songwriter whose material possessed a distinct Canadian quality. Songs like 'Urge for Going', 'Winter Lady' and 'Come to the Sunshine' that she performed that week were rich in imagery. Each painted a vivid portrait of the changing seasons and owed much to her origins on the Saskatchewan Prairies. Like Tyson and Lightfoot before her, Mitchell was writing songs with a unique sense of place. Her Riverboat performance was a turning point. Afterwards, Mitchell left her husband and moved to New York where, she hoped, bigger things lay in store. Settling in Manhattan's Chelsea district, she turned her one-bedroom apartment into what she called her 'magic princess' retreat, with bedroom walls covered in tinfoil and door frames lined with crepe paper. There she began writing as many as four songs a week, including the buoyant 'Chelsea Morning' (for which US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary later named their daughter). 'I Had a King' detailed her marriage break-up with its lines about the man who 'carried me off to his country for marriage too soon'. With $400 in the bank, she told Rolling Stone she thought she was 'filthy rich'. (Continues...) Excerpted from Joni by Barney Hoskyns . Copyright \u00a9 2017 Backpages Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of Picador. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Music"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 18.96}, {"asin": "1501165135", "title": "A Hundred Small Lessons: A Novel", "author": "Ashley Hay", "description": "Review Praise for A Hundred Small Lessons : \u201cA reflective, mystical meditation on interconnectedness and shared experiences\u2026that will prompt readers to reflect on how one life can be commingled with the past as well as be a first draft of the future.\u201d \u2015 Shelf Awareness, starred review \u201cNumerous scenes in this thoughtful novel will linger in the reader\u2019s memory \u2026A lyrically written portrayal of the lives of two women tied together by memories and the house they share, A Hundred Small Lessons is sure to be enjoyed by readers of Kate Morton.\u201d \u2015 BookPage (Top Pick) \u201cHay\u2019s prose is stunningly, shatteringly beautiful , and the emotional punch she delivers as the women\u2019s paths ultimately converge makes this seemingly quiet novel a breathless and powerful read .\u201d \u2015 San Francisco Book Review \u201cHay truly encapsulates how our lives are interwoven . We are sent on a journey through the decades as small events and echoes of memories overlap, intersect and suddenly converge into a beautiful portrait spanning the past, present and future. Every word has a purpose and resonates \u2026Readers will fall in love with the vivid landscapes of Brisbane and the impeccable, lyrical language that seeps from the pages.\u201d\u00a0 \u2015 RT Book Reviews \"If you haven\u2019t read anything by Ashley Hay, you are in for a treat : her language is lyrical, the lives she creates are authentic, her words are a delight to read. This is another delightful book from a very talented writer .\" \u2015 WAMC Radio \u201cThis contemplative novel explores the emotions of saying goodbye to a life of familiarity and embracing the unknown \u2026Readers who loved the quiet introspection of Anita Shreve\u2019s The Pilot\u2019s Wife and Elizabeth Strout\u2019s Olive Kitteridge will enjoy the detailed emotional journeys of Hay\u2019s characters. Their stories will linger long after the final page is turned.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal \u201cIf home is where the heart is, when does a house become a home\u2014or, conversely, stop being one? Two women struggle to find the answer\u2026Elsie\u2019s aging memories give the book a timeless sense of marriage and motherhood and perhaps a flicker of what Lucy may find in her future. The home that Elsie must give up with regret, Lucy must learn to love. This is typical of Hay who slowly weaves a tale of past and present lives, exploring the sense that the gap between the two women is not impervious to sensitive souls. Both Elsie and Lucy are finely and sympathetically drawn , and their lives highlight issues that affect many women. A cerebral tale, slow-moving but profound .\u201d\u00a0 -- Kirkus\u201cHer intricately layered story, bolstered by perspectives of an old mother and a young one, tackles the thorny questions of what it means to become a parent and how it feels to be no longer needed as one. Lyrical and tenderhearted , this will delight fans of Liane Moriarty and Kate Hewitt.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cEngaging\u2026Hay\u2019s perceptive prose illuminates both Elsie\u2019s and Lucy\u2019s lives, resulting in a rich dual character study that spans generations .\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cA book that overflows with gratitude for the hard, beautiful things of this world , and for the saving worlds of our imagination.\u201d -- Helen Garner, award-winning author of Everywhere I Look\"An emotional and satisfying read about navigating life's many phases and how place can transform who we are.\" \u2015 Hello! Canada \u201cHay renders the small details of an undramatic, decent life with tenderness that is touching and compelling \u2026a measured piece of writing that works carefully to create pensive and evocative images of time and place and people.\u201d \u2015 The Australian \u201c A Hundred Small Lessons explores notions of home, family, identity, creativity, aging and our relationship with cities and the natural world .\u2026Hay explores the ways in which we inhabit spaces: building homes and filling them with our possessions, dreams, regrets, fears and secrets. This graceful novel, with its unflinching approach to reality and its gentle undercurrents of sadness, nostalgia and hope, is a highly recommended read for fans of literary fiction.\u201d \u2015 Books + Publishing (Australia), five stars \u201cHay\u2019s intelligent scrutiny of the human psyche gives depth to this neatly constructed story.\u201d\u00a0 \u2015 Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) \u201c Deeply affecting \u2026Hay\u2019s unique novel glides like a swan and only after the last page do you realize how deeply you\u2019ve dived.\u201d \u2015 Country Style (Australia) \u201cHay creates a compelling story, charting what it is to be human.\u201d \u2015 Mindfood (Australia) \u201cHay explores with considerable empathy and insight the everyday lives of two very different generations\u2026With a lovely attention to the detail of things and feelings, Hay enlists our concern for her characters and an appreciation for the revealing echoes they call up in our own lives.\u201d \u2015 The Advertiser (Australia) \"A luminous evocation of ordinary lives and the city that shapes them. Ashley Hay brings a pointillist eye to the daily miracles of love, of chance, of belonging .\" -- Kristina Olsson \u2015 award-winning author of Boy, Lost Praise for The Railwayman's Wife : \u201cExquisitely written and deeply felt, The Railwayman's Wife is limpid and deep as the rock pools on the coastline beloved by this book\u2019s characters and just as teeming with vibrant life. Ashley Hay\u2019s novel of love and pain is a true book of wonders.\u201d -- Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Secret Chord\u201c The Railwayman\u2019s Wife is a fine evocation of place and time - a vivid love letter to a particular corner of post-war Australia. Ashley Hay writes with subtle insight about grief and loss and the heart's voyage through and beyond them. It's a lovely, absorbing, and uplifting read.\u201d -- M.L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans \u201cThe Railwayman's Wife is a beautifully attentive study of what comes after - after a funeral, after a war - and Ashley Hay is a wise and gracious guide through this fascinating territory. This is a book in which grief and love are so entwined they make a new and wonderful kind of sense.\u201d -- Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest\u201cAshley Hay weaves a moving tale of love, loss and hope.\u201d \u2015 Us Weekly \u201cHay\u2019s poetic gifts are evident in her descriptions of the wild coastal landscape and Roy\u2019s measured verse. This poignant, elegant novel delves into the depth of tragedy, the shaky ground of recovery, and the bittersweet memories of lost love.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cMultilayered, graceful, couched in poetry, supremely honest, gentle yet jarring, Hay's thought-provoking novel pulls you along slowly, like a deep river that is deceptively calm but full of hidden rapids. Much to ponder.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cSignificant moments are described with astoundingly solid writing, and the coastal setting is beautifully depicted. Previously released to critical acclaim in Australia in 2013 and a 2014 winner of the Colin Roderick Prize in the UK, this second novel from Hay is the kind of slow, ruminative, evocative story that will appeal to devotees of literary fiction.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal \u201cAfter wow-ing European audiences, this book is coming stateside to dazzle you\u2026Beautifully written, and featuring some excellent passages about writing and reading itself, this book will have you feeling every emotion at once.\u201d \u2015 Bustle \u201cHay has lovingly crafted a poignant, character-driven novel filled with heartache and hope, which is transferred to the reader through lyrical prose, poetic dialogue and stunning imagery.\u201d \u2015 RT Magazine \u201cA literary and literate gem of a book that leaves you with a set of emotions that I suspect last for a long, long time.\u201d \u2015 Psychology Today \"This story is a study in emotion: grief, hope, love, redemption, and yearning. The prose is so elegant that it seems to glide.\u201d \u2015 Historical Novel Society \"Hay delicately threads together the lives of a widowed librarian, an unproductive poet, and a guilt-ridden doctor as they grapple with life after loss in post-World War II Thirroul, a small seaside village in New South Wales, Australia.\" \u2015 Coastal Living About the Author Ashley Hay is the internationally acclaimed author of the novels A Hundred Small Lessons , The Body in the Clouds , and The Railwayman\u2019s Wife , which was honored with the Colin Roderick Award by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Australia, among numerous other accolades. She has also written four nonfiction books. She lives in Brisbane, Australia. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. A Hundred Small Lessons 1 Elsie\u2019s house IT WAS early on a winter\u2019s morning when she fell\u2014the shortest day of 2010, the woman on the radio said. From where Elsie lay, quite still and curled comfortably on the thick green carpet between the sofa and the sideboard, she could see how the sun coming in through the back door made a triangle on the kitchen floor. The light caught the pattern on the linoleum and touched the little nests of dust that her broom had missed under the lip of the kitchen cupboards. The bright triangle changed as the minutes passed, disappearing from the kitchen to pop up first in the back bedroom, then across the busy pattern of Nile green and white tiles in the bathroom. Later, in her own bedroom, it reached almost all the way across the floor to the thick rose-colored chenille of her bedspread, before it swung around further towards the west in search of the sunroom. The pile of the carpet, from where she lay, looked like neatly sheared blades of grass, the tidy job of mowing that Clem would have done. There was something comforting about being this close to the topography of the house. She knew this place so well. She wasn\u2019t sure if it was an extension of her, or she of it. So this was a new kind of exploration, noticing the way the floor sloped a little into the spare room, and how the beading sagged slightly on one segment of the ceiling. Topography: she counted through the letters\u2014ten. Geography; landscape. The answer to fourteen down in that morning\u2019s crossword, where she\u2019d been trying to make \u201cprojection\u201d fit. She was losing her touch. From outside, she could hear the kookaburra; he\u2019d be looking for his food. You could set your watch by him, she thought. There were cars on the road, the squeak of the swing in the park, the rich buzz of aeroplanes climbing up from the airport, the chatter of lorikeets, corellas. All that activity; it was nice to lie still among it\u2014although the kookaburra would be disappointed she\u2019d put nothing out today. And then the house muttered a little too, its boards creaking and stretching as the day warmed. It was a consoling sound. They\u2019d had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband\u2019s, her children\u2019s, and now their children\u2019s in turn\u2014echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor. \u201cReverb,\u201d one of Don\u2019s young boys had told her\u2014Don\u2019s own grandson, she supposed: her great-grandson then. The one with the noisy guitar. \u201cImagine it like this, Nan: layers of echoes arranged to make it sound like you\u2019re in a great big space.\u201d Well, \u2018reverb,\u2019 she thought clearly. A nice word. She liked to keep abreast of what they knew, how they lived\u2014their magic gadgets, their shiny new phones. Like this, Nan: one swipe and it turns on. She swiped her fingers now against the thick green carpet. Yes, she could almost hear it. All those voices; all those years. It was lunchtime, and then afternoon, and as the sun sank lower, she wondered how cold it might get, there on the floor, overnight. She was eighty-nine years old, and her bones were brittle and tired. The neighbors came then, one to the front door, one to the back. \u201cElsie,\u201d they called, \u201care you there, love? Are you right?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not here,\u201d she said, and lay still, wondering if she could turn her head far enough to see the fiery clouds of the sunset through the windows at the front of the house. There were sirens in the street\u2014she could see the reflections of blue and red flashing lights on the wallpaper above her head\u2014and then a policeman broke in through the door. By whose authority, she thought she said, but no one seemed to hear and she was onto a stretcher and into an ambulance before she had time to realize she didn\u2019t have her shoes. Imagine leaving home without your shoes. It was cold in the back of the ambulance and too bright. She wanted her cardigan. She wanted to sleep. If she could move her head slightly, she might see the steps, the porch, the battered front door. If she could lever herself up a bit more. But she couldn\u2019t. \u201cRightio, love.\u201d The uniformed man was far too cheerful for his job. Elsie closed her eyes. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m ready to go.\u201d Her voice, this time, quite loud and clear. In the hospital, a fortnight later on, she thought they said she was going home, but it wasn\u2019t her home they took her to. Some other place, with a bright new apartment for her, a view down to the river, a bell she could press for attention, and meals, if she preferred it, in a hall. She had her shoes now, and her cardigan\u2014they were bringing her mountains of stuff for such a short stay. \u201cWhat\u2019s that word? \u2018Respite?\u2019?\u201d she said to Donny when he came one day at lunch. \u201cSort of, Mum,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a way.\u201d She\u2019d signed some papers about some people she\u2019d never heard of, a pair called Ben Carter and Lucy Kiss. Donny\u2019s wife Carol said they had a little boy. But what was that to do with her? Were they tenants for her house while she was here? \u201cSort of, Mum,\u201d said Don again. \u201cYes. In a way.\u201d \u201cWell, make sure they keep up the garden. Your father will never forgive me if that rockery goes wrong.\u201d Clem Gormley. Now, where was he? When did they say he\u2019d be here? \u201cBen Carter,\u201d said Don, squaring the papers. \u201cLucy Kiss. I think we\u2019ve made the right choice.\u201d Of course, she knew what was happening; she knew where she was. The facility, she\u2019d always called it, with its apartments for the well ones, and rooms\u2014then wards\u2014for those who weren\u2019t. It was just a stop or so on the bus along from her place, and its back fence butted the sports fields where Donny\u2019s grandkids played. She could walk home from here, she thought. Be back in no time. She\u2019d lived in that house more than sixty years\u2014nearly sixty-three, she worked out as she lay the first night in her new room in her old bed and her old, cold sheets. She could remember the day they moved in, the size of their loan so cripplingly vast that she never dared to speak of it to Clem. To even put it into words. Back when the house was fresh and new. The house whose lawns her husband had so carefully tended. Rest his soul: yes. That was it. And yet in spite of so many years, the day she fell, the day she lay there on the floor, was the first time she\u2019d seen the way the light moved from one room to another, tracking from the back of the house to the front, calling into corners, illuminating space. Such a lovely thing to have seen, she thought. Such a lovely day to have spent. The modest house was sold, as the real estate agent had promised, in next to no time. \u201cA big block like this, with the park at the back, and the shops, and so close to the city\u2014no trouble at all,\u201d the agent had said. Elsie\u2019s children, the twins, Don and Elaine, came to empty the house for the sale. Elaine swept shelves of items into bags, disposing of them in the gaping maw of a dumpster emptied once, emptied twice. Don went through things piece by piece: cutlery drawers, button boxes, the old letter rack from the high kitchen shelf. Some of its receipts and notes dated from decades before. There were photos in there too: a gallery of grandkids, an image of Elsie before her own children were born, and the house up to its windows in water during the \u201974 flood. He stood a while, wiping the dust off this last image. \u201cThat bloody flood\u2014you know, I don\u2019t think she ever got over it. We should have made her sell the house back then.\u201d \u201cAnd made no money on it\u2014who\u2019d have bought here, after that? We\u2019re lucky that people forget.\u201d Elaine had the fridge door open and shoveled jars and packets into a garbage bag. \u201cLook at this\u2014all out of date.\u201d \u201cCarol used to take her shopping once a week; some of it should be all right.\u201d Don slipped the flood photo underneath the other pictures, and stared a while at a tiny black and white of his mother, taken almost seventy years ago. \u201cShe was so pretty, wasn\u2019t she, when she first married Dad? This must have been when she was working at that chemist\u2019s in the city, before we were born. She always said she felt important, behind the counter in her starched white coat.\u201d He turned the photo over: \u201cJanuary 1941,\u201d he read. \u201cThe year we were born\u2014and that\u2019ll be seventy years ago, soon.\u201d He shook his head at this impossible thought. \u201cSo strange that she\u2019ll never come home. Do you mind if I take these?\u201d \u201cThis milk\u2019s two months past its date.\u201d Elaine dropped it into the bag, bursting the carton so that the room filled with a terrible, sour smell. \u201cI wonder why she never went back to work\u2014she must have been so bored. God, we should have got a cleaner in and\u2014oh!\u201d Her hand at her throat as a crow, big and shiny black, landed on the threshold, cocking its head to look through the door. \u201cYou don\u2019t mind if I take these, Elaine?\u201d Elaine tied the bag with a savage twist. \u201cWhatever you like.\u201d She glanced across at him. \u201cYou were always more sentimental than me\u2014here.\u201d One of the pictures had dropped on the floor. \u201cHere\u2019s another.\u201d She reached down and passed it across. It was a photo of a portrait, and Don frowned. \u201cIt\u2019s a painting, but it almost looks like Mum.\u201d He held it close to get a better look. \u201cA painting of Mum? Let me see.\u201d His sister took it from him and went out onto the deck, studying it in the sun. \u201cIt can hardly have been her,\u201d she said at last, folding the print\u2014in half, then half again\u2014and stuffing it into her pocket. \u201cAs if she\u2019d get a portrait done like that.\u201d Most of the furniture went to a thrift store, along with the clothes and almost everything from the glass-fronted kitchen cupboards: the crystal, the crockery, the pots and the pans. \u201cOf course, she\u2019s not dead yet,\u201d said Elaine, which made Don wince as he set aside a painted vase he thought was his mother\u2019s favorite and a book he remembered her reading, years ago, around the time that his father had died. She looked small in the new place, he thought. She looked lost. \u201cI must get back to reading to your father,\u201d she said when he next visited, patting the old paperback with its spotted pages and crumbly cover. \u201cAnd did you bring my house keys? How will I get in when I go home?\u201d In each room, there was something Don balked at removing. The sideboard in the lounge where his own school sports trophies still sat arranged on one end. A plastic fern in the sunroom. The velvet-covered stool in front of his mother\u2019s dressing table. \u201cYour father did that upholstery\u2014lovely rose-colored velvet; a present one birthday,\u201d Elsie said when he mentioned it. \u201cHe said it was fit for a queen.\u201d She smiled. \u201cBut you\u2019re right: I won\u2019t need it while I\u2019m here.\u201d She\u2019d watched her reflection change through the decades as she\u2019d sat on that elegant stool, her hair fading from a warm chestnut brown down to grey and the skin under her fine chin loosening. All those crystal canisters on the dressing table; the vials of perfume she\u2019d never quite finished. Who was keeping up the dusting and the sweeping while she was away? Was Elaine chipping her nail polish pulling out the little weeds that grew between the white pebbles in the front garden? She doubted it. When she visualized her daughter, she saw a younger version of herself. She was always astonished when the real Elaine arrived and looked, and was, so very different.  When the new people came, they put the stool and the fern into a dumpster along with all the wallpaper\u2014\u201ca different pattern in every room,\u201d said the husband, Ben, laughing\u2014and the thick green carpet. \u201cLast vacuumed . . .\u201d He shrugged, glancing down at his small son. \u201cI think Tom\u2019s found a cockroach to eat.\u201d Ben was taller than he stood, his shoulders curled from years hunched over writing. His dark hair was greying and he kept his glasses on top of his head, ready to read things at a moment\u2019s notice. He looked down at his son, his hands busy with the desiccated insect, with a detached kind of appraisal. \u201cBut these floorboards are going to look lovely,\u201d said his wife, Lucy, taking the cockroach out of the boy\u2019s hand. \u201cIt\u2019s such beautiful wood. And look, they\u2019ve left a pile of pretty doilies.\u201d They were bundled together behind the door, and she paused for a moment, stroking the patterns on the delicate white linen runners and mats\u2014a suite of flowers and fruit and elaborate twirling curls. \u201cLook at this\u2014\u201d holding up a star-shaped doily for her husband to admire. \u201cSo fine: the stitching\u2019s as neat on the back as it is on the front. I wonder if they meant to take them; seems a shame that no one wanted them. Or maybe they meant them for us.\u201d Sitting on the floor, Tom unpacked small white pebbles from the back of a brightly colored plastic truck. \u201cStar,\u201d he said, pointing to the shape his mother held. \u201cStar.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s a beautiful word\u2014and a whole new one.\u201d Lucy smiled so much she was crying. \u201cSee, Lu?\u201d said Ben, brushing her deep red hair away from her forehead. \u201cI knew we\u2019d be all right here.\u201d  They spent three weeks stripping, painting, moving. The first night they slept in the house, Lucy woke at three, disoriented by the map made by the beading on the ceiling. Which house was this? Which city, which country? In the past years they\u2019d been all over the place\u2014to Washington, to London, back to Sydney, and now to Brisbane. Where they seemed to have bought a house. \u201cFirst step to feeling settled,\u201d Ben had declared\u2014and Lucy thought she ought to trust that he was right. Brisbane: the place where he\u2019d grown up. Now it was where Tom would grow up too, while Ben went off to his new job with the paper. Gadgets, inventions, and discoveries had always been the things that piqued his interest (Lucy preferred more seriously to describe it as science or technology), and he\u2019d at last been approached to cover that round. \u201cI\u2019d be mad not to give it a go\u2014all those magnificent stories,\u201d he\u2019d said in Sydney when the offer was first made. \u201cWe\u2019ll stay here until Tom turns one, then we\u2019ll go. Come on\u2014the next adventure!\u201d She had jobs that she did\u2014administration, management. He had a job that he loved. That was how they both defined their working lives. \u201cYou\u2019re mad to go,\u201d her sisters had said. \u201cTom\u2019s so tiny. You need your networks.\u201d \u201cGet back to work,\u201d her mother had said. \u201cBest way to settle into a new place.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019ll have a ball,\u201d her father had said. \u201cA whole new city\u2014and take your time.\u201d Their standard difference of opinion, thought Lucy, and here I am. She stared at the ceiling. Old bed, new house. It was the first house they\u2019d ever bought. They\u2019d been in Brisbane a month or so\u2014and back in Sydney barely a year before that. She was unpacking boxes in this house that she\u2019d packed in London, in Washington before that. She\u2019d never thought of it as moving but as arriving, and there was a trick to arriving somewhere new\u2014a person or a place that made it easy, or a sliver of coincidence that made her think they\u2019d landed precisely where they ought to be. \u201cAnd now, the great Australian dream,\u201d Ben had joked. \u201cThe kid, the house, the mortgage.\u201d How very fast they\u2019d made that real. Now, in the night\u2019s light, she looked at her husband\u2019s face as he slept\u2014he was always smiling, home each night with some great story, some great new moment from his day. While she made spaceships for Tom as she emptied their boxes, and began to work out where they were. Their names had looked so slight against the weight of all that mortgage. \u201cIn at the deep end,\u201d she\u2019d said to her sisters, trying to laugh. And they\u2019d laughed too. The floorboards felt warm as she walked to the kitchen. She liked the rich glow of the newly polished jarrah, and she liked how they felt underfoot. There was something warm about the whole house at night\u2014perhaps it was the soft light from the streetlamps. She stood by the kitchen window, filling a glass with water, and watched as rain started to fall, smudging the reflection of the lamps in the park into patches of brightness on its concrete path. She walked into the living room with her glass, patting a doily that she\u2019d left on the arm of a chair. \u201cI know we\u2019re not really doily people,\u201d she\u2019d said to Ben, \u201cbut it seems wrong not to keep some of these\u2014they\u2019re exquisite.\u201d Now, as her fingers felt the stitching, she knew the tiny mats would probably hang around for as long as they lived in this house. Elsie\u2019s house, thought Lucy. Elsie Veronica Gormley. She\u2019d seen the woman\u2019s name on the contract, and she\u2019d pressed the neighbors for any more details. Elsie must have been around ninety, they\u2019d said, and she\u2019d lived here a very long time. She and her husband had bought the house when it was built, back in the forties, and they\u2019d lived here with their twins, a boy and a girl. Her husband had died\u2014no one could quite remember when; no one had been here that long. And then she\u2019d fallen. And then she\u2019d gone. \u201cI think they chose to sell to you because you\u2019re a family,\u201d the estate agent had said as she\u2019d slid the contracts across her cluttered desk. \u201cWe\u2019ll look after it,\u201d Lucy said as she signed her name and passed them on to Ben. \u201cMeant to be,\u201d he said, squinting through his glasses as he signed. There was a tiny whisper in the darkness from some of the seventeen circles they\u2019d found drilled into the different rooms\u2019 floors when the carpet had been taken up. \u201cCircumference of a broom handle,\u201d Ben had said. \u201cWe should stopper them up.\u201d But he hadn\u2019t done that yet, and the wind sometimes caught at them, stirring puffs of air like little breaths. Lucy checked on Tom and headed back to bed, rattling the front doorknob as she went by. \u201cWe should change the locks,\u201d she\u2019d said to Ben earlier that day. \u201cYou should always change the locks when you buy a house.\u201d \u201cWhat?\u201d Ben had laughed. \u201cWhat do you think is going to happen? Elsie\u2019s going to let herself in?\u201d \u201cElsie\u2019s family\u2014how many keys might there be in the world?\u201d Now, in the darkness, her fingers fiddled with the door lock\u2019s button. Safe and sound, safe and sound, safe and sound. It was like a line from a lullaby. In the quietness of the middle of the night, she turned these words end over end in her head, dropping back into sleep beside her husband and his warmth.  Elsie woke at three, disoriented by the hum of an air conditioner nearby. Three in the afternoon, she thought, looking at her watch. How could they have let me sleep so long\u2014I\u2019ve missed breakfast and lunch, and there was a bus I wanted to catch. She buttoned her cardigan, and as she felt around for her shoes, her handbag, her hat, she knocked the vase that Don had brought for her, cracking it into four or five pieces as it smashed against the floor. She\u2019d never liked it\u2014it had been a present from one of Clem\u2019s friends when they were first married. She dropped the pieces into the rubbish bin, wondering why it was so dark. Then she heard the rain against the window and nodded. This time of year, you could expect a thundery shower on a Brisbane afternoon. She looked into the street: it was very quiet, and although she watched and watched, no cars or buses came. Perhaps there was a strike she didn\u2019t know about. Still, it wasn\u2019t far to walk: through the park towards the river and then along the road. She\u2019d see her garden, her lilies, her hydrangeas, her azaleas. She\u2019d see how they\u2019d fixed the front door\u2014Donny said it was bright red now, which she wasn\u2019t sure about\u2014and how the walls inside had all been stripped of their carefully papered patterns. She smiled: there and back in an hour. She\u2019d feel like herself again once she was home. She\u2019d let this strange dark rain ease up before she went.  The next morning, taking Tom into the garden, Lucy paused at the top of the stairs, registering the stray flecks of the new front-door paint spattered on the porch\u2019s balustrade. Such a strong color, somewhere between vermilion and scarlet. Fire engine, Lucy had called it, but Ben revised it\u2014\u201clipstick\u201d\u2014with a smile. Lucy loved how brazenly bright it was. She scratched at a splatter, then levered the color from under her fingernail and rolled it into a ball. Their new place. Leaning out from the top of the stairs, she saw the park, the busy through road beyond that, the streaks of shiny color as the cars zoomed by. Hours of entertainment: Tom would love it. There was a shimmer of movement and a kookaburra landed on the power line, its feathers soft and furry and its head tilted to one side, expectant. \u201cHello,\u201d said Lucy. \u201cAre you a regular here? Look, sweetheart, isn\u2019t he beautiful?\u201d She turned Tom around to see the bird\u2019s smooth feathers, its still trust. A car came around the corner then and the bird took flight, before settling itself farther along the wire. Lucy raised her hand, uncertain if she was waving to the car, to the bird, to the house, or the morning itself. Then she helped Tom down each step. The kookaburra sat, watching. \u201cWell done, love,\u201d Lucy said as Tom reached the last tread. \u201cThe first step in being somewhere new.\u201d She smiled. \u201cAnd later, we\u2019ll head out and explore.\u201d As she turned to herd his steps across the lawn, she saw footprints, smaller than her own and closely set, already pressed into the still-wet grass. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 12.29}, {"asin": "0615716121", "title": "Nobody Has to Know", "author": "Frank Nappi", "description": "Review \"A haunting, briskly-paced page turner that explores the darkest recesses of the human psyche while propelling the reader through an intricate series of hair-raising twists and turns. Nobody Has to Know is a masterfully written tale that is expertly told. Frank Nappi knows how to entertain the reader from start to finish.\" -- #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Nelson DeMille A contemporary reimagining of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita with a Fatal Attraction twist, Nappi's latest is a fast-paced thriller. Cameron Baldridge -a young, handsome high school English teacher-seemingly has it all...But underneath the perfect facade is a deeply scarred man still trying to come to grips with the tragic death of his first love...He pines for an attractive student named Nikki...and ultimately tastes the \"forbidden fruit\"-with disastrous consequences...The story's pacing is brisk, the narrative generally fluid and the conclusion an absolute jaw-dropper...- Kirkus Reviews Thrilling story about the harrowing repercussions that occur when a young teacher sleeps with one of his high school students...packs a powerful warning about how dangerous it is to cross social and sexual boundaries...Nobody Has To Know is both a guilty pleasure and intellectually pleasing...sheds insight into the psychology, behavior and history of why people delve into dangerous sexual relationships.\u00a0 -- The Rockford Review From the Author \"Nobody Has To Know represented for me a formidable challenge -- venturing into a completely new genre,\" Nappi says. \"I really wanted to see if I could create a work that had inherent integrity with regard to theme as well as entertain readers with the usual elements present in this sort of novel. Consequently, because this endeavor represented such a leap and challenge, this book more than the other three I have published, is imbued with a very special quality for me as an author. It took years t perfect, but I am most pleased with the results, including Mr. DeMille's effusive praise, which has made for one of the most special moments of my career as an author.\" From the Inside Flap One doesn't simply read a Frank Nappi story, one lives and breathes it. In this gripping tale of a teacher's forbidden obsession, Nappi's artful language catapults the reader into his story as few writers can. This nationally-acclaimed author keeps pulling out surprises and pulling us in.  -Betty Dravis & Chase Von, co-authors of Dream Reachers Nappi's prose tells a beautifully chaotic story of love and lust, suspense and madness - some of the greatest elements of truly powerful, absolutely moving drama.  - Christy Tillery French, author of The Bodyguard series A powerful, page-turning thriller that will leave readers riveted and wanting more. - Armand Mastroianni, producer/director of A Dark Plan Frank Nappi is a master wordsmith of many genres. Hugely successful with his first three novels, he now takes the plunge into the dark literary waters with Nobody Has to Know... everything a thriller should be.- Susan Alcott Jardine, author of THE CHANNEL: Stories From L.A .   From award winning author Frank Nappi comes a roller-coaster ride into the anarchy of a personal inferno... A nightmarish and terrifying tale. Nobody Has To Know is a bewitching thriller that will keep you guessing until the final act!  - Barbara Watkins, author of award-winning Hollowing Screams About the Author Frank Nappi has taught high school English and Creative Writing for over twenty years. His debut novel, Echoes From The Infantry, received national attention, including MWSA's silver medal for outstanding fiction. His follow-up novel, The Legend of Mickey Tussler, garnered rave reviews as well, including a movie adaptation of the touching story \"A Mile in His Shoes\" starring Dean Cain and Luke Schroder. Frank continues to produce quality work, including Sophomore Campaign, the intriguing sequel to the much heralded original story and the just released thriller, NOBODY HAS TO KNOW, which received an endorsement from #1 New York Times bestselling author Nelson DeMille. Frank is presently at work on a third installment of his Mickey Tussler series and his next thriller. He lives on Long Island with his wife Julia and their two sons, Nicholas and Anthony. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.89}, {"asin": "1250142997", "title": "Frankie: A Novel", "author": "Shivaun Plozza", "description": "Review ALA\u2019s Best Fiction for Young Adults List YALSA Teens\u2019 Top 10 Pick Shortlisted for the Australian Children\u2019s Book Council Book of the Year Award, the Victorian Premier\u2019s Literary Award, and the 2017 Gold Inky Award Winner of the 2017 Sisters in Crime Davitt Award (YA) \u201cReaders will love Frankie for her courage, passion, and honesty as a narrator, and supporting characters are equally well-drawn. A powerful debut about a girl learning to love despite the dangers.\u201d \u2015 ALA Booklist \u201cFrankie's a great, gutsy character, full of heart.\u201d \u2015 Printz Award winner Melina Marchetta, author of Jellicoe Road and Saving Francesca \u201c Frankie will make you laugh till it hurts and then she\u2019ll break your heart. Spoiler alert: it may be with a welding gun or the collected works of Shakespeare. But no matter what she throws at you, you\u2019ll want to keep rooting her on to the bitter end.\u201d \u2015 Morris Award Finalist Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock , author of The Smell of Other People's Houses \u201cA gritty, darkly witty debut.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cOriginal, and often obscenely funny. I frequently laughed aloud while reading Frankie .\u201d \u2015 Australian Book Review \u201cThis is a great debut novel from a fantastic new Australian author. It has everything YA fiction needs to be captivating: mystery, tough women, annoyingly cute bad boys, sarcasm, and humor. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2015 Readings Monthly About the Author Shivaun Plozza is an award-winning Children\u2019s and YA writer. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Frankie , was a CBCA Notable Book, shortlisted for the Inky Awards, Highly Commended at the Victorian Premier\u2019s Literary Awards and won the YA category of the Davitt Awards. Her second novel is Tin Heart , which Jennifer Niven called \u201cswoon-worthy, moving, deep, and funny.\u201d When she\u2019s not writing, Shivaun works as an editor and manuscript assessor. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 4.95}, {"asin": "1496702042", "title": "Death Comes to the Fair (A Kurland St. Mary Mystery)", "author": "Catherine Lloyd", "description": "About the Author Catherine Lloyd was born just outside London, England, into a large family of dreamers, artists, and history lovers. She completed her education with a master\u2019s degree in history at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and uses the skills she gained there to research and write her historical mysteries. Catherine currently lives in Hawaii with her husband and four children. Her website is located at www.catherine-lloyd.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.05}, {"asin": "0974985708", "title": "searching among the dead a coroner's tale", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 8.2}, {"asin": "0765312956", "title": "The Road to Dune", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 20.0}, {"asin": "B01LK0W54M", "title": "Into the North Wind: A thousand-mile bicycle adventure across frozen Alaska", "author": "Jill Homer", "description": "Review \"Into the North Wind\" is a great book, and it's a challenge to cross the finish line with Homer and not get choked up. She has a way of winning you over. Readers who decide they now need to do this for themselves will have an inkling of what's involved. It's quite an accomplishment, and there are good reasons why so few people have done it.-- Anchorage Daily News About the Author Jill Homer is an outdoor adventure enthusiast, freelance writer and designer living in Boulder, Colorado. She was a community news journalist - pale-faced and risk-adverse, with a body better suited to shelving library books than scaling mountains - when her then-boyfriend convinced her to move to Homer, Alaska, in 2005. There she discovered the unique and obscure sport of snow biking, which launched her into a whirlwind lifestyle of endurance racing, travel, and adventure sports. Her athletic accomplishments include a women's bicycle record for the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail in Alaska, a former women's record for the 2,740-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, and nearly fifty ultramarathon finishes. Deep down, she's still the awkward, timid girl she was while growing up in the suburbs of Sandy, Utah. She has authored three memoirs, a compilation of personal essays, and co-authored a biography about a man who has walked across Alaska eight (now nine) times. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Specialty Travel"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1479131792", "title": "Deadly Lode", "author": "Mr. Randall R Reneau", "description": "Review \" Deadly Lode is a great fiction read.\" Daryn Watson, Reader Views \"Deadly Lode is an unconventional but thoroughly entertaining book.\" Julia Zurcher - Spokane Coeur d'Alene Living About the Author Randall Reneau is the author of six novels, including Diamond Fields, a Royal Dragonfly Book Awards grand prize winner, and Deadly Lode, a Richard Boes Memorial Award winner. He is also a two-time winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award. A former international geologist and Vietnam veteran, he lives with his wife, Lynne, in Austin, Texas.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "1628454679", "title": "SAT Prep 2017-2018: Study Guide & Practice Test Questions for the Reading, Writing & Language, Math, & Essay Sections on the College Board SAT Exam", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Test Preparation", "College & High School"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 1.48}, {"asin": "B005BYV0G8", "title": "Death Before Swine", "author": "V.K. Scott", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 2.99}, {"asin": "1606045040", "title": "Vet Tails", "author": "Charlie Freed", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Professionals & Academics"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 8.3}, {"asin": "0062657577", "title": "Field of Bones: A Brady Novel of Suspense (Joanna Brady Mysteries)", "author": "J. A. Jance", "description": "From the Back Cover While on maternity leave, Sheriff Joanna Brady is dragged into a far-reaching investigation to bring down a sadistic killer in this chilling tale of suspense from beloved New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance Though she\u2019s still recovering from a series of tragedies, Joanna Brady\u2019s life has never been busier.\u00a0 Her older daughter is off to college, her five-year-old son is full of energy and boundless curiosity, and she\u2019s just given birth to a new daughter\u2014on the same night she won her third election as Cochise County sheriff in a squeaker of a race.\u00a0 In addition, her husband, Butch, is away on an exhausting book tour. Despite her devotion to her work, Joanna is determined to see her maternity leave through this time. But in this beautiful desert landscape, home of Wyatt Earp, Tombstone, and the shoot-out at the OK Corral, a monster is roaming free\u2014a serial killer who has transformed Joanna\u2019s small corner of the Southwest into a field of bones. When a teenager turns in a human skull found on the far side of the San Bernardino Valley in the Peloncillo Mountains between Arizona and New Mexico, it is the beginning of a multiple homicide case. As much as she would rather stay home with her newborn and lose herself in the cold cases to be found in her father\u2019s long- unread diaries, Joanna instead finds herself overseeing a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions and an FBI profiler. Filled with the beloved characters, small-town charm, vivid history, intriguing mystery, and the scenic Arizona desert backdrop that have made the Joanna Brady books perennial bestsellers, this latest entry featuring the popular sheriff is sure to please J. A. Jance\u2019s legions of fans. About the Author J.A. Jance is the New York Times Bestselling author of more than sixty books.\u00a0Born in South Dakota and raised in Bisbee, Arizona, she and her husband live in the Seattle area with their two longhaired dachshunds, Mary and Jojo.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.18}, {"asin": "098614732X", "title": "Brother Wars", "author": "Steven K. Smith", "description": "About the Author Steven K. Smith writes the middle grade series The Virginia Mysteries, adventures with a twist of history, and Brother Wars. Steven lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and three sons. Born and raised in rural northwestern New Jersey, he moved to Virginia in 2011 and quickly fell in love with its history and charm. Visit his website at www.VirginiaMysteries.com. He also writes contemporary fiction for grownups as Steven Sawyer. When he's not writing, Steven enjoys coaching his boys in sports, hiking, kayaking, photography, and taking naps. Some of his favorite children's books include Where the Red Fern Grows, Rascal, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Bridge to Terabithia, and the Chronicles of Narnia series.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0985401400", "title": "Sea of Crises", "author": "Marty Steere", "description": "Review \"Steere's high-octane suspense tale takes off with all the intrigue and honor of the best space-age Westerns and political thrillers.\" - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \"Author Marty Steere is brilliant!... The action is non-stop and fast-paced and is mixed with just the right amount of mystery to make a perfect thriller.... [The] plot is plausible, the characters are realistic, and the writing is superb...so stunning a read that you will be unable to stop reading until the very end.\" - Readers Favorite \"Attention grabbing from start to finish, this novel is filled with non-stop action and suspense. Enjoyable, entertaining, and original, readers will fly through the pages.\" - Publishers Weekly From the Back Cover \"That shouldn't be here.\"  Those are the last words uttered by Commander Bob Cartwright in September 1976, just before all communication with the crew of Apollo 18 is inexplicably lost during the astronauts' first moonwalk. Frantic attempts to re-establish communications with the astronauts are unsuccessful. Three days later, however, as NASA is scrambling to put together a rescue mission, astronomers detect a burn of the service propulsion system, and, on schedule, but still in eerie silence, the command module begins its return transit, culminating in the welcome sight of the capsule descending majestically beneath a trio of parachutes into the South Pacific. But when the hatch is opened, the navy divers tasked with assisting the astronauts into the recovery helicopter make a gruesome discovery. The bodies of the three men inside have been burned beyond recognition, victims of a failed heat shield. And with them has died any chance of learning the meaning of Cartwright's enigmatic last statement or what transpired during those three blacked out days in the Mare Crisium, or Sea of Crises. Unfortunately, unless and until man returns to the moon, it's a mystery that will remain forever unsolved.  Or will it?   Thirty-six years later, Cartwright's sons make a shocking discovery: The capsule that came down in the Pacific Ocean with three charred remains was not their father's capsule. And the body they buried all those years before was not their father. What they've uncovered puts the three brothers on the run, chased by a ruthless group who will stop at nothing to preserve the secret behind the fate of the Apollo 18 astronauts. The brothers will need to set aside past differences and pool their talents if they are to stay alive and unravel the mystery behind what really happened in the Sea of Crises.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Literary"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 15.95}, {"asin": "0983576106", "title": "BRAVE AND FUNNY MEMORIES OF WWII: By a P-38 Fighter Pilot", "author": "Lyndon Shubert", "description": "Review 5-Star Review By Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite .....Lyndon Shubert's historical military memoir, Brave and Funny Memories of WWII by a P-38 Fighter Pilot , is a marvelous collection of war yarns that just happen to be true. While I was saddened to realize that this gifted and very funny man is in the late stages of Alzheimer's, his voice is still so loud and clear in these stories about his wartime service. While I've read many World War II memoirs, Shubert's resonated so strongly, and I appreciated learning about the P-38 fighter pilots and the role the 154th played during the war. The photographs Betty Shubert includes in this book go so far in showing the reader the real Shubert, the daredevil goof whose bravery was so exceptional and who excelled at self-deprecation. Each picture gives us more insight into that kind and funny man who sacrificed so much. I had a grand time getting to know Lyndon Shubert and hear him tell his war stories, and I'm hoping Betty gets his unpublished manuscript, The Misadventures of the Testosterone Kid , published soon. I'm looking forward to reading it. Brave and Funny Memories of WWII by a P-38 Fighter Pilot is most highly recommended. 5-Star Review By Divine Zape for Readers' Favorite .....Your heart will pound as you read this compelling memoir and you will feel the author's emotions as he takes you through the different episodes of his flying experience. The writing is laced with symbolism and poetry and the author's unique voice comes across powerfully. It is hard to not fall in love with the writing and the themes. I loved the fact that the author could weave the themes of facing fears, family, war, and friendship so seamlessly into the narrative. The humor is genuine and it hits the reader swiftly in their minds and hearts. Brave and Funny Memories of WWII by a P-38 Fighter Pilot is a hugely entertaining read and Lyndon Shubert surely has a rare gift for storytelling. 5-Star Review By Arya Fomonyuy for Readers' Favorite .....Lyndon Shubert has a unique style of writing and a phraseology that is equally unique, communicating the suspense, the sense of incertitude and the paralysis that often gripped the pilot. The language is smooth and it is punctuated by witty and humorous lines. In this slim memoir, the author takes readers along with him and allows them to have a sense of what it felt like to fly in the midst of danger during WWII. The photos offer delightful sights captured by the author while stationed in Bari, Italy. I found this book to be informative, educative, and downright entertaining. 4-Star Review By Caitlin Lyle Farley for Readers' Favorite ..... Brave and Funny Memories of WWII by a P-38 Fighter Pilot makes the hours spent reading fly by like minutes. Shubert's memoir has a refreshing lack of the depressing accounts that usually feature in memoirs of war. Lyndon Shubert writes in a conversational style that promotes a sense of intimacy with the reader. One negative side effect of this is that the narrative tends to stray back and forth on a topic, much like it would in an actual conversation. Some of the nuances behind the author's choices and behaviour, particularly in the Azores, were lost to me as pertinent details were only revealed later. Clear photos spaced throughout the text add to the story as Lyndon Shubert takes the reader from the USA to Italy, and through the skies of Europe. While the denouement is bittersweet, Brave and Funny Memories of WWII by a P-38 Fighter Pilot remains the ideal book for anyone looking for a light, entertaining read about WWII. MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW-James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief ....Synopsis: \"Memories of WWII\" is the intensely personal story of Lyndon Shubert and his experience as a young fighter pilot operating a P-38 in the skies of Europe during World War II. A simply riveting read that includes such encounters as when he was attacked by four Messerschmitts, \"Memories of WWII\" underscores the reality that no matter how much you prepare, no matter how much you read, how much you train, no matter how much you think of yourself as a 'Hot Shot Pilot,' you are never truly ready for experiencing life and death aerial combat! Of special note is Lyndon Shubert's memories of how it felt to say a 'last goodbye' to his bride believing he would never see her again, as he left to fight WWII. Critique: Exceptionally well written, \"Memories of WWII: By a P-38 Fighter Pilot\" will prove to be an valued and appreciated contribution to the growing library of World War II histories, memoirs and biographies. While unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library World War II Military History collections and supplemental studies reading lists, it should be noted for students, academics, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that 'Memories of WWII: By a P-38 Fighter Pilot\" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $5.49). From the Author Please see my new Facebook page at:\u00a0facebook.com/P38Flyer/ From the Inside Flap They all say BRAVO!Accolades from the Experts Lyndon Shubert has a well-deserved reputation as a raconteur . He draws the reader with him into the dangerous skies of wartime Europe and then shares his experiences as an actor on Broadway with Spencer Tracy. I am certain readers will enjoy his true-life stories as much as I; especially those with an interest in WWII aerial combat.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0H Steve Blake, WWII Aviation Historian\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Author-Editor of Lightning Strikes, the\u00a0official magazine of the P-38 National Association Author Lyndon Shubert's stories of bravery and heroism are combined with touching memories. Having heard him speak publicly on many occasions and having also met the author, I can say that his writing style equals his ability to hold an audience spellbound! ... I highly recommend this entertaining read for aviation buffs as well as WWII historians.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0H\u00a0Kevin Thompson, Historian\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Planes of Fame Air Museum - Chino, California\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Guest Editor of\u00a0Brave & Funny Memories Lynn Shubert was a founding member of our Veterans Club where he often spoke at meetings. It was exciting to hear stories directly from one so close to combat. Our group traveled to places where he spoke. At Planes of Fame Air Museum, a rebuilt P-38 was on display. Lynn explained all the intricate parts to us. I know you will find this book an excellent read.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0H Bruce G. Hunt\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Past President of the Palmia Veterans Club\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Chairperson of the Mission Viejo Marines & Sailors Adoption Committee I have known Lynn Shubert for 15 years as a good friend and consummate story teller: an art that has been largely lost. We share a common interest in flying. We used to meet for lunch regularly where he shared his exciting exploits in WWII ... If you love good aviation stories, you will love Lynn's book: it is like being there with him as he reminisces.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0H Michael Heath\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Financial Advisor -\u00a0Western International Securities, Inc. From the Back Cover *\u00a0 If you want to know how a young fighter pilot felt in his head and his heart as he was about to fly the enemy skies of WWII, this book is for you. Always afraid he was about to die, he climbed into the cockpit anyway... and lived to tell you about it.*\u00a0 How would you feel if you were a new guy in the sky ... attacked by four Messerschmitts?*\u00a0\u00a0Let me tell you, no matter how much you prepare, no matter how much you read, how much you train, no matter how much you think of yourself as a 'Hot Shot Pilot.' You are never ready for life and death combat!*\u00a0 How did it feel to say a 'last goodbye' to your bride believing you would never see her again as you left to fight WWII?\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Lyndon Shubert, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross at age 24, had a fascinating, colorful and often glamorous career. He was a writer and actor in early television and performed on Broadway with Spencer Tracy. As a pioneering executive of the teleprompter industry in the USA and Europe, he taught three presidents, as well as actors Orson Welles and Ronald Reagan, and many other top celebrities and politicians how to use the teleprompter. Shubert wrote and produced movies including a feature film about the young Marilyn Monroe, and has been published in numerous aviation history magazines. He became a successful film executive known all over the world as president of the International Theater Equipment Association (ITEA) where he earned his reputation as a raconteur at Hollywood celebrity packed banquettes. After retirement he was a popular guest speaker at various air shows and museums including the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California and other places where fans of the P-38 and aviation history gathered. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "1944020039", "title": "The Ominous Eye: The Nocturnals Book 2 (2)", "author": "Tracey Hecht", "description": "Review \u201cReturning fans will be rewarded with the expected engaging plot twists, plenty of humor\u2026and reaffirmation of the trio\u2019s mutual loyalty and friendship.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cFeaturing spirited animal characters who deal with real-life scenarios in a relatable way...the books celebrate the very meaningful idea of friendship and what it means to forge positive relationships.\u201d\u00a0 \u2015 Amy Poehler's Smart Girls \u201cThe series addresses bullying and empathy in an easy, accessible way, and the books are meant to be read aloud.\u201d \u2015 New York Post \u201c The Nocturnals is an enchanting story about a group of animals who band together to protect their friends and find adventure. The characters are delightful and the nighttime landscape is captivating. It was just as I expected\u2014because the best stories always take place in the dark!\u201d -- R.L. Stine, Author of Goosebumps\u201cHecht continues to charm readers with delightfully drawn characters and consistent suspense\u2026A welcome return of the colorful and curious trio\u2014their next can't arrive soon enough.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Tracey Hecht is a writer and entrepreneur who created The Nocturnals , the critically acclaimed middle grade and early reader series. The American Booksellers Association chose her first book, The Nocturnals: The Mysterious Abductions , as a Kids\u2019 Indie Next List pick. In addition, her Grow & Read early reader book, The Chestnut Challenge , was given a Mom\u2019s Choice Gold Award. With the New York Public Library, she has also created a Read Aloud Writing Program that has since been conducted in over 150 schools, libraries, and bookstores. Other books in the Nocturnals middle grade series include The Ominous Eye, The Fallen Star , and The Hidden Kingdom . Tracey currently splits her time between New York City and Oquossoc, Maine, with her husband and four children. Kate Liebman is an artist who lives and works in New York City. She graduated from Yale University, contributes to the Brooklyn Rail, and has shown her work at multiple galleries. She grew up in Santa Monica, California.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "0451240677", "title": "The Chocolate Clown Corpse: A Chocoholic Mystery", "author": "JoAnna Carl", "description": "Review Praise for the Chocoholic Mystery series \u201cI\u2019m proud to stand up and say, \u2018My name is Charlaine, and I\u2019m a Chocoholic!\u2019\u201d\u2014#1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris\u201cKeeps you guessing all the way to the end.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cJoAnna Carl satisfies your sweet tooth along with your craving for a tasty whodunit.\u201d\u2014Cleo Coyle, author of the Coffeehouse Mysteries\u201cA deft mix of truffles and trouble. Chocaholics\u2014this book is for you!\u201d\u2014Laura Childs, author of the Tea Shop mysteries\u201cA real page-turner, and I got chocolate on every one!\u201d\u2014Tamar Myers, author of Butter Safe Than Sorry\u201c[A] delectable treat starring a heroine impossible to dislike.\u201d\u2014 Midwest Book Review \u201cAnyone who loves chocolate\u2014and who doesn\u2019t?\u2014will love this delicious, fast-paced addition to the Chocoholic Mystery series. It has more twists and turns than a chocolate-covered pretzel!\u201d\u2014Leslie Meier, author of Wicked Witch Murder \u201cDollops of chocolate lore add to the cozy fun.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cDeliciously cozy\u2026richly entertaining and has no calories.\u201d \u2014Elaine Viets, author of the Dead-End Job mysteries\u201cJoAnna Carl\u2019s books are delicious treats, from the characters to the snippets of chocolate trivia.\u201d\u2014 Roundtable Reviews About the Author JoAnna Carl is the pseudonym for a multipublished author.\u00a0 She spent more than twenty-five years in the newspaper business as a reporter, feature writer, editor, and columnist. She holds a degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma and also studied in the OU Professional Writing Program, and is the author of the Chocoholic Mystery series which includes The Chocloate Book Bandit. . She lives in Oklahoma but summers in Michigan, where the Chocoholic Mystery series is set. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ALSO BY JOANNA CARL OBSIDIAN ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Chapter 1 I don\u2019t usually answer the telephone at the Warner Pier police station. Warner Pier is a small town, true, and my aunt is married to the police chief, true, and somehow I wind up at the station now and then. But the PD has staff\u2014the chief, four patrolmen, and a clerical assistant. The 9-1-1 calls go to a county system twenty-four hours a day, and after the office closes at five o\u2019clock, ordinary business calls are caught by an answering machine after two rings. They don\u2019t need a volunteer to answer the phone in Warner Pier, Lake Michigan\u2019s most picturesque resort. But that day I was sitting around the station at five fifteen, the only person there, waiting for my aunt and uncle and my husband so we could all go out to dinner. I had plopped into a chair next to the empty desk usually occupied by the secretary. When the phone rang my mind was in three other places, and after just one ring I automatically picked it up. \u201cTenHuis Chocolade,\u201d I said. I\u2019d not only answered a phone I shouldn\u2019t have, I\u2019d answered it the way I do for my job. The caller, a woman, gasped. \u201cOh! I was calling the Warner Pier Police Department.\u201d \u201cAnd you reached it. I\u2019m not the regular person who answers the phone, so I said the wrong thing. But I\u2019ll try to help you.\u201d \u201cOh. Well\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d The caller had an odd, whispery voice. \u201cI wanted to ask about a crime that happened about a month ago.\u201d \u201cI can refer your question to the right person.\u201d \u201cIt was a violent death.\u201d Hmmm. Warner Pier doesn\u2019t have all that many killings. Or did she mean an accident? \u201cYes?\u201d \u201cThe murder of Morris Davidson. The clown. A month ago. Do you remember it?\u201d \u201cOh yes. It caused quite a stir around town.\u201d I looked at the caller ID on the secretary\u2019s phone. The little screen held a number with an area code I didn\u2019t recognize. \u201cWhere are you calling from? I\u2019m surprised the Davidson killing got any attention outside of Warner County, since it was not too unusual.\u201d She didn\u2019t answer my question. \u201cNot unusual? Why do you say that?\u201d \u201cIt was the proverbial break-in with the burglar reacting violently when surprised by the homeowner.\u201d The caller gasped. \u201cIs that what people think happened?\u201d \u201cAfter the confession, there wasn\u2019t much else to think.\u201d \u201cConfession? Confession! You mean someone confessed to the murder?\u201d \u201cYes. He\u2019s now in jail.\u201d \u201cOh.\u201d I could barely hear her. The woman\u2019s voice was more than surprised. It was amazed. Maybe beyond amazed. \u201cWho is this?\u201d I asked. She spoke but again didn\u2019t answer my question. \u201cIn jail! But that\u2019s awful!\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s pretty standard procedure,\u201d I said. \u201cIf you confess to killing someone, you are sent to jail. Can you give me your name?\u201d The only answer was a click as the woman hung up. I stared at the silent receiver. \u201cWeird,\u201d I said. There was a knock at the door, and I looked up to see my husband, Joe, through its window. I let him in and immediately told him about the phone call. \u201cIsn\u2019t that strange?\u201d I asked. Joe shrugged. \u201cYou say there was no name on the caller ID?\u201d \u201cRight. There was a number, but no name. Is that suspicious?\u201d \u201cNot necessarily.\u201d Joe is a lawyer who has some experience as a defense attorney. Plus, he served as city attorney of our little town for a couple of years, and his office was in the same building with the police station. So he\u2019s drunk a lot of coffee with cops. \u201cThe call was probably made from a pay phone,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are still a few around.\u201d \u201cBut the woman sounded so amazed to learn a burglar had confessed to killing Moe Davidson.\u201d \u201cWe were all astonished, as I recall.\u201d \u201cI admit I was.\u201d Joe grinned. \u201cLee, when the guy everybody loves to hate is murdered, every single person in town is a suspect. So finding out that Moe was taken out by someone who didn\u2019t even know him\u2014well, Agatha Christie wouldn\u2019t have approved.\u201d He sat down in one of the visitors\u2019 chairs and picked up a magazine. \u201cSo I tend to agree with your caller.\u201d \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d \u201cJust that the whole situation was astonishing. Not satisfying.\u201d Joe looked into space for a moment before he spoke again. \u201cFrankly, I don\u2019t think the guy\u2014Hollis? Is that his name? I don\u2019t think he has good representation. If I were his attorney, that confession would never have been made, much less accepted as true.\u201d He gave a short laugh. \u201cAlthough he\u2019d probably still be right where he is now. In jail. And he may yet be sent for a decent mental examination.\u201d My uncle and aunt Hogan and Nettie Jones arrived then, and the four of us went out to dinner. I told Hogan about the odd phone call, but he simply shrugged. \u201cSome curious person. But Davidson\u2019s death was surprising all around. His whole life was surprising.\u201d \u201cSurprising how?\u201d \u201cFirst off, how could such an annoying guy be so funny?\u201d When the caller had called Moe Davidson a clown, she hadn\u2019t been slamming his intelligence or personality. Moe had literally been a clown. He\u2019d dressed up in a comic hobo outfit and marched in parades under the name Hobo Moe. He had done pantomime jokes. He\u2019d pulled quarters out of kids\u2019 ears. He\u2019d walked an invisible dog. He\u2019d bragged that his makeup\u2014including the row of painted teardrops near his left eye\u2014was registered with a national listing of clowns and could not legally be copied by any other clown. Moe had even run a clown business, Clowning Around, which happened to be located in the shop next door to TenHuis Chocolade, where I\u2019m business manager. Moe\u2019s store offered clown paraphernalia and collectibles\u2014dolls, games, costumes, DVDs, figurines, notepaper, and a million other items. He provided a clown act for parties. Anything to do with clowns was available at his store. But Moe was equally well-known in Warner Pier for his nonclown activities. When he wasn\u2019t being funny, Moe was one of the most annoying cranks in town. At one time or another\u2014when he wasn\u2019t wearing his clown outfit\u2014all of us could cheerfully have killed him, or at least yelled at him. As far as I know, Moe Davidson never hit, stabbed, shot, drowned, or otherwise physically attacked anyone. But, by golly, he hurt a lot of people. Moe\u2019s weapon was his tongue. He could figure out where anyone\u2019s sensitive spot was, and he knew just what to say to make that sensitive spot hurt. He whacked my ego with a verbal crowbar every time he walked into TenHuis Chocolade, and he seemed to walk in there a lot more than I wanted him to. I have this problem talking. I mix up my words. The highfalutin name for it is \u201cmalapropism,\u201d named after a Mrs. Malaprop in an eighteenth-century play by Sheridan. She made Bartlett\u2019s Familiar Quotations for describing a fellow character as \u201cheadstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.\u201d I once remarked that an unusually kind person had \u201clots of apathy.\u201d Personally, I don\u2019t find Mrs. Malaprop very funny. To me the condition is embarrassing, not humorous. I control this most of the time; it comes out mainly when I\u2019m nervous. And I never once spoke to Moe Davidson without feeling nervous. He laughed whenever he saw me. That made me nervous, and I misspoke. Once he came into TenHuis Chocolade for a pound of truffles, and I recommended the \u201cAsexual Spice\u2014I mean, Asian Spice!\u201d Another time, he approached me with a formal document he wanted to present to the Warner Pier City Council, and I said, \u201cOh, I\u2019m sorry. I make it a rule not to sign petit fours\u2014I mean, petitions!\u201d Moe would laugh at me and tell everybody in town what I\u2019d said. He became the only person in Warner Pier I actively tried to avoid. And I couldn\u2019t avoid him, since he worked next door. When he wasn\u2019t too busy with civic affairs to open the store. When Joe was serving as city attorney, he couldn\u2019t avoid him either. Moe Davidson was that annoying citizen who got up at every civic meeting and opposed something. He also frequently telephoned Joe to gripe, and he wrote letters to the local newspaper. He even gave money to the causes he supported. At a public meeting, the most maddening thing about Moe was that he always started out by saying, \u201cMy family has been in business in Warner Pier since my great-great-grandfather came here in 1845.\u201d Joe said he always had an awful time not breaking in to comment, \u201cSo has my family, Moe, and none of us was ever very successful either.\u201d Because despite the Davidson family\u2019s long history in southwest Michigan, no one in the clan ever became very prominent. They were farmers who didn\u2019t own much land, operators of barbershops and dry cleaning establishments, managers and clerks for small retail businesses. None of them was in \u201cthe professions\u201d\u2014law, medicine, theology, engineering, and such. Joe could never understand why Moe thought an ordinary middle- and working-class background\u2014even one covering one hundred seventy-five years\u2014qualified him as an authority on civic affairs. A civics class would have been more impressive, and Moe didn\u2019t even have that in his background. Both Joe and I also found Moe lacking in common sense. His positions on the city\u2019s doings seemed to come out of left field, or sometimes right field. One time he\u2019d be strongly pro-environment. When the next issue came up, he\u2019d take the position that government was putting environmental issues in front of individual rights. No one could ever predict if he was going to be pro or con on any particular issue until they saw his name on the list of donors. But despite his fanatic and sometimes fantastic views on how to run the city, Moe never ran for office; he lived outside the city limits. He remained simply an interested local businessman and public-spirited citizen who always got up and spoke his piece. By doing this, he managed to infuriate everybody at one time or another. Moe might have been run out of town if it weren\u2019t for his clown act. At every community parade, carnival, or celebration, he painted on a smile and a row of tears, put on his Hobo Moe costume, and made all the children\u2014and most of the adults\u2014laugh. As long as he kept his mouth shut he was hilarious. Moe Davidson was a strange combination of qualities, so maybe it was poetic justice that he died strangely and that his death led to a strange phone call. I probably would have forgotten the whole thing\u2014call, killing, and clown\u2014if three things hadn\u2019t happened. First, Aunt Nettie and Hogan took their dream trip to the South Sea Islands. Second, a For Sale sign went up next door. Third, Joe was dragged into the case. Or maybe he jumped in willingly. Chapter 2 In midwinter in Michigan, we all dream of the South Seas. Snow usually starts here in November. In December it\u2019s fun\u2014skiing, snowmobiling, skating, and Christmas. January\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Well, by then the winter routine has set in, and we can live with it. February is a good time to catch up with your reading and to watch a bunch of DVDs; plus, I\u2019m usually busy then because Warner Pier holds its annual winter tourism promotion that month, and I serve on the tourism committee. But when March starts, and the snow and cold seem to have no end, that\u2019s when most of us are ready for the funny farm\u2014as long as that farm is located someplace warm. Joe and I usually take a vacation in December or January. I need to check in with my parents in Texas, and from there we go on down to the Gulf of Mexico or over to Phoenix or someplace else that is warm and sunny for a couple of weeks. Then we can face February or March, when Aunt Nettie and Hogan try to get away. It\u2019s best for TenHuis Chocolade if Aunt Nettie and I don\u2019t leave town at the same time. This winter Aunt Nettie and Hogan had decided to splurge on Samoa and Tahiti\u2014and they were going in late February. They were even booked for a week on a sailing ship, completely out of touch with civilization. No phones. Limited e-mail. Hogan found a retired sheriff\u2019s deputy to stand in as police chief, and they began to pack lightweight clothes in flowery patterns. As usual, TenHuis Chocolade and I were both up to our ears in the annual winter promotion of the Chamber of Commerce tourism committee. This year the theme was Clown Week, so our shop was full of foil-wrapped molded clowns and molded clown hats in one-inch, two-inch, and four-inch sizes. Not only was I heavily involved, but my best friend Lindy and her whole family had also been sucked in. Lindy and I have been friends for half our lives, and we\u2019re an example of how small-town lives can become entangled. Lindy and I worked together at TenHuis Chocolade when we were both sixteen. At eighteen she married Tony Herrera, who just happened to have a close friend named Joe Woodyard. Twelve years later I married Joe Woodyard. (It gets even more complicated.) Lindy and Tony have three kids. Tony\u2019s dad, Mike Herrera, is a successful restaurant owner, and Lindy is catering manager for her father-in-law. Mike was elected mayor of Warner Pier, and in the middle of his third term he married my mother-in-law, Mercy Woodyard. Anybody who can understand all this without drawing a diagram is a genius. And it largely came about because Joe and Tony both went out for high school wrestling. So I wondered what was going to happen when Lindy told me her son, Tony Junior, now in ninth grade, had signed up for the wrestling team at Warner Pier High School. \u201cI\u2019m almost surprised,\u201d I said. \u201cHis dad will be a hard act to follow, after competing on the team that won State\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cOh sure. Haven\u2019t you and I heard about that glorious event a million times?\u201d \u201cAt least half a million, anyway.\u201d I laughed. \u201cIs Tony Senior excited about Tony Junior\u2014\u201d \u201cPuh-leeze! There is no more \u2018Tony Junior.\u2019\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s happened to him?\u201d \u201cNow that he\u2019s a high school athlete, he\u2019s known as T.J.\u201d \u201cHmmm. It\u2019s a good enough nickname, but how is Tony Senior taking it?\u201d \u201cAbout like you\u2019d expect. He doesn\u2019t say much, but he doesn\u2019t know whether he should be angry or hurt. Anyway, he accidentally pushed Ton\u2014I mean T.J.\u2014toward wrestling because they\u2019re having a long-term hassle.\u201d \u201cWhat about?\u201d \u201cWrestling! Professional wrestling.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m under the impression that all amateur wrestlers hate the pros.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re pretty close to right. Tony\u2014Tony Senior\u2014froths at the mouth when he catches T.J. watching those shows. Uses words like \u2018stupid\u2019 and \u2018phony.\u2019 It\u2019s caused some homemade matches I haven\u2019t enjoyed. The kind that include yelling and pouting.\u201d \u201cDoesn\u2019t Tony see that if he\u2019d drop it, T.J. would probably lose interest?\u201d \u201cHeavens! I wish one of them would lose interest. They\u2019re driving me nuts. That\u2019s why I talked both of them into working on Clown Week. But not together.\u201d \u201cWhat are they going to do?\u201d \u201cTony has agreed to supervise the skating rink.\u201d \u201cOh good! Joe says he was always the best skater in their gang, growing up. And he\u2019s big enough to keep any rambunctious skaters in line.\u201d Lindy nodded. \u201cAnd T.J. is going to work on the sledding hill.\u201d \u201cLearning to handle the public, huh? His grandfather will have him working as a waiter PDQ.\u201d \u201cOh, Marcia\u2019s already going to work at the Sidewalk Caf\u00e9 during Clown Week.\u201d Marcia was Lindy\u2019s older daughter, now sixteen. I laughed. \u201cSend her around if she wants some hints on how to get good tips. Waiting tables saved my bacon several times before I landed in the chocolate business.\u201d *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0* Between Clown Week and Aunt Nettie and Hogan\u2019s trip, I nearly forgot that odd phone call to the police station. A few days after it came, Joe and I drove Hogan and Aunt Nettie to the Grand Rapids airport and enviously waved as they lugged their carry-ons down to the departure gate. When they reached Sydney they e-mailed to let us know they arrived safely and were about to set sail. Their first day at sea was the day Moe Davidson\u2019s store went on the market. As business manager of TenHuis Chocolade, I had long lusted after the building next door. Moe Davidson had owned that building, but I didn\u2019t know who inherited it. He was survived by a wife, Emma, and he had two grown children from a previous marriage. The Warner Pier gossip mill reported that Moe and the kids had hardly spoken for years. Both son and daughter were in their early thirties. I hadn\u2019t ever seen Moe\u2019s daughter, but I had heard that her name was Lorraine. I had met the son, Chuck, briefly, when he visited the shop. Emma and Moe had been married about two years, and she had occasionally worked in the Clowning Around shop, but nobody in Warner Pier knew her well. The Davidsons hadn\u2019t spent the past two winters in Warner Pier; lots of tourist-oriented businesses close up in the off-season. Emma and Moe had gone to her home in Indiana. In addition, Emma hadn\u2019t taken much part in local affairs when she was there. I\u2019d never met her, and I\u2019d heard she didn\u2019t have much to say for herself. In September Moe had closed the store for the winter, though he had originally planned to reopen for Clown Week. None of us knew if that would work out now. The apartment over the store, a common facility in downtown Warner Pier, had been vacant for a couple of years. Even though I didn\u2019t know just who now owned the building next door, I knew I wanted to buy it from them. So the new For Sale sign got my attention fast. Nearly forty years earlier Aunt Nettie and her first husband, Phil TenHuis\u2014my mother\u2019s brother\u2014had spent a year in the Netherlands learning to make luxury, European-style chocolates. They then rented a shop in their hometown and opened a business catering to the tourists who visited one of Lake Michigan\u2019s prime resorts, Warner Pier. Due to Aunt Nettie\u2019s and Uncle Phil\u2019s hard work and expertise, plus the good business climate of Warner Pier, TenHuis Chocolade had prospered. As time went by they had bought the original building, the shop had expanded to fill its whole downstairs, and they had remodeled several times. Five years earlier Uncle Phil had been killed in a traffic accident. By then I was a five-foot-eleven blond divorcee with an accounting degree, so I moved up from Texas and joined TenHuis as business manager. I met Joe, got married, and settled into the community. I was proud of being part of TenHuis Chocolade and proud because we had tripled the mail-order side of the business. Today the business depends on mail order as much as on tourism. This keeps us busy year-round, unlike the Warner Pier merchants who depend solely on summer visitors. I thought TenHuis had lots of potential for even more expansion, and to expand we needed more space. I needed a larger office staff, but we had no place to put desks or people. We needed at least one sales rep out there calling on corporations and convention planners. We needed a larger shipping department. We needed a catalog and direct-mail department, a catering specialist, a larger workroom for producing truffles and bonbons, and a dozen other things that we couldn\u2019t have because we had no place to house them. So I\u2019d had my eye on the store next door as an investment for TenHuis Chocolade ever since I came to work for Aunt Nettie. It would double our available space while keeping TenHuis in its prime location, in the heart of Warner Pier\u2019s picturesque business district. We could expand without the inconvenience of changing our address. However, I had always thought of the building as a purchase for TenHuis as a company. But the company couldn\u2019t buy a pricy piece of property\u2014and I\u2019m happy to say that downtown Warner Pier property is expensive\u2014without Aunt Nettie\u2019s approval. She is president of the company. But if the building went on sale while Aunt Nettie was out of the country, and I had to move quickly to get it\u2014well, I might have to buy it on my own. The thought was terrifying. I\u2019d have to talk to Joe, of course, since he\u2019d be linked to me as a purchaser. I\u2019d also have to consult my banker. But a sale was probably doable. I fought down a panic attack, took two deep breaths, and called the Realtor. That the sign even went up showed how out of touch Moe Davidson\u2019s kids\u2014or wife, or whoever was handling his estate\u2014were. Warner Pier is small enough to rely on word of mouth. If a piece of property in the business district goes on the market, the rest of the business community gets advance warning in the post office line or the drugstore or the coffee shop. Rarely do we find out something\u2019s for sale by seeing a sign. At least the name of the real estate firm was familiar. I\u2019d served on a Chamber of Commerce committee with the local agent, Tilda VanAust. I saw the sign at ten thirty and was on the phone with Tilda by ten thirty-five. \u201cHow did the Davidsons get the store on the market so fast?\u201d I asked. \u201cActually,\u201d Tilda said, \u201cMoe had signed the property over to Emma for tax reasons, so it didn\u2019t have to go through probate. Emma\u2019s signing it back to Chuck and Lorraine. She\u2019s here to help them close the building out, but she won\u2019t share in the proceeds.\u201d \u201cInteresting. How much are they asking?\u201d I held my breath. The asking price she mentioned was, of course, way too high, but I told her I\u2019d definitely like to view the property. I tried to sound cool. \u201cOf course, Tilda, you know that business was not so hot this year in Warner Pier. But my aunt and I would like to consider expansion at some future date. So we might look at it as an investment.\u201d \u201cLee, you know that this property is in a prime location. There\u2019s been a lot of interest in it already. I\u2019m expecting an offer this week.\u201d Sure. As if I believed that, since nobody had known it was going on the market. But now that it was officially for sale, I expected Tilda would be getting some calls. I definitely wanted to be first in line, but I didn\u2019t want to act so eager that Tilda saw me as a sucker. Tilda said she had some time that very day, so we agreed to tour the building at three o\u2019clock. As soon as I hung up I tried to figure out what time it was for Aunt Nettie and Hogan. Actually, I decided, it didn\u2019t matter. The best way to reach them was by e-mail. Hogan had said he\u2019d check that whenever he had access to it. I fired off an electronic message. Then I sat back and faced facts. I was on my own. It was unlikely that I\u2019d be able to reach Aunt Nettie to get her approval in the next few days. If I wanted advice, I had a perfectly good husband who had a law degree and also knew a lot about construction. Joe would be glad to advise me. Besides, if I had to act on my own, any buying I did would involve him legally, so he\u2019d have to go along with it anyway. Joe works three days a week for an agency similar to the Legal Aid Society. It\u2019s located in Holland, thirty miles away, and specializes in poverty law. I picked up the phone and called his office. \u201cSorry, Lee,\u201d the administrative assistant said. \u201cHe had to go see a judge down in Warner County.\u201d \u201cIn our county? But nearly all his cases are in Holland.\u201d \u201cI know. He was surprised by the call. But he went. You could call his cell.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t want to do that. Either he\u2019d have it turned off or I\u2019d interrupt something he doesn\u2019t want interrupted. I\u2019ll send him a text. But if you hear from him, ask him to call me.\u201d I hung up and began to chew my nails and consider the possibilities. I might not be able to talk the Davidson family down to a figure I thought was fair, and I\u2019d have to give the whole project up. But even if we did reach an agreement, Aunt Nettie might not think it was a good idea. Or if I couldn\u2019t reach Aunt Nettie, I could decide to buy it on my own, only to find that Aunt Nettie didn\u2019t want it. Joe and I would wind up owning a downtown building we didn\u2019t really want. Then we could either resell it or rent it out. It might be a good financial investment. Or we could fail to find a buyer or a leaser and lose a lot of money we couldn\u2019t afford to lose. Looking at the purchase from several angles, it could be either a real winner or a serious loser. I bit another nail. When the time came to meet Tilda, I asked one of the ladies who make the chocolate to watch the counter. I also told her where I\u2019d be and asked her to pass that news on to Joe if he showed up. Then I took a deep breath, put on my jacket, and headed next door. The entrance to Clowning Around was ajar, so I walked right in, then came to a complete stop. All I could see were clowns. Clown dolls, clown masks, clown puppets, clown pictures, clown books. They hung from the ceiling and were stacked in shelves along both side walls. They were piled on tables in the middle of the room. There were white-faced clowns, hobo clowns, even a mannequin of a dog wearing a clown costume. There were girl clowns and boy clowns. Harlequins and Pierrots. And the centerpiece was a large portrait of Moe himself, wearing his Hobo Moe outfit. Crazy colors and wild shapes were everywhere. The bizarre decor of the shop made the first sound I heard fit right in. It was a loud, piercing whine. The noise sounded like a siren, but I quickly realized it was a human voice of the high-pitched and annoying sort. \u201cHonestly! The mess! This place is nowhere near ready to show to potential buyers. That agent must be crazy.\u201d A deep and melodious male voice replied, \u201cCleaning is our responsibility, Lorraine. It\u2019s not up to the Realtor. And I\u2019m not getting rid of anything until we get through this Clown Week promotion and see if we can\u2019t sell most of the stock.\u201d \u201cNobody would buy those idiotic clowns! God! I\u2019ve gotten to the point where I hate these things. They\u2019re just reminders of what a jerk we had for a dad. And nobody will be interested in the building in the shape it\u2019s in. It needs to be staged.\u201d \u201cStaged?\u201d The deep voice chuckled. \u201cYou\u2019ve been watching too much HGTV.\u201d \u201cYou haven\u2019t been watching enough, Chuck. Things have to look attractive if they\u2019re going to sell.\u201d I\u2019d apparently interrupted a family quarrel. I quickly slammed the door behind me, just to make a noise, then called out, \u201cHello! Anybody here?\u201d I heard a gasp from the back room, and the face of a blond woman appeared between two clown masks. The light was so lousy I couldn\u2019t see her clearly, but when she spoke the voice was the one I\u2019d heard earlier. \u201cHi, there! Are you Mrs. Woodyard?\u201d \u201cYes, I\u2019m Lee Woodyard, your next-door neighbor. I was supposed to meet Tilda VanAust.\u201d \u201cShe got held up, so she sent us to open up. I\u2019m Lorraine Davidson.\u201d The woman edged out of a curtained door that obviously led to the back room. She hit a switch and light flooded over her. The effect was that one of the clowns had come to life. Lorraine was one of those women who apparently believe that if a little makeup enhances her appearance, then a lot will make her a raving beauty. She wore heavy blue eye shadow, and blush was slathered on in exactly the wrong part of her cheeks. Her eyebrows looked as if they\u2019d been painted on with a Magic Marker. Her hair had been bleached until it would have tempted any healthy horse to have a bite, and she wore it in a fluffy, \u201cbig hair\u201d style. In other words, her appearance matched her voice. Loud, brassy, and unpleasant. I blinked. Then I saw a man behind her and realized it must be the guy with the voice as melodious as Lorraine\u2019s was raucous. \u201cHi,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m Chuck Davidson.\u201d Chuck matched his voice, too. He was tall, nice-looking, and neatly dressed, with dark hair and even features. He came forward and we shook hands. He had a pleasant smile. \u201cAnd this,\u201d Chuck said, \u201cis our stepmother, Emma.\u201d For a moment I couldn\u2019t figure out who he was talking about. There was no other person present. Then there was movement among the clowns, and a small woman came from behind the counter. Mrs. Davidson couldn\u2019t have offered a greater contrast to her stepdaughter. Lorraine was tall. Emma Davidson was short. Lorraine was thin, almost skinny. Mrs. Davidson was plump. Lorraine had long, bleached hair. Her stepmom\u2019s hair was a mousy brown and was short and straight. Mrs. Davidson didn\u2019t speak, but simply nodded. I hadn\u2019t come to talk to these people. I hope I greeted them pleasantly, but I was there to look around. So we looked. I told the three of them that I wanted to get an idea of the building and to visualize the changes that would be required if we expanded into that space. I led the way, looking at the shelving, then going into the back to judge the amount of room. I had brought a flashlight, and I investigated the basement, making sure there were no damp spots and taking a look at the furnace. Chuck accompanied me. I addressed questions to him, but he was vague about details such as utility bills and taxes. I\u2019d have to get those figures from Tilda. I wasn\u2019t paying him much mind, actually, until he caught my attention with a strange remark. \u201cOf course, I know that cost is no object to you, Lee.\u201d I turned to look at him, and I\u2019m sure my amazement showed. But I tried to turn my reply into a joke. \u201cChuck! I\u2019m an accountant! I assure you that even if my last name were Rockefeller, cost would matter to me.\u201d He smiled. \u201cI know you and your husband are major benefactors of Warner Pier.\u201d For a moment I felt more amazed than ever. Then I got it. \u201cOh. Someone has told you that Joe donated the Warner Point Conference Center to the city.\u201d \u201cIt was a terrific gift.\u201d \u201cJoe inherited that property unexpectedly, and he didn\u2019t want to own it. In fact, because of the taxes and upkeep he couldn\u2019t afford to own it. He says he gained financially by giving it away. And he donated it with the understanding that his name would never appear publicly in connection with the center.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sorry! I didn\u2019t know the background.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s quite all right. There\u2019s no secret about any of this. But I assure you that Joe and I personally are like most people. We live paycheck to paycheck. As for the possible purchase of this building, that would be a business decision for TenHuis Chocolade. I certainly have no interest in becoming a downtown landowner myself.\u201d I had to admire Chuck. Although I had tried to speak pleasantly, I had definitely told him where to get off. A lot of people would have been crushed by my little speech. Chuck didn\u2019t turn a hair. \u201cI\u2019m sorry I misunderstood the situation. I guess I\u2019m used to my dad.\u201d \u201cYour dad?\u201d \u201cOh yes. I\u2019m sure you know he was always giving money for community projects. But he would want full credit and a picture in the newspaper.\u201d I\u2019d observed that particular trait in Moe myself. But I decided I\u2019d better not comment. \u201cI guess I\u2019m ready to look around upstairs,\u201d I said. \u201cIs the stairway near the rear entrance?\u201d Chuck followed me to the back. I had stopped for a look at the staff bathroom when I heard the front door open. Good, I thought, it\u2019s Tilda. Now we can get down to cases. Instead, I heard Lorraine\u2019s raucous croak. \u201cOf all the nerve!\u201d The voice that replied to her was deep and familiar. \u201cI beg your pardon?\u201d \u201cYou\u2019ve got gall, coming here to harass us!\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sorry\u2014I was told I would find my wife here.\u201d It was Joe, and for some reason Lorraine Davidson was angry with him. I headed for the front of the store. Chuck called out. \u201cLorraine! Calm down.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 15.32}, {"asin": "1612961495", "title": "Promises of Like Souls (A Julie Madigan Thriller)", "author": "Val Conrad", "description": "About the Author Being squeamish is not a good characteristic for anyone outside of emergency services. It's not helpful for thriller writers, either, says Val Conrad. She loves being able to blend the reality of the places she has lived with actual history, adding the complexities of medicine, and setting a story against a background and bone-chilling crime and the challenge of solving it. From paramedic to nurse to teacher, Val most recently took time away from writing to finish her third degree and become a family nurse practitioner. She lives in the Texas Panhandle with her husband Bill, serving her hometown and making time to write.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "1561458791", "title": "King & Kayla and the Case of the Mysterious Mouse", "author": "Nancy Meyers", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 1\u20133\u2014King and Kayla return in a new mystery for the early elementary crowd. This time King's ball goes over the fence, but it is not in the neighbor's backyard when they look for it. Can this clever dog and his human find the missing ball? The author has a knack for writing humorous stories from a canine perspective. Youngsters will laugh at King's enthusiasm as each new thing becomes his favorite\u2014playing fetch, running after his ball, eating grilled cheese, and making new friends. Young puppy Thor provides more laughs as he is constantly distracted by butterflies and birds. The digitally-colored and pencil illustrations have a lightness that matches the tone of the story, while the expressive faces of the characters add depth. Readers can see King's disgusted look as he smells something \"BAD.\" The illustrations makes it clear what King means when he says that \"Kayla makes mad eyes at\" him. Budding detectives will have the benefit of both King's discoveries and Kayla's reasoning as they piece together the clues. VERDICT A welcome addition to collections supporting the transition from picture books to chapter books, this title will appeal to both dog lovers and mystery buffs.\u2014Suzanne Costner, Fairview Elementary School, Maryville, TN Review \"Confusion, mischief, and silliness abound. Kids who don't always have the vocabulary to express themselves will sympathize with this waggish pup and his earnest desire to be understood by his human.\" \u2014Kirkus Reviews \"Budding detectives will have the benefit of both King's discoveries and Kayla's reasoning as they piece together the clues. . . . A welcome addition to collections supporting the transition from picture books to chapter books, this title will appeal to both dog lovers and mystery buffs.\" \u2014School Library Journal About the Author Dori Hillestad Butler has published magazine stories, educational materials, plays, book reviews, characters for a board game, and over sixty children's books. A two-time Geisel Honor Book winner for King & Kayla and the Case of the Missing Dog Treats and King & Kayla and the Case of the Lost Tooth , she has also been nominated for children's choice awards in nineteen different states and won the 2011 Edgar Award for the best juvenile mystery for Buddy Files: Case of the Lost Boy . She lives in Washington. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1849669740", "title": "J.K. Rowling: A Bibliography 1997-2013", "author": "Philip W. Errington", "description": "Review \u201cA descriptive bibliography is often a labor of love; to write one for all the works of J. K. Rowling (including some ephemera, proof copies, and articles) in UK and US editions (excluding Braille and large type) from 1997 to 2013 is an act of heroism scarcely exceeded by the boy wizard himself, and worthy of this unique publishing phenomenon. Rowling herself describes the result as \u2018slavishly thorough\u2019 and \u2018mind-boggling,\u2019 and professes to be \u2018humbled and deeply flattered\u2019 by it. Most might see the uses of this type of work as professional (for auctioneers) or financial (for collectors). But one may also chart textual changes, illustration history, or marketing practices of the series, thanks to the significant level of detail used for each edition of each work. Printed books and manuscripts expert Errington (Sotheby's) includes descriptions of title pages, collation, construction, size, spacing, illustration, binding, jacket, pricing, and special comments for all the books, though the other materials are less thoroughly described. The author's notes are of particular value, providing insights into the publishing history of a series and an author whose effect on publishing, popular culture, and the world at large can hardly be overstated. Summing Up : Highly recommended. All academic levels; professionals/practitioners.\u201d \u2013M. R. Pukkila, Colby College, USA, CHOICE \u201cRowling's books are covered in exquisite detail ... Many of the notes read like good stories in themselves and there are some fascinating snippets of information to be had.\u201d \u2015 The Bookbag Book Description The first descriptive bibliography of the published work of J.K. Rowling. About the Author Philip Errington is Director for Children's Books within the Department of Printed Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby's. He is the author of John Masefield : The 'Great Auk' of English Literature: A Bibliography (2004), and the editor of several new editions of Masefield's work. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 47.99}, {"asin": "1682471500", "title": "OSS Operation Black Mail: One Woman\u2019s Covert War Against the Imperial Japanese Army", "author": "Ann Todd", "description": "Review \"\u2026for those interested in WWII history, intelligence efforts, and women agents, every page has something fascinating to offer.\" - Criminal Element.com and WildMooBooks \"The terms 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' are very much in vogue in the modern political era (2016-2017). More than seventy years ago, during World War II, fake news was the handiwork of Elizabeth P. 'Betty' McIntosh and her colleagues in the Morale Operations (MO) branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. Their aim was to undermine the individual enemy fighting man's will to win, in the case of McIntosh and her confreres, the Japanese soldier in Southeast Asia\u2026. Ann Todd has written a colorful account of the life of a remarkable Woman\u2026. All readers will enjoy this fast-paced and fascinating biography.\" -- The Journal of America's Military Past \"Todd has created a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in the Allied war against Japan, U.S. intelligence operations in the 1940s, and the critical role of women in the OSS and the U.S. intelligence community . . . . There are few books that cover the same ground in Asia, and very few that offer the insight Todd provides on how it feels to work to erode enemy morale as part of a larger war zone effort . . . . Every page is filled with information that practitioners of the espionage trade, historians of World War II, and the common reader will want to read and re-read.\"-- Studies in Intelligence \"It's well worth a read by people who read your blog and who are interested in World War II history and espionage. It's quite a remarkable book.\" -- Center for International Maritime Security \"In OSS Operation Black Mail , Ann Todd provides the reader with an integrated discussion of the strategic role of the OSS in Asia, the tactical missions of the various units of OSS assigned to CBI, and the personal insights of one of the most important OSS and CIA officers, Elizabeth P. McIntosh. Any one of these aspects would make this book recommended reading for intelligence professionals; by combining all three, though, Todd has created a book that should be required reading for anyone interested in the Allied war against Japan, US intelligence operations in the 1940s, and the critical role of women in the OSS and the US intelligence community.\" -- Soldier of Fortune\" \"If read back to back, first, ' Sisterhood of Spies ,' immediately followed by ' OSS Operation Black Mail ,' every scene almost ever paragraph, add to the cumulative creation of a single new definition that combines honor, bravery, and courage in America's wars.\" -- Leatherneck Magazine \"Every page is filled with information that practitioners of the espionage trade, historians of World War II, and the common reader will want to read and re-read.\" - Center for the Study of Intelligence \"Todd not only tells Elizabeth's story, but she informs us about the little-known, but hugely important role of OSS in the East, in a tale full of colourful characters, such as Paul Child (Julia's husband) and Jane Foster, who led a tragic life. She also fills the book with the vivid atmosphere of the East, and she has a thorough knowledge of history.\" --Bookaddiction \"This is a fascinating look at the use of implacable and harsh psychological operations against a mortal enemy, conducted without restraint or remorse. The author delves into Elizabeth's story in a way that makes it seem almost fictional, but the book is obviously well researched. Her subject is a real-life hero who is still acknowledged for her skill and work by the present-day intelligence community. It is a tribute to the accomplishments of a legendary American spy who started in the OSS and continued her career in the postwar CIA.\" -- WWII History Magazine \"A readable book that is a tribute to an inventive 'woman of intelligence' and an important OSS success story.\" -- The Washington Times \"Ann Todd has made an invaluable contribution to the intelligence literature. Her portrait of OSS officer Betty McIntosh, a personal hero and role model for many of us in the intelligence profession, brings Betty's amazing story to life. This is a beautifully researched and written book. It is a wonderfully fitting tribute to a legendary American spy.\"-- James M. Olson, senior lecturer, George Bush School of Government and Public Service, and former Chief of CIA Counterintelligence.\"A fascinating account of a remarkable woman in extraordinary circumstances. War and spycraft as they have seldom been portrayed. And a wonderful match between author and subject.\"--H. W. Brands, New York Times bestselling author of The First American and Traitor to His Class \"Today as 'fake news' and 'disinformation' muddy our news media and roil our political discourse, this colorful account of an adventurous and deeply patriotic young woman shows what powerful weapons these can be against a wartime adversary. Former reporter Betty McIntosh emerges from these pages as one of OSS General 'Wild Bill' Donovan's most creative shadow warriors.\" --Peter Earnest, Executive Director of the International Spy Museum \" OSS Operation Black Mail is the fascinating story of Betty McIntosh, whose real-life World War II exploits with the OSS sound like the product of a Hollywood screenwriter's imagination. Betty was a trailblazer in American intelligence, both in the OSS and later the CIA. Her story is not to be missed.\" --Bill Harlow, former Chief Spokesman, Central Intelligence Agency About the Author ANN TODD has been a contributing author and consultant for the National Geographic Society, given presentations in national parks about OSS operations, and worked as a historian for the National Museum of the Marine Corps. She served in the U.S. Coast Guard, and now lives in Dripping Springs, Texas.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 29.52}, {"asin": "B0006RXN6K", "title": "My West Side Story: A Grand Adventure", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 11.01}, {"asin": "1250141222", "title": "Thank You for Being Late", "author": "Thomas L. Friedman", "description": "Review \"Thomas L. Friedman is a self-\u00adconfessed 'explanatory journalist'\u2015whose goal is to be a 'translator from English to English.' And he is extremely good at it . . . it is hard to think of any other journalist who has explained as many complicated subjects to so many people . . . Now he has written his most ambitious book\u2015part personal odyssey, part commonsense manifesto . . . As a guide for perplexed Westerners, this book is very hard to beat.\" \u2015John Micklethwait, The New York Times Book Review \"[An] ambitious book . . . In a country torn by a divisive election, technological change and globalization, reconstructing social ties so that people feel respected and welcomed is more important than ever . . . Rather than build walls, [healthy communities] face their problems and solve them. In [Friedman's] telling, this is the way to make America great.\" \u2015Laura Vanderkam, The Wall Street Journal \"Engaging . . . in some senses Thank You For Being Late is an extension of [Friedman's] previous works, woven in with wonderful personal stories (including admirably honest discussions about the nature of being a columnist). What gives Friedman\u2019s book a new twist is his belief that upheaval in 2016 is actually far more dramatic than earlier phases . . . Friedman also argues that Americans need to discover their sense of 'community,' and uses his home town of Minneapolis to demonstrate this.\" \u2015Gillian Tett, Financial Times \"The globe-trotting New York Times columnist\u2019s most famous book was about the world being flat. This one is all about the world being fast . . . His main piece of advice for individuals, corporations, and countries is clear: Take a deep breath and adapt. This world isn\u2019t going to wait for you.\" \u2015 Fortune \"[A] humane and empathetic book.\" \u2015David Henkin, The Washington Post \"[Friedman's] latest engrossingly descriptive analysis of epic trends and their consequences . . . Friedman offers tonic suggestions for fostering 'moral innovation' and a commitment to the common good in this detailed and clarion inquiry, which, like washing dirty windows, allows us to see far more clearly what we\u2019ve been looking at all along . . . his latest must-read.\" \u2015 Booklist (starred review) \"The three-time Pulitzer winner puts his familiar methodology\u2015extensive travel, thorough reporting, interviews with the high-placed movers and shakers, conversations with the lowly moved and shaken\u2015to especially good use here . . . He prescribes nothing less than a redesign of our workplaces, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and communities . . . Required reading for a generation that's 'going to be asked to dance in a hurricane.'\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) About the Author Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist-the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of six bestselling books, among them From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat .He was born in Minneapolis in 1953, and grew up in the middle-class Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean studies, attended St. Antony's College, Oxford, on a Marshall Scholarship, and received an M.Phil. degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. After three years with United Press International, he joined The New York Times , where he has worked ever since as a reporter, correspondent, bureau chief, and columnist. At the Times , he has won three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1983 for international reporting (from Lebanon), in 1988 for international reporting (from Israel), and in 2002 for his columns after the September 11th attacks. Friedman's first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem , won the National Book Award in 1989. His second book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), won the Overseas Press Club Award for best book on foreign policy in 2000. In 2002 FSG published a collection of his Pulitzer Prize-winning columns, along with a diary he kept after 9/11, as Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 . His fourth book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005) became a #1 New York Times bestseller and received the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in November 2005. A revised and expanded edition was published in hardcover in 2006 and in 2007. The World Is Flat has sold more than 4 million copies in thirty-seven languages. In 2008 he brought out Hot, Flat, and Crowded , which was published in a revised edition a year later. His sixth book, That Used to Be Us: How American Fell Behind in the World We Invented and How We Can Come Back , co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, was published in 2011.Thomas L. Friedman lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "0385535732", "title": "Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill", "author": "Candice Millard", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2016: It should come as no surprise that Winston Churchill was an ambitious, young go-getter long before he became Sir Winston Churchill\u2014but you might be surprised by how interesting his young life was. The son of Lord Randolph Churchill\u2014who ascended to the position of leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer before dying at the age of forty five\u2014Winston Churchill set off as a young man to find glory on the battlefield, with an eye toward ultimately emulating his father\u2019s success in politics. The young Winston played a part in four wars on three different continents, the last of which was the Boer War. His experience as a prisoner in that war is the jumping off point of this book, and author Millard puts her narrative gifts to work as she describes his harrowing escape, setting the man in his time, and illustrating the man to describe his times. \u2013 Chris Schluep, The Amazon Book Review Review NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Chosen as a Washington Post and New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2016 \"A thrilling account...This book is an awesome nail-biter and top-notch character study rolled into one...Could someone be persuaded to make a movie about this episode of his life? I\u2019d watch.\" \u2014 New York Times Critic Jennifer Senior's Top Ten Books of 2016 \u201cGripping\u2026tremendously readable and enjoyable\u2026\u201d \u2014 Alex von Tunzelmann, The New York Times Book Review \"[A] truly fascinating book.\" \u2014 Financial Times \"A gripping story...It's a thrilling journey and Millard tells it with gusto.\" \u2014 The Guardian \u201cMillard\u2019s tome is a slam-bang study of Churchill\u2019s wit and wile as he navigates the Boer War like [a] proto-James Bond.\u201d \u2014 USA Today About the Author CANDICE MILLARD is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic . She lives in Kansas City with her husband and three children. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prologue Crouching in darkness outside the prison fence in wartime southern Africa, Winston Churchill could still hear the voices of the guards on the other side. Seizing his chance an hour earlier, the twenty-five-year-old had scaled the high, corrugated-iron paling that enclosed the prison yard. But now he was trapped in a new dilemma. He could not remain where he was. At any moment, he could be discov\u00adered and shot by the guards or by the soldiers who patrolled the dark, surrounding streets of Pretoria, the capital of the enemy Boer repub\u00adlic. Yet neither could he run. His hopes for survival depended on two other prisoners, who were still inside the wall. In the long minutes since he had dropped down into the darkness, they had not appeared. From the moment he had been taken as a prisoner of war, Churchill had dreamed of reclaiming his freedom, hatching scheme after scheme, each more elaborate than the last. In the end, however, the plan that had actually brought him over the fence was not his own. The two other English prisoners had plotted the escape, and agreed only with great reluctance to bring him along. They also car\u00adried the provisions that were supposed to sustain all three of them as they tried to cross nearly three hundred miles of enemy territory. Unable even to climb back into his hated captivity, Churchill found himself alone, hiding in the low, ragged shrubs that lined the fence, with no idea what to do next.  Although he was still a very young man, Churchill was no stranger to situations of great personal peril. He had already taken part in four wars on three different continents, and had come close to death in each one. He had felt bullets whistling by his head in Cuba, seen friends hacked to death in British India, been separated from his regiment in the deserts of the Sudan and, just a month earlier, in November 1899, at the start of the Boer War, led the resistance against a devastating attack on an armored train. Several men had died in that attack, blown to pieces by shells and a deafening barrage of bullets, many more had been horribly wounded, and Churchill had barely escaped with his life. To his fury and deep frustration, however, he had not eluded capture. He, along with dozens of Brit\u00adish officers and soldiers, had been taken prisoner by the Boers\u2014the tough, largely Dutch-speaking settlers who had been living in south\u00adern Africa for centuries and were not about to let the British Empire take their land without a fight. When the Boers had realized that they had captured the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the highest ranks of the British aristocracy, they had been thrilled. Churchill had been quickly transported to a POW camp in Pretoria, the Boer capital, where he had been imprisoned with about a hundred other men. Since that day, he had been able to think of nothing but escape, and returning to the war. The Boer War had turned out to be far more difficult and more devastating than the amusing colonial war the British had expected. Their army, one of the most admired and feared fighting forces in the world, was astonished to find itself struggling to hold its own against a little-known republic on a continent that most Europeans consid\u00adered to be theirs for the taking. Already, the British had learned more from this war than almost any other. Slowly, they were real\u00adizing that they had entered a new age of warfare. The days of gallant young soldiers wearing bright red coats had suddenly disappeared, leaving the vaunted British army to face an invisible enemy with weapons so powerful they could wreak carnage without ever getting close enough to look their victims in the eye. Long before it was over, the war would also change the empire in another, equally indelible way: It would bring to the attention of a rapt British public a young man named Winston Churchill. Although he had tried again and again, in war after war, to win glory, Churchill had returned home every time without the medals that mattered, no more distinguished or famous than he had been when he set out. The Boer War, he believed, was his best chance to change that, to prove that he was not just the son of a famous man. He was special, even extraordinary, and he was meant not just to fight for his country but one day lead it. Although he believed this without question, he still had to convince everyone else, something he would never be able to do from a POW camp in Pretoria. When Churchill had scrambled over the prison fence, seizing his chance after a nearby guard had turned his back, he felt elated. Now, as he kneeled in the shrubs just outside, waiting helplessly for the other men, his desperation mounted with each passing minute. Finally, he heard a British voice. Churchill realized with a surge of relief that it was one of his co-conspirators. \u201cIt\u2019s all up,\u201d the man whispered. The guard was suspicious, watching their every move. They could not get out. \u201cCan you get back in?\u201d the other prisoner asked. Both men knew the answer. As they stood on opposite sides of the fence, one still in captivity, the other achingly close to freedom, it was painfully apparent that Churchill could not undo what had already been done. It would have been impossible for him to climb back into the prison enclosure without being caught, and the punish\u00adment for his escape would have been immediate and possibly fatal.  \u00a0 \u00a0In all the time he had spent thinking about his escape since arriv\u00ading in Pretoria, the one scenario that Churchill had not envisioned was crossing enemy territory alone without companions or provisions of any kind. He didn\u2019t have a weapon, a map, a compass, or, aside from a few bars of chocolate in his pocket, any food. He didn\u2019t speak the language, either that of the Boers or that of the Africans. Beyond the vaguest of outlines, he didn\u2019t even have a plan\u2014just the unshak\u00adable conviction that he was destined for greatness. Part OnePushful, the YoungerChapter 1 -\u00a0Death by Inches From earliest childhood, Churchill had been fascinated by war, and dreamed of gallantry in battle. \u201cThere is no ambition I cherish so keenly,\u201d he had confided to his younger brother, Jack, \u201cas to gain a reputation for personal courage.\u201dAs a boy, he had collected a miniature army of fifteen hundred toy soldiers and spent hours sending them into combat. \u201cFrom very early youth I had brooded about soldiers and war, and often I had imagined in dreams and day-dreams the sensations attendant upon being for the first time under fire,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt seemed to my youthful mind that it must be a thrilling and immense experience to hear the whistle of bullets all around and to play at hazard from moment to moment with death and wounds.\u201d At Sandhurst, the Royal Military College, from which he had graduated in 1894, Churchill had loved nothing more than to participate in war games, regretting only \u201cthat it all had to be make-believe.\u201dTo be an aristocratic Englishman in the late nineteenth century meant being surrounded not merely by the lavish benefits of imperial power but by its equally vast responsibilities. Covering more than a fifth of the world\u2019s land surface, the British Empire had come to rule about a quarter of the human race\u2014more than 450 million people living on every continent and on the islands of every ocean. It was the largest empire ever known, easily outranking the once mighty Spanish Empire, which had been the original object of the awe-filled description \u201cthe empire on which the sun never sets.\u201d It was five times the size of the Roman Empire at its zenith, and its influence\u2014over people, language, money, even time, for the clocks in every time zone were set to Greenwich mean time\u2014was unrivaled.By the time Churchill reached adulthood, the greatest threat to the empire no longer came from the other major powers\u2014Spain, Portugal, Germany or France\u2014but from the ever-expanding burden of ruling its own colonies. Although long the object of admiration, envy and fear, the British army had been stretched impossibly thin as it struggled to keep the empire intact, crisscrossing continents and oceans to put down revolts everywhere from Egypt to Ireland.To Churchill, such far-flung conflicts offered an irresistible opportunity for personal glory and advancement. When he entered the British army and finally became a soldier, with the real possibility of dying in combat, Churchill\u2019s enthusiasm for war did not waver. On the contrary, he had written to his mother that he looked forward to battle \u201cnot so much in spite of as because of the risks I run.\u201d What he wanted most from his life as a soldier was not adventure or even battlefield experience but a chance to prove himself. He wanted not simply to fight but to be noticed while fighting.For a member of Churchill\u2019s high social class, such bold, unabashed ambition was a novelty, if not an outright scandal. He had been born a British nobleman, a direct descendant of John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, his parents personal friends of the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria\u2019s oldest son and heir. Yet in his open pursuit of fame and popular favor, Churchill seemed far less Victorian than Rooseveltian. \u201cThe immortal Barnum himself had not a greater gift for making himself and his affairs the talk of the world,\u201d his first biographer, Alexander MacCallum Scott, would write just a few years later. \u201cWinston advertises himself as simply and unconsciously as he breathes.\u201dIn a world in which men were praised not just for their stiff upper lip but for extreme modesty when it came to their own achievements, Churchill was widely criticized for being that most offensive of creatures, the medal hunter. He was called a \u201cself-advertiser,\u201d a \u201cyoung whippersnapper,\u201d even, by a reporter for the Daily Chronicle, \u201cPushful, the Younger.\u201d He was not unaware of these criticisms and even years later, bewildered by the viciousness with which he was attacked, would admit that it was \u201cmelancholy to be forced to record these less amiable aspects of human nature, which by a most curious and indeed unaccountable coincidence have always seemed to present themselves in the wake of my innocent footsteps.\u201d He was not, however, about to let them slow him down.Churchill knew that the surest and quickest route to recognition, success and perhaps, if he was lucky, fame was a military medal. It was \u201cthe swift road to promotion and advancement in every arm,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe glittering gateway to distinction.\u201d Distinction, in turn, could be parlayed into political clout, opening a door onto the kind of public life that he longed for, and which he believed was his destiny. So while the military was not, for Churchill, an end in itself, it was certainly a very useful means to an end. What he needed was a battle, a serious battle, one that would be talked about, would be remembered, and, with a good dose of courage and a little showmanship on his part, might propel him to the forefront of the military stage. For that, he was willing to risk anything, even his life.Churchill had seen real fighting for the first time in 1895. Instead of spending his leave playing polo or foxhunting like most young officers, he had gone to Cuba as a military observer, joining a fighting column of the Spanish army during an uprising that was a prelude to the Spanish-American War. It was here that he began smoking cigars, giving birth to a lifelong habit and a distinct preference for Cubanos. It was also here that on his twenty-first birthday he heard for the first time \u201cbullets strike flesh.\u201d In fact, he had very nearly been killed by a bullet that, by the capriciousness of fate, had sailed just a foot past his head, striking and killing the horse standing next to him. In Cuba, however, he had been only an observer, not an active participant, and for Churchill that would never be enough.Churchill\u2019s true education in the harsh realities of Britain\u2019s colonial wars began the next year, in the remote mountains of British India\u2019s North-West Frontier, modern-day Pakistan, whose sweeping vistas, unforgiving beauty and lethal conflicts would later suggest powerful parallels to those of southern Africa. For the British army, no colony had been more difficult to subdue than India, the jewel in the empire\u2019s crown, and no part of India had proved more deadly for British soldiers than the tribal lands of the Pashtun, an ethnic group renowned for their military skill and unyielding resistance to outside control.It was, in fact, the Pashtun\u2019s unmatched ferocity in battle that drew Churchill to India, and to the Pashtun heartland known as Malakand. In October 1896, Churchill had arrived in India with his regiment, the Fourth Queen\u2019s Own Hussars. He had come hoping to find himself quickly at the center of action. Instead, he had spent month after frustrating month in Bangalore, which he irritably described to his mother as a \u201c3rd rate watering place.\u201dThe incredible luxury in which he lived had made little difference. Left to find their own lodgings, Churchill and two fellow officers had chosen what Churchill described to his mother as \u201ca magnificent pink and white stucco palace in the middle of a large and beautiful garden.\u201d They paid for this lavish abode by combining their salaries, given to them in silver rupees poured into a string net bag \u201cas big as a prize turnip,\u201d with any allowance they managed to pry from dwindling family fortunes.Like some of his fellow officers, Churchill came from a family that was rich in titles and grand estates, but little else. The Churchill family palace, Blenheim, was, like most great houses in England at the end of the nineteenth century, hovering on the brink of collapse. The 5th and 6th Dukes of Marlborough had lived lives of such extravagance that when Churchill\u2019s grandfather inherited the title and the palace, he had been forced to sell not just land but some of the treasures that the family held most dear. In 1875, when Churchill was not yet a year old, the 7th Duke sold the Marlborough Gems, a stunning assortment of more than 730 carved gemstones, for more than \u00a336,000. A few years later, despite the protestations of his family, he sold the Sunderland Library, a vast and historically significant collection.The most effective means the Churchills had found of keeping the palace from going under, however, had been to marry the successive dukes off to \u201cdollar princesses,\u201d enormously wealthy heiresses whose families longed for an old British title to burnish their new American money. Soon after becoming the 8th Duke, Churchill\u2019s uncle George Spencer-Churchill, whose first wife divorced him in the wake of an affair, married a wealthy New York widow named Lillian Warren Hamersley. His son, now the 9th Duke, dutifully followed in his footsteps, marrying a dollar princess of his own, the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, in 1895.Despite his family\u2019s financial failings, Churchill was accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, and he hired a veritable army of servants while in India. \u201cWe each have a \u2018Butler\u2019 whose duties are to wait at table\u2014to manage the household and to supervise the stables: A First Dressing Boy or valet who is assisted by a second DB: and a sais [syce] to every horse or pony,\u201d Churchill had coolly explained to his mother. \u201cBesides this we share the services of 2 gardenders [sic]\u20143 Bhistis or water carriers\u20144 Dhobies or washermen & 1 watchman. Such is our m\u00e9nage.\u201dWhen a Pashtun revolt began in the mountains of Malakand the next year, Churchill, bored and restless, had been on leave in London, at the world-famous Goodwood Racecourse. It was a perfect day, the racecourse was so beautiful that the Prince of Wales referred to it as a \u201cgarden party with racing tacked on,\u201d and Churchill was \u201cwinning my money.\u201d As soon as he learned of the revolt, however, Churchill knew that this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, and he was not about to waste a moment or wait for an invitation. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 21.33}, {"asin": "1517903750", "title": "The Infamous Harry Hayward: A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis", "author": "Shawn Francis Peters", "description": "Review \"The story of Harry Hayward is a portrait both of a genuinely chilling nineteenth-century killer and of a golden American city\u2014Minneapolis in the 1800s\u2014that provides a home to the darkness within us. Shawn Francis Peters does full justice to both light and shadow in this murderous tale.\"\u2014Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner\u2019s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York \"At last, a great nonfiction storyteller has given this terrifying murderer the well-researched and vividly written treatment he deserves. The Infamous Harry Hayward places readers inside the disordered mind of a Victorian era killer\u2014and won\u2019t let them go.\"\u2014Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist and The Lobotomist \" The Infamous Harry Hayward is a riveting account of a dark chapter in Minnesota history\u2014the murder-for-hire of a dressmaker, \u2018Kittie\u2019 Ging. The 1895 trial of Harry Hayward, a Victorian Era gambler and the murder\u2019s criminal mastermind, grabbed lurid newspaper headlines in a case that pitted one brother against another.\"\u2014John Bessler, author of Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Executions in Minnesota \"The book unfolds as a play-by-play of the seven-week trial and reads much like the sensationalist reporting of the events at the time. The end result is an entertaining tale of crime and punishment from Minnesota\u2019s gilded age and a great episode from the annals of yellow journalism.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly \"Peters\u2019 scholarly, yet accessible, prose takes readers into the shadowy corners of Minneapolis and the sinister mind of a \u201cman without a soul\u201d.\"\u2014 Isthmus \"If you\u2019ve never heard of Harry Hayward you\u2019ll love reading about this serial seducer, con man, gambler and crook. This nonfiction evocation of a sensational life reads like a thriller.\"\u2014 St. Paul Pioneer Press About the Author Shawn Francis Peters teaches in the Integrated Liberal Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison. He has written five books, most recently The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era .", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 18.95}, {"asin": "099878480X", "title": "Tea in Tripoli: A Memoir", "author": "Bernadette Nason", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 17.95}, {"asin": "B07SHHR9MD", "title": "Alone at Dawn: Medal of Honor Recipient John Chapman and the Untold Story of the World's Deadliest Special Operations Force", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People", "Military", "Afghan & Iraq Wars", "Afghan War"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1464204004", "title": "High Country Nocturne: A David Mapstone Mystery (David Mapstone Mysteries, 7)", "author": "Jon Talton", "description": "About the Author Jon Talton is a fourth-generation Arizonan, the author of 12\u00a0novels, and a former columnist for the\u00a0Arizona Republic. Talton now lives in Seattle, where he is the economics columnist for the\u00a0Seattle Times\u00a0and writes the blog Rogue Columnist. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. High Country Nocturne A David Mapstone Mystery By Jon Talton Poisoned Pen Press Copyright \u00a9 2015 Jon TaltonAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4642-0400-5 CHAPTER 1 In the end, the truth was almost beside the point. CHAPTER 2 Ten o'clock. Two o'clock. I knew the drill. It had been many years since I had been pulled over by the police, almost as many years since I was a young deputy sheriff doing traffic stops myself. When I did, I wanted to see the driver's hands right where mine rested now. Ten o'clock and two o'clock on the steering wheel. Left hand at ten. Right hand at two. Where I could be sure he wasn't concealing a gun. Extra points if he had shut down the engine and held his driver's license and vehicle registration. Unless the driver was being extra careful because he was a bad guy. Then I would be on extra guard. Traffic stops were scary, especially if they were on lonely roads after midnight. It was you and the driver and anybody else in the car and the darkness. Backup might be miles away. You might think you were pulling over a driver to tell him his taillight was out. Unless the driver had killed his girlfriend or robbed a Circle K five minutes before and didn't know you were only being Deputy Helpful. When I was a rookie, these stops were the only part of the job that scared me. Now I was the driver and Sharon Peralta, my partner's wife, sat beside me. My hands rested at ten and two, and the digital clock read one o'clock in the morning. I had taken a chance roaring north out of Phoenix on Interstate 17 in her silver Lexus IS 250C convertible. I took a chance doing ninety-five when the posted speed limit was twenty miles-per-hour lower. With budget cuts, traffic stops by the Department of Public Safety\u2014the highway patrol\u2014had plummeted so low that people started calling it the \"shadow patrol.\" But the shadow patrol nailed me as I climbed out of Camp Verde. Red lights and blue lights followed me as I took an exit that led down a cut to a crossroads. I pulled off the pavement onto the dirt ten yards before a stop sign. A spotlight swept the inside of the car, then focused on our rearview mirror. That was standard procedure to keep the occupants of the stopped vehicle from seeing into the police car behind them. I had already used the button to roll down the window when I heard the officer's voice. \"Do you know why I stopped you, sir?\" A Southern accent washed through my ear canal. \"I was speeding.\" A flashlight beam flashed across the interior, lingering on our laps and our feet. She asked for my driver's license and registration. I handed them over. She stood to the rear of the door so I couldn't see her. Her tactics were sound. \"Please stay inside your vehicle, sir. And please shut off your lights.\" One didn't hear many Southern accents in Arizona today, even though many of Phoenix's early settlers were ex-Confederates. That accent had two broad and mutually exclusive presentations, hick and high-class magnolia. She was definitely the latter. I said, \"I'm sorry, Sharon.\" As if she hadn't been through enough already. All the lights on the DPS cruiser shut down. Just a few years ago, we would have been left in profound darkness, with only the highway, miraculously blasted through the rugged country, as a reminder of modernity. This was the exit to Montezuma's Castle National Monument, seven-hundred-year-old cliff dwellings. At night, nobody would be here. The darkness would be primeval. Now a tribal casino sat on a bluff to the east, polluting the high desert sky. If you asked me, it was a monstrosity. But nobody asked me. Nobody had asked me about adding five million people to the state since I was a child. I shook my head. \"Who is Sharon Peralta?\" The cop had returned, stepping lightly. \"I am.\" Sharon leaned forward and squinted into the flashlight beam. Her eyes were tired. \"Is this your vehicle, ma'am?\" She said that it was. \"Do you know this man?\" \"Yes, he's a friend.\" \"Sir, please step out of the car. Ma'am, you stay here.\" I had been afraid this might happen, so I came out with it. \"I'm armed.\" \"Why is that, sir?\" The magnolia debutante voice didn't seem stressed. And it was not as if she could ask to see my permit. Not in Arizona, which had some of the most liberal gun laws in the country. \"I'm a private investigator.\" She asked me where the gun was and I told her it was in a holster on my belt. Then she told me to place it slowly on the dash and I did, carefully, barrel forward, hand away from the trigger. My familiar Colt Python .357 magnum revolver. But with the four-inch ribbed barrel, it was a mean-looking firearm. Her flashlight beam lingered on it. \"Anything else?\" Be respectful. That was another part of the drill. \"No, ma'am.\" It was even the truth. I didn't take time to bring Speedloaders with extra ammunition or a backup piece after the phone call woke me at nine minutes after midnight Saturday morning. I was sleepy and in a hurry and on the drive up into the High Country, I thought this had been a rash move. Now, I was glad to have only one firearm to explain. The flashlight clicked off. \"Please step out of the car.\" Now her voice had lost its lilt. Or maybe I was being nervous. One thing was sure; I was wide-awake. I opened the door and slid out, dropping my feet onto the hard-packed dirt and getting my first look at the DPS cop. She was more than a head shorter than me, dressed in the standard uniform: tan slacks, tan long-sleeved shirt, shoulder patch in the shape of the state and colors of the state flag, seven-point gold star above her left pocket. Thanks to the casino's neon, I could see that her hair was strawberry blond, tied back in a bun. Her features seemed attractive, even the slightly weak chin. Her expression was camouflaged by shadows. Age? Around thirty. \"Walk to the back of the car and put your hands on the trunk, please, palms down.\" I did as she asked. The cold made me shiver. We were three thousand feet higher than Phoenix, where it was resort weather and the wrecking ball of summer only a bad memory. That was why Lindsey had given me my leather jacket. But it was in the back seat and I only had on a T-shirt, jeans, and athletic shoes. The metal of the trunk conducted the cold through my hands, adding to the discomfort. It must have been a quiet night for her to take this much time. Or she recognized Sharon's last name. That might be problematic. I wished she would write the ticket, give me the lecture, and send me away with a \"drive safely, sir.\" Instead, I heard a discomfiting snap and she told me to turn around. Her gun was out, aimed at me. It was pointed at my face. In the academy, they call this aiming at \"the lethal T\" or the \"fatal T.\" The T consisted of the eyes and nose, a shot guaranteed to kill instantly. Officers are usually trained to shoot at a suspect's \"body of mass,\" the torso. That is an easier, surer target. But more criminals are wearing body armor. She was not in a combat shooting stance, with both hands on the weapon for stability. Instead, she held it confidently in one hand, her right. That was unusual. Seeing her finger on the trigger heightened my concern. This was something definitely not taught at the academy. Officers learn to keep the trigger finger aligned with the side of the gun's lower receiver and slide\u2014\"ready to engage,\" as the instructors put it. This prevents an accidental discharge. But there it was, the pistol staring me in the eyes, the officer's finger on the trigger. This situation left me one cough or involuntary nerve spasm away from being shot and I wouldn't live more than a few seconds. No time for last words. Words like, \"Tell my wife I love her.\" Or, \"Why did you shoot me? I was unarmed.\" It is impossible to speak after your face has been torn apart and a bullet acts out the laws of physics inside your skull. Impossible, when you are already dead. This is your brain, Mapstone. This is your brain blown out of the back of your head all over the bumper of Sharon's fancy convertible. \"I'm not armed,\" I said, forcing my voice to remain calm, its cadence slow, as I raised my hands. \"I am not posing any threat to you. Please take your finger off the trigger.\" She didn't do as I suggested. I studied the gun. It was a semi-automatic, black with intimidating lines. I couldn't identify the maker. It wasn't the Glock that was standard with police. A tractor-trailer rig approached on the Interstate, grinding uphill toward Flagstaff. If only the truck driver needed to pull off and came down the cut and somehow broke the spell that had this officer in its grasp. But then the semi was gone and the world around us was quiet. Not a single gambler came or went from the casino. The nation's sixth-largest city was only ninety miles south but it might as well have been on a different planet. I had the tactical solutions of a can of cat food. When I went through the academy too many years ago, I had learned how to disarm a shooter without having a gun myself. This involved stepping close inside her reach and doing a hard, straight-arm bar to dislodge the weapon. But she was too far away and I had never tried this desperate move in real life. She seemed to read this thought and took one more step back, then crooked her arm close to her side, the gun still perfectly aimed. If the barrel were an eye, it could have winked at me. I raised my empty hands higher, feeling the slick between the T-shirt and my skin. \"Why are you doing this?\" My mouth was so dry it had trouble forming the words. She cocked her head as if about to answer, then thought better of it. \"I used to be a cop,\" I said. \"I know how stressful a traffic stop can be.\" The strawberry blond Sphinx stared at me. \"Maybe you read about me. David Mapstone. I solved cold cases for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.\" She said, \"I know who you are.\" The way she said it told me she meant more than a name she'd read on my driver's license. And my self-possession started to crack. \"Do we know each other? What's your name?\" I couldn't make out her nametag or badge number. Then she lowered pistol in the direction of my groin and smiled. \"Where ...?\" That was as far as she got. A pair of headlights on high beams. A car coming off the Interstate, headed toward us. I squinted and turned my head aside as the glare grew more intense. The car stopped behind her cruiser and kept its lights on. More than a few beats passed in silence, her hair a halo in the backlights. I prayed it was another DPS unit and that an officer would talk her down. She continued to face me. \"Friends of yours?\" Now it was my turn to say nothing. She slipped the gun back into its holster with one clean move and snapped it in place. The pleasant drawl returned to her voice, as if the past five minutes had never happened. She handed back my license and registration. \"You drive safely, sir.\" Within thirty seconds, she was gone, spewing dirt and rocks. My savior behind the high beams remained. My tongue tasted dust as wobbly legs conveyed me to the car and I put the Python back in its holster. One last time, I turned and stared at the headlights. After a few minutes, once we were back on the highway, I found the same headlights following us a quarter mile behind. I didn't know who was inside, although I had a good guess. But I was certain they had saved my life. Sharon looked me over. Sweat was coming through the T-shirt. \"Are you all right, David?\" \"Sure.\" \"Really?\" \"She let me off with a warning.\" And how. I set the cruise control at seventy-five as the Interstate climbed and climbed toward Flagstaff. Sharon stared at her lap, dark hair curtaining off her face, and said nothing more. This was unusual. Sharon was a master conversationalist. Weren't all shrinks talkers? And they wanted you to talk. We had much to discuss, in fact. But I didn't speak either, about what had happened minutes before at the traffic stop, about the telephone call that had brought us here, or everything that had come at us in the previous day. The silence was so profound that my breathing sounded like screams. I silently replayed the scene by the side of the road. It was late. I had been awakened and forced to drive after a stressful day. The mind plays tricks. But the finger on the trigger was no illusion. And I replayed the angry metal click of the woman's holster. It bothered me for more reasons than the gun in my face. The old Galco High-Ride holster that held my Python had a strip of leather that wrapped around the frame of the gun. It is called a retention strap, meant to keep an attacker from grabbing the gun and using it on you. I could get to the revolver easily by grasping the handle and moving my hand against the place the retention strap connected to the rest of the holster. It would come loose with a snap and I'd be ready to rock. But that was old school. I cursed aloud. \"What it is, David?\" \"It's some inside baseball cop stuff. Probably nothing.\" She didn't push it. It wasn't inside baseball. Inside cop world. Snap. No. Most law-enforcement officers didn't use those retention straps now. Manufacturers had advanced the security of holsters substantially so that it was much more difficult for the weapon to be taken in a struggle. It helped that the semiautomatic pistols cops carried had smooth butts, no exposed hammer like the Python's to accommodate. I stared into the red lights of a truck several car-lengths ahead, then signaled and moved to pass. Now cops carried holsters classified as Level 2, Level 3, and even Level 4, based on the degree of protection they provided. But almost all had one element in common\u2014to unholster the gun, the officer moved the strap forward. In the more advanced holsters, the pistol must be properly gripped and a lever switched. None of these regulation holsters made a snap. \"She wasn't ...\" I absently let the car slow down against the gravity of the mountain it needed to climb. \"What?\" Sharon asked. I pushed down the accelerator and we surged forward. \"I was thinking. Always a surprising thing when I do it.\" She laughed and I kept silent. I was thinking that perhaps the DPS officer was old school like me and refused to adopt a new holster. Thinking perhaps she was not a police officer. She pointed the gun at my crotch and said, \"Where ...?\" Where, what? Where were we going? Where was Peralta? As the cold sweat stayed with me, another thought came. If I saw her again, it would once more be in darkness and I wouldn't get a second chance. Sharon said, \"Do you still get panic attacks, David?\" I ignored her and held my iPhone against the steering wheel, shakily texting Lindsey one character, an asterisk. I watched the iPhone screen as the message was delivered. After a few tense seconds, Lindsey texted back. Another asterisk. In our personal code, it meant one thing: leave the house immediately. Go. CHAPTER 3 The blue and red police lights were visible even before I took the Ash Fork exit off Interstate 40\u2014the vision of Dwight David Eisenhower flowing from Barstow, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina. We descended onto a two-lane road, crossed a wash, and I pulled the car into a broad, flat lot surrounding what had once been a gas station. All that was left was a rectangular streamline moderne building, long-abandoned, with an office on one end and two garage doors on the other, with a single yellow streetlight burning above. I pulled in behind a Yavapai County Sheriff's Department cruiser with its light bar flashing. Nobody seemed to notice us. The cops were on the other side of yellow crime-scene tape, milling around a pickup truck illuminated by multiple spotlights. It was a new Ford F-150, extended cab. Mike Peralta's truck. \"David.\" Sharon touched my hand. The poor lighting couldn't conceal the agony in her eyes. \"If he's ...\" She stopped, squeezed my hand hard. \"It's going to be fine.\" I gently disentangled her hand, took off my gun, slid on my leather jacket, and stepped out into the chill. The wind was coming hard from the west and the air smelled of pines. My stomach was tight, but after the encounter with the woman in the DPS uniform, I was focused and calm. Thanks to some fluke of brain chemistry, I usually excel in these situations. Panic only hits me later, when I am safe and alone. But I had no confidence that it would be fine, as I had assured Sharon. He might have come up here and blown his brains out. He might have been murdered. His body might be in the truck awaiting me. (Continues...) Excerpted from High Country Nocturne by Jon Talton . Copyright \u00a9 2015 Jon Talton. Excerpted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 17.28}, {"asin": "0062403737", "title": "Deep Black: A Tom Locke Novel (Tom Locke Series, 2)", "author": "Sean McFate", "description": "Review \u201cLocke is another strong hero in the growing subgenre of black-ops thrillers, and Deep Black is a maze of treachery and intrigue to the very end.\u201d \u2014 Booklist Online \u201cMcFate knows his way around bold, riveting stories, fascinating characters and ground-level combat that are sure to please fans of Brad Thor, Tom Clancy, and Daniel Silva.\u201d \u2014 Mark Greaney, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One Minute Out \u201cHas an enjoyable, realistic feeling\u2026will appeal to action junkies and armchair diplomats alike.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews From the Back Cover TOM LOCKE MUST TRACK A MISSING SAUDI PRINCE HOLDING DEVASTATING SECRETS WHO HAS FLED DEEP INSIDE ISIS TERRITORY IN THIS SECOND SIZZLING MILITARY ACTION THRILLER FROM THE AUTHORS OF SHADOW WAR In Paris, a motorcade is attacked by masked men who corner a Saudi prince and steal the case handcuffed to his wrist. A thousand miles away in Istanbul, the prince\u2019s brother receives a mysterious phone call, and moments later narrowly escapes a black ops ambush after a dash through the grand bazaar. Meanwhile, military contractor Tom Locke is working undercover on the frontlines of ISIS-infected Iraq. He\u2019s on the run from Apollo Outcomes, a private military corporation run by the treacherous Brad Winters, when he\u2019s approached by a Saudi middleman who offers good money to find the missing son of a high-ranking government official. What Locke doesn\u2019t know is that multiple sides of a clandestine war are scrambling to find the young prince, that he may be holding the key to a new world order, and that his father may or may not be using him to topple the Saudi government. As he pushes deeper into ISIS territory, Locke must navigate both the on-the-ground battle lines and the larger \u201cdeep state\u201d war he has stumbled into yet again. To complete the mission and keep his men safe, the battle-hardened Locke must use his considerable skill to combat a fanatical enemy on the ground\u2014while a duplicitous adversary much closer to home waits for his chance to strike. . . . Once again, Sean McFate lends his rare expertise to this riveting, fast-paced tale of enigmatic warriors and international treachery, proving that he\u2019s one of the most captivating new thriller writers of recent years. About the Author Sean McFate is a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and Georgetown University\u2019s School of Foreign Service. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank. He served as a paratrooper in the US Army\u2019s 82nd Airborne Division and then worked for a major private military corporation, where he ran operations similar to those in this book. He is the author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order , and holds a BA from Brown University, a MA from Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He lives with his wife in Washington, DC. Bret Witter has co-authored eight New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 bestseller The Monuments Men . He lives with his family in Decatur, Georgia. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "0807000272", "title": "Liberation: New Works on Freedom from Internationally Renowned Poets", "author": "Nick Makoha", "description": "About the Author Mark Ludwig is the founding executive director of the Terez\u00edn Music Foundation (TMF), dedicated to preserving and performing the musical legacy of composers imprisoned in the Terez\u00edn concentration camp and all artists lost in the Holocaust. By commissioning new works of composers and poets, TMF strives to fill the silence these great artists left and to use their legacy as a vehicle promoting dialogue and freedom of expression. Mark lives in Boston, where he is also a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1480846473", "title": "Tara's Treasures", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 16.95}, {"asin": "0838911854", "title": "Library and Information Science: A Guide to Key Literature and Sources", "author": "Michael F. Bemis", "description": "Review \"Every librarian takes on new responsibilities for which no previous experience is adequate for the unfamiliar task at hand. In these situations what is often needed is a source that gives step-by-step directions with examples, templates, and outlines. Library and Information Science: A Guide to Key Literature and Sources addresses this individual need and fills this particular niche in the professional literature.\" -- Journal of Academic Libraries \"As a research starter on a topic in librarianship, I'd say this will be useful for many, especially beginners and librarians in the field who may not have extensive access to LIS sources. For me, I'd keep it on my shelf to check on things now and then as part of keeping up or for my areas of interest. This is one I am suggesting for librarians to at least look over.\" --The Itinerant Librarian BlogWhat Bemis has succeeded in doing is creating a book that is packed with a lot of interesting and useful information for library and information science faculty and students, as well as for working academic, public and school librarians in various stages of their careers ... a useful and worthwhile tool to keep within reach. --Reference Reviews About the Author Michael F. Bemis has written reference book reviews for American Reference Books Annual , Library Journal , Reference and User Services Quarterly , and other professional librarian publications. He reviews book proposals for Praeger Press and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He recently completed a two-year term as chair of the Materials Reviewing Committee of ALA's Reference and User Services Association (RUSA).", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 3.6, "price": 70.0}, {"asin": "1941393659", "title": "The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People", "author": "Bethanne Kelly Patrick", "description": "Review \u201c'How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!' Thoreau only says 'a book,' but Bethanne Patrick had the excellent idea of asking notable figures in the arts, business, media and politics to be more specific. The result is a collection of lively brief essays extolling the power of the printed word while also providing an appealingly idiosyncratic reading list. Be prepared for surprises!\" \u2014 Michael Dirda , Pulitzer Prize-winning literary journalist and author of Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books \"Turns out great writers are also great readers. Or at least the ones in this book are. Their essays will entertain you and move you\u2014and also add several dozen titles to your reading list. So beware.\" \u2014 A.J. Jacobs , New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically \"An inspiring collection that will make a perfect gift for an aspiring writer or devoted reader.\" \u2014 Kirkus \"When people claim that books changed their lives, if you look at them closely, their lives rarely seem to have actually changed. That's not the case with the bibliomaniacs in this masterfully curated anthology. Not only have these books changed their lives, they tell you how, when, and why. Your to-read pile is about to grow by leaps and bounds.\" \u2014 Josh Hanagarne , author of The World's Strongest Librarian: A Book Lover's Adventures \"Lively, addictive . . .\u00a0The short entries are like literary snack food: once readers start consuming them, they may find it difficult to stop. Book lovers will recognize themselves in these portraits and feel among friends. Perhaps the most valuable takeaway from this joyous volume is that, in an increasingly digital world, the printed word still matters.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Bethanne Patrick is the author of An Uncommon History of Common Things (with John Thompson) and An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy . She is a contributing editor at The Literary Hub. Her essays, reviews, and interviews appear in publications including The Washington Post , Virginia Quarterly Review , O the Oprah Magazine , The Mid.com, and many more. In 2009, she created the #FridayReads hashtag, which continues to attract thousands of readers around the world.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Essays & Correspondence"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 15.67}, {"asin": "1613254059", "title": "Dyno Don: The Cars and Career of Dyno Don Nicholson", "author": "Doug Boyce", "description": "Review \"This book is an excellent tribute to one of drag racing's very best, No. 18 on NHRA's Top 50 Drivers list.\" (D. Randy Riggs Vintage Motorsport 2018-08-20)\"Boyce's 174-page softcover book is a work worthy of Nicholson's legacy.\" ( Old Cars Weekly 2018-11-09)\"This book is sure to please fans of the man and followers of the sport.\" (Mark J. McCourt Hemmings Muscle Machines 2019-12-12) From the Back Cover Many fans of drag racing consider the most interesting era to be from the 1950s through the 1970s, the years when the sport really took off. During that period, so much changed from a speed and technology standpoint that people often refer to this time as the golden age of drag racing. Fans followed their favorite drivers and their favorite brands through the ranks as mildly modified door slammers from Junior Stock turned into Super Stock, Funny Cars, and Pro Stock. Drivers often became associated with a particular manufacturer, such as Chevy, Ford, or Chrysler through sponsorship, factory team rides, or sometimes simply their own preference. The more successful drivers became household names in the drag racing community. Chevy had Grumpy Jenkins, Pontiac had Arnie \"the Farmer\" Beswick, Mopar had Sox & Martin and \u201cDandy\u201d Dick Landy, and Ford\u2019s most successful driver of the era was the legendary \"Dyno Don\" Nicholson. Nicholson'' first wins on a national level were actually in the early 1960s in Chevrolet products. He became extremely successful on the match-race circuit. Then, in 1964, he switched over to Mercury with the new Comet after General Motors enacted a factory ban on racing activities. He won 90 percent of his match races that year. He stuck with Ford and Mercury products and won throughout the 1960s and 1970s, even after Ford also pulled the plug on factory team sponsorship. He made it to the final rounds in nearly 50 national events during that period, in addition to winning championships, awards, and match races along the way. Innovator, hard worker, pioneer, hard racer, tough competitor, a true gentleman, and a man you couldn\u2019t dislike . . . These descriptions are shared by his colleagues and competitors throughout the course of his hall of fame career. About the Author Doug Boyce has had a lifelong addiction to drag racing. He turned his first wrench at age 8 and attended his first race at age 10. The essence of burning rubber and screaming open pipes filled his head and by his early teens, he was elbow deep in building classic Chevys. He continued to fuel the fire while working 9 to 5 in the automotive field. Doug has filled what little spare time he has had writing numerous club and magazine articles related to drag racing's golden years. He has an on going love of drag racing and the way it used to be. He is the author of Grumpy's Toys and Junior Stock , both best-selling CarTech titles. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Automotive"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 33.69}, {"asin": "0988494418", "title": "The Clock Of Life", "author": "Nancy Klann-Moren", "description": "Review \"This is not only a fine read, this is an important novel by an important new voice in the art of blending fiction and fact and making sense of it all.\" Grady Harp, Literary Aficionado \" The Clock Of Life by Nancy Klann-Moren is one of those books where everything about it feels right.\" Candi Sary, Underground Book Review \"Brought to life by a first-class storyteller, The Clock Of Life is one of those books I was sad to see end. Edie Crabtree, Newport Beach Independent. \"Klann-Moren gives a true history lesson, and her inclusion of historical events in her novel make the book more vivid. \u00a0I personally loved it and recommend it to anyone looking for a light, fresh, and cultural (historical) read\". Reviewed by Kelly Santana for Readers' Favorite. \"Narrative and dialogue contain picturesque dialogue that opens the story in the mind of the reader. Highly talented and skilled writer.\" Judge, Writer's Digest Self-Published e-Bood Awards", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1620159368", "title": "Burnt Edges", "author": "Dana Leipold", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": null}, {"asin": "1573063215", "title": "Hamakua Hero", "author": "Patsy Iwasaki", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In the late 19th century, a shortage of labor for the sugar plantations on the islands of Hawaii and difficult economic circumstances in Japan made for a synergistic coupling: thousands of Japanese (mostly young men) left for Hawaii. According to Iwasaki's young adult history tale, those immigrant workers didn't exactly find an immigrants' paradise. Relegated to the most grueling plantation work under frequently cruel bosses, the young Katsu Goto, like other workers, tried to get off the treadmill by opening a store and becoming a businessman. Goto's success, and status as a leader of immigrant workers agitating against miserable working conditions, unfortunately enrages some of the white locals, who look for retribution. Iwasaki's story, though told in vividly juvenile style by artist Berido, is a straight history lesson, with all the attendant pluses and minuses of the genre--fascinating subtext being one of the former, and a tendency toward excessive literalness and footnotes being one of the latter. Although very local in its focus, this is a smart piece of immigrant history. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. Review In the late 19th century, a shortage of labor for the sugar plantations on the islands of Hawaii and difficult economic circumstances in Japan made for a synergistic coupling: thousands of Japanese (mostly young men) left for Hawaii. According to Iwasaki's young adult history tale, those immigrant workers didn't exactly find an immigrants' paradise. Relegated to the most grueling plantation work under frequently cruel bosses, the young Katsu Goto, like other workers, tried to get off the treadmill by opening a store and becoming a businessman. Goto's success, and status as a leader of immigrant workers agitating against miserable working conditions, unfortunately enrages some of the white locals, who look for retribution. Iwasaki's story, though told in vividly juvenile style by artist Berido, is a straight history lesson, with all the attendant pluses and minuses of the genre--fascinating subtext being one of the former, and a tendency toward excessive literalness and footnotes being one of the latter. Although very local in its focus, this is a smart piece of immigrant history. (Oct.) <BR>(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --From Publishers Weekly About the Author Patsy Y. Iwasaki was born and raised on Kaua\u02bbi, surrounded by sugar cane and plantations. Her grandparents immigrated to Hawai\u2018i from Hiroshima and worked on the Lihue Sugar Plantation. Iwasaki is currently a lecturer at the University of Hawai\u2018i at Hilo in the Communication and English departments. Read more", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.0}, {"asin": "1524519049", "title": "Pebbles and Izzy: The Shells Are Talking to Me", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 28.22}, {"asin": "1464204977", "title": "The Traitor (British Library Spy Classics)", "author": null, "description": "About the Author SYDNEY HORLER (1888-1954) began his career as a journalist. During the First World War he worked as an official propagandist. From the 1920s until his death he was a prolific and popular author of thriller novels which were famously advertised under the slogan \"Horler for excitement!\"", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 2.9, "price": 18.99}, {"asin": "0805058117", "title": "The Veterinarian's Touch: Profiles of Life Among Animals", "author": "Lee Gutkind", "description": "Review \"Vivid portraits of an extraordinary group of doctors. \"-Kirkus Reviews\"Gutkind sensitively reveals the many challenges and satisfactions of a noble calling. \"-Diane Ackerman About the Author Lee Gutkind, editor of the popular new journal Creative Nonfiction, is the award-winning author of eight books. He writes for the New York Times Magazine and teaches at the University of Pittsbugh. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Professionals & Academics"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 3.95}, {"asin": "0773729127", "title": "From the Cop Shop: Weird and Wonderful Tales from Our Men and Women of the Badge", "author": "Peter V. MacDonald", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 16.97}, {"asin": "0307388921", "title": "Choke", "author": "Chuck Palahniuk", "description": "Review \u201cSheer, anarchic fierceness of imagination. . . . Raw and vital.\u201d\u2014 The New York Times \u201cPuts a bleakly humorous spin on self-help, addiction recovery, and childhood trauma. . . . Funny mantra-like prose plows toward the mayhem it portends from the get-go.\u201d\u2014 The Village Voice \u201cPalahniuk has a vision that's distinctive. Like it or loathe it, Choke cannot be dismissed. Nor can its creator.\u201d\u2014 Houston Chronicle \u201cFew contemporary writers mix the outrageous and the hilarious with greater zest. . . . Chuck Palahniuk's splenetic, anarchic glee makes him a worthy heir to Ken Kesey.\u201d\u2014 Newsday About the Author Chuck Palahniuk's novels are the bestselling Fight Club , which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary , Lullaby , Survivor , Haunted , and Invisible Monsters . Portions of Choke have appeared in Playboy , and Palahniuk's nonfiction work has been published by Gear , Black Book , The Stranger , and the Los Angeles Times . He lives in the Pacific Northwest.www.chuckpalahniuk.net Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. In the summer of 1642 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a teenage boy was accused of buggering a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. This is real history on the books. In accordance with the Biblical laws of Leviticus, after the boy confessed he was forced to watch each animal being slaughtered. Then he was killed and his body heaped with the dead animals and buried in an unmarked pit. This was before there were sexaholic talk therapy meetings. This teenager, writing his fourth step must've been a whole barnyard tell-all. I ask, \"Any questions?\" The fourth-graders just look at me. A girl in the second row says, \"What's buggering?\" I say, ask your teacher. Every half hour, I'm supposed to teach another herd of fourth-graders some shit nobody wants to learn, like how to start a fire. How to carve an apple-head doll. How to make ink out of black walnuts. As if this is going to get any of them into a good college. Besides deforming the poor chickens, these fourth-graders, they all walk in here carrying some germ. It's no mystery why Denny's always wiping his nose and coughing. Head lice, pinworms, chlamydia, ringworm?for serious, these field trip kids are the pint-sized horsemen of the apocalypse. Instead of useful Pilgrim crap, I tell them how their playground game ring-around-a-rosy is based on the bubonic plague of 1665. The Black Death gave people hard, swollen, black spots they called \"plague roses,\" or buboes, surrounded by a pale ring. Hence \"bubonic.\" Infected people were locked inside their houses to die. In six months, a hundred thousand people were buried in the huge mass graves. The \"pocket full of posies\" was what people of London carried so they wouldn't smell the corpses. To build a fire, all you do is pile up some sticks and dry grass. You strike a spark with a flint. You work the bellows. Don't think for a second this fire-starting routine makes their little eyes sparkle. Nobody's impressed by a spark. Kids crouch in the front row, huddling over their little video games. Kids yawn right in your face. All of them giggle and pinch, rolling their eyes at me in my breeches and dirty shirt. Instead, I tell them how in 1672, the Black Plague hit Naples, Italy, killing some four hundred thousand people. In 1711, in the Holy Roman Empire, the Black Plague killed five hundred thousand people. In 1781, millions died worldwide from the flu. In 1792, another plague killed eight hundred thousand people in Egypt. In 1793, mosquitoes spread yellow fever to Philadelphia, where it killed thousands. One kid in the back whispers, \"This is worse than the spinning wheel.\" Other kids open their box lunches and look inside their sandwiches. Outside the window, Denny's bent over in the stocks. This time just out of habit. The town council has announced he'll be banished right after lunch. The stocks are just where he feels most safe from himself. Nothing's locked or even closed, but he's bent over with his hands and neck where they've been for months. On their way here from the weaver's, one kid was poking a stick in Denny's nose and then trying to poke the stick in his mouth. Other kids rub his shaved head for luck. Starting the fire only kills about fifteen minutes, so after that I'm supposed to show each herd of kids the big cooking pots and twig brooms and bed warmers and shit. Children always look bigger in a room with a six-foot ceiling. A kid in the back says, \"They gave us fucking egg salad again.\" Here in the eighteenth century, I'm sitting beside the hearth of the big open fireplace equipped with the regular torture chamber relics, the big iron pothooks, the pokers, andirons, branding irons. My big fire blazing. This is a perfect moment to take the iron pincers out of the coals and pretend to study their pitted white-hot points. All the kids step back. And I ask them, hey kids, can anybody here tell me how people in the eighteenth century used to abuse naked little boys to death. This always gets their attention. No hands go up. Still studying the pincers, I say, \"Anybody?\" Still no hands. \"For real,\" I say and start working the hot pincers open and shut. \"Your teacher must've told you about how they used to kill little boys back then.\" Their teacher's outside, waiting. How it worked was, a couple hours ago, while her class was carding wool, this teacher and me wasted some sperm in the smokehouse, and for sure she thought it would turn into something romantic, but hey. Me being face deep in her wonderful rubbery butt, it's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this. You wear a foofy linen shirt, a cravat, and some breeches, and the whole world wants to sit on your face. The two of you sharing ends of your fat hot slider, you could be on the cover of some paperback bodice-ripper. I tell her, \"Oh, baby, cleave thy flesh unto mine. Oh yeah, cleave for me, baby.\" Eighteenth-century dirty talk. Their teacher, her name's Amanda or Allison or Amy. Some name with a vowel in it. Just keep asking yourself: \"What would Jesus not do?\" Now in front of her class, with my hands good and black, I stick the pincers back into the fire, then wiggle two of my black fingers at the kids, international sign language for come closer. The kids in the back push the ones in the front. The ones in the front look around, and one kid calls out, \"Miss Lacey?\" A shadow in the window means Miss Lacey's watching, but the minute I look at her she ducks out of sight. I motion to the kids, closer. The old rhyme about Georgie Porgie, I tell them, is really about England's King George the Fourth, who could just never get enough. \"Enough what?\" a kid says. And I say, \"Ask your teacher.\" Miss Lacey continues to lurk. I say, \"You like the fire I got here?\" and nod at the flames. \"Well, people need to clean the chimney all the time, only the chimneys are really small inside and they run all over the place, so people used to force little boys to climb up in them and scrape the insides.\" And since this was such a tight place, I tell them, the boys would get stuck if they wore any clothes. \"So just like Santa Claus . . .\" I say, \"they climbed up the chimney . . .\" I say, and lift a hot poker from the fire, \"naked.\" I spit on the red end of the poker and the spit sizzles, loud, in the quiet room. \"And you know how they died?\" I say. \"Anybody?\" No hands go up. I say, \"You know what a scrotum is?\" Nobody says yes or even nods, so I tell them, \"Ask Miss Lacey.\" Our special morning in the smokehouse, Miss Lacey was bobbing on my dog with a good mouthful of spit. Then we were sucking tongues, sweating hard and trading drool, and she pulled back for a good look at me. In the dim smoky light, those big fake plastic hams were hanging all around us. She's just swamped and riding my hand, hard, and breathing between each word. She wipes her mouth and asks me if I have any protection. \"It's cool,\" I tell her. \"It's 1734, remember? Fifty percent of all children died at birth.\" She puffs a limp strand of hair off her face and says, \"That's not what I mean.\" I lick her right up the middle of her chest, up her throat, and then stretch my mouth around her ear. Still jacking her with my swamped fingers, I say, \"So, you have any evil afflictions I should know about?\" She's pulling me apart behind and wets a finger in her mouth, and says, \"I believe in protecting myself.\" And I go, \"That's cool.\" I say, \"I could get canned for this,\" and roll a rubber down my dog. She worms her wet finger up my pucker and slaps my ass with her other hand and says, \"How do you think I feel?\" To keep from triggering, I'm thinking of dead rats and rotten cabbage and pit toilets, and I say, \"What I mean is, latex won't be invented for another century.\" With the poker, I point at the fourth-graders, and I say, \"These little boys used to come out of the chimneys covered with the black soot. And the soot used to grind into their hands and knees and elbows and nobody had soap so they stayed black all the time.\" This was their whole lives back then. Every day, somebody forced them up a chimney and they spent all day crawling along in the darkness with the soot getting in their mouths and noses and they never went to school and they didn't have television or video games or mango-papaya juice boxes, and they didn't have music or remote-controlled anything or shoes and every day was the same. \"These little boys,\" I say and wave the poker across the crowd of kids, \"these were little boys just like you. They were exactly like you.\" My eyes go from each kid to each kid, touching all their eyes for a moment. \"And one day, each little boy would wake up with a sore place on his private parts. And these sore places didn't heal. And then they metastasized and followed the seminal vesicles up into the abdomen of each little boy, and by then,\" I say, \"it was too late.\" Here's the flotsam and jetsam of my med school education. And I tell how sometimes they tried to save the little boy by cutting off his scrotum, but this was before hospitals and drugs. In the eighteenth century, they still called these kind of tumors \"soot warts.\" \"And those soot warts,\" I tell the kids, \"were the first form of cancer ever invented.\" Then I ask, does anybody know why they call it c... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 8.92}, {"asin": "1600052223", "title": "Ignite! The 4 Essential Rules for Emerging Leaders (People-First Leadership)", "author": "Sal Silvester", "description": "Review I believe the time to change is now. Ignite! sets leaders on course to make a significant difference in themselves, their people, and their teams. - Marshall Goldsmith, author of New York Times best sellers MOJO and What Got You Here Won't Get You There Whether you are a veteran leader or a first-time leader, this book will help you rethink the way you lead in every aspect of your life.- Matthew Kelly, New York Times bestselling author of The Dream Manager and Off Balance About the Author Sal Silvester is an author, speaker and consultant who works with leaders and their teams to accelerate culture change and business results. He is founder and president of 5.12 Solutions Consulting Group and author of the popular book Ignite! The 4 Essential Rules for Emerging Leaders.Since 2001, 5.12 Solutions Consulting Group has worked with teams and leaders from a variety of mid-sized and large organizations to make shifts in how they collaborate and lead to achieve positive business results. Sal Silvester and his team lead client engagements in Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Team Building and Corporate Training.\u00a0Sal knows what it means to be a team member and a leader. He is a graduate of the US Army Ranger and Airborne schools; he has managed consulting engagements, and competed on Adventure Racing Teams. He is an avid rock climber and mountain biker, and has competed in 6 marathons and is an Ironman Triathalon finisher.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Business Culture"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 19.95}, {"asin": "1944020144", "title": "The Moonlight Meeting: The Nocturnals Grow & Read Early Reader, Level 2", "author": "Tracey Hecht", "description": "Review \u201cThis banter-filled early reader describes the initial meeting between shy Tobin the pangolin, brash Bismark the sugar glider, and kindhearted Dawn the fox\u2026the pared-down narration and dialogue quickly establish their personalities...Hecht successfully set the stage for more adventurous outings down the road.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cPhysical characteristics, personality quirks, and the beginnings of their mutual trust and friendship are aptly portrayed through both words and pictures. A few \u2018Nocturnals Fun Facts\u2019 at the end should help with any factual queries. Whether listening, reading along, or launching individual attempts, satisfied readers will be ready and waiting for the next installment.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cAn entertaining story of friendship and sharing, and educates us about those who are different from us.\u201d \u2015 Story Monsters Inc. \u201cVery highly recommended for family, daycare center, preschool, elementary school, and community library collections.\u201d \u2015 Midwest Book Review \u201cThe series addresses bullying and empathy in an easy, accessible way, and the books are meant to be read aloud.\u201d \u2015 New York Post About the Author Tracey Hecht is a writer and entrepreneur. The American Booksellers Association chose the first book in her critically acclaimed middle grade series, The Nocturnals: The Mysterious Abductions , as a Kids\u2019 Indie Next List pick. In addition, her Grow & Read early reader book, The Chestnut Challenge , was given a Mom\u2019s Choice Gold Award. In partnership with the New York Public Library, Tracey created a Read Aloud Writing Program that she has since conducted\u2015both in person and virtually\u2015in over 150 schools, libraries, and bookstores across the country. Other books in the Nocturnals Grow & Read early reader collection include The Tasty Treat, The Moonlight Meeting, The Peculiar Possum, The Slithery Shakedown, The Kooky Kinkajou, The Best Burp and The Weeping Wombat . Tracey currently splits her time between New York City and Oquossoc, Maine, with her husband and four children. Rumur Dowling is a writer who graduated from Harvard College and studied eighteenth-century poetry in Oxford as a Henry Fellow. He now lives in his hometown of New York City. This is his first children's book. Waymond Singleton is an illustrator and animator with an adoration for stories depicting quirky characters and daring adventures. He received his BFA in Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design. He lives in Burbank where he spends his free time making short films.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 3.31}, {"asin": "1468195115", "title": "Barge Pilot", "author": "R. Lee Barrett", "description": "About the Author R. Lee Barrett lives with his wife Shareen and most of their six children near Ft. Worth, Texas. Lee has been a practicing attorney for more than ten years, often bartering legal services for premium cigars. Although Lee has published numerous legal articles, and maintained a blog for bankruptcy practitioners, Barge Pilot is his first novel.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "1470101254", "title": "The Burning Sky: Halcyon #1: A Steampunk Fantasy", "author": "Joseph R. Lewis", "description": "Review \"The Burning Sky kept me guessing, right up to its dramatic conclusion.\" -- Big Al's Books and Pals \"If someone were to ask me where to start with steampunk, I would point them here.\" -- Opinions of a Wolf \"Superbly written, tightly woven, and packed full of action scenes. The Burning Sky is quality writing with great characters...\" -- The Alternative \"A steampunk book where the entire power structure of the world as we know it is subverted? I very nearly wept with joy. I hadn't realized how dearly I needed a book like this and now it will be painful to go back to the same old stuff.\" -- Linda Ghio About the Author Joseph Robert Lewis enjoys creating heroines that his daughter can respect, as well as worlds in which history, mythology, and fantasy collide in unpredictable ways. Joe was born in Annapolis and went to the University of Maryland, where he took not one but two classes on Viking poetry. He lives in Maryland with his family.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": "from 6.10"}, {"asin": "B00AUWHDEE", "title": "Strands of Fate", "author": "Linda Kozar", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1501164686", "title": "Betty Ford: First Lady, Women's Advocate, Survivor, Trailblazer", "author": "Lisa McCubbin", "description": "Review \"A warmly sympathetic biography of a spirited woman.\" \u2015 KIRKUS REVIEWS \"[A] meticulously researched and delightful biography\u2026 McCubbin writes with great tact and sensitivity in this insightful and beautifully told look into the life of one of the most public and admired first ladies.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"This fast-moving book reveals a lively, independent, and indomitable woman who influenced both the women\u2019s movement and America\u2019s perception of addiction.\" \u2015 Booklist \"Lisa McCubbin\u2019s insightful portrait is admiring without being fawning, candid without a whiff of tabloid salaciousness...The result is a vivid picture of a singularly influential woman.\" \u2015 Bookpage \"McCubbin's engaging style brings Betty Ford vividly to life, presenting a must-read for fans of presidential biography and history.\" \u2015 Library Journal About the Author Lisa McCubbin Hill\u00a0is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author. She is the author of the acclaimed biography Betty Ford: First Lady Women\u2019s Advocate, Survivor, Trailblazer and coauthor (with Clint Hill) of the New York Times bestsellers Mrs. Kennedy and Me ; Five Days in November ; Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford ; and My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy. She met Clint Hill while writing her first book, The Kennedy Detail : JFK\u2019s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence (with Gerald Blaine). Previously, Lisa was a television news anchor, reporter, and talk-radio host. In 2021, Lisa McCubbin married coauthor Clint Hill. Visit her at LisaMcCubbin.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 21.08}, {"asin": "1616203722", "title": "The Walls Around Us", "author": "Nova Ren Suma", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 9 Up\u2014This haunting and evocative tale of magical realism immerses readers in two settings that seem worlds apart. The book is told in alternating first-person voices from the perspective of two teenagers: lonely Amber, who at age 13 was convicted of murdering her abusive stepfather and sent to Aurora Hills, a juvenile detention facility, and Vee, an insecure yet ruthlessly ambitious Julliard-bound ballerina. Through Vee's and Amber's recollections, readers learn about talented, kind-hearted Ori, Vee's former best friend and a dancer herself, who after being convicted of a heinous crime is sent to Aurora Hills, where she becomes Amber's roommate\u2014and where soon after a strange tragedy occurs. Though the plotting of this taut, gripping suspense leans heavily on ghosts and murder and will easily attract teens, this is no mere thriller. The prose is mesmerizing, laced with visceral, gorgeous figurative language, and draws subtle parallels between the disciplined, constricting world of ballet and the literal prison in which Amber and Ori find themselves. Believable and well developed, Vee and Amber have strong, unforgettable voices that ring true. Suma's unflinchingly honest depiction of the potentially destructive force of female friendship and skillful blending of gritty realism with supernatural elements is reminiscent of Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls (Viking, 2009), and the eerie mood she evokes is unnervingly potent. VERDICT A powerful story that will linger with readers.\u2014Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal Review \"With evocative language, a shifting timeline and more than one unreliable narrator, Suma subtly explores the balance of power between the talented and the mediocre, the rich and the poor, the brave and the cowardly\u2026 To reveal more would be to uncover the bloody heart that beats beneath the floorboards of this urban-legend-tinged tale.\"\u00a0\u2014 The New York Times \" The Walls Around Us passionately testifies to the ways in which girls are walled up, held down, fenced in. It's a gorgeously written, spellbinding ghost story. . . Nova Ren Suma's prose hums with such power and fury that when the explosions do happen, they seem unavoidable.\"\u00a0\u2014 Chicago Tribune \"Unputdownable . . . the well-paced plot reveals guilt, innocence, and dark truths that will not stay hidden.\"\u00a0\u2014 The Boston Globe \"Mixing mystery and supernatural elements, this book is ridden with lyrical prose and will keep you guessing the truth right up until the very end.\"\u00a0\u2014 Bustle.com \"Intense and haunting . . . This story is told in line after line of beautifully crafted prose that sear themselves into the reader's mind. Revelations seep out in an almost abstract way that sneaks up on you, then suddenly the truth is out and knocking you sideways. A stunning, unforgettable, and ghostly tale from start to finish.\"\u00a0\u2014 San Francisco Book Review \"Suma excels in creating surreal, unsettling stories with vivid language, and this psychological thriller is no exception. Along the way, Suma also makes a powerful statement about the ease with which guilt can be assumed and innocence awarded, not only in the criminal justice system, but in our hearts\u2014in the stories we tell ourselves. A fabulous, frightening read.\"\u00a0\u2014 Booklist , starred review \"The wholly realistic view of adolescents meeting the criminal justice system is touched at first with the slimmest twist of an otherworldly creepiness, escalating finally to the truly hair-raising and macabre. Eerie, painful and beautifully spine-chilling.\"\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus Reviews , starred review \"This haunting and evocative tale of magical realism immerses readers in two settings that seem worlds apart . . . Suma\u2019s unflinchingly honest depiction of the potentially destructive force of female friendship and skillful blending of gritty realism with supernatural elements is reminiscent of Laurie Halse Anderson\u2019s Wintergirls, and the eerie mood she evokes is unnervingly potent.\"\u00a0\u2014 School Library Journal , starred review \"In lyrical, authoritative prose, Suma weaves the disparate lives of [the] three girls into a single, spellbinding narrative that explores guilt, privilege, and complicity with fearless acuity. . . The twisting, ghostly tale of Ori\u2019s life, death, and redemption is unsettling and entirely engrossing.\"\u00a0\u2014 The Horn Book Magazine , starred review \"Gratifyingly disturbing . . . Suma craftily sets the two stories against one another, moving between Violet\u2019s fiercely grounded account and Amber\u2019s hauntingly destabilized one, enticing readers to figure out how the pieces go together.\"\u00a0\u2014 Bulletin for the Center for Children\u2019s Books , starred review \"Powerful . . . The compelling narrative, written in scintillating prose and featuring incredibly real characters, brings the two stories together in an explosive finale with a supernatural twist that results in a satisfying resolution.\"\u00a0\u2014 VOYA , starred review \"Gripping. . . Just try to put this down.\"\u00a0\u2014 Shelf Awareness for Readers , starred review \"A suspenseful tour de force, a ghost story of the best sort, the kind that creeps into your soul and haunts you.\"\u00a0\u2014 Libba Bray, author of The Diviners and A Great and Terrible Beauty \"Fearlessly imagined and deliciously sinister, The Walls Around Us is hypnotic, luring the reader deeper and deeper into its original, shocking narrative.\"\u00a0\u2014 Michelle Hodkin, The Mara Dyer Trilogy \"Written in luscious and deliciously creepy prose not easy to forget\u2026This is a story about guilt and innocence, about secrets and how deep we let people into those places within us, and it\u2019s a story about how the past can define our present, even if we try desperately to keep that past under wraps. Put it on your radars now; this is an outstanding literary young adult novel more than worth the wait.\"\u00a0\u2014 Book Riot From the Back Cover \u201cOri\u2019s dead because of what happened out behind the theater, in the tunnel made out of trees. She\u2019s dead because she got sent to that place upstate, locked up with those monsters. And she got sent there because of me.\u201d On the outside, there\u2019s Violet, a dancer days away from the life of her dreams when something threatens to expose the shocking truth of her achievement. On the inside, within the walls of Aurora Hills juvenile detention center, there\u2019s Amber, imprisoned for so long she can\u2019t imagine freedom. Tying their two worlds together is Orianna, who holds the key to unlocking all the girls\u2019 darkest mysteries . . . The Walls Around Us is a ghostly story of suspense told in two voices--one still living and one long dead. \u201cUnputdownable . . . The well-paced plot reveals guilt, innocence, and dark truths that will not stay hidden.\u201d \u2014 The Boston Globe \u201cWith evocative language, a shifting timeline and more than one unreliable narrator, Suma subtly explores the balance of power between the talented and the mediocre, the rich and the poor, the brave and the cowardly . . . To reveal more would be to uncover the bloody heart that beats beneath the floorboards of this urban-legend-tinged tale.\u201d \u2014The New York Times \u201cA suspenseful tour de force, a ghost story of the best sort, the kind that creeps into your soul and haunts you.\u201d \u2014Libba Bray, author of The Diviners and A Great and Terrible Beauty \u201cA gorgeously written, spellbinding ghost story.\u201d \u2014Chicago Tribune About the Author Nova Ren Suma is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us , which was an Edgar Award finalist. She also wrote Imaginary Girls and 17 & Gone and is co-creator of FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology .\u00a0She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and teaches writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from the Hudson Valley, she spent most of her adult life in New York City and now lives in Philadelphia. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 13.41}, {"asin": "1618216341", "title": "Genius Hour: Passion Projects That Ignite Innovation and Student Inquiry", "author": null, "description": "From School Library Journal \"Genius Hour\" is an educational trend that focuses on the individual learner and allots regular class time for students to pursue a personal passion. The idea is based on the assumption that young people learn collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity when allowed to explore their interests. McNair lays out the six phases of Genius Hour in detail, with chapters devoted to \"Passion,\" \"Plan,\" \"Pitch,\" \"Project,\" \"Product,\" and \"Presentation.\" She also addresses troubleshooting and assessment. Each chapter ends with reflection questions and a list of technological resources that were discussed in the prior pages. Sample planning documents for students and teachers are included, too. In addition to offering a typical annotated bibliography, the book provides Genius Hour\u2014related Twitter handles and hashtags. One drawback of the text is that McNair appears to have implemented this concept primarily with gifted students, so educators working with a wider variety of learning levels and styles may need to look elsewhere. Though the volume mentions standards, it doesn't get specific about them. VERDICT Best for educators whose school administrators are already on board with Genius Hour, but anyone interested in the concept will find useful material within.\u2014Deidre Winterhalter, Oak Park Public Library, IL Review Andi McNair's Genius Hour is a great resource for those who want to release potential in students but do not know how or where to start. The processes and tools provided are a great foundation for students (and their teachers) to use as they pursue projects they are passionate about . . . . Whether the reader is a novice or veteran, I feel that everyone will gain something of value from reading Genius Hour.,Terry Carter,MiddleWeb, 6/15/17This book is a fantastic guide for teachers to implement student-directed passion projects in the classroom . . .. Although aimed at educators, this book can also be useful for parents. It includes great tips on how to discover and encourage the passions of children. This is certainly valuable information for parents. It also provides a clear and concise understanding of what the goals of education should be in our modern age. It definitely challenges the norm, but in an inspiring and energizing way.,Sarah Perry,Manhattan Book Review, 6/1/17The book takes what could be a very open-ended process and provides an organizational framework so teachers and students can make the time productive . . . A very practical and good reference as teachers work to optimize the process in their individual classrooms. Mindprint Learning, 12/1/17 About the Author Andi McNair is the Digital Innovation Specialist at ESC Region 12 in Waco, TX. Before working at the center, she taught elementary and gifted/talented students at a small rural school in Texas. Andi was in the classroom for a total of 16 years before pursuing her passion to change education by giving educators practical ways to create experiences that will engage and empower this generation of learners. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0316393983", "title": "This Is What a Librarian Looks Like: A Celebration of Libraries, Communities, and Access to Information", "author": "Kyle Cassidy", "description": "About the Author Kyle Cassidy is an author and photographer whose work includes the forthcoming Where I Write: Fantasy & Science Fiction Authors in Their Creative Spaces . His work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair , the Sunday Times of London, Marie Claire , NPR, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia, PA.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Photography & Video"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0615649564", "title": "The Kindness Of Ravens", "author": "Frank Bardessono", "description": "From Publishers Weekly \"Gifted novelist Bardessono offers this relentlessly raw and, often, darkly humorous account of youth and young manhood set in the gritty, neon-colored Los Angeles of the 1980s. Bardessono's novel is idiosyncratic, hilarious, deeply emotional, and an excellent representation of the time in which it's set.\" - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Review \"Bardessono expertly captures the hedonism of the 1980s...wryly observant, equally comfortable with the sacred and the scatological.\" - Foreword Reviews \"A witty, touching tale of an extraordinary young man's love for an older woman...poignantly depicts Daren's struggles to reconcile his strange visions with the world around him, giving way to an exploration of love, addiction and maturity...with a fresh, offbeat style, full of cleverness and humor.\u00a0 An original, quirky love story.\" - Kirkus Book Reviews \"The Kindness of Ravens is a heartrending look at a young man's search for hope, true love, and meaning in a world that doesn't make that search easy.\" - IndieReader About the Author Frank Bardessono is an award winning, critically acclaimed author who graduated from California State University, Chico with bachelor's degrees in psychology and philosophy. He is a passionate advocate for the disabled and the unhoused in Southern California. He dabbles in the zen of Dudeness and occasionally writes novels in multiple genres including literary fiction, philosophy, and YA fiction. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0692490124", "title": "Hillsider: Snapshots of a Curious Political Journey", "author": "Don Ness", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 18.94}, {"asin": "0425239268", "title": "Mortar and Murder (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery)", "author": "Jennie Bentley", "description": "About the Author Jennie Bentley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Do-It-Yourself Mysteries. The Prime Crime home renovation series features textile designer Avery Baker and her handyman boyfriend, Derek Ellis, who renovate houses in Maine. She also writes under the name Jenna Bennett.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0399585966", "title": "As Bright as Heaven", "author": "Susan Meissner", "description": "Review Praise for As Bright as Heaven \u201cA story of one family\u2019s heartbreak and hope. Strong [and] resilient, Meissner\u2019s characters step off the page and into history.\u201d\u2014Lisa Wingate, New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours \u201cA family saga, coming-of-age tale, and riveting historical fiction all in one. A must read!\u201d\u2014Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan's Tale \u201cA thoughtful examination of life...somber, gripping, and illuminated with hope.\u201d\u2014Kate Quinn, USA Today bestselling\u00a0author of The Alice Network \u201cTraces of Little Women in the trials and fortitude of the Bright women. An affirmation of the power of love and duty.\u201d\u2014Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew\u2019s Last Stand and The Summer Before the War \u201cA fascinating historical novel and a beautifully written story of love, loss, and family. A gorgeous, unforgettable book.\u201d\u2014Jillian Cantor, author of Margot and The Lost Letter About the Author Susan Meissner is a former managing editor of a weekly newspaper and an award-winning columnist. She is the award-winning author of A Bridge Across the Ocean , Secrets of a Charmed Life , A Fall of Marigolds , and Stars Over Sunset Boulevard , among other novels. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 \u00a5January 1918\u00a5 Pauline Morning light shimmers on the apricot horizon as I stand at the place where my baby boy rests. Stouthearted chickadees are singing in the day, just like they have done every other winter's dawn, but when this same sun sets tonight, I will be miles away from them, and inside an unfamiliar house. There will be no reminders anywhere that Henry was ever mine. Not visible ones, anyway. I kneel on the dead grass, brittle with icy moisture. The fabric of my skirt draws in the chilled damp, as if it is parched with thirst. The growing wetness at my knees is unhurried and easy, like a clean, slow blade. I look at the little marble slab that bears Henry's name and the carving of a sweet lamb curled up among lilies, and I'm reminded again that he was my angel child, even before he flew away to heaven. From the moment I held my boy, glistening and new, I knew that he wasn't like the other babies I'd given birth to. He wasn't like my girls. They'd slipped out annoyed by the noise and chill and sharp edges of this world. Not Henry. He didn't cry. He didn't curl his tiny hands into fists. He didn't shout his displeasure at being pulled out of the only safe place he knew. When the doctor placed him in my arms, Henry merely looked at me with eyes so blue they could've been sapphires. He held my gaze like he knew who I was. Knew everything about me. Like he still had the breath of eternity in his lungs. He didn't care when I parted the folds of his blanket to look at his maleness and marvel at the pearly sheen of his skin against mine. I could scarcely believe I'd given birth to a boy after three girls and so many years since the last one. I just kept staring at Henry and he just let me. When Thomas was let into the room, he was as astonished that we had a son as I was. The girls were, too. They followed in right after their father, even though it was the middle of the night, and we all gazed and grinned at the little man-child, the quiet lad who did not cry. My father-in-law came over the next morning, as did Thomas's brothers and their wives, all of them smelling of dried tobacco leaves and spice. My parents came, too, and my sister, Jane, who was newly pregnant with her own child after several years of hoping and praying for a baby. They all marveled at how beautiful Henry was, how calm, how enchanting his gaze and how sweet his temperament. My mother and Thomas's sisters-in-law stared at him like I'd done the night before, amazed as I had been at how serene this baby was. They had known, too, without knowing, that something wasn't right. The few months we had with Henry were wonder filled and happy. He did all the things a baby does that make you smile and laugh and want to kiss his downy head. When he needed something, like my breast or a clean diaper or affection, he didn't wail; he merely sighed a sweet little sound that if it were made of words would have started with \"If it's not too much trouble . . .\" We didn't know he didn't have the physical strength to exert himself. His perfectly formed outsides hid the too-small, too-weak heart that my body had made for him. And yet had God asked me ahead of time if I wanted this sweet child for just shy of half a year, I still would have said yes. Even now, eight weeks after Henry's passing, and even when I hold Jane's sweet little newborn, Curtis, I would still say yes. I don't know if Thomas feels this way, and I know the girls don't. Evelyn is still sad, Maggie is still angry, and Willa is still bewildered that Henry was taken from us. I can't say why I am none of those things anymore. What I feel inside, I'm not sure there are words to describe. I should still be sad, angry, and bewildered, but instead I feel a numbness regarding Death that I've told no one about. Not even Thomas. I no longer fear Death, though I know that I should. I'm strangely at peace with what I used to think of as my enemy. Living seems more the taskmaster of the two, doesn't it? Life is wonderful and beautiful but oh, how hard it can be. Dying, by contrast, is easy and simple, almost gentle. But who can I tell such a thing to? No one. I am troubled by how remarkable this feeling is. This is why I changed my mind about moving to Philadelphia. I'd said no the first time Thomas's uncle made his offer even though I could tell my husband was interested. Back then I couldn't imagine leaving this sleepy little town where I've lived all my life, couldn't imagine leaving my parents, though I've never been especially dependent on their subtle shows of affection. I didn't want to move to the city, where the war in Europe would somehow seem closer, didn't want to uproot the girls from the only home they've ever known. Didn't want to tear myself away from all that was familiar. Uncle Fred wrote again a couple months after Henry was born, and Thomas had said we needed to think carefully before turning down a second invitation. \"Uncle Fred might take his offer to one of my brothers,\" Thomas had told me. I truly would have given the matter more serious thought if Henry hadn't begun his slow ascent away from us right about the same time. When my son's fragile heart finally began to number his days, nothing else mattered but holding on to him as long as we could. Thomas didn't bring up the matter again when the third letter from Uncle Fred arrived last week. My husband thinks I cannot leave this little mound of grass. But the truth is, I have come out from under the shroud of sorrow a different person. I no longer want to stay in this place where Henry spent such a short time. I don't want Thomas shading a view of the wide horizon with hands calloused from binder leaves. I don't want the girls to end up mirroring this life of mine, in a place where nothing truly changes but the contours of your heart. More than that, I want to know why Death seems to walk beside me like a companion now rather than prowling behind like a shadowy specter. Surely the answers await me in Uncle Fred's funeral parlor, where he readies the deceased for their journeys home. Thomas would've gone to his grave rolling cigars for other men to smoke, but now he will one day inherit Uncle Fred's mortuary business and then he won't be under the thumb of anyone. I don't know what it is like to be the wife of an undertaker. I only know that I need to remember how it was to keep Death at a distance. I kneel, kiss my fingertips, and brush them against the H carved into the cold stone. And I rise from the wet ground without saying good-bye. Chapter 2 Maggie I will miss the curing barn in autumn, when the tobacco leaves hang from the laths like golden skirts in a wardrobe. I've always loved how in October the papery leaves smell like cedar, molasses, and tree bark. There won't be anything like them in Philadelphia. And we'll be long gone by the time October comes around again. The curing barn is my favorite place because it's either as busy as a beehive or as still as a painting. After that first killing frost it's like the painting, so still and quiet you can forget there's a changing world outside. No one has to do anything in the curing barn in the fall except have a look-see now and then to make sure none of the tobacco leaves are getting moldy. In the fall, we're all in the rolling room. I'm twelve but I've the delicate hands of a young woman, Grandad says, so I roll a nice cigar. Evie just turned fifteen and doesn't like rolling; she'd rather be reading under the locust tree when the weather's nice, but she likes to buy books with the money she earns. Our younger sister, Willa, is only six. It would've been a long while before Grandad told her she had hands as graceful as a dancer and rolled a cigar better than a man did. I don't usually spend much time in the barn when the tobacco leaves are finished with their curing, but that was where I was when Mama told Papa she'd seen Uncle Fred's letter. I'd come home from school, done my chores, and then walked across the snowy field from our house to lie among the few remaining wooden slats that still held their toast-colored leaves. I'd been going to the curing barn a lot since my baby brother died, but Papa had forgotten I was there. \"I've been thinking about Philadelphia,\" Mama said. Papa had been checking the empty laths for rot and weak spots. He was a couple rows over from me, and I was on my back on the dirt behind a crate, looking up at the leafy ball gowns. The last time Mama had been to Philadelphia was when Henry was still alive. She and Evie had taken him to see a doctor, and they'd come home with the awful news that he wasn't going to get better. There was no doctor in the city or on the face of the whole earth who could cure Henry. \"I think we should go,\" Mama had said. At first I thought Willa must be sick now, and that was why Mama wanted to go to Philadelphia again. Or Evie. Or maybe I was the sick one and I didn't even know it yet. But then Mama added she'd seen Uncle Fred's latest letter asking Papa to come work for him in Philadelphia, and now she was thinking it was a good idea after all. \"What made you change your mind?\" Papa sounded surprised. A second or two went by before Mama answered him. \"Everything.\" Papa paused a moment, too, before he said, \"If we do this, I don't think we can undo it.\" \"I know.\" \"We won't be able to get back here that often, Pauline. Not at first.\" \"I know that, too,\" Mama said. \"If I can bring the girls back to see the family for a week or two in the summer, I can be content with that.\" \"I don't suppose your parents will be too keen about this. Especially your mother.\" \"No, maybe not. But you know how she is. She'll quietly stew on it a bit, and then she'll be done. I think in the end she wants us to be happy. I know that's what I'd want for us if I were her.\" A funny, spirally feeling had started to wind its way inside me as my parents talked to each other. Papa and Mama were talking about moving to the city to live with Uncle Fred, a man I had only met once. He came out to Quakertown when Granny died. Not Mama's mama, Papa's. When I was eight. Papa had said, \"Are you sure now? Are you sure this is what you want to do?\" \"It's what you want to do, isn't it?\" Mama replied. \"It will mean a good life for you and the girls. A much better life than what I'm giving you here.\" \"You've given us a good life, Tom,\" Mama said. \"I want to give you a better one.\" Then Papa said he needed to tell Grandad and break the news to the family and they'd need to sell the house. They talked for a few more minutes, but I wasn't listening to everything they said. I was thinking about leaving my friends and the other family members and the curing barn. I couldn't remember what Uncle Fred's business was, but I was positive it wasn't growing tobacco and rolling cigars. Not in the city. It was so strange to me that my parents could just decide we were leaving and we'd leave. How could we move away from where we'd buried Henry? When Mama left, I stood up slowly so that I would see Papa before he saw me. But he was looking my direction and he saw my head clear the laths. I'm not afraid of my father. He doesn't yell or curse or storm about when he's angry, but he can look like he wants to. He's tall like Grandad and has the same coffee brown eyes that glitter like stars both when he's happy and when he's sad. And I guess when he's surprised, too. \"I didn't know you were still in here,\" he said. \"I know.\" \"Did you hear everything?\" I nodded. He gave me a very serious look. \"You can't say anything to anybody, not even your sisters, until I talk to Grandad first. You understand?\" \"Are we moving to Philadelphia?\" He hesitated a second or two before answering, like he almost couldn't believe it was true himself. \"Yes,\" he said. \"Why? What's wrong with where we live right now?\" Papa moved from his row to mine. \"There's nothing wrong with where we live right now. I just have a chance to give you girls a much better home. Better schooling. Better everything. My uncle Fred doesn't have any children. He has no one to leave his home and business to. He wants to leave them to me when he dies. To us. He has a very nice house, Mags. Electric lights in every room. Hot water from the tap.\" \"And so just like that, we're going?\" \"Mama and I've been thinking on it awhile.\" \"All my friends are here.\" \"You will make new ones. I promise you will.\" \"Henry's here.\" My throat felt hot and thick as I said Henry's name. I looked away from Papa, and in the direction of the cemetery, even though I couldn't see it from inside the curing barn. Papa put his hands gently on my shoulders so that I would turn my head to face him again. \"Henry's in heaven. He's not in the graveyard here-you know that. We're not leaving him; we're taking him with us in our hearts.\" I reached up to flick away a couple tears that wanted to trail down my face. \"I need you to promise you won't say anything. Not yet,\" Papa said. I didn't answer. \"Maggie, I want your word now.\" \"I promise,\" I finally whispered. \"All right, then.\" He took one hand off my shoulders, but left the other one as he began to lead us toward the big door that led outside. \"When I tell your sisters, that's when you'll know it's okay to tell other people. Not until then.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.53}, {"asin": "0525429204", "title": "The War I Finally Won", "author": "Kimberly Brubaker Bradley", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 4\u20136\u2014Eleven-year-old Ada picks up her story shortly after The War That Saved My Life left off. She's in the hospital, nervously awaiting the surgery that will fix her club foot, when Susan receives a letter from Lady Thornton that obviously upsets her. Turns out, Ada's mother was killed in a bombing. Ada does not know how to feel about that, but, ever practical, she worries about where that leaves her and brother Jamie now that they are war orphans instead of child evacuees. Despite Susan's assurances that the three of them are family now, Ada remains prickly and irritable, particularly when Jamie falls easily into calling Susan \"Mum.\" The three move into a cottage on the Thornton estate and are soon joined by Lady Thornton when the big house is needed for the war effort. Ada is leery of Lady Thornton, but living in close quarters brings out the best and worst in everyone, especially when Lord Thornton arrives with a German Jewish girl named Ruth whom he wishes Susan to tutor. Ada's unique voice helps evoke the novel's vivid setting and numerous complex characters. There is destitution but plenty of humor. There is also plenty of heartbreak and loss, so readers will want to keep a box of tissues handy. VERDICT Fans of the first book will love the sequel even more; truly a first purchase. While it stands alone, encourage readers to read both books to fully appreciate Ada's remarkable and wholly believable triumph.\u2014Brenda Kahn, Tenakill Middle School, Closter, NJ Review A New York Times bestsellerA Washington Post Best Book of the YearA Boston Globe Best Book of the YearA Kirkus Best Book of the YearA Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of the YearA Southern Living Best Book of the YearA BookPage Best Book of the YearAn Indie Next List selectionA CCBC Choices book \"Stunning . . . By turns tough and tender, this novel leavens complex themes with moments of wonder and joy.\"\u00a0\u2014 The Washington Post \"Rarely is a children\u2019s book so honest [and] daring. But there is comfort too, in Ada\u2019s desire to love and grow. . . . The power of this book is that it describes, slowly and sometimes painfully, that it is possible not just to live through pain, but to live with it.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 The New York Times \u2605\u00a0\"Thoughtful, brave, true, and wise beyond her years, Ada is for the ages\u2014as is this book. Wonderful.\"\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus , starred review\"It\u2019s rare when a sequel is just as beautifully written and just as touching (maybe even more so) than the first book. . . .\u00a0Bradley writes the story in such a way that the reader is by turns both touched and then, pages later, heartbroken. Over and over.\u201d\u00a0\u2014HuffPost\u2605\u00a0\"Fans of the first book will love the sequel even more; truly a first purchase. While it stands alone, encourage readers to read both books to fully appreciate Ada\u2019s remarkable and wholly believable triumph.\"\u00a0\u2014 School Library Journal , starred review\"Harrowing and heartening.\"\u00a0\u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \u2605\u00a0\"Bradley sweeps us up in the story she\u2019s telling and at the same time raises hard questions and makes us think\u2014even as she moves us to tears.\"\u00a0\u2014 The Horn Book , starred review\u2605\u00a0\"A\u00a0perceptive look into othering . . . Bradley sensitively portrays Ada\u2019s journey to accept selfless kindness and love after years of neglect in a poignant and satisfying story of found family that will stay with readers.\"\u00a0\u2014 Publishers Weekly , starred review\"Ada . . .\u00a0is one of the most unforgettable characters in modern children\u2019s literature.\"\u00a0\u2014 The Washington Post \"In a hard times, complicated people do the best they can.\u00a0That\u2019s what we see in this bittersweet moving story . . . (Be prepared for both tears and smiles with this one!)\" \u2014ImaginationSoup\"Ada\u2019s story is a winning combination of history and healing, and fans may hope that Bradley isn\u2019t quite finished with her just yet.\"\u00a0\u2014 Booklist About the Author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley lives on a forty-two-acre farm in Bristol, Tennessee. She is the author of several books for children, including Leap of Faith , Jefferson\u2019s Sons , the New York Times bestselling The War I Finally Won , and the #1 New York Times bestselling, Newbery Honor book The War that Saved My Life . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 You can know things all you like, but that doesn\u2019t mean you believe them. \u201cAda! You need to drink something!\u201d Susan\u2019s voice, scolding. Susan\u2019s hands, pushing a cup of cold tea into mine. \u201cI don\u2019t want to,\u201d I said. \u201cReally I don\u2019t.\u201d Susan curled my fingers around the teacup. \u201cI understand,\u201d she said, \u201cbut please try. It\u2019s the last thing they\u2019re going to let you have. You\u2019ll be thirsty in the morning.\u201d My right foot was twisted sideways at the ankle. It had been all my life. My ankle bones grew curled, so my toenails scraped the ground and what should have been the bottom of my foot faced the sky. Walking hurt like anything. Despite the calluses, the skin on my foot tore and bled. This night in the hospital\u2014nearly three years ago now\u2014was September 16, 1940. A Monday. It was a little over a year into the war between Hitler and most of the rest of the world. Eleven years into the war between the rest of the world and me. The very next day surgeons were going to chop my curled ankle bones up and rearrange them. Maybe into something like a functional foot. I put the teacup Susan gave me to my lips. I forced myself to sip. My throat closed. I choked. Tea splattered across the bedcovers and my tray. Susan sighed. She mopped up the spilled tea, then motioned for one of the nurses that was putting up the blackout to come take away my tray. Since the start of the war, we covered our windows with blackout screens every night, so that German bombers wouldn\u2019t be able to aim at our lights. My hospital wasn\u2019t in London, which was getting bombed every night right now, but that didn\u2019t mean it wouldn\u2019t be hit. You never could tell what Germans would do. \u201cLetter for you, Mum,\u201d the nurse said, handing Susan an envelope as she scooped up the tray. \u201cDelivered to the hospital? How odd.\u201d Susan opened it. \u201cIt\u2019s from Lady Thorton.\u201d She unfolded the letter inside. \u201cShe must have sent it before she got my note with the boardinghouse\u2019s address. Ada, are you quite sure you don\u2019t want something to eat? Toast?\u201d I shook my head. The mouthful of tea I\u2019d swallowed swirled in my stomach. \u201cI think I\u2019m going to be sick.\u201d Susan gasped. She looked up at me, snatched a basin from the bottom shelf of my bedside table, and thrust it beneath my chin. I clenched my teeth and held everything in. Susan\u2019s hand shook. The basin shook too. I looked at her face. She\u2019d gone pale, her eyes dark and wide. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d I asked. \u201cWhat does that letter say?\u201d \u201cNothing,\u201d she said. \u201cBreathe deep. That\u2019s it.\u201d She put the basin down, folded Lady Thorton\u2019s letter, and tucked it into her handbag. Something was wrong. I could see it on her face. \u201cIs it Butter?\u201d I asked. \u201cWhat?\u201d \u201cHas something happened to Butter?\u201d Butter was Susan\u2019s pony. I loved him. He was staying in Lady Thorton\u2019s stables while I was in hospital. \u201cOh,\u201d Susan said. \u201cNo. That is, Lady Thorton didn\u2019t mention Butter, but she would have if anything were wrong.\u201d \u201cMaggie?\u201d Maggie was Lady Thorton\u2019s daughter, my best friend. \u201cMaggie\u2019s fine,\u201d Susan said. Her hands still shook very slightly. Her eyes didn\u2019t look right. \u201cEveryone\u2019s fine in the village.\u201d \u201cAnd Jamie\u2019s fine,\u201d I said. It was a statement, not a question, because it had to be true. My brother Jamie wasn\u2019t in the village\u2014he was here with us. Susan and Jamie and Bovril, Jamie\u2019s cat, were staying in a rented room in a boardinghouse near the hospital. Jamie was there with the landlady now. Jamie was six years old. We\u2019d guessed he was seven, but we had his birth certificate now and he wasn\u2019t, not quite. I was eleven. I had my birth certificate too. I\u2019d known my real birthday for just over a week. Susan nodded. \u201cJamie\u2019s fine.\u201d I took a deep breath. \u201cIs something stopping my surgery?\u201d Before last week, when Mam tried to snatch us away from her, Susan had said she couldn\u2019t give permission for me to have surgery. She still couldn\u2019t give permission, but she didn\u2019t care anymore. She said that what was right and what was permitted were sometimes different things. I needed surgery and I was going to have it. I didn\u2019t ask questions. Susan smoothed my hair back from my forehead. I pulled away. \u201cI won\u2019t let anything stop your surgery,\u201d she said. There was still something off about her voice and expression. I knew it had to do with Lady Thorton\u2019s letter. Lady Thorton could upset just about anyone. When I\u2019d first met her, before I knew her name, I called her the iron-faced woman. She was sharp like an ax. Lady Thorton couldn\u2019t meddle with us here. We\u2019d lost everything inside Susan\u2019s house, but I still had Jamie, Susan, Bovril, and Butter. And surgery tomorrow. It was more than enough. You can know things all you like, but that doesn\u2019t mean you believe them. A little over a year ago, I\u2019d taught myself to walk in Mam\u2019s one-room London flat. I kept it secret, wiping up the blood before Mam came home every day. I\u2019d only wanted to be able to leave the flat, not the city, but learning to walk saved me. When Mam sent Jamie away from London with all the other kids, because of Hitler\u2019s bombs, I snuck out too. We ended up with Susan and Butter in a seaside village, in Kent. Susan didn\u2019t want us then. We didn\u2019t want her either, but I wanted her pony, and Jamie and I both liked her food and eventually we all three wanted to stay with each other. Of course that was when Mam showed up to take us back. Only a week ago, that was. Susan decided to fight for us. She followed us to London, which meant we were all away from Susan\u2019s house the night German bombers destroyed it entirely. So the worst thing\u2014Mam\u2019s return\u2014became the best thing\u2014not dying from the bombs. Now everyone was acting like my surgery tomorrow would be the best thing ever, which made me worry it might turn out bad. Susan said it couldn\u2019t be bad. She said she hoped my foot would work properly after the surgery, but if it didn\u2019t I would be fine. I was fine now and I would be fine afterward, no matter what. Maybe. Depended entirely on what you meant by fine. We were still in a war. The nurses claimed they\u2019d be able to get all the patients into the basement quickly enough if the air raid sirens went off. They hadn\u2019t had to do it yet, so who knew if they really could. Susan leaned forward. She hugged me. It was awkward for us both. I let out my breath. My stomach still churned. \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d Susan said. \u201cI\u2019ll see you in the morning. Go to sleep.\u201d I couldn\u2019t sleep but the night passed anyhow. In the morning Susan held my hand while a nurse wheeled my bed down the hall. We stopped outside a heavy white door. The nurse said to Susan, \u201cThis is as far as you can go.\u201d I hadn\u2019t realized Susan would have to leave me. I clung to her. \u201cWhat if it doesn\u2019t work?\u201d For a moment her fingers tightened around mine. \u201cCourage,\u201d she said, and let go. In the operating theater a man in a long gown held a mask in front of my face. \u201cWhen I put this over your mouth,\u201d he said, \u201cI want you to very slowly count to ten.\u201d I only made it to four before I fell asleep. Coming out of the ether was harder. My right leg was pinned, trapped. I couldn\u2019t move. I broke into a sweat struggling to pull myself free. I\u2019d been caught in a bombing, buried in rubble. I couldn\u2019t move my leg. Then somehow I was trapped again in the dank cabinet beneath the sink, in our old flat in London. Mam had locked me inside. The cockroaches\u2014 \u201cShh.\u201d Susan\u2019s voice, soft in my ear. \u201cSettle down. It\u2019s over. You\u2019re fine.\u201d I was not fine. Not in the cabinet, not with Mam\u2014 Someone pinned my arms. Threw a blanket over me, tucked it tightly around my sides. \u201cOpen your eyes,\u201d Susan\u2019s voice said, still gentle. \u201cThe surgery\u2019s over.\u201d I opened my eyes. Susan\u2019s face swam blurrily in front of me. \u201cYou\u2019re safe,\u201d she said. I swallowed hard. I said, \u201cYou\u2019re lying.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not.\u201d \u201cI can\u2019t move my leg. My right leg. My clubfoot leg\u2014\u201d \u201cYou haven\u2019t got a clubfoot,\u201d Susan said. \u201cNot anymore.\u201d I woke properly in the middle of the night. Screens surrounded my bed. A dim light shone behind them. \u201cSusan?\u201d I whispered. One of the night nurses came to my bedside. \u201cThirsty?\u201d she asked. I nodded. She poured me water and I drank. \u201cHow badly does it hurt?\u201d I couldn\u2019t move my right leg because the doctors had put a cast on it after the surgery. I remembered that now. Beneath the plaster, a strong dull ache centered around my right ankle and pulsed toward my knee. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d I said. \u201cIt always hurts.\u201d \u201cMore than you can bear?\u201d I shook my head. I could bear almost anything. The nurse smiled. \u201cThat\u2019s right,\u201d she said. \u201cYour mother said you were a tough one.\u201d She handed me a pill. \u201cSwallow this.\u201d I said, \u201cSusan\u2019s not my mother.\u201d Thank God for that. I swallowed the pill and fell back asleep. When I opened my eyes again Jamie\u2019s face was inches from mine. His hair looked like it hadn\u2019t been brushed in weeks. His eyes were red and swollen. He was crying. I pushed myself up in a panic. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d Jamie launched himself onto the bed. He banged into my cast. I winced. \u201cEasy,\u201d Susan said, pulling him back. Jamie burrowed against me. I put my arms around him and looked over his head to Susan. \u201cTell me what\u2019s wrong,\u201d I said. \u201cIt was in Lady Thorton\u2019s letter,\u201d Susan answered. I nodded. I knew that. Jamie said, \u201cOur mam\u2019s dead.\u201d You can know things all you like, but that doesn\u2019t mean you believe them. Chapter 2 I knew my mother\u2014Mam\u2014worked nights in a munitions factory in London. I knew bombs were falling on London now, every single night in fierce, horrendous waves. I knew the Germans targeted factories, especially munitions ones. I\u2019d been caught in a bombing raid myself. Brick walls exploded above my head. Afterward shattered glass drifted across the streets like snow. So I knew Mam could die. I just didn\u2019t believe it. Even despite all the bombs. I thought Mam would live forever. I thought Jamie and I would never be free. I hugged Jamie. He sobbed. He thunked my cast again. I managed not to scream. Susan tucked a pillow between Jamie and my cast. She eased herself onto the corner of the bed. She rubbed Jamie\u2019s back. \u201cIs it real?\u201d I asked. \u201cIt\u2019s real,\u201d she said. \u201cReally real?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Susan said. I said, \u201c Are you sorry?\u201d Was I sorry? I supposed I was. Maybe? My mother hated me. You\u2019ll never see us again, I\u2019d said to her, a week ago in London. She\u2019d said back, Is that a promise? Now it was. \u201cThis isn\u2019t a happy ending,\u201d Susan said. \u201cIt\u2019s not the worst possible ending, but it isn\u2019t happy, and I\u2019m sorry for that. I am grateful to have an ending, though. Your mother can\u2019t hurt you anymore.\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d I don\u2019t know whether Mam and I could have had a happy ending. I always hoped so\u2014of course I did, she was my mother\u2014but it was another thing I didn\u2019t fully believe. I turned to Jamie. \u201cWhy are you sad? Mam hated us. She said so.\u201d Jamie sobbed harder. \u201cI loved her,\u201d he said. Jamie was nicer than me. He probably did love Mam. I didn\u2019t. I wished I did. I wished like anything she loved me. I looked at Susan again. \u201cHow am I supposed to feel?\u201d A good daughter would feel sad, I supposed. But if Mam was dead, then I was no longer anyone\u2019s daughter. I wasn\u2019t sad. I wasn\u2019t happy. Or angry. Or anything. Susan\u2019s hand clasped mine over Jamie\u2019s narrow back. \u201cHowever you feel is fine.\u201d \u201cIs there a word for feeling nothing?\u201d \u201cYes,\u201d Susan said. \u201cStunned. I felt stunned when I first heard my mother died.\u201d I looked at her. \u201cWhen did your mam die?\u201d \u201cA few years ago. Several months before Becky.\u201d Becky, Susan\u2019s very best friend, died of pneumonia three years before the war. I knew that. They had lived together; Susan\u2019s bombed house had belonged to Becky first, and it was Becky who gave Susan Butter. \u201cBoth deaths were hard,\u201d Susan said. \u201cMy feelings about my mother\u2019s were more complicated.\u201d I let go of Susan\u2019s hand. \u201cHow did Lady Thorton know about Mam?\u201d Before last week, we\u2019d heard nothing from Mam for an entire year, not one word despite all the letters Susan and I wrote her, until she showed up in person to drag me and Jamie back to London. \u201cI\u2019d given the WVS your mother\u2019s new address,\u201d Susan said. \u201cOne of the WVS groups in London contacted Lady Thorton. I suppose they\u2019re monitoring casualty lists.\u201d The WVS was the Women\u2019s Volunteer Service. They did war work. Susan was part of our village\u2019s WVS. Lady Thorton was its head, which made her in charge of evacuees like Jamie and me. Susan reached for my hand again. I pulled it away. Jamie kept crying. I wanted to comfort him, but my insides felt hollow. I didn\u2019t know what Jamie and I were, if Mam was dead. Could we still stay with Susan? Were we still evacuees? \u201cWhat happens next?\u201d I asked. Susan paused. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ll ask Lady Thorton about the arrangements.\u201d I blinked. My heart stuttered. It wasn\u2019t the answer I expected. It wasn\u2019t the answer I wanted. Arrangements. The word came ringed with worry. It arrived on a wave of panic. It fell to the pit of my stomach. Where had I heard that word before? Susan didn\u2019t say, Don\u2019t worry. She didn\u2019t say, Of course you\u2019ll live with me. She didn\u2019t say, I\u2019ll make sure you\u2019re taken care of. She had said all those things the day she rescued us from Mam for the second time, the day her house was bombed. She said we\u2019d stay together always. I\u2019d believed her. Had she been lying? Or did everything change because Mam died? \u201cIs there a word that means children with dead parents?\u201d I asked. Susan swallowed. She said, \u201cOrphans.\u201d Orphans. Jamie and I were orphans now, not evacuees. We wouldn\u2019t stay under Lady Thorton\u2019s protection. Susan wouldn\u2019t be able to keep us. Something different happened to orphans. Pain gripped my gut. It hurt worse than my foot ever had. I tightened my arms around Jamie. I would hang on to him no matter what. I would never let us be separated. \u201cI\u2019ll be walking soon,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019ll be very useful then.\u201d Susan blinked. \u201cYour recovery will take a few months,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know that.\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m very hardworking.\u201d \u201cYes, you are,\u201d Susan said. \u201cBut you won\u2019t heal faster because of it. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ll be allowed to leave the hospital, whatever else happens.\u201d \u201cDo I have to leave right away?\u201d This day grew worse and worse. \u201cNo, no, of course not.\u201d Susan sounded distracted. \u201cI only mean for the funeral. If we have one. Whatever we do.\u201d Funeral. Another word I didn\u2019t understand. Even after a year of living with Susan there were so many things I didn\u2019t understand. Mam hadn\u2019t been much for words, and there was a limit to how much I could teach myself, looking out the one window of our flat. Arrangements. \u201cLine up against that wall,\u201d Lady Thorton had said last September, in her crisp head-of-the-WVS voice. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make arrangements.\u201d We\u2019d just come off the train that had evacuated us to the village from London. A whole herd of dirty, shabby children, and Jamie and me the most wretched-looking of all. I was nearly done in from the effort of getting away, my clubfoot oozing blood and hurting so badly my knees shook. The villagers filed past us, looking us up and down. No one wanted Jamie and me. I was back to that place now, only cleaner and with my right foot in plaster. \u201cYou\u2019d better go,\u201d I said, turning my back on Susan. \u201cYou\u2019ll need to start making arrangements.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.74}, {"asin": "1533370249", "title": "Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions", "author": "Scott M. Graffius", "description": "Review \"One of the best Scrum books of all time\"\u00a0\u2015 BookAuthority\u00a0\"The book highlights the versatility of Scrum beautifully.\"\u2015 Literary Titan\u00a0\"A superbly written and presented guide to team-based project management that is applicable across a broad range of businesses from consumer products to high-tech.\"\u2015 IndieBRAG\u00a0\"Recommended.\"\u2015 The US Review of Books\u00a0\"The book is excellent.\"\u00a0\u2015 Readers' Favorite\u00a0\" Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions is an all-inclusive instruction guide that is impressively 'user-friendly' in tone, content, clarity, organization, and presentation.\"\u2015 Midwest Book Review\u00a0\"A-type personalities (those inclined to avoid instruction manuals) and non-readers will rejoice upon discovering this guide which makes getting started with Agile Scrum a breeze.\"\u2015 Literary Classics Book Reviews\u00a0\" Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions is a must-have for a project manager wanting to introduce Scrum to the organization.\"\u2015 PM World Journal\u00a0\"A clear and authoritative roadmap for successful implementation, Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions is strongly recommended.\"\u2015 BookViral From the Back Cover Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions will show you how to easily and quickly employ Scrum, the most popular agile project development and delivery framework. About the Author Scott M. Graffius is an agile project management consultant, practitioner, award-winning author, and keynote speaker. Content from his books, speaking engagements, and more has been used by businesses, governments, and universities including Gartner, Cisco, RSA, Ford, LITE-ON Technology Corporation, Liberty Mutual Group, Atlassian, the United States Department of Energy, the United States Army, the State of Wisconsin, the New Zealand Ministry of Education, Tufts University, James Madison University, Santa Clara University, Brigham Young University, Texas A&M University, The Open University, Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation, and others. Thinkers360 named Scott a global top thought leader and influencer. He can be reached at ScottGraffius.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 34.99}, {"asin": "1492638145", "title": "The Storybook Knight: A Rhyming Story About Dragons For Kids", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0990620735", "title": "Together We Empower: Rekindling Hope in Rural India", "author": "Marly Cornell", "description": "Review \"A roadmap for development workers and organizations engaged in initiatives to bring about sustained long-term social change in partnership with communities.\" \u00a0~Deep Shikha, PhD, Department of Economics, St. Catherine University, Minnesota\"Educating and mobilizing citizens to invoke democratic processes to access justice is what the rule of law demands and what Sehgal Foundation is doing in India's rural villages.\" \u00a0~N. R. Madhava Menon, LLD, IBA chair of Continuing Legal Education, National Law School of India University\"A well-documented and well-written publication illustrating the rich contributions made by S M Sehgal Foundation to transform the lives of the poor.\" \u00a0 ~D. R. Prasada Raju, PhD, FNAE, advisor and head, retd, Dept. of Science and Technology, Government of India, New Delhi From the Author Together We Empower: Rekindling Hope in Rural India is the winner in the \"Social Change\" category of the \u00a02016 International Book Awards (IBA) About the Author Marly Cornell is an award-winning author, artist, and social justice advocate. She is the author of Seeds for Change: The Lives and Work of Suri and Edda Sehgal (Sehgal Foundation, 2014) and The Able Life of Cody Jane: Still Celebrating (LightaLight Publications, 2011). Read more", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 15.29}, {"asin": "1641524375", "title": "Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day: Exercises to Feel Calm, Stay Focused & Be Your Best Self", "author": "Jennie Marie Battistin MA, LMFT", "description": "Review \"I enthusiastically recommend this book. I think that using these exercises in the classroom would aid in creating a more enriching teaching environment. A mindful student becomes a successful student.\" \u2014Mary Jane Heater, M.Ed, Co-author of Team Teaching Science: Success for All Learners \"This book is a great tool for teens and adults alike\u2014whether they\u2019re in therapy or not. The exercises are simple, quick, and well-organized into easily-digestible sections. With world stress levels at an all-time high and attention-spans at an all-time low, mindfulness has never been more important to have. Especially useful for our teens and young adults who are under increasing pressure to achieve at all costs and navigate an ever-changing social and technological landscape, this book serves up bite-sized morsels to help sooth stress, forge focus, and prevail in the present.\" \u2014Julia Young, MA, LMFT, LPCC, Founder & CEO of Caring Connected \"Navigating the day-to-day stress and anxiety of teens can be a challenge! As a junior high school teacher and mom of two, I found Jennie Marie's practical daily mindfulness exercises to be the perfect complement to my work both at home and school. 'Procrastination Pit' and 'Show Me the Love' are just two examples of relatable exercises that have proven to reduce stress and help my students and me become more productive. This is a must-read for all parents, teachers, and teens!\" \u2014Aimee Bastin, Department of Exceptional Learners Chairperson and Resource Teacher in Fishers, Indiana \"Teens live at the heart of the digital age, bombarded with images that only compound the natural developmental stressors and pressure that come with adolescence. In this straightforward guide to mindful ways of being, Jennie Marie Battistin has taken the mystery out of mindfulness and compiled an easy-to-read and utilize guide to informing everyday activities with awareness, self-regulation, and increased calm\u2014the counterbalance to stress. This is a \u2018must-read\u2019 for teens and parents alike!\" \u2014Rhea Harris-Junge, MFT, Certified EMDR Therapist, Certified Havening Practitioner, Eating Disorder Specialist About the Author JENNIE MARIE BATTISTIN MA, LMFT , is a licensed marriage family therapist and the founding director of Hope Therapy Center. As a mother of five grown children, she has a passion for helping teens and parents develop tools and resources to navigate challenges and mental health concerns.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.2}, {"asin": "1626723311", "title": "The Big Bad Fox", "author": "Benjamin Renner", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 3\u20136\u2014The proverbial fox may be a menace to the henhouse\u2014but not the hero of this work. The titular character lacks gumption, guile, or cunning, and the chickens send him running each time he ventures into the farmyard. Taking pity on the fox, the wolf proposes playing the long game: stealing eggs and eventually eating the hatched chickens. The fox successfully makes off with the eggs, but things get complicated when the chicks emerge and (surprise, surprise!) assume that the fox is their mother. Though this work is similar in look and tone to typical comic strips (bulging-eyed, caricaturelike characters with exaggerated expressions; occasional slapstick violence; motion lines), there's a sophistication to the art that recalls the author/illustrator's roots as a celebrated filmmaker and cartoonist. Renner sets the individual scenes against a white backdrop, free of borders, resulting in a clean design, and the use of color, texture, and shading is top-notch. While much of the humor derives from somewhat predictable setups, such as the fox's botched attempts at proving that he can be just as intimidating as the wolf, it's sure to tickle young funny bones, and the author injects the narrative with a sly, edgy sensibility that sets this title apart from more typical fare. This one has heart, too, depicting the fox's burgeoning feelings of affection toward his unlikely ward. VERDICT Bound to keep adults and kids alike laughing, this is a winning selection for comic book fans, reluctant readers, and those who enjoy subversive comedy.\u2014Mahnaz Dar, School Library Journal Review \"Bound to keep adults and kids alike laughing, this is a winning selection for comic book fans, reluctant readers, and those who enjoy subversive comedy.\" \u2015 School Library Journal, starred review\"Graphic novels fans from grades three and up are all going to find some- thing to like here from the art to the humor to the tender underbelly... In a celebratory era of powerful, memorable, visually significant graphic novels, this one happily joins the mountain near the top.\"\u2015 Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, starred review\"Although this concept of role reversal may be well-trod, Renner handles it deftly, making the predictable feel satisfying. A comically charming underfox tale.\" \u2015 Kirkus \" Renner\u2019s tone hits the sweet spot between snarkiness and sentimentality.\" \u2015 Horn Book About the Author Benjamin Renner is an award-winning French cartoonist, animator, and filmmaker. He received a 2014 Academy Awards nomination in the category of Best Animated Feature for the film Ernest & Celestine. Look for the animated adaptation of his comic, Le grand mechant renard ( The Big Bad Fox ). Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 10.39}, {"asin": "0972550313", "title": "Holy Cow It's Me (An Autobiography of Dr. Landau's Experiences As a Veterinarian in Southwestern Wisconsin)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 24.99}, {"asin": "1628455012", "title": "MCAT Prep 2018-2019: Test Prep & Practice Test Questions for the Medical College Admission Test", "author": "TPB Publishing", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 9.72}, {"asin": "1575790335", "title": "The prairie practitioners: 20th century South Dakota veterinarians", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "0718037685", "title": "The Candidate (A Newsmakers Novel)", "author": "Lis Wiehl", "description": "Review \u201c. . . there is plenty of suspense, exciting twists and complex characters that make it hard to put down.\u201d -- RT Book Reviews, 4-star review About the Author New York Times bestselling author Lis Wiehl is the former legal analyst for Fox News and the O \u2019 Reilly Factor and has appeared regularly on Your World with Neil Cavuto , Lou Dobbs Tonight , and the Imus morning shows. The former cohost of WOR radio's WOR Tonight with Joe Concha and Lis Wiehl , she has served as legal analyst and reporter for NBC News and NPR's All Things Considered , as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney's office, and as a tenured professor of law at the University of Washington. She appears frequently on CNN as a legal analyst. Sebastian Stuart has published four novels under his own name, including The Hour Between, winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award and an NPR Season\u2019s Readings selection. He has also co-written national and New York Times bestselling books. As senior editor of e-book publisher New Word City, Stuart has written over two dozen original non-fiction e-books.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 8.85}, {"asin": "1101988142", "title": "Terminal Impact (Jack Valentine Marine Sniper)", "author": "Charles Henderson", "description": "Review Praise for Terminal Impact \u201cThe dialogue\u2014salty, irreverent, demeaning, profane\u2014rings true of men at war.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cPowerful and compelling...Delivers the goods.\u201d\u2014The Real Book Spy About the Author Charles Henderson is a veteran of more than twenty-three years in the United States Marine Corps, with a distinguished career spanning from Vietnam to the Gulf War, after which he retired as a Chief Warrant Officer.\u00a0He is the author of the critically acclaimed military classics Marine Sniper and Silent Warrior , which first chronicled the exploits of USMC sniper Carlos Hathcock. He is also the author of Marshalling the Faithful , Goodnight Saigon , Jungle Rules ,\u00a0and the fictional Jack Valentine Marine Sniper series. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1Eight, seven, six. The second hand on Jack Valentine's watch ticked.Five . . . Snuggle into the rifle, Jack. Like she's the woman you love. Yeah, baby. Breathe. Relax.Four . . . Close your eyes, bro. That's it. Go inside the bubble.Three . . . Now open up. Natural point of aim. Solid. Center mass.Two . . . Focus. Crosshairs sharp, clear. Target fuzzy.One . . . Hold that half breath. Ease the trigger roll. Squeeze.Burlap fringe from his Ghillie-suit bonnet tickled Jack Valentine\u00d5s face as a dry January breeze rustled the fuzzy strips of light green, dark green, and various shades of brown camouflage tied on netting that hid his face. Slowly, careful to not rustle the growth of dry dead foliage that hid him, he eased his fingers up and gave his itching cheek a rub.The newly promoted Marine corporal and his spotter partner, Staff Sergeant Walter Gillespie, affectionately known as Hacksaw, likewise Ghillied up, lay tucked beneath a weed crop on the raised border of a set of long and narrow farm fields. From this hide, they watched the main entrance of what appeared to be a Republican Guard command center, across a highway, nearly a thousand yards ahead of them.Elmore Snow's special operations team had parachuted into position from a high-altitude low-opening jump the night before, two-man teams landing in three zones on the northwest side of the city of Hillah, Iraq, along Highway 84, which led to Hindiya and Karbala. Early that morning, January 17, 1991, Allied aircraft and sea-launched cruise missiles had begun the bombardment of Iraqi command and control centers, and antiaircraft-missile positions. The Persian Gulf War had now begun.The mustang captain and his team's senior noncommissioned officer, Gunny Ray Ambrose, whom Snow had named Mutt during South American drug-war deployments, had moved northeast, edging around the outskirts of the city, past the palace that Saddam Hussein had built on a promontory hill overlooking the ruins of ancient Babylon, that he had also renovated into a new museum, honoring himself and ancient King Nebuchadnezzar. Saddam had even had his name carved in the bricks, boasting the lie saddam hussein, son of nebuchadnezzar.Sergeants Kermit The Frog Alexander and Cory Habu Webster had skirted eastward, well past the captain and gunny's position while Jack and Hacksaw went west, then bent their trek southward toward a curious ring of lights that turned out to be the suspected Republican Guard command center that all three teams had sought.They found a spot close enough to see what went on but far enough away to not draw attention to themselves. The sniper team had Ghillied up and lay in a hide because of random farmers and goatherds wandering by uncomfortably close. The Marines planned to stay put until nightfall, then move out west, beyond searching eyes, and find a place to eat, rest, and await next orders for movement.Captain Snow reported the grid coordinates of the military targets to higher command over satellite-linked radio, and told the operations staff that neither Saddam Hussein nor anyone else important appeared to occupy the Summer Palace. The only people they saw there were caretakers.As for Jack and Hacksaw, military traffic constantly streamed in and out of the Republican Guard headquarters, and only moments ago they had seen a dark blue Rolls-Royce sedan enter the complex and park by the building with the flagpole flying the Iraqi colors.Two soldiers in desert-camouflage uniforms and burgundy berets hurried to the rear passenger-side door as the driver opened it. A trim, slight man in a dark green uniform with a bald head and a short beard got out, put on his burgundy beret, exchanged salutes with the soldiers, and followed them inside the building.\"He's got to be a regional commander. Flag rank, judging from the car,\" Captain Snow told his team on their heavily encrypted sat-link headsets.\"Shall we dance when he exits, sir?\" Hacksaw asked.\"If you took the shot, do you have adequate egress?\" Elmore asked in return.\"Once it's dark we do,\" Jack broke in. \"Right now, sir, we take the shot, we best sit tight. We might get away with one shot. We're off in the boonies, where they likely won't look for us.\"\"What's the distance?\" Snow asked.\"Range finder says 812 meters to the sedan,\" Gillespie reported.\"How do you feel about it, Jack?\" Elmore asked.\"Quartering breeze off my right leg, nice and steady at three clicks, I can't ask for better shooting conditions. I'm all in, sir,\" Jack answered.\"One shot, one kill, it's all you've got,\" the captain said. \"How about it, Staff Sergeant Gillespie?\"\"We need to take the shot, sir,\" Hacksaw came back. \"Even if Corporal V misses, just think how it will fuck with these dudes' heads. They won't know whether to shit or go blind, paranoia fucking up their dope.\"\"Bear in mind, Staff Sergeant, lots of important ears might be listening to you at the national command center as well as Riyadh,\" Elmore cautioned his swarthy Marine. Then added, \"Stand by while I clear the mission.\"An hour had passed, and Hacksaw began to grumble, \"I got a brick crawled straight up my ass and parked. What I wouldn't give to take a leisurely shit and read the newspaper with a hot cup of black coffee.\"\"Scoot down behind us and pinch off a loaf. Nothing's stirring,\" Jack grumbled back. \"Just make sure you drop your turds where I won't crawl in them.\"\"You got it, bro,\" Hacksaw said, and inched himself backwards, off the two-foot-high raised berm overgrown with weeds. \"I hate taking a shit lying down, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Sure glad I don't wear panties. This might leave a stain.\"Jack fought the urge to laugh and focused on what he saw through his rifle's twelve-power scope sight.Just as Hacksaw farted and released a steaming load, Elmore Snow came on the sat-link.\"We're a go on the shot, but as a stopgap, should the target decide to depart the area,\" the captain said.\"What'd ya mean, stopgap, Skipper?\" Jack asked.\"We've got a Nighthawk inbound with a GBU-27 to deliver on that Iraqi command center,\" the captain answered.\"That's like a mark 84 laser-guided smart bomb, isn't it? Two thousand pounds of high explosive, sir?\" Jack came back.\"Roger that, a bunker buster,\" Elmore said.\"Just checking, sir,\" Jack answered. Then he added, \"Seems like I recall the lethal blast radius of a two-grand bomb throws fragmentation four hundred meters up and out.\"\"Roger that,\" the captain confirmed.\"Won't it get just a touch breezy out here, across the flats, Staff Sergeant Gillespie and me lying on this two-foot-high berm eight hundred meters away from the target? Just weeds for protection?\" Jack asked, worried.\"You should be fine,\" the captain replied. \"I've called it in closer, but not much. You'll get some dust up your snot locker.\"Jack Valentine shrank over his rifle and looked through the scope again, watching the headquarters main door and the blue Rolls-Royce parked in front.\"Hacksaw back at you, sir,\" the staff sergeant said over his sat-link as he eased alongside Jack and put his eye back on the high-power spotting scope equipped with infrared and night-vision technology. \"Had to scatter a little rat bait out in this farmer's tater crop if you know what I mean.\"\"Did you copy my com?\" Snow asked.\"Roger,\" Gillespie answered. \"Why the mark 84? Last I checked, that bomb puts down a thirty-foot-deep crater, fifty feet across, and blows through sixteen feet of concrete or fifteen inches of solid steel. Kind of overkill for a two-story spread-out office complex.\"\"Wizards in the head shed think this headquarters may sit atop a good-size bunker system,\" Elmore explained. \"Obviously a flag officer inside, the one you spotted, and maybe more.\"Given the war began before daylight this morning, we believe they could have a command and control center underground. You said lots of traffic in and out, and that blue Rolls-Royce has our G-two people convinced you happened upon a major honeypot.\"\"Does this mean we can come home early?\" Hacksaw joked.\"Maybe you're half-right, Walter. We may get to bust out of this burg and redeploy,\" Snow answered. \"As soon as I know anything, I'll let you boys know, too. We'll all likely beat feet to the rally point and await pickup there.\"\"Anything going with Frogman and Habu?\" Gillespie asked.\"They've got a flight of four Tomcats loaded with mark 82s inbound on targets. We're trying to coordinate those strikes with yours. How about your laser? It set up? We need to get that target painted,\" the captain followed.\"Just pulled it from the drag bag and setting up as we speak,\" Hacksaw answered.\"While you're in the bag, go ahead and pull out the camera and put on the long lens,\" Snow told him. \"If this commander with the blue Rolls emerges from the headquarters, I want pictures of him.\"\"If he comes out of the building, he's probably leaving, sir,\" Jack said.\"That's where you have the green light to splash him,\" Elmore replied. \"I want Walter to snap his pictures, nonetheless, and you take your shot. Be nice to identify this guy.\"\"Got you covered, Skipper,\" Hacksaw broke in. \"Laser is up and painting the target. I'm on the camera with a nice view of the car and front door. Awesome lens. Very clear. By the way, sir, it looks like the driver is talking on a radio.\"\"Now he's stepping out,\" Jack added, seeing the driver's door open.\"What's the ETA on that Nighthawk?\" Walter asked.\"I just checked, and the pilot says he's less than two mikes out,\" Elmore came back.\"May be too late,\" Jack said, seeing the general emerge through the front doors, square away his burgundy beret, and jog down the steps. Instead of escorting the senior officer, the driver ran to his station, started the car, and left the general to let himself in the backseat.\"Your range is hot, corporal. Wind unchanged. You've got your dope. Fire at will,\" Hacksaw said, snapping the camera as fast as the motor drive could run the film past the shutter.Jack Valentine took a breath, watching the Iraqi commander in the dark green uniform run to the car, his scope sight's reticle center mass on the man. He let out his breath halfway, held it, and relaxed, crosshairs dead on target. Then he added pressure to his trigger finger.Boom! The rifle bucked against Jack's shoulder, and he watched through the scope.Two steps from the back door of his Rolls-Royce sedan, the shot took the Iraqi commander off his feet and drove him backwards to the ground. As the bullet struck his upper chest, red spray and debris exploded from his body.Calm and cool, Jack drew back his bolt, ejected the spent cartridge slowly into his hand, never taking his eye off the rifle scope, watching the crowd of Iraqi officers pour out of the building, handguns and rifles drawn.\"Report,\" Elmore said on the satellite radio.Sirens began wailing, and Iraqi soldiers, rifles ready, poured from every wing of the command complex.\"You ever piss in an ant bed, Skipper?\" Hacksaw laughed, still snapping pictures. \"Corporal Valentine just broke his cherry. Score him one kill. A general at that! Nice. Real nice.\"\"Your laser still painting the target?\" Elmore asked.\"Yes, sir,\" Hacksaw replied, just as a whistling whining screaming sound from the sky came down and the entire command-center complex suddenly erupted in a massive, ground-shaking, deafening explosion. Dirt, debris, bodies, cars, trucks tumbled in the air as a great brown-and-gray cloud rose a thousand feet into the late-afternoon sky.\"We best di di mau, Boo-Boo,\" Hacksaw said, gathering equipment into the drag bag and rolling down the back side of the berm. Jack slid out, too, hot on his partner's heels.On February 24, 1991, Allied ground forces rolled across the line of departure into Iraq. Saddam\u00d5s three-hundred-thousand-man force occupying Kuwait fled the land. Many of them surrendered to the Americans, while others faced death from their own Republican Guard, who shot deserting Iraqi soldiers on sight. In four days, Allied forces conquered the Iraqi army and restored Kuwait to its rightful owners. General Walter Boomer and his Marines waded through Kuwait the first day. Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu would have been proud.On the second day of March, Elmore Snow and his team of five Marines sat at a table on the mess deck of the USS Iwo Jima. Like a family admiring baby pictures, they passed around copies of choice reconnaissance photographs they had taken during their deep special operations mission.\"What do we do?\" Hacksaw asked, holding up a photo he snapped of the dirtball mushroom cloud that used to be the Republican Guard headquarters.\"We fuck shit up!\" Jack laughed.\"And the pi?ce de r\u017dsistance,\" Gillespie added, holding up a photograph of the Iraqi general just as Jack's bullet struck him. Stop-action death. The center of his chest exploding as the bullet lifted him off his feet.Hacksaw grinned at Jack. \"Corporal Valentine put the hammer of justice on this sand flea. Fucked him up!\"\"Hammer.\" Raymond Ambrose smiled over his cup of coffee, looking at Jack. \"I name you, Hammer.\"Elmore Snow raised his coffee mug with his men and toasted their new addition. \"Here's to Hammer,\" he said.\"And here's to the loss of virginity,\" Jack added.\"So, Corporal Valentine, what do you think of South America?\" Elmore asked the young Marine.\"I'm fluent in Spanish,\" the corporal said, and smiled back. \"Mexican, I should say. My mom, you know.\"\"I read that in your SRB,\" the captain said, nodding.\"Did you also see where I put in for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training?\" Jack came back. \"I'd really like to go, Skipper.\"Everyone at the table looked at the green young corporal sideways.\"What the fuck, over?\" Hacksaw said. \"BUD/S is redundant, shitstain. You done done it. What's those deck apes gonna teach a badass Para-Frog Scout-Sniper Force-Recon hard-baked little bitch like you?\"Then the staff sergeant scooted close to Jack and wrapped his tattooed, muscled arm around the corporal's neck. \"Listen to me,\" Walter said, wrinkling his brow, \"this is your daddy talkin' to ya. A Navy SEAL ain't nothin' but a sailor tryin' to be like a Marine. You got that?\"Fuck me to tears, boy. Stop thinking such silly thoughts. You need to pack your trash and go down to South America with us men and kill yourself some of them cocaine cowboys we been huntin'. You got the good eye, the trigger, and the Hammer!\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.98}, {"asin": "1948122480", "title": "Digital Transformation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction", "author": "Thomas M. Siebel", "description": "Review \u201cUrgent doesn\u2019t begin to describe the insights contained in Tom Siebel's Digital Transformation . His combination of historic perspective and an incisive approach to the specific technologies reshaping our world should be essential reading for any leader.\" \u2014 Eric Schmidt , Former CEO of Google Inc. \u201cTom Siebel has laid out in simple terms how to understand and thrive in today\u2019s new information economy. Digital Transformation is a must read for today\u2019s business leaders.\u201d \u2014 Charles Schwab , Founder and Chairman, The Charles Schwab Corporation \u201cSiebel skillfully describes the new technologies that you must understand to give you confidence to ask the right questions and drive change that delivers both short-term results and long-term competitive advantage.\u201d \u2014 Robert Simons , Professor, Harvard Business School \u201cDigital Transformation delivers a detailed look at the big picture, explaining not only what is happening now, but what companies must do and why. Instead of being fearful, read this book and learn how human leadership, strategy, and risk-taking can make the most of it.\u201d \u2014 Garry Kasparov , Former World Chess Champion \u201cIn this book, Tom Siebel offers compelling insights from a practitioner\u2019s point of view\u2014he cuts through the hype and offers practical advice for CEOs and other leaders. In doing so, Tom paints an inspiring vision for an inevitable future.\u201d \u2014 George Roberts , Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, KKR \u201cTom Siebel\u2019s Digital Transformation should alarm every CEO and government leader about the simultaneous arrival of an existential technological threat\u2014and an historic opportunity. A must-read for every leader in business and government.\u201d \u2014 Robert M. Gates , Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Siebel explains why business evolution is speeding up, ushering in a new era of real-time data analysis and prediction. Digital Transformation is a top-priority read for CEOs and boards in every large organization in the world.\u201d \u2014 Rich Karlgaard , Publisher and Futurist, Forbes \u201cDigital technology is changing the world with breath-taking speed. In a clearly written book that combines market-tested experience and piercing insight, Tom Siebel provides leaders with the advice they need to guide organizations.\u201d \u2014 Christopher L. Eisgruber, President, Princeton University \u201cEveryone talks about digital transformation and here is our chance to actually understand and execute it well.\u201d \u2014 Jay Crotts, Chief Information Officer, Royal Dutch Shell \u201cIn Digital Transformation , Tom Siebel describes how the disruptive technologies of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big, data, and the internet of things are propelling massive changes in how nations, industries, and corporations function. Throughout the book, he offers valuable advice to corporations and individuals working in this transforming landscape.\u201d \u2014 Robert J. Zimmer , President, University of Chicago About the Author Thomas M. Siebel is CEO of C3.ai, a leading provider of enterprise artificial intelligence software. A globally renowned leader in information technology, Mr. Siebel has been at the forefront of several major innovation cycles, including relational databases, enterprise application software, Internet computing, AI, and the Internet of things. He pioneered the customer relationship management (CRM) category with the founding of Siebel Systems. Recognized by Businessweek as one of the top 25 managers in global business, Mr. Siebel is a three-time recipient of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award and was named a Glassdoor Top CEO in 2018. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Computer Science"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0820348724", "title": "Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs: Identification and Natural History of the Fireflies of the Eastern and Central United States and Canada (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)", "author": null, "description": "Review This is a true gem of a book, a celebration of fireflies in all their diversity. With her unique combination of expert knowledge, boundless enthusiasm, superb photography and above all her love of these magical creatures, Lynn Faust leads us through every aspect of their lives and emphasizes the need to enjoy, study, cherish and protect them. She has created a supremely authoritative yet wonderfully accessible guide that is sure to inspire and inform the next generation of firefly-researchers. This book will draw you into the world of fireflies and make you want to go out into the night to discover and enjoy them for yourself. -- John Tyler \u2015 Past Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, and author of The Glow-Worm Lynn Faust's Fireflies, Glow-worms and Lightning Bugs is overflowing with contagious enthusiasm for Lampyridae and other bioluminescent insects, but you won't want to spill a drop. It is a perfect brew of natural history, anecdote and careful taxonomy, sparkling with accessible-but-authoritative text and saturated with superb photography. Fireflies, Glow-worms and Lightning Bugs promises to be a natural history classic, and is a perfect guide to the \"magical world of fireflies\" in eastern and central North America. -- Stephen A. Marshall \u2015 author of Flies: The Natural History and Diversity of Diptera This is a book for all of us, from nature enthusiasts and backyard entomologists to beetle experts to theoretical biologists. The guide, as the author modestly calls it, packs a wealth of information and wit. Rigorous but simple, and fun to read. Decades worth of original field observations make Lynn Faust's book a priceless contribution to the study of a charismatic but poorly understood group of insects, nothing short of a scientific monograph. It will be extensively cited in research papers, no doubt\u2015and leave you with a striking impression that fireflies are relevant to the entirety of human experience. Only someone of Lynn's insight and dedication can put humble bugs in a context that wide. She says this is the book she wanted when she first got interested in fireflies. What she came up with is exactly the kind of treatment we want for every group of organisms, to boost and nurture our fascination with nature, to show us how those tiny parts of our world work. I'm afraid, though, this book will remain a unique example for quite a while; people with skill, energy, and expertise matching Lynn's are few and far between. -- Vassili Belov \u2015 Contributing Editor, BugGuide.net Do you call them fireflies or lightning bugs? Or do you have another name for these insects that are neither bugs nor flies but bioluminescent beetles? A new book, Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs , by Lynn Frierson Faust takes an in-depth look at the biology and allure of these familiar night visitors. Faust is the first to offer a comprehensive look at species of the eastern and central United States. The book is unequivocally the best ever written on North American lightning bugs. . . . Faust\u2019s excellent book answers a multitude of questions about these twinkling night travelers. What do they eat? The adults of most species never eat. They only mate. Can fireflies bite us or attack plants in our gardens? Easy answer to both \u2013 absolutely not. . . . If nothing else, this book will spark memories of the childhood delight you felt when you caught lightning bugs in a jar \u2013 and then let them go. It may also encourage you to turn off the front porch light unless you\u2019re expecting visitors. -- Whit Gibbons \u2015 Aiken Standard But if Faust\u2019s book doesn\u2019t make the task simple\u2015getting down to species is not a simple job, she admits\u2015having the Lightning Bug Lady by your side, with her graceful, wise, and witty advice, coupled with a plethora of incredible pictures (the cover photo, by David Hughes, of a Big Dipper firefly, a species found in our area, rocketing upward is itself worth the retail price of the guide), makes the job both doable and downright pleasant. -- Bruce Fellman \u2015 Naturalist's Journal For the last twenty-six years, Lynn Faust has been working to catalog and decipher the bioluminescent Morse Code each species flickers out come spring and summer. 'Lightning bug flashes are works of art,' says Faust, a naturalist who recently penned the definitive book on the topic, Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs . -- Jason Bittel \u2015 Smithsonian Everyone who\u2019s seen fireflies aglow is pleased, comforted, or amazed with what they\u2019ve seen. Who dislikes fireflies? This book will be with you outside at night, with your book light attached, while you try to identify your first flashing firefly to species. -- Randy Lauff \u2015 Canadian Field-Naturalist Review This is a true gem of a book, a celebration of fireflies in all their diversity. With her unique combination of expert knowledge, boundless enthusiasm, superb photography and above all her love of these magical creatures, Lynn Faust leads us through every aspect of their lives and emphasizes the need to enjoy, study, cherish and protect them. She has created a supremely authoritative yet wonderfully accessible guide that is sure to inspire and inform the next generation of firefly-researchers. This book will draw you into the world of fireflies and make you want to go out into the night to discover and enjoy them for yourself.Lynn Faust's Fireflies, Glow-worms and Lightning Bugs is overflowing with contagious enthusiasm for Lampyridae and other bioluminescent insects, but you won't want to spill a drop. It is a perfect brew of natural history, anecdote and careful taxonomy, sparkling with accessible-but-authoritative text and saturated with superb photography. Fireflies, Glow-worms and Lightning Bugs promises to be a natural history classic, and is a perfect guide to the \"magical world of fireflies\" in eastern and central North America.This is a book for all of us, from nature enthusiasts and backyard entomologists to beetle experts to theoretical biologists. The guide, as the author modestly calls it, packs a wealth of information and wit. Rigorous but simple, and fun to read. Decades worth of original field observations make Lynn Faust's book a priceless contribution to the study of a charismatic but poorly understood group of insects, nothing short of a scientific monograph. It will be extensively cited in research papers, no doubt\u2014and leave you with a striking impression that fireflies are relevant to the entirety of human experience. Only someone of Lynn's insight and dedication can put humble bugs in a context that wide. She says this is the book she wanted when she first got interested in fireflies. What she came up with is exactly the kind of treatment we want for every group of organisms, to boost and nurture our fascination with nature, to show us how those tiny parts of our world work. I'm afraid, though, this book will remain a unique example for quite a while; people with skill, energy, and expertise matching Lynn's are few and far between.Do you call them fireflies or lightning bugs? Or do you have another name for these insects that are neither bugs nor flies but bioluminescent beetles? A new book, Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs , by Lynn Frierson Faust takes an in-depth look at the biology and allure of these familiar night visitors. Faust is the first to offer a comprehensive look at species of the eastern and central United States. The book is unequivocally the best ever written on North American lightning bugs. . . . Faust\u2019s excellent book answers a multitude of questions about these twinkling night travelers. What do they eat? The adults of most species never eat. They only mate. Can fireflies bite us or attack plants in our gardens? Easy answer to both \u2013 absolutely not. . . . If nothing else, this book will spark memories of the childhood delight you felt when you caught lightning bugs in a jar \u2013 and then let them go. It may also encourage you to turn off the front porch light unless you\u2019re expecting visitors.But if Faust\u2019s book doesn\u2019t make the task simple\u2014getting down to species is not a simple job, she admits\u2014having the Lightning Bug Lady by your side, with her graceful, wise, and witty advice, coupled with a plethora of incredible pictures (the cover photo, by David Hughes, of a Big Dipper firefly, a species found in our area, rocketing upward is itself worth the retail price of the guide), makes the job both doable and downright pleasant.For the last twenty-six years, Lynn Faust has been working to catalog and decipher the bioluminescent Morse Code each species flickers out come spring and summer. 'Lightning bug flashes are works of art,' says Faust, a naturalist who recently penned the definitive book on the topic, Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs .Everyone who\u2019s seen fireflies aglow is pleased, comforted, or amazed with what they\u2019ve seen. Who dislikes fireflies? This book will be with you outside at night, with your book light attached, while you try to identify your first flashing firefly to species. Review Get better acquainted with the performers of your own backyard ?light show? Book Description Get better acquainted with the performers of your own backyard \u201clight show\u201d About the Author LYNN FRIERSON FAUST is an advisory consultant on firefly studies with state and national parks in Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and New York and an on-site scientific consultant with BBC Nature, the Discovery Channel, and National Geographic, among many other media outlets. She has also aided in identification and educational advisement for the Cincinnati Museum Center and published surveys of the fireflies of Mammoth Cave National Park, Congaree National Park, and the Allegheny National Forest. Faust has presented around the world on the topic of fireflies and published numerous scientific papers. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 25.25}, {"asin": "B07MKYV764", "title": "The Christmas Boutique: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (The Elm Creek Quilts Series Book 21)", "author": "Jennifer Chiaverini", "description": "Review \u201cCelebrating the 20th anniversary of the first novel in her extensive Elm Creek Quilts series, Chiaverini\u2019s latest installment is rich with detail...telling the tale of a particular woman\u2019s motivation to design and craft a particular quilt. Whether inspired by love or grief, the resulting artwork is described with astonishing attention to design, workmanship, and symbolism. Chiaverini also explores how the practice of her craft transforms each woman\u2019s emotional life, each stitch bringing her closer to a sense of peace\u2026 A warm portrait of women bound by craft\u2014perfect for fireside reading.\u201d -- Kirkus Reviews --This text refers to the hardcover edition. About the Author Jennifer Chiaverini is the New York Times bestselling author of several acclaimed historical novels, including Mrs. Lincoln\u2019s Sisters and Resistance Women , as\u00a0well as the beloved Elm Creek Quilts series. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, she lives with her husband and two sons in Madison, Wisconsin. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "0988445301", "title": "Edentown", "author": "D.J. Edmiston", "description": "About the Author Daniel Edmiston is an actor, director, and author of nine produced plays, including \"Coyote Point,\" winner of the 2007 Pillars Prize in Playwriting at Georgia College and State University. He resides in Idaho with his wife and two young daughters. \"Edentown\" is his first novel.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0967182301", "title": "Birth in a Chicken House: A Collection of Stories", "author": "D.V.M. James Lucas", "description": "From the Publisher Dr Lucas kept notes of his experiences about the people and animals he worked with throughout his career. For several years he has been busy transforming those notes into stories. Stories, which he wanted to leave to his children and grandchildren about his life. The humorous tales are true and the chapter title depict their nature. It's time to laugh and Birth in a Chicken House will do just that! Remember the time you tried to help pull another person's vehicle? How about the first dent in your brand new car? All you needed was a good night's sleep and those dogs across the way won't hush for even a second! From large animals to small and people of all walks of life, you will be able to relate to the stories. Birth in a Chicken House is a very descriptive book regarding the characteristics of animals and culture. Dr. Lucas not only explains the veterinary process, but he describes the beauty and history of Southern Iowa. As the pages are turned readers will laugh, cry and start planning their next vacation to this unforgettable land. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Doc Anderson's portfolio was full of quips. He used to say that Southern Iowa, as far as weather is concerned, is the hottest, the coldest, the wettest and the driest place on earth. We got it all and all in between. Northern Iowans expected cold winters with lots of snow and they seemed to love it. In Southern Iowa, we enjoyed, on the average, mostly milder winters. Still, blasts of cold from the North did not escape us entirely. Winter could blow in bitter cold and beautiful scenic snow. Early mornings of extremely cold temperatures presented a rapture of sparkling frost and atmospheric sundogs could light up a daytime sky. This was a frigid winter that followed the summer of heat and drought in the early 70's. It was amazing that a few months earlier it had been scorching hot. The crops had burned up in the field. Now it was colder than a penguin's behind. The ground water level was at an all-time low and many wells had dried up. The well I used to water the cattle herd was dry and I had to devise a method to winter water them. I put a pump on the power take-off of my little B Farmall tractor. Then, I drove the tractor down to the pond, chopped a hole in the ice, stuck a hose down in the pond and pumped water up. It was an interesting operation. My cows needed five to ten gallons of water a day to keep nutritional balance in their huge paunches. That winter they'd drink by licking the layer of ice and snow covering the ground. It was nowhere near the amount of water they required. When the supplemental water I pumped came flowing from the hose, the cows would crowd in to be first at the fresh supply. The more aggressive cows would push their way in. The more timid creatures would slink back and wait their turn. It was a very frigid morning. I had gone to pump water for my cows but my faithful little B Farmall refused to start. I woke my wife, Kay, to ask for her help. I knew that we could start the tractor by pulling it with another vehicle. A short, sharp tug should do the trick. Kay was more than willing to assist. Kay jumped out of bed, dressed, got a cup of coffee and away we went. We spoke on the way of the winter's dazzling beauty. Alongside the road, a cock rooster pheasant strutted in the sun. His beautifully colored feathers and long tail gleamed brightly against the sparkling frost on the fences and shrubs. Amazing, I thought, how Mother Nature equipped pheasants with the ability to withstand cold temperatures when they had only shrubs and overlaying frozen grass for protection. The little tractor was sitting in a shed. I backed my 4-wheel-drive veterinary truck into the building until I was about three feet from the tractor's front wheels. I got out of the truck and attached one end of a 15-foot heavy log chain to the front spindle of the tractor. The other end I attached to the back of the truck. I stood back and looked the situation over. The driveway to the shed was covered with ice and snow. To pull start a vehicle, dry ground was required. Traction was needed to turn the tractor's wheels, to subsequently turn the piston over for the start. The little tractor needed to turn over before we hit the ice and snow I had concluded. Kay's job was to drive the vet truck. I said to her, \"We'll try to pull start it right in the shed where the traction is good. So, when I tell you to go, give it hell, so it'll turn over quickly while on dry footing.\" Kay got behind the wheel of the truck. I got on the B Farmall with its triangle front end. I turned on the ignition, put it in the proper gear to start, and said to her, \"OK, give it hell!\" What I had forgotten to say was, \"Be sure to tighten the chain first.\" When I heard Kay put the truck in gear and stomp on the accelerator, I knew I was in deep trouble. When the slack came out of the chain, the tractor (with me holding on pale-faced and frozen to the seat) ejected from the building like a rocket from a launch pad. Kay headed for the road and took a sharp left. I followed on the tractor, swinging at a 90 to 180 degree pendulum, sliding on the ice. Kay never looked back. She continued toward the road at a galloping pace. When she got to the road she hesitated while she checked for oncoming traffic. The hesitation put slack back in the chain and the tractor rolled up on it. Kay cautiously looked in both directions but didn't see anything coming on the highway. She floor boarded the truck. The chain's slack quickly dwindled as she jerked and pulled me along. Kay picked up speed. There was one last lurch before the front end of the tractor completely broke away. I came to an abrupt halt. Kay looked back after hearing the terrible noise. She stopped the truck and sheepishly walked back to see the tractor in two pieces. She said, \"Oh, oh, did I do something wrong?\" \"Oh, hell no,\" I said, feeling slightly upset. I was too relieved to be alive to be angry. \"This happens all the time,\" I added. It was a story I would tell our grandchildren. During the ride back to town I reminded Kay of another time her driving about did us in. We were chasing a cow in my veterinary truck at Dwight Lovitt's. Kay was about nine months pregnant. I was holding on to the back of the truck with one hand, trying to throw the lariat with the other. The cow was fast, but Kay was faster. She must have had a lapse in memory, forgetting I was in the back. Kay drove off lickety-split into a mud seep and became stuck. This time, her poor driving actually saved me from toppling out. This was a story I would tell at the coffee shop. Amazingly enough, the whole episode didn't even start Kay in labor.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 26.68}, {"asin": "0198540396", "title": "The Oxford Companion to the Earth", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Earth Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.62}, {"asin": "143925267X", "title": "Mighty Miss: A Mississippi River Experience", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Gary brings over forty years of guiding canoe trips and story telling to Mighy Miss. He has been a Boy Scout Executive, Outward Bound Instructor, English teacher, Play Director and Minister before turning to writing.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Water Sports"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "157806743X", "title": "Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner s Office", "author": "John Temple", "description": "From Booklist In 2000 Pittsburgh journalist Temple spent time in the Allegheny County Coroner's Office, riding out with its personnel on calls to collect bodies and returning to watch the autopsies. Temple imparts a general impression of forensic pathology, and his accounts of two female interns' reactions to the sights and smells provide a reality check for readers considering the career. Tracy and Carey learn the ropes and the lingo of the macabre from a staff that has seen it all--murders, suicides, overdoses. The newbies absorb from the veterans the necessary distance to perform the job, especially on \"floaters and stinkers,\" described here in unsparing detail. Occasionally, the chief of the office glides past the dissection tables dispensing advice, and since he is the nationally famous Dr. Cyril Wecht, his employees pay attention. In between specific cases, Temple provides minihistories of the office of coroner, how it differs from that of a medical examiner, and the techniques of forensics. Writing evenly and efficiently, Temple will enlighten fans of the CSI television shows. Gilbert Taylor Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review In 2000, Pittsburgh journalist Temple spent time in the Allegheny County Coroner's Office, riding out with its personnel on calls to collect bodies and returning to watch the autopsies. Temple imparts a general impression of forensic pathology, and his accounts of two female interns' reactions to the sights and smells provide a reality check for readers considering the career. Tracy and Carey learn the ropes and the lingo of the macabre from a staff that has seen it all\u2015murders, suicides, overdoses. The newbies absorb from the veterans the necessary distance to perform the job, especially on \u201cfloaters and stinkers,\u201d described here in unsparing detail. Occasionally, the chief of the office glides past the dissection tables dispensing advice, and since he is the nationally famous Dr. Cyril Wecht, his employees pay attention. In between specific cases, Temple provides mini-histories of the office of coroner, how it differs from that of a medical examiner, and the techniques of forensics. Writing evenly and efficiently, Temple will enlighten fans of the CSI television shows. (Gilbert Taylor Booklist ) From the Publisher An inside look at a big city coroner's office where three investigators probe the mysteries of death From the Inside Flap An inside look at a big city coroner's office where investigators probe the mysteries of death About the Author John Temple is author of The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates , published by University Press of Mississippi. His book American Pain was named a \"Best Book of 2015\" in the True Crime category by Suspense Magazine . He is associate professor of journalism at the Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. Prior to teaching, Temple was a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh, Greensboro, and Tampa. More information about Temple and his books can be found at www.johntemplebooks.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "1611861780", "title": "You're Dead\u2015So What?: Media, Police, and the Invisibility of Black Women as Victims of Homicide", "author": "Cheryl L. Neely", "description": "Review \u201cHeartbreaking and insightful . . . an important reminder that there is a long history of silencing and/or ignoring the victims of violent crimes, especially when they are women of color. Neely\u2019s research exposes the media bias that renders them unworthy of our attention, empathy, and ultimately of justice. Her careful attention makes their lives and deaths visible and restores their humanity.\u201d \u2014 Danielle L. McGuire, author of At the Dark End of the Street About the Author Cheryl L. Neely is Professor of Sociology at Oakland Community College where she teaches courses in Sociology and Criminology.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 22.95}, {"asin": "1463533136", "title": "Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide", "author": "Jill Homer", "description": "Review \"Be Brave, Be Strong\" is a book both simple and enormously complex, a story both nuanced and quick-reading, and an adventure narrative of both personal and cultural significance. Most of all, it elevates the joy of suffering on a bike to high intrapersonal art. --\u00a0David Chenault, Bedrock and Paradox We're given fascinating views into the internal struggle and psychological influences that allow some people to push their mind and body to the edge and actually achieve heightened awareness and ability that forever creates in them a craving to experience it again and again. -- \"Flying With Red Haircrow\" I am in awe of this woman... not only can she write a good yarn, but her story is amazing. I mean how many of us would ride a mountain bike from Canada to Mexico in rain and over 11,000 foot mountains in just 24 days? With only two outfits and a bag of junk food and a sleeping bag? -- Tara Chevrestt, \"Book Babe\" Another great adventure story from Jill. If you enjoy adventure and cycling, you'll enjoy this book. And be careful because you might just develop dreams of one day riding the Tour Divide yourself. -- Andy Amick Jill Homer grants us plenty of personal insights into the background to her Tour Divide ride, and her feelings during the ride itself. This is a very open, female perspective on what I assume is normally the predominantly macho and insular world of extreme bike racing, and means the book is never just a dry account of a bike ride. -- Jim Speakman About the Author Jill Homer grew up in Sandy, Utah, and graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in journalism in 2000. She began her career working for weekly and daily newspapers in Utah and Idaho. In 2005, she moved to Homer, Alaska, to pursue adventure in the Last Frontier. She never viewed herself as an athlete, but she was searching for a unique kind of outlet that provided both physical and psychological challenges. Endurance cycling fit that description. Two years of (mainly mis)adventures landed her in one of the most difficult endurance races in North America, a 350-mile winter traverse of Alaska wilderness called the Iditarod Trail Invitational. The unforgettable experience was the genesis of her first book, Ghost Trails: Journeys Through a Lifetime. Her second book, Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide is a continuation of her ongoing adventures. She currently works as a freelance writer and editor in Los Altos, California.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Travelers & Explorers"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.95}, {"asin": "0451225740", "title": "The Cat, the Quilt and the Corpse: A Cats in Trouble Mystery", "author": "Leann Sweeney", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Sweeney (Pick Your Poison) launches the Cats in Trouble mystery series with a meandering whodunit. Jillian Hart is content making and selling cat quilts and living quietly in Mercy, S.C., with her three cats, Syrah, Chablis and Merlot. When Syrah is catnapped, Jillian finds not only the thief-thanks to a state-of-the-art alarm system installed by charming PI Tom Stewart-but also a murder mystery to solve. The cats are entertaining four-legged assistants, with traits like Chablis's human allergy and Merlot's ninja-style defensive tactics. Jillian's quirky neighbors also liven up the thin plot, particularly Tom, whose knack with alarms and computers comes in handy, and flamboyant deputy coroner Lydia Monk. Kitty-lovers will enjoy the feline trivia, but readers looking for a complex mystery will chafe at the slow pace and last-minute revelations. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \"A welcome new voice in mystery fiction.\" -- Jeff Abbott\"An intriguing puzzle which has buried layers that must be uncovered.\"\"The most likable sleuth to come along in years.\" -- Rick Riordan About the Author Leann Sweeney is the New York Times bestselling author of the Cats in Trouble Mysteries, including The Cat, The Sneak and the Secret and The Cat, the Vagabond and the Victim . Leann was born and raised in Niagara Falls, and educated at St. Joseph\u2019s Hospital and Lemoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She also has a degree in behavioral science from the University of Houston. A retired registered nurse, she has been writing in the mystery genre for many years and also writes the Yellow Rose Mystery series. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "160469727X", "title": "The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books", "author": "Marta McDowell", "description": "Review Winner of the Garden Writers Association 2018 Silver Medal of Achievement \u201cThis well-researched, sweeping book details the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and those who came before her. It is clear that the different landscapes shaped them, particularly Laura and \u2018Pa.\u2019 The original are of Garth Williams and Helen Sewell deepens the poignancy and power of Laura\u2019s prairie, since today only one percent of it survives. Laura\u2019s work has preserved it for us. This book preserves it for us.\u201d \u2014Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall , winner of the Newbery Medal \u00a0 \u201cLavishly illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps, and, notably, a selection of Helen Sewell and Garth Williams\u2019 illustrations from the Little House books. . . . the book is a feast of opportunity for dedicated Wilder fans and enthusiastic gardeners everywhere.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cMcDowell commemorates the 150th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder with a captivating look at the beloved Little House on the Prairie author\u2019s relationship with nature. . . . McDowell\u2019s warm descriptions of the author, her times, and the plants she loved provide a wonderful companion to Wilder\u2019s books, while instructions on growing a Little House\u2013inspired garden add an interactive component. Gardeners, botanists, and fans of Wilder will love this book.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cReaders who fondly remember Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s Little House books will delight in this biography. . . . A well-researched, beautifully illustrated title that entwines the natural world depicted in Wilder\u2019s books with her life as a settler, farmer, and writer.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal\u200b \u201c[With] historical maps, photographs, botanical drawings, original illustrations by Helen Sewell and Garth Williams, and the ample descriptions of scenery in the series. . . Marta McDowell provides a snapshot of the gardens, plants and land that influenced Laura Ingalls Wilder's frontier life in the Little House books.\u201d \u2014 Shelf Awareness \u201cA narrative that is accessible to advanced younger and seasoned readers alike. . . this work is a lovely gift for anyone who loves or has loved the Little House books.\u201d \u2014 NYBG\u2019s Plant Talk \u201cAfter reading the descriptions of ground cherries and green-pumpkin pie, you may be inspired to grow a pioneer garden in the 21st century.\u201d \u2014 Country Gardens \u201cMarta McDowell\u2019s charmingly enthusiastic glossary of the plants so integral to settler survival is just the kind of folksy vade mecum that book-loving Laura and her family would have relished.\u201d \u2014 Country Life \u201cLike the \u2018Little House\u2019 books themselves, [this is] a story of a slice of garden history, and an evolving American landscape of the imprint the pioneers had on it, and it had on them too. A tale of their intimate connection with the natural world, and of what McDowell calls Laura\u2019s wild and beautiful life.\u201d \u2014 A Way to Garden \u201cA lively, detailed look at Wilder's plant, farm and garden interests in the many places she lived.\u201d \u2014 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel\u200b \u201cIt's a beautifully produced book on quality paper. Marvelous illustrations, maps and photographs, illuminate McDowell's well-researched, engaging text. There are plenty of detailed descriptions of the plants and landscapes Wilder loved.\u201d \u2014 New Jersey Herald\u200b \u201cReaders have cause for real celebration. The book provides both beauty and substance. . . a treasure.\u201d\u2014 South Dakota Historical Society Press \u201cWilder buffs and nature enthusiasts will revel in the details McDowell reveals.\u201d\u2014 Green Bay Press Gazette From the Back Cover \u201cThis well-researched, sweeping book details the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and those who came before her. It is clear that the different landscapes\u2014Wisconsin, Kansas, the Ozarks\u2014shaped them, particularly Laura and \u2018Pa.\u2019 The original art of Garth Williams and Helen Sewell deepens the poignancy and power of Laura\u2019s prairie, since today only one percent of it survives. Laura\u2019s work has preserved it for us. This book preserves it for us.\u201d \u2014Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall , winner of the Newbery Medal \u201cOne morning the whole world was delicately silvered. Every blade of grass was silvery and the path had a thin sheen. . . . When the sun came up, the whole prairie sparkled. Millions of tiny, tiny sparks of color blazed on the grasses.\u201d \u2014from On The Banks of Plum Creek , by Laura Ingalls Wilder About the Author Marta McDowell\u2019s writing has appeared in The New York Times , Woman\u2019s Day, Country Gardening , and elsewhere . Her previous books include Beatrix Potter\u2019s Gardening Life , All the Presidents\u2019 Gardens , The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder , Emily Dickinson\u2019s Gardening Life , and Unearthing The Secret Garden . She consults for public gardens and private clients, writes and lectures on gardening topics, and teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, where she studied landscape design. She lives, writes, and gardens in Chatham, New Jersey. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Preface Some decades ago when I fit the criteria of Young Adult reader, I was Laura Ingalls. That is, when I wasn\u2019t Nancy Drew or, somewhat later, a foot-stamping Scarlett O\u2019Hara. Laura spoke her mind, rode black ponies bareback, helped Pa with the haying, and pushed off her sunbonnet. Besides, I had the genetic creds for Laura. My mother grew up in the middle of the Illinois prairie, became a teacher, and taught in a one-room country schoolhouse, just like Laura and Ma Ingalls. Her family inspired my love of gardening and my confidence with canning jars. My father was a farm boy from Henry County, Kentucky, whose stories included the Christmas crate of oranges\u2014the single gift shared among his family of nine\u2014and walking to school unless the creek was too high, in which case they rode the mule. It wasn\u2019t until I was well into adulthood that I realized that the first family car of my memory, a mammoth black Hudson sedan dubbed \u201cOld Jenny,\u201d had been named after a mule of his youth. Born in 1867, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a bumper crop of books for young readers. Farming, gardening, and nature were backdrops and key plot elements for every volume in the series. Originally published between 1932 and 1943, the eight novels chronicle growing up in the Wisconsin woods and on the prairies of Kansas, Minnesota, and South Dakota over a twenty-year period starting in the late 1860s. It was a coming of age story for a girl and reflected the coming of age of a nation, as homesteaders spread west from the Mississippi. Beyond history, her books were about natural history. Laura discussed weather and land forms. She observed plants and the animals that depended on them. She foraged wild berries and picked wildflowers. And long before she was a writer, Laura Ingalls Wilder was a gardener and farmer, growing food for the table and raising crops for sale. She lived the farmer\u2019s covenant with the wider natural world, tending soil, plants, and animals to sustain herself and her family. For many of us, Wilder\u2019s books introduced us to a life in and dependent on nature. Never was germination so eagerly awaited or crop failure so devastating. Her stories, predating reality TV by decades, often read like some sort of Survivor: Prairie Edition . Yet despite grasshopper plague, drought, fire, twister, and blizzard, her love of nature shines through, buoyant with optimism. Nature, in her world, is its own character, one with a definite if sometimes unstable personality. It isn\u2019t too much of a stretch to group Laura Ingalls Wilder with America\u2019s nature writers. Nature was her home, as well as little houses. Readers of her books become budding naturalists. The actions of the Ingalls and Wilder families take place in different parts of the country with different ecosystems, and the stories demonstrate the results of changes to the land. The series sows a deep appreciation for the world outside one\u2019s own door. Now that I am approaching the age at which Laura Ingalls Wilder started writing her memoir and novels, I found that exploring her works became a personal time machine. She opened a portal into my own melting pot of memory as I explored the places and plants of her life. I\u2019ve organized this book in two parts. After a short prologue, \u201cA Life on the Land\u201d follows the trail of Wilder\u2019s plant, farm, and garden interests intertwined with her life story. If you\u2019re a Wilder fan, you will find a familiar order, as it follows the sequence of the Little House books chronologically and geographically. I urge you to read or reread them alongside. Three additional chapters cover the Wilders at Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, and the other places that her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, gardened. The second part of the book, \u201cWilder Gardens,\u201d is for the traveler who wants to hop into the wagon and travel to Wilder and \u201cwilder\u201d gardens across America, and for the gardener\u2014aspirational or experienced\u2014who would like to grow the plants that Laura grew and knew, with a catalog of specifics including botanical names. And speaking of \u201cLaura,\u201d I hope she would excuse the familiarity. In her day, even Almanzo did not address her by her first name until after they were engaged. After that, Miss Ingalls became Mrs. Wilder. But because she shared herself with so many who got to know her character first-hand, a chapter at a time, Laura is the name I will use when referring to her as a person, reserving Wilder for her professional name as a writer. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.39}, {"asin": "1250075254", "title": "Risking It All: A Novel", "author": "Nina Darnton", "description": "Review Praise for Risking It All :\"Fans of Jodi Picoult and Janelle Brown will enjoy this poignant and thought-provoking novel.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cThoughtfully written and thoroughly engaging\u2015a tale of compromise, tough decisions...and love.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus \"Nina Darnton explores the nuances of surrogacy and marriage as well as the meaning of family and parenting, all the while illuminating that life \u2015 even in its saddest, messiest moments \u2015 can still be wonderous where there is hope and love.\" \u2015Viola Shipman \u201cA fascinating glimpse into a marriage after tragedy strikes. Once you start Risking It All , you won\u2019t put it down.\u201d \u2015Catherine Coulter, New York Times , USA Today , and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Devil's Triangle \u201cWith understanding and insight, Nina Darnton\u2019s Risking it All is a poignant depiction of marriage in a time of unforeseen hardship. It is also an inspiring example of what having one person believing in you can do for a child. The story so compelling that the pages seemed to turn themselves until the very end.\u201d \u2015Sally Hepworth, bestselling author of The Mother's Promise Praise for Nina Darnton:\u201cA fast-paced thriller with the kind of emotional impact that transcends a simple whodunit.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews on The Perfect Mother \u201cThis haunting page-turner will keep you up all night and be long remembered after the last page has been read.\" \u2015Mary Higgins Clark on The Perfect Mother \"A vivid portrait of a troubled country.\" \u2015 The New York Times on An Africa Affair \"A smart and diverting\u2026international thriller that will satisfy readers looking for new talent and a brisk read.\" \u2015 Booklist on An Africa Affair About the Author NINA DARNTON is the author of the critically acclaimed novels An African Affair and The Perfect Mother as well as Risking It All . She has written for The New York Times , Elle , House and Garden , Travel and Leisure , the New York Post , and Newsweek . She has a BA from the University of Wisconsin, an MS in Psychology from the New School of Social Research, and an MFA from Columbia University. Nina and her husband John Darnton have three children and four grandchildren and live in New York City and New Paltz, New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Risking It All By Nina Darnton St. Martin's Press Copyright \u00a9 2017 Nina DarntonAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-07525-3 CHAPTER 1 Marcia was sopping wet when she entered the lobby of her building on West End Avenue. She kicked off her soaked shoes in the doorway. They were probably ruined, she thought, but she was too excited to care. She went straight to her bedroom, dripping little rain puddles onto the Oriental rug in the entry hallway, changed out of her clothes and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. Catching a glimpse of herself in the bedroom mirror, she noticed her wet hair plastered around her face and towel-dried it with one hand while opening her briefcase. She ignored the manuscript she had brought home to edit and extracted three pamphlets she'd picked up in her doctor's office that afternoon. Clutching them in her hand, she curled up on her bed to read them again. Surrogacy. Her last chance, her last hope. She had tried everything else. Surely this would work. But she knew getting Jeff to accept it would be an uphill fight. At least it wasn't adoption; she knew he would never give in on that. But he'd also been resistant to every form of conception other than as a by-product of their lovemaking. She would have preferred it to have happened naturally too, but it hadn't. They had tried to conceive a baby for three years with nothing to show for it but a less spontaneous and thus less exciting sex life. She had taken her temperature every day for months to determine when she was ovulating. She'd rush home when she was and miss dinner dates or parties required for her work. Making love became so separated from seduction it began to seem like a job. They'd been to doctors and they'd had every test anyone could think of and nothing explained why she couldn't conceive. Yes, they'd told her, he had a slightly low sperm count, but others with the condition still had children. Whether that was the problem or it was something else entirely, she remained barren and it had become the heartbreak of her life. Convincing Jeff to try any medical intervention hadn't been easy. After the first two years of disappointments he was ready to give up. That had been a year ago but she remembered every detail of their conversation as if it were yesterday. She had just emerged from the bathroom, fighting tears. \"I got my period,\" she'd said disconsolately. She'd climbed into bed, pulled up the blanket and turned away from him, staring silently into space. \"Don't react like this, Marcia. It's only one time.\" \"One more time after two years of only one more time. I feel so sad and so stressed I don't know what to do.\" \"Maybe it's the stress that's stopping it from happening,\" he said. \"I don't know, that sounds vaguely like it's my fault somehow.\" \"No, I'm not saying that. We're both tense.\" \"Look, if being tense prevented conception, rape victims would never get pregnant.\" He paused for what seemed like a long time before venturing his next suggestion. \"Listen, honey, please, turn around. I want to say something.\" She sighed and turned to face him. \"Maybe we just can't do this,\" he said gently. She didn't look at him. Her thoughts were far away. \"Maybe not like this,\" she said quietly. \"But there are other ways.\" He looked perplexed. \"We could try IUI,\" she said. \"What's that?\" \"It's intrauterine insemination.\" He looked puzzled. \"You know,\" she added with a little smile, \"the turkey baster method.\" He withdrew his arm from her shoulder. \"That's a turn-on,\" he said. \"It's not supposed to be a turn-on,\" she countered. \"It's not about sex. It's about conception.\" \"I thought those two went together.\" \"Well, I guess this is for when they don't,\" she said softly, getting out of bed and leaving the room. He'd gone along with it after that, but she knew he did so grudgingly. He hated the idea and he hated the process, and she knew, and appreciated, that he submitted only because he understood how important it was to her. But when that method also repeatedly failed, he was more than ready to give up. She'd begged him to talk to her doctor about another possibility and so, reluctantly, he went with her to discuss the next step with her gynecologist. The doctor had suggested in-vitro fertilization: Marcia's egg would be harvested in a minor surgical procedure and then fertilized by Jeff's sperm outside her body. It would then be inserted into her uterus. The doctor explained that to increase the odds of success she would insert several fertilized eggs at the same time. The process, she said, would cost about $15,000. They were shocked. Insurance wouldn't pay any of it and although they could afford it \u2014 Jeff had a good job in a law firm and Marcia was a senior editor at a publishing house \u2014 this was not a price they could shrug off. Besides, they realized that it might not take the first time around. Each cycle would multiply the cost by the same amount. How far were they ready to go? \"What if more than one egg takes?\" Jeff had asked one night as they were lying in bed talking about it. \"That's very rare,\" Marcia answered. \"Not so rare. I can just imagine it. The Naiman Quintuplets,\" he said. He pretended to roll up his sleeves like a circus barker. \"Come and see them. A modern miracle.\" Marcia laughed. \"Well, we'd be sure to get lots of presents. And five of each. Can't you just see them lined up in their cribs, all of them with your chin dimple?\" \"It's not funny, Marcia. What if we did have twins? That's not rare at all in this procedure.\" \"We'd be done, then,\" she whispered. \"There'd be a few tough years, but we wouldn't have to do this part ever again.\" They had gone through with it. There had been no way to turn back \u2014 Marcia wanted a baby too much. She'd have tried anything, paid anything, borrowed if she had to. And Jeff had gotten into the spirit of it. It had become a challenge, a kind of high-stakes game and, as usual, he simply didn't want to lose. He seemed equally devastated when it didn't work, Marcia thought. But when she insisted they try it again, he balked. And when she'd convinced him, promising this would be the last time, and once again failed to conceive, he refused to try a third time. The subject had been dropped. They stopped taking her temperature and consciously trying to conceive. But Marcia never really let it go. She was painfully aware that her thirty-ninth birthday was approaching and that soon she might lose her chance completely. She'd taken her temperature without telling him and made sure they made love when she thought she was ovulating. Still, nothing had happened and she felt bereft every month when she got her period. Continually disappointed, her usual optimism failed her and she fell into a depression from which she couldn't seem to emerge. Now hope slowly stirred again, like a cat stretching after a long sleep. She felt a renewed sense of possibility and purpose, and resolved to research the subject thoroughly starting tomorrow. She knew Jeff would be against it \u2014 they had discussed surrogacy early on and both had rejected the idea \u2014 but that was before it was clear it was their only chance. She'd taken it up with her doctor today, and she believed that she had finally hit upon the right solution and that nothing now could stand in her way. Nothing, that is, except Jeff. CHAPTER 2 She spent the next two hours reading about surrogacy on the Internet, pulling up articles, criticisms, and testimonials from happy parents. She learned there were agencies that provided guidance through the process of surrogacy, companies with names like Conceptual Options and Growing Generations, and she made a note of their numbers, resolving to speak to their representatives. Maybe there is a book in it, she thought, featuring different couples talking about their experience. If not, there should be, she noted mechanically \u2014 she was an editor, after all. She heard the door open and close \u2014 Jeff coming home. She decided not to discuss it with him right away. It would be prudent to wait until she had more hard facts with which to counter his arguments. But she was so excited that she was barely able to wait until they finished dinner. She fidgeted and fussed around the kitchen and when he started to tell her about a run-in he'd had with a colleague, he noticed she hardly heard a word he said. Seeing that something was preoccupying her, he asked what was going on. He didn't need to ask twice. \"Jeff, I saw Dr. Gordon today,\" she blurted, barely restraining her excitement. Dr. Gordon was her gynecologist and Jeff stiffened. \"Is everything okay?\" \"Yes, everything's fine. It was just a checkup. But we discussed something I really want to talk to you about.\" \"Sure.\" \"She thinks maybe we should try surrogacy.\" He let out an exasperated sigh. \"Marcia, we already discussed surrogacy. That was one area I thought we agreed on. It's wrong. It's exploitive. It's rich people renting the wombs of poor people who do it only because they need the money.\" \"I've been reading up on it. Some women say they do it to help people who can't have children.\" \"I think that's bullshit.\" She bristled. He was already turning this into an argument. \"Why is the only scenario you can accept a selfish one? Believe it or not some people actually get pleasure from helping others.\" \"You used to say it was all about class,\" Jeff countered. She nodded. \"I did and I still see that,\" she said evenly, \"but I have to admit I'm open to a different interpretation now. I mean, if there's psychological testing, if the birth mother really knows what she's getting into \u2014 maybe it should only be allowed for women who already have children of their own, for example. And if the birth mother or family really need the added income, maybe it's a way of doing something good for both families.\" He looked at her with feigned admiration. \"It's amazing how you can adapt your principles to your needs,\" he said. \"No, I'm just able to let go of my prejudices when I have more information,\" she snapped. He got up to get a beer. He hesitated at the refrigerator, clearly deciding whether to come back and resume the conversation, or settle down in the living room and look for a game on ESPN. She knew he didn't want to return, but he finally came back to the table and sat down heavily. \"It just feels wrong, Marcia. Unnatural. A woman isn't an incubator; she has feelings. You can't predict how she'll feel if she bonds with the child during her pregnancy and then has to give it away. What if she changes her mind? Remember that case you used to talk about? That woman who went through the whole surrogacy, signed a contract and everything, and then backed out when the baby was born? What was her name?\" \"Mary Beth Whitehead. I followed that story compulsively.\" She frowned. \"I was very much on her side at the time. But things have changed. When she did it, they used her egg. The baby really was her baby, biologically as well as emotionally. Whatever she thought before, whatever she signed up for, she was that baby's mother and it was heartbreaking to watch her pain.\" \"I know. And I don't think any woman can know how she'll feel about giving up her baby until she actually experiences childbirth,\" Jeff answered, grateful for even this slight concession. \"That's not something you can just sign away without the option to change your mind. I mean, think about it. What if we did this and at the last minute, the mother changed her mind?\" \"I don't know. But I'd like to find out how often something like that happens. One of the articles said that now it's not usually the surrogate's egg that's used. That's one of the good things that came out of the Whitehead case. If we did this, the baby would be genetically ours. We need to do more research. There are lots of families who have done it. I think the odds of success are knowable.\" \"I don't know. It just involves three people when it should involve two \u2014 like adoption, which I also never wanted.\" \"I've always known how you feel about adoption and that's why I never pushed it. But maybe we should revisit it. Would it really bother you so much to not have the baby come from us?\" \"Come from us? You mean you think it comes from us when it's born to another mother? I'd call that the definition of not coming from us.\" \"Not really. But if you can't stand that idea, what is it actually about adoption that makes you so against it?\" \"It's not about the genes. For me the worst part in adoption and in surrogacy too is the complications and intrusions it makes in your life. These days you don't just adopt a baby. You have to have a 'relationship' with the birth mother. Even if you don't, the child has a right to know who she is. Families become more complicated. I don't want any of that.\" \"Jeff, you're confusing things. If the surrogate gives birth to our baby there wouldn't be any reason to maintain a relationship with her after the pregnancy and delivery.\" \"Who knows? All I know is that our child should come from us in a normal way. I agreed to try to increase our chances and that didn't work. So maybe we're just not meant to have kids.\" That stopped her. \"Not meant to have kids,\" she repeated slowly. \"Not meant by whom? God? Fate? Destiny? You don't even believe in any of those. We make our own destiny, you've said that a hundred times.\" She stopped talking and turned away, trying to stop her tears, but they came in spite of her resolve. He softened immediately, reaching out to take her hand. \"Honey, I just think it would be good to try to focus on other aspects of our lives. We're pretty lucky in so many ways. We love each other. We have a great marriage. We can make a good life together even if we never have children.\" She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand and got up to get a tissue to blow her nose. When she returned, he reached over to stroke her hair and gently pulled her into an embrace. \"I love you so much, Marcia. I'm happy now. As we are. Aren't you happy with me?\" She kissed his neck. \"You know I am. Of course I am. But I always wanted us to be a family. And I'm just not ready to give up on that, not yet.\" \"Would it be so terrible if we did? I mean, giving up isn't always a defeat. Sometimes it's more like just giving in.\" \"Giving in to what?\" \"To reality.\" She shrugged, lifted her chin and pursed her lips, a gesture he recognized as her stubborn refusal to hear him. He got up and stretched his legs before pulling the chair out and sitting down again. \"We're all raised to think having kids is what couples have to do. There's this myth we're all fed of the perfect happy family,\" he said. \"It's a portrait we have in our minds. But it doesn't always turn out that way and when that happens it's like someone erased the two children that were supposed to replace us. We can't help feeling there's something wrong. But it's not always so wonderful. Think of Nick and Sarah \u2014 really, Marcia, does their life seem so enviable?\" She couldn't help smiling just a little thinking of the chaos she'd noticed the last time she'd visited their friends. Encouraged, he went on, \"Their apartment is cramped. The couch is stained. There are toys all over \u2014 you can't walk through the living room without crunching some plastic action figure underfoot. The kids can be cute, but they also scream and cry and have tantrums when they don't get what they want. Nick says it's almost impossible to work at home. It takes so long to put the kids to bed that Sarah says she usually just goes straight to sleep when they do. No more wine and cheese before dinner as they tell each other about their day. And that's a couple with normal kids. What if there are problems?\" Marcia seemed to be listening so he continued. \"And think of Ben and Kathy. They decided not to have kids and they're living an incredible life. They have money for anything they want. They have an amazing apartment filled with designer furniture and antiques. They have elegant dinner parties using their wedding silver and china, and the place always looks beautiful. She dresses like a fashion model. They do things together and fill their lives with activities and travel and fun.\" Marcia gave a desultory shrug. \"Their life just seems so empty and shallow and narcissistic,\" she said. \"I can't believe they chose it. It makes me so mad that they had the ability to have a family and turned it down. Did you know she got pregnant?\" Jeff frowned; she hadn't been listening after all, he realized. \"Well, she did. And she had an abortion,\" Marcia said, ignoring Jeff's expression. \"And I, who want it so much, can't get pregnant. It's not fair.\" He raised his voice in frustration. \"I know. It's not fair. But we've tried everything. Maybe it's time to start accepting it.\" (Continues...) Excerpted from Risking It All by Nina Darnton . Copyright \u00a9 2017 Nina Darnton. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 16.0}, {"asin": "0884482790", "title": "While You're Here, Doc: Farmyard Adventures of a Maine Veterinarian", "author": "Bradford B. Brown", "description": "From Booklist Tales of animal doctoring in a small coastal town in 1950s Maine fill this new addition to the ranks of veterinary memoirs. Since he charged his clients by the miles that he had to drive to deliver his services, Brown often heard the \"while you're here, Doc\" line as farmers would add on \"just one more\" patient once the veterinarian had showed up. Whether chasing a stallion through a blizzard so his torn ear could be stitched--surgery done on the floor of the general store whose plate glass window the stallion had crashed through--or checking the sore tooth of a pet monkey after a merry chase in and out of the house (not to mention all the bite wounds), Brown pretty much saw it all in his years in practice. Full of laconic farmers, hysterical owners, and more feisty animal patients than one can imagine, these stories of backwoods veterinary care are sure to be popular among James Herriot lovers. Nancy Bent Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review \"Stuffed with hilarious recollections of nearly a quarter century of dealing with all kinds of animals and their owners.\" \u2015 Yankee Magazine \"Mixes veterinary know-how with Down East storytelling, and each of his stories is a stand-alone gem.\" \u2015 Maine In Print \"Full of laconic farmers, hysterical owners, and more feisty animal patients than one can imagine, these stories of backwoods veterinary care are sure to be popular among James Herriot lovers.\" \u2015 Booklist \"Brown\u2019s medical skills, physical stamina, courage, and especially his strong senses of perspective and humor made him ideally suited to the rigors of his chosen profession. They also make him the perfect narrator of a volume that succeeds as an All Creatures Great and Small, Maine-style.\" \u2015 Bangor Daily News \"Do not leave this book unattended by the bedside of any summer visitor. It will vanish, and they will look innocent. (Check their luggage.)\" \u2015 Courier-Gazette About the Author Bradford B. Brown, DVM, grew up on a farm in Vasselboro, Maine, and like two of his brothers, graduated from the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. He joined his brother Phil's veterinary practice in Belfast, Maine, where they worked together for thirteen years, and then continued on his own for ten more, running a small-animal hospital and making hundreds of farm calls. After he retired to the family farm in Vasselboro, he began writing about the people and animals and many adventures he had enjoyed. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.0}, {"asin": "1452161089", "title": "Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Novel and Creative Writing Book, National Novel Writing Month NaNoWriMo Guide)", "author": "Grant Faulkner", "description": "Review \"Are you feeling...stuck? Unmotivated? Uninspired? Are you trapped inthe middle-novel swamp, or did you find all your plot threads wound upin one big knot? Grant Faulkner, executive director of National Novel Writing Month(NaNoWriMo), has a new book to help wordsmiths find momentum again: Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo. Divided into 52 encouraging, actionable chapters, Faulkner walks writersthrough problems like imposter syndrome, creative blocks, overcomingrejection, and author envy.\"- The Writer Pep Talks for Writer' does exactly as the title suggests. This features 52 short essays to kick-start creativity and motivate your writer's mojo, and is suitable for any writer on any stage of their creative journey. This is a complete guide to mentally motivating yourself for the chaotic month to come but, with timelessly solid advice suitable for any creative individual, this is also a good resource to be pored over at any time of the year. - United by Pop About the Author Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He's published Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo; Brave the Page, a teen writing guide; Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories; and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story.\u00a0\u00a0His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, as well as in anthologies such as Best Small Fictions and Norton's New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, LitHub, Writer's Digest, and The Writer. He also co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing.\u00a0\u00a0Additionally, Grant is co-founder of the Flash Fiction Collective, a member of the National Writing Project Writers Council, Aspen Words' Creative Council, and Lit Camp's Advisory Council. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Pep Talks for Writers 52 Insights And Actions To Boost Your Creative Mojo By Grant Faulkner Chronicle Books LLC Copyright \u00a9 2017 Grant FaulknerAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4521-6108-2 Contents Introduction: A Creative Manifesto, 8, 1 You Don't Need Permission to Be a Creator, 12, 2 How Do You Create?, 16, 3 Finding Your Muse, 21, 4 Be a Beginner, 25, 5 Make Your Creativity into a Routine, 30, 6 Goal + Deadline = Magic, 34, 7 Embrace Constraints, 39, 8 The Art of Boredom, 43, 9 Getting Ideas: A Writing Rorschach Test, 48, 10 Building a Creative Community, 52, 11 An Artistic Apprenticeship, 56, 12 Getting Feedback, 60, 13 Channel Your Super Heroic Observational Powers, 65, 14 Cavort Wander Play, 70, 15 Using Your Life in Your Story, 74, 16 Overcoming Creativity Wounds, 79, 17 Make Your Inner Editor Work for You, 84, 18 Accept the Mess, 89, 19 Pull Yourself Out of the Comparison Trap, 93, 20 Put Your Life Struggles in Perspective, 98, 21 Treating Impostor Syndrome, 103, 22 Embrace Vulnerability, 108, 23 Fail Often Fail Better, 114, 24 Creativity as an Act of Defiance, 118, 25 You Are What You Wear, 123, 26 Where You Work Matters, 126, 27 Artistic Thievery, or the Art of Remixing, 130, 28 Take a Story Field Trip, 135, 29 Looking through Your Character Kaleidoscope, 139, 30 On Finding Creative Flow, 144, 31 Say, \"Yes, and ...\": The Secrets of Improve, 149, 32 Think Fast to Outpace Writer's Block, 154, 33 An Exercise in Extreme Writing, 158, 34 Sleep, Sleeplessness, and Creativity, 162, 35 Be Deluded Be Grand, 166, 36 Nurturing Awe through Darkness, Solitude, and Silence, 169, 37 New Experiences = New Thoughts, 174, 38 The Magical Sprites of Creativity: Distractions, 179, 39 Trusting in The Absurd, 184, 40 Move Differently to Think Differently, 188, 41 Specialize (but Not Too Much), 192, 42 The Art of Melancholy, 196, 43 Thank Your Muse, 201, 44 Writing with a Persona, 205, 45 Persisting through Rejection, 210, 46 Know Thyself, 215, 47 Make Irritants into a Symphony, 220, 48 Hold Things Lightly, 224, 49 Intuition versus Logic, 227, 50 Vanquishing Fear with Curiosity, 232, 51 Logging the Hours: Mastery Equals Perseverance, 236, 52 What Is \"Success\"?, 241, In Review, 246, CHAPTER 1 YOU DON'T NEED PERMISSION TO BE A CREATOR Each year , I talk to hundreds of people who have perfected a peculiar and disturbing art: the art of telling themselves why they can't jump in and write the novel of their dreams. \"I've never taken any classes. I don't have an MFA.\" \"I have a lot of ideas for stories, but I'm not a real writer.\" Or, worst of all, they say, \"I'm not a creative type.\" I call this the other syndrome \u2014 as in \"other people do this, but not me.\" We've all been there, right? We open up the pages of a magazine, and we read a profile of a magnificently cloaked and coiffed artistic being \u2014 a twirling scarf, moody eyes, locks of hair falling over a pensive brow. We read the witticisms and wisdom the celebrated artistic being dispenses while drinking a bottle of wine with a reporter one afternoon in a charming hamlet in Italy. The artistic being tells of creative challenges and victories achieved, and then drops in an anecdote or two about a conversation with a famous author, a good friend. There's a joke about a movie deal that fell through, and then an aside about the one that won an Oscar. There's talk about a recently published book, which called to them and gave them artistic fulfillment like no other book ever has. And, as we sit in our house that is so very far from Italy, and we look across the kitchen, over the dishes on the counter, to the cheap bottle of wine from Safeway, and the phone rings with a call from a telemarketer, just as a bill slides off the stack of bills, we tell ourselves, \"Other people are writers. Other people get the good fortune to have been born with a twirling scarf around their neck. Other people get to traipse through Italy to find a fantastic novel calling them. Other people get to be who they want to be \u2014 whether it's through family connections, blessed luck, or natural talent. But that's not me. That's other people.\" And you know what, we're right. The life of an artist is for others \u2014 because we just said so, and in saying so, we make it true. But here's the rub. Even after negating our creative potential, we're bound to wake up the next day to a tickle of an idea dancing in a far corner of our mind, a memory that is trying to push a door open, a strange other world that is calling us. We wash those dishes, we pay that stack of bills, we drink that cheap bottle of wine, but we know there's something else \u2014 we know there's something more. And there is something more. There's the creative life. You don't need a certificate for it; you don't need to apply to do it; you don't even need to ask permission to do it. You just have to claim it. You might not wear scarves in Italy, but you can make your own version of the artistic life, no matter where you live or what demands of life you face. It's not always easy, of course. There will be naysayers, those people who think it's silly or trivial to be a \"creative type,\" those who think it's audacious and pretentious for you to write a novel, those who think you can't do it because you lack the qualifications. You've decided to escape the mire of your creative slough, and sometimes that threatens others. But you're not embracing your creativity because it's an easy path. You're doing it because you have something to say. And no one gets to tell you that what you have to say doesn't matter, because it matters to you. The arts don't belong to a chosen few. Quite the opposite: every one of us is chosen to be a creator by virtue of being human. If you're not convinced of this, just step into any preschool and observe the unbridled creative energy of kids as they immerse themselves in finger painting, telling wild stories, banging on drums, and dancing just for the sake of dancing. They're creative types because they breathe. And you're a writer because you write. There's no other definition. Don't fall into the common trap of hesitating to call yourself a writer if you haven't published a book. It can easily happen. Agatha Christie said that even after she'd written ten books, she didn't really consider herself a \"bona fide author.\" You earn your bona fides each time you pick up a pen and write your story. So start by telling yourself you're a writer. Then tell the world. Don't mumble it, be proud of it, because to be a writer takes moxie and verve. Your task as a human being and as an artist is to find that maker within, to decide that you're not \"other,\" you're a creator. Honor the impetus that bids you to write \u2014 revere it, bow to it, hug it, bathe in it, nurture it. That impetus is what makes life meaningful. It's what makes you, you. CHAPTER 2 HOW DO YOU CREATE? Despite the plethora of how-to-write books that promise surefire recipes for writing success, there is no right way to write. The way a person creates is a mysterious thing, similar to a person's favorite color. Why do some people like a certain color and not another one? Blue has been my favorite color for as long as I can imagine. Yet some people like red, others prefer periwinkle, and then there are those who like fulvous (a brownish yellow). Why? It just is. And it's a good thing, right? We need the world to be painted a variety of colors. We need to walk through rooms with different hues, to feel life as a celebration of color in its many forms, to make life, well, colorful. When I begin a story, I sit down with an itch of a story idea stirring in my mind, and I write a sentence, without too much thought, without any maps of logic, and then I write another sentence, and then another, one thing leading to the next, writing in pursuit of faint inklings and distant whispers, writing to discover, writing just to write. It's as if I'm lost in a foreign city, and I'm trying to find my way home, but I can only follow hunches, scents in the air, touches of memory. I'll eventually find my way home, or I believe I will, but I know I'll take wrong turns and end up in places I might not know how to get out of. I know there will be moments I'm scared or frustrated or desperate, but I also know I'll wander into magical places I couldn't have possibly found in any guidebook. It's a fun way to write \u2014 to write as a quest. I get to walk through a dark forest and discover something new each time I write. No one tells me where to go. If I get a sudden and impulsive idea, then I can indulge that story line and explore all its tentacles and tributaries. If I want to include a character's diary entries to add a layer of characterization \u2014 yes, why not? The downside to this approach is that I tend to explore my characters' worlds and meander down their highways and byways more than I stitch everything together into a tight and suspenseful plot. I'm not especially adept at writing the kind of novel where everything is there for a well-considered reason, where one thing leads to the next and the dramatic trajectory is always rising with taut tension. In some ways, I tend to plot after the novel has been written. So my constant question has been whether I should abandon my loosey-goosey ways and buckle down and outline my novel ahead of time. And not just with a sketchy outline, but a tightly orchestrated game plan. I wonder this when I begin every novel, and then I wonder it more and more as I proceed. Here's the thing, though. I have outlined stories and novels. While it's fun for me to think through a narrative arc and plot it out, if I write with an outline \u2014 with so much of the story already formed in my brain \u2014 the joy and meaning of writing is diminished. With an outline, I write to determine, not to explore. Instead of walking through a foreign city without a map and looking all around to find my way, I look at the map more than I look at the world around me. For me, planning a novel \u2014 at least in any deep and meticulous way \u2014 violates the very spirit of why I write. Now I'm not arrogant enough to assert that my way is the right way. I often question it myself \u2014 even now, I wonder if I don't outline because of a character flaw or a lack of discipline. I deeply respect writers who use outlines, spreadsheets, Post-it notes, and white boards to delineate their stories. But I also know that every writer creates in a different and mysterious way, so I try not to chastise myself too much. I often think of \"The Hedgehog and the Fox,\" an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin that addresses different creative types. The title is a reference to a phrase attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus who wrote, \"A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.\" Berlin used this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences, and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea. I write like a fox. Others write like a hedgehog. And then others write like another animal, let's say an anteater, and whatever defining characteristic an anteater has guides them to create their stories in their way. There's no such thing as the way to create good work; you just have to find your way. There's no such thing as the way to create good work; you just have to find your way. Ann Beattie's favorite hours to write are from midnight to three in the morning. James Baldwin liked to rise before dawn, before there were sounds of anyone in the house. Legend has it that Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin before she began her day's writing because a foretaste of the grave was supposed to inspire her macabre sensibility. Some writers thrive in solitude, while others seek to write with others. Some writers are vitalized by background noise, while others are horribly distracted by it. The most creative people often contain contradictory extremes, inhabiting a multitudinous personality. I did NaNoWriMo the first time because I'm such a slow, plodding writer and wanted to experience my imagination at a different pace. I'm an early morning writer, but sometimes on a Saturday night, I'll make a pot of coffee at 10 and plan to write into the dark silence of the night. I might just write my next novel on note cards, as Vladimir Nabokov did. And I'll never quit dallying with different types of outlines (and chastising myself for pantsing [winging it] anyway). So find your way, embrace your way, but don't become too rigid. Experimenting with your process is a way to open yourself up to new possibilities. CHAPTER 3 FINDING YOUR MUSE Inspiration is a funny thing. It's powerful enough to move mountains. When it strikes, it carries an author forward like the rushing torrents of a flooded river. And yet, if you wait for it, nothing happens. The irony is that so much is actually created \u2014 mountains moved, sagas written, grand murals painted \u2014 by those who might not even describe themselves as particularly inspired. Instead, they show up every day and put their hands on the keyboard, their pen to paper, and they move their stories forward, bit by bit, word by word, perhaps not even recognizing that inspiration is striking in hundreds of tiny, microscopic ways as they push through another sentence, another page, another chapter. \"I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day,\" said William Faulkner. This is the principle way writers finish 50,000 words of a novel each year during National Novel Writing Month \u2014 by showing up \u2014 and it applies to being creative the rest of the year as well. Inspiration is often characterized as a thunderbolt \u2014 a brilliant flash that strikes from the heavens, a eureka moment, and that metaphor certainly holds truth, because inspiration can be a sudden igniting force, random and illuminating and otherworldly (and even a bit dangerous). Yet I think of inspiration, at least the big, gobsmacking moments of inspiration, as more like Bigfoot. Sightings of Bigfoot are rare, and he's so elusive that he can't be captured physically, or even truly on film, so his very existence is in question. It's wonderful to believe he exists, because it's nice to think of the world as strange and beautiful enough to spawn such a creature, but if you go out into the woods and look for Bigfoot, you're not likely to find him, just as you can't force sweeping gusts of inspiration to appear on any given day. The muse of Greek mythology \u2014 that creature depicted in a beautiful flowing gown, playing a harp \u2014 was invoked by authors to sing stories into their ears, but I'd like to recast this muse. The muse doesn't sing the words of a story to you; the muse is conjured in the telling \u2014 in overcoming those lulls that strike with willpower, grit, and as much caffeine as it takes. I see the muse as hundreds of invisible sprites that sleep in the whispery spaces between each word. These sprites are enlivened only by the breath of a churning imagination, by the stirrings of a story moving forward. The muse of inspiration appears when you plop your heart onto the beautiful blank page that awaits your words. Such a muse is ineffable, so miniature that she often goes unnoticed, yet an author must trust that the responsibility for bringing those story sprites to life resides in creating a spool of words that spins onto the page. \"A writer is either compelled to write or not,\" said Toni Morrison. \"If I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.\" The urge to wait for inspiration has killed many a wonderful story. Now, of course, you'll have lulls. Your willpower will face the crippling doldrums of self-doubt. You'll tell yourself no one wants to read your story. You'll tell yourself your characters are clich\u00e9s, your plot unremarkable. And you \u2014 you! \u2014 are not a writer. You are a person with silly dreams who should know better, and you should just return to a life where you sit and simply be entertained by other people's imaginative creations. A life of binge-watching TV series isn't all bad, is it? Here's what you must know: Every single creator throughout history has experienced such moments. Keep trusting that the muse of inspiration appears when you plop your heart onto the beautiful blank page that awaits your words. The words you create every day are each fruit-bearing ker- nels of inspiration. Each word wants more and more words to follow. And you are the all-powerful God that sends those words \u2014 those story-igniting lightning bolts \u2014 into a world that's coming to life before your own eyes. You are your own muse. Let the blank page be a spigot for all of the dramatic, ornery, lyrical, and shocking thoughts in your head that are eager to come out. CHAPTER 4 BE A BEGINNER So much of our emphasis in life is to be the one who knows. When we embark seriously on any new endeavor, we look up to the masters and gurus and yearn to match their expertise someday. They're the ones who have it all figured out, after all. When they walk into rooms, people tilt their heads up in admiration. People ask them questions and hang on their every word. The experts move through life with surety, certainty, and maybe even a good paycheck, or so it seems from the outside. They dash off novels, speak with aplomb, and take exotic vacations. When you're a beginner, it's easy to feel awkward and clumsy. We want to be graceful; we want it all to be effortless; or we just want to move. Paradoxically, though, it can be more exciting to be the one who doesn't know \u2014 the one who is beginning the search, the one immersed in the pursuit of answers, the one who has the humility to be open to learning all possibilities. When my son was learning to walk, I paused one afternoon to simply watch his attempts. We're accustomed to think that falling causes frustration, but Jules didn't furrow his brow or cry out as he plopped on his behind again and again. He got up, swaying back and forth, wrestling with gravity, noticing the tenuous shifts coursing throughout his body, and he worked on his strength to stay steady, as if putting the pieces of a puzzle together. As I watched him, I listed the lessons of his practice: 1. He didn't care if anyone was watching. 2. He approached every attempt in a spirit of inquiry. 3. He didn't mind failure. 4. He took pleasure in each new step/milestone. 5. He didn't imitate another person's walk; he was just intent on finding his own way. He was quite naturally immersed in shoshin, or beginner's mind, a notion from Zen Buddhism that emphasizes the benefits of being open to whatever occurs and being observant and curious in each effort. \"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few,\" said the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. The idea is that in the beginner's mind there are no considerations of that very confining box called achievement, because the true beginner is always learning. A beginner's mind is innocent of preconceptions, expectations, judgments, and prejudices. Devise a way to stay in the mindset of a beginner, to be na\u00efve and wholly open to the world. (Continues...) Excerpted from Pep Talks for Writers by Grant Faulkner . Copyright \u00a9 2017 Grant Faulkner. Excerpted by permission of Chronicle Books LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.95}, {"asin": "0425257274", "title": "Out of Circulation (Cat in the Stacks Mystery)", "author": "Miranda James", "description": "Review Praise for the New York Times bestselling Cat in the Stacks Mysteries \u201cCourtly librarian Charlie Harris and his Maine Coon cat, Diesel, are an endearing detective duo. Warm, charming, and Southern as the tastiest grits.\u201d\u2014Carolyn Hart, New York Times bestselling author of the Death on Demand Mysteries\u201cCombines a kindhearted librarian hero, family secrets in a sleepy Southern town, and a gentle giant of a cat that will steal your heart.\u201d\u2014Lorna Barrett, New York Times bestselling author of the Booktown Mysteries\u201cIdeal for Christie fans who enjoy a good puzzle.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal \u201c[A] pleasing blend of crime and charm.\u201d\u2014 Richmond Times-Dispatch \u201cJames just keeps getting better and better...It's an intelligent read, so well-written that I couldn't stop reading it. Every single time I turned out my light for the night, I found myself thinking about the story, flipping the light switch again and reading just \u2018one more chapter.\u2019\u201d\u2014MyShelf.com About the Author Miranda James is the New York Times bestselling author of the Cat in the Stacks Mysteries and the Southern Ladies Mysteries.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0312532741", "title": "Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners", "author": "Alan Emmins", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Who cleans up when a killer leaves a really big bloody mess? In a chatty, tongue-in-cheek profile of Neal Smither, chief of Crime Scene Cleaners Inc., journalist Emmins lets the Boss Cleaner speak passionately of how he tackles spills and splotches resulting from the San Francisco Bay area's murders, suicides and other deaths. Emmins delves into the zany character of Smither, a loving family man who puts on a coarsely humorous persona as protective armor as he surrounds himself with the dark realm of death, monitoring his multimillion-dollar business in a highly competitive field. Hanging around with Smither means a grisly experience of suicide surrounded by transgender porn, bodies splattered by gunfire or the decayed corpses of those ruined by meth or contagious disease. For a totally gonzo way of looking at the crime scene cleaning business, try this engrossing, wisecracking assessment (of Smither, Emmins writes, [I]f not actually one of Death's litter, he must be at barest minimum a cousin) of a world we know exists but ignore as we go on about our lives. (Jan.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review Who cleans up when a killer leaves a really big bloody mess? In a chatty, tongue-in-cheek profile of Neal Smither, chief of Crime Scene Cleaners Inc., journalist Emmins lets the \"Boss Cleaner\" speak passionately of how he tackles spills and splotches resulting from the San Francisco Bay area's murders, suicides and other deaths. Emmins delves into the zany character of Smither, a loving family man who puts on a coarsely humorous persona as \"protective armor\" as he surrounds himself with the dark realm of death, monitoring his multimillion-dollar business in a highly competitive field. Hanging around with Smither means a grisly experience of suicide surrounded by transgender porn, bodies splattered by gunfire or the decayed corpses of those ruined by meth or contagious disease. For a totally gonzo way of looking at the crime scene cleaning business, try this engrossing, wisecracking assessment (of Smither, Emmins writes, \"[I]f not actually one of Death's litter, he must be at barest min ( Publishers Weekly ) About the Author ALAN EMMINS has written for GQ , The New York Post , Dazed & Confused , FHM , Playboy , and The New York Daily News . He is also managing editor of the fiction magazine and website Edit Red. Emmins is British, but has worked mainly in New York. He now lives in Denmark. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "True Crime"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 22.84}, {"asin": "B01M08J8LB", "title": "Word Problems: 120 Math Problems For Kids: Math Workbook Grade 1 (Math For Kids)", "author": "Stephen Hill", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 2.99}, {"asin": "006268535X", "title": "Caroline: Little House, Revisited", "author": "Sarah Miller", "description": "Review \u201cPeeling back the layers of Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s Little House on the Prairie series allows Miller to reveal the real Caroline Ingalls, Wilder\u2019s mother. Not to be missed by Wilder\u2019s grown-up fans or those who enjoy historical fiction about the settling of the American West in the late 1800s.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cThrough assured prose, Miller puts us in those conversations, showing us the fear and uncertainty behind Wilder\u2019s implacable, unflappable \u201cMa,\u201d but also her strength and devotion to her husband and children...\u00a0this is a stunning novel. Miller\u2019s research is impeccable and her writing exquisite...\u201d \u2014 Historical Novels Review, Editors\u2019 Choice \u201cComforting, inspiring and beautifully written, Caroline is a precious addition to the story of the Ingalls family but stands on its own as a testament to the spirit, grit and courage that built America.\u201d \u2014 Mary Jane Clark \u201cA master of historical fiction, Miller forges Caroline Ingalls into a formidable, complex pioneer woman, and adult fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s Little House series will delight in this portrayal of \u201cMa.\u201d Beguiling, pulse-pounding historical fiction.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cI was entertained, transported, and inspired by Sarah Miller\u2019s CAROLINE. Each passage was written with so much care and love, I now can\u2019t imagine reading Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s series without a copy of CAROLINE close at hand.\u201d \u2014 New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Shelley Shepard Gray \u201cReaders who grew up cherishing the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder will find much to savor in Caroline...Full of lyrical descriptions of the wild beauty of the Kansas countryside, Caroline is a well-researched and thoughtful look at the inner life of one of America\u2019s most famous frontier women.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201cNow, Miller draws her\u00a0[Caroline\u00a0Ingalls]\u00a0onto center stage, gifting readers with a beautiful portrait of a remarkable, true pioneer. This is a beautiful tribute to a mother and a family who followed their dreams and a tale that is as uplifting and real as the original Little House books.\u201d \u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cA stunning and sentimental novel brimming with historical detail, Caroline grants readers a chance at a new experience with an old familiar story.\u201d \u2014 Bustle About the Author Sarah Miller began writing her first novel at ten years old and has spent half her life working in libraries and bookstores. She is the author of Caroline: Little House, Revisited, and Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller , which was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and nominated for numerous state award lists. Sarah lives in Michigan.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "0878398198", "title": "The Hungry Coast: Fables from the North Shore of Minnesota", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Noah Prinsen grew up in Grand Marais and has lived on the North Shore of Lake Superior most of his life. The woodcuts in this book were carved from pine and hand-printed on an antique Line-O-Scribe press. More of his artwork can be viewed at noahprinsen.com. Marlais Olmstead Brand lives and writes in the Great Frozen North that mere mortals know as Minnesota. She is the recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and her work has appeared in the Best New American Voices collections by Scribner\u2019s and Harvest Books.\u00a0The Hungry Coast: Fables from the North Shore of Minnesota\u00a0is Brand's first collection of short stories.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Short Stories & Anthologies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0963409212", "title": "Tough Customers : True Adventures of Game Wardens and the Outlaws They Pursue", "author": "Terry Hodges", "description": "Review \"Lieutenant Terry Hodges is to wildlife protectors what Joseph Wambaugh is to big-city cops. His book, TOUGH CUSTOMERS, is evocative story-telling . . .\" -- Paul Dean, Los Angeles Times About the Author Author Terry Hodges is the winner of the Outdoor Writers Association of California's Writer of the Year award. He is a 26 year veteran California Fish and Game Warden and his true warden adventure stories appear in every issue of the magazine Outdoor California. He also writes for California Game and Fish Magazine, Oregon and Washington Game and Fish Magazine, California Waterfowl Association Magazine and California Hunter Magazine.", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 36.08}, {"asin": "0983170177", "title": "77 Ways to Find New Readers for Your Self-published Book", "author": "Laura Pepper Wu", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0374292191", "title": "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories", "author": "Wells Tower", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. The stories in this outstanding debut collection explore the troubled relationships of men down on their luck, in failed marriages, estranged from family, caught in imbroglios between sons and their fathers and stepfathers, and even, in Wild America, the subtle and ferocious competition between teenage girls. Bob Monroe, the protagonist of The Brown Coast, loses his job, his inheritance and his wife after the death of his father. The narrator of Down Through the Valley, meanwhile, is persuaded to drive his ex-wife's boyfriend home from an ashram after he injures himself. In Leopard, the threat of a missing pet leopard lurking in the woods hints at a troubled 11-year-old's rage toward his stepfather. The narrator of Down Through the Valley has a savage freak-out that terrifies him. The strange and magnificent title story, in which Vikings set off again toward an oft-raided island, beautifully ties the collection together in its heartbreaking final paragraph. Tower's uncommon mastery of tone and wide-ranging sympathy creates a fine tension between wry humor and the primal rage that seethes just below the surface of each of his characters. (Mar.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine Critics described this collection as visceral, contemplative, and inappropriately side-splitting, and were captivated by tales of men and their roles as fathers, stepfathers, brothers, sons, husbands, and ex-husbands (only one story featured a female protagonist). Reviewers further marveled at Tower\u2019s ability to take readers from gut-clutching hilarity to gloomy introspection and back again in compact, descriptive language. Although critics disagreed about which stories were the best, only the Boston Globe cited \u201cweaker,\u201d \u201cchoppy,\u201d and \u201coverlong\u201d entries. Overall, Tower has created a stunning collection of stories that will linger in the hearts and minds of readers.Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC Review \u201cRemarkable . . . [Tower\u2019s] syntax, though always easy to follow, is supple enough to wrap itself around several shades of meaning in the same sentence. His understanding of previously under-recognized feelings . . . is rich in detail and passionate in utterance. And his familiarity with the whole ghastly world of malls and \u2018cute\u2019 commercial culture is serious, even plangent, certainly not merely satirical. Every one of the stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is polished and distinctive. Though he\u2019s intrigued by the painful experiences of men much older than he is, Tower can write with equal power about young women and boys; about hell-\u00adraising, skull-bashing ancient Vikings and an observant housebound old man of the 21st century, even about a cheerful, insouciant pedophile. His range is wide and his language impeccable, never strained or fussy. His grasp of human psychology is fresh and un-Freudianizing . . . Tower\u2019s dialogue is as crisp and contemporary and offbeat as Lorrie Moore\u2019s and his vision of Ameri\u00adca as despairing as Joy Williams\u2019s (to cite just two of our greatest short story writers).\u201d \u2014Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review \u201cIn Wells Tower\u2019s sad-funny-disturbing stories, the world is a precarious place, where the innocent have bad dreams, and even the not-so-innocent worry about \u2018the things the world will do to them\u2019 and their loved ones . . . This arresting debut collection of stories decisively establishes Mr. Tower\u2014a magazine journalist who has also won two Pushcart Prizes\u2014as a writer of uncommon talent, a writer with Sam Shepard\u2019s radar for the violent, surreal convolutions of American society; Frederick Barthelme\u2019s keen ear for contemporary slang; and David Foster Wallace\u2019s eye for the often hilarious absurdities of contemporary life . . . As \u2018Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned\u2019 demonstrates, Mr. Tower has an instinctive gift for creating characters with finely calibrated interior lives and an almost Dickensian physical immediacy. His writing can be darkly hilarious and grotesque and yet simultaneously attuned to his people\u2019s sense of loss and bewilderment and frustration . . . We eagerly devour these tales not for their story lines but for Mr. Tower\u2019s masterly conjuring of his people\u2019s daily existence, his understanding of their emotional dilemmas, his controlled but dazzling language and his effortless ability to turn snapshots of misfits and malcontents into a panoramic cavalcade of American life.\u201d \u2014Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times \u201c[An] incredible talent . . . It sometimes feels as if there\u2019s nothing Tower can\u2019t render in arresting fashion . . . Tower\u2019s prose is a welcome reminder that the first job of the fiction writer is to introduce the reader to worlds both new and familiar in ways they wouldn\u2019t have arrived at on their own . . . Tower writes with spellbinding virtuosity . . . One suspects we\u2019ll be hearing his name\u2014which invokes prose that is both soaring and deep\u2014for a long time to come.\u201d \u2014Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times Book Review \u201cConsistently artful and funny and empathetic . . . Tower, who grew up in North Carolina, has been seeding these stories patiently across magazines and literary journals over the last ten years or so, quietly building a reputation as a painstaking stylist devoted to the near-impossible art of highly polished colloquialism. Reading his work piecemeal as it emerged, what stood out most was the lovely warmth of his voice. His sentences are strenuously musical, full of careful detail and surprising metaphors . . . He has a special talent for channeling the idiosyncrasies of lower-middle-class speech, and his plots often weave around bright little bursts of incidental dialogue . . . It also feels like something slightly new in the canon of maleness\u2014a little glade or clearing, where the air is slightly different.\u201d \u2014Sam Anderson, New York \u201cWe need books like Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned . . . What [Tower\u2019s] portraits lack in grandeur, they compensate for in their accuracy . . . [The characters] live the way we Americans do.\u201d \u2014Benjamin Alsup, Esquire \u201c Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned . . . is a triumph of a debut\u2014not just believably generous, but revelatory in its rendering of all the different kinds of hurt that a human being can sustain in the course of a life.\u201d \u2014Leon Neyfakh, The New York Observer \u201cIn his debut collection, Tower writes about raggedy men, neglected boys, and quarrelsome Vikings who are down on their luck (if they ever had any). But the stories are very funny, and surprising, and possess a rugged beauty.\u201d \u2014Vendela Vida, Vanity Fair \u201cWells Tower is a ferociously talented writer, author of one of the most powerful and entertaining books you\u2019re likely to come across this year . . . Tower\u2019s families and hapless men are bent and broken in a multitude of surprising and delightful ways.\u201d \u2014Justin Taylor, Paste \u201cBittersweet, beautiful, and ardently conflicted . . . As evidenced by the emotional punch packed into such brief tales\u2014nine stories in about 250 pages\u2014Tower is almost incapable of overloading a sentence with an unnecessary word. His style is perfectly suited to short fiction: \u2018Down Through the Valley,\u2019 in less than twenty pages, is jammed with more pathos than a four-hundred-page potboiler.\u201d \u2014Kevin Canfield, Bookforum \u201cThe stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are the most arresting I\u2019ve read in some time. Tower is adept at capturing the many ways men can be unhappy, lonely, stymied or adrift, and his language has the virtuoso inventiveness of Barry Hannah, that magic-trick quality that can make a description of an overcast sky feel new and strange . . . His characters come across like aliens, possessing the kind of maverick weirdness that marks them as real people rather than types . . . He\u2019s also got a knack for pacing and a hell of a sense of humor. I so enjoyed \u2018The Brown Coast,\u2019 the collection\u2019s first story, I read it twice before proceeding through the rest of the book.\u201d \u2014Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast \u201cI had fun reading these stories. I laughed out loud eight times during the first one . . . and had a silly smile on my face throughout most of them.\u201d \u2014Charles E. May, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel \u201c[An] outstanding debut collection . . . The strange and magnificent title story, in which Vikings set off again toward an oft-raided island, beautifully ties the collection together in its heartbreaking final paragraph. Tower\u2019s uncommon mastery of tone and wide-ranging sympathy creates a fine tension between wry humor and the primal rage that seethes just below the surface of each of his characters.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review and Pick of the Week)\u201cThe title barely hints at the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners power of the stories.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\u201cTower\u2019s debut story collection confirms what readers of Harper\u2019s , McSweeney\u2019s , The Paris Review , and other major publications have known for some time: Tower is a serious talent . . . Tower\u2019s voice is honest and strange, humorous and insightful.\u201d\u2014Kevin Clouther, Booklist \u201cOutstanding . . . Tower has crafted a powerful and assured debut collection.\u201d \u2014Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal \u201cSharply funny, obliquely devastating.\u201d \u2014Grady McFerrin, Best Life \u201cWells Tower\u2019s stories are written, thrillingly, in authentic American vernacular\u2014violent, funny, bleak, and beautiful. You need to read them, now.\u201d \u2014Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen\u2019s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay \u201cThese are lurid, ingenious, beautiful, delicate, and very funny stories. Full of pity and terror, they are also great fun to read. Wells Tower has written a brilliant book.\u201d \u2014Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision \u201cWells Tower is a blindingly brilliant writer who does more than raise the bar for debut fiction: he hurls it into space. With the oversized heart of George Saunders, the demon tongue of Barry Hannah, and his very own conjuring tools that cannot here be named, Tower writes stories of aching beauty that are as crushingly funny and sad as any on the planet.\u201d \u2014Ben Marcus, author of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String About the Author Wells Tower\u2019s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker , Harper\u2019s Magazine , McSweeney\u2019s , The Paris Review , The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories , The Washington Post Magazine , and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review . He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Everything Ravaged, Everything BurnedJust as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. We all knew who it was. A turncoat Norwegian monk named Naddod had been big medicine on the dragon-and-blight circuit for the last decade or so, and was known to bring heavy ordnance for whoever could lay out some silver. Scuttlebutt had it that Naddod was operating out of a monastery on Lindisfarne, whose people we\u2019d troubled on a pillage-and-consternation tour through Northumbria after Corn Harvesting Month last fall. Now bitter winds were screaming in from the west, searing the land and ripping the grass from the soil. Salmon were turning up spattered with sores, and grasshoppers clung to the wheat in rapacious buzzing bunches. I tried to put these things out of my mind. We\u2019d been away three long months harrying the Hibernian shores, and now I was back with Pila, my common-law, and thinking that home was very close to paradise in these endless summer days. We\u2019d built our house together, Pila and me. It was a fine little wattleand- daub cabin on a pretty bit of plain where a wide blue fjord stabbed into the land. On summer evenings my young wife and I would sit out front, high on potato wine, and watch the sun stitch its orange skirt across the horizon. At times such as these, you get a good, humble feeling, like the gods made this place, this moment, first and concocted you as an afterthought just to be there to enjoy it. I was doing a lot of enjoying and relishing and laying around the rack with Pila, though I knew what it meant when I heard those flint-edged winds howling past the house. Some individuals three weeks\u2019 boat ride off were messing up our summer and would probably need their asses whipped over it. Of course, DjarfFairhair had his stinger out even before his wife spotted those dragons winging it inland from the coast. He was boss on our ship and a fool for warfare. His appetite for action was so terrifying and infectious, he\u2019d once riled up a gang of Frankish slaves and led them south to afflict and maim their own countrymen. He\u2019d gotten in four days of decent sacking when the slaves began to see the situation for what it was and underwent a sudden change of attitude. Djarf had been fighting his way up the Rhine Valley, making steady progress through a half-assed citizens\u2019 militia of children and farmers, when the slaves closed in behind him. People who were there say he turned absolutely feral and began berserking with a pair of broadaxes, chewing through the lines like corn kernels on a cob, and that when the axes broke, he took up someone\u2019s severed leg and used it as a club, so horrifying those gentle provincials that they fell back and gave him wide berth to the ship. Djarf was from Hedeby-Slesvig up the Sli fjord, a foul and rocky locality whose people take a worrisome pleasure in the gruesome sides of life. They have a habit down there if they don\u2019t like a child\u2019s looks when he slides from the womb, they pitch him into the deep and wait for the next one. Djarf himself was supposedly a colicky baby, and it was only the beneficence of the tides and his own vicious tenacity that got him to the far beach when his father tried to wash him from the world. He\u2019d been campaigning for payback ever since. I guess I was with him on a search-and-destroy tour against Louis the Pious, and with my own eyes watched him climb up over the soldiers\u2019 backs and stride across their shoulders, scything skulls as he went. On that same trip, we ran low on food, and it was Djarf who decided to throw our own dead on the fire and have at last night\u2019s mutton when their stomachs burst. He\u2019d been the only one of us to dig in, apart from a deranged Arab along as a spellbuster. He reached right in there, scooping out chewed-up victuals with a shank of pine bark. \u201cGreenhorns,\u201d he called us, the firelight twitching on his face. \u201cFood\u2019s food. If these boys hadn\u2019t gotten their threads snipped, they\u2019d tell you the same thing.\u201d So Djarf, whose wife was a sour, carp-mouthed thing and little argument for staying home, was agitating to hop back in the ship and go straighten things out in Northumbria. My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day and admitted that he, too, was giving it some thought. Like me, he wasn\u2019t big on warrioring. He was just crazy for boat. He\u2019d have rowed from his shack to his shithouse if somebody would invent a ship whose prow could cut sod. His wife had passed years ago, dead from bad milk, and now that she was gone, the part of Gnut that felt peaceful in a place that didn\u2019t move beneath him had sickened and died as well. Pila saw him coming down the hill and scowled. \u201cDon\u2019t need to guess what he\u2019ll be wanting,\u201d she said, and headed back indoors. Gnut ambled down over the hummocky earth and stopped at the pair of stump chairs Pila and I had put up on the hill where the view was so fine. From there, the fjord shone like poured silver, and sometimes you could spot a seal poking his head up through the waves. Gnut\u2019s wool coat was stiff with filth and his long hair so heavy and unclean that even the raw wind was having a hard time getting it to move. He had a good crust of snot going in his mustache, not a pleasant thing to look at, but then, he had no one around to find it disagreeable. He tore a sprig of heather from the ground and chewed at its sweet roots. \u201cDjarf get at you yet?\u201d he asked. \u201cNo, not yet, but I\u2019m not worried he\u2019ll forget.\u201d He took the sprig from his teeth and briefly jammed it into his ear before tossing it away. \u201cYou gonna go?\u201d \u201cNot until I hear the particulars, I won\u2019t.\u201d \u201cYou can bet I\u2019m going. Ahydra flew in last night and ran off Rolf Hierdal\u2019s sheep. We can\u2019t be putting up with this shit. It comes down to pride, is what it comes down to.\u201d \u201cHell, Gnut, when\u2019d you get to be such a gung-ho motherfucker? I don\u2019t recall you being so proud and thin-skinned before Astrud went off to her good place. Anyhow, Lindisfarne is probably sacked-out already. If you don\u2019t recall, we pillaged the tar out of those people on the last swing through, and I doubt they\u2019ve come up with much in the meantime to justify a trip.\u201d I wished Gnut would go ahead and own up to the fact that his life out here was making him lonely and miserable instead of laying on with this warrior-man routine. I could tell just to look at him that most days he was thinking of walking into the water and not bothering to turn back. It wasn\u2019t combat he was after. He wanted back on the boat among company. Not that I was all that averse to a job myself, speaking in the abstract, but I was needing more sweet time with Pila. I cared more for that girl than even she probably knew, and I was hoping to get in some thorough lovemaking before the Haycutting Month was under way and see if I couldn\u2019t make us a little monkey. But the days wore on and the weather worsened. Pila watched it closely, and the sadness welled up in her, as it often did when I\u2019d be leaving. She cussed me on some days, and others she\u2019d hold me to her and weep. And late one evening, far toward dawn, the hail started. It came suddenly, with the rasping sound a ship makes when its keel scrapes stone. We hunkered down in the sheepskins, and I whispered soothing things to Pila, trying to drown out the clatter. The sun was not yet full up in the sky when Djarf came and knocked. I rose and stepped across the floor, which was damp with cold dew. Djarf stood in the doorway wearing a mail jacket and shield and breathing like he\u2019d jogged the whole way over. He chucked a handful of hail at my feet. \u201cToday\u2019s the day,\u201d he said with a wild grin. \u201cWe got to get it on.\u201d Sure, I could have told him thanks anyway, but once you back down from one job, you\u2019re lucky if they\u2019ll even let you put in for a flat-fee trade escort. I had to think long-term, me and Pila, and any little jits we might produce. Still, she didn\u2019t like to hear it. When I got back in bed, she tucked the covers over her face, hoping I\u2019d think she was angry instead of crying. The clouds were spilling out low across the sky when we shoved off. Thirty of us on board, Gnut rowing with me at the bow and behind us a lot of other men I\u2019d been in some shit with before. Some of their families came down to watch us go. \u00d8rlStender fucked up the cadence waving to his son, who stood on the beach waving back. He was a tiny one, not four or five, standing there with no pants on, holding a baby pig on a hide leash. Some of the others on board weren\u2019t a whole lot older, rash and violent children, so innocent about the world they would just as soon stick a knife in you as shake your hand. Gnut was overjoyed. He laughed and sang and put a lot of muscle into the oar, me just holding my hands on it to keep up appearances. I was missing Pila already. I watched the beach for her and her bright red hair. She hadn\u2019t come down to see me off, too mad and sad about me leaving to get up out of bed. But I looked for her anyway, the land scooting away with every jerk of the oars. If Gnut knew I was hurting, he didn\u2019t say so. He nudged me and joked, and kept up a steady flow of dull, merry chatter, as though this whole thing was a private vacation the two of us had cooked up together. Djarf stood at hi... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Short Stories & Anthologies"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "1596352965", "title": "Medals in the Attic", "author": "Cathy Elliott", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 3.96}, {"asin": "B01M98T80O", "title": "My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues", "author": "Pamela Paul", "description": "Review \u201c[Pamela Paul] is reflective, open and at times achingly funny. My Life with Bob is the book that she was put on this Earth to write.\u201d \u2015 The Economist \"Pamela Paul recalls the stories that have given shape to her own narrative in her appealingly roving memoir.... which includes...undersung marvels that boldly take measure of the world\u2015and challenge us to write our own story.\" \u2015 Vogue \u201cAn engaging and\u2026funny memoir\u2026. a delightfully gushing love letter to books \u2015 books as a medium that can connect us, transport us and transform us.\u201d\u2015 Washington Post \"Bob becomes a memory keeper, not so much of the books...as of the personal associations they hold for her, such as the place where she read them or the people she was with at the time. Paul approaches books with tenderness, desire, insecurity, and, always, ambition.\"\u2015 The New Yorker \u201cA rollicking, intimate expedition through a brilliant booklover\u2019s heart, mind, and life\u2026. \u2018My Life With Bob\u2019 is a fun, accessible, well-written bookalogue; the kind of memoir Pamela Paul would have raved about in the venerable New York Times Book Review if she hadn\u2019t written it.\u201d\u2015 The Christian Science Monitor \u201cA heartwarming reminiscence of the books that reflected and shaped her state of mind at every stage of life. By the end, you\u2019ll be hard pressed to not start keeping a \u2018Bob\u2019\u2026of your own.\u201d\u2015 Harper\u2019s Bazaar \u201cA bibliophile\u2019s treasure trove of insights.\u201d\u2015 O, The Oprah Magazine \u201cReading Paul, I began to see how much the books you gravitate towards reveal about your truest loves, your most instinctive urges, as well as more thoughtful, curated appetites\u2026. She displays true bravery by listing all of the books she\u2019s finished reading\u2026 [it\u2019s] a baring of one\u2019s soul that merits respect.\u201d\u2015 Financial Times \"The ultimate book about reading books.... an intimate look into [Paul's] interior life and the ways in which the stories she has read have changed her own story. Clever and heartfelt, My Life With Bob will appeal to anyone with a deep love for reading.\"\u2015 Buzzfeed \"Downright delightful.... a thoroughly agreeable voice to spend time with: energetic, resolute, self-ironic and always passionate about books.... A plot really does ensue \u2015 and it\u2019s not strained for \u2015 in the form of Paul\u2019s life. And what a life that has been.\"\u2015 San Francisco Chronicle \"A smart, beautifully written memoir about the relationship we have with books and how the books we read frame our lives. This charmer is a must for every beach bag this Summer.\"\u2015 PopSugar \"Compelling, authentic, and every dream of every woman who puts reading before eating, the stories offer a perspective on life.... Perfection in a book, My Life with Bob is a love story for readers and woman who love books too much!\"\u2015 The Review Broads \"Pamela Paul's My Life with Bob is absolutely essential for those of us to whombooks are more or less everything. This is a book I was born to read!\" \u2015Robert Gottlieb \u201cMy Life with Bob is a sweet and heady book that casts a serious charm. Our lively and fetching heroine\u2019s journey becomes more thrilling by the page as Pamela Paul perfectly captures the joys of a lifetime devoted to books, as well as the attendant pressure, doubt, and insecurity. Reading this memoir is pure pleasure \u2015 funny, brainy, far-reaching\u2015 but more than anything, it feels like a call to arms to recommit to our best self: the book person.\u201d\u2015 Maria Semple \u201cIn this hilarious, wise, and elegiac account of a life led half in the world and half in books, Pamela Paul writes with courage and exuberance about the bumpy road to maturity. Her voice\u2015tender, moral, madcap, nostalgic, generous\u2015will captivate all but the most stony reader. My Life with Bob is full of hope, full of love, a joyful and poignant reflection on the well-written sentence and the well-lived life.\u201d\u2015 Andrew Solomon \"Any book that helps me remember reading the Betsy-Tacy-Tib series as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , is a book I like. Pamela Paul's My Life With Bob is an absorbing, delightful amalgam \u2015 it's a recommended reading list, a personal reflection, and a paean to reading. I\u2019m sorry I never wrote down all the books I read (or even practically any), but I\u2019m so glad Pamela Paul did.\"\u2015 Meg Wolitzer \u201cPaul is inspired to question why we read, how we read, what we read, and how reading helps us create our own narratives. Readers will be drawn to this witty and authentic tribute to the extraordinary power of books.\u201d\u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"A witty, heartfelt, deeply optimistic narrative...Titles about reading and books abound, but this memoir stands in a class by itself. Bibliophiles will treasure, but the addictive storytelling and high-quality writing will vastly increase its audience.\"\u2015 Library Journal (starred review) \"Intelligent, unique, and wise, Paul's book not only remembers a life lived among and influenced by books. It also reveals how the most interesting stories existless as words printed on pages and more as 'stories that lie between book and reader.' A thoughtfully engaging memoir of a life in books.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cWhat makes Paul\u2019s narrative absorbing and resonant is her determination: we observe her journeying towards the life she always wanted to have, by reading her way through it.\u201d \u2015 The Times Literary Supplement --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees books coverage at The New York Times. She is also the host of the weekly podcast, Inside The New York Times Book Review. Prior to joining the Times , she was a contributor to Time magazine and The Economist; her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post , Slate , and Vogue .She is the author of My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues ; By the Book ; Parenting, Inc. ; Pornified ; and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "0142196703", "title": "An Elm Creek Quilts Companion: New Fiction, Traditions, Quilts, and Favorite Moments from the Beloved Series", "author": "Jennifer Chiaverini", "description": "Review Praise for Jennifer Chiaverini and the Elm Creek Quilts series \u201cChiaverini\u2019s themes of love, loss, and healing will resonate with many, and her characters\u2019 stories are inspiring.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cChiaverini has an impressive ability to bring a time and place alive.\u201d \u2014Romantic Times Book Reviews \u201cEmotionally compelling.\u201d \u2014Chicago Tribune on Sonoma Rose \u201cJennifer Chiaverini has made quite a name for herself with her bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series. From the Civil War to the Roaring Twenties to contemporary settings, these novels have offered suspense, romance, and, at times, in-depth looks into the social, political, and cultural differences that helped shape a nation.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201cChiaverini excels at weaving stories and at character development. We can relate to the residents of Elm Creek Valley because they remind us of folks we know\u2014a cousin, an aunt, or a grandmother.\u201d \u2014 Standard-Examiner (Utah) About the Author Jennifer Chiaverini is the New York Times bestselling author of Enchantress of Numbers , Mrs. Lincoln's\u00a0Dressmaker , Fates and Traitors , and other acclaimed works of historical fiction, as\u00a0well as the beloved Elm Creek Quilts series. She lives with her husband and two sons\u00a0in Madison, Wisconsin.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1497309840", "title": "The Tower, the Monster, and the Tree", "author": "TM Gregg", "description": "From the Author 0 From the Inside Flap Empty From the Back Cover 0 About the Author 0 Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.5, "price": 21.55}, {"asin": "1101904658", "title": "In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox", "author": "Carol Burnett", "description": "Review \u201cIn this light, behind-the-scenes memoir, [Burnett] pays tribute to the many talented individuals responsible for the show's enduring success, [sharing] some of the hilarious impromptu moments on the set and sheds light on the many memorable sketches, including the movie parodies that have become classic TV.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"The great comedian [Carol Burnett] filled America\u2019s living rooms with pratfalls and Tarzan yells....\u00a0Carol Burnett\u2019s new memoir, In Such Good Company ,\u00a0captures this zaniness with relish.\u00a0Written in Burnett\u2019s laughing voice, the book chronicles how she prepared her weekly dose of mayhem....\u00a0Resonating with Burnett\u2019s lively enthusiasm, In Such Good Company captures the excitement of being there once again, and it\u2019s a joyous addition to her earlier memoirs.\"\u00a0\u2014 The\u00a0Washington Post About the Author CAROL BURNETT has been an actor on Broadway, on television, and in the movies.\u00a0 She has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, The Mark Twain Prize for Humor and the Kennedy Center Honors, among other singular achievements of a woman comedian who was nothing less than a pioneer and a role model for stars like Tina Fey, Amy Pohler and Amy Schumer. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTIONI recently had the extreme pleasure of receiving the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and in accepting the honor I talked about how much I loved going to the movies with my grandmother, Nanny, as a kid. My favorites were the comedies and the musicals. I think that\u2019s when I fell in love with the idea of, someday, being a musical comedy performer. Since there wasn\u2019t television \u201cback in the covered wagon days,\u201d when I was growing up, I never imagined that my dream would be realized by having my own weekly musical comedy variety show on the small screen. But that\u2019s exactly what happened.I\u2019ve been thinking about that time a lot, and since my memory is pretty good, I decided to put my thoughts down on paper for anybody who might be interested in what we did and how we did it.In doing the research for this book, I watched all 276 shows, even though at times I felt like Norma Desmond watching herself on the screen in Sunset Boulevard!When I was watching the first few episodes, the first thing I noticed was how I looked. I laughed out loud at my various hairdos, with different shades of red, remembering that I (amateurishly) dyed my hair myself every week using Miss Clairol, because I hated to waste my time sitting in a beauty parlor.What really stand out are the changes that evolved. Of course the hairstyles, makeup, and costumes were constantly changing. Remember, this was the late sixties into the seventies . . . \u200bbell-bottoms, miniskirts, etc. The makeup was exaggerated\u2014heavy eyeliner and large Minnie Mouse false eyelashes . . . \u200bupper and lower! Even Bob Mackie, our brilliant costume designer, who surprised us every week with his creations, both beautiful and comedic, would admit that he missed the mark on some occasions. But they were rare.One of the things I noticed was how I evolved over those eleven years. I went from the \u201czany, kooky, man-hungry, big-mouthed goofball,\u201d which was who I had fashioned myself into during my early years, including my time as a regular on the Garry Moore television show, into a somewhat more \u201cmature kook.\u201dI always loved doing the physical comedy\u2014falling down, jumping out of windows, getting pies in the face\u2014however, around thirty-seven, thirty-eight years old, three or four years into the show, I found myself enjoying tackling more sophisticated and complex satires and some of the sketches that had a tinge of pathos. \u201cThe Family\u201d scenes with Eunice, Mama, and Ed always touched me deeply, because as crazy as they could get, there was always an element of reality\u2014these were people suffering disappointment and regret, raging against fate, doing the best they could.Naturally, there were a lot of sketches and musical numbers I had completely forgotten. Some of them made me laugh, and some, I admit, made me cringe! But overall, I was transported back to the most wonderful and pleasurable phase of my career.What follows are many outstanding memories of what occurred during a \u201cregular show week.\u201d I\u2019ll share anecdotes about our cast members, many of our guests, recurring characters, favorite movie parodies, some of the funny and off-the-cuff questions from our audience and my responses\u2014basically how we all played together in the sandbox\u2014hilariously\u2014from 1967 to 1978.Some of these stories may be familiar to those of you who know me best, but they needed to be retold in order to give you the whole picture of those eleven wonderful years!But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over at the very beginning . . . \u200bIN THE SANDBOXWhen I was growing up, theater and music were my first loves, so my original show business goals revolved around being in musical comedies on Broadway, like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin. My stage break came in the spring of 1959, when I was cast as \u201cWinnifred the Woebegone\u201d in the musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress, a takeoff on Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s fairy tale \u201cThe Princess and the Pea.\u201d It was an Off-Broadway production at the Phoenix Theatre, directed by none other than the iconic George Abbott, \u201cMr. Broadway\u201d himself!The show was originally scheduled for a limited run of six weeks, but it was so popular that it was moved to Broadway and ran for over a year. I got my wish; I was on Broadway! Because no one had expected the production to be so successful, there were numerous booking issues that caused our little show to be bounced from theater to theater\u2014from the Phoenix to the Alvin to the Winter Garden to the Cort and, finally, to the St. James. There were a couple of jokes going around the business about the production during this period. I remember Neil Simon quipped, \u201cIt\u2019s the most moving musical on Broadway! If you haven\u2019t seen Once Upon a Mattress yet, don\u2019t worry, it\u2019ll soon be at your neighborhood theater.\u201dMy second big break came in the fall of 1959 when I was asked to be a regular performer on The Garry Moore Show, a terrifically popular TV comedy-variety series. For almost a year, until the summer of 1960, I doubled up and did both shows. I would perform in Mattress on Tuesdays through Fridays at 8:30 p.m. and then do two shows a day on Saturdays and Sundays.I would rehearse for Garry\u2019s show eight to nine hours a day Monday through Friday, and then we would tape his show on Friday, in the early evening, which gave me just enough time to hop the subway and head downtown to arrive at Mattress in time for the 8:30 curtain!I had no days off. Hey, I was young, I told myself\u2014but evidently not that young, because one Sunday, during a matinee, I fell asleep . . . \u200bin front of the audience!Normally, the scene involved Princess Winnifred trying her best to get a good night\u2019s sleep on top of twenty mattresses, but she couldn\u2019t. The mattresses were highly uncomfortable and lumpy, resulting in a very active pantomime in which I jumped up and down, pounding on the offending lumps, and finally wound up sitting on the edge of the bed wide awake, desperately counting sheep as the scene ended. Not this Sunday. As I lay there on top of twenty mattresses, I simply drifted off to dreamland. Our stage manager, who was in the wings, called, \u201cCarol?\u201d And then louder, \u201cCarol!\u201d I woke up with a start and nearly fell off the very tall bed. The audience howled, but the producers changed the schedule after that and moved the Sunday performance to Monday, so I could have Sundays off.By that time The Garry Moore Show had switched to tape, like everyone else, but we still performed in front of a live audience as if it were a live show\u2014no retakes, no stops. We wanted the excitement and spontaneity that went with the feeling of live theater\u2014which was exactly what made the show so good, every Tuesday night on CBS.The musical numbers and the writing were certainly worthy of being on the Great White Way; in fact, our junior writer was Neil Simon, whom we called \u201cDoc.\u201d He had worked for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. It\u2019s a little-known fact that Neil wrote Come Blow Your Horn, his first play, while he was working for Garry, who was one of his first investors!Garry\u2019s show was a great learning experience for me. I remember sitting around the table reading the script the week that the famous vaudeville performer Ed Wynn was the guest. Then in his seventies, he had begun his career in vaudeville in 1903 and had starred in the Ziegfeld Follies beginning in 1914. He told great stories about those days. He got on the subject of \u201ccomics vs. comedic actors.\u201dGarry asked him what the difference was.\u201cWell,\u201d Ed said, \u201ca comic says \u2018funny things,\u2019 like Bob Hope, and a comedic actor says things funny, like Jack Benny.\u201dThat\u2019s what I wanted to be . . . \u200bsomeone who \u201csays things funny.\u201dI left Mattress in June of 1960, while I was still a regular on Garry\u2019s show, but I really never dreamed television was going to be my \u201cthing,\u201d even though I found myself falling in love more and more with the small screen. Garry\u2019s show allowed me to be different characters every week, as opposed to doing one role over and over again in the theater. In essence we mounted a distinct musical comedy revue every week\u2014week in and week out\u2014in front of a live studio audience, just like in summer stock.However, I still harbored my dream of starring again on BROADWAY and being the next Ethel Merman.CBS asked me to sign a contract with them after I had been on Garry\u2019s show for a few seasons. The deal I was offered was for ten years, from 1962 to 1972, paying me a decent amount to do a one-hour TV special each year, as well as two guest appearances on any of their regular series. However, if I wanted to do an hour-long variety show of my own during the first five years of the contract, they would guarantee me thirty one-hour shows!In other words, it would be my option! CBS would have to say yes, whether they wanted to or not!They called this \u201cpay or play\u201d because they would have to pay me for thirty shows, even if they didn\u2019t put them on the air. \u201cJust push the button!\u201d was the phrase the programming executives used. This was an unheard-of deal, but I didn\u2019t pay much attention to it, because I had no plans to host my own show\u2014never dreamed I\u2019d ever want to. I was going to focus all of my energy on Broadway.A MAN\u2019S GAMEBy 1966 I had married Joe Hamilton, who had produced Garry\u2019s show, and we had our adorable daughter, Carrie, and another baby on the way. My Broadway career had not panned out, which was why we were in Hollywood to begin with, and I was as in demand as a carton of sour milk. We were sitting on orange crates and packing boxes in the living room of a Beverly Hills home we had somehow managed to scrape together the down payment to buy.We had to do something to earn some money. It was the week between Christmas and New Year\u2019s; 1967 was a few days away and our five-year deadline on the pay-or-play clause was about to expire. Joe and I looked at each other, looked around the furniture-less living room, and picked up the phone.Mike Dann, one of the top executives at CBS in New York City, took the call and sounded happy to hear from me. He asked about our holidays and I said they had been lovely, but I was calling to \u201cpush the button\u201d on the thirty one-hour comedy-variety shows they had promised me in my contract five years ago.Mike honestly didn\u2019t remember any of this. He was completely in the dark. Joe took the phone and reminded him in great detail. My guess is that more than a few lawyers were called away from their holiday parties that night to review my contract.When Mike called the next day, he said, \u201cWell, yes, I can see why you called, but I don\u2019t think the hour is the best way to go. Comedy-variety shows are traditionally hosted by men: Gleason, Caesar, Benny, Berle, and now Dean . . . \u200bit\u2019s really not for a gal. Dinah Shore\u2019s show was mostly music.\u201d\u201cBut comedy-variety is what I do best! It\u2019s what I learned doing Garry\u2019s show\u2014comedy sketches. We can have a rep company like Garry\u2019s, and like Caesar\u2019s Hour. We can have guest stars! Music!\u201d\u201cHoney, we\u2019ve got a great half-hour sitcom script that would fit you like a glove. It\u2019s called Here\u2019s Agnes! It\u2019s a sure thing!\u201dHere\u2019s Agnes? No thanks . . . \u200bwe pushed the button.PLAY!CBS scheduled our show\u2019s premiere for Monday, September 11, 1967, opposite I Spy and The Big Valley, both of which were among the top-watched shows on TV. It was pretty obvious the network didn\u2019t think we\u2019d last the whole season; otherwise they would have given us a more forgiving slot where we\u2019d have had more of a chance to get some traction. In truth, we weren\u2019t sure we\u2019d last, either. We sighed and decided we\u2019d at least get our thirty shows. We could start unpacking, because, for a year, the bills would get paid.It was all a gamble, but despite everything, many of the original staff members from Garry\u2019s show, like head writer Arnie Rosen, director Clark Jones, choreographer Ernie Flatt, lead dancer Don Crichton, and many more, took the plunge and followed us to California.Lyle Waggoner came on board to be my handsome foil\u2014I winced in embarrassment while rewatching the shows when I saw myself going gaga and swooning over him, which was a running gag for the first few seasons. Eventually, much to my relief, we deep-sixed the \u201cswooning over Lyle\u201d bit and he morphed from just being the show\u2019s good-looking announcer to getting laughs as different nuanced characters. He turned into a very good sketch performer.Vicki Lawrence had no professional experience when we brought her on. It was fascinating to watch her grow out of her awkward, young teenage stage and into a very clever and confident comedienne and singer/dancer.Harvey Korman was a consummate comedic actor from the get-go, but I also saw him evolve over the years in ways that were astonishing. He never fancied himself a singer or a dancer. If our choreographer, Ernie Flatt, tried to give him a dance step to execute, he would freeze in his tracks, but if you gave Harvey the role of a dancer, he would improvise dance steps that made him look like Gene Kelly . . . \u200bwell, I won\u2019t go that far, but you\u2019d swear the guy was born to move. It worked the same way with singing; he could sing up a storm if he was playing the part of someone who could sing!We did a lot of movie takeoffs on the show, and I swear he seemed to channel those famous actors\u2014Ronald Colman in our version of Random Harvest, Zachary Scott in Mildred Pierce, and who could ever forget his Clark Gable in our Gone With the Wind parody?Tim Conway was a frequent guest in the early years and joined us every week in the ninth season! Much more about him\u2014and the rest of our gang\u2014later . . . \u200bWe all played together in our crazy, creative sandbox and delivered a fresh, Broadway-like musical comedy review each week, and boy did we have fun . . . \u200bfor eleven years! Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 21.47}, {"asin": "1250001781", "title": "The Lies We Tell", "author": "Theresa Schwegel", "description": "About the Author Theresa Schwegel is a Loyola University graduate and the recipient of an MFA in screenwriting at Chapman University. Her debut novel, Officer Down , won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was short-listed for the Anthony Award. In 2008, she received the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation. She lives in Chicago.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "1525510096", "title": "The Berlin Enigma: Memories - From Boy to Spy", "author": "D F Harrington", "description": "About the Author As a commercial pilot for twenty-three years in Northwestern Ontario, Darlene Harrington's experiences ranged from being the captain of a King Air to writing newsletters for the local flying club and column for the Kenora Daily Miner & News. It was an exciting career with a different adventure every day, at times flying an injured child from a remote location in Canada's far north to Toronto's SickKids Hospital. Now retired from aviation, Darlene is sharing the many stories she has collected, starting with her debut novel. The Berlin Enigma is a memoir based on her father's extraordinary life and heartfelt memories from both world wars, first as a soldier and then as a British spy. Darlene and her spouse, Rob, divide their time between Drayton Valley, Alberta and Kenora, Ontario, Canada. Darlene also enjoys painting, playing piano, gardening, and spending time with friends and family.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 25.99}, {"asin": "0804105995", "title": "Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner", "author": "Michael M. Baden", "description": "Amazon.com Review Forensic pathologist Michael Baden was a medical examiner in New York City for more than 25 years. Now he works for the New York State Police and teaches forensic medicine. This engrossing book covers: (1) several famous cases, including Baden's personal re-examination of the autopsy findings for Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy; (2) unusual cases Baden had as medical examiner for NYC, such as an autopsy on a dining room table at the Plaza Hotel; (3) how medical examiners decide on means of death, with a section on poisons; (4) the history of coroners and medical examiners since 12th century England; (5) disturbing politics involved in the office of the Chief Medical Examiner of NYC; (6) identification of the dead; (7) time of death; (8) multiple-murder cases; (9) an almost perfect murder; (10) close calls, including near deaths during sex; (11) cases of mistaken diagnosis; and (12) autopsy findings that shed light on what happened in the Attica uprising. From Publishers Weekly The function of medical examiners is to perform pk autopsies and determine causes of death; examiners must be expert in forensic pathology. Baden here \"delivers a sobering indictment of a system in which, he claims, fewer than a thousand physicians nationwide are qualified to conduct this work,\" maintained PW. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Inside Flap * JFK's autopsy failed to disclose crucial evidence.* The deaths of John Belushi and Elvis Presley were far more complex than anyone has let on.* Decisive medical findings in the von Bulow affair were consistently overlooked.These are but three of the shocking revelations in Dr. Michael Baden's first-person, no-holds-barred account of his distinguished career in forensic pathology. In determining the causes of tens of thousands of deaths, from those of presidents and rock stars to victims of serial killings, exotic sex rituals, mass disasters, child abuse and drug abuse, Baden has come to the unavoidable conclusion that the search for scientific truth is often sullied by the pressures of expediency. He produces dramatic evidence to demonstrate that political intrigue, influence peddling, and professional incompetence have created a national crisis in forensic medicine.\"A fascinating look into the mechanics of forensics and a disconcerting lesson in the politics of death.\" -- The New York Times Book Review From the Back Cover * JFK's autopsy failed to disclose crucial evidence.* The deaths of John Belushi and Elvis Presley were far more complex than anyone has let on.* Decisive medical findings in the von Bulow affair were consistently overlooked.These are but three of the shocking revelations in Dr. Michael Baden's first-person, no-holds-barred account of his distinguished career in forensic pathology. In determining the causes of tens of thousands of deaths, from those of presidents and rock stars to victims of serial killings, exotic sex rituals, mass disasters, child abuse and drug abuse, Baden has come to the unavoidable conclusion that the search for scientific truth is often sullied by the pressures of expediency. He produces dramatic evidence to demonstrate that political intrigue, influence peddling, and professional incompetence have created a national crisis in forensic medicine.\"A fascinating look into the mechanics of forensics and a disconcerting lesson in the politics of death.\" -- The New York Times Book Review Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1592988768", "title": "Pockets of Joy: Deciding to Be Happy, Choosing to Be Free", "author": "Roxane Battle", "description": "Review In this delightfully honest book, we cheer for Roxane as she makes difficult and wise choices--and willingly pays the price professionally--in an effort to forge work-life balance and maintain the God-honoring priorities of being a great parent. Her refreshing example in our success-crazed culture is an inspiration to women and men everywhere! --Deborah Smith Pegues, international speaker and best-selling author, 30 Days To Taming Your Tongue Pockets of Joy is candid, beautifully written, and easy to read. It is Roxane's story of finding those pockets of joy during an extremely difficult season in her life. Whether you're a single mom or not, you will find yourself quickly drawn in, and learning invaluable life lessons along the way. --Pastor Janet Conley, Cottonwood Church Pockets of Joy is for anyone who has experienced that deep--and often dark--realization that your life hasn't gone the way they planned. It's for anyone who never expected to end up where they are. It's for anyone who's thinking about giving up. If that's you, then this book is what you need right now. --Kathleen Cooke, cofounder, Cooke Pictures and Influence Lab From the Inside Flap \"In this delightfully honest book, we cheer for Roxane as she makes difficult and wise choices--and willingly pays the price professionally--in an effort to forge work-life balance and maintain the God-honoring priorities of being a great parent. Her refreshing example in our success-crazed culture is an inspiration to women and men everywhere!\" --Deborah Smith Pegues, international speaker and best-selling author, \"30 Days To Taming Your Tongue\" \"'Pockets of Joy' is candid, beautifully written, and easy to read. It is Roxane's story of finding those pockets of joy during an extremely difficult season in her life. Whether you're a single mom or not, you will find yourself quickly drawn in, and learning invaluable life lessons along the way.\" --Pastor Janet Conley, Cottonwood Church \"'Pockets of Joy' is for anyone who has experienced that deep\u0097and often dark\u0097realization that your life hasn't gone the way they planned. It's for anyone who never expected to end up where they are. It's for anyone who's thinking about giving up. If that's you, then this book is what you need right now.\" --Kathleen Cooke, cofounder, Cooke Pictures and Influence Lab About the Author Roxane Battle is an award-winning television personality and writer with a passion for telling stories. With more than twenty-five years of on-air experience, Roxane has appeared on major market network affiliates as a top-rated news anchor, reporter, and talk show host. Best known for her humor and masterful storytelling, Roxane speaks locally and internationally to both secular and faith-based audiences on the topic of work-life balance, sharing candidly from her own experience as a former single mother in the workforce. Roxane has won numerous awards for her writing and producing and has been the subject of national feature stories in Working Mother and Ebony magazines. Roxane currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she dodges snowplows, runs 5Ks for fun, and feeds homemade mac and cheese to her family and friends. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.82}, {"asin": "B01NCW4FDI", "title": "Death of a Dancer (Beldon Magna Mysteries Book 3)", "author": "Anthony Litton", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1616205229", "title": "When the English Fall: A Novel", "author": "David Williams", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of July 2017: When the English Fall is a fascinating, dystopian novel that uses journal entries to recount the unraveling of present day society from the point of view of an outsider community. The journal\u2019s author is an Amish man named Jacob, who firmly believes in his religion\u2019s dedication to peace, family, and community. It is in his words that the story begins and ends, as day by day Jacob records his family\u2019s life on their Pennsylvania farm and their interactions with the English. When an unprecedented disaster brings nearby cities to a grinding halt, the cities\u2019 inhabitants turn to the Amish farmers for help; but they also intrude upon them with violence. As lawlessness and acts of savagery intensify, Jacob\u2019s peaceful community is forced to make hard decisions. Author David Williams grants us access into a closed society, a reminder of how reliant the rest of us are on technology to sustain our way of life\u2014and that even the most steadfast will struggle in the face of chaos. When the English Fall is a gripping story, with an ending that made me want to go back and read it all again\u2026 --Seira Wilson Review New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice \u2022 A July 2017 Indie Next Pick \u2022 LibraryReads Selection \u2022 July 2017 Amazon Top 10 Best Book of the Month \u201cAn apt and original spin on the genre of \u2018prepper fiction.\u2019\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \"It\u2019s rare to find a debut novel as finely crafted as When the English Fall .\" \u2014 Los Angeles Times \u201cEntrancing [and] deceptively simple, lulling, holding, at times, the power of prayer.\u201d \u2014 Boston Globe \u201cWilliams\u2019 use of tension, suspense, and compression is masterful, calling to mind the distilled prose of Ron Rash. In the past decade, pop culture may have become oversaturated with post-apocalyptic stories, but this one is fresh, unique and unforgettable . . . A quiet, brilliant little novel.\u201d \u2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cAn unusually good post-apocalyptic novel.\u201d \u2014 Christian Science Monitor \u201cA quirky addition to the growing volume of novels that imagine the repercussions of climate change . . . Williams is brilliant at creating a plausible Amish narrator in Jacob.\u201d \u2014 Financial Times \u201cClever . . . the totality of When the English Fall is surprisingly moving, and Jacob a sympathetic and compelling guide to a world that feels closer every day.\u201d \u2014Newsday \u201cA standout among post-apocalyptic novels, as simply and perfectly crafted as an Amish quilt or table. Lyrical and weirdly believable.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews , starred review \u201cA quiet, ideas-focused dystopian novel that will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal , starred review \u201c[A] satisfying post-apocalyptic novel . . . The unique spin draws readers into an alarmingly plausible story of contemporary civilization\u2019s demise.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cTold in the quiet, simple prose of a quiet, pious man, this is an intriguing take on the dystopian novel.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cFascinating . . . When the English Fall is a gripping story, with an ending that made me want to go back and read it all again\u2026\u201d \u2014 Seira Wilson for Omnivoracious: The Amazon Book Review \"A fascinating debut.\" \u2014 B&N Sci-Fi blog \u201c When the English Fall takes its place in the landscape of post-collapse survivalist fiction as satisfyingly as a puzzle piece clicking into a gap. You'll read it and wonder how you never realized it was missing. Jacob's determination to remain true to his faith, his struggle to protect his family and aid his neighbors while chaos gathers around him, is both convincing and affecting, and gradually, without ever seeming to grasp for it, his humble, questing voice accrues a surprising power.\u201d\u2014 Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead From the Back Cover \u201cA standout among post-apocalyptic novels, as simply and perfectly crafted as an Amish quilt or table.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201c When the English Fall takes its place in the landscape of post-collapse survivalist fiction as satisfyingly as a puzzle piece clicking into a gap. You\u2019ll read it and wonder how you never realized it was missing.\u201d \u2014Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead \u201cShe talks about the lights, and about the darkness. The skies are bright with angel wings, she will shout, suddenly. The English fall! The English fall! Again and again she says this.\u201d After a huge celestial storm sends out magnetic waves so powerful that planes fall out of the sky, phones stop working, and computers go dead, all the ties that hold together modern society begin to unravel. But amid the confusion and panic\u2014and imminent, encroaching violence\u2014there remains one group of people untouched by the spectacular events: the Amish. Thrifty and steadfast, they have remained true to the traditions they have followed for generations, completely independent from technology. How long can this peaceful people stay safe from the disintegrating society around them? About the Author David Williams is a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church. He lives in Annandale, Virginia. When the English Fall is his first novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. September 6 Hannah tells me it was not so good with Sadie today, not good at all. She did not sleep last night, that I know. And she was so distressed today, Hannah says. There were no seizures, but she is so unhappy. \u00a0 She broods, and will only sleep, or talk in strange circles, as she has since it got worse. \u00a0 But now it is only one thing she can seem to think about. She talks about the lights, and about the darkness. The skies are bright with angel wings, she will shout, suddenly. The English fall! The English fall! Again and again she says this. The skies filled with angel wings, about the English, and about the fall. We give her the medicine, and it quiets her, but the quiet passes more quickly. \u00a0 I confess I am troubled, and I am praying much over it. \u00a0 Sadie was always different. Before the doctors told us there was something wrong, before the seizures, she was different. She was born with a caul, which means nothing. I have seen calves born with cauls, and there is no magic I can see in them. They get eaten, just like all of the other calves. Their jerky tastes no different from regular jerky. But sometimes the old women still talk, Hannah tells me. \u00a0 The angel\u2019s touch, some said she had. And the folk still remember what she said about Bishop Beiler, before even the first signs of the cancer. And about the Hostetler girl. And about that calf. It was strange, and Bishop Schrock had many talks with me about the whisperings that should not be part of the order. \u00a0 \u201cThere is no Christ in this,\u201d he said. \u201cThis seems the Devil\u2019s work,\u201d he said. \u00a0 I nodded, but told him she was a good girl, because she was, even if she did say strange things. I felt anger, too, for Bishop Schrock can be a hard man. Of the bishops in this district, his heart turns most quickly to discipline. But prayer and more prayer returned my heart to the grace of Christ. \u00a0 And now she moans in the night, and I hear her whisper. Every night, every night for a month, as I read back. \u00a0 And every night, it is the same thing. \u00a0 The angel wings, and the sky, and the English. And the fall. \u00a0 Though she is my little girl, barely more than a child, the hairs rise on my arms as I write this. It is just a sickness, I say to my soul. Just a sickness of the mind. \u00a0 But I do not believe myself when I say it. I cannot but worry that something bad will happen. September 16 This early morning, after the milking, Jacob and I slaughtered a pig, the big one. Much of the morning was cutting and preparing, and setting the meat into the freezer. \u00a0 There will be more, but it was the whole work of our morning. It took longer than anticipated, and our breakfast was no longer warm, but Hannah was forgiving, even as she chided us. \u00a0 After breakfast, we finished building the last of the order. Mike will be pleased. I sent Jacob to the community phone, so that we could tell Mike. \u00a0 Hannah prepared simple food, slaw and some meat pies, and Sadie helped, as the Fishers were to come in the late afternoon. Joseph and Rachel and their five, plus Rachel pregnant again, they have been blessed and fruitful. And they are still not old. There will be more children, a larger family. \u00a0 Their oldest, also Rachel, is fourteen just like our Sadie, then Fritz and Hosheah, then Mariam, then Micah. \u00a0 It was a lively afternoon. The Fishers came in their wagon and a buggy, and Jacob was at once off with the boys to play. Sadie was calm, and she and Rachel went to talking and walking for a while, as Hannah and the older Rachel rested with lemonade before cooking for the evening. \u00a0 Joseph and I sat, and we talked. He was worried about the Johansons, who operate the 375 acres just to the south of his own. They had always had problems, and always been the sort of family that struggles, even in the good times when the harvest was good and the money was plentiful. Even the best blessings of Providence cannot turn a soul from sorrow if it has set itself down that path. \u00a0 But with the terrible weather, and the power outages, and the trouble, they were suffering. The hot and dry summer stunted their corn, and all they grew was corn. When the fierce rains began again, their fields were much damaged. Some rains, they can handle, but two or three inches an hour? \u00a0 Joseph shook his head as he spoke. The Johansons had seen almost no yield this year. The herbicide-treated soil had no quackgrass, nothing to hold it, and the slight incline of much of that property meant that much corn and soil were washed away. I had seen it, the washes cutting across what had been good earth. \u00a0 The Johansons also had several chicken coops, long flat structures with hens by the tens of thousands, all packed into crates. That had been a good cash yield, from one of the big companies that puts chicken into the stores in the cities. But then the power failed midsummer, not one of the storm outages, but when one power company wouldn\u2019t provide to another. The fans failed, and the coops became ovens. Most of the hens died. \u00a0 Mr. Johanson was beside himself, deep in debt to the bank, and the loans and loan guarantees and payments from the government that used to tide English farmers over no longer came through. Something about China, and austerity measures. Mike has told me about these things, too. \u00a0 Joseph was worried, because his neighbor had taken to drinking more and more. Two nights before, there had been angry shouting in the distance. It was just drunkenness and rage, as he stumbled through the fields shouting with a bottle in his hand, cursing uselessly at his own fields, blasting the sun-blasted earth with his hate. The police came, called by another neighbor. Very sad thing, we both thought. \u00a0 So we prayed together for his neighbor, for the family. And then we ate, and gave thanks. It was good, to be together. A blessing. \u00a0 I WAS LOOKING OUT ACROSS our little farm, in the halfdarkness of the night, and giving thanks for the blessing we had been given, when she was suddenly by my side without my knowing it. Like a wraith, she moves sometimes, my Sadie. \u00a0 I asked her how she had enjoyed her time with Rachel, and she smiled and said it was good to see her. \u00a0 She looked at the night sky, dimming at the cool of day. She said that the angels were coming soon. The sky will be filled with their wings. She was not upset, as she had been before. There was no seizure. She was very calm. But she was still saying it. \u00a0 \u201cWe will be all right, when they come,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it will not be easy, Dadi.\u201d \u00a0 And then she went inside. \u201cIt\u2019s late, Dadi,\u201d she called to me. \u201cCome in.\u201d September 22 And on the third night, the angels came and filled the heavens. \u00a0 It began in early evening, as I watched, sitting with Sadie again, just as she had asked. \u00a0 It was just darking, the last colors of the sun vanishing, the first stars showing, the light of the town brightening. It had been a beautiful sunset. \u00a0 And then they came. A flicker here, and a flicker there, color danced in the sky. Then sheets of it, brighter and brighter, dancing wild sheets cast across the skies, beautiful purples and blues and pinks. \u00a0 The sky became full of them, dancing, waving, and pulsing. They would fade a little, and strengthen, and then grow stronger and stronger. \u00a0 So beautiful. But terrible. What was this? Angels? It was not as I would have thought. So bright and silent. I do not know. I do not yet know. \u00a0 Hannah came, and Jacob, and we watched together, as the wings of angels lit the skies, and the earth glowed under the warm light. Jacob laughed and pointed and jumped around at the joy of it. \u00a0 Then it grew so bright that it was brighter than midnight under a full moon, bright enough to see my hand, to see the house. Angel wings dipped, radiant with color, and touched the earth. There was a feeling of strangeness in the air, I do not know what it was, but the hairs on my arm rose. From fear, perhaps, because it was strange, but also because the air seemed sharp with . . . something. I do not know. But the smell changed. \u00a0 \u201cDadi, it\u2019s so bright, what is that smell?\u201d asked Jacob, suddenly stilled, his voice filled with awe and alarm. Hannah pulled in close, but Sadie stood separate, looking up, rocking back and forth a little. \u00a0 It went on, radiant and terrible and beautiful. We stood silent. \u00a0 And then Jacob said, \u201cDadi, look, there are no lights in the town now,\u201d he said, \u201cand there are no lights on the road.\u201d \u00a0 It was true. And he was excited and frightened, and looking everywhere and talking, and then he pointed up. \u00a0 \u201cLook at the plane,\u201d he called out, and there it was, an airplane, a big one. It was not where the planes normally fly, high and moving north or south. The silhouette was low and large. There were no lights on it, or in it, just the beautiful light dancing on and behind it. \u00a0 It was sideways. It was coming down. \u00a0 I could see both wings, bent back dark like a broken cross, and it was floating downward, downward, very slow. It was very wrong. I began to pray. \u00a0 The plane moved down, southward, like a dark, windblown leaf against the color-splashed sky. We lost it to view behind the trees. \u00a0 And then there was a faint flash, and a few seconds later, a crump like a short peal of thunder. \u00a0 \u201cOh blessed Jesus, all those people,\u201d said Hannah, and she began to pray softly and in earnest, her whispered prayers melding with mine. \u00a0 Still, the skies danced, so bright, so silent. \u00a0 And a few seconds later, another flash, to the north. And a minute later, another to the southwest. \u00a0 Sadie turned to us, and her eyes were huge and wet with tears. \u00a0 \u201cThe English fall,\u201d she said. \u00a0 And then she went inside, away from the light that filled the sky over the darkened earth. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 19.98}, {"asin": "1611683807", "title": "Baby You're a Rich Man: Suing the Beatles for Fun and Profit", "author": "Stan Soocher", "description": "Review \u201c[T]his accessible and well-written book [is] a worthwhile read for serious Beatles fans interested in the legal and financial details of the world\u2019s most popular band.\u201d\u00a0\u2015Library Journal\u201cFab! Soocher\u2019s cast of mobbed-up producers, cut-out shilling managers, and opera-composing judges reads like Elmore Leonard in the Sky with Diamonds.\u201d\u2015Steven Lee Beeber, author of The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB\u2019s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk,\u201cAs mega-successful but legally clueless young men, the Beatles\u2015both as a group and individually\u2015collected more lawsuits than gold records. Stan Soocher, painstakingly and accessibly, sorts it all out in the fascinating, entertaining, and meticulously researched Baby You\u2019re a Rich Man. The book should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone even thinking of entering show business.\"\u2015Jeff Tamarkin, author of Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane,\u201c[Soocher\u2019s] work is relevant to both Beatles maniacs from back in the day and modern musicians alike.\u201d \u2015Colorado Music Buzz\"Baby You're a Rich Man foregrounds lost or little-known details to provide a kind of alternative biography. [Soocher's] achievement is to present detailed analysis of dry legal material in a manner that is as enjoyable as a thriller. In daily newspaper-ese, Baby You're a Rich Man is unputdownable.\"--Times Higher Education (U.K.) Review \u201cAs mega-successful but legally clueless young men, the Beatles\u2014both as a group and individually\u2014collected more lawsuits than gold records. Stan Soocher, painstakingly and accessibly, sorts it all out in the fascinating, entertaining, and meticulously researched Baby You\u2019re a Rich Man. The book should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone even thinking of entering show business.\" (Jeff Tamarkin, author of Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane) About the Author STAN SOOCHER is associate professor of music and entertainment industry studies at the University of Colorado\u2019s Denver Campus. In addition, he is an entertainment attorney and has served as Editor-in-Chief of Entertainment Law & Finance. The recipient of the Texas Star Award from the State Bar of Texas, Soocher has written for Rolling Stone and the National Law Journal and is previously the author of They Fought the Law: Rock Music Goes to Court. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Pop Culture"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 27.95}, {"asin": "1503942953", "title": "Dryland: One Woman's Swim to Sobriety", "author": "Nancy Stearns Bercaw", "description": "Review \u201cA brave, honest, adventurous memoir that keeps you turning pages as Bercaw travels around the world and rediscovers what it really means to win\u2026at life.\u201d \u2015Leigh Newman, author of Still Points North About the Author Writer and national champion swimmer Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a seventeen-time NCAA All-American athlete and was inducted into the University of South Florida\u2019s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2009. Her writing has appeared in publications around the world, including the New York Times , the Huffington Post , the Korea Herald , U.S. News & World Report , Abu Dhabi\u2019s Tempo magazine, and ScaryMommy.com. She is the author of Brain in a Jar: A Daughter\u2019s Journey Through Her Father\u2019s Memory and a contributor to Chicken Soup for the Soul: Living with Alzheimer\u2019s and Other Dementias . She lives in Vermont with her husband and son.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "0761189815", "title": "Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything", "author": "Lydia Kang", "description": "Review \u201c[A]n insightful look at human hubris in the story of would-be cures of all our ailments.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 NPR\u2019s Science Friday \u201cMuch more than simply an overview of radioactive suppositories and mummy powder, Quackery is a thrilling dive into the human desire to live, to thrive, and the incredible power of belief. Delightful, disturbing, and delightfully disturbing, Quackery shares fascinating medical tales from throughout the ages, including the age we live in. It astonishes with the history of what patients once did in the name of \u2018health\u2019 and makes you wonder what we will one day look back on with equal shock.\u201d \u2014Dylan Thuras, coauthor of Atlas Obscura \u201cFascinating, fun, and occasionally infuriating. . . . a\u00a0cautionary tale that should resonate even today\u2014a reminder that when it comes to health care, being an informed consumer may indeed save your life.\u201d \u00a0 \u2014Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner\u2019s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz-Age New York \u201c Quackery brilliantly educates and entertains through the errors of doctors and scientists of the past. An entertaining read that will shock you and change how you view the health claims on products that we see daily.\u201d \u00a0 \u2014David B. Agus, MD, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller The End of Illness and Professor of Medicine and Engineering, University of Southern California \u00a0 \u201cA bubbling elixir of the comically useless, the wildly hyped, and the just plain weird in would-be cures through history. Peel away those quaint old patent medicine labels and add some modern buzzwords, and marvel at how much has (and yet hasn\u2019t really) changed.\u201d \u00a0 \u2014Paul Collins, author of The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars \u201cNext time someone reminisces to you about the good old days, remind them how people used to wash their faces with arsenic, rub on radium liniment, and give each other tobacco smoke enemas. This compulsively readable compendium is a great reminder that medicine in the old days was often worse than the disease\u2014and that there\u2019s always reason to be wary of \u2018miracle cures.\u2019\u201d \u00a0 \u2014Bess Lovejoy, author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses \u201cEntertaining and informative.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Publishers Weekly \"[A]\u00a0fantastical (and morbidly funny) glimpse into the history of medicine.' \u2014 Buzzfeed.com About the Author Lydia Kang, MD, is a practicing internal medicine physician and author of young adult fiction and adult fiction. Her YA novels include Control, Catalyst , and the upcoming The November Girl . Her adult fiction debut is entitled A Beautiful Poison . Her nonfiction has been published in JAMA , the Annals of Internal Medicine , and the Journal of General Internal Medicine . This author is represented by the Hachette Speakers Bureau. Nate Pedersen is a librarian, historian, and freelance journalist with over 400 publications in print and online, including in the Guardian , the Believer , the San Francisco Chronicle , and the Art of Manliness .", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.73}, {"asin": "1938416007", "title": "Junior", "author": "Ray Donley", "description": "Review At times comical, at times thoughtful, this novel is packed with memorable moments and refreshing insights on some of the more serious parts of life. A highly readable account of one man's journey from suspected terrorist to sought-after celebrity. -- Kirkus Reviews This book provides a light-hearted take on matter we often take too seriously for our own good -- politics, religion, and sports! -- San Francisco Book Review About the Author Ray Donley's childhood dream was to play point guard in the NBA. When that dream died, he became a lawyer, a profession in which foot speed and fast twitch muscles are not a prerequisite to gainful employment. After writing factually accurate and mostly boring legal briefs for thirty years, Ray decided to write a novel so he could just make stuff up. He researched, as lawyers do, and determined that what the world needed was a novel that combined his interests in the Bible, sports, cosmic cause and effect, silly religiosity, and movies where things get blown up. Ray lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, who is also an attorney. Their two wonderful daughters attend college.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 16.95}, {"asin": "0915996006", "title": "The Great Sympathetic: Walt Whitman and the North American Review", "author": "J. D. Schraffenberger", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 6.27}, {"asin": "0873518896", "title": "Augie's Secrets: The Minneapolis Mob and the King of the Hennepin Strip", "author": "Neal Karlen", "description": "Review \"Karlen offers a loving, page turning...colorful and impressively researched account of the Midwest underworld and his fascinating great-uncle that feels right out of Damon Runyon. He serves up innumerable subplots about the Minneapolis Mob's crucial role in the nation's bootlegging, bookmaking and other illicit activities....entertaining and nostalgic, it's a lost world revived by Karlen in all is eccentric swagger and hard-boiled madcap edginess.\"- The Minneapolis Star Tribune,", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 21.81}, {"asin": "1618216945", "title": "Space, Structure, and Story: Integrated Science and ELA Lessons for Gifted and Advanced Learners in Grades 4-6 (Advanced Cirriculum From Vanderbilt University's Program for Talented Youth)", "author": "Emily Mofield Ed.D.", "description": "Review \"A great guide for educators that lack the experience of designing entire units of work, [it] could be used to help write other units as well. A work to be considered for placement in media centers to assist new educators in the production of good lesson plans and those ever popular rubrics.\" Lewie Dunn, Georgia Military College, 2/3/18 About the Author Tamra Stambaugh, Ph.D., is an assistant research professor in special education and Executive Director for Talented Youth at Vanderbilt University. Emily Mofield, Ed.D., is an assistant professor in the College of Education at Lipscomb University. Her background includes 15 years experience teaching gifted students and leading gifted services.", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 42.31}, {"asin": "145981309X", "title": "Can Your Conversations Change the World? (PopActivism, 3)", "author": null, "description": "Review \"A good jumping-off point for budding feminists searching for an upbeat place to start. Idealistic and hopeful.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"As in Can You Smartphone Change the World? and Can Your Outfit Change the World? , the information presented here is engaging, conversational, and encourages reflection...Highly Recommended.\" \u2015 CM: Canadian Review of Materials \"The book's focus on the importance of conversation is a particularly admirable choice for this huge topic\u2026This is an accessible book for young girls and it is armed with enough concrete information to begin this important conversation.\" \u2015 Resource Links Book Description We need to talk about feminism. From the Inside Flap feminism, activism, communication, intersectionality, openness From the Back Cover feminism, activism, communication, intersectionality, openness About the Author Erinne Paisley is an activist, public speaker, youth content developer and writer. She was awarded one of ten University of Toronto National Scholarships and graduated with a BA in Peace, Conflict, and Justice & Book and Media Studies from the University of Toronto, Trinity College. She has since gone on to study and lecture at the University of Amsterdam. She is also the author of the PopActivism series. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Social Issues"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0299305341", "title": "Living Black: Social Life in an African American Neighborhood", "author": "Mark S. Fleisher", "description": "Review \u201cGoes against the common notion that American ghettos are broken places. . . . Brief, accessible . . . suitable for a general readership.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA very engaging account of fieldwork among gang members, their families, and their community, in line with ethnographies like Tally\u2019s Corner , Code of the Street , or Gang Leader for a Day .\u201d\u2014Jeffrey Ian Ross, coauthor of Beyond Bars \u201cA human story, not necessarily an account of white vs black or haves vs have nots. . . . Living Black should be required reading for anyone who could benefit from a look outside their own world into the world of others. Which is most of us.\u201d\u2014 Chicago Book Review \u201cAn accessible introduction to ethnographic fieldwork, a window into a deeply textured community . . . and an illustration of the myriad ways that poverty and racism have cascading implications for communities, families, and individuals.\u201d\u2014 Michigan Historical Review About the Author Mark S. Fleisher is a research professor in the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. He formerly worked at the Federal Bureau of Prisons and at Illinois State University. He is the author of Beggars and Thieves , Dead End Kids , and Warehousing Violence .", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 2.5, "price": 28.45}, {"asin": "0998217743", "title": "Resurrection America", "author": "Jeff Gunhus", "description": "Review Nominated for 2017 Thriller Award from International Thriller Writers.\u00a0 \" Resurrection America does touching work , tying together a portrait of rural America in crisis. Without pulling any punches, Gunhus delivers an unforgettable thriller that is thought-provoking, honest, and true-blue .\" -- Foreword Reviews Gunhus...adroitly designs a frightening world upended by geopolitical chaos ; the United States, the victim of catastrophic terrorists attacks, struggles to bring order to global madness...\u00a0Johnson is a memorable and relatable hero, hardened by war and loss but astonishingly hopeful. This tale offers a deliciously creepy vision of a grim tomorrow rendered harrowingly plausible. A terrifying account of global disorder and American decline. --Kirkus Reviews Jeff Gunhus paints a chillingly plausible vision of a not-too-distant future in which the United States and the world has been shaken by terrorism, war and economic disaster. Resurrection America is a must-read, tautly written, moving at times at an almost breathless pace , filled with twists and turns that will keep readers guessing until the last page. - Charlotte Miller\" A roller coaster read which had me up to the early hours to read 'just one more chapter'\". - Kaye Nutman\"Absolutely stunning thriller!\" - Anima\"Many twists and surprises kept the suspense level high ...\" - Jay Williams \"Wow!! I just finished reading Resurrection America and it was great!\" - Shari Armon \"And the ending was terrifying perfec t. I'm a sucker for an unexpected ending , and Gunhus really delivers.\" - Jo\"It was an exciting storyline, right from the start.\u00a0Overall a thrilling read !\" -Michelle Shealy\"A page turner . I couldn'tread it fast enough.\" - Norma\"An excellent exciting book.\" - Sam Borrelli\"This book is excellent and well-writte n. The plot is entirely believable. I've done some research into bio-hacking and cyber possibilities: this storyline is only a few years away from being very rea l.\" Kent Larson\"This story is an amazing thriller mixed with science-fiction --exactly the type of genre that I love to read!\" - Marianna Maquire\"I loved this action packed book .The author does a great job with characterization as well. This novel held my interest all the way ! - Penny Cockrell\"Resurrection America gets off to a roaring start shrouded in a mystery or is it a thriller or maybe science fiction? It turns out to be a little of each with a touch of horror thrown in for good measure.\" - Paul\" A real page turner with well developed characters. Scary, but believable .\" - Quanita\" Reader beware ~ there are twists and turns in the story and an ending that won't go away \" -Sandra King\"Jeff Gunhus does not disappoint. The mystery begins right away , making it easy to \"get into\" the story quickly.\" - Alicia Owen\"If you like a good dystopian story with a little bit of conspiracy theory thrown in, if you harbor just a little concern about computers working their tendrils into every facet of our lives, and if you appreciate a story with little guys standing up to bullies... this is a book for you .\" Bartski Van Badbarto\"Resurrection America moves along at a good pace and keeps you strapped to your seat the entire time.\" - Alicia Huxtable\"This is a great read and has a brilliant twist at the end .\ufeff I enjoyed reading this book.\" -Sharon Hoskins\".. .will make you think about the possibilities of not only man but the whole of existence. I would highly recommend this book to anyone that likes sci fi, especially the kind that is not so far in the future.\" - Berney\" I loved this nove l, I will not tell anything about the story I will say hold on and enjoy the ride, he has a way of getting you all excited then he pulls back and starts to build the tension up again.\" - Edward\"Jeff Gunhus has put together in a book what we all are afraid to put into words and speak out loud. Horrifying and apocalyptic .\u00a0Great read.\" - Kay\"In this taut, thought-provoking apocalyptic thriller from Gunhus ( Night Chill ), hard times have hit the little hamlet of Resurrection, Colo., and the mayor has reinstated the local fall festival in the hope that the food, music, crafts, and fun will lift the community's spirits. When someone erects a high electric fence in front of the entrance to a long-abandoned mine, Sheriff Rick Johnson is concerned. A series of small, easily dismissed incidents niggle at his mind, but he decides to let things ride until after the festival. Soon, grave problems develop that directly involve every citizen of Resurrection and eventually spiral into a technological threat so cataclysmic that Rick can hardly comprehend its significance. Will Rick and his allies, including AI expert Cassandra Baker, be able to thwart the mad plans of Hank Keefer, the mine's new owner, and the unbridled greed of Cassandra's narcissistic billionaire boss, Brandon Morris? Readers will keep turning the pages to find out as the action builds to a surprising conclusion.\" -- Publishers Weekly", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "0525478388", "title": "Chicks with Sticks (Knitwise)", "author": "Elizabeth Lenhard", "description": "About the Author Elizabeth Lenhard lives with her family in Atlanta, Georgia.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.94}, {"asin": "0425233456", "title": "Plaster and Poison (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery)", "author": "Jennie Bentley", "description": "About the Author Jennie Bentley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Do-It-Yourself Mysteries. The Prime Crime home renovation series features textile designer Avery Baker and her handyman boyfriend, Derek Ellis, who renovate houses in Maine. She also writes under the name Jenna Bennett.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0062676709", "title": "Day of the Dead: A Novel (A Frieda Klein Novel, 8)", "author": "Nicci French", "description": "Review Praise for Sunday Silence : \u201cComplex...intriguing...truly unique.\u201d \u2014 Tami Hoag \u201cFabulous, unsettling, and riveting.\u201d \u2014 Louise Penny \u201cUnforgettable. Psychological dynamite.\u201d \u2014 Alan Bradley \u201cThe husband-and-wife team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French combine psychological suspense with a form of police procedural in a brilliant cat-and-mouse game that provides the perfect finale for this concluding entry in the celebrated Frieda Klein series.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) From the Back Cover Now the final book in this extraordinary series is here. And it\u2019s an ending you\u2019ll never forget. A decade ago, psychologist Frieda Klein was sucked into the orbit of Dean Reeve\u2014a killer able to impersonate almost anyone, a man who can disappear without a trace, a psychopath obsessed with Frieda herself. In the years since, Frieda has worked with\u2014and sometimes against\u2014the London police in solving their most baffling cases. But now she\u2019s in hiding, driven to isolation by Reeve. When a series of murders announces his return, Frieda must emerge from the shadows to confront her nemesis. And it\u2019s a showdown she might not survive. Criminology student Lola Hayes has tracked Frieda down with a single-minded pursuit: She wants to delve inside the mind of a woman besieged by darkness. But in following every move Frieda makes, Lola is exposing herself to the same terrors\u2014and the same twisted fixation of a diabolical psychopath. This gripping cat-and-mouse thriller pits one of the most fascinating characters in contemporary fiction against an enemy like none other. Smart, sophisticated, and spellbinding, Day of the Dead will leave you breathless. About the Author Nicci French is the pseudonym of English wife-and-husband team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. Their acclaimed novels of psychological suspense have sold more than 16 million copies around the world. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 13.39}, {"asin": "1626344515", "title": "The Company of Demons", "author": "Michael Jordan", "description": "Review The plot, the characters, and the details all conspire to give the reader a book that is excruciating to put down because of the craving to see what happens next. -- Cleveland Sun News \"Jordan is a cross between John Grisham and Stephen King.\" -- Cleveland Scene \"A well-written and complexly plotted crime thriller.\" --Caroline McCullagh, Mensa Bulletin ''The terror of the Torso Murderer returns in this gritty, Cleveland-centrictale. Jordan delights with crackling dialogue, true-to-life characters,an intensely paced plot, and an explosive finale. A must-read for fans of Lecter, Dexter, and the Ripper.''\u00a0-- John Keyse-Walker, Author of Sun, Sand, Murder and Beach, Breeze, Bloodshed ; winner of Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award ''Michael Jordan brings characters and scenes to life in this emotionally gripping and compelling breakout novel. Brilliantly crafted.''-- Rick Porrello, author of To Kill the Irishman (adapted into a major motion picture), Superthief! , and The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia Corn, Sugar, and Blood \"In this intense novel--gory at times, but flecked with humor-- lawyer John Coleman struggles to keep his life in order as his situation becomes increasingly precarious. The writer (no, not that Michael Jordan) weaves dramatic, Law & Order -worthy courtroom scenes as part of a page-turner about deception, betrayal, addiction and mystery, in which nearly every poor decision comes back to haunt.\" --The George Washington University Magazine \"...enough twists and turns that many readers will be surprised by the ending of this book that is part serial killer thriller and part legal drama.\" --Sarasota Scene Magazine The Company of Demons by Michael Jordan is a wonderful blend of crime and mystery, a riveting story with sophisticated characters. [...] Michael Jordan is a great storyteller and he has the ability to keep the narrative emotionally intense and psychologically disturbing. The Company of Demons is a real page-turner. -- Reader's Favorite About the Author Michael Jordan obtained his undergraduate degree from Ohio Wesleyan University with highest honors, and his law degree from George Washington University, where he was a member of the Law Review. A trial lawyer and arbitrator for over three decades, he has been recognized as an Ohio Super Lawyer\u00ae and named to Best Lawyers in America\u00ae. The Company of Demons is his first novel.  A native of Saginaw, Michigan, Michael and his wife, Linda Gross Brown, a soft pastel artist, divide their time between homes in Rocky River, Ohio, and Longboat Key, Florida. They enjoy traveling, pleasure boating, and very cold martinis.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 15.95}, {"asin": "1572232986", "title": "Squirrel Wars: Backyard Wildlife Battles & How to Win Them", "author": "George H. Harrison", "description": "From Library Journal Addressing far more than squirrel problems, the author thoroughly understands the dilemmas of homeowners wishing to enjoy backyard wildlife without encouraging pest species. A respected nature writer also known for his public television specials on bird watching, Harrison deftly describes the mammals, birds, and insects considered common backyard pests. He entertainingly documents problems homeowners have experienced, relates their quirky methods of coping, and offers sound advice to minimize the nuisances. Harrison addresses such topics as raccoons in chimneys, rabbits in the garden, and rats around birdfeeders, but there are some surprising exclusions; bats, coyotes, and snakes aren't mentioned, though Bill Adler Jr. included them in Outwitting Critters: A Surefire Manual for Confronting Devious Animals and Winning (LJ 9/1/92). Overall, this is highly readable and informative. Recommended for all public libraries. -Bonnie Poquette, Shorewood P.L., WI Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \"This is a fine book and for the price, a steal! Every gardener should have a copy.\" -- Richmond Times - Dispatch, May 14, 2000 George Harrison describes squirrels as public enemy #1 and backs up this criticism with incredible, often comic, human-vs-squirrel stores. -- The Times-Picayune, February 15, 2000 I found this book very interesting. I'll be putting the tips and tactics to work soon, and I'm sure you will too, if you have any backyard problems. -- Northern Virginia Daily, May 13, 2000 It's filled with ideas for those who want to rid themselves of various pests without resorting to firearms. It has good info and is well-written. -- The Virginia Gazette, May 3, 2000 Personally, I found the book informative and interesting reading. -- Tri-County Sunday, May 1, 2000 About the Author George H. Harrison is an award-winning author, photographer, and Television producer. George, along with his wife Kit, has written many books on nature and the outdoors along with several videos. They produced and hosted three PBS specials on backyard birds and are writers for Sports Afield and National Wildlife magazines. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 14.05}, {"asin": "B00BJBI8L2", "title": "Ironsides' Peril: A Zach Colt Adventure (The Zach Colt Adventures Book 2)", "author": "Michael D. Urban", "description": "Review WINNER: \u00a0SUSPENSE/THRILLER -- 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards HONORABLE MENTION: \u00a0FICTION - THRILLER - TERRORIST -- 2013 Readers' Favorite International Book Awards\"A first-rate thriller.\" \u00a0William Martin, author of The Lincoln Letter \"Thisis a fun read; it could easily be the premise for a feature film.\u00a0 The author clearly knows the style and pace of modern international thrillers coupled with a milieu he knows and has researched well....\u00a0 [I]t's an adventuretale for nearly all ages.\" Judge, Writer's Digest 21st Annual Self-Published Book Awards \"When [O]ld Ironsides turns 215, the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 and the Fourth of July all happen to fallwithin the s ame time frame . . . the city of Boston is poised to celebrate . . . until a series of terrorist attacks strike . . . the beginning of what will turn out to be one of the most terrifying and harrowing days in American history. \u00a0There are not many authors who will takeyou inside the mind of a terrorist, but Urban takes us into the minds of three.\u00a0Not only that, he provides captivating details about the history of Old Ironsides, the military and his main characters \u00a0. . . every single one of them comes alive and seem extremely real . . . I really enjoyed this book.\"\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a05- Star Review, Readers' Favorite \"A terrorist with roots to the original Barbary pirates and his ruthless band have hijacked the USS Constitution.... \u00a0As thrillers go, this one benefits from anunusual setting ... as well as a likable hero in Zach Colt, a combination ofBruce Willis and Batman,....\u00a0 I suspect Urban has the making of a ... series that can be successful ....\u00a0 A good read.\" 6/13 Jack Quick, Stacey Alesi's Bookbitch.com From the Author Welcome to Adventure! About the Author Mike Urban is an Ivy League graduate, an ex- cop, a former federal prosecutor and currently a trial attorney.\u00a0 For nearly a decade he lived in and explored Panama. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "1604697938", "title": "Cutting Back: My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto", "author": "Leslie Buck", "description": "Review \u201cAn unusual and entertaining memoir . . . . she learns\u2014about durability and resilience. She learns to prune trees exquisitely. Most of all, she learns that \u2018an apprentice must . . . be the good student.\u2019 Not a bad lesson for any gardener.\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cHer writings, inevitably, are a reflection on the contrasts between the roles of the gardener in two very different cultures.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cBuck has as good an eye for cultural dissonance as she does for pines that need pruning. . . . This is an absorbing read about the formative interplay of humans, cultures, and gardens.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly starred review \u201cThe descriptions of the gardens the author tends while in Japan will transport readers; it is an armchair tourist\u2019s treat to wander the temple gardens as she describes them.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cRead Cutting Back for insight into Japanese gardening culture, for descriptions of naturalistic Japanese gardens, or if you enjoy travel memoirs.\u201d \u2014 NYBG\u2019s Plant Talk \u201cIf you love losing yourself in natural settings, this memoir is definitely for you. . . . the life lessons Buck learns away from her pruning shears will appeal to any reader.\u201d \u2014 Bustle \u201cLeslie Buck\u2019s compelling story bring together three themes\u2014a woman\u2019s journey in life, adaptation to a new and strange culture, and discovery of a career that fulfills through its challenges. The connecting threads are Japanese gardens and gardening. Gardening is both Buck\u2019s profession and a metaphor for Buck\u2019s reflection on her life as a cycle of planting, nourishing, and pruning to achieve rich yet balanced growth. These familiar themes feel fresh in Buck\u2019s light yet sensitive prose that transmits her adventurous spirit yet reflective soul. Japanese gardens have long been recognized as special, almost magical, places that inspire and nourish. Leslie Buck\u2019s memoir gives them a human dimension.\u201d \u2014Kendal H. Brown, author of Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America \u201cLeslie Buck offers a graciously pruned story about learning garden care in Japan, where no-one-telling-you-how leads to intimately discovering for yourself what\u2019s what--a learning that is \u201centrenched in your body.\u201d Leslie tells her story with charm and good-humor.\u201d \u2014Edward Espe Brown, author of Tassajara Bread Book \u201cGardening in Japan is traditionally a male-dominated occupation. It is awkward and certainly not easy for Japanese women to enter, let alone a young woman from a foreign country. \u00a0Leslie\u2019s strong conviction to learn Japanese pruning enabled her to dive into this uncharted world. Most impressive of all, however, was her bold move to select Uetoh Zoen in Kyoto, one of the oldest and most highly acclaimed landscape companies in Japan, as her host gardener. The \u201csecrets\u201d of Japanese gardening are subtly yet evidently revealed throughout the memoir, in describing such things as the way we handle pine tree branches, and the way we examine and correct the performance of a novice gardener. Her undeterred enthusiasm has opened a new door for her and for her followers.\u201d \u2014Sadafumi Uchiyama, head curator at the Portland Japanese Garden , and third generation Japanese gardener \u201cShe learns to sweep with a twiggy traditional hoki and takes her first steps to becoming a senteishi, or tree pruner.\u201d \u2014 The Financial Times \u201cTold with beautiful, carefully crafted language and a perceptively candid voice. . . . the book\u2019s core is its intuitive appreciation for nature.\u201d \u2014 Forward Magazine\u200b \u201cAs much a story of bravery and the challenge of adapting to an unfamiliar culture as it is of horticulture. Anyone contemplating a brave career gamble will learn from it.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle\u200b \u201cInformative and inspiring. . . . the book will appeal to both gardeners and non-gardeners. As much as Buck\u2019s story is about Japanese garden aesthetics, it is also about stepping out of your comfort zone and taking a chance.\u201d \u2014 The American Gardener \u201cThis should be on the reading lists of university Japanese studies courses because of its insights into the country\u2019s apprenticeship systems.\u201d \u2014 Post Magazine\u00a0\u200b \u201cA fascinating personal account, and not just for gardeners.\u201d \u2014 The Irish Garden \u201cA book based on direct experience and encounter, stemming as much from the heart as from backbreaking toil, aching joints and calloused hands.\u201d \u2014 The Japan Times \u201cBuck is a fine guide\u2026Reading Cutting Back taught my untrained eye to more fully appreciate the complexities of Japanese formal gardens and the folks who are entrusted to maintain them.\u201d \u2014 Kyoto Journal \u200b \u201cAn unusual and entertaining memoir . . . . she learns\u2014about durability and resilience. She learns to prune trees exquisitely. Most of all, she learns that \u2018an apprentice must . . . be the good student.\u2019 Not a bad lesson for any gardener.\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cHer writings, inevitably, are a reflection on the contrasts between the roles of the gardener in two very different cultures.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cBuck has as good an eye for cultural dissonance as she does for pines that need pruning. . . . This is an absorbing read about the formative interplay of humans, cultures, and gardens.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly starred review \u201cThe descriptions of the gardens the author tends while in Japan will transport readers; it is an armchair tourist\u2019s treat to wander the temple gardens as she describes them.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cRead Cutting Back for insight into Japanese gardening culture, for descriptions of naturalistic Japanese gardens, or if you enjoy travel memoirs.\u201d \u2014 NYBG\u2019s Plant Talk \u201cIf you love losing yourself in natural settings, this memoir is definitely for you. . . . the life lessons Buck learns away from her pruning shears will appeal to any reader.\u201d \u2014 Bustle \u201cLeslie Buck\u2019s compelling story bring together three themes\u2014a woman\u2019s journey in life, adaptation to a new and strange culture, and discovery of a career that fulfills through its challenges. The connecting threads are Japanese gardens and gardening. Gardening is both Buck\u2019s profession and a metaphor for Buck\u2019s reflection on her life as a cycle of planting, nourishing, and pruning to achieve rich yet balanced growth. These familiar themes feel fresh in Buck\u2019s light yet sensitive prose that transmits her adventurous spirit yet reflective soul. Japanese gardens have long been recognized as special, almost magical, places that inspire and nourish. Leslie Buck\u2019s memoir gives them a human dimension.\u201d \u2014Kendal H. Brown, author of Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America \u201cLeslie Buck offers a graciously pruned story about learning garden care in Japan, where no-one-telling-you-how leads to intimately discovering for yourself what\u2019s what--a learning that is \u201centrenched in your body.\u201d Leslie tells her story with charm and good-humor.\u201d \u2014Edward Espe Brown, author of Tassajara Bread Book \u201cGardening in Japan is traditionally a male-dominated occupation. It is awkward and certainly not easy for Japanese women to enter, let alone a young woman from a foreign country. \u00a0Leslie\u2019s strong conviction to learn Japanese pruning enabled her to dive into this uncharted world. Most impressive of all, however, was her bold move to select Uetoh Zoen in Kyoto, one of the oldest and most highly acclaimed landscape companies in Japan, as her host gardener. The \u201csecrets\u201d of Japanese gardening are subtly yet evidently revealed throughout the memoir, in describing such things as the way we handle pine tree branches, and the way we examine and correct the performance of a novice gardener. Her undeterred enthusiasm has opened a new door for her and for her followers.\u201d \u2014Sadafumi Uchiyama, head curator at the Portland Japanese Garden , and third generation Japanese gardener \u201cShe learns to sweep with a twiggy traditional hoki and takes her first steps to becoming a senteishi, or tree pruner.\u201d \u2014 The Financial Times \u201cTold with beautiful, carefully crafted language and a perceptively candid voice. . . . the book\u2019s core is its intuitive appreciation for nature.\u201d \u2014 Forward Magazine\u200b \u201cAs much a story of bravery and the challenge of adapting to an unfamiliar culture as it is of horticulture. Anyone contemplating a brave career gamble will learn from it.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle\u200b \u201cInformative and inspiring. . . . the book will appeal to both gardeners and non-gardeners. As much as Buck\u2019s story is about Japanese garden aesthetics, it is also about stepping out of your comfort zone and taking a chance.\u201d \u2014 The American Gardener \u201cThis should be on the reading lists of university Japanese studies courses because of its insights into the country\u2019s apprenticeship systems.\u201d \u2014 Post Magazine\u00a0\u200b \u201cA fascinating personal account, and not just for gardeners.\u201d \u2014 The Irish Garden \u201cA book based on direct experience and encounter, stemming as much from the heart as from backbreaking toil, aching joints and calloused hands.\u201d \u2014 The Japan Times \u201cBuck is a fine guide\u2026Reading Cutting Back taught my untrained eye to more fully appreciate the complexities of Japanese formal gardens and the folks who are entrusted to maintain them.\u201d \u2014 Kyoto Journal \u200b From the Back Cover \u201cLeslie goes all the way, immersing herself in Japan\u2019s gardening culture to master a craft to its fullest. I admire her dedication and this beautiful book is a testimony to her success.\u201d \u2014Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse restaurant and founder of the Edible Schoolyard Project \u201cIn well-pruned prose, Buck has written in turns a hilarious, informative, and culturally revealing tale of coming of age as a gardener.\u201d \u2014Liza Dalby, author of Geisha and The Tale of Murasaki: A Novel \u201cGardening in Japan is traditionally a male-dominated occupation. It is awkward and certainly not easy for Japanese women to enter, let alone a young woman from a foreign country. Leslie\u2019s strong conviction to learn Japanese pruning enabled her to dive into this uncharted world. Her undeterred enthusiasm has opened a new door for her and for her followers.\u201d \u2014 Sadafumi Uchiyama, garden curator at the Portland Japanese Garden and third-generation Japanese gardener \u201cLeslie Buck\u2019s compelling story brings together three themes\u2014a woman\u2019s journey in life, adaptation to a new and strange culture, and discovery of a career that fulfills through its challenges.\u201d \u2014Kendall H. Brown, author of Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America , and professor of Asian Art History, California State University, Long Beach \u201cLeslie Buck offers a graciously pruned story about learning garden care in Japan, where no one telling you how leads to intimately discovering for yourself what\u2019s what.\u201d \u2014Edward Espe Brown, American Zen teacher and writer About the Author Leslie Buck is a garden designer and aesthetic pruner who specializes in natural design in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has over two decades of gardening experience, and a fine art degree from U.C. Berkeley and the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts in France. In 2000, Buck studied with Uetoh Zoen, one of the oldest and most highly acclaimed landscape companies in Japan. She has worked, taught, and volunteered in hundreds of private landscapes and as well as dozens of public gardens including the Portland Japanese Garden, Hakone Japanese Garden, Tassajara Zen Center, and Merritt College. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 24.95}, {"asin": "1937084558", "title": "Forgiving Waters", "author": "Kenneth L Capps", "description": "Review : A book that stays with you. It deals with friendship, prejudice , coming of age, family, and death. --Patrice Summers, NetGallery About the Author Born in Houston, Texas, in 1959, Kenneth L. Capps joined the US Marine Corps in 1979 for a thirteen-year career. He started a tree removal company is 1993. In 2009, Ken won honorable mention in nonfiction in the New Bern Literary Symposium in North Carolina. The next year, in 2010, he placed second in fiction in the same contest. Ken's writing career started at 50 years of age in what he considers to be the best years of his life.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "0870207202", "title": "Educating Milwaukee: How One City\u2019s History of Segregation and Struggle Shaped Its Schools", "author": null, "description": "Review Educating Milwaukee: How One City's History of Segregation and Struggle Shaped its Schools examines the educational history of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the school voucher movement, and an innovator in programs that offer school choice. Paradoxically, a wider range of options does not guarantee a better education for children, an especially corrosive problem given Milwaukee's problems of concentrated poverty and de facto segregation. Author, teacher, and urban history expert offers a close examination of the many different school choice initiatives that have been attempted in Milwaukee from 1967 to 2013, and explains why Milwaukee's children as a whole continue to struggle with academic achievement today. Educating Milwaukee discusses why constructing new schools in the inner city has sometimes compounded its educational woes (the burdensome cost often leads to harsh budget cuts forced upon existing schools, without addressing many of their biggest problems), how \"magnet schools\" attracting the best and brightest students compounds declining enrollment in general public schools, the problems of outright incompetence and scandals in underperforming charter schools, and more. \"...magnet schools and private schools may want to enroll only the intelligent, motivated students and may try to prevent students with disabilities, behavior problems, and low test scores from enrolling... These practices also raise questions about the fairness of setting up a hierarchy of schools - a hierarchy that runs counter to the notion of equal educational opportunity - and about the political motivations behind choice. Surely that was not what reformers intended.\" Extensive notes and an index round out this thought-provoking, sharply critical history. (Midwest Book Review, Social Issues Bookshelf, February 2016) About the Author James K. Nelsen has a PhD in urban history from the University of Wisconsin\u2013Milwaukee and teaches high school social studies at Golda Meir School in Milwaukee, a public magnet school for college-bound students in grades 3 through 12. As a lifelong resident of Milwaukee, he finds the history of the city fascinating, from its early days in the mid-nineteenth century to the modern challenges of urban life today. As a teacher, he enjoys researching the history of education from colonial times to the present. When not teaching or researching, he enjoys volunteering with youth groups, exploring his city, and following his beloved Milwaukee Brewers baseball team.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 23.16}, {"asin": "0692004270", "title": "Zigzagging in the Pacific", "author": "Harold J. Cook", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Memoirs"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 4.01}, {"asin": "B01ENNQ22O", "title": "Pancakes in Paris: Living the American Dream in France", "author": "Craig Carlson", "description": "Review Pancakes in Paris is a funny, inspiring, moving, and provocative story...no less than fascinating. -- \"Huffington Post\" [A] refreshingly honest memoir about...the Kafkaesque ordeal he went through to make his dreams come true here. -- \"Heather Stimmler-Hall, founder and editor of the Secrets of Paris newsletter and website\" Carlson does an admirable job of recounting his rocky childhood, the numerous strange connections to France during his early life, and what these events ultimately revealed to him about his life...Carlson's narrative is an inspirational, tasty trip through one man's delightful and hard-won success. -- \"Publishers Weekly\" Carlson tells his story with an openness and an ironic sense of humor. Pancakes in Paris is a great success story and will inspire readers to never stop trying to achieve their goals. -- \"Roger S. Christiansen, television director of Friends and Hannah Montana\" Craig's book is cheerful as his diners and as satisfying as his pancake breakfasts. -- \"Stephen Clarke, author of A Year in the Merde and Paris Revealed\" Donald Corren's engaging performance highlights Carlson's roller-coaster experience of getting Breakfast In America, a diner in Paris, from concept to actuality. Corren's spirited narration captures Carlson's struggle not only with French bureaucracy and other cultural differences but also with creating a following for the diner. While most of the accents and pronunciations are spot-on and capture the nuances of the French people in the book, some deliberately imperfect pronunciations add an authentic flavor of an American trying to fit in. Ever entertaining are Corren's perfectly delivered comments on the sometimes passionate, sometimes laissez-faire Gallic responses to the various situations that make Carlson's journey both difficult and rewarding. -- \"AudioFile\" His adventures are full of interesting characters, delicious food, and charming sites. -- \"Bustle\" With nonstop enthusiasm, the author details the many obstacles he faced to make his dream a reality...A light, entertaining. -- \"Kirkus Reviews\" With Carlson recounting hurdles from amusing to serious, this memoir makes for a delicious read. -- \"Booklist\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. About the Author Craig Carlson is the owner and founder of Breakfast in America, the first American-style diner in Paris, which has been featured in the Lonely Planet and Frommer's travel guides. Donald Corren is a stage, television, and voice actor whose work has been featured on and off Broadway, in regional theaters, behind animated characters, and on television for the past three decades. Trained in the theater division at Juilliard, he is also a writer whose credits include the original Martha Stewart Living television series and the medals ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 1.99}, {"asin": "1418493783", "title": "All's Fair: A Personal History of War and Love", "author": "Allen R. Ferguson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Memoirs"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.79}, {"asin": "1641524073", "title": "The Complete Cursive Handwriting Workbook for Kids: Laugh, Learn, and Practice the Alphabet with Silly Jokes", "author": "Crystal Radke", "description": "Review \u201cAs a pediatric occupational therapist, I work with a wide variety of students who are unable to write in print, but are very successful with writing in cursive as writing in cursive activates a different part of our brains. Crystal Radke\u2019s The Complete Cursive Handwriting Workbook For Kids is a vital, essential, and beautifully done tool. I will be using it consistently in my daily sessions working with students.\u201d \u2014Samantha Adkins, Registered Occupational Therapist, OTR \"As a mother of five, I was disappointed when our local public school system chose to eliminate cursive handwriting from the curriculum. There are so many benefits to teaching our children the cursive, from teaching fine motor skills and patience to developing a strong worth ethic. Thankfully, Crystal Radke fills in the gap and offers a fun, creative tool for teaching our children the necessary life skill of writing in cursive. My 11-year-old daughter loved the vibrant colors and cute jokes throughout the book. I give The Complete Cursive Handwriting Workbook for Kids an A+.\" \u2014Elizabeth Oates, author, speaker, and founder of Collab Conference for Writers \u201dWow! Crystal Radke takes the task of learning cursive handwriting and turns it into a fun and creative exercise for kids. The practice lessons in the second half of the book with jokes is quite humorous and, most importantly, effective!\u201d \u2014Tammy Schulte, mother and educator specializing in dyslexia About the Author CRYSTAL RADKE is an educator, speaker, writer, and mother. Her personal mission is to help children learn and grow. She runs a consulting business where she mentors educators and promotes professional development.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 6.5}, {"asin": "0767918797", "title": "Dissecting Death: Secrets of a Medical Examiner", "author": "Frederick T. Zugibe", "description": "From Publishers Weekly While not a household name, Zugibe, who was chief medical examiner of Rockland County, N.Y., for 35 years, has the experience and credentials to write meaningfully about his field: he developed numerous new techniques for forensic pathology and presided over an amazing variety of investigations. In this readable account, the doctor presents 10 challenging cases he encountered, as well as his insights as a self-described Monday-morning quarterback on two of the most notorious crimes of the 1990s: the brutal slaying of JonBen\u00e9t Ramsey and the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. As Zugibe's own work is intriguing enough, the inclusion of those sensations seems like a ploy to widen appeal, and the authors' decision to include a section on the scientific accuracy of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ may strike some as odd. The writing is sometimes flat, and the book would have had more depth and resonance had Zugibe presented instances where, despite his skills and instincts, he was led astray. Nonetheless, Zugibe's detections in the 1981 Brinks robbery case and his pro bono work in the case of a young journalist who disappeared in El Salvador make compelling reading for fans of insider accounts of forensics. (Aug.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Former Rockland County, New York, chief medical examiner Zugibe reveals how he helped solve some of the most complex murders in the county over the course of his 35-year career. Zugibe unwraps a body from 20 plastic bags and must determine what happened to the man's body after he died. In another case, he points out key evidence from a gunshot wound to disprove a suspect's claim that the victim was stabbed to death before being shot. He uses maggots found on a body to narrow down the time of death. Along the way he dispels assumptions about forensics and even delves into two of the most famous cases of the last 15 years, the JonBenet Ramsey murder and the O. J. Simpson trial, to show how the forensic evidence in those cases was mishandled or overlooked. Zugibe and Carroll's straightforward style makes for clear and fascinating reading, and the cases chosen are intriguing. With the popularity of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and other forensic science dramas on television, expect wide interest in this gripping book. Kristine Huntley Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review Advance Praise for Dissecting Death \u201cDr. Frederick Zugibe has once again proven that real-life events can be stranger than fiction. DISSECTING DEATH is a fascinating compilation of ten cases in which the author, an outstanding and highly experienced forensic pathologist, played a key role in solving complex and controversial crimes.\u00a0 Readers will be enthralled with these dramatic stories and learn a great deal about how a modern-day medical examiner\u2019s office should properly function.\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\u00a0 Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., Coroner, Allegheny Countyauthor of Mortal Evidence and Tales from the Morgue \u201cAs a homicide and forensic expert I thoroughly enjoyed reading Dr. Zugibe\u2019s DISSECTING DEATH .\u00a0Sophisticated forensic enthusiasts will be thrilled to have this book as their reference as they delve into the intricacies of the medicolegal mysteries presented in television programming such as CSI, Law & Order, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.\u201d \u2014 Vernon J. Gerbeth, NYPD Lieutenant-Commander (ret.), Commanding Officer of the Bronx Homicide Task Force (ret.)\u00a0\u201cI was delighted to read Dissecting Death by such an extraordinary, talented forensic pathologist.\u00a0 Dr. Zugibe\u2019s Sherlock Holmesian analysis of difficult cases has solved the most \u2018insoluble\u2019 cases.\u00a0 This book is a thrilling drama.\u201d \u00a0\u2014 Enid Gilbert-Barness, M.D About the Author FREDERICK ZUGIBE, M.D., Ph.D., is the former chief medical examiner of Rockland County and remains one of the nation\u2019s most respected forensics experts. DAVID L. CARROLL has cowritten thirty-one books and produced twelve network television films. Both men live in Rockland County, New York. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER1Of Ice Men and the Lure of ForensicsThe great and constant need of those who investigate homicide and practice forensic pathology or criminal law is a warm humanism.--RAMSEY CLARK, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY GENERALSeeking truth to protect life.--MOTTO OF THE ROCKLAND COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER'S OFFICECORPSE BY THE WALLNyack, new york, is a historic hudson river valley town famous for its antique stores and sensible restaurants. People frequently make the twenty-mile drive up from New York City to spend a lazy afternoon drifting in and out of the town's quaint shops, or walking Nyack's network of shore trails that fronts the mighty Palisades. The house of the painter Edward Hopper is now a museum and a major tourist attraction. The cottage where the writer Carson McCullers died is frequently visited.Small Town, USA, but with a lot of polish. Not a neighborhood for gruesome frolics.Yet on a warm September day in 1983, along the heavily forested Clausland Mountain Road a quarter mile out of town, Patrolman Edwin Gonzalez, a Palisades Park police officer on morning patrol, spies a woman's blouse crumpled up near an old stone wall along the south side of the road.Patrolman Gonzalez gets out of his car to investigate.As he walks toward the blouse he notices an even more suspicious-looking object, a stuffed, heavy-duty garbage bag, the type contractors use to dispose of construction materials. The bag was apparently dumped over the wall, then rolled down a slight incline before stopping between two rocks. It is wrapped with a great deal of tape and rope. It gives off a rank odor and displays bulges where arms and feet and heads might be.The officer surveys the bag for several minutes, senses trouble, but knows how risky it can be, forensically speaking, to touch a suspicious piece of evidence. Since he is in the Orangetown district of Rockland County, he calls Lieutenant Youngman from the Orangetown Police to come over and investigate.Lieutenant Youngman is quickly on the scene.And he agrees, unwrapping the bag would be unsound procedure at this point. Nor is it necessary: circling the bundle, he notices a human foot jutting out from a hole in the bottom of the wrapping.Lieutenant Youngman calls the Rockland County Medical Examiner's Office. Since I am the chief medical examiner for the County of Rockland, it is my duty to examine the body on site, then transport it to the morgue for autopsy. I drive directly to the scene of the crime.The first sight that greets me as I approach the foul-smelling sack is a spotted garden snake slithering out from a hole in the bottom. Flies buzz around it crazily, and an army of carrion beetles marches in and out of small holes in the plastic, some carrying tiny packets of decomposed flesh.Now as most people know from media hullabaloos such as the O. J. Simpson trial, when police and medical examiners arrive at a crime scene the first few minutes spent examining a corpse and collecting evidence can make or break a case. Certainly, this scene is no exception. This body must be handled gingerly, or important evidence will be contaminated.Slowly, slowly is the watchword.STRANGE WRAPPINGS\"Slowly,\" it turns out, is an understatement.First, the County Sheriff's Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) arrives and sets to work taking pictures of the bag and of the wooded area surrounding it. As they position themselves here and there, snapping the crime scene from various angles, I stand nearby and study the bag. There is, every official at the site agrees, something puzzling about the way it is packaged.For starters, when a murdered body is dropped off, it is usually loosely trussed, unceremoniously stuffed into a cardboard box or barrel, then heaved into a deserted corner of the world such as a culvert or secluded woods.This bag, however, has been handled with extraordinary care. There is even a whimsical quality to the wrapping, almost as if it were a gift package. The person who performed the wrapping obviously did so with a great deal of flair, and this fact already provides clues concerning the perpetrator's personality.The murderer appears to be a careful, thorough person, who takes a kind of punctilious pride in his work--or perhaps her work; a person with deft hands and thus, perhaps, some manual or artistic skills; a person who knows, as a trained and alert professional killer might know, the importance of small details and the fact that one small, foolish mistake can tip your hand and lead to your arrest.Since photos are still being taken of the crime scene, it is too soon to touch the evidence or remove the body. It is apparent, though, that inside this bag are more bags, like boxes in boxes. Perhaps a number of them.Why so many? One bag is usually enough.And another singular fact. Over the years I have looked into many open graves and closets and metal drums, where there lay corpses in every conceivable stage of decay. The body invariably emits exactly the same noxious stench. Just as cedar wood always smells the same and cow dung always smells the same, so a dead body unfailingly puts forth the same recognizable odor.But though the stench emanating from this bag is offensive, it is different from the smell of any decomposing body I have ever encountered. Actually, I have never smelled anything quite like it in my entire career.All very puzzling.MORE STRANGE WRAPPINGSThe bundle is carefully lifted and driven back to the medical examiner's office, where we lay it out on the table and take X rays.The pictures confirm what we already know, that the bag contains a human body, entirely intact. They also reveal metallic fragments inside the skull.We now begin the slow, tedious process of unwrapping. Indeed, there are a number of bags inside the main bag--a staggering twenty of them, one inside the other. The inner bags appear older than the outer bags, and each sack has been secured with two-inch-wide plastic tape, then tied with small segments of clothesline. Beetles and other insects emerge from the packing as the plastic is unfolded. I see also that one arm on the corpse is taped tightly to the chest; the other has come loose, probably during the bagging and wrapping. The corpse's hands have been exposed to the elements or to some type of harsh environment, and both are dried and hardened--\"mummified,\" in forensic language.Finally, the last bag is removed, revealing the body of a heavyset Caucasian male. He is wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt with \"Royal Knight permanent press USA\" on the label. Also Haggar slacks and argyle socks. In his right front pants pocket he has $15 and a few coins. We carefully launder all his clothing and meticulously describe each item: its color, size, style, and labels. In the event that someone comes forward in the future to identify the remains, these clothes can be compared with the clothing the missing man was reportedly wearing when last seen alive.The victim in question appears to be middle-aged. Though his frame is shrunken, he probably stood around six feet tall when alive and weighed 200 pounds or more. While there are a number of forensic inconsistencies in his appearance, external observation suggests that he has been dead for three or four weeks.He also has a single bullet hole in the back of his head.THE ANATOMY OF AUTOPSYBefore I describe the autopsy that follows, some background information on autopsies in general is in order: how they provide us with useful information, the sequence of surgical and laboratory procedures we follow, and our pre-established goals. Autopsies have often played an important role, sometimes a central role, in helping me to understand and, we hope, solve a case. For people interested in forensic science and its sometimes esoteric methodologies, knowing a bit about the mechanics of body examination helps.During an autopsy, of course, a medical examiner's first mission is to identify the corpse on the table. But while our multibagged cadaver does not reveal his secrets so easily, as you will see, eventually his identity becomes the central axis around which this entire bizarre homicide turns.In general, I attempt to ID a corpse by recording a number of critical physical features that the victim's friends, family, and/or witnesses will recognize. These features include the victim's weight, height, build, sex, age, race, facial features, hair configuration and color, eye color, muscular development, skin color, clothing, jewelry, scars, tattoos, and physical malformations such as a clubfoot or a missing toe. When possible, fingerprints are also taken and matched with those in government and law enforcement fingerprint databases.Minute inspection of certain body parts often reveals vital information. Weatherworn, craggy hands, for instance, may belong to a laborer, especially one who works outdoors. Pink, smooth hands are indicative of nonmanual professions, often desk jobs. Dirty, unkempt hands tell one story; manicured, meticulously clean ones quite another. A large callus on the first and second knuckles of one or both hands usually belongs to a person who trains in the martial arts, especially karate. Calluses on the fingertips of the left hand mean this person plays the guitar or other stringed instrument; if the calluses are thick, this person may be a professional musician.If a body arrives in the morgue stripped of its flesh, I often call in specialists such as odontologists--forensic dentists--to examine and compare the victim's teeth against dental photographs listed in databases around the country. We may consult anthropologists adept at using skeletal remains to establish race, sex, age, size, body type, and so forth. When no other method of identification succeeds, forensic sculptors, studying what remains of the victim's cranial architecture, are... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "True Crime"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 16.9}, {"asin": "1542627737", "title": "Raking Light from Ashes", "author": "Relli Robinson", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Memoirs"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1421419289", "title": "The Sting of the Wild", "author": "Justin O. Schmidt", "description": "Review Schmidt's tales will prove infectiously engaging even to entomophobes.\u2015 Publishers Weekly On Schmidt's pain scale, this book rates a zero\u2015painless. On the pleasure scale, it rates a ten, a highly enjoyable read.\u2015 Natural History Readers who share my fascination with the natural world, and particularly those who revel in unusual animal facts, will love The Sting of the Wild .\u2015 Between the Covers An excellent book.\u2015 Newsweek A good read, with valuable evolutionary context for bees and their insect relatives interwoven with entertaining travel tales of an engaged entomologist.\u2015 American Bee Journal Even though the pain-laced topic might leave you wincing, Schmidt\u2019s engaging and entertaining writing makes for a tale worth reading.\u2015 Scientific American [Schmidt's] low-down on sting biochemistry and physiology is relentlessly zestful, even as he recounts the swelling, burning consequences of his curiosity.\u2015 Nature The Sting of the Wild is full of the stories of science of stings. Schmidt is an engaging writer, and his youthful enthusiasm for scary critters makes for a book that will sometimes scare you and sometimes make you double over with laughter . . . It\u2019s a masterpiece of nature writing.\u2015 Nature's Cool Green Science If you\u2019re interested in bugs of any kind, and especially the notorious ones, this book will entertain, educate, and excite.\u2015 Discover Magazine Not only does he explain his Schmidt Sting Pain Index, wherein he rates the pain of numerous stings on a scale of one to four, but he also relates the fascinating natural histories of these animals.\u2015 National Geographic Totally fascinating.\u2015 FiveThirtyEight The arms race that created the stinger hypodermic, and its biochemical warfare toxins, was a direct result of communal nesting, because the greater risk of predation demanded a formidable defensive strategy. This is the evolutionary theme through which the author lovingly interjects his own personal anecdotes.\u2015 BBC Wildlife Magazine It's hard to imagine a nature book being more fascinating and fun.\u2015 Virgin Radio UK In addition to providing colorful, connoisseur-grade descriptions of the pain caused by stings, The Sting of the Wild provides all sorts of information about stinging insects.\u2015 Newser Beautifully written . . . like nothing else you have ever read.\u2015 NPR's Science Friday Full of adventure, humor and Schmidt's impressive scholarship.\u2015 Redlands Daily Facts Schmidt, an entomologist at the Southwestern Biological Institute, is an excellent writer. He can write clear, engaging explanations of sting evolution and venom chemistry, as well as spin a good yarn about his adventures collecting stinging insects. I enjoyed his dry, judiciously applied, wit.\u2015 Pica Hudsonia The Sting of the Wild weaves [Schmidt's] theories about stinging insects through a narrative of his personal experiences digging in the dirt. For many readers, the highlight of the book will be the appendix, his celebrated Pain Scale for Stinging Insects, which rates the pain level of dozens of insect stings, an index he created mostly by firsthand experience, either by suffering stings incidentally during field research or, in some cases, by inducing them. Because stings of the same magnitude don\u2019t necessarily feel the same, Schmidt has written haiku-like descriptions for each of the 83 sting entries.\u2015 New York Times Magazine The Sting of the Wild is a delicate and highly refreshing glimpse into the private mind of a professional scientist. \u00a0\u2015 Times Literary Supplement Schmidt\u2019s story is really new, refreshing, and thoroughly entertaining.\u2015 Journal of Natural History This is an informative and engaging story about the fascinating lives behind the insects that you may just think of as very annoying visitors at picnics.\u2015 The Biologist [A] surprisingly joyful book. . . Schmidt does a good job of passing on his boundless enthusiasm for insects. The sting of the wild is an easy read, packed with chemistry and anecdotes.\u2015 Chemistry World The Sting of the Wild sheds light on the mysteries of stinging insects in a delightful and humorous narration. I recommend the book to every entomologist, ecologist, and naturalist interested in exploring the impressive world of Hymenoptera.\u2015 American Entomologist Anecdotes of field encounters with research subjects (and some incidentally encountered forest and desert coinhabitants) are woven throughout and bring readers close to what it feels like to be a field biologist. I will not spoil these dispatches fromthe front lines of venom, other than tomention that amongmy favorites were the author\u2019s adventures with a large Bushmaster snake (a tropical viper) at night in the rain forest, a venomspraying species of wasp nesting above a tropical cliff, and the giant Asian honey bee (again at night) with a team of lucky (?) coworkers. If this cast of animal characters piques your curiosity, I am confident you will thoroughly enjoy The Sting of the Wild.This volume represents the best kind of natural history writing\u2015a treasure trove of solid and fascinating biology cleverly disguised as a good read.\u2015 The Quarterly Review of Biology The Sting of the Wild is a great book for lay readers. Think of it as insect gossip, though verified gossip, of course. It has that convivial tone of sharing what's going on with the Jones, but the Jones are killer bees... You don't have to be a bug lover to enjoy The Sting of the Wild . I sure am not one, but nature is endlessly inventive and Schmidt knows how to make her inventions interesting and enjoyable.\u2015 Tonstant Weader You\u2019ll feel only pleasure and no pain when you read this captivating, accessible, and sometimes humorous account of Justin Schmidt\u2019s life with stinging insects; the wasps, ants, and bees. Schmidt recounts fascinating adventures and encounters of the stinging kind. Expect to be both informed and delighted as you read about his tales from the field and laboratory. This book is a must-read for naturalists, hikers, entomologists, and everyone who enjoys being outdoors.\u2015Stephen Buchmann, author of The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives It's no wonder Justin Schmidt is known as the 'Connoisseur of Pain' and 'The King of Sting.' As an entomologist who has savored the stings of insects from all over the world, from the bullet ant to the yellow jacket, Schmidt serves as the perfect guide to these tiny and exquisitely painful creatures. A fascinating blend of science, storytelling, and adventure, Sting of the Wild is a must-read for anyone who has ever looked at a wasp with wonder, but not dared to get too close. Justin Schmidt dared to get close, and, fortunately for us, he lived to tell the tale.\u2015Amy Stewart, New York Times bestselling author of Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects It is impossible to read this book without feeling things crawl up your leg or hearing angry buzzing. The world\u2019s greatest expert on insect stings describes his experiences with cow-killers, fire ants, yellow jackets, killer bees, giant hornets, and all those other pain-inflicting creatures, while offering an evolutionary account of their defenses.\u2015Frans de Waal, author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Review It is impossible to read this book without feeling things crawl up your leg or hearing angry buzzing. The world\u2019s greatest expert on insect stings describes his experiences with cow-killers, fire ants, yellow jackets, killer bees, giant hornets, and all those other pain-inflicting creatures, while offering an evolutionary account of their defenses. -- Frans de Waal Book Description The \u201cKing of Sting\u201d describes his adventures with insects and the pain scale that\u2019s made him a scientific celebrity. From the Inside Flap Entomologist Justin O. Schmidt is on a mission. Some say it's a brave exploration, others shake their heads in disbelief. His goal? To compare the impacts of stinging insects on humans, mainly using himself as the test case. In The Sting of the Wild , the colorful Dr. Schmidt takes us on a journey inside the lives of stinging insects. He explains how and why they attack and reveals the powerful punch they can deliver with a small venom gland and a \"sting,\" the name for the apparatus that delivers the venom. We learn which insects are the worst to encounter and why some are barely worth considering. The Sting of the Wild includes the complete Schmidt Sting Pain Index, published here for the first time. In addition to a numerical ranking of the agony of each of the eighty-three stings he's sampled so far, Schmidt describes them in prose worthy of a professional wine critic: \"Looks deceive. Rich and full-bodied in appearance, but flavorless\" and \"Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.\" Schmidt explains that, for some insects, stinging is used for hunting: small wasps, for example, can paralyze huge caterpillars for long enough to lay eggs inside them, so that their larvae emerge within a living feast. Others are used to kill competing insects, even members of their own species. Humans usually experience stings as defensive maneuvers used by insects to protect their nest mates. With colorful descriptions of each venom's sensation and a story that leaves you tingling with awe, The Sting of the Wild 's one-of-a-kind style will fire your imagination. Schmidt's tales will prove infectiously engaging even to entomophobes.-- Publishers Weekly Even though the pain-laced topic might leave you wincing, Schmidt's engaging and entertaining writing makes for a tale worth reading.-- Scientific American [Schmidt's] low-down on sting biochemistry and physiology is relentlessly zestful, even as he recounts the swelling, burning consequences of his curiosity.-- Nature On Schmidt's pain scale, this book rates a zero--painless. On the pleasure scale, it rates a ten, a highly enjoyable read.-- Natural History Readers who share my fascination with the natural world, and particularly those who revel in unusual animal facts, will love The Sting of the Wild .-- Between the Covers An excellent book.-- Newsweek The Sting of the Wild is full of the stories of science of stings. Schmidt is an engaging writer, and his youthful enthusiasm for scary critters makes for a book that will sometimes scare you and sometimes make you double over with laughter . . . It's a masterpiece of nature writing.-- Nature's Cool Green Science If you're interested in bugs of any kind, and especially the notorious ones, this book will entertain, educate, and excite.-- Discover Magazine Not only does he explain his Schmidt Sting Pain Index, wherein he rates the pain of numerous stings on a scale of one to four, but he also relates the fascinating natural histories of these animals.-- National Geographic Totally fascinating.-- FiveThirtyEight It's hard to imagine a nature book being more fascinating and fun.-- Virgin Radio UK In addition to providing colorful, connoisseur-grade descriptions of the pain caused by stings, The Sting of the Wild provides all sorts of information about stinging insects.-- Newser Beautifully written . . . like nothing else you have ever read.--NPR's Science Friday Full of adventure, humor and Schmidt's impressive scholarship.--Redlands Daily Facts Schmidt, an entomologist at the Southwestern Biological Institute, is an excellent writer. He can write clear, engaging explanations of sting evolution and venom chemistry, as well as spin a good yarn about his adventures collecting stinging insects. I enjoyed his dry, judiciously applied, wit.-- Pica Hudsonia The Sting of the Wild weaves [Schmidt's] theories about stinging insects through a narrative of his personal experiences digging in the dirt. For many readers, the highlight of the book will be the appendix, his celebrated Pain Scale for Stinging Insects, which rates the pain level of dozens of insect stings, an index he created mostly by firsthand experience, either by suffering stings incidentally during field research or, in some cases, by inducing them. Because stings of the same magnitude don't necessarily feel the same, Schmidt has written haiku-like descriptions for each of the 83 sting entries.-- New York Times Magazine A delicate and highly refreshing glimpse into the private mind of a professional scientist.-- Times Literary Supplement Schmidt's story is really new, refreshing, and thoroughly entertaining.-- Journal of Natural History This is an informative and engaging story about the fascinating lives behind the insects that you may just think of as very annoying visitors at picnics.-- The Biologist [A] surprisingly joyful book . . . Schmidt does a good job of passing on his boundless enthusiasm for insects. The Sting of the Wild is an easy read, packed with chemistry and anecdotes.-- Chemistry World The Sting of the Wild s heds light on the mysteries of stinging insects in a delightful and humorous narration. I recommend the book to every entomologist, ecologist, and naturalist interested in exploring the impressive world of Hymenoptera.-- American Entomologist A good read, with valuable evolutionary context for bees and their insect relatives interwoven with entertaining travel tales of an engaged entomologist.-- American Bee Journal Justin O. Schmidt is a biologist at Southwestern Biological Institute and is associated with the Department of Entomology at the University of Arizona. He is the coeditor of Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators . --Amy Stewart, New York Times bestselling author of Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army and Other Diabolical Insects \"Tonstant Weader\" From the Back Cover Entomologist Justin O. Schmidt is on a mission. Some say it\u2019s a brave exploration, others shake their heads in disbelief. His goal? To compare the impacts of stinging insects on humans, mainly using himself as the test case. In The Sting of the Wild , the colorful Dr. Schmidt takes us on a journey inside the lives of stinging insects. He explains how and why they attack and reveals the powerful punch they can deliver with a small venom gland and a \u201csting,\u201d the name for the apparatus that delivers the venom. We learn which insects are the worst to encounter and why some are barely worth considering. The Sting of the Wild includes the complete Schmidt Sting Pain Index, published here for the first time. In addition to a numerical ranking of the agony of each of the eighty-three stings he\u2019s sampled so far, Schmidt describes them in prose worthy of a professional wine critic: \u201cLooks deceive. Rich and full-bodied in appearance, but flavorless\u201d and \u201cPure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.\u201d Schmidt explains that, for some insects, stinging is used for hunting: small wasps, for example, can paralyze huge caterpillars for long enough to lay eggs inside them, so that their larvae emerge within a living feast. Others are used to kill competing insects, even members of their own species. Humans usually experience stings as defensive maneuvers used by insects to protect their nest mates. With colorful descriptions of each venom\u2019s sensation and a story that leaves you tingling with awe, The Sting of the Wild \u2019s one-of-a-kind style will fire your imagination. \"Schmidt's tales will prove infectiously engaging even to entomophobes.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Even though the pain-laced topic might leave you wincing, Schmidt\u2019s engaging and entertaining writing makes for a tale worth reading.\"\u2015 Scientific American \"[Schmidt's] low-down on sting biochemistry and physiology is relentlessly zestful, even as he recounts the swelling, burning consequences of his curiosity.\"\u2015 Nature \"On Schmidt's pain scale, this book rates a zero\u2015painless. On the pleasure scale, it rates a ten, a highly enjoyable read.\"\u2015 Natural History \"Readers who share my fascination with the natural world, and particularly those who revel in unusual animal facts, will love The Sting of the Wild .\"\u2015 Between the Covers \"An excellent book.\"\u2015 Newsweek \" The Sting of the Wild is full of the stories of science of stings. Schmidt is an engaging writer, and his youthful enthusiasm for scary critters makes for a book that will sometimes scare you and sometimes make you double over with laughter . . . It\u2019s a masterpiece of nature writing.\"\u2015 Nature's Cool Green Science \"If you\u2019re interested in bugs of any kind, and especially the notorious ones, this book will entertain, educate, and excite.\"\u2015 Discover Magazine \"Not only does he explain his Schmidt Sting Pain Index, wherein he rates the pain of numerous stings on a scale of one to four, but he also relates the fascinating natural histories of these animals.\"\u2015 National Geographic \"Totally fascinating.\"\u2015 FiveThirtyEight \"It's hard to imagine a nature book being more fascinating and fun.\"\u2015 Virgin Radio UK \"In addition to providing colorful, connoisseur-grade descriptions of the pain caused by stings, The Sting of the Wild provides all sorts of information about stinging insects.\"\u2015 Newser \"Beautifully written . . . like nothing else you have ever read.\"\u2015NPR's Science Friday \"Full of adventure, humor and Schmidt's impressive scholarship.\"\u2015Redlands Daily Facts \"Schmidt, an entomologist at the Southwestern Biological Institute, is an excellent writer. He can write clear, engaging explanations of sting evolution and venom chemistry, as well as spin a good yarn about his adventures collecting stinging insects. I enjoyed his dry, judiciously applied, wit.\"\u2015 Pica Hudsonia \" The Sting of the Wild weaves [Schmidt's] theories about stinging insects through a narrative of his personal experiences digging in the dirt. For many readers, the highlight of the book will be the appendix, his celebrated Pain Scale for Stinging Insects, which rates the pain level of dozens of insect stings, an index he created mostly by firsthand experience, either by suffering stings incidentally during field research or, in some cases, by inducing them. Because stings of the same magnitude don\u2019t necessarily feel the same, Schmidt has written haiku-like descriptions for each of the 83 sting entries.\"\u2015 New York Times Magazine \"A delicate and highly refreshing glimpse into the private mind of a professional scientist.\"\u2015 Times Literary Supplement \"Schmidt\u2019s story is really new, refreshing, and thoroughly entertaining.\"\u2015 Journal of Natural History \"This is an informative and engaging story about the fascinating lives behind the insects that you may just think of as very annoying visitors at picnics.\"\u2015 The Biologist \"[A] surprisingly joyful book . . . Schmidt does a good job of passing on his boundless enthusiasm for insects. The Sting of the Wild is an easy read, packed with chemistry and anecdotes.\"\u2015 Chemistry World \" The Sting of the Wild s heds light on the mysteries of stinging insects in a delightful and humorous narration. I recommend the book to every entomologist, ecologist, and naturalist interested in exploring the impressive world of Hymenoptera.\"\u2015 American Entomologist \"A good read, with valuable evolutionary context for bees and their insect relatives interwoven with entertaining travel tales of an engaged entomologist.\"\u2015 American Bee Journal Justin O. Schmidt is a biologist at Southwestern Biological Institute and is associated with the Department of Entomology at the University of Arizona. He is the coeditor of Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators . About the Author Justin O. Schmidt was a biologist at the Southwestern Biological Institute and is associated with the Department of Entomology at the University of Arizona. He is the coeditor of Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "0385682611", "title": "Creatures of the Rock: A Veterinarian's Adventures in Newfoundland", "author": "Andrew Peacock", "description": "Review Winner of the Newfoundland and Labrador Non-Fiction AwardFinalist for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour \u201c Creatures of the Rock is a truly great read about an astounding life-long adventure. Funny, heartfelt and so insightful I think I have a good shot at birthing a cow if called upon in an emergency.\u201d \u2014Rick Mercer\"Peacock writes with charm.\" \u2014 Toronto Star \u201cPeacock\u2019s keen ear for dialogue draws readers in and makes the stories come alive. . . . Peacock\u2019s wry humour contributes greatly to his storytelling. . . . An ode to his adopted province and the creatures he serves in his practice. Creatures of the Rock provides readers with the opportunity to learn something new and be entertained at the same time.\u201d \u2014Winnipeg Free Press \u201cPoignant and well-told.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \"Since 1970, when Alf Wight, under the pen name James Herriot, began his enormously successful All Creatures Great and Small series. . . others have tried to emulate his folksy, self-deprecating style. Peacock succeeds. His humorous anecdotes flow with an effortlessness that marks a true storyteller. . . . Downright hilarious.\" \u2014 Maclean's \u201cHis stories show the dark side of life as well as the charmingly light. . . . Readers will also enjoy the author\u2019s self-deprecating humour and fondness for colourful detail in stories that illuminate his deep regard and warmth for the people and places\u2014and animals\u2014of his adopted province.\u201d \u2014 Guelph Mercury \"Peacock uses humour, real-life drama to share rural Newfoundland with the world.\u201d \u2014 The Southern Gazette (Newfoundland)\u201cWondrous funny. Creatures of the Rock is a book for anyone who has ever loved an animal. These are astonishing stories, told with self-deprecating humour and deep affection for Newfoundland\u2019s creatures, great and small. Andrew Peacock inspires us to be curious, renews our sense of wonder, and reminds us that home is where the creatures are. A marvel of a book.\u201d \u2014Jessica Grant, author of Come, Thou Tortoise About the Author ANDREW PEACOCK was born in Toronto and raised in the town of Kapuskasing in northern Ontario. After finishing degrees in biology at Trent University and veterinary medicine at the University of Guelph he moved with his wife to the small fishing village of Freshwater on the island of Newfoundland. As a veterinarian he worked in a mixed animal practice in rural Newfoundland from 1982 until 2010. He is now retired from clinical practice and works for the Newfoundland and Labrador College of Veterinarians. Andrew and his wife previously owned an independent bookstore named \"Waterwords\" in the town of Carbonear. His family, writing, music, photography and love of the outdoors keep him very busy and happy.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Professionals & Academics"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 19.95}, {"asin": "1937226301", "title": "Canyon Sacrifice (National Park Mystery Series)", "author": "Scott Graham", "description": "Review \"Graham has created a beautifully balanced book, incorporating intense action scenes, depth of characterization, realistic landscapes, and historical perspective.\" \u2014 REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE \"This riveting series debut showcases Graham's love of nature and archeology, simultaneously interjecting some serious excitement. Graham is to be commended for weaving together several cultures into one story. Recommend to readers who enjoy Tony Hillerman, Nevada Barr, and C.J. Box's Joe Pickett series.\" \u2014 LIBRARY JOURNAL \"A gripping tale of kidnapping and murder\u2026in a style similar to mysteries by Tony Hillerman.\" \u2014 ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL \"Graham has created a story of richness and depth\u2026Graham's comfort and familiarity with his subject make the story an enjoyable read.\" \u2014 DURANGO HERALD \"A riveting mystery\u2026Graham takes readers intimately into the setting, his knowledge of the places he writes about apparent at every turn.\" \u2014 DURANGO TELEGRAPH \"A terrific debut novel.\" \u2014 C.J. BOX , New York Times bestselling author of Stone Cold \"The real star of this engrossing mystery novel is the Grand Canyon itself. Scott Graham clearly knows the territory. Graham delivers a glorious portrait of one of the most compelling landscapes on earth, a place that can kill just as easily as it thrills. This is a topnotch read.\" \u2014 WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER , New York Times bestselling author of Tamarack County \" Canyon Sacrifice delivers it all and then some.\" \u2014 MARGARET COEL , New York Times bestselling author of Killing Custer \"Bring an extra\u2013large bowl of popcorn while you read Sacrifice in one sitting.\" \u2014 C.M. WENDELBOE , author of Death on the Greasy Grass \"In this gripping, imaginative mystery set in Grand Canyon National Park, ancient Anasazi culture collides with the modern world in the most unexpected of ways. Like Tony Hillerman, Scott Graham uses his deep knowledge of the region to fashion a thrilling, compulsively readable story.\" \u2014 FRANK HUYLER , author of The Blood of Strangers \"As unpredictable and twisty as a switchback trail plummeting into its depths, Graham's thriller sucks you into the mysteries of the canyon and the story of an unsuspecting family whose lives will never be the same.\" \u2014 TED BOTHA , author of The Girl With the Crooked Nose \"Graham deftly weaves a first\u2013rate mystery through the caves and canyons and winding roads of the Grand Canyon. If you've been, you'll immediately be drawn into the story. If you've never been, this may be your motivation to buy the ticket! I can't wait to read which national park he tackles next!\" \u2014 TRICIA FIELDS , Hillerman Prize\u2013winning author of Scratchgravel Road About the Author SCOTT GRAHAM is the author of the acclaimed National Park Mystery series, featuring archaeologist Chuck Bender and Chuck's spouse, Janelle Ortega. In addition to the National Park Mystery series, Scott is the author of five nonfiction books, including Extreme Kids , winner of the National Outdoor Book Award. Scott is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys backpacking, river rafting, skiing, and mountaineering. He has made a living as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, radio disk jockey, and coal\u2013shoveling fireman on the steam\u2013powered Durango\u2013Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. He lives with his spouse, who is an emergency physician, in Durango, Colorado.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 11.39}, {"asin": "1566894077", "title": "The Little Free Library Book (Books in Action)", "author": "Margret Aldrich", "description": "Review \u201c The Little Free Library Book , a 200-page hardcover published by Minneapolis-based Coffee House Press and written by Twin Cities author Margret Aldrich, explains the history and the philosophy of LFL creator Todd Bol, stories of stewards around the world, tips for starting and curating a Little Library, building plans and 350 color photos of the most creative libraries.\u201d \u2015 Pioneer Press \u201c The Little Free Library Book is both an entertaining read and an inspiring one. Aldrich writes with a clear, journalistic ease. The prose is informative but shot through with an obvious affection for her subject.\u201d \u2015 Star Tribune \u201c[ The Little Free Library Book ] is the definitive guide to a phenomenon.\u201d \u2015 MinnPost \"In April, Coffee House Press in Minneapolis will publish The Little Free Library Book , a book that documents library owners from all over the world.\" \u2015 Chicago Tribune \u201cBoth primer and inspiration, a history & a guide for how to get involved\" \u2015 Los Angeles Times \u201cA charming book.\u201d \u2015 Isthmus \u201c[Margret Aldrich] profiles Little Free Libraries with distinct creative flair and the citizen librarians behind them.\u201d \u2015 The Capital Times \" The Little Free Library Book , is something entirely unique and exciting to read. . . . The Little Free Library Book has pictures galore for inspiration, how-to instructions for those looking to start their own LFL, and first hand experiences from Aldrich herself, as well as from founder Todd Bol, and from LFL stewards around the world.\u201d \u2015 Hazel & Wren \u201cBol\u2019s grassroots story and those of many Little Free Library caretakers are told in Margret Aldrich\u2019s delightful new book, The Little Free Library Book \u201d \u2015 SF Gate \u201cA beautiful coffee table book.\u201d \u2015 Book Riot \"Stewards across the globe can be found within the [Little Free Library Book's] pages, along with helpful how-to's for any question you can conjure, professional blueprints for building your own LFL, and photos of some of the coolest Libraries around.\" \u2015 Loft \u201cSay what you will about the current state of American society, we\u2019ve still got some small pockets of democratic beauty around our country.\u201d \u2015 Secrets of the City \u201cThe organization is also celebrating the launch of the The Little Free Library Book , which highlights the people behind the movement, written by Minneapolis-based author and Little Free Library steward Margaret Aldrich.\u201d \u2015 Bring Me The News \u201cNow that movement has it\u2019s own book chronicling the history of the idea, along with a collection of unusual and poignant firsthand stories from owners, and a resource guide for how to get the most out of your own Little Free Library. There are also a plethora of photos of unique and and inspired Little Free Libraries to spark your creative juices.\" \u2015 L'etoile \u201c Book Riot contributor Margret Aldrich\u2018s The Little Free Library Book , available for preorder, comes out from Coffee House Press. Isn\u2019t the cover beautiful? I need this book!\u201d \u2015 Book Riot \"Lovers of books and libraries will adore this title, as will readers interested in folk art or successful grassroots movements. Be warned, Little Free Libraries are sure to spring up wherever this book is available.\" \u2015 Library Journal, *starred review* \u201cThe Little Free Library Book is a colorful book that\u2019s nearly as charming as the tiny libraries themselves.\u201d \u2015 Isthmus \u201cTwenty-five thousand Little Free Libraries later, there\u2019s a handy coffee table book, The Little Free Library Book, that details some 300 colorful examples and blueprints for building your own.\u201d \u2015 Milwaukee Magazine \u201cMargret Aldrich chronicles the movement that began in 2009 with the simple concept of \u201ctake a book, return a book\u201d in The Little Free Library Book, which includes photos, helpful how-tos, and professional blueprints.\u201d \u2015 Experience Life Magazine \u201cWell-conceived and delightfully accessible . . . It\u2019s not a simple story, but Aldrich captures its idiosyncratic contours simply by telling the stories of stewards from around the world.\u201d \u2015 Public Art Review \u201c The Little Free Library Book offers a wonderful collection of stories and pictures of Libraries around the world\u2015why people got involved and how they have benefited. It also offers tips for builders, sponsors, organizers and users, and other projects that capitalize on the same values that make Little Free Libraries so successful.\u201d \u2015 Little Observationist \u201c[ The Little Free Library Book ] has wonderful photos, tells the history of the idea, and gives you some ideas to create your own little free library.\u201d \u2015 Tales from an Open Book About the Author Margret Aldrich is a freelance writer and editor. Her articles have appeared in the Utne Reader, Experience Life! , and elsewhere. She lives in Minneapolis with her family.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 30.04}, {"asin": "0807044881", "title": "A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa", "author": "Tony Bartelme", "description": "Review \u201cBartelme writes knowingly of the dedication of a valiant doctor determined to change how modern medicine interacts with the world.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cProblem solving, improvising, and expressing compassion permeate this unusual and fascinating chronicle.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cA lyrical, inspirational and altogether rewarding account of first- and third-world surgeons working together to perform neurosurgery miracles in the heart of Africa.\u201d\u2014Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation \u201c A Surgeon in the Village turns the modern philanthropic paradigm on its head. In this inspiring story of cultivating medical sustainability, Tony Bartelme teases out the human dimensions of neurosurgery and illustrates how connection and mentoring have the power to transform entire nations.\u201d\u2014Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear \u201cThis exceptionally well-written book, a compelling tribute to the human spirit and to generosity, brings into sharp focus the shortage of surgeons in sub-Saharan Africa. In poetic prose, Bartelme describes how a dedicated and caring mentor can transfer knowledge and neurosurgical skills to a Tanzanian clinician with little formal training so that the latter can perform simple neurosurgical procedures that save lives. This is a book that every student and practitioner of global surgery will find enjoyable and inspiring reading.\u201d\u2014Haile Debas, founding director of the University of California Global Health Institute\u201cIn A Surgeon in the Village , Tony Bartelme deftly weaves history and current affairs into a powerful story of redemption and hope. This book is a page-turner that will leave you transfixed and transformed.\u201d\u2014James M. Scott, 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor About the Author Tony Bartelme has received numerous national awards for his investigative reports, including honors by the Scripps Foundation, Sigma Delta Chi, and Gerald Loeb Foundation. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times, including the series that is the basis for A Surgeon in the Village , which he spent four years researching and writing. He was the recipient of a 2011 Harvard University Nieman Fellowship and is a graduate of Northwestern University\u2019s Medill School of Journalism. He is senior projects reporter for the Post and Courier , in Charleston, South Carolina, where he lives.", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 23.32}, {"asin": "0374154775", "title": "The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War", "author": "Joanne B. Freeman", "description": "Review A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 An NPR Best Book of 2018 One of Smithsonian's Best History Books of 2018 Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Semifinalist for the PEN/ John Kenneth Galbraith Award \"Given the enormous literature on the Civil War era, it\u2019s difficult for a historian to say something genuinely new, but Freeman has managed to do just that . . . Freeman is a meticulous researcher and a vivid writer, and The Field of Blood makes for entertaining reading.\" \u2015Eric Foner, The London Review of Books \"An impressive feat of research . . . Freeman's story [. . .] has elements of both horror and slapstick . . . The Field of Blood [. . . ] feels current. The political discourse it documents, if not the level of political violence, is alarmingly familiar in our own time . . .\" \u2015Andrew Delbanco, The Nation \"Superb . . . Freeman has written a smartly argued, diligently researched, even groundbreaking book.\" \u2015Eric Herschtal, The New Republic \"Absorbing, scrupulously researched . . . Freeman uncovers the brawls, stabbings, pummelings, and duel threats that occurred among United States congressmen during the three decades just before the Civil War.... Men and women crowded the Congressional galleries with the expectation of seeing entertaining outbreaks, much the way fans of professional wrestling or hockey do today . . . But Freeman never loses sight of the fact that fighting in Congress was far more than a sport.\" \u2015David S. Reynolds, The New York Times Book Review \u201cA superb, serious, authoritative, lively, occasionally amusing work of scholarly bravura . . . Freeman\u2019s research is prodigious, her scholarship unimpeachable. By shifting her gaze from the conventionally cited causes of the Civil War, she has deepened our understanding of its coming. \u201d \u2015James M. Banner, Jr., The Weekly Standard \"Fascinating . . . [ Field of Blood ] demonstrates the historic truth of an observation by black activist H. Rap Brown in the 1960s: \u2018Violence is a part of America\u2019s culture; it is as American as cherrypie.\u2019 . . . [Joanne B.] Freeman\u2019s book goes far toward explaining why there was a Civil War.\" \u2015 H.W. Brands, The Wall Street Journal \"In her vivid and remarkable new book . . . Joanne B. Freeman puts dozens of forgotten episodes of political violence into stark context . . . Freeman's wry touch and appreciation for the absurdities of politics \u2013 and politicians \u2013 give the book a burst of energy and readability. Most vitally, the story she tells has heightened relevance in our own tumultuous era.\" \u2015Randy Dotinga, Christian Science Monitor \"Freeman's research, both archival and secondary, is stunning ... [her] prose is clear and accessible ... [a] superb volume, which should stand for years as one of the most important books on the antebellum era.\" \u2015Douglas R. Egerton, Civil War Book Review \u201cCompelling and enlightening . . . Freeman\u2019s pathbreaking book should be read by anyone interested in Congress, the Civil War or American history in general.\u201d \u2015Roger Bishop, BookPage \u201cLeavened by the author\u2019s wry wit, the book is a page turning triumph of narrative history, deeply researched and persuasively argued. It explains, more lucidly than ever before, \u201cthe wrenching experience of plotting a political path in a nation behind torn in two.\u201d \u2015Brian Matthew Jordan, New York Journal of Books \u201cWith narrative flair and scholarly gravitas, Joanne Freeman has given us a powerful and original account of a ferociously divided America. For readers who think things in the first decades of the 21st century have never been worse, Freeman\u2019s portrait of a tempestuous and tumultuous U.S. Congress offers a sobering and illuminating corrective. She shows us that the battles of the Civil War began not at Fort Sumter but in the U.S. Capitol, providing a new and compelling angle of vision on the origins of what Lincoln called our \u2018fiery trial.\u2019\u201d \u2015Jon Meacham, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The American Lion \u201cIn 1861, Americans grimly set to slaughtering the better part of a million of their fellow citizens. It was the most extraordinary break in the nation\u2019s history\u2015and Joanne Freeman charts its approach in an extraordinary new way. With insightful analysis and vivid detail, she explores the human relationships among congressmen before the Civil War, and finds a culture of astonishing violence. In fistfights, duels, and mass brawls, her innovative account detects steps toward disunion\u2015and changes how we think about political history.\u201d \u2015T.J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer\u2019s Trials \u201cJoanne B. Freeman\u2019s erudition\u2015and humor\u2015are their own accomplishment, but it\u2019s remarkable a masterful work on the disruptive state of the Union arrives precisely at this time. There could be no better guide. I\u2019m left wondering whether America is in a state of disrepair or still in the process of being born.\u201d \u2015Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family \u201cThose who deplore the hyperpartisanship and decline of civility in contemporary American politics as unprecedented need to know more history. As Joanne Freeman makes clear in this compelling account, party strife, personal honor, and above all the slavery controversy brought unparalleled mayhem to the floors of Congress in the generation before the Civil War. Southern bullying and growing Northern resistance in the House and Senate foreshadowed the battlefields of 1861-1865.\u201d \u2015 James McPherson, emeritus professor of history Princeton University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom \u201cJoanne Freeman puts us on the tumultuous and touchy floor of Congress during its most contentious and momentous years. In a story researched and written with bold energy, she chronicles a young America brawling its way toward war. The personalities and conflicts of long-forgotten duels and fights leap to life, speaking to our own time with surprising relevance.\u201d \u2015Edward L. Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom , winner of the Lincoln Prize \u201cJoanne Freeman of Yale calls attention to the scandalously frequent role of violence in the United States Congress across 28 tense years culminating in the Civil War. She describes many varieties of Congressional violence, including bullying, fighting in the halls of Congress, fisticuffs, guns, knives, duels and threats of duels. With painstaking research, she penetrates the conspiracy of silence imposed by sources frequently reluctant to publicize the embarrassing truth. The reader is surprised that such an important story should have waited so long to be told.\u201d \u2015Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of What Hath God Wrought \u201cCongress in the 19th Century was a violent place to work. Legislators let out their sectional rage on each other, throwing punches and wielding weapons, in an institution that made our current politics look downright tame. In her riveting narrative, Joanne Freeman unpacks this volatile world to explain why the relations between elected officials became so brutal.\u201d \u2015Julian Zelizer is a political historian at Princeton University and author of The Fierce Urgency of Now \"[Freeman] excavates a little-discussed aspect of American history in this scholarly but brisk and accessible account . . . French\u2019s long-standing friendship with the unmemorable Franklin Pierce provides fresh insight into the political culture of the time, and the descriptions of the tragicomic Cilley-Graves duel and the horrific caning of Charles Sumner are detailed and thoughtful . . . Freeman grants followers of modern politics a look back at another fascinating, impassioned period of change in which Congress became full of 'distrust, defensiveness, and degradation,' mimicking the constituents at home.\" \u2015 Publisher's Weekly \"A finely researched and well-written examination of the often overlooked legislative breakdown that preceded the Civil War.\" \u2015 Booklist \"A thought-provoking and insightful read for anybody interested in American politics in the lead up to the Civil War.\" \u2015 Library Journal (Starred Review) About the Author Joanne B. Freeman , a professor of history and American studies at Yale University, is a leading authority on early national politics and political culture. Author of the award-winning Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and editor of The Essential Hamilton and Alexander Hamilton: Writings , she is a cohost of the popular history podcast BackStory .", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 25.2}, {"asin": "B00CNIN1WQ", "title": "What a Picture's Worth (Creative Woman Mysteries)", "author": "Susan Page Davis", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 15.6}, {"asin": "1250028485", "title": "The Woman Who Couldn't Scream: A Novel (The Virtue Falls Series, 4)", "author": "Christina Dodd", "description": "Review Praise for The Woman Who Couldn't Scream: \"Dodd's new title delivers complex storytelling, a rollicking pace, and surprising twists and turns, plus sly humor, a touch of the supernatural, and a full cast of interesting and diverse characters. Readers will be thrilled to get back to Virtue Falls.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Tense, taut, and beautifully paced, this latest addition to Dodd's series is another stunner; it will appeal to romance and suspense fans alike.\" \u2015 Library Journal ( starred review) Praise for Because I\u2019m Watching: \u201c Two emotionally damaged characters find hope, self-forgiveness, and love in this exquisitely crafted, modern version of Gaslight that hooks readers and keeps them mesmerized until the end. A chilling and gripping tale, beautifully done.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal (starred review) \"Romantic suspense favorite Dodd heads back to Virtue Falls for another smart, dramatic mystery that will keep readers flipping pages until the very end, with unexpected twists, psychological tension, and emotional depth...Another Virtue Falls winner.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Praise for Obsession Falls: \u201cDodd delivers another white-knuckle tale of romantic suspense...The plot\u2019s twists and turns are handled with a positively Hitchcockian touch, while the brilliantly etched characters, polished writing, and unexpected flashes of sharp humor are pure Dodd.\u201d \u2015 Booklist (starred review) \u201cThis one is impossible to put down. A remarkable, mesmerizing series.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal (starred review) Praise for Virtue Falls: \"A winning read. Intense and suspenseful, with touches of romance, humor and mysticism.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Mega talent Dodd returns with a truly stunning work of mystery, danger and romance.\" \u2015 Romantic Times (Top Pick)\u201cDodd slowly ratchets up the suspense level to the breaking point, while introducing readers to the diverse and quirky characters\u2026a nail-biting book.\u201d \u2015 Booklist From the Author Connect with Christina Dodd Amazon - Follow me at the Christina Dodd page amazon.com/-/e/B001H6TZG6 About the Author New York Times bestseller Christina Dodd writes \"Edge-of-the-seat suspense.\" --(Iris Johansen) with \"brilliantly etched characters, polished writing, and unexpected flashes of sharp humor that are pure Dodd.\" (ALA Booklist) Her 55+ books\u00a0have been called \"Scary, sexy, and smartly written\" by Booklist, and much to her mother's delight, Dodd was once a clue in the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle.\u00a0Enter Christina's worlds\u00a0at christinadodd.com\u00a0and join her mailing list for humor, book sales and entertainment (yes, she's the proud author with the infamous three-armed cover.) Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.97}, {"asin": "0425224570", "title": "Fatal Fixer-Upper (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery)", "author": "Jennie Bentley", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Like an ornate Victorian house, Bentley's debut mystery is built on a solid foundation but winds up laden with gewgaws and light on practical basics. New York textile designer Avery Marie Baker inherits a run-down New England manse from a reclusive aunt who died under mysterious circumstances. Avery is little and cunning and pouts a lot, and she's about as bright as her boy friend's crowbar. She instantly suspects dislikable people of having a hand in her aunt's death, while completely missing blatant clues pointing to the killer. Avery soon winds up in predictable anticlimactic peril, waiting for buff handyman Derek Ellis to rescue her. The characters and the town are charming, but without any real suspense\u2014except whether Avery can convince Derek to let her mosaic tile the kitchen counter\u2014there's no substance to the mystery. (Nov.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \"A terrific new series.\"\u2014Diana Killian, author of Death in a Difficult Position \"Original, adorable, fast-paced and fun...Jennie Bentley is a charming new voice.\"\u2014Hank Phillippi Ryan, author of Say No More Review Nashville author Jennie Bentley's new novel Fatal Fixer-upper offers the first adventure of arguably the most unlikely sleuth imaginable. Crime solving isn't exactly Avery Baker's forte. Not only is she not a former or current police officer, detective or private investigator, but Baker's not even interested in reading mystery fiction, let alone being in the center of a case. She's been a New York textile designer, but now her passion is home renovation. The current target is her aunt's crumbling home, which she first has to clean up before putting it on the market. While she'd prefer to just unload the property, and has even found someone who will buy it immediately, her motivation changes once she discovers how much its value will increase with just a few strategic repairs. But just as things get moving regarding the renovation, and Baker's found a new ally in handyman Derek Ellis, her life gets turned upside down. It seems that there's more to her aunt's dilapidated dwelling than just a house falling apart. There's a connection between her aunt's property and a professor who disappeared under questionable circumstances. Baker becomes more curious as she begins finding clues linking the house and the missing man, even though she sometimes just stumbles on them because she's far from a polished investigator. However, Baker is good enough to soon begin unraveling the truth, and that subsequently gets her life threatened. Fatal Fixer-upper doesn't unfold like a standard mystery yarn. Bentley develops the character of Ellis while supplying a solid and clever crime caper. Baker can be impulsive, shrewd, stubborn or misguided, and her sense of adventure can be a plus one minute and a major detriment the next. Bentley also offers plenty of detail and information about the personalities of home renovators, showing that often fixing a home can be an exasperating, difficult task. Baker's already uncertain about handling a property in her family, and once other problems begin surfacing, she's even more concerned. Billed as a \"do-it-yourself mystery,\" Fatal Fixer-upper smartly blends investigative drama, sexual tension and romantic comedy elements, and marks the start of what looks like an outstanding series of Avery Baker cases.Billed as a \"do-it-yourself mystery,\" Fatal Fixer-upper smartly blends investigative drama, sexual tension and romantic comedy elements, and marks the start of what looks like an outstanding series of Avery Baker cases. Review 4 1/2 stars ...the mystery is unusually strong. Home renovation and design tips are skillfully worked into the story, the characters are developed and sympathetic, and the setting is charming. The climax leads to a bang-up ending in which the intelligent heroine has to either save herself or lose all... A missing professor, disappearing antiques and old secrets all combine for a first-rate mystery and a frightening surprise ending. Review Avery Baker has an idyllic life: great job, great guy, rent-controlled apartment in New York City. When she gets a letter from a 90-something relative in Maine - it mentions family secrets and the need to set things right - Avery isn't eager to head north. But her boss/beau gives her time off and she heads to main in a rented car. Upon arrival in Waterfield, however, Avery discovers that Great Aunt Inga is dead and a handwritten will names Avery as sole heir - heir to a Victorian monstrosity that needs lots of TLC to enhance its marketability. Avery strikes a deal with a local renovator (a real hunk and single) to work with her to restore Aunt Inga's home. In between removing wallpaper and old linoleum, Avery uncovers what may be the family secrets Aunt Inga's letter referred to. Soon Avery comes to believe the old lady's death was something other than the accident it was ruled. She also discovers a link between Aunt Inga and a missing college professor. Like many heroines in cozy mystery series, Avery begins her adventure in detection upon receiving a surprise inheritance - in that way it's reminiscent of Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity mysteries. And like them, Fatal Fixer-Upper is definitely in super-cozy territory with no real \"on-screen\" violence. Fatal Fixer-Upper's polished writing and well-paced story set it a notch or two above many first novels. Some books take awhile to get into - but I was hooked on Fatal Fixer-Upper from page one. I particularly appreciate the author's ability to make do with a small cast -- so many first-time authors overpopulate their books. Fatal Fixer-Upper is a fun read that's just the ticket when readers crave escapism.If you find yourself renting Miss Marple DVDs or you still get chills when you hear the Mystery theme song, Nashvillian Jennie Bentley has written a book for you. Fatal Fixer-Upper is a cozy whodunit with many elements familiar to fans of Agatha Christie or Murder, She Wrote. Spooky old house? Check. A professor's mysterious disappearance? Check. Romance with a strapping handyman? Check. About the Author Jennie Bentley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Do-It-Yourself Mysteries. The Prime Crime home renovation series features textile designer Avery Baker and her handyman boyfriend, Derek Ellis, who renovate houses in Maine. She also writes under the name Jenna Bennett. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1558216707", "title": "Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men", "author": "Donald McCaig", "description": "From the Back Cover There is a Scottish saying: \"There is no good flock without a good shepherd, and there is no good shepherd without a good dog.\" Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men is the story of Donald McCaig's search through rural Scotland for just the right sheepdog to bring back to his farm in America. Beyond the vivid stories of his Scottish travels, McCaig delves into the mysterious pact between dog and man, which involves trust and deep communication. Traveling from town to town to competitions and farms, meeting shepherds and trainers, McCaig introduces us to unforgettable animal and human characters. This is a book not only for dog lovers, but for anyone interest in the communication and trust between animal and human. (6 X 9, 240 pages, b&w photos)", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.9}, {"asin": "0385542704", "title": "The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)", "author": "DR. LUCY JONES", "description": "Review *An Amazon Best Science Book of 2018* \u201cIn The Big Ones , Jones presents the history of natural disasters as the history of ourselves; looking back as a way to look forward.\u201d \u2014 Los Angeles Times \u201cThis incredible book by leading seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones shows just how influential natural disasters are on life as we know it.\u201d \u2014 Chicago Review of Books (The Best Nature Writing of 2018 So Far) \u201c[A] bracing examination\u2026This work could prove beneficial to all who live in an area prone to natural disasters, which is just about everyone.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cFor all her impressive expertise, Jones delivers a very accessible book\u2014without sacrificing the scientific content, the text is sprinkled with relatable analogies to help readers better understand some of the more technical geological processes...Touching on environmental science, history, sustainability, plate tectonics, engineering, and design, this book is sure to have broad appeal.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cLively and provocative.\u201d \u2014 Los Angeles Review of Books \u201cJones is a gifted storyteller, making complex geologic concepts accessible and having fun along the way . . . And she provides hope that, when disaster strikes, communities will persevere.\u201d \u2014 Shelf Awareness \u201cJones\u2019 fascinating book takes a long view at natural events in order to help us understand our environment and to prepare for and survive natural disasters.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201cSeismologist Lucy Jones deploys arresting details to brilliant effect throughout The Big Ones .\u201d \u2014 Maclean\u2019s \" The Big Ones is a timely and essential remembrance of how natural disasters have changed the world in dramatic ways. Lucy Jones is a first-rate storyteller and fine researcher.\" \u2014 Douglas Brinkley , New York Times bestselling author of Rightful Heritage and The Great Deluge \u201cNobody does a better job of explaining the science of disasters and the psychology of humans than Lucy Jones. This book is priceless\u2014both as a history and a prophecy.\u201d \u2014 Amanda Ripley , New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World and The Unthinkable About the Author DR. LUCY JONES was a seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey for thirty years, most recently as Science Advisor for Risk Reduction. She created the Great ShakeOut Drill, an earthquake preparation experiment that by 2016 included 53 million participants around the world. A research associate at Caltech, she holds a PhD in geophysics from MIT and a BA in Chinese language and literature from Brown University. She lives in Southern California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Brimstone and Fire from out of Heaven Pompeii, Roman Empire, AD 79 The earth rocked and shook, the bases of the mountains trembled and reeled because of God\u2019s anger. \u2014\u00adPsalm 18 We all know the story of Pompeii. An eruption of poisonous gases and heavy ash covered the Roman city some two thousand years ago, burying people in their houses, completely wiping out the city in a matter of days. We look back and see the inevitability of the destruction and pity the inhabitants for not knowing better. Who would build a city on the side of an active volcano? Tourists today visit what might be considered a parable for what happens when you build a community without regard for the threats around you, preserved for our edification and amusement. We assure ourselves we wouldn\u2019t make the same mistake.Mount Vesuvius is a classic conical volcano rising over four thousand feet above the Bay of Naples. Its shape tells geologists much of what is going on inside. The massive cone demonstrates that lava comes out faster than erosion can wash it away, so it is active now and future eruptions are a certainty on the scale of geologic time. To rise up and form a mountain as it has, and not just flow as a liquid over the landscape, the lava must be fairly sticky (or viscous, to use the technical term). The sticky lava can hold in gases, at least for a while. That means that eruptions can be explosive. Alternating layers of volcanic ash, the result of explosive eruptions, and cooled lava are needed to grow the tallest mountains\u2014\u00ada type called stratovolcanoes.So why build a city here, where the danger is so great? For the same reason that Seattle lies in the shadow of Mount Rainier, Tokyo looks up to Mount Fuji, and Jakarta is encircled by five active volcanoes, including Krakatau: when they aren\u2019t erupting, volcanoes make great homes. Volcanic soils are porous with good drainage and lots of fresh nutrients, producing fertile crops. Deformation of the rocks around a volcano often creates good natural harbors and defensible valleys. Plate tectonics might guarantee that the next event will happen, but which generation will experience the extreme event is determined by chance. And to most human beings, as to the inhabitants of Pompeii in AD 79: if it hasn\u2019t happened to me, it simply hasn\u2019t happened.*Vesuvius\u2019s eruption in the sixth century BC led the Osci tribes of that region, and the Roman conquerors who followed, to declare it the home of the god Vulcan. The periodic steam rising from it was a reminder that Vulcan was the smith of the gods, forging their weapons in a celestial furnace. But the volcanic soil was fertile, holding water and supporting some of the richest agriculture of the Roman empire, and so civilization flourished. Six hundred years without an eruption had made Vesuvius seem the definition of safe.By the beginning of the first century AD, several towns had been built on the side of the volcano, including Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Misenum. The region had been conquered by Rome in the third century BC, and it had become a flourishing, prosperous community. Excavations have found the remains of a thriving commercial center. Frescoes celebrate the craftsmen who wove and dyed cloth, a major local industry. A sprawling, open-\u00adair marketplace has been uncovered, complete with restaurants and snack bars. Tax records show that Pompeii\u2019s vineyards were much more productive than those around Rome and their wine was sold across the Empire. (The first known product brand based on a pun is from Pompeii, a jar of wine labeled \u201cVesuvinum.\u201d)Wealthy Romans had villas constructed in the area to come enjoy the seaside. Large public markets, houses of worship, and government buildings reflect a community living well above simple subsistence. Many of the houses excavated in Pompeii are spacious and elegant. Beds were found carved out of marble. Some houses had their own baths, and public baths served the community with water brought in from the Roman aqueduct system. Situated at the end of the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii, even then, hosted the glitterati.It is from this culture that we get our word disaster \u2014\u00adliterally, \u201cill-\u00adstarred.\u201d To Romans, disasters happened because their fate had been written in the stars. The random nature of disasters, relative to the scale of one human lifetime, creates such a level of fear that all human cultures have come up with some means for ascribing meaning to them. When Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar , gives Cassius the line \u201cThe fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves,\u201d he is speaking against a cultural norm that finds explanation of the unexpected in our fates.Romans were in the hands not just of destiny but of their capricious gods. Like the Greek before it, Roman mythology portrayed the gods as selfish, careless entities, albeit very powerful ones. Disasters happened to an individual because he got in the way of a spat between these powerful beings. Vulcan, the god of fire, was not physically attractive, but he had been given Venus, the goddess of love, to be his wife. Volcanic eruptions, then, were a sign of his anger when he found out about one of Venus\u2019s infidelities.This may have provided an explanation for volcanic episodes, but it was not a particularly reassuring one. It left the people powerless in the face of petty gods and their tantrums. So they attempted to soothe Vulcan\u2014\u00adto reclaim a sense of control\u2014\u00adin their annual feast honoring him. Vulcan represented fire both in its beneficial uses, such as metalsmithing, and in its destructive power, such as in volcanoes and wildfires (the more common threat to grain storage in the heat of the summer). So with the Vulcanalia, held every year on August 23, they placated the god, offering bonfires and sacrifices to keep destruction from being visited upon their harvest.In AD 79, as the Vulcanalia was being celebrated by unwitting residents of Pompeii, Vesuvius was entering the final phase of what would be one of its largest eruptions. Our knowledge of the eruption comes from two sources. One is, of course, the evidence preserved in the city of Pompeii itself, fifteen miles outside Naples. The ash from the eruption buried the city over the course of a few weeks, completely destroying the community. Ninety percent of the residents escaped alive, but they abandoned the region, and the existence of the city was almost forgotten. The site was rediscovered and excavated in the eighteenth century, including the corpses of the residents who did not escape.The second source is a young Roman scholar, Pliny, called the Younger, who wrote letters that have come down to us describing the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, during the eruption. The younger and elder Plinys were part of Rome\u2019s minor aristocracy, both holding the rank of equestrian , entitled to be a knight in the army, and were originally from the Lake Como region in northern Italy. Pliny the Elder served in the Roman army, primarily in Germany, for the first two decades of his adulthood. He never married, but his widowed sister came to live with him after he left the army, along with her young son. The son was adopted by his uncle and took his name, and thus came to be called Pliny the Younger. Pliny the Elder was famous in Rome both for his writings and for his close relationship with the emperor Vespasian. While in the army, he wrote a history of the German wars, with details like how to use a horse\u2019s movements to fight with a javelin more effectively. In his later diplomatic career as a ruler of various provinces, he collected information about the history of the regions and their natural \u00adfeatures.Two years before the eruption, Pliny the Elder published his thirty-\u00adseven-\u00advolume Naturalis Historiae , \u201cOn Natural History,\u201d often called the first encyclopedia. It represented his observations as he traveled the Empire, creating one of the largest literary works to come down to us from Roman times. In the preface, he says that \u201cto be alive is to be watchful,\u201d and we see that passion in the breadth of topics he catalogs. From a modern scientist\u2019s perspective, he may seem a bit credulous (as in, for example, his description of monstrous races of people with the heads of dogs). But he also shows a scientist\u2019s passion for knowledge. He finishes his final volume with the words \u201cGreetings, Nature, mother of all creation, show me your favor in that I alone of Rome\u2019s citizens have praised you in all your aspects.\u201d He seems to have been obsessive about his work, often choosing writing over sleep.In AD 77, in addition to the release of his On Natural History , Pliny the Elder was appointed by the emperor to be head of the Roman fleet berthed in the Bay of Naples. The Pliny household moved to Misenum, at the mouth of the Bay of Naples. From their villa, they had a commanding view of Mount Vesuvius on the other side of the bay. Pliny the Elder directed fleet operations as he worked on revisions to his Natural History . Pliny the Younger was completing his legal training, studying with his uncle, and becoming a prolific chronicler himself.After the centuries of quiet, the latter part of the first century had seen an increase in earthquakes, with a particularly severe one in AD 62. That earthquake had damaged quite a few houses in Pompeii (even in AD 79, some of them were still being repaired).Numerous earthquakes were felt and recorded in the next decade, and people began accepting them as a normal part of life. At the Vulcanalia celebrations on August 23, AD 79, Pliny the Younger\u2019s journal entry noted several earthquakes occurring during the day, but he thought nothing of them, \u201cas earthquakes are common in [the region of] Campagnia.\u201d We now know that magma must move from the magma chamber, often several miles deep in the earth, to the surface for an eruption to occur. That movement can be marked by earthquakes, bulging of the earth\u2019s surface, and gas emissions. It can take months, years, or even decades before enough pressure has been built to cause an eruption. (This makes volcanic eruptions more likely to be predicted than many other geological \u00adphenomena.)The next day, August 24, the lives of everyone in Campagnia were turned on end. A little after noon, Vesuvius exploded violently, sending a column of gas and ash high into the sky. Both Plinys observed this from across the Bay of Naples. The Younger wrote, \u201cI cannot give you a more exact description of its appearance than by comparing to a pine tree; for it shot up to a great height in the form of a tall trunk, which spread out at the top as though into branches.\u201dTrue to form, Pliny the Elder wanted to see the eruption more closely. He started arranging for vessels of the fleet to help with evacuations and to take him across the bay to make more detailed observations. Pliny the Younger wisely chose to stay at the villa and continue with his schoolwork. As preparations were under way, the Elder received a message from a noblewoman friend whose villa sat in Stabiae at the foot of Vesuvius, begging him to help them escape. He dispatched the galleys to Herculaneum, but he himself took a \u201cfast-\u00adsailing cutter.\u201d As they approached Herculaneum, cinders and ash fell so heavily that the ship\u2019s pilot advised returning to Misenum. Pliny replied that \u201cfortune favors the brave,\u201d ordering the pilot to sail for Stabiae, where his friend lived. Winds whipped up by the eruption brought the cutter into port but then made it impossible to leave.Pliny\u2019s friend and her household were terrified by the eruption and the inability of the ship to navigate the rough seas roiled by the turmoil of the eruption. In her villa, Pliny tried to reassure his friends by feasting, bathing, and sleeping while waiting for the winds to abate. But as the eruption grew worse, it became clear that the winds were not dying down. (They were in fact being generated by the eruption itself, although Pliny obviously did not know that.) They decided to try again to get the ship to sea. They ventured back to the shore with pillows tied to their heads to protect them from the falling volcanic ash and molten rock. The sea was still too rough to board the ships, and the air was so foul as to make breathing difficult. Pliny the Elder was overcome and fell to the ground, unable to rise. His friends finally abandoned him and boarded the ship. They were able to escape and thus give the tale to Pliny the Younger. The friends returned three days later and found the body of Pliny the Elder under ash but with no obvious injury. Most scholars have decided he died from a heart attack, perhaps triggered by noxious gases. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Earth Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "0983296219", "title": "Airplanes in the Garden: Monarch Butterflies Take Flight (A Mom's Choice Award Recipient)", "author": "Joan Z. Calder", "description": "Review Thumbs up! A delightful story with splendid illustrations, sure to delight and intrigue all young monarch lovers. --Dr. Robert Michael Pyle, author of Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of PassageA story that will entertain while it educates children about the magic and mysterious world of monarch butterflies. Creating awareness and empathy at an early age is our best bet for the protection of these fragile wonders of nature. --Nick de Pencier, Director, PBS's NOVA: The Incredible Journey of the ButterfliesQuiel's beautifully designed illustrations are fresh, vibrant, playful, and eye-catching perfect for capturing the imagination of children of all ages. --Nita Leland, author of Exploring Color and The New Creative Artist From the Inside Flap Airplanes in the Garden: Monarch Butterflies Take Flight sees the world through the eyes of an imaginative young girl who adopts two monarch caterpillars in her family garden, and lets her imagination fly as she follows them through metamorphosis. The tale of Sergio and Stanley, transforming from caterpillars into colorful butterflies, promises to entertain readers of all ages.  The book includes an informative section, with maps of the amazing monarch migration, helpful tips to grow your own butterfly-friendly garden, and a lovely song by Rebecca Troon. About the Author Joan Z. Calder, author, horticulturist, and garden designer, manages the campus greenhouse at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also nurtures a butterfly garden.\u00a0She grew up learning about gardening on a dairy farm in Cato, Wisconsin.\u00a0Calder travels the U.S. to educate the public about monarch migration and the importance of conserving their habitat. The author currently resides in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband, John, and many caterpillars. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.47}, {"asin": "1941681948", "title": "Forty Martyrs", "author": null, "description": "Review ''Philip F. Deaver is one of my favorite writers, and readers have been waiting a long time for Forty Martyrs . It's good to finally have this book in my hands.'' -- Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk ''I have deeply admired, for many years, the work of Philip F. Deaver, a writer unparalleled in his examination of lost souls longing to be found. In prose that is quietly lyric, and sharp with truth, his stories are kinetic with heartbreak and magic. His work is a triumph, and I would follow it anywhere.'' -- Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me ''We learn more about the people around us and about our own interior lives when we venture into the stories and human landscapes of Philip F. Deaver's work. Deaver's hand is always deft, always nuanced, always steeped in the storyteller's craft. The book you hold in your hands is made to be read alone on a quiet porch--just as much as it's meant to be read aloud to someone you love. Filled with tenderness and pain, intimacy and clarity, Forty Martyrs resounds with Deaver's bright signature--a clear-eyed curiosity and wonder for all that travels through the human heart.'' -- Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country ''Philip F. Deaver is a writer after my own heart. This is a funny, haunted, and haunting work of fiction, the kind of book that makes you shake your head in baffled wonder and give thanks.'' -- David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals ''I could hardly stop reading, from first to last. These piercingly direct stories contain endless subtleties and subtexts, uniting and dividing them in the most convincing and intricate way. And they're so full of recognizable emotion concerning our interactions with the people who comprise our worlds, public and private--the relationships we've forged while climbing the frail scaffolding of human interaction that we can only hope will support us.'' -- Ann Beattie, author of The State We're In -- Praise for Forty Martyrs ''Written in vivid, spare prose, the best of these stories linger, sad and profound, like songs you sing to yourself.'' --New York Times ''A triumph . . . a noteworthy introduction.'' --Kirkus Reviews ''Permeated with finely crafted writing, grounded in the solidity of objects and places realized through well-textured description and resonant dialogue, this debut makes a wise, quietly provocative statement about commonplace tragedy and the ironies and fragility of relationships.'' --Publishers Weekly ''Like all good fiction, the stories in this first collection are true. . . . The language, especially the dialogue, is clean and well-lit; the narration is seemly. This is a fine debut'' --Virginia Quarterly Review ''This collection . . . is quite impressive.'' --Chicago Tribune -- Praise for Silent Retreats : From the Inside Flap Praise for Silent Retreats: \"Written in vivid, spare prose, the best of these stories linger, sad and profound, like songs you sing to yourself.\" -- New York Times \"Permeated with finely crafted writing, grounded in the solidity of objects and places realized through well-textured description and resonant dialogue, this debut makes a wise, quietly provocative statement about commonplace tragedy and the ironies and fragility of relationships.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Like all good fiction, the stories in this first collection are true. . . . The language, especially the dialogue, is clean and well-lit; the narration is seemly. This is a fine debut.\" -- Virginia Quarterly Review \"This collection . . . is quite impressive.\" -- Chicago Tribune About the Author Philip F. Deaver was born in Chicago, IL, and grew up in the Midwest. He is the author of the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning story collection Silent Retreats, and the poetry collection How Men Pray. His poems have been featured several times on The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere; and have been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Catholic Short Stories, and the baseball anthologies Anatomy of Baseball and Bottom of the Ninth. He is a Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 5.97}, {"asin": "0451415086", "title": "Do Or Diner: A Comfort Food Mystery", "author": "Christine Wenger", "description": "From Booklist Trixie Matkowski buys her aunt\u2019s diner, cottage, and bait business in a small Maine town. But from the start, things go wrong. Trixie has to fill in as the overnight cook; then the local health inspector dies in the diner from poisonous mushrooms, prompting most of the customers to abandon the place. Trixie sets out to restore the diner\u2019s reputation and determine what really happened to the health inspector. She finds lots of people who would like to see her out of the picture: the mayor, who is desperate to buy the diner, and Trixie\u2019s competitors in the restaurant business, among them. Meanwhile, the attentions of attractive Deputy Ty Brisco prove distracting. Although the bad guys may be a little too apparent, the frame story about a woman trying to save her business is engaging. Readers who enjoy B. B. Haywood\u2019s small-town Maine mysteries may also enjoy this series. Includes recipes. --Amy Alessio About the Author Christine Wenger has worked in the criminal justice field and written romances for Harlequin. She\u2019s always loved to read cozy mysteries, and is thrilled to bring the beauty of upstate New York to life in this series.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "B00EYJG70U", "title": "Deadliest in Show (Creative Woman Mysteries)", "author": "Christy Barritt", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 6.36}, {"asin": "0983177708", "title": "The Able Life of Cody Jane - Still Celebrating", "author": "Marly Cornell", "description": "From Publishers Weekly As a young woman, Cornell (Walks on the Beach with Angie co-written with Don Warner) experienced the horror of hearing, moments after giving birth to a baby, that her daughter \"might not live.\" Cody Jane had spina bifida, a congenital birth defect that can lead to infection, paralysis, brain damage, or death. But Cornell had looked into her newborn's eyes, had seen that, \"whatever physical problems she might have, she was fine,\" and was determined to be a good mother and fought for Cody Jane on numerous fronts, including advocating for the right doctors and surgeries, and ensuring that her daughter wasn't forced into a school for mentally handicapped children. Much space is devoted to the medical and psychological reality of mothering someone living with a shunt, but what also emerges is Cody Jane's growth into a unique, funny, and independent young woman involved in a romantic relationship (Cornell doesn't gloss over the fact that her own relationships, including two marriages, crumbled; Cody Jane's biological father left to become a monk). Cornell couldn't do everything for and be everything to Cody Jane, and her guilt is apparent. Her perspective on raising a child with severe disabilities (which includes reminders of the importance of counseling) is important, and stands as a loving tribute. Published with the support of the Spina Bifida Association. (May) Review As a young woman, Cornell ( Walks on the Beach with Angie co-written with Don Warner) experienced the horror of hearing, moments after giving birth to a baby, that her daughter ''might not live.'' Cody Jane had spina bifida, a congenital birth defect that can lead to infection, paralysis, brain damage, or death. But Cornell had looked into her newborn's eyes, had seen that, ''whatever physical problems she might have, she was fine,'' and was determined to be a good mother and fought for Cody Jane on numerous fronts, including advocating for the right doctors and surgeries, and ensuring that her daughter wasn't forced into a school for mentally handicapped children. Much space is devoted to the medical and psychological reality of mothering someone living with a shunt, but what also emerges is Cody Jane's growth into a unique, funny, and independent young woman involved in a romantic relationship (Cornell doesn't gloss over the fact that her own relationships, including two marriages, crumbled; Cody Jane's biological father left to become a monk). Her perspective on raising a child with severe disabilities (which includes reminders of the importance of counseling) is important, and stands as a loving tribute. Published with the support of the Spina Bifida Association. (May) -- Publishers Weekly 4/4/2011 The Natural Order In the natural order of life, children outlive their parents. But when the order is reversed, parents can be caught between the bitterness of their loss and the sweet celebration of a life. Marly Cornell is firmly committed to the celebration. When her daughter Cody was born with the most severe form of spina bifida, doctors told the young mother that if Cody survived at all, she might be paralyzed and/or brain damaged. But Marly experienced something different when she looked down at the newborn. She remembers, ''Somehow as I looked at those wide eyes and felt the grip of her little fingers around my thumb, I knew she was fine -- no matter what else might be wrong.'' Eight infants a day in the U.S. are born with spina bifida (166,000 Americans, according to the Spina Bifida Association) and it remains the most common permanently-disabling birth defect. As it turned out, Cody did survive but there were plenty of difficulties along the way -- dozens of surgeries, a wheelchair for her mobility and various changes in her family -- but her mother never changed her mind -- Cody was fine, more than fine. Cornell treasures her daughter's joyride of a life in a new book called The Able Life of Cody Jane: Still Celebrating (LightaLight Publications, May 2011). She describes a person who was, from her earliest years, a sensitive kid with a droll sense of humor who did not allow her physical limitations to define her or get in the way of her fun. A staunch defender of the vulnerable, Cody stepped up to advocate for others who were treated unfairly, and for herself when necessary -- and, as every person with a disability knows, that can be a daily occurrence. The chemistry between mother and daughter pops off the page as their close relationship grows into an enduring friendship that balances Cody's adult life of independence with inevitable dependencies. Marly's eyes light up as she explains, ''Stories about people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions are framed so often in tragedy and pity instead of recognizing the powerful spirit, joy and humor that is often part of daily life for so many people who confront difficult and genuine barriers.'' Cody died in 2004 at 32 years old, but she still got the last laugh. Marly reflects, ''Looking back, it seemed like Cody had a tough life in many ways, but that was not how we experienced it at the time. That wasn't how either of us felt. We laughed every day and sometimes more when situations were scariest.'' It's a safe bet that Cody, ever the witty one, is yukking it up with the angels. The Able Life of Cody Jane was published with the support of the Spina Bifida Association. For more about this, go to theablelife.com. --Cheryl Wills Author, Anchor/Reporter for NY1 News, Author of Die Free: A Heroic Family Tale , Huffington Post 05/13/11 01:44 PM ET From the Author The Able Life of Cody Jane was the winner of a Midwest Book Award. About the Author Marly Cornell is an artist, writer, and editor with a BFA from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and an MA from St. Mary's University of Minnesota. She has maintained a painting and writing studio, spoken publicly on art and social justice issues (nationally and internationally as well as radio and TV interviews), contributed magazine articles on a freelance basis, edited and ghostwritten author manuscripts, and created art throughout her daughter Cody's life. However, this work remained secondary as she worked in the corporate nonprofit sector in healthcare, behavioral services, mental health law, and physician recruitment. For thirty years, this afforded her the opportunity to be in close proximity to many of the systems and people that had life-and-death influences on her daughter and their family. Cornell now works full time as a freelance writer and editor, with occasional art commissions. Cornell also\u00a0cowrote Walks on the Beach With Angie with Don Warner (2008) on the topic of the loss of a child. The book won two Midwest Book Awards and was a finalist for two Indie Excellence Awards and a Ben Franklin Award. She has served on several nonprofit boards and, for four years was the chair of the Midwest Book Awards program. She maintains affiliations with several writing, editing, and social justice and advocacy organizations. The author is interested in providing support and encouragement for, and shedding light upon, the hundreds of thousands of children, adults, and families living with disabilities and/or chronic medical conditions who often confront challenging and difficult real-life situations with great courage, humor, and spirit. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "1585675393", "title": "Hemingway in Africa", "author": "Christopher Ondaatje", "description": "From Publishers Weekly The gap of Hemingway's African excursions in books about \"Papa\" is partly filled by this copiously illustrated if casually written work from British explorer-biographer Ondaatje ( Journey to the Source of the Nile ). Hemingway went on only two safaris in a lifetime of traveling (1933-1934 and 1953-1954), but both were vivid, pivotal experiences. The first inspired his famous stories \"The Snows of Kilimanjaro\" and \"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber\" and his bestseller Green Hills of Africa ; the latter trip inspired two posthumous works, the less well-received The Garden of Eden and True at First Light. Ondaatje follows the faded trail of Hemingway's safaris in Kenya and Tanzania (then Tanganyika) and puts them in the context of his works and those of other African writers, such as Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham (whose work Hemingway championed). Although Papa's tracks are fainter in contemporary Africa than in Cuba and Paris, Ondaatje, an old hand on sub-Saharan Africa, has as observant an eye as Hemingway's for the land's beauty and a better one for its residents-which he complements with his photography. By the time of Hemingway's second visit, the era of the traditional colonial safari was closing, just as his own career was. While the opening description in \"The Snows of Kilimanjaro\" of a leopard carcass on the mountain's highest slopes concluded, \"No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude,\" Ondaatje possesses a sympathetic insight into what Hemingway was without falling prey to the myth. 98 color photos, 3 maps not seen by PW . Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Ondaatje, author of seven books (including Sindh Revisited , 1996, and Journey to the Sources of the Nile , 1998), follows in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway's two African safaris, undertaken in the mid-1930s and mid-1950s in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, to uncover new insights into Hemingway's life and writings. Thanks to a wealth of photographs of Hemingway on safari as well as of modern photos of East Africa, the reader is offered glimpses of the ambience and environment with which the great author surrounded himself in his egotistical quest for manhood and for artistic immortality. He was always dependent on and jealous of more accomplished hunters on his safaris--such as Bror Blixen (Isak Dinesen's husband) or Philip Percival, who was coaxed out of retirement to guide Hemingway's second safari in 1954. Ondaatje is as much of a romantic as his subject, and in uncovering various letters and early influences, he fleshes out a picture of the great author as an adventurer in spirit, though flawed by his own ego and alcoholism. Allen Weakland Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 46.94}, {"asin": "0451416503", "title": "Murder of a Stacked Librarian: A Scumble River Mystery", "author": "Denise Swanson", "description": "From Booklist A wedding is on the agenda in Swanson\u2019s long-running Scumble River series. School psychologist Skye Denison and police chief Wally Boyd will marry in less than a week (right after Christmas), and there is plenty still to do\u2014even before librarian Yvonne Osborne is killed, apparently having been forced off a bridge in her car. Now Wally is missing holiday celebrations, and Skye has a vision of what being married to a cop is going to be like. She perseveres, however, continuing with the wedding preparations while helping Wally question suspects in her role as police psychologist consultant. Swanson effectively mixes the ongoing investigation with plenty of humorous slices of Skye\u2019s daily life. Series fans will enjoy both the crime solving and the small-town high jinks\u2014and, of course, they get a wedding at the end! --Amy Alessio Review Praise for the New York Times Bestselling Series \u201cI enjoy every minute of every book of this series.\u201d\u2014#1 New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris\u201cTop-notch storytelling with truly unique and wonderful characters.\u201d\u2014 CrimeSpree Magazine \u201cEndearing\u2026quirky\u2026a delight.\u201d\u2014 Chicago Tribune \u201cThe folks of Scumble River will tickle the fancy of cozy fans.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Denise Swanson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Scumble River and Devereaux\u2019s Dime Store mystery series.\u00a0She worked as a school psychologist for twenty-two years before\u00a0quitting to write full-time.\u00a0She lives in Illinois with her husband, classical composer David Stybr, and their cool black cat, Boomerang. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1770413146", "title": "Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects", "author": "David Waltner-Toews", "description": "Review \u201cWaltner-Toews punctuates this serious subject with his quirky humour \u2026 Eat the Beetles! is an essential part of a growing buzz?.\u201d \u2015 Toronto Star \u201c Eat the Beetles provides a sturdy literary exoskeleton to the field of human insectivory. An in-depth look at the science behind the movement, it entertains as it enlightens.\u201d \u2015 Daniella Martin, author of Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet \u201cWhen it comes to the future of insects as food for humans and livestock, Waltner-Toews walks the line between skepticism and optimism in an intelligent, witty, and provocative analysis that should be a model for any clear-headed discussion of non-traditional solutions to the world\u2019s problems.\u201d \u2015 Jeff Lockwood, author of The Infested Mind: Why Humans Fear, Loathe and Love Insects and Poisoned Justice \u201cThis will inform and fascinate readers of food history, gastronomy, epidemiology, and ecology, as we begin to understand more about the lives of insects and the important roles they play in our society.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cWhile Eat the Beetles! covers serious topics, including the world\u2019s food scarcity issues, it\u2019s also entertaining, with amusing stories and thoughtful reflection.\u201d \u2015 University of Guelph News From the Inside Flap Will eating insects change the world for the better?\u200b Meet the beetles: there are millions and millions of them and many fewer of the rest of us \u2015 mammals, birds, and reptiles. Since before recorded history, humans have eaten insects. While many get squeamish at the idea, entomophagy \u2015 people eating insects \u2015 is a possible way to ensure a sustainable and secure food supply for the eight billion of us on the planet. Once seen as the great enemy of human civilization, destroying our crops and spreading plagues, we now see insects as marvellous pollinators of our food crops and a potential source of commercial food supply. From upscale restaurants where black ants garnish raw salmon to grubs as pub snacks in Paris and Tokyo, from backyard cricket farming to high-tech businesses, Eat the Beetles! weaves these cultural, ecological, and evolutionary narratives to provide an accessible and humorous exploration of entomophagy. From the Back Cover Will eating insects change the world for the better?\u200b Meet the beetles: there are millions and millions of them and many fewer of the rest of us \u2015 mammals, birds, and reptiles. Since before recorded history, humans have eaten insects. While many get squeamish at the idea, entomophagy \u2015 people eating insects \u2015 is a possible way to ensure a sustainable and secure food supply for the eight billion of us on the planet. Once seen as the great enemy of human civilization, destroying our crops and spreading plagues, we now see insects as marvellous pollinators of our food crops and a potential source of commercial food supply. From upscale restaurants where black ants garnish raw salmon to grubs as pub snacks in Paris and Tokyo, from backyard cricket farming to high-tech businesses, Eat the Beetles! weaves these cultural, ecological, and evolutionary narratives to provide an accessible and humorous exploration of entomophagy. About the Author David Waltner-Toews is an epidemiologist, veterinarian, and writer specializing in ecosystem approaches to health and disease. He is the founding president of Veterinarians without Borders. Previous books include The Origin of Feces , The Chickens Fight Back , and Food, Sex and Salmonella . He has also published fiction and poetry. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Selected Excerpts from Eat the Beetles! So, even before I\u2019d sampled the bar snacks at le Festin Nu, my head was in turmoil. All around me, bugs were changing everything I thought I knew about food, feed, and agriculture. How could I have missed this? The Festin Nu bar was a room just a few meters wide, clad in dark, weathered wood with handwritten notices taped on the plate glass windows framing a darkened doorway. On a couple of low stools out on the sidewalk, a man and a woman were leaning against the glass, sipping beer, and chatting quietly in the warm, late afternoon haze of the day. The stores on either side had metal shutters pulled down. Inside, a reverse-J-shaped bar took up the far end of the small room. Beyond that, through a dimly lit doorway, a dozen or so people were sitting on church basement chairs, drinking beer and watching Romancing the Stone with French subtitles: how young Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner looked! (Danny DeVito never changes.) The bartender, Alex Cabrol, with his wry almost-smile, dark, wavy hair, and ragged straw fedora with a hole in it, reminded me of a 1967-vintage \u201cMotorcycle Song\u201d Arlo Guthrie. When I asked for insects, he waved at the menu board and asked which ones. \u201cAll of them,\u201d I said, hoping I did not sound too much like a bug-eating version of Monty Python\u2019s Mr. Creosote. \u201cWe could go two ways with insect-eating,\u201d le Festin Nu\u2019s chef, Elie Daviron, said in that BBC report. \u201cThe agro-industry would just churn them into protein flour. I want to keep the notion that the insects are real, whole animals.\u201d Real, whole animals. I tried to imagine them and then decided that would be a bad strategy. Brace yourself, order, and eat , I told myself. It\u2019s just food . August being vacation season for many Parisians, Cabrol explained, Daviron was unavailable, and the kitchen was not fully stocked. Of the six insects listed on the menu, only five were available. They didn\u2019t have any of the giant water bugs left in stock. He poured me one of the craft beers for which they are known, and I sipped it, wondering if I would be able to convince my brain that eating worms and crickets was okay. I asked Alex where the bugs came from. He said that some came from Southeast Asia \u2015 he was leaving the next day for Cambodia to check out new possibilities \u2015 but they also sourced crickets and mealworms from a French breeder and distributor called Dimini Cricket. My first thought was that the name was a too-cute reference to Jiminy Cricket, the talking insect in Disney\u2019s Pinocchio . I recalled that in Carlo Collodi\u2019s original story, the young, wooden-brained vandal, in a fit of annoyance, had killed the cricket by throwing a mallet at him. In Disney\u2019s version, the cricket was a funny, wise, tag-along, apparently insufficiently annoying to incite murder. But would you eat him? In Disney\u2019s moral universe, I wondered, would it be as bad to eat crickets as to eat Bambi? I later discovered that the name of the breeder was based on the surname of one of the farm\u2019s founders, which is a cautionary tale about the perils of cross-cultural branding. After about twenty minutes, Alex brought out five small plates, presented like tapas. The insects were artfully arranged, each species accompanied by figs, sun-dried tomatoes, raisins, and chopped, dried tropical fruits. I quaffed my beer and considered the fare before me: buffalo worms, crickets, large grasshoppers, small black ants, and fat grubs with beaks, which I later identified as palm weevil larvae. I called for another beer, and then, bite by mindful, methodical bite, I ate them all. The crickets and grasshoppers were crunchy, with no strong flavor, the ants sour, tangy. The palm weevil larvae were a bit chewy, like dried figs. In the manner of pub food the world around, the dishes were on the greasy side. I guessed that with a couple of pitchers of craft beer, and a group of friends, these bugs would be just fine. But were they the future of global food security? Later, strolling the packed alleys and streets among the tourists in and around Montmartre, I was chuffed that I\u2019d passed my Paris pub bug challenge without having suffered any hallucinatory visions of giant cockroaches. Ever since I\u2019d heard the name of this pub, I couldn\u2019t get out of my head images of those human-sized insects from David Cronenberg\u2019s adaptation of Naked Lunch . I wondered why I thought of eating insects as strange, even revolting. What made eating bugs in a pub any different than eating deep-fried chicken wings? Was this mix of beer, dare, and disgust the future of eating insects? Or would eating insects morph from the queasy adventures of \u201cbug-eating\u201d into the more neutral, sanitized cuisine of entomophagy , the term used for insect-eating by many of its proponents? In 2007, I was part of a mission sponsored by the World Organisation for Animal Health, also known as the OIE. 56 Three of us \u2015 all of European descent \u2015 were to assess the animal health capacities in Cambodia. In less than a week, we drove between flat fields of rice in the south, pondered the flocks of ducks bobbing around in rickety enclosures that extended from the fields into one of the many tributaries of the Mekong, and nosed through offices from the Vietnamese\u2013Cambodian border in the south to the north end of Tonl\u00e9 Sap, a thriving lake that occupies much of the center of the country. From pre-dawn to after dark, we visited Spartan government and lush private laboratories, hole-in-the-wall pharmacies, makeshift autopsy rooms, research centers, colleges and universities still struggling to reinvent themselves after the Pol Pot regime all but destroyed them with its brutal anti-intellectualism, outdoor slaughtering \u201cslabs\u201d where Brahman cattle could die breathing the sun-filled air, and half-hidden slaughterhouses where little boys in torn, bloodied shorts scrambled with plastic buckets after gushes of pigs\u2019 blood, gut-splatters, and bits of discarded flesh. We saw chickens, ducks, pigs, and cattle, free-range and caged, from scruffy to fat to dead and hung up on hooks. On the road trip between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap I saw something else \u2015 and yet, in some Douglas Adams, if-it-doesn\u2019t-make-sense-it\u2019s-invisible, sort of way, I didn\u2019t see it. Scattered across the green rice paddies and along gray, water-filled ditches and ponds were structures from which flapped sheets of translucent plastic. Below each sail was a rectangular \u201cboat\u201d constructed of the same materials. In the daylight they were usually rolled up, but at night the sails were unfurled into vertical rectangles. More intriguing to me, they were lit up at night, like ghostly square-faced scarecrows rattling and flapping in the wind and rain. When I asked about these, our guide smiled. At the next roadside market, he showed me large baskets heaped full of walnut-sized water bugs. The beetles, attracted to the light, flew into the sheets, and then dropped into the containers below. They were food. For people. At the time, I thought this a slightly unsettling curiosity and recalled how, in 1968, lugging a heavy, frameless, green canvas backpack through the same region, the back of my shirt so soaked with sweat it would later peel off in shredded pieces, I had declined to nosh on the beetle \u201cshish ke-bugs\u201d proffered up to my open window by eager boys at Thai bus stops. Now, again, I found the very idea of biting into these cockroach-like bugs revolting. I did not know, in 1968, or in 2007, that giant water bugs were grilled or fried in Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia, or that the Thais ate so many that they were importing them from neighboring countries, that wild populations were declining because of habitat change and pollution, that prices were going up and that they were difficult to farm because the bugs started eating each other when they were crowded. It had never crossed my mind that caring for these bugs might be part of my veterinary job, or that the OIE and the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture should be interested in this. Or even that these insects might hold one of the diverse keys to local food security around the world. Why did these things never cross my mind? I suspect it was because I was distracted by an immediate concern for the well-being of my own species. What I did see were the effects of people being food for insects. I saw a motorbike, man in front, woman behind, infant in between. This is not an unusual sight in Southeast Asia. Often you can see two or three children along with their parents and full shopping bags on a tiny motorbike. The difference here, in Phnom Penh, in 2007, was that the woman was holding up a bag of intravenous fluid, and the thin tube from that bag was inserted into the arm of the infant. Cambodia was in the throes of an epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever that, in 2007, sickened 40,000 people and killed more than 400, many of them children. Dengue fever viruses \u2015 like those that cause Zika and yellow fever \u2015 are spread by mosquitoes. The female mosquitoes are the ones that feed on mammalian blood, and hence the ones that transfer the virus from one bloody lunch buffet to the next. Ironically (if one can see past the obvious species barriers), the female mosquitoes are drinking human blood in order to ensure that their own offspring live. Mosquitoes are manifesting that fierce mothering instinct that has enabled many species to survive these many centuries in the face of the incalculable odds against them. They are not \u201cout to get us.\u201d Like the Maasai who drink the blood of cattle, and the French who eat blood sausage, the mosquitoes, lice, and ticks that use our blood are simply nourishing themselves and their babies. Cricket farming might improve household nutrition and increase income for smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia, and improve the lot of rural women there, but what roles could it have in North America, where industrialized livestock systems were well entrenched? Canada\u2019s Entomo Farms offers an example of what might be done. Rather than starting from the wants of consumers, Entomo Farms started from the farm and decided to take a more direct approach to putting insects on the dinner table. Ecologists Tim Allen and his colleagues Joe Tainter and Tom Hoekstra have called this approach \u2015 starting from the resource base rather than the consumer \u2015 \u201csupply-side sustainability.\u201d Marketing themselves as \u201cthe future of food,\u201d Entomo declares that they are producing the \u201cworld\u2019s most sustainable superfood.\u201d Having started out as \u201creptile feeders,\u201d producing insects for reptiles and fish, they had made the cross-species leap just a year before my 2015 visit. Dedicated, enthusiastic, smart, and media-savvy, the owners have been profiled in Canadian newspapers and radio programs and celebrated their innovative fare with politicians at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. In a Canadian Business article on Entomo, reportedly \u201cNorth America\u2019s largest cricket farm,\u201d journalist Carol Toller marvels at how easily and delightedly nine-year-old Kayla Goldin, daughter of one of the three brothers who operate the business, scarfs down a handful of waxworms. Toller parades out the usual rational arguments in favor of eating insects: on a weight-for-weight basis, they use a lot less land and water than other domestic livestock, and on a per-weight basis, they convert feed inputs into meat more efficiently than, say, cattle. The title and subtitle of the article get at the primary challenge in scaling up, however. \u201cHow a New Wave of Food Entrepreneurs Hope to Persuade Us to Eat Bugs,\u201d announces the title. The text beneath reads, \u201cCrickets might just be the miracle food for a hungry 21st century. The only catch? Convincing squeamish shoppers.\u201d Entomo is just a few hours down the road from where I live, near the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, so, in the summer of 2015, before I set off on my entomophagical world travels, I drove over to see for myself what was happening. On my way, I noticed a sign beside the road that read \u201cThis land is our land. Back off government.\u201d If I didn\u2019t know rural Ontario better, I might have started worrying about rural survivalist gangs and whether insects were a menu item for them: Cormac McCarthy meets the Organic Prepper? 87 I don\u2019t know what I was expecting, but there was nothing special that would broadcast this as a cricket farm, the way one might recognize a dairy farm or a feedlot by the sight of it, or a pig farm by the smell of it. The farm building looks like what it is \u2015 a converted, warehouse-like chicken barn, about ten thousand square feet, set in a very lightly rolling countryside, a patchwork of boreal forest, corn, and pastures. The business was started by Darren Goldin along with his two brothers, Ryan and Jarrod; partners Caryn Goldin (culinary manager) and Stacie Goldin (media specialist) are also clearly important members of the team. Darren greeted me as I pulled up to the large open door of the building, a windrow of frass bags along one side of the asphalt parking lot. The former occupant, a now-retired chicken farmer, lives on the neighboring farm and is apparently happy with what these new insect farmers are doing. Darren Goldin had almost finished his undergrad degree in environmental studies at York University in Toronto when he decided to head west to join a protest against the clearing of old-growth forests in Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. After that, he and a friend decided to build a cabin in the Kootenay mountains and live off the grid. Finally concluding that he was missing social and family connections, Darren returned to Ontario. He and his partner, Caryn, made percussion instruments and then got into producing insects for pet reptiles and amphibians. Then came the 2013 FAO report on insects as the future of food. That was also the year that the Aspire group from McGill got their million-dollar prize. Darren talked to his brothers. \u201cHey, we didn\u2019t get any prizes,\u201d they said, \u201cbut we already know how to do this. What\u2019s stopping us?\u201d For Darren and his brothers and their partners, Entomo became a way to translate concerns about environmental degradation into useful action, creating ecologically sustainable alternatives to big-eco-footprint agriculture. I have been on a lot of livestock farms \u2015 beef and dairy cattle, chickens, turkeys, ducks. I like the companionship of cows, their low-voiced coughing and grunting, and am happy to sometimes enable them to fulfill their ecological job descriptions, but a cricket farm \u2015 the chorus of male crickets singing for a mate \u2015 was a whole new experience for me. Darren walked me through the process. Eggs were grown on clean, slightly moist peat moss. Set on top of this was a cardboard structure of interlocking columns that looked like the kind of thing one would pack wine bottles in to keep them from breaking. The hatchlings would climb upward as soon as they were born, an instinct that seems to be unrelated to light. From the \u201cnursery,\u201d the hatchlings were moved (in their interlocking columns) to blue storage boxes, which were stacked on shelves in a long, narrow room. They were fed a mix of ground corn and soy (grown on the farm), which was spread on the bottom of the blue plastic tubs. For two weeks, as they went through a couple of molts, this was their home: condos for crickets. Darren then guided me into a much larger room, where the crickets were taken out of their blue boxes, and the cardboard columns were set in rows on either side of long, rubberized water troughs, fed by a drip system. In this room, warmer than the rest of the building (about 30 degrees Celsius), the crickets would stay for four weeks, growing to maturity. I watched them lining up along the thin stream of water, like any other animal, sipping. I felt at home here, amidst the quiet skittering of tiny animals. They were being fed the same feed mix as before. As they matured, the males would begin to chirp out for mates and then (assuming they found a willing female) to breed. Pregnant females would then look for places to deposit their fertilized eggs. Egg-laying places were provided in the form of shallow trays with slopes at either end and a bed of soft peat moss. The eggs would be harvested for use in starting a new generation. If you put the whole tray into a bucket of water, the moss rises to the top and the eggs sink to the bottom. These eggs can then be put into the nursery, where they hatch. Shortly after mating and laying eggs, crickets die. Just before this happens, between breeding and death, it is time to harvest. The crickets are shaken from their cardboard towers into blue boxes and then dumped through a metal funnel into bags on a weigh-scale \u2015 five pounds at a time. Dry ice is added, and the crickets quickly die from a combination of cold and lack of oxygen. Once the crickets are harvested, Darren said, the water troughs are flushed first with chlorinated water and then with fresh, clean water. The frass is swept up from the floor and kept in sacks. The few crickets that are left run for a \u201chotel\u201d (one of the cardboard interlocking arrangements) from which they are shaken out into a bag. Back outside, Darren waved at the bags of frass stacked up next to a fence. The frass, he said, was excellent fertilizer, high in phosphorus and potassium. He has been using it on their own crops and selling to area farmers, and he told me that I could take as much as I wanted for my garden. They didn\u2019t yet have a marketing plan, and he wished someone would pick it up as a business venture. They were already so busy just keeping up with the demand for their primary products. The crickets were processed at a different site, a building in the nearby town of Norwood. Just around the corner from some restaurants and other businesses, there was no smell emanating from the small building, and the neighbors appeared to be just fine with Entomo being there. Inside, beyond a reception room and some offices with computers, was a room with stainless steel ovens like pizza ovens (many drawers, crickets on large cookie sheets). Derek Delahaye, Entomo\u2019s processing manager, was washing off batches of crickets in the sink and spreading them on the cookie sheets. If the crickets are to be flavored, that will happen at this point. Otherwise they are toasted and then ground up for \u201cflour.\u201d The biggest market for this flour is companies that produce energy bars and protein bars. Derek rattled off a list of at least half a dozen such companies. Besides Derek, two other people were in and around the kitchen area, a young man and a young woman about high-school student age. For a while they sat at computers, then they moved around the room packing things. As with the other insect businesses that I\u2019d visited in Canada and Europe, I was struck by the fact that this phenomenon seems largely driven by people in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Given that this is the generation inheriting the unsustainable agri-food mess we Boomers have created, it seems appropriate that they are the ones coming up with innovative solutions. Standing there looking over the cozy kitchen, I popped a few crickets into my mouth: my first bona fide cricket snack. Then, as we talked, I tried more, some straight from the ovens and others that were flavored (BBQ, Honey Mustard, Moroccan) before roasting. Once I got past the eyes and legs, and the idea of bugs, and popped them into my mouth, I concluded that they tasted, as Darren had warned me, like food. A little nutty. I had expected the legs to stick in my teeth, or trigger my gag reflex, but it all crunched up nicely. Healthy snack food, Darren informed me, crickets were high in protein, omega 3 fatty acids, B vitamins, calcium, and iron. The mealworms, higher in (good) fat, had a slightly richer flavor, like potato chips. In the summer of 2015, Entomo was producing 4,000 pounds (about 1,800 kilograms) per week of crickets and 1,500 pounds (700 kilograms) of frass, and using about 30 gallons (just over 100 liters) of water per day. I asked Darren if crickets \u2015 like pigs, chicken, and cows \u2015 had any disease problems. He nodded. Cricket farmers in North America used to raise Acheta domesticus , which grow quickly to maturity and have a good feed conversion ratio. In 2009, an epidemic of Acheta domesticus densovirus put half of the cricket producers in North America out of business or forced them to select different species. Darren knew of one farm in Alberta with the virus, and the farmer almost dismantled his barn, did a thorough cleaning, and got fresh crickets; in nine weeks, they were all dead again. They now use a different species of cricket, Gryllodes sigillatus (the banded cricket), which is resistant to the virus but doesn\u2019t grow as large. Why crickets? The rationale, not only for Entomo but also for other similar companies, is that these are the insects most likely to appeal to North American palates and preferences. If entomophagists wanted to make a big difference, normalizing insects for the North American palate, it wasn\u2019t going to happen in $500-a-plate upscale restaurants. As whole animals, crickets and mealworms are like pub food \u2015 popcorn, peanuts, chicken wings. They can easily be made into protein powder and used to fortify soups, breads, and energy bars. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 2.9, "price": 16.95}, {"asin": "B003IYI73M", "title": "Cleo: The Cat Who Mended a Family", "author": "Helen Brown", "description": "About the Author Helen Brown\u00a0was born and brought up in New Zealand, where she first worked as a journalist, TV presenter, and scriptwriter. A multi\u2011award\u2011winning columnist, Helen now lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her family and feline, the internationally beloved Jonah. Cleo rose to the top of the bestseller lists in its first weeks in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, France, and Australia, and has been translated into more than sixteen languages. Cats & Daughters entertained her readers with publication in six countries, and her novel Tumbledown Manor showed her storytelling talents at their best. You are invited to visit Helen at www.helenbrown.com and follow her on Facebook. The author will donate a portion of her earnings from this book to BideaWee animal shelter and hospital. Learn what you can do to help at www.bideawee.org. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist Grace can come in deceptively small packages. For Brown, it arrived in the form of a runt-of-the-litter kitten whom her two young sons, Sam and Rob, adored on sight. Promised as an upcoming present for Sam\u2019s tenth birthday, it was a gift the boy never received. While the kitten was being weaned from its mother, Sam was taken from his. Just weeks after his birthday, Sam was killed in an auto accident, and Brown\u2019s world changed forever. Yet when the kitten was delivered to her new home right on schedule, Brown\u2019s heart first broke with the unfairness of it all, then gradually began to mend as little Cleo did what all kittens do: mounted a charm offensive like no other. Over the next 23 years, as Brown\u2019s marriage ended and career blossomed, the spunky Cleo remained her constant source of comfort and inspiration. Heartfelt and open, Brown\u2019s buoyant tale of loss and recovery celebrates the resilient patience and restorative powers of animal compassion. --Carol Haggas --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \" A remarkable memoir... I realized that Helen Brown didn't break my heart at all - she opened it.\" --Beth Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt\"An absolute must.\" --Cat World\"The next Marley & Me. Even non cat-lovers will be moved.\" --Good Housekeeping --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "193722645X", "title": "Mountain Rampage: A National Park Mystery (National Park Mystery Series, 2)", "author": "Scott Graham", "description": "Review \"A fast\u2013paced mystery set in the majestic country around Estes Park, with dozens of quirks and turns\u2026Graham brings his knowledge of mountains and climbing into play as his hero, Bender, scales mountains and rappels down mine shafts.\"\u2014 THE DENVER POST \"Graham's clever tale is tailor\u2013made for those who prefer their mysteries under blue skies.\" \u2014 KIRKUS REVIEWS \"Description and dialogue balance to bring both the rounded characters and the Rocky Mountain setting alive in this tale of danger, death, and intrigue\u2026Scott Graham has created a satisfying and suspenseful adventure.\" \u2014 FOREWORD REVIEWS \" Mountain Rampage combines archaeology education, family relationships, outdoor adventure and taut mystery.\" \u2014 ROUNDUP MAGAZINE \"Filled with murder and mayhem, jealousy and good detective work\u2014set against a stunning Colorado backdrop\u2014 Mountain Rampage is an exciting, nonstop read.\" \u2014 ANNE HILLERMAN , New York Times bestselling author of Spider Woman's Daughter \"In Mountain Rampage , Scott Graham delivers taut writing, solid plot twists, a cast of interesting characters, and an appealing protagonist both men and women will love. Get ready for a leave\u2013you\u2013breathless high country southwestern adventure.\" \u2014 MICHAEL MCGARRITY , New York Times bestselling author of Hard Country \"Move over Nevada Barr\u2014clean prose and confident storytelling combine to make Scott Graham's second National Park Mystery Series novel a must\u2013read for fans of Western outdoor fiction and for mystery lovers everywhere.\" \u2014 CHUCK GREAVES , author of Hush Money \"In archaeologist Chuck Bender, Scott Graham has created a flawed, all\u2013too\u2013human, and memorable investigator who had me rooting for him to the end.\" \u2014 MARGARET COEL , author of Night of the White Buffalo About the Author SCOTT GRAHAM is the author of the acclaimed National Park Mystery series, featuring archaeologist Chuck Bender and Chuck's spouse Janelle Ortega. In addition to the National Park Mystery series, Scott is the author of five nonfiction books, including Extreme Kids , winner of the National Outdoor Book Award. Scott is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys backpacking, river rafting, skiing, and mountaineering. He has made a living as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, radio disk jockey, and coal\u2013shoveling fireman on the steam\u2013powered Durango\u2013Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. He lives with his spouse, who is an emergency physician, in Durango, Colorado.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.39}, {"asin": "0999689614", "title": "\"HURLEY: From the Beginning!\" Book Autographed by Hurley Haywood", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 3.3, "price": "from 574.99"}, {"asin": "081298840X", "title": "When Breath Becomes Air", "author": "Abraham Verghese", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of January 2016: When Breath Becomes Air is a powerful look at a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis through the eyes of a neurosurgeon. When Paul Kalanithi is given his diagnosis he is forced to see this disease, and the process of being sick, as a patient rather than a doctor--the result of his experience is not just a look at what living is and how it works from a scientific perspective, but the ins and outs of what makes life matter. This heart-wrenching book will capture you from page one and still have you thinking long after the final sentence. \u2013Penny Mann Review \u201cI guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option. . . . Part of this book\u2019s tremendous impact comes from the obvious fact that its author was such a brilliant polymath. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to him\u2014passionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to die\u2014so well. None of it is maudlin. Nothing is exaggerated. As he wrote to a friend: \u2018It\u2019s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough.\u2019 And just important enough to be unmissable.\u201d \u2014Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201cPaul Kalanithi\u2019s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, written as he faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, is inherently sad. But it\u2019s an emotional investment well worth making: a moving and thoughtful memoir of family, medicine and literature. It is, despite its grim undertone, accidentally inspiring.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cPaul Kalanithi\u2019s posthumous memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy. . . . [Kalanithi] delivers his chronicle in austere, beautiful prose. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead. . . . The narrative voice is so assured and powerful that you almost expect him to survive his own death and carry on describing what happened to his friends and family after he is gone.\u201d \u2014 The Boston Globe \u201cDevastating and spectacular . . . [Kalanithi] is so likeable, so relatable, and so humble, that you become immersed in his world and forget where it\u2019s all heading.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cIt\u2019s [Kalanithi\u2019s] unsentimental approach that makes When Breath Becomes Air so original\u2014and so devastating. . . . Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201c[ When Breath Becomes Air ] split my head open with its beauty.\u201d \u2014Cheryl Strayed \u201cRattling, heartbreaking, and ultimately beautiful, the too-young Dr. Kalanithi\u2019s memoir is proof that the dying are the ones who have the most to teach us about life.\u201d \u2014Atul Gawande \u201cThanks to When Breath Becomes Air, those of us who never met Paul Kalanithi will both mourn his death and benefit from his life. This is one of a handful of books I consider to be a universal donor\u2014I would recommend it to anyone, everyone.\u201d \u2014Ann Patchett \u201cDr. Kalanithi describes, clearly and simply, and entirely without self-pity, his journey from innocent medical student to professionally detached and all-powerful neurosurgeon to helpless patient, dying from cancer. Every doctor should read this book\u2014written by a member of our own tribe, it helps us understand and overcome the barriers we all erect between ourselves and our patients as soon as we are out of medical school.\u201d \u2014Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery About the Author Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon and writer. He grew up in Kingman, Arizona, and graduated from Stanford University with a BA and MA in English literature and a BA in human biology. He earned an MPhil in history and philosophy of science and medicine from the University of Cambridge and graduated cum laude from the Yale School of Medicine, where he was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society. He returned to Stanford to complete his residency training in neurological surgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience, during which he received the American Academy of Neurological Surgery\u2019s highest award for research. He died in March 2015. He is survived by his large, loving family, including his wife, Lucy, and their daughter, Elizabeth Acadia. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Part IIn Perfect Health I BeginThe hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live?\u2014\u00adEzekiel 37:1\u2013\u00ad3, King James translationI knew with certainty that I would never be a doctor. I stretched out in the sun, relaxing on a desert plateau just above our house. My uncle, a doctor, like so many of my relatives, had asked me earlier that day what I planned on doing for a career, now that I was heading off to college, and the question barely registered. If you had forced me to answer, I suppose I would have said a writer, but frankly, thoughts of any career at this point seemed absurd. I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe.I lay there in the dirt, awash in sunlight and memory, feeling the shrinking size of this town of fifteen thousand, six hundred miles from my new college dormitory at Stanford and all its promise.I knew medicine only by its absence\u2014\u00adspecifically, the absence of a father growing up, one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner. When I was ten, my father had moved us\u2014\u00adthree boys, ages fourteen, ten, and eight\u2014\u00adfrom Bronxville, New York, a compact, affluent suburb just north of Manhattan, to Kingman, Arizona, in a desert valley ringed by two mountain ranges, known primarily to the outside world as a place to get gas en route to somewhere else. He was drawn by the sun, by the cost of living\u2014\u00adhow else would he pay for his sons to attend the colleges he aspired to?\u2014\u00adand by the opportunity to establish a regional cardiology practice of his own. His unyielding dedication to his patients soon made him a respected member of the community. When we did see him, late at night or on weekends, he was an amalgam of sweet affections and austere diktats, hugs and kisses mixed with stony pronouncements: \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to be number one: find the guy who is number one, and score one point higher than he does.\u201d He had reached some compromise in his mind that fatherhood could be distilled; short, concentrated (but sincere) bursts of high intensity could equal .\u2008.\u2008. whatever it was that other fathers did. All I knew was, if that was the price of medicine, it was simply too high.From my desert plateau, I could see our house, just beyond the city limits, at the base of the Cerbat Mountains, amid red-\u00adrock desert speckled with mesquite, tumbleweeds, and paddle-\u00adshaped cacti. Out here, dust devils swirled up from nothing, blurring your vision, then disappeared. Spaces stretched on, then fell away into the distance. Our two dogs, Max and Nip, never grew tired of the freedom. Every day, they\u2019d venture forth and bring home some new desert treasure: the leg of a deer, unfinished bits of jackrabbit to eat later, the sun-\u00adbleached skull of a horse, the jawbone of a coyote.My friends and I loved the freedom, too, and we spent our afternoons exploring, walking, scavenging for bones and rare desert creeks. Having spent my previous years in a lightly forested suburb in the Northeast, with a tree-\u00adlined main street and a candy store, I found the wild, windy desert alien and alluring. On my first trek alone, as a ten-\u00adyear-\u00adold, I discovered an old irrigation grate. I pried it open with my fingers, lifted it up, and there, a few inches from my face, were three white silken webs, and in each, marching along on spindled legs, was a glistening black bulbous body, bearing in its shine the dreaded blood-\u00adred hourglass. Near to each spider a pale, pulsating sac breathed with the imminent birth of countless more black widows. Horror let the grate crash shut. I stumbled back. The horror came in a mix of \u201ccountry facts\u201d (Nothing is more deadly than the bite of the black widow spider) and the inhuman posture and the black shine and the red hourglass. I had nightmares for years.The desert offered a pantheon of terrors: tarantulas, wolf spiders, fiddlebacks, bark scorpions, whip scorpions, centipedes, diamondbacks, sidewinders, Mojave greens. Eventually we grew familiar, even comfortable, with these creatures. For fun, when my friends and I discovered a wolf spider\u2019s nest, we\u2019d drop an ant onto its outer limits and watch as its entangled escape attempts sent quivers down the silk strands, into the spider\u2019s dark central hole, anticipating that fatal moment when the spider would burst from its hollows and seize the doomed ant in its mandibles. \u201cCountry facts\u201d became my term for the rural cousin of the urban legend. As I first learned them, country facts granted fairy powers to desert creatures, making, say, the Gila monster no less an actual monster than the Gorgon. Only after living out in the desert for a while did we realize that some country facts, like the existence of the jackalope, had been deliberately created to confuse city folk and amuse the locals. I once spent an hour convincing a group of exchange students from Berlin that, yes, there was a particular species of coyote that lived inside cacti and could leap ten yards to attack its prey (like, well, unsuspecting Germans). Yet no one precisely knew where the truth lay amid the whirling sand; for every country fact that seemed preposterous, there was one that felt solid and true. Always check your shoes for scorpions, for example, seemed plain good sense.When I was sixteen, I was supposed to drive my younger brother, Jeevan, to school. One morning, as usual, I was running late, and as Jeevan was standing impatiently in the foyer, yelling that he didn\u2019t want to get detention again because of my tardiness, so could I please hurry the hell up, I raced down the stairs, threw open the front door .\u2008.\u2008. and nearly stepped on a snoozing six-\u00adfoot rattlesnake. It was another country fact that if you killed a rattlesnake on your doorstep, its mate and offspring would come and make a permanent nest there, like Grendel\u2019s mother seeking her revenge. So Jeevan and I drew straws: the lucky one grabbed a shovel, the unlucky one a pair of thick gardening gloves and a pillowcase, and through a seriocomic dance, we managed to get the snake into the pillowcase. Then, like an Olympic hammer thrower, I hurled the whole out into the desert, with plans to retrieve the pillowcase later that afternoon, so as not to get in trouble with our mother.Of our many childhood mysteries, chief among them was not why our father decided to bring his family to the desert town of Kingman, Arizona, which we grew to cherish, but how he ever convinced my mother to join him there. They had eloped, in love, across the world, from southern India to New York City (he a Christian, she a Hindu, their marriage was condemned on both sides, and led to years of familial rifts\u2014\u00admy mother\u2019s mother never acknowledged my name, Paul, instead insisting I be called by my middle name, Sudhir) to Arizona, where my mother was forced to confront an intractable mortal fear of snakes. Even the smallest, cutest, most harmless red racer would send her screaming into the house, where she\u2019d lock the doors and arm herself with the nearest large, sharp implement\u2014\u00adrake, cleaver, ax. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 17.42}, {"asin": "0736093699", "title": "The Athlete's Guide to Sports Supplements", "author": "Josh Hingst", "description": "Review \u201c The Athlete\u2019s Guide to Sports Supplements includes the latest information on a variety of popular supplements. For athletes and sport professionals, it is the most credible evidence-based guide available.\u201c Tom Myslinski-- Strength and Conditioning Coach Jacksonville Jaguars \u201c The Athlete\u2019s Guide to Sports Supplements offers grounded insight for athletes.\" Dave Ellis, RD, CSCS-- Past President Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians Association Ambassador \" The Athlete\u2019s Guide to Sports Supplements is an indispensable resource for any athlete considering the use of supplements.\" Matt Fitzgerald-- Author of The Runner\u2019s Edge About the Author Kimberly Mueller, MS, RD, CSSD is a registered dietitian and board-certified specialist in sportdietetics with immense experience working with athletes competing within the endurance and team-sport arena. She grew up competing in club-level soccer before focusing her attention on the sport of running as a Division I collegiate cross-country and track-and-field athlete. She has also earned accolades as an All-American Triathlete, as well as an elite runner chasing after the Olympic trials standard for the marathon. Kim enjoys using her own practical sport experiences and knowledge of nutrition science to help fellow athletes achieve optimal health and peak fitness performance via creation of custom menu plans and personalized nutrition coaching with her company, Fuel Factor (www.Fuel-Factor.com). Kim\u2019s passion for customized nutrition also led her to help develop and launch Infinit Nutrition (www.infinitnutrition.com), a company that custom-blends functional ingredients to address the performance and health goals of recreational and professional athletes, including those competing in such prestigious events as Tour de France and Formula 500. She is well known for her nutrition clinics and as a contributor to books such as The Performance Zone, The Woman Triathlete, Triathlon Revolution, Racing Weight, The New Rules of Marathon, and Half Marathon Nutrition. As a nutrition coach for Infinite Running (www.infiniterunning.org), Kim helps elite runners develop daily and race-day nutrition strategies that enhance endurance, facilitate optimal recovery, and protect against performance staleness. Kim lives in San Diego, where she is actively involved with several athletic groups, including the San Diego Track Club and Triathlon Club of San Diego. In 2013, she began a new journey as mom to her beautiful baby girl, Kaia Lyn. Josh Hingst, MS, RD, CSCS, head strength coach with the Philadelphia Eagles, is a specialist in the fields of nutrition and strength and conditioning, giving him unique expertise in understanding how nutrition and supplementation can complement strength training. He has worked extensively with strength and power athletes in sports such as Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, football, basketball, and baseball. His professional licenses and certifications include registered dietitian and certified strength and conditioning specialist. Prior to his work with the Philadelphia Eagles, Hingst was assistant strength and conditioning coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. He also spent three years as the director of sport nutrition at the University of Nebraska. In that role he directed programs in body composition analysis, nutrition education, performance fueling strategies, eating disorder prevention and counseling, and sport supplements and hydration. Before joining the Nebraska Cornhuskers, Hingst served as team nutritionist for the Atlanta Falcons during their 2008 season, after spending five years in strength and conditioning and sport nutrition capacities at Florida State. During his time at FSU, Hingst earned his master's degree in clinical nutrition with an emphasis in sport nutrition. He received bachelor's degrees in nutrition sciences and dietetics and exercise science from Nebraska in 2001.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Diets & Weight Loss"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 21.95}, {"asin": "162231557X", "title": "Prairie Home Companion 40th Anniversary Collection", "author": "Garrison Keillor", "description": "About the Author Garrison Keillor, born in Anoka, Minnesota, is an essayist, columnist, blogger, and writer of sonnets, songs, and limericks. Keillor wrote and hosted the radio show A Prairie Home Companion for forty years. He and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, live in Minneapolis and New York.As the host of A Prairie Home Companion for over forty years, Garrison Keillor has captivated millions of listeners with his News from Lake Wobegon monologues. He has been honored with Grammy, ACE, and George Foster Peabody awards, the National Humanities Medal, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Radio"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": "from 30.95"}, {"asin": "1598869736", "title": "Work It!: Veterinarian at Seaside Zoo (Work It! Book Collection)", "author": null, "description": "Review Bella Santi and Sierra Christmas are two lucky girls who receive an internship with a veterinarian at the local Seaside Zoo in San Francisco through the Work It Club internship program for girls. Sierra is bold and confident, Bella is shy and less sure of herself because of a tragic event in her family months earlier. The girls work with the veterinarian, Dr. Lopez, as she saves a baby wolf, feeds a snow leopard cub, grooms a rare pony from Sweden, and even cares for a giraffe. They also work together to solve a mystery at the zoo. This book is full of real details about the day-to-day job of being a zoo veterinarian. It contains Action Notes at the back of the book full of resources for readers who want to take the next step and find out more about taking care of zoo animals. For girls who are animal lovers or just curious about them, this book will quickly become a favorite. A bonus for all of us who have daughters is that this book is part of a series designed to inspire girls about career choices, think big about their lives and take action. I give this first book in the series my highest recommendation! --Darryl L. Mobley, Founder & Publisher of Family Digest Magazine", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.09}, {"asin": "1520504543", "title": "5-Minute Book Marketing for Authors: Easy and effective ways to market your book every single day!", "author": "Penny C. Sansevieri", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Writing, Research & Publishing Guides"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1626724458", "title": "Be Prepared", "author": "Vera Brosgol", "description": "Review A New York Times Book Reiview Notable Children's Book of 2018A Boston Globe Best Children's Book of 2018Selected as the Best Graphic Novel of 2018 by Parents Magazine \"Beautifully drawn, brutally funny, brilliantly honest. Vera is such a good cartoonist I almost can\u2019t stand it.\u201d \u2015Raina Telgemeier, author of Smile \"Perfect for fans of Shannon Hale\u2019s Real Friends (2017), this will easily lodge a place in readers\u2019 hearts, even as it has them rolling in the aisles.\"\u2015 Booklist , starred \"The story, both culturally specific and universal, is a welcome addition to the growing canon of comics tales by talented women cartoonists (Raina Telgemeier, Tillie Walden, Zeina Abirached, Cece Bell, and many others) based on their own lives.\"\u2015 Horn Book, starred \"The dialogue rings true, the pace is seamless, and the panel artwork, in woodsy browns and greens, conveys feelings with clean, assured lines. By turns sardonic, adorable, and noble, Vera is a beguiling hero who learns how to recognize who's really on her side.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly, starred \"A gorgeous, emotional memoir worthy of any graphic novel collection.\"\u2015 School Library Journal, starred \"While the culturally specific references will particularly resonate with kids of Russian heritage, the larger story will strike chords with any kid who has ever struggled to find a place to belong.\"\u2015 Kirkus \"There\u2019s no real villainy here, just the quotidian slings and arrows carelessly shot by kids more concerned with fun than empathy. That makes Vera a character with appeal to every tween who\u2019s ever felt disappointed by peers\u2015or by a fulfilled wish that didn\u2019t live up to its bright, shiny promise.\"\u2015 The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books About the Author Vera Brosgol was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1984 and moved to the United States when she was five. Her first graphic novel, Anya's Ghost , was published in 2011 by First Second. Her picture book Leave Me Alone! was a 2017 Caldecott Honor book. She was a storyboard artist at Laika Inc. for ten years, working on films including Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and at last count has knit twenty-five sweaters.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "1250123070", "title": "Come Sundown: A Novel", "author": "Nora Roberts", "description": "Review \u201cRoberts always tells a good story that balances romance and suspense, but in this title, the narrative is deeper, the mystery is more layered, and with Alice, Roberts moves into another level of exploring physical and emotional trauma and the powerful balm of family and love. [Roberts] is moving into more complex and darker storytelling, to terrific effect.\u201d -- Kirkus Starred Review\"With its take-no-guff heroine, who understands the importance of family and friends, and a compelling plot peppered with domestic details and composed of equal measures of spine-tingling suspense and sexy romance, this is quintessential Roberts.\"-- Booklist Rave Review\u201cWhat makes this novel most engaging is Roberts\u2019s ability to suffuse her story with rich details of one family\u2019s life, as well as sizzling doses of romance and mystery.\u201d-- Publishers Weekly About the Author NORA ROBERTS is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 230 novels, including Legacy, The Awakening, Hideaway, Under Currents, The Chronicles of The One trilogy, and many more. She is also the author of the bestselling In Death series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Come Sundown By Nora Roberts St. Martin's Press Copyright \u00a9 2017 Nora RobertsAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-12307-7 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Begin Reading, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 \u2014 Present Day \u2014 Dawn bloomed, pink as a rose, tinting the snow-drenched mountains with delicate color. Elk bugled as they swam through mists on their morning pilgrimage, and the rooster crowed his insistent alarm. Savoring the last of her coffee, Bodine Longbow stood at the kitchen door to look and listen to what she considered the perfect start of a November day. The only thing that could make it better was one additional hour. Since childhood she's wished for a twenty-five-hour day, had even written down all she could accomplish with just sixty minutes more. Since Earth's rotation didn't accommodate her, she made up for it, rarely sleeping beyond five-thirty. When dawn broke, she had already completed her morning workout \u2014 a precise sixty minutes \u2014 showered, groomed, dressed for the day, checked e-mails and texts, eaten a breakfast of yogurt, which she was trying to convince herself to like with granola that she didn't like any better than yogurt, while she checked her schedule on her tablet. Since her schedule already lived in her head, the check wasn't necessary. But Bodine believed in being thorough. Now, with the predawn portion of the day in the bag, she could take a few moments to enjoy her morning latte \u2014 double espresso, whole milk, and a squirt of the caramel she promised her inner critic she'd wean herself off of eventually. The rest of the household would pile in soon, her father and brothers from checking on the stock, getting the ranch hands going. Since it was Clementine's day off, Bodine knew her mother would sail into the kitchen, cheerfully and perfectly produce a Montana ranch breakfast. After feeding three men, Maureen would put the kitchen to rights before sailing off to the Bodine Resort where she served as the head of sales. Maureen Bodine Longbow was a constant wonder to her daughter. Not only was Bodine dead sure her mother didn't actively wish for that extra hour a day, she obviously didn't need it to get everything done, to maintain a solid marriage, help run two complex businesses \u2014 the ranch and the resort \u2014 while continuing to enjoy life to the fullest. Even as she thought it, Maureen breezed in. Her short, roasted-chestnut hair crowned a face pretty as rosebud. Lively green eyes smiled at Bodine. \"Morning, my baby.\" \"Morning. You look great.\" Maureen skimmed a hand down a narrow hip and the trim, forest green dress. \"I've got meetings on top of meetings today. Gotta make an impression.\" She slid open the old barn door that led to the pantry, took a white butcher's apron from the hook. Not that a pop of bacon grease would dare to land on that dress, Bodine thought. \"Make me one of those lattes, would you?\" Maureen asked as she fastened the apron. \"Nobody makes them as good as you.\" \"Sure. I've got a meeting straight off this morning with Jessie,\" Bodine said, referring to the resort's events manager of three months, Jessica Baazov. \"About Linda-Sue Jackson's wedding. Linda-Sue's coming in at ten.\" \"Mmm. Your daddy tells me Roy Jackson's crying in his beer over the cost of marrying off his girl, but I know for a fact Linda-Sue's ma's determined to pull out every stop, and then some. She'd send that girl down the aisle to a celestial chorus of angels if we could provide it.\" Bodine meticulously steamed the milk for the latte. \"For the right price, Jessie'd probably manage it.\" \"She's working out real well, isn't she?\" With an enormous skillet on the eight-burner range, Maureen began frying up bacon. \"I like that girl.\" \"You like everybody.\" Bodine handed her mother the latte. \"Life's happier if you do. If you look for it, you can find something good about anybody.\" \"Adolf Hitler,\" Bodine challenged. \"Well, being what he was, he gave us a line in the sand most never want to cross again. That's a good thing.\" \"Nobody's like you, Mom.\" Bodine bent from her superior height \u2014 she'd passed her mother's five-three at twelve, and had kept going another five inches \u2014 kissed Maureen's cheek. \"I've got enough time to set the table for you before I go.\" \"Oh, honey, you need breakfast, too.\" \"I had some yogurt.\" \"You hate that stuff.\" \"I only hate it when I'm eating it, and it's good for me.\" Maureen sighed, lifting the bacon out to drain, adding more. \"I swear, sometimes I think you're a better ma to yourself than I ever was.\" \"Best mom ever,\" Bodine countered, taking a stack of the everyday plates from the cabinet. She heard the racket seconds before the back door opened. The men in her life piled in along with a pair of dogs. \"Mind you wipe your boots.\" \"Oh, now, Reenie, as if we'd forget.\" Sam Longbow took off his hat \u2014 nobody ate at Maureen's table wearing a hat. He stood six-three, most of it leg, a raw-boned, handsome man with silver wings sweeping through his black hair, with character lines fanning out from the corners of deep brown eyes. He had a crooked left incisor, which Bodine thought added charm to his smile. Chase, two years Bodine's senior hung his cattleman's hat on the peg, shrugged out of his barn jacket. He'd gotten his height and build from his father \u2014 all the Longbow siblings had \u2014 but in face and in coloring, he favored his mother. Rory, three years her junior, combined the two with deep brown hair, lively green eyes in a twenty-two-year-old version of Sam Longbow's face. \"Can you make enough for one more, Mom?\" Maureen arched her eyebrows at Chase. \"I can always make enough for one more. Who's the one?\" \"I asked Cal to breakfast.\" \"Well, set another plate,\" Maureen ordered. \"It's been too long since Callen Skinner's been at our table.\" \"He's back?\" Chase nodded at Bodine, headed to the coffee machine. \"Got here last night. He's settling into the shack, like we talked about. A hot breakfast'll help that along.\" While Chase downed black coffee, Rory added generous doses of milk and sugar to his own. \"He doesn't look like some Hollywood cowboy.\" \"A disappointment to our youngest,\" Sam said as he washed his hands in the farmhouse sink. \"Rory hoped he'd walk around with jangling spurs, a silver band around his hat and polished-up boots.\" \"Didn't have any of them.\" Rory snagged some bacon. \"Doesn't look much different than when he left. Older, I guess.\" \"Not a full year older than me. Save some of that bacon for the rest of us,\" Chase added. \"I've got more,\" Maureen said placidly and lifted her face when Sam bent down to kiss her. \"You look pretty as a candy box, Reenie. Smell just as pretty, too.\" \"I've got a morning full of meetings.\" \"Speaking of meetings.\" Bodine checked her watch. \"I have to go.\" \"Oh, honey, can't you stay to say hey to Callen? You haven't seen that boy in near to ten years.\" Eight years, Bodine thought, and had to admit she was curious to see him again. But ... \"I just can't, sorry. I'll see him around \u2014 and you, too,\" she said, kissing her father. \"Rory, I need to go over some things with you at the office.\" \"I'll be there, boss.\" She snorted at that, aimed for the mudroom where she'd already put her packed-for-the-day briefcase. \"Snow's coming by afternoon,\" she called, bundling into her coat, hat, scarf, and, pulling on gloves, walked out into the cold morning. She was running a minute behind, so she walked briskly to her truck. She'd known Callen was coming back, had been at the family meeting about hiring him on as head horseman for the ranch. He'd been Chase's closest friend as long as she could remember, and had wavered between being the bane of her existence to her first secret crush, back to bane, back to crush. She couldn't quite remember which category he'd been in when he'd left Montana. Now, as she drove over the corrugated snowpack of the ranch road, it occurred to her he'd been younger than Rory when he'd left home. About twenty, she calculated, no doubt pissed and frustrated at losing the bulk of his birthright. Land, she thought now, her father had bought from the Skinners when \u2014 if you said it politely \u2014 his father had fallen on hard times. He'd fallen on hard times because he gambled any good times away. Dead crap as a gambler, she'd heard her father say once, and as addicted to it as some are to the bottle. So with the land he'd surely loved down to less than fifty acres, the house, and a few outbuildings, Callen Skinner had set off to make his own way. According to Chase, Cal had done just fine, ending up wrangling horses for the movies. Now, with his father dead, his mother a widow, his sister married with a toddler and another baby on the way, he'd come back. She'd heard enough to know that what Skinner land remained wasn't worth what was owed on it from mortgages and loans. And the house stood empty as Mrs. Skinner had moved in with her daughter and family in a pretty house in Missoula where Savannah and her husband owned a craft shop. Bodine expected another meeting soon about buying the last fifty acres, and as she drove she weighed whether that parcel would work better for the ranch or resort. Fix up the house, she mused, rent it to groups. Or for events. Smaller weddings, corporate parties, family reunions. Or save that time and expense, tear it down, build from there. She entertained herself with possibilities as she drove under the arching Bodine Resort sign with its shamrock logo. She circled around, noting the lights on in the Trading Post as whoever caught the first shift prepared to open for the day. They had a trunk show this week with leather goods and crafts, and that would lure in some of the late-fall guests. Or with Rory's teams' marketing blast, draw in non-guests who'd stay for lunch at the Feed Bag. She pulled up in front of the long, low building with its wide front porch that housed reception. It always made her proud. The resort was born before she was, at a gathering with her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother \u2014 with her grandmother, Cora Riley Bodine, driving the train. What had started as a bare-bones dude ranch had grown into a luxury resort that offered five-star cuisine, personalized service, adventure, pampering, events, entertainment, and more, all spread over more than thirty thousand acres, including the working ranch. And all, she thought as she got out of the truck, with the priceless beauty of western Montana. She hurried inside where a couple of guests were enjoying coffee in front of the massive, roaring fire. She caught the fall scents of pumpkin and cloves, approved, as she waved a hand toward the desk, intent on reaching to her office and getting organized. Detoured to the desk when Sal, the perky redhead Bodine had known since grade school, signaled her. \"Wanted you to know Linda-Sue just called to say she'd be a little late.\" \"She always is.\" \"Yeah, but this time she's saying it instead of just being it. She's going by to pick up her mother.\" The solid foundation of Bodine's day suffered its first crack. \"Her mother's coming to the meeting?\" \"Sorry.\" Sal offered a sorrowful smile. \"That's mostly Jessie's problem, but thanks for the heads-up.\" \"Jessie's not in yet.\" \"That's all right, I'm early for the meeting.\" \"You always are,\" Sal called out as Bodine veered off, taking the turn that led back to the resort manager's office. Her office. She liked the size of it. Big enough to hold meetings with staff or managers, small enough to keep those meetings intimate and personal. She had a double window looking out on stone paths, a portion of the building that held the Feed Bag and the more exclusive Dining Hall, and fields rolling toward the mountains. She had deliberately arranged her grandmother's old desk with her back to that window, avoiding distractions. She had two high-backed leather chairs that had once graced the office in the ranch house, and a small sofa \u2014 once her mother's and now reupholstered with a sturdy weave in a strong summer blue. She hung her coat, hat, and scarf on the coatrack in the corner, smoothed a hand over her hair \u2014 black as her father's, worn in a long, straight tail down her back. She had the look of her grandfather \u2014 so his widow always said. Bodine had seen photographs, and acknowledged her resemblance to the young, doomed Rory Bodine who'd died in Vietnam before his twenty-third birthday. He'd had bold green eyes and a wide, top-heavy mouth. His black hair had had a wave to it while hers ran ruler straight, but she had his high cheekbones, his small, pugnacious nose, and the white Irish skin that required oceans of sunscreen. But she liked to think she'd inherited her grandmother's canny business sense. She went to the counter that held the pod machine that made tolerable coffee, took a mug to her desk to go over her notes for her first two meetings of the day. As she finished up a phone call and an e-mail simultaneously, Jessica came in. Like Maureen, Jessie wore a dress \u2014 a sharp red in this case paired with a short leather jacket the color of top cream. The short, high-heeled boots wouldn't last five minutes in the snow, but they matched the red dress as if they'd been dyed in the same batch. Bodine had to admire the slick, unassailable style. Jessica wore her streaked blond hair pulled back in a sleek coil as she often did on workdays. Like the boots, her lips matched the dress perfectly and suited her slashing cheekbones, her slim, straight nose, and her eyes of clear, glacier blue. She sat as Bodine finished the call, taking her own phone out of her jacket pocket and scrolling through something. Bodine hung up, sat back. \"The coordinator for the Western Writers Association's going to contact you about a three-day retreat and farewell banquet.\" \"Do they have dates? Numbers?\" \"Projected number ninety-eight. Dates are January nine arrival, departure on January twelve.\" \"This January?\" Bodine smiled. \"Their other venue fell through, so they're scrambling. I checked and we can work this. We slow down right after the holidays. We'll hold the Mill for them, for the meeting rooms and banquet, and the number of cabins she requested for forty-eight hours. The coordinator \u2014 Mandy \u2014 seemed organized, if a little desperate. I've just now sent you, my mother, and Rory an e-mail on the particulars. Their budget should work.\" \"All right. I'll talk to her, get a meal plan, transportation, activities, and so on. Writers?\" \"Yep.\" \"I'll alert the Saloon.\" Jessica made another note on her phone. \"I've never organized an event for writers that doesn't run a big bar tab.\" \"Good for us.\" Bodine wagged a thumb at the little coffeemaker. \"Help yourself.\" Jessica simply lifted the Irish green Bodine Resort insulated cup of water she carried habitually. \"How do you live without coffee?\" Bodine wondered, sincerely. \"Or Coke. How do you live on water?\" \"Because there's also wine. And there's yoga, meditation.\" \"All of those things put you to sleep.\" \"Not if they're done right. You really should do more yoga. And meditation would probably help you cut back on the caffeine.\" \"Meditation just makes me think about all the other things I'd rather be doing.\" Leaning back, Bodine swiveled her chair side to side. \"I really like that jacket.\" \"Thanks. I went into Missoula on my day off, splurged. Which is nearly as good as yoga for the mind and spirit. Sal tells me Linda-Sue's going to be a little late \u2014 newsflash \u2014 and her mother's coming with her.\" \"That's the latest. We'll deal. They're booking fifty-four cabins for three days. Rehearsal dinner, wedding, wedding reception, basically taking over Zen Town the day before the wedding in addition to the other activities.\" \"The wedding's only four weeks away, so that's not much time to change their minds, add more fluff.\" Bodine's wide mouth tipped into a smirk. \"You've met Dolly Jackson, right?\" \"I can handle Dolly.\" \"Better you than ... anybody,\" Bodine decided. \"Let's go over what we've got.\" They went over the list top to bottom, and had moved on to a smaller holiday party event the week before Christmas when Sal stuck her head in the door. \"Linda-Sue and her mom.\" \"Be right there. Wait, Sal? Order up some mimosas.\" \"Now you're talking.\" \"Smart,\" Jessica said, after Sal popped out again. \"Fuss over them and soften them up.\" \"Linda-Sue's not so bad. Chase dated her for about five minutes in high school.\" Bodine rose, tugged her dark brown vest into place. \"But mimosas never hurt. Let's soldier up.\" Pretty, curvy, easily flustered Linda-Sue paced the lobby with her hands clasped between her breasts. \"Can't you just see it, Mom? Everything decorated for Christmas, the trees, the lights, a fire going like now. And Jessica said the Mill's just going to sparkle.\" \"It better. I'm telling you we need those big candle stands, Linda-Sue, at least a dozen. Gold ones, like I saw in that magazine. Not the shiny gold, the classy gold.\" (Continues...) Excerpted from Come Sundown by Nora Roberts . Copyright \u00a9 2017 Nora Roberts. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Women's Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 29.99}, {"asin": "0425229130", "title": "Spackled and Spooked (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery)", "author": "Jennie Bentley", "description": "About the Author Jennie Bentley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Do-It-Yourself Mysteries. The Prime Crime home renovation series features textile designer Avery Baker and her handyman boyfriend, Derek Ellis, who renovate houses in Maine. She also writes under the name Jenna Bennett.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "194265832X", "title": "The Fevers of Reason: New and Selected Essays", "author": "Gerald Weissmann", "description": "Review Praise for The Fevers of Reason \"A rich layering of past, present, science, and literature to present diverse takes on the issue at hand. . . . Weissmann not only endeavors to connect the realms of literature and medicine, but also to create community among readers in light of class, race, religion, and age.\" \u2015 Glassworks Magazine \"Essays that brim with knowledge and bubble with attitude.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Highly accessible, entertaining. . . . Every current theme, including buzz about free radicals and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, is tempered with a historical anecdote. Here, too, are cautionary concerns about henna tattoos, reminders to beware of 'alternative science,' and lots of humor. Weissmann's science writing is juicy and conversational.\" \u2015 Booklist \"Expertly hopscotch[es] across all sorts of topics. . . . Weissmann's humanist, sometimes sardonic, voice binds together disparate strands to show how all human endeavor is linked. . . . Weissmann clearly sees how history obfuscates the work of women, people of color and immigrants, and tries to alter that. . . . Anyone with an interest in American scientific or literary history will enjoy this collection.\" \u2015 Shelf Awareness for Readers \"Weissmann's project is to show how science and culture aren't as distant as often thought, and the best of the essays are wonderfully stimulating and exciting in how they make this point. . . . Admirers will be captivated anew.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly Select Praise for Gerald Weissmann \"Gerald Weissmann is Lewis Thomas's heir.\" \u2015 Robert Coles \"Weissmann has a strong and well-informed interest, unusual for a scientist, both in poetry and in art.\" \u2015 Freeman Dyson \"[Weissmann] bridges the space between science and the humanities, and particularly between medicine and the muses, with wit, erudition, and, most important, wisdom.\" \u2015 Adam Gopnik \"America's most interesting and important essayist.\" \u2015 Eric Kandel \"How I envy the reader coming upon Dr. Weissmann's elegant, entertaining essays for the first time!\" \u2015 Jonas Salk \"Dr. Weissmann's juggling with the balls of global politics, biology, medicine, and culture in the framework of history is breathtaking.\" \u2015 Bengt Samuelsson , Nobel Laureate and former chairman of the Nobel Foundation \"The premier essayist of our time, Weissmann writes with grace and style.\" \u2015 Richard Selzer \"An absolutely first-rate writer.\" \u2015 Kurt Vonnegut \"[Weissmann] is a man of wide culture, a captivating and graceful writer.\" \u2015 New Yorker \"Weissmann introduces us to a new way of thinking about the connections between art and medicine.\" \u2015 New York Times Book Review \"Oliver Sacks, Richard Selzer, Lewis Thomas . . . Weissmann is in this noble tradition.\"\u2015 Los Angeles Times \"As a belles-letterist, Weissmann is the inheritor of the late Lewis Thomas . . . Like Thomas, he's a gifted researcher and clinician who writes beautifully. Unlike Thomas, he is an original and indefatigable social historian as well.\" \u2015 Boston Globe \"He writes as a doctor, a medical scientist, a knowing lover of art and literature and a modern liberal skeptic. But more than anything else, Weissmann writes as a passionate and wise reader.\" \u2015 New Republic \"Weissmann is a master of the essay form. His witty and elegant prose makes the toughest subject matter not only accessible but entertaining.\" \u2015 Barnes and Noble Review \"[Weissmann] is a Renaissance Man. . . . He'll stretch your mind's hamstrings.\" \u2015 Christian Science Monitor \"[Weissmann's essays] intertwine the profound connections of science and art in the context of our modern era . . . to illuminate the ongoing challenges scientists face in dealing with scrutiny and criticism, from colleagues and from our broader society.\" \u2015 Science \"Erudite, engaging, and accessible.\" \u2015 Library Journal \"Weissmann models his work after that of his mentor, Lewis Thomas. . . . His ideas . . . are every bit as important.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author Gerald Weissmann (August 7, 1930 \u2013 July 10, 2019) was a physician, scientist, editor, and essayist whose collections include The Fevers of Reason: New and Selected Essays ; Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter: Pop Culture and Modern Science ; Mortal and Immortal DNA: Science and the Lure of Myth ; and Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Essays & Correspondence"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "1477561757", "title": "The Risk of a Fall", "author": "T.W. Vanderneck", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 6.5}, {"asin": "1605373575", "title": "Welcome Home, Beaver", "author": null, "description": "Review \"The illustrations are detailed and make it fun for children to explore animal life underground. The rhyming text is perfect for read-alouds and a map showing the locations of each animal\u2019s habitat is given at the back of the book. Readers will have fun finally finding Beaver\u2019s home in North America. Recommended.\u201d \u2015 School Library Connection \u201cThe play between word and text perfectly weave together. \u2026 There is so much to discover at each animal's home, fun things. There's always something new to discover every time kids flip through, which will definitely keep them coming back for more. These animal homes aren't the common well-known ones, but rather introduce young listeners/readers to some 'homes' they haven't necessarily run across before. Warm feelings of security and comfort close off the tale as Beaver finally finds his own home and is glad to be there. But this isn't a book that will be set down after that last page and forgotten. It's one to flip through and read time and again.\u201d \u2015 BOOKWORM FOR KIDS About the Author Perhaps it was inevitable that Magnus Weightman (Sunderland, 1974) would one day illustrate his own children's book. Drawing has been a passion since his childhood and it was also the reason he chose to become an architect and urban designer. Becoming a father inspired him to bring his love for drawing, architecture, nature and travel together in his first book. Welcome Home, Beaver is both a journey of discovery of amazing animal houses and an epic search for home. From his English/Norwegian roots Magnus has now made his family home in Rotterdam.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0451413652", "title": "Murder, Served Simply (Amish Quilt Shop Mystery)", "author": "Isabella Alan", "description": "Review Praise for the\u00a0Amish Quilt Shop Mysteries \u201cIsabella Alan captures Holmes County and the Amish life in a mystery that is nothing close to plain and simple, all stitched together with heart.\u201d\u2014Avery Aames, Agatha Award\u2013winning author of the Cheese Shop Mysteries\u201cA dead-certain hit with devotees of cozy mysteries.\u201d\u2014P. L. Gaus, author of the Amish-Country Mysteries\u201cIsabella Alan captures the spirit of the Amish perfectly.\u201d\u2014Cozy Mystery Book Review\u201cAn adventure for which the pages seem to turn themselves.\u201d\u2014Open Book Society About the Author Isabella Alan is the national bestselling author of the Amish Quilt Shop Mysteries, including Murder, Handcrafted ; Murder, Plainly Read ; Murder, Served Simply ; Murder, Simply Stitched ; and Murder, Plain and Simple . An academic librarian for a small college in Ohio, she grew up visiting the state\u2019s Amish country with her family. As Amanda Flower, she is the author of the Agatha Award\u2013nominated Maid of Murder as well as the Magical Bookshop Mysteries. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Water fell from the faucet into the old porcelain sink in Running Stitch\u2019s tiny bathroom. Through the closed door, I heard the cheerful Pennsylvania Dutch chatter of the ladies from my quilting circle. Normally, the sound would have made me smile. Today, any noise was certain to cause an instant migraine. I dabbed my face with a damp paper towel, careful not to mar my eye makeup. When Ryan Dickinson showed up at my door, I wanted to look my best. Not for him but for me. Didn\u2019t every girl feel like that when confronted with her ex-fianc\u00e9? Of course, most girls don\u2019t have their parents to blame for the reunion. I rested my forehead on the mirror and willed myself to get a grip. A tap came at the door. \u201cAngie, are you okay in there?\u201d asked Anna, who had been my aunt Eleanor\u2019s closest friend. I opened the door. My kitten, Dodger, and French bulldog, Oliver, sat on either side of her. Concern was plastered on all three of their faces. \u201cI\u2019m fine,\u201d I said, forcing some Christmas cheer into my voice. None of them bought my act. \u201c Ya , you sound like it.\u201d If you had asked me before my move from Dallas to Ohio\u2019s Amish Country whether Amish women were sarcastic, I would have said no. Boy, did Anna prove me wrong. \u201cI am fine.\u201d She stepped back to give me enough space to exit the bathroom. \u201cYou didn\u2019t seem that way earlier today. When your parents and Ryan arrived, you practically threw them onto the progressive-dinner sleigh. You barely gave Mattie and me enough time to introduce ourselves.\u201d I crossed the shop to the long table lined with tureens of soup, each made by a lady from my quilting circle, and chili made by me. I had to bring a little of Texas to this Christmas in Ohio. \u201cThe sleigh was leaving,\u201d I said as I stirred my chili. \u201cI didn\u2019t want them to miss this important event in Rolling Brook. It\u2019s not like they will have another chance to have an Amish progressive dinner.\u201d \u201cThey will if they come next Christmas,\u201d Anna said. I shivered. \u201cMom and Dad are welcome back, but this will be the last Christmas Ryan Dickinson spends in Rolling Brook if I can help it.\u201d Mattie Miller, my young assistant in the shop, said, \u201cRyan is very handsome.\u201d I scowled at the chili. Maybe I should add some more hot sauce and show them how we really do chili in Texas. \u201cHe\u2019s no more handsome than the sheriff. The sheriff is distinguished,\u201d Anna said. I flinched. There lay the heart of the problem. Ryan Dickinson, my ex-fianc\u00e9, and Sheriff James Mitchell, my kind-of boyfriend, were together in the same county for Christmas. I never thought I would see the day, not even in my worst nightmares. And it was all thanks to my mother, the mastermind behind the drama. Suddenly, the chili didn\u2019t seem all that appetizing. I debated going back to the bathroom in case I needed to toss the half dozen Christmas cookies I had pilfered from the tray Mattie had brought across the street from her family\u2019s bakery. I placed the glass lid back on the Crock-Pot. Mattie\u2019s thin eyebrows wrinkled. \u201cAngie, you don\u2019t look so good. Are you ill?\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll be fine. The holidays are always stressful, right?\u201d Anna sniffed. \u201cThe Englisch make it stressful. It\u2019s not that way in the Amish world. We know Christmas is a time of reflection on our faith, and to be with family.\u201d \u201cI think most English folks know that too,\u201d I said. \u201cBut there are also credit cards involved.\u201d Anna shook her head as if I\u2019d hit her with yet another mysterious English riddle. Mattie unwrapped a third stack of plastic bowls from their packaging and set them on the edge of the table. \u201cThe progressive dinner is across the street at the bakery.\u201d \u201cAlready?\u201d I swallowed hard. The next stop would be Running Stitch. I hurried to the front window. Sure enough, the progressive-dinner sleigh was off-loading customers, most of whom were local English folks, with the exception of Ryan and my parents. Before the cold could seep through their heavy winter coats and parkas, they dashed into the bakery. My best friend and Mattie\u2019s sister-in-law, Rachel Miller, would warm them up with hot coffee and some of her prizewinning friendship bread. Maybe if Mom and Ryan overeat, they will be too ill to talk to me about whatever brought them to Ohio this Christmas, I thought, feeling more cheerful. Then I could spend the rest of the week avoiding talking to them about it. I wouldn\u2019t mind talking with my dad though. I suspected he was on my side. Plus, Dad had the ability to pack away a couple of pies single-handedly. The progressive dinner wouldn\u2019t even be a challenge for him. Mattie patted my arm as she carried a tray of crackers to the second long table along the quilt shop\u2019s front window. \u201cAngie, don\u2019t worry so much. It will all be fine.\u201d When had Mattie become the calm, reassuring one? When she\u2019d started working for me four months ago, she\u2019d been a quiet, unassuming Amish girl. I liked the new Mattie, but I wasn\u2019t sure how her conservative brother felt about her new confidence. I peered out through Running Stitch\u2019s display window. One of my favorite quilts, a double wedding ring pattern done in Christmas red and green, hung over the quilt stand next to a five-foot Christmas tree decorated with white lights and pincushions as ornaments. The Amish don\u2019t have Christmas trees in their homes. Like everything else, their Christmas decorations are modest\u2014some greenery and maybe a string of popcorn at most. I shuddered at what my Amish friends would think of the nine-foot glitzed-and-glittered tree that sat in the front hall of my parents\u2019 home back in Dallas. There were enough electric bulbs on it to light up an aircraft carrier. Dad always said it wasn\u2019t worth putting up a Christmas tree unless you could see it from space. Thinking of the tree made me nostalgic and happy that both of my parents were in Rolling Brook for Christmas. The sleigh shifted forward a foot as the two draft horses shuffled in place. Steam escaped from their nostrils as they stamped the snow-covered road. Jonah, Anna\u2019s son and my childhood friend, sat on the driver\u2019s seat of the sleigh. He spied me in the window and waved. He arched his sandy-colored eyebrows as if to ask a question. Great, I thought, even Jonah wonders how I\u2019m going to handle Ryan. Does the entire town know my ex-fianc\u00e9 is here for Christmas? I already knew the answer to that one. Behind me, Anna and Mattie spoke in hushed tones. I walked across the room in time to hear Mattie say, \u201cAaron said it\u2019s wrong for the Englischers to portray the Amish that way.\u201d Ahh, I thought, the play. An Amish Christmas was the second hot topic in town, and I was happy to have it. At least it took some of the heat off me. \u201cDid you hear what it\u2019s about?\u201d Mattie asked. \u201cJudging from the title,\u201d Anna said, \u201csomething about the Amish and Christmas.\u201d \u201cNee.\u201d Mattie put her hands on her hips. \u201cI mean yes, but it\u2019s mostly about an Amish girl who falls in love with an Englischer and leaves the community. My brother says that it belittles our way of life.\u201d Anna snorted. \u201cLet the Englisch have their fun.\u201d \u201cIf it were just Englischers .\u201d Mattie lowered her voice until I could barely hear her. \u201cEve Shetler is in the play.\u201d Anna clicked her tongue. \u201c Ya, I heard that. Eve is an Englischer now. It\u2019s not our concern what she does now that she has left the community.\u201d \u201cMany don\u2019t feel that way. It\u2019s fine she left the community, but why would she come back and mock it?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t think the play is meant to mock anything,\u201d I said, jumping in for the first time. \u201cHave you seen it?\u201d Mattie asked. \u201cNo, I heard bits and pieces when I was at the inn setting up for the Christmas quilt show. Tonight will be the first time I\u2019ll see it run all the way through.\u201d The progressive dinner would end at the Swiss Valley Hotel on Rolling Brook\u2019s border with Berlin. The grand finale of the evening would be the opening of An Amish Christmas . Perhaps now was not the best time to mention the musical numbers in the production. Mattie smoothed the pile of napkins on the table. \u201cThen you can\u2019t say for sure.\u201d I opened my mouth to protest, but the bell over the front door rang. Progressive diners poured into the quilt shop. Cheerful chatter quickly filled the small shop. The women raved over the quilts, and the men made a beeline for the tureens of soup. Anna and Mattie took up their posts behind the soup table and began dishing hot soup and chili into bowls. Mom, Dad, and Ryan were in the back of the pack. My father gave me a huge grin, and it took all my willpower not to run over to him and give him a big bear hug like I had when I was a little girl. The man behind him, Ryan, stopped me. Ryan had a pained expression on his face as he rubbed his arms, as if to get blood circulating. Clearly, spending the night freezing in an Amish sleigh as it moved from business to business in Rolling Brook and eating heavy Amish food were not what he expected when he arrived in Ohio. I knew Ryan, the fitness fanatic, was already calculating the number of calories he\u2019d consumed since his plane landed and how many hours it would take in the gym to burn them off. His gaze zeroed in on me. Could I be wrong, but did his expression soften? My stomach did a little flip. I wouldn\u2019t let Ryan\u2019s chocolate puppy-dog eyes work their magic on me. I wasn\u2019t going to be fooled this time. Never again. I broke eye contact, and I took a deep breath. It was just a week. What could possibly happen to ruin Christmas in a week? I glanced down at my beloved Frenchie, Oliver. He covered his nose with his white paw. Oliver knew better. He knew all the players on and off the stage. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.51}, {"asin": "0807056405", "title": "Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution", "author": "Marcus Eriksen", "description": "Review \u201cEriksen succeeds in dramatizing a significant problem and enlisting popular support, noting some immediate steps that can be taken to create recyclable products...The thrills and chills of rafting packaged with a compelling call to action.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cEriksen\u2019s work is a much-needed wake-up call for the public to pressure politicians to finally tackle an often-overlooked but deadly form of pollution.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201c Junk Raft is a stimulating, thought-provoking and factually grounded read.\u201d\u2014 Nature \u201cThis book combines many of my favorite things\u2014adventure far from shore, the spirit of exploration, and the fight to save our oceans\u2014all in a gripping narrative that\u2019s also a parable for our time. In the battle for the future of our living world, Marcus Eriksen is a true warrior.\u201d\u2014James Cameron, filmmaker and deep-ocean explorer\u201cNavigating between an epic seafaring adventure and an activist\u2019s environmental distress call, Junk Raft serves as a reflection of the choices and journeys that each of us makes and helps us understand how plastic in the oceans is deeply intertwined with the future of human life. Eriksen gets at the heart of what it means to respond to environmental catastrophe on our imperiled planet. As Marcus\u2019s wife, Anna, puts it so memorably, \u2018Love creates justice.\u2019\u201d\u2014C\u00e9line Cousteau, documentary filmmaker, artist, and environmental activist\u201cMarcus Eriksen and I share the same struggle, namely, to draw back the plastic curtain in order to subdue the monster that the plastics industry created. Junk Raft is filled with adventure, romance, and important truths that will be needed by the thousands of groups who will eventually overcome the beast. This book heralds the beginning of a new field of scientific research, adding fuel to movements dedicated to the survival and liberation of the natural and human worlds.\u201d\u2014Captain Charles Moore, author of Plastic Ocean and founder of Algalita Marine Research and Education\u201cWhen the junk raft was originally making its crossing from California to Hawaii, it was big news for ocean lovers around the world. It\u2019s exciting to now be able to read such a personal account of these adventures, exploring the thoughts that were going through Marcus\u2019s mind, and the daily challenges that arise when taking a journey as monumental as this one.\u201d\u2014Jack Johnson, musician and clean-ocean activist\u201c Junk Raft takes us on an exciting and quixotic voyage of exploration, adventure, and activism, and along the way, Marcus Eriksen somehow manages to turn his cutting-edge research into an engaging love story. Don\u2019t be fooled by the title\u2014Eriksen\u2019s Junk Raft carries a treasure chest full of adventurous stories, wise insights, and valuable lessons on how to protect our oceans.\u201d\u2014Stuart H. Coleman, author of Eddie Would Go and Hawaii manager of the Surfrider Foundation About the Author Marcus Eriksen is the cofounder and director of research for the 5 Gyres Institute, with firsthand experience from more than twenty ocean-crossing expeditions, and he has written and published research on the impact of plastic pollution in the world\u2019s oceans. He is the author of Junk Raft and My River Home: A Journey from the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico .", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Professionals & Academics"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 18.56}, {"asin": "1888683376", "title": "Dust Between My Toes: An Amish Boy's Journey", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": null}, {"asin": "0739458671", "title": "House Calls and Hitching Posts: Stories from Dr. Elton Lehmans Career Among the Amish", "author": "Elton Lehman", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Professionals & Academics"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 27.05}, {"asin": "1633920992", "title": "Out of Focus (3) (Chosen Paths)", "author": "L.B. Simmons", "description": "About the Author After graduating from Texas A&M University, L.B. Simmons did what any biomedical science major could do. She entered the workforce as a full-time chemist. Years later, never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined herself a USA Today Bestselling contemporary romance author as well. What began as a memoir for her children, ended up being her first self-published book, Running on Empty . Soon after, her girls were given reoccurring roles in the remainder of what became the Mending Hearts series. L.B. Simmons doesn\u2019t just write books. With each new work, she attempts to compose journeys of love and self-discovery so she may impart life lessons to readers. She\u2019s tackled suicide, depression, bullying, eating disorders, as well as physical and sexual abuse, all the while weaving elements of humor into the storylines in effort to balance the difficult topics. Often described as roller coaster rides, her novels are known for eliciting a wide range of emotions in each story she tells.", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.86}, {"asin": "006236359X", "title": "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 15.39}, {"asin": "0987671715", "title": "Jockeys and Jewels", "author": "Bev Pettersen", "description": "From the Author Jockeys and Jewels is the first book in the Dangerous Odds Series which also includes Color My Horse and Fillies and Females. All three books may be enjoyed as standalones. From the Inside Flap An undercover cop investigates the murder of his ex-partner and falls in love with the dedicated jockey he has deceived. His lies thrust them into the crosshairs of a killer...and now much more than their love is at stake. From the Back Cover \"Jockeys and Jewels is a sparkling jewel of a romance--clever, entertaining, and touching.\"-- Julianne MacLean, USA Today Bestselling Author \"Bev Pettersen is firmly on my must-buy list. Her books sweep you away to the world of Thoroughbred racing, and her cast of jockeys, horse trainers, and grooms are lovable and unforgettable.\" - Hope Ramsay, Bestselling Author of Home At Last Chance. \"Bev Pettersen brings complex characters and a riveting story to life through engaging dialogue, a well crafted plot, and a budding love story centered around a crackling good murder mystery. Not just for fans of horse racing, (think Dick Francis with romance), there is something in this exciting and original well-told tale for everyone. Highly recommended!\" -- Judith James, IPPY Awards Gold Medal Winner Praise for Bev Pettersen's Riding For Redemption:\"The latest romantic mystery from Pettersen...enlivened by amiable characters and a robust setting.\"\u00a0- Kirkus Reviews \"Packed with both mystery and romance, conspiracy and emotion, with story lines centered on the polar opposites of horses and the Mexican drug cartel, this award-winning romantic mystery novel is a thrill throughout...a great read all around!\" - Pacific Book Reviews About the Author USA Today Bestselling Author Bev Pettersen is a three-time nominee in the National Readers Choice Award as well as a two-time finalist in the Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart\u00ae Contest. She competed for five years on the Alberta Thoroughbred race circuit and is an Equine Canada certified coach. She lives in Nova Scotia with her family, and when she's not writing novels, she's riding. Visit her at bevpettersen.com Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1450404677", "title": "Running for Women", "author": "Jason R Karp, PhD", "description": "Review \"Using meticulous research, Karp and Smith have created a practical and intriguing masterpiece for female runners of all ages and abilities. Highly recommended!\" Lorraine Moller-- Boston Marathon Winner, Olympic Marathon Medalist, Cofounder of the Lydiard Foundation, Author of On the Wings of Mercury \u201cIn Running for Women, Carolyn Smith and Jason Karp combine scientific research with realistic guidelines that all women can follow to combat the effects of aging.\u201d Meghan Arbogast-- Four-Time Qualifier to the Olympic Marathon Trials, Team USA Leader at World 100K Championships, World-Record Holder for 50+ Age Group in the 100K \u201cIn Running for Women, Dr. Karp and Dr. Smith provide women and their coaches a clear path to success and enjoyment in training and racing.\" Joe Compagni-- Director and Head Coach, Men's and Women's Track and Field and Cross Country Monmouth University About the Author Jason Karp, PhD, MBA, is a running coach, exercise physiologist, author, speaker, and creator of the REVO\u2082LUTION RUNNING\u2122 certification for coaches and fitness professionals.A TEDx speaker, Dr. Karp has given hundreds of international lectures at the world's top fitness conferences and coaching clinics. He has been an instructor for USA Track & Field's level 3 coaching certification and for coaching camps at the U.S. Olympic Training Center.Jason was awarded the 2011 IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year, is a two-time recipient of the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, & Nutrition Community Leadership Award (2014, 2019), and was a 2019 finalist for Personal Fitness Professional Trainer of the Year and 2020 finalist for Association of Fitness Studios Influencer of the Year.Dr. Karp received his PhD in exercise physiology with a physiology minor from Indiana University, his MBA at San Diego State University, his master's degree in kinesiology from the University of Calgary, and his bachelor's degree in exercise and sport science with an English minor from Penn State University.. Carolyn Smith, MD, is the head medical team physician and medical director in the department of intercollegiate athletics and athletic training educational program at Marquette University. She is also the executive director of the Marquette University Medical Clinic, an adjunct faculty member in the College of Health Sciences, and a member of the Board of Directors for Special Olympics Wisconsin.\u00a0A lifelong runner, Carolyn competed for the University of Wisconsin and ran in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. She is a national age-group record holder, 100-kilometer and 24-hour national ultramarathon champion, and 7-time member of the U.S. 100K National Team.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Women's Health"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 11.98}, {"asin": "1596353805", "title": "Boxed In (Annie's Attic Mysteries)", "author": "Karen Kelly", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.09}, {"asin": "1771643374", "title": "Arthur: The Dog who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home", "author": "Mikael Lindnord", "description": "Review A Sunday Times Bestseller \"An incredible journey.\"\u2014Daily Telegraph \"Arthur latched onto an extreme sports team during the Amazon race - and what happened next will melt the hardest heart\"\u2014Daily Mail About the Author Mikael Lindnord is the author of the books Arthur and its follow-up Rescue Dog Tales . Arthur is soon to be made into a major motion picture starring Mark Wahlberg. When he's not writing books, Lindnord is an adventure racer, race planner, and motivational speaker. A former aspiring professional hockey player, today he travels the world as an adventure racer. When not racing he lives with his wife, children, and, of course, his dog Arthur. Arthur is a mongrel from somewhere in Ecuador. He likes meatballs, long runs with Mikael, and relaxing with his family in Sweden.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.48}, {"asin": "0889955484", "title": "Clutch", "author": "Heather Camlot", "description": "Review \"Joey narrates his own tale with all the fear and bravado he is feeling moment to moment. Camlot weaves the elements together seamlessly and naturally while never losing sight of Joey at the center of it all. All the characters, including the city itself, are fully developed and play important roles in Joey's journey, as when Mr. Friedman speaks to Joey about his Holocaust experiences and losses. Yiddish phrases and traditions are defined as they occur. Woven through it all is the story of Jackie Robinson's first season of professional baseball in Montreal, captivating Joey and his friends, with actual quotes from sports reporters placed at the beginning of each chapter. Readers will be completely enthralled with Joey's world and root for him all the way. Powerful, moving, and wonderful.\"\u2014 Kirkus Star Review \"A superb story. Joey is a fully developed, complex character one can't help but love. His friends and family are all believable and interesting. The fast-paced plot is never dull and never predictable. Tension steadily mounts when Joey, in his desperate search for money, unwittingly aligns himself with a gangster who just happens to be the father of his best friend, Ben. Serious trouble looms. \"By the end of Clutch , Joey has learned some important life lessons, but he is still 13. One can only hope Camlot writes a sequel \u2014 Joey surely has many great adventures ahead.\"\u2014 Quill & Quire \"Heather Camlot's characters are people you'd like to know. In writing Clutch , she has scored a home run. Highly Recommended \".\u2014 CM Magazine \"This Toronto author's debut novel is a wonderful read, with a compelling plot, plenty of unpredictable twists and an engaging protagonist who learns some important life lessons.\"\u2014 City Parent \"Heather Camlot has hit a home run with this debut novel! Chapters are short, the plot moves along at a great pace and she has created endearing characters that are easy for kids to relate to. Both reluctant and proficient readers will want to keep turning the pages to reach the end, and whether they're baseball crazed or not, they'll love this heartfelt and moving story about a young Jewish kid who just wants a better life for himself and his family.\"\u2014 Canadian Children's Book News \" Clutch is a close and compelling look at one small family within a small community, part of a larger community still struggling to find its feet after the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust, finding meaning in the triumphs of an underdog hero and in embracing the connections that make us who we are. The author's interview at the end of the story is lovely. Recommended.\" \u2014 thebookwars.ca blog \"Short chapters that keep the intriguing plot moving quickly forward, a feeling of ever-growing tension, terrific secondary characters worthy of our admiration and having their own stories to tell, together teach a memorable history lesson for readers. Joey's first person narration is poignant, brave, and desperate. You will not forget him. I hope to meet him again one day.\"\u2014 Sal's Fiction Addiction \"A meticulously researched and lovingly crafted debut novel. . . The story dazzles with tight, pithy writing and accurate historical details that are smoothly woven in.\"\u2014 Montreal Review of Books \"Heather Camlot hits it out of the ballpark with this wise, tender and often funny story about friendship, loss and post-World War II Montreal.\"\u2014 Monique Polak , author of Bullies Rule \"Life, death, love and baseball! What more could a reader want? A home run.\"\u2014 Kevin Sylvester , author of MiNRS Book Description On Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2017 list in the Middle-Grade Historical Fiction category On the 2018 Skipping Stones Honor Awards list Nominated for the 2018 Silver Birch Fiction Award 2019 Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award Sundogs nominee A Starred selection on the CCBC Best Books for Kids & Teens list for spring 2018 Finalist for the 2018 Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People On Resource Links' list of The Year's Best in 2018 About the Author Heather Camlot is an editor and translator who has written for The New York Times , The Globe and Mail and Canadian Living . She lives in Toronto. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 7.2}, {"asin": "B00CE0RI7W", "title": "Recipe for Deception", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.5}, {"asin": "B01HVFXNVE", "title": "Expired Listings: Revenge Begins at Home", "author": "D.M. Barr", "description": "Review \u201cA buoyant, commendable mystery that piles on red herrings with ferocity and glee...the spiraling final act, culminating with the killer's staggering reveal, is an exhilarating ride.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \u201cExceptionally well written...a consistently compelling read from beginning to end...a masterfully crafted suspense thriller that will prove to be an enduringly popular addition to personal reading lists and community library collections.\u201d -- Midwest Book Review Expired Listings is a sumptuous and starkly original mystery in which real estate agent Dana Black finds herself chasing a killer instead of just a listing. D.M. Barr's debut effort mimes the best from Sue Grafton, Susan Isaacs and Judith Krantz with an aplomb normally reserved for a far more seasoned writer in a tale that satisfies at every level. Splendid, searing, and sensational!\"-- Jon Land , USA Today bestselling author of The Rising \u201cExpired Listings is smart, funny, and sexy - a wild romp through the (oddly compatible) worlds of high stakes real estate and the \"kink\" subculture...it's funny and scary, fast and furious when it needs to be. An enjoyable and titillating ride into hidden worlds - and the mind of a ruthless killer.\u201d-- Carole Bugge/C.E. Lawrence , author of Lee Campbell Mystery Series (Silent Stalker, etc) and Claire Rawlings Mystery Series A lot of twists and turns along with red herrings. A fast-paced mystery with a bit of romance. Thoroughly enjoyable! --Janet Lane Walters, prolific author of 30+ novels including Seducing a Pair of Blakefield Friends: Double Feature. There is everything anybody could ask for in a cracking good suspense novel - red herrings, a possibly unreliable narrator, some sex and romance, and a pace that builds to breakneck speed before a surprising revelation. -- Kathryn Guare , author of Where a Wave Meets the Shore I love it when a book defies my expectation. DM Barr crafted a mystery that has just the right amount of racy sex, humor and kept me guessing. Definitely a fun read and well worth the time. Looking forward to seeing what's next from Barr. -- BJ Knapp , author of Beside the Music Great Read, Well Written! This book keeps its promise of fun, suspense and just plain enjoyable reading. Highly recommended! -- S.A. Stolinsky , author of Hot Shot So suspenseful! I couldn't put the book down, and OMG, finding out who the killer is was a shock! Can't wait for the next offering by D.M. Barr.\u2014 Elf Ahearn , author of A Rogue in Sheep's Clothing From the Author Reviews are the lifeblood of any author, especially in today's world of social proof. Please don't forget to let other readers know of your experience reading \"Expired Listings.\" And I certainly hope that it's a pleasant one! -- D.M. Barr About the Author WHO IS D.M. BARR?By day, a mild-mannered salesperson, wife, mother, rescuer of senior shelter dogs, happily living just north of New York City. By night, an author of novels of sex, suspense and satire, such as Expired Listings, Murder Worth the Weight, The Queen of Second Chances, Saving Grace-A Psychological Thriller, and Simple Tryst of Fate . I was also the co-editor of the Sisters in Crime-New York/Tri-State anthology, Justice for All: Murder New York Style 5 .\u00a0My background includes stints in travel marketing, travel journalism, meeting planning, public relations and real estate. I was, for a long and happy time, an award-winning magazine writer and editor. \u00a0Then kids happened. And I needed to actually make money. Now they're off doing whatever it is they do (of which I have no idea since they won't friend me on Facebook)\u00a0and I can spend my spare time weaving tales of debauchery and whatever else tickles my fancy.\u00a0The main thing to remember about my work is that I am NOT one of my characters. For example, as a real estate broker, I've never played Bondage Bingo in one of my empty listings or offed one of my problem clients. I've never plotted against the administrators of my local weight loss clinic, or worried that my husband was planning to murder me for my inheritance. Well, that's not entirely true, but let's go with that for now. And I've never mastered the hula hoop to impress a group of senior citizens.\u00a0But that's not to say I haven't wanted to... Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Humor & Satire"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0618436634", "title": "ER Vets: Life in an Animal Emergency Room", "author": "Donna M. Jackson", "description": "From School Library Journal Starred Review. Grade 5-8\u2013With plentiful, excellent-quality photographs, this highly visual book offers a behind-the-scenes look at an emergency animal hospital in Colorado. While a German shepherd's life is saved, a snake could not be resuscitated. The pictures work well with the smallish-print text. Photographs range from heartbreaking (the saddest-ever Basset hound) to heartwarming (Shelley, a dog recovering from HBC, or hit by a car in vet-speak) to somewhat graphic. There are examples of X-rays and action shots of surgeries. In a chapter on the history of vets and pets, readers learns about how, in 15th-century France, a sow and her piglets were put on trial for murdering a child. Source notes are appended. A section on grief counseling for families with critically ill pets and a spread on how to put together a pet first-aid kit are included. Well-researched and well-written, ER Vets is an engaging book on a hot topic. \u2013Anne Chapman Callaghan, Racine Public Library, WI Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Gr. 5-8. A veteran nonfiction author as well as a pet owner, Jackson doesn't sidestep the emotional and physical demands of working in an emergency clinic, but her sensitive, behind-the-scenes look at emergency care also clearly shows the rewards of the profession and the bonds between owner and pet. To get the facts, she spent time in a-state-of-the-art facility, talking with vets, vet techs, pet owners, and even grief counselors, and observing a variety of animal patients--from a ball python, Lucy, that can't be saved, to a foal, Paco, born weak and tiny, that lives. The book's organization seems a little haphazard: while some chapters focus on particular animals, others are fairly general, and a few insets are sandwiched between the sections (for example, one discussing foods humans eat that can harm an animal). Still, Jackson gives both pets and their caregivers their due, and numerous, excellent photos, including a look at a surgery in progress, make this not only intriguing browsing material but also an honest initiation to a worthwhile career. A list of items for a pet first-aid kit is appended. Stephanie Zvirin Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review A Junior Library Guild Selection About the Author Donna M. Jackson is an award-winning author of many\u00a0nonfiction books for young readers.\u00a0 Her work includes The Bone Detectives, The Name Game and, most recently, The Elephant Scientist -- named a 2012 Robert F. Sibert Honor book, a 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Nonfiction Honor Book, and\u00a0an NSTA/CBC Outstanding Science Trade book.\u00a0She lives with her husband, Charlie, and their family near the Colorado's Rocky Mountains. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 19.68}, {"asin": "1463577052", "title": "Changers' Summer: Changers Trilogy", "author": "Mike Lewis", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 3.0, "price": 9.0}, {"asin": "1432785427", "title": "A Presence of Power", "author": "Larry Halonen", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "1464204764", "title": "The Vulture (Ike Schwartz Series)", "author": "Frederick Ramsay", "description": "Review The basic story flows smoothly, with parallel themes of terrorism and child abuse. Ike, and his wife, Ruth, are delightful characters, and Ike\u0092s CIA friend, Charlie Garland, proves as resourceful as ever. (Theodore Feit Midwest Book Review )The hero is a unconventional small-town Virginia sheriff named Ike Schwartz. His wife, Ruth, is cut from a different cloth, too. She's a college president fond of talking about her lingerie and making sheetmusic. The book begins when a car bomb explodes, and we learn what series followers have known all along: Sheriff Ike is a former CIA spook, crammed with dark skills. The search for the car bomber begins with Ike's colleagues at the Picketsville, Virginia, sheriff's office and widens to include FBI suits and Ike's raffish former CIA pal, Charlie. The detective plot is engrossing, and confrontations and assassinations make up the liveliest part of this uneven novel, almost carrying it past yards of windy sentences and a married couple's bantering that isn't as witty as it's meant to be. When the evil mastermind is paralyzed below the neck, we get a disquisition on the difference between tetraplegic and paraplegic. \"Imagine the potential damage to our youth mixing our classic languages could have.\" Nick and Nora wept. (Don Crinklaw Booklist )Marry new technology to old-fashioned policing and readers have something special. And that's what they have in The Vulture. ( SirReadaLot )Ike Schwartz\u0092s car is a smoking ruin on a Picketsville, VA, street. As a former CIA operative and the current sheriff, Ike has his share of enemies, but who could be responsible for the bombing? Picketsville launches an all-out investigation aided by Ike\u0092s CIA colleague Charlie Garland. This is the tenth in this terrific police procedural series (after Drowning Barbie). ( Library Journal )Were it not for a manufacturing fluke that created matching keys for identical cars, Sheriff Ike Schwartz would be a pile of ashes. Instead, it is an undercover officer who exploded in his car after meeting the Picketsville, Virginia Sheriff, but only a few are in on the mix-up. The atomization of the law enforcement officer is more of a declaration of war than a simple hit, and to that end Ike will use his CIA background and connections to discover who attempted to wipe him off of the planet. Ike is a man of principles and who always believes in doing the right thing, and this has garnered him no shortage of enemies. Now though, they have endangered the life of his wife Ruth Harris, and that infuriates him into a ruthlessly homicidal rage that is all the more terrifying for his calmness.~~~While Ike and Ruth take on new identities to maintain the pretense of his death and chase those who are chasing them, back in Picketsville the Sheriff\u0092s department is instigating its own investigation into the attack on their beloved leader. Used to be underestimated by State and federal agencies, acting Sheriff Frank Sutherlin more than capably utilizes the department to discover a threat that endangers the nation. A man who believes in Capitalism as Darwinism is intent on ruthlessly taking over the country financially, and he has the resources and magnetism to achieve his goals.~~~An actual coincidence that occurred with the author\u0092s own vehicle inspired the start of this novel, and from there it ratchets into high gear with suspense, action-packed scenes, and fun antics of Ike and his allies. Ike\u0092s relationship with his wife Ruth, the very liberal president of the local college, continues to be a highlight with banter that is as quick-witted as it is funny. Neither has yet to be swayed to the other\u0092s opposing political viewpoints, but somehow they completely match as a couple. Ike\u0092s CIA nemesis/friend Charlie continues to lend support even as he draws Ike back into black ops, and with Ruth as a surrogate for the reader we are introduced to a shady world of complex technological spying and covert warfare. This tenth in the series continues to maintain is high standard of writing with compelling intrigue, sardonic humor, and a stoic hero for the ages. ( NetGalley )The sheriff of Picketsville, Virginia, has seen a lot of trouble over the years. But who hates him enough to try to blow him to kingdom come? When Ike Schwartz's car is reduced to a twisted mass of metal on the main street of Picketsville, his wife, Ruth, and his team at the sheriff's office are devastated. Luckily for Ike, a former CIA agent, he drove off in the wrong car by mistake and is still alive and in hiding. Initially, only Ruth and his old CIA pal Charlie Garland know the truth, and they try to keep it that way, especially after Ike and Ruth's getaway cabin in the woods is also destroyed by a bomb. The bomber is caught but keeps mum. But Ike's network of friends in the CIA, FBI, and local police are eager to catch his would-be killer. The clues point to wealthy, politically connected Martin Pangborn, a man with a grudge against the government who has no use for any minorities, including Jewish sheriffs. So Ike and Ruth disguise themselves and head off to Idaho, where Pangborn's New Star Ranch trains anti-government troops and hides an even more sinister secret. Back home, Ike's team continues to look for answers while maintaining the fiction that he's dead. It takes a lot of high-tech tricks to uncover the truth. Ike's 10th (Drowning Barbie, 2014, etc.) uses themes cut from current headlines to ramp up the excitement. ( Kirkus )A remote Shropshire town is beset by wartime demons even more insidious than the Third Reich. It's 1941. American widower Edwin Carpenter is retired from his job as a university professor, and he's made the arduous trip to England to study a stone circle just outside the town of Noddweir. He's corresponded with Vicar Timothy Wilson and arranged to lodge with Grace Baxter, whose father, the village constable, has gone off to war. The village is of two minds over the disappearance of Issy Chapman, the teenage daughter of the village blacksmith. On one hand, Issy is considered a troublemaker and a slut; on the other, her father is rumored to mistreat her. Quite a few children have been removed from their city homes and sent to the country for their safety, billeted among many families in and around Noddweir, and inevitably their numbers include quite a few tough troublemakers. As more children vanish, suspicion runs rife among the villagers. An outsider like Edwin is naturally high on the list of suspects. Then the ineffectual special constable sent to replace Grace's father is found murdered, and several other villagers die in suspicious circumstances as rumors of strange sightings occur. Grace's grandmother, a student of the old ways, folk cures, and magic, insists that the stone circle known as the Guardian Stones is responsible for all the horrifying events. Edwin, unpersuaded, tries to help Grace do her father's job and protect the town from whatever modern evil is plaguing it. A fascinating look at a small town mired in the past and confronting the future\u0097 with a bombshell ending. ( Kirkus )This fourth mystery featuring animal-loving zookeeper Teddy Bentley continues to highlight fascinating and compelling lore about animals and their care. Teddy loves her charges for their uncomplicated goals and purity; humans are far more deceptive and confusing. Along with the charming polar bear cub Magnus, are two Icelandic foxes, gorgeous horses, and many, many puffins.~~~The land is as beautiful as it is dangerous, as very active volcanoes continue to emit \u0093bumps.\u0094 The complacent Icelanders don\u0092t worry about anything that they can\u0092t control. Their language is as unfathomable as their cuisine\u0097rotted shark, anyone?\u0097but the author does an admirable job attempting to explain the language\u0092s origin, usage, and use in family names. In such a small country, of course they need an app to prevent inconvenient incest dating.~~~Teddy\u0092s cynical humor with humans is never present with her animals, but fortunately she has enough numerous entertaining interactions with the Geronimo Birders to make this a delightfully funny mystery. The neighboring movie sets of a Berserker Viking film and science fiction movie only add to absurdity. The author\u0092s mix of devotion to animals, clever dialogue, and travelogue details will have readers booking their next flight to Iceland, along with their orders of future installments of this always original and enjoyable mystery series. ( Kings River Life Magazine ) About the Author Frederick Ramsay has published fourteen books that range from historicals (The Jerusalem Mysteries), to Africa (The Botswana Mysteries), to police procedurals (The Ike Schwartz Mysteries). In addition, his stand-alone Impulse was named one of the Best 100 Books of the Year in 2006 by Publishers Weekly. He is an iconographer and an accomplished public speaker. He lives and writes in Arizona.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 26.95}, {"asin": "0307952045", "title": "We the People: The Modern-Day Figures Who Have Reshaped and Affirmed the Founding Fathers' Vision of America", "author": "Juan Williams", "description": "Review Advance Praise for We the People \u00a0 \"American democracy is continually being reborn, and Juan Williams brings alive the impact of some of the modern-day leaders of this renewal. By portraying people of different backgrounds and ideologies, he has created a series of narratives that are both inspiring and thought provoking.\" -- Walter Isaacson \u00a0 \u201cIn a Washington boiling with anger, some of it real and some of it synthetic, Juan Williams is a rarity. He combines strong beliefs with a cheerful ability to see how disparate people, including some with whom he disagrees, have enriched the American mosaic. From Robert Moses to Robert Ball, and from George Meany to Charlton Heston, this book will remind readers of some strong men and women who made the nation strong.\u201d --George F. Will \u00a0 \"The Founders of our nation, politically bold and intellectually adventurous,\u00a0would be appalled at the idea that their revolutionary work would be used as a trump card against change, creative thinking, or social progress. The genius of Juan Williams' We the People is that it shows how subsequent generations kept the promise of those who created our\u00a0republic by building on their work rather than sitting back complacently,\u00a0advancing the rights of excluded groups, and\u00a0facing new problems squarely. Williams'\u00a0moving portraits of key figures in our national story show why\u00a0the American\u00a0gift\u00a0for self-criticism and self-correction\u00a0will always be one of our\u00a0greatest assets.\" \u00a0-- E. J. Dionne Jr., author, Why the Right Went Wrong \"Juan Williams' We the People is a fascinating intellectual romp through American history.\u00a0 All sorts of burning current event issues\u2014 the Gun Lobby, immigration, evangelical politics, sexual revolution\u2014 are brilliantly explored by Williams.\u00a0 Only a first rate mind could have written such a wide ranging and original survey.\u00a0 Highly recommended!\" --Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and author of Rightful Heritage: \u00a0Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America \"The Founders themselves would have approved of this ambitious and endlessly fascinating book. With his customary acumen, Juan Williams weaves together a rich montage of the people shaping a diverse and dynamic modern America. We the People is social history at its very finest, and belongs on the bookshelf of all history buffs. What a daring book! What a triumph!\" -- Jay Winik, author of 1944 and April 1865 \"Juan Williams has penned a rich, fascinating, and\u00a0zesty\u00a0tour among the men and women who have helped shape what we think of today when we think of America.\u00a0 The book is provocative, fun, and nonpartisan, all at the same time.\u00a0 Just what we need to explain how we got here, and where we might be headed.\" \u00a0-- Stephen L. Carter, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University\"The battle over the Constitution and how the USA should be run rages on.\u00a0For Americans who want an informed view of the great debate, there is no better book than We the People .\u00a0I thank Juan Williams for writing it.\"-- Bill O\u2019Reilly,\u00a0Anchor,\u00a0Fox News Channel About the Author Juan Williams is a top political analyst for Fox News Channel, co-host of the daily news show \u201cThe Five,\u201d and a columnist for The Hill. Previously, he worked for two decades at The Washington Post as White House correspondent and a prize-winning columnist. He has won an Emmy for TV documentary writing. For ten years, he was a daily talk show host and senior political correspondent for NPR. His written work includes such critically acclaimed, bestselling books as Eyes on the Prize , Enough , and Thurgood Marshall . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The Founding Fathers and Modern America \"What happened to my America?\u201d \u201cWhy don\u2019t those people speak English?\u201d And \u201cMr. Williams, don\u2019t take this the wrong way, but .\u2008.\u2008. you know, at the donut shop, at the gas station, in the schoolyard--have you ever seen so many immigrants, especially the Latinos everywhere?\u201d \u201cThese kids are so thuggish.\u2008.\u2008.\u2008. Do you see any reason to be confident in this country\u2019s future?\u201d After the 2012 presidential election I heard those kinds of urgent questions from older white conservatives. They seemed disoriented. With obvious anxiety they felt the cycle of history spinning away from them, leaving them dizzy and angry at being pushed away from the center of politics and culture by the emerging \u201cNew America.\u201d One poll found 53 percent of white Americans saying the changes in culture, economics, demographics, and politics were coming too quickly and damaging America\u2019s \u201ccharacter and values.\u201d This sense of disillusionment is not limited to older white conservatives. In the same 2011 poll, done by Heartland Monitor, the National Journal, and Allstate, 51 percent of African Americans said they too felt all the demographic and political churning was too much and the \u201ctrends are troubling.\u201d A 2015 poll done by Reuters and Ipsos found that 62 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Independents, and 37 percent of Democrats \u201cfeel like a stranger in [their] own country.\u201d Another 72 percent of Republicans, 58 percent of Independents, and 45 percent of Democrats \u201cdon\u2019t identify with what America has become.\u201d I myself am hardly immune from this national anxiety over change, and it hit me personally eight years before the 2012 election, in 2004. That year I turned fifty and felt the new realities of life pushing against me everywhere. Just think about how much the world changed during my first fifty years on Earth. When I was born, in 1954, people who looked like me sat at the back of the bus, drank out of separate water fountains, and went to separate schools. Eighty-nine years after the end of the Civil War, my father, an immigrant black man, could not get anything but a low-end job in most American companies. He could not go to most American schools, could not live in most American neighborhoods, and was not allowed to swim in most pools, golf on most courses, or go to most amusement parks. My mother, who was born in Panama, did not see Latinos as a major force in American life. The census did not even bother to count the number of Latinos in the United States during the 1950s. In 1970 Latinos in the United States added up to less than 5 percent of the population. Today Latinos make up over 17 percent of the U.S. population, outnumbering blacks as the largest minority group. In 1954 abortion was not a critical political issue. The idea of women controlling the rights to their own fertility and their bodies was not a \u201cculture war\u201d argument splitting conservatives and liberals. Fifty years ago U.S. government policy, supported by conservatives, promoted family planning. It was seen as a boon to parents, allowing them to better provide for a smaller number of children. In the 1950s there was no controversy over homosexuality, largely because society was not willing to have the conversation. My mom had a gay male friend who came by the apartment regularly to design and sew dresses. Yet I never heard him or anyone else talk about gay rights. Gays remained in the closet for fear of persecution. What a different America I saw in 2004. The leaps in the nation\u2019s demographics, economy, and culture made it feel to me like hundreds of years had passed. America went from allowing smoking everywhere to banning smoking everywhere. Gambling went from the street corner \u201cnumbers man\u201d to government-run lotteries. The rising presence and influence of women in corporate America, the military, and the media shifted the power equation between the sexes, as more women decided they did not need a man to support themselves, to live a full life, or even to have a child. In fact, women began to outnumber men in colleges and graduate schools. They became the majority of the workforce as male-dominated blue-collar jobs went to Asia. Conversations about gay rights morphed into court cases about the right of gays to have legal, state-approved marriages. Essential fibers of the social fabric--public schools, for example--began to fray, leading to calls for reform (charter schools, magnet schools, and vouchers) that would allow parents and students greater choice to find the best school for their needs. America experienced its first major gun control movement, saw the rise of a national gun lobby, and endured a spike in mass shootings in schools around the country. And there was wholesale change in the federal government in the decades following World War II. We saw postwar America become the global \u201carsenal of democracy\u201d that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised it would back in 1940, protecting far-flung regions of the world from Soviet communism. We witnessed the South become a Republican stronghold. That led to a conservative political revolution that culminated in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. New technology emerged, changing the way Americans communicate, process information, and form relationships. It seemed that within just a few years suddenly everyone had a cell phone. New cable television channels, hundreds of them, appeared in everyone\u2019s home. Internet and podcast programming moved entertainment to new platforms. And today we can use apps such as OkCupid and Tinder to find people to date in our local area. The economy got hot in 2004, thanks to revolutions in finance, high-tech companies, hedge fund investments, and ever-higher housing prices. The bubble, of course, would soon burst. As the economic ways of the past unraveled early in the twenty-first century, the white working class, though buoyed for a while by rising home prices and cheap credit, has faced a rude reality of stagnant wages due to a dim job market, an end to pensions, and the decline of unions. The same has been true for African Americans. Despite the rise of the black middle class in the 1970s, after the 2008 recession the African American unemployment rate soared as high as it had been in the 1960s. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina blew the cover off ingrained black poverty in New Orleans, exposing nationwide roots of black poverty tied to record high rates of unwed mothers and failing schools. The big racial arguments of the latter half of the twentieth century, which had focused on the continuing impact of the history of segregation and the need for affirmative action in college admission and hiring, faded. The focus on black poverty shifted to questions about family structure. And at the same time, ironically, the promise of equality under the law had come ever closer to being fully realized for educated blacks, Latinos, and Asians. That is why immigrants kept coming to America in waves. Change was hitting the country from multiple directions. During these years I traveled the country as part of a National Public Radio (NPR) series called The Changing Face of America. The shows examined issues ranging from the increased use of personal technology on a daily basis to changes in how Americans worshiped to the increased acceptance of legal, state-supported gambling across the country. For the series I met with Mexican immigrants who had been given amnesty under President Reagan\u2019s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. I talked with the first generation of Americans who grew up using cell phones and the Internet after the 1996 Telecommunications Act. I reported on poor people, especially young minorities, who lost the right to welfare support because of the welfare-to-work laws crafted by Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Clinton in the 1990s. Looking back, it seems that the folks I met through The Changing Face of America were living out the theories of Buckminster Fuller and Ray Kurzweil, two futurists who have argued that because of exponential leaps in technology and our understanding of biology, change is coming at a faster rate now than ever before in human history. Kurzweil calls it the \u201claw of accelerating returns.\u201d In a 2001 essay he wrote, \u201cWe won\u2019t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century--it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today\u2019s rate).\u201d So how long ago and far away is the America of 1776? How distant is the Founding Fathers\u2019 America from the reality of twenty-first-century America? I can only imagine how different the people I met while working on that show would be if I reconnected with them today. Imagine the dizziness the Founding Fathers would experience. The NPR series won critical acclaim. These stories of change in American life from east to west, from urban to rural, and among young and old reminded me that American life was being transformed in exponential leaps. As a journalist, I was particularly alert to the new reality of fragmented politics and niche media. Experiences that at one time served to unify large segments of the population, such as watching one of the three network evening news programs, began to dissolve, with audiences for news programs breaking into politically separate groups, listening to their preferred views on talk radio or watching politically tilted cable news shows. Even the surge of American nationalism following the 9/11 attacks and the decision to go into two wars faded quickly. At first flags flew everywhere and people stood to applaud the troops at sporting events. But as time passed the wars didn\u2019t feel so real anymore. No one was drafted. College campus protests like those that emerged in opposition to the war in Vietnam never took place because the professional force fighting the war and dying generally did not come from elite colleges--or colleges at all, for that matter. Similarly, the once widespread trust in institutions began to slide. The public schools suffered because of poor performance, the Catholic Church because of pedophile scandals. Baseball stars found themselves before Congress, accused of cheating with performance-enhancing steroids. Our confidence in the goodwill of Wall Street bankers and other financial leaders eroded. Trust in the word of government officials fell when people found out they had been misled about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and later when the government was shown to be have been asleep at the switch when the economic crash came in 2008. As a black man, I was particularly struck that the once reliable framework of racial identity in America--white majority and black minority dealing with the aftermath of slavery and legal segregation--began to blur as Latinos and Asians began to exercise new cultural and economic influence on the nation. For the next few years I continued filing away stories that fit the pattern of these foundational shifts in American life. I wanted to weave this collection of colorful threads into a vivid tapestry that revealed the new look of modern American life. What became clear to me was that America was engaged in a new beginning. This was not the country where I grew up. America has been reborn any number of times over the course of its existence. The westward expansion, the Civil War, the New Deal--all had their turn at reinventing the country. Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I found myself looking at one of those extraordinary moments of national transformation. A new America had emerged, at times painfully bursting from past realities and shedding cultural norms, as it entered stage after stage of uncertain change. To me, this radical transformation was something to celebrate. Yes, political polarization and fear of rapid change were making people anxious. But overall, middle-class Americans continued to enjoy a high standard of living compared to other people around the globe. Plus the policies that forced people of color and women into subservience have all but vanished. And we Americans have a chance to create, like artists with an untouched canvas, a new, potentially better reality for ourselves. Then, in 2010, I had an epiphany that forced me to look deeper at the radical changes taking place in the structure of the country. It began with that year\u2019s U.S. census report--an unlikely starting point for an epiphany. The census results on the age of the American people jumped out at me. They showed that over a quarter of the American population was younger than the age of eighteen. At first I didn\u2019t believe it. But the census graphs indicated that children, high school age or younger, made up the largest single cohort of any of the demographic categories. I had thought people my age, baby boomers, accounted for the lion\u2019s share of the population. I had believed that the declining birth rate among whites should be shrinking the number of young people. But the census told a different story. The influx of immigrants with sky-high birth rates had created an incredibly young nation with a total population of over 300 million American citizens. I remember expressing my shock at the young age of the population to friends and fellow journalists and having them react with surprise at my surprise. \u201cHave you gone to the movies lately?\u201d one fellow journalist asked. \u201cEvery other movie is about vampires or zombie hunters. Whom do you think they\u2019re being marketed to? They\u2019re not making movies for you and me, buddy. They\u2019re made for those young people.\u201d My wife asked me if I had gone to the mall lately. The businesses that were bustling, even during the recession, she informed me, sold clothing and accessories to young people--stores like J.Crew, H&M, and Urban Outfitters. To my embarrassment, she told me that I\u2019d have a hard time buying a pair of jeans. The newer denim styles are designed to fit tight young bodies, she said with laughter; older people have to shop for \u201ccomfort\u201d jeans. And, she added, it\u2019s obvious that merchants understand how family life is changing. Busy moms no longer take charge of buying clothes for their teenage children. Instead, parents give money to their children and let them go to the mall. It occurred to me that to be a good journalist early in the twenty-first century I needed to better understand young Americans. I wasn\u2019t totally in the dark. I did know that younger voters, especially first-time voters, constituted a crucial part of the coalition that elected Barack Obama in 2008. According to exit polls, Obama carried two-thirds of the youth vote against Republican John McCain--about 15 million ballots. Both Obama\u2019s supporters and his critics described him as a \u201crock star\u201d because of his ability to connect with younger votes who had previously been written off by politicians as too lazy and disengaged to show up at the polls on election day. Obama attracted thousands of them at a time to his rallies and enthralled them, surrounding himself with the kind of adoration you\u2019d sooner associate with Taylor Swift. But I also had a hunch that America\u2019s youth-heavy population had affected more than Obama\u2019s 2008 victory. I needed to meet with these young people and listen to them to hear in their own words how they see their role in this new American story. The rising social and economic power of young people was intersecting with their growing political power. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 6.98}, {"asin": "1568585470", "title": "The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness", "author": "Jill Filipovic", "description": "Review \"There's a subtle radicalism to Filipovic's vision of politicized pleasure...She's proposing a thorough remodeling of the house that white men built.\"\u2015 Megan Garber, The Atlantic \"Filipovic creates an accurate and complex portrait of the struggles facing working women-and the collective effort necessary to remedy them.\"\u2015 Mic \"Filipovic dives deep into the machinery of American culture and politics to uncover the underlying causes of continuing inequality, demonstrating the necessity of reframing our deeply held cultural beliefs.\"\u2015 Bust \"A wonderfully intersectional work.\"\u2015 Bustle \" The H-Spot is the feminist book we've all been waiting for. Filipovic is a brilliant and engaging writer, and offers a necessary new way to think about gender, politics, and happiness. In the current political moment, The H-Spot couldn't be better timed.\"\u2015 Jessica Valenti, author of Sex Object \"Jill Fillipovic consistently captures the modern zeitgeist and I rely on her fresh perspective. Read her book; she will give us hope for the future like no one else can.\"\u2015 Sally Kohn \"Part feminist history, part memoir, and part call to action, this engaging volume presents a sound argument for shifting both policy and cultural attitudes toward a prioritization of female happiness. Filipovic gives a comprehensive look into what makes American women happy-and why so many aren't-in a system that seems set up to limit them. Using detailed research and thoughtful analysis, as well as numerous interviews with women of varied backgrounds, Filipovic discusses some of the most significant points of female happiness (or lack thereof)-from female friendship to motherhood to equal pay, and more-in all their complexity and through an intersectional feminist lens. Filipovic, who writes for the New York Times, Cosmopolitan.com, among other publications, is unflinchingly honest in her analysis of what it means to be female in America, both in 2017 and throughout history. VERDICT Thought provoking and sure to spark discussion, this title will appeal to fans of Roxane Gay and other feminist writers, as well as readers seeking well-researched works that speak to today's political climate.\"\u2015 Library Journal \"A sound analysis of what really makes women happy. . . . An assertive, eye-opening investigation of women's happiness. [Filipovic's] research and analysis are spot-on, and she provides readers with plenty of useful information to drive deep and necessary discussions for years to come. A timely, enlightening exploration of what American women truly want and need to live purposeful, fulfilling, happy lives.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Women have come a long way, but the idea that women deserve to feel pleasure is still a third rail in American society. Jill Filipovic asks, instead, what if we stopped talking about women solely as wives, mothers, and workers, and started to think of women as people who have a right to pursue happiness-for themselves. The idea makes many people squirm, but the result would be a better society, for everyone.\"\u2015 Amanda Marcotte, author of It's a Jungle Out There \"By politicizing the question 'What makes women happy?' Jill Filipovic turns us away from the world of self-help and self-improvement to focus on the systems that deny women the right to fulfillment. The H-Spot is a deeply researched and cogently argued book that demands a radical reimagining of policy to ensure not only an end to gender oppression, but the establishment of new systems where women's happiness is not sidelined or ignored, and is instead central to our understanding of freedom.\"\u2015 Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching \"Jill's book is a much-needed examination of the intersection of two issues we rarely see discussed together: feminism and happiness. For too long, critics of feminism have used the happiness argument to belittle the importance of the cause and argue that female emancipation somehow makes women unhappy. It couldn't be further from the truth. Empowered women are happier women. We should all have a right to happiness and for far too long, women have been excluded from that pursuit. In her book, Jill makes an eloquent case for women's right to be truly happy. It's about damn time someone said it, women deserve and have earned their happiness, and they are going to take it!\"\u2015 Liz Plank, senior correspondent, Vox \"Sexism and misogyny may be humankind's primary flaws, and Jill Filipovic offers a searing and sanguine look at how they block the happiness of women and men alike. Her debut is a guide to better living through an emancipatory mindset. If you thought feminism's goal was gender equality alone, The H-Spot demands that we expect more.\"\u2015 Jamil Smith, journalist and cultural critic \"This is a damn good book that is filling in blank spots I didn't know I had about sex, about women, about history, and about how much better our lives, relationships, and societies could be if we opened up our imaginations as Jill has so courageously, generously, and effectively done. Men, women, and everyone on the spectrum in between should read and talk about this book.\"\u2015 Baratunde Thurston, author of How to Be Black \"What if, instead of relying on women to self-sacrifice and man-please, society valued women's happiness? What would have to change-in our social and political arrangements, at work, at home, in bed? Widely known for her shrewd and searching journalism on contemporary feminist issues, Jill Filipovic is the perfect writer to raise these provocative questions-and point the way to some answers.\"\u2015 Katha Pollitt, author of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights \"Filipovic frames happiness as a political question-one that goes back to the Declaration of Independence itself...She shows her subject is crucial, and the political changes needed to close the 'happiness gap' between American men and women would be revolutionary. If, as the old adage has it, no one is free until we are all free, Filipovic shows the same may be true of being happy.\"\u2015 New York Times Book Review \"A practical, carefully researched modern-life primer for everywoman. Through chapters about motherhood, friendship, sex, work and relationships, she uses her own experience and that of others to navigate the structural problems facing women in a patriarchal society - and to explain how they can be happier.\"\u2015 Financial Times About the Author Jill Filipovic is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a regular columnist for Cosmopolitan.com, where she was previously a senior political writer. A former columnist for the Guardian , she is also an attorney. Her work on law, politics, gender, and foreign affairs has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Nation, Foreign Policy , and others. Follow her on Twitter @JillFilipovic.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 14.0}, {"asin": "1616202610", "title": "This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!", "author": "Jonathan Evison", "description": "Review \u201cIntricately structured\u2026 Evison resists every neat resolution, every unearned epiphany. And as fanciful as his prose can be\u2026he\u2019s not afraid to depict the dark side of aging as it is, and not as we wish it were\u2026. The result is a book that speaks to all of us, whether we\u2019re young enough to check Facebook 50 times a day, or old enough only to have a vague idea what the Internet is. The themes Evison presents \u2013 disappointment, delusion, redemption \u2013 are universal, and he deals with them beautifully in this wonderful novel. This is your life, Harriet Chance, but it\u2019s ours, too.\u201d \u2014New York Times Book Review \u201cEvison\u2019s rollicking novel is a close-up up of the life of 78-year-old Harriet Chance, whose Alaskan cruise highlights include indulging in endless seafood buffets, acquiring touristy tribal knickknackery, and discovering the secret of her deceased husband\u2019s decades-long affair with her best friend.\u201d \u2014O, The Oprah Magazine \u201cOpenhearted, effervescent . . . Evison handles the jaunty tone with aplomb.\u201d \u2014Washington Post \u201c[ This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! ] is infused with Evison's characteristic empathy and heart and humor. Its tension emanates from the relationships Harriet has botched and from our changing understanding of who she is and what's at risk. As a writer, [Evison\u2019s] got a talent for character, emotion and pacing.\u201d \u2014Los Angeles Times \u201cThank heaven for surprises, especially of the Jonathan Evison variety . . . Sure to become a book club favourite this fall, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is a pleasurable mix of the crazy escapades, changing relationships and thoughtful reflections that make up a life. It shows us that whatever age we are, the delightful surprises never stop, but neither do the growing pains. It reminds us too that when it comes to forgiveness, often the hardest person to forgive is ourselves.\u201d\u2014 Toronto Star \u201cEvison writes with his typical unflinching honesty about a life that is not what it seems . . . poignant reflections on aging, parenting, friendship and marriage constantly surprise with their quiet truthfulness.\u201d \u2014 The Globe and Mail \u201cSlowly, and with admirable, dark precision, Evison lays Harriet bare...With a touch of snark and a lashing of perfectly affected irony, he flenses her to the bone and, somehow, seems kind in doing it. It is Evison\u2019s timing\u2014the slow burn and perfect pacing of the reveals \u2014 that makes This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! hang together. And with Harriet Chance \u2014 poor, frustrated, flummoxed Harriet \u2014 Evison has found his ideal foil.\u201d \u2014NPR Books \u201cJonathan Evison charms with This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! \u201d \u2014Vanity Fair \u201cBittersweet but buoyant, with a heart-tugging finish.\u201d \u2014Good Housekeeping \u201cA quirky, fun writing style pulls you through this wonderful tale . . .\u201d \u2014 Sunset Magazine \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine a family member of any family who won\u2019t see something familiar in Harriet's quest to understand her spouse, her children and herself. And when the expected but still jarring ending unfolds, it\u2019s hard to imagine the reader who won\u2019t be moved by this lively, lovely work.\u201d \u2014Denver Post \u201c This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is a terrific novel, funny and moving, wistful and wise. Jonathan Evison\u2019s writing crackles on the page.\u201d \u2014Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins \u201cA generous and wise tale, told with Evison\u2019s trademark verve and charisma, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is a deeply felt and deeply comforting novel.\u201d \u2014Patrick Dewitt, author of The Sisters Brothers \u201c[A] treasure of a book . . . This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! [is] a novel that has it all, humor and pathos, and a main character named Harriet who\u2019ll wend her way into your heart . . . You\u2019ll root for Harriet, embrace her and empathize with her, a sinewy tough, but sweet natured heroine, if ever there was one. She\u2019s a character you\u2019ll not soon forget in a novel that\u2019s charming from beginning to end.\u201d \u2014Washington Missourian \u201cIn every situation, poor Harriet draws the short straw. But This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is anything but a drag: Evison . . . makes Harriet\u2019s sad story sing . . . [Evison\u2019s] over-the-top commentary conveys the pathos of Harriet\u2019s misadventures with just the right blend of snark and sympathy, and it\u2019s tremendously fun to read . . . Harriet\u2019s character emerges in fascinating detail, as if from a chrysalis . . . She\u2019s much more interesting than we thought. So, for that matter, is Evison\u2019s novel . . .\u201d \u2014 Commentary \u201c This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! has all the wonderful snap and sizzle we've come to expect from Jonathan Evison\u2019s work, and as much heart as any novel I\u2019ve read in recent years. \u00a0Jonathan packs an entire life--many lives--into this fine book, and does so with the empathy and insight of a writer at the top of his game.\u201d \u2014Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn\u2019s Long Halftime Walk \u201c[T]he book\u2019s lesson is more an affirmation than revelation: Life is hard and complicated; everyone has secrets, and even that unassuming old woman you see standing quietly at the bow of the boat has endured drama and betrayal and passion. In the end, the sweetness overrides the sorrows. This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is a lively, entertaining read, funny and poignant.\u201d \u2014Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cJonathan Evison is a ridiculously gifted storyteller: racing, breathless, and vibrant with his prose, hungry for personal truths, and clearly in love with the world around us all. That compassion and those writerly charms are deeply felt in This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! , an irresistible, inventive novel full of important ideas about how we live our lives as parents, children, partners, and human beings.\u201d \u2014Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins \u201cI can\u2019t get enough of the work of this Bainbridge Island writer, who has the gift of combining humor and tragedy and making it all wildly entertaining.\u201d \u2014Seattle Times \u201c[The] blend of the light and the lacerating is close to seamless in his new novel, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! . . . This fast-paced novel is both penetrating and persuasive in the complexities it uncovers in Harriet's tamped-down character and lifetime of compromises.\u201d \u2014The Oregonian (Portland, OR) \u201cOnce again, Jonathan Evison dazzles. This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is as sweet as it is inventive, profound as it is hilarious, unflinching as it is big-hearted. \u00a0Step right up, don't be shy! \u00a0Take the hand of Evison's delightfully menacing master of ceremonies and let him lead you into the kaleidoscopic journey of your life.\u201d \u2014Maria Semple, author of Where\u2019d You Go, Bernadette \u201cInsightful, richly entertaining look at a woman who, very late in the game, finds that life remains full of surprises\u2026Evison writes humanely and with good humor of his characters, who, like the rest of us, muddle through, too often without giving ourselves much of a break. A lovely, forgiving character study that's a pleasure to read.\u201d \u2014Kirkus Reviews, starred review \u201cTrust me: this is not schmaltzy or treacly. Rather, This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is a cheeky, smart, and incisively observed work of literary fiction that fans of Maria Semple, Jami Attenberg, and Jonathan Tropper will adore.\u201d \u2014Bustle.com \u201cEvison is a talented writer that is capable of making the reader think beyond the book with his candid character conversations and dialogues and his thought-provoking subject matter. Through humor and seriousness, Evison will almost force the reader to consume this book in one sitting!\u201d\u2014 Portland Book Review \u201cFun and snappy . . . a breezy page-turner.\u201d \u2014Deseret News (Salt Lake City) \u201cLuckily for readers, there is This is Your Life, Harriet Chance, by Jonathan Evison, to provide a contemplative, funny and sensitive take on the polychromatic journey of life . . . a patchwork of moments, both large and small, that are, in turns, amusing, heartbreaking and recognizable in their universality . . . At its core, Evison\u2019s book is an examination of human identity and what that means as a person grows older and begins to entwine and interact with other people . . . [Harriet is faced] with rediscovering her own individuality and with moving beyond the dysfunctional relationship she has had with her adult daughter. Written with both humor and pathos, This is Your Life, Harriet Chance probes the juncture where those two intersect, where the beautiful melancholy of life is the sweetest.\u201d \u2014 Summit Daily (Vail, Colorado) \u201cSuch is the mastery of Evison\u2019s storytelling . . . Evison tackles aging characters\u2019 laments while also capturing the scope of change in the transition from the 20th to 21st centuries. This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! gives a nod to present-day woes, ranging from global warming to upside-down mortgages, but doesn\u2019t gloss over angst from bygone days . . . Evison succeeds in giving Harriet\u2019s life story the satisfying send-off it deserves.\u201d \u2014Washington Independent Review of Books \u201cEvison\u2019s voice is buoyant and cheeky as he unveils the deep traumas that form Harriet\u2019s sense of herself . . . Evison succeeds in crafting a believable and gut-wrenching story, particularly Harriet\u2019s relationship with her daughter and their efforts to accept and love one another.\u201d \u2014Publishers Weekly \u201cBoth uplifting and melancholy, funny and thought-provoking, this entertaining read speaks directly to the importance of acceptance and healing.\u201d \u2014Booklist \u201cNovels about postmodern women tend to fall flat or reach too far in their attempts to be poignant. Evison takes a different approach, modeling Harriet after your favorite crazy aunt. She isn\u2019t perfect, nor is she a complete hot mess. The result is a relatable, likable, often wine-filled wrecking ball of a woman . . . She\u2019s an unlikely heroine, but those are always the most compelling. She is not only everywoman\u2019s woman, she is downright delightful. It\u2019s a dysfunctional love story with a heap of redemption and forgiveness thrown in . . . Evison\u2019s way of storytelling is smooth, inventive, charming and hits the mark for readers of all ages.\u201d \u2014Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Miss.) \u201cEvison\u2019s fourth novel is witty, not bland; knowing rather than saccharine sweet; wise instead of clich\u00e9d . . . In spite of its honesty\u2014an honesty that, at times, you might even call brutal\u2014Evison\u2019s is a bright book, not a dark one. Never weighed down by its topicality or lacking in humor, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! puts off a sort of freeing energy, a feeling of peace for its characters and readers. Wit and empathy, easy lyricality and elegant construction\u2014these are Jonathan Evison\u2019s strengths as a writer. They\u2019re all here. But there\u2019s truth here, too; lest we forget we live in the real world, not the kindly-lit soundstage of some American faerie tale.\u201d \u2014Electric Literature \u201cEvison alternates between a cheeky narration of Harriet\u2019s past and present . . . It echoes the cinematic approach of Evison\u2019s previous work, painting a vivid picture that\u2019s easy for a reader to immerse him or herself in . . . A book of secrets, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! reveals how one or two choices can dramatically alter not only the course of your life, but the lives of many others.\u201d \u2014BookPage \u201cA heart-bursting, wonderful story that will make you want to give everyone in your life a big hug.\u201d \u2014Hello Giggles \u201cThis novel works from every angle. . . I laughed, giggled, cried and held Harriet close as the pages of her life opened to me. Then I started over again not ready to let her go. I not only recommend you read this one, I urge you to read it. The life you come to understand may well be your own.\u201d \u2014 Roanoke Times \u201cThe narration is fresh and effective \u2026 Harriet Chance is an out-of-the-ordinary but believable protagonist who, like all of us, has a mixture of victories and disappointments behind her. This is a charming novel about learning how to reckon with the past.\u201d \u2014 BookBrowse.com From the Back Cover \u201cOnce again, Jonathan Evison dazzles . . . This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is as sweet as it is inventive, profound as it is hilarious, unflinching as it is bighearted. Step right up, don\u2019t be shy! Take the hand of Evison\u2019s delightfully menacing master of ceremonies and let him lead you into the kaleidoscopic journey of your life.\u201d \u2014 Maria Semple, author of Where\u2019d You Go, Bernadette \u201cA generous and wise tale, told with Evison\u2019s trademark verve and charisma, This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is a deeply felt and deeply comforting novel.\u201d \u2014 Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers \u201c This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! has all the wonderful snap and sizzle we\u2019ve come to expect from Jonathan Evison\u2019s work, and as much heart as any novel I\u2019ve read in recent years. Evison packs an entire life--many lives--into this fine book, and does so with the empathy and insight of a writer at the top of his game.\u201d \u2014 Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn\u2019s Long Halftime Walk \u201cInsightful, richly entertaining . . . Evison writes humanely and with good humor of his characters, who, like the rest of us, muddle through, too often without giving ourselves much of a break. A lovely, forgiving character study that\u2019s a pleasure to read.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews, starred review About the Author Jonathan Evison\u00a0is\u00a0the author of the novels All About Lulu , West of Here , The Revised\u00a0Fundamentals of Caregiving , This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! , Lawn Boy , and Legends of the North Cascades .\u00a0He lives with his wife and family in\u00a0Washington State. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. November 4, 1936 (HARRIET AT ZERO) Here you come, Harriet Nathan, tiny face pinched, eyes squinting fiercely against the glare of surgical lamps, at a newly renovated Swedish hospital high on Seattle\u2019s First Hill. It\u2019s an unseasonably chilly Wednesday in autumn, and the papers are calling for snow. Roosevelt by a landslide! they proclaim. Workers grumbling in Flint, Michigan! In Spain, a civil war rages. Meanwhile, out in the corridor, your father paces the floor, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Clutching an unlit Cuban cigar, he checks his wristwatch. He\u2019s got a three-o\u2019clock downtown. By the end of the week, Harriet, you\u2019ll leave the hospital wrapped in a goose-down swaddler knit by your ailing grandmother. Your father will miss his three-o\u2019clock today. But let\u2019s not get ahead of ourselves here. They don\u2019t call it labor for nothing. Let\u2019s not forget the grit and determination of your mother. All that panting and pushing, all that clenching and straining, eyes bulging, forehead slick with sweat. Let\u2019s take a moment to appreciate the fact that she won\u2019t begrudge you any of it, though you\u2019ll always be your father\u2019s girl. Here you come, better late than never: a face presentation. Not the boy your father so desperately wanted, but here you come, anyway, all six pounds three ounces of you. Button nose, conical head, good color. A swirl of dark hair atop your little crown. And a healthy pair of lungs, too. Listen to you wail as the doctor slaps your fanny: your cries phlegmy and protracted. Hear them? These are virtually the last sounds you will utter until well after your second birthday. Yes, Harriet, you were an exceptionally quiet child. Too quiet. Exhibit A: December 31, 1936. For the rest of their lives, your parents will regale you, and anyone who will listen, with a rollicking story about a certain New Year\u2019s Eve party on the north end. The story involves a bassinet into which your father, in a moment of stoned clarity and admirable foresight, fastened you by your ankles and armpits for safety, using his own necktie and a leather belt from the host\u2019s closet. The party is a triumph, as the story goes, with Bacchus leading the charge. The music is brassy, the walls are thrumming. So frenzied the celebration, in fact, that amid their merrymaking, revelers fail to notice the upended bassinet in the corner. That is, until whiz kid Charlie Fitzsimmons, the firm\u2019s youngest partner, lipstick on his collar, ladies\u2019 underpants adorning the crown of his head, nearly trips on you on his way back from the punch bowl. It will not be the last time Charlie Fitzsimmons takes notice of you. \u201cWould you look at that glass of milk?\u201d he shouts. For an instant, the party is struck dumb as everyone turns their attention to the corner. Look at Harriman Nathan\u2019s girl! \u201cShe\u2019ll make a hell of a judge,\u201d observes Charlie. And of course, hilarity ensues. The story never fails, and you\u2019re the punch line, Harriet. There you are, for God only knows how long, upside down, your poker face turning from red to blue to purple, your little gray eyes gazing impassively at the world, as your parents ring in a prosperous 1937. You never made a peep. This is your life, Harriet. The beginning, anyway. August 11, 2015 (HARRIET AT SEVENTY-EIGHT) Harriet finds Father Mullinix in his stuffy office behind the chapel, his reading glasses roosting halfway down the bridge of his nose, his laptop propped open in front of him. He\u2019s on his feet before she can cross the threshold. \u201cHarriet, you\u2019re shivering. Sit.\u201d He lowers her into a straight-backed chair. \u201cMy goodness, you\u2019re sopping wet.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s here, Father,\u201d she says. \u201cI found his slippers this morning next to mine in the breakfast nook.\u201d Father Mullinix smiles patiently, setting his big hands on the desktop. \u201cWe\u2019ve talked about this several times recently, Harriet. There\u2019s but one ghost in the Bible, and we both know who that is.\u201d \u201cBut last week, the WD-40. And now this.\u201d Drawing a weary breath, Father Mullinix holds it in. \u201cYou don\u2019t understand,\u201d says Harriet. \u201cThe WD-40, that was him, telling me to quiet those hinges on the dishwasher. He hated the squeaking.\u201d Slowly, Father Mullinix releases his breath. Clasping his hands together on the desktop, he proceeds expertly in a measured tone. \u201cPerhaps it is possible he\u2019s trying to speak to you through God,\u201d he concedes. \u201cBut certainly I wouldn\u2019t take the WD-40 as a sign. Perhaps you left it there on the chair, a lapse in memory. It happens to me daily. Yesterday I found these very glasses in the pantry. We\u2019re all so busy in these times, so preoccupied. And you of all people, Harriet, you are so diligent in all things, particularly for someone of your . . . experience.\u201d \u201cBut I know I didn\u2019t leave it there. And the slippers.\u201d \u201cWell, I\u2019m sure there\u2019s an explanation.\u201d \u201cI saw him Father, I felt him. Last night, we were at the Continental Buffet. He was eating corned beef.\u201d \u201cAh, I see. You\u2019ve had another dream.\u201d \u201cI wasn\u2019t dreaming. He was an actual presence.\u201d Father Mullinix smiles sadly, but Harriet can tell his patience is wearing thin. For months, she\u2019s been eating up his time, unloading her grief on him, bludgeoning him with the details of her dream life and, most recently, trying in vain to convince him that Bernard still lingered somehow in the earthly realm. Perhaps she was mistaken in confiding in him this time, though he\u2019d never failed her in the past. \u201cDo you think I\u2019m, oh, Father . . . you don\u2019t think I\u2019m . . . ?\u201d \u201cI think, perhaps, you could use some rest, Harriet.\u201d \u201cBut Father, I assure you I\u2019m\u2014\u201d \u201cPlease, let me drive you home, Harriet.\u201d September 9, 1957 (HARRIET AT TWENTY) Look at you, Harriet, a grown woman! No longer a glass of milk but a tall drink of water. Okay, not so tall. Maybe a little on the squat side, maybe a little pudgy, to hear your mother tell it. But your hygiene is fastidious, your bouffant is formidable. And you\u2019re still quiet, which makes you popular among lawyers and men alike. But you\u2019ve no time for men. You\u2019re a professional. Marriage is one negotiation that can wait. First, your own apartment. An automobile. A promotion. The sky is the limit! Here you are, at Fourth and Union, top floor, just three months removed from your associate\u2019s degree. And not your father\u2019s firm, either. Sure, you had a push, a few advantages in life, but you got here on your own. No, you\u2019ll never be a lawyer, but a crack legal assistant is not out of the question. You love your job. Okay, maybe love is a bit strong. But prepping documents, writing summaries, filing motions, all of it agrees with you. Look at you, downtown girl: chic but pragmatic. Shopping at Frederick & Nelson! Lunching at the Continental Buffet! Let\u2019s be honest, though. Let\u2019s talk about the problem that has no name. All these months later, they\u2019re still slapping your fanny around the office. Your salary doesn\u2019t stretch that far. The work is exhausting. As both a woman and an assistant, you\u2019re expected to work harder. And for what? A string of pearls? A sleek automobile? A slap on the can from a junior partner? It will be six more years before Friedan exposes the \u201cfeminine mystique,\u201d twelve more before Yoko Ono proclaims woman as \u201cthe nigger of the world.\u201d But by God, Harriet Nathan, you\u2019re determined to buck your disadvantages. Okay, maybe determined is a bit strong; how about resigned to them? The least you can do is achieve independence. Tackle adulthood on your own terms. Put that associate\u2019s degree to some purpose. Make a name for yourself, Harriet Nathan. The truth you\u2019re not telling anyone, especially not your father, is that amid the administrative whirlwind of the office, the hustle and bustle of downtown, the ceaseless tedium of legal research, you yearn for something less exhausting: for stability, predictability, and yes, a Christmas hearth festooned with stockings. You yearn, too, Harriet, for a man. C\u2019mon, admit it. So, what is it about this new young building superintendent that catches your attention in the hallway upon your return from lunch, as he explains to your boss, in layman\u2019s terms even you can understand, the difference between AC and DC? Surely, it\u2019s not his stature. He\u2019s two inches shorter than you. And it turns out, he\u2019s not all that young, at thirty-three. There is, however, a squareness to his shoulders, a symmetry to his face, a quiet confidence in his bearing. Not just the firm, but the whole building\u2014all that concrete and steel, all that electricity, all that plumbing\u2014is reliant upon his capability. You\u2019re not alone. The whole office is impressed by his confidence, charmed by his forthrightness. Even the partners, those pompous autocrats, bulging at the waist, those experts who defer to no one, treat this man as an equal. But here\u2019s the thing: tending an elevator, a fan, a heating duct, in his neatly creased work trousers, penlight clutched between his teeth, as he reaches for his tool belt, exposing the gray Semper Fi tattoo on his inside wrist, he strikes you as more than their equal. Harriet Nathan, meet Bernard Chance, your valentine for 1957. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1593638868", "title": "Differentiating Instruction With Menus for the Inclusive Classroom: Math (Grades 3-5)", "author": "Laurie E. Westphal", "description": "Review This publication for grades 3-5 is designed to address the needs of a classroom that includes special needs or limited English-proficient students. The activities included on the menus are engaging and appropriate. Most of the menus contain wide-ranging choices, with some options involving art, technology, drama, and experiments. In addition, many activities contain real-world applications. ,Jennifer Orr,Teaching Children Mathematics, 2/1/14 About the Author After teaching science for more than 15 years, both overseas and in the U.S., Laurie E. Westphal now works as an independent gifted education and science consultant. She enjoys developing and presenting staff development on differentiation for various districts and conferences, working with teachers to assist them in planning and developing lessons to meet the needs of their advanced students.", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 12.0}, {"asin": "145164437X", "title": "In the Water They Can't See You Cry: A Memoir", "author": "Amanda Beard", "description": "About the Author Amanda Beard is a seven-time Olympic medalist. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, the photographer Sacha Brown, and her son, Blaise. Visit her at AmandaBeard.net. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. chapter 1 I wanted to get to the pool so badly, I was practically running. The July sun had already dried all the dew on our neighbors\u2019 matching green lawns, and I was hot. Why were they taking so long? I turned around to watch my family, almost half a block behind me. Mom and Dad, laughing as usual about some story, carried all the junk. They had packed a cooler filled with drinks, sandwiches, and chips that\u2019d last us the whole day of hanging out in the pool and on the surrounding soft, grassy hills. Though we lived only two blocks away, my mom had enough towels, books, and blankets that we looked as if we were moving to the pool. Okay, I could understand my parents\u2019 slow speed, but what were my sisters\u2019 problems? Lagging even farther behind, Leah and Taryn had their heads close together the way they always did when they were gossiping, which was a lot of the time. The three of us were like variations on the same theme. Despite the age differences (Leah was two years older than Taryn, who was five years older than me), we were all beanpoles with olive skin, dark brown hair, bright blue almond-shaped eyes, and huge California-girl smiles. But we couldn\u2019t have looked more different. Leah\u2019s hair was feathered as it always was, and even though we were headed for the pool, she had put on the blue eyeliner that was her current style obsession. I had to admit, she looked really good. Taryn was just as pretty. Her short hairstyle made her neck look graceful like a dancer\u2019s. It was so different from the long, mostly blonde hair that practically every girl in our town had. But she hated doing her hair so much that Mom had threatened to cut it all off if she didn\u2019t brush it. Taryn didn\u2019t brush it, and my mom didn\u2019t make idle threats. So Taryn had hair like a boy\u2019s, which was fine with her. However, I was the real tomboy. I never heard of a sport I didn\u2019t want to play, and I never wavered from my uniform of shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. Today I had jazzed it up with my acid-washed shorts and New Kids on the Block tank top. But the heat was beginning to make my bathing suit underneath stick to my torso. \u201cCome on!\u201d I shouted at my family. They just ignored me. I could have run ahead without them. I knew the site\u2014the pool (nine feet at one end, four feet at the other), the grassy hills, the showers, the covered area with picnic tables\u2014like I knew the back of my hand. And I loved everything about the place: the buttery smell of sunscreen, the feel of hot concrete under my feet, the shock of the first jump into the pool. It didn\u2019t matter that I spent all day, every day of the week, around the same pool during swim team practice. On the weekends, it was different; I had to be with my family. Instead of bolting ahead, I waited for my sisters, who agreed to play Marco Polo with me as soon as we arrived. After they grew bored, my dad chucked me across the pool a few times before he had to get out and help my mom set up the chairs and cooler near the encampment of parents. Luckily a group of neighborhood kids started a fierce game of sharks and minnows that went on until we were starved and our skin was puckered and white. I hopped out of the pool and bolted toward my mom, who greeted me with a clean towel, a turkey sandwich, and a cold Dr Pepper. After gobbling down lunch, I went straight back into the water. And that\u2019s where I stayed, where we all stayed, until the sun started to go down on that perfect summer day. Perfect . That\u2019s the word that describes where I grew up. Irvine, California, had cul-de-sacs and identically manicured lawns, kids on bikes and parents who let us do pretty much as we wanted in what seemed like the safest town in the world. It was straight out of a John Hughes movie where the biggest problem is a fight with your best friend. You never saw a single piece of litter on the streets. Even the bright blue sky was straight out of a Hollywood set. Located in Orange County (not exactly known as a land of hardship), my hometown was sunny, on average, 325 days a year. And because it\u2019s on the coast, the average temperature is a comfortable seventy degrees. We never had to worry about the town\u2019s Easter Egg Hunt or Fourth of July Bike Parade getting rained out. As I said\u2014perfect. My parents fit right in. High school sweethearts from the Puget Sound region in Washington State, they got married when my mother, Gayle, was twenty and my dad, Dan, was twenty-one. He had been the captain of the football team, and she had been captain of the cheerleading squad. I made fun of them for their cheesy perfection (my mom was homecoming queen), but secretly I was proud to have them as parents. With his dark skin, black hair, and blue eyes, I thought my dad was the most handsome guy in the world. A basketball player at Washington State, he kept his six-one frame in great shape by continuing to play lots of sports. My petite mom, a lighter beauty with sandy-blonde hair and pale-blue eyes, fit right into my dad\u2019s side. You couldn\u2019t have asked for better parents. They were like best friends who never fought. Because they were both teachers\u2014my dad taught hotel and restaurant management at Orange Coast College, and my mom taught art at various local schools\u2014they always seemed to be around. Over boring, balanced breakfasts and dinners prepared by my mother, which we ate together every day, my siblings and I competed to see who could be the goofiest and get the most attention. Whether it was acting out Annie during a family camping trip or telling the best fart joke over chicken and broccoli, Mom and Dad encouraged us to have fun. Everything was about having a good time. There was always something crazy going on in our house. That\u2019s why all the neighborhood kids gravitated to our four-bedroom tract home in a development called the Colony. My parents, in their very laid-back way, welcomed every single one of our friends. They kept the fridge and cabinets stocked with all the best junk food and allowed us to act young and silly. That meant not freaking out if someone spilled soda on the carpet, hit a lawn ornament with a hockey puck, or lay around watching MTV all afternoon. Some kids liked it so much, they hardly ever left. One summer, Bobby Lanza, a boy I was really close to from the age of two on, spent every minute that he wasn\u2019t sleeping at our house. That wasn\u2019t such a big deal; lots of kids did that. But Bobby, who was eight at the time, wore his Speedo for every single one of those minutes. \u201cJeez, Bobby, give that thing a rest,\u201d my sister Taryn said by early July. \u201cMaybe you should give it a wash and wear something else,\u201d Leah said. \u201cDo you sleep in your Speedo too?\u201d Taryn laughed. Bobby was unfazed, and so was I. Teasing was the price we happily paid to hang out with (or at least around) my older sisters and their friends. Although we were on the fringes\u2014listening to the new Huey Lewis and the News album through an open door to the living room or using the terms face! or bitchin\u2019 even if we had no idea what they meant\u2014it was still an exciting place to be. Growing up, I thought Leah and Taryn were the coolest people on earth. Anything they did, I wanted to do too. When they started wearing huge socks scrunched down by their ankles, I begged my mom for a pair and wore them piled around my toothpick ankles. They used mousse to get their bangs to stand straight up, then so would I\u2014well, at least once before I decided hair was a waste of time. I even posed the same way they did in photos, with their head tilted way over to one side. Taryn wasn\u2019t tolerant of my copycat ways. To her, I was nothing more than the annoying little sister. If my parents ever left her to babysit me, we\u2019d both cry to try to get out of the arrangement. Leah, on the other hand, treated me like her special little baby. She would do anything for me, including play endless sessions of Barbie. If Leah had jumped off a bridge, I would have followed in a heartbeat. While I didn\u2019t leap off Golden Gate, I did take tap, jazz, and ballet because Leah was a big dancer. I stuck with it for several years until it was obvious to me and everyone else that I wasn\u2019t very good at it. While I adored Leah, the best times were when the entire family was together. And there was no better time in our family than Christmas. In our house, Christmas was not a subtle affair. We were those guys who got our tree the minute after the Thanksgiving dishes had been cleared. We played Christmas music and Christmas movies nonstop, decorated the house like crazy, and drank hot cocoa even though it was Southern California. I lived for our traditions, which included my mother and grandma baking trays of fattigman , an exotic savory cookie popular in Sweden and Norway, and my dad reading the children\u2019s book The Polar Express to all the kids at our annual holiday party. We also used the holiday as an excuse to sneak in a few practical jokes, like the time we gave our grandfather\u2014my dad\u2019s dad, who had been a strict high school principal\u2014a black lace thong for Christmas just to see his reaction when he opened his present. My mom, dad, sisters, and I all wound up laughing too hard to see the expression of shock on his face. While I recognized that my parents, my town, our home, the pool, and my sisters (even Taryn) were perfect because of their natural, easygoing, and carefree ways, for me perfection could be achieved only through a kind of vigilance I had known ever since I could remember. Hyperorganized, a neat freak, kind of compulsive: call it what you like, I needed order. All my stuff was perfect. In my sixth-grade classroom, my little desktop stood out like an empty island in a sea of chaos. My pencils were lined up in descending height order next to my pens at the top of the desk, schoolwork and notes to the left, books to the right. When kids knocked my display askew with their backpacks, the disorder sent a cold feeling directly to the pit of my stomach. Until I righted it again. No one ever had to tell me to clean my room; it was always clean. That was no small feat considering I had two parakeets (Goldie and Zeba), two lovebirds (Peaches and Big Mouth), and our family cats (Angel and Dodger), who used my room as their hangout. Those birds were a mess, constantly throwing their food out of their cages and all over my floor. The vacuum was practically attached to my hand, I used it so much. They were worth it though. I spent hours with my animals, dressing up the cats in outfits and teaching the birds to sit on my finger, which I thought was so cool. They were like best friends. It wasn\u2019t just my room that I cleaned. I would have sooner died than have my human friends come over to a dirty house. Before a playdate, I cleaned the house\u2014and I don\u2019t mean tidy but what my mom called a \u201cdeep clean.\u201d I busted out the wood cleaner for the coffee table, dusted the bookshelves, put all the dishes away, Windexed the sliding glass doors, and made sure my Chipmunks record collection was nicely organized. My sisters\u2014whose rooms appeared to have been hit by bombs that sent their Huey Lewis and Andre Agassi posters askew and their clothes across the floor\u2014looked at me like I was crazy. My mom, on the other hand, thought her youngest daughter giving her house a good scrub-down was hilarious. \u201cWhen I grow up, Mom, I want to be your maid,\u201d I said. It was my fantasy job because I could live with my mom and clean. \u201cFantastic,\u201d she said. I didn\u2019t know my Windexing was weird\u2014my parents certainly never made me feel that way. In fact, they made me feel as if anything I did was okay. Limitations never crossed my mind, especially when it came to the physical. Rambunctious to the extreme, I loved a goal, a competition, a challenge of any kind. There\u2019s an old family video from one of our hiking trips to Yosemite where my sisters stop at a soggy, moss-covered log to discuss whether they can use it to cross a rushing creek. Suddenly the camera pans to me; with tall alpine trees as my backdrop, I flip my hair brazenly and then start to run across the log. No contemplation, no strategy, no taking it slow\u2014just going for it. In the next scene, I fall off the log like a cartoon character and land smack in the gooey mud. I was completely humiliated, but no fall could erode my fearlessness. Nothing bad was ever going to happen to me. I was sure of that. My combined fearlessness and high energy made for a lot of showing off. To expend a little bit of the energy that drove my parents nuts, they enrolled me in every activity under the sun. By the time I was four years old, I was taking swimming, soccer, gymnastics, and dance. And still, I had enough steam left over to play endless roller hockey with the neighbors. When it came to sports, I wanted to do it all. And in Irvine that was a completely realistic goal. Everything was at our fingertips, with pristine basketball and tennis courts, fields, and pools that anybody in the community could use for free. I didn\u2019t care if they were \u201cboys\u2019 sports\u201d or not, I played softball, football, and basketball\u2014you name it. Dad couldn\u2019t have been happier; I was the son he never had. Even when my dad and I rode our bikes to the basketball court to play horse, I felt the rush of competition and pedaled hard to keep up with him. On the court, he towered over me, his broad shoulders, lean torso, and powerful legs completely eclipsing my spaghetti-thin frame. But I thought I still had a shot. I\u2019m faster, smarter. I can beat this giant. We both had the squinted look of people taking a game really, really seriously. For hours we played horse (there was no way I could out-dribble my six-foot dad), forgetting about the time of day, trying crazier and crazier shots. My dad didn\u2019t let me win. I had to really win. That hardly happened, but when it did, I bragged to my family how I had schooled Dad on the court. In the whirlwind of activities that I did on any of the trim fields or bright, shining facilities in our town, swimming held a special place. Swimming was major in Orange County. Every kid did it, and every rich kid tried to do it well. For me, the love was real. From my earliest memories, the pool was the place of long, happy summer days having fun surrounded by everyone I knew. It was also the only sport shared by my oldest, girlie-girl sister; my middle, rebellious one; and me. Before I had even turned two years old, my parents toted me to the community pool to watch my sisters\u2019 practices and swim meets with their team, the Colony Red Hots. Hanging from my father\u2019s arm or toddling with the help of my mother\u2019s hand, I thrust my hands out, trying to reach the moving shapes in a spray of blue. By three, I was a full-on water baby who longed to be a part of the team, even though I wasn\u2019t eligible to join the summer league until the following year. I was such a pest that the coaches got me a tiny black swimsuit with red piping, the uniform of a Red Hot. It was official (at least to me!): I was part of the team. My parents and the coaches let me spend all summer pretending. I followed swimmers alongside the pool during races as if I and not they were swimming. During free swim, I dove like a dolphin between the legs of the older kids horsing around and challenged my sisters to see who could hold our breath underwater the longest. I stayed in the pool until my lips were blue and someone finally yanked me out. In the summer of 1986, it was truly official. Old enough to really be in the league, I curled my toes around the edge of the starting block, as I had been taught, and stared at the long stretch of shining blue in front of me. In the periphery of my goggles I could detect the movements of my competitors, but I didn\u2019t look at them. Just straight ahead. Bang! A shot announced the start of the race. I pushed off the block, trying to fly as far as I could through the air, and plunged into the water. In a flurry of reaching and kicking, my brain repeating every instruction again and again, I moved like a fish through the water. No, that\u2019s too slow. More like a speeding bullet. Definitely. My heart pounded with the effort and my four-year-old muscles began to strain. How much longer could I go? Then, bam , my hands hit the hard wall, and I shot up out of the water. An entire lap! And I had done it. I won! I scanned the crowd through the watery view of my goggles and found my family cheering wildly. My sisters, in their Red Hot suits, were making whooping sounds while my mom clapped happily. But my dad was the most excited, pumping his fist into the air. I felt as if I had won the Olympics. I was hooked. That summer I practiced for a half hour in the morning every day of the week with the other kids my age and then spent the rest of the day hanging around the pool, watching the older team members work out, or playing games until the sun had finally ducked behind the hills, which meant it was time to go home for dinner. The pool was the place to be. Mom and Dad, who had the summers off from teaching, were always waiting alongside the other parents at picnic tables covered in sandwiches and drinks for their ravenous kids. When my sisters weren\u2019t in the pool, they joked around and gossiped with their friends in the shade of the trees or moved to the grassy hills for more serious discussions. Out of the whole week, Saturdays were my favorite. That\u2019s when we had swim meets. My three or four races were each only a lap long, which I knew wasn\u2019t as hard as what the older kids did, but it didn\u2019t matter. They were races and I was going to win. I put everything I knew how to put into those fifty-second bursts of crazy energy, and it usually paid off. If anyone singled me out as a swimmer, it wasn\u2019t for talent. It was for love and belonging. With the sun shining, my sisters as teammates, and my parents as cheerleaders, I would have been happy to stay in the water forever. Life would always be like this, because why change what\u2019s perfect?", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1577361490", "title": "Pet ER : Memoirs of an Animal Doctor", "author": "George A. Porter", "description": "About the Author George A. \"Tad\" Porter graduated from the University of California at Davis in 1962 in the field of small animal medicine. His first practice was in Torrance, California, until he contracted with eleven different hospitals as the emergency veterinarian. In 1970, he opened his own practice in Redondo Beach and continued to do emergency calls from 1967 to 1974. In 1974 he helped fouind the Emergency Pet Clinic of South Bay, Inc., in Torrance.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Memoirs"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 4.07}, {"asin": "1771386606", "title": "Me, Me, Me", "author": "Lori Joy Smith", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2\u2014Three young girls are preparing for a school talent show. Annie suggests that they create an all-girl singing group. Lillemor and Lilianne love the idea\u2014that is, until Annie starts to monopolize all of the decisions for the group. This book adeptly depicts characters' frustration through illustration. As Annie increases her dominance over the girls, her friends go from perplexed to annoyed. The warm-toned pastel palette gives the images an inviting look and feel. Dunklee employs colored word bubbles to distinguish dialogue from narrator commentary. The word bubbles shift to a white color against vibrant backgrounds. Different fonts used in word bubbles help emphasize phrases that are particularly important to the characters. VERDICT This title will resonate with kids and encourage them to embrace teamwork and inclusiveness in their daily lives. A solid addition.\u2014Deanna Smith, Mamaroneck Public Library, NY Review A pleasing morality tale on the importance of friendship and teamwork.\u2015 Kirkus Reviews This title will resonate with kids and encourage them to embrace teamwork and inclusiveness in their daily lives.\u2015 School Library Journal About the Author Annika Dunklee was born in Uppsala, Sweden, to a Scottish father and a Swedish mother. She bases a lot of her stories on her own childhood memories. My Name Is Elizabeth! was inspired by anyone who dislikes having his or her name shortened, lengthened, mispronounced or mangled in some way. Lori Joy Smith is an illustrator and fine artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries across Canada and the United States. Her illustrations have appeared on greeting cards and in Chirp, American Girl, Teen and Today's Parent magazines, among other places. Lori enjoys knitting, drawing and sewing. She lives with her family in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 5.95}, {"asin": "1541455479", "title": "The Many Lives of Catwoman: The Felonious History of a Feline Fatale", "author": "Tim Hanley", "description": "Review \"Feed your kitty now, because once you start reading, you won't be able to stop. Tim's words are as mesmerizing as Catwoman herself.\" ---Adrienne Barbeau, actress and voice of Catwoman in Batman: The Animated Series", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1517065852", "title": "The Sweet Smell of Murder (A Chocolate Centered Cozy Mystery)", "author": "Cindy Bell", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "1845137116", "title": "Last of the Summer Wine: The Inside Story of the World's Longest-Running Comedy Programme", "author": "Andrew Vine", "description": "Review \u2018An authoritative history of the show\u2019 'Thorough, affectionate and well-written, this is a must-have for all fans of the show' 'Celebrate the final series of this television classic with this superb book' \u00e2??An authoritative history of the show\u00e2?? 'Thorough, affectionate and well-written, this is a must-have for all fans of the show' 'Celebrate the final series of this television classic with this superb book' About the Author Andrew Vine is an award-winning journalist and assistant editor of the Yorkshire Post. He is author of 'Last of the Summer Wine: The Story of the World's Longest Running Comedy Series', and of 'A Very Strange Way to Go To War: The Canberra in the Falklands'. He lives in Leeds.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "1570876606", "title": "MASH Angels: Tales of the First Air Evac Helicopters", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Transportation"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 25.99}, {"asin": "006242792X", "title": "SECRETS FLIGHT", "author": "Maggie Leffler", "description": "Review \u201cA delightful novel: warm, wry, smart and very funny.\u201d \u2014 Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K. on The Goodbye Cousins \u201cAn excellent summer read.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly on The Goodbye Cousins Praise for The Diagnosis of Love: \u201cI loved this book and loved its voice. How often is one both charmed and intrigued on page one and ever onward? Maggie Leffler\u2019s writing accomplishes that thing I enjoy the most: lively storytelling that is in equal parts wryly witty and touching.\u201d \u2014 Elinor Lipman, author of My Latest Grievance and Then She Found Me \u201cThis novel celebrates the support system that family and friends can offer in difficult times. Leffler\u2026writes with warmth and confidence about new beginnings.\u201d \u2014 Booklist on The Diagnosis of Love \u201cThe ageless, timeless themes of friendship and family run deeply through Leffler\u2019s heart-wrenching novel. Beautifully and sensitively told in alternating viewpoints, this easy-to-read tale is thought-provoking and memorable.\u201d \u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cThrough this heartwarming, one-of-a kind tale, author Maggie Leffler reminds us that the most improbable friendships can transform us in the most unexpected ways. A must read!\u201d \u2014 Pam Jenoff, international bestselling author of The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach From the Back Cover A captivating breakout novel that brings readers from the skies of World War II to the present day, when a woman is prepared to tell her secrets at last Estranged from her family since just after World War II, Mary Browning has spent her entire adult life hiding from her past. Now eighty-seven years old and a widow, she is still haunted by secrets and fading memories of the family she left behind. Her one outlet is the writing group she\u2019s presided over for a decade, though she\u2019s never written a word herself. When a new member walks in\u2014a fifteen-year-old girl who reminds her so much of her beloved sister, Sarah\u2014Mary is certain fate delivered Elyse Strickler to her for a reason. Mary hires the serious-eyed teenager to type her story about a daring female pilot who left home for the sky and gambled everything for her dreams\u2014including her own identity. As they begin to unravel the web of Mary\u2019s past, Mary and Elyse form an unlikely friendship. Together they discover it\u2019s never too late for second chances and that sometimes forgiveness is all it takes for life to take flight in the most unexpected ways. \u201cThrough this heartwarming, one-of-a kind tale, author Maggie Leffler reminds us that the most improbable friendships can transform us in the most unexpected ways. A must-read!\u201d\u2014Pam Jenoff, internationally bestselling author About the Author Maggie Leffler is an American novelist and a family medicine physician. A native of Columbia, Maryland, she graduated from the University of Delaware and volunteered with AmeriCorps before attending St. George\u2019s University School of Medicine. She practices medicine in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband and sons. The Secrets of Flight is her third novel. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1452161216", "title": "Invisible Cat Activities: A Complete-the-Drawing Book (Cat Coloring Book, Book for Cat Lovers)", "author": "Cate Anevski", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.95}, {"asin": "1587217775", "title": "A New England Country Veterinarian", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Professionals & Academics"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 13.95}, {"asin": "1250145791", "title": "Christmas in London: A Novel", "author": "Anita Hughes", "description": "Review \"Hughes has romance readers\u2019 mouths watering and hearts melting with this food-and holiday-themed novel. A quick read with a friendly, familiar tone, Hughes\u2019 latest brings her characters to life with real-life heartbreak and the charm of London during the most magical time of year.\" \u2015 Booklist \"Reading Christmas in London you\u2019ll feel magically transported!\" \u2015 Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of A Lowcountry Christmas \"Anita Hughes' charming characters and sweet romance transported me to London during the most festive time of year. Enjoy!\" \u2015 Brenda Novak, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Heart of Christmas \"What's better than being home for the holidays? Christmas in London ! In this romantic novel, Anita Hughes gifts readers with London landmarks, fabulous food, British history, Christmas shopping at Harrods, star-crossed characters and the best holiday present of all \u2015 love.\" \u2015 Viola Shipman, author of The Charm Bracelet and The Hope Chest \"Why you should read it: This is a very interesting writing style, with two romances in one book. I loved it...fantastic foods and fashions.\" \u2015 HappyEverAfter, USAToday.com Praise for Christmas in Paris : \"Christmas. Paris. Star-crossed lovers. Yup, it\u2019s the perfect holiday read!\" \u2015Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dashing Through the Snow \"Gorgeously festive and evocative, this is a compelling story filled with characters you truly care about. I adored it.\" \u2015Melissa Hill, USA Today bestselling author of The Charm Bracelet \"I was instantly transported back to France, once again strolling the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, taking in the scents, the sights, the taste of Paris. It doesn\u2019t get any better than falling in love in La Ville-Lumi\u00e9re , the City of Light, during the most magical time of year. Delicious, delectable, and delightful!\" \u2015Donna Kauffman, USA Today bestselling author of Starfish Moon \"Hughes bring her signature combination of haute couture and high-society romance to Paris, adding a touch of magic and allowing us to live vicariously through Isabel as she falls in love in the most glamorous city in the world\u2015and buys labels most women can only dream about. A charming modern-day fairy-tale romance.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Anita Hughes does it again in her latest novel: a love affair with Paris during the most magical time of year, starring a likable, slightly naive heroine everyone is rooting for.\" \u2015 Booklist About the Author ANITA HUGHES is the author of Rome in Love (adapted into a Hallmark movie in 2019), and Christmas in Vermont (adapted into a Lifetime movie in 2019). She is also the author of Market Street, Lake Como, Santorini Sunsets , Christmas in Paris , Monarch Beach, and other titles. She attended UC Berkeley's Masters in Creative Writing Program, and lives in Dana Point, California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Christmas in London By Anita Hughes St. Martin's Press Copyright \u00a9 2017 Anita HughesAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-14579-6 CHAPTER 1 Louisa nudged open the industrial-sized oven and thought nothing smelled as wonderful as cinnamon and nutmeg nine days before Christmas. Everything about the bakery's smooth wooden counters thrilled her: the buttery pie crusts waiting for crisp Granny Smith apple slices and scoops of whipped cream, the eggnog custard nestled in white cups, the cupcakes topped with cream cheese frosting and shaped liked Christmas trees. And she especially loved the croquembouche she had convinced Ellie, the bakery's owner, to let her make on her own time. She learned the recipe for croquembouche at a cooking course in Normandy and never forgot the cream-filled pastry puffs dipped in caramel and laced with spun sugar. She examined it now and thought the puffs were a little crooked and the cream may not be as rich as she used in Normandy, but when she popped one in her mouth she tasted vanilla and a crust so airy it was like a single fat snowflake drifting down from the sky. That was one of the things people didn't realize about being a pastry chef. It wasn't just about baking a delicious cheesecake or whisking eggs and flour so a souffl\u00e9 was firm and delicate at the same time. It was about exploring other cultures. She loved to make lamingtons from Australia with their gooey centers and coconut flakes and panettones from Italy topped with powdered sugar and citrus rinds and toffee pudding from England so thick it stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her phone lit up with texts and she brushed aside a stray hair and picked it up. Her friends urged her to join them doing all the things twenty-something New Yorkers enjoyed a week before Christmas: ice-skating in Central Park or sipping champagne cobblers at the Monkey Bar or braving Christmas shoppers at Bloomingdale's to pick out the perfect party dress. But there was always the possibility of falling and spraining her wrist when she ice-skated and champagne gave her a headache and even though she loved Bloomingdale's with its decorated Christmas tree and scents of expensive perfumes, she couldn't afford a pair of silk stockings let alone a whole dress. And besides, every extra hour she worked brought her closer to her goal. She had been saving for four years and by next Christmas she was determined to open her own restaurant specializing in homemade desserts. She'd already started scouting locations \u2014 roaming the trendy streets of Chelsea and venturing to the Upper West Side with its leafy sidewalks and elegant brownstones. In the summer there would be blueberry tarts and upside-down cake with plums the color of lipstick and almond ice cream torte. And at the Christmas holidays! She would serve Baked Alaska and gingerbread trifle with cognac custard and sliced pears. She stretched like a cat that had been sitting too long in front of the fire and noticed the rain drizzling on the pavement. If she had brought a proper raincoat she would almost look forward to the six blocks' walk to her apartment. She thought of all the things she planned to do when she got home: read the chapter on chocolate ganache in Gordon Ramsay's new cookbook, try out a new recipe for key lime pie with limes she bought at the corner market, take a bath before her roommate prepared for a date and spent hours in the bathroom doing her hair and makeup. Every day for the last week Louisa had staggered up the stairs to her apartment and unlocked the door. She'd flipped through the mail and brewed a cup of orange hibiscus tea. Then she'd lain down on her bed fully clothed just to close her eyes. Hours later she would wake with a crick in her neck and her jacket digging uncomfortably into her side. A bell tinkled and Louisa realized she'd forgotten to lock the bakery door and change the sign to CLOSED. The kitchen door opened and a man of about thirty appeared. He wore a rain-splattered leather jacket and had short light-brown hair. \"I'm sorry, we're closed.\" She took the cinnamon rolls out of the oven and placed them on the island in the middle of the room. \"You're not closed, actually.\" He entered the kitchen. \"The door of the bakery was unlocked and the red blinking sign said OPEN.\" \"The sign is new and I always forget to unplug it,\" Louisa said. \"The cash register is empty and the desserts are put away. I'm afraid you'll have to leave.\" \"Are these cinnamon rolls any good?\" He inspected the tray. \"I really couldn't say,\" she answered. \"I just took them out of the oven.\" \"They smell delicious.\" He picked one up. \"Do you mind if I try one?\" \"You can't just help yourself!\" she protested, wiping her hands on her apron. \"I spent hours baking them.\" The man inhaled deeply and took a small bite. He finished chewing and looked at Louisa. \"Excellent! Not too gooey and with just the right amount of sweetness,\" he announced. \"Possibly the best cinnamon roll I've ever tasted.\" \"Do you think so?\" she asked, suddenly happy despite herself. \"I've been working on the recipe for ages. I use a secret ingredient I can't tell anyone about. And the brown sugar has to have just the right amount of molasses.\" \"Is that all there is?\" He waved at the two trays of cinnamon rolls. \"Or are there more in the oven?\" \"That's two dozen cinnamon rolls! It took me all afternoon.\" She suddenly remembered that it was 7:00 p.m. and she'd been at the bakery since early morning. \"I'll take the lot.\" He picked up a tray. \"Do you have any boxes? I can't have them getting ruined in the rain.\" \"Put that down!\" she said hotly. \"You can't just waltz in here and help yourself to what's on the counter.\" \"I wasn't going to help myself, I was going to pay you.\" He reached into his pocket and took out a wallet. \"How much are they?\" \"They're not for sale.\" She shook her head. \"Of course they're for sale,\" he countered. \"This is a bakery. You didn't make twenty-four cinnamon rolls to eat before bed.\" \"They're not for sale now. They're for the morning,\" she clarified. \"They're our most popular item the week before Christmas. People love them with a cup of coffee or hot chocolate.\" \"I need them now.\" He riffled through his wallet. \"Will one hundred dollars be enough? I can't imagine you charge more than six dollars a cinnamon roll even if this is the East Village.\" \"One hundred dollars for twenty-four cinnamon rolls!\" Louisa gasped. Ellie had asked Louisa what they should charge and Louisa suggested three dollars apiece. She was terrible at pricing her own desserts. It was a tug-of-war between being grateful people liked them enough to pay for them and wanting Ellie to make a profit. \"I'm sorry, you can't have them. I'm not the owner and I'm not allowed to sell the products after hours. I'd be happy to hold them for you when we open tomorrow morning, if you'd like to come back then.\" \"Two hundred dollars, then.\" He handed her two hundred-dollar bills. \"And an extra fifty if you find me a box.\" \"That's very generous, but then I wouldn't have any left for the morning rush hour,\" she explained. \"We have to sell cinnamon rolls the week before Christmas. It's our most requested item.\" \"You have other pastries. They can buy Danish or croissants,\" he suggested. \"Any other time of the year perhaps, but not now.\" She shook her head. \"People allow an extra fifteen minutes to get to work just so they can pick up a cinnamon roll. It's the high point of their day.\" \"Have you heard of the cooking show Baking with Bianca ?\" he asked. \"We're filming a Christmas special in a brownstone nearby and there was a small fire in the kitchen. The snowball cupcakes look like they were roasted over a campfire and the fig crumble bars are burnt to a crisp. There isn't time to bake anything else and the other bakeries are closed. I need something for Bianca to hold in front of the camera.\" \"It's the most watched cooking show in New York.\" She nodded. \"At first I was a little put off by Bianca's lipstick. How could you taste your own desserts without getting bright-red lipstick all over the spoon? But I've tried some of the recipes and the steamed gingerbread pudding is delicious.\" \"Bianca wears waterproof lipstick, it wouldn't come off during a monsoon,\" he murmured. Louisa noticed that the man's eyes were blue and there was an ink smudge on his cheek. His cheeks were smooth and when he smiled crinkles formed around his mouth. \"I'm sorry, they're not mine to sell,\" she insisted. \"Ellie, the owner, is at The Nutcracker with her daughter, Chloe, and I can't interrupt her. You can try again tomorrow.\" \"I've got a stylist and a lighting guy and a camera operator who will report this to the union if we go a minute overtime,\" he pleaded. \"And think of the viewers. They're going to tune in to learn how to bake something special for Santa Claus or bring the perfect Christmas gift to Aunt Mary in the hospital and be disappointed.\" Christmas was Louisa's favorite time of year because people were so nice to each other. All month the spirit of doing the right thing was intoxicating. People jostled to give up their seat on the subway and when she walked down Fifth Avenue she heard the sound of coins dropping into Salvation Army cans. She wanted to help him, and in exchange Bianca could mention the bakery on the show. It would be wonderful publicity and Ellie would be thrilled. \"I have an idea,\" she suggested. \"What if Bianca says on air that the bakery is one of her favorite spots in Manhattan? Ellie would get free publicity and you would get your cinnamon rolls.\" She paused. \"I will have to come in early and make more, but I don't mind. I'll do anything to help the bakery succeed.\" \"You're a lifesaver,\" he said and kissed her on the cheek. \"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that but you've made me so happy.\" He stepped back and grinned. \"My job is to make everything on the set run smoothly and Bianca was roaming around like a lion with an injured paw. Even our producer, Kate, couldn't placate her. Kate is usually as soothing as a warm brandy before bed.\" \"That sounds perfect right about now,\" she said with a sigh. \"I arrived so early this morning the homeless man was still asleep. Every evening I give him a stack of blankets and every morning when he wakes up he returns them.\" \"You give a homeless man blankets?\" He stopped. \"Doesn't that encourage him to hang around? I'm sure your customers don't want to see him when they're ordering their morning cappuccino.\" \"No one sees him, he sleeps in the covered alley in the back. Even Ellie doesn't know he comes,\" she said. \"The shelters are so crowded, sometimes it's hard to get a blanket at all. I give him a cup of leftover coffee and blankets I keep in the storeroom.\" She paused. \"No one knows, please don't say anything.\" \"My lips are sealed. I have to go, or I'll be fired and looking for a handout.\" He picked up the trays. \"I'm Noah, it's a pleasure doing business with you.\" \"I'm Louisa.\" She nodded. \"I hope it all works out.\" He walked to the door and turned around. \"You've saved my job, I don't know how to thank you.\" Louisa watched Noah cross the street and thought she shouldn't have said yes. Now she'd have to be back at the bakery at 5:00 a.m. Her shoes would barely have time to dry and she wouldn't be able to wash her hair before work. But it was too late now. The cinnamon rolls were gone and she had to get home before the soft rain became a downpour. She closed the front door and studied the white Christmas tree decorated with gumdrops and peppermints in the bakery window. The red sign still flashed OPEN and she laughed. She unlocked the door and unplugged it. Then she covered her head with her hands and hurried down the street. CHAPTER 2 Louisa poured a cup of coffee from the bakery's silver coffeepot and added cream and sugar. She took a sip and stared at the cup blankly. She had been there so long she couldn't remember how many cups she'd already consumed. There was the shot of espresso she gulped down when she arrived. The stone floor was freezing under her moccasins and the coffeepot took too long to heat up. She made an espresso in the espresso machine and drank it while she assembled brown sugar and cinnamon. Then there had been the cup of coffee with a splash of vanilla she sipped after she handed the cinnamon rolls to Danielle, who worked the bakery's counter. That was the best cup of the day. It was fresh and hot, and she could savor it slowly. But then Danielle needed a tray of pecan crescent cookies and Louisa groaned and returned to work. Now it was early afternoon, and the coffee was so stale it needed a large dose of cream and two packets of sugar just to swallow it. The kitchen door opened and Louisa looked up. Noah wore a long wool coat and blue jeans. \"Not you again!\" she exclaimed. \"Because of you I woke up so early, I banged my foot on the radiator in the dark. I had to hobble six blocks and when I arrived the bakery was like the inside of an igloo. I made two trays of cinnamon rolls and three cranberry logs and a persimmon pudding. If you have any designs on my pecan crescent cookies, you better think again. They're for the evening rush, and I'm not going to make more.\" \"They look excellent but I'm not hungry.\" Noah glanced at the tray. \"And I'm sorry you hurt your foot. I'm in a bit of trouble and need your help.\" \"I'm a firm believer in helping others, especially at Christmas.\" She poured the coffee in the sink. \"But everyone has their limits. I was about to drink coffee that is so stiff you could put it behind a frame and hang it on the wall. I'm afraid this time you'll have to solve your own problems.\" \"The cinnamon rolls were a huge hit. The crew fought over who took them home and the producer, Kate, said they were the best she ever tasted,\" he began. \"Kate is very particular, she's worked with Anthony Bourdain.\" \"Anthony Bourdain!\" Louisa's eyes were wide. \"Did she really say they were good?\" \"Her exact words were 'they are so rich and flaky they should be served at afternoon tea at the Waldorf.'\" He paused. \"Are you happy?\" \"Very happy.\" Louisa imagined getting a plug on national television for her restaurant when it opened. Then she studied Noah suspiciously. \"But I'm exhausted. If you need more cinnamon rolls you'll have to wait until tomorrow. As soon as I finish these crescent cookies I'm going home.\" \"The only person who didn't react favorably to the cinnamon rolls was Bianca.\" He lifted the lid of the coffeepot and inhaled. \"She took a few bites to show the camera how delicious they were and an hour later her lips blew up like a blowfish. Whatever you used, she was allergic.\" \"It must have been the nutmeg, that's my secret ingredient!\" she gasped. \"Some people are allergic. I should have told you. I'm sorry, it's my fault.\" \"Unfortunately she has an extreme case,\" he finished. \"Her doctor said she'd look like that for a week.\" \"I feel terrible. Should I send an apology note or a fruit basket?\" She stopped. \"But why do you need my help? I'm the last person Bianca wants to see.\" \"Tonight the whole crew is flying to London to prepare to film Christmas Dinner at Claridge's. Top chefs from around the world are going to prepare Christmas Eve dinner at one of the most famous hotel restaurants.\" His eyes darkened. \"Bianca was supposed to bake her layered fruitcake with cr\u00e8me fra\u00eeche frosting. Except now she's going to be lying in a dark room watching Scandal and drinking milkshakes with a straw.\" Louisa's cheeks paled and a shiver ran down her spine. \"Oh, I see,\" she breathed. \"That does create a problem.\" He glanced at the clock above the oven. \"In four hours and thirty-six minutes I have to be at the British Airways lounge at JFK. Before I hand over my boarding pass and receive my complimentary glass of champagne, you're going to help me find Bianca's replacement.\" \"How would I do that?\" Louisa demanded. \"I'm a twenty-seven-year-old pastry chef at a bakery on the Lower East Side. I don't know any famous chefs and I've never been invited to a restaurant opening.\" She turned back to the crescent cookies. \"I'm happy to write an apology, but I can't find a replacement.\" \"You don't understand,\" he urged. \"I'm the one who brought the cinnamon rolls to the set. If I don't show up with Bianca's replacement, I'll be fired.\" \"Aren't you overreacting?\" she offered. \"You didn't mean to make Bianca's lips blow up like a blowfish. She must have insurance for these situations.\" \"Insurance doesn't cover the press releases that have been sent out, and the promotional ads that have been filmed, and the fact that working alongside those chefs will be a huge boost for Bianca's career,\" he spluttered. \"Someone has to take the blame, that's how television works. It will be my head rolling around the network floor like a cabbage at Trader Joe's.\" (Continues...) Excerpted from Christmas in London by Anita Hughes . Copyright \u00a9 2017 Anita Hughes. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 20.68}, {"asin": "080509525X", "title": "Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics", "author": "Kim Phillips-Fein", "description": "Review \u201cA powerful and involving work of narrative history\u2026 You come away from Fear City with a clear sense of what was lost as New York left behind one set of priorities and embraced another.\u2026 This is a book that deserves an audience beyond New York City history buffs, and all the more so because of its relevance to our political moment. The young Donald Trump makes a brief cameo appearance as an icon of the new New York, a real estate mogul who leveraged his father\u2019s connections and the city\u2019s desperation into massive tax breaks, starving the city of badly needed revenues for education and other basic municipal functions as he developed properties for the rich. \u2015Jonathan Mahler, The New York Times Book Review \u201c Fear City is the best account of the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s and, more than that, an indispensable contribution to understanding the rise of austerity economics and the long decline of the public sector. This is a history with huge implications for the remaking of American politics and economics in our time.\u201d \u2015Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Origins of the Urban Crisis \u201cThe remaking of New York City under cover of crisis was a prelude to what would become a global economic tidal wave. In zeroing in on this little-understood chapter of urban history, Fear City helps sheds much-needed light on a range of contemporary crises, from the starvation of public services amidst enormous private wealth to the rise of Donald Trump. Kim Phillips-Fein is a historian of the first order.\u201d \u2015Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything \u201cFair, thorough, incisive, and stylish, this is the best book to read not just on New York\u2019s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, but about how bankers became our unacknowledged legislators ever since.\u201d \u2015Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge \u201cBefore there was Reagan, before there was Thatcher, there was New York City\u2019s fiscal crisis. Here we can see the blueprint for what has since been done to the entire world. This is the story of how the gears were shifted and the age of liberalism put into reverse, told with all the engrossing details, all the forgotten characters, and a memorable style.\u201d \u2015Thomas Frank, author of What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal \u201cA tour de force. If you want to find the roots of modern conservatism, don\u2019t look in Louisiana, Arizona, or rural Wisconsin. Look in New York, and read Kim Phillips-Fein\u2019s superb Fear City . New York in the 1970s, as Phillips-Fein compellingly shows, was the first sustained victory in the New Right\u2019s long war against the New Deal. Extremely well written and impressively researched, Fear City is essential reading to understand how finance capital, real estate speculation, austerity budgeting, and punitive policing first came together to create the toxic politics of today.\u201d \u2015Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia and Kissinger\u2019s Shadow \u201c Fear City provides the definitive account of the moment when New York City liberalism ran out of momentum and money, and the conservative reaction that has culminated in Donald Trump began. Phillips-Fein chronicles not only the tense dance with municipal bankruptcy but the largely forgotten efforts by ordinary New Yorkers to stop the legal coup by local and national elites. Lucid, elegantly written, full of new information, it belongs on the shelf of key books about the city, alongside The Power Broker , Gotham , and their like.\u201d \u2015Joshua B. Freeman, author of American Empire and Working-Class New York \u201cThis revealing narrative of New York\u2019s transformation from working-class social democracy to the glittering home of fancy finance reminds us that behind the mask of austerity there always lurks a bitter politics of class.\u201d \u2015James K. Galbraith, author of The Predator State and Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice \u201cThe story of New York\u2019s financial crisis in the seventies is really a story about the role of cities in America today. New Yorkers pride themselves on being cosmopolitan, on welcoming immigrants, on being willing to spend money on education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Kim Philips-Fein convincingly explains why that caused problems for the city in the past and why now we need New York values more than ever.\" \u2015Joseph E. Stiglitz, author of Globalization and Its Discontents and The Price of Inequality \u201cPaced like a thriller and extremely well written . . . Phillips-Fein narrates with almost cinematic flair, and by the time the credits roll, the significance of her accomplishment becomes clear. The book should be required reading for all those interested in the past, present, and future of democratic politics.\u201d \u2015Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cDeftly recounts the clash between government entities and vested interests as New York struggled to cope with slashed social service . . . Given events since, New York\u2019s crisis\u2015and the author\u2019s astute account of it\u2015seems oddly timely . . . Sobering, smart reading with many pointed lessons for activists.\u201d \u2015Kirkus Reviews (starred review) About the Author Kim Phillips-Fein is a professor of history at New York University and the author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal . A recipient of grants from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she has written for The Nation , Dissent , The Baffler , The Atlantic , and The New York Times , among other publications.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 32.22}, {"asin": "1539119955", "title": "Don't Throw In the Trowel!: Vegetable Gardening Month by Month (Easy-Growing Gardening)", "author": "Rosefiend Cordell", "description": "Review A simple and well laid out guide to vegetable gardening.\"What a delightful read this is! This lady certainly knows her onions!There is a wealth of practical knowledge to be had in this book. Nothaving kept a veggie garden for a number of years, It both remindedthings I already knew and informed me of many things I didn't. It is anideal guide for both new-comers to the gardening world, as well asestablished gardeners.\" -- Ty from Wales\"Loved her style -- almost felt like having her right here chatting with me or in a very small, friendly classroom -- a quick & easy read. I also liked her month by month approach -- I am never thinking in February when it is cold& wet that I really should be getting seeds started for setting out in spring & that to do so, I'd better have gotten the stuff ready even sooner. She also covers square foot gardening, maintenance of equipment, etc. I have been making veggie gardens since I was a kid & even swapped an engine out in my 4x4 truck myself years ago, so I am not a novice, but still found the book useful & interesting. She also gives links to other useful resources, seed & info sites, etc.\"Let me start out by clarifying that my thumb has never been green whatsoever,yet I still try to garden every year. Despite my clear lack of skills, I always have grandiose ideas for a beautiful vegetable garden. It turns out that perhaps my biggest room for improvement was just learning from my previous mistakes! This year, I have started to keep a journal so I can see next year what went wrong and what not to do again. Who knew you could forget what you did an entire year ago?I'm certainly nowhere near where I would like to be, but I wish I had had this book years ago, if only to make me feel a little better to know that \"plants are very forgiving\" and to just keep trying through trial and error.I can't recommend this book enough. Other gardening books are intimidating, but this one is practical and often times pretty funny. From the Author Two things:First: You know more about gardening than you think.Second: A garden - the soil - the plants - all of these are very forgiving.When it comes down to it, you can do pretty much anything to these.(Though, actually, bulldozer races through the garden are out of thequestion.)A garden is forgiving. Plants are built to put up with a lot of nonsene. It's part of their nature. They obviously can't getup and walk away, so they're made to endure. But some plants are betterat getting along than others are. The trick is finding out which onesthese are.That was part of my outlook, as city horticulturist:If it won't grow for you, why then, it can go away somewhere and wilt.Life is too short to spend on fighting with plants that you don't like.I carried that over into my work in my vegetable garden. I went afterplants that were easy to grow and take care of, and I used methods thatgot results with as little work as possible. I mean, there is alwayswork to be done around the garden. You've got to pull weeds and squashaphids and dump soapy water over the eggplant when it catches fleabeetles and try to keep up with all the strawberries. But I found thatthere are ways to make the work less backbreaking, and I outline them in the book. Also I included neat illustrations from old seed catalogs,just for fun.I enjoyed writing this book, and I hope you get a lot of good out of it and even learn something while having fun. From the Back Cover Vegetable gardening is an enterprise fraught with adventure and peril.Well, okay, that's only true when you pull up a weed and a cloud ofbumblebees boils up from a nest underground. Otherwise, gardening is apretty good way to spend your time, and you get tomatoes. Don't Throw In the Trowel!: Vegetable Gardening Month by Month guides the Midwest gardener, month by month, through the many gardening tasks that need to be done.This book helps you be more effective, plots out your month-by-month to-do list, and keeps you up to speed. Melinda R. Cordell has worked in horticulture half her life, including a stint as city horticulturist in St. Joseph, Missouri. About the Author Melinda R. Cordell worked in most all aspects of horticulture - in garden centers, in wholesale greenhouses, as a landscape designer, and finally as city horticulturist, where she took care of who-knows-how-many-gardens around the city as well as the Krug Park rose garden and the 300 roses there. She fought the rose rosette virus,which killed off over 50 roses during her very first year, and planted both old and new varieties, using mostly organic methods.\u00a0She lives in northwest Missouri with her husband and kids, the best little family that ever walked the earth,as well as two hens and a couple roses and a lot of weeds. She hates weeding so much. You can't even imagine. Rose to the Occasion:An Easy-Growing Guide to Rose Gardening is the second of the Easy-Growing Garden series, which will include Annuals and Perennials, Soilbuilding, Houseplants, and Trees and Shrubs, and many others. The first book in the series is Don't Throw in the Trowel!: Vegetable Gardening Month by Month. Check it out. She's also published Butterfly Chaos , a novel about cousins, a ghost, and a tornado; and Chicago Review Press has published her nonfiction book Courageous Women of the Civil War: Soldiers, Spies, Medics, and More . She earned her Master's in Writing for Children from Hamline University, and her fiction and articles have appeared in Cricket, Highlights, The Horn Book, Organic Gardening, Birds and Blooms , and Grit . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Gardening & Landscape Design"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.0}, {"asin": "0451232496", "title": "Curiosity Thrilled the Cat (Magical Cats)", "author": "Sofie Kelly", "description": "Review Praise for the New York Times Bestselling Magical Cat Mysteries \u201cOwen and Hercules are a delight.\u201d\u2014Kings River Life Magazine \u00a0 \u201cIf you are a fan of Miranda James\u2019s Cat in the Stacks mysteries, you will want to read [this series].\u201d\u2014MyShelf.com \u00a0 \u201cCoziness at its finest. I adore those magical cats!\u201d\u2014Socrates\u2019 Book Reviews  \u00a0 \u201cWith great characters and an interesting story, readers will be in for a treat with this classic whodunit.\u201d\u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cSmall-town charm and a charming cat duo make this every cat fancier\u2019s dream.\u201d\u2014The Mystery Reader About the Author Sofie Kelly is a New York Times bestselling author and mixed-media artist who lives on the East Coast with her husband and daughter. She writes the New York Times bestselling Magical Cats mysteries and, as Sofie Ryan, writes the New York Times bestselling Second Chance Cat mysteries.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "1101986360", "title": "The Driver: A Thriller", "author": "Hart Hanson", "description": "Review Praise for Hart Hanson and The Driver \u201cHanson's\u00a0storytelling voice is off the charts: blunt, morbid, morally indignant and furiously funny.\u201d\u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cIt is so hard to be unique in crime fiction and Hart Hanson has done it big time with The Driver . It\u2019s got all the ingredients: high risks, strong momentum, unseen turns and a set of gripping characters. You can\u2019t ask for more!\u201d\u2014Michael Connelly\u201cAn outstanding debut thriller. Readers of Scott Turow and Harlan Coben will appreciate the intricate plot and rich character development.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cThe Driver is an action-packed, humor-infused novel that doesn\u2019t disappoint. Hart Hanson\u2019s debut is chock full of eccentric characters, from soldiers with a cause to crooked cops to diva wannabes. This is a book that is sure to fly from the shelves to the bedside tables.\u201d\u2014 The San Francisco Book Review \u201cThe first chapter delivers an entertainment smack upside the head that will keep readers rapt to the story's end....Wryly funny and whip-smart, Hanson's narrative seamlessly weaves in serious themes, pop culture and a bit of a love letter to Los Angeles.\u201d\u2014Shelf Awareness\u00a0\u201c[A] remarkable debut\u2026 The dialogue is crisp and street-tough, and the action redefines relentless . Expect lots of buzz for what is sure to be one of the season\u2019s hottest first novels.\u201d\u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201cHanson, creator of the long-running TV series Bones, takes to crime fiction in high style. Like Carl Hiaasen, he shows great pleasure in combining nasty violence with an arch comic sensibility...[a] fresh-voiced first novel.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cHanson, creator of the TV series Bones , melds well-placed bits of humor with a serious look at the emotional trials of returning veterans. The energetic plot demands a sequel.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cRiveting, smart, and funny, The Driver is a masterfully crafted debut. Michael Skellig is the hero we\u2019ve been waiting for\u2014a wry war veteran who doesn\u2019t take anything (or anyone) too seriously, even while staring down the face of a sawed-off shotgun.\u201d\u2014Harlan Coben \u201cFunny and smart.\u201d\u2014Dallas Morning News\u00a0\u201c[A] hugely entertaining thriller...Infused with dark humor.\u201d \u2014The Oklahoman \u201c The Driver has it all\u2014crisp dialogue, complex characters, anda plot that zips at breathtaking speed. I see the beginning of a great career in thriller fiction.\u201d\u2014Kathy Reichs\u00a0\u201c The Driver is packed with action...tightly plotted...The characters [are] sharply drawn and sympathetic (the heroes) or scary (the villains). Good or bad, they all come alive on the page.\u201d\u2014 St. Louis Post-Dispatch \u201c[A] page turner.\u201d\u2014 New York Post \u201c The Driver is everything a great thriller should be\u2014always smart, often funny, and relentlessly exciting. The novel features imaginative mayhem from the first pages, a terrific twisting plot, and countless fresh elements, starting with its hip, witty, limo-driver hero, who deals with the eccentric world of high-profile skateboarding and the lingering sadness of many of our vets. I loved every page.\u201d\u2014Scott Turow\u00a0\u201cHart Hanson has given us a wonderful debut novel in The Driver . Former Army Special Forces Sergeant Michael Skellig runs a limousine service in Los Angeles, staffed by his hand-picked team of former war companions.\u00a0Skellig and his people are living casualties of America's wars\u2014damaged in different ways but clinging to their lives with determination, anger, and resourcefulness. Set in an LA of narcissistic celebrity, corrupt law enforcement, and limitless greed, The Driver is grim, funny, violent, and moving\u2014all on the same page.\u201d\u2014T. Jefferson Parker \u201cThe Driver is smart, brash, and funny, with characters who strut right out of an Elmore Leonard novel. \u00a0For thrills, chills, and plenty of laughs, Hart Hanson is your man.\u201d\u2014Tess Gerritsen\u00a0\u201cThe ghost of Raymond Chandler is apparently alive and well and living inside Hart Hanson. I felt as though I was reading a 21st century reboot of The Long Goodbye . Brutal, gripping and funny. A dazzling debut.\u201d\u2014Charles Cumming About the Author Hart Hanson wrote for Canadian television before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked on various TV programs before creating the series Bones , the longest-running scripted hour-long series on the FOX network. Married with two sons, Hart lives with his wife, Brigitte, in Venice, California. The Driver is his first novel. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Something Gets in My Eye Five minutes before a pair of overconfident, underaged, undercooked, tweaked-out, teenage-skater-boy assassins swagger through the front door of an upscale bar in a tourist hotel just south of the Santa Monica Pier, I'm innocently killing time in the manner of all limo drivers since the invention of the wheel: wiping down my vehicle with a chamois while listening to a less car-proud driver complain about the weather. He isn't wrong to complain, considering how the two of us are being sandblasted by Santa Ana winds in the limos-wait-here alley behind the hotel. \"Fuckin' Santa Anas,\" he said, squinting into the grit. \"White people freak the fuck out, level a black man the evil eye.\" Black man referred to him; white people referred to me. Which was fair because I am, in fact, an astoundingly vanilla man: brown hair, brown eyes, five foot eleven, medium build-your average kind of white man, milquetoast invisible average-but while I admit to regarding him with interest, \"leveling the evil eye\" parlayed too much spin on it. (Yet . . .) There was something about the guy that didn't ring true. He wore a dark-blue limo-driver's suit made for somebody maybe two inches shorter than himself unless he'd recently undergone a growth spurt, which seemed unlikely given that he was pushing thirty. His shoes were not the standard black wingtips or cap-toed oxfords; they were patent leather laceless boots, sporting flashy silver toe and heel caps (though whether gaudy-cheap or conspicuous-expensive was beyond me). His hair was rusty colored in a way that said beach bum more than limo driver. As did his cigarillo packed with primo weed. Plus, he checked his phone with manic regularity. Normally, I'd have written him off as a moonlighting soul surfer obsessively checking an app that tracked storm waves from across the ocean. Except the Santa Anas blow out any kind of decent surfing; even junk surfers don't need an app for that. Most likely Mr. Chelsea Boots was new to the limo business, nervous, checking for texts from a particularly demanding client-but if that was the case, then why was he getting high? To calm his jitters? So yeah, come to think of it, maybe Chelsea Boots was right and I was leveling him the evil eye. Or maybe he was paranoid from the weed. Maybe a little of both. My mobile buzzed. I removed my sunglasses, shaded the screen from the setting sun and gusts of grit with my body. It was my mechanic, Tinkertoy, calling. I answered in my most soothing voice. \"It's me.\" Dead silence (not unexpected). Sonic blackouts are a quirk of Tinkertoy's post-traumatic stress paranoia, an awkward unwanted intermission as she evaluates whether or not the person on the other end of the call is for reals the person she herself just dialed. \"It's you who?\" Tinkertoy asked. \"This is Michael Skellig,\" I answered. Crickets. \"Your boss.\" Silence. In college, in addition to required math and engineering classes, I took an elective survey course in Great Thinkers in which we studied the birth of medicine, featuring protodoctors, half scientist / half magician, starting with a Greek named Hippocrates. (You've heard of his oath.) Hippocrates set out to label and categorize human beings by separating us into four basic groups based upon (I shit you not) a personal predominance of the following: snot, black bile, yellow bile, and blood. He labeled these Humors. We all have one, a humor, like a sign of the zodiac. Hippocrates would have diagnosed Tinkertoy as a Melancholic, meaning she suffered from a surfeit of black bile. Eventually, Tinkertoy decided that I was, in fact, who I claimed to be and, in the jerky, tumbledown telegram way she speaks once she decides it's safe, she said, \"Two is ready. Fuel injector was fucked. Not like from sabotage. Nuh-uh. Just old. So I replaced it. Hundred seventy-five bucks. Secondhand. Could not. Be rebuilt.\" Two referred to the second of the three limos I own. I was currently leaning on our flagship: Number One. \"Good job,\" I said, and waited for Tinkertoy to analyze that controversial response for hidden meaning. You're wondering where I get the patience to deal with Tinkertoy, and the answer is that I appreciate the way she fends off her PTSD demons by immersing herself in the minutiae of all things mechanical (typewriters, binoculars, clocks and compasses, fuel injectors, air-conditioning units, cameras, whirligigs, toys, guns, stereos, computers, lawn mowers, and anything else you can think of with spinning, clicking, percolating, conducting, gyrating, or ambulatory properties). The Veterans Health Administration psych wizards categorize Tinkertoy not as Melancholic but as Ego-syntonic suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder derived from Post-Traumatic Stress with Serotonergic Imbalance Resulting in Adjustment Disorder with Anxious Features-indicating, to me at least, that shrinks could learn a thing or two from Hippocrates and his humors. Chelsea Boots huffed noisily on his doctored Black & Mild blunt, quick, shallow, urgent puffs like trying to keep something alight that wants to go out. The major limo companies do not sanction that kind of behavior. They maybe look the other way if a driver is obliged to take a friendly hit off a doobie (I know, but that's what I call it) to assuage the nerves of a pot-paranoid client who worries about off-duty cops moonlighting as limo drivers. But Chelsea Boots sucked back on his shit with Snoop Dogg levels of enthusiasm, the end of his cigar glowing red even through all this crashing sunlight. Tinkertoy finally ticked the last box on her exasperating mental list and said, \"Ripple says should he call in Lucky since Two is ready?\" Ripple's another employee Army vet with issues. I hired him to handle scheduling and dispatch for my company, Oasis Limo Services. The other full-time driver is named Lucky. Lucky owns a ten percent stake in the company but he has to trust me on that because he's an illegal alien coasting along on forged documents (yes, another veteran-we all have our tribes). I named our company Oasis Limo Services on the advice of my mother, who, as a politician, knows a lot about branding. Mom said that if I called it Stars and Stripes Limo Services it would scare the limousine liberals on the west side of Los Angeles, who happen to be my target clientele. Plus, according to Mom, the word oasis works on the subliminal level to seduce prospective clients into feeling \"like Bedouins eating dates in a tent near a cool water hole after crossing the Sahara.\" (Like everyone else who doesn't know better, Mom views Los Angeles as both a literal and a figurative desert.) \"Ripple needs to do his job,\" I told Tinkertoy, which resulted in the muffle of Tinkertoy covering the phone with her grease-stained palm, ostensibly repeating to Ripple what I'd just said. Ripple is barely nineteen years old and looks younger, a luminously pale freckled boy with crazy hair like copper wires. He draws cartoons all day, all of them horrifically violent in the way that sets off alarms for the VA wizards. Just over a year ago, Private Second Class (E-2) Ripple had a bad day in a shithole called Walakan, southwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan, when he lost his right leg from just above the knee to a sniper and his left leg at the hip when an HMMWV (which was rushing to block a second kill shot) accidentally ran him over. Hippocrates would label Ripple Sanguine, which means his predominant humor is blood, which tells you just about everything you need to know about the kid. I heard Ripple's voice in the background, a jumble of words followed by a clearly discernible, \"Tell Skellig to go fuck himself!\" followed by Tinkertoy's muffled, \"Why don't you? Go fuck? Yourself?\" followed by escalating classic Sanguine-versus-Melancholic insults. I hung up to let the two of them work it out. \"Famous poem about the Santa Anas,\" Chelsea Boots continued, as though our conversation had never been interrupted, \"concerning a wife and a knife. You got a wife?\" I shook my head. \"Why not?\" How do you answer a question like that? I'm single for all the usual reasons plus a couple of ancillary snags and detriments, for example: an eye-catching scar on my forearm left by an obstinate pit bull whose windpipe I was forced to (honest to God!) wrench out in panicked self-defense-please, no grief about the humane treatment of animals. Killing a dog is not a meet-cute anecdote on a first date (especially if the woman in question is an animal lover), and yet due to the prominence of the dimpled scars on my arm it has never not come up, unless I wear long sleeves, in which case, this being Los Angeles, the woman in question assumes I'm a junkie. I could go for Gila monster attack as an explanation, but then I'm lying on a first date, which, as any relationship expert will tell you, does not bode well for the future of the relationship. Putting aside the dog-killer excuse, the main reason I do not have a wife is that I'm hopelessly in love with a woman who not only refuses to marry me but decided that the fact that I'd asked (and she'd refused) meant that we should take our whole relationship to a much more casual level. Instead of admitting all that to baked Mr. Chelsea Boots, I changed the subject. \"It's not a poem.\" \"What's not a poem? Wife with a knife? What is it, then? Doesn't sound like no kind of joke.\" \"It's a story.\" Which is when a speck of grit blew into my eye and burned like an ember. Santa Anas are the katabatic devil winds that blow no good from the high deserts-everybody knows that, not only wives and knives, poets and surfers and limo drivers, especially getting late in the afternoon, after twenty-eight hours of no sleep, driving around a client who obviously does not ever want to go home, the sun banging on your eyeballs from both the sky and the reflection off the ocean. I heard a burst of calliope music from the Santa Monica Pier amusement park, blown up the alley behind the hotel on a back eddy of the Santa Anas, and my eye watered and stung and the wind spoke to me in the guttural accent of a Chechen jihadist torturer I shot through the eye in Yemen a decade ago. What the Chechen said was Troubletroubletrouble. Yes, yes, I know, on top of the dog story now you're going to be all freaked-out about my mental health, but those ghostly wind warnings have saved my life a dozen times, always keening in the spectral voice of somebody I'd killed. Of course I've never admitted that to the wizards. I tell them that I experience an overwhelming sense of d\u017dj\u02c6 vu and disconnection from the world. They tell me I suffer from a form of PTSD-induced protomigraine known as an aura. Why don't I tell the wizards about my whispering ghost voices? Because they will take it much too seriously and plunge a needle full of Thorazine in my ass. . . . troubletroubletroublebadtrouble . . . \"What up?\" Chelsea Boots asks, because I'm tossing the chamois onto the limo's hood, tucking my sunglasses into the breast pocket of my shirt, and turning to trot along the broken asphalt of the alley, instinctively reaching for a phantom sidearm that isn't there and hasn't been there for three years. I slam into the dented metal door at the rear of the hotel like I'm trying to escape a burning building, then thump on it with my elbow until it opens a crack. I shove my way past the shocked Malaysian dishwasher kid wearing eyeliner and rubber gloves, moving fast and low, like I'm leading a strike team, through the coolness of the corridor, smelling cleaning fluids and raw refrigerated beef, olive oil, spilled liquor, antiseptic. I zigzag through the kitchen, scanning, scanning, ignoring the whoops and hollers of the Mexicans and Guatemalans who work there-\"Hey! Choo can be dere!\"-bursting from behind the bar into a cool place of wood warmth and air-conditioning and mirrors and an infinity of bottles and indirect light and people and music throbbing at 180 beats per minute (like the heart of panic). \"Jesus Christ!\" grunts a barback; then there's a bouncer who plants himself in front of me, chanting, \"Stop. Stop. Stop!\" in the singsong, patronizing, faux-weary voice bouncers affect to hide their own anxieties in a physical confrontation. When I outzig his zag, he tucks in behind and chases me. \"Buddy? Buddy?\" This bouncer moves well but his nose has never been broken, which indicates that he's a martial arts type, which means that, unlike a boxer or a cop, he cannot take a hit and keep coming, so when he grabs my shoulder I spin, elbow him once, solar plexus, and keep going. I consider shouting my client's name, which is Bismarck Avila (that's right, the wunderkind skateboarding hip-hop mogul from the reality show), but then I see Avila rising as the culminating sound of the disturbance I'm causing roils over my head and breaks over him like a wave, so I jostle my way through the evening drinks crowd, managers and agents and call girls and tourists, muttering \"'Scuse me, 'scuse me, 'scuse me . . .\" in a way that really means, Get the fuck out of my way or I will hurt you. Two three-hundred-pound bodyguards rise in front of me like darkness looming, twins, buttoning their Hugo Boss suits in the way large African American men do in order to intimidate average-size Caucasian men like me, the same monumental bookends who followed my limo in a tricked-out black Navigator as I drove their boss from club to club to sex club to hotel suite to restaurant to private party to bar-a different woman or women in the back servicing the client on each leg. \"Get him out,\" I advise the twins, pointing at Avila but scanning, scanning, for the threat that the Chechen had warned me about but had not yet presented itself in reality. \"I don't think so,\" Tweedledee says. \"Who you talkin'?\" Tweedledum asks. \"That's the limo driver,\" says Tweedledee just before the bullet slaps his gut, right through his Hugo Boss buttonhole, the crack of a nine millimeter following a microsecond later and the awful wet-clap sound of bullet meets flesh, and for the two seconds before hysteria and panic hit, the whole place goes as silent as Antarctica. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 11.57}, {"asin": "1944995218", "title": "The Secret Island of Edgar Dewitt", "author": "Ferrill Gibbs", "description": "Review \"Edgar Dewitt is an adventurous and smart boy who just moved from a small fishing town in Alabama to Mount Lanier, Washington. As Edgar was exploring the woods behind his new backyard, he ran into something quite mysterious: a shack, with a very deep hole in the middle of the floor. This hole is the entrance to Edgar\u2019s double life, with math tests by day and adventures by night. During his adventures he makes friends, and enemies. It was a great book, well written and full of adventures. It had some really interesting characters with some great personalities, making it a wonderful book for anyone over the age of ten. It was a good-sized book, and I couldn\u2019t stop reading it. I could really visualize the story. Although the story was a fantasy and not based off of real science, you feel like it could really happen. It was suspenseful. I think it would make a great movie.\" - Charlie, Age 13 ( Kids' BookBuzz ) From the Back Cover Edgar Dewitt is the new kid in town. Moving from Alabama to Mount Lanier, Washington has been quite the change, and Edgar quickly realizes making new friends won't be as easy as he thought. On his first day in town, he meets one of Mount Lanier's best: the incorrigible Chris Weedy, who's as bright as a sack of socks and as mean as you can get.One day while exploring the woods behind his new house, Edgar discovers something mysterious: an old abandoned cabin. But the real magic happens when he finds something even more magnificent inside the cabin itself: a dark and ominous hole. After studying the hole for a few days, Edgar musters his courage and jumps in feet first. It takes him straight through the center of the earth to a tiny island in the middle of the Indian ocean, and Edgar knows he's stumbled upon something ancient. Something secret--a seemingly impossible way to journey to the other side of the world.\u00a0For the next several weeks, the island becomes a sanctuary where Edgar can escape Chris Weedy's cruel taunting and his parents' constant questions. But a sudden, nearby wildfire threatens to engulf the town in flames and take Edgar's volunteer firefighter father along with it. Edgar must act fast and decide between saving his new town or keeping his newly found safe haven. About the Author Ferrill Gibbs is a writer and singer/songwriter from the Alabama Gulf Coast,\u00a0whose songs have been featured in American Songwriter Magazine and\u00a0CMJ, material that iTunes has called, \". . . fully arranged pop songs that literate and mature music fans could enjoy.\"He graduated a touch beneath summa cum laude in English at Auburn University, widely regarded as the off-off-Ivy League of the South. Clinging to the oft repeated axiom that C students rule the world, Ferrill wakes each day in gleeful expectation of the profits to start rolling in, and has a blog that is highly trafficked by his mother, Linnie.\u00a0\u00a0Having worked in several industries including food service and construction, Ferrill now manages a chain of family-owned convenience stores with his wife, \"Fish,\" in his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, where they live with two wonderful dogs and one feisty kitten. The Secret Island of Edgar Dewitt is his first novel. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.37}, {"asin": "0684802074", "title": "Love, Miracles, and Animal Healing", "author": "Allen M. Schoen", "description": "Amazon.com Review Dr. Schoen shares his holistic view of animal healing in the form of instruction and example: loving tales of the animals and people he has known. If you loved All Creatures Great and Small, this book will take you one step further, from compassion to knowledge. A practical guide for living with and caring for our animal companions. From Library Journal Examples from Schoen's veterinary practice describe the value of bonding between owner and pet and between animals of different species (love), the usefulness of alternative methods of treatment (miracles), and the (healing) effects of compassion, gratitude, and companionship. Acupuncture, acupressure, and herbal remedies are described in detail, but the author frequently points out the importance of proper diagnosis and application of alternative treatments either by or at the direction of a veterinarian because of the possible need for concurrent antibiotic or other standard therapy and the dangers of using some herbal remedies at incorrect doses. Schoen's heartwarming bonding stories and his presentation of alternative methods of treatment in their proper perspectives makes this a good choice for pet collections.?A. Louis Shor, DVM, Veterinary Consultant, Mt. Laurel, N.J.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Schoen is an American James Herriot with a difference: instead of gradually growing into the use of antibiotics and the wonders of technology (as Herriot did), Schoen was taught all about powerful healing drugs in school. But he believed that what was missing in modern veterinary education was the caring and spiritual understanding. He mastered all the technology, then, through his practice, gradually learned that, at times, folk remedies, affection, acupuncture, and other holistic methods are more effective than a jar of pills or surgery. Denise Perry Donavin Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 16.27}, {"asin": "B00HZVL9UM", "title": "Raven Threads", "author": "K. D. McCrite", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 8.0}, {"asin": "0996274057", "title": "Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe", "author": "Robert Matzen", "description": "Review \u201cEven before Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart went off to war, he was a fighter, working hard to prove his passion for military aviation to the U.S. government. In this meticulously researched book, film historian Matzen ( Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3) provides the rich, detailed backstory of Stewart\u2019s time as a WWII bomber pilot. He delves deep into Stewart\u2019s restless spirit, chronicling his family\u2019s legacy of war service, his rise to movie stardom, the many women in his life, and his struggles to fly and serve his country. Matzen paints a revealing picture of a man who defied bureaucratic and health obstacles to become a U.S. Army Air Force squadron commander. He depicts the excitement and horror of life in a bomber crew as Stewart commanded a series of missions over Germany, interspersing his story with those of other WWII survivors, such as radio operator Clem Leone and Gertrud Siepmann, who was a young child in Germany during Hitler\u2019s rise to power. He also shows that, although considered a war hero, Stewart had difficulty getting reestablished as an actor until Frank Capra cast him in It\u2019s a Wonderful Life . Military and movie buffs alike will revel in this vivid portrayal of a man who successfully straddled two worlds.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cUnlike many Hollywood stars, James Stewart (1908\u201397) didn't make morale-boosting combat films during World War II; he was busy flying combat missions over Europe. Like many veterans, he preferred not to talk about his experiences when the conflict was over. One of the first major studies of the actor's risky missions over Nazi Germany, this title chronicles Stewart's improbable rise from small-town life in Indiana, PA, to his college years at Princeton, where he acquired his love for acting and befriended Henry Fonda, Joshua Logan, and Margaret Sullavan. His shy persona attracted the likes of actresses Marlene Dietrich, Olivia de Havilland, Norma Shearer, and Loretta Young. The bulk of this book covers Stewart's stay in England, his relationships with fellow crew members, who dealt daily with fear, loneliness, mud, and bitter cold. Stewart returned from Europe a changed man, reflected in his edgy, sometimes angry antihero roles in 1950s westerns and Alfred Hitchcock films. Author Matzen relies on extensive research and the cooperation of surviving crew members; however, as in his Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 , small details and comments about the subject's thoughts must be taken on faith. VERDICT: Overall, an illuminating, recommended look at a hidden chapter in Stewart's life.\"\u00a0 \u2014 Library Journal \u201cExhaustively researched, exceptionally well written, Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe is as informed and informative as it is thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation. While certain to be an enduringly popular addition to community and academic library American Biography collections and a 'must' for all Jimmy Stewart fans, it should be noted for personal reading lists that Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe is also available in a Kindle format.\"\u00a0 \u2014 Midwest Book Review \"Great gift for anybody like me who just loves Jimmy Stewart and loves a good story of history that you've never heard before.\"\u2014Glenn Beck\"This week's must-read books...A revealing look at the wartime service of one of America's most beloved actors.\"\u00a0 \u2014 New York Post \u201cAs Jimmy Stewart\u2019s children, we have always known that our father\u2019s service during the war was the most significant event of his life, although he rarely spoke of it. This book gives us the best glimpse we will ever have of what that experience was like for him and the men he flew with. Thank you, Robert Matzen.\u201d \u2014Kelly Stewart, daughter of Jimmy Stewart About the Author Robert Matzen is an American author who specializes in Hollywood history. He spent 10 years with NASA and his avid interest in aviation-related topics resulted in the bestsellers Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe and Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 . He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Leonard Maltin is a film critic and historian who can be regularly seen on ReelzChannel and Turner Classic Movies. He is the author of the long-running Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide and its companion, Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide . He lives in Los Angeles, California.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1604695897", "title": "All the Presidents' Gardens: Madison\u2019s Cabbages to Kennedy\u2019s Roses\u2015How the White House Grounds Have Grown with America", "author": "Marta McDowell", "description": "Review \u201cMcDowell\u2019s entertaining look at the gardens at America\u2019s premier residence illustrates the nation\u2019s horticultural aspirations, trends, and history. . . . A thorough researcher, McDowell unearths little-known stories and vivid details to illuminate important personalities and provide insight into our gardening past. Often injecting wit, she explains how the White House has dealt with typical garden pests (raccoons who fish in water gardens) as well as atypical problems (e.g., helicopter winds or hosting 1,000 guests at a time). Resplendent with historical images, the work also includes plant lists and short bios of key White House gardeners. . . . [An] informative gem of a book.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cHistory is often best learned from stories, and there are plenty of anecdotes here. . . . The writing is conversational and inviting, as one might find when visiting a garden with someone who knows it well. Photographs, line drawings, paintings, maps, and other documents add to the interesting stories. . . . a delightful and elucidating work.\u201d \u2014 Booklist starred review\u200b \"A delightful dig through White House gardens.\u00a0[McDowell] plots their history from the Washington administration to the Obamas. . . . Her descriptions of the grounds and evolving garden tastes are complemented with a colorful array of illustrations. McDowell fills the book with juicy tidbits: the last cow to graze on the White House lawn (1912) was named Pauline Wayne; Herbert Hoover wanted \u2018the help\u2019 to seem invisible, so they hid behind hedges when he passed by.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cGiven its timeless grace, the visitor today might think that the Rose Garden was always a part of the grounds of America\u2019s first garden, but as Marta McDowell\u2019s absorbing book drives home, the 18 acres around the executive mansion have been constantly tweaked, changed and replanted over the past two centuries.\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post \u201cLong may there be erudite and entertaining books like All the Presidents\u2019 Gardens to enlighten and educate about American garden history.\u201d \u2014 The American Gardener \u201cMarta\u2019s \u2018voice\u2019 creates a sense of fascination within the reader. Her wit and insight shines through as she describes the White House Gardens, sometimes utilitarian and spare, and other times lush and extravagant. . . . The greatest achievement of Marta\u2019s book, though, isn\u2019t the precise documentation of the history of The First Garden, if you will, but in the way she weaves the tales of American ingenuity and preservation into it.\u201d \u2014NYBG's Plant Talk \u201cA well-presented history of the White House garden, which doubles as a companion to early American garden history.\u201d \u2014 Gardens Illustrated \u201cThis book\u2019s deeply researched material is impressive. . . . The book is a kind of TMZ of presidential horticultural history that will delight gardeners and history buffs alike.\u201d \u2014 Country Gardens \u201cA really fun book. . . . It\u2019s also very well-researched by author Marta McDowell and exhaustively covers every administration from George Washington to Barack Obama, complete with lists of head gardeners and plants.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Garden Rant \u201cA refreshing change from the onslaught of political memoirs. . \u00a0. . Through the lens of the White House gardens, one can get a sense of America\u2019s rich horticultural and garden history.\u201d \u2014 Hortus \u201cPost-election rehabilitation for gardeners\u201d \u2014 The Triangle Gardener \u201cRife with well-researched anecdotes that illuminate the past as well as contemporary and historical photographs and illustrations, the book presents a fresh \u201cnonpartisan\u201d perspective on American life. . . . The book will be equally appealing to the horticulturalist and the history enthusiast.\u201d \u2014 Coastal Home \u201cit\u2019s full of fascinating archival photos and illustrations, and the stories and each garden offer glimpses of life in America (and the White House) through history.\u201d \u2014 Houston Chronicle \u201cThis charming, copiously illustrated book is a treasure trove for historians and horticulturalists alike.\u201d \u2014Elle D\u00e9cor \u201cA\u00a0fascinating insight for gardeners and historians of one of the world\u2019s most famous homes.\u201d \u2014 RHS Garden Magazine \u201cFrom the moment a spade first broke ground for construction of the White House, the 18 acres of presidential gardens have served as a backdrop to history: a social commentary, fashion statement and a lesson in agriculture for the nation. All the Presidents\u2019 Gardens by historian Marta McDowell is U.S. history in full bloom.\u201d \u2014 California Bountiful From the Back Cover Hail to the red, white, and blue\u2014and green! From the most momentous events in our nation\u2019s history to our fleeting cultural obsessions, the White House grounds have been a mirror of America. With wit and insight, garden historian Marta McDowell traces the fascinating story of how our presidents and their families have left their imprint upon the eighteen acres surrounding the executive mansion. Far more than just an account of Lincoln\u2019s goats, Ike\u2019s putting green, and Kennedy\u2019s roses, All the Presidents\u2019 Gardens delves into the thrilling and the heart-breaking events that have shaped our national consciousness. About the Author Marta McDowell\u2019s writing has appeared in The New York Times , Woman\u2019s Day, Country Gardening , and elsewhere . Her previous books include Beatrix Potter\u2019s Gardening Life , All the Presidents\u2019 Gardens , The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder , Emily Dickinson\u2019s Gardening Life , and Unearthing The Secret Garden . She consults for public gardens and private clients, writes and lectures on gardening topics, and teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, where she studied landscape design. She lives, writes, and gardens in Chatham, New Jersey. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Preface The United States was too big. For a topic, that is. When my editor suggested I might write a history of American gardening, I sat at my desk. Stunned. It seemed a subject broad as a sea of grass, long and muddy as the Mississippi, elusive as a white whale that would, after a mad, obsessed chase, drag me under. Regional differences are vast. What grows happily for friends in Denver sulks, then dies, in my humid New Jersey garden. Then there are questions of influence that vary across the wide waist of the continent: the Spanish with their patio and courtyard gardens from Florida to California, the tidy colonial gardens of New England, the immense plantations of the antebellum South. And with more than five-plus centuries, depending on how you count, the players involved in American horticulture and landscape design are legion. Two people convinced me to take on this quest\u2014one dead, one alive. The reason I study, teach, and write about garden history is because of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872\u20131959). On my first visit to the grounds of Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown in the 1980s, I was smitten with it and Farrand, its designer, one of the country\u2019s first landscape architects. It was about Beatrix Farrand that I taught my first class at the New York Botanical Garden. Some years later one of my landscape history students, Seamus Maclennan, chose the White House grounds as the topic for his final project. It was riveting, a fifteen-minute chronicle of change in one of America\u2019s most recognizable landscapes. There were victory gardens and flowerbeds, glasshouses and putting greens, all set in the context of American history. For the problem now before me, it would set bounds, but also pull in a cast of characters and a VIP setting. Before I embarked on this undertaking Seamus graciously gave me leave to use his idea, proving once again, if you want to hum along with the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, \u201cthat if you become a teacher, by your pupils you\u2019ll be taught.\u201d Even with this approach, given the number of presidents plus first ladies, gardeners, architects, and the like, I\u2019ve had to impose some economies in terms of scope. If, for example, Zachary Taylor is your favorite president, you will be disappointed. As neither he nor his wife were involved in the White House gardens, they do not appear in the narrative. \u201cSummer White Houses\u201d were eliminated, though I was sorely tempted by places like Warm Springs, Georgia, Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s retreat south of Atlanta, and Rancho del Cielo, Reagan\u2019s Western White House. The fourteen White House head gardeners\u2019 biographies tell an interesting story in their own right so we see them together in \u201cFirst Gardeners\u201d at the back of the book. I have defaulted to common names of plants in the body of the book. For those who prefer proper botanical nomenclature, you will find it in a back section, \u201cAll the Presidents\u2019 Plants\u201d\u2014a look at White House plantings over the past two centuries\u2014and the index. If you had hoped for a complete list of plants named for presidents and first ladies, I did too. Unfortunately in most cases these cultivars have not stood the test of time, at least in terms of the marketplace. A rhododendron named \u2018Mrs. Grover Cleveland\u2019 might have been a big seller in the 1890s but soon disappeared from the nursery trade. Long-term White House head gardener Irvin Williams once said, \u201cWhat\u2019s great about the job is that our trees, our plants, our shrubs, know nothing about politics.\u201d Despite the presidential focus of the book, I have attempted to emulate the politics of plants. Because whether gardeners lean right or left, blue or red, we are united by a love of green growing things and the land in which they grow. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 26.35}, {"asin": "1941283187", "title": "x0 (46. Ascending)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1101980257", "title": "The Bridge to Brilliance: How One Principal in a Tough Community Is Inspiring the World", "author": null, "description": "Review \u201cThe story of Mott Hall Bridges Academy is the story of American education. Nadia Lopez stands on the front line of the fight to educate America\u2019s children.\"  \u2014 Brandon Stanton, author of Humans of New York \"Essential...the key to academic excellence begins with an open mind.\" \u2014Essence\" A valuable depiction of what it takes for principals and teachers to reach children in the most troubled communities...will give readers even more reasons to ask what we as a society are doing to support the thousands of educators who labor in obscurity, trying to help the nation's most vulnerable children.\" \u2014Dale Russakoff, The New York Times Book Review \u201cNadia Lopez\u2019s efforts to support the needs of children in one of the most under-resourced communities in the country should serve as a reminder to all that what\u2019s required to open pathways to excellence are educators who unlock potential. We should all be committed to living Nadia\u2019s legacy. She founded a school to strengthen a community and our country . . . what will you do?\u201d \u2015David J. Johns, Executive Director,\u00a0White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans \"For anyone in education who thinks a student is beyond learning, Lopez's story will prove them wrong. The narrative demonstrates a clear progression from a woman's dream for a model school to that reality, which has made a huge impact in its neighborhood and across the country.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Nadia Lopez is the founding principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy, a model for quality education that includes a safe, nurturing, and innovative learning environment. Since being featured on Humans of New York in February of 2015, she has been profiled in countless national media outlets, has been invited to speak at Harvard, and was invited to the White House, and delivered a TED Talk on the \u201cRevolution of Education.\u201d She is the recipient of the 2015 Black Girls Rock Change Agent Award and the 2015 Barnard College Medal of Distinction Awardee. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Sitting at my desk, I contemplated all the paperwork that had piled up since my school, Mott Hall Bridges Academy, was thrust into the spotlight a few months before. A small public middle school in one of the poorest and most underserved neighborhoods of Brooklyn was an unlikely candidate for an international press sensation. But ever since one of my boys brought attention to Mott Hall through a comment he made on the popular blog Humans of New York, ordinary people around the world had been captivated by what I was trying to do\u2014 which was simply to take care of kids everyone else seemed to want to forget. I had barely started on the stack of performance reviews awaiting my attention when Malik walked in and sat down in one of the chairs across from my desk. The kids in this building know my door is open to them anytime. \u201cI need to have a talk,\u201d the sixth grader said in such a soft voice I could hardly hear him. \u201cTalk about what?\u201d I asked. \u201cAbout me.\u201d \u201cWhat about you?\u201d \u201cMy work.\u201d \u201cWhat about it?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s hard.\u201d \u201cOkay, which classes are hard for you?\u201d \u201cEvery class. Except PE. It\u2019s too hard. I\u2019m failing. I always fail.\u201d His problems had begun back in his elementary school when his fourth- grade teachers, who couldn\u2019t tolerate his angry demeanor, let him fall behind. Malik, with chubby cheeks from baby fat he\u2019d soon lose and sad eyes that he kept downcast, was typical of a kid from a failing elementary school; he was two years older than most of the children in his grade because he\u2019d been held back a couple of times. The first thing people notice about him is that he looks like he\u2019s angry\u2014 all the time. His expression makes it seem like he can\u2019t be bothered, like he doesn\u2019t want to hear what you have to say. That couldn\u2019t be further from the truth, but you would never know it unless you speak to him, which his expression keeps people from doing. I always tell my kids, \u201cYou need to understand there are teachers in this world who, if they don\u2019t like you, have that power to derail you. Even if you don\u2019t feel like they\u2019re invested, you can\u2019t stop doing your work. Because they will be fine with you failing and repeating the grade.\u201d I understood how Malik\u2019s demeanor could deflate a whole room and how frustrating that might be for a teacher just trying to get through a curriculum that was necessary to prepare a class to take state exams. But it wasn\u2019t that he didn\u2019t care; he acted like he didn\u2019t care. Some teachers in his elementary school, however, took his negative behavior personally. Instead of supporting him and working with him until he understood the material, they just held him over. That started a trajectory from which it would be very hard for Malik to deviate. Making kids repeat grades unfortunately is rarely about remediation and more about punishment. So when Malik came to us, not only did he still lack the academic skills he should have had by sixth grade but, as a thirteen- year-old in class with mostly eleven- year- olds, he was also disconnected from his peers. He would become agitated by how loud the other children in his class, who were at a different maturity and energy level, would get. Don\u2019t mistake me, Malik was not innocent. Soon after he arrived at Mott Hall, he had to call his mother from my office because he was talking back to his teacher and arguing with his peers. He got on the phone and said, \u201cYeah. So I\u2019m told I need to call you because, like, I was rude. Yeah. Uh- huh. Uh- huh. Yeah, a\u2019ight.\u201d Then he hung up. \u201cWho were you talking to?\u201d I asked. \u201cMy mother.\u201d \u201cNo, no. I know I told you to call your mother. But I\u2019m going to tell you, don\u2019t ever talk to your mother like that. You can\u2019t \u2018a\u2019ight\u2019 her or dismiss her.\u201d \u201cShe ain\u2019t have a problem with it.\u201d \u201cBut I do, and I am a mother. So maybe she doesn\u2019t want to have that type of conversation with you, but I will. Don\u2019t you ever in your life, as long as I\u2019m in your space, talk to your mother like that.\u201d \u201cA\u2019ight. A\u2019ight.\u201d \u201cMalik! What did I just say?\u201d Malik wasn\u2019t a bad kid or even a troublemaker; he was just always in trouble. It was heavy as he sat across from my desk and admitted he \u201calways\u201d failed, not least of all because this wasn\u2019t the first hard conversation he and I had had that week. Two days earlier, I had let him know he wasn\u2019t going on the big Harvard trip with the rest of the school. In a much- publicized event, people from all over the world had funded the trip once they learned that there was a principal who wanted her underserved students to experience what it was like at one of America\u2019s elite institutions of higher learning. Everyone at Mott Hall was excited beyond words to go, but Malik and a handful of other stu- dents wouldn\u2019t be invited to participate. He wasn\u2019t going because of his defiance toward adults, although he tried to argue, \u201cI can act right on a trip.\u201d \u201cFirst,\u201d I told him, \u201cyou have to remember that acting right starts in school. If you don\u2019t behave yourself here and respect the adults who love you, then you don\u2019t get the privilege of choosing when it will be convenient for you to do so. I don\u2019t prepare you for trips. I prepare you for life,\u201d I said. \u201cYou need to identify how we can help you become the best scholar. Because if you think the only way of surviving life is going on a Harvard trip, then your priorities are not in the right place.\u201d Now that he had come into my office to explain the source of his attitude and anger, I knew it was genuine. He wasn\u2019t trying to ingratiate himself, because Malik and all the kids at Mott Hall knew me better than that. My expectations are high and I never waver from them. He wasn\u2019t going on the trip, which hadn\u2019t been an easy decision for me. I didn\u2019t enter education to punish children. In the last few days, though, something in Malik had clicked, a nebulous connection between attitude, trust, and opportunity. He was in my office to finally talk about what was keeping him from succeeding in school. This was a moment of great achievement, at least in my school. By all accounts\u2014 economic, social, academic\u2014 the State of education in America for children of color living in disadvantaged communities is extremely poor, while the con- sequences for them if they don\u2019t make it in school are severe. Many issues contribute to the devastating difference between education for white children and education for those of color, including poverty, inequitable distribution of resources, and lower parental involvement and education levels. But the punitive way the system deals with children of color can\u2019t be underestimated. The so- called school- to-prison pipeline starts early. According to the latest numbers available from the U.S. Department of Education\u2019s Civil Rights Data Collection, black students, who represented 18 percent of preschoolers between 2011 and 2012, made up 48 percent of preschool students who received more than one suspension. Compare that to white students, comprising 43 percent of all preschool students, who made up only 23 percent of the suspensions\u2014 in other words, children of color are suspended at twice the rate of white children in preschool. That\u2019s just the start. Nationwide, black students\u2014 whose teachers on the whole have less experience and are paid less than those in majority- white schools\u2014 are suspended or expelled at three times the rate of white ones. Integration has proven in study after study to offer the best outcomes in terms of bringing up test scores for children of color. But after the initial commitment to desegregation through court orders and thirty- five years of enforcement of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, around 1989, schools began reverting to levels of seg- regation not seen since the sixties. There are a number of reasons that this is so, including the fact that many federal agencies no longer take an active role in enforcement of integration. The proportion of black students in schools with a majority of white students, 23.2 percent, was lower in 2011 that it was in 1968. Today\u2019s answer to the problems of students who aren\u2019t learning has been to create higher standards under the rubric Common Core, a blanket measure against which all schools nationwide\u2014 impoverished or wealthy\u2014 are judged. The other solution is to offer school choice, by way of charter schools, where public money goes to schools that don\u2019t have to follow public school guidelines. There are all kinds of charters, but the innovation that most of them feature focuses on high test scores as the only measure of success. In that context, Mott Hall is a different kind of place. First of all, we\u2019re not a charter school (which I\u2019ll explain in more detail later). My goal for my students, who are primarily economically disadvantaged and of color, is twofold. First, in the short time that I have them, I want them to be what they are\u2014 children\u2014and second, I want to give them the skills to be confident as students when they leave. I want them to play, learn, build resiliency, take risks, become compassionate\u2014 all without worry about failure. I\u2019m hard on the adults in this building, because there are no second chances with our children. Once they leave us, few people will ever pour into them the love and belief in their abilities that we do. Those are high stakes. Disheartening circumstances in no way reduce my expectations for excellence from my students. We have many inspirational sayings at our school, but one of my favorites is the name we\u2019ve given to our kids: Brownsville Brilliance. This title turns the perceptions about them and their community on their heads. When I ask the scholars what the word brilliance makes them think of, they answer \u201cintelligence,\u201d \u201cradiance,\u201d and \u201cdiamonds.\u201d Yes, and what are diamonds but precious gems created when a large amount of pressure and force is exerted, just as it is on my scholars in life. In this way, we speak into existence how we find the positive in a place that has been discarded. I, and the rest of the staff at Mott Hall Bridges Academy, who have committed to working with the most challenging communities, understand that, just as it takes a long time for carbon to become a diamond, change for our students is not an event, it is a process. So when Malik, a boy who has to be defiant to survive on the streets of Brownsville, was able to make himself vulnerable enough to admit to me he was having trouble, yes, that was a big achievement. I came around my desk and sat down next to Malik. \u201cOne, I want to thank you for coming into my office and admitting you\u2019re struggling. That is half the battle,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat are you doing next week for spring break?\u201d \u201cNothing.\u201d \u201cYou can come to school. I\u2019ll be here anyway, and I will sit with you and go through your work. Bring your books, so I can see exactly where you are struggling. You become angry and give attitude because you don\u2019t understand. Yes or no?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cThen you need to promise me something. Use your words and let the adults know how we can help you. Got it?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d \u201cOkay, then we\u2019re going to get through this together.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.45}, {"asin": "0813120705", "title": "MASH: An Army Surgeon in Korea", "author": "Otto F. Apel", "description": "From Library Journal The popular television series M*A*S*H owes its historical accuracy in part to Apel, chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in 1951 and consultant on the show. Here Apel (with son Pat) expands on the themes common to the television episodes and familiar to viewers: the severe working conditions, the irreverence hospital staff often had for army protocol, and the insufficiency of necessary supplies. Apel outlines the historical and political forces that created these conditions and, ironically, the considerable advances in emergency medical care made during the Korean War. Although his work is heavily autobiographical, Apel draws from primary and secondary Korean War literature to provide statistics and documentation. Personal photos appear throughout the text. Well written and researched, this book provides entertainment as well as historical value and is appropriate for both public and academic settings.AAndy Wickens, Univ. of Illinois, Lib. of the Health Sciences, ChicagoCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist The 1951 doctors' draft took Otto Apel out of surgical residency and sent him to Korea. He felt obligated to serve but now deplores his lack of military training before being placed at the battlefront. In contrast to his preparation was that of the other subject of his account, the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH), developed to meet the special needs of the Korean War. Aided by his son, Apel writes in particular about the formation and daily activities of the 8076th MASH, to which he was assigned. He began operating the moment he reached the unit, stationed near the 38th parallel, and learned military surgery from the muddy or dusty ground up. Improvisation was essential every day, as was teamwork among the surgeons, nurses, and support staff, who, Apel shows, provided exemplary care for the wounded soldiers. The great difference between the MASH on TV and the MASH at the battlefield, Apel and his colleagues later felt, was that the latter had casualties. William Beatty Review \"The reader is spared nothing, and at times I shared with the authors an understanding of the emotional effect medical work in a war zone can cause.\"\u2015 BMJ \"The great difference between the MASH on TV and the MASH on the battlefield, Apel and his collegues later felt, was that the latter had casualties\"\u2015 Booklist review \"A superb book. . . . Reading this fine nonfiction account of an army surgeon in the Korean War will make you wish you had been there treating casualties. It did me!\"\u2015 Journal of the American Medical Association \"Well written and researched, this book provides entertainment as well as historical value.\"\u2015 Library Journal \"Most readers will find Apel's memoirs fascinating, horrifying, humorous, and heartbreaking.\"\u2015 Library Lane \"One of the most readable memoirs that I have come across. A real contribution to the history of the Korean War.\"\u2015 Mac Coffman \"This memoir is about war, but it addresses a different aspect of war: the struggle of men and women in the U.S. Army who were called upon to expend their efforts and their lives preserving human life during this vicious combat.\"\u2015 McCormick (SC) Messenger \"His descriptions are full of detail, often vivid, regularly most critical of the US Medical Corps.\"\u2015 Medicine, Conflict, and Survival \"The authors have skillfully blended the surgeon's personal experiences into the bigger picture of military medicine, providing the reader with an informative and interesting account of the MASH and its impact during the Korean War.\"\u2015 Military \"Exposes the true nature of the Korean conflict from a medical perspective. . . . An excellent account of the history of MASH units and how they operated in Korea.\"\u2015 Navy Medicine \"Apel shows the true side of the Army hospitals.\"\u2015 Ohio Today \"The book is a wonderful paean to all our men and women who served in Korea.\"\u2015 Ohioana Quarterly \"Provides a close look at the way a MASH functioned. . . . The Apels have produced a well written and useful book.\"\u2015 Southern Historian From the Publisher \"This memoir is about war, but it addresses a different aspect of war: the struggle of men and women in the U.S. Army who were called upon to expend their efforts and their lives preserving human life during this vicious combat.\"--McCormick (SC) Messenger \"The reader is spared nothing, and at times I shared with the authors an understanding of the emotional effect medical work in a war zone can cause.\"--BMJ \"Provides a close look at the way a MASH functioned. . . . The Apels have produced a well written and useful book.\"--Southern Historian \"A superb book. . . . Reading this fine nonfiction account of an army surgeon in the Korean War will make you wish you had been there treating casualties. It did me!\"--Journal of the American Medical Association \u0093The authors have skillfully blended the surgeon\u0092s personal experiences into the bigger picture of military medicine, providing the reader with an informative and interesting account of the MASH and its impact during the Korean War.\u0094\u0097Military \u0093Exposes the true nature of the Korean conflict from a medical perspective. . . . An excellent account of the history of MASH units and how they operated in Korea.\u0094\u0097Navy Medicine \u0093His descriptions are full of detail, often vivid, regularly most critical of the US Medical Corps.\u0094\u0097Medicine, Conflict, and Survival About the Author Otto F. Apel, M.D., who has been in private practice for forty-four years as a surgeon, served as a consultant to the producers of the television series M*A*S*H. His son, Pat Apel, is an attorney. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 35.0}, {"asin": "0393634353", "title": "Residue: A Kevin Kerney Novel (Kevin Kerney Novels, 13)", "author": "Michael McGarrity", "description": "Review \"Complex, entirely original, and whip-smart, Residue is all but impossible to put down. And Michael McGarrity once again proves himself a master.\" \u2015 John Lescroart, New York Times best-selling author of the Dismas Hardy series About the Author Michael McGarrity is the author of the nationally best-selling Kevin Kerney crime novels, which he concluded in Head Wounds , and the acclaimed American West historical trilogy. A former psychotherapist and deputy sheriff, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.0}, {"asin": "1326622080", "title": "It Ain't Rock & Roll: The biography of drummer John Kerrison", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.2}, {"asin": "1595340807", "title": "1, 2, 3, S\u00cd!: Numbers in English y Espa\u00f1ol (ArteKids)", "author": null, "description": "Review \u201cThe bold, bilingual 10-page board book (suitable for chewing for the toothless set as well) should make teaching numbers to kids a little easier\u2015and a lot more fun.\u201d\u2015 San Antonio Express-News \u201cPerceptive readers will likely be drawn toward the diverse images and media.\u201d\u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author Madeleine Budnick is the author, series editor, and designer of the ArteKids books . Budnick got her start designing books twenty-plus years ago and has of late been getting involved in written content as well. She brings to the series a passion for the arts (she holds a degree in art history and drawing) and a commitment to creating books that aim to inspire and enrich a child\u2019s world. In addition, she is deeply committed to language education and celebrating cultural richness. Her two young daughters\u2015who knowingly and unknowingly act as consultants on the project\u2015are in a language immersion school. Creating books that combine all these interests makes Budnick's work for ArteKids books as much like play as the law allows. She lives in Portland, Oregon.The San Antonio Museum of Art dates its history to 1925. Located in the former Lone Star Brewery complex, its collections position it as one of the preeminent city museums in the nation.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.23}, {"asin": "1535306939", "title": "First Russian Reader for the Family: Bilingual for Speakers of English Level A1 and A2 (Graded Russian Readers) (Russian Edition)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "1623368944", "title": "From Freezer to Table: 75+ Simple, Whole Foods Recipes for Gathering, Cooking, and Sharing: A Cookbook", "author": "Polly Conner", "description": "About the Author Rachel Tiemeyer and Polly Conner are the creators of Thriving Home, a food and lifestyle blog sharing the freezer cooking lifestyle, whole food recipes, and encouragement for families on the parenting journey. With three kids each and constantly strapped for time, Rachel and Polly are self-proclaimed \u201cfreezer cooking evangelists\u201d who are passionate about equipping families to enjoy healthy, homemade meals around the table together. They live with their husbands and children in Columbia, Missouri. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Part I MAKING FREEZER COOKING A LIFESTYLE Congratulations on taking your first freezer cooking quiz ever! If you're like we once were, you noticed a few gaps in your freezer cooking knowledge. No prob. As self-proclaimed (and tongue-in-cheek!) \"freezer cooking evangelists,\" we're passionate about resourcing you for this lifestyle change that will benefit you and your family over the long haul. In this section, we'll quickly motivate and set you up for success before you dive into filling that cold chest, addressing questions like: What are the advantages of freezer cooking? How should you freeze and thaw meals? What foods should you avoid freezing? How long can you freeze foods? Do I need a deep freezer? FREEZER COOKING PART Y: A one-time event where a group gathers together to cook, assemble, and package a variety of freezer meals. FREEZER CLUB: An ongoing small group of friends who commit to regularly cooking freezer-friendly meals for one another. Members prepare recipes at home on their own time and then swap at a meeting. We'll also equip you with two ways to share the freezer stocking load with friends, both at one-time Freezer Cooking Parties and in an ongoing Freezer Club. Learning to freezer cook on our own and with friends has positively transformed how we prepare food, shop, eat, and spend our time and money. We think this lifestyle shift will do the same for you, too. Let's get started on a change you won't regret! CHAPTER 1 A Deep Dive into the Cold Chest Freezer cooking pays off over time, but there is a little bit of a learning curve. That's why, in this chapter, we're aiming to motivate you with the big picture of this lifestyle. Then, we'll walk you through six essential steps to making successful freezer meals, as well as address all your burning questions. From the very basics to the very specific, we are diving in and sharing everything we know. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF FREEZER COOKING? As we mentioned in our own stories in the introduction, freezer cooking can help you and your family in so many ways. Wow, isn't it motivating to know that it provides all of the following benefits? 1. Saves money because you'll be buying in bulk and eating at home. It's no secret that when you buy food in bulk quantities, it is usually cheaper. By planning your meals, especially in a Freezer Club (see page 25), and cooking in large quantities, you'll see your grocery bill go down significantly. We've found that when we cook this way, a four-serving meal tends to cost around $8 to $12 depending on the ingredients needed. This translates to about $2 to $3 per person for a wholesome, healthy meal. Plus, having ready-to-go meals within reach reduces the temptation to spend cash eating out. Who needs to wait for takeout when you have Turkey Pesto Paninis or Parmesan and Herb Chicken Tenders in the freezer, just a few minutes away from being piping hot? 2. Cuts down on prep and cooking time, leaving you with more freedom to relax and spend time with loved ones. Let's be honest. Cooking a well-rounded, healthy dinner every night is a daunting task for anyone. Deciding what to make, shopping, prepping, cooking, and cleaning up can sap the last bit of physical and mental energy you have after a long day. Add a few tired, grumpy kids to the mix, and the dinner hour can be quite a challenge. By having meals that you doubled from a previous meal or made with a group of friends (see Chapters 2 and 3) ready to go in the freezer, you'll cut down on all those extra little trips to the store during the week. Even more importantly, you'll reduce your prep, cooking, and cleanup time regularly, leaving weeknights freer to relax, spend time with your family, exercise, enjoy hobbies, or whatever else has been crowded out of your life by the daily cooking grind! 3. Provides a wide variety of wholesome, nutrient-dense meals to help you eat more healthfully. Freezer cooking, especially using the recipes in this book, makes homemade food full of real, wholesome ingredients readily available. We believe eating a healthy diet means consuming a variety of whole foods, ones that are closest to their natural state. Through research and our own experience, we've learned that when we consume real food-with an emphasis on lots of produce, whole grains, organic or local meats and dairy, wild- caught seafood, and healthy fats-our bodies tend to do what they are supposed to do. We have more energy, sleep better, avoid headaches and stomachaches, and feel comfortably full and stop from overeating more easily. Whole foods are the fuel our bodies are made to run on. The good news is that freezer cooking can help you eat more whole foods in two main ways. First, cooking from scratch allows you to control what goes into your food, thus avoiding loads of extra sodium, sugar, unhealthy fats, preservatives, additives, and food dyes that are packed into fast food and other processed, store-bought foods. Second, freezer cooking also means you will have nutritious, easy-to-prepare meals at your fingertips all the time, which results in fewer fast-food runs or prepackaged meal purchases. Once you learn how easy it is to stock your freezer, your family will be well on their way to eating a wide range of nutritious foods every day. 4. Allows you to always have meals on hand to take to a friend in need. With freezer cooking, it's easy to have meals ready to go to take to new parents or others in need. Over the years, we have given many new moms, people in crisis, grandparents, college students, and even a man recently released from prison some extra freezer meals to bake or warm up at their convenience. With meals in the freezer, you can be that friend who shows up at someone's doorstep with a healthy dinner and a few words of encouragement. It's a simple act of caring and thoughtfulness that can make a bigger impact than you may realize. If you choose to freezer cook with friends, there are even more advantages to reap. 5. Expands your family's palette. It's easy to fall into a rut and make the same meals on a regular rotation, isn't it? A Freezer Cooking Party or Freezer Club allows you to experience different kinds of cuisines, flavors, and ingredients that you may not normally prepare at home. This has been a great palate-expanding experience for our children (and husbands!). Even better, it has also allowed us to get more nutritional variety into our bodies and the bodies of our families. 6. Helps you become a better cook. Among other things, freezer cooking with friends can stretch you as a home cook. It has forced us to try our hand at all kinds of new recipes. As a result, our recipe repertoire and cooking skills have grown beyond anything we could have accomplished on our own. It's almost like taking a cooking class with your friends, but at the end you all leave as savvier, more experienced cooks with stocked freezers! 7. It's fun. Last and certainly not least, we think freezer cooking with our friends is simply fun! At our Freezer Club meetings and Freezer Cooking Parties, we often have coffee, wine, snacks, and a great time hanging out together. To top it all off, you get to come home and fill your freezer to the brim with already-prepared healthy meals. It's the perfect night out, if you ask us! WHAT ARE THE STEPS TO SUCCESSFULLY FREEZING MEALS? Freezer cooking isn't especially hard, but there are a few keys to success. To get the tastiest results, keep these six simple steps in mind. STEP 1 Use high-quality fresh ingredients that stand up well to freezing and thawing. Rule #1 of freezer cooking is that what you put in is what you get out. Be sure to select only the freshest, high-quality foods to use in your freezer meals. If an ingredient didn't taste good to begin with, it certainly won't be better after freezing. Also keep in mind that some foods freeze and thaw much better than others. While it's safe to freeze most foods, the texture and taste of some are extremely compromised after being frozen and thawed, as the box on page 5 shows. Additionally, seasoning and spices can tend to get stronger when they sit in the freezer in a meal. Season lightly before freezing, and add additional seasonings when reheating or serving.FOODS THAT TYPICALLY DON'T FREEZE AND THAW WELLNote: Some of these ingredients will freeze well within a recipe. However, the texture may change if frozen as a single ingredient. VEGETABLES: celery, cucumbers, lettuce, onions, bell peppers, potatoes, radishes, sprouts FRUITS: apples, citrus fruits, grapes, melons DAIRY: soft cheeses, cottage cheese, cream cheese, cream, custard, mayonnaise, sour cream, yogurt OTHER: canned food still in cans, eggs in shells, fried foods, pasta cooked beyond al dente STEP 2 Chill cooked dishes before freezing. It's important to let freshly cooked dishes cool before placing them in the freezer. There are a number of reasons for this. First, putting foods that are still warm in the freezer can raise the freezer's temperature. This can cause surrounding frozen items to partially thaw and refreeze, which can alter the taste and texture of those foods. Second, placing hot food in a plastic freezer bag or container can result in the plastic releasing chemicals into the food. Third, warm food freezes so slowly that ice crystals form on top, which can also alter the texture of the freezer meal. To avoid contamination while allowing food to cool, never let perishable food sit out on the counter for longer than 2 hours. To bring down the temperature more quickly, place partially cooled food in a shallow, wide container and refrigerate it, uncovered, until cold. Or, to chill soup or stew quickly, pour it into a metal bowl and set it in a larger bowl filled halfway with ice water. Stir occasionally. STEP 3 Freeze in an airtight, freezable container. There are multiple ways that meals can be stored in the freezer. Your freezing method will likely depend on the space in your freezer, the types of meals you make, and what containers you have on hand. Whatever method you choose, the goal is to prevent the food from being exposed to air, which can result in freezer burn. Freezer burn occurs when the moisture in the outer layers evaporates, leaving behind \"dry\" pockets. While it isn't harmful to eat freezer-burned food, the texture and flavor can be adversely affected. Wrapping food tightly and using the four freezing methods we recommend on page 8 will help keep freezer burn at bay. It's also helpful to label your meals so you know exactly what they are and how long they have been in the freezer. Affix a label to each container with the name of the dish, number of servings (or volume/weight), and the date you put it in the freezer. STEP 4 Freeze quickly and at the right temperature. The faster food freezes, the better its quality will be once it's defrosted. Slowly frozen food forms large ice crystals that may turn the food mushy. Here are some tips for freezing food quickly and at the right temperature: Store all foods at 0\u00b0F or lower to retain vitamin content, flavor, texture, and color. Use a freezer thermometer to ensure this. Do not crowd the freezer, so that there is enough room for air to circulate around food, allowing it to freeze rapidly. Never stack packages to be frozen. Instead, spread them out in one layer on various shelves, stacking them only after they're frozen solid. Store soups and stews in freezer bags, which can be placed flat and will freeze quickly. Store foods in small servings, when possible, to help them freeze quickly. This also allows you to defrost only what you need. A secondary freezer is not a necessity for freezer cooking, but it can be helpful if you want to make freezer cooking a lifestyle. It can actually store food at a more constant, lower temperature than a refrigerator's freezer, protecting the taste and texture of food longer. Plus, it provides room for stocking up on ingredients when they are on sale, saving produce when it is in season, and stacking up all of those freezer meals you'll be accumulating soon. A secondary freezer doesn't have to be huge and expensive, though. Simply start with a standard chest freezer. If you want something bigger, both of us have the Frigidaire Gallery 2-in-1 Upright Freezer and love it. STEP 5 Follow recommended storage times for freezing meals. From a safety standpoint, food that is properly packaged and safely frozen (kept at a constant temperature of 0\u00b0F or lower) can be frozen indefinitely. Yes, indefinitely! However, even though something may be safe to eat, that doesn't mean it will taste its best after a long time in the freezer. The chart on page 10 provides some general guidelines for how long to freeze particular foods and still maintain their quality. These recommendations are conservative and somewhat subjective, to be honest. We have frozen food much longer than some of these times with good results. There are many variables that affect the amount of time food can be frozen (type of freezer, ingredients in the recipe, quality of the packaging, etc.), so it's hard to say exactly when a freezer meal will go \"bad.\" Regardless, it is good to have a rough idea of how long something can hang out in your freezer.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 17.68}, {"asin": "1476795924", "title": "Leadership: In Turbulent Times", "author": "Doris Kearns Goodwin", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of September 2018: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin demonstrates how leaders are made, not born, as she thoughtfully explores the highs and lows of four U.S. presidents who faced moments of horrific national crisis. Goodwin's clean, assured sentences set the stage as each future president discovers within himself the desire to enter politics, the calamitous blows that knocked each one down, and how they tackled the struggles that tore at the sinews of the country. Most fascinating is Goodwin's revelations about how very differently Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson approached not only their political careers but how they developed the character traits that helped them see\u2014or make\u2014a path toward a critical response that many others disagreed with. Lincoln's delivery of the Emancipation Proclamation, Theodore Roosevelt's handling of labor strikes, FDR's battle against the Great Depression in his first 100 days, and Johnson's prioritization of civil rights while a nation mourned were actions that could have ripped the country further apart but eventually bound it together and strengthened its democratic foundations. The rare weakness within Leadership: In Turbulent Times is the outlining of specific qualities, such as \"Take the measure of the man\" and \"Set a deadline and drive full-bore to meet it,\" that are meant to distill leadership wisdom into bullet points, like contemporary business books. Goodwin's strength is in the rich context she provides as she shows that great leaders develop in dissimilar ways but ultimately have a vision they reach for and rely on when times are at their most turbulent. \u2014Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review Review \u201cWritten in the companionable prose that makes Goodwin\u2019s books surefire best sellers. . . . We can benefit from reminders that even flawed mortals can, in times of national emergency, achieve great things. We can only hope that a few of Goodwin\u2019s many readers will find in her subjects\u2019 examples a margin of inspiration and a resolve to steer the country to a better place.\u201d\u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cA book like Leadership should help us raise our expectations of our national leaders, our country and ourselves.\u201d\u2014 The Washington Post \u201cGoodwin\u2019s volume deserves much praise \u2014 it is insightful, readable, compelling even \u2014 but the strongest compliment might be this: Her book arrives just in time.\u201d\u2014 The Boston Globe \u201cAfter five decades of magisterial output, matching Pulitzer Prize-winning quality with best-selling appeal, Doris Kearns Goodwin leads the league of presidential historians. Insight is her imprint . . . Elegantly, she gathers the deeply researched strands of her big books to focus on the formative qualities of her White House heroes . . . The result is a fascinating study in contrasts, beautifully structured, as Goodwin alternates case studies of each president to examine the youthful roots of their ambition, their growth amid adversity, and their ultimate challenges.\u201d\u2014 USA Today \u201cAn inspiring read.\u201d\u2014 Christian Science Monitor \u201cPublished at a turbulent time, her book is a rich source of information and inspiration. . . . Most important, Goodwin reminds us that a democracy leadership is a two-way street, a mirror in which people, for better and worse, see their collective reflection.\u201d\u2014 Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201cA masterwork on how good leaders become great leaders, how burning personal ambition can be elevated into driving ambition for a cause greater than self.\u00a0\u00a0Riveting, uplifting, and incisive, Leadership is a culminating work of a true intellectual artist.\u201d\u2014 Jim Collins, author of \u201cGood to Great,\u201d co-author \u201cBuilt to Last\u201d \u201cBusiness students invariably ask me: 'With what historical figure would you like to have lunch?' Doris Kearns Goodwin has prepared a marvelous banquet with four\u00a0leaders whose lives provide lessons for all of us. Pull up a chair.\u201d\u2014 Warren Buffett \u201cA must read.\u201d\u2014 Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski \u201c[An] expert, extremely relevant study.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cWith Leadership , Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin cements her reputation as a scholar with a remarkable ability to bring the complexities of our past to life for everyday readers. It\u2019s a welcome gift indeed.\u201d\u2014 Bookpage \u201c Leadership is a bravura performance by Doris Kearns Goodwin, an artist who writes today with the same level of excellence that she\u2019s demonstrated for more than 40 years.\u201d\u2014 Washington Independent Review of Books \u201cIt\u2019s as if she spent her entire career simply preparing to write this one volume. It was worth the wait. And well timed: If ever our nation needed a short course on presidential leadership, it is now.\u201d\u2014 Seattle Times About the Author Doris\u00a0Kearns\u00a0Goodwin\u2019s interest in leadership began more than half a century ago as a professor at Harvard. Her experiences working for Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House and later assisting him on his memoirs led to her bestselling Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream . She followed up with the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II . She earned the Lincoln Prize for the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals , the basis for Steven Spielberg\u2019s Academy Award\u2013winning film Lincoln , and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit , the New York Times bestselling chronicle of the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts. Visit her at DorisKearnsGoodwin.com or @DorisKGoodwin. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.36}, {"asin": "0525573097", "title": "American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation", "author": "Holly Jackson", "description": "Review \u201cIn this\u00a0electric debut, Jackson . . . eschews presidents and generals to construct a mesmerizing story of people who committed themselves to a vision of the United States based on \u2018collectivity, equality, and freedom.\u2019 . . . This is\u00a0essential reading for anyone interested in how the U.S. became what it is today.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cJackson adeptly interweaves all these stories, connecting one radical thinker to another to show the sweep of progressive thought in the nineteenth century that continues to echo today. Abundantly detailing political movements and the characters who led them, this history appeals to a broad spectrum of readers.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201cMagnificent . . . This incisive and well-written overview of Americans who protested wrongs in their society deserves a wide readership. Many fine academic studies have covered the subjects here, but this account, written for a general audience, is authoritative and fast-paced and vividly portrays a crucial period.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201cThe author\u2019s account moves swiftly and interestingly. . . . Jackson\u2019s book merits attention as a study in what she calls \u2018slow-release radicalism,\u2019 with seeming failures that eventually turned into successes. A useful survey of American activism and its lasting repercussions.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA forcefully argued and lyrical account . . . Readers interested in the history of social and radical movements, along with antebellum history, will find much to enjoy.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cBy recovering the passionate lives and words of idealistic radicals and reformers, Holly Jackson reveals the better angels of nineteenth-century America.\u00a0Telling a powerful story in lucid prose, she reminds us of what people of courage and conviction can achieve against long odds and powerful foes.\u201d \u2014Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u2013winning author of American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750\u20131804 \u201c American Radicals is\u00a0a brilliant and timely firecracker of a book. Following the lives and activism of a diverse and fascinating cast of characters\u2014men and women, black and white, all of them fearless\u2014Holly Jackson has crafted a tale as dynamic and lively as America itself.\u201d \u2014Karen Abbott, author of The Ghosts of Eden Park and Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy \u201cA masterful history and a profound meditation on the limits of protest, American Radicals is immensely useful for today\u2019s activists.\u201d \u2014Micah White, author of The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution \u201cTeeming with colorful and long-forgotten characters,\u00a0Holly Jackson\u2019s dazzling new history\u2014at once wide-ranging and fine-grained\u2014recovers anew the restless and improbable spirit of reform that animated America in the\u00a0nineteenth century. American Radicals is a timely and powerful reminder that America has always been a work in progress\u2014and\u00a0that\u00a0voices of protest echo with purpose and\u00a0urgency\u00a0across the generations.\u00a0Amid the din of our daunting times, here is a history lined with hope.\u201d \u2014Brian Matthew Jordan, finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History for Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War \u201c American Radicals is\u00a0a wise and vivid history\u00a0of the women and men who imagined a nation that would live up the ideals of untrammeled personal liberty and direct democracy and then dared to build movements and communities dedicated to that purpose.\u00a0This is a book that will educate and thrill progressives of all ages.\u201d \u2014Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914\u20131918 and professor of history at Georgetown University \u201cJackson gives readers stories that are\u00a0inspiring, infuriating, hilarious, frustrating, and meaningful\u00a0for our complicated present.\u00a0An outstanding book that any modern radical should read.\u201d \u2014Erik Loomis, associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes About the Author Holly Jackson is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.\u00a0Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as a number of scholarly venues. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PART IFoul Oppression in the Wind of Freedom, 1817\u20131840CHAPTER 1A Tremendous NOOn the morning of August 16, 1824, a majestic flotilla appeared on the water in New York harbor: a series of ships decorated like floating palaces, all in the service of escorting one man safely to port. The Marquis de Lafayette stepped ashore to the sound of fifty thousand people cheering wildly, among them the vice president of the United States and two hundred of the city\u2019s leading citizens. After a month at sea, the cacophony must have been overwhelming: cannons booming, bells ringing, flags flapping, the West Point band in full swing. Militias stood at attention, wearing Lafayette\u2019s portrait over their hearts. Elderly veterans embraced him, openly weeping. Mothers thrust their children into his arms. Men and women fainted. Others approached him so choked with emotion they could not speak. They placed a crown of fresh cypress and laurel boughs on his head and ushered him into a grand carriage drawn by four white horses. The parade proceeded up Broadway to city hall, passing flag-draped buildings and banners stamped with the name of the returning hero, fresh flowers raining down from the windows. The shops were all closed, the business of New York City standing still for the day.1As a mere teenager, the Frenchman had joined the Americans in their War for Independence, not only risking his life in battle, but volunteering his own money to feed, clothe, and pay his battalion. His leading role in the Battle of Yorktown had earned him a place in the pantheon of military heroes whose victory brought into being a new nation. Now that nation was nearing its fiftieth anniversary, and Lafayette was back to help celebrate: the only general from the Revolutionary army alive, and still a robust presence a month before his sixty-seventh birthday. But underneath all the patriotic pride was an undeniable note of anxiety.The election year of 1824 was the very first in which no founding father appeared on the ticket. From Washington to Monroe, the first five presidents had been active participants in the conception of the new republic, but the country would soon outlive the men who had created it. To survive, it would need to transition from an experimental republic steered and administered directly by its makers to a permanent state, which would require a particular interpretation of its history. Thomas Jefferson had argued that every generation ought to be able to remake American society and all of its laws so that they would not be tyrannically ruled by his generation\u2019s dead hand. But by 1824, Americans were looking not for constant reinvention but for stability. Most wanted to believe that the words and deeds of the founders were final and the era of insurrection closed. France loomed as a cautionary tale, having torn up a number of constitutions by this time, its revolution followed by periods of terrible violence, a dictatorship, and finally the restoration of the monarchy in 1814. American society bolstered itself in this troubling changing-of-the-guard moment with a near-religious commemoration of the founding generation\u2014a worshipful attitude that Ralph Waldo Emerson would denounce as the tendency to \u201cbuild the sepulcres of the fathers,\u201d to be \u201cretrospective,\u201d or conservative of what had been, rather than following the lead of the founders in daring to imagine what else might be. In short, revolutionary iconoclasm had been replaced with filial piety in American political culture.2Lafayette\u2019s return was a landmark event in this culture of commemoration. He and his compatriots were to be remembered no longer as militant radicals, high on Enlightenment theory and ready to die for untried ideals, but as patriarchs of a static lineage that must be revered and preserved. While most of the other founders were dead or nearly so, Lafayette still had the physical wherewithal to reassure the American people at a moment when a certain crucial thread threatened to snap. Congress felt it was so important for him to visit at this time that it offered to send a ship to any port in France to convey him to the United States, to live on America\u2019s dime for two years, and receive payments in stock and land for his contributions to the revolution, a show of largesse that made the young nation feel strong and rich as its semicentennial Jubilee approached.So they rolled out a welcome like no other. Before he left New York, Lafayette was honored by \u201cthe fete\u201d at Castle Garden, which one attendee described as \u201cthe most brilliant and magnificent scene ever witnessed in the United States.\u201d This seems to have been the actual party of the century, a dazzling visual spectacle more lavish than anything anyone present could remember, surpassing even royal coronations. Six thousand partiers with two hundred servants in tow danced the cotillion under an arrangement of chandeliers reflecting the light of a thousand torches. Lafayette went on to tour all twenty-four of the states, paraded around in fine style as the \u201cguest of the nation.\u201d Wherever he went, he was greeted with festivals, dances, and speeches. Maidens robed in white and wearing crowns of myrtle marched under newly constructed triumphal arches in choreographed formation with engraved lances aloft. They named streets, towns, counties, and city squares for him; at least one newborn was saddled with the name \u201cWelcome Lafayette.\u201d On one occasion, a young army officer sang some verses he had composed, but when he came to the climax of the song, his voice faltered with emotion and he was unable to say the general\u2019s name. He fell at Lafayette\u2019s feet crying and rushed away.But on the day of his arrival, Lafayette\u2019s mind was occupied with thoughts of one woman, who was at that moment still in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean en route to the United States. From the center of the celebratory hubbub, he wrote to a friend how eagerly he awaited the coming ship that would reunite him with his \u201cbeloved.\u201d A month behind his hero\u2019s welcome in New York, a far less distinguished vessel pulled in to the harbor with no fanfare, with a woman aboard who was too indispensable to Lafayette to be left out of his American tour but already too controversial to have arrived by the same boat or to be mentioned in any of the official accounts of his visit. As the general\u2019s intimate friend, she would soon be entertained in the homes of the nation\u2019s first families, only to be regarded in the years to come as the most notorious radical in its history.Lafayette was the revolutionary past, but she was the revolutionary future; the press would call her \u201cthe female Tom Paine.\u201d No one worshipped the founders more than she did, and for that very reason she refused to regard their accomplishment as mere symbolism, their rhetoric as empty, or their project complete. In 1824, she was the hushed-up younger woman behind the man who was bringing the country they both idolized to its feet. But within five years, her name would be denounced from pulpits and splashed across the front pages of newspapers, shorthand for a festering fusion of interracial sex, Free Love, gender-bending, and atheism that threatened to bring down the Republic: \u201cthat she-demon and unprincipled profligate, FANNY WRIGHT.\u201d3Frances Wright was an orphaned Scottish aristocrat who had been raised, along with her younger sister, Camilla, by a string of relatives in England. She spent most of her youth with an aunt who lived in a twenty-room mansion in a tiny town called Dawlish, on the southern seacoast of Devonshire. When she was seventeen, Wright happened upon a history of the American Revolution in the library of a family member\u2019s estate, later recalling how strange it had been to find a \u201csubject so politically heterodox\u201d in that patrician context. Opening the book had awoken her to \u201ca new existence\u201d in an instant. \u201cFrom that moment my attention became riveted on this country,\u201d she would later write, \u201cas on the theater where man might first awake to the full knowledge and the full exercise of his powers.\u201d Restless and bored with the limited round of activities available to a genteel young lady under the watch of a persnickety aunt, she began to dream of the United States as a nearly magical new world \u201cconsecrated to liberty,\u201d where traditional constraints and distinctions had been abandoned, and vowed to see it in person one day.4Wright went off to live with one of her father\u2019s relatives, James Mylne, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, a hotbed of the Scottish Enlightenment; her uncle held the faculty position that had once been occupied by Adam Smith. In this environment, Wright imbibed a devotion to reason and empiricism, a suspicion of received wisdom, traditions, and religious authority that would animate her activist career. Women would not be admitted as students at Glasgow until 1883, so Wright\u2019s free access to the university library enabled an education that would remain unavailable to other women for generations. She wrote poetry, a philosophical treatise, later a play. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 7.5}, {"asin": "1938441842", "title": "Speaking of Murder: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries)", "author": "Les Roberts", "description": "About the Author Les Roberts is the author of 16 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich, as well as 11 other books of fiction. The past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writer\u2019s League, he came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood. He was the first producer and head writer of the Hollywood Squares and wrote for The Andy Griffith Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., among others. He has been a professional actor, a singer, a jazz musician, a teacher, and a film critic. In 2003 he received the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio.Dan S. Kennedy is a strategic business and marketing advisor and consultant. As a professional speaker, he has repeatedly appeared with former U.S. presidents, legendary entrepreneurs, and Hollywood celebrities, addressing audiences as large as 35,000. The author of more than twenty business books (www.NoBSBooks.com), he was born, raised, and lives in the Cleveland area.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 24.0}, {"asin": "1475947127", "title": "Missing Emily: Croatian Life Letters", "author": "Jodie Toohey", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 8.07}, {"asin": "1566892090", "title": "Open Line", "author": "Ellen Hawley", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Everything changes for late-night radio talk show host Annette Majoris after she jokingly tells her Twin Cities audience that the Vietnam War was a government hoax. Where Annette had been struggling, careerwise and financially, she quickly finds herself grappling with a multiplying caller-base, national syndication and the romantic attentions of wealthy Republican Party mover-and-shaker Walter Bishop. Guided by Walter, who co-opts Annette's message to launch a presidential hopeful, and supported by Stan Marlin, the erstwhile leader of a radical conservative organization, Annette persists on the air that Vietnam never really happened, provoking outrage and disgust and attracting a following among veterans who, haunted for decades by their participation in the war, find in Annette's questioning the possibility for closure and healing. While Annette defends her argument persuasively for a time, it's a house of cards that comes crashing down. Hawley's characters are fully realized people, with their own set of ambitions, insecurities and competing desires, and her great achievement is to have constructed out of their lives a deft and hilarious sendup of the media and political culture. (May) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Twentysomething Minnesota talk-radio host Annette Majoris becomes the talk of the town when, to spice up a sluggish broadcast, she suggests that the Vietnam War didn\u2019t happen. Then she starts to wonder: Could such a seemingly preposterous proposition be possible? Soon she has the attention of Stan Marlin, an edgy right-wing activist just itching for a new cause. Then romantic sparks fly between Annette and Walter Bishop, a Republican Party mover-and-shaker who has money, charm, and the state\u2019s very ambitious governor on his speed dial. Overeager Stan sends Annette fat folders full of \u201cfacts\u201d supporting her precarious thesis. Her following grows, as does the anxiety of her producer, who doesn\u2019t like what she\u2019s doing, but can\u2019t deny that her listener base is larger than ever. Annette has detractors, to be sure, but she\u2019s also received calls from Vietnam vets who say she\u2019s helped them come to terms with their angst. Hawley (Trip Sheets, 1998) shrewdly skewers the media and popular culture as she catalogs Annette\u2019s journey from no-name to fame. --Allison Block About the Author Ellen Hawley is the author of the novel Trip Sheets, which won a Writer's Voice Capricorn Award. She has moonlighted as a radio host, driven a cab, taught creative writing, and was the editor of the Loft Literary Center's magazine for eighteen years. A native New Yorker, she now divides her time between homes in Minnesota and Cornwall. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.95}, {"asin": "0996195211", "title": "The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street", "author": "Jacob M. Appel", "description": "Review \"Jacob Appel's wonderful stories crystallize the moments in life that make us doubt everything we thought was true about our loves, fears, and regrets.\"--Dallas Hudgens author of Wake Up, We're Here and Drive Like Hell. \"To read [Jacob Appel] is to be schooled in his unique and refreshing brand of literary mastery. Appel is at the top of his game in THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET, his delightfully quirky, ever smart, funny, and moving new collection. In these eight keenly observed stories, Appel's endearing if flawed characters find themselves in the throes of tough choices where there are no easy answers. Circumstances may skew absurd...but Appel's humanity is real and unwavering, particularly in matters of the heart. Crackling with detail and bursting with irresistible tidbits ranging from medicine to bioethics to property law, Appel's stories seamlessly draw from his deep well of knowledge to deliver a result not only worthy of study, but that will make your belly ache with laughter.\"--Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace. \"Eight more superb stories from atalented pen.\"--Kirkus Review\"Appel is a master of the dilemma,and each of these stories hooks the reader with a stunner. But the seeminglyabsurd--a mail-order house delivered to the wrong address, an uncle promisingto show his two nephews the true edge of the world--soon gives way to dark,harsh truths for Appel's characters. None of the answers are easy, and thatmakes these stories a rich, satisfying read.\"--Ben Stroud, author of Byzantium .\"There is no one in American letters quite like Jacob Appel. His wise tales remind me of some of John Cheever's short stories, but only if those stories had been reimagined through the dreamy vision of Mark Helprin and then improved with a 21st Century sensibility. The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street is by turns strange, familiar, funny, and philosophically engaged, and never for a moment disappointing.\"--Hugh Sheehy, author of The Invisibles . About the Author Jacob M. Appel is a doctor, lawyer, medical bioethicist, and a widely published fiction writer. In addition to THE TOPLESS WIDOW OF HERKIMER STREET (Howling Bird Press, 2016), he has written nine books, including, most recently, MIRACLES AND CONUNDRUMS OF THE SECONDARY PLANET (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). His first novel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up , won the Dundee International Book Award in 2012. His short story collection SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) won the 2012 Hudson Prize. He has won the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, and many other honors. He has published short fiction in more than two hundred literary journals, including Agni , Conjunctions , The Gettysburg Review , Prairie Schooner , The Virginia Quarterly Review , and West Branch . Appel holds graduate degrees from Brown University, where he also taught for many years, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Harvard Law School, New York University's MFA program in fiction, and Albany Medical College's Alden March Institute of Bioethics. A resident of New York, he currently teaches at the Gotham Writer's Workshop and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 20.0}, {"asin": "1464203814", "title": "The Hog's Back Mystery (British Library Crime Classics)", "author": "Freeman Wills Crofts", "description": "Review This wasn't my first foray into the world of British mysteries; I have been a long time fan of the great Agatha Christie. This book had good points and bad points for me. It was told from the perspective of the Scotland Yard inspector working the case. There was very minimal action it was definitely written to be a brain buster to see if you could work out what had happened BEFORE the last two chapters of the book where they spell it all out for you. It was definitely a book to take you back to a much, much simpler time which I appreciated. I would have to say that the best aspect of this book was the complete lack of forensic options due to the time period, I loved the fact that it was all brain power on the part of the inspector. ( Netgalley ) A delightful British Crime Book. This is a strong police procedural with a dose of a cozy mystery. This is a good mystery with crusty characters of Britain and beautiful location. The plot is complex and intelligent. It is a fun read one that does lend itself toward escape for a afternoon of reading. Well Done. ( Netgalley ) About the Author FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS (1879-1957) was one of the pre-eminent writers in the golden age of British crime fiction. He was the author of more than thirty detective novels, and was greatly acclaimed by peers such as Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 8.83}, {"asin": "159635383X", "title": "The Deed in the Attic (Annie's Attic Mysteries)", "author": "K. D. McCrite", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 16.89}, {"asin": "1945507209", "title": "Unlimited: Conquering the Myth of the Glass Ceiling", "author": "Dr. Cortney Baker", "description": "About the Author Dr. Cortney Baker is a speech therapist, business owner, entrepreneur, speaker, wife, mother of three, and proud native Texan. She received her doctoral degree at Pepperdine University in Organizational Leadership, and she has a passion for helping others develop their leadership potential. She is owner and CEO of KidsCare Therapy, a pediatric home healthcare agency employing hundreds of Texans. Dr. Baker also opened Baker Management Group, an organization where she enjoys consulting and speaking nation-wide. Cortney is the author of the #1 Amazon Best-Selling book The 10 Dos and Don\u2019ts for Business: Lessons to Lead Effectively, and she was honored to be named a finalist for Texas Business Woman of the Year in 2014 and 2015.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Management & Leadership"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1592988547", "title": "They Call Me Buddy: The World Traveler", "author": null, "description": "Review ''We really enjoyed reading this book and we are sure the other children that read this will enjoy it too!'' --Ava and Toby Mercer, Dublin, Ireland ''The book is awesome and the illustrations are fantastic.'' --Joanna Mai, Minneapolis, Minnesota ''I think this book is great for children to learn about the world.'' --Lilli Duff, Houston, Texas ''I really enjoyed learning about all the different countries that Buddy visited. I think it would be fun to travel with Buddy.'' --Josh Puckett, Mooresville, North Carolina ''I love this book about Buddy. I've read it four times today and learned facts I never knew.'' --Sophie Firek, Sydney, Australia -- Reviews About the Author Dave Harrison is an international finance executive, corporate board director, and serves on several nonprofit boards. He and his wife have lived and worked in three countries outside the United States. Family, education, travel, and photography top the list of Dave's interests. In addition to the Buddy book series that he and illustrator Gladys Tripp are working on, he is writing an economics primer for adults and has a scientific religious book in the works. Dave is the father of two adult children, grandfather to five children, and lives with his wife, Susan, a United Methodist Minister, near Charlotte, North Carolina.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 16.0}, {"asin": "1628998717", "title": "Threads of Evidence: A Mainely Needlepoint Mystery", "author": "Lea Wait", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.19}, {"asin": "0231177542", "title": "The Traveler's Guide to Space: For One-Way Settlers and Round-Trip Tourists", "author": "Neil F. Comins", "description": "Review There is no other book for the popular reader that addresses the many serious challenges involved in deep space travel. Understanding these issues is essential for anyone with an interest in space exploration. The Traveler's Guide to Space does an excellent job at looking at the whole picture, from space tourists to one-way colonization; from physical to psychological challenges. -- Robert Geller, University of California, Santa Barbara The Traveler's Guide to Space takes you on an amazing adventure and gives you the perspective that only a seasoned scientist can. Neil Comins presents a thorough and timely account of the incredible sights that await any solar system traveler, as well as scientific insight into the sensations, pitfalls, and wonders both geological and astronomical that he or she will encounter along the way. -- Andrew West, astronomerNeil F. Comins has written the go-to book for anyone interested in space exploration. \u2015 Uncovered Books This makes an excellent primer for anyone, especially astronomy enthusiasts and budding astronauts, who can't afford a ticket to space and wish to visit in spirit. \u2015 Booklist The Traveler's Guide to Space is a delight... don't leave Earth without it. \u2015 New Scientist Reading The Traveler\u2019s Guide to Space will help the reader have a better grasp on what is happening in current events. -- Steve Canipe \u2015 National Science Teachers Association Recommended. -- J. Z. Kiss, UNC-Greensboro \u2015 Choice Recommended for space fans with active imaginations! \u2015 Read Well About the Author Neil F. Comins is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Maine. His books include Discovering the Universe , tenth edition (2014), What If the Earth Had Two Moons? (2010), Heavenly Errors: Misconceptions About the Real Nature of the Universe (Columbia, 2003), and What If the Moon Didn't Exist? (1993).", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 32.95}, {"asin": "0451232801", "title": "Murder of a Bookstore Babe: A Scumble River Mystery", "author": "Denise Swanson", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Tales and Treats, a new independent bookstore in the small town of Scumble River, Ill., arouses passions even before it opens in Swanson's lackluster 13th mystery featuring school psychologist Skye Denison (after 2010's Murder of a Wedding Belle). Conservative protesters as well as local business owners like Skye's used-car dealer cousin, Hugo Leofanti, view Tales and Treats as a threat. Soon after the bookstore's controversial opening, Skye discovers a woman crushed under a bookcase of rare books. Improbably even for a cozy, Skye's fianc\u00e9, police chief Wally Boyd, allows her to take the lead in interviewing suspects, many of whom are related to her. The efforts of Skye's former boyfriend, Simon Reid, to win her back add some romantic tension, but weak humor and plotting make this a forgettable entry in the series. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. About the Author Denise Swanson has worked as a school psychologist for 17 years. This is her second novel featuring Skye Denison and Scumble River. Her first book, Murder of a Small-Town Honey , debuted to advance praise from the Charlotte Austin Review, Meritorious Mysteries , and BookBrowser . She is currently working on the next Scumble River mystery, Murder of a Sleeping Beauty . Denise lives in Illinois with her husband, Dave, and their cool black cat, Boomerang. For more information, visit her website: www.deniseswanson.com", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1250075858", "title": "Mind Game: A Novel (Eve Duncan, 22)", "author": "Iris Johansen", "description": "Review Praise for Mind Game: \"Johansen returns to the world of Eve Duncan, Joe Quinn, and Jane MacGuire\u2015 suspense with a touch of supernatural \u2015to resounding success and ties up some loose ends and romantic possibilities from past books. The final scene will be especially enjoyable to series fans. Enthralling, entertaining, and completely satisfying .\" \u2015 Kirkus \u201cBestseller Johansen convincingly mixes mystical elements with a rapid-fire plot in her 21st Eve Duncan novel \u2026The sexual attraction between Jane and Seth simmers in the background as the action builds to a stunning climax in Dubai.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Johansen is a true master of building in the right amount of complexity spiced with danger, thrills and engrossing characters! \" \u2015 RT Book Reviews (Top Pick) Praise for Iris Johansen: No Easy Target \u201cMega-star Johansen is a true master of building complex plotlines while developing immensely intriguing characters\u2026This book, like others before it, not only provides an amazing thrill-ride but also sets up the promise of future adventures with these characters.\u201d \u2015 RT Book Reviews Night and Day \u201cFull of mysticism and mystery , this fast-paced novel is sure to appeal to all fans of romantic suspense.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly Hide Away \"This first-rate novel of romantic suspense will please Johansen\u2019s many fans and newcomers alike.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) Shadow Play \u201cEve Duncan novels by Johansen are so good that, supernatural or not, readers and fans remain completely engaged. \u201d \u2015 Suspense Magazine Your Next Breath \u201cDelivering gut-wrenching emotion and spine-tingling suspense is what Johansen does best, and when you add in a touch of the supernatural...you get the perfect storm of a thriller! Johansen never disappoints!\u201d \u2015 RT Book Reviews \u201c Gripping \u2026Iris Johansen\u2019s talent in character development , impeccable plotting, and remarkable depiction is nonpareil.\u201d \u2015 Reader to Reader About the Author Iris Johansen is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Night , Blood Game , Eve , and Eight Days to Live , among others. She began writing after her children left home for college, and first achieved success in the early 1980s writing category romances. In 1991, she began writing suspense historical romance novels, and in 1996 she turned to crime fiction, with which she has had great success. She lives near Atlanta, Georgia.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.24}, {"asin": "B0098QPJ7G", "title": "SURLY BONDS (Jason Conrad Thriller Series Book 2)", "author": "Michael Byars Lewis", "description": "Review The Bottom Line: Guaranteed to please Brad Thor fans, this terrific military thriller finds Moscow hardliners plotting to assassinate the next U.S. president...Thanks to author Michael Byars Lewis' gift for creating well-drawn characters, Surly Bonds is more than a story about espionage and geopolitics - it's also a coming of age story with a touch of romance...every piece of Jason's story - and all military aspects - feels both earned and authentic. What's more, given the aggressive geopolitics played in today's Kremlin, the plot feels remarkably timely. Read it.\u00a0-BestThrillers.com --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author SURLY BONDS is an Award Winner! 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards - FINALIST - First Novel Category! 2013 READER'S FAVORITE Book Awards - FINALIST - Fiction Intrigue Category Michael Byars Lewis grew up in the Air Force and graduated from Louisiana State University. A professional pilot, he has accumulated over 5,000 flying hours in military and civilian flying, including his time as an airline pilot flying the 737-200 and the 737-800. Michael's adventures have given him the opportunity to travel around the world but now he lives in Florida with his wife Kim and their two children, Lydia and Derek. SURLY BONDS is his first novel. Reviews: \" . . . a suspenseful and well-crafted thriller that delivers . . .\" - Jack Magnus for Reader's Favorite \" . . . Michael Byars Lewis is an author to watch out for in this genre . . .\" - Maria Beltran for Reader's Favorite --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0525557539", "title": "A Death in Eden: A Sean Stranahan Mystery", "author": "Keith McCafferty", "description": "Review Praise for Keith McCafferty and the Sean Stranahan mystery series \u201cKeith McCafferty gets the West just right... an impressive writer.\u201d \u2014 Margaret Coel , New York Times bestselling author of The Man Who Fell From the Sky and Winter\u2019s Child \"If you\u2019re not reading Keith McCafferty because you don\u2019t fly fish or because you don\u2019t like mysteries or westerns, you need to get started because he\u2019s just flat-out terrific.\" \u2014 Craig Johnson , author of the Walt Longmire novels, the basis for the Netflix drama Longmire \"Like Brad Smith and Elmore Leonard, McCafferty does a marvelous job of manipulating mood\u2026 A must for Craig Johnson and C.J. Box fans.\" \u2014 Booklist (starred) \u201c[Keith McCafferty] writes with heart and command of the story that sparkles on every page.\u201d \u2014 Michael McGarrity , New York Times bestselling author of Backlands \"Fresh, quirky, and yet utterly believable.\" \u2014 Nevada Barr , New York Times bestselling author of the Anna Pigeon mysteries \u201cMcCafferty nails the delicate balance between humor and heft in a genuine way.\u201d \u2014 P.J. Tracy , New York Times bestselling author of Off the Grid \"Rich in history, local color, and unique characters.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Keith McCafferty is the survival and outdoor skills editor of Field & Stream , and the author of The Royal Wulff Murders , The Gray Ghost Murders , Dead Man's Fancy , Crazy Mountain Kiss , which won the 2016 Spur Award for Best Western Contemporary Novel, Buffalo Jump Blues , and Cold Hearted River . Winner of the Traver Award for angling literature, he is a two-time National Magazine awards finalist. He lives with his wife in Bozeman, Montana. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Object of Desire Harold Little Feather lifted his hand from the wheel to scratch at the tattoo of wolverine tracks that circled the lower biceps of his left arm. The tattoo was recent and ran underneath the elk tracks that circled the upper arm, which he\u2019d had inked more than twenty years before. On his right arm, badger tracks circling below wolf tracks. Like the wolverine tracks, the badger tracks were new, but they didn\u2019t itch. When his sister had caught him scratching at his arm at the kitchen table that morning, she\u2019d said, \u201cSomebody has too many spirit animals if you ask me. That might have been okay when you worked for the sheriff, but you\u2019re a state investigator now. Tattoos are unbecoming for someone of your stature.\u201d\u201cI know,\u201d he\u2019d said. \u201cIt must be an Indian thing.\u201dShe\u2019d smiled, but hadn\u2019t laughed. Harold and his sister were Blackfeet, though Janice had been called Snowflake by her own people, and could have passed if her orbital bones weren\u2019t so pronounced. She hadn\u2019t put a foot onto the reservation more than a half a dozen times since marrying a white boy out of high school, the last occasion being her mother\u2019s memorial the year before.But Harold straddled the two worlds. In the one, he braided his hair and wore khakis and a badge, newly issued, with Montana Division of Criminal Investigation lettered inside a blue circle. In the other, he let his hair fall down his back and wore shit-\u200bkicker boots,\u00a0jeans, and one of his three flannel shirts, the long-\u200bsleeved one for winter, the two with the arms cut off the rest of the year.That\u2019s the way he dressed whenever he drove up through Browning. Browning was Blackfeet tribal headquarters, at the foot of the peaks that girded Glacier National Park. It was where his ex lived, where a bunch of relatives lived, and where, he\u2019d recently learned, he had a son, born from a liaison with a Chippewa Cree woman. The union had taken place on the Rocky Boy Reservation eighteen years, four months, and some small change ago, a figure he knew down to the day not because of the woman\u2014he recalled little beyond that her eyes were green\u2014but because it was the last time he\u2019d ever drunk alcohol. That was a long time for a Montanan of any skin color to go without a drink, and except for Harold\u2019s grandfather, whom he had worshipped, probably a record for anyone in his family.He placed his hand back on the wheel and thought about his son, whom he\u2019d made the acquaintance of only because his mother had died in a car accident and his mother\u2019s brother, who had taken custody, had decided to divulge to Harold the family secret. Probably, Harold thought, because the man knew Harold had a job in the outside world and figured there could be money coming his way. Not a charitable way to look at it, but it had made Harold bitter, being kepti n the dark all those years. Bitter, then mad, finally, only sad. How could you ever make up for the lost time?He tapped at the Bluetooth in the truck and saw he was out of cell range. It didn\u2019t matter. He\u2019d only be leaving the same message that he\u2019d left yesterday and the day before, when he first learned that he\u2019d be heading north to that part the state.\u201cI\u2019ll be canoeing the Smith for five days starting the morning of the sixth and could use another hand on a paddle. I\u2019ve got the food and the gear. Just get yourself to Camp Baker by ten Wednesday and pack your rod and your raincoat.\u201dNo \u201cI love you, son.\u201d They weren\u2019t at that point and might never be,\u00a0but nonetheless, the words sent through the ether on a bent bow with his heart riding on the string.Harold geared down to cross the one-\u200blane bridge and found himself in a tent camp populated by the floaters who\u2019d drawn a permit to launch. Camp Baker was run by Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, and the ranger, one of those always-smiling men who make you question their sincerity, was busy assigning campsites and getting the floaters ontheir way. He could use a little help, but the department wouldn\u2019t pony up for another position. A shake of his head, a downward pout of his mouth. The sad state of state affairs. Could Harold give him half an hour? The steady stream would dry to a trickle then.Harold changed his clothes and carried his canoe down to the river\u2019s edge. His two dry bags of gear were already packed, his rifle in its case, fly rod, fishing vest, binoculars, ax. He leaned back against a fence post to watch the spectacle. A man with a Jell\u2011O stomach and a face like abeet was loading cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon into an Avon raft, while a woman wearing a camo bikini top raised a pirate flag on the bow. She wore a University of Montana Grizzlies ball cap; he wore a Montana State Bobcats T\u2011shirt. Another couple were helping them load.\u201cThings might get dicey, huh?\u201dHarold turned his head. Two young women who looked enough alike to be sisters were carrying a canoe up alongside his. The taller of the two, her hair darker by a shade, slapped at her hip, indicating Harold\u2019s gun belt.Harold patted the grips of his holstered revolver.He looked back over his shoulder at the two couples pushing off their raft.\u201cYou let a mixed marriage like that onto the river,\u201d he said, \u201cthe claws have to come out sometime. Never know when you might need some law and order.\u201d\u201cWell, we won\u2019t cause any trouble,\u201d the woman said. She held two fingers together in a mock salute. \u201cScout\u2019s honor.\u201d\u201cYou want a hand with your gear?\u201d\u201cSure. A big strong man comes in handy when you\u2019re just a bitty little girl.\u201d The words sarcastic, her smile anything but. She was openly flirting with him and Harold decided to play along. Why not? He had nothing but time.The women introduced themselves as Carol Ann McManus and Jeanine Regulio, old college roommates from Duke University, separated now by distance and family commitments. They\u2019d kept in touch, though, and had independently put in for a Smith permit for seven years. Jeanine had finally drawn, and now they found themselves in the doghouse because their husbands, Jeanine\u2019s in particular, refused to understand why they hadn\u2019t been invited.\u201cHe just doesn\u2019t get it,\u201d Jeanine said. She was the one who\u2019d done the talking to this point. \u201cHe thinks I must be turning lesbo. You understand, don\u2019t you?\u201d\u201cSure,\u201d Harold said. \u201cYou just need girl time.\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I told him.\u201d\u201cSo why are you here?\u201d she said. \u201cIs it because of the scarecrows?\u201dA perplexed expression must have shown on Harold\u2019s face.\u201cYou don\u2019t know?\u201d\u201cGuess not.\u201dIt was Carol Ann\u2019s turn to speak. A lanky blonde, she had a sunburn-\u200bpeeled, not quite straight nose and a space between herfront teeth. Her voice had a tinkling quality, like a creek that\u2019s polished between ice banks. \u201cYeah. Floaters are seeing scarecrows up in the cliffs. The ranger gave us a number to call after the float. You know. If we saw one. To report it so they could take it down. Spooky, huh?\u201dShe told Harold that they\u2019d been talking to some of the other floaters the night before around a campfire and had learned that a couple of the parties had got launch dates because of last-\u200bminute cancellations.\u201cBacked out because they were afraid?\u201d Harold said.\u201cYeah. Spooked. The ranger told us they might shut the river down. We could be putting in just under the wire. It is sort of weird.\u201dHarold saw the river ranger approaching. \u201cMy cue,\u201d he told the women.\u201cThanks for helping us load,\u201d Jeanine said. \u201cWhere are you camping tonight?\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s up to the man.\u201d He gestured toward the ranger.\u201cWe\u2019re going to be at Lower Indian Spring. If you want to stop by, we have a beer for you.\u201d\u201cI might take you up on that.\u201d\u201cWe don\u2019t bite or anything,\u201d Carol said.\u201cSpeak for yourself,\u201d Jeanine said. \u201cI\u2019m not making any promises.\u201dHarold pushed their canoe off, all of them laughing. He heard Carol Ann, say, \u201cI can\u2019t believe you said that.\u201d And turning her head, her paddle lifted, water beaded on the blade, dripping, said to Harold, \u201cI can\u2019t believe she said\u00a0 that.\u201dThe canoe grew smaller as it turned downriver.\u00a0 Jeanine, in the stern, waved backwards over her shoulder.\u201cDid you see those arms? I could climb him like a totem pole.\u201d The words floated over the water.\u201cSssh,\u201d he heard Carol Ann say. \u201cSound carries. That\u2019s racist.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m just saying . . .\u201d And they were around the bend out of sight, their laughter still carrying above the bickering of the current.\u201cI think I\u2019ve been objectified,\u201d Harold said. \u201cMust be the gun.\u201dThe ranger nodded. \u201cMust be,\u201d he said. Then, to himself, under his breath, \u201cYeah, the gun. I\u2019ve only been packing open carry for ten years. Nobody ever offered to climb me like a totem pole.\u201d\u201cThe braid then,\u201d Harold said. \u201cWomen, they like a braid.\u201dThe ranger, whose shrinking island of forelock hair had separated from the mainland nodded, sucking in his cheeks and then puffing\u00a0them out. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t know about that. But what the hey? We took your land. Least we can do is lend you our women.\u201dHarold thought, Or maybe it\u2019s because you got a 295 70R 18 around your middle . Something about the man beyond his offensive remark rubbed Harold the wrong way.\u201cYou want to come on up to my abode, I\u2019ll show you our sit\u2011u\u2011a\u2011tion.\u201d\u201cI was told it had something to do with pictographs. Now I\u2019m hearing scarecrows.\u201dThe ranger nodded. \u201cMay be one. May be the other. May be both. You\u2019ve been out of the loop, huh?\u201d\u201cSomething like that.\u201dFor six weeks that spring Harold had been aiding an investigation into a poaching ring inside Yellowstone Park, working undercover ina sting operation as a tracker and middleman buyer of grizzly bear gall bladders. Bear gall bladders were worth a fortune in Chinese and Korean traditional medicines markets, and out of the loop didn\u2019t begin to describe the isolation of living the daily terror of being found out by the two men who were the trigger fingers of the ring, brothers\u2011in\u2011law who called themselves \u201cRural Free Montanans,\u201d which, as far as Harold could discern, meant they didn\u2019t hold jobs, not ones that could stand legal scrutiny anyway, they didn\u2019t pay taxes, and they didn\u2019t believe the laws of the land applied.As a test, Harold had been forced to shoot at a grizzly bear, a light phase boar with dark lower legs and a cream chest patch, in the Hayden Valley. He had missed, deliberately, blaming his aim on flinching upon being stung by a wasp. In fact he had been stung by a wasp a half hour earlier and could show the men the welt. That had drawn a long, assessing stare from the elder man, who had cold black eyes and a long face under a graying beard, who wore a headscarf likea pirate and had a claw of a right hand dating to the time when he\u2019d set a rifle butt on the ground with his hand resting over the muzzle, accidentally tripping the sear. The hand had healed with a starburst\u00a0of raised scar tissue across the palm and cockeyed fingers, the little one no more than a flipper.When the man clenched the hand, a habit he had like a hiccup, the little finger drooped from his fist like a comma. He\u2019d listened as Haroldg ave his excuse, then finally nodded, and said, \u201cShit happens.\u201dThen he\u2019d said, \u201cCharlie,\u201d\u2014 Charlie Two Bear was the name Harold had gone by\u2014\u201cthing is, Char-\u200blie,\u201d separating and drawing out the syllables, \u201cif you were to have missed, say, on purpose, I\u2019d have been forced to take the diamond stone to the knife. Wouldn\u2019t have no choice.\u201d He had drawn a drop-\u200bpoint hunter from his belt scabbard, a whetstone from his pants pocket, and began to run the blade across it. \u201cI take pride in being able to separate out the bladder, Charlie. Why, it\u2019s like a\u2019 art, and me, a natural righty turned southpaw. Right-\u200bhanded, left-\u200bhanded, I never seen no one could work a blade to compare, except maybe Dewey here.\u201d He nodded toward his brother\u2011in\u2011law, who looked like a garden gnome, short with a barrel chest and few words. His talents, as Harold had witnessed, lay elsewhere.\u201cNever done it on a man, though,\u201d he continued. \u201cI\u2019d know the general lay of the land\u2014once you get under the skin, a man, he can\u2019t be that much different\u2014but I\u2019d have to feel around with the blade, could be some co\u2011lateral damage. Puncture the aorta, something like that. Oops . First time for everything though, huh? Next bear, I\u2019m going to count on your aim being better.\u201dThe man went by Job, as pronounced in the King James Bible, which he often quoted, having claimed to have once been a preacher. Preacher or not, he was one scary son of a bitch. But there had been no next test because there had been no next bear. The wind had changed and the brothers\u2011in\u2011law had disappeared back into the folds of the Little Belt Mountains\u2014it was at a bar in Belt where Harold first met them\u2014though Job was light on the specifics, mentioning only a compound. Harold envisioned one of the nameless under-\u200bthe-\u200bradar shantytowns, where men who held grudges against the government\u00a0lived among like-\u200bminded individuals who took the rifle off the wall any time they spotted a state vehicle.The official line, the one Harold had been fed by his supervisor, was that thanks to him they had had plenty to make an arrest, but they were after the men behind the knives rather than the ones drawing them, and they were going to bide their time to find just the right one. That was as much explanation as Harold was given, though it was true that when you busted a ring, you brought everybody in at once or not at all. The brothers\u2011in\u2011law would resurface, they were the kind who always did, and Harold would be called back into the sting. It hadn\u2019t been his cover that was blown, and he still had their trust, as far as it went. Not something he was looking forward to, though, not at all.Harold found his eyes wandering and refocused, his ears picking up the sound of the current.\u201cOut of the loop\u2019s one way to put it,\u201d he told the ranger.\u201cWell, then, what do you know?\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.89}, {"asin": "039325481X", "title": "Morningstar: Growing Up with Books", "author": "Ann Hood", "description": "Review \"Poignant, touching, and enlightening. . . . Hood provides a new rich glimpse into an Italian American childhood. A treat for bibliophiles and readers of all genres.\" \u2015 Library Journal \"Not many people could point with such specificity to books that have imparted valuable life lessons, and Hood shares beloved works with an affecting and inspiring reverence.\" \u2015 Booklist \"Charming. . . [an] homage to the power of books.\" \u2015 Kirkus \" Morningstar is a love letter to the very act of reading and the power of books to light the way. I can think of no better guide than Ann Hood, whose generosity of spirit, courage, humor, gumption, and grace are a powerful reminder that language and story have the capacity to heal, to instruct, and to change our lives. What a mighty little book, so full of heart.\" \u2015 Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion and Slow Motion \"As a childhood reader myself, I loved this enchanting journey through Ann Hood\u2019s early fascination with reading and how it shaped her life and sensibility. Hood is a delightful writer, wise, charming, and lucid, and book lovers will find Morningstar irresistible.\" \u2015 Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Ruined by Reading About the Author Ann Hood is the author of eleven books, including the best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most and The Knitting Circle , and the memoirs Comfort: A Journey Through Grief and Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food . She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 8.25}, {"asin": "1456828703", "title": "The Folk and Their Fauna", "author": "Scott D. Gottschalk", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "1949180093", "title": "The Philosopher and the Golem: A novel", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "World Literature"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 22.3}, {"asin": "1618218492", "title": "Gifted Program Evaluation: A Handbook for Administrators and Coordinators", "author": null, "description": "About the Author The National Association for Gifted Children\u2019s mission is to support those who enhance the growth and development of gifted and talented children through education, advocacy, community building, and research. NAGC aims to help parents and families, K\u201312 education professionals including support service personnel, and members of the research and higher education community who work to help gifted and talented children as they strive to achieve their personal best and contribute to their communities. Virginia H. Burney, Ph.D., is a long-time advocate for gifted students and consults with teachers, districts, and state departments across the U.S. in the development of high-quality services for gifted learners.", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 49.95}, {"asin": "1925595005", "title": "Gorinjas: The beginning", "author": "Mark Lancaster", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "1681812681", "title": "The Audit: How an Honest Mistake Became a Federal Crime", "author": "Francine Messier", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Taxation"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.5}, {"asin": "1476798796", "title": "The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years", "author": "Joseph A. Califano Jr", "description": "Review \"Frank, detailed and nuanced story of [Califano\u2019s] four years as one of Lyndon Johnson\u2019s chief advisors [which] deserves more attention than it ever received.\u201d  \u00a0 -- Michael Bechloss \u2015 The Wall Street Journal \"Taking on a character like LBJ was as daunting asone might imagine. This book helped me shape the role in a way that onlysomeone who actually knew the 36th president could. The book containsinsightful and honest details of this larger-than-life character, and allowedme to see the greatness of his impassioned hope, and the minutia of histroubled soul. He was indeed a Triumph and a Tragedy. Thank you Joe, forbringing him to life for me and millions of others.\" -- Bryan Cranston, Tony Award-winning actor portraying LBJ in the play ALL THE WAY\u201cWonderful book...What makes this memoir of\u2026 his Presidency stand out is its vividness. Johnson leaps out of the pages in all his raw and earthy glory.\u201d \u2015 The New York Times Book Review \u201cA joy to read. A walk through the [most tumultuous] half-decade from 1964 to 1969 ... Oh what anecdotes. Johnson leaves you breathless, disbelieving, aghast\u2026recommended without reservation.\u201d -- Stephen Ambrose \u2015 The Washington Post Book World \u201cAs close as we'll ever come to seeing Johnson in action with our mind's eye, thanks to Califano's descriptions and care\u2026 Not many will give you a better tour of political Washington or such an intimate look at the big, flawed man who was Lyndon B. Johnson.\u201d \u2015 Los Angeles Times \u201cAn insider\u2019s view of the inside, [this] memoir spares no aspect of its complex subject.\u2026Readable, forthcoming, and shrewd.\u201d \u2015 The New York Review of Books \u201cA sparkling memoir\u2026Califano\u2019s riveting accounts of Johnson\u2019s willingness to take the lead on difficult issues\u2026could well serve as a guide today\u2019s timid politicians.\u201d \u2015 San Antonio Express \u201cAs personal a picture as has yet emerged of Lyndon Johnson the man\u2026.[A] fascinating behind-the-scenes report.\u201d \u2015 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cSuperbly written and riveting reading. It is an enormously significant contribution to the public record.\u201d \u2015 New York Law Journal \u201cAnyone who wishes to feel what it was really like to be in the trenches with Johnson must read this account\u2026.The author\u2019s details are graphic, intimate, sometimes scatological. They bring the Johnson manner alive and glowing\u2026.Nobody who loves our system of government should fail to turn to Califano for instruction and inspiration.\u201d -- Henry F. Graff \u2015 The New Leader \"Joe Califano\u2019s gripping memoir of life with LBJ is one of my favorite books. No aide to this Texas President was closer to him than the Brooklyn-born Califano, who saw almost everything and ardently shared his domestic purposes, yet\u2014and this is so rare among White House memoirs\u2014writes about the boss he served, after decades of hindsight, with surprising detachment and analytical brilliance. Triumph and Tragedy is funny, poignant and unforgettable. Future generations who wish to know what it was really like to work, day to day, alongside this towering, incomparable President during some of the most consequential moments in American history would be well advised to start here.\u201d -- Presidential historian and author Michael Beschloss\u201cTerrific\u2026. The best insider account I\u2019ve read of the LBJ administration to date.\u201d -- Robert Dallek, author of LONE STAR RISING and LYNDON B. JOHNSHON: PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENT\"Just watching Johnson wheel and deal through Califano's eyes makes a rousing good story. Johnson's successors in the White House must still salivate at the kind of arm-twisting, ball-busting tactics that permitted the President to sweep through his legislative package.\" -- Ellen Dahnke \u2015 The Nashville Tennessean \"Joe Califano...had a ringside seat for LBJ's amazing success and dizzying descent. His highly entertaining and thoughtful memoir is the best description of the inner workings of the Johnson White House I have ever read and LBJ--inspiring, terrifying, funny and tragic--comes alive in a way no other writer has managed.\" -- Robert Schenkkan, Pultizer Prize winner, Tony Award-winning author of ALL THE WAY\u201cA hugely entertaining narrative\u2014by turns exhilarating, somber, hilarious, touching\u2026[has] an immediacy and intimacy that no other biography has captured.\u201d \u2015 America Magazine \u201cFew books radically change my opinion, but Joseph A. Califano, Jr.\u2019s The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson has\u2026.Anyone reading Mr. Califano will realize, wow, how he got things done\u2026.Johnson\u2019s legislative program was dazzling, with its historic measures in civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid and Federal Aid to education....\u201d -- Ken Adelman \u2015 Washington Times \u201cRich with Johnson anecdotes\u2026 The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson reminds us all of what it was like to have a president who tried to do something.\u201d -- Kim Eisler \u2015 Legal Times \u201cA revealing anecdote-laden work\u2026Califano\u2026can really write. Four stars.\u201d -- Larry King \u2015 USA Today \u201cOne of the very best presidential memoirs I have ever read.\u201d -- Liz Smith \u2015 Newsday About the Author Joseph A. Califano, Jr. spent thirty years in Washington at the top of the Pentagon, on the White House staff as chief domestic advisor to the President, and in the Cabinet. He worked as an attorney for The Washington Post during Watergate and has represented clients as varied as the Black Panthers and Coca Cola. He also spent years on Wall Street and served on more than fifteen public company boards and numerous not-for-profit boards. He is founder of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA). He has written fourteen books, including Our Damaged Democracy . He lives in Westport, Connecticut.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.13}, {"asin": "1515119254", "title": "Tovi the Penguin: goes to the seaside", "author": "Janina Rossiter", "description": "Review \"I adore this charming series following theinquisitive penguin, Tovi,and his two buddies. They always discoversomething a little bit out ofthe ordinary in their outings and thisseaside story is no exception.Beautiful illustrations and winsomecharacters make this series a bighit with my youngest daughter who isfour and the humor appeals to myolder daughter who is eight and readsthe books to her little sister.\"-\u00a0Lizzie Harwood, author of Triumph: Collected Stories and Xamnesia: Everything I Forgot in my Search for an Unreal Life Close to Destiny \"A fun, educational adventure with an adorable penguin! My kids (age 11/2 and 3) love the Tovi the Penguin books, and this newest book is noexception. They love pointing out the ladybug on each page, and thelanguage is easy for them to understand. They know certain parts byheart already and repeat as I read out loud. The illustrations arebeautiful, and there are lots of tiny details for them to pick out,name, talk about... they really get a lot out of just one book!\"- Vicki Lesage, author of Confessions of a Paris Potty Trainer About the Author Amazon bestselling author Janina Rossiter loves three things: design, France and her little family. She studied communication & illustration design at university, and haslived in Germany (her home country), England (where she met herhusband), and now France (where she vows to stay). After graduating with a degree from university she worked as a packaging designer for a fewyears before setting off on her own and expanding into freelance design. She enjoys the creative energy of Paris, where she lives with herEnglish husband and her two daughters.With the arrival ofher first daughter, Janina's love for painting and drawing found a newlease on life and, before long, she combined her passion forillustration with the wonderfully inspiring world of children. Afterthat, it was simply a matter of time before Tovi the Penguin was born... .", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 10.5}, {"asin": "0873412184", "title": "Game Wardens Vs Poachers: Tickets Still Available", "author": "James L. Palmer", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Hunting & Fishing"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 3.3}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1533301255", "title": "My Father's Ashes: A Young Man's Journey Through His Father's Life", "author": "Bruce Jenvey", "description": "About the Author Bruce Jenvey was raised in rural Michigan with a great interest in history, popular culture, and the paranormal. After twenty years in the advertising industry, he founded Great Lakes Cruiser Magazine and spent the next decade traveling the region as both historian and journalist. Today, Bruce is the award-winning author of Angela's Coven, and the Cabbottown Witch Novels as well as other tales of the paranormal. Visit our site for the latest releases in digital and paperback: www.covenbooks.com", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "B08N1CB2XB", "title": "The Abyss: A Max Austin Thriller, Book #5 (The Russian Assassin)", "author": "Jack Arbor", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B006ICVOUO", "title": "The Shoemaker's Wife: A Novel", "author": "Adriana Trigiani", "description": "About the Author Adriana Trigiani is beloved by millions of readers around the world for fifteen bestsellers, including the blockbuster epic The Shoemaker's Wife ; the Big Stone Gap series; Lucia, Lucia ; the Valentine series; the Viola series for young adults; and the bestselling memoir Don't Sing at the Table . Trigiani reaches new heights with All the Stars in the Heavens , an epic tale from the golden age of Hollywood. She is the award-winning filmmaker of the documentary Queens of the Big Time . Trigiani wrote and directed the major motion picture Big Stone Gap , based on her debut novel and filmed entirely on location in her Virginia hometown, to be released nationwide on October 9th, 2015. She lives in Greenwich Village with her family. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \u201cWithin the pages of this novel, Trigiani\u2019s 10th, is a gloriously romantic yet sensible world that seamlessly blends practicality and beauty\u2026built around the staggering cultural and social changes the war years swept in\u2026. Trigiani\u2019s very best\u2026exquisite writing and a story enriched by the power of abiding love.\u201d ( USA Today )\u201cI\u2019ve always loved reading Trigiani, but [this] is something totally new and completely wonderful: a rich, sweeping epic which tells the story of the women and men who built America dream by dream. If you\u2019re meeting her work for the first time, get ready for a lifelong love affair. Splendid.\u201d ( Kathryn Stockett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Help )\u201cThe breathtaking\u2026 historical novel sparkles in exquisite details and vivid descriptions.\u201d ( Huffington Post )\u201c[A] great read\u2026.Bella.\u201d ( People )\u201cPure pleasure . . . full-bodied and elegantly written.\u201d ( Washington Post Book World )\u201cYou\u2019ll have trouble putting this novel down.\u201d ( Richmond Times-Dispatch )\u201cThe novel is a sweeping epic, but at its heart, it\u2019s a love story. It speaks to an era of possibilities.\u201d ( Providence Journal )\u201cTrigiani\u2019s page-turning newest\u2026 is a sweeping saga\u2026 More than an epic romance, Trigiani\u2019s work pays homage to the tribulations of the immigrant experience, and the love that makes the journey and hardships worthwhile.\u201d ( Publishers Weekly )\u201cThis expansive epic, which seems tailor-made for a miniseries, manages to feel both old-fashioned and thoroughly contemporary\u2026[an] irresistible love story.\u201d ( Booklist )\u201cTrigiani\u2019s gift for using vivid details to create a strong sense of place and her warm affection for her characters will make this a satisfying read for her many fans.\u201d ( Library Journal )\u2026an old-fashioned, romantic tale of two star-tangled lovers...but also a paean to artisanal work, food, friendship and family\u2026Trigiani is a master of palpable and visual detail. ( Washington Post ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review \u201cWithin the pages of this novel, Trigiani\u2019s 10th, is a gloriously romantic yet sensible world that seamlessly blends practicality and beauty\u2026built around the staggering cultural and social changes the war years swept in\u2026. Trigiani\u2019s very best\u2026exquisite writing and a story enriched by the power of abiding love.\u201d (USA Today )\u201cI\u2019ve always loved reading Trigiani, but [this] is something totally new and completely wonderful: a rich, sweeping epic which tells the story of the women and men who built America dream by dream. If you\u2019re meeting her work for the first time, get ready for a lifelong love affair. Splendid.\u201d (Kathryn Stockett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Help )\u201cThe breathtaking\u2026 historical novel sparkles in exquisite details and vivid descriptions.\u201d (Huffington Post )\u201c[A] great read\u2026.Bella.\u201d (People )\u201cYou\u2019ll have trouble putting this novel down.\u201d (Richmond Times-Dispatch )\u201cThe novel is a sweeping epic, but at its heart, it\u2019s a love story. It speaks to an era of possibilities.\u201d (Providence Journal )\u201cTrigiani\u2019s page-turning newest\u2026 is a sweeping saga\u2026 More than an epic romance, Trigiani\u2019s work pays homage to the tribulations of the immigrant experience, and the love that makes the journey and hardships worthwhile.\u201d (Publishers Weekly )\u201cThis expansive epic, which seems tailor-made for a miniseries, manages to feel both old-fashioned and thoroughly contemporary\u2026[an] irresistible love story.\u201d (Booklist )\u201cTrigiani\u2019s gift for using vivid details to create a strong sense of place and her warm affection for her characters will make this a satisfying read for her many fans.\u201d (Library Journal ) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon.com Review Kathryn Stockett Interviews Adriana Trigiani Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. The Help is her first novel. Kathryn Stockett: This is by far your most epic novel to date. How long did it take you to write The Shoemaker\u2019s Wife ? Adriana Trigiani: I worked on this story for over 20 years as I wrote scripts and novels and had my own family. There are scraps of paper, dinner napkins, and bills with timelines and notes scrawled across them. There are old notebooks filled with my grandmother\u2019s musings from 1985. I collected train tickets, copies of ships\u2019 manifests, and a silk tag with my grandmother\u2019s name from garments she had created. I traveled as far as the Italian Alps and as close as the few blocks it takes me to walk to Little Italy in New York City to capture the historical aspects of the story. All of this went into the novel. It was a delicious gestation period. Stockett: This is a novel, but it is inspired by a true story\u2014a family story, right? Trigiani: Yes\u2014my grandparents, Lucia and Carlo. Their love was a dance with fate. It is riddled with near misses against a landscape of such massive world events that it\u2019s a wonder they got together at all . My challenge was to present their world to the reader so it might feel it was happening in the moment. I wanted the reader to have the experience I had when stories were told to me by the woman who lived them. Stockett: The novel takes place during the first half of the twentieth century--what is so compelling about this period of time to you? Trigiani: The cusp of the twentieth century was a time everything was new\u2014cars, phones, planes, electricity, even sportswear, and in each innovation was a kind of explosive potential. No one could predict where all the inventions would lead, people only knew that change was unavoidable. My grandparents were delighted every time America presented them with something they had never seen before. And my grandparents\u2019 sense of wonder never left them, so I tried not to let it leave the page, be it a cross-country train ride or the first snap of the bobbin on an electric Singer sewing machine. Stockett: Through the remarkable story of Enza and Ciro, your novel tells the larger story of the immigrant experience in America. Trigiani: What a gift immigrants were and are to this country! They bring their talents and loyalty and make our country even greater. My grandparents were proud to be new Americans. Assimilation was not about copying an American ideal, but aspiring to their own version of it. The highest compliment you could pay a fellow immigrant was: he (or she) was a hard worker . I hear the phrase work like an immigrant said, but really, it\u2019s bigger than that\u2014we must also dream like immigrants . Stockett: The Shoemaker\u2019s Wife seamlessly brings together fictional characters and historical figures\u2014how did the wonderful Caruso enter the novel? Trigiani: It started with a three-foot stack of vinyl records\u2014my grandmother Lucia\u2019s collection of Caruso. Her absolute devotion to The Great Voice lasted her whole life long. I knew, in order to write this novel, I had to fall in love with Caruso too, because he sang the score of my grandparents\u2019 love affair. When Lucia passed, I went to my first opera, seeking understanding and comfort. As the music washed over me, I began to understand why my grandmother was such a fan. The words were Italian, and the emotions were big; nothing was left unexpressed in the music. If only life were that way. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap High in the Italian Alps at the turn of the twentieth century, Ciro, a strapping mountain boy, meets Enza, a practical beauty. But when scandal rocks Ciro's tiny village, unbeknownst to Enza, he is sent to hide in America. When disaster strikes Enza's family, she, too, is forced to go to America. Ciro and Enza build fledgling lives--until fate intervenes and reunites them. But it is too late: Ciro has volunteered to serve in World War I and Enza finds success in the costume department of the Metropolitan Opera House. Over time, these star-crossed lovers meet and separate, until the power of their love changes both of their lives forever. Inspired by Trigiani's own family history, The Shoemaker's Wife defines an era with operatic scope that will live on in the imagina-tions of readers for years to come. -- Booklist --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover High in the Italian Alps at the turn of the twentieth century, Ciro, a strapping mountain boy, meets Enza, a practical beauty. But when scandal rocks Ciro's tiny village, unbeknownst to Enza, he is sent to hide in America. When disaster strikes Enza's family, she, too, is forced to go to America. Ciro and Enza build fledgling lives\u2014until fate intervenes and reunites them. But it is too late: Ciro has volunteered to serve in World War I and Enza finds success in the costume department of the Metropolitan Opera House. Over time, these star-crossed lovers meet and separate, until the power of their love changes both of their lives forever. Inspired by Trigiani's own family history, The Shoemaker's Wife defines an era with operatic scope that will live on in the imagina-tions of readers for years to come. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Shoemaker's Wife By Adriana Trigiani HarperCollins Publishers Copyright \u00a9 2012 Adriana TrigianiAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-06-125710-0 Excerpt CHAPTER 1 A GOLD RING Un Anello d'oro The scalloped hem of Caterina Lazzari's blue velvet coat grazed the freshfallen snow, leaving a pale pink path on the bricks as she walked acrossthe empty piazza. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic sweep of herfootsteps, like hands dusting flour across an old wooden cutting board.All around her, the Italian Alps loomed like silver daggers against apewter sky. The rising winter sun, a pinprick of gold buried in the expanseof gray, barely flickered. In the first light of morning, dressed inblue, Caterina looked like a bird. She turned, exhaling a long breath into the cold winter air. \"Ciro?\" she called out. \"Eduardo!\" She heard her sons' laughter echo across the empty colonnade, butcouldn't place them. She surveyed the columns of the open portico. Thiswasn't a morning for hide and seek, or for playing games. She called tothem again. Her mind swam with all she had accomplished, big choresand small errands, attending to a slew of overwhelming details, documentsfiled and keys returned, all the while stretching the few lire shehad left to meet her obligations. The first stage of widowhood is paperwork. Caterina had never imagined she would be standing here alone, onthe first day of 1905, with nothing before her but the small hope of eventualreinvention. Every single promise made to her had been broken. Caterina looked up as a window on the second floor of the shoe shopopened and an old woman shook a rag rug out into the cold air. Caterinacaught her eye. The woman looked away, pulled the rug back inside, andslammed the window shut. Her younger son, Ciro, peered around one of the columns. His blue-greeneyes were the exact color of his father's, as deep and clear as thewater of Sestri Levante. At ten years old, he was a replica of Carlo Lazzari,with big hands and feet and thick sandy brown hair. He was thestrongest boy in Vilminore. When the village children went down intothe valley to collect sticks bundled to sell for kindling, Ciro always hadthe heaviest haul strapped to his back because he could carry it. Caterina felt a pang whenever she looked at him; in Ciro's face wasall she had lost and would never recover. \"Here.\" She pointed to theground beside her black leather boot. \"Now.\" Ciro picked up his father's leather duffel and, running to his mother,called to his brother, who hid behind the statuary. Eduardo, at eleven, resembled his mother's people, the Montini family,dark eyed, tall, and willowy. He too picked up his satchel andran to join them. At the foot of the mountain, in the city of Bergamo, where Caterinahad been born thirty-two years ago, the Montini family had set up aprinting press that churned out linen writing paper, engraved callingcards, and small books in a shop on Via Borgo Palazzo. They had ahouse and a garden. As she closed her eyes, she saw her parents sittingat an alfresco table under their grape arbor, eating ricotta and honeysandwiches on thick, fresh bread. Caterina remembered all they wereand all they had. The boys dropped their suitcases in the snow. \"Sorry, Mama,\" Ciro said. He looked up at his mother and knew forcertain that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Her skinhad the scent of peaches and felt like satin. His mother's long hair fellinto soft, romantic waves, and ever since he could remember, as he layin her arms, he had twisted a lock until it became a single shiny blackrope. \"You look pretty,\" Ciro said earnestly. Whenever Caterina was sad,he tried to cheer her up with compliments. Caterina smiled. \"Every son thinks his mother is beautiful.\" Hercheeks turned pink in the cold as the tip of her aquiline nose turnedbright red. \"Even when she isn't.\" Caterina fished in her purse for a small mirror and a chamois puff.The tip of red disappeared as she powdered it. She pursed her lips andlooked down at her boys with a critical eye. She straightened Eduardo'scollar, and pulled Ciro's coat sleeve over his wrist. The coat was toosmall for him, and no amount of pulling would add the two inches atthe cuff to make it fit properly. \"You just keep growing, Ciro.\" \"I'm sorry, Mama.\" She remembered when she had their coats made for them, alongwith pin-cord trousers and white cotton shirts. There had been tuftedblankets in their cribs when they were born, a layette of soft cottongowns with pearl buttons. Wooden toys. Picture books. Her sons hadlong outgrown the clothes, and there was no replacing them. Eduardo had one pair of wool pants and a coat given to him by aneighbor. Ciro wore the clean but ill-fitting clothes of his father, thehems on the work pants three inches deep, tacked with ragged stitchesbecause sewing was not one of Caterina's talents. Ciro's belt wastightened on the last grommet, but still too loose to function properly.\"Where are we going, Mama?\" Ciro asked as he followed his mother.\"She told you a hundred times. You don't listen.\" Eduardo lifted hisbrother's duffel and carried it. \"You must listen for him,\" Caterina reminded Eduardo. \"We're going to stay at the convent of San Nicola.\" \"Why do we have to live with nuns?\" Ciro complained. Caterina turned and faced her sons. They looked up at her, hopingfor an explanation that would make sense of all the mysterious goings-onof the past few days. They weren't even sure what questions to ask,or what information they needed to know, but they were certain theremust have been some reason behind Mama's strange behavior. She hadbeen anxious. She wept through the night when she thought her sonswere asleep. She had written lots of letters, more in the last week thanthey could ever remember her writing. Caterina knew that if she shared the truth, she would have failedthem. A good mother should never knowingly fail her children, notwhen she is all they have left in the world. Besides, in the years to come,Ciro would remember only the facts, while Eduardo would paint themwith a soft brush. Neither version would be true, so what did it matter?Caterina could not bear the responsibility of making every decisionalone. In the fog of grief, she had to be sensible, and think of every possiblealternative for her boys. In her mental state, she could not take careof her sons, and she knew it. She made lists of names, recalling everycontact in her family's past and her husband's, any name that might behelpful. She scanned the list, knowing many of them probably neededas much help as she did. Years of poverty had depleted the region, andforced many to move down to Bergamo and Milan in search of work. After much thought, she remembered that her father had printedmissals for every parish in the Lombardy region, and as far south asMilan. He had donated his services as an indulgence to the Holy RomanChurch, expecting no payment in return. Caterina used the old favor tosecure a place for her sons with the sisters of San Nicola. Caterina placed a hand on each of their shoulders. \"Listen to me. This is the most important thing I will ever tell you.Do as you're told. Do whatever the nuns ask you to do. Do it well. Youmust also do more than they ask of you. Anticipate. Look around. Dochores before the sisters ask. \"When Sister asks you to gather wood, do it immediately. Nocomplaining! Help one another - make yourselves indispensable.\"Chop the wood, carry it inside, and build the fire without asking.Check the damper before lighting the kindling. And when the fire isout, clean the ash pit and close the flue. Sweep up so it looks like a picture.Prepare the hearth for the next fire with dry logs and kindling. Putthe broom and the dustpan and the poker away. Don't wait for Sister toremind you. \"Make yourselves useful and stay out of trouble. Be pious and pray.Sit in the front pew during mass and sit at the farthest end of the benchduring dinner. Take your portions last, and never seconds. You arethere because of their kindness, not because I could pay them to keepyou. Do you understand?\" \"Yes, Mama,\" Eduardo said. Caterina placed her hand on Eduardo's face and smiled. He put hisarm around his mother's waist and held on tight. Then she pulled Cairoclose. Her soft coat felt good against his face. \"I know you can be good.\"\"I can't,\" Ciro sputtered, as he pulled away from his mother's embrace,\"and I won't.\" \"Ciro.\" \"This is a bad idea, Mama. We don't belong there,\" Ciro pleaded. \"We have no place to stay,\" Eduardo said practically. \"We belongwherever Mama puts us.\" \"Listen to your brother. This is the best I can do right now. Whensummer comes, I will come up the mountain and take you home.\" \"Back to our house?\" Ciro asked. \"No. Somewhere new. Maybe we'll move up the mountain to Endine.\" \"Papa took us to the lake there.\" \"Yes, the town with the lake. Remember?\" The boys nodded that they did. Eduardo rubbed his hands togetherto warm them. They were rough and pink from the cold. \"Here. Take my gloves.\" Caterina removed her elbow length black gloves. She helped Eduardo's hands into them, pulling them up andunder his short sleeves. \"Better?\" Eduardo closed his eyes; the heat from his mother's gloves traveledup his arms and through his entire body until he was envelopedin her warmth. He pushed his hair back with his hand, the scent of thebrushed cotton, clean lemon and freesia, reassuring him. \"What do you have for me, Mama?\" Ciro asked. \"You have Papa's gloves to keep you warm.\" She smiled. \"But youwant something of Mama's too?\" \"Please.\" \"Give me your hand.\" Ciro pulled his father's leather glove off with his teeth. Caterina slid a gold signet ring off her smallest finger and placed iton Ciro's ring finger. \"This was given to me by my papa.\" Ciro looked down at the ring. A swirling, artful C in an oval of heavyyellow gold gleamed in the early morning light. He closed his fist, thegold band still warm from his mother's hand. The stone facade of the convent of San Nicola was forbidding. Grandpilasters topped with statues of saints wearing expressions of hollowgrief towered over the walkway. The thick walnut door had a sharp peaklike a bishop's hat, Eduardo observed as he pushed the door open. Caterinaand Ciro followed him inside into a small vestibule. They stompedthe snow off their shoes on a mat made of woven driftwood branches. Caterina reached up and rang a small brass bell on a chain. \"They're probably praying. That's all they do in here. Pray all day,\"Ciro said as he peered through a crack in the door. \"How do you know what they do?\" Eduardo asked. The door opened. Sister Domenica looked down at the boys, sizingthem up. She was short and shaped like a dinner bell. Her black and whitehabit with a full skirt made her seem wider still. She placed her handson her hips. \"I'm Signora Lazzari,\" Caterina said. \"These are my sons. Eduardo and Ciro.\"Eduardo bowed to the nun. Ciro ducked his head quickly asif saying a fast prayer. Really, it was the mole on Sister's chin he wishedto pray away. \"Follow me,\" the nun said. Sister Domenica pointed to a bench, indicating where the boysshould sit and wait. Caterina followed Sister into another room behinda thick wooden door, closing it behind her. Eduardo stared straightahead while Ciro craned his neck, looking around. \"She's signing us away,\" Ciro whispered. \"Just like Papa's saddle.\" \"That's not true,\" his brother whispered back. Ciro inspected the foyer, a round room with two deep alcoves, oneholding a shrine to Mary, the Blessed Mother, and the other, to SaintFrancis of Assisi. Mary definitely had more votive candles lit at her feet.Ciro figured it meant you could always count on a woman. He took adeep breath. \"I'm hungry.\" \"You're always hungry.\" \"I can't help it.\" \"Don't think about it.\" \"It's all I think about.\" \"You have a simple mind.\" \"No, I don't. Just because I'm strong, doesn't mean I'm stupid.\" \"I didn't say you were stupid. You're simple.\" The scent of fresh vanilla and sweet butter filled the convent. Ciro closed his eyes and inhaled. He really was hungry. \"Is this like the storyMama told us about the soldiers who got lost in the desert and saw awaterfall where there was none?\" Ciro stood to follow the scent. Hepeered around the wall. \"Or is there a cake baking somewhere?\" \"Sit down,\" Eduardo ordered. Ciro ignored him and walked down the long corridor. \"Get back here!\" Eduardo whispered. The walnut doors along the arcade were closed, and streams offaint light came through the overhead transoms. At the far end of thehallway, through a glass door, Ciro saw a cloister connecting the mainconvent to the workhouses. He ran down the arcade toward the light.When he made it to the door, he looked through the glass and saw abarren patch of earth, probably a garden, hemmed by a dense gnarl ofgray fig trees dusted with snow. (Continues...) Excerpted from The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani . Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Adriana Trigiani. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "0226399001", "title": "Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)", "author": "Douglas Michael Jesseph", "description": "About the Author Douglas M. Jesseph is assistant professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University.", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Mathematics"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 32.13}], "target_asin": "1533301255"}
{"user_id": "AEJ2CLAA7BJPJJ72W27FV2CTXNJQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0875521894", "title": "Jonathan Edwards Resolutions: and Advice to Young Converts", "author": "Jonathan & Darlene Edwards", "description": "About the Author Jonathan Edwards (1703\u20131758) served the Northampton Congregational Church in Massachusetts for twenty-three years, then missionary outpost to the Mohawk and Mohican tribes. In 1758, he became president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), only to die a few months later due to an adverse reaction to a vaccination.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "1539367118", "title": "Confesiones de San Agustin (Spanish Edition)", "author": "San Agust\u00edn", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Antiques & Collectibles"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.0}, {"asin": "B004UJCCTE", "title": "A Sketch of the Life and Labors of George Whitefield", "author": "J. C. Ryle", "description": "About the Author John Charles Ryle (10 May 1816 - 10 June 1900) was the first Anglican bishop of Liverpool --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0311463231", "title": "La Voluntad de Dios (Spanish Edition)", "author": "John F. MacArthur", "description": "About the Author El doctor John MaxArthur es pastor de la iglesia Grace Community Church de Sun Valley, California, y presidente de The Master's College and Seminary. Conocido por su predicacion expositiva y dinamica, el autor es escuchado diariamente en el program radial Gracia a vosotros. Sus muchos libros incluyen Los carismatiocos, El evangelio segun Jesucristo, Equipados para la batalla, A solas con Dios, entre otros.", "categories": ["Books", "Libros en espa\u00f1ol"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.25}, {"asin": "1530667054", "title": "La inmortalidad del alma (Spanish Edition)", "author": "San Agust\u00edn", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Philosophy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "198602797X", "title": "El Libre Albedrio: Un Esclavo (Spanish Edition)", "author": "Charles Haddon Spurgeon", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Theology"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "1878087134", "title": "Working Sheet Metal", "author": "David J. Gingery", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 20.18}, {"asin": "0192802526", "title": "Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction", "author": "John C. Polkinghorne", "description": "Review `John Polkinghorne has brought to life that most mysterious and perplexing of revolutions in understanding and has made its mysteries accessible.' Peter Atkins, University of Oxford`John Polkinghorne has produced an excellent piece of work. ... Many authors of \"popular\" books on modern physics have the regrettable habit of mixing science fact with science fiction. Polkinghorne never does that: he always allows the truth to stand by itself and show its own fascination. ... I think that this is an excellent contribution to the literature on quantum theory for a general audience.' Chris Isham, Imperial College, London`This splendid book explains both the triumph and the mystery that is quantum theory. It is a triumph because of its towering mathematical structure, and amazing empirical accuracy. It is a mystery because of the conundrums about how to interpret it. John Polkinghorne, himself a distinguished quantum physicist, is a sure guide to all of this: he celebrates the successes of the theory, and shows unfailingly good judgement about the conundrums.' Jeremy Butterfield, University of Oxford About the Author John Polkinghorne was from 1968 to 1979 Professor of Mathematical Physics in the University of Cambridge, and later president of Queen's College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was knighted in 1997. His many books include The Quantum World (1986), The Faith of a Physicist (1994), and Science and Theology (1998).", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Physics"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.06}, {"asin": "1931464235", "title": "Ethan Allen and Allen & Wheelock: Their Guns and Their Legacy", "author": null, "description": "Review A collector's dream. -- The Midwest Book Review, September 2006 This book is the bible...for arms museum curators [and] collectors of antique firearms. -- Larry S. Sterett", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Classics"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 65.0}], "target_asin": "198602797X"}
{"user_id": "AG7S42PTXHG4IN4EUDJWJDHLGTTA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "031621115X", "title": "Private Vegas", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "Review Praise for Private Berlin: \"Patterson has always been an expert at conceiving chilling villains of his many pieces, and with Sullivan, he achieves new heights of terror.... Private Berlin will make you a fan of this wide-ranging and marvelously conceived series, if you are not one already.\"--Bookreporter.com\" Private Berlin promises fast paced action and unforgettable characters with plot twists and deceptions worthy of any James Patterson novel.\"--Examiner.com About the Author James Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records . Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977 James Patterson's books have sold more than 300 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels , the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider . He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 5.47}, {"asin": "B01ENU0V5Q", "title": "The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller (The Blake Jordan Series Book 1)", "author": "Ken Fite", "description": "Review \"I gave this novel a 5 because it grabbed me and never let me go until I unwillingly had to admit I had arrived at the end. I can't wait for the sequel! A real thriller for those who like to read about the beltway.\" - Kennalea (reader, Amazon.com) \"This one is a good combination of a believable plot with just the right amount of technical material to make it real.\" - Richard Gordon (reader, Amazon.com) \"I was so amazed to discover this writer. He does everything right with this story. Just enough to keep you interested, but I got so wrapped up in it I couldn't put it down.\" - Shirley Collum (reader, Amazon.com) \" From the moment I started reading this book I couldn't put it down, kept me up late at night when I had to get early the next morning. I would highly recommend this book. \" - AC (reader, Amazon.com) \" This book was fantastic. It is one of those rare books that captures your attention and you cannot stop reading it. Looking forward to the next book in this series.\" - Glassmaker (reader, Amazon.com)", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B003TM3DJQ", "title": "Sew Many Quilts, September/October 1997", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "1440543410", "title": "Mini Donuts: 100 Bite-Sized Donut Recipes to Sweeten Your \"Hole\" Day", "author": "Jessica Segarra", "description": "Review \"If you're a fan of donuts, you must get a copy of this cookbook. A copy of this cookbook along with a mini donut pan would make the perfect holiday gift for a relative, a friend, or yourself. The recipes are simple to make and fun to eat.\" -- A Well-Seasoned Life blog\"Almost all of the recipes in the book can be made with a mini donut maker appliance...a darling holiday gift.\" -- Recipe Girl blog\"Can you imagine if you just tried one donut recipe every week? How awesome would your days be? I love, love, love this cookbook.\" -- Writing, Wishing blog\"The recipes are all clearly written and easy to understand. The ingredients all seem to be things you will either have in your cabinet already or are able to get in your grocery store. There are a lot of color photos in this cookbook. This cookbook would be great for folks that enjoy donuts, baking and entertaining.\" -- From Val's Kitchen blog\"If you have kids or grand kids they will go crazy for these little treats. In the book you will find cocktail inspired, fruity nibbles, candy-aisle donuts and more.\" -- Family Fresh Cooking \"Many of you probably know of Jessica from The Novice Chef. To say she is talented seems like an understatement. And her new book Mini Donuts: 100 Bite-Sized Donut Recipes just shows you how right I am. Not only did she come up with all the recipes, but she photographed them too! Every picture is perfect, and droolworthy, and that is no small task.\" -- Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts blog\"The donuts were moist, light, and delicious! Can't wait to try more recipes!\" -- Make Ahead Meals for Busy Moms blog\"It's cheerful, bright and just down right fun. Adorable and delectable.\" -- Half Baked - The Cake Blog About the Author Jessica Segarra is the woman behind The Novice Chef Blog (thenovicechefblog.com). She started her website in 2008 with a flip camera phone and a love of good food. Now all these years later, she is living her dream life as a recipe developer, food photographer and cookbook author. She lives in Tampa, Florida and spends all her free time chasing after her twin daughters, husband and 5 rescue pets!", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Baking"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "1893824152", "title": "EQ5: Block Book- An Illustrated Guide to the Block Patterns in EQ5", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.96}, {"asin": "098038298X", "title": "Football", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Football (American)"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 5.88}, {"asin": "0715337564", "title": "Two from One Jelly Roll Quilts: 18 Designs to Make Your Fabric Go Further", "author": "Pam Lintott", "description": "About the Author Pam and Nicky Lintott own and run The Quilt Room, one of Europe's largest specialist quilt shops. Pam and Nicky have written the best selling Jelly Roll Quilts and Layer Cake, Jelly Roll & Charm Quilts and compiled Jelly Roll Inspirations , all for the David & Charles imprint.Pam Lintott opened her shop, The Quilt Room, in 1981, which she still runs today, along with her daughter Nicky. Pam and Nicky are the authors of several bestselling quilt books, including the phenomenally successful Jelly Roll Quilts.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 13.79}, {"asin": "1464703523", "title": "Christmas Sparkle", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Holly Hill Quilt Designs evolved through Mary Jane Carey's love of quilting. \"Our specialty is creating small seasonal applique patterns that are fun and make us smile,\" Mary Jane said. She opened The Christmas Shoppe in 1995, selling her quilts and handmade Santas, and now has a full-fledged online shop at www.hollyhillquiltdesigns.com", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "1538744333", "title": "The Kennedys - After Camelot", "author": "J. Randy Taraborrelli", "description": "About the Author J. Randy Taraborrelli is a respected journalist, a recognizable entertainment personality, and in-demand guest on many television programs including Today, Good Morning America, The Early Show, Entertainment Tonight, and CNN Headline News . He is the bestselling author of thirteen books.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 15.99}, {"asin": "B00BIOG1ZU", "title": "Killing Jesus: A History (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)", "author": "Bill O'Reilly", "description": "About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa , and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Killing Jesus A History By Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard Henry Holt and Company Copyright \u00a9 2013 Bill O'Reilly and Martin DugardAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8050-9854-9 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, A Note to Readers, Book I: The World of Jesus, Book II: Behold the Man, Book III: If You Are the Son of God, Take Yourself Off This Cross, Afterword, Postscript, Notes, Sources, Acknowledgments, Illustration Credits, Index, About the Authors, Copyright, Also by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, CHAPTER 1 BETHLEHEM, JUDEA MARCH, 5 B.C. MORNING The child with thirty-six years to live is being hunted. Heavily armed soldiers from the capital city of Jerusalem are marching to this small town, intent on finding and killing the baby boy. They are a mixed-race group of foreign mercenaries from Greece, Gaul, and Syria. The child's name, unknown to them, is Jesus, and his only crime is that some believe he will be the next king of the Jewish people. The current monarch, a dying half-Jewish, half-Arab despot named Herod, is so intent on ensuring the baby's death that his army has been ordered to murder every male child under the age of two years in Bethlehem. None of the soldiers knows what the child's mother and father look like, or the precise location of his home, thus the need to kill every baby boy in the small town and surrounding area. This alone will guarantee the extermination of the potential king. It is springtime in Judea, the peak of lambing season. The rolling dirt road takes the army past thick groves of olive trees and shepherds tending their flocks. The soldiers' feet are clad in sandals, their legs are bare, and they wear the skirtlike pteruges to cover their loins. The young men sweat profusely beneath the plates of armor on their chests and the tinned bronze attic helmets that cover the tops of their heads and the sides of their faces. The soldiers are well aware of Herod's notorious cruelty and his penchant for killing anyone who would try to threaten his throne. But there is no moral debate about the right or wrong of slaughtering infants. Nor do the soldiers question whether they will have the nerve to rip a screaming child from his mother's arms and carry out the execution. When the time comes, they will follow orders and do their jobs \u2014 or risk being immediately killed for insubordination. The sword's blade is how they plan to dispatch the babies. All soldiers are armed with the Judean version of the razor-sharp pugio and gladius preferred by the Roman legions, and they wear their weapons attached to the waist. Their method of murder, however, will not be restricted to the dagger or sword. Should they wish, Herod's soldiers can also use a skull-crushing stone, hurl the baby boys off a cliff en masse, or just wrap their fists around the infants' windpipes and strangle them. The cause of death is not important. What matters most is one simple fact: king of the Jews or not, the infant must die. * * * Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, King Herod gazes out a palace window toward Bethlehem, anxiously awaiting confirmation of the slaughter. In the cobbled streets below him, the Roman-appointed king sees the crowded bazaars, where vendors sell everything from water and dates to tourist trinkets and roast lamb. The walled city of some eighty thousand residents packed into less than a single square mile is a crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean. With one sweep of his eyes, Herod can s --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Review \u201cO'Reilly is the natural choice to narrate this work\u2026 he carries the work along and the audiobook is a good introduction to the Synoptic Gospels.\u201d \u2015 AudioFile Magazine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "World"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1492637335", "title": "How to Catch the Tooth Fairy", "author": "Adam Wallace", "description": "About the Author Adam Wallace is a children\u2019s writer and cartoonist living in Australia. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling How to Catch series and The Holiday Heroes Save Christmas. Andy Elkerton is a children\u2019s book illustrator who loves to create creatures that are impossible to catch! He is known for his work on the New York Times bestselling How to Catch series and is based in the United Kingdom.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.19}, {"asin": "0316159778", "title": "The 5th Horseman (Women's Murder Club)", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "About the Author James Patterson's most recent major international bestseller is Honeymoon. He is the author of 34 books and lives in Florida.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 23.75}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1440213984", "title": "Machine Embroidered Quilting and Applique: Simple Steps for Revolutionary Results", "author": "Eileen Roche", "description": "About the Author Founder and editor of Designs in Machine Embroidery magazine, Eileen Roche has been a frequent guest on PBS television shows, Sewing With Nancy\u00ae , Martha's Sewing Room and others. Eileen has designed embroidery collections for Amazing Designs\u2122 and Designs in Machine Embroidery and is the author of three previous Krause Publications books. Eileen has created numerous tools for the home embroiderer including the patented In The Hoop\u2122 Angle Finder, the Magna-Quilter, a magnetic hooping device for stitching on multiple layers and has a patent-pending on the Stipple! technique.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 17.16}, {"asin": "060961066X", "title": "Barefoot Contessa Family Style: Easy Ideas and Recipes That Make Everyone Feel Like Family", "author": "Ina Garten", "description": "From Publishers Weekly This second book follows the same basic premise as Garten's phenomenally popular Barefoot Contessa Cookbook: simple, elegant home cooking with good ingredients and a minimum of fuss. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to include ordinary chicken noodle soup and mashed potatoes and gravy in a cookbook, but Garten pulls it off with heart and style. Dinners are conceived as crowd-pleasers, with a big nod to Italian home-cooking: oven-fried chicken, penne with five cheeses, Sunday rib roast, risotto, lasagna. Like other cookbooks with a specialty-shop pedigree (such as Silver Palate), Garten's book is inflected with a certain catering mentality-a lot of salmon, sun-dried tomatoes, the inevitable Curry Chicken Salad, the forgiving and easy Chicken with Tabbouleh. However, these recipes manage to seem not dated but just reasonable solutions to the eternal problem set of practicality, flavor and time. With photographs of the dishes on nearly every spread and a nice, open format, Garten's book is easy to use. Sections on desserts, kids, and brunch complete this fine snapshot of real-life cooking and the joys of eating in.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Garten's first two books featuring recipes from the Barefoot Contessa, her gourmet takeout shop in East Hampton, NY, have sold more than 400,000 copies. Her latest repeats the appealing format of those titles, offering sophisticated but easy recipes and an attractive design featuring dozens of color photographs, mostly closeups of the recipes but including some casual shots of the author, friends, and family. Garten's \"family style\" cooking includes dishes like Chicken Noodle Soup and Parker's Fish & Chips (separate chapters are devoted to breakfast and kids' foods), but there are also elegant dishes like Tuna Tartare, Saffron Risotto, and Lobster Cobb Salad, not exactly everyday fare. Sure to be popular. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Ina Garten made her name as a premier supplier of prepared foods in Long Island's Hamptons' carryout Barefoot Contessa . Her latest cookbook continues the traditions of her earlier work. In Barefoot Contessa Family Style , Garten serves up dinners centered on homey comforts. Mashed turnips are made palatable to even the fussiest eater by topping them with crisply fried shallots. Squash gets enriched with brown sugar and plenty of butter. Basil, cheddar, and ricotta cheese enliven otherwise bland corn pudding. For a patriotic party, nothing surpasses the sentiment of Garten's flag cake, with its precise rows of red raspberries marching between stripes of whipped cream. Blueberries and more piped whipped cream create a field of stars. Mark Knoblauch Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved From the Inside Flap Ina Garten, who shared her gift for casual entertaining in the bestselling Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Barefoot Contessa Parties! , is back with her most enticing recipes yet?a collection of her favorite dishes for everyday cooking. In Barefoot Contessa Family Style , Ina explains that sharing our lives and tables with those we love is too essential to be saved just for special occasions?and it?s easy to do if you know how to cook irresistible meals with a minimum of fuss. For Ina, the best way to make guests feel at home is to serve them food that?s as unpretentious as it is delicious. So in her new book, she?s collected the recipes that please her friends and family most?dishes like East Hampton Clam Chowder, Parmesan Roasted Asparagus, and Linguine with Shrimp Scampi. It?s the kind of fresh, accessible food that?s meant to be passed around the table in big bowls or platters and enjoyed with warm conversation and laughter.In Ina?s hands tried-and-true dishes are even more delicious than you remember them: Her arugula salad is bright with the flavors of lemon and Parmesan, the Oven-Fried Chicken is crispy without excess fat, and her Deep-Dish Apple Pie has the perfect balance of fruit and spice. Barefoot Contessa Family Style also includes enticing recipes that are memorable and distinctive, like Lobster Cobb Salad, Tequila Lime Chicken, and Saffron Risotto with Butternut Squash.With vivid photographs of Ina cooking and serving food in her beautiful Hamptons home, as well as menu suggestions, practical wisdom on what to do when disaster strikes in the kitchen, and tips on creating an inviting ambience with music, Barefoot Contessa Family Style is the must-have guide to the joy of everyday entertaining. From the Back Cover Ina Garten, who shared her gift for casual entertaining in the bestselling Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Barefoot Contessa Parties!, is back with her most enticing recipes yet--a collection of her favorite dishes for everyday cooking. In Barefoot Contessa Family Style, Ina explains that sharing our lives and tables with those we love is too essential to be saved just for special occasions--and it's easy to do if you know how to cook irresistible meals with a minimum of fuss. For Ina, the best way to make guests feel at home is to serve them food that's as unpretentious as it is delicious. So in her new book, she's collected the recipes that please her friends and family most--dishes like East Hampton Clam Chowder, Parmesan Roasted Asparagus, and Linguine with Shrimp Scampi. It's the kind of fresh, accessible food that's meant to be passed around the table in big bowls or platters and enjoyed with warm conversation and laughter. In Ina's hands tried-and-true dishes are even more delicious than you remember them: Her arugula salad is bright with the flavors of lemon and Parmesan, the Oven-Fried Chicken is crispy without excess fat, and her Deep-Dish Apple Pie has the perfect balance of fruit and spice. Barefoot Contessa Family Style also includes enticing recipes that are memorable and distinctive, like Lobster Cobb Salad, Tequila Lime Chicken, and Saffron Risotto with Butternut Squash. With vivid photographs of Ina cooking and serving food in her beautiful Hamptons home, as well as menu suggestions, practical wisdom on what to do when disaster strikes in the kitchen, and tips on creating an inviting ambience with music, Barefoot Contessa Family Style is the must-have guideto the joy of everyday entertaining. About the Author In 1978, Ina Garten left her job as a budget analyst in the White House to pursue her dream of operating a specialty food store in the Hamptons. Since opening the Barefoot Contessa, she has written the bestselling Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Barefoot Contessa Parties! She is a frequent contributor to major national magazines and writes a recurring column in O Magazine . Her new television series on entertaining can be seen on Food Network. Ina lives in East Hampton, New York, and Southport, Connecticut, with her husband, Jeffrey. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. StartersTurn up the VolumeWe've all had the experience. We're invited to dinner at a friend's house. We ring the doorbell and the host (maybe a little distraught) opens the door to a VERY quiet house. Oops! Are we the first to arrive, or-worse-is it the wrong day? Either way, we feel a bit ill at ease and the evening's off to a bad start.Replay the opening scene with this difference: the host opens the door and you hear Roy Orbison belting out \"Pretty Woman\" or the Beach Boys rocking to \"Good Vibrations.\" Not only do you know you've come to a party, but you feel good immediately. No matter what kind of day you've had, your spirits soar. And that's a great start for a fabulous evening.I think the first few minutes of a party really set the tone for the night. For me, music that makes you feel like you're at a party is the difference between a fun evening and a dull one. The music I choose is a lot like the food I make: it's familiar, but it's a little better than you remembered. I used to organize all the details for a party and then at the last minute throw some CDs on the stereo. Once I realized how important the music was, I started previewing my choices while I cooked dinner. (My CD changer holds six discs, more than enough for an entire evening.) During cocktails, I'll choose music that is upbeat and fun and I play it just a little too loud: Cesaria Evora's Caf\u00e9 Atlantico, Stephane Pompougnac's Costes: La Suite, Pink Martini's Sympathique, and The Best of the Temptations: Volume 1, the 60's. I always know I'm successful if everyone is swaying to the music while we fix drinks and nibble on roasted cashews.When it's time for dinner I want to turn down the volume a bit but I don't want something that's going to put everyone to sleep. This is a great time for Anita Baker's Rapture, Ann Hampton Callaway's To Ella with Love, and even something a little more emotional, like Roy Orbison's For the Lonely. The music makes you feel good but it's relaxed. Then, as I'm serving dessert and everyone is feeling just a little too satisfied, I'll crank up the volume again with something like Roxy Music's Avalon or a CD from the Cuban group Buena Vista Social Club. This way I'll send everyone home feeling upbeat and thinking, \"Wasn't that fun!\" East Hampton Clam Chowder Serves 6 to 8This soup is a variation on a recipe from the original Loaves and Fishes Cookbook written by friends Devon Fredericks and Susan Costner. Instead of the usual bland cream and clams, this one is like a clam stew with lots of vegetables and just a bit of milk to finish. You can make it a day in advance and reheat it slowly before dinner.12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, divided2 cups chopped yellow onions (2 onions)2 cups medium-diced celery (4 stalks)2 cups medium-diced carrots (6 carrots)4 cups peeled medium-diced boiling potatoes (8 potatoes)1 1/2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme leaves (1/2 teaspoon dried)1 teaspoon kosher salt1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1 quart (4 cups) clam juice1/2 cup all-purpose flour2 cups milk3 cups chopped fresh chowder clams (1 1/2 pounds shucked clams)Melt 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) of the butter in a large heavy-bottomed stockpot. Add the onions and cook over medium-low heat for 10 minutes, or until translucent. Add the celery, carrots, potatoes, thyme, salt, and pepper and saut\u00c3\u00a9 for 10 more minutes. Add the clam juice, bring to a boil, and simmer, uncovered, until the vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.In a small pot, melt the remaining 8 tablespoons of butter and whisk in the flour. Cook over very low heat for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Whisk in a cup of the hot broth and then pour this mixture back into the cooked vegetables. Simmer for a few minutes until the broth is thickened.Add the milk and clams and heat gently for a few minutes to cook the clams. Taste for salt and pepper. Serve hot.If you use bottled clam juice instead of fresh, you may need to add more salt. Chicken Noodle Soup Serves 6Forget canned soup-this is the real thing. And wouldn't we all feel better after eating a bowl? I love having homemade chicken stock in the freezer so I can make this soup in a hurry.1 whole (2 split) chicken breast, bone in, skin onOlive oilKosher saltFreshly ground black pepper2 quarts homemade Chicken Stock (page 93)1 cup medium-diced celery (2 stalks)1 cup medium-diced carrots (3 carrots)2 cups wide egg noodles1/4 cup chopped fresh parsleyPreheat the oven to 350 degrees.Place the chicken breast on a sheet pan and rub the skin with olive oil. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Roast for 35 to 40 minutes, until cooked through. When cool enough to handle, remove the meat from the bones, discard the skin, and shred or dice the chicken meat.Bring the chicken stock to a simmer in a large pot and add the celery, carrots, and noodles. Simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes, until the noodles are cooked. Add the cooked chicken meat and parsley and heat through.Season to taste and serve.I use Goodman's wide egg noodles. Roasted Vegetable Soup Serves 6 to 8I love a recipe that uses leftovers. When I'm making roasted vegetables for dinner, I'll make a double batch and have extras for soup the next day. This is a very versatile recipe-you can also throw in last night's mashed potatoes and even the tossed green salad from lunch! It all adds wonderful flavor and goodness. And how else can you get vegetables into your kids without their knowing it?6 to 8 cups chicken stock, preferably homemade (page 93)1 recipe Roasted Winter Vegetables (page 110)Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepperfor servingBrioche Croutons (page 36)Good olive oilIn a large saucepan, heat 6 cups of chicken stock. In two batches, coarsely puree the roasted vegetables and the chicken stock in the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade. Pour the soup back into the pot and season to taste. Thin with more chicken stock and reheat. The soup should be thick but not like a vegetable puree, so add more chicken stock and/or water until it's the consistency you like.Serve with brioche croutons and a drizzle of good olive oil. Brioche Croutons Makes 6 to 8 cupsAren't the croutons the best part of a Caesar salad? These croutons are made with brioche bread and they're delicious in soup or on a salad. One day I put some out with drinks and they all disappeared! This is a great way to use that leftover bread in the freezer.1 12-ounce brioche loaf or challah2 tablespoons good olive oil1/2 teaspoon kosher salt1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepperPreheat the oven to 350 degrees.Slice the bread about 3/4 inch thick. Cut off the crusts and then cut the slices in 3/4-inch dice. You should have 6 to 8 cups of croutons.Place the croutons on a sheet pan and toss them with the olive oil, salt, and pepper. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, tossing once, until they're nicely browned on all sides. Cool to room temperature before using and store in a sealed plastic bag. Smoked Salmon Spread Makes 1 1/2 pintsWe started to make this dip at Barefoot Contessa to use up extra smoked salmon, but it was so popular that we had to buy more salmon just to make it. This is my idea of the perfect \"no-cook\" appetizer to serve with drinks. And the good news is that it actually tastes better if you make it a few days early.8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature1/2 cup sour cream1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice1 tablespoon minced fresh dill1 teaspoon prepared horseradish, drained1/2 teaspoon kosher salt1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1/4 pound (4 ounces) smoked salmon, mincedCream the cheese in an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment until just smooth. Add the sour cream, lemon juice, dill, horseradish, salt, and pepper, and mix. Add the smoked salmon and mix well. Chill and serve with crudit\u00c3\u00a9s or crackers.If you can find it, I prefer Norwegian salmon; it's drier and less salty than other smoked salmon. Buffalo Chicken Wings Makes 32 piecesMy assistant Barbara Libath and I know that if we test a recipe during the day and we both go home and make it for dinner, it's a winner. These chicken wings, which are broiled not fried, passed that test. Served with the traditional blue cheese dip and celery sticks, they're delicious!for the wings16 chicken wings (about 3 pounds)1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter1 teaspoon cayenne pepper4 teaspoons Frank's Hot Sauce, or 1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce1 teaspoon kosher saltfor the dip1 1/2 cups crumbled gorgonzola or other blue cheese1 cup good mayonnaise3/4 cup sour cream2 tablespoons milk3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepperCelery sticks, for servingPreheat the broiler.Cut the chicken wings in thirds, cutting between the bones. Discard the wing tips. Melt the butter and add the cayenne, hot sauce, and salt. Put the wings on a sheet pan and brush them with the melted butter. Broil them about 3 inches below the heat for 8 minutes. Turn the wings, brush them again with the butter, and broil for 4 more minutes, or until cooked.For the dip, place the blue cheese, mayonnaise, sour cream, milk, Worcestershire, salt, and pepper in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Process until almost smooth.Serve the chicken wings hot or at room temperature with the blue cheese dip and celery sticks. Tuna Tartare Serves 6On one of my book tours, Barbara Libath and I found ourselves at the fabulous Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. After we stopped running around the rooms exclaiming, \"There are two bathrooms! There are four televisions!\" we went to the bar downstairs to meet some friends. We were served a fresh tuna tartare that I had to come home and try to re-create. I think this is close.3/4 pound very fresh tuna steak4 tablespoons olive oilGrated zest of 1 lime3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice1/2 teaspoon wasabi powder1 teaspoon soy sauce6 dashes Tabasco sauce1 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper1/4 cup minced scallions, white and green parts (2 scallions)1/2 ripe Hass avocado1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds (optional)Cut the tuna into 1/4-inch dice and place it in a medium bowl. In a small bowl, combine the olive oil, lime zest, lime juice, wasabi, soy sauce, Tabasco, salt, and pepper. Pour over the tuna, add the scallions, and mix well. Cut the avocado in half, remove the seed, and peel. Cut the avocado into 1/4-inch dice. Carefully mix the avocado into the tuna mixture. Add the toasted sesame seeds if using and season to taste. Allow the mixture to sit in the refrigerator for at least an hour for the flavors to blend. Serve on crackers.Use the finest quality tuna you can find; two of the best are yellowfin and big-eye.Wasabi is a powder made from the dried root of Japanese horseradish. You can find this very pungent seasoning in the Asian section of the grocery store. Endive, Stilton & Walnuts Serves 6This is a good salad to make in winter when endive is one of the only salad \"greens\" available. It's so easy to make and yet so elegant. You can make the vinaigrette several days in advance.1 1/2 pounds endive (5 heads)1 cup walnut halves (3 ounces)3 tablespoons white wine or champagne vinegar1 teaspoon Dijon mustard1 extra-large egg yolk, at room temperature (see Note)1 teaspoon kosher salt1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1/2 cup good olive oil6 to 8 ounces English Stilton cheese, crumbled1/4 cup whole fresh flat-leaf parsley leavesCut the end off each head of endive and peel or cut each leaf off the core. If the leaves are large, cut them in half lengthwise. Place the leaves in a large mixing bowl.Toast the walnuts in a dry saut\u00e9 pan over medium heat for about 3 minutes, tossing often, until warmed and crisp.Whisk together the vinegar, mustard, egg yolk, salt, and pepper in a bowl. While whisking, slowly add the olive oil until the dressing is emulsified. Pour enough dressing onto the endive leaves to moisten and place them on individual plates. Sprinkle each salad with the crumbled Stilton, walnuts, and parsley leaves. Season to taste and serve.If you're worried about eating raw egg yolk, substitute 1 tablespoon mayonnaise. Green Salad with Creamy Mustard Vinaigrette Serves 6 to 8When Alex Witchel, the talented New York Times writer and novelist, came to interview me in East Hampton, it was a particularly miserable, cold, and rainy winter day. I served her a steaming bowl of lentil soup from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, a salad prepared with this vinaigrette, and a cheese board with Cheddar and Brie. It was a simple but warming lunch and we had a wonderful afternoon together. She graciously requested a copy of this recipe.3 tablespoons champagne vinegar1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard1/2 teaspoon minced fresh garlic1 extra-large egg yolk, at room temperature (see Note)3/4 teaspoon kosher salt1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1/2 cup good olive oilSalad greens or mesclun mix for 6 to 8 peopleIn a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, mustard, garlic, egg yolk, salt, and pepper. While whisking, slowly add the olive oil until the vinaigrette is emulsified.Toss the greens with enough dressing to moisten and serve immediately.If you're worried about raw egg, substitute 1 tablespoon mayonnaise.When you're serving a salad for a dinner party, put the vinaigrette in the bottom of a serving bowl and place the greens on top. This can sit for an hour or two until you're ready to toss and serve it. Arugula with Parmesan Serves 6When I'm having a dinner party, I try not to cook more than two things; I'll assemble the rest. That way I don't spend the evening standing in front of the oven fretting, \"Is it done?\" This is an easy salad to assemble as a first course. The arugula is peppery, the vinaigrette lemony, and the Parmesan spicy. Prepare the ingredients in advance and just toss them together before dinner. Serve with a wedge of lemon if you like.1/2 pound fresh arugula (3 large bunches)1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (2 lemons)1/2 cup good olive oil1/2 teaspoon kosher salt1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1/4-pound chunk very good Parmesan cheeseIf the arugula has roots attached, cut them off. Fill the sink with cold water and toss the arugula for a few minutes to clean. Spin-dry the leaves and place them in a large bowl.In a small bowl, whisk together the lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Pour enough dressing on the arugula to moisten. Toss well and place the salad on individual plates.With a very sharp knife or a vegetable peeler, shave the Parmesan into large shards and arrange them on the arugula.Since this recipe has very few ingredients, it depends on using the best for its flavor. I always choose aged Italian Parmesan (Parmigiano-Reggiano) cheese. Parmesan Roasted Asparagus Serves 6Italians often eat their vegetables as \"antipasti,\" that is, before the main course. This is a very easy first course that I sometimes serve in the classic Italian way, topped with a single fried egg.2 1/2 pounds fresh asparagus (about 30 large)2 tablespoons olive oil1/2 teaspoon kosher salt1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese2 lemons cut in wedges, for servingPreheat the oven to 400 degrees.If the stalks of the asparagus are thick, peel the bottom half of each.Lay them in a single layer on a sheet pan and drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast for 15 to 20 minutes, until tender. Sprinkle with the Parmesan and return to the oven for another minute. Serve with lemon wedges.I prefer thick asparagus to thin ones; they have much more flavor. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Cooking Methods"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 13.95}, {"asin": "B0061BT9XG", "title": "Islands in the Snow: A journey to explore Nepal's trekking peaks (Footsteps on the Mountain Diaries)", "author": "Mark Horrell", "description": "About the Author For many years Mark Horrell has been writing what has been described as one of the most credible Everest opinion blogs out there. He writes about trekking and mountaineering from the often silent perspective of the commercial client. For nearly 20 years he has been exploring the world's greater mountain ranges and keeping a diary of his travels. As a writer he strives to do for mountain history what Bill Bryson did for long-distance hiking. His favourite mountaineering book is The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman. --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Asia"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "B00DTUHI2Q", "title": "NYPD Red 2", "author": "James Patterson", "description": "Review \"In the case of NYPD RED, there is simply too much fun --- in the form of inventive murder, sex, chemistry, investigation, more murder, more sex, and the like. Potboiler? Yes. Wonderfully told? Indeed.\"\u2015 bookreporter.com PRAISE FOR JAMES PATTERSON:\"The prolific Patterson seems unstoppable.\"\u2015 USA Today \"James Patterson knows how to sell thrills and suspense in clean, unwavering prose.\"\u2015 People \"Patterson's novels are sleek entertainment machines, the Porsches of commercial fiction, expertly engineered and lightning fast.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author James Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records . Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977 James Patterson's books have sold more than 300 million copies. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels , the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider . He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}], "target_asin": "1440213984"}
{"user_id": "AF4EASWWJLLENOCLMJ7DZRCD7FHQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1437714560", "title": "Study Guide for Pathophysiology for the Health Professions", "author": "Barbara E. Gould", "description": "Review Get more practice for Pathophysiology for the Health Professions", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Basic Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 1.18}, {"asin": "1405104376", "title": "Soap For Family Medicine (BLACKWELL'S SOAP SERIES)", "author": "Daniel C. Maldonado MD", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 29.0}, {"asin": "1451191979", "title": "Dermatology for Advanced Practice Clinicians", "author": "Margaret A. Bobonich", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 73.31}, {"asin": "0323080243", "title": "Pediatric Primary Care (Burns, Pediatric Primary Care)", "author": "Dawn Lee Garzon Maaks", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.44}, {"asin": "1451191863", "title": "The Essential Guide to Primary Care Procedures", "author": "Rebecca Small MD FAAFP", "description": "Review 4-Star Review from Doody's Review Service!\"This remains one of the best, if not the best, book for understanding and learning how to perform the basic outpatient procedures in the primary care office. The first edition was published in 2009. Because the purpose of this book is to teach, the editor describes the focus of this second edition as breaking down each procedure into its component parts and illustrating techniques to give primary care and emergency medicine providers the skills necessary to provide primary care services. The editor and contributors have continued the work begun with the first edition. The audience includes primary care and emergency medicine providers, resident or attending, as well as the nursing and technical staff who are called upon to prepare patients and assist in the procedure. For the most part, the contributors are highly experienced practitioners and teachers. The value of this book lies in the completeness of the information , the explanations of the important aspects of the procedure, indications and contraindications, the equipment lists, the pictures and videos of the procedure, and the CPT billing codes associated with the procedures. This continues to be a most necessary addition to every training program in primary care or emergency medicine. It is one of the best books on outpatient procedures -- there are few that come close.\"Reviewed by Vincent F Carr, DO, MSA, FACC, FACP(Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences) on behalf of Doody's Review ServiceWeighted Numerical Score: 94 - 4 Stars!", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 120.6}, {"asin": "1437709656", "title": "Pathophysiology for the Health Professions", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Basic Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.05}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1451173431", "title": "Algorithmic Diagnosis of Symptoms and Signs: A Cost-Effective Approach", "author": "R. Douglas Collins", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 19.29}, {"asin": "1599951509", "title": "The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History", "author": "Bret Witter", "description": "About the Author Robert M. Edsel is the Founder and President of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, a not-for-profit entity that received the National Humanities Medal, the highest honor given in the United States for work in the humanities field. He also serves as a Trustee at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. He lives in Dallas. Bret Witter cowrote the bestseller Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World (Grand Central). He lives in Louisville, KY.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 18.99}, {"asin": "0821755498", "title": "Merlin's Legacy #03: Daughter Of Light", "author": "Quinn Taylor Evans", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Contemporary"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 5.95}, {"asin": "0316284610", "title": "The Unwanted: A Memoir of Childhood", "author": "Kien Nguyen", "description": "About the Author Kien Nguyen was born in Nhatrang, South Vietnam, in 1967 to a Vietnamese mother and an American father. He left Vietnam in 1985 through the United Nations' Orderly Departure Program. After spending time in a refugee camp in the Philippines, Nguyen arrived in the United States. He is now a dentist in New York City.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 12.19}], "target_asin": "1451173431"}
{"user_id": "AF4W546VVXAW5QZ62NMGGBIJSGQQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0968838936", "title": "Mediterranean By Cruise Ship: The Complete Guide to Mediterranean Cruising, Third Edition", "author": "Anne Vipond", "description": "Review \"...perfect for anyone looking for an overview of ports of call and doesn't want to buy several books.\" -- ABOUT CRUISES.COM, MARCH 12TH, 2004 \"This book should be considered a high priority. A core resource for most public libraries.\" -- Library Journal. March 2005 From the Publisher Here is an indispensable guide for anyone taking a Mediterranean cruise. Detail at your fingertips on: Ports of Call, Shore Excursions, Archaeological Sites. Art & Architecture, History & Culture, Shopping Tips, Cruise & Land Tour Options. Mediterranean By Cruise Ship focuses on the ports, islands and places of interest of this fascinating destination from the view of the cruise traveller. Each chapter provides historical background and practical information and includes accurate walking maps showing exactly where ships dock, tips on getting around, concise descriptions of local attractions and beautiful photographs that capture the essence of each locale. Veteran cruise writer Anne Vipond, author of a series of cruising guides, has created a reliable reference book that helps cruise travellers make the most of their time in port.", "categories": [], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 5.96}, {"asin": "0968838979", "title": "Alaska by Cruise Ship: The Complete Guide to Cruising Alaska with Giant Pull-out Map (5th Edition)", "author": null, "description": "Review \"This book should be considered a high priority. A core resource for most public libraries.\" -- Library Journal, March 2005 With her crisp writing and in-depth reporting, she's created a terrific guide book on Alaska. -- Cruise Critic, August 9, 2007", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Canada"], "average_rating": 3.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1493027727", "title": "The Connecticut River from the Air: An Intimate Perspective of New England\u2019s Historic Waterway", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Now Executive Director of the New England Air Museum, Jerry Roberts\u2019 30-year career as an exhibit designer, writer, documentarian, and museum executive has earned him a reputation as a storyteller able to engage the public in dynamic accounts of historical events and places with a very modern sensibility. He has served as Vice President in charge of Exhibits at the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum in New York City, Executive Director of Connecticut River Museum in Essex CT, and Battlefield Historian for the British Raid on Essex Project. He has designed and built over forty exhibits, has written or co-written several books and documentaries and has published dozens of newspaper and magazine articles. Roberts is an avid sailor and merchant marine master and has navigated the eastern seaboard in small boats and historic vessels from The Gulf Coast to Nova Scotia. He lives overlooking the Connecticut River with his wife and two children. When not flying wide body passenger jets around the globe for one of the worlds largest airlines, Captain Tom Walsh, a United States Marine Corps veteran, explores Americas landscape and waterways in his own small aircraft. His company, Shoreline Aerial Photography ( www.shoreline-aerial.com ) is commissioned by major corporations, government agencies, and individuals to document large scale construction projects, keep tabs on urbanization, and capture breathtaking views of private homes, vessels, and majestic scenes all over the country. He flies out of both Connecticut and Florida. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 38.11}, {"asin": "0738556297", "title": "Old Tucson Studios (Images of America: Arizona)", "author": "Paul J. Lawton", "description": "About the Author Author Paul J. Lawton served as deputy sheriff of the Pima County Sheriff's Department for 25 years and, in 1998, became the chief pyro technician and armorer at Old Tucson Studios. He has previously written three other books: The Last Full Measure: Law Enforcement Deaths in Arizona, Old Tucson: Then and Now, and Hollywood in the Desert: The Films of Old Tucson. In this volume, he has gathered together more than 200 vintage photographs from a forgotten cache of records discovered in wake of a devastating 1995 fire at the studios.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 21.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "192774721X", "title": "Alaska by Cruise Ship (Ocean Cruise Guides)", "author": "Anne Vipond", "description": "About the Author Anne Vipond, author of several guidebooks to cruising, draws on her sailing background to impart her enthusiasm for cruise travel. She is the recipient of a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism award for her guidebooks and her cruising articles have been published in magazines and newspapers across North America and overseas.", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Canada"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 18.45}, {"asin": "1401322352", "title": "Fisherman's Bend (Jane Bunker)", "author": "Linda Greenlaw", "description": "From Booklist Formerly a Florida police detective, Jane Bunker is now an insurance investigator who has picked up a second job as the assistant deputy of Knox County, Maine. On the way back from Cobble Harbor, where she was investigating a claim for a vandalized boat, Jane comes across a circling lobster boat that is missing its crew. The captain, Parker Alley, is presumed dead, but Jane investigates the case along with the death by heroin overdose of Parker\u2019s son. Parker had numerous enemies, and complicating matters, the lobstermen in the area are upset about a possible aquaculture venture that would grow oysters in the bay. Jane ties up all the loose ends while she works to become a part of her new community. Small-town life, the difficult job of harvesting lobsters, and the beauty of the Maine coast are well delineated as Greenlaw immerses the reader in boating practice and lore. The tenacious Jane is a fully fleshed protagonist, and the secondary characters are also well developed in this satisfying mystery, the second in a series. --Sue O'Brien About the Author Linda Greenlaw has been a deep-sea fisherman for 18 years, becoming the first and only female swordfish captain in the Grand Banks Fleet. This career earned her a prominent role in Sebastian Junger's runaway bestseller, The Perfect Storm and a protrayal in the subsequent film. She was raised in Maine and graduated from Colby College. Greenlaw now lives on Isle au Haut, Maine, where she captains a lobster boat.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 16.22}, {"asin": "B0043M6L22", "title": "Criminal Intent (Mike Daley/Rosie Fernandez Legal Thriller Book 3)", "author": "Sheldon Siegel", "description": "Amazon.com Review Mike Daley has a checkered past as a former priest, an ex-public defender, and even a corporate lawyer. Now he's a criminal defense attorney partnered with his ex-wife, Rosie, in a San Francisco firm that's too small to attract high-profile clients unless they happen to be related to the principals--which in this case, they are. The chief suspect in the murder of famed director Richard MacArthur and the star of the film that's supposed to resurrect his fading career is Rosie's niece Angel. While the plot features too many other suspects and not enough surprises, it's the relationship between Mike and Rosie that gives this well-crafted but otherwise humdrum mystery its appeal. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist Mike Daley, former priest and public defender, returns in his third San Francisco-based adventure. He and his law partner, ex-wife Rosie Fernandez, find themselves squarely in the middle of several disasters--all involving their extended family. Rosie's niece, Angel, an up-and-coming actress, is accused of murdering her much older husband, a has-been movie director who was about to release his comeback hit--starring Angel, of course. Rosie's brother, a hardworking business owner in the Mission District, is being pinched by politically connected wiseguys to support a controversial business development. As if that pressure weren't enough, Mike is forced to keep his intimate relationship with a judge under wraps for fear of ruining her career, plus Rosie faces her own personal struggles. Despite the cumulating setbacks, Mike and Rosie forge ahead to defend Angel, which brings them to the doorsteps of the elite, in both San Francisco and Hollywood. Their discovery methods are meticulous and ingenious, which should keep those who crave legal details from complaining about the relative lack of courtroom scenes. The relationship between Mike and Rosie continues to be the strength of this series, and a surprise ending will keep readers yearning for more. Mary Frances Wilkens Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library Journal In Siegel's third fast-paced legal thriller (after Special Circumstances and Incriminating Evidence) featuring the San Francisco criminal defense team of Mike Daley and Rosie Fernandez, the couple rushes to aid Rosie's niece, Angelina, after she is arrested for the bludgeoning death of her husband, an Academy Award-winning movie director. Family ties are also tested when Rosie's brother, Tony, is ensnared in a subplot of graft and extortion. Siegel does a nice job of blending humor and human interest into the mystery. Daley and Fernandez are competent lawyers, not superhuman crime fighters featured in more commonplace legal thrillers. With great characters and realistic dialog, this book provides enough intrigue and courtroom drama to please any fan of the genre. Recommended for all public libraries. - Jill M. Tempest, Jackson-George Regional Lib. Syst., MS Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly The charm and originality that marked Special Circumstances and Incriminating Evidence, Siegel's first two legal thrillers about former priest and ex-public defender Mike Daley, are wearing a bit thin in this third outing. Mike's firm has moved from a shabby office over a martial arts studio in San Francisco's Mission District to a spot around the corner that used to house a tarot reader. He practices criminal law with his ex-wife, Rosie Fernandez, and another former girlfriend is also a partner in the struggling firm. Mike is having a secret affair with a sitting California Superior Court judge; Rosie is undergoing treatment for breast cancer; their 10-year-old daughter, Grace (and everyone else except Rosie and Mike), thinks they should get back together. But the real fireworks are provided by various members of Rosie's extended family, which seems to be even vaster than Sharon McCone's giant clan in Marcia Muller's books. Rosie's niece, Angel, a top model married to a fading film director, is accused of beating her husband to death with his Oscar statuette, while Angel's father, Tony, a respected produce merchant, gets involved in a kickback scheme to build a movie studio in the China Basin area. Siegel is still adept at detailing the workings of criminal law from the inside and his sense of nostalgia for the rapidly vanishing working-class enclaves of San Francisco is palpable. But this installment meanders a bit and relies too heavily on the familiar personality quirks of its protagonists. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Sheldon Siegel has been a lawyer in private practice for eighteen years. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Enough intrigue and courtroom drama to please any fan of the genre. -- Library Journal Ingenious...a surprise ending that will keep readers yearning for more. -- Booklist --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0747252874", "title": "The Spider's Web Sister Fidelma (Sister Fidelma Mysteries)", "author": "Peter Tremayne", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}], "target_asin": "192774721X"}
{"user_id": "AFXXRDYB7CSWOXBIRRQG7T44XNDA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B00MT79EAY", "title": "Physics Concept Questions - Book 1 (Mechanics 1): 400+ Questions & Answers", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B00MTSJDZ4", "title": "Physics Concept Questions - Book 4 (Heat): 100+ Questions & Answers", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00MT7VO3Y", "title": "Physics Concept Questions - Book 2 (Mechanics 2): 500+ Questions & Answers", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B00MTTRLA2", "title": "Physics Concept Questions - Book 5 (Sound): 150+ Questions & Answers", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B00MTU6AQC", "title": "Physics Concept Questions - Book 6 (Electricity & Magnetism): 300+ Questions & Answers", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B00MTSJBA6", "title": "Physics Concept Questions - Book 3 (Matter): 300+ Questions & Answers", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1284089231", "title": "Introduction to Public Health", "author": "Mary-Jane Schneider", "description": "About the Author Mary Jane Schneider is the Director of Interdisciplinary Programs and Clinical Associate Professor of Health Policy, Management, and Behavior at the School of Public Health, University at Albany, State University of New York, Rensselaer.", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.0}, {"asin": "0345484223", "title": "The Measure of the Magic: Legends of Shannara (Pre-Shannara: Legends of Shannara)", "author": "Terry Brooks", "description": "Review \u201cImmensely entertaining . . . a page-turner full of action and magic.\u201d\u2014Bookreporter  \u00a0 \u201cClassic Terry Brooks . . . infused with details of Shannara\u2019s legends.\u201d\u2014Fantasy Faction \u00a0 \u201c[Brooks is] the most important fantasy writer since J.R.R. Tolkien.\u201d \u2014Rocky Mountain News \u201cFoolproof for fantasy lovers.\u201d \u2014Library Journal About the Author Terry Brooks has thrilled readers for decades with his powers of imagination and storytelling. He is the author of more than thirty books, most of which have been New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Judine, in the Pacific Northwest. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. One \u00a0 Humming tunelessly, the ragpicker walked the barren, empty wasteland in the aftermath of the rainstorm.\u00a0 The skies were still dark with clouds and the earth was sodden and slick with surface water, but none of that mattered to him.\u00a0 Others might prefer the sun and blue skies and the feel of hard, dry earth beneath their feet.\u00a0 Others might revel in the brightness and the warmth.\u00a0 But life was created in the darkness and damp of the womb, and the ragpicker took considerable comfort in knowing that procreation was instinctual and needed nothing of the face of nature\u2019s disposition that he liked the least. He was an odd looking fellow, an unprepossessing, almost comical tatterdemalion.\u00a0 He was tall and whipcord thin, and he walked like one of those of those long-legged water birds.\u00a0 Dressed in dark clothes that had seen much better days, he tended to blend in nicely with the mostly colorless landscape he traveled.\u00a0 He carried his rags and scraps of cloth in a frayed patchwork bag slung over one shoulder, the bag bursting at the seams with its load, looking very much as if it would rip apart completely with each fresh step its bearer took.\u00a0 A pair of scuffed leather boots completed the ensemble, scavenged from a dead man some years back, but still holding up quite nicely. Everything about the ragpicker suggested that he was harmless.\u00a0 Everything marked him as easy prey in a world where predators dominated the remnants of a decimated population.\u00a0 He knew how he looked to the things that were always hunting.\u00a0 He knew what they thought when they saw him coming.\u00a0 But that was all right.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t mind.\u00a0 He had stayed alive this long by keeping his head down and staying out of harm\u2019s way.\u00a0 People like him, they didn\u2019t get noticed.\u00a0 The trick was in not doing anything to call attention to yourself. So he tried hard to give the clear and unmistakable impression that he was nothing but a poor wanderer who wanted to be left alone, but you didn\u2019t always get what you wanted in this world.\u00a0 Even now, other eyes were already sizing him up.\u00a0 He could feel them doing so, several pairs in several different places.\u00a0 But those eyes that belonged to the animals \u2013 the things that the poisons and chemicals had turned into mutants \u2013 were already turning away.\u00a0 Their instincts were sharper, more finely tuned, and they could sense when something wasn\u2019t right.\u00a0 Given the choice, they would almost always back away. It was the eyes of the human freaks that stayed fixed on him, eyes that lacked the necessary awareness to judge him properly.\u00a0 These were the predators that seldom sensed the danger and so almost never turned away.\u00a0 Two were studying him now, deciding whether or not to confront him.\u00a0 He sighed.\u00a0 He would try to avoid them, of course.\u00a0 He would try to make himself seem not worth the trouble.\u00a0 But, again, you didn\u2019t always get what you wanted. He breathed in the cool, damp air, absorbing the taste of the rain\u2019s aftermath on his tongue, of the stirring of stagnation and sickness generated by the pounding of the sudden rain, of the smells of raw earth and decay, the whole of it marvelously welcome.\u00a0 Sometimes, when he was alone, he could pretend he was the only one left in the world.\u00a0 He could pretend that what remained of the world was his and his alone.\u00a0 He could think of it all as his private preserve, his special place, and imagine that he was all that was left and everything belonged to him. He could pretend that nothing would ever bother him again. His humming dropped away, changing to a little song: Ragpicker, ragpicker, what you gonna do. When the hunters are hunting and they\u2019re for hunting you. Ragpicker, ragpicker, just stay low. If you don\u2019t draw attention they might let you go. He hummed a few more bars, wondering if he had gotten past the predators.\u00a0 He was thinking it was almost time to stop and have something to drink and eat.\u00a0 But that would have to wait.\u00a0 He sighed, his lean, sharp-featured face wreathed in a tight smile that caused the muscles of his jaw to stand out like cords. Ragpicker, ragpicker, you\u2019re all alone. The hunters that are hunting want to pick your bones. Ragpicker, ragpicker, just walk on. If you wait them out they will soon be gone. He crossed a meadow, a small stream filled with muddy water, a rocky flat in which tiny purple flowers were blooming and a withered woods in which a handful of poplars grew sparse and separate as if strangers to each other.\u00a0 Ahead, there was movement in a rugged mass of boulders that formed the threshold to foothills leading up to the next chain of mountains, a high and wild and dominant presence.\u00a0 He registered the movement, ignored it.\u00a0 Those who had been watching him were still there and growing restless; he must skirt their hiding place and hope they were distracted by other possibilities.\u00a0 But there didn\u2019t appear to be anyone else out here other than himself, and he was afraid that they would come after him just because they were bored. He continued on furtively, still humming softly. Daylight leached away as the clouds began to thicken anew.\u00a0 It might actually rain some more, he decided.\u00a0 He glanced at the skies in all four directions, noting the movement of the clouds and the shifting of their shadows against the earth.\u00a0 Yes, more rain coming.\u00a0 Better that he find shelter soon. He stalked up the slope into the rocks, his long thin legs stretching out, meandering here and there as if searching for the best way through, trying to move away from the watchers, trying to pretend he was heedless of them, that he knew nothing of them and they, in turn, should not want to bother with him. But, suddenly, his worst fears were realized and just like that they were upon him. They came out of the rocks, having moved from their previous hiding place, two shaggy-haired, ragged men, one large and one small, both carrying blades and clubs.\u00a0 One was blind in one eye and the other limped badly.\u00a0 They had seen hard times, the ragpicker thought, and they would not be likely to have seen much charity and therefore not much inclined to dispense any.\u00a0 He stood where he was and waited on them patiently, knowing that flight was useless. \u201cYou,\u201d one-eye said, pointing a knife at him.\u00a0 \u201cWhat you got in that bag of yours?\u201d The ragpicker shrugged.\u00a0 \u201cRags.\u00a0 I collect them and barter for food and drink.\u00a0 It\u2019s what I do.\u201d \u201cYou got something more than that, I\u2019d guess,\u201d the second man, the larger of the two, the limper, said.\u00a0 \u201cBetter show us what you got.\u201d The ragpicker hesitated, and then dumped everything on the ground, his entire collection of brightly colored scarves and bits of cloth, a few whole pieces of shirts and coats, a hat or two, some boots.\u00a0 Everything he had managed to find in his travels of late that he hadn\u2019t bargained away with the Trolls or such. \u201cThat\u2019s crap!\u201d snarled one eye, thrusting his knife at the ragpicker, nearly pricking him with the tip.\u00a0 \u201cYou got to do better than that!\u00a0 You got to give us something of worth!\u201d \u201cYou got coin?\u201d demanded the other. Hopeless, the ragpicker thought.\u00a0 No one had coin anymore and even if they did it was valueless.\u00a0 Gold or silver, maybe.\u00a0 A good weapon, especially one of the old automatics from the days of the Great Wars, would have meant something, would have been barter material.\u00a0 But no one had coins. \u201cDon\u2019t have any,\u201d he said, backing away a step.\u00a0 \u201cCan I pick up my rags?\u201d One-eye stepped forward and ground the colored cloth into the ground with the heel of his boot.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s what I think of your rags.\u00a0 Now watch and see what I\u2019m gonna do to you!\u201d The ragpicker backed away another step.\u00a0 \u201cPlease, I don\u2019t have anything to give you.\u00a0 I just want you to let me pass.\u00a0 I\u2019m not worth your trouble.\u00a0 Really.\u201d \u201cYou ain\u2019t worth much, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d said the one who limped.\u00a0 \u201cBut that don\u2019t mean you get to go through here free.\u00a0 This is our territory and no one passes without they make some payment to us!\u201d The two men came forward again, a step at a time, spreading out just a little to hem the ragpicker in, to keep him from making an attempt to get around them.\u00a0 As if such a thing were possible, the ragpicker thought, given his age and condition and clear lack of athletic ability.\u00a0 Did he look like he could get past them if he tried?\u00a0 Did he look as if he could do anything? \u201cI don\u2019t think this is a good idea,\u201d he said suddenly, stopping short in his retreat.\u201cYou might not fully understand what it is that you are doing.\u201d The predators stopped and stared at him, not quite believing what they were hearing.\u00a0 \u201cYou don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good idea?\u201d said the one that limped.\u00a0 \u201cIs that what you said, you skinny old rat?\u201d The ragpicker shook his head.\u00a0 \u201cIt always comes down to this.\u00a0 I don\u2019t understand it.\u00a0 Let me ask you something.\u00a0 Do you know of a man who carries a black staff?\u201d The two exchanged a quick look.\u00a0 \u201cWho is he?\u201d asked one-eye.\u00a0 \u201cWhy would we know him?\u201dThe ragpicker sighed.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t know that you do.\u00a0 Probably you don\u2019t.\u00a0 But he would be someone who had real coin on him, should you know where to find him.\u00a0 You don\u2019t, do you?\u201d \u201cNaw, don\u2019t know anyone like that,\u201d snarled one-eye.\u00a0 He glanced at his companion.\u201cC\u2019mon, let\u2019s see what he\u2019s hiding in that sack.\u201d They came at the ragpicker with their blades held ready, stuffing the clubs in their belts.\u00a0 They were hunched forward slightly in preparation for getting past whatever defenses the scarecrow intended to offer, the blades held out in front of them. \u00a0The ragpicker stood his ground, no longer backing up, no longer looking as if he intended to try to escape.\u00a0 In fact, he didn\u2019t look quite the same man at all.\u00a0 The change was subtle and hard to identify, but it was evident that something was different about him.\u00a0 It was in his eyes as much as anywhere, in a gleam of madness that was bright and certain.\u00a0 But it was in his stance, as well.\u00a0 Before, he had looked like a frightened victim, someone who knew that he stood no chance at all against men like these.\u00a0 Now, he had the appearance of someone who had taken control of matters in spite of his apparent inability to do so, and his two attackers didn\u2019t like it. But that didn\u2019t stop them, of course.\u00a0 Men of this sort were never stopped by what they couldn\u2019t understand, only by what was bigger and stronger and better armed.\u00a0 The ragpicker was none of these.\u00a0 He was just an unlucky fool trying to be something he wasn\u2019t, making a last ditch effort to hang onto his life. One-eye struck first, his blade coming in low and swift towards the ragpicker\u2019s belly.\u00a0 The second man was only a step behind, striking out in a wild slash aimed at his victim\u2019s exposed neck.\u00a0 Neither blow reached its intended mark.\u00a0 The ragpicker never seemed to move, but suddenly he had hold of both wrists, bony fingers locking on flesh and bone and squeezing until his attackers cried out in pain, dropped their weapons and sank to their knees in shock, struggling to break free.\u00a0 But the ragpicker had no intention of releasing them.\u00a0 He just held them where they were, on their knees before him, moaning and writhing, studying their agonized expressions. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t make assumptions about people,\u201d he lectured them, bending close enough that they could see the crimson glow in his eyes, a gleam of bloodlust and rage.\u00a0 \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t be like that.\u201d His hands tightened further, and smoke rose through his fingers where they gripped the men\u2019s wrists.\u00a0 Now the attackers were howling and screaming in agony as their imprisoned wrists and hands turned black and charred, burned from the inside out. The ragpicker released them then and let them drop to the ground in huddled balls of quaking, blubbering despair, cradling their ruined arms, stricken by what had been done to them. \u201cYou\u2019ve ruined such a lovely day, too,\u201d the ragpicker admonished.\u00a0 \u201cAll I wanted was to be left alone to enjoy it, and now this.\u00a0 You really are pigs of the worst sort, and pigs deserve to be roasted and eaten!\u201d They cried out anew at this and attempt to crawl away, but he was on them much too quickly, seizing their heads and holding them fast.\u00a0 Smoke leaked from between his clutching fingers, rising from their heads in spiraling wisps, and the men jerked and writhed in response. \u201cHow does that feel?\u201d the ragpicker wanted to know.\u00a0 \u201cCan you tell what\u2019s happening to you?\u00a0 I\u2019m cooking your brains, in case you\u2019ve failed to recognize what you are experiencing.\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t feel very good, does it?\u201d It was a rhetorical question, which was just as well because neither man could manage any kind of intelligible answer.\u00a0 All they could do was hang suspended from the ragpicker\u2019s killing fingers until their brains were turned to mush and they were dead. The ragpicker let them drop.\u00a0 He thought about eating them, but the idea was too distasteful to consider seriously.\u00a0 They were vermin, and he didn\u2019t eat vermin.\u00a0 So he stripped them of their clothing, taking small items for his collection, scraps of cloth from each man that would remind him later of who they had been, and left them for scavengers he knew would not be picky.\u00a0 He gathered up his soiled rags from the earth into which they had been ground, brushed them off as best he could and returned them his carry bag.\u00a0 When everything was in place, he gave the dead men a final glance and started off once more. Bones of the dead left lying on the ground. One more day and they will never be found. Ragpicker, ragpicker, you never know There are rags to be found wherever you go. He sang it softly, repeated it a few times for emphasis, rearranging the words, and then went quiet.\u00a0 An interesting diversion, but massively unproductive.\u00a0 He had hoped the two creatures might have information about the man with the black staff, but they had disappointed him.\u00a0 So he would have to continue the search without any useful information to aid him.\u00a0 All he knew was what he sensed, and what he sensed would have to be enough for now. The man he sought was somewhere close, probably somewhere up in those mountains he was walking towards.\u00a0 So eventually he would find him. Eventually. The ragpicker allowed himself a small smile.\u00a0 There was no hurry.\u00a0 Time was something he had as much of as he needed. Time didn\u2019t really matter when you were a demon. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0618169318", "title": "How Do I Feel?/\u00bfC\u00f3mo me siento?: Bilingual English-Spanish (Good Beginnings)", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Pamela Zagarenski is the winner of two Caldecott Honors. The books she has illustrated have also been Booklist Editor's Choices, Horn Book Fanfare and Bulletin Blue Ribbon books, winners of Bank Street's Claudia Lewis Award, and translated into many languages. As well as illustrating picture books, she creates paintings and has a gift card line. She lives in Connecticut. Visit her online at pzagarenski.com, on Instagram\u00a0@sacredbee, and Twitter\u00a0@sacredbeez.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.99}], "target_asin": "B00MTSJBA6"}
{"user_id": "AGOZLGG7UIRO5JJXQBH6VPXLMUZA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0884488799", "title": "Not a Cat: a memoir", "author": "Winter Miller", "description": "Review \"You will love Not a Cat .\u00a0This is a friend in a cat suit!\" \u2015 Gloria Steinem \"Gato is my Yoda. I love this book.\" \u2015 Samantha Bee \"\u201cI don\u2019t feel that \u2018cat\u2019 describes me,\u201d a sleek gray tom announces at the start of this mod \u201cmemoir,\u201d a children\u2019s book debut \u201cas told to\u201d playwright Miller by her late pet, Gato. First outlining the numerous ways he\u2019s similar to other animals (\u201cSometimes I eat grass. Maybe I\u2019m a cow?\u201d), Gato goes on to describe having many human-like experiences. Stylish unlined illustrations show the feline driving a taxi in San Francisco, taking the subway in N.Y.C., and sipping a milk cocktail beneath the Hollywood sign. \u201cHow do you know I\u2019m not a person?\u201d questions the cool cat, clad in a green track suit and gold chains, before the book concludes with a fitting challenge to labels\u2019 utility. Novgorodoff\u2019s illustrations aptly portray people of various abilities, ages, cultures, religions, and skin tones, and a final portrait of Gato beneath the framed, cross-stitched adage \u201cYou be you\u201d resoundingly drives home Miller\u2019s message of acceptance. \" \u2015 PW \" Between his opening greeting and the bookend closing page on which he stalks away after taking no questions, Gato wants to make one thing perfectly clear: Although he has four legs, two ears, and a long, long tail, the word \"cat\" does not define him. His identity is his alone to describe and determine. With the help of Danica Novgorodoff's laugh-out-loud illustrations, author/storyteller Winter Miller takes young readers on a fun tour of Gato's adventures, accomplishments, and daily activities that makes mincemeat of any first impressions. Gato wears a sweater and a leash, so is he a dog? He runs in pastures, so is he a horse? He likes flowers, so is he a bee? He swims, so is he a duck? He has flown in airplanes and ridden in subways, so is he a person? Maybe he's all those things, but what he truly is, he wants us to know, is Gato. Critique:\u00a0Based upon the author's own feline companion, and to underline this message of empowerment and self-identity, the back cover and backmatter include photos of the real Gato (Winter Miller's cat) doing everything he claims and more. Signs on walls, headlines in newspapers, New Yorker cartoon homages, and sight gags on every page reward repeated readings and will make \"Not a Cat: A Memoir\" an truly fun picture book with a serious underlying message about self-determination. All the more impressive when considering that this is the author's first children's picture book, and while also available in a digital book format, \"Not a Cat: A Memoir\" is an original and unreservedly recommended addition to family, daycare center, preschool, elementary school, and community library picture book collections for children ages 3-5. \" \u2015 Susan Bethany, Midwest Book Review \"Add to the great philosophers in history, along with Plato and Kant, Gato the Cat. Well, maybe not a cat. Hmm. Just call Gato a cat searching for a sense of self, with verve, humor\u2015and plenty to teach us along the way.\" \u2015 Nicholas Kristof \"Gato, like all really interesting people, contains multitudes.\" \u2015 Jessica Love, author of Julian Is a Mermaid \"Can a cat teach us to embrace our multitudes? When that cat is Gato, as interpreted by Winter Miller, the answer is yes.\" \u2015 Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk \"What a fun, absolutely gorgeous book. It will invite young readers to open up their perspectives. I'm in love with Gato!\" \u2015 Maulik Pancholy, actor&Stonewall Honor-winning author of The Best At It All About the Author Winter Miller\u00a0is a playwright whose published plays include No One Is Forgotten , In Darfur , and The Penetration Play .\u00a0She has written for\u00a0The New York Times,\u00a0New York Magazine, and\u00a0The Boston Globe,\u00a0and her plays and essays appear in multiple anthologies. Winter was previously a journalist in the editorial department of\u00a0The New York Times, at Fox News, and at\u00a0Full Frontal\u00a0with Samantha Bee. She has been profiled in\u00a0The New Yorker, Bomb,\u00a0and on NPR\u2019s\u00a0Brian Lehrer Show\u00a0and\u00a0All of It with Alison Stewart. Not a Cat ,\u00a0Winter\u2019s first picture book, is the story lived by her extraordinary cat Gato. Learn more about Winter and Gato at\u00a0www.wintermiller.com.Danica Novgorodoff is an artist, writer, and graphic novelist from Brooklyn, NY and Louisville, KY. Her graphic novel Long Way Down (Atheneum; adapted from Jason Reynolds\u2019 novel) received starred reviews from Kirkus, SLJ, BCCB, and Booklist, the latter saying this: \u201cFar more than just an illustration of the events of the novel, Novgorodoff\u2019s iteration powerfully cultivates the tone and mood of its source material, demonstrating just how effective and artful comics can be.\u201d Her other graphic novels include The Undertaking of Lily Chen, Refresh Refresh, and Slow Storm from Macmillan, and the self-published A Late Freeze .\u00a0Her art and writing have been published in MoMA Magazine, Best American Comics, The Believer, Artforum, Esquire, VQR, Slate, Orion, Seneca Review, Ecotone Journal, The Arkansas International, and others.\u00a0Danica\u2019s works in progress include a graphic novel on climate change (MacMillan, in collaboration with journalist Meera Subramanian), a children\u2019s book on the explorer Alexander von Humboldt (Penguin Random House), and a book on rice (Flatiron Books; in collaboration with Harlem chef JJ Johnson).", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 12.24}, {"asin": "145493381X", "title": "Invent-a-Pet", "author": "Vicky Fang", "description": "About the Author Vicky Fang is a product designer and children\u2019s book author. This is her first picture book, and she has also written the early chapter book series, Layla and the Bots. She lives with her family in Mountain View, CA, and can be found online at vickyfang.com and on Twitter @fangmous.\u00a0 \u00a0 Tidawan Thaipinnarong is a freelance illustrator and visual development artist, currently based in Bangkok, Thailand. She graduated from Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California, with an MFA in Illustration. This is her first picture book.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1419741829", "title": "This Joy!", "author": "Shelley Johannes", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2-A young girl celebrates the world around her and the love within her in a story figuratively bursting with happiness. Enjoying the beauty of nature, from soft green grass to tall trees and sand beneath her feet, the child attempts to express the immense joy she feels within her while she is experiencing these everyday miracles. Sharing that everything is a gift, from being with friends and loved ones to watching birds take flight in the sky, the girl divulges one final secret: although we can't capture every part of the beautiful world in our hands, we can always stretch out our arms and hold on to our loved ones. Beautiful pencil, marker, and crayon illustrations bring to life the joy in the young protagonist's world, and it is easy to imagine she could be the artist behind the illustrations as she enjoys activities such as finger puppets and playing with blocks. The short, poetic sentences, made up of a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, combine perfectly with the ebullient illustrations. The emotions she is so eager to describe come through every lovely page. VERDICT A wonderful reflection on enjoying the amazing world and people around us, this book will have readers young and old smiling in recognition.-Selenia Paz\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \"A huge dose of joy and a clear reminder to celebrate each day and each other.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Beautiful pencil, marker, and crayon illustrations bring to life the joy in the young protagonist\u2019s world, and it is easy to imagine she could be the artist behind the illustrations as she enjoys activities such as finger puppets and playing with blocks. The short, poetic sentences, made up of a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, combine perfectly with the ebullient illustrations.\"\u2015 School Library Journal About the Author Shelley Johannes is the author-illustrator of the Beatrice Zinker, Upside Down Thinker chapter book series. A former architectural designer, she has a fondness for tracing paper, process, and accidental discoveries. She and her family live in Michigan with two feathered friends, Max and Alex, who make every day sunny and birdy. More Than Sunny was her debut picture book. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 3.7, "price": 18.71}, {"asin": "0063049449", "title": "Friendbots: Blink and Block Make a Wish (I Can Read Comics Level 2)", "author": "Vicky Fang", "description": "Review Amply demonstrates the values of a positive attitude and a little creative thinking. \u2014 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Vicky Fang is a children\u2019s product designer who invents things\u2014like cars that talk to each other, or buildings that play music, or games you can play with your voice. She\u2019s even designed robots for kids! She is the author of Invent-a-Pet, the Layla and the Bots series, the I Can Code board book series, and the Blink and Block I Can Read Comics titles.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 6.31}, {"asin": "1953458505", "title": "Long Goes to Dragon School", "author": "Helen H. Wu", "description": "Review \"A beautifully illustrated tale with an affecting message ...Wu offers a picture book about dragons that tells a story of diversity and inclusion. Wu weaves a positive message into a delightful story that will appeal to young readers...Using a dragon as the main character strengthens the overall message that everyone is different and has unique gifts to share ...Besom's appealing watercolor illustrations wonderfully complement the text , clearly representing the story's events. From beginning to end, the images will likely enchant youngsters as they get to know Long's world. \" - Kirkus Reviews Long learns perseverance and self-acceptance , while his class learns a valuable lesson on cultural differences . A thoughtful author's note explains dragons' roles as water spirits in China and draws parallels between Long's experiences and those of immigrants navigating new cultures . -Booklist An insightful picture book in which a young dragon with unique abilities struggles to fit in... learns the importance of individuality and diversity . -Foreword Reviews \"Children, and especially those from minority cultures, will find encouragement in this endearing tale of a young dragon learning to love his unique gifts.\" - Livia Blackburne, New York Times bestselling author of I Dream of Popo \"A witty and charming book that conveys a message of inclusion and diversity in the most delightful way possible.\" - Eric Fan, The Fan Brothers, creators of The Night Gardener and Ocean Meets Sky \"Dragons from both the East and the West come together in a swirl of colors and discover their very own talents in a delightful way.\" - Bookworm for Kids About the Author Helen H. Wu is a children\u2019s book author and illustrator, as well as a translator and publisher. She is the author of Tofu Takes Time , illustrated by Julie Jarema (Beaming Books, 2022) and Long Goes To Dragon School , illustrated by Mae Besom (Yeehoo Press, 2023). Helen is the Publisher of Yeehoo Press, an independent children\u2019s book publisher based in San Diego, California. Being fascinated by the differences and similarities between cultures, Helen loves to share stories that empower children to understand the world and our connections. Born and raised in Hefei, China, Helen moved to the US in her 20s. Currently, she resides in sunny Southern California, with her family and two kids. Mae Besom is an award-winning artist whose books include New York Times bestsellers What Do You Do With an Idea? and What Do You Do With a Chance? Mae uses traditional media, pencil, and watercolor to create texture and light within her enchanting illustrations. Mae lives in Chongqing, China.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "1506482864", "title": "Mabel's Topsy-Turvy Homes", "author": "Candy Wellins", "description": "Review This sweet tale highlights the exciting variety of a two-home child's experiences, validating them all. Parental love and quality time are ever present in the warm, cozy illustrations. . . Doubly fun! -- Kirkus Reviews \"Contrasting warm and cool palettes complement this tale for any child who is searching for a new definition of home.\" -- Foreword Reviews About the Author Candy Wellins is a former elementary school teacher and has a BA in journalism and a master's in literacy education. She's now a full-time mom to three wonderful children who keep her up-to-date and immersed in children's literature. She is the author of Saturdays Are for Stella and The Stars Beckoned: Edward White's Amazing Walk in Space. She and her family make their home in Central Texas. When she's not reading, writing, or mothering, Candy loves running, traveling, and taking naps! Jess Rose is an illustrator and designer living in Yorkshire, England. She has loved to draw her entire life, creating characters and helping tell stories that children can relate to. She has two children and uses her experience as a parent to inspire her work.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 12.42}, {"asin": "188500897X", "title": "Seven Golden Rings", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 20.31}, {"asin": "1534460411", "title": "The Beak Book", "author": "Robin Page", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2-Young readers who are curious about birds from around the world will enjoy Page's latest offering, which provides a colorful and informative look at one unique feature of a bird: its beak. Whether a bird is using its long beak to sniff out food like a kiwi, its curved beak to climb up a branch like a macaw, or its large beak to keep cool in warmer temperatures, a bird's beak plays an important role. The text, which follows the pattern \"This beak is for..,\" uses a larger type to emphasize the beak's particular function. Simple, declarative sentences make this ideal for read-alouds or for readers who are just starting to read independently. Vibrant, textured illustrations not only show the bird up close but also depict the action described in the text. Captions provide further information, although the text is written at a higher reading level than the main text. The back matter includes a map of birds mentioned in the book, as well as additional sources. Page shows that despite their differences, all birds use their beaks to start life in the same way: by breaking out of their shell. VERDICT This detailed overview would be an excellent choice for collections that are looking for additional titles about birds.-Louie Lauer, Jefferson Elem. Sch., Fargo, ND\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review By zooming in on one of birds\u2019 most idiosyncratic features, Page reveals just what a multifaceted marvel a beak can be: \u201cThis beak is for drilling./ This beak is for scooping.// This beak is for shredding./ This beak is for clutching.\u201d Placed alongside a large, clean-lined illustration of a bird in profile, a declarative statement on each page describes what a specific beak can do. (Expertly captured field marks, rendered in vibrant, saturated color, pop against the crisp white background.) Page also offers a sentence explaining the declaration alongside an inset illustration showing the bird using its beak as described: \u201cUsing the expandable pouch that is part of its beak, the pelican scoops up a fish.\u201d A clear, concise, and engaging read for fledgling ornithologists. Back matter includes more species detail and a bibliography. Ages 3\u20138. (Jan.) -- Publishers Weekly *STARRED* \u2015 October 26, 2020 If you thought beaks were just for pecking, think again.  This picture book examines in piercing detail the astonishing adaptability of birds\u2019 beaks. [...] An unusual insight into one aspect of the amazing adaptability of birds. -- Kirkus Reviews \u2015 October 15th, 2020 About the Author Robin Page has written and illustrated many picture books celebrating the natural world, including the 2003 Caldecott Honor recipient What Do You Do with a Tail Like This? , which she created with her husband Steve Jenkins, and her own A Chicken Followed Me Home! , Seeds Move! , and Shall We Dance? . Robin lives in Boulder, Colorado. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.79}, {"asin": "1984813021", "title": "Don't Hug Doug: (He Doesn't Like It)", "author": "Daniel Wiseman", "description": "Review Praise for Don't Hug Doug : A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the YearAn ALA Notable Children\u2019s BookA Bank Street Best Children\u2019s Book of the Year \u201cA simple but effective lesson for children learning their own personal boundaries.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 TODAY \u201c Don\u2019t Hug Doug can make kids feel better about their own boundaries, and challenge them to understand the comfort of others. But really, it gives grown-ups something to consider, too.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Boston Globe * \u201cA cheerful approach to basic consent . . . An excellent update on the golden rule: treat people how they want to be treated.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews , starred review * \u201c A gently humorous picture book that kindly, effectively highlights the importance of asking others before initiating physical contact.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly , starred review\u201cSimple and effective in showing young viewers how to establish bodily autonomy . . . A great starting point for a conversation about boundaries and how to set them.\u201d \u2014 The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books \u201c A fun way to deliver the truth of different strokes for different folks.\u201d \u2014Booklist \u201cIt\u2019s great to see . . . boundaries [of consent and personal autonomy] talked about,\u00a0and Don\u2019t Hug Doug does it in a way that\u2019s both reinforcing and fun to read.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 The A.V. Club About the Author Carrie Finison writes poetry, stories, and books for kids. She is the author of the picture book Dozens of Doughnuts , illustrated by Brianne Farley. She lives outside Boston with her husband, their son, and their daughter, and two cats who allow her to work in their attic office. Visit the author at carriefinison.com and follow her on Twitter @CarrieFinison.Daniel Wiseman is the #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator of The World Needs More Purple People by Kristen Bell and Benjamin Hart. He has illustrated many books for kids, including Goodbye Brings Hello by Dianne White, Play This Book by Jessica Young, When Your Lion Needs a Bath by Susanna Leonard Hill, and the Baby Scientist series by Laura Gehl. He lives with his family in Knoxville, Tennessee. Learn more at danieldraws.com or follow the artist on Instagram @d_wiseman.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 12.49}, {"asin": "1624148867", "title": "Kid Coach", "author": "Rob Justus", "description": "Review \"Large, flashy illustrations capture the playful energy of the narration and lend to sharing the book with a storytime audience... Justus presents a valuable lesson about integrity and kindness.\" \u2013 Kirkus Reviews \u201cJustus\u2019s positive messages about healthy confidence and good sportsmanship come through.\u201d \u2013 Publisher's Weekly \"[D]azzling with colorful, energetic illustrations. The father-son role reversal, along with a healthy dose of potato puns, provides plenty of laughs.\" \u2013 Booklist \"A playful title to remind readers that important lessons about sportsmanship can be learned at any age.\" \u2013 School Library Journal \"This romp of a readaloud has a lot of character, and whether viewers are wrestling fans or not, they are sure to get a chuckle out of Kid Coach\u2019s antics with couch-potato-turned-pro-wrestler Dad... This would be an excellent choice for a discussion of that hard-to-grasp concept of sportsmanship, as well as just being pure wacky fun.\" \u2013 BCCB About the Author Rob Justus spent a decade as an award-winning market researcher before deciding to pursue his passion for illustration and creative storytelling. Drawing inspiration from nature, human observation, Rob loves to create stories that capture the wonder and excitement of childhood and the joy of exploration. Kid Coach is his debut book. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.54}, {"asin": "0593372514", "title": "A Seat at the Table: The Nancy Pelosi Story", "author": "Laura Freeman", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 1-4-Growing up as the daughter of Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro of Baltimore, Nancy Pelosi witnessed political life up close. Every week her father's constituents were welcomed into the family home to air their concerns. When the mayor \"went off to city hall,\" it was her mother who \"made them finally feel heard,\" and connected community members with the services they needed. Boxer briefly notes Pelosi's other influences as well as her campaign work while raising five children, her election to Congress, and her rise to become the first female Speaker of the House. The author focuses on the subject's struggle to gain a \"seat at the table\" as a woman in politics, and how once she did, she used her influence to support other female candidates. Causes Pelosi has championed throughout her career are mentioned, but the few specifics are relegated to an author's note and time line. Quotes throughout support a picture of a determined woman for whom public service is a \"noble calling.\" This title ends with the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob stormed Congress, \"shattering\" items in the Speaker's office but \"not her strength\" as later that day she called lawmakers back into session to confirm the vote of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. Broad strokes characterize Freeman's lackluster illustrations, which often feature a large generalized portrait in the foreground with several separate, smaller scenes enacted in the background. VERDICT An accessible introduction with a focus on Pelosi's influences and role as a woman in politics.-Daryl Grabarek, formerly at School Library Journal\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \" Pays due homage to its subject. \"-- Kirkus Reviews\" S ends a resilient message .\"-- Publishers Weekly\u00a0\" An \u00adaccessible introduction with a focus on Pelosi\u2019s influences and role as a woman in politics.\"-- School Library Journal About the Author Elisa Boxer is a Maine-based, Emmy-winning journalist and columnist whose writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times , Inc . and Fast Company . Having worked in newspaper, magazine and television journalism, Elisa is thrilled to bring her reporting and storytelling skills to the world of children's literature. She is especially drawn to stories of unsung heroes like the ones featured in her first book, The Voice That Won the Vote: How One Woman's Words Made History . Visit her at elisaboxer.comLaura Freeman received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and began her career working for various editorial clients. She has illustrated over thirty children's books, including Hidden Figures written by Margot Lee Shetterly, Kamala Harris by Nikki Grimes, the forthcoming The Faith of Elijah Cummings by Carole Boston Weatherford, and the Nikki & Deja series by Karen English. In addition to illustrating books and editorial content, her art can be found on a wide range of products, from dishes and textiles to greeting cards. Originally from New York City, she now lives in Atlanta with her husband and their two children. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 12.89}, {"asin": "0593175778", "title": "The Natural Genius of Ants", "author": "Betty Culley", "description": "Review \u2605\u00a0\"Endearingly executed, this gentle tale will see readers applauding as they reach the end.\" \u2014 Booklist , starred review\"Quietly and emotionally intelligent, this tale satisfies .\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"This hopeful story that explores the reality of hardship and mistakes amid themes of forgiveness and resilience.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Betty Culley is the acclaimed author of the middle-grade novel Down to Earth, which received a starred review from Booklist, calling it \u201ccaptivating,\u201d and the YA novel in verse Three Things I Know Are True, which was a Kids\u2019 Indie Next List Top Ten Pick and an ALA- YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults nominee. When writing The Natural Genius of Ants, Betty kept an ant farm and cared for a carpenter ant queen. She\u2019s worked as a pediatric nurse and lives in a small town in central Maine. You can find her online at bettyculley.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ONE The Mistake Dad said being in Kettle Hole was like going back in time, but I didn\u2019t know what he meant until we got here. The trees are tall and straight, and farm fields stretch out to the sky. There are gigantic bullfrogs with eyes as big as nickels, and trucks filled with logs rumble down the dirt roads, blowing up dust. Instead of streetlights shining outside our windows, we\u2019re in a place so dark at night you feel invisible. A place where you hear coyotes howl and yip. Dad says they live deep in the woods, even though it sounds like they\u2019re very close. We came here because of my father\u2019s mistake. He can\u2019t forgive himself for what he did. It doesn\u2019t matter that he\u2019s a doctor, and doctors make mistakes like everybody else. After the baby died, Mom tried to explain why Dad was so sad. She said people are human and she\u2019d gotten things wrong at work, too. \u201cDid any parasites die?\u201d I asked. She\u2019s studying a parasite that makes people lose their vision. It\u2019s so small you can only see it through a special microscope. My little brother Roger\u2019s eyes got very big. Since Dad\u2019s mistake, my mouth has been on autopilot. \u201cHarvard!\u201d Mom said my name once, like a warning, and quickly looked around to see if Dad had heard me. Luckily, he hadn\u2019t. For five months after his mistake, Dad didn\u2019t work. He didn\u2019t leave our apartment on the fifth floor except to get a haircut. He cried when no one was looking and even when everyone was looking. Then he got the idea for us to go to Kettle Hole for the summer, the place where he grew up. His childhood friend Vernon Knowles was renting out his house six states away from our apartment and the hospital where Dad used to work. \u201cYou know I can\u2019t leave my research right now,\u201d Mom said when Dad told us about his plan. \u201cI know you can\u2019t leave the parasites. They need you so much. They depend on you. They can\u2019t live without you,\u201d I said. Mom and I collect parasite jokes. Later, I overheard Mom and Dad talking in their bedroom. She asked him why he wanted to go to Kettle Hole. In his thought-\u00adout, list-\u00admaking way, he gave her three reasons. \u201cPeople know me as the Corson boy there, not Dr. Corson. Kettle Hole is always in my heart, even though I haven\u2019t been back since my grandfather\u2019s funeral. And Robert Frost was right\u2014\u00adthat home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.\u201d Mom had one answer to his three reasons. \u201cIf that\u2019s what you need to do, Marshall.\u201d Dad answered back, \u201cVern thought Earlene would make it, but she\u2019s been gone six months and he\u2019s in a spot trying to pay off her medical bills and raise his daughter. He was going to lose the house, and we need a place to stay. Give me this time with the boys, Dee. Maybe I can do something right and make it a summer they will always remember.\u201d It was quiet then, and I peeked into their room. Mom had her arms around Dad, her cheek pressed against his. He just stood there with his arms hanging down, like he didn\u2019t have enough energy to hug her back. Mom answered, \u201cYou were born to be a doctor, Marshall. Please use this summer to figure out a way to forgive yourself.\u201d To get to Kettle Hole, we drove east for more than a day and then headed north. The highway in Maine was only two lanes, and the farther north we went the less cars there were on the road. I\u2019ve never been to the town where my father grew up. Mom grew up in the city where we live, but Mom\u2019s mother, my abuela, is from the Dominican Republic. I\u2019ve never been there, either. Part of the year she lives right near us, and part of the year she goes back to the DR to see family. \u201cThe fields and the woods are just how I remember,\u201d Dad said when we got off the highway. \u201cIt\u2019s like going back in time.\u201d \u201cThen you better speed up,\u201d I blurted out. Dad drove exactly five miles under the speed limit, both hands on the wheel. \u201cWhy would I want to do that?\u201d he asked without turning his head away from the road. \u201cSo we get there before you\u2019re too young to drive. And I\u2019m only ten, so if you go too slow, I\u2019ll disappear.\u201d I saw a little smile on Dad\u2019s face in the rearview mirror, but he didn\u2019t drive any faster. Being on a long car trip makes you think about things. Roger, I know, thought about one thing. The food in the cooler on the back seat between us. He\u2019d watched Dad fill it and he had a contest with himself to eat some of everything packed in there. Grapes, cheese slices, juice boxes, macaroni and cheese, oatmeal raisin cookies. Mom wouldn\u2019t have let Roger eat so much, but Dad was busy driving. And when Roger had food in his mouth, he wasn\u2019t asking the same thing over and over\u2014\u00adWhat do you think Mommy is doing RIGHT NOW? Or saying, If Mommy was here, she\u2019d sing the car song. I have no idea what the car song is, but Roger sang the only lines he remembered until they were stamped in my brain. Car, car, car Far, far, far While Roger ate, I looked out my window and thought about the things people say about mistakes, all of which are wrong: Mistakes happen. Don\u2019t be afraid to make mistakes. It\u2019s only a mistake. You learn from your mistakes. Don\u2019t worry. It was an honest mistake. None of those things are true, I thought, because if they were, Dad would still be taking care of the smallest and sickest babies in the hospital instead of planning our summer to remember. Roger wouldn\u2019t be one state away from a belly\u00adache after eating his hundredth snack. All I could do, as we got closer and closer to Kettle Hole, was hope that going back to the place where Dad grew up wouldn\u2019t turn out to be another mistake. TWO One Word or Two? When we finally pull up in front of Mr. Knowles\u2019s house in Kettle Hole, it\u2019s dark all around us, with only one light shining on a porch the whole length of the house. Dad shuts off the motor and opens the car door. Roger snores in his sleep. \u201cListen,\u201d Dad says. \u201cBarred owls.\u201d There\u2019s an eerie hooting noise and then cries like monkeys screaming. Dad stands there looking into the woods where the sounds are coming from. \u201cDo you have the key to the house?\u201d I ask. \u201cIt should be open,\u201d he says. That\u2019s how I end up being the first one in, carrying my backpack over my shoulder. I feel for a switch on the wall, and the room lights up. The floor is wood and the house smells like the cabin I stayed in at summer camp last year. It\u2019s colder inside the house than outside. The living room has a couch and chair at one end and a desk and floor lamp in a corner. There\u2019s a kitchen with a square table and four chairs. The windows are low and tall, and none of them have curtains. Up a set of stairs are three bedrooms and a bathroom. One bedroom has a big bed like Mom and Dad\u2019s. I drop my backpack on the bed in the smaller of the other two. This way there\u2019s no tears from Roger for getting the worst room. Plus the smallest room has a window that looks out onto a roof, and a long closet under a sloping wall. That night I fall asleep on the bed in the room without even taking my sneakers off. The morning after we arrive, I\u2019m the last one awake. Dad is in the kitchen and I smell his coffee brewing. Roger is at the kitchen table. \u201cWhat are Roger and I going to do here?\u201d I ask Dad. \u201cAny number of things,\u201d he says. \u201cSee what catches your eye, where your interests take you.\u201d Dad\u2019s face is pale from spending the past five months inside, his eyelashes almost see-\u00adthrough, and his hair is the same light brown as Roger\u2019s, but thinner on top. \u201cWhat about you? What are you going to do?\u201d I ask him. \u201cI\u2019m going to work on being a better parent,\u201d he says. \u201cBetter how? Who are you competing against?\u201d The words are out before I have a chance to think. Dad answers in a serious voice. \u201cBetter in all ways, Harvard. More involved. More focused. More adaptable.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re hired. When can you start?\u201d Dad ignores or doesn\u2019t notice that I\u2019m being mouthy. He drops toast on plates, puts out jelly, shakes the orange juice container, and spins silverware across the table so it lands exactly in front of where we\u2019re each sitting. Then he sits down and clasps his hands on the table in front of himself. He\u2019s wearing a white short-\u00adsleeved button-\u00addown shirt, and in the front pocket there\u2019s a pen and a mini notepad. \u201cI didn\u2019t bring the computer because there\u2019s no internet connection in the house. It\u2019s also hard for me to get reception on my cell phone unless I\u2019m outside. But anytime you want to call Mom you can use the house phone there on the desk.\u201d \u201cIs that what you meant by going back in time?\u201d I ask. \u201cInternet access and TV cost money Vern doesn\u2019t have. I think you\u2019ll find plenty of things to keep you busy here. Also, I want you both to know you can talk to me about anything, and ask whatever questions you have.\u201d I can\u2019t stop myself. \u201cWhich came first, the chicken or the egg?\u201d \u201cWhich came first, the chicken or the egg?\u201d Roger repeats, tipping himself out of his chair and onto the kitchen floor laughing. He\u2019s still holding a piece of jelly toast in one hand. Roger is five and falls on the floor whenever he thinks something is really funny. \u201cRoger, back in your chair,\u201d Dad says automatically. \u201cThat\u2019s an eternal question, isn\u2019t it? I don\u2019t have an answer. I also wanted you to know you can invite your friends here anytime. If they fly up, we can meet them at the airport.\u201d There\u2019s only my friend Tobias who I\u2019d want to come. He\u2019s the friend who never asked why Dad was always home or why Dad would sometimes cover his eyes with his hands and turn away. Tobias would sit at the kitchen island while Dad was cooking or cleaning up and tell him stories about what happened at school. \u201cThe word vacationland. Would you think it was one word or two?\u201d I ask. On the drive here I saw the Maine license plates, white with black letters and the word vacationland on the bottom. \u201cI don\u2019t know. Probably two?\u201d Dad guesses. \u201cThat\u2019s what I thought, but it was one word on the Maine license plates. Vacationland. Not vacation land. It doesn\u2019t make sense.\u201d I don\u2019t stop there. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to know, right? Like why is toothbrush one word but swimming pool is two words?\u201d \u201cSwimming pool. Can we get a swimming pool?\u201d Roger asks. \u201cAnd bathroom and spaceship are one word, but ice cream is two words.\u201d \u201cThat is a puzzle,\u201d Dad says, looking at his plate. He cuts the crusts off his toast with a knife and fork, cuts the toast into four squares, then cuts the squares into perfect triangles. \u201cI want ice cream, too. Swimming pool. Bathroom. Spaceship. Swimming pool. Bathroom. Spaceship. Ice cream,\u201d Roger says over and over, because whatever I say, Roger wants to say at least twice. Dad puts down his knife and fork. He presses his hand on his throat, over the place where his stethoscope used to hang. When I first started blurting things out, Mom said, If you can, Harvard, before you say something you might regret or that could hurt someone\u2019s feelings, ask yourself why you\u2019re saying it. And if you know the reason and it\u2019s a good reason, then go ahead. But the sadder Dad is, the more I can\u2019t stop to ask myself anything. Or maybe I don\u2019t try because what if some of those words make him laugh again? THREE Heat Lightning On our first day in Kettle Hole, I see a bullfrog and a skinny snake with yellow stripes in the woods, and get bitten by bugs Dad calls deerflies. Roger plays ball with Dad, climbs in the tire swing that\u2019s hanging from a tree, and rocks himself in a hammock on the back lawn. Dad says Vernon Knowles and his daughter are supposed to stop by around dark. I\u2019m near the open window when a man and a girl walk up the stone step onto the porch. The sun hangs right over the tops of the trees, and the sky is \u00adorange and pink. The porch light shines on them. The man is wearing a T-\u00adshirt and jeans. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever knocked on this door before,\u201d he says. The girl leans against him. He puts his arm around her. The girl\u2019s face reminds me of a bird. It\u2019s triangle-\u00adshaped, with her chin the bottom point and her brown eyes far apart above a small sharp nose. Her brown hair hangs down past her shoulders. \u201cMe neither,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re here,\u201d I call to Dad, \u201cbut they\u2019re just standing there on the porch.\u201d Dad rushes to the door and opens it wide. The man comes in first. He\u2019s shorter than Dad and his arms are thick and muscly, like a weight lifter\u2019s. His hair is almost as dark as mine and Mom\u2019s. Dad hugs the man, who thumps him on the back. \u201cMarshall Corson, Spelling Bee King of Kettle Hole,\u201d his friend says. \u201cWelcome back!\u201d \u201cVern,\u201d Dad says. \u201cIt\u2019s been too long.\u201d Mr. Knowles squeezes Dad\u2019s shoulder. \u201cThank you, Marshall, for helping me keep my promise to Earlene and stopping us from losing the house. I\u2019m sure my father is looking down on me, shaking his fist that I took out a second mortgage on the homestead.\u201d \u201cNo, it\u2019s you, Vern, who helped me, more than you know. Boys,\u201d Dad says, \u201cmeet Mr. Knowles, my oldest friend in the world. Vern, this is my son Harvard, and that\u2019s my younger boy, Roger.\u201d Dad points first to me, still near the window, and then to Roger, who\u2019s on the couch. Roger waves at them with both hands. \u201cHello there, Roger!\u201d Mr. Knowles waves back, then turns to me. \u201cHarvard, that\u2019s a great old Maine name. I hope it suits you as well as it did your great-\u00adgrandfather. He was a good man. And this is my daughter, Nevaeh. She\u2019ll be eleven in October.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 10.81}, {"asin": "0593118049", "title": "The Stars Beckoned: Edward White's Amazing Walk in Space", "author": "Courtney Dawson", "description": "Review Praise for The Stars Beckoned : \"The right stuff for children with the stars in their eyes.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \"An introduction to a space pioneer that\u2019s ideal for the youngest nonfiction readers.\" -- Publishers Weekly About the Author Candy Wellins (candywellins.com) is a former elementary school teacher who now spends her days as a full-time mother and author. Her debut picture book, Saturdays Are for Stella , is set to publish in 2020 from Page Street Kids. Candy lives in Central Texas. Follow her on Twitter @candy_wellins and on Instagram @candywellins.Courtney Dawson is a freelance illustrator with a great love for drawing, reading, and most kinds of ice cream. She has a background in animation and a deep love for picture books. You can follow her on Instagram @courtneyjdee.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "1328635201", "title": "How to Wear a Sari", "author": "Joanne Lew-Vriethoff", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2-Fumbling with knitting needles, spilling garbage from a torn trash bag-an unnamed, aggravated young girl with brown skin and brown hair is feeling too small and inadequate for grown-up tasks. She wants to prove her maturity to her family. Inspiration strikes, although a bit out of the blue. Why not arrive at her family's party wearing one of her mother's elegant saris? After choosing the perfect green and yellow sari-not too plain, not too fancy, with the right amount of sparkle-the persistent young narrator demonstrates the step-by-step process of donning a sari. Readers learn that a blouse and petticoat are worn underneath and how to correctly tuck, wrap, and pleat the sari. The look is polished with a stylish brooch, jewelry, and sparkly sandals. Now the challenge will be to walk in those high-heeled sandals to show off her sophisticated outfit at her family gathering. Unsteady and wobbly, the young girl trips, sending food flying across a multigenerational family. On the bright side, the girl can now contribute a hilarious moment to the family's mishap hall of fame. Khiani's lighthearted, debut picture book is insightful for young readers unfamiliar with saris, relatable for accustomed readers, and despite feeling choppy and underwhelming in the conclusion, will entertain children. Lew-Vriethoff's illustrations are lively and fluid, appropriately matching the flowing movement of saris. VERDICT A welcomed, playful addition to a small selection of picture books available on this traditional attire.-Emily Brush, Novi P.L., MI\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \"Simple, multi-patterned line art drawings in a lively color palette by Lew-Vriethoff pilot young readers through Khiani\u2019s winning guide to sari-wearing...an enjoyable behind-the-scenes look at a South Asian staple.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly \"A delightful picture book about dressing\u2014and acting\u2014like a grown-up before your time\" -- Kirkus \u2014 About the Author Darshana Khiani is a second-generation Indian American who grew up in rural Pennsylvania and now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. Her skills include writing picture books, debugging network routers, and solving jigsaw puzzles. However, wearing a sari is not one of them.\u00a0HOW TO WEAR A SARI is her debut picture book. www.darshanakhiani.com Twitter: @darshanakhiani Instagram: @darshanakhiani Joanne Lew-Vriethoff is the acclaimed illustrator of many children's books including the new edition of The Invisible String , and The Invisible String Workbook , as well as Darshana Khiani's How to Wear a Sari . Her passion and love for storytelling is shown through her whimsical but heartfelt illustrations in books that range from picture books to middle grade novels in both Dutch and English. She loves discovering the world with her family by traveling and collecting memories that give her more inspiration for her art. She grew up in Los Angeles, studied at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, and now\u00a0divides her time between Amsterdam and Malaysia. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "162354131X", "title": "No Voice Too Small: Fourteen Young Americans Making History", "author": "Jeanette Bradley", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 2\u20135\u2014This inspiring title profiles 14 young people who are a positive force for change. The young activists vary in age and actions, but they all took remarkable steps to improve their communities and country. Levi Draheim joined forces with other young people to sue the United States over climate change. Mari Copeny, known as \"Little Miss Flint,\" raised money and awareness to combat the Flint, MI, water crisis. Zach Wahls campaigned for LGBTQ equality within the Boy Scouts of America. A brief biography detailing the spotlighted individual is paired with a poem, each written by a different poet. Back matter includes brief explanations of the poetry forms used throughout the book, such as free verse and spoken word. The back matter also features brief biographies of the poets (including Nikki Grimes, Hena Khan, and Charles Waters), whose commitment to diverse and inclusive children's literature is evident from their remarkable body of work. The illustrations are lovely. Portraits of the children on brown paper wonderfully enhance the text. All readers will be empowered. VERDICT An excellent selection for poetry and social justice collections; a helpful resource to teach students about poetry and its many forms.\u2014Alyssa Annico, Youngstown State Univ., OH Review \"Overall this is a stunning book that should be gifted at every opportunity, and placed permanently on every bookshelf.\" -- The Tiny Activist From the Author How did the book come about? We began talking in a private Facebook group related to the March 2018 KidLitWomen initiative co-founded by authors Grace Lin and Karen Blumenthal. Jeanette said she had been thinking about the need for a book about activism, and I immediately messaged her with my interest, because I had been, too.\u00a0We decided to write about kids because so many were out there using their voices and using their power. Writing about minors can be tricky. Why write about contemporary young activists rather than young activists from movements past? Yes, it is tricky. We took great care to work with the families of those we featured, because we wanted to make sure we had their blessing. We really wanted the book to speak to young readers and show them that they have this power within themselves, if only they harness it. So we decided to feature contemporary youths to show readers that activism is happening among their peers right now, and if they can sing their passions, they can change the world, too.\u00a0-- Lindsay About the Author * Lindsay H. Metcalf grew up on a Kansas farm and is the author of Farmers Unite! Planting a Protest for Fair Prices . An experienced journalist, Lindsay has covered a variety of change-makers as a reporter, editor, and columnist for the Kansas City Star and other news outlets. lindsayhmetcalf.com * Keila V. Dawson has been a community organizer, teacher, school administrator, educational consultant, and advocate for children with special needs. She has lived in the Philippines, Japan, and Egypt. Dawson is a New Orleans and the author of The King Cake Baby . keiladawson.com * Jeanette Bradley has been an urban planner, an apprentice pastry chef, and the artist-in-residence for a traveling art museum on a train. She is the author and illustrator of Love, Mama . Jeanette lives in Rhode Island with her wife and kids. jeanettebradley.com Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.34}, {"asin": "0763690457", "title": "Juli\u00e1n Is a Mermaid", "author": "Jessica Love", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2\u2014Young Juli\u00e1n lives with his abuela and is obsessed with mermaids. He imagines taking off his clothes, growing a tail, and swimming freely through the blue-tinted water with swirls of fish and stingrays. After spying some women on a train dressed as mermaids, Juli\u00e1n later tells his abuela, \"I am also a mermaid,\" then proceeds to wrap a curtain around his waist as a \"tail.\" Ferns in his hair complete the fantastical look, and when his grandmother catches him \u2014is he in trouble? Not at all! In fact, she takes Juli\u00e1n to a festival where people are dressed as fantastically as Juli\u00e1n. Love couples the spare narrative with vivid, imaginative, and breathtaking illustrations. VERDICT A heartwarming must-have for one-on-one and small group sharing.\u2014Amanda C. Buschmann, Carroll Elementary School, Houston Review This is Jessica Love\u2019s debut picture book, and every choice she makes \u2014 the spare text, a color palette both muted and lively, full-bleed pages that make even subway cars and apartment rooms feel as expansive as the ocean \u2014 imbues the story with charm, tenderness and humor\u2026Alongside Juli\u00e1n, readers learn that anyone can be a mermaid: All it takes is love and acceptance, a little imagination and a big swishy tail.\u2014The New York Times Book ReviewLove couples the spare narrative with vivid, imaginative, and breathtaking illustrations. A heartwarming must-have for one-on-one and small group sharing.\u2014School Library Journal (starred review)Refreshingly, Spanish words aren't italicized. Though it could easily feel preachy, this charmingly subversive tale instead offers a simple yet powerful story of the importance of being seen and affirmed.\u2014Kirkus Reviews (starred review)[Julian] is, in a word, fabulous. Love lets an anxious beat pass before Abuela takes Juli\u00e1n by the hand, leading him to what some readers may recognize as the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. \u201cLike you, mijo,\u201d says Abuela. \u201cLet\u2019s join them.\u201d Love\u2019s deep empathy for her characters and her keen-eyed observations of urban life come together in a story of love, understanding, and embracing the mermaid within us all.\u2014Publishers Weekly (starred review)The luminous, lovely, and layered art is what really makes the book...The concluding parade is a confectionary wonder of marine fantasy that many kids will yearn to join, and it might prompt adults to set up their own in- library mermaid celebrations. More importantly, though, those who\u2019ve been shy about their love for dazzle and showmanship will love the idea of a formidable grandparental ally, and they will find this encouraging and empowering.\u2014Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)Juli\u00e1n\u2019s emotional journey takes on depth through small but important details: a wary look in the mirror, a slight inward slump of the shoulders, a chin held high while marching down the street. Love uses vibrant watercolors with gouache and ink and a lively style to create scenes that splash and swirl to life on the page.\u2014The Horn Book (starred review)Across her watercolor, gouache and ink spreads, Love captures the transformative power of being seen...Love's affecting combination of the literary and the visual results in a powerful affirmation of individuality, creative expression and unconditional acceptance.\u2014Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review)Love\u2019s painted scenes glow against muted backgrounds, with saturated, opaque tones tracing the graceful shapes of the figures. They\u2019re especially striking when Juli\u00e1n gets swept away in a vivid underwater fantasy: a school of sea creatures whirls around him as he transforms into a mermaid. That scene is nicely replicated when he arrives at the parade, which is populated by scores of people in a wide variety of inventive costumes. The affectionate depiction of a broad range of body types and skin tones makes this particularly cheery.\u2014BooklistThis beautiful book is one of the very few picture books about a gender non-conforming child. Yet it feels like a celebration of all children who want to do things differently than the parental figures in their lives\u2014and a love letter to the grownups who deeply understand them.\u2014GothamistThere is nothing about this book that is forgettable. In fact, you may have a hard time not thinking long and hard about it after you put it down. A book for mermaids and boys and girls and parents and teachers and booksellers and librarians and . . . Let\u2019s just simplify things and say it\u2019s a book for the human race.\u2014Betsy BirdJessica Love\u2019s vivid watercolor and gouache illustrations are made even brighter by her decision to paint on brown paper; the richly colored palette pops off the pages, and abundant character is conveyed via the subtlest of facial expressions and body language. Also subtle\u2014and terrifically poignant\u2014is the eloquent encouragement of Abuela\u2019s spare words. A book for the ages, Juli\u00e1n Is a Mermaid is going to make a big splash.\u2014BookPageThe illustrations couldn\u2019t be more beautiful, and I love how Juli\u00e1n\u2019s grandmother accepts him for exactly who he is...I\u2019m so grateful for books like these that help foster acceptance and understanding from a young age.\u2014A Cup of Jo (blog) Juli\u00e1n Is a Mermaid makes a fine addition to the best LBGT children\u2019s books.\u2014Brain Pickings (blog)Groundbreaking...here\u2019s a happy picture book that challenges traditional gender stereotypes, rendering one boy free to be himself.\u2014San Francisco ChronicleRight now, I just finished reading \u2018Juli\u00e1n Is a Mermaid,\u2019 by Jessica Love, which is an awesome picture book, one of my favorites, and I won\u2019t spoil the end for you, but it has something to do with the mermaid parade.\u2014Charles George Esperanza, The New York TimesIt\u2019s a story of a little boy who is taken with some elegant costumes, and decides to fashion one of his own. It\u2019s that simple, but it makes a big impression; I can\u2019t recommend it highly enough.\u2014The New York Times Book Review e-newsletter About the Author Jessica Love is an illustrator and a New York based actor. She has a BA in studio art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as a graduate degree from Juilliard. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.89}, {"asin": "1536208914", "title": "I Am a Bird", "author": "Hyewon Yum", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 1-A little girl flies like a bird as she rides in the bicycle seat behind her dad each morning on the way to school. Arms raised and mouth open, she gleefully sings to the birds who follow and waves to friends and neighbors. When she spots an unfamiliar woman in a blue coat, who neither waves or smiles, the little girl is puzzled. On every day she sees the woman, the girl has a mood shift, until the day she unexpectedly sees the woman in the park, singing to and feeding the birds. She views the woman in a new light, and her smile and wave are finally reciprocated. Colored pencil drawings show the details of the seaside town with its various birds in flight or perched along the bicycle's route; all the characters have pale skin, and all have dark hair, but for the older woman, who has gray locks. The girl's dislike and fear of the woman is mirrored in the monster graffiti on a wall. An effective spread depicts a bird's-eye view of the pair and their shared love of birds and what will likely be a new friendship. VERDICT A young girl learns that appearances are deceiving in this cheerful secondary purchase.-Ramarie Beaver, formerly at Plano P.L., TX\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review 'I fly like a bird on Daddy\u2019s bike,' the narrator joyfully croons as we watch father and daughter whizz through a coastal, colored-penciled town. . . . Suddenly she spies 'a woman with a blue coat and a big bag \u2026 walking very fast,' and clutches her dad\u2019s sweatshirt, as gouache graffiti demons appear on a wall and a graphite shadow joins the gray-haired figure like an evil twin. Yet there she is one day in the park, 'whispering a song to the birds!' Lim\u2019s text and Yum\u2019s art soar as the two 'see' each other at last.\u2014New York Times Book ReviewThe soft, textured illustrations expertly pair with the understated text and its beautifully simple, implicit message to look closer before jumping to conclusions...A gentle story about connection that will connect with readers of all ages.\u2014Kirkus Reviews (starred review)A little girl and her father take regular bike rides through their coastal town...It\u2019s a tale that celebrates imagination; birds (the monochromatic drawings of graceful birds in flight on the endpapers are a highlight); and the value of getting past fears to discover that we all have more in common than we might think.\u2014The Horn BookLim\u2019s simple, heartfelt narration deftly captures the perturbation kids can develop around an adult who seems unfriendly, and there\u2019s enough amiable reassurance to counterbalance the sympathy. Yum\u2019s softly textured colored pencil and gouache illustrations capture the airy freedom of a zippy bike ride through a lovely seaside Korean (judging by store lettering) town...Kids who\u2019ve had their own encounters with hard-to-slot adults will appreciate the validation and the encouraging outcome.\u2014Bulletin of the Center for Children's BooksEach day, a rosy-cheeked girl rides to school in the booster seat on the back of Daddy\u2019s bike, pretending to fly and sing like the many birds in their coastal town... It\u2019s a simple tale for the youngest set of readers, written around an overt message of not judging too quickly and finding connections in unexpected ways... Yum\u2019s soft colored-pencil illustrations complement the words with a pleasant atmosphere, setting the tone through gently bright colors and the simple, smiling features of her characters... A sweetly serene story with a useful lesson.\u2014Booklist About the Author Hope Lim is a debut children's book author. She has a bachelor\u2019s in English literature and has worked as a conference interpreter for the US State Department. Hope Lim lives in San Francisco. Hyewon Yum is the author and illustrator of several acclaimed books for children, including Mom, It\u2019s My First Day of Kindergarten!, which earned her an Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award, and Saturday Is Swimming Day . She is also the illustrator of A Piece of Home, written by Jeri Watts. Hyewon Yum lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 16.99}, {"asin": "1250313627", "title": "Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World", "author": "Anna Crowley Redding", "description": "Review A 2020 NSTA Best STEM Book \"Investigative journalist Redding does an admirable job of chronicling Larry and Sergey\u2019s amazing successes and will inspire young people to follow in their ingenious footsteps. It\u2019s more comprehensive than other books for young readers about Google\u2019s founders, with energetically written short chapters, interesting facts, graphics, and photos \" \u2015 Booklist on Google It, starred review\"This readable and breezy history of the tech behemoth [is] An appealing and timely look at a universally relevant subject and a good fit for STEAM-related reading lists.\" \u2015 School Library Journal on Google It About the Author Anna Crowley Redding is the author of Google It, Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World, and Black Hole Chasers. The recipient of multiple Edward R. Murrow and Associated Press awards, Crowley Redding uses her Emmy award-winning investigative reporting skills to dig into compelling topics that are shaping our world. Her works have been translated into multiple languages, garnered national news coverage, and been recognized by the National Association of Science Teachers for excellence. Crowley Redding lives outside of Portland, Maine with her family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Elon Musk A Mission to Save the World By Anna Crowley Redding Feiwel and Friends Copyright \u00a9 2019 Anna Crowley ReddingAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-31362-1 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, Chapter 1 TAKE AWAY THE ARMOR, Chapter 2 LAUNCH, Chapter 3 TYPING VS. WALKING, Chapter 4 ONE PLANET IS NEVER ENOUGH, Chapter 5 TWO COMPANIES AND A FUNERAL, Chapter 6 DON'T PANIC, Chapter 7 TYRANNY, Chapter 8 THE WHEEL, REINVENTED, Chapter 9 OF COURSE I STILL LOVE YOU, Chapter 10 IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL, Chapter 11 MARS OR BUST, Chapter 12 THIS IS THE BORING BIT, Chapter 13 DANGER, Chapter 14 PRODUCTION HELL, Bibliography, Endnotes, Acknowledgments, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 TAKE AWAY the ARMOR Actor Robert Downey Jr. was looking at the opportunity of a lifetime. He'd just landed the role of comic book superhero Tony Stark, the billionaire genius also known as Iron Man. Stark is not your cookie-cutter superhero. He wasn't born with supernatural powers. He is flawed, gritty, intense \u2014 driven. Just ask Captain America. In an epic movie scene, Captain America confronts Tony Stark. Taking one stalking, provoking step at a time, Captain America circles Stark, spitting out a question meant to expose Stark's inferiority. \"Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?\" Stark doesn't miss a beat and doesn't even bother to turn his head to look at Captain America before answering. \"Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.\" Those four words not only summed up the man, but also summed up the herculean task Robert Downey Jr. had before him. Downey had to accomplish nothing less than making Tony Stark real. And that meant embodying those four words: genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. Sitting across from Iron Man director Jon Favreau, Downey discussed the role. He needed to understand Stark's character deeply, answering questions like what made Tony Stark tick, what drove his ambitions, what kind of genius could transform fantasy into reality. Because if you understand the character, then you can become him, and that's how you bring Tony Stark to life. Downey was struck by an idea. He wanted to hang out with a real-life Tony Stark. And he had someone in mind. One man whose personality and life actually epitomized the heart and soul of Tony Stark's character, with all the trappings of Stark's supersized success. If Downy could spend time with this man, study him, try to get in his head, well then, Downey could nail the role. That man was Elon Musk. At thirty-five years old, Elon had already amassed a fortune and was well on his way to becoming one of the most powerful people in the world. With companies like PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX, he pushed technology to the limit until he forced innovation and breakthrough, making his mark on three of the biggest industries that exist: banking, automobiles, and space. His ambitious ideas were so far-out that people often laughed at him, until they didn't \u2014 usually because he'd accomplished the impossible. In 2007, Robert Downey Jr. gave Elon a call and soon found himself walking around SpaceX headquarters with Elon himself \u2014 observing, talking, and picking Elon's brain. That time allowed Downey to perfect the role. That said, there was a major divergence between Elon and the comic book character. Tony Stark's script came with a slick backstory: Child prodigy and heir apparent of famed entrepreneur accomplishes one incredible feat after another and then takes the helm of his father's company and pushes it to the next level and beyond. Elon's backstory was far from slick. His childhood was dark, painful, and brutal. Elon had to endure both emotional torment at home and physical attacks at school. As a bullied schoolboy in Pretoria, South Africa, he was not an heir apparent. He was not a media darling in waiting. No, Elon was simply trying to survive. NAME: Elon Reeve Musk NICKNAMES: Genius Boy, Muskrat DATE OF BIRTH: June 28, 1971 PLACE: Pretoria, South Africa FIRST COMPUTER: Commodore VIC-20, at age 10 BOOKSHELF: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. GAME SHELF: Dungeons & Dragons DAYDREAMS AND NIGHTMARES As a little boy in South Africa, it was obvious from the time Elon could speak and toddle around that he was different. Elon's mom, Maye Musk, recognized her son's intelligence straightaway. \"He seemed to understand things quicker than other kids,\" she said. But she noticed something else, too \u2014 something about Elon's behavior that concerned her. Elon would suddenly stare off in the distance, falling into a daydream so deep, so trancelike, that no one could get his attention. It could happen mid-conversation or in the middle of a busy room. His mother was worried. Did Elon have a massive hearing loss? Shuffling him off to doctor after doctor, Maye tried to get to the bottom of it. The doctors saw it too. He sometimes seemed lost in another world that no one could penetrate. Elon endured test after test. Finally, his doctors scheduled him for surgery. The plan was to remove his adenoids and hope Elon would hear better. But the surgery had no impact at all. That's when they discovered his hearing was actually fine. It was his mind. Elon was simply so deep in thought, so focused on his ideas, immersed in every detail, that he detached from the rest of the world. It was as if a movie was playing out before his eyes, allowing Elon to visually puzzle out a problem. Like daydreaming on steroids, he could not only see ideas but run virtual tests on them too. \"It seems as though the part of the brain that's usually reserved for visual processing \u2014 the part that is used to process images coming in from my eyes \u2014 gets taken over by internal thought processes,\" Elon explained to biographer Ashlee Vance. \"I can't do this as much now because there are so many things demanding my attention but, as a kid, it happened a lot. That large part of your brain that's used to handle incoming images gets used for internal thinking.\" That was not the only personality trait of Elon's that stood out from an early age. A penchant for breaking rules and breaking them boldly \u2014 with commitment, drive, and flair \u2014 landed six-year-old Elon in some pretty hot water with his mother. It all started when Elon's mom grounded him. She made his punishment perfectly clear: Elon would not be allowed to go to his cousin's birthday party. And Elon's reaction was also perfectly clear. Stay at home? When his younger brother and sister were going to the party? No way. Absolutely not. Mind churning, Elon realized he needed a plan to get around the punishment. Wait \u2014 his bike! He could ride his bike there. Elon let his mother know in no uncertain terms that he would most certainly be at the party. He didn't need her to drive him there. He would ride his bike \u2014 all by himself. Elon recounted this story in an auditorium full of people at the Computer History Museum. The crowd hung on his every word as he explained that telling his mother was a critical mistake. Because as soon as he divulged his plan, his mother looked at her son and fibbed. \"She told me some story about how you needed a license for a bike and that the police would stop me,\" he explained. To a six-year-old, dealing with the police seemed really bad. So a bike would not work. As Elon saw it, that left him with one option: He would have to walk. Only, his cousin's house wasn't around the corner or in the neighborhood or even close by. In fact, the birthday party was across town \u2014 about twelve miles away. One foot in front of the other, Elon walked. And walked. And walked. Some four hours later, victory was in sight. Elon was just a couple of blocks away when he spotted his mother leaving the party with his brother and sister. \"She saw me walking down the road and freaked out,\" he said. Heart racing, Elon took off and ran into his cousin's yard. He climbed a tree, perched himself high in the branches, and refused to come down. That sense of independence and injustice was unshakeable. Two years later, after Elon turned eight years old, his parents divorced. Elon, along with his brother, Kimbal, and sister, Tosca, lived with their mom. A model and dietician, Maye Musk woke up each morning and got to work with modeling gigs, wellness talks, meeting nutrition clients, and managing the paperwork and scheduling that comes with running your own business to make ends meet. She was not a hovering mother; she couldn't afford to be. And there was this \u2014 she wanted her children to be independent, to understand what hard work was by watching her example, and to have the freedom to find their own way. That left Elon with a lot of time on his hands, mostly unsupervised. He did not let it go to waste. Kimbal was only a year younger, which made them natural co-conspirators. The two boys focused on rockets. Not just reading about them, but making them and figuring out explosives. \"I am shocked,\" he told Rolling Stone, \"that I have all my fingers.\" When he wasn't with Kimbal blowing things up or out riding their motorbikes, Elon was reading, sometimes for ten hours a day. Often, when Elon headed into town for a shopping trip with his family, he would just suddenly disappear. One minute he was there, the next minute he was nowhere to be found \u2014 until his mom or siblings checked the closest bookstore. All the way in the back, sitting on the floor, completely lost inside a book, that's where you could find Elon. Elon's mom would even drag him along to dinner parties if she didn't have a date. \"I'd bring him to meet some interesting adults, and he'd hide a book under the table to read if they weren't interesting enough,\" she said. For Elon, reading wasn't simply a pastime. He was consuming vast amounts of information, devouring books whole, and remembering every detail plucked from their pages. \"I was raised by books,\" he explained to Rolling Stone. \"Books, and then my parents.\" And comic books. Typically when you walk into a comic book store, you look around, make your selection, pay for it, and bring it home to read. But when Elon walked into the comic book store, he read them right then and there. Not just one comic book. Not two. He read them all. Every single comic book on the rack. Every single comic book in the store. Every. One. He loved them all, but some favorites were Doctor Strange, Batman, Green Lantern, Superman, and even Iron Man. \"In the comics, it always seems like they are trying to save the world,\" Elon said. Devouring as many sci-fi books as he could get his hands on, Elon discovered a similar theme. His favorites were Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.\" At one point, I ran out of books to read at the school library and the neighborhood library,\" he said. Ran. Out. Of. Books. So what do you do as fourth grader when you have gone through the entire collection of two libraries? Well, the first thing Elon did was try to convince the librarians to order more. And while he waited for those new books to come in, he needed to do something to keep his insatiable curiosity well fed \u2026 he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end. He relished the information, loved knowing about the greater world and everything in it. And Elon became something of a walking, talking encyclopedia himself. If his family had a question, they turned to Elon for the answer. His sister, Tosca, gave him a nickname: Genius Boy. That said, sometimes when people around him were talking, they might get a fact or two wrong. But Elon always knew the right answer and instantly corrected them. As you can imagine, this did not win him friends. While his younger siblings were popular and had plenty of playdates, Elon did not. But the lack of friends did not hold Elon back from reading and obtaining as much knowledge as he could on any topic that interested him. The lack of friends did not stop him from his deep distant daydreams. And the lack of friends did not prevent him from opening the covers of a great science fiction novel and losing himself completely in the story. The truth was, the books and daydreams helped Elon feel less alone. It had now been two years since Elon's parents divorced. Elon began thinking of his dad, who lived alone. Something about that seemed sad to Elon, even unfair. \"I felt sorry for my father,\" Elon explained to Rolling Stone 's Neil Strauss. \"He seemed very sad and lonely by himself. So I thought, 'I can be company.'\" As he saw it, his mom had all three kids. Elon felt it was only fair that he go and live with his father. In the end, both he and his younger brother, Kimbal, moved in with Errol Musk. Errol was a talented and gifted engineer, an entrepreneur, and part owner of an emerald mine. His home had plenty of books to feed Elon's reading habit. And with site visits to Errol's construction projects, Elon and Kimbal took advantage of the opportunity to roll up their sleeves and learn. Studying pipes and lines, they learned plumbing. Mixing and spreading mortar, the boys learned how to lay bricks. They added wiring, window fitting, and other jobs to their growing list of skills. That hands-on experience, combined with what Elon was reading, his ability to visualize processes, and his own intelligence, meant he quickly understood complicated tasks and engineering concepts in a way that felt innate, obvious. \"What's very difficult for others is easy for me. For a while, I thought things were so obvious that everyone must know this,\" he said. \"Like how the wiring in a house works. And a circuit breaker, and alternating current and direct current, what amps and volts were, how to mix fuel and oxidizers to create an explosive. I thought everyone knew this.\" There was another perk to living with his father: the travel. Errol took the kids on amazing vacations to different countries around the world. But there was one place Elon wanted to visit more than any other: America. After all, as Elon leafed through page after page of his comic books, they all seemed to take place in the United States. If the storyline was good versus evil, then the backdrop for that battle, the stage for those save-the-world confrontations, was America. Plain and simple. And Elon wanted to see it for himself. America was a place where anything seemed possible. It stood in complete contrast to the environment of apartheid in South Africa. Finally, at ten years old, Elon was sitting on a plane with his dad, headed for a visit to the land of the free. America did not disappoint. While caped superheroes were not roaming the streets, Elon did discover something amazing in his hotel \u2014 an arcade. Elon already had a video game player, but it was quite primitive. \"It didn't have cartridges,\" he said. \"It had four games you could play.\" But in America at that time, many hotels and motels had their own video game arcades, and traveling from one city to another, Elon made finding the game room a priority. Slipping quarters into the slots, pushing buttons at rapid fire, finessing his moves, Elon wasn't just playing the games, he was puzzling out bigger questions. How do these games work, anyway? How do you program them? How do you program computers? How do you create games? Not long after Elon returned to South Africa, Elon would get his first chance to explore his questions about video games, computers, and how they worked. On his next trip to the local mall, Elon headed straight to the electronics store. And it just so happened, they'd received shipment of a new type of electronic \u2014 a home computer. \"It was like, 'Whoa,' Elon explained. \"I had to have that and then hounded my father to get the computer.\" Gathering up all his saved allowance, Elon asked his father to make up the difference. THROWBACK! Commodore-VIC 20 MEMORY: 5 kilobytes RELEASE DATE: 1980 HISTORY: The first computer to sell one million units, it was a hit on the new home computer market. Previously, computers were sold to businesses, universities, and adult professionals. This computer was targeted to families and kids for games and education. PRICE WITHOUT ACCESSORIES: $299.95 COMPETITIVE EDGE: Sound and color PITCH MAN: William Shatner, as in Captain Kirk! Soon, Elon had a Commodore VIC-20 sitting in his house. It came with a manual for BASIC programming language \u2014 with a workbook full of lessons to practice each new bit of programming. \"It was supposed to take like six months to get through all the lessons,\" Elon said. But for ten-year-old Elon? It took him three days. He didn't sleep, but he mastered programming his new computer. \"It seemed like the most super-compelling thing I had ever seen,\" he said. Elon set to work trying to program his own games. He couldn't get over it. \"You could type these commands, and then something happens on the screen. That's pretty amazing.\" Two years later, Elon created a game called Blastar. \"In this game,\" Elon wrote in the description, \"you have to destroy an alien space freighter, which is carrying deadly Hydrogen Bombs and Status Beam Machines.\" Elon sold the code to a technology magazine for $500. It was his first taste of taking a new technology, obsessing over it, innovating, and then using those skills to make money. From the outside looking in, Elon had everything: a beautiful sprawling house, money, a spot in a great school, his own computer (at a time when that was an exorbitant luxury), and a father who shared his knowledge and time with his boys. It seemed perfect. But inside was another story \u2014 and that story was (and is to this day) dark and painful. \"It may sound good,\" Elon said. \"It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery.\" The problem, according to Elon, was his dad. \"He was such a terrible human being,\" Elon divulged to Rolling Stone. \"You have no idea. My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil.\" To biographer Ashlee Vance, Elon said, \"He's good at making life miserable \u2014 that's for sure. He can take any situation no matter how good it is and make it bad. He's not a happy man,\" he explained. \"I don't know how someone becomes like he is. It would just cause too much trouble to tell you any more.\" Even Elon's mother would not elaborate when pressed for more detail in interviews. \"Nobody gets along with him. He is not nice to anyone. I don't want to tell stories because they are horrendous,\" she said to Vance. At school, Elon's situation was not any easier. He was growing up in a South Africa that celebrated macho behavior and conventional stereotypes of what it means to be a young man. But Elon was not particularly interested in sports or athletic pursuits. He was interested in technology, computers, games, and sci-fi. (Continues...) Excerpted from Elon Musk by Anna Crowley Redding . Copyright \u00a9 2019 Anna Crowley Redding. Excerpted by permission of Feiwel and Friends. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.9}, {"asin": "0593124782", "title": "The Worm Family Has Its Picture Taken", "author": "Jennifer Frank", "description": "Review \"Sure to worm its way into readers\u2019 hearts.\"\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus Reviews, starred review\"Off-the-beam, James Marshall-esque story.\u201d \u2014 The Bulletin \u201cA terrific pairing of new and veteran talent, as well as a gentle but firm nudge for any child who\u2019s felt the pang of familial embarrassment.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cStein\u2019s worms could be cousins to Richard Scarry\u2019s, with guileless facial expressions and simple, personality-enriching accessories. The earth(worm)-toned mixed-media illustrations have lots of adorable detail (watch Baby Worm). The text has kid-appeal (\u201cCool,\u201d is Emma\u2019s signature understated response), and the situations are relatable for young people longing to stand out from the crowd.\u201d \u2014 The Horn Book About the Author Jennifer Frank has been a member of SCBWI for ten years. Before writing children's books, Jennifer was a family coordinator at the Boston Children's Hospital. She lives with her husband and three daughters outside of Boston. THE WORM FAMILY HAS ITS PICTURE TAKEN is her debut.David Ezra Stein is the Caldecott Honor illustrator and author of INTERRUPTING CHICKEN and its sequel, INTERRUPTING CHICKEN AND THE ELEPHANT OF SURPRISE, which the Wall Street Journal called \"a celebration of love and language.\" The next in the series, INTERRUPTING CHICKEN, COOKIES FOR BREAKFAST, will publish in Fall 2021. David is also the creator of DINOSAUR KISSES, I'M MY OWN DOG, and many other award-winning picture books. His picture book LEAVES won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Kirkus Reviews Editor's Choice, and a School Library Journal Best Book. He lives in New York. Visit David at davidezrastein.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "0063047470", "title": "Mirror to Mirror", "author": "Rajani LaRocca", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 4-8-Chaya and Maya are identical twins with a strong bond. Maya has been keeping a secret since they were six years old, something even her twin doesn't know about. Chaya picks up on Maya's anxiety and wants to tell their parents, but Maya asks her to keep it undercover. When Chaya discovers Maya is harming herself by digging into to her hand with her own fingernails, seeing the blood shocks her into action. Blaming herself for the anxiety her twin is experiencing, Chaya changes her interests and activities to those different from Maya, to give her space to shine. Unfortunately, Maya sees this as her sister pulling away from her and feels isolated. Each sister feels like the other twin has it easier, so they swap places while at camp-\u00e0 la The Parent Trap-style musical Long Lost, which they both adore. This novel-in-verse is told in alternating, dual perspectives of Chaya and Maya, which give readers insight into their thoughts and Maya's superstitious secret. LaRocca has created each sister with her own clear voice that is easy to discern as the point of view shifts. The cadence of the lyrical free verse lends itself beautifully to the musical talents of both girls. Family dynamics give readers more understanding and compassion for Maya's perfectionist ways when another family member seems to experience similar pressure that sometimes results in tense situations. Anxiety is presented respectfully, with the goal of helping to remove stigma. VERDICT This engaging verse novel opens doors to more conversations about mental health and deserves a place on every middle grade shelf.-Lisa Krok\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u201cA searing and poignant exploration of sisterhood, and all of its complexities. Maya and Chaya\u2019s story will help young readers wrestling with anxiety feel less alone, and help crack open many important conversations.\u201d \u2014 Jasmine Warga, Newbery Honor-winning author of Other Words for Home \"A thoughtful and deeply moving story in verse.\"\u00a0 \u2014 Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author \"A sensitive portrayal of sisters and music told in lyrical free verse that sings with hope.\" \u2014 Margarita Engle, Newbery Honor-winning author of The Surrender Tree and Young People's Poet Laureate Emeritus \"Deserves a place on every middle grade shelf.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal \"This nuanced novel explores complex aspects of family and sibling dynamics and will give readers much to ponder.\" \u2014 Horn Book Magazine About the Author Rajani LaRocca was born in India, raised in Kentucky, and now lives in Massachusetts, where she practices medicine and writes award-winning books for young readers,\u00a0including the Newbery Honor-winning novel in verse, Red, White, and Whole . She\u2019s always been an omnivorous reader, and now she is an omnivorous writer of novels and picture books, fiction and nonfiction, in prose and poetry. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, she lives outside Boston with her family. Visit her at\u00a0rajanilarocca.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 15.79}, {"asin": "0593175735", "title": "Down to Earth", "author": "Betty Culley", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 4\u20137\u2014Fascinated with geology, Henry spends hours breaking rocks open. His family members are water dowsers, people who sense sources of water using a dowsing rod. Henry is anxious because water dowsing is not something one can learn from a book, and not everyone in the family has the \"gift.\" When he tries to use a dowsing rod to find water, he feels an urge to hold the stick toward the sky instead of the ground. Soon, a giant meteorite falls to Earth. Henry is ecstatic to find and analyze the rock from space. But the meteorite has brought more than just media attention and a collector offering a giant financial reward\u2014the rock has caused a disaster, and Henry feels responsible. Culley perfectly illustrates Henry's complicated feelings and insecurities. He reacts like any child would, especially when the small town seems to hold him responsible. Poignant, lyrical prose and an engaging mix of geology, astronomy, and wonder will make this title popular, especially for fans of Nancy Viau's Samantha Hansen Has Rocks in Her Head. Henry is cued as white. VERDICT Heartwarming and absorbing, this is a solid choice for middle grade collections. Perfect for readers who want a great small-town story mixed with STEM.\u2014Patrick Tierney, Pascoag P.L., RI Review \"A captivating middle-grade novel.\u201d \u2013Booklist, Starred Review \"This is the perfect match for middle graders starting to sort through what we do know, what we don\u2019t know yet, and what might be unknowable.\u201d \u2013The Bulletin \" Heartwarming and absorbing .\" -School Library Journal \" Fun and exciting from start to finish.\" -CentralMaine.com About the Author Betty Culley's debut YA novel in verse, Three Things I Know Are True, was a Kids' Indie Next List Top Ten Pick and an ALA-YALSA Quick Pick. Her first middle-grade novel, Down to Earth, is inspired by her fascination with meteorites, voyagers from another place and time. She's worked as a pediatric nurse and lives in a small town in central Maine. You can find her online at bettyculley.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE The pointed end of a forked stick is believed to point toward the ground when it passes over water. \u2014\u00adThe World Book Encyclopedia: Volume D When I was five, I watched my father saw a Y-shaped twig off my great-\u00adgrandfather\u2019s hundred-\u00adyear-\u00adold apple tree. I waited to see if he would cut any other letters. There were branches that would make good L\u2019s and I\u2019s and a curved J just right for my best friend, James. I wondered if Dad would saw off three branches and tie them together to make the H for my name\u2014\u00adHenry. Now I\u2019m one hundred percent older than I was then, and when Dad circles the tree his grandfather planted on Bower Hill Road, I know he\u2019s not looking for letters. He\u2019s searching for the perfect forked stick for dowsing. He doesn\u2019t dowse for buried metal or gemstones. My dad, Harlan Bower, is a water dowser and he uses his stick to find veins of water deep underground. It doesn\u2019t have to be apple wood. It can be pear or willow. But if I ever try to dowse for real, I want my first branch to come from my great-\u00adgrandfather\u2019s tree. Having an H name like my father doesn\u2019t make me a\u00a0dowser. Being a Bower doesn\u2019t make me a dowser. Living on Bower Hill Road, with its underground springs and good-\u00adtasting well water, doesn\u2019t make me a dowser. My great-\u00adgrandfather and grandfather could find fresh water trapped beneath hard granite rock. Sixty-\u00adsix-\u00adpoint-\u00adsixty-\u00adsix percent of my grandfather\u2019s sons are dowsers. My father: 33.33\u00a0percent Uncle Lincoln: 33.33\u00a0percent Uncle Braggy: 0\u00a0percent My grandfather, my father, and Uncle Lincoln all discovered their water dowser talents when they were ten. I already read about dowsing in the D encyclopedia. It tells what it is, but not why some people can do it and other people can\u2019t. My father taught me how to dig a hole with straight sides and how to put rubble rocks in the middle of my stone walls so they can shift with the frost. But when I asked him how to dowse, he said it\u2019s not something you can teach, it just happens. I asked which was more important, the stick or the person that held it, and he said both. I asked if it was easier to dowse for water on a rainy day and he said he\u2019d never thought about that. The apple tree has a black gash on the trunk where lightning hit it. No one saw the lightning strike, and the tree kept growing. No one teaches a tree to find water. Its taproot goes straight down into the earth, the same direction my father\u2019s dowsing stick bends when it finds water. The day I turned ten, I went up the hill and stood under my great-\u00adgrandfather\u2019s tree. It was late August and there were so many apples they pulled the branches down around me. I touched the gash where lightning marked the tree. When I looked up, all I could see were Y\u2019s. Big Y\u2019s, little Y\u2019s, straight and crooked, too many to count. I traced the straightest Y with my finger, but I didn\u2019t break it off the tree. This perfect Y is at the very end of a branch that grows toward Nana\u2019s front porch. It will be an easy one to find again if Dad asks me to dowse for a well. Then I\u2019ll finally learn whether my great-\u00adgrandfather\u2019s abilities were passed down to me or not. If I could have chosen to be a dowser for my tenth birthday present, I would have, but I know Dad would say it\u2019s not something anyone else can give you. CHAPTER TWO Dowsing (water witching or water divining) is probably as old as man\u2019s need for water. It is an \u201cart\u201d certain people have which enables them to find underground sources of water. \u2014\u00adJoseph Baum, The Beginner\u2019s Handbook of Dowsing: The Ancient Art of Divining Underground Water Sources Before we head out into the icy field, James breaks a branch off a wild cherry tree for his dowsing stick. I pull my little sister, Birdie, behind us on her red sled. It\u2019s so cold out the snow that falls is gritty like sand and won\u2019t stick. It\u2019s the kind my father calls dry snow. James holds the Y-shaped branch the way my father and Uncle Lincoln do when they dowse\u2014\u00adpalms up, each hand holding an end of the V, elbows at his sides, the end of the Y pointing out in front of him. \u201cWhat should I dowse for, Henry?\u201d James asks me. \u201cA mammoth tusk like the one we saw in the museum?\u201d \u201cHow about Dad\u2019s good hammer? He lost it at the top of the field when he was fixing the tractor last summer.\u201d \u201cThen I\u2019ll dowse in that direction.\u201d James\u2019s eyes are the clear blue of the sky reflected in the ice, and his blond hair sticks out from under his wool hat. \u201cKeek keek keek.\u201d A small hawk glides overhead. \u201cKeek keek,\u201d Birdie calls back. Birdie is only two, but she can make a cry just like a hawk. \u201cKeek keek keek,\u201d the hawk screeches again, and flies off into the thick woods at the edge of the field. \u201cI think I see something!\u201d James yells, running ahead with his branch. \u201cLook! A deer antler! My best find yet!\u201d He holds up the antler. \u201cI bet this would sell fast on the yard sale table.\u201d James brings over the antler, and Birdie and I touch the hard, bony points. Then Birdie starts wiggling her legs in the sled. \u201cSlide down,\u201d she says. \u201cCan you say \u2018Push my sled, Henry\u2019?\u201d I try to get Birdie to say more than two words at a time and to say my name in the sentence. \u201cSLIDE NOW,\u201d Birdie tells me. I start her sled with a gentle push, and as it picks up speed, Birdie puts her arms out like wings. The dry snow makes the sled squeak. \u201cYou\u2019re going fast, Birdie. Hold on to the sides!\u201d I shout. \u201cSteer toward the hay bales!\u201d Dad puts hay bales at the bottom of the hill to stop our sleds so we don\u2019t slide out into the road. I watch Birdie zoom down the hill, the red of her mittens two bright spots moving in the air. \u201cI DO!\u201d Birdie shouts back. She doesn\u2019t steer with her hands, but she leans her body from side to side, like a hawk in the air. \u201cHere, Henry.\u201d James gives me his dowsing stick. \u201cYou take it. You\u2019re the real dowser. I\u2019m gonna go up in the woods and see if I can knock down some pinecones for your mom to start fires with.\u201d He\u2019s sure I\u2019m a dowser even though I haven\u2019t dowsed for real. The last time I went with Dad on a well-\u00addrilling job, I offered to try dowsing. When I said that, Dad stood still for a second, staring at me, and answered, Lincoln could use a hand digging the drainage ditch. Which didn\u2019t make sense, because you don\u2019t dig the ditch until you find the spot to drill. And you don\u2019t find the spot to drill until you dowse for it. I think he didn\u2019t want to watch me try and try and not be able to do it. Or hear what people in town would say when they heard what happened: Too bad that Bower boy can\u2019t dowse like his father. James runs across the ice, as excited about getting pinecones for Mom as he was about finding the antlers. I once heard my father say it was wonderful how James gave one hundred percent to whatever he was doing. Especially since he almost drowned with his mother when he was Birdie\u2019s age. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 10.7}, {"asin": "1646862910", "title": "Nour's Secret Library", "author": null, "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 1-4-When Damascus, once a city of blooming roses, cherries, and apricots, becomes destroyed by war, Nour and Amir are forced to take shelter with their families in the small basement of their house. Despite the scary bombings, they start collecting books from the rubble and start a secret library called \"Al-Fajr,\" or \"dawn.\" This is a beautiful and poignant coming-of-age book. Everything about childhood is as it should be: a busy neighborhood, the sights and smells of a thriving community, bustling markets, and happy school children, who are dreaming and plotting their secret missions and imagining a world bigger than their dreams. It is a universal tale of how creative a child's mind can truly be. However, this book also takes readers on a heartbreaking journey and offers insight into how bombardments and warfare destroy a community and affect the most vulnerable. This book shows the spirit of the children and communicates that no matter the devastation around them, they will still find a way to dream of a better world. Black-and-white charcoal illustrations of the battered city are overlaid with the colorful world to depict the wrecked city. Back matter and the glossary provides an excellent opportunity to learn about Syria and famous libraries of the Middle East. VERDICT Based on the author's and illustrator's personal experiences, this unique war story is full of hope and resilience that shines through even the worst of situations.-Noureen Qadir-Jafar\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u2605 \u201cA beautiful and poignant coming-of-age book . . . Based on the author\u2019s and illustrator\u2019s personal experiences, this unique war story is full of hope and resilience that shines through even the worst of situations\u201d \u2013 School Library Journal, starred review\u201cThis dual story\u2014one of destruction, and one of preservation and hope\u2014focuses on the importance of reading during war and the cultural role of libraries and knowledge, especially during times of crisis\u201d \u2013 The Horn Book Magazine\u201cAs their city is ravaged by war, two children and their community create an oasis of hope amid the destruction . . . A warm, engaging, and informative book that\u2019s a valuable addition to children\u2019s literature about war and conflict\u201d \u2013 Kirkus Reviews\u201cInspired by a true story and the author\u2019s own childhood experience, Nour\u2019s Secret Library conveys the comfort and hope books and libraries offer in times of struggle\u201d \u2013 Anne Thompson, A Library Lady\u201cIn \u2018Nour\u2019s Secret Library,\u2019 books are a refuge for a community under attack\u201d \u2013 Wall Street Journal\u201cA beautifully told and illustrated story of hope and community\u201d \u2013 The Guardian\u201cBooks prove \u2018a safe port in a sea of war\u2019 when conflict comes to Damascus in this affecting picture book\u201d \u2013 Publishers Weekly\u201cThis picture book tells the story, inspired by reality, of Syrian cousins who salvage books from bombed buildings and create a secret library in a basement, which offers a refuge from war. Lyrically told and attractively illustrated, it is a celebration for book lovers anywhere\u201d \u2013 Sunday Times About the Author Wafa\u2019 Tarnowska is an award-winning writer, translator and storyteller. She was born in Lebanon and has worked and lived in several countries from India, to Australia, to the UAE as well as Cyprus and Lebanon. She currently lives between the UK and Poland, writing, translating books and documentaries and offering storytelling sessions in English and Arabic. Wafa' sees herself as a cultural bridge between East and West, and has also written the award-winning The Arabian Nights for Barefoot Books. Vali Mintzi was born in Romania and studied at the prestigious Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. She works as an illustrator and graphic editor for the children's art magazine Einayim. In 2012 she was awarded The Israel Museum Ben-Yitzhak Award for the Illustration of a Children's Book. Her vibrant and evocative style is influenced by painters such as Bonnard, Hockney and Matisse. She has also illustrated The Girl with a Brave Heart for Barefoot Books. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 13.19}, {"asin": "0063032910", "title": "One Wish: Fatima al-Fihri and the World's Oldest University", "author": "M. O. Yuksel", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 2\u20135\u2014This is a beautiful new biography about Fatima al-Fihri, and the university she founded in Morocco. In simple but flowing prose, Yuksel brings al-Fihri's story from the ninth century to the present, weaving a tale of faith and charity through the \"one wish\" she had, to establish a school for all. Quraishi's illustrations are sweet and subtle\u2014the juxtaposed end papers show al-Fihri's lasting legacy, and the use of a similar fabric on her headdress and in the garments of scholars in the future is a heartwarming touch. This is a well-crafted picture book biography, especially given that so little is known of al-Fihri's early years. The focus on her legacy, as well as the back matter with time lines and translations, is a strong pull for readers. VERDICT Who could not love a book about a girl whose first spoken word was \"read\"? Add this biography to any collection looking to be well rounded when it comes to women's history.\u2014Aryssa Damron Review This is a well-crafted picture book biography, especially given that so little is known of al-Fihri\u2019s early years. The focus on her legacy, as well as the back matter with time lines and translations, is a strong pull for readers. Who could not love a book about a girl whose first spoken word was \u201cread\u201d? Add this biography to any collection looking to be well rounded when it comes to women\u2019s history. \u2014 School Library Journal (starred review) An inspiring profile of a tenacious trailblazer that highlights the power of knowledge. Quraishi\u2019s transporting gouache-and-watercolor illustrations furnish a nuanced portrayal of the early medieval Arab world. \u2014 Kirkus Reviews Advocating for persistence and education, this picture book adroitly demonstrates how al-Fihri\u2019s Muslim faith inspired her community care. \u2014 Publishers Weekly In a text rich with imagery, Yuksel ( In My Mosque ) tells the true story of Fatima al-Fihri, whose one wish was to build a school for all. The illustrations develop their own visual language. A welcome story that emphasizes the intellectual foundations of Islamic North Africa and the importance of charitable work that plants seeds for subsequent generations. \u2014 Horn Book Magazine About the Author M.O. Yuksel is the award-winning author of In My Mosque , and One Wish: Fatima al-Fihri and the World\u2019s Oldest University . Of Uzbek heritage, she was born in T\u00fcrkiye and immigrated to the United States when she was seven. She spent most of her childhood in New York City. Ramadan is her favorite time of year. Visit her online at www.moyuksel.com. Mariam Quraishi is an illustrator and designer living in New York. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Mariam favors traditional media, namely watercolor and gouache, for her work. In her free time, she can be found painting the beautiful champa trees and motia flowers from her hometown of Karachi. Whether the chai stains you find in her work are intentional or accidental, she\u2019ll never tell! To see her latest creations, please visit\u00a0www.mariamquraishi.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 11.79}, {"asin": "1525302396", "title": "Time for Bed's Story", "author": null, "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 2-4-Bedtime often has a negative reputation, but when does anyone ever think about bedtime from the perspective of the bed? Bed has decided to speak out and voice his concerns after so many years of discontentment. From being kicked and drooled on at night to being jumped on during the day, Bed is having a hard time. The stinky mysteries under the bed are getting to him, and he can not bring himself to even talk about the tooth incident. But, now that the child who sleeps on Bed is getting older, it seems like the right time to ask for a little consideration of Bed's feelings, too. Children who enjoy stepping away from the traditional storytelling style will appreciate the humor of this book. Bed has real personality and says everything that a typical bed, if alive, might be thinking. Short sentences make the story accessible for a range of readers, but the humor is best suited for those midway through elementary school. Vintage colors and patterns adorn each page, providing a retro quality to the story. Each illustration is dynamic, shifting in perspective from close-up to broader views, varying the feel of every page. The character of Bed is endearing in his curmudgeonly demeanor, especially as the child takes no notice. VERDICT For a story hour about out-of-the-box thinking, this is a novel, cheerful way to get children to view things from a different perspective.-Mary Lanni, formerly at Denver P.L.\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review A cute, original, and funny book for younger readers.\u2015 Kirkus Reviews For a story hour about out-of-the-box thinking, this is a novel, cheerful way to get children to view things from a different perspective.\u2015 School Library Journal There's a nice blend of snark and warmth in this offbeat furniture narrative ...\u2015 The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books ... recommended for home and school libraries ...\u2015 CM Magazine ... a stroke of conceptual genius.\u2015 New York Times About the Author Monica Arnaldo is an illustrator and author living in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in children's magazines, picture books and middle-grade novels. Her clients include Owlkids Books, Penguin Random House, \u00c9ditions Scholastic, Chirp magazine and Chickadee magazine. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.59}, {"asin": "1624149219", "title": "Saturdays Are For Stella", "author": "Candy Wellins", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.1}, {"asin": "198483665X", "title": "Animals Go Vroom!", "author": "Abi Cushman", "description": "Review \"Cushman's appealing, digitally colored pencil drawings offer plenty of action, details, and dressed-animal characters for kids to enjoy. Fun for reading aloud.\" - Booklist About the Author Abi Cushman has loved drawing and painting since she was a child. She studied art and art history at Tufts University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the University of Melbourne in Australia. She now lives on the coast of Connecticut with her husband and two children. Please visit her at abicushman.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Cars, Trains & Things That Go"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 16.49}, {"asin": "0358238420", "title": "A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything", "author": "Kirsten W. Larson", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 3\u20135\u2014Focusing on the ups and downs of Wonder Woman's status as a role model, Larson begins with the superheroine's origins in 1941. The author details changes through the years as Wonder Woman went from capturing enemy soldiers and even serving as president of the United States (in the far future) to, in the 1950s, just angling to retire and marry before being revived as a feminist icon in subsequent decades and becoming the strong, independent TV and movie star of today. Skipping over seamier details (Wonder Woman's creator William Marston was a real piece of work, by other accounts), the author names and pays tribute to the women writers and editors who played prominent roles in the predominantly white male world of comics publishing to create the WW stories and, later, films. In a personal afterword preceding the generous list of further resources, Larson also connects Wonder Woman's long fight for social justice to real-world struggles for civil and equal rights. Possibly for licensing reasons, Wu steers clear of clear or conventional depictions of Wonder Woman\u2014and covers her cleavage with discreet swirls of bunting to keep censors at bay, too\u2014but fills the illustrations with images of proud, active fans, mostly (but not entirely) girls and women, of diverse races. VERDICT References to Diana Prince's actual adventures and feats are scattered, so readers will have to look elsewhere for her background and exploits, but this picture book tribute provides a strong motive for doing so.\u2014John Peters, Children's Literature Consultant, NY Review \u2605 \"[I]nspiring and entertaining, much like Wonder Woman herself....A lively exploration of recent women\u2019s history as well as the creation of an iconic female superhero.\"\u2014 Kirkus, STARRED\u00a0review\u00a0\u00a0 \u2605 \"This story about Wonder Woman, the iconic comic book, comic strip, TV show, and blockbuster superhero movie persona, splendidly parallels the history of women in America over the past 80 years....This is an engaging addition to the superhero canon and packs quite a punch for everyday women heroes.\"\u2014 Booklist, STARRED\u00a0review \u2014 About the Author Kirsten W. Larson used to work with rocket scientists at NASA. Now she writes books for curious kids. Her picture books include A True Wonder: The Superhero Who Changed Everything; Wood, Wire, Wings: Emma Lilian Todd Invents an Airplane ; and The Fire of Stars: The Life and Brilliance of the Woman Who Discovered What Stars are Made of . Kirsten lives near LA with her dog and family.\u00a0kirsten-w-larson.com, Twitter: @KirstenWLarson, Instagram: @KirstenWLarson Katy Wu illustrated the picture books A True Wonder: The Superhero Who Changed Everything by Kirsten W. Larson and Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code by Laurie Wallmark, among several others. She lives in Portland, Oregon. katycwwu.tumblr.com, Twitter: @thewildkat, Instagram: @thewildkat Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1728232171", "title": "Listen to the Language of the Trees: A story of how forests communicate underground", "author": "Tera Kelley", "description": "Review \"Smart, concise explanations of a tricky topic leave readers only wanting to learn more\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews (STARRED) \"A gold mine of information... detailed illustrations... [an] informative and engaging book.\" \u2015 Booklist (STARRED review) \"Beautifully detailed illustrations... complement the text perfectly\" \u2015 Youth Services Book Review (STARRED review) About the Author Tera Kelley was a children's bookseller for six years, and her first book, Ocean Baby, was selected for the ocean curriculum of Santa Cruz's Migrant Head Start Program. She is currently a freelance writer and editor in Northern California, where she works at a local library. Find out more about her work at terakelley.com. Marie Hermansson is an illustrator who strives to create illustrations that cultivate imagination and spark natural curiosity. When she\u2019s not working, she enjoys gardening, hiking, and going to museums. She lives with her family in North Carolina.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0062891367", "title": "Cow Boy Is NOT a Cowboy", "author": "Gregory Barrington", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2-A great lesson in individuality delivered in a charming fashion. Humdrum Farm is just what one would expect-boring. Chickens lay average eggs; pigs roll in the mud (but only when necessary), and the goats eat tasteless rice cakes. Enter Goat Girl-the antithesis of dull. She's into French cooking, likes to dress up as a dinosaur, and enjoys riding in a hot air balloon over the countryside. When Goat Girl meets Merle, an exceedingly dull bull, she is smitten. She instantly starts calling him \"cowboy\" despite the fact that Merle insists that he is not adventurous nor brave, and has a suspicion that he is allergic to horses. There is no way that this cow, who is a boy, is in fact, a cowboy. However, fate has other plans for Merle and when some chickens attempt to cross the road, Merle is forced to channel his inner cowboy and save the day. VERDICT This picture book debut is a must have for all collections. The colorful digital illustrations are full of humor and children will fall in love with Goat Girl and her joie de vivre.-Amy Nolan, St. Joseph P.L., MI\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review Barrington\u2019s debut is a fun farm fable with softly modeled cartoons that are full of zip (well, at least when Goat Girl is around) and expressive (mostly expressing boredom) creatures. Little listeners, who\u2019ll be anything but bored, will likely hope for further Goat Girl and Cow Boy adventures. This chipper tale of an unlikely farm friendship is sure to bring a smile.\u00a0 \u2014 Kirkus Reviews A great lesson in individuality delivered in a charming fashion.\u00a0This picture book debut is a must have for all collections. \u2014 School Library Journal (starred review) From the Inside Flap This is Merle. Merle is a cow boy who lives on Humdrum Farm, where nothing ever happens. Merle is ordinary. This is Goat Girl. Goat Girl lives on Humdrum Farm, too. She is anything but ordinary.One day an overexcited Goat Girl mistakes underwhelmed Merle for a cowboy, and he cannot believe his ears. I am NOT a cowboy. I am a bull. But when humdrum Farm is in need of a hero, will Merle live up to his new name? From the Back Cover WELCOME TO HUMDRUM FARM Where Nothing Ever Happens! About the Author Gregory Barrington lives at the foot of the Rocky Mountains with his just-right family and four dogs that have noses that are too cold and breath that is too hot. While he has seen bears outside his front door, he has never let them into his house. Gregory\u2019s first book, Cow Boy Is NOT a Cowboy , was the winner of the thirtieth annual Colorado Book Award and received a starred review from School Library Journal . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1452177163", "title": "The Longest Letsgoboy", "author": "Derick Wilder", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 3-Letsgoboy, a dog along in years, and his pint-sized companion embark on their final walk, their senses taking in the magic of the summer woods. Letsgoboy is delighted at every turn by the sights, sounds, and smells of the forest, and he uses a lexicon uniquely his own to describe his environs-clouds are puffers, trees are tallsticks, squirrels are branchjumpers. And while his joy cannot be dulled by the fatigue of old age, Letsgoboy knows that this walk will be his last. He revels in the love he feels for his surroundings and Little, his girl. With his earthbound journey complete, he peacefully passes in the shadow of his home. His girl grieves, seasons turn, and spring brings renewed life and a puppy to Letsgoboy's child. Wilder deftly navigates the difficult topic of death by presenting it in tandem with the joy of life. The grief of loss is acknowledged, but not dwelled upon, and Wilder's use of literal-and sometimes silly-descriptive phrases adds just the right amount of levity to a tough subject matter. The mixed media illustrations work brilliantly in conjunction with the text, particularly Chien's depiction of Letsgoboy's passing. The palette fluctuates from vibrant to solemn, shifting appropriately to the mood of the story. VERDICT One not to be missed, this moving, visceral tale is a testament to the bond between a child and pet. Any person, young or old, who has experienced loss will find this essential purchase a profound comfort.-Sarah Simpson, Westerville P.L., OH\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u201c[A] moving testament to the love between child and dog. An affecting resource for starting conversations with readers experiencing their own loss.\u201d- Publishers Weekly \u201c[A]s genuinely doggy a narrative as ever there was . . . Echoing the strong mutual attachment that underlies every line of this monologue, Chien\u2019s grainy, soft-focus scenes follow [an] old pooch and a tiny, exuberant child who barely reaches his shoulder through a woodsy ramble, and then sends the dog on alone, to soar through bright abstract spaces . . . If there\u2019s a dryeye in the house after this, check for a pulse.\u201d- Booklist , starred review \u201cStunning, tender, and brilliant. Readers will laugh and cry-but most of all love.\u201d- Kirkus Reviews , starred review \u201cOne not to be missed, this moving, visceral tale is a testament to the bond between a child and pet. Any person, young or old,\u00a0who has experienced loss will find this essential purchase a profound comfort.\u201d- School Library Journal, starred review \u201c[ The Longest Letsgoboy ] is a perfect storm of tearjerk, with its supple poetry, canine narration, and picture of loss, but there\u2019s a reassuring message about what we love remaining a part of us forever that youngsters may find . . . bolstering. . . . Chien\u2019s mixed-media illustrations . . . tactfully distance the events, and an emphasis on sunny tones keeps the mood upbeat even amid the sadness. [A] spiritual complement to the more concrete take[s] on pet succession . . .\u201d\u2014 The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books , starred review About the Author Derick Wilder is the founder of Reading Giraffe, a literacy initiative with the goal of creating lifelong readers by making books come alive. He has been writing for as long as he can remember, but endless hours in the children's section of the library with his daughter sparked his love for picture books. He lives in Fort Mill, South Carolina. This is his first book.Catia Chien is a Brazilian-Taiwanese artist. She's the illustrator of such titles as The Sea Serpent and Me , which won a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators; A Boy and a Jaguar , an ALA Notable Book and recipient of the Schneider Family Book Award; and The Bear and the Moon . She lives in New York City with her family. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 11.69}, {"asin": "0062689800", "title": "Eventown", "author": "Corey Ann Haydu", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 5-7-What would you give up to always be content, to never experience grief or intense anger? Would you give up choice, variety, creativity, joy? These are exactly the questions addressed when Elodee and her twin sister Naomi move with their parents to Eventown in order to get a fresh start in their lives. The family has experienced something terrible-an unknown event from which they have not been able to recover. All of that changes upon the family's arrival in their new town. It is quite literally a place where the sun always shines. There are no cars needed in Eventown since everyone bikes, the neighbors are friendly, and their new school is pleasant. Her parents are happy, as if the strain on them has been lifted, and her sister fits in like a glove. Elodee is only one who feels a distant strangeness, as if it is all a little too pleasant. Elodee begins to question her \"perfect\" new home. She notices that all the houses look exactly the same, the library is filled with blank books, and the ice cream shop only serves three flavors. Elodee must being to unravel her family's past in order to figure out what's missing and find true emotional closure for all of them. \u00adVERDICT An emotionally complex and wonderfully told story that will capture tween readers.-Patricia Feriano, Montgomery County Public Schools, MD\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u201cWould life be better if we could forget the past? That\u2019s the question Corey Ann Haydu poses in her engrossing Eventown . With its embedded questions about the consequences of erasing all your problems, Eventown will doubtless hit many a middle grade reader\u2019s sweet spot.\u201d \u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cA wonderful and inventive story about being a kid in an imperfect world\u2014beautiful, mysterious, and deeply satisfying.\u201d \u2014 Rebecca Stead, Newbery Medal-winning author of When You Reach Me and Goodbye Stranger \u2605 \u201cAt once enchanting, heart-rending, and bittersweet.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u2605 \u201cAn emotionally complex and wonderfully told story.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal (starred review) \u2605 \u201c[A] thought-provoking novel... [A]\u00a0memorable and brave heroine.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cReaders will feel for the brave, unconventional Elodee, who both affirms her individuality but also feels the loneliness of it... A hope-tinged tale about the long aftermath of tragedy.\u201d \u2014 ALA Booklist \u201cHaydu brings a different dimension with real poignancy... less The Giver and more Pleasantville... [ Eventown ] will reel in readers looking for family dramas as well as those seeking a little ideological stretching, and it will leave them with plenty to discuss about the price of walling yourself off from pain.\u201d \u2014 Bulletin of the Center for Children\u2019s Books \u201cA marvelous defense of messiness, mistakes, and uncomfortable conversations ... this book is pure Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Pleasantville.\u201d \u2014 Betsy Bird of Fuse 8 \u201cCorey Ann Haydu doesn\u2019t shy away from tough topics in her books. Eventown is no exception.\u201d \u2014 Time for Kids \u201c[An] original, thought-provoking and engaging novel exploring how our stories shape us and can help us heal from even the most terrible loss... Haydu offers an inspired creation in the \u201cperfect world\u201d of Eventown.\u201d \u2014 Buffalo News Praise for The Someday Suitcase :\u201cA touch of magic, the promise of snow, and so much love I can barely keep it together to write this sentence. I know Clover and Danny will stick with me for a long, long time.\u201d \u2014 Kate Milford, New York Times bestselling author of The Greenglass House \u201cBeautiful, true, and magical. This book touched my heart.\u201d \u2014 Lauren Myracle, author of the Wishing Day series \u2605 \u201cQuietly superb prose...Haydu doesn\u2019t romanticize illness, but she provides comfort through art, science, magic, love, and a purple suitcase. A sharp, clear-cut piece that knows life is beautiful and sickness isn\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u2605 \u201cHaydu\u2019s second middle-grade novel is poignant and powerful. A heartbreaking story about the healing power of friendship amid human fragility.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u2605\u00a0\u201cIn this moving, exquisitely written story, Corey Ann Haydu explores the thin line between science and magic within an intense bond of friendship.\u201d \u2014 Shelf Awareness (starred review) \u201cHaydu does not shield readers from hard truths, creating complex characters who face difficult situations. This sensitive work will strike an emotional chord with middle-graders.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal Praise for Rules for Stealing Stars: \u2605 \u201cA well-crafted blend of realism and fantasy.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal (starred review) \u2605 \u201c[A] lyrical story of love and loss. The way the sisters fight and love in equal measure, as well as their basic need for one another, rings poignantly true in this touching and heartwarming story, which contains a \u2018tiny bit of magic, right here in the real world.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201cHaydu makes skilled use of her story\u2019s fantastical overlay to create a haunting narrative about the ways family members can fail-but also support-each other.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cHaydu is a masterful wordsmith.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cTender, wise, and heartbreakingly lovely, this story is as brilliant as a stolen star, and every bit as magical. Prepare to be enchanted.\u201d \u2014 Katherine Applegate, Newbery-award winning author of The One and Only Ivan \u201cA gorgeous, profound, deeply felt book that lovingly explores intricate sibling relationships, the crushing weight of family secrets, and the delicate magic of hope. Rules for Stealing Stars is sublime.\u201d \u2014 Anne Ursu, author of Breadcrumbs and The Real Boy \u201cSilly and her sisters are flesh-and-bone characters; they gripped me by my very heart and pulled me into their tense and mysterious family story. With beguiling moments of magical realism and engaging turns of phrase, Corey Ann Haydu has crafted a glowing middle grade debut.\u201d \u2014 Leslie Connor, award-winning author of Waiting for Normal and Crunch About the Author Corey Ann Haydu is the author of Eventown and other acclaimed novels for children and young adults. She grew up in the Boston area, earned her MFA at the New School, and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her toddler daughter, who hasn\u2019t yet discovered the delight of tea parties with her abuelita, but is already curious enough to make an excellent detective. Find out more at www.coreyannhaydu.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.06}, {"asin": "1506480357", "title": "Tofu Takes Time", "author": "Helen H. Wu", "description": "Review \u2605 A standout story about a healthy food that some readers will embrace as a reflection of their own culture or diet and others will be inspired to try making ... These are a delight to the ear and make this book one that promises successful read-alouds. The playful tone works in beautiful partnership with Jarema's joyful illustrations as granddaughter and grandmother work together. - School Library Journal , Starred Review Sentimental and quaint...A culinary lesson in patience.\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus Reviews Patience is cushioned with family warmth and the joy of spending time together in a tale, which also dives into the wonder of making tofu ... The illustrations carry a gentle atmosphere, while holding details as well as a sense of imagination, too. These balance well with the words. While telling the story and repeating the grandmother's one phrase again and again, the author has also built in sound words (such as Tik) to add a sense of playfulness. Young listeners will be able to repeat these as well as the book is picked up again and again.\u2014 Tonja Drecker, Bookworm for Kids Food is love in Chinese families. Tofu Takes Time illustrates that connection perfectly in this lyrical tale of a young girl making tofu with her grandmother. A lovely story of food, love, family, and the rewards of waiting for a good (and delicious) thing.\u2014 Livia Blackburne, New York Times Bestselling Author of I Dream of Popo Beautifully and whimsically illustrated, Tofu Takes Time is a lovely celebration of tradition and family.\u2014 Kat Zhang, Award-winning Author of Amy Wu and the Perfect Bao Tofu Takes Time sends me back to my childhood and those moments spent making soymilk, baozi, jiaozi, and zongzi with my Chinese mom. The sound-filled story captures the wonder and impatience of witnessing ingredients take shape as food. Each stage of the tofu-making process is connected to an appreciation of the components\u2014seeds, water, cloth, heat, weight, and shape\u2014which I thought was marvelous. Because \"tofu takes time,\" this book is an ode to patience and delayed gratification, ending with a family meal served with pride. A wonderful addition to any child's library!\u2014 Karen Yin, Author of Whole Whale and So Not Ghoul Tofu Takes Time is lovely in its simplicity and magical in its proportions. This is a story of a granddaughter and grandmother making tofu together and it is also a story of the natural processes that allow us the gift of a favorite food and its connections to family, history, and the natural world.\u2014 Kao Kalia Yang, Author of The Most Beautiful Thing and A Map into the World About the Author Helen H. Wu is a children's book author, illustrator, and translator. She was born and raised in Hefei, China, and now lives in San Diego, California. As a proud first-generation immigrant, Helen loves to share inspiring stories from her own immigrant experience. Her proudest moments are when her own two children listen patiently to her stories again and again. Julie Jarema is an illustrator, writer, and bookseller. She graduated from Bard College with a degree in Written Arts. When she's not making up stories, you can find her going on backyard adventures, sending snail mail, or practicing her circus skills.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 10.47}, {"asin": "1328560910", "title": "From Here to There: Inventions That Changed the Way the World Moves", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 7.49}, {"asin": "1328498069", "title": "Louis", "author": "Tom Lichtenheld", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 3-Louis is a teddy bear who has truly seen it all. And he's a teddy bear who has had enough. He has been used and abused as a pillow, a hankie, and as lunch for a prehistoric beast. He's been buried alive, thrown into a hurricane, hung out to dry, and has even been made an accessory to a nightmare-inducing crime! Lichtenheld lets readers know that Louis is ready to break free-but there is always a reason not to leave, and he's going to need more cupcakes. Rowan-Zoch's colorful and expressive illustrations complement Lichtenheld's silly story and truly bring Louis the grumpy bear to life. Fans of the author's Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site will delight in this enjoyable picture book. VERDICT Perfect for read-alouds or one-on-one sharing, this is a laugh-out-loud spin on a would-be runaway's best-laid plans.-Elizabeth Blake, Fields Corner Lib., Dorchester, MA\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u2605 \"Like a faithful teddy, sure to become a favorite for many readers.\"\u2014 Kirkus, STARRED review\u00a0\u00a0 \"Lichtenheld\u2019s first-person narration is just the right amount of cranky, rendering Louis as both sympathetic (he does get thrown in the washing machine, after all) and clueless as to how good he has it.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly \"Rowan-Zoch\u2019s colorful and expressive illustrations complement Lichtenheld\u2019s silly story and truly bring Louis the grumpy bear to life.... Perfect for read-alouds or one-on-one sharing, this is a laugh-out-loud spin on a would-be runaway\u2019s best-laid plans.\"\u2014 School Library Journal \"A cheeky reminder to kids to show a little care to what they might be taking for granted.\"\u2014 BCCB \u2014 About the Author TOM LICHTENHELD makes books for children and people who used to be children. His New York Times bestsellers include I Wish You More and Duck!Rabbit! , created with Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site , created with Sherri Duskey Rinker, and Stick and Stone , created with Beth Ferry. See all of his books at www.tomlichtenheld.com. Author, illustrator, bookseller, and activist: Julie Rowan-Zoch grew up collecting freckles and chasing hermit crabs in NY, and spent years slicing rich breads in Germany before waking up to 300 days of blue Colorado skies. If she doesn\u2019t answer the door, look in the garden! Website: https://julierowanzoch.wordpress.com/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/julierowanzoch/ Twitter:\u00a0@JulieRowanZoch Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArtistJulieRowanZoch Instagram: @jrzoch Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.66}, {"asin": "1547607211", "title": "Amah Faraway", "author": "Margaret Chiu Greanias", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2-Kylie and her mother travel to Taipei from San Francisco to spend time with her Amah, or grandmother, with whom she video chats frequently but can't visit because of the distance. At first, the little girl feels nervous and unsure about the excursion, daunted by the language barrier and overwhelmed by new tastes and sights Amah wants to share with her. However, when they visit the hot springs, Kylie finally finds that embracing this comforting activity bonds her with her Amah and allows her to enjoy the rest of the stay. She delights in all of the things she found strange at first, and is sad to leave her grandmother when it's time to return home. She enthusiastically continues to video chat with her grandmother every Saturday and is no longer scared, but excited for future visits. Subisak's watercolor, pencil, and ink illustrations lovingly show details from Taiwanese life and culture. Ranging from multiple vignettes per page to full spreads, they possess an almost cinematic storyboard quality while supporting the mirrored narrative symmetry that has the hot spring visit as its midpoint. Taiwanese words and conversation are used throughout, clear from context. VERDICT As is true for Hyewon Yum's Grandpa Across the Ocean, this is a poignantly emotional and highly relatable story for children whose grandparents or other family members might live far away, but also one that teaches universal lessons about overcoming fears of the unfamiliar.-Yelena Voysey, formerly at Pickering Educational Lib., Boston Univ.\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \"A heartfelt homage to her Taiwanese heritage that binds multiple generations on either side of the globe. . . . Margaret Chiu Greanias and Tracy Subisak delightfully, inventively present a hesitant child's transformative reunion with her Taiwanese grandmother on the other side of the world.\" - Shelf Awareness, starred review \u201cSubisak\u2019s watercolor, pencil, and ink illustrations lovingly show details from Taiwanese life and culture. Ranging from multiple vignettes per page to full spreads, they possess an almost cinematic storyboard quality while supporting the mirrored narrative symmetry that has the hot spring visit as its midpoint. . . . This is a poignantly emotional and highly relatable story for children whose grandparents or other family members might live far away, but also one that teaches universal lessons about overcoming fears of the unfamiliar.\u201d \u2015 School Library Journal, starred review \u201cAn au courant portrayal of a transnational childhood.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cA sympathetic portrayal of long-distance family ties.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cEncouraging openness toward new experiences amid a centering of one child's diasporic shift in cultural perception, this contemporary tale tenderly spotlights the strengthening of an intergenerational relationship.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author Tracy Subisak was known for running around the school yard as a wild horse in the second grade. She is an illustrator and designer living in Portland, Oregon. Shawn Loves Sharks is her first picture book for Roaring Brook Press. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 18.93}, {"asin": "1338359010", "title": "Chicken Little: The Real and Totally True Tale (the Real Chicken Little)", "author": "Sam Wedelich", "description": "Review Praise for Chicken Little: The Real and Totally True Tale : \"In this clever spin on the classic tale, Chicken Little makes it clear-right from the get-go-that she's got plenty of pluck... Wedelich's hand-lettered text is chockful of humor... Equally chuckle-worthy, Wedelich's loose-lined digital illustrations feature a protagonist who sports cowboy boots and oversized spectacles, both tinted fire-engine red. In this fractured fable, empathy ends up saving the day, and the moral (don't believe everything you hear; check the facts) is broadcast loud and clear.\" -- The Horn Book \"Whimsy reigns in Wedelich's debut picture book, a reimagining of the classic doomsday story. Punchy speech balloons and spare, loosely lined digital cartoons imbue the title character with abundant personality and humorous mood swings...Sprawling across vertical matte pages dominated by teal and ochre hues, Wedelich's hand-lettered text mimics her story's high energy, while the hens' wry asides (\"We're free-range!\") amplify the comedy. A spry readaloud that will entertain adults and listeners in equal measure.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Sam's whimsical line brings to life a contemporary take on a classic character. This unexpected story has a great message and many laughs.\" -- Kirkus Review \"The whole episode takes on a kinder, gentler slant... [and] this chicken, stylish in her red cowboy boots and huge eyeglasses, is worthy of admiration for her ability to \"pullet\" together in the wake of a sudden mishap.\" -- Booklist About the Author Sam Wedelich is the creator of Chicken Little: The Real and Totally True Tale and its hilarious companion Chicken Little and the Big Bad Wolf . She is also a cartoonist, illustrator, and installation designer. When she isn\u2019t hunched over her art table trying to make something funny or beautiful, Sam enjoys gardening, cycling, and making music. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two kids. You can visit her online at samwedelich.com or follow her on Instagram @samwedelich.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.64}, {"asin": "1419741292", "title": "Where Three Oceans Meet", "author": "Rajani LaRocca", "description": "Review \"A celebration of intergenerational, border-crossing love. . .\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"A satisfyingly poignant close against expansive views from Kanyakumari concludes this warm intergenerational tale, which emphasizes how love transcends distance and endures across continents.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"The metaphor of the intertwining of cross-cultural and cross-generational similarities and differences is sustained from start to finish, offering points of connection for readers from all backgrounds.\" \u2015 Booklist About the Author Rajani LaRocca is a physician and an author of books for young readers, such as Midsummer\u2019s Mayhem and Seven Golden Rings . She was born in Bangalore, India, and immigrated to the United States when she was very young. She now lives in eastern Massachusetts with her family. You can find her online at rajanilarocca.com. Archana Sreenivasan is a freelance illustrator. Her previous picture books include Desert Girl, Monsoon Boy and Seven Golden Rings. She lives in Bangalore, India, with her family. You can find her online at archanasreenivasan.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0062463314", "title": "Big Papa and the Time Machine", "author": "Shane W. Evans", "description": "Review \u201cBig Papa takes his grandchild back in time to see what bravery looks like in this tender story by Bernstrom ( Gator, Gator, Gator! ) . . . Wide angles give the spreads visual power, while soft pastels convey the journey\u2019s otherworldly atmosphere and the stories\u2019 intimacy.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"A unique perspective in a beautifully executed book about starting school. A must-purchase. Bernstrom\u2019s\u00a0latest book digs deep, with a story about a child facing fears by discovering a grandfather\u2019s difficult past . . . In the first-person narrative, written largely in dialogue that features African American Vernacular English, the child poses questions, and the knowing grandparent responds with sage, though not preachy, one-liners. \u201cSometimes you gotta walk with giants if you ever gonna find out what you made of.\u201d Evans\u2019s signature style animate(s) the story in a joyous way that uplifts the text.\"  \u2014 School Library Journal (starred review) \u201cThis imaginative and inventive tale walks a child through African American history by way of his grandfather\u2019s past. An excellent choice for reading with grandparents or for a first-day-of-school storytime.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cBernstrom\u2019s colloquial text captures the warm relationship between Big Papa and his grandson.\u201d \u2014 Horn Book Magazine \u201cLove and reverence for history and family radiate from Bernstorm's words.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Daniel Bernstrom is the author of the critically acclaimed One Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree , as well as Gator, Gator, Gator!, Big Papa and the Time Machine, Song in the City, and Good Night, Little Man . Dan earned an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University and currently works at the Learning Resource Center Coordinator at Minnesota State College Southeast, where he tutors students in math, writing, and science. He lives in Red Wing, Minnesota, with his wife, Heather; daughter, LaVonne; and sons, Grace, and Haven. Shane W. Evans is the author and illustrator of Underground , a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner, We March , and Olu\u2019s Dream and the illustrator of more than forty books for children, including Chocolate Me!; Mixed Me!; and I Love You More Than . . . , all by Taye Diggs. He has exhibited his art all over the world, in West Africa, South Africa, and France and Chicago, New York, and other major U.S. cities. He has a home base in Kansas City, Missouri, where he runs Dream Studio, a studio that is open to the community. You can visit the work online at www.shaneevans.com and\u00a0www.dreamstudio777.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0807551759", "title": "Beatrix Potter, Scientist (She Made History)", "author": "Wu, Junyi", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 3-This picture book biography stresses Beatrix Potter's scientific research. As a child, Potter found inspiration in nature. The text describes her methods as observing, questioning, collecting, and recording. Potter and her brother Bertram loved animals. However, when a pet died, she mourned the loss and also studied the animal bones. As Metcalf explains in an extensive note, artists in the 19th century boiled their dead pets so they could remove the skin and muscles, preserve the skeletons, and therefore learn about the inner workings of animals. Potter's parents encouraged her art, but she did not receive the same formal education as her brother. She was deeply interested in fungi; she spent years experimenting with spores, making sample slides to study under her microscope, and creating detailed drawings of fungi. When she tried to submit her work to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, male scientists initially dismissed her findings. Why she stopped studying fungi and pivoted to children's books is not explained; the answer seems to have been lost to history. Wu's colorful, vivid illustrations appear to be rendered in pastels. Wu does not attempt to replicate Potter's style but captures a sense of her drawings within the larger spreads. VERDICT Celebrating how Potter's talents and interests informed each other, this inviting biography illuminates an unfamiliar aspect of an accomplished woman's life.-Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, St. Christopher's Sch., Richmond, VA\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \"This inviting biography illuminates an unfamiliar aspect of an accomplished woman's life.\" \u2015 School Library Journal \"An unusual combination of women's history and science that shows not all questions can be answered.\"-- Kirkus \"Metcalf's lyrical text is succinct and focused . . .\u00a0this makes a worthy addition to STEAM and women's history units.\" -- Booklist \"Metcalf's tale illustrates difficulties of breaking through prejudiced systems\u2026a story that both shows what was and hints at what might have been.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Lindsay H. Metcalf has worked as a reporter, editor, and parenting columnist for The Kansas City Star. She lives in Kansas. Junyi Wu is a freelance illustrator and designer and a graduate of ArtCenter College of Design. Her passions include pies, puns, and puzzles. She is based in Orange County, California. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Biographies"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.99}, {"asin": "0823440192", "title": "Amira's Picture Day", "author": "Reem Faruqi", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2-Amira feels conflicted when she realizes that school picture day is the same day as Eid. Spotting the crescent moon marking the end of Ramadan, Amira and her brother Ziyad know it means that there will be prayers, celebrations, and skipping school the following day. Amira's mom decorates the girl's hands with mehndi. Amira and Ziyad prepare goody bags for the kids at the masjid, while her mother irons Amira's Eid outfit, a beautiful blue and gold mirrored shalwar kameez. Though Eid is full of the joy and community she loves, missing picture day puts a damper on the celebration, until Amira thinks of a possible solution. Deceptively simple, Faruqi's narrative gently addresses the impact that the celebration of non-\u00adJudeo-Christian holidays has on children and choices families make to uphold traditions. Moreover, Amira's conflicted feelings and insistence on finding a solution create opportunities for dialogue about the importance of acknowledging spaces that matter to children, especially while families try to foster positive identity. Azim's illustrations are fun and colorful, with tiny details reflecting the family's personality, while the people attending Eid celebrations at Amira's masjid are racially and culturally diverse, with varied skin tones, body types, and expressions of fashion and style. Back matter features an author's note and glossary of terms, referencing Urdu and Amira and her family's Pakistani roots. VERDICT A lovely addition to the collection of books about Eid that can be used all year long.-Ariana Sani Hussain, The Blake Sch., Wayzata, MN\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \u2605 \"Faruqi\u2019s prose is sweetly descriptive ('Tiny mirrors on her blue shalwar kameez shone happily in the sunlight'), and jewel-toned digital illustrations by Azim have a joyful, comics-style sensibility, with meticulous attention paid to the attire of the diverse crowd at the masjid. An endearing portrait of one child\u2019s specific cultural concern, with universal appeal for any reader ever caught between conflicting commitments.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly , Starred Review \u2605 \"Faruqi effectively builds up the excitement to celebrate Eid and balances it with Amira\u2019s distress at missing Picture Day\u2014readers will see that both are important. The characters and interactions at the masjid are real, reinforcing a community celebrating Eid, and so are Amira\u2019s interactions with her classmates. Azim\u2019s illustrations pair well with Faruqi\u2019s words, focusing on facial expression as well as body language to highlight the mixed emotions: excitement, sadness, surprise. There is much diversity among the people at the masjid, including hijab styles, other attire, and racial presentation. . . . Sweet and sympathetic.\" \u2014 Kirkus\u00a0Reviews , Starred Review \u2605 \"Deceptively simple, Faruqi\u2019s narrative gently addresses the impact that the celebration of \u00adnon-\u00adJudeo-Christian holidays has on children and choices families make to uphold traditions. Moreover, Amira\u2019s conflicted feelings and insistence on finding a solution create opportunities for dialogue about the importance of acknowledging spaces that matter to children, especially while families try to foster positive identity. Azim\u2019s illustrations are fun and colorful, with tiny details reflecting the family\u2019s personality, while the people attending Eid celebrations at Amira\u2019s masjid are \u00adracially and culturally diverse, with varied skin tones, body types, and expressions of fashion and style.\"\u2014 School Library Journal , Starred Review \"Colorful and humorous cartoon artwork, created digitally, captures Amira\u2019s expressive facial features and energetic body motions as she deals with disappointment, then celebrates a happy outcome. A great pick for teachers wanting to incorporate different cultural celebrations into holiday units.\" \u2014Booklist \"The rollercoaster of emotions around an anticipated event, holiday or otherwise, is perfectly captured here, from excitement to nervousness to joy to the inevitable letdown when it\u2019s all over, and Amira\u2019s frenetic energy has her galloping through the pages. . . . An author\u2019s note and glossary make this a useful primer for kids unfamiliar with Eid, but this could easily be used as a discussion starter about how we celebrate special days and with whom.\" \u2014 The\u00a0Bulletin of the Center for Children\u2019s Books About the Author Reem Faruqi is an acclaimed children's book author. Her debut picture book, Lailah's Lunchbox , was named an ALA Notable Book and a Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People and was selected for the International Literacy Association's Choices reading list. Reem's debut middle grade book Unsettled is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Reem immigrated from Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, to Peachtree City, Georgia, when she was 13 years old. She now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and children. Find her online at www.ReemFaruqi.com.Fahmida Azim is an illustrator and storyteller whose work has appeared in the New York Times , Dallas News , NPR, Vice, Eater, and more. Born in Bangladesh, Fahmida immigrated to Virginia as a child and later graduated from VCUarts. Her publishing debut, Muslim Women Are Everything , written by journalist Seema Yasmin, publishes in 2020. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington. Find her online at Fahmida-Azim.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1580896863", "title": "You're Invited to a Moth Ball: A Nighttime Insect Celebration", "author": "Loree Griffin Burns", "description": "Review \u2666 Full-color photographs accompany detailed instructions for attracting and studying North American moths as well as basic facts.Early on, there is a candid shot of six kids sitting at a picnic table, verdant grass stretching out from all sides. (Five present white while one might be a child of color.) The children appear engaged in chatting and drawing pictures of moths. Superimposed in bright white type over the grass beneath them, conversational text explains that a moth ball is a celebration to honor \"a spectacular insect\" and invites readers to join in and learn more. Every page turn leads to bright, colorful photographs and further information. Layout, art, and text function together well. Without condescension, the text is ever fixed on its intended audience; after a thorough, illustrated listing of materials for a successful moth ball: \"Did I mention we get to stay up late? Because we do!\" photographs show the children setting up a sheet and lights for an observation area and then making snacks of rotting bananas and brown sugar to entice moths that respond more to sweets than to light. There are reminders to be gentle interspersed among facts that include differentiating between moths and butterflies, and the moth life cycle. The nature of the adventure assumes readers will have access to a private, nighttime green area in the summer as well as adults to help them. Entomological ecstasy for rural and suburban budding scientists. \u2014 Kirkus Reviews , starred review \u2666 What\u2019s a moth ball? It\u2019s a party that provides opportunities for people to study moths at night. While this fully illustrated book lets readers experience a moth ball vicariously, its primary purpose is to show them how to plan and carry out their own events. First, the hosts \u201cinvite\u201d moths by making a concoction of rotting bananas and brown sugar and brushing it onto trees and fences. Next, they set up a moth viewing area (a sheet hung from a clothesline and lit by \u201ca special light bulb or two\u201d) nearby. Then, at night, people closely observe the moths that gather there. The text and illustrations highlight the anatomy of moths and how they differ from butterflies. With many large, appealing photos that show a group of kids happily involved in preparations during the day and enjoying the event at night, this volume has an inviting look, reflecting the encouraging tone of the text. While most hands-on science books present many familiar projects in quick succession and without much explanation, this volume does a thorough job of explaining a novel project and, through the illustrations, making every stage of the process look like fun. A handsome guidebook with an engaging approach to nature study. \u2014 Booklist , starred review Burns and Harasimowicz have assembled a \u201cMoth Ball\u201d with all the instructions, procedures, and suggested resources needed to attract these nocturnal insects for study. Vibrant photography and informative text highlight the event\u2019s fun accessibility. The text and illustrations work together for both visual and verbal learning styles. There is artwork, book study, and preparations for the night-time activity. The participants make nectar by mashing bananas and brown sugar together, and then they paint it on tree trunks and fence posts. A white sheet and a light source are used to attract and collect the moths. The insects arrive; the citizen scientists learn which moths come to the light and which consume the nectar. When the observations are completed, a young girl is depicted alone in her tent studying a book on moths. Overall, the collective presentation is effective. Back matter includes a glossary, resources, and author\u2019s and photographer\u2019s notes. Be sure to check out both of them, especially the photographer\u2019s notes, because Harasimowicz shares how she overcame nighttime challenges. \u00adVERDICT An informative scientific adventure. \u2014 School Library Journal With her latest book, Burns (Tracking Trash, rev. 3/07; The Hive Detectives, rev. 5/10) has earned the right to add Master Party Planner to her resume. Here she hosts a \u201cmoth ball,\u201d a STEM-friendly activity in which a group of youngsters observes moths in action on a summer night. They whip up a yummy snack for the insects (nectar made from rotten bananas and brown sugar); smear the food on tree trunks and fence posts to attract the moths; hang up a white backdrop (in this case, a sheet); illuminate it; wait for dark; and observe a number and variety of moths settling on the backdrop or on nectar-laden trees. Sharp photographs depict the group of children as they plan and execute their evening activity, as well as the variety of moths encountered, showcasing these insects both at true size and magnified. DIY directions for creating such gatherings are repeated in an appendix, and all the equipment necessary is detailed and photographed within the text. Burns\u2019s use of direct address and her light conversational tone invite readers to join the scientific festivities throughout the book; the text is unfailingly encouraging and enthusiastic (\u201cHey, is it dark outside yet? Great. Let\u2019s go mothing!\u201d). Additional appendices include a diagram of the moth life cycle, a labeled photograph showing the parts of a moth, a glossary, resources (including a website) with additional photographs, and notes from both author and photographer.\u2014 The Horn Book About the Author Loree Griffin Burns is an award-winning writer who holds a PhD in biochemistry. Each of her books draws heavily on both her passion for nature and her experience as a working scientist. She is the author of Life on Surtsey: Iceland's Upstart Island, Citizen Scientist: Be a Part of Scientific Discovery in Your Own Back Yard , and Beetle Busters: A Rogue Insect and the People Who Track It .Ellen Harasimowicz has been a professional photographer since 2003. She has made photographs for newspapers and schools, and she has illustrated four children's books, all with Loree Griffin Burns. Ellen loves to travel and photograph far-off places. www.ellenharasimowicz.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 16.99}, {"asin": "0062967363", "title": "The Gravity Tree: The True Story of a Tree That Inspired the World", "author": "Anna Crowley Redding", "description": "Review \"A sweet windfall of history and inspiration.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cGenerations of scientists, including Albert Einstein in 1930 and Stephen Hawking in 1987, have visited the Gravity Tree to pay their respects to Newton\u2026this picture book may resonate with science-minded children.\u201d \u2014 Booklist About the Author Anna Crowley Redding loves nothing more than putting on a detective hat to discover a forgotten tale of history and heroism, which made Rescuing the Declaration of Independence such fun to write. Anna\u2019s stealthy research skills come from an Emmy Award\u2013winning career as an investigative reporter and a lifelong tendency to never mind her own business. Anna is also the author of Google It: A History of Google and Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World. She lives with her family outside Portland, Maine. You can visit her at www.annacrowleyredding.com. Yas Imamura is an illustrator of many picture\u00a0books for children, including Winged Wonders by Meeg Pincus and The Very Oldest Pear Tree by Nancy I. Sanders. She\u2019s also a product designer for clients such as Anthropologie, Papyrus, and Sanrio. She currently lives and works\u00a0in Portland, Oregon. You can visit her at www.yasimamura.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 15.39}, {"asin": "0062740326", "title": "Rescuing the Declaration of Independence: How We Almost Lost the Words That Built America", "author": "Anna Crowley Redding", "description": "Review \"Fotheringham\u2019s ( Most Wanted ) action-packed illustrations, hand-drawn and digitally rendered, bring to life a little-known piece of United States history...Redding ( Google It ) imbues her often-alliterative narration with a sense of urgency, echoed in the artwork, as Pleasanton works to save original manuscripts such as the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Nearly every spread features exigent motion, whether a galloping horse or Pleasonton running.\"\u00a0 \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cAt its heart, Rescuing the Declaration of Independence is an action movie with a famous star (the documents). You can talk to your kids about whether or not a physical object like a Constitution needs to be preserved and visited or if its merits are found in different ways. And for folks that want to give their teaching of the War of 1812 a more interesting hook.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal \u201cThe narrative propels readers forward and is complimented by Fotheringham\u2019s playful, digitally rendered illustrations\u2026this picture book is a unique tale of heroism by an ordinary and relatively unknown clerk. A welcome addition to history shelves.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal \"Budding historians as well as those unfamiliar with history will both enjoy this pleasant, fast-moving selection.\"\u00a0 \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cThis rollicking tale gives a nice sense of the time period. It also emphasizes how the actions of a less-than-famous but determined individual can have great effect and demonstrates that each person's role in history\u2014even one that focuses on packing up government files and papers\u2014is important. Budding historians as well as those unfamiliar with history will both enjoy this pleasant, fast-moving selection.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews From the Back Cover In the name of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Stephen had to save it! Today, the Declaration of Independence is one of the most heavily guarded treasures of the United States of America, but during the War of 1812 it would have been destroyed if not for a man whose name and story have nearly been forgotten by time. . . . Stephen Pleasonton knew paper. He spent his days reading and writing letters, organizing files, and recording the recordables. However, none of that prepared him for the urgent message he received from his boss alerting him that the British army was on its way to the capital. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and numerous other documents that Stephen was entrusted with were all in danger! It was up to him to get our nation\u2019s most cherished and priceless artifacts safely out of Washington. But how would a lowly clerk manage that? Award-winning journalist Anna Crowley Redding and Sibert Honor illustrator Edwin Fotheringham bring to life this riveting true story about how Stephen Pleasonton saved the words that built America. About the Author Anna Crowley Redding loves nothing more than putting on a detective hat to discover a forgotten tale of history and heroism, which made Rescuing the Declaration of Independence such fun to write. Anna\u2019s stealthy research skills come from an Emmy Award\u2013winning career as an investigative reporter and a lifelong tendency to never mind her own business. Anna is also the author of Google It: A History of Google and Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World. She lives with her family outside Portland, Maine. You can visit her at www.annacrowleyredding.com. Edwin Fotheringham is the award-winning illustrator of numerous books for kids, including What to Do About Alice? , recipient of both a Sibert Honor and a Boston Globe\u2013Horn Book Award Honor; The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy) ; Those Rebels, John & Tom ; and Thomas Paine and the Dangerous Word . He lives with his family in Seattle, Washington. You can visit him at www.edfotheringham.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 18.99}, {"asin": "1984836625", "title": "Soaked!", "author": "Abi Cushman", "description": "Review \"Sometimes we just need pure fun, and this book is it. Awesome!\" \u2015Kids' Indie Next List Top 10 Pick \"Visually elegant and character-driven to the hilt, this book makes the familiar make-lemonade story feel as fresh as the outdoors after a summer shower.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"...a great story about finding joy in the moment, whatever it might be, and learning to let go of your expectations. A sure hit for any kind of weather, and every kind of story hour.\" \u2015 School Library Journal \"A charming and good-humored reminder that a little rain can't truly spoil the merriment.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Animated facial expressions and dynamic body language add an extra layer of humor to this entertaining read-aloud.\" \u2015 The Horn Book About the Author Abi Cushman has loved drawing and painting since she was a child. She studied art and art history at Tufts University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the University of Melbourne in Australia. She now lives on the coast of Connecticut with her husband and two children. Please visit her at abicushman.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.5}, {"asin": "1635922968", "title": "LillyBelle: A Damsel NOT in Distress", "author": "Joana Pastro", "description": "Review \"The picture book\u2019s lessons of self-empowerment, the importance of dialogue, and the value of understanding are efficiently rendered, aided by rounded, earth-toned illustrations that create a grounded fairy-tale world little readers will enjoy.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"LillyBelle is spunky and brave. The book is beautifully illustrated and...help[s] make the story come to life. It is a fun read, all the way to the surprising ending.\" \u2014 Kiss the Book About the Author Originally from Brazil, Joana Pastro is a former architect. This is her first book for children. Jhon Ortiz is a 3D character animator and illustrator from Valencia, Spain. He is a dreamer who always looks for new stories.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.67}, {"asin": "1338617621", "title": "Bisa's Carnaval", "author": "Carolina Coroa", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 1-4-Clara is excited about celebrating Carnaval. It is her holiday to enjoy with her family. She worries that this year her bisa (great-grandmother) will not be able to attend. In the first spread, the phrase, \"Louder, Faster,\" is bolded, reversed, and enlarged, which acts to convey the tempo of the celebration, a festive time that brings everyone together and is a way for the older generation to pass on tradition. This is depicted as Bisa shows Clara, who needn't have worried, an album filled with pictures of past experiences. They are part of a larger cultural celebration that extends to readers as they see the village come together; the pages are filled with color, the rhythm of the sounds, and the street signs and other writing in Spanish. VERDICT A great additon to holiday collections, this book celebrates community and legacy.-Ruth Guerrier-Pierre, New York P.L.\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review Praise for Bisa's Carnaval : * \"The Brazilian duo of author Pastro and illustrator Coroa bring to life the street Carnaval of Olinda, a city in the northeast of Brazil, with a story that celebrates one of the country\u2019s most important and beloved holidays with humor, truth, and heart.\" -- Kirkus Reviews , starred review About the Author Joana Pastro is an architect turned children's author whose love for writing continues to grow. Many of her stories are inspired by her own childhood and her adventures as a mother. Originally from Brazil, Joana now lives in Florida with her amazing husband, her three extremely creative children, and a rambunctious Morkie. Visit Joana at joanapastro.com.  Art has always been a major part of Carolina Coroa, from her childhood in Brazil to her life in Dublin, where she works as a designer. She brings color and light to all her work, especially in her own visual storytelling. Visit her at carolinacoroa.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "0762479299", "title": "Your Birthstone Book: Unearth the Secrets of Your Birthday Gem", "author": "Sarah Glenn Marsh", "description": "About the Author Sarah Glenn Marsh is an author of several young adult novels and over half a dozen picture books. When she's not writing, she loves creating pottery and painting it in exciting new colors. She lives with her husband and many pets, including four dogs and three birds, in Richmond, Virginia. Hallye Webb is an illustrator and designer based in New York City. Drawing inspiration from the Wisconsin farm where she grew up, her Mexican heritage, and the art of storytelling, she hopes her work inspires readers to love and care for their communities and our planet. She lives near Central Park with her husband Stephen and their dog Moss.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 12.6}, {"asin": "0807578746", "title": "This Is a Sea Cow", "author": "Cassandra Federman", "description": "Review \"This Is a Sea Cow will have kids laughing out loud at story time. Federman knows how to quickly pull her readers into this funny and informative story about the popular underwater mammal perhaps better known as a manatee. Fact: Happy faces plastered with huge grins will appear throughout the duration of this book.\" - Good Reads with Ronna \"This engaging account is designed as a homework assignment on marine mammals. An appealing first look.\" - Kirkus 2021 Redbud Read-Aloud Book Award Masterlist About the Author Cassandra Federman is a writer and illustrator in California. She wanted to grow up to be a comic book artist and a marine biologist. She decided this book accomplishes both of those things. Her first book is This Is a Sea Cow.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "1250801389", "title": "Old Friends", "author": "Lenny Wen", "description": "Review Praise for Old Friends : A 2023 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the YearA Bill Martin, Jr. Picture Book Award NomineeA 2023 Maine Literary Award Finalist \"[F]ull of warmth and joy. This celebration of intergenerational friendship is ultimately a comforting tale, like a cozy knit cardigan or a warm berry crisp, perfect for a lapsit or a Grandparents\u2019 Day read-aloud.\" \u2015 Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (BCCB ), starred review\"Readers of every generation will delight in Old Friends \u2018 joyful tone and affirming message.\" \u2015 BookPage About the Author Margaret Aitken is a Scottish writer for children. As a child, she could often be found outside hoping to stumble upon the characters of Brambly Hedge and Beatrix Potter. After studying medicine at the University of Glasgow, she worked as a doctor in the village of Doune, a filming location for Outlander and Game of Thrones. Along with her husband and three sons, Margaret is currently enjoying life in a New England-style farmhouse in Maine. When she isn\u2019t writing she can mostly be found at the beach, in the garden, or baking something gluten-free. Old Friends is her debut picture book. Lenny Wen is an author/illustrator who was born in Indonesia. She is the illustrator of several picture books, such as Cal Everett\u2019s Halloween is Coming and Amy Robach\u2019s Better Together . Lenny currently lives in Austria. When she is not illustrating or writing, you might find her staring at the trees, contemplating story ideas, reading books, filling up her cup with coffee, or hugging her dog.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 13.29}, {"asin": "1250622328", "title": "Black Hole Chasers: The Amazing True Story of an Astronomical Breakthrough", "author": "Anna Crowley Redding", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 5\u20138\u2014An intriguing and comprehensive look at the subject. The focus of this readable and captivating narrative is in detailing the history of black holes, following the lives of the lead scientists and how they became interested in black holes, and sharing the challenges, failures, and eventual success of the Event Horizon Telescope project. The short chapters have many asides highlighting scientists throughout history who contributed to our understanding of black holes. Lingo alerts appear throughout when a new term is introduced. The volume includes an extensive bibliography with books, articles, and websites where readers can go do further research. Redding's narrative on the lives of the scientists and their seemingly insurmountable challenge of capturing the first image of a black hole will immediately grab readers and pull them in. Her book explains complex ideas in easy-to-understand terms and sprinkles photos and interesting anecdotes throughout to flesh out the story. Kids will be enthralled by exceptional storytelling and inspired to learn more about the phenomenon, and astronomy overall. VERDICT Put in the hands of your aspiring scientists and readers with insatiable curiosity. An essential purchase.\u2014Kristin Williamson, Metropolitan Lib. Syst., OK Review \"An intriguing and comprehensive look at the subject... Kids will be enthralled by exceptional storytelling and inspired to learn more about the phenomenon, and astronomy overall.\" -- School Library Journal Online , starred review\"This accessible account chronicles the complex work of the Event Horizon Telescope Project in 2019 to capture and publish definitive data about and photographs of black holes.... The twists and turns of this scientific breakthrough should pique reader curiosity about innovation.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"More comprehensive than other books for young readers about Google\u2019s founders, with energetically written short chapters, interesting facts, graphics, and photos\" \u2015 Booklist on Google It, starred review \"This readable and breezy history of the tech behemoth [is] An appealing and timely look at a universally relevant subject and a good fit for STEAM-related reading lists.\" \u2015 School Library Journal on Google It \"Humorous accounts of Google's unpretentious beginnings as a student project, and its early years as a bare-bones startup in a friend's garage will intrigue teens who dream of growing their own projects into software and devices used by millions.\" \u2015 VOYA on Google It About the Author Anna Crowley Redding is the author of Google It, Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World, and Black Hole Chasers. The recipient of multiple Edward R. Murrow and Associated Press awards, Crowley Redding uses her Emmy award-winning investigative reporting skills to dig into compelling topics that are shaping our world. Her works have been translated into multiple languages, garnered national news coverage, and been recognized by the National Association of Science Teachers for excellence. Crowley Redding lives outside of Portland, Maine with her family. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.49}, {"asin": "159270168X", "title": "The Jacket", "author": "Kirsten Hall", "description": "Review A New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of 2014 & a Huffington Post Honorable Mention for 'Most Charming' Picture Book of 2014 \"This book is a revelation, seamlessly blending the cleverness of its conceit with the virtues of captivating storytelling...It's as poignant as it is smart. The beauty of Tolstikova's pastel-tinged illustrations, whose manner changes from page to page and suggests both childlike simplicity and a quiet mastery of modernist color and design, shows there's more to a book than its concept.\" --Mark Levine, The New York Times Book Review . Also listed as an \"Editor's Choice.\"\"...ingenious and poignant...\" A New York Times \"Notable Children's Book of 2014.\"\"The book itself is part of the story. The jacket that the girl makes at the end of the book is identical to the jacket of the physical book. This fact makes for a fun read aloud...But The Jacket is much more than just a clever gimmick. There are big themes aplenty here: love, friendship, fear. All are handled with subtlety, making for a story with emotional depth...A book to love.\" -- Travis Jonker, School Library Journal \"The mixed-media illustrations do a beautiful job of capturing such things as the interior of a bookstore, the girl's love for both her companions...Book's understanding of the girl's love for her dog is a particularly poignant inclusion, both textually and visually. the idea's originality and the child-friendly instructions at the end of Book's tale make this a novel gift pick for the juvenile bibliophile.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \"Literary agent Hall debuts with a lovely story that tenderly showcases the relationship between a girl and a book while giving readers the chance to form a very similar relationship, thanks to a neat bit of book design. Debut talent Tolstikova's mixed-media artwork reveals a knack for emotional range.\" -- Publisher's Weekly \u201cIn the unusual, wonderful, and magically meta picture-book The Jacket, writer Kirsten Hall and illustrator Dasha Tolstikova explore the beauty and terror of falling in love with a book from the perspective of the book itself.\u201d \u2013 Brain Pickings A New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of 2014 & a Huffington Post Honorable Mention for 'Most Charming' Picture Book of 2014 \"This book is a revelation, seamlessly blending the cleverness of its conceit with the virtues of captivating storytelling...It's as poignant as it is smart. The beauty of Tolstikova's pastel-tinged illustrations, whose manner changes from page to page and suggests both childlike simplicity and a quiet mastery of modernist color and design, shows there's more to a book than its concept.\" --Mark Levine, The New York Times Book Review . Also listed as an \"Editor's Choice.\"\"...ingenious and poignant...\" A New York Times \"Notable Children's Book of 2014.\"\"The book itself is part of the story. The jacket that the girl makes at the end of the book is identical to the jacket of the physical book. This fact makes for a fun read aloud...But The Jacket is much more than just a clever gimmick. There are big themes aplenty here: love, friendship, fear. All are handled with subtlety, making for a story with emotional depth...A book to love.\" -- Travis Jonker, School Library Journal \"The mixed-media illustrations do a beautiful job of capturing such things as the interior of a bookstore, the girl's love for both her companions...Book's understanding of the girl's love for her dog is a particularly poignant inclusion, both textually and visually. the idea's originality and the child-friendly instructions at the end of Book's tale make this a novel gift pick for the juvenile bibliophile.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \"Literary agent Hall debuts with a lovely story that tenderly showcases the relationship between a girl and a book while giving readers the chance to form a very similar relationship, thanks to a neat bit of book design. Debut talent Tolstikova's mixed-media artwork reveals a knack for emotional range.\" -- Publisher's Weekly \u201cIn the unusual, wonderful, and magically meta picture-book The Jacket, writer Kirsten Hall and illustrator Dasha Tolstikova explore the beauty and terror of falling in love with a book from the perspective of the book itself.\u201d \u2013 Brain Pickings About the Author Before Dasha Tolstikova became an illustrator, she was a photographer, a reporter, a newswire translator, a sales clerk, a cargo van driver, a film producer, and a decorative painter \u2013 not necessarily in that order. She is a graduate of the SVA MFA Illustration program. In addition to The Jacket , she is currently working on her autobiographical graphic novel with Groundwood Books. The Jacket is her debut into the world of picture books.After getting an MA in early childhood education from NYU, Kirsten Hall taught both preschool and elementary school for several years while writing learn-to-read books for Scholastic and engaging in the book world in many other ways. Today, Kirsten is the sole proprietor of Catbird Productions, a book packager and boutique literary agency. The Jacket is her debut picture book.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 1.92}, {"asin": "0062908022", "title": "Three Things I Know Are True", "author": "Betty Culley", "description": "Review Review\"Piercingly realistic. A poignant, humanizing exploration of a sadly timely issue.\" --\u00a0Kirkus Reviews\"Culley's compelling free-verse poems accumulate into a poignant story of a family that was already struggling and then transformed into something unrecognizable. Liv's narration is touching, honest, and perceptive. A\u00a0story of love and resilience as much as loss and grief.\" -- Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books\u00a0(starred review)\"Eloquent narrative verse. Culley deftly captures the community's nuanced responses and the heartbreak both families navigate as this devastating tragedy becomes a political battleground.\" --\u00a0Publishers Weekly\"A heartbreaking story about a topic that is too prevalent in today's society.\" -- School Library Journal\"An emotional journey\u00a0that follows a life-altering tragedy.\u00a0Culley weaves carefully chosen details into a slowly forming tapestry. A\u00a0tale that is both harrowing in subject matter and elegant in execution.\" -- ALA Booklist About the Author Betty Culley lives in central Maine, where the rivers run through the small towns. She\u2019s an RN who worked as an obstetrics nurse and as a pediatric home hospice nurse. She went into foster care at nine months old and was adopted three years later. As an adult, she was found by five siblings she never knew she had. Visit her online at www.bettyculley.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.68}, {"asin": "1728424305", "title": "Rena Glickman, Queen of Judo", "author": "Martina Peluso", "description": "Review A biography on Rena Glickman is overdue, and this book portrays her with a powerful independence and unwavering persistence...This book is an enjoyable read and good reference on a little-known champion of women in judo. \"'Rena Glickman, Queen of Judo' is an engaging, entertaining and informative read throughout.\" \u2015 Midwest Book Review \"A worthy homage to a fascinating woman who was a force for change in a man\u2019s world.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Eve Nadel Catarevas enjoys discovering little-known historical figures and sharing their achievements with others. \u00a0Eve lives in Westport, Connecticut, with two- and four-legged family members. Martina Peluso studied at the Art Institute of Naples. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout the world. Her previous books include Joseph and the Sabbath Fish and Og's Ark . She lives in Naples, Italy, with her cats Peppe and Ernesto.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Biographies"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 3.37}, {"asin": "1250134889", "title": "Stegothesaurus", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.36}, {"asin": "1419741810", "title": "More Than Sunny", "author": "Shelley Johannes", "description": "From School Library Journal Toddler-PreS\u2014Two siblings, barely able to contain their exuberance, make the most out of all kinds of weather. As the book moves through the year, the young girl and her smaller brother (who have dark hair and pale skin) discover what makes each season magical\u2014from hunting for frogs to making snow angels with their parents. The story in verse is simple yet descriptive, perfect for a young audience. Pencil illustrations and mixed media vividly display characters' expressions and emotions. Vibrant colors are used throughout and there is an abundance of detail on every page for readers to pore over. Children will delight in the characters' excitement about the change in seasons and all of the new activities that come with it. VERDICT This book is perfect for one-one-one sharing or toddler story time and will have children interested in seeing what happens next.\u2014Sara Thomas, New Castle P.L., DE Review \"The playful rhymes flow easily, beg to be read aloud, and would work well as creative writing prompts in elementary classrooms... A bouncy and buoyant take on the changing seasons.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"The rhythmic prose, shown in a crayon-esque lettering, traces the siblings\u2019 passing days and the seasons... Dynamic art rendered in pencil and mixed media on tracing paper and finished digitally matches the text\u2019s energy in this charming seasonal perusal.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"There is an abundance of detail on every page for readers to pore over. Children will delight in the characters\u2019 excitement about the change in seasons and all of the new activities that come with it.\" \u2015 School Library Journal About the Author Shelley Johannes is the author-illustrator of the Beatrice Zinker, Upside Down Thinker chapter book series. A former architectural designer, she has a fondness for tracing paper, process, and accidental discoveries. She and her family live in Michigan with two feathered friends, Max and Alex, who make every day sunny and birdy. More Than Sunny was her debut picture book. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1646860586", "title": "Dance Like a Leaf", "author": "AJ Irving", "description": "Review \u2605 \"This evocative pairing of story and art creates a tone poem and lesson, a lovely reflection on the seasons of life, and a gentle lead-in to discussion of death and renewal.\" --School Library Journal, starred review From the Inside Flap We sip our tea. \"Tea makes your tummy toasty,\" Grandma says. We bundle up. \"The more scarves, the better,\" Grandma says. We wave to the trees. \"Hello trees!\" Grandma says. From the Back Cover How will autumn feel without Grandma? About the Author Every autumn AJ Irving remembers her grandma by sipping tea, painting trees and dancing under falling leaves with her two children. She writes picture books and poetry on her big back porch in a little town near Jackson Hole, Wyoming.\u00a0 Claudia Navarro has illustrated many books for children,including the critically acclaimed La Frontera: El viaje con papa / MyJourney with Papa for Barefoot Books. She says she hopes to be like thegrandmother in this story one day. Claudia lives in Mexico City, Mexico. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0374307040", "title": "Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge", "author": "Ray Anthony Shepard", "description": "Review A Jane Addams Children's Book Award Honor Book A Bank Street Best Book of the Year An ALSC Notable Book A NCSS Notable Book \"With a distinctive, haunting voice, powerful images, and thought-provoking story structure, this unique look at a remarkable young woman\u2019s life choices and decisions offers an utterly necessary but seldom highlighted perspective on the contradictions within our society\u2019s foundations. A powerful antidote to whitewashed cultural mythology.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews, starred review \"A stunning picture book debut . . . an evocative portrait that keenly interrogates the structures upon which America is built.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly, starred review \"A fine addition to all collections.\" \u2015 Booklist \"This is a moving complement to Dunbar\u2019s Never Caught (BCCB 1/19) as well as a potent exemplar of scathing historical critique.\" \u2015 Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (BCCB) About the Author Ray Anthony Shepard is a former teacher and retired editor-in-chief of a major education publishing company. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska College of Education and the Harvard Graduate School Education where he received a Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. His books for children include Now or Never!: Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry's War to End Slavery and Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge . Keith Mallett has been drawing and painting for as long as he can remember. As an artist and designer he has created posters and fine art prints for over thirty years. He lives in San Diego with his wife Dianne and his German Shepherd Pi. How Jelly Roll Morton Invented Jazz was his first children's book.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 18.99}, {"asin": "1419745891", "title": "Penguin Journey", "author": "Angela Burke Kunkel", "description": "Review **STARRED REVIEW** \"Perfect for group storytime and discussion. . .The familiar black and white of emperor penguins contrast well with the scenes of rich winter blues of Antarctic ice, sea, and sky and, later, the warm pastels of the spring skies as time passes, the temperatures warm, and the penguin family unit basks in their success?.\"\u00a0\u2015 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Angela Burke Kunkel is a school librarian and the author of Digging for Words: Jos\u00e9 Alberto Guti\u00e9rrez and the Library He Built . After soaking up the sun in the Southwest for a number of years, Burke Kunkel now lives in Vermont with her husband, two children, two dogs, two guinea pigs, and one rapidly growing bearded dragon. She hopes to meet a penguin (or three!) up close one day. Visit her at angelakunkel.com. Catherine Odell \u2019s childhood spanned the globe and helped her to develop an appreciation for the interconnectedness of life on planet Earth. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, working as a freelance illustrator. She is the author and illustrator of the picture book series Pepper and Frannie. When she is not drawing and painting in her garage studio, she can be found selling her artwork at local street fairs, skating a mountain road, or surfing in the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean. Visit her at canyoufeedthedog.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 10.03}, {"asin": "1771474173", "title": "How to Party Like a Snail", "author": "Naseem Hrab", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 3-Even the meekest of partiers will feel seen by this snail. Snail loves being invited to parties, but sometimes all the noise makes him shrink into his shell. It's not long before he stops getting invited. Luckily Snail thinks up his very own, very subdued party, just for himself. \"I love me!\" he says in a refreshing portrayal of a quiet yet confident character. The party is perfect. He has warm milk, \"a hug in a mug,\" and lip syncs to lullabies. Except his party is missing one thing-a friend! Stump, as always (after all, he's rooted to the ground) is there for Snail, and they snuggle up in a blanket for a wild all-nighter \"in their hearts.\" As in Weekend Dad, Hrab tackles an important topic with humor: how can we belong if we aren't like everyone else? Collier's (A Horse Named Steve) illustrations strike just the right tone: sincere and humorous. In muted, vintage tones, the all-animal-and-one-stumpcast includes wide-eyed Snail with a party hat atop his shell, Raccoon swinging his hips to the music, Worm and Bear getting their boogie on, and an extremely expressive Stump. Adults will enjoy the requisite boom box in the forest, but kids might wonder what in the world it is! VERDICT A nice social-emotional addition to any collection, this has a very quiet character carrying a rather loud message: All volumes welcome.-Hillary Perelyubskiy\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \"Tailor-made for younger party lovers with a low tolerance for high decibels. A SHHH pecial treat for children who prefer to play it\u2026soft.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"Hrab tackles an important topic with humor: how can we belong if we aren\u2019t like everyone else? [A] nice social-emotional addition to any collection, this has a very quiet character carrying a rather loud message: All volumes welcome.\" \u2015 School Library Journal \"This delightful tale is perfect for bedtime and particularly for smalls who are sensitive to sound.\" \u2015 The Small Protagonist \"Although How to Party Like a Snail is written in a jovial and lighthearted manner, it introduces the reader to an important initiative \u2013 that is, increasing understanding and compassion toward introverts and sensory-sensitive individuals.\" \u2015 Canadian Review of Materials \"Hrab\u2019s tale promotes inclusivity ... Children learn that while some people might like the loud, others thrive in the quiet, and just because a party is quiet, doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be fun!\" \u2015 Children\u2019s Literature Comprehensive Database \"A wildly charming, earnestly rendered ' SHHH ellebration of the SHHH ush.'\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly - STARRED REVIEW \"This could be a useful book for children who are hesitant to attend parties or playdates. Therapists or social workers may find it a worthy addition to their bibliotherapy toolbox.\" \u2015 Youth Services Book Review \"This charming story with wonderfully comic illustrations reminds young readers that they can be themselves, and still find someone who shares their interests.\" \u2015 Calgary Herald \"For those who often find parties too loud or rowdy, this book is a special affirmation that quieter parties are just as much fun as those that are not.\" \u2015 Canadian Children's Book News \"Hrab shares a positive message and highlights the fact that while noisy\ncan be fun, quiet can be enjoyable as well.\" \u2015 Kiss the Book About the Author NASEEM HRAB is a writer and storyteller, and the author of the Ira Crumb series, The Sour Cherry Tree , and Weekend Dad , which was a finalist for the Governor General\u2019s Literary Awards. Her comedy writing has appeared on McSweeney\u2019s Internet Tendency and The Rumpus .\u00a0She loves improv and coffee ice cream. Naseem lives in Toronto, Ontario. KELLY COLLIER was born in Ottawa and grew up in Toronto, Ontario, where she still lives with her husband and daughter. She has an identical twin sister and an older brother. As kids, Kelly and her sister drew all the time, mostly in an effort to \"outdraw\" their brother. Kelly studied illustration in college and is both the author and illustrator of the Steve the Horse series. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": "from 14.57"}, {"asin": "0358008417", "title": "Beauty Woke", "author": "Nonieqa Ramos", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2\u2014Ramos (Your Mama) continues to celebrate the strength and beauty of women and girls in a modern tale reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty. Surrounded by love even before she is born, Beauty is raised on a steady dose of family and pride in her Puerto Rican heritage and community. When Beauty hears racist comments on television directed at people who look like her and her family, she questions her sense of identity and self-worth, which are eventually restored by those she loves and who love her. Escobar's vivid, detailed illustrations are a feast for the eyes. The text is a lyrical mix of English and Spanish, blended beautifully; this is not a text that rhymes, but it is solidly rhythmic and engaging. It's ideal for read-alouds, and may resonate even more for parents than with their young children. VERDICT Invite readers to listen in on a tale for fans of fractured fairy tales and the trickster tales of Yuyi Morales. A recommended purchase for libraries serving young children.\u2014Monisha Blair Review \"An authentic and affirming celebration of culture, community, and self-acceptance.\" \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \"Ramos' poetic ode to identity and validation winds itself through evocative imagery in both English and Spanish.... Each page exudes energy and passion.\u00a0Escobar's powerful panorama of diversity is a blazing exclamation point to Beauty's triumphant journey. This bold manifesto of cultural awareness reaches out to awaken the sleepwalkers among us.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cRamos ( Your Mama ) continues to celebrate the strength and beauty of women and girls in a modern tale reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty.... Escobar\u2019s vivid, detailed illustrations are a feast for the eyes.... A tale for fans of fractured fairy tales and the trickster tales of Yuyi Morales. A recommended purchase.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal About the Author NoNieqa Ramos is an educator who wrote The Disturbed Girl's Dictionary , a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection\u00a0and an In the Margins Award Top Ten pick. Her debut picture book, Your Mama , earned three starred reviews. She is a proud member of Las Musas, the Soaring 20s, and PB Debut Troupe 21. She lives in Virginia with her family. www.nonieqaramos.com Twitter: @nonieqaramos Instagram: @nonieqa.ramosPaola Escobar is a Colombian graphic designer and illustrator. Her\u00a0portfolio is incredibly\u00a0versatile and she has worked for a variety of publishers worldwide including SM Spain, Planeta, Norma, Fleurus.In the UK her clients include Oxford University Press, Penguin Random House, Walker, Scholastic UK, Laurence King,\u00a0Little Brown Book Group,\u00a0HarperCollins and Chicken House.\u00a0Over the coming years she also has a variety of projects\u00a0coming out with US publishers Little Bee Books, Versify, \u00a0Zonderkidz, HarperCollins US, Schwartz and Wade and Simon & Schuster. In addition to publishing, she has worked across a broad range of printed and digital magazines. She currently works as a freelance illustrator and lives very happily in Bogota with her husband and dog Flora.\u00a0 Instagram: @paoesco8ar Twitter: @paolaesco8ar Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. &#9733; &#34;Ramos&#8217; poetic ode to identity and validation winds itself through evocative imagery in both English and Spanish, connecting the strength of community with self-acceptance. From one-word stanzas echoing with a mother&#8217;s heartbeat to flowing anthems of pride, each page exudes energy and passion. Escobar&#8217;s powerful panorama of diversity is a blazing exclamation point to Beauty&#8217;s triumphant journey. This bold manifesto of cultural awareness reaches out to awaken the sleepwalkers among us.&#34;&#160;<b>&#8212;</b><b><i>Kirkus, </i>STARRED review&#160;</b> Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1534467688", "title": "Welcome to Dweeb Club", "author": "Betsy Uhrig", "description": "Review \"A funny and original story about friendship and the future.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Betsy Uhrig is the author of The Polter-Ghost Problem , Double the Danger and Zero Zucchini ,\u00a0and Welcome to Dweeb Club. She\u00a0was born and raised in Greater Boston, where she lives with her family and way more books than you are picturing. She graduated from Smith College with a degree in English and has worked in publishing ever since. She writes books for children instead of doing things that aren\u2019t as fun. Visit her at BetsyUhrig.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 Chapter 1 THE ORIGINS OF THE FLOUNDER Bay Upper School H.A.I.R. Club are shrouded in mystery. Or maybe cloaked in mystery. Or at least wearing a heavy cardigan of mystery. As the official club historian, I tried to figure it out, and you can decide whether I was at all successful. I do know one thing, though: None of us would have joined if Glamorous Steve hadn\u2019t gotten there first. And if we hadn\u2019t joined, our lives would have turned out very differently. I\u2019m not just saying this for dramatic effect\u2014it is a fact. But let\u2019s start at the beginning. A history should go in order, after all. It was the second week of seventh grade. I was still finding my way around the building, which was way bigger and more crowded than elementary school, and mentally labeling kids I didn\u2019t know (Vegan Lunch, Stork Legs, British Accent, et cetera). When I walked into school that morning, there were folding tables lining both sides of the main hall. The tables had posters hanging in front of them advertising various school clubs. Two or three upbeat kids who looked way too cheerful for that time of day sat behind each table. All these upbeat kids were trying to get other, lower-beat kids to join their clubs, offering enticements like mini-muffins, and those rubber bracelets that really hurt if you shot them at people, and even tiny Frisbees with FBUS ULTIMATE FRISDEE (oops) printed on them. It was my intention to walk right by these tables and keep going until I got to my locker. It was not my intention to sign up for a club that morning. I like to take my time making big decisions, and joining a school club was a big decision. Your choice of clubs could determine a whole new set of friends and also what kinds of labels would get slapped on you . It was way too early\u2014in the day and the year\u2014for me to be making a decision with these kinds of life-changing consequences. But I didn\u2019t make it to my locker. My friend Glamorous Steve was standing at the last table in the row, and he grabbed the strap of my backpack as I was hurrying past, causing me to lurch to a stop. \u201cJason,\u201d he said. \u201cWait up.\u201d \u201cWhat?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m going to sign up for\u201d\u2014he looked down at the sheet of paper that was the only thing on the table\u2014\u201cH.A.I.R. Club. You should too.\u201d No one, upbeat or not, was sitting behind the table. There were no posters. There was no swag. There was a sign-up sheet with a coffee ring on it and New This Year! See Ms. Grossman, Faculty Adviser, for Details! scrawled across the bottom in red pen. Ms. Grossman was my US History teacher, and even this early in the year, I was all too familiar with her red scrawls. \u201cIs this a joke?\u201d I said. I glanced at the sheet with its un-filled-in blanks. There wasn\u2019t even a crummy pencil next to it. \u201cThere\u2019s no one signed up at all. And what is Hair Club, anyway?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not Hair Club,\u201d said Steve. \u201cIt\u2019s H.A.I.R. Club. It\u2019s initials.\u201d \u201cSo what do the initials stand for?\u201d \u201cNo idea. Maybe \u2018Hair And Its Relatives\u2019?\u201d I could see why that might interest Steve. He had perfect hair and he put real effort into its upkeep. It did not, however, interest me and my normal-to-greasy, effort-free hair. \u201cSo it is Hair Club,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd what\u2019s a hair relative? Fingernails? Sorry. Not interested.\u201d I had turned to head for my locker when Steve put a hand on my shoulder. \u201cHere\u2019s the thing,\u201d he said. \u201cWhatever it stands for\u2014and it might have nothing to do with hair\u2014H.A.I.R. Club is brand-new. No one is signed up yet. We\u2019d be the first members.\u201d I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. But I turned back to face him. \u201cSo?\u201d \u201cSo if we join now, as seventh graders, we\u2019ll be club officers by the time we\u2019re in, like, eighth grade.\u201d Now he had my attention. \u201cIf we\u2019re the first to sign up,\u201d I said, thinking out loud, \u201cwouldn\u2019t we be club officers right away? It\u2019s only fair.\u201d Steve was nodding at my brilliant logic. Or maybe at my willingness to go along with him. He handed me a pen. \u201cWe\u2019d be in charge of a brand-new club. In seventh grade. Think about it,\u201d he said. I was already signing my name. A word about Glamorous Steve before we go on. Steve\u2019s family had moved to Flounder Bay the summer before sixth grade. There are three kinds of new kids, as I\u2019m sure you know. There\u2019s the weird new kid, the bland new kid, and the glamorous new kid. Steve, who was from California and had that perfect hair and a smile that pretty much made a cartoon twinkly ping whenever he flashed it, was as glamorous as it got in Flounder Bay. His glamour was upped by the fact that a hopelessly bland kid also named Steve had moved to town at the same time. So there was Steve and there was Glamorous Steve. And then, for most of us, there was just Glamorous Steve, the other kid having been forgotten. Or maybe he changed his name. Doesn\u2019t matter. He won\u2019t appear in this history again. Glamorous Steve had a talent for doing even the geekiest things with such infectious enthusiasm that he made them not just acceptable but downright trendy. He was a long-distance runner. Boring, you say? Yes, indeed. Unless Glamorous Steve was moving effortlessly past you, his glorious hair streaming behind him. He collected stamps. Game over, you\u2019re thinking. And ordinarily you\u2019d be right. But he made it work. Somehow, he made it work. So I knew I was safe signing up for anything Steve was a part of. In fact, even as Steve was writing his name below mine on the H.A.I.R. Club sign-up sheet, his glamour was rippling through the hallway and other kids were falling into line behind him. They didn\u2019t care what he was signing up for\u2014if Glamorous Steve was in, they wanted in too. I should add that fully half of them balked when they got to the point of actually writing their names. After all, they had no idea what H.A.I.R. stood for. And they could see for themselves the empty table and its pathetic sign-up sheet. Even Steve\u2019s glamour wasn\u2019t enough for them to risk their reputations on what looked like the losingest club ever. I don\u2019t blame them. And I\u2019m glad only ten kids signed up. Those others will never know what they missed. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "1492678465", "title": "The Elephants' Guide to Hide-and-Seek: A Funny Picture Book of Friendship, Inclusivity, and Play", "author": "Kjersten Hayes", "description": "Review \"Adorable\u2026Young readers will enjoy.\" \u2015 Booklist \"Cheery, energetic\u2026Lively fun.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Kjersten Hayes is a debut author based in Bellingham, Washington. She has spent many years creating and selling independent collage work, greeting cards and handmade art journals. Visit her at www.kjersten.com. Gladys Jose is a freelance illustrator and designer, living in Orlando, Florida. She studied art at the University of Central Florida and graduated with a BFA specializing in graphic design. She works from her studio at home for numerous clients. Visit her online at gladysjose.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1623541980", "title": "Bracelets for Bina's Brothers (Storytelling Math)", "author": "Rajani LaRocca", "description": "Review It\u2019s the Hindu holiday Raksha Bandhan, when sisters give brothers bracelets to ask for their protection from harm. This year, Bina is old enough to make bracelets for her three older brothers: Vijay, Siddharth, and Arjun. To prepare, she asks each brother about their favorite and least favorite colors. At the craft store, Bina and her mother pick out blue, orange, and green beads along with some special beads that represent each of the brother\u2019s interests: a book, a basketball, and a pair of musical notes. When they return from the store, and with the help of her dog, Tara, Bina gets to work. For each bracelet, she creates a pattern using the colors that each brother likes\u2014something that can be confusing to remember and results in a few do-overs. Eventually, Bina creates three different bracelets using three different color patterns, each one perfect for her brothers. On Raksha Bandhan, Bina\u2019s gifts are a hit\u2014and so is the gift that the brothers give Bina, even if it doesn\u2019t necessarily follow a pattern. Basing a plot on Raksha Bandhan, which has come under criticism for its gendered emphasis on girls\u2019 needing protection from boys, feels like a strange way to introduce a spunky female protagonist like Bina. Still, the text does seamlessly integrate the mathematical concept of patterning into a fun and accurate modern twist on an ancient religious tradition. The colorful illustrations perfectly capture Bina\u2019s impish spirit as well as her love for her family. An author\u2019s note expands on both Raksha Bandhan and patterns.This culturally relevant, STEM-savvy picture book showcases a strong female protagonist. \u2014 Kirkus Reviews Bina loves her three brothers, even though they can be annoying, and every year, their family celebrates Raksha Bandhan, a Hindu custom that affirms the bond between brothers and sisters. According to the tradition, sisters tie bracelets on their brothers\u2019 wrists to protect them, and in return, brothers give their sisters gifts. This year, Bina decides she will make the bracelets herself, using beads of their favorite colors along with an \u201cextra-special\u201d bead to symbolize their unique interests. Here Bina\u2019s task takes on a mathematical twist as she arranges the beads using an every-other-one pattern. Readers will enjoy being swept up into Bina\u2019s conundrum, along with her constant companion, Tara the dog, as she tries different color combinations of beads. The vibrant colors and perky tone of this culturally specific yet universally appealing book make for a fun read-aloud with a bit of a math lesson sneaked in. Back matter explains Raksha Bandhan and suggests some fun activities. \u2014 Booklist For the Hindu holiday of Raksha Bandhan, which celebrates the bond between siblings, Bina, who has warm brown skin and dark wavy pigtails, sets out to make her three older brothers\u2014book-loving Vijay, musical Siddharth, and athletic Arjun\u2014bracelets to keep them safe. There\u2019s just one thing she must keep in mind: each brother has one color he favors and one that he doesn\u2019t. After Mommy helps Bina buy green, blue, and orange beads, the girl sets out to make individualized bracelets, relying on the family dog for emotional support. LaRocca\u2019s prose is accessible, with plenty of dialogue, and Prabhat\u2019s digital art charms via vivid, dynamic spreads. This latest installment of Charlesbridge\u2019s Storytelling Math series proves both educational and appealing. Back matter includes an author\u2019s note and an explanation of the patterns involved in Bina\u2019s bracelet making. \u2014Publishers Weekly About the Author Rajani LaRocca is a book lover, doctor, and foodie who was born in India, raised in Kentucky, and now lives in the Boston area. Her debut middle-grade novel, Midsummer's Mayhem , is an Indian American middle-grade mashup of A Midsummer Night's Dream and competitive baking.Chaaya Prabhat is a graphic designer, illustrator and lettering artist. She holds an MA in graphic design from Savannah College of Art and Design. She lives and works in Chennai, India. www.chaayaprabhat.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "0593094492", "title": "Clyde Likes to Slide (Clyde the Hippo)", "author": "Larissa Marantz", "description": "About the Author Keith Marantz loves writing for children. His ever-flowing inspiration comes from his own three--they serve as his idea-proving grounds and are also his toughest critics.Larissa Marantz worked as a character designer on Nickelodeon's Rugrats and Rocket Power . She illustrated several books for Nickelodeon as well, including Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Wild Thornberrys . Her latest project is illustrating Charlie and the Octopus by Rebecca Roan. When she's not illustrating, Larissa teaches figure drawing to animation students at Laguna College of Art and Design. She also runs her own company, OC Art Studios, through which she teaches art to elementary through high-school age students. Her illustrations are inspired by her three children and her husband, Keith Marantz, with whom she collaborates on picture books. They live in Orange County, California.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 13.1}, {"asin": "1525302388", "title": "Sloth and Squirrel in a Pickle", "author": "Cathy Ballou Mealey", "description": "Review Sure to tickle more than a few ribs.\u2015 Kirkus Reviews Young audiences will find the resourcefulness of Sloth and Squirrel amusing and learn that sometimes mistakes can be turned into something positive.\u2015 CM Magazine About the Author Cathy Ballou Mealey is a former college administrator and instructor. She volunteers in schools and organizations supporting children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. She has degrees in psychology, classical studies and higher education administration. She is also the author of When a Tree Grows, published by Sterling in 2019. She lives north of Boston with her family.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 13.49}, {"asin": "1419744224", "title": "Be a Tree!", "author": "Maria Gianferrari", "description": "Review **STARRED REVIEW** \"This book has the advantage of lyrical, accessible poetry and vibrant watercolors from an ever changing palette.\"\u2015 Kirkus Reviews **STARRED REVIEW** \"By foregrounding living beings that exemplify grace, strength, and endurance, Gianferrari gives readers a new way to think about their individual and collective existences.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"An encouraging nudge to look toward nature for guidance, and a valuable message that \"together, we are a forest.\"\" \u2015 The Horn Book Magazine About the Author Maria Gianferrari has always loved trees. She has climbed fig trees in Italy, stood under stately coastal redwoods and twisted Torrey pines, and marveled at mitten-shaped sassafras leaves, colorful coral trees, and sawtooth oak acorn nests. She lives with her family in a house encircled by trees, one of which is a spruce planted in memory of her beloved dog, Becca. Be a Tree! is her first book with Abrams. Felicita Sala is a self-taught illustrator. She has illustrated several picture books, including the award-winning She Made a Monster: How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lynn Fulton, and The Hideout by Susanna Mattiangeli, as well as her own book of recipes for children, What\u2019s Cooking at 10 Garden Street? She grew up between Italy and Australia and now lives in Rome with her family.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0593373405", "title": "Courage Like Kate: The True Story of a Girl Lighthouse Keeper", "author": "Anna Crowley Redding", "description": "About the Author ANNA CROWLEY REDDING is the author of such children's books as The Gravity Tree , Rescuing the Declaration of Independence , Google It, and Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World, among others . Her first career was as an Emmy-award winning investigative television reporter, anchor, and journalist. The recipient of multiple Edward R. Murrow awards and recognized by the Associated Press for her reporting, Crowley Redding now focuses her stealthy detective skills on digging up great stories for young readers. Anna\u2019s books have been recognized by NSTA as best STEM books. Visit her on the web at annacrowleyredding.com.EMILY SUTTON was born in Yorkshire, England, and graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art. She is the illustrator of Grow: Secrets of Our DNA by Nicola Davies, Ernestine's Milky Way by Kerry Madden, The Christmas Eve Tree by Delia Huddy , and Tiny: The Invisible World of Microbes, which won an AAAS award for best picture book. Her work can also be seen on textiles for St. Jude's fabrics, for which she won an Elle Deco award for best surface design. Visit her on the web at emillustrates.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 15.49}, {"asin": "1536213322", "title": "Mommy's Hometown", "author": "Jaime Kim", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2\u2014A young boy listens as his mother tells him about her hometown when she was growing up: \"She said an old river weaved through her village like a long thread. It sparkled in the morning and shimmered at dusk.\" The young boy is excited to finally get to travel by train to see this wonderful place that he's only heard about. Upon arrival, he's surprised to see that the village is now a giant city with tall skyscrapers and people bustling everywhere. His mother tells him that things have changed over the years, but that some things have stayed the same. The pair finds the family house standing on the corner with they boy's grandma excitedly waiting for them. As they venture around the city, they come to the river and decide to wade in, just like the mother did as a young girl. Cherubic characters are adorably set in full-color backgrounds on the majority of the pages. Illustrations are digital and all characters are Asian. This picture book lends itself nicely to compare and contrast, then and now, as well as talking about what happens to the landscape when concrete and buildings take over. VERDICT A beautiful addition to any library shelf where the connection between generations is the discussion.\u2014Tracy Cronce Review A child visits their mother\u2019s hometown and is surprised to find it now differs from her recollections. . . The pair make their own memories in this special place, reinforcing that it is familial bonds and unconditional love that define home rather than physical surroundings. A tranquil warmth radiates from the illustrations. . . An uplifting, intergenerational story.\u2014Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Lim poignantly explores the tension between new and old in this setting-oriented tribute to family bonds. . . . Moving smoothly between rural and urban environments, Kim\u2019s carefully illuminated digital graphics play dexterously with shadow, adding drama to the duo\u2019s journey.\u2014Publishers Weekly (starred review)This picture book is bittersweet, highlighting a touching bond between mother and son as they reminisce over the past and embrace the present. . . Jaime Kim\u2019s digital illustrations highlight the stark differences between the new and the old. . . will likely resonate with viewers sharing a similar background. \u2014The Bulletin of the Center for Children's BooksReaders are treated to sumptuous full-page spreads devoid of text, where they can linger and imagine, like the child does, a carefree life in a beautiful place. . . . This gentle, layered story will resonate with imaginative readers as it shares a message of optimism and beauty. \u2014BooklistThis picture book lends itself nicely to compare and contrast, then and now, as well as talking about what happens to the landscape when concrete and buildings take over. . . beautiful.\u2014School Library JournalAs peaceful and gentle as that glowing sky, \u2018Mommy\u2019s Hometown\u2019 is a gorgeous ode to home, family, the things that change and the things that stay the same.\u2014The Virginian Pilot About the Author Hope Lim is the author of I Am a Bird , illustrated by Hyewon Yum, and My Tree , illustrated by Il Sung Na. Born and raised in South Korea, Hope Lim now lives with her family in San Francisco. Jaime Kim was born and raised in Korea before moving to the United States at the age of eighteen. She is the author-illustrator of Ready for the Spotlight! and the illustrator of many books for young readers, including La La La: A Story of Hope by Kate DiCamillo. Jaime Kim lives in North Carolina. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 10.62}, {"asin": "1984892630", "title": "Digging for Words: Jos\u00e9 Alberto Guti\u00e9rrez and the Library He Built", "author": "Angela Burke Kunkel", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 2\u2014This is a story of literacy and two Jos\u00e9s, both look forward to Saturday. On that day, the older Jos\u00e9, a garbage collector who carefully gathers books that have been discarded, will open the doors to his collection and share it with the children of their barrio, including the young boy, Jos\u00e9. The lyrical text weaves together the daily routines of both Jos\u00e9s, showing elements of their day in Bogot\u00e1, Colombia, and the scenes that play out in their imaginations when they discover a new world inside a book. The digitally painted illustrations capture the joy of anticipation and discovery as well as loving details of the barrio of La Nueva Gloria, where there was no library until 2000. An author's note expands on the true story that inspired this book, as well as suggesting sources for more information about Guti\u00e9rrez. An inviting and generous story that will be a pleasure to read aloud. VERDICT Recommended, particularly for fans of books such as Anika A. Denise's Planting Stories, also illustrated by Escobar, and as a city-set complement to Jeanette Winter's Biblioburro.\u2014Amanda Foulk, Sacramento P.L. Review An American Library Association Notable BookA Kirkus Best Picture Book of 2020A Junior Library Guild Selection \"The inspiring story of a man who believes in the power of books and the importance of community.\"\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review\u201c An inviting and generous story that will be a pleasure to read aloud.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 School Library Journal , Starred Review \"This amiable picture book offers children glimpses of Colombia as well as a role model who values books and enjoys sharing them with others \u2026. Simultaneously published in a Spanish edition, Rescatando Palabras. \"\u00a0\u2014 Booklist About the Author ANGELA BURKE KUNKEL is a school librarian who lives with her husband, two children, and two rescue pups on the banks of Otter Creek in Vermont. Digging for Words is her debut. Visit her on the web at angelakunkel.com and on Twitter @angkunkel.PAOLA ESCOBAR grew up traveling from town to town in Bogota, Colombia. She has published with SM Spain, Planeta, Norma, and more. Paola is the illustrator of Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpr\u00e9, an Indie Pick called \"a must-have for all libraries\" in a School Library Journal starred review. She lives with her husband and dog, Flora. Follow her on Instagram @paoesco8ar. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "0062909533", "title": "Thank You, Neighbor!", "author": "Ruth Chan", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2-In Chan's latest, an Asian child's neighborhood walk with their pup encourages readers to slow down and connect with others. The story begins indoors as the child clips an orange leash on the eager pooch and, on the title page, leaves a low-rise apartment. The true-to-life stroll that follows mixes typical dog behavior (and waste) with short, sweet interactions with neighbors and community helpers. Whether keeping everyone safe, tidying things up, or rescuing a cat from a tree, the neighbors \"take care of each other\" and are \"a big family.\" That's why, as the child narrator advises, it's important to always say, \"Thank you, neighbor!\" The walk eventually circles back home, where an adult greets the child with warm, steaming dumplings. The bright, colorful digital cartoon illustrations provide plenty of opportunities for engagement and discovery. Readers can peer through windows or look in backgrounds for small, often comedic, details. The urban setting's denizens are diverse in age and skin tone; a few use canes or wheelchairs. Of the many professions represented, one librarian's subtly tattooed arm is a delightfully stereotype-breaking touch. A visual reference to Matt de la Pe\u00f1a and Christian Robinson's Last Stop on Market Street positions this similarly community-minded story with a strong sense of place as a wonderful companion. An author's note and photo (with real neighbors!) provides personal context about Chan's own walks through Brooklyn with her dog. VERDICT A welcome reminder for readers in all kinds of neighborhoods. Highly recommended.-Alec Chunn, Eugene P.L., OR\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review This sweet book will encourage storytelling about readers\u2019 own local neighborhoods.\u00a0 \u2014 Kirkus Reviews The book\u2019s strong sense of the common good is as invigorating as a brisk walk. \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) A welcome reminder for readers in all kinds of neighborhoods. Highly recommended. \u2014 School Library Journal (starred review) About the Author Ruth Chan spent her childhood tobogganing in Canada, her teens living in and exploring China, a number of years studying art and education, and a decade working with youth and families in underserved communities. She now writes and illustrates in Brooklyn, New York, where she can often be found chatting with her neighbors. Visit www.ohtruth.com for more info. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 12.69}, {"asin": "1984895834", "title": "Donut Feed the Squirrels: (A Graphic Novel) (Norma and Belly)", "author": "Mika Song", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2-Resident squirrels Norma and Belly are thick as thieves, in addition to being actual thieves. Having burned their pancakes, they are lured outside of their tree-trunk domicile by the sweet scent of a doughnut truck that's set up shop. With the help of a couple of crafty accomplices, they plot to steal doughnuts for a giant party. Song uses negative space and highlighting to create contrast between the fuzzy masterminds and their environments. Her watercolors are gentle but expressive, as are her inked shapes. All four squirrel protagonists have distinct silhouettes, including Gramps, an older fellow with huge rectangular glasses, and Little Bee, who resembles the letter B. Onomatopoeia brings the squirrels' antics to life: Thunk, boing, splat, crash, screech, woosh, spritz, ding, and shhhhh accompany the silly animal slapstick and the sounds of the truck's automated machinery. The humans of the story-the doughnut maker and a neighborhood child who loves to glide around on roller skates-are largely oblivious to the squirrels' hunger-fueled schemes. Everyone comes out ahead eventually, resulting in an amusing tale of friendship, teamwork, and unintended consequences. Word balloons are generally large and clearly placed, with most of them using fewer than five words each. Young readers will enjoy using context clues to predict how characters' will behave. VERDICT Independent readers will devour this sweet and scrumptious heist story.-Thomas Maluck, Richland Lib., SC\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review \"Their antics are divided into five short chapters that young readers can read with confidence, and the sweet ending unquestionably satisfies .\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Booklist, starred review \"Two problem-solving squirrels stage a successful doughnut heist in this amusing start to a graphic novel series for emerging readers.\"\u00a0\u2014 Shelf Awareness, s tarred review\u201cDrawing with graceful ink lines and colored wash, Song capitalizes on comic moments.... Norma and Belly are never snarky; instead, they present a consistent mix of enterprise, wit, and cheer. \u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Mika Song is a children's writer/illustrator who makes stories about sweetly funny outsiders. She grew up in Manila, Philippines and Honolulu, Hawaii before moving to New York to study at Pratt Institute. She studied animation and worked as an animator before getting into children's books. In 2015, she received the Portfolio Award at the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Winter Conference in NYC. Tea with Oliver (HarperCollins) is the first book she both wrote and illustrated. Donut Feed the Squirrels is her debut graphic novel.@mikasongdraws Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0593373359", "title": "Make Way: The Story of Robert McCloskey, Nancy\u00a0Sch\u00f6n, and Some Very Famous Ducklings", "author": "Angela Burke Kunkel", "description": "Review \u2605 \u201cA wonderful picture book about creativity and collaboration .\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews , starred review\u2605 \"Burke Kunkel\u00a0renders a genuinely suspenseful and touching account of Sch\u00f6n delicately approaching McCloskey with the idea of memorializing his book\u2019s characters.\"\u00a0\u2014 Publishers Weekly , starred review\"The well-executed , full-page illustrations rendered in a vintage style are perfect for the period they depict.\"\u00a0\u2014 Booklist \"[Keane's]\u00a0loose lines and energetic compositions are a good match for the conversational text.\"\u00a0\u2014 The Horn Book \"A visually appealing and \u00adwell-researched addition to biographical narratives.\" \u2014School Library Journal About the Author Angela Burke Kunkel is the author of Digging for Words , an ALA Notable Book and Kirkus Best Book of the Year. It also received the Americas Award and the International Latino Book Award for best English language title. She is also the author of Penguin Journey , called \"stunning\" in a starred review from Kirkus Reviews . Claire Keane is the author-illustrator of Little Big Girl and Once Upon a Cloud and the illustrator of Paolo, Emperor of Rome by Mac Barnett and Why? by Adam Rex, among others. She is also known for her development art for the movies Tangled and Frozen. She studied at \u00c9cole Sup\u00e9rieure d'Arts Graphiques in Paris and now lives in Venice Beach, California with her kids.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 19.99}, {"asin": "1596436115", "title": "A Wonderful Year", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 16.47}, {"asin": "1534419136", "title": "Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston", "author": "Alicia D. Williams", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 3-This vibrant portrait of the early life and career of Black American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is sure to inspire young readers. Newbery Honor-winning author Williams follows Hurston from her childhood in Florida through her success as a writer in New York, emphasizing her efforts to reach each milestone in her career. Hurston is characterized as tenacious, and she overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles to pursue her dream. Alc\u00e1ntara's luminous illustrations will immediately engage readers, with saturated colors and captivating use of shadow and light. The narrative showcases a strong sense of setting. Readers can envision a lush Floridian landscape during Hurston's younger years, and later, the energy and promise of the Harlem Renaissance. Williams's lively prose employs dialect and a conversational style; it begs to be read aloud. The tone is a fitting tribute to Hurston's writing style and her work in researching and preserving African American folktales. This title is more of an inspirational story of grit and determination than a resource for school reports, but an author's note provides additional details about Hurston's life and work and includes further resources. VERDICT A welcome addition to any picture book biography collection; Williams deftly underscores the value of perseverance and education while highlighting the achievements of an influential Black female author.-Allison Tran, Mission Viejo Lib., CA\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review *\"A lively, joyfully rendered portrait of a literary legend.\" -- Publisher Weekly, starred review* \u201cWilliams\u2019 narration is a readaloud dream\u2026.it will be a joyful guide for folklore enthusiasts\u201d -- BCCB, starred review* \u201cThis introduction to an American icon feels just right.\u201d -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review* \"A welcome addition to any picture book biography collection\" -- School Library Journal, STARRED review About the Author Alicia D. Williams is the author of Genesis Begins Again , which received Newbery and Kirkus Prize honors, was a William C. Morris Award finalist, and for which she won the Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe Award for New Talent; and picture books Jump at the Sun and The Talk , for which she received a Coretta Scott King Author Honor. A graduate of the MFA program at Hamline University, and an oral storyteller in the African American tradition, she lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.Jacqueline Alc\u00e1ntara is the illustrator of the critically acclaimed The Field and Freedom Soup . Her favorite days are spent drawing, painting, writing, and walking her dog. In 2016, she was awarded the inaugural We Need Diverse Books Illustrator mentorship. Find out more at JacquelineAlcantara.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Geography & Cultures"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "1534418881", "title": "Muslim Girls Rise: Inspirational Champions of Our Time", "author": "Aaliya Jaleel", "description": "Review Compilations about women leaders have grown in number each year; now, at last, here is one about modern Muslim women that exhorts readers to \"find your passion, and\u2026RISE.\" ... As a collection for younger readers to browse, as a starting point for older readers, and as a source of inspiration and pride for all ages, this volume wins. Not to be missed. -- Kirkus Reviews *STARRED* \u2015 August 1, 2019 About the Author Saira Mir is a physician and author of the award-winning picture book Muslim Girls Rise , which she wrote for her daughter and other children to have Muslim feminist role models. As an OB-GYN, she has cared for many families through pregnancy loss, but could not find the book she needed to help support her daughter through grief over her own family\u2019s loss, which inspired her to write Always Sisters . She lives in the DC area with her kids and is always on the hunt for the next best playground and bubble tea.Aaliya Jaleel is a Sri-Lankan American illustrator who loves illustrating bright, bold color palettes and floral themes. Some of her works include the books Under My Hijab , Muslim Girls Rise , and The Masjid Kamal Loves . Aaliya also works as a designer for animation.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.72}, {"asin": "133856546X", "title": "No Snowball!", "author": "Isabella Kung", "description": "Review \"Kung follows up her tale of queenly kitty confusion with the inevitable new-sibling story. Her watercolor and gouache illustrations of a family and their wide-eyed, endearing pets are a perfect match (and mismatch) for the tale's action\u2014hilariously, NoFuzzball's interpretation of events is sometimes at odds with what is depicted in the artwork.\" - Kirkus About the Author Isabella Kung grew up in Hong Kong where she would spend hours prowling through the library; creating her own narrative for every one of her stuffed animals; and drawing all over her textbooks. Now she works as an adjunct professor of illustration and lives in San Francisco with her husband and two cats. No Fuzzball! is her debut picture book. You can read more about Isabella at isabellakung.com and follow her work on Instagram @isabellakungill or Twitter @isaberryk.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "149981075X", "title": "The Secret Code Inside You: All About Your DNA", "author": "Steven Salerno", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 3-Have you ever wondered why you can't catch flies with your tongue like a lizard, or see in the dark like an owl, or fly like a bird? The answer is found in a secret code called DNA, deep inside each human, giving bodies the instructions they need to grow. And while cells carry these secret codes, what people do with their bodies-and who they become-is up to them. This whimsical approach to explaining the concept of DNA, cells, and chromosomes manages to make a complex topic accessible to preschoolers. The rhyming text is easily readable, even when dealing with complicated terminology. Salerno's soft-edge and colorful illustrations bring these hard-to-visualize concepts to life. Resources include a detailed page of DNA facts as well as instructions for a fun experiment. However, suggestions for further reading are limited to a few websites, and only two sources are cited in the bibliography. VERDICT A good addition for public libraries, appealing to a wide age range.-Savannah Kitchens, Parnell Memorial Lib., Montevallo, AL\u03b1(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. Review Operating on three levels, this book will help readers crack their own secret codes.As they begin their exploration of the concept of DNA, the youngest listeners will be drawn in with questions featuring fun animals and text with internal and end rhymes, alliteration, and puns. \"Why aren't you finny like a fish, / or grinny like a shark? / Why can't you catch flies with your tongue, / or / see / things / in / the / dark?\" Describing DNA as \"twisted ladders, or tiny, twirling noodles\" creates accessible concrete images for children. The science ramps up for slightly older readers and discusses how personal traits like height or the size of a child's nose, ears, or hands are determined by the DNA that parents and grandparents share with their children. Definitions and explanations of key vocabulary like genes and chromosomes are clear, but the rhyming format creates the occasional awkward phrase. Dynamic and eye-catching illustrations on later pages emphasize the difference between genetic coding and each person's unique choices. \"[DNA] makes the color of your eyes, / but YOU choose where to look: / at butterflies or sunset skies, / or even at this book.\" Personal choice also determines how someone uses their muscles and chooses an occupation. For older readers or the more science curious, the backmatter is full of DNA facts and explanations, URLs to child-friendly websites, and a well-designed and -explained experiment to extract DNA from a banana.A solid introduction to a complex topic. \u2015 Kirkus Reviews Have you ever wondered why you can't catch flies with your tongue like a lizard, or see in the dark like an owl, or fly like a bird? The answer is found in a secret code called DNA, deep inside each human, giving bodies the instructions they need to grow. And while cells carry these secret codes, what people do with their bodies-and who they become-is up to them. This whimsical approach to explaining the concept of DNA, cells, and chromosomes manages to make a complex topic accessible to preschoolers. The rhyming text is easily readable, even when dealing with complicated terminology. Salerno's soft-edge and colorful illustrations bring these hard-to-visualize concepts to life. Resources include a detailed page of DNA facts as well as instructions for a fun experiment. However, suggestions for further reading are limited to a few websites, and only two sources are cited in the bibliography. A good addition for public libraries, appealing to a wide age range. \u2015 School Library Journal About the Author Rajani LaRocca, MD, was born in India, raised in Kentucky, and now lives in the Boston area with her wonderful family and impossibly cute dog. She earned a BA and an MD from Harvard, and spends her time writing novels and picture books, practicing medicine, and baking too many sweet treats. She is the author of Midsummer's Mayhem , Much Ado About Baseball , Seven Golden Rings , and Red, White, and Whole . Find her online at RajaniLaRocca.com and on Twitter and Instagram @rajanilarocca. Steven Salerno has illustrated more than thirty picture books, including Brothers At Bat , which made the New York Times Book Review' s list of notable picture books, The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons , which won the Irma Black Award for Excellence in Children's Literature, and Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag . Originally from Vermont, Steven lives and works in New York City. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "0525518355", "title": "Dozens of Doughnuts", "author": "Carrie Finison", "description": "Review Praise for Dozens of Doughnuts : A Junior Library Guild Selection \"Deliver[s] as much satisfaction as . . . new doughnuts themselves.\" -- Publishers Weekly \"Deliciously illustrated . . . I like the writing, the story, the art, the doughnuts, the counting, the whole kerschmozzle.\" -- School Library Journal \"A whimsical picture book filled with lessons about sharing, being a good friend, and even counting.\" -- Romper \"A silly book with an important message about boundaries and not putting yourself last in relationships.\" -- Book Riot About the Author Carrie Finison writes poetry, stories, and picture books for children. Dozens of Doughnuts is her debut picture book. She lives outside Boston with her husband, son, and daughter (who all love doughnuts), and two cats who allow her to work in their attic office.Brianne Farley is the illustrator of Charlotte the Scientist is Squished by Camille Andros and its sequel Charlotte the Scientist Finds a Cure . She has also written and illustrated two picture books: Secret Tree Fort and Ike's Incredible Ink . Brianne studied creative writing and art at Macalester College, and then received her MFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She lives in Michigan. Visit her at briannefarley.com or follow her on Instagram @briannehfarley and Twitter @briannefarley.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 14.33}, {"asin": "1338582895", "title": "Happy Paws: A Branches Book (Layla and the Bots)", "author": "Vicky Fang", "description": "Review Praise for Happy Paws (Layla and the Bots #1): \"This easy-to-predict story, told in a mix of text and speech balloons, will give new readers confidence while imparting solid STEM lessons of research and implementation, and it's great to see a young girl of color portrayed as a confident inventor (and rock star). A solid introduction for an appealing new chapter-book character.\" -- Kirkus Reviews \"This transitional chapter book is ideal for emergent or early fluency readers. It includes charming illustrations to assist with decoding, and interesting STEM themes... this bright, inventive title would make a nice addition to a library's early chapter book collection.\" -- School Library Journal About the Author Vicky Fang is a product designer who spent five years designing kids' technology experiences for both Google and Intel, often to inspire and empower kids in coding and technology. She started writing to support the growing need for early coding education, particularly for girls and kids of color. She is the author, and sometimes illustrator, of nineteen new and upcoming books for kids, including the Layla and the Bots series, Invent-a-Pet , I Can Code Board Books, Friendbots , and the forthcoming Ava Lin series, Best Buddies series, AlphaBot , and The Boo Crew Needs You! You can visit Vicky at vickyfang.com.  Christine Nishiyama is an illustrator and the founder of Might Could Studios. She self-published a picture book called We Are Fungi . You can visit Christine at mightcouldstudios.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.74}, {"asin": "1452144826", "title": "Endlessly Ever After: Pick YOUR Path to Countless Fairy Tale Endings!", "author": "Laurel Snyder", "description": "Review \u201cGrab your favorite outerwear (cozy coat or riding hood?) and your sense of adventure because Snyder and Santat have created a fun-filled fairy-tale mashup that puts kids in the driver\u2019s seat. . . . [ Endlessly Ever After \u2019s] interactive nature, large trim size, and bold, full-bleed illustrations make it an excellent candidate for group sharing. There is also a fractured-fairy tale aspect to the stories featured, which ensures there are surprises around every corner. A highly entertaining read, full of possibilities.\u201d\u2015 Booklist Reviews \u201cMultiple reader options give the woodsy road to Grandma\u2019s house any number of surprise twists and diversions. . . . Some choices are hard but not this one: Pick it up!\u201d\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cWhether they are timid or bold, readers will delight in directing a rhyming story that magically changes every time, with choices to suit all adventurers. . . . Snyder reminds readers that \u2018every day\u2026you choose,\u2019 and the choices you make matter. . . . [ Endlessly Ever After ] could lead to raucous story hours or interactive group reads, but what everyone needs to ask is: Do you wish you had a Choose-Your-Own-Fairy-Tale book in your hands right now? Open the book. Highly recommended.\u201d\u2015 School Library Journal \u201cInvoking myriad fairy tale scenarios throughout a cascading choose-one\u2019s-path format, Snyder (the Charlie and Mouse series) builds a fairy story with logic gates. . . . Santat ( The Aquanaut ) romps lushly through this fairy tale universe, giving the folklore mainstays . . . an exaggerated, kinetic quality. . . . Readers accustomed to video game\u2013style endings won\u2019t be bothered by Rosie\u2019s many demises; turning the page resumes the action and leads to more choices, and employing frenetic action right through to the end\u2015er, ends.\u201d\u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cThe choose-your-own-adventure format applied to fairytales is pure magic.\u201d \u2015 Good Housekeeping \u201c[G]et comfortable; kids will insist on multiple readings . . . The humorously grim text is well matched with amusing illustrations that keep even the darker story elements lighthearted . . . Both text and art are endlessly clever.\u201d \u2015 The Horn Book Magazine \u201cIllustrated by Dan Santat with his customary luminous dynamism, Endlessly Ever After [is] a picture book that will have children flapping the pages back and forth depending on where their curiosity leads them. . . . Mixing and matching elements of well-known fairy tales, Ms. Snyder and Mr. Santat have created a raucous read and a sly tribute to the joys of improvisational storytelling.\u201d\u2015 The Wall Street Journal About the Author Dan Santat is a Caldecott-Medal-winning author-illustrator of many children's books. An honors graduate of ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena, he is also the creator of the Disney animated hit The Replacements . Dan lives in Southern California with his wife, two kids, and various pets.Laurel Snyder is the author of many children's books, including Swan, Hungry Jim , and Charlie & Mouse , which won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, Laurel teaches creative writing at Hamline University and lives with her family in Atlanta, GA.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0762473983", "title": "Lulu and Zoey: A Sister Story", "author": "Carrie Finison", "description": "Review \u201cRhythmic rhyming couplets imbue this story with upbeat energy, which is reflected in the dynamic, vibrantly colored single- and double-page\u2013spread digital illustrations. The sisters\u2019 relationship is refreshingly realistic, from power dynamics arising from their age gap to the way shared creative passions can quell conflict\u2026. A simple, heartwarming ode to sisterhood.\u201d\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"A solid choice to add to a school's collection of sibling stories.\"\u2015 School Library Journal \u201cThe illustrations by Jackson are colorful, full of expression, and heartwarming. The soft details and pastel hues bring warmth to the realistic characters. Supportive with a strong family message, this offering is a natural read-alike for Kelly Sterling Lyons\u2019s\u00a0Ty\u2019s Travels series.\u201d\u2015 Booklist About the Author Carrie Finison writes and develops fiction and nonfiction writing for educational, textbook, and assessment publishers. Her work includes Dozens of Donuts , Don't Hug Doug and Pigs Dig a Road . Brittany Jackson loves telling stories through her art, from dynamic and diverse character design, to delightfully fun and energetic children's book illustrations. She attended the College for Creative Studies and was the Grand Prize Winner of the L Ron Hubbard's Illustrator of the Future Award in 2007.\u00a0Her debut illustrated picture book is the New York Times Bestseller, Parker Looks Up , published by Aladdin Books.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 14.49}, {"asin": "0062803492", "title": "Five Things About Ava Andrews", "author": "Margaret Dilloway", "description": "Review \u201cSuccessfully explores the complexities of chronic illness mixed with mental illness \u2026 a heartwarming story about a community discovering activism.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cAlongside a sensitive portrayal of Ava\u2019s invisible disabilities, well-wrought subplots, such as problems with an unkind classmate and the growing distance between two once-close friends, support the journey of Dilloway\u2019s thoughtful protagonist from timid observer to well-liked social activist.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cAn excellent selection for book clubs for children, read-together picks, and for anyone who enjoys a good underdog story.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 ALA Booklist \u201cDilloway covers a lot of ground including social justice, mental health, physical ability, and prejudice, but all the while the narrative is hopeful and encouraging.... Ideal for book clubs and discussions.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 School Library Journal About the Author Margaret Dilloway is the author of Summer of a Thousand Pies and six other books for children and adults. She lives with her family in San Diego, where she performs long-form improv on three teams and writes and produces sketch shows. Margaret can be found online at www.margaretdilloway.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 5.34}, {"asin": "1338565427", "title": "No Fuzzball!", "author": "Isabella Kung", "description": "Review \"The fluffy black kitty gives preschool readers an early lesson in the unreliable narrator as she describes her relationship with her humans. In Kung's illustrations, she's an expressive, endearing little chunk of well-meaning evil. Her interracial human family is just as expressive, and the bright spot and full-bleed illustrations are entertaining from the first endpaper to the last.\" - Kirkus Reviews About the Author Isabella Kung grew up in Hong Kong where she would spend hours prowling through the library; creating her own narrative for every one of her stuffed animals; and drawing all over her textbooks. Now she works as an adjunct professor of illustration and lives in San Francisco with her husband and two cats. No Fuzzball! is her debut picture book. You can read more about Isabella at isabellakung.com and follow her work on Instagram @isabellakungill or Twitter @isaberryk.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0358125065", "title": "I'm a Hare, So There!", "author": "Julie Rowan-Zoch", "description": "Review \"This clever rumination on the differences between commonly mixed-up animals is a sneakily educational readaloud.\"\u2014 BCCB \"For anyone a bit hazy on the differences between a rabbit and a hare, a tortoise and a turtle, or, for that matter, a hog and a javelina, this cactus-country confab begins to clear things up.\"\u2014 Booklist \"Animated and educational\"\u2014 Kirkus \u2014 About the Author Author, illustrator, bookseller, and activist: Julie Rowan-Zoch grew up collecting freckles and chasing hermit crabs in NY, and spent years slicing rich breads in Germany before waking up to 300 days of blue Colorado skies. If she doesn\u2019t answer the door, look in the garden! Website: https://julierowanzoch.wordpress.com/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/julierowanzoch/ Twitter:\u00a0@JulieRowanZoch Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArtistJulieRowanZoch Instagram: @jrzoch", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1324015934", "title": "Somewhere in the Bayou", "author": "Jerome Pumphrey", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2\u2014In a bold graphic style that uses big, flat shapes and a limited palette of gray, tan, brown, brick, and sage, four swamp creatures are beset with curiosity, and maybe even fear. A squirrel, mouse, rabbit, and weasel (or opossum, from the book jacket), in tersely worded speech bubbles that would not be out of place in Waiting for Godot, question the sight before them: \"What should we do?/ We could just\u2014/ Find another way?/ No. There's only one way past a sneaky tail.\" One by one, they are picked off by the tail, and in this soon-to-be-story-hour-hit, listeners will be on the edge of their seats. The survivor, the mouse, figures out why the tail is there, and helps a docile alligator get unstuck. The punch line is an uproarious gift from the Pumphreys, who could not lace more eccentric charm into this if they had 1000 more pages. It's just right. VERDICT To paraphrase another epic piece about hungry snapping jaws, you're going to need a bigger story hour.\u2014Kimberly Olson Fakih About the Author Jerome Pumphrey is an author/illustrator and a graphic designer at The Walt Disney Company. He lives in Clearwater, Florida. Jarrett Pumphrey is an author/illustrator and the former cofounder and CEO of a tech startup. He lives in Austin, Texas.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.79}, {"asin": "1951836626", "title": "Animals in Pants", "author": "Suzy Levinson", "description": "Review \u201cWith sure command of metrics as well as excellent comic timing, Levinson dishes out pithy observations on animals. A tailor-made parade for younger clotheshorses.\u201d\u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cTwenty-three very short and funny poems cover a wide variety of animals and the many types of pants they might wear. Silly and clever.\u201d\u2015 The Horn Book Magazine About the Author Suzy Levinson is a writer and poet whose work has been published in numerous poetry anthologies and children\u2019s magazines. Animals in Pants is her debut picture book. She lives in New York. Kristen and Kevin Howdeshel l are a husband-and-wife illustration team whose books include The Poet Wolf of Piney Woods , published by Cameron Kids. They live in Kansas City, Missouri.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 17.39}, {"asin": "1536209945", "title": "ABC Cats: An Alpha-Cat Book", "author": "Leslea Newman", "description": "From School Library Journal PreS-K\u2014Fine feline fun can be found in this alphabet book where every page sees a different cat sitting by, lazing on, or climbing up its letter in perfect harmony with a measured rhyme scheme describing each specific cat. Light watercolors form letters and cats alike, though the details are best understood from the text. About the Author Lesl\u00e9a Newman is the author of more than seventy books for children, including the Candlewick titles Heather Has Two Mommies ; Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed ; and October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard , a Stonewall Honor Book. She lives in Massachusetts. Isabella Kung is an illustrator, author, instructor, and professional cat cuddler whose illustrations have been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, Spectrum Fantasy Art, 3x3 , Creative Quarterly , and SCBWI. She grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in San Francisco.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1250148227", "title": "Google It: A History of Google", "author": "Anna Crowley Redding", "description": "Review \"Investigative journalist Redding does an admirable job of chronicling Larry and Sergey\u2019s amazing successes and will inspire young people to follow in their ingenious footsteps. It\u2019s more comprehensive than other books for young readers about Google\u2019s founders, with energetically written short chapters, interesting facts, graphics, and photos \" \u2015 Booklist, starred review\"This readable and breezy history of the tech behemoth [is] An appealing and timely look at a universally relevant subject and a good fit for STEAM-related reading lists.\" \u2015 School Library Journal \"This chronological history of the first two decades of Google is attractively packaged to appeal to a teen audience. ... Humorous accounts of Google's unpretentious beginnings as a student project, and its early years as a bare-bones startup in a friend's garage will intrigue teens who dream of growing their own projects into software and devices used by millions.\" \u2015 VOYA About the Author Anna Crowley Redding is the author of Google It, Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World, and Black Hole Chasers. The recipient of multiple Edward R. Murrow and Associated Press awards, Crowley Redding uses her Emmy award-winning investigative reporting skills to dig into compelling topics that are shaping our world. Her works have been translated into multiple languages, garnered national news coverage, and been recognized by the National Association of Science Teachers for excellence. Crowley Redding lives outside of Portland, Maine with her family. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Google It A History of Goggle By Anna Crowley Redding Feiwel and Friends Copyright \u00a9 2018 Anna Crowley ReddingAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-14822-3 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, Part 1: Frenemies + Homework + Legos = Google?, CHAPTER 1 A Cold, Hard, Google-less World, CHAPTER 2 Homework, CHAPTER 3 The Long-Lost Nightmare: Search Before Google, CHAPTER 4 #Spelling, CHAPTER 5 Google World Headquarters, CHAPTER 6 Rules Are for Breaking, CHAPTER 7 Y2K, CHAPTER 8 Rallying Cry, CHAPTER 9 Parental Supervision, Part 2: Google It!, CHAPTER 10 Googler (Person Who Works at Google), CHAPTER 11 That's No Joke!, CHAPTER 12 Troubled Waters, CHAPTER 13 Verb, CHAPTER 14 YouTube, CHAPTER 15 Beyond Search: The Recipe for Alphabet Soup, Part 3: Impossible Goal + Attempt (+/-Success) = Moonshot, CHAPTER 16 A Healthy Disregard for the Impossible, CHAPTER 17 Send In the Cars, CHAPTER 18 Wear It!, CHAPTER 19 U Is for UFO, CHAPTER 20 The More We Change, the More We Stay the Same, Source Notes, Bibliography, Acknowledgments, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 A Cold, Hard, Google-less World Need to know how many stacked pennies it would take to reach the moon? Want to know about the latest visual effects technology used to make Star Wars ? Need to know if George Washington really had dentures made out of wood? FYI: \u2022 It would take a stack of 240 billion pennies to reach the moon! \u2022 Star Wars special effects \u2014 Check out this cool link for a peek at how the latest computer graphics (CG) were used to pull off the stunning visuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obwG9k6x2us \u2022 Was George Washington's wooden smile made from wooden teeth? NO. His false teeth were actually made of bone, ivory, and sometimes other humans' teeth. Imagine you can't google the answers because \u2014 well, Google hasn't been invented yet. You have two choices. You can sit there on your couch, swallow your curiosity like a bitter pill, and live with not knowing. Or you can get your parents to drive you to the library. Fingers crossed, the answers you need are somewhere in the pages of a book that's somewhere on their bookshelves. But wait a minute. What if your parents don't know how to get to the library? You'll have to consult a paper map. WARNING! Unless you are an origami dynamo, once you unfold a map, it might never be refolded correctly. Never. Don't even try. Still can't find it? It may come down to this: You have to use a paper phone book to look up the library's phone number. Then, pick up your home phone (the kind that's wired to a wall), wait for a real, live human being to answer, and then ask for directions. Yikes! It's hard to believe, but that was life without Google. Getting information was difficult and took a lot of work. Horrified? The two guys who thought up Google were just as freaked out as you are. This was the world they grew up in, back in the 1970s and 1980s. And even as kids, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin knew they wanted to change the world. When Larry and Sergey were born in 1973, technology was in a very different place than it is today. In most homes, telephones were attached to walls and could only be used to make phone calls. No texts, no news, no maps \u2014 just phone calls. Hope was coming. That year, the first-ever cell phone call was made. But these cell phones were huge, like talking into a brick. Plus, the battery life was around twenty minutes. And then there was the price tag: $3,995! In today's dollars? That would set you back more than $22,000. Oh, and about your TV. If you needed to change the channel, you had to get up and physically turn a dial on your TV set, unless you were one of the lucky ones who had a pricey remote control! Computers had been something used mostly by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in research and academic settings. They were physically huge and could take up an entire desk or even a whole room. But this last thing was about to change \u2014 just in time to inspire Larry's and Sergey's love of technology. But it wouldn't be easy. Larry and Sergey were born on opposites sides of the planet. And when their paths finally crossed, they didn't even like each other. It's a wonder Google ever happened at all. Frenemies: Fight@1stSight When Larry and Sergey met during the summer of 1995, they should have been the best of friends. After all, they both loved computers, math, engineering, science, and technology. They had both attended Montessori schools and grown up in families steeped in STEM. That's a lot in common. BFFs at first sight, right? Nope. Not even close. When they met for the very first time, Larry and Sergey couldn't stand each other! Twenty-two-year-old Larry was supposed to be enjoying a welcome tour of San Francisco for new students checking out nearby Stanford University. Already accepted to Stanford, Larry was giving the university a thorough look-see before deciding if he wanted to study there \u2014 though secretly he couldn't believe Stanford wanted him! Spanish colonists founded San Francisco in 1776. The Gold Rush of 1849 made San Francisco the largest city on the West Coast. Today, the San Francisco Bay Area is home to 8.7 million people, making it the fifth-largest metro area in America. Enter twenty-one-year-old Sergey. He was the tour guide. Who better to lead the tour? As a second-year graduate student, Sergey was known for zipping around Stanford's hallways on Rollerblades. He was not only fun, he was smart, too. Sergey had already aced his required courses and now devoted a serious chunk of time to advanced swimming, trapeze lessons, and Ultimate Frisbee. (Oh! And some elective courses. He did fit some study into his free time.) But as Larry and Sergey trudged up one hill and down another, this duo filled the streets of San Francisco with their bickering banter. They argued about anything and everything ... needling, poking, prodding, questioning, interrupting, and talking down to each other. Their first meeting was a disaster. The only thing the two agreed on was their opinion of the other. In a word? Obnoxious. Aerial view of Stanford University. (Photo by Jrissman.) The sprawling 8,000-acre Stanford University campus was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (designer of New York City's famous Central Park). Sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford has long been an incubator for creativity and innovation. Companies including Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, Cisco, Intuit, and SunMicrosystems can trace their origins to Stanford. But the same chemistry that sparked the nonstop squabbling also acted like a magnet. By the time school started in the fall of 1995, Larry and Sergey had discovered that they actually had a lot in common, from their science-filled childhoods to their passion for technology and engineering, not to mention their undeniable knack for spirited debate. Both Larry and Sergey were confident in exploring new ideas and taking risks. They were also both obsessed with efficiency and improving the way things worked. And in just a few months, they would team up on a school assignment that would change their lives \u2014 and ours, too. SERGEY BRIN NAME: Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin DATE OF BIRTH: August 21, 1973 PLACE: Moscow, Russia FIRST COMPUTER: Age 9, Commodore 64 Sure, by today's standards, the Commodore 64 isn't much to look at, but this remains one of the most popular computers ever sold. Because of the quality of the audio and graphics, it was great for gaming. The Commodore 64 sold for $595 in 1982. FAMILY: Sergey Brin was born into a family of intellectuals. His great-grandmother? A microbiologist. His grandfather? A math professor. Both of his parents were brilliant mathematicians. They were also very brave. Faced with anti-Semitism and discrimination in their home country of Russia, Sergey's parents made the difficult choice to leave everything behind and start a new life in America. Sergey was only six years old. Immigrating to the United States during the 1970s was no simple matter. Like many immigrants, the Brin family had to leave most of their belongings behind. But an American-based agency devoted to immigrants helped Sergey's family. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society helped the Brins navigate the paperwork and apply for visas, and even bought tickets to the US for the family. In 2009, thirty years after Sergey and his family arrived in the United States, Sergey gave $1 million to the agency that helped his family escape Russia and resettle in Maryland. In 2017, when US President Donald Trump announced an immigration order banning travel to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries, Sergey joined the crowd of protesters at San Francisco's airport, saying, \"I am here because I am a refugee.\" Settling into a small home in Baltimore, Maryland, Sergey's father became a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and Sergey's mom became a research scientist for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center \u2014 something that would never have been possible for Jews in Russia. SCHOOLING: At his Montessori school, Sergey immersed himself in puzzles, math, and science projects; by middle school, his teachers had realized he was a genuine math prodigy. Sergey sailed through high school, graduating early while also accumulating a year of college credit. This allowed him to graduate from the University of Maryland at only nineteen and become one of the youngest students ever admitted to Stanford's PhD program. COULDA-WOULDA-SHOULDA ALERT! MIT rejected Sergey's grad school application. The school probably wishes it could get a do-over. BOOKSHELF: No one captured Sergey's attention quite like Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in Physics. During Sergey's child-hood, Feynman published several books, including: \"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!\": Adventures of a Curious Character (1985) and \"What Do You Care What Other People Think?\": Further Adventures of a Curious Character (1988). RICHARD P. FEYNMAN (1918\u20131988) was a world-famous theoretical physicist and a pioneer in quantum computing and nanotechnology. As a child, he was raised to ask questions and challenge the status quo. By the time he was eleven, Feynman had spent hours taking apart radios and tinkering in his own makeshift laboratory. He even built a burglar alarm for his bedroom! Brilliant by any standard, Feynman also experienced antiSemitism. Even though he'd mastered a host of advanced mathematics, Columbia University denied his application. The reason? The school only allowed a certain number of Jews into their program and had already met that quota. Feynman attended MIT instead. In the 1940s, during World War II, Feynman worked at the supersecretive Los Alamos National Laboratory, collaborating on the most top-secret project of the day \u2014 the atomic bomb. Serious business, to be sure. Like Sergey, Feynman was not only smart, but also fun ... and enjoyed picking locks and playing pranks. Feynman's contributions to physics, nanotechnology, and quantum computing make him one of the greatest physicists in American history. LARRY PAGE NAME: Lawrence \"Larry\" Page DATE OF BIRTH: March 26, 1973 PLACE: Lansing, Michigan FIRST COMPUTER: Age 6, Exidy Sorcerer The Exidy Sorcerer was made by a video/arcade game company, Exidy. The Sorcerer was faster than its competitors and offered better graphics, which improved gaming. It was also the first plug-in-and-go home computer, which meant you could take it out of the box, plug it in, and start using it. Prior to this, setting up and using computers required technical know-how that the average person just didn't have. And a SHOUT-OUT to NO SHOUTING ... one of the key selling points for this computer was that it offered both upper- and lower case letters for typing. Phew! Pipe down, everybody. FAMILY: Larry Page was born into a house where life revolved around technology. Larry's father was a computer science and artificial intelligence professor at Michigan State University. Talk about a pioneer! His mother had a master's degree in computer science and worked as a database consultant. SCHOOLING: Larry also attended a Montessori school. \"I think I was the first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document,\" Larry recalled in an interview. (In the 1970s and 1980s, most homework assignments and even research papers were still handwritten.) Larry graduated from the University of Michigan. He majored in both computer science and business. YIKES ALERT! MIT also rejected Larry's grad school application. Double whammy! INSPIRATION: At twelve years old, Larry read about an inventor named Nikola Tesla. As he leafed through the pages of Tesla's biography, Larry realized he wanted to be an inventor, too. But Larry also quickly identified a tragic flaw in Tesla's story, which he saw as a cautionary tale. Even though Tesla was an amazing inventor, he never found fame or fortune through his work while he was alive. \"I realized I wanted to invent things, but I also wanted to change the world,\" Larry said. \"I wanted to get them out there, get them into people's hands so they can use them.\" NIKOLA TESLA (1856\u20131943) was an extraordinary inventor, leading the way at the dawn of electricity. Filing more than seven hundred patents, Tesla invented the Tesla coil, which is still used in radio technology today. He also experimented with X-rays and radio waves, and laid the foundation for wireless technology. But Larry Page was right. Tesla was never as successful, as well-known, or as celebrated as his nemesis: Thomas Edison. Sometimes Tesla even had to dig ditches just to support himself. He died in New York City in 1943, poor and suffering from mental illness. BOOKSHELF: When Larry Page read The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman (1988), he became inspired by Norman's main premise: The user is always right. CHAPTER 2 Homework There's homework and then there's HOMEWORK. There's the kind you knock off in five minutes and the kind that determines your whole entire life. As graduate students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin faced the most epic homework assignment of all: the doctoral thesis. It's like getting married \u2014 to your homework. First, you propose your carefully chosen topic to your professors. With their approval, you dive into the deep end of research, spending hours, days, weeks, months \u2014 however long it takes to break new ground, discover something, or deepen humanity's understanding of your topic. And if that's not enough pressure, the last step is to present your research to a panel of professors. Professors who are allowed to ask you questions about your work \u2014 even challenge you \u2014 and you have to defend what you've learned! Larry knew he needed to find just the right topic for his doctoral thesis. And he quickly turned his attention to the World Wide Web. In 1995, the web was only six years old \u2014 just a baby. Back then, in the ancient times of the internet, there were only about ten million web pages. And each page generally took thirty seconds to load \u2014 an eternity. Today the web is made up of 4.73 billion web pages (and counting). LINGO ALERT! The web and the internet are not the same thing. The internet is a giant network of computers, connected by cables and wireless signals. This network of networks allows computers to exchange information. The web is all of the content \u2014 documents, files, folders, web pages, and other resources \u2014 available via the internet, and is connected through links. Still, when Larry looked at the web, he didn't just see a bunch of clunky, primitive web pages. He saw a mathematical graph. Each web page was a point on the graph. And just like the dots on a graph are connected by lines, the websites were connected with links. Now came the questions. Were these links important? What could links tell us about a single page on the internet? Larry wanted to know more. That's when he noticed something interesting: It was easy to look at a web page and see how many outgoing links it had to other sites. They were right there on the page in hypertext, ready to be clicked. But what Larry wanted to know was how many other sites linked back to a particular page? How many incoming links referred to a page? In 1995, nobody knew. Hypertext is interactive text that leads you to another document, aka a web page. Oftentimes it's highlighted in another color. You can simply move your pointer to the hypertext and click to travel to the linked document, or web page, or information. Larry explained it to a reporter like this: \"The early versions of hypertext had a tragic flaw: You couldn't follow links in the other direction.\" Larry wanted to reverse that. Backlinks When you run for class president, you're not elected based on the number of leaders you think are brilliant. Instead, you are elected by the number of people who vote for you. Put another way, your popularity isn't measured by how many people you like; it's by how many people like you. Studying the structure of the internet, Larry discovered a similar truth. It's not how many sites you link to that matters. What matters is how many sites link to your page. The more sites that link to you, the more relevant, substantial, and credible your site is. Each time a web page links to you, it's like a vote of confidence. The more votes a page receives, the more credible and important it must be. This idea reminded Larry of something that was talked about a lot in his house when he was growing up: citation. (Continues...) Excerpted from Google It by Anna Crowley Redding . Copyright \u00a9 2018 Anna Crowley Redding. Excerpted by permission of Feiwel and Friends. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1944762825", "title": "Chowder Rules!: The True Story of an Epic Food Fight", "author": "Anna Crowley Redding", "description": "Review \"Redding and illustrator Vita Lane tell this story with clear narrative and colorful, funny illustrations revealing remarkable and little-known Maine history. \" \u2015Bill Bushnell, Kennebec Journal Awards And Nominations 2020 Lupine Honor Award Winner About the Author Anna Crowley Redding is a former Emmy-award winning investigative television reporter, anchor, and journalist. The recipient of multiple Edward R. Murrow awards and recognized by the Associated Press for her reporting, Redding now focuses on digging up great stories for kids-which, as it turns out, is her true passion. She is the author of the young adult nonfiction titles, Google It: A History of Google , and Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World , and the picture book, Rescuing the Declaration of Independence . Vita Lane is a children's book illustrator. She has created artwork for a wide variety of projects including quilting fabric, wedding invitations, an animated music video, puzzles, and more. She loves blueberries, yoga, hiking, dogs, and road trips. She has a freckle in her left eye and can recite all 50 states in alphabetical order. This is her first picture book.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 17.95}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1452172870", "title": "The Fire of Stars: The Life and Brilliance of the Woman Who Discovered What Stars Are Made Of", "author": "Kirsten W. Larson", "description": "Review \u201cA stellar subject, breathtaking artwork, and unique layout set this biography for young readers apart from the rest.\u201d \u2015 School Library Journa l , starred review\u201c[M]akes a good addition to the astronomy shelves.\u201d \u2015 Booklist \u201cKirsten Larson deftly weaves together her compelling biography of an important woman who \"stick[s] to her path\" despite the odds. The decision to parallel Cecilia's development with that of an emerging star is an inspired one, and Katherine Roy uses pencil, ink and digital color to create luminous illustrations that crackle with energy.\u201d \u2015 Shelf Awareness , starred review\u201cMarrying format, language, and subject, Larson conscientiously emphasizes Payne\u2019s accomplishments. Taking place alongside inky interstellar sidebar views, accompanying pencil and ink illustrations by Roy glow\u2026\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly , starred review\u201dA luminous thematic pairing.\u201d\u00a0\u2015 Kirkus , starred review About the Author Kirsten W. Larson used to work with rocket scientists at NASA. Now she writes books for curious kids. She is the author of Wood, Wire, Wings: Emma Lilian Todd Invents an Airplane and A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything , along with several forthcoming titles. She lives near Los Angeles, California, with her family.\u00a0Katherine Roy is the award-winning author and illustrator of many science-based books for kids, including her Sibert Honor book Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California\u2019s Farallon Islands and How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild . She is also the illustrator of Otis and Will Discover the Deep: The Record-Setting Dive of the Bathysphere and of Red Rover: Curiosity on Mars . She lives with her husband and sons in Oregon, where she loves gazing up at the stars.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "1719646406", "title": "Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0547995679", "title": "Messenger (Giver Quartet) (Giver Quartet, 3)", "author": "Lois Lowry", "description": "Review \"Lowry masterfully presents another thought-provoking, haunting tale in this third novel, a companion to The Giver and Gathering Blue.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"Lowry moves far beyond message, writing with a beautiful simplicity rooted in political fable, in warm domestic detail, and in a wild natural world, just on the edge of realism.\" \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \"Told in simple, evocative prose, this companion to The Giver (1993) and Gathering Blue (2000) can stand on its own as a powerful tale of great beauty. \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) About the Author Lois Lowry is the author of more than forty\u00a0books for children and young adults, including the New York Times bestselling Giver Quartet and\u00a0popular Anastasia Krupnik series. She has received countless honors, among them the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, the California Young Reader\u2019s Medal, and the Mark Twain Award. She received Newbery Medals for two of her novels, Number the Stars and The Giver .", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "0062060554", "title": "Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel", "author": "S. J. Watson", "description": "Amazon.com Review Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2011 : Every day Christine wakes up not knowing where she is. Her memories disappear every time she falls asleep. Her husband, Ben, is a stranger to her, and he's obligated to explain their life together on a daily basis--all the result of a mysterious accident that made Christine an amnesiac. With the encouragement of her doctor, Christine starts a journal to help jog her memory every day. One morning, she opens it and sees that she's written three unexpected and terrifying words: \"Don't trust Ben.\" Suddenly everything her husband has told her falls under suspicion. What kind of accident caused her condition? Who can she trust? Why is Ben lying to her? And, for the reader: Can Christine\u2019s story be trusted? At the heart of S. J. Watson's Before I Go To Sleep is the petrifying question: How can anyone function when they can't even trust themselves? Suspenseful from start to finish, the strength of Watson's writing allows Before I Go to Sleep to transcend the basic premise and present profound questions about memory and identity. One of the best debut literary thrillers in recent years, Before I Go to Sleep deserves to be one of the major blockbusters of the summer. --Miriam Landis Review \u201cAn exceptional thriller. It left my nerves jangling for hours after I finished the last page.\u201d \u2014 Dennis Lehane \u201cImagine drifting off every night knowing that your memories will be wiped away by morning. That\u2019s the fate of Christine Lucas, whose bewildering internal world is rendered with chilling intimacy in this debut literary thriller. . . . You\u2019ll stay up late reading until you know.\u201d \u2014 People (4 stars) \u201cThe summer\u2019s single most suspenseful plot belongs to BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP. . . . pure page-turner.\u201d \u2014 New York Times \u201cQuite simply the best debut novel I have ever read.\u201d \u2014 Tess Gerritsen \u201cMemories\u2015real, false, and a bit of both\u2015are at the heart of Watson\u2019s haunting, twisted debut\u2026. Watson handles what could have turned into a cheap narrative gimmick brilliantly, building to a chillingly unexpected climax.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cThis mesmerizing, skillfully written debut novel works on multiple levels. It is both an affecting portrait of the profound impact of a debilitating illness and a pulse-pounding thriller whose outcome no one could predict.\u201d \u2014 Booklist (starred review) \u201cAn intriguingly fresh look at the amnesia-focused psychological thriller. . . . A captivating and highly suspenseful read, populated with believable characters who lead the reader through a taut, well-constructed plot.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal \u201cWatson\u2019s debut novel unwinds as a story that is both complicated and compellingly hypnotic. . . . Watson\u2019s pitch\u2013perfect writing propels the story to a frenzied climax that will haunt readers long after they\u2019ve closed the cover on this remarkable book.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \u201cA deft, perceptive exploration of a fascinating neurological condition, and a cracking good thriller.\u201d \u2014 Lionel Shriver \u201cBrilliant in its pacing, profound in its central question, suspenseful on every page and satisfying in its thriller ending.\u201d \u2014 Anita Shreve From the Back Cover \"As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I\u2019m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me. . . .\" Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love\u2014all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may be telling you only half the story. Welcome to Christine's life. About the Author S. J. WATSON was born in the Midlands. His first novel was the award-winning Before I Go to Sleep , which has sold more than four million copies in over forty languages, followed by the critically acclaimed novel Second Life . S. J. Watson lives in London. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 16.99}], "target_asin": "1452172870"}
{"user_id": "AF3TVB7QDKSNGSGHNMUVSQOTBEDQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "9773058611", "title": "Beloved Beasts", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "from 99.99"}, {"asin": "0764955470", "title": "What Do You Know About Ancient Egypt? Quiz Deck", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 19.53}, {"asin": "1416938583", "title": "Egypt (Insiders)", "author": "Joyce Tyldesley", "description": "About the Author Joyce Ann Tyldesley is a British archaeologist and Egyptologist, academic, writer and broadcaster who specialises in the women of ancient Egypt.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "History"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.98}, {"asin": "1510714340", "title": "The Pocket Guide to Equine Knots: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Most Important Knots for Horse and Rider (Skyhorse Pocket Guides)", "author": "Dan Aadland", "description": "About the Author Dan Aadland is the author of several books, including Treading Lightly with Pack Animals: A Guide to Low-Impact Travel in the Backcountry, and is a frequent contributor to Western Horseman and other equestrian publications. He and his wife, Emily, live in Absarokee, Montana, where they breed Tennessee Walking Horses and organize pack trips.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0984358528", "title": "The Appalachian Trail by Day Hikes: Tips for the Timid", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Polly Schoning is a retired veterinary pathologist who lives in Manhattan, Kan., but whose ties to the Appalachian Trail are strong--not only as a hiker but also as a former board member of the Green Mountain Club in Vermont and a life member of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the Maine Appalachian Trail Club.", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": "from 9.95"}, {"asin": "0061671851", "title": "Go with Me: A Novel", "author": "Castle Freeman", "description": "Review \u201cReminiscent of Cormac McCarthy...Go With Me is at once wry, primal, epic and impossible to put down. I\u2019m telling you the same thing I told the writer Richard Price: You must read this.\u201d \u2014 Charles Bock, bestselling author of BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN, on NPR's \"You Must Read This\" \u201c[An] elegant little thriller about cunning versus cruelty . . . [a] pure delight, thanks to Freeman\u2019s streamlined storytelling, dead-on dialogue, and lyrical descriptions of the bleak, woodsy landscape. This is a meticulous New England miniature, with not a wasted word.\u201d \u2014 O magazine \u201cThis nimble thriller is the literary equivalent of a fierce bantamweight fighter: Short but muscular and lightning quick, it packs a surprising punch . . . Freeman has a flawless ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for quirky detail . . . Superb.\u201d \u2014 People (Critic's Choice) \u201cWhat a spiffy little yarn, loose and funny and, at a few key junctures, righteously bloody...The book takes just a few hours to read--about the running time of the swell indie movie someone should make from this offbeat charmer.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cLike its young heroine, Lillian, Freeman\u2019s trim powerhouse is \u2018a pistol.\u2019 \u2026Freeman\u2019s beautifully cadenced dialogue is rich with humor, philosophic depth and a near-mythic sensibility.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cGO WITH ME ambles along with that \u2026 mixture of corny irony and shrewd wisdom\u2026 These guys have a sweetness and slyness about them that\u2019s affecting. \u2018They don\u2019t change,\u2019 Freeman writes. \u2018Time doesn\u2019t pass for them.\u2019 You could say the same for good storytelling like this.\u201d \u2014 Washington Post \u201cCastle Freeman Jr. packs more story into 160 pages than more famous authors could fit into twice as many...Go With Me is a dialogue-driven, take-the-law-into-your-own-hands story that is slick with humor and musings on pop culture, aging and American women.\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cThis gem of a novel by Vermont author Freeman may bring him the larger audience he so richly deserves\u2026Freeman turns this fablelike story into a surprisingly suspenseful showdown. And the artful cutaways to the old-timers\u2019 priceless, extremely funny conversations add another level of richness to the tale.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cThere is a clear moral arc to this storyline, and suspense too. But GO WITH ME is also a literary novel, with echoes of \u201cDeliverance\u201d and Cormac McCarthy...Mr. Freeman adroitly captures the feel of played-out Vermont towns and people, and his dialogue has a terse, almost humorous, cadence.\u201d \u2014 Wall Street Journal \u201cA fast, memorable read gooey with atmosphere, Go With Me is a gem that sparkles with sly insight and cuts like a knife.\u201d \u2014 Boston Globe \u201cCastle...knows the territory well here, whether of the woods or the human heart. Go With Me is a fine testament to his considerable talents.\u201d \u2014 Hartford Courant \u201cOne of the smartest novels we\u2019ve read in a long time.\u201d \u2014 Time Out Chicago \u201cFreeman\u2019s ear is flawless. The dialogue is taut, funny, wise, poignant, deceptively simple and only on occasion profane. . . . The description is astute and often beautiful.\u201d \u2014 The Times-Argus (VT) The Times-Argus (VT) The Times-Argus (Vermont) \u201cIn this compact little gem of a novel two unlikely heroes help a stubborn woman track down a villainous bully. It\u2019s a tale of love and justice and it\u2019s beautifully constructed, with lightness and with expertise, out of north country conversations so quietly funny that every page brings a smile.\u201d \u2014 Reeve Lindbergh, author of Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age--and Other Unexpected Adventures \u201c...the best mystery you missed in 2008...Tense and funny, \u201cGo With Me\u201d glides on pitch-perfect dialogue and a humdinger finale. \u2014 Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cThis unusual little gem of a book is part comic romp and part nail-biting thriller...Castle Freeman writes with both wit and a deep understanding of the human psyche, and he does not cheat us out of a dramatic climax.\u201d \u2014 The Guardian About the Author Castle Freeman Jr. is the award-winning author of two previous novels, a story collection, and a collection of essays. A regular contributor to The Old Farmer's Almanac since 1982, he lives in Newfane, Vermont, with his wife, Alice.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "1455818259", "title": "Celebrity in Death (In Death Series)", "author": "J.D. Robb", "description": "About the Author Nora Roberts is the number-one New York Times-bestselling author of more than 150 novels, including High Noon, Angels Fall, Blue Smoke, and Northern Lights. She is also the author of the bestselling futuristic suspense series written under the pen name J. D. Robb. There are more than 280 million copies of her books in print.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": "from 16.50"}, {"asin": "1402790295", "title": "Large Print Easy Monday Crosswords (Large Print Crosswords)", "author": "Peter Gordon", "description": "About the Author Peter Gordon is the Executive Editor for Sterling Publishing, overseeing the puzzle and game books, and was the crossword editor of The New York Sun . His crosswords have appeared in The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , USA Today , Los Angeles Times , The Washington Post , Newsday , and numerous puzzle magazines, including Games , where he was an editor for seven years. Gordon was a member of the winning U.S. teams at the 1990 International Crossword Marathon in Bjelovar, Yugoslavia, and the 1999 World Puzzle Championship in Budapest, Hungary. In 1994, he represented the U.S. at the Rummikub world championship on a cruise up the Rhine River, and he is the two-time division winner at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. His books include Hall of Fame Crosswords , Yahtzee Scratch & Play , Match Wits With Mensa: Test Your Trivia Smarts , and Verbiage for the Verbose ; he is also the coauthor of Solitaire Battleships , Scrabble-doku , and Mensa Guide to Solving Sudoku . He writes a weekly current events crossword for The Week .", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Puzzles & Games"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.49}], "target_asin": "0984358528"}
{"user_id": "AFVKSHC2GOEXMOORTB24IGF3LCIQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1523608854", "title": "By Way of Accident: The true stories behind the discovery of Egypt's greatest monuments", "author": "Ahmed Abul Ella", "description": "About the Author Ahmed has spend his life exploring the mystery of Ancient Egypt and its links to modern Egypt and the world. He is the author of \"Prophets & Pharaohs\" (2003), \"The Great Temples of Egypt\" (2009), \"The Great Tombs of Egypt\" (2011) and \"The Great Gods & Goddesses of Egypt\" (2015). He is also a lecturer and guest speaker, as well as a skilled tour guide and trip leader in Egypt. He lives with his family outside the city of Giza, not far from the Pyramids!", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Ancient Civilizations"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "1925811255", "title": "The Leaf Supply Guide to Creating Your Indoor Jungle", "author": "Lauren Camilleri", "description": "About the Author Lauren Camilleri and Sophia Kaplan are the brainchildren behind the Sydney-based interior-design nursery Leaf Supply. They have professional backgrounds in interior architecture and advertising, respectively, and previously authored a book (also called Leaf Supply ) for Smith Street Books in 2018.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 23.37}, {"asin": "0692155163", "title": "Color-Me Cards: Greeting Cards: adult coloring book, 27 Stress-relieving designs, beautiful pen & ink drawings, all-occasion cards, blank greeting cards, color your own cards", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Stationery, Journals & Notebooks", "Journals"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0961634499", "title": "Mary Manatee: A Tale of Sea Cows", "author": "Suzanne Tate", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 4.95}, {"asin": "B08SPQZM86", "title": "Perfect, Almost", "author": "Sandra ARCH", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Romance"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.79}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1643361961", "title": "Taste the State: South Carolina's Signature Foods, Recipes, and Their Stories", "author": "David S. Shields", "description": "Review \" Taste the State is a love letter to my ancestral state's disproportionate contribution to our national and global culinary genius. With the dual forces of a passionate chef-scholar and a rigorous and ebullient culinary historian and master of letters, the Palmetto State has found the perfect team to render a splendid volume dedicated to its cuisine.\"\u2015Michael Twitty, James Beard Award winning author of The Cooking Gene \"Take an award-winning chef and add a seasoned heritage foodways scholar; blend (equal parts) centuries of South Carolina cooking and agricultural history; and voila\u2015a historical culinary delight to be sampled and savored. This wonderful book will be at home in either the library or kitchen.\"\u2015Walter Edgar, author of South Carolina: A History \"A smart and insightful romp through the South Carolina larder, from knuckle hull peas to red horse bread, from liver pudding to shrimp pilau. Taste the State reminds me that our foodways derive power and meaning from the stories we tell about our place and our people.\"\u2015John T. Edge, James Beard Award-winning author of The Potlikker Papers \"With Taste the State , Kevin Mitchell and David Shields prove once again that they're THE dynamic duo of culinary history. Their meticulous research will satisfy anyone who hungers for a deeper understanding of South Carolina cuisine. I definitely wish this wonderful work was available when I wrote my books on soul food and barbecue. Future culinary historians will be grateful for their dedication.\"\u2015Adrian Miller, James Beard Award-winning author of Soul Food \"We devoured Kevin Mitchell and David Shields's Taste the Stat e, which reveals on every page fresh and new information about foods that have all but disappeared, such as palmetto pickle and tanya root, and also traditions still very much alive, like Frogmore stew, barbecue and boiled peanuts. Mitchell and Shields's collaboration is the most engaging\u2015and cookable!\u2015volume on the Palmetto State's foodways to date, and we believe it will be a model for a new form, state-by-state foodways encyclopedias. For the time being, South Carolina is the envy of the nation!\"\"\u2015Matt Lee & Ted Lee, James Beard Award-winning authors of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook \" Taste the State is a delightful mix of recipes, historical stories, and an exploration into the cultural meaning of food. It is a window into the cuisine of South Carolina that resists any whitewashing and leans into the complex mix of Native, Black and European influences in the state's cuisine. It will whet your appetite to slow down, absorb the rich heritage around you, and taste the Slow Food of South Carolina!\"\u2015Anna Mul\u00e9, Executive Director, Slow Food USA\"From chubby Palmetto Asparagus to the \"cheap high\" of Yaupon Tea, Taste the State serves up intriguing bits of South Carolina food history, resulting in an entertaining, edifying treat.\"\u2015 Foreword Reviews [Starred review] \" Taste the State is not only an informative read\u2015it's an enjoyable one. It's suitable for all foodies, professional or otherwise, and is written with warmth and humor that serves to highlight the respect that Mitchell and Shields feel for South Carolina food. This is a book to savor, both in short reads and through in-depth perusal.\"\u2015 South Carolina Libraries \"a delicious read for the culinary armchair aficionado as well as the kitchen gourmet.\"\u2015 Charleston Magazine About the Author Kevin Mitchell is the first African American chef instructor at the Culinary Institute of Charleston in South Carolina. He has culinary arts degrees in occupational studies and management from the Culinary Institute of America and a master's degree in southern studies from the University of Mississippi, where he studied Southern foodways, the preservation of Southern ingredients, and the history of African Americans in the culinary arts. In 2020 Mitchell was named a South Carolina Chef Ambassador. David S. Shields is Carolina Distinguished Professor of the English Language and Literature Department at the University of South Carolina and the chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. He is the author of numerous books, including Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine and The Culinarians: Lives and Careers from the First Age of American Fine Dining , and the recipient of the Southern Foodways Alliance's Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 30.25}, {"asin": "0451231899", "title": "Freedom (TM)", "author": "Daniel Suarez", "description": "Review \u201c Freedom\u2122 surpasses its smart, exciting predecessor. This concluding volume crackles with electrifying action scenes and bristles with intriguing ideas about a frightening, near-future world. The two books combined form the cyberthriller against which all others will be measured.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review)\u201cSuarez continues his popular technothriller, and Daemon fans will be well be pleased with the exciting conclusion.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cAn engrossing, fast-paced tale of speculative fiction.\u201d\u2014SF Site About the Author Daniel Suarez is a New York Times bestselling author, TEDGlobal speaker, and former systems analyst. His unique brand of high-tech fiction explores the causes and impacts of rapid technological change. The author of seven novels, his latest, Critical Mass (second in the Delta-v series), is a realistic space-tech adventure depicting humanity's transition from a climate-imperiled, Earthbound civilization to one that utilizes resources and energy from space to secure a promising, sustainable future.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0547572441", "title": "A Maze of Death", "author": "Philip K. Dick", "description": "From the Back Cover [headline] A dark and mysterious tale of murder, religion, and the nature of reality. Delmak-O is a dangerous planet. Though there are only fourteen citizens, no one can trust anyone else and death can strike at any moment. The planet is vast and largely unexplored, populated mostly by gelatinous cube-shaped beings that give cryptic advice in the form of anagrams. Deities can be spoken to directly via a series of prayer amplifiers and transmitters, but they may not be happy about it. And the mysterious building in the distance draws all the colonists to it, but when they get there each sees a different motto on the front. The mystery of this structure and the secrets contained within drive this mind-bending novel. PHILIP K. DICK (1928\u20131982) wrote 121 short stories and 45 novels and is considered one of the most visionary authors of the twentieth century. His work is included in the Library of America and has been translated into more than twenty five languages. Eleven works have been adapted to film, including Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ), Total Recall , Minority Report , and A Scanner Darkly . About the Author Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928\u20131982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": "from 5.90"}, {"asin": "1419708457", "title": "Rosie Revere, Engineer (The Questioneers)", "author": "Andrea Beaty", "description": "From School Library Journal K-Gr 2\u2013Young Rosie is always trying to solve problems with her inventions. Shy and quiet, she resists talking about her dream to become a great engineer when a favorite uncle laughs at one of the gizmos she designs especially for him. But when Great-Great Aunt Rose shows up for an extended stay sporting a red polka-dotted scarf \u00e0 la Rosie the Riveter, she regales her niece with stories of her experiences building airplanes during World War II. She wistfully declares, \u201cThe only thrill left on my list is to fly!/But time never lingers as long as it seems./I'll chalk that one up to an old lady's dreams.\u201d This is an itch that Rosie has to scratch, so she sets about designing a unique contraption to help her aunt take to the skies. Of course, it doesn't turn out as planned, but Rose helps Rosie see that it was a success, despite its short air time. By the end of the story, Rosie is wearing the same polka-dotted scarf around her head. Rosie's second-grade teacher, Ms. Greer, is a lot more encouraging and open-minded about the power of creation and creativity than she was in Iggy Peck, Architect (Abrams, 2007). Roberts's charming watercolor and ink illustrations are full of whimsical details. The rhyming text may take a few practice shots before an oral reading just to get the rhythm right, but the story will no doubt inspire conversations with children about the benefits of failure and the pursuit of dreams.\u2013Maggie Chase, Boise State University, ID\u03b1(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. From Booklist This celebration of creativity and perseverance is told through rhyming text, which gives momentum and steady pacing to a story, consistent with the celebration of its heroine, Rosie. She\u2019s an imaginative thinker who hides her light under a bushel (well, really, the bed) after being laughed at for one of her inventions. Then she finds encouragement from a great-great aunt whose laughter is a celebration rather than a judgment. The pairing of the wisdom of an older woman and the enthusiasm of a young girl works beautifully. Roberts\u2019 colorful watercolor and pen-and-ink illustrations, overflowing with debris, gadgets, and inventions like helium pants, are as lively as the text and Rosie herself. The graph papers on the cover and end pages are reminders that creativity requires deliberate thought (Rosie\u2019s aunt gives her a notebook before they begin each invention). A historical note at the back of the book connects Rosie to her namesake, Rosie the Riveter, with her slogan, \u201cWe can do it!\u201d Young readers will already be convinced. Grades K-2. --Edie Ching Review AndreaBeaty.com From the Author I am thrilled by David Roberts' amazing illustrations and can't wait for creative kids of all ages to read this book! From the Inside Flap This is the story of Rosie Revere,who dreamed of becoming a great engineer. Where some people see rubbish, Rosie Revere sees inspiration. Alone in her room at night, shy Rosie constructs great inventions from odds and ends. Hot dog dispensers, helium pants, python-repelling cheese hats:\u00a0 Rosie's gizmos would astound--if she ever let anyone see them. Afraid of failure, she hides them away under her bed. Until a fateful visit from her great-great-aunt Rose, who shows her that a first flop isn't something to fear--it's something to celebrate.Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, the author-illustrator team behind the classic picture book Iggy Peck, Architect, have whipped up another stunning, witty invention that honors pursuing one's passion--with persistence. About the Author Andrea Beaty is the author of many picture books including IGGY PECK, ARCHITECT and Doctor Ted. Her novels range from the lyrical SECRETS OF THE CICADA SUMMER to the humorous graphic novel/novel hybrid ATTACK OF THE FLUFFY BUNNIES. Her new novel, DORKO THE MAGNIFICENT is available April 2, 2013! Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 12.18}], "target_asin": "1643361961"}
{"user_id": "AHKARJ6DSMGZO3ABQ7GWCYARCS4A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B01EN506CO", "title": "A Merciful Death (Mercy Kilpatrick Book 1)", "author": "Kendra Elliot", "description": "Review \"In the debut of her new Mercy Kilpatrick series, Elliot crafts an eerily fascinating small town. An air of menace is palpable throughout the story, and the characters hide a wealth of secrets and twisted loyalties.\" \u2014 RT Book Reviews \"Elliot is a master of romantic suspense, and her latest sets a rural community of preppers (people preparing for disaster) in the sights of a killer. Elliot expertly interweaves the current murders with the damage that past crimes have done to Mercy and Truman's souls, and she lays out convincing tracks to a number of possible culprits in Eagle's Nest. Fascinating details about prepper lifestyle give extra flavor to this mystery, adding to its memorability.\" \u2014Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review About the Author Kendra Elliot is the award-winning author of numerous books, including the Bone Secrets and Callahan & McLane series. Kendra won the 2015 and 2014 Daphne du Maurier awards for Best Romantic Suspense, and she was an International Thriller Writers finalist for Best Paperback Original and a Romantic Times finalist for Best Romantic Suspense. She has always been a voracious reader, cutting her teeth on classic female heroines such as Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Laura Ingalls. She was born, raised, and still lives in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her husband and three daughters but looks forward to the day she can live in flip-flops.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B06Y6K1WX1", "title": "In a Flicker: A Novel", "author": "George R. Lopez", "description": "About the Author George R. Lopez is a military veteran, serving as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War. Living in Europe for three years of his tour of duty, he fell in love with its history. After being honorably discharged he has since made his home in Florida. Eventually much of his training led him into the field of the paranormal where he excelled, fast becoming an accomplished, well-respected member of the community. Creator and host of his own network, as a radio broadcaster, a prolific lecturer and spokesman for positive ideals regarding investigation of the supernatural realm, George brings a much needed pragmatic perspective to this endeavor, in avid pursuit of the truth. From veteran to researcher, now author, this story blends his natural artistry with an insatiable curiosity, brewing in his analytical mind for a quarter of a century before finding its way into the world in print. Andrea P. Perron is the author of the supernatural trilogy \u201cHouse of Darkness House of Light\u201d, the true story behind the major motion picture \u201cThe Conjuring\u201d. As a 1980 graduate of Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with a B.A. in English and philosophy, she went on to become first an entrepreneur then later a counselor by day, meanwhile spending decades in the theatre as an actor and singer by night. Now, as a lecturer and apprentice paranormal investigator, she travels extensively, speaking on various subjects in the field from spirituality to extraterrestrial activity. \u201cIn A Flicker\u201d is her first collaboration on a project, what she describes as a true labor of love, bringing to light an otherwise dark story with a profound message for humanity. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B08R2KRQ58", "title": "The 7 She Saw (Blake Wilder FBI Mystery Thriller Book 1)", "author": "Elle Gray", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B091DNXTMM", "title": "A Terrible Fall of Angels (A Zaniel Havelock Novel Book 1)", "author": "Laurell K. Hamilton", "description": "Review \u201cWow! A Terrible Fall of Angels has it all\u2014a terrific new character, devious twists, plenty of action, and one hell of an ending. Brava!\u201d\u2014Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Ink and Rage \"Zaniel Havelock is a great character, part tough guy detective, part speaker to angels, in a setting where the powerful beings from every religion aren't just real, but actively messing with people's lives. It's a great ride.\u00a0In a world where angels and demons walk openly among mankind, it takes a special kind of cop to solve paranormal crimes. Havoc is the man.\"\u2014Larry Correia, New York Times bestselling author of Destroyer of Worlds \u201cA Terrible Fall of Angels will intrigue new fans, long term fans, and returning fans of Laurell K. Hamilton.\u201d\u2014Under the Covers Book Blog\"[Laurell K. Hamilton]\u00a0continues to bring great characters, entertaining and unique story lines, action, and suspense together in her novels.\"\u2014Mystery and Suspense\"Nice-paced read with interesting characters and events.\"\u2014I Smell Sheep About the Author Laurell K. Hamilton is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series and the Merry Gentry, Fey Detective series. A Terrible Fall of Angels , the first book in an exciting new series, features Detective Zaniel Havelock in a world where Angels and Demons walk among us.  \u00a0 With more than forty novels published, Laurell continues to create groundbreaking fiction inspired by her lifelong love of monster movies, ghost stories, mythology, folklore, and things that go bump in the night. Her love of the macabre, books in general, animals and nature led her to degrees in English and Biology. She is a non-practicing biologist, but uses her science background to add an extra level realism to her fiction.  \u00a0 She currently lives in St. Louis with her family, two spoiled Japanese chins, a house panther, and a house lion. In her free time, Laurell trains in Filipino martial arts with a specialization in blade work, and travels to scuba dive and bird watch as often as she can. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One There were angel feathers in the dead woman's bed. They looked like huge white swan feathers, impossibly large, but then they were supposed to propel something the size of a tall man skyward. I didn't have to see the angel to know that he'd be tall; they were all tall, some close to eight feet, but average was between six feet and seven feet. I was six feet, three inches, a big guy by most standards, but angels always made me feel small, even when they were close to my own height. It wasn't about physical inches when you were in the presence of angels. I stared down at the feathers scattered across the tangled bedclothes like soft ivory, lacy cream curling with their edges moving as the window air conditioner blew directly across from the bed. The bed was shoved up against one wall, with most of the small off-campus apartment taken up by the desk and enough floor space for the yoga mat that was leaning in the other corner. The forensics team had finished in the bedroom, though I could hear them in the bathroom that this apartment shared with the one next door. I clenched my hands in the plastic gloves, booties over my shoes so I wouldn't contaminate the crime scene. My detective shield was around my neck on its lanyard. My FN 509 nine-millimeter was in a side holster under my jacket. I had its little brother, the 503, at home. Some of the other cops had given me a hard time about not carrying a Glock, until I invited them down to the shooting range to try an FN. Then they asked price. There were other cops around, lots of them; there always were at a murder scene, because that's how it was called in first. A murder scene with angel evidence on-site, and they bumped the call up to us. The Metaphysical Coordination Unit was our official title, but the other cops and most of the media called us the Heaven and Hell Unit, because we didn't just solve crime on one side of the spiritual divide, we worked both sides of the street-someone had to keep the peace between beings that could tear the world apart if they ever went to war again. If the angel feathers hadn't been here it would have been listed as a rape homicide and been given to Sex Crimes. I stared down at the feathers; they'd started to gleam as the light faded outside the small window. I wasn't certain if they glowed with holy fire or I was seeing the light inside my head where I saw spirits and visions. The largest feather was so white it looked ghostly in the dying light. The others were less pure in color, more off-white, and they had flecks and edges of faint color to some of them. Not all angels had snow-white wings, but that was the color that most people expected, so that was the color the angels had chosen for the largest feather that they left behind. They had wanted to make certain the human police officers first on the scene would call in the Metaphysical Coordination Unit and send for me, because I was the angel expert. I stared at the largest feather as if I was trying to read it, but it just lay there whiter than the sheets it was lying on. It was as long as the bed, carefully placed on the edge, a huge primary flight feather. There was no way for anyone to have gotten out of the bed without disturbing that feather, yet it lay ruler straight. The other feathers weren't anything that would cripple a wing, but this one would if angels flew like birds. The feathers were all on top of the sheets, not under them, not on the floor, not scattered like they'd be if the rapist had been an angel as the feathers seemed to imply. I knew angels didn't lose feathers when they had sex, not even if it was rough, because for most of them the wings weren't that solid. For those whose wings were solid, no human being was strong enough to tear them apart, not barehanded. Either the angels did it themselves, or something powerful enough to injure them did it, which meant it wasn't the victim. I'd have bet any amount of money that they'd been placed on the bed after the crime had been committed, but why? Why did the angels care enough about this one undergrad college student to incriminate themselves? God might know when every sparrow fell, but the angels didn't show up to catch the bird before it hit the ground. Of course, they hadn't saved the woman. She'd been found nude, beaten to death, and with enough dried bodily fluid on her body that rape was almost a certainty. Until forensics confirmed it, it wouldn't be rape, but it was a sexually motivated crime; we were only waiting on the medical examiner to give us a list of exactly what had happened to Megan Borowski. Thinking her name made it almost impossible not to picture her body, the beating her face had taken, her body left on the floor of the room like the murderer had just gotten up and walked out after he was done with her. There were no signs of remorse, no attempt to cover what he'd done to her face, or her nudity. It made it more likely to be a stranger, or someone who didn't feel regretful about what he'd done. We were all assuming the attacker was male, because of the bodily fluids on the body and the strength needed for the beating. I had to try to think of Megan Borowski as just the victim, a body savaged by attacker or attackers unknown, because it could have been two men. That might explain why she hadn't screamed for help. Had one threatened her in some way during the rape-I won't kill you if you just do what I want-and then they'd killed her anyway? Evil, it was evil, even if it was just men who did it, but was it Evil with a capital E? Was that why the angels had been ordered to leave their feathers at the crime scene, so we'd know it wasn't just a human-on-human crime? I had one of the few quiet moments I'd ever had at a scene like this, where some trick of duty or assignment had sent everyone somewhere else, so I had a moment to stare down at the dead woman's bed all by my lonesome. I didn't believe it was an accident that I was alone. The crime might not have been planned, but when every other person working a suspicious death leaves the prime crime scene to just me, well, I was waiting for whatever the Big Guy wanted me to see, or hear, or experience. Maybe there'd be a clue that only I would find, or needed to find. God worked in mysterious ways, and so did all His messengers, that much I knew. I heard one of the crime scene techs curse, as if something wasn't going to plan in the hallway. Celestial beings were involved; nothing would go according to human planning, I knew that much. In all the years I'd worked angel detail I'd never seen a single feather left behind unless the angel was fighting for their own safety. If there'd only been one smaller feather, I might have thought the victim had an angelic lover, maybe. Angels were funny things and could affect people in ways that neither the human lover nor the angel could see coming. Because we were the wild cards, we humans, once angels got a taste for us, they could screw up both their eternity and our lives-screw it up all to Hell. Of course, one small feather might have been overlooked in the initial investigation. Realistic evidence of an angelic lover wouldn't have been spotted right away. It wouldn't have made anyone call us yet. I wouldn't be standing here if the angels hadn't gone all-out to grab my attention. The silence got that weighted quality to it, and I knew that even if one of the techs came back into this room in the next few minutes, they might not see a damn thing except me. If they were one of the gifted and could see the unseen, they were about to be in for a Heaven of a show. The angel manifested just in front of me, between the foot of the bed and the window. The hair on my arms stood to attention, but the skin on my neck stayed calm, so I knew it was an angel, but not one of the angels that had left the feathers. They wouldn't be able to manifest like this anymore. Once the spiritual got solid enough to leave DNA behind, they couldn't just conjure themselves out of thin air. The figure hovering before me wasn't even solid enough to stand on the carpet, because \"it\" was made mostly of light. The angel glowed before me, all white and gold-yellow light; even its eyes were full of yellow fire, but there was no heat. Angels don't give off heat, no matter how fiery they look; if you ever see a glowing angel and feel heat come off it, it's not an angel, exactly. One of the first things you need to understand if you work angel detail is that fallen angels are still angels, and demons, well, that's another problem altogether, but the rule is, if it gives off heat, run; if you can't run, pray. The angel's wings were barely hinted at; \"he,\" or \"she,\" was mostly just light with a humanoid figure in the middle of it, and a shimmering hint of wings, and flowing robes, but mostly just that full-bodied halo, the aurora. The voice sounded male, but honestly angels this shining are sexless, they just are. \"We are pleased that we do not have to manifest fully for you, Detective Zaniel Havelock.\" It wasn't the opening I'd expected; if angels seek you out personally then it's with an extremely specific message like in the Bible: You are pregnant with the Son of God, or Flee now, enemies are coming. The personal conversational style was how they spoke to Angel Speakers, Angelus Dictum, which means \"the angel said\" to make it clear that the person sharing the message from the angel is not an angel but only their mouthpiece. Angels did not speak like this to people on the outside, but once I'd been inside and I fell back into the same rhythm, an old habit come back to haunt me. \"You can lose the humanoid stuff altogether if you want. I do appreciate you trying not to drive me insane by manifesting in your pure energy form, but it's okay, I don't need the baby steps.\" \"Very well,\" it said, and the human pretense went away. I was left staring at light, or flame, or something in between the two. It filled nearly all of that half of the room, but it gave off neither heat nor formed shadows. Again, if something says it's an angel, and glows at you, but it causes shadows around it, it's not the good kind of angel, or maybe it's not an angel at all. The light turned its \"head,\" and I could read the body language of that glow; most people wouldn't have been able to. \"You asked for me to drop the physical away, not for my comfort, but because you wished to see if I cast a shadow.\" I shrugged and fought not to let my shoulders tighten. You couldn't wrestle an angel in this form; it wasn't \"real\" enough, but the body tenses, preparing for fight or flight, even though neither will help you. You can't hit pure spirit, and you sure as Heaven can't run from it, because spirit-level angels can just appear anywhere, in multiple places, at multiple times, and it's all real, all them, because when they're this pure, time doesn't mean to them what it means to most of us. They can simultaneously be in several places at once, at the same time for us humans, but different points of time for the angel itself. Time is way more flexible than the human mind can comprehend. It was a good thing that the pure spirit didn't commit crimes, because we would be beyond fucked trying to prove it, solve it, or catch them. When this guy was finished glowing at me, he'd go back to God, maybe even be absorbed back into that ultimate light. Witness protection had nothing on the pure spirit angelic. They could literally be reabsorbed and made pure and new again when they made their next earthly appearance. \"I know you are one who has walked through the flame and survived, but I did not understand what it might mean.\" I remembered standing in the middle of flames that did not burn, and cast no shadow, and surrounded me on every side. If my faith had not been pure enough, I would have been consumed by holy fire. I blinked the memory away and faced the much fainter light of the angel before me. \"And what does it mean?\" I asked. \"That you do not think as others do or see as other flesh sees. You are the only Angelus Dictum to ever finish your training and then turn your back on it.\" \"I am not an Angel Speaker, I'm a cop.\" \"You are a police officer, but that does not mean you are not also an Angel Speaker; otherwise how could I be here?\" I couldn't argue with the angel and I very much wanted to, so I let it go. The conversation was getting too weird, and off topic. I was here to solve a crime, not dissect my past. \"Maybe I was meant to be a police officer, and work with the angelic like this.\" \"Perhaps.\" Again, it did that \"head\" turn, but this time it was listening. The fact that it had to listen to hear God's voice meant it wasn't pure spirit anymore, or it wasn't going to be for long. This one was at the beginning of a path that might lead it to be as solid as the angel we were seeking. They sent down pure spirit, but every time they talked to anything of flesh, they stopped being quite so much spirit, and a little more . . . flesh. This one had come down to talk to humans before, several times before. The next time I saw \"him\" he'd probably be male, or closer to it. The voice is the first clue, the first move in choosing a \"gender.\" --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B016ZNRC0Q", "title": "The Butterfly Garden (The Collector Book 1)", "author": "Dot Hutchison", "description": "From the Publisher Sometimes a story is powerful enough\u2014and horrifying enough\u2014to instantly transfix us and forever change the way we look at a simple object. In The Silence of the Lambs , it\u2019s the lotion in the basket. In this gruesome crime novel, it\u2019s butterflies.  Maya, a fierce survivor, leads us through the aftermath of a brutal event as she recounts her tale to the FBI, but her story keeps us at the edges, letting the questions simmer, bubbling up small answers that beg new, bigger questions in their wake: How did Maya escape captivity? Did the other girls survive? What happened to the garden\u2014and the Gardener?  Maya reveals a vivid dimension to the twisted puzzle and raises larger questions about her own motives. As the truth slowly emerges from a carefully constructed cocoon, author Dot Hutchison has us questioning whether this is a tale of terrible beauty or a beautiful tale of terror.  The frantic rustling of a butterfly\u2019s wings against a collector\u2019s net seems futile\u2014but when many butterflies flock together, they become much harder to pin down. For us, this innocuous symbol of transformative beauty will forever be a perverse reminder of the Gardener, a depraved man with his magnificent, grotesque collection of butterflies. - Alison Dasho and JoVon Sotak, Editors About the Author Dot Hutchison is the author of A Wounded Name , a young adult novel based on Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet , and the adult thriller The Butterfly Garden . With past experience working at a Boy Scout camp, a craft store, a bookstore, and the Renaissance Faire (as a human combat chess piece), Hutchison prides herself on remaining delightfully in tune with her inner young adult. She loves thunderstorms, mythology, history, and movies that can and should be watched on repeat. For more information on her current projects, visit www.dothutchison.com or check her out on Tumblr (www.dothutchison.tumblr.com), Twitter (@DotHutchison), or Facebook (www.facebook.com/DotHutchison).", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B09KTMLX91", "title": "The Murders in Beacon Hill (Olivia Knight FBI Mystery Thriller Book 2)", "author": "Elle Gray", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B0B1KBW3Y5", "title": "The Missing Girls (Blake Wilder FBI Mystery Thriller Book 12)", "author": "Elle Gray", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B00OL1QMFQ", "title": "Cold Shadows (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper Book 2)", "author": "J. L. Bryan", "description": "About the Author J. L. Bryan studied English literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He enjoys remixing elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror, and science fiction into new kinds of stories.Carla Mercer-Meyer is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. She has a strong musical theater background, as she has been performing her entire life. Her performances include Into the Woods; You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown; and many other theatrical productions. Carla resides in Southern California. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.99}, {"asin": "B017RBIZGK", "title": "The Body Reader (Detective Jude Fontaine Mysteries Book 1)", "author": "Anne Frasier", "description": "Review \u201cAbsorbing.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201c The Body Reader is a superb novel full of suspenseful exploits\u2026An electrifying murder mystery\u2014one of the best of the year.\u201d \u2014Mysterious Reviews \u201cFrasier is exceptional at weaving together the character trauma and the central plot. What the characters experience isn\u2019t brushed aside, but their demons are faced head on and developed to add layers to the story. The result is a satisfying resolution with some hope readers may see the characters return in a future offering.\u201d \u2014 Beach Reads \u201cThe story is totally engaging and Anne Frasier has a way with words that keeps you hooked nonstop.\u201d \u2014Mystery Sequels From the Author Q&A with Anne Frasier, author of The Body Reader What inspired you to write about a woman who was kidnapped for three years? I liked the idea of following Jude's journey as she comes back from that place.It's a bit of an allegory. Many of us have found ourselves trapped in unbearable life situations that can be escaped with strength and determination. How did you come up with the idea of a woman who is able to \"read\" bodies? I never actually saw body reading as the driving force of the book, and considered The Body Reader my working title.\u00a0I just wanted a cop who was more sensitive to people than the average detective, which is how I wrote her. How did you create the character Jude Fontaine, and at any point did you find it difficult to write from her perspective? She was difficult because it was important that she be removed and shut off.It's hard to make that kind of character sympathetic, regardless of what she'sbeen through. Would you ever consider writing a sequel to this book and if so, do you have any ideas on what you would focus on? I'd love to write a sequel. It would be a bigger story, with a bigger canvas. Broken family dynamics seem to play a large role in this book. What inspired you to include this topic in your story? I come from a pretty damaged family, so it's hard to keep that kind of thing out of my books no matter how I try. Chapter eighteen depicts a defining moment in the story for Jude Fontaine. Did you place yourself in her shoes during this part, and if so, was it a difficult moment to write about? I know it sounds odd, but I actually really enjoyed writing that scene because it was the culmination of her search for her captor and it allowed her to finally wake up and feel for the first time in the book. Is there a message that you hope your readers take away when they are done reading this thrilling novel? At its core, The Body Reader isa story of female empowerment. Jude's freedom and sense of self was taken from her, but she came back stronger than ever. About the Author NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHORUSA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHORRITA AWARD AUTHOR~~Anne Frasier is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Her award-winning books span the genres of suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, paranormal, and memoir. She won a RITA for romantic suspense, and the Daphne du Maurier Award for paranormal romance. Her thrillers have hit the USA Today list and have been featured in Mystery Guild, Literary Guild, and Book of the Month Club. Her memoir, The Orchard, was an O, The Oprah Magazine Fall Pick; a One Book, One Community read; a B+ review in Entertainment Weekly; and a Librarians\u2019 Best Books of 2011. She divides her time between the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and her writing studio in rural Wisconsin. Review \u201cAbsorbing.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201c The Body Reader is a superb novel full of suspenseful exploits\u2026An electrifying murder mystery\u2014one of the best of the year.\u201d \u2014Mysterious Reviews \u201cFrasier is exceptional at weaving together the character trauma and the central plot. What the characters experience isn\u2019t brushed aside, but their demons are faced head on and developed to add layers to the story. The result is a satisfying resolution with some hope readers may see the characters return in a future offering.\u201d \u2014 Beach Reads \u201cThe story is totally engaging and Anne Frasier has a way with words that keeps you hooked nonstop.\u201d \u2014Mystery Sequels --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "0789211254", "title": "Greek and Roman Mosaics", "author": null, "description": "From the Back Cover Mosaic has been called \"painting for eternity,\" and it is in fact one of the few arts of antiquity to survive in something like its original condition and variety. Mosaic pavements with geometric and figural motifs first appeared in Greece at the end of the fifth century BC and subsequently spread throughout the entire classical world, from the palaces of the Greco-Bactrian rulers of present-day Afghanistan to the villas of Roman Britain. Local workshops cultivated many distinctive regional styles, while traveling teams of Hellenistic craftsmen produced figural mosaics of stunning refinement, often modeled after famous paintings; indeed, their work constitutes one of our only records of classical Greek painting, which has been almost entirely lost. The styles and techniques of the ancient mosaicist's art are given a concise yet authoritative exposition in the first part of this handsome volume. The second, and larger, part conducts the reader on a chronological tour of the most important centers of the art form's development, from the Macedonian capital of Pella, whose compositions in natural pebbles set a high artistic standard for mosaics at the very beginning of their history, to the Basilica of San Vitale at Ravenna, whose wall and vault mosaics, with their glittering vision of a triumphant Christianity, mark the transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Special attention is given to Pompeii and its surroundings, where the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 preserved intact an astonishing variety of mosaics, including such ambitious figural scenes as the famous Alexander mosaic, composed of some four million miniscule tesserae, as well as characteristically Roman pavements in black and white, and the brightly colored wall mosaics of garden grottoes. Featuring more than two hundred newly commissioned photographs, Greek and Roman Mosaics is the first survey of its subject to be illustrated in full color. It will be a necessary addition to every art lover's library, and a worthy companion to Abbeville's Italian Mosaics: 300-1300. About the Author Umberto Pappalardo has served as Inspector of Excavations at Pompeii and Director of Excavations at Herculaneum. Rosaria Ciardiello, also a classical archaeologist, received her doctorate from the University of Naples Federico II. Luciano Pedicini, a second-generation photographer of antiquities, has contributed to numerous important publications. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION Mosaic was a widespread form of decoration in the Greek and Roman world. Evidence of its popularity can be seen in the many square miles of mosaic floors that survive from Syria to Greece, from Egypt to Tunisia, from Spain to France, from Britain to Germany, and from Croatia to Italy. In the Hellenistic age, the tyrant Hiero II of Syracuse gave King Ptolemy III of Egypt a grand ceremonial ship whose cabins were decorated with splendid mosaics depicting scenes from the Iliad, while in the Roman age, Julius Caesar brought mosaics along on his military campaigns, presumably to adorn his tent, and the emperor Caligula desired that even his luxurious vessels on Lake Nemi be covered with polychrome mosaics. In our own time, after one of the icons of modern culture, John Lennon of the Beatles, was assassinated on the street outside his home in New York, a nearby area of Central Park was turned into a memorial known as Strawberry Fields. This memorial features a round mosaic of a stylized sun with the title of Lennon\u2019s most famous song, \u201cImagine,\u201d in the center. Its geometric pattern may have been inspired by those of Roman mosaics, such as the apse of the caldarium in the House of Menander at Pompeii. And so we find one of the most representative arts of antiquity, seemingly vanished forever, making a very striking reappearance in the contemporary world. This example of artistic continuity is not unique. In February 1917, when a performance of the Ballets Russes, with scenery and costumes by Picasso, was staged at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, the artist visited Pompeii with the dancer Leonide Massine and the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. None other than Jean Cocteau, who was directing the show, took a photograph of Picasso and Massine in front of the mosaic fountain in the House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto (plate 2). In the House of the Labyrinth, Picasso had the opportunity to see a mosaic depicting the Minotaur (plate 4). The artist, who had attended the Spanish bullfights since childhood and was moreover a man of extraordinary sensibility, could not but identify with this man-bull who is betrayed to his death by his half-sister. The Minotaur leaves the cave anguished, not so much by the wounds to his body as by those inflicted on his heart. From this encounter arose one of the most celebrated themes of Picasso\u2019s art (plate 3). The posthumous influence of the ancient art of mosaic does not end there; many other examples could be cited. For instance, some years ago, a well-known italian musical agent and passionate archaeologist of the Near East had a copy of the central part of the famous mosaic map in Madaba, depicting the city of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, made for the music room of his home near Verona (plate 232). Still, beginning in the Middle Ages, the art of tessellated mosaic was largely supplanted by that of large marble inlays. The cause of this decline is difficult to determine, although it is possible that in the Roman world, where half the population was enslaved, the low cost of manpower allowed for a greater abundance of such handicrafts. Indeed, the many square miles of ancient mosaics suggest that while they were very elaborate, they must not have been very costly to make. Today, in any case, the medium no longer has the importance that it did in antiquity, and there are only sporadic revivals, such as those by Italian craftsmen in Ravenna and Piazza Armerina, intended for the luxury market. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 129.84}, {"asin": "0451498895", "title": "Sweet Potato Soul: 100 Easy Vegan Recipes for the Southern Flavors of Smoke, Sugar, Spice, and Soul : A Cookbook", "author": "Jenne Claiborne", "description": "Review \u201cThis beautifully photographed, comprehensive work of Claiborne\u2019s cuisine deserves to be a part of your everyday repertoire.\u201d \u2014VegNews \" Sweet Potato Soul starts with an\u00a0Erykah Badu\u00a0quote and ends with a recipe for pecan muhammara. Clearly, there\u2019s a lot to love. The debut cookbook from beloved\u00a0vegan food blogger\u00a0Jenn\u00e9 Claiborne, Sweet Potato Soul offers vegan twists on soul food classics alongside memories of Claiborne flipping fluffy pancakes to the sound of gospel music in her Nana\u2019s kitchen. Fittingly, a wonderfully comprehensive section on southern pantry staples devotes almost 6 full pages to sweet potatoes varietals. What looks good:\u00a0Fluffy sweet potato biscuits, coconut collard salad, \u201cHarlem caviar\u201d black eyed pea salad, Creole red bean sausages, and jackfruit jambalaya.\" \u2014Bon Appetit \"Many traditional dishes are off-limits to a vegetarian or vegan, but the smart use of spices and other ingredients can bring them back within reach. This is just what Jenn\u00e9 Claiborne does so beautifully in her new book, Sweet Potato Soul. Claiborne brings Southern flair . . . to plant-based dishes. That means shredded sweet potatoes and pecans in her granola, coconut three ways (oil, milk and sugar) in her peach cobbler and oyster mushrooms in her \u00e9touff\u00e9e. . . . I knew it was the real deal when my fiance, whose people come from Louisiana, took one bite and put down his spoon\u2014so he could take a photo.\" \u2014Washington Post \"Jenn\u00e9 makes a vegan lifestyle look easy \u2014not to mention totally delicious. Her tips and recipe roundups are super-practical for vegans and non-vegans alike.\" \u2014Rachael Ray Every Day \"One potato, two potato, give me all your sweet potatoes!! Jenne has crafted the best soul satisfying comfort vegan recipes.\" \u2014 Chloe Coscarelli, author of Chloe Flavor and Chloe's Kitchen \"We\u2019ve all been waiting for this! Jenn\u00e9 Claiborne's Sweet Potato Soul cookbook is an absolute dream for anyone craving Southern flavors and soul food classics. Hearty, inviting, and always delicious, Jenn\u00e9\u2019s recipes prove time and time again that stick-to-your-ribs eating can be completely plant-based!\" \u2014 Sarah Britton, Holisitic Nutritionist and founder of My New Roots \"Jenn\u00e9 has done an incredible job of compiling all of her favorite vegan soul food classics in this stunning cookbook. Vegans and those curious about plant-based eating will love the beautiful images, recipes, and thoughtful narrative in this book. I can't wait to dig in (especially to Nana's Sweet Potato Pie)!\" \u2014 Dana Shultz, author of Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking About the Author Jenne Claiborne is a NYC-based vegan personal chef, cooking instructor, and the blogger behind Sweet Potato Soul, with over 200,000 followers on social media. She studied at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and founded the personal chef company, The Nourishing Vegan, whose clients have included India Arie, Lucy Liu, Lululemon, Soho House, Whole Foods, and many more. Jenn\u00e9 has been on Today , and her recipes and nutritional advice have been featured in VegNews, the Vegetarian Times, Shape.com, the Huffington Post, Reader's Digest, ThoughtfullyMagazine, Greatist, Well+Good, Laika magazine, Urban Bush Babes, Main Street Vegan , Our Hen House, and Refinery 29 . She is the cocreator of Buddhalicious, an online meal planning service that makes it easy for people to adopt a healthy and delicious vegan diet.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 12.99}], "target_asin": "B00OL1QMFQ"}
{"user_id": "AGHFLKQ2EKOUYHPVUIU63OV4T3NA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1541672542", "title": "Dreams of El Dorado", "author": "H. W. Brands", "description": "Review \"Lively...[Brands] knows how to write in a popular style that draws us in and holds our interest...[He] also pauses to make some thought-provoking insights, which round out the narrative and present his subject in a fresh light...An engaging, eminently readable introduction.\"\u2015 Wall Street Journal \"An exciting new history of the American West and how it was settled, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush and more.\"\u2015 New York Post \"[Brands] has a deft narrative touch and a talent for highlighting the human drama undergirding historical events...History as adventure story.\"\u2015 Los Angeles Reviewof Books \"[A] fine new history.\"\u2015 Houston Chronicle \"Brands surveys the past three centuries of the West, chronicling all-too-human tales of hope, greed, triumph, tragedy, and irony. His history is propelled by the stories of amazing characters, some famous, others obscure...A marvelous short history of the West, rewarding both expert and neophyte readers.\"\u2015 Booklist (starredreview) \"Brands is a master storyteller...[ Dreams of El Dorado ] will enthrall aficionados of 19th-century American history.\"\u2015 Library Journal \"A lively, well-written survey full of novel observations on a region shrouded in legend.\"\u2015 Kirkus \"Brands argues convincingly that the reality of the American West was very different than the way it was mythologized...Lucid prose and short, tightly focused chapters...This broad but clearly structured study, with its many well-chosen illustrations, is likely to have wide appeal.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"The expansion of the United States across what would become the American West is the sort of sprawling, tumultuous epic that is best told by a calm and concentrated mind. Fortunately the author of this book is H.W. Brands, who has the vision and supreme narrative skill to braid the chaotic tendrils that make up the past into a story that is almost as exciting for its coherence as it is for the heroic and heartbreaking events it so vividly renders. Dreams of El Dorado is the latest reason to think of Brands as America's go-to historian.\"\u2015 Stephen Harrigan , author of Big Wonderful Thing and The Gates of the Alamo \"A subject this monumental demands prose to match it, and I am pleased that to report that, in this sprawling epic, H. W. Brands is at his sparkling best. He is of the American West and grew up in its myths, which may explain why he writes about it with such passion and clarity.\"\u2015 S. C. Gwynne , New York Times bestselling author of Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell \"The 'winning' of the American West is that biggest and most daunting of subjects, so big that most historians have found it necessary to bite off small corners of this grand and sordid tale of empire-building. But here H.W. Brands endeavors to tell it all, from Texas to California, from beaver pelts to buffalo robes, from the hoofbeats of horses to the steam blasts of the first transcontinental trains. Epic in its scale, fearless in its scope, this is a bravura performance from one of our master historians.\"\u2015 Hampton Sides , bestselling author of Blood and Thunder About the Author H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times -bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class . He lives in Austin, Texas.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "081256684X", "title": "The Deliverance (Skye's West)", "author": "Richard S. Wheeler", "description": "Review \u201cSkye is one of the most memorable figures in Western fiction since Max Brand's Destry.\u201d \u2015 Tulsa World \u201cWheeler's westerns just keep getting better and better.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cWell-loved western writer Wheeler takes a big grip on afflictions of the heart in each outing...\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews on Downriver About the Author Richard S. Wheeler has written over fifty novels and several short stories. He has won four Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the field of western literature. He lives in the literary and film community of Livingston, Montana, and is married to Professor Sue Hart, of Montana State University-Billings. Before turning to fiction he was a newsman and book editor. He has raised horses and been a wrangler at an Arizona dude ranch.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.76}, {"asin": "0786044322", "title": "Riding Shotgun (A Red Ryan Western)", "author": "J.A. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over 300 books, including the series THE MOUNTAIN MAN; PREACHER, THE FIRST MOUNTAIN MAN; MACCALLISTER; LUKE JENSEN, BOUNTY HUNTER; FLINTLOCK; THOSE JENSEN BOYS; THE FRONTIERSMAN; SAVAGE TEXAS; THE KERRIGANS; and WILL TANNER: DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL. His thrillers include BLACK FRIDAY, TYRANNY, STAND YOUR GROUND, and THE DOOMSDAY BUNKER. Visit his website at www.williamjohnstone.net or email him at dogcia2006@aol.com.  \u00a0 Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher,\u00a0and fact checker to one of the most popular western\u00a0authors\u00a0of all time, J.A. Johnstone learned from\u00a0the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone. \u00a0 \u00a0 He began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or\u00a0researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts.\u00a0J.A. worked hard\u2014and learned.  \u00a0 \u201cEvery day with Bill\u00a0was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me\u00a0all\u00a0he could\u00a0about the art of storytelling. \u2018Keep the historical facts accurate ,\u2019\u00a0he would say. \u2018Remember the readers, and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: be the best J.A. Johnstone you can be.\u2019\u201d", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1723844217", "title": "A Trail Too Far: A Western Frontier Adventure (A Rab Sinclair Western)", "author": "Robert Peecher", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.5}, {"asin": "149673534X", "title": "Forever Texas: A Thrilling Western Novel of the American Frontier (A Forever Texas Novel)", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the #1 bestselling Western writer in America and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of hundreds of books, with over 50 million copies sold. Born in southern Missouri, he was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. He left school at fifteen to work in a carnival and then as a deputy sheriff before serving in the army. He went on to become known as \"the Greatest Western writer of the 21st Century.\" Visit him online at WilliamJohnstone.net. J.A. Johnstone learned to write from the master himself, Uncle William W. Johnstone, who began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts. J.A. worked hard and learned, later going on to become the co-author of William W. Johnstone\u2019s many bestselling westerns and thrillers. J.A. Johnstone lives on a ranch in Tennessee and more information is at WilliamJohnstone.net.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.89}, {"asin": "0786043784", "title": "A Good Day for a Massacre (A Slash and Pecos Western)", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over 300 books, including the series THE MOUNTAIN MAN; PREACHER, THE FIRST MOUNTAIN MAN; MACCALLISTER; LUKE JENSEN, BOUNTY HUNTER; FLINTLOCK; THOSE JENSEN BOYS; THE FRONTIERSMAN; SAVAGE TEXAS; THE KERRIGANS; and WILL TANNER: DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL. His thrillers include BLACK FRIDAY, TYRANNY, STAND YOUR GROUND, and THE DOOMSDAY BUNKER. Visit his website at www.williamjohnstone.net or email him at dogcia2006@aol.com. \u00a0 Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher,\u00a0and fact checker to one of the most popular western\u00a0authors\u00a0of all time, J.A. Johnstone learned from\u00a0the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone. \u00a0 \u00a0 He began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or\u00a0researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts.\u00a0J.A. worked hard\u2014and learned.  \u00a0 \u201cEvery day with Bill\u00a0was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me\u00a0all\u00a0he could\u00a0about the art of storytelling. \u2018Keep the historical facts accurate ,\u2019\u00a0he would say. \u2018Remember the readers, and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: be the best J.A. Johnstone you can be.\u2019 \u201d", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0786043806", "title": "The Wicked Die Twice (A Slash and Pecos Western)", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of over 300 books, including Preacher, The Last Mountain Man, Luke Jensen Bounty Hunter, Flintlock, Savage Texas, Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man; The Family Jensen, Sidewinders, and Shawn O'Brien Town Tamer . His thrillers include Phoenix Rising, Home Invasion, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge , and Suicide Mission . Visit his website at www.williamjohnstone.net or by email at dogcia2006@aol.com.Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher,\u00a0and fact checker to one of the most popular western\u00a0authors\u00a0of all time, J.A. Johnstone learned from\u00a0the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone. \u00a0He began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or\u00a0researching his massive American Western history library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts.\u00a0J.A. worked hard\u2014and learned. \"Every day with Bill\u00a0was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me\u00a0all\u00a0he could\u00a0about the art of storytelling. \u2018Keep the historical facts accurate,' he would say. \u2018Remember the readers, and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: be the best J.A. Johnstone you can be.'\"", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.91}, {"asin": "081256586X", "title": "Downriver: A Barnaby Skye Novel (Skye's West)", "author": "Richard S. Wheeler", "description": "Review \"Wheeler is a master of character and plot, and this novel showcases his talents at their peak.\" - Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"Draws his memorable characters with bold and bigger-than-life strokes.\" Terry C. Johnston, award-winning author of The Plainsman \"Well-loved western writer Wheeler takes a big grip on afflictions of the heart in [ Downriver ].\" -K irkus Reviews About the Author Richard S. Wheeler has written over fifty novels and several short stories. He has won four Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the field of western literature. He lives in the literary and film community of Livingston, Montana, and is married to Professor Sue Hart, of Montana State University-Billings. Before turning to fiction he was a newsman and book editor. He has raised horses and been a wrangler at an Arizona dude ranch. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Downriver one G loom hung over the rendezvous on the Popo Agie River. Evil rumors wormed through the gathering, furrowing brows. They were saying this would be the last gathering of the mountain men. The American Fur Company wouldn't buy a beaver plew at all, or if it did, it would pay so little that the mountaineers would starve. A man couldn't keep body and soul together in the mountains anymore. There were whispers that the company's tent store would have fewer items and these would be more costly than ever.It had reached Barnaby Skye's ears that the trapping brigades would be pared down and free trappers released from contracts; that long-term company men would be let go and that it didn't matter how good a job a man had done. He heard that the engages would find themselves as useless as a lame horse. He had heard that prime beaver pelts wouldn't bring fifty cents, and an entire year's hard work wouldn't keep a man in gunpowder. Those bleak rumors had built up an awful thirst in Barnaby Skye. A jug usually solved his problems, at least until the fat moon turned skinny.Just so long as they brought spirits, everything would be all right. Whiskey fueled each rendezvous. Without it, the trappers might as well go back to loading cotton or blacksmithing or plowing prairie soil or tallying waybills in a warehouse. But not one man among them believed that the year's supplies, now being packed in from Fort Union, would not include the pure grain alcohol that would be mixed with PopoAgie River water, a plug of tobacco or two, and some Cayenne pepper, that set the old coons to baying.One thing wasn't a rumor: fashion had shifted. In 1833, John Jacob Astor himself had discovered that silk top hats were the vogue; that hats made from beaver felt had vanished from the shops of Europe. In 1834 he had sold out his American Fur Company, and now the Upper Missouri Outfit was really Pratte, Chouteau and Company, though no one called it that. It was said that Astor, the great fur magnate, had known exactly what he was up to, and had gotten out of the fur business in the nick of time, richer than Midas and safer than Gibraltar.That was the dark talk those June days beside the Popo Agie, where it met the Wind River, among dour trappers waiting for the fun to begin and the trade whiskey to flow. The rest of the bad tidings wasn't rumor at all. No one had done well this year. Beaver were just about trapped out, except maybe on the streams controlled by the dangerous Blackfeet, and the competition of small outfits and free trappers had made life in the wilderness tougher than ever. No one had many plews to trade, and those few wouldn't bring much more than a few grains of DuPont powder and a bar of lead. There were men in camp who had put in a hard year's work and wouldn't get fifty dollars for it.And so, that June of 1838, Barnaby Skye waited for what life would bring, but without much hope. Maybe this would be the last rendezvous. He would have to find some other way to survive, and so would all the rest of the mountain men gathered together for the customary trade festival and summer fun that year. What would he do? What would he become? Who would he be in the hazy future? Was this the end of his sojourn in the wilds? Would he return to the sea, from whence he came?At least the American Fur Company had sent an outfit upriver, and it was due at any time now. The trappers could buy the traps and gunpowder and flannels and blankets they needed, and keep on going for another year if they had a fewpacks of skins to peddle. Maybe there was hope in that. Maybe things would get better.The trappers knew that much, because an express rider from Fort Union, located at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri, had told them the Otter was thrashing its way upstream with an outfit, a cargo of trade goods. But no one knew what bleak news would accompany the outfit, and not a man in that camp believed that the news would be very good. The St. Louis owners of the company had made it clear a year earlier they were losing money on the beaver business. Silk was in; beaver felt was out.Skye had been a brigade leader, a salaried man, one of only five in camp, so he had weathered the bad times a bit better than some of the trappers. They had numbed their legs for long hours in freezing water while baiting traps with castoreum and collecting beaver, found small comfort in winter's darkness, fought their way into obscure corners of the Rockies, only to find that other, equally determined trappers had cleaned out the streams. And now the beaver had all but vanished.Lucien Fontenelle, the veteran fur man in charge of field operations for the American Fur Company, was more optimistic.\"Beaver may be trapped out, but the company's not just in the beaver business,\" he confided to Skye as they lounged under a cottonwood, staring at snow-burdened peaks. \"It can sell any pelt or hide we can ship.\"\"For less plunder,\" Skye said.Fontenelle nodded. \"Hard doings now,\" he said. \"But we'll keep on going. That's what Pierre Chouteau himself told me; they'd keep on going. There's fur here and markets there. Maybe it'll be ermine or mink, deer and elk hides, weasel or otter, maybe even buffalo hides, but there's a market in the States.\"Skye was not a gloomy man, nor a pessimist, but all the bad talk was eroding his joy. For a dozen years he had been in the mountains, and was considered a veteran and even an oldman by the trapping fraternity, though he wasn't far into his thirties, and just beginning life.They considered him an odd duck, perhaps because of his British ways and his peculiar looks. He had been a pressed seaman, dragooned into the Royal Navy when he was a boy in London. He hadn't escaped the iron claw of His Majesty's Navy until he jumped ship at Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, seven years later, and made his way into the interior, with little more than his wits and a knife and belaying pin to keep him alive.Maybe that's why he was a more serious and somber man than most of the mountain fraternity; why he was more diligent and careful and willing to learn anything of value; why he treasured his liberty so much that he would die rather than surrender it. He had spent seven years in bondage, subservient to the whim of assorted boatswains, midshipmen, masters, captains, and lords of the admiralty, and freedom meant more to him than it did to anyone in the mountains.Maybe he seemed odd to the fraternity because he insisted on being called Mister, or maybe it was because of his burly barrel-shaped body, or the seaman's roll in his gait. Maybe it was because of his giant misshapen nose, which had suffered much pulping and pounding in innumerable brawls, a hogback that now dominated his face so that his small blue eyes and thin lips shrank to nothing in comparison. Or maybe it was his battered black top hat, pierced by arrow and shot, which he wore with determined dignity in all seasons, perched on a full mane of ragged brown hair that reached his shoulders.Or maybe they found him odd simply because he wasn't an American, and didn't speak the trapper lingo, and addressed others with politeness and civility, which were things he was born to and couldn't help. He was a man without a country; not able to return to England, yet not a westering man out of the States, so he lived in some sort of limbo, hisonly nation the trapping fraternity of the mountains--and his wife Victoria's people, the Crows.But he didn't mind. What counted was their respect as well as his own respect for himself, and what else they thought of him didn't matter. He had mastered the wilderness arts in a hurry. And never stopped learning how to subsist himself in a world where there was nary a shop on any corner to sell him beef or pork or bread or greens, and nary a tailor to sew him a suit of clothes, nary a smith to fashion a weapon, and nary a doctor to tend to his ills and aches and broken bones. He had mastered the Arkansas toothpick, the Green River knife, the Hawken percussion rifle, the war axe and throwing hatchet, the savage's bow and arrow, war club and lance because there were no constables in the wilds to protect him. He knew how to build a smokeless fire, how to read the behavior of crows and magpies, how to sense an ambush around a bend. He had graduated summa cum laude from the Rocky Mountain College, where one either won a baccalaureate or died in some obscure gulch, his fate unknown.So he, along with two hundred others, lingered in the verdant meadows where the Popo joined the Wind, awaiting whatever the lords of their fate in distant St. Louis had to offer. It was a sweet land, at least in summer, with cool evenings, and vast panoramas in which grassy benchlands surrendered to dark-timbered slopes, which in turn stretched upward in bright blue distances to snow-capped peaks that fairly cried \"Freedom!\"The blue haze of campfires lay in the air, and the pungent aroma of wood smoke. In addition to the trappers, the dusky tribesmen had gathered once again to trade their pelts for all those treasures brought from afar by the white men: powder and lead, blankets, hooks, traps, mirrors, beads, and especially, the trade whiskey the wily traders concocted and sold by the cup or jug for furs.Skye could see the tawny buffalo-hide lodges of the Crowsarrayed in a circle, and those of the Shoshones and Nez Perce, and some plenty of other tribes as well, dotting the verdant meadows. Here, on neutral trading ground, even hereditary enemies enjoyed a momentary peace, though they were all fair game for one another once they departed from the legendary trapper's fair.Skye waited restlessly, his eyes on the low divide that would someday soon reveal a string of heavily burdened pack horses and mules, and some gaudily bedizened mountaineers driving them into the rendezvous.He did not know what he would do if the news was bad, which is what he fully expected. There weren't enough beaver pelts in camp to pay for the enormous expense of shipping all those goods from St. Louis, much less earn anyone a profit. He had two skills: he was an able seaman, and could always ship out on any merchant vessel, and he was also an able mountaineer. He suspected he might just need to learn another trade, and he wasn't sure what it might be.His wife Victoria was visiting with all her friends and relatives, some of whom she saw only at these annual fairs. At rendezvous time, he often went for hours, even a day, without seeing her. But whenever they were together on the trail, leading a brigade, she and he scrubbed and cooked and hunted together, lived and loved together with a unity of purpose and spirit that transcended their radically different upbringings. They were friends and lovers, hunters and warriors, and boon companions upon life's sweet walk. Except when he was enjoying his annual binge. The thought made him thirsty.He was still young. He'd suffered hardship in the mountains, but his body was strong, and hardship had annealed the steel in him and wrought a man of rare courage and intelligence and something else: honor.Ten days passed, then eleven, and finally on the twelfth, Joe Meek, who had been scouting up the trail for news, returned with news: The American Fur Company pack train would arrivethe next day. From the crest of the ridge where he had observed the distant train, he could see it was a small one, poor doings compared to the outfits the company brought in during the heyday of the beaver trade. But an outfit, anyway, and maybe there would be a few casks of spirits on the backs of those mules to gladden the hearts and bodies of the trappers.So the next day, that June, Skye might learn his fate.Copyright \u00a9 2001 by Richard S. Wheeler Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.11}, {"asin": "0786048689", "title": "Brannigan's Land (A Brannigan's Land Western)", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the #1 bestselling Western writer in America and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of hundreds of books, with over 50 million copies sold. Born in southern Missouri, he was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. He left school at fifteen to work in a carnival and then as a deputy sheriff before serving in the army. He went on to become known as \"the Greatest Western writer of the 21st Century.\" Visit him online at WilliamJohnstone.net. J.A. Johnstone learned to write from the master himself, Uncle William W. Johnstone, who began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts. J.A. worked hard and learned, later going on to become the co-author of William W. Johnstone\u2019s many bestselling westerns and thrillers. J.A. Johnstone lives on a ranch in Tennessee and more information is at WilliamJohnstone.net.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 6.79}, {"asin": "0812579089", "title": "Going Home: A Barnaby Skye Novel (Skye's West, 11)", "author": "Richard S. Wheeler", "description": "Review \u201cSkye is one of the most memorable figures in western fiction since Max Brand's ' Destry '.\u201d \u2015 Tulsa World \u201cBy the glorious Wheeler . . . . As a westerner, Wheeler is a writer's writer whose prose has the authority of handset type but sparkles like horseshoes on flint rock.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews About the Author Richard S. Wheeler (1935-2019) wrote over fifty novels and several short stories. He won six Spur Awards (for Fool's Coach , Sierra , Masterson , Drum's Ring , Vengeance Valley , and The Canyon of Bones ) and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the field of western literature. His series include Skye's West and The Witness. Before turning to fiction he was a newsman and book editor. Wheeler lived in the literary and film community of Livingston, Montana. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Going Home A Barnaby Skye Novel By Wheeler, Richard S. Forge Books Copyright \u00a9 2001 Wheeler, Richard S.All right reserved. ISBN: 9780812579086 One Barnaby Skye did not have a care in the world, except perhaps for those big doings yonder in the shade of a brush arbor. He took his ease on a buffalo robe before his small lodge, watching puffball clouds spin out of the mountains and the gents in the brush arbor divide up the world. The wild times, when every trapper in the beaver country quenched a mighty, yearlong drought, had died, and now in the somnolent mid-July heat, rough trappers played cutthroat games, spun yarns, snored, or flirted with enterprising red hoydens.His Crow wife, Victoria, had abandoned him to his trapping cronies and gone to drink spirits and tell bawdy jokes with the Flatheads, allies of her people, who were present in force to trade at the Rocky Mountain Fur Company store and sponge up the bacchanal. She had female friends and even distant relatives among the Salish.The Flatheads and other tribes had swarmed to the great 1832 summer fair, this time in Pierre\u2019s Hole, the navel in Mother Earth just west of the Great Breasts, or Grand Tetons, which Barnaby Skye thought was plumb center, the best of all places for the great annual gathering of trappers.Pierre\u2019s Hole offered a mild climate, vast stretches of lush grazing ground for all the ponies, icy creeks tumbling from the mountains, abundant firewood, plentiful game\u2014though not any buffalo\u2014and saucy breezes eddying out of the Tetons to freshen the spirit as well as body. What better place to bake the year\u2019s aches out of the body, swill the Sublettes\u2019 firewater with new and old rivals, and engage in nefarious sins that ruined body and soul?This year, the frosty waters of the Tetons had been mixed with pure grain spirits carried in great casks from St. Louis, and seasoned with some ancient plugs of tobacco and cayenne pepper to produce trade whiskey, the alchemist\u2019s potion that set trappers and redskins to baying at the moon and marking trees. Skye had finally had his fill of that, and of the nausea that dogged each binge, and had sunk into a summer of indolence, his mind meandering and untethered and his keen eye observing the daily passage of dusky and predatory females.These were some doings, all right. For the first time, the American Fur Company had shown up, a big brigade of trappers led by William H. Vanderburgh and Andrew Drips, and they planned to set up a store of their own just as soon as Lucien Fontenelle arrived with that company\u2019s trade goods, which were being shipped up the Missouri and then carried by packhorse to the rendezvous. That was the big doings. They were late, which gave the Rocky Mountain Fur Company an edge for the moment. But from a longer perspective, the well-funded opposition probably signaled the end of the outfit.Nor was that all of it. This year an American army officer named Bonneville, fat with East Coast capital, had ventured west with his own expedition. And an odd Bostonian ice merchant named Nathaniel Wyeth had marched out with a whole troop of idiot mangeurs du lard in uniforms. And in addition to that, there was a big party of free trappers in camp, all of them ruthless rivals of the men Skye had allied with for years: Bridger, Fraeb, Gervais, Fitzpatrick, and Sublette.The new competition troubled Skye. The mountains were his mother and father. He wasn\u2019t a Yank, but a pressed seaman who had jumped his Royal Navy frigate at Fort Vancouver in 1826 and ended up in the Rocky Mountains, a man without a country. He had never eyed the settled United States, and had no great wish to.England was a closed chapter in his young life. He had Victoria, and if he belonged to anything other than the Trappers Nation now, it was the Crow Nation, into which he had married. He could scarcely imagine his slim Crow consort padding the lanes of London in her moccasins. But sometimes, in the still of the night, he wondered how his family fared, and how the streets of his own city would appeal to him now. And he missed those things.Of his family he knew little. He had been a merchant\u2019s son, destined to take over the family export business, when a press gang snatched him from the cobbled streets hard by the London Dock at East End. He never saw his family again. They surely did not know his whereabouts or even whether he was alive. And would never know.Black Harris folded his lengthy frame beside Skye.\u201cWhat\u2019s the word?\u201d he asked, nodding in the general direction of that willow-covered brush arbor where the brigade leaders from several outfits dickered with each other.Skye squinted through the heat, and shrugged. \u201cThey\u2019ll make my fate, or I\u2019ll make my fate,\u201d he said.\u201cNothing\u2019ll change. American Fur will gouge us just as mighty as our outfit for possibles. We\u2019ll still fork out mountain prices for every blanket and trap and jug of lightning, and they\u2019ll still offer mountain prices for every plew, take it or leave it,\u201d Harris said. \u201cEverything changes except prices.\u201d\u201cIt reminds me of my first rendezvous, when I walked in from the sea. That\u2019s when Ashley sold out to Smith, Jackson, and Sublette. Now we\u2019re seeing big doings again.\u201dRendezvous was the time to reoutfit, buy some white men\u2019s marvels such as calico, knives, ribbons, copper kettles, and thick blankets for his Crow woman. And of course, take the edge off his thirst. Each spring his thirst built up in his parched body like a plugged volcano. And the day the supply caravan rolled in, Barnaby Skye could be found near the head of the line leading toward the kettles of mountain whiskey, ready to pickle his brains for a week.The Skyes had done well with the old firm.But Barnaby Skye wasn\u2019t sure about the future. Which of these outfits, wrestling with each other under that brush arbor, would survive and which would go under? How would things line up? Suddenly life in the mountains wasn\u2019t a sure bet. Maybe he\u2019d be out of salaried work as a camp tender or brigade leader or hunter, his occupations these several years. It nagged him. He didn\u2019t like trapping. Trappers lived hard and dangerous lives, wading in icy streams, always in danger of freezing, drowning, starving, and from arrows and scalp knives.He was the stray dog without a country. A man ought to have a home, a nation, a people, but all his allegiances were nothing more than transitory alliances formed at summer rendezvous like this one. He knew he was set apart in their minds. He spoke the polite English he was born with, and not the bizarre vernacular of the Yanks.\u201cI think I\u2019m about to become a free trapper again. Black.\u201d\u201cNo man\u2019d do better at it. You know which way the stick floats.\u201d\u201cI never much cared for it. But I could make a warm camp and keep men healthy. I can hunt, make meat.\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s plumb center, Skye.\u201d\u201c Mister Skye, mate.\u201dHarris was grinning.For six years, they had called him Skye and for six years he had told them to preface it with a mister . That\u2019s what the Royal Navy did to him, all those gentlemen officers calling each other mister, but addressing enlisted men by their last names.It was the joke of the camps. Call Barnaby Skye anything but mister and watch the response. Trappers would send greenhorns, mangeurs du lard , or \u201cpork-eaters,\u201d as they were called, over to Skye just to watch him fume at the way they addressed him. That was all right with Skye.Barnaby Skye had filled out in the mountains until he became a barrel of a man. He still walked with a rolling sailor\u2019s gait, as if the mountains were the pitching decks of men-o\u2019war. He squinted out at the wilderness from deep-set blue eyes, set apart by a formidable ridge his friends swore was the king of all noses, long, thick, mountainous, dominant, and overmastering the rest of his jowly red face.They made sport of his nose, betting that no one at any rendezvous would ever match it, and he let them. His nose was the fleshly evidence of a thousand sailor brawls, a nose that had been erected by fistic abuse into the lord and viceroy of all mortal noses. The mountaineers treasured his nose even more than they treasured Skye.His other hallmark was his splendid beaver top hat, black and silky, climbing up from his skull like a cannon\u2019s barrel. It was the hat gentlemen habitually wore, and that is why he wore it. In England, and in the Royal Navy, he could not be a true gentleman. In this, the New World, he could be what he chose. And so they called him Mister Skye, and he wore his top hat, much battered now and bearing evidence of the uninvited passage of two arrows, and the whole of this, the royal nose, the top hat, and the way he required others to address him, they saw as crown and scepter and purple and ermine.\u201cSkye, I\u2019d pass the jug with you tonight, but your nose would get in the way,\u201d Harris said. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t be fair to the rest. You can snort a whole snifter of firewater and hold it in your nostrils.\u201d\u201cIt is a rare English talent, Black,\u201d said Skye. \u201cI accept. I will drink your party dry.\u201cBlack Harris yawned and headed to his robes for a nap.Skye thought he\u2019d sleep to dusk, carve some meat off the hanging elk haunch, and then buy another jug of mountain whiskey. The supply had declined alarmingly, and Skye wanted one last celebration before the casks went dry, or the firm began watering the last of its stock, reducing woeful trappers to sniffing a cork and sighing.Thus passed a July afternoon, while the adventurers who ran the business, took the risks, carted supplies a thousand miles from St. Louis and a fortune in furs back to that gateway of the West, haggled through the day.Skye snored, until late in the day when a shadow darkened his leisure. In any place other than rendezvous, that shadow would have evoked a lifesaving bolt upward and twist to one side. But here, the one place in the wilderness where it was safe, he contented himself merely to open his eyes and squint upward, past the ridgeback of his nose, to the young man above.Ogden.Skye blinked.\u201cMister Skye,\u201d said Ogden.\u201cYou\u2019re the only gent in six years who\u2019s addressed me as I wish. For that I am tentatively in your debt.\u201dSkye sat up. Ogden was grinning. They had not seen each other for six years. When Skye was fleeing pell-mell from the Royal Navy, he ran smack into Peter Skene Ogden and his brigade of Hudson\u2019s Bay trappers in the Oregon country. He expected to be captured and hauled back to Fort Vancouver and sent in chains to London and a life in durance vile. But this Canadian was no ordinary man, and actually listened to Skye\u2019s story rather than scoffing and threatening. In the end, he helped a desperate and hungry seaman escape into the wilderness of North America.And here was his benefactor, wanting to talk. Ogden was seven hundred miles away from Vancouver. Barnaby Skye sensed that there was portent in all this.\u00a0Copyright \u00a9 2000 by Richard S. Wheeler Continues... Excerpted from Going Home by Wheeler, Richard S. Copyright \u00a9 2001 by Wheeler, Richard S.. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 20.03}, {"asin": "0786048743", "title": "Sons of Thunder (A Slash and Pecos Western)", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the #1 bestselling Western writer in America and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of hundreds of books, with over 50 million copies sold. Born in southern Missouri, he was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. He left school at fifteen to work in a carnival and then as a deputy sheriff before serving in the army. He went on to become known as \"the Greatest Western writer of the 21st Century.\" Visit him online at WilliamJohnstone.net. J.A. Johnstone learned to write from the master himself, Uncle William W. Johnstone, who began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts. J.A. worked hard and learned, later going on to become the co-author of William W. Johnstone\u2019s many bestselling westerns and thrillers. J.A. Johnstone lives on a ranch in Tennessee and more information is at WilliamJohnstone.net.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "078603646X", "title": "Winchester 1886", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of over 300 books, including PREACHER, THE LAST MOUNTAIN MAN, LUKE JENSEN BOUNTY HUNTER, FLINTLOCK, SAVAGE TEXAS, MATT JENSEN, THE LAST MOUNTAIN MAN; THE FAMILY JENSEN, SIDEWINDERS, and SHAWN O\u2019BRIEN TOWN TAMER. His thrillers include Phoenix Rising, Home Invasion, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge, and Suicide Mission. Visit his website at www.williamjohnstone.net or by email at dogcia2006@aol.com.  \u00a0 Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher,\u00a0and fact checker to one of the most popular western\u00a0authors\u00a0of all time, J.A. Johnstone learned from\u00a0the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone. \u00a0 \u00a0 He began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or\u00a0researching his massive American Western history library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts.\u00a0J.A. worked hard\u2014and learned.  \u00a0 \u201cEvery day with Bill\u00a0was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me\u00a0all\u00a0he could\u00a0about the art of storytelling. \u2018Keep the historical facts accurate ,\u2019\u00a0he would say. \u2018Remember the readers, and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: be the best J.A. Johnstone you can be.\u2019\u201d", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 7.98}, {"asin": "0786043768", "title": "Cutthroats (A Slash and Pecos Western)", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over 300 books, including the series THE MOUNTAIN MAN; PREACHER, THE FIRST MOUNTAIN MAN; MACCALLISTER; LUKE JENSEN, BOUNTY HUNTER; FLINTLOCK; THOSE JENSEN BOYS; THE FRONTIERSMAN; THE LEGEND OF PERLEY GATES; THE CHUCKWAGON TRAIL; FIRESTICK; SAWBONES; and WILL TANNER: DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL. His thrillers include BLACK FRIDAY, TYRANNY, STAND YOUR GROUND, THE DOOMSDAY BUNKER, and TRIGGER WARNING. Visit his website at www.williamjohnstone.net or email him at dogcia2006@aol.com.  \u00a0 Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher,\u00a0and fact checker to one of the most popular western\u00a0authors\u00a0of all time, J.A. Johnstone learned from\u00a0the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone. \u00a0 \u00a0 He began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or\u00a0researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts.\u00a0J.A. worked hard\u2014and learned.  \u00a0 \u201cEvery day with Bill\u00a0was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me\u00a0all\u00a0he could\u00a0about the art of storytelling. \u2018Keep the historical facts accurate ,\u2019\u00a0he would say. \u2018Remember the readers, and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: be the best J.A. Johnstone you can be.\u2019\u201d", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "0739327348", "title": "The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: Unabridged Selections From The Frontier Stories, Volume 5", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 26.0}, {"asin": "0578485761", "title": "I Will Die With You", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 14.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1496734491", "title": "Go West, Young Man: A Riveting Western Novel of the American Frontier", "author": "William W. Johnstone", "description": "About the Author William W. Johnstone is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of over 300 books, including Preacher, The Last Mountain Man, Luke Jensen Bounty Hunter, Flintlock, Savage Texas, Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man; The Family Jensen, Sidewinders, and Shawn O'Brien Town Tamer . His thrillers include Phoenix Rising, Home Invasion, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge , and Suicide Mission . Visit his website at www.williamjohnstone.net or by email at dogcia2006@aol.com.Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher,\u00a0and fact checker to one of the most popular western\u00a0authors\u00a0of all time, J.A. Johnstone learned from\u00a0the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone. \u00a0He began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or\u00a0researching his massive American Western history library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts.\u00a0J.A. worked hard\u2014and learned. \"Every day with Bill\u00a0was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me\u00a0all\u00a0he could\u00a0about the art of storytelling. \u2018Keep the historical facts accurate,' he would say. \u2018Remember the readers, and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: be the best J.A. Johnstone you can be.'\"", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "B00EHZ4B86", "title": "The Day My Parents Got Lost", "author": "Susette Williams", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "193172282X", "title": "The Adventures of Slim & Howdy: A Novel", "author": "Bill Fitzhugh", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Country music superstars Brooks & Dunn have enjoyed massive success (30 million albums sold, dozens of awards), but surely a novel about their alter egos couldn't possibly excite anybody outside of die-hard fans, could it? Actually, the duo, along with novelist Fitzhugh, bash out a comic caper that has enough plot twists and nutty one-liners to hook even twang-haters. The book follows lanky, laconic Slim and romantic, goofy Howdy as the two troubadours ramble around the Texas honky-tonk circuit. There's the time Slim, armed with a pair of hedge clippers, reclaims his stolen guitar from Brushfire Boone; or the hot double date that ends with a pantsless Howdy dodging bullets. The boys land a steady gig at a roadhouse in Del Rio until its owner is kidnapped and ransomed. With no shortage of suspects, the boys follow the trail into the Mexican desert, where a zany cast of bad guys gathers for the boffo final shootout. It's like a particularly good episode of The Dukes of Hazzard : corny as hell, but heaps of fun. (May) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \"[A] comic caper that has enough plot twists and nutty one-liners to hook even twang haters. . . heaps of fun.\" ( Publishers Weekly ) About the Author Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn have sold thirty million copies of the ten albums they've recorded together and have scored twenty-three #1 hits in their career as country music singer/songwriters. The duo has been awarded Entertainer of the Year three times, and Vocal Duo of the Year for the last fifteen consecutive years by the Country Music Association. Bill Fitzhugh is the award-winning, critically acclaimed author of seven comic suspense novels. He has written for television on NBC, Fox, and the BBC, and his novels have been optioned by major movie studios. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, he currently resides in Los Angeles. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 3.9}, {"asin": "1593501188", "title": "American Studies", "author": "Mark Merlis", "description": "About the Author Mark Merlis is a prize-winning novelist and author of \"An Arrow's Flight\" and \"Man About Town.\" He is also a health policy consultant with thirty years of experience.", "categories": ["Books", "LGBTQ+ Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 33.76}], "target_asin": "1496734491"}
{"user_id": "AF4NUGR6XVCEIXFRUG3UNIUT7LFQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1580082572", "title": "Mrs. Wilkes' Boardinghouse Cookbook: Recipes and Recollections from Her Savannah Table", "author": "Sema Wilkes", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Ninety-four year old Sema Wilkes has been running her boardinghouse in Savannah, Ga., since 1943, cooking up traditional Southern favorites biscuits, collard greens, hush puppies for a clientele of gentlemen farmers, Girl Scouts and Yankee tourists. Indeed, the remembrances of Mrs. Wilkes and her family and friends are so entertaining that the book is best approached as a memoir/oral history interrupted by recipes for soups, casseroles, fried delights and desserts. The book vividly portrays a few of the eatery's more irregular regulars, including one Spanish Civil War veteran who, always arriving via tricycle, ate there every weekday for three decades. Equally well-rendered are the strong women who have helped Mrs. Wilkes in the kitchen throughout the years, including the late Mildred Capers, who judged the doneness of her fried chicken by the sound of the oil in the fryer. But it's not clear how some of these dishes would fare outside of Mrs. Wilkes's delightful environs; the Fried Chicken recipe lists the needed ingredients: flour, evaporated milk, salt and pepper, but obviously, it is the context Southern hospitality, fresh ingredients and an experienced kitchen staff that make it special. Also, a few oddities included in the book would have perhaps been best left on the boardinghouse table a Tango Salad, for instance, with lemon gelatin, canned pineapple and pimentos. Nevertheless, this is a delightful homage to Southern life. (May)Forecast: The continuing interest in Southern food, along with an ecstatic blurb from Craig Claiborne, should help this book's sales. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Sema Wilkes has presided over her Savannah, GA, dining room for 68 years. At age 94, she still tastes every dish before it comes out of the kitchen, but now there are three other generations of her family working in the restaurant. Although \"Mrs. Wilkes' \" was originally a typical boardinghouse, feeding only its dozen or so roomers, good food was always her focus, and it became a restaurant soon after she took over in the 1940s. Today, there are lines around the block of people waiting to taste her Southern food at least 13 different dishes at every meal and \"the boardinghouse\" has a national reputation. But the cooking is much as it always was (one of her cooks has been there since the1950s): Buttermilk Chicken, Corn Pudding, the biscuits that Craig Claiborne described as \"one of the greatest things, ever, to happen\" in his life. Coauthor Edge's readable text provides the history of the restaurant and the people involved in it. Recommended for all regional American cooking collections. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \u201cCaptures the essence of Southern fare.\u201d \u2014Restaurant Hospitality \u201c[Mrs. Wilkes' biscuits are] one of the greatest things, ever, to happen in my life.\u201d \u2014Craig Claiborne\u201c[At Mrs. Wilkes'] the guests look in amazement as big platters of crisp, fried chicken and plenty of it, are set down on the white oilcloth. Then come feathery biscuits, generous squares of cornbread, tender okra simmered with tomatoes, pickled beets, candied yams, pitchers of sweetened ice tea.\u201d \u2014Boston Globe\u201cCertainly down-home food is not news to regulars at such enduring American establishments as Mrs. Wilkes' Boardinghouse in Savannah, where guests sit at community lunch tables and help themselves from ten to twelve bowls and platters of meats, salads, and vegetables.\u201d \u2014Time\u201cA meal at Mrs. Wilkes' is reminiscent of dinner at Grandma's.\u201d \u2014Esquire About the Author SEMA WILKES was born in 1907 to Georgia farmers who grew tobacco, cured hams, smoked sausages, and otherwise worked hard to get by. As the oldest of four children, all orphaned, she learned to cook out of necessity. Married at 16, a mother at 21, relocated to Savannah in the name of the war effort at 35, Sema went to work at Mrs. Dixon\u2019s Boardinghouse. Three years later, in 1943, she took over the boardinghouse and began building what would become her legacy. She lived in Savannah, Georgia, until her death in 2002. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 29.99}, {"asin": "0486438767", "title": "Fashions of the Old South Coloring Book (Dover Fashion Coloring Book)", "author": "Tom Tierney", "description": "About the Author One of the leading authorities on fashion history, Tom Tierney created over 150 paper doll books for Dover Publications. With subjects ranging from U.S. Presidents to popular movie stars, Mr. Tierney's books are famous for being carefully researched and meticulously rendered. His releases are prized by fashion professionals, collectors, and paper doll lovers all over the world.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 3.99}, {"asin": "0919761283", "title": "The Home School Source Book", "author": "Jean Reed", "description": "Review \"The nicest thing about this book is that it is not only thorough, but engaging, warm, friendly, encouraging, and reassuring.\" -- Marsha Ransom, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Homeschooling About the Author Jean Reed successfully homeschooled her four children with her husband, Donn. She has contributed to The Homeschooling Book of Answers and Homeschool Open House. She lives in Bridgewater, Maine, and Knowlesville, New Brunswick. Donn Reed is the author of the first two editions of The Home School Source Book.", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 10.16}, {"asin": "1843091844", "title": "The Ultimate Bread Machine Cookbook", "author": "Jennie Shapter", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Baking"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.32}, {"asin": "0486436276", "title": "Color Your Own Still Life Paintings (Dover Art Coloring Book)", "author": "Marty Noble", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Arts, Music & Photography"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 86.43}, {"asin": "048623908X", "title": "The Victorian House Coloring Book", "author": "Daniel Lewis", "description": "From the Back Cover Open this book and you'll soon find yourself immersed in the wonderful gingerbread world of Victorian architecture and interior design. From a nostalgic introduction by John Philip Sousa III to the charming original illustrations of Daniel Lewis, The Victorian House Coloring Book invites children and colorists to re-create the furnishings, color schemes, and rich decorations of a lovely Victorian home.Comprising a complete household tour, these beautifully authentic illustrations depict the exterior, attic, front hallway, parlor, library, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom (including a water closet), and basement. In addition, a delightful double-page spread shows the garden with a gazebo.Typical of Victorian-era house, which often combined several architectural styles, the house shown here blends a simple Italianate exterior with such Second Empire features as a mansard roof and dormer windows. Other styles often featured in such homes include Queen Anne and Romanesque revivals, Carpenter Gothic and Stick, and Eastlake.A well-researched and informative text by Kristin Helberg accompanies each illustration, commenting on furnishings and architectural details and providing insight into the historical background and everyday life of the era. Dollhouse buffs, who consistently prefer the Victorian style to all others, will welcome this handsome book, while designers and illustrators will be especially pleased that all the illustrations are royalty free.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Activities, Crafts & Games"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 4.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0058OJ428", "title": "Grave Situation (Detective Allan Stanton Book 1)", "author": "Alex MacLean", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1111306915", "title": "Workbook for Milady Standard Esthetics: Fundamentals", "author": "Joel Gerson", "description": "About the Author The Premier Source for Education Resources in Cosmetology, Esthetics, Barbering, Nail Technology, Makeup, Massage Therapy, Salon & Spa Management and Business Training. Serving the Beauty and Wellness Industry since 1927.", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 21.85}, {"asin": "099609993X", "title": "Have You Filled a Bucket Today? (Bucketfilling Books)", "author": "Carol McCloud", "description": "Review \"Children are not the only ones that need to learn how to be truly happy. It's all in the bucket, that invisible bucket that follows you everywhere. . . teaches young readers valuable lessons about giving, sharing, and caring. This guide to daily happiness, though, is not just for kids. We all need reminders of the benefits of positive thinking and positive behavior. It's an important lesson to teach and remind us all . . . that showing kindness and appreciation of others goes a long way to making this world a happier place for everyone, including ourselves. A classic tale, beautifully told and beautifully shared.\" - Emily-Jane Hills Orford, Readers' Favorite Book Reviews From the Author This book was first published in 2006 to teach young children, primarily ages 4-9, how to be bucket fillers. Since then, bucket filling has spread around the world to help millions of people of all ages have happier and more rewarding lives. In this revised and updated edition, the verbs \"bucket dipping\" and \"bullying\" have replaced the nouns \"bucket dipper\" and \"bully\" to help readers understand that \"bucket dipping\" and \"bullying\" are negative behaviors (what we are doing) and not permanent labels (who we are). Readers will also learn that you can fill or dip into your own bucket.I first learned about bucket filling in a seminar for early childhood educators in the 1990s. The speaker, a brain research expert,said it is helpful to think of every person as being born with an invisible bucket. The bucket represents a person's mental and emotional health. You can't see the bucket, but it's there. She said that it is primarily the responsibility of parents and other caregivers to fill a child's bucket. When you hold, caress, nurture, touch, sing, play, and provide loving attention, safety, and care, you fill a child's bucket. Giving that love is filling buckets.In addition to being loved, children must also be taught how to love others. Children who learn how to express kindness and love lead happier lives. When you care about others and show that love by what you say and do, you feel good and you fill your own bucket, too.As you read this book with children, use it as an opportunity to model this concept by filling their buckets. Tell them why they are special to you. Help them imagine whose bucket they might fill and what they could say or do to fill a bucket. Tell them whose bucket you filled that day. Practice with them to become daily bucket fillers. Very quickly they will experience the pride and joy of filling buckets.Learn more about bucket filling through our website, bucketfillers101.com, and be sure to sign up for our free e-newsletter,BUCKET FILLOSOPHY\u00ae 101. Keep filling buckets and your bucket will always be full. From the Back Cover This heartwarming book encourages positive behavior by using the concept of an invisible bucket to show children how easy and rewarding it is to express kindness, appreciation and love by \"filling buckets.Updated and revised, this 10th anniversary edition will help readers better understand that \"bucket dipping\" is a negative behavior, not a permanent label. It also explains that it's possible to fill or dip into our own buckets. For more information on bucket filling and free downloadables and resources, visit bucketfillers101.com. About the Author Carol McCloud, the \"Bucket Lady,\" is the author of ten books, which began with the ever-popular Have You Filled a Bucket Today? A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids in 2006. By trade, Carol is a speaker, author, and certified emotional intelligence trainer. Her books have sold nearly three million copies in English and have been translated into many different languages. A champion for bucket filling, Carol works with a powerful team who strive to help all ages grow in kindness, self-control, resilience, and forgiveness, all leading to a happier life. For more information, visit bucketfillers101.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.95}, {"asin": "1630588970", "title": "Covered Bridge Charm", "author": "Dianne L. Christner", "description": "Review \"Uncertainty merges with tenacity in a story of resourcefulness to bring joy to one lonely heart while spilling love across the pages in the process. Readers caring for aging friends and family will spot themselves in the fervent quest to solve the mystery and uncover delight.\" -Olivia Newport, author of Amish Turns of Time historical fictionChristner\u2019s (\u201cPlain City Bridesmaids\u201d series) well-crafted, small-town setting and endearingly quirky characters will engage fans of Amish fiction, particularly those who like Margaret Brownley. Readers in search of an enchanting romance will enjoy following the blossoming relationship between Carly and Adam. \u2015 Library Journal Published On: 2016-02-01Carly is a fun protagonist that readers quickly fall for. Her quirky, strong willed character is a breath of fresh air, and her compassion is endearing. The relationship she has with Adam Lapp is both humorous and frustrating, and while readers root for them to end up together, the \u00a0novel is not predictable enough to know if that is what is going to happen. Overall a quick, lovely novel that leaves readers with a smile. -- Sarah Frobisher \u2015 RT Book Reviews Published On: 2016-03-01 Fans of Christian Amish romance fiction will like Christner\u2019s entertaining, light love story mixed with a heartwarming subplot that effectually reveals real-life aging issues some elderly experience. -- Nancy Kanafani \u2015 CBA Retailers+Resources Published On: 2016-03-01 Book Description Carly Blosser may not match the typical description of a conservative Mennonite woman--unmarried at 27, living alone, and careening around her Oregon neighborhood on a pink bicycle--but she has a soft heart for the elderly Mennonite residents at the assisted living facility, where she works as a caregiver. Carly focuses on one lonely resident named Martha and decides to reunite her with an old flame by her 85th birthday. Soon, new clues sweep Carly in a harried race to the finish line where love is sure to be the ultimate prize. About the Author DIANNE CHRISTNER lives in New River, Arizona, where life sizzles in the summer when temperatures soar above 100 degrees as she writes from her air-conditioned home office. She enjoys the desert life, where her home is nestled in the mountains and she can watch quail and the occasional deer, bobcat, or roadrunner.\u00a0\u00a0 Dianne was raised Mennonite and works hard to bring authenticity to Mennonite fiction. She now worships at a community church. She\u2019s written over a dozen novels, most of which are historical fiction. She gets caught up in research having to set her alarm to remember to switch the laundry or start dinner. But her husband of forty-plus years is a good sport. They have two married children, Mike and Rachel, and five grandchildren, Makaila, Elijah, Vanson, Ethan, and Chloe.\u00a0 She welcomes you to visit her website at http://www.diannechristner.net Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 6.0}], "target_asin": "B0058OJ428"}
{"user_id": "AFHFTNV5NI7DNU4UGH7OALGJP2GA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0849943744", "title": "Life Support (Santee, Book 1)", "author": "Robert Whitlow", "description": "About the Author Robert Whitlow is the bestselling author of legal novels set in the South and winner of the Christy Award for Contemporary Fiction. He received his JD with honors from the University of Georgia School of Law where he served on the staff of the Georgia Law Review. Website: robertwhitlow.com; Twitter: @whitlowwriter; Facebook: robertwhitlowbooks.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.89}, {"asin": "B00CKX9P7E", "title": "A Hopeful Heart (Hearts of the Lancaster Grand Hotel Book 1)", "author": "Amy Clipston", "description": "Review \u201cClipston\u2019s series starter has a compelling drama involving faith, family and romance. Hannah\u2019s dilemma will speak to many who have struggled with religious beliefs, and her daughter Amanda\u2019s interest in leaving the Amish community for a career as a veterinarian opens doors for more engaging storylines to come in this absorbing series.\u201d -- Romantic Times TOP PICK! --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Amy Clipston is the award-winning, bestselling author of many novels, including the Kauffman Amish Bakery series and the Hearts of the Lancaster Grand Hotel books. Amy holds a degree in communication from Virginia Wesleyan College and works full-time for the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Visit her at amyclipston.com.Amy Melissa Bentley is a professional stage and screen actress. A member of SAG-AFTRA, she has performed in Scotland, New York City, and throughout Connecticut. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B00BK0XH2M", "title": "Love in Bloom: A Fresh-Start Family Romance (The Heart of Main Street Book 1)", "author": "Arlene James", "description": "About the Author Author of more than 90 books, including the Chatam House and Prodigal Ranch series, from Love Inspired, with listing at www.arlenejames.com and www.chatamhouseseries.com. Can be reached at POB 5582, Bella Vista, AR 72714 or deararlenejames@gmail.com . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The pavement outside the Kansas City Airport radiated heat even though the sun had already sunk below the horizon. Tate held his nearly eight-year-old daughter's hand a little tighter and resisted the urge to shake out his long legs and hurry along as they crossed the traffic lane to the sidewalk. He pushed back the brim of his straw cowboy hat and squinted against the dying sunshine to read the signs hanging overhead.\"That's it down there,\" he said, pointing. \"Baggage Claim A.\"They hurried in that direction, Isabella skipping ahead. The hem was coming down on the back side of her favorite purple T-shirt. He'd have to ask his mom to buy her a new one to match the embroidery on her favorite pair of jeans. Meanwhile Ms. Lily Farnsworth would just have to excuse his daughter's attire, as well as his lateness. And the heat.Lifting his hat, he mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. The first day of July had dawned hot and clear. He hoped that Ms. Farnsworth, being from Boston, was prepared for what she would find here in Kansas.Lily Farnsworth was the last of six new business owners to arrive, each selected by the Save Our Streets Committee, dubbed the SOS, of the town of Bygones. As a member of the committee, Tate had been asked to meet her at the airport in Kansas City, transport her to Bygones and act as her official host and contact. With the Grand Opening just a week away, most of the shop owners had been at work preparing their stores for some time already, but Ms. Farnsworth had delayed until after her sister's wedding, assuring the committee that a florist's shop required less preparation than some retail businesses. Tate hoped she was right.He still wasn't convinced that this scheme, financed by a mysterious, anonymous donor, would work. But if something didn't revive the financial fortunes of Bygones\u2014and soon\u2014their small town would become just another ghost town on the north central plains. Tate thought of the school where he had met his late wife and of the cemetery where he had buried her nearly eight years ago, and he ached to think of those places abandoned and forgotten, so he would do what he could to revive the community.Isabella stopped before the automatic doors and waited for him to catch up. He did so quickly, and they entered the cool building together. A pair of gleaming luggage carousels occupied the open space, both vacant. A few people milled about. Some wore uniforms of one sort or another; most just seemed to be waiting. One, a tall, slender, pretty woman with long blond hair and round tortoiseshell glasses, perched atop a veritable mountain of luggage. She wore black ballet slippers and white knit leggings beneath a gossamery blue dress with fluttery sleeves and hems. Her very long hair parted in the middle and waved about her face and shoulders. As he watched, she gathered that pale gold hair in slim-fingered hands with tiny knuckles, twisted it into a long rope and pulled it over one shoulder. Her gaze touched his then skittered away. He felt the insane urge to look closer, behind the lenses of those glasses that gave her a calm, intelligent air, but of course, he would not.For one thing, Tate Bronson did not interest himself in attractive women. For another, that could not be Lily Farnsworth. Lily Farnsworth was a florist from Boston, not a blonde\u2014he glanced back at the woman seated on the baggage\u2014with the air of a ballet dancer and librarian combined. He turned away, the better to resist the urge to stare, and scanned the building for anyone who might be his florist. Maybe he should have made a sign; but then, he wasn't a limo driver. He was a rancher and farmer trying to help keep his town from dying a slow, certain death. He'd have felt like an idiot standing there with a hand-lettered sign.One by one the possibilities faded away, greeted by others or disappearing on their own. Finally Isabella gave him that look that said Dad, you're being a goof again. She slipped her little hand into his, and he sighed inwardly. Of course the pretty blonde was not a ballet dancer or librarian at all. And she'd packed up half of Boston to bring with her. Even with the long-bed pickup truck out there in the parking lot, a good number of those suitcases and boxes would have to go into the backseat with Isabella. So, an idiot with or without the sign. Great. Turning, he walked the few yards to the luggage mountain and swept off his straw cowboy hat.\"Are you Lily Farnsworth by any chance?\"A slender forefinger with a blunt tip and a knuckle so delicate it seemed made of paste came up to push those round glasses more firmly onto a nose as straight and fine as a blade. She nodded just once and rose, brushing at her filmy skirt, a clear blue like the darkly fringed eyes behind the lenses of her glasses. Her ivory-pink skin, completely devoid of cosmetics, showed a sprinkling of freckles across cheeks that bunched into pale apples when she smiled\u2014and what a smile it was. She had perfect lips, wide and mobile, not too thin and not too thick, a luscious natural dusty pink against blindingly white, even teeth. A square-tipped chin on an oval face completed the picture.\"I'm Lily,\" she said in a voice as gossamery as her skirts. \"You must be Tate Bronson. What a pleasure it is to meet you. I was expecting a grizzled old rancher, not a handsome, young\u2026well\u2026\"She bowed her head, her blond hair flowing forward to hide her reddening face. Tate frowned, not at all liking the way his heart sped up. Yep, no sign needed. He was perfectly capable of behaving like an idiot without any props.Looking down at her comfortable flat slippers, Lily willed away the color swamping her face. Honestly, she'd gotten over this awkwardness long ago. Hadn't she? If only she hadn't been staring at him all this time, she'd have had more control of her tongue. That and fatigue had gotten the better of her. To get the best price, she'd flown from Boston to Atlanta to Kansas City, which had made for a long day. Suddenly she wished she'd taken more pains with her appearance, but why bother when she was so tall and thin and wore glasses? Men generally failed to notice her at all, and when they did, they treated her like their sisters or their maiden aunts. This one would barely even look at her. No doubt his wife was the next thing to a fashion model. A man as attractive as him would naturally marry a woman like that.Tall and muscular, with thick, dark brown hair worn so short that the circular cowlicks at his crown and the center of his forehead were clearly visible, he had smooth features and warm brown eyes in a squarish face marked by dimples even when he wasn't smiling. Given the thickness of his hair, his brows seemed surprisingly slender, and if he had a fault then it was the thinness of his lips. Or was that simply his frown?The little redheaded imp with him seemed undeterred by his scowl. She skipped forward and put out a chubby hand. \"Hi! I'm Isabella. I'm seven, almost eight. How old are you?\"\"Isabella,\" Tate Bronson scolded. \"You don't ask a lady her age.\"\"Why not? I'm a lady, and I told her mine.\"\"I'm sorry,\" Bronson apologized, his frown softening. He really was quite attractive, especially when he wasn't frowning. \"My daughter is looking forward to her birthday later this month, but that's no excuse for her being rude.\"\"That's all right,\" Lily said with a smile. Switching her gaze to the girl, Lily bent forward. \"It's a pleasure to meet you, Isabella.\" Dropping her voice to a stage whisper, she confessed, \"I turned twenty-seven on May Day.\"Isabella cut her blue-eyed glance up at her father, drawling, \"Twenty-seven's good. Daddy's twenty-seven. His birthday's in September. Then he'll be twenty-eight.\"Lily felt a jolt of surprise. Twenty-eight with an eight-year-old. That made him a very young father.Tate made an impatient sound and said, \"Can we get going, please? We have a long drive ahead of us.\"\"Oh, of course,\" Lily said apologetically, gathering her voluminous handbag and backpack. She slung one over each shoulder, stacked two of the smaller boxes atop one of the larger wheeled bags and prepared to haul out the lot.\"Wait,\" Tate said. \"Let's do this with some organization.\"Feeling chastised, Lily ducked her head, her long hair sliding forward. \"Okay. Uh, what would you suggest?\"He pulled up the handle on one of the smaller wheeled bags and handed it to Isabella, then tossed a box onto his shoulder and snagged the handle of the larger bag from Lily, saying, \"Wait here with the rest. We'll take out these and be back.\"Lily bit back a protest. Those were vases and other glass items balanced on his shoulder, going-away gifts from her friends in Boston, things to help her get started in Bygones. Her former employer and coworkers knew how carefully she had budgeted to make this plan feasible, even selling her beloved car to raise the necessary funds to match the grant and choosing a shop with living quarters above it to cut expenses. She had packed those particular items carefully for shipping and sent them ahead of her to be collected when she arrived at the airport; she supposed they would survive Tate Bronson, so she bit her lip and watched him walk away without saying a word. His daughter followed him, her long red curls bouncing merrily. Lily noticed idly that the hem of the child's purple T-shirt had come down, but her mind was too preoccupied with her new venture to assign any significance to that fact.While helping her sister pick out flowers for her upcoming wedding, the florist, a former employer of Lily's, had surreptitiously handed her a newspaper article about a place in Kansas taking applications for matching grants for businesses willing to locate in the small town of Bygones. The applicants had to submit a business plan, deposit funds equal to the amount of the requested grant, agree to hire locals and complete a minimum two-year residency. Failure to maintain the required residency and keep the business in operation would constitute a default, in which case, the grant would have to be repaid within five years. Knowing that Lily hated what she was currently doing for a living and much preferred the work that she'd done while attending college and graduate school\u2014namely, floral design\u2014this friend and former employer had encouraged Lily to apply for one of the grants.Lily had considered it answered prayer when she had been chosen as one of the grant recipients, but she hadn't told her family of her plans until the last moment. They had not taken it well. She couldn't blame them.It was one thing to find a nail in one's soup; it was another when that nail swam to the top of the bowl and climbed out. Lily was now the only florist in a family of lawyers. Oh, she had the degree and the law license, but she was not, strictly speaking, a lawyer, at least not anymore. Now she was a florist, which meant that it was door-die for her here in Kansas.Everything depended on making this work. Lily had staked everything on this scheme. Should she fail in Bygones, she would be buried in debt, and returning to her former occupation would be her only alternative, even if she wasn't very good at it. Worse, it would mean returning home to the bosom of her family, and that she did not want under any circumstances but especially not in defeat. If she was to be the maiden aunt to her sister's children, she would be so at a distance with a successful business to occupy her time and mind. She would not hang around Boston, pretending she wasn't miserable and envious, while her sister and new brother-in-law started their family, something they were eager to do.No, it was bad enough that her sister had married the man whom Lily had wanted for herself. Lily didn't have to stick around and watch them have babies, not when she so wanted babies, too. If she couldn't have a family of her own, Lily would do whatever it took to build a successful business in Bygones. That included, she reminded herself as Tate Bronson and his adorable daughter moved toward her once more, those things that went against her nature, such as speaking up. So, as he bent to take up another of her boxes, she found her voice.\"Uh, if you\u2026if you could be careful.\"He gave her such a look, as if she were an inanimate object suddenly come to life, but he took great care stacking the boxes and hoisting them onto his shoulders. He then turned and walked away without a word. Isabella took up her backpack, chattering.\"I'll have to sit in the corner, but it's okay. I don't mind. Daddy shoulda left the bags of feed at home. He didn't figure you'd have so much stuff.\"\"I see,\" Lily muttered. She quickly took the backpack from Isabella and shouldered it once more, then pulled up the handle on one of the medium bags. \"Think you can handle that?\"\"Uh-huh.\"Using both hands, Isabella began pulling the bag toward the door. Lily stacked the remaining two boxes atop the remaining suitcase and, also using both hands, began backing toward the door. They made the sidewalk before Tate returned to scoop up boxes and bags.\"Come on.\"Lily tried to explain herself as they crossed the street and trailed across the parking lot. \"I, um, looked into standard shipping, but it was cheaper to check some things as luggage and send the rest as air freight, and this way I have it all on hand when I arrive. I\u2014I'm sorry I didn't think to warn anyone that I would have extra luggage.\"He shrugged. \"Part of my responsibilities.\"\"Do you mind if I ask what your responsibilities are, I mean, so far as I'm concerned?\"\"Get you there. Make sure you get set up in time for the Grand Opening.\"\"Very good. I appreciate that.\"He seemed to thaw a bit then. \"I'm your official contact with the committee and your host, at least through the Grand Opening reception.\"\"Oh. All right. That's nice. Thank you.\"\"No problem. When you're ready to hire help, I'll have a list of names for you, too.\"\"Ah. That will be useful.\"\"When do you think you'll be ready to hire someone, by the way?\"\"Um, soon after the Grand Opening, I should think.\"\"I see.\"\"That is, if it's successful.\"\"The town's done its part,\" he told her.\"That's good to know. What can you tell me about the town? I mean, beyond the statistics.\"He seemed to consider for a moment before saying, \"Nothing much to tell.\" Lily's spirits sagged. She was tired and uncertain and hoping for a warm welcome, not this terse, tepid greeting. \"You'll see soon enough,\" he added, stopping next to a dirty white double-cab pickup truck. He placed one of the boxes in the bed of the truck. Lily took a deep breath.\"Um, do you.do you think we could put those boxes inside?\"He turned a surprised look on her. \"You want those particular boxes inside, not the suitcases?\"\"What's in the boxes is more valuable,\" she said, pushing up her glasses.He lifted his eyebrows. \"Okay. If that's the way you want it.\"\"Yes, thank you,\" she replied softly.He reached into his pocket and an electronic beep sounded. He opened the back door of the cab and wrestled the big suitcase to the ground then transferred boxes to the inside. It took some shifting around, but they finally got everything loaded. As soon as they were all belted into their seats, Tate behind the wheel, Lily on the front passenger side and Isabella in a booster seat behind Lily in the back, Isabella spoke up.\"Daddy got on the SOS 'cause we're Bronsons.\"\"SOS?\"\"It's short for Save Our Streets,\" he explained, starting the engine. \"That's the name of the committee that chose the businesses that got the grants.\"\"Yes, I remember reading that in the paperwork, but what does being Bronsons have to do with it?\"\"Bronsons founded the town,\" he answered brusquely.\"They were brothers,\" Isabella volunteered, \"and one of 'em runned off with the other one's sweetheart, so they hated each other.\"\"Oh, dear,\" Lily murmured.\"They got over it,\" Tate stated matter-of-factly, and that was that.Lily sighed mentally. She'd imagined a sweet little town, pulling together to do something grand, not feuding founders and \"nothing much to tell.\"Suddenly Isabella piped up from the backseat again. \"Are you married?\"\"What? Uh. No.\"\"Daddy's not married, either.\"So, no fashion model wife then. That explained the falling-down hem on Isabella's T-shirt. No conscientious mother would let such a pretty little girl go out with the hem coming down on her T-shirt, or so Lily imagined. A single father, now, he probably wouldn't even notice such a thing. While Lily wondered about Isabella's mother, Isabella wondered about other things, and she wasn't the least bit shy in letting Lily know.\"Have you got a boyfriend?\"\"Isabella!\" Tate barked.Lily cringed. \"No, I don't have a boyfriend, either.\"\"How come?\"\"Well, I\u2014I just.\" Lily felt her face heat.\"Don't you want to get married and have children?\" My, what a direct child. \"Y-yes. Very much.\"\"Do you like babies? I like babies.\"\"I love babies.\"\"My friend Bonnie has a baby sister. I want a baby sister.\"Lily shot a glance at Tate Bronson, who was not married. Perhaps he and Isabella's mother were divorced, and his ex-wife had remarried, and Isabella was hoping for a baby sister from that quarter. If so, that might explain the granitelike tightness of Tate's profile just then.\"Isabella, that's enough!\" Tate ordered. \"You pipe down now.\"\"Okay, Daddy.\"\"I mean it. Not another word.\"\"Yes, sir.\"Lily sank down in her seat, feeling the undercurrents swirl around her. She didn't know Tate Bronson's story, but she knew her own.Didn't she want to get married and have children? Oh, yes. Very much. But that wasn't likely when she didn't even have a boyfriend, when she hadn't ever had a boyfriend. And why was that? Wasn't it obvious? Painfully obvious, she imagined, at least to Tate. Maybe not to his precocious daughter.She just wasn't the sort men noticed or in which they developed interest. She'd had ample proof of that already. She didn't need any more, not from Tate Bronson or anyone else.Lily turned her unseeing gaze out the quickly darkening window and prayed that she hadn't made a horrible mistake in coming to Kansas. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0718039505", "title": "Jesus Always, Padded Hardcover, with Scripture References: Embracing Joy in His Presence (a 365-Day Devotional)", "author": "Sarah Young", "description": "About the Author Sarah Young, author of the bestselling 365-day devotionals Jesus Calling and Jesus Listens , has sold more than 40 million books worldwide. Jesus Calling has appeared on all major bestseller lists. Sarah's writings include Jesus Calling , Jesus Listens , Jesus Always , Jesus Today , Jesus Lives , Dear Jesus , Jesus Calling for Little Ones , Jesus Calling Bible Storybook, Jesus Calling: 365 Devotions for Kids , Peace in His Presence , and more, each encouraging readers in their journeys toward intimacy with Christ. Sarah and her husband were missionaries in Japan and Australia for many years. They currently live in the United States. Sarah enjoys praying daily for readers of all her books. Connect with Sarah at: Facebook.com/JesusCalling Instagram.com/JesusCalling Youtube.com/jesuscallingbook Pinterest.com/Jesus_Calling Twitter.com/Jesus_Calling", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Bible Study & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "0849943752", "title": "Life Everlasting (Santee, Book 2)", "author": "Robert Whitlow", "description": "From Publishers Weekly Fans who missed Whitlow's Life Support will want to read that novel before attempting this sequel, which has strong moments but may be confusing to the uninitiated. Divorce lawyer Alexia \"Alex\" Lindale finds herself doubling as a criminal defense attorney for Rena Richardson, a perfidious client who keeps changing her story about how her wealthy husband came to fall from a cliff. Meanwhile, the husband begins to emerge from his coma due to the healing power of prayer and music\u2014a recovery that terrifies Rena, who fears that he will soon be able to tell the truth about his accident. The novel offers a well-honed subplot about Alex's growing Christian faith and her attraction to the pianist who first introduced her to God, as well as interesting courtroom drama and lovely ruminations on music and nature. However, the plot threads aren't as tight or the twists as surprising as readers have come to expect from the Christy-winning Whitlow, and the ending fizzles. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Robert Whitlow is the bestselling author of legal novels set in the South and winner of the Christy Award for Contemporary Fiction. He received his JD with honors from the University of Georgia School of Law where he served on the staff of the Georgia Law Review. Website: robertwhitlow.com; Twitter: @whitlowwriter; Facebook: robertwhitlowbooks. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One The light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not .--John 1:5 kjv Baxter Richardson opened his eyes. He didn't know where he was or how he had gotten there, but the pale white ceiling pushed aside the impenetrable darkness that had threatened to engulf him. He lay still, not yet aware that he couldn't do anything else. He heard a woman singing. With the sound came a memory. He closed his eyes. Music had rescued him from the abyss and guided him through the black mist. Without the music, he would never have found his way to the light. He opened his mouth to speak, to ask a question of the singing voice. But all that came out was a groan. The singing voice stopped. A speaking voice replaced it. \"Mr. Richardson, I'm Sarah Locklear, one of the nurses taking care of you. Can you hear me?\" Baxter tried to open his eyes a second time, but they refused to obey. \"Mr. Richardson,\" the voice repeated. \"You're at home in Santee in the cottage next door to your house. Your wife is there now. Do you want me to get her?\" The darkness reappeared. The young man fought to drive it back. \"Did you hear the music?\" Baxter watched in terror as the darkness grew until it met over his head like a great black bowl. \"If you can hear me, make a sound.\" Baxter moaned in agony of soul. The circle of darkness was complete, and the sides began to move slowly, inexorably, downward. Once the inky gloom enveloped him, he knew he would be dead. Lower and lower it came. He gasped for breath. \"Praise God!\" the voice said. \"Thank you, Jesus.\" The darkness moved to within inches of Baxter's face and stopped, an invisible force held at bay by an unseen power. The singing voice returned. The stalemate continued. But as the voice grew stronger, tiny flashes of light began to streak across the dark like shooting stars, glimmers of hope in a hopeless world. Baxter listened. The melody rose to a higher place. The pinpoints of light increased. Their flickering glory didn't fade. Baxter took a deep breath. ---- Rena Richardson rolled over in bed and opened her eyes. Her hair had fallen over her face, and when she looked sleepily toward the bedroom door, she mistook the man standing there for a few strands of blonde hair twisted together. She brushed the hair from her face. The figure remained. She jerked awake and sat up. \"Who is it?\" she called out, her voice echoing in the large bedroom. She reached for the nightstand drawer. The man stayed in the shadows without moving. Rena opened the drawer and felt the cool barrel of the pistol. She grabbed the gun. Her voice trembled. \"I have a gun!\" The man didn't move or speak. Rena pointed the pistol, but her hand shook so badly she wasn't sure she could hit the doorway, much less an intruder half hidden in the shadows. The man still refused to budge. Rena squinted and rubbed her eyes with her left hand. Suspicion surfaced. Still holding the gun, she reached over and turned on a small lamp. The dim beam barely reached across the room to the door, but there was no mistaking the identity of her visitor. Baxter. Rena collapsed back onto the pillow for a moment and shut her eyes before bouncing up for another look. \"Are you still there?\" she asked peevishly. The figure continued to stare at her impassively. \"You know, if you would talk, it would make everything more realistic,\" she said. Usually her husband left at the sound of her voice. \"What do you want from me? I don't have anything for you!\" The figure stayed put. \"Why don't you die and get a life?\" Rena yelled. The incongruity of her question struck her as funny. She gave a short laugh. \"That's it!\" she called out. \"Get a life!\" Rena threw off the covers and stood. She'd had enough. Always before, her husband had disappeared when confronted. If need be, she would put her fist through his face to prove him false. She glanced down at the floor to retrieve one of her satin slippers. When she looked up, Baxter was gone. She rushed to the hallway and turned on the light. Nothing. She went to the top of the stairs and looked down. Except for the usual nighttime creaks, the old house was deserted. \"And don't come back!\" she screamed. \"Do you hear me? Don't come back!\" ---- Alexia Lindale sat at the desk in her makeshift office typing the last few lines of a letter to the lawyer on the other side of a divorce case. Her phone buzzed. \"Alex, it's Rena Richardson,\" said the receptionist for the real-estate company where Alex was temporarily quartered. \"She says it's urgent.\" Everything with Rena was urgent. The transfer went through and Alex picked up the receiver. \"What is it?\" Rena's breathless voice held the twang of the Appalachian hills where she'd been raised. \"Jeffrey came to see me this morning. He gave me the information you need to sue his father for using the power of attorney to transfer property out of Baxter's name.\" \"What kind of information?\" \"Names of companies, how much Baxter owned before the accident, and the amount that he owns now.\" Alex picked up a folder from the stack of Richardson files on the corner of her desk. Inside was a copy of a durable power of attorney Baxter had signed at age eighteen giving his father, Ezra, absolute control over his personal and business affairs. \"Give them to me.\" Rena listed the names of the companies and percentages of ownership. Alex didn't recognize any of the entities. In a small town like Santee, the identity of every viable local business enterprise should be common knowledge. \"They're probably shell companies or subsidiaries of Richardson and Company set up for particular projects,\" Alex said. \"I don't know what you're talking about.\" The lawyer ran her fingers through her dark hair. \"I'm thinking out loud. I'll need you to fax Jeffrey's list to me. Did Jeffrey tell you why he is willing to sabotage his father?\" \"He wants to help me and thinks it's wrong what Ezra's doing to me and Baxter.\" Alex had heard this before, yet remained unconvinced of Jeffrey's altruism. Her client continued, \"And he still doesn't know that you know he's giving me information. He wrote down the names of several Richardson employees and said I should mention them if anyone asks how you found out what Ezra is doing.\" \"I'm not going to do that,\" Alex retorted. \"And I won't let you do it either. If you're questioned under oath about your sources, you'll have to tell the truth. Jeffrey can't hide behind you.\" \"You don't understand,\" Rena said. \"It's not like that. He wants to help me.\" Alex drew a small target in the margin of her legal pad and put Rena's initials in the bull's-eye. \"Why would Jeffrey turn on his father and risk so much to help a woman who married his brother only six months ago? How can you trust him?\" Rena's voice revealed a hint of panic. \"Don't argue with me. Just check out the information. I can't make Jeffrey . . .\" she stopped. \"Mad?\" Alex offered. \"What is going on, Rena?\" The phone was silent for a moment. \"It's not that,\" Rena answered in a calmer tone. \"It's best for me to cooperate with him. We can help each other. He doesn't think it will be necessary to go very far with a lawsuit before his father will back down. Then it won't be necessary to tell who gave us the information.\" \"I can't count on that,\" Alex said. \"And it's foolish to think that filing a lawsuit against someone as powerful as your father-in-law is going to scare him into doing the right thing. Using the power of attorney to transfer property from Baxter's name is technically legal, and it will take a court order to stop him. A judge won't do that without convincing evidence that Ezra is wielding the power of attorney as a weapon to defraud you.\" \"He backed down about the money he took from our checking account and returned it,\" Rena countered. \"True,\" Alex admitted. \"But that was only a few thousand dollars. How much do you think Baxter's share of these companies is worth? Did Jeffrey give you any idea?\" \"No, but he said he could get whatever you need. He just doesn't want to do anything that will ruin the businesses.\" \"How would making Ezra restore the status quo hurt the businesses?\" \"That's just what he told me.\" \"It's not good enough.\" \"Why are you giving me such a hard time? You're supposed to be helping me, not making everything more stressful than it already is.\" \"Okay,\" Alex said. \"Fax over the information, and I'll think about what to do.\" \"Will other people at your office see it? I'm sure Jeffrey doesn't want anyone else to know what he's doing.\" Alex sighed. \"If you promise to send it in the next five minutes, I'll stand by the fax machine and snatch it up before anyone else can read it.\" \"And when will you file suit?\" Rena asked. \"I want to do it as soon as possible.\" \"I'll call you.\" Alex hung up the phone and walked down the hallway to the small room that contained the fax and copy machines. In less than a minute, the fax machine began to spit out a single sheet of paper. Alex held it lightly in her fingers as it inched out of the machine. She glanced down at the list of companies. During the six years she worked at Leggitt & Freeman, Alex knew that Ezra Richardson had hired Ralph Leggitt to set up multiple companies and perform legal work in scores of business deals. Though Alex had avoided business law to focus on domestic litigation, she wasn't a total stranger to corporate structures. In divorce cases she often had to uncover information that businessmen concealed from their wives, and ferreting out key pieces of financial data was one of Alex's strengths. Many ex-husbands still bore the fiscal scars of the beatings she'd given them when they tried to hide assets. The lawyer took Jeffrey's list back to her office and put it in her briefcase. It was late afternoon, and a new investigation would have to wait. As she snapped her briefcase shut and entered the hallway, she almost collided with Rachel Downey, the startlingly blonde real-estate broker who owned the building. Rachel, a short, jolly woman with a penchant for multiple rings, was always ready for a chat. \"Glad I caught you,\" Rachel said. \"I drove by the house on King Street this afternoon. I'm even more convinced that it's going to make a great office for you. When is your contractor going to start the renovation?\" \"Soon. We were together this afternoon, but we didn't talk business.\" Rachel raised her eyebrows. \"Gwen Jones told me you were spending a lot of time with your contractor. Isn't he also some kind of minister?\" Alex smiled. \"Yes, he's the music minister at the Sandy Flats Church. What else did Gwen say?\" Rachel stepped closer. \"That she was going to leave Leggitt & Freeman as soon as your office is up and running. She's already picked out a secretarial desk and credenza.\" \"Well, keep that quiet. If one of the partners finds out, they'll fire her before I'm ready to start paying her.\" Rachel lowered her voice. \"Your plans are safe with me.\" Alex was less sure. Rachel continued. \"Tell me more about your music-loving contractor.\" Alex stepped back. \"There's not much to tell. He's a minister who plays the piano.\" \"And from what I've heard, he's quite a bit older than you are.\" \"He was in the seventh grade when I was born.\" Alex watched as Rachel quickly did the math in her head. \"With a daughter almost as old as you are,\" the Realtor added. \"She's in her early twenties, Rachel. I'm pushing past thirty-one.\" Rachel sniffed. \"A virtual old maid. I was already on my second husband by your age.\" Alex laughed. \"So, what's wrong with me trying to catch up? Don't you think it's about time I got married? I need at least a couple of husband scalps under my belt before I turn forty.\" Alex patted Rachel on the arm. \"And that's all the personal information you're prying out of me. The reason Ted and I were together today had to do with Baxter Richardson.\" Rachel raised her pencil-thin eyebrows. \"I didn't think the Richardson clan went to church.\" \"Sandy Flats is not their church. Ted asked me to go with him because I represent Rena and could get him in to see Baxter.\" Alex paused, not knowing how to explain to Rachel that Ted Morgan saw music as a form of prayer for a sick person. She wasn't sure about it herself. \"Is it true that Rena put Baxter in the cottage next door to their house?\" Rachel asked. \"Yes. They've turned it into a long-term care facility.\" \"How is he doing?\" \"No closer to waking up than the first time I saw him in ICU in Greenville. He's in a coma and paralyzed from the neck down. He's breathing on his own, but that's about it. His mental status is a mystery.\" Rachel shook her head. \"He's the best of the lot. I've brokered some deals with his father, but I had to watch him like a hawk, and Jeffrey is just as bad or worse. He tried to cheat me out of a commission but back-pedaled in a hurry when I caught him.\" Rachel's tongue could be smooth as soft butter when describing a house for sale, but she wouldn't hesitate to use it as a dagger if attacked or swindled. Jeffrey was wise to back down. \"If anybody else tries to take advantage of you, call me,\" Alex said. \"I'll write them a nasty letter.\" Rachel fluffed up her hair. \"That's okay. You did great work getting me out of my last huge marital mistake. I'll save you for the big problems.\" \"Then get a prenuptial agreement and don't fall for a guy just because he buys you rings.\" Rachel held up her hands and wiggled her bejeweled fingers. \"Don't worry, I've run out of room.\" \"Good.\" Rachel pointed to the lawyer's bare left hand and exclaimed as if making a grand discovery, \"Look, Alex, you've got plenty of space!\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "0842364471", "title": "The Substitute Guest (Grace Livingston Hill #20)", "author": "Grace Livingston Hill", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 17.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B007BBVD3Y", "title": "The Bull Rider's Baby (Cooper Creek Book 2)", "author": "Brenda Minton", "description": "About the Author Brenda Minton lives in the Ozarks. She's a wife, mom to three, foster mom to five and grandma to a princess. Life is chaotic but she enjoys every minute of it with her family and a few too many dogs. When not writing she's drinking coffee on the patio, wrangling kids or escaping for an evening out with her husband. Visit her online at www.brendaminton.net --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. When Keeton West entered Convenience Counts store at seven in the morning, Sophie Cooper was the last person he expected to see. But there she was, running down the sidewalk, brushing a hand through her shoulder-length auburn hair. Not really auburn, though. Her hair had always been dark brown. The hint of red probably came from a bottle, but he liked it. He even kind of liked her in a slim-fitting business suit, her high heels clicking on the floor as she walked through the door. She looked like an executive from some Tulsa high-rise office building, not the daughter of a wealthy rancher. She was a sleek and shiny European car in a world of pickup trucks. He grinned at that comparison and watched as she hurried through the glass door at the front of the store. He thought about approaching her, and then reconsidered. Exhaustion must be getting to him or it wouldn't have crossed his mind. For the past two nights he'd gotten almost no sleep. And then this morning he'd gotten up early to head into Dawson for a few necessities. The baby in his arms had insisted on the supplies. The problem was, he didn't know what things a baby required. She cried, that's about all he knew. And he knew in baby talk, crying meant something. Either she was hungry, needed changing or something else was wrong. At about two in the morning he started to think the last choice might be the correct one. After he gave her the last bottle he had, he was at a loss. A few hours later he found himself here, hiding from Sophie Cooper before he could ask the store's proprietor for baby advice. \"Hey, Sophie, what has you out so early in the morning?\" Trish Cramer leaned over the counter at the front of the store. She and her husband, Jimmy, had owned Convenience Counts for as long as Keeton could remember. And they'd always liked to keep tabs on what was happening in Dawson, Oklahoma. There wasn't a local paper, but the folks in Dawson had Jimmy and Trish. \"I'm just here to grab some breakfast.\" Sophie grinned at them. She had a smile that could knock a guy to the ground. She'd always been beautiful. The woman was even better than the girl she'd been years ago. If things had been different, she would have married his brother, been his sister-in-law. If everything hadn't changed on a June night sixteen years ago, that is. But it had changed. Nothing could undo that night. Keeton sighed and moved around the corner of the shelves he'd been standing in front of, out of the line of sight so that he wouldn't be the first thing Sophie saw when she turned his way. He peeked, though. Like a thirteen-year-old kid spying on cheerleaders when they'd stopped for a diet cola after practice. Yeah, he'd been that kid. And Trish had given him the eye then, the way she was now. \"You're working on a Saturday?\" Trish looked over the tops of her glasses. \"Do you need gas pumped?\" Jimmy came around the corner of the counter, wiping his hands on a rag. \"No, I filled up last night. I just need to grab breakfast and go.\" She stopped in front of the warming tray and eyed food that had been sitting under a heat lamp probably since the place opened an hour ago. Breakfast pizza and a few egg sandwiches. He'd grab something for himself, once he figured out what a three-month-old baby ate for breakfast. He looked down at the mysterious creature cuddled up against him. For once the baby wasn't crying. He had to stop thinking of her as \"the baby.\" She was his baby. Lucy. She cuddled into him, trusting, even after just a couple of days of knowing him. His baby. He shook his head, the way he'd been doing since his ex-wife had dropped Lucy with him. A baby hadn't been on his list of things to get. But he had her, and he couldn't imagine not having her. Although he could imagine getting a little more rest. He hoped sleep didn't turn out to be a thing of the past. \"Honey, you're always in a hurry.\" Trish had moved closer to Sophie. \"When are you going to settle down?\" \"No time for settling down, Trish. Work keeps me busy.\" Trish laughed at that. \"Well, that isn't going to keep you warm when the winters are long. You need a husband.\" Keeton nearly groaned because when Trish said \"husband\" she shot him a look over Sophie's right shoulder. He shushed the baby and repositioned her. Babies were heavy. He hadn't realized how heavy a twelve-pound bit of fluff and spit-up could be until he'd spent a full day hauling one around. \"I think I'll be fine. I've got a good furnace.\" Sophie answered Trish on the husband issue. \"I'll just grab something off the shelf.\" \"All of this hurrying isn't good for your digestion,\" Trish called out, the all-knowing voice of reason and common sense. \"Then I'll take a pack of those antacids you have behind the counter to go with whatever I buy.\" Keeton pulled his hat down low and grinned at the comeback. One thing about Sophie Cooper, she wasn't a wallflower. She'd slapped him once, years ago. He shook his head and reached for a jar of baby food because maybe Lucy needed more than bottles. When he got to the register, he'd ask Trish. Click click of heels. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Sophie hurried in his direction. With a single step he moved back to the end of the aisle. She stopped in front of the few breakfast items on the shelves, frowning as she surveyed the options. The baby in his arms whimpered. He bounced her a little, hoping to quiet her down. It had worked last night. He'd spent about an hour swaying back and forth in his living room, wishing he had real furniture and maybe the smarts to tackle his situation a little differently. Smart would have been not marrying Becka Janson because he felt sorry for her. She'd played him good. She'd found out his winnings, his earnings and how much he'd invested in Jeremy Hightree's custom motorcycle business and she'd latched on quick. At least he'd been smart enough for a prenup. The baby in his arms wiggled, squirmed and let out a real cry. Sophie Cooper turned, her hazel eyes widened as she zeroed in on him and the baby. A smile trembled on her lips and her gaze shifted from the baby to him. He tipped his hat and grinned, knowing charm and good looks weren't going to mean a thing to the woman standing in front of him. Her attention wasn't on him anyway. She looked at the baby, the coolness in her eyes softening, warming. Man, she hadn't changed much at all. She could still stop a guy in his tracks and make him forget what he wanted to say. \"Keeton West.\" Her voice shook a little. \"And a baby.\" He held the baby with one arm and cupped the two jars of food in his free hand. He knew his shirt had spit-up smeared on the shoulder and he hadn't shaved in three days. He couldn't think of a thing to say that wouldn't sound ridiculous. \"Me and a baby.\" Stupid. Pre-Lucy he would have winked and said something like \"It's been a long time.\" Or, \"Sophie, you're as beautiful as ever.\" Instead he jabbered like the infant in his arms and echoed her like a fifteen-year-old with his first crush. Actually, he knew fifteen-year-old boys who would have done better. If he'd had any sense at all he would have stayed in Broken Arrow. He had a nice little place on the edge of the city. But wanting his family land back\u2014that had been his driving force for as long as he could remember. He needed to remember that was his reason for being here. One thing stood between him and the biggest portion of that land. Sophie Cooper. She'd bought one hundred acres of land that used to be his family farm. She smiled at the baby, not at him. \"She's beautiful.\" Next time Sophie would listen to that little voice that told her to run in and get a breakfast sandwich from the Mad Cow. But no, she'd been in a hurry and thought the local convenience store would be quicker. Surprise, nothing was ever quick in Dawson. Or easy. People always managed to get in her business. If it wasn't her family it was one of the locals trying to find out what she'd been up to, or trying to find a way to marry her off. Today the problem happened to be Keeton West. She had one hour to get to a meeting in Grove and then she had her other project to work on. And Keeton West had something dripping down the front of his shirt, very close to where it was unbuttoned at the throat. Very close to the silver cross and chain that he wore around his very tan neck. She cleared her throat and stumbled back to the present. The main thing she didn't want to discuss with him was land she'd recently bought. The baby in his arms forced her to act, though. Maybe it had to do with being a Cooper. Or maybe she couldn't run from biology. Even if she didn't have children of her own. Was it her imagination or did she hear a very loud clock ticktocking in her ear? The baby spit up again. \"Keeton, she's sick.\" Sophie grabbed a role of paper towels off the shelf and ripped them open. \"Here, sweetie. Oh, that's awful stuff.\" Keeton West and a baby. She tried to connect dots and couldn't. She couldn't imagine him with a child. And yet.. She wiped the baby's chin. The infant had his nose. She had his brother Kade's nose. The thought ached deep down inside Sophie, in a place that had been broken and empty for a long time. It was the part of her heart that still missed Kade. Or what they might have had. Pudgy baby arms reached for her and big eyes overflowed with tears that trickled down the little girl's pink cheeks. Keeton held tight and Sophie put on a smile that said none of this hurt, none of it mattered. She had survived. She'd gotten past the pain of losing Kade. She was whole. \"Thank you.\" Keeton's voice was low and husky, his eyes sought hers. An... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0470603399", "title": "Real Estate Accounting Made Easy", "author": "Obioma Anthony Ebisike", "description": "From the Inside Flap Real Estate Accounting Made Easy For laypeople and accountants with little or no real estate accounting experience, Real Estate Accounting Made Easy is a complete and easy&#45;to&#45;use road map to a broad range of real estate account&#45; ing topics. Starting with an introduction to real estate terms and products, and the fundamentals of real estate accounting, this book goes from sole ownership&#151;the simplest form of real estate ownership &#151;to other forms of ownership such as partnerships, joint ventures, and real estate investment trusts &#40;REITs&#41;. Take a look inside for just&#45;the&#45;basics coverage of: Forms of real estate entities Forms of real estate entities Accounting for operating property revenues and expenses Accounting for operating property revenues and expenses Accounting for capital improvements and tenant inducements Accounting for capital improvements and tenant inducements Real estate valuation and investment analysis Real estate valuation and investment analysis Accounting for real estate investments and acquisition costs Accounting for real estate investments and acquisition costs Accounting for project development costs on GAAP basis Accounting for project development costs on GAAP basis More complex types of transactions, such as development project revenue recognition, are also discussed in depth. In addition, you'll learn what to expect from audits that real estate entities are subjected to, with audit processes and procedures broken down to help you&#151;whether you are an auditor, accountant, or manager&#151;to understand the roles and importance of audits. This how&#45;to guide offers a wealth of practical information for putting real estate accounting principles to work for your organization. It's the ins and outs of accounting for real estate&#151;made easy. From the Back Cover A hands-on guide to the ins and outs of real estate accounting\u2015made easy! Boiling down the complicated details of real estate accounting into manageable essentials, Real Estate Accounting Made Easy equips you with the tools you need to successfully run the financial and accounting operations within your organization. Always practical and never over-technical, this helpful guide: Discusses straightforward accounting terminology Discusses straightforward accounting terminology Clearly explains real estate accounting Clearly explains real estate accounting Covers the characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of entities in which real estate assets are held Covers the characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of entities in which real estate assets are held Equips you to understand the reporting entity Equips you to understand the reporting entity Helps you become conversant in various real estate accounting topics Helps you become conversant in various real estate accounting topics Author Obioma Anthony Ebisike,a leading authority on real estate accounting, offers workable information in basic terminology. Even if you do not have a professional grasp of accounting principles and financial reporting, this book makes it all clear with accounting rules explained in terms anyone can understand, to help you better fulfill your duties. Suitable for investors, analysts, accountants, and auditors, Real Estate Accounting Made Easy is your essential guide for a clear, concise explanation of real estate accounting finance. About the Author OBIOMA ANTHONY EBISIKE, CPA, MS, has over ten years' experience in the accounting industry, both in the audit and real estate fields. He is currently a controller at a New York-based inter- national real estate investment firm, and was a former audit and advisory services manager with Deloitte & Touche LLP. He has provided accounting training to his accounting and finance team and led discussions on the impact of emerging accounting rules and regulations. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 35.89}, {"asin": "1737818604", "title": "Pebbles and the Biggest Number: A STEM Adventure for Kids - Ages 4-8", "author": "Joey Benun", "description": "Review \"An excellent addition to any STEM bookshelf.\" \u2014BookLife by Publishers Weekly (Editor's Pick) \"Benun's engaging story will appeal to children of a variety of ages and levels of mathematical skills.\" \u2014Kirkus Reviews An informative picture book that packs an extraordinary amount of eye-opening information into the story of a curious butterfly. \u2014Foreword Reviews \"If I could recommend this book a nonillion times (check it out-a nonillion has 30 zeros!), I would!\" \u2014Feathered Quill Book Reviews \"With each page taking us to a completely different location, no two illustrations are very much alike. The variety of gorgeous scenery will keep readers anxious to turn each page.\" \u2014Independent Book Review \"Kids love counting, but not many counting books for young readers focus on the really BIG numbers in science and the natural world.\" \u2014The Children's Book Review \"Benun skillfully simplifies complex topics, weaving them into an approachable and entertaining storyline that only gets better with each reading.\" \u2014Indies Today \"It has all of the elements for adventure, masking the learning aspect and memorization making it 100% fun.\" \u2014Pacific Book Review (Notable Book Seal) \"Offers an impressive wealth of knowledge with numerous teachable moments for the parent to expand upon as their child grows. \u2014Reader Views Kids \"Colorful, approachable illustrations of friendly characters and a focus on fun facts help this picture book transcend its theme about numbers to one about discovering the world around you.\" \u2014BlueInk Review About the Author Joey Benun has always thought BIG. His fascination with numbers began when he was five years old\u2014the bigger, the better. Years later, a fortuitous conversation with his niece and nephews inspired him to write a book about BIG numbers for little kids. Thus, Pebbles and the Biggest Number was born! Years before Pebbles took flight, nine-year-old Joey wrote his first comic book series about a disgruntled ketchup packet who resents being discarded and turns into The Ketchup Monster .Today, Joey works and lives in Brooklyn, New York, as an Amazon account manager for his family-owned apparel business, The Bentex Group. During his free time, he enjoys engaging in religious studies, listening to TED Talks, and playing tennis.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "0977997308", "title": "Snow: The South Texas Christmas Miracle 2004", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 17.2}], "target_asin": "B007BBVD3Y"}
{"user_id": "AGLTM5FKO3CQMPW4UYRJ24X7DFHQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0983879257", "title": "nfld GUIDE of New York City - Map and Listings - Landmarks - Museums - Shopping - Restaurants", "author": "Alberto Michieli", "description": "About the Author Who we are A project started in Winter 2009 by group of designers, a creative from Venice who has already signed works for various international brands and sales people with experience in retail, analyzing the trends and sales request. The guide/maps created a new style, a unique product, conceived for giving a new kind of guide to business people, students, tourists and new residents. The graphic is very clean, the subways lines are embedded with the the streets for an easy navigation. The landmarks are highlighted. Please check our eBay store at masters to see feedback It has become the best seller in New York and Washington DC stores for 3 years in a row Retail is $6.90 Available in pocket size soon Don't waste energy and time using a gps phone with small screen that take forever to load where to go and present the Empire State Building same importance as next door Nail Salon We have Washington DC map and also London Made in USA Water resistant", "categories": ["Books", "Travel", "Food, Lodging & Transportation"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 4.9}, {"asin": "0810993228", "title": "The Fairy Tale Detectives (The Sisters Grimm, Book 1)", "author": "Michael Buckley", "description": "About the Author Michael Buckley is the author of the successful Sisters Grimm and NERDS series. He is also the author of the Undertow trilogy. He lives in New York City. Peter Ferguson is an illustrator of picture books, comic books, and novels. He lives in Montreal, Canada.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.97}, {"asin": "0983436215", "title": "The Day the Towers Fell: The Story of September 11, 2001", "author": "Maureen Crethan Santora", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 21.89}, {"asin": "0375838414", "title": "New York's Bravest", "author": "Mary Pope Osborne", "description": "From the Back Cover In the 1840s, there was a real vounteer firefighter named Mose Humphreys whose bravery was reknown throughout New York City. Plays about him began being performed on Broadway in 1848 and over the years his strength and heroics took on larger-than-life proportions, much like those of Paul Bunyan. Mary Pope Osborne has honed down the legends about him to a brief, dramatic, sometimes comical, but ultimately moving text of picture book length. Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher's stunning paintings capture this 8-foot-tall superhero rushing into burning buildings, saving babies and bankers, and wolfing down the feasts bestowed upon him by the grateful citizens of old New York-until the one big hotel fire after which he was never seen again. The author has included a historical note about the origins of this tall tale, and the book is dedicated to the 343 New York City firefighters who gave their lives to save others on September 11, 2001. Mary Pope Osborne included a longer, different version of this legend in her distinguished collection \"American Tall Tales. \"From the Hardcover edition. About the Author Mary Pope Osborne included a longer, different version of this legend in her distinguished collection American Tall Tales.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 7.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0316126446", "title": "The Jolly Postman", "author": "Janet Ahlberg", "description": "About the Author Husband and wife team Allan and Janet Ahlberg created many popular picture books for young readers, including the Jolly Postman series and Each Peach Pear Plum , which was awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal for distinguished illustration in the UK.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.29}, {"asin": "B09QFG531B", "title": "The House on Seventh Street", "author": "Joan McGlone", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "091625142X", "title": "Lagoon Time: Our Life and Times Among the Gray Whales of Laguna San Ignacio", "author": null, "description": "Review No one knows more about Laguna San Ignacio and its gray whales than Steven Swartz. This is the one book to take with you on a visit to the magical lagoon, or to read with longing to caress a whale if you haven't made the trip yet. - Homero Aridjis, Founder of Mexico\u2019s \u201cGroup of 100\u201d conservation organization. From the Inside Flap \"There are few places as magical as Laguna San Ignacio. Lagoon Time lets us experience this unique ecosystem through the eyes of the researchers that have studied it for decades and the hearts of the residents who protect it now and in the future.\" -- Bernardo Alps, Research Associate, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.\"The 'friendly gray whale' phenomenon is unlike any other interspecies communication in the world, and marine scientist Steven Swartz, Mary Lou Jones, and their colleagues have been documenting it for more than a generation. Follow his words and pictures into the lagoon, and be prepared for a mysterious and astonishing experience.\" -- Dick Russell, author of Eye of the Whale. About the Author Along with his wife and research partner, Mary Lou Jones, Steven conducted the first systematic studies of gray whales in Laguna San Ignacio from 1977 to 1982. He earned his Ph.D. in marine science in 1986 from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has researched and published widely on gray whales and their breeding lagoons in Baja California throughout his career. Steven edited and contributed to the classic Academic Press treatise \u201cThe Gray Whale\u201d with Mary Lou Jones and J. Stephen Leatherwood. He has been active in the Society for Marine Mammalogy as a Charter Member and elected officer. Steven has served as a consultant to the Mexican government\u2019s Ministry for the Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries (SEMARNAP), and worked for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission and the National Marine Fisheries Service. He continues to work with non-government organizations (NGOs) on various marine protected area conservation projects. With his colleague, Jorge Urban R., they established and co-directs the Laguna San Ignacio Ecosystem Science Program in Baja California, Sur, Mexico, to ensure that science-based information continues to be available to those responsible for conserving these unique marine protected areas, and to train future generations of marine wildlife scientists. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Biological Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "1511927585", "title": "Primary Motive", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 7.25}], "target_asin": "0316126446"}
{"user_id": "AE6MHNI5UZ5DUR6TGCOLA52NORFA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1623433371", "title": "Journey with the Orca 2015 Wall Calendar", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Our location in the Wisconsin northwoods helps keep Willow Creek Press off the publishing world's radar. Around here, we're more accustomed to landing walleyes and muskies than big books and authors - events hardly worthy of note in Publisher's Weekly. But, a few years ago we did get noticed with the release of Just Labs, a unique and colorful tribute to Labrador retrievers. The book quickly became a bestseller (now with 250,000 copies in print) and frankly startled us with its success. \u00a0 We were not surprised for long, however, and now an entire line of popular Willow Creek Press titles evokes the myriad joys of dog and cat ownership. Today we are known for these high-quality, light-hearted books and feature over 40 such titles in a continually-expanding line.", "categories": ["Books", "Calendars"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "0292752407", "title": "How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken", "author": "Alex Marshall", "description": "From Library Journal Marshall criticizes New Urbanism for being more about style than substance, but he acknowledges that the more it recognizes the hard truths of regional planning, the more it can become a positive force. A journalist by trade, Marshall writes with wit, reason, and style, effectively driving home his well-researched premise that cities exist and evolve based on transportation systems, the building of wealth, and government guidance or misguidance. He offers few solutions to current urban problems, setting his sights on enlightening the reader about why and how cities evolve. Marshall cites the human craving for simple solutions to complex problems and makes it clear that when people come together to plan a regional city consciously, as they have in Portland, OR, difficult choices must be made. [...] How Cities Work is very strongly recommended for both academic and public libraries as an excellent resource on the history and future of American cities. Drew Harrington, Pacific Univ., Forest Grove, OR Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review \"This is an outstanding book that I hope and expect will make a major contribution to the current debate on cities and suburbs.\" (Robert Fishman, author of American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy and Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia) Review This is an outstanding book that I hope and expect will make a major contribution to the current debate on cities and suburbs. -- Robert Fishman From the Back Cover DO CITIES WORK ANYMORE? How did they get to be such sprawling conglomerations of lookalike subdivisions, megafreeways, and \"big box\" superstores surrounded by acres of parking lots? And why, most of all, don't they feel like real communities? These are the questions that Alex Marshall tackles in this hard-hitting, highly readable look at what makes cities work. MARSHALL ARGUES that urban life has broken down because of our basic ignorance of the real forces that shape cities -- transportation systems, industry and business, and political decision making. He explores how these forces have built four very different urban environments -- the decentralized sprawl of California's Silicon Valley, the crowded streets of New York City's Jackson Heights neighborhood, the controlled growth of Portland, Oregon, and the stage-set facades of Disney's planned community, Celebration, Florida. To build better cities, Marshall asserts, we must understand and intelligently direct the forces that shape them. Without prescribing any one solution, he defines the key issues facing all concerned citizens who are trying to control urban sprawl and build real communities. His timely book will be important reading for a wide public and professional audience. About the Author A past Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Alex Marshall is a freelance journalist in New York City, who has written about urban design for the Washington Post, George, Metropolis, Planning, and other national publications. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 21.1}, {"asin": "159179238X", "title": "Getting Unstuck: Breaking Your Habitual Patterns and Encountering Naked Reality", "author": "Pema Chodron", "description": "Review \u201cCh\u00f6dr\u00f6n demonstrates how effective the Buddhist point of view can be in bringing order into disordered lives.\u201d \u2015Publishers Weekly About the Author Ani Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City. She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California. Pema has two children and three grandchildren. While in her mid-thirties, Ani Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years. She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London. His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to Scotland at that time, and Ani Pema received her ordination from him. Pema first met her root guru, Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1972. Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987. At the request of the Sixteenth Karmapa, she received the full bikshuni ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong. Ani Pema served as the director of Karma Dzong in Boulder, Colorado until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey. Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche gave her explicit instructions on establishing this monastery for western monks and nuns. Ani Pema currently teaches in the United States and Canada and plans for an increased amount of time in solitary retreat under the guidance of Venerable Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. She is also a student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the oldest son and lineage holder of Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Ani Pema is interested in helping establish Tibetan Buddhist monasticism in the West, as well as continuing her work with western Buddhists of all traditions, sharing ideas and teachings. Her non-profit, The Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n Foundation, was set up to assist in this purpose. She has written several books: The Wisdom of No Escape , Start Where You Are , When Things Fall Apart , The Places that Scare You , No Time To Lose , Practicing Peace in Times of War , How to Meditate , and Living Beautifully . All are available from Shambhala Publications and Sounds True.Ani Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in 1936, in New York City. She attended Miss Porter's School in Connecticut and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught as an elementary school teacher for many years in both New Mexico and California. Pema has two children and three grandchildren.While in her mid-thirties, Ani Pema traveled to the French Alps and encountered Lama Chime Rinpoche, with whom she studied for several years. She became a novice nun in 1974 while studying with Lama Chime in London. His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa came to Scotland at that time, and Ani Pema received her ordination from him.Pema first met her root guru, Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in 1972. Lama Chime encouraged her to work with Rinpoche, and it was with him that she ultimately made her most profound connection, studying with him from 1974 until his death in 1987. At the request of the Sixteenth Karmapa, she received the full bikshuni ordination in the Chinese lineage of Buddhism in 1981 in Hong Kong.Ani Pema served as the director of Karma Dzong in Boulder, Colorado until moving in 1984 to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to be the director of Gampo Abbey. Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche gave her explicit instructions on establishing this monastery for western monks and nuns.Ani Pema currently teaches in the United States and Canada and plans for an increased amount of time in solitary retreat under the guidance of Venerable Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche. She is also a student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the oldest son and lineage holder of Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche.Ani Pema is interested in helping establish Tibetan Buddhist monasticism in the West, as well as continuing her work with western Buddhists of all traditions, sharing ideas and teachings. Her non-profit, The Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n Foundation, was set up to assist in this purpose.She has written several books: The Wisdom of No Escape , Start Where You Are , When Things Fall Apart , The Places that Scare You , No Time To Lose , Practicing Peace in Times of War , How to Meditate , and Living Beautifully . All are available from Shambhala Publications and Sounds True.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Worship & Devotion"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 24.85}, {"asin": "0786861568", "title": "Lettin It All Hang Out", "author": "David Cashion", "description": "From Publishers Weekly \"Some of the most unforgettable women in the world... are men.\" In this engagingly chatty, featherweight autobiography, drag queen RuPaul traces his transformation from misfit son of a troubled mother in Georgia, to unsung \"superstar-in-exile\" dancing on bars in Manhattan's East Village, to international sensation with the hit single \"Supermodel of the World.\" Since the book's completion, he has also become the first known cross-dresser to win an advertising contract with a major cosmetics company. Ru takes ample time out along the way to expand on the New Age platitudes of such songs as \"Everybody Say Love\" and aim a few harsh words at naysayers and tellers of stupid anatomical jokes?including comedian Milton Berle, whose infamous run-in with co-presenter Ru at the MTV Video Awards is described in sordid backstage detail here. But despite the title, Ru remains emotionally corseted until the final chapter, in which he discusses the hardships involved in growing up gay and examines his difficult relationship with his father. This extraordinary extrovert remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma wearing a bodysuit and sky-high wig. Ample snapshots of the many faces of Ru nearly make up for the lack of psychological insight. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Social Sciences"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": "from 55.95"}, {"asin": "1584691727", "title": "Granny's Clan: A Lyrical, Heartwarming Family Story Perfect for Young Marine Biologists (Includes Vocabulary and More Information About Orcas)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "1490399828", "title": "Mittle", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "0764112082", "title": "Training Your Pet Rat (Training Your Pet Series)", "author": "Gerry Bucsis", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 20.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0786718641", "title": "Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities", "author": "Alex Marshall", "description": "About the Author Alex Marshall, an independent journalist in New York City, is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken, and is a Senior Fellow at the Regional Plan Association in New York City. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Salon, Slate and many other publications. A former staff writer for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Marshall was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University in 1999-2000. Marshall holds a master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University in New York, and a bachelor's degree in Political Economy and Spanish from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Marshall lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the documentary film editor Kristin Barlow, and their son Max.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Architecture"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 4.99}, {"asin": "1507533993", "title": "Practical Writing: A Guide to Effective Communication for Educators and Other Professionals", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Betty J. Sternberg is executive director of the Duke Academy for Educational Leadership at Duke University and a professor of educational leadership at Central Connecticut State University. She is former commissioner of education for the State of Connecticut and superintendent of schools in Greenwich, Connecticut. She holds a Ph.D. in education and psychology from Stanford University, an MA in mathematics education from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA in philosophy from Brandeis University. Her writing has appeared in EdWeek, Harvard Educational Review and The Education Digest. Marsha J. Howland is a writer, editor and writing consultant. After a 20-year career in the communications office of the Connecticut State Department of Education, she retired as director of communications. Previously she had been an administrator at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts, and a reporter and award-winning columnist for The Salem Evening News in Salem, Massachusetts. She holds a BA in English from Wellesley College, Massachusetts. An active member of a long-standing writing group, she is an avid poet and writer.", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Words, Language & Grammar"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 9.95}, {"asin": "1544850603", "title": "Relaxing Patterns (Lori's Pattern Coloring Books for Adults)", "author": "Lori Greenberg", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.95}, {"asin": "1484753550", "title": "The Chew: An Essential Guide to Cooking and Entertaining: Recipes, Wit, and Wisdom from The Chew Hosts (ABC)", "author": "The Chew", "description": "About the Author Hosts Mario Batali, Michael Symon, Carla Hall, Clinton Kelly and Daphne Oz all live in the New York area.", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Quick & Easy"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.99}], "target_asin": "0786718641"}
{"user_id": "AHFQ5MRI4LTHMD33JCFUVU5Z2B5Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0805096663", "title": "Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot", "author": "Martin Dugard", "description": "Review \u201cImmersively written . . . Mr. O'Reilly and Mr. Dugard succeed in investing a familiar national tragedy with fresh anguish. . . A powerful historical pr\u00e9cis.\u201d \u2015 Janet Maslin, The New York Times \u201cAll the suspense and drama of a popular thriller.\u201d \u2015 Husna Haq, The Christian Science Monitor About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa , and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Killing Kennedy The End of Camelot By Bill O'Reilly Henry Holt and Co. Copyright \u00a9 2012 Bill O'ReillyAll right reserved. ISBN: 9780805096668 Chapter 24 NOVEMBER 22, 1963TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY, DALLAS9:45 A.M. Crowds of eager Dallas residents stand on the curb in front of the Texas School Book Depository. The president won\u2019t pass by for three hours, but they\u2019ve come early to get a good spot. Best of all, it looks like the sun might come out. Maybe they\u2019ll get a glimpse of John F. Kennedy and Jackie after all. Lee Harvey Oswald peers out a first-floor window of the depository building, assessing the president\u2019s route by where the crowds stand. He can clearly see the corner of Elm and Houston, where John Kennedy\u2019s limousine will make a slow left turn. This is important to Oswald. He\u2019s selected a spot on the depository\u2019s sixth floor as his sniper\u2019s roost. The floor is dimly lit by bare 60-watt lightbulbs and is currently under renovation, and thus empty. Stacks of book boxes near the window overlooking Elm and Houston will form a natural hiding place, allowing Oswald to poke his rifle outside and sight the motorcade as it makes that deliberate turn. The marksman in Lee Harvey Oswald knows that he\u2019ll have time for two shots, maybe even three if he works the bolt quickly enough. But one should be all he needs. \u00a6 \u00a6 \u00a6 Air Force One crabs into the wind as Colonel Jim Swindal eases her down onto the runway at Dallas\u2019s Love Field. John Kennedy is ecstatic. Peering out the windows of his airplane, he sees that the weather has turned sunny and warm and that yet another large Texas crowd is waiting to greet him. \u201cThis trip is turning out to be terrific,\u201d he happily confides to Kenny O\u2019Donnell. \u201cHere we are in Dallas and it looks like everything in Texas will turn out to be fine for us!\u201d Police cars circle the field, and officers are even stationed on rooftops. But these are the only ominous sights at the airport. For the estimated welcoming party of two thousand are overjoyed to see Air Force One touch down, marking the first time a president has visited Dallas since 1948. Grown men stand on their tiptoes to see over the throngs in front of them. Airport personnel leave their desks inside the terminal and jostle into position near the chain-link fence separating the runway from the parking lot. The U.S. Air Force C-130 carrying the president\u2019s armored limousine lands and opens its cargo ramp. The bubble top remains on board the plane. The convertible top is completely down. A local television newsman, who is covering the spectacle live on air, enthusiastically reports that the bubble top is nowhere in evidence and that people will be able to see the president and First Lady \u201cin the flesh.\u201d The reporter also reminds his audience that the president will be returning to Love Field between \u201c2:15 and 2:30\u201d to depart for Austin. Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, await the president on the tarmac, as they have on every leg of the Texas trip. The vice president\u2019s job is to stand at the bottom of the ramp and greet the president. Johnson is not happy about this assignment, but he puts on a good face as Jackie emerges from the rear door of the plane, radiant in the pink Chanel suit with the matching pillbox hat. Two steps behind, and seen in person for the first time by the people of Dallas, comes John Kennedy. \u201cI can see his suntan from here!\u201d the local TV reporter gushes. The official plan is for JFK to head straight for his limousine to join the motorcade, but instead he breaks off and heads into the crowd. Not content with merely shaking a few hands, the president pushes deep into the throng, dragging Jackie along with him. The two of them remain surrounded by this wall of people for more than a full minute, much to the crowd\u2019s delight. Then the president and First Lady reemerge, only to wade deep into another section of crowd. \u201cBoy, this is something,\u201d enthuses the local reporter. \u201cThis is a bonus for the people who have waited here!\u201d The president and First Lady shake hands for what seems like an eternity to their very nervous Secret Service detail. \u201cKennedy is showing he is not afraid,\u201d Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Observer writes in his notebook. Finally, John and Jackie Kennedy make their way to the presidential limousine. Awaiting them are Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie. There are three rows of seats in the vehicle. Up front is the driver, fifty-four-year-old Bill Greer. To his right sits Roy Kellerman, like Greer, a longtime Secret Service agent. Special Agent Kellerman has served on the White House detail since the early days of World War II and has protected presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and now Kennedy. JFK sits in the backseat, on the right-hand side, patting his hair into place after his foray into the crowd. Jackie sits to his left. The First Lady was handed a bouquet of red roses upon landing in Dallas, and these now rest on the seat between her and the president. Governor Connally sits directly in front of the president, in the middle row, known as jump seats. Connally takes off his ten-gallon hat so that the crowds can see him. Nellie sits in front of Jackie and right behind the driver, Special Agent Greer. As the motorcade leaves Love Field at 11:55 a.m., the presidential limousine\u2014Secret Service code name SS-100-X\u2014is the second car in line, flanked on either side by four motorcycle escorts. Up front is an advance car filled with local police and Secret Service, among them Dallas police chief Jesse Curry and Secret Service special agent Winston Lawson. Behind John Kennedy\u2019s vehicle is a follow-up convertible code-named Halfback. Kennedy\u2019s two main members of the Irish Mafia, Dave Powers and Kenny O\u2019Donnell, sit here, surrounded by Secret Service agents heavily armed with handguns and automatic weapons. Clint Hill, head of the First Lady\u2019s Secret Service detail, stands on the left running board of Halfback. Special agents Bill McIntyre, John Ready, and Paul Landis also man the running boards. Car four is a convertible limousine that has been rented locally for the vice president. Even as the vehicles pull away from Love Field, it is obvious that LBJ is angry and pouting. While every other politician in the motorcade is waving to the crowds, he stares straight forward, unsmiling. Bringing up the rear is car five, code-named Varsity and filled with a Texas state policeman and four Secret Service agents. Way up at the front of the motorcade, driving several car lengths in front of SS-100-X, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry is committed to making the president\u2019s visit as incident-free as possible. The fifty-year-old chief is a lifetime law enforcement officer. In addition to working his way up through the ranks of the Dallas police, he has augmented his knowledge by attending the FBI Academy. Curry has been involved in almost every aspect of the planning for John Kennedy\u2019s visit and is dedicating 350 men\u2014a full third of his force\u2014to lining the motorcade route, handling security for the president\u2019s airport arrival, and policing the crowd at the Trade Mart speech. However, Curry has chosen not to position any men in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza, thinking that the main crowd-control issues will take place prior to that destination. Once the motorcade turns from Houston Street and onto Elm, it goes under an overpass, turns right onto Stemmons Freeway, and through a relatively uncrowded area to the Trade Mart. Better to focus his officers on the busiest thoroughfares along the route, rather than waste them in a place where few people will be standing. Curry has also ordered his men to face toward the street, rather than toward the crowd, thinking it wouldn\u2019t hurt for them to see the man they\u2019re protecting as a reward for the many long hours they will be on their feet. This ignores the example of New York City, where policemen stand facing away from the street, so they can better help the Secret Service protect the president by scanning the city\u2019s many windows for signs of a sniper\u2019s rifle. But it doesn\u2019t matter during the motorcade\u2019s first easy miles. There is so little to do and so few people to see that a bored Jackie puts on her sunglasses and begins waving at billboards for fun. The white-collar workers along Lemmon Avenue are few in number and unexcited. They\u2019d rather enjoy their lunch break from the IBM factory. \u00a6 \u00a6 \u00a6 At the exact same moment, it\u2019s also lunchtime at the Texas School Book Depository. Most of Lee Harvey Oswald\u2019s coworkers have left the building, hoping to get a glimpse of the president. Just down the block, FBI special agent James Hosty has forgotten all about investigating Lee Harvey Oswald and is just trying to make sure he gets a look at his hero, President Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald didn\u2019t bring a lunch to work today. And he doesn\u2019t plan on eating. Instead, he moves a pile of boxes into position on the grimy sixth floor of the depository building, fashioning a well-concealed shooting nest. At 12:24 p.m., nearly thirty minutes into the motorcade, the president\u2019s car passes Special Agent James Hosty on the corner of Main Street and Field. The G-man gets his wish and sees Kennedy in the flesh, before spinning back around and walking into the Alamo Grill for lunch. At 12:28 the motorcade enters a seedy downtown neighborhood. Straight ahead, the beautiful green grass of Dealey Plaza is clearly visible. The Secret Service agents are stunned by the reception the president is now receiving, with people everywhere cheering and applauding. At 12:29 the motorcade makes the crucial sharp right-hand turn onto Houston Street. From high above, in his sixth-floor sniper\u2019s lair, Lee Harvey Oswald sees John F. Kennedy in person for the first time. He quickly sights the Mannlicher-Carcano, taking aim through his scope as the motorcade skirts the edge of Dealey Plaza. The crowds here are still large and enthusiastic, despite Chief Curry\u2019s prediction that they would have thinned by this point. The people shout for Jackie and the president to look their way. As per agreement, JFK waves at the people standing in front of buildings on the right side of the road, while Jackie waves at those standing along grassy Dealey Plaza, to their left. This ensures that no voter goes without a wave. The motorcade is just five minutes away from the Trade Mart, where Kennedy will make his speech. Almost there. Inside the presidential limousine, Nellie Connally stops waving long enough to look over her right shoulder and smile at John Kennedy. \u201cYou sure can\u2019t say that Dallas doesn\u2019t love you, Mr. President.\u201d Ironically, at that very moment, if JFK had looked up to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, he would have seen a rifle barrel sticking out of an open window, pointed directly at his head. But Kennedy doesn\u2019t look up. Nor does the Secret Service. It is 12:30 p.m. The time has come for Special Agent Bill Greer to steer SS-100-X through the sweeping 120-degree left turn from Houston and onto Elm. \u00a6 \u00a6 \u00a6 Most people live their lives as if the end were always years away. They measure their days in love, laughter, accomplishment, and loss. There are moments of sunshine and storm. There are schedules, phone calls, careers, anxieties, joys, exotic trips, favorite foods, romance, shame, and hunger. A person can be defined by clothing, the smell of his breath, the way she combs her hair, the shape of his torso, or even the company she keeps. All over the world, children love their parents and yearn for love in return. They revel in the touch of parental hands on their faces. And even on the worst of days, each person has dreams about the future\u2014dreams that sometimes come true. Such is life. Yet life can end in less time than it takes to draw one breath. Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard Continues... Excerpted from Killing Kennedy by Bill O'Reilly Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Bill O'Reilly. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.08}, {"asin": "0471423513", "title": "The Rescue: A True Story of Courage and Survival in World War II", "author": "Steven Trent Smith", "description": "From the Back Cover Praise for The Rescue \"Steven Trent Smith grapples boldly with several big subjects: the Japanese occupation of the Philippines; the capture of Japan's 'Z Plan' (the decisive-battle strategy for destroying the U.S. Pacific Fleet); the rescue by submarine of forty Americans stranded in the Philippines; the climactic Battle of the Philippine Sea. Meticulously researched and well written, The Rescue ties these elements together into an epic that is emotionally engaging from start to rousing finish.\"-Martin Russ, author of \"Breakout and The Last Parallel\" \"Smith's thoroughly researched, detailed account of the brave American and Filipino guerrillas on Negros Island in the Philippines will do much to introduce readers to this little known aspect of World War II in the Pacific. . . . This is a fascinating story well told.\"-Elizabeth Norman, author of the award-winning \"We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Nurses Trapped on Bataan by the Japanese\" \"The Rescue is a delightful journey with the gallant few who resisted the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and who shaped the larger events wh ich led to victory in the Pacific. Smith's brilliant research and unique storytelling make this account a must for all who enjoy history and a grand adventure.\"-Peter Huchthausen, author of \"October Fury\" \"With a photojournalist's eye for action and detail, Steven Trent Smith's The Rescue is a remarkable achievement. The incredible mission to save forty Americans stranded in the Philippines reads more like a work of fiction. . . . A must-read for all those interested in one of the great secret submarine operations of World War II and all action adventure fans alike!\"-Richard P. Henrick, author of \"Crimson Tide and Nightwatch\" About the Author STEVEN TRENT SMITH is a five-time Emmy Award--winning freelance TV photojournalist and the author of \"Wolf Pack: the American Submarine Strategy That Helped Defeat Japan (\"Wiley). He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 16.75}, {"asin": "B002QGSWBA", "title": "It's still not safe."}, {"asin": "0682478369", "title": "We Ate Gooseberries: Growing Up on a Minnesota Farm During the Depression", "author": "Vernon J. Schaefer", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.48}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0451234103", "title": "Escape From Davao: The Forgotten Story of the Most Daring Prison Break of the Pacific War", "author": "John D. Lukacs", "description": "Review Praise for Escape From Davao \u201cLike the event it covers, Escape from Davao is unique\u2026You are holding in your hands the story of the only successful American group escape from a Japanese camp.\u201d\u2014James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers \u201cA remarkable story\u2026Exhaustively researched and superbly written.\u201d\u2014Bill Sloan, author of Brotherhood of Heroes \u201cA fast moving, real-life escape story, and an unexpected chronicle of a fight against censorship.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cLukacs readily evokes the high tension and strenuous travails of the fugitives\u2019 evasion of enemy patrols en route to evacuations by American submarines\u2026Built from every available research source, Lukacs\u2019 diligent, impassioned history will aid and abet the ever-growing interest in WWII fighting experience.\u201d\u2014 Booklist About the Author John D. Lukacs is a writer and historian whose byline has appeared in The New York Times , USA Today , and on ESPN.com.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Asia"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.0}, {"asin": "B005V2DUP4", "title": "Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar", "author": "Cheryl Strayed", "description": "Review \u201cPenning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer\u2019s life into account but also Strayed\u2019s. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Leigh Newman, Oprah.com \u201cA fascinating blend of memoir and self-help. Strayed is an eloquent storyteller, and her clear-eyed prose offers a bracing empathy absent from most self-help blather.\u201d \u2014Nora Krug, The Washington Post \u201cStrayed\u2019s worldview\u2014her empathy, her nonjudgment, her belief in the fundamental logic of people\u2019s emotions and experiences despite occasional evidence to the contrary\u2014begins to seep into readers\u2019 consciousness in such a way that they can apply her generosity of spirit to their own and, for a few hours at least, become better people. . . . The book\u2019s disclosures\u2014on the part of both the writer and her correspondents\u2014is ultimately courageous and engaging stuff.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Anna Holmes, New York Times Book Review \u201cWise and compassionate.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Gregory Cowles, New York Times Book Review \u201cInside the List\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIt seems inadequate to call \u2018Dear Sugar\u2019 an advice column, because it exists in a category all its own . . . Part memoir, part essay collection, the aptly titled Tiny Beautiful Things gathers together stunningly written pieces on everything from sex to love to the agonies of bereavement. Strayed offers insights as exquisitely phrased as they are powerful, confronting some of the biggest and most painful of life\u2019s questions. . . . . In her responses, Strayed shines a torch of insight and comfort into the darkness of these people\u2019s lives, cutting to the heart of what it means to love, to grieve and to suffer.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Ilana Teitelbaum, Shelf Awareness \u201cWhat makes a great advice columnist? . . . Strayed has proved during her tenure at the website the Rumpus, where she has helmed the Dear Sugar column since 2010, that the only requirement is that you give great advice\u2014tender, frank, uplifting and unrelenting. Strayed\u2019s columns, now collected as Tiny Beautiful Things , advise people on such diverse struggles as miscarriage, infidelity, poverty and addiction, and it's really hard to think of anyone better at the\u00a0job. Strayed has succeeded largely because she shares personal, often heartbreaking stories from her own life in answering readers' questions. Her experiences are qualifications, in a sense, as Strayed has taken the wisdom she gained from personal tragedies, including her mother's early death and the breakup of her first marriage, and generously applied it to all manner of issues. . . . What runs through all the columns, which range from a few hundred to a few thousand words in length, is Strayed\u2019s gift at panning out from the problem in question. Often, the fuller picture that Strayed gives us illustrates what needs to happen for the letter-writers to change, to pull themselves out of their current predicament, to see things in a different way, to\u00a0act. . . . Here is Strayed\u2019s breathtaking ability to get to the core of her own failures and triumphs, which she often does through surprising and sharp imagery. . . . Strayed has covered much ground in these transformative pieces. In the end, Tiny Beautiful Things serves as a guide for anyone who is lost, and those who only think they might\u00a0be.\u201d \u2014Liz Colville, San Francisco Chronicle \u201cAs Sugar, Strayed addresses questions about love, family, addition, grief, abuse, afflictions, fears, friends, gossip, among other topics\u2014and in each of her answers, without fail, she meets the letter writers with a kind of startling compassion; what Steve Almond termed \u2018radical empathy.\u2019 Dear Sugar is an advice column like no other.\u201d \u2014Nika Knight, Full Stop \u201cIt is very rarely that I am a ridiculous fangirl about anything. It\u2019s so emotionally taxing, so inherently undignified, that I try not to fall into the trap. So it took me by surprise when, upon discovering Dear Sugar at the Rumpus, I gradually fell down the rabbit hole into ridiculous fangirlishness for the first time in years. [Strayed took me to] the edge of the dark wood, staring into the place where the most wrenching and lovely truths reside. A place to lose your heart and find it again. If there is a common thread that unites the columns, it\u2019s work. Sugar doesn\u2019t tolerate laziness: doing the work to reach one\u2019s full potential, to write that novel, to exorcise ghosts, to let go of resentments and jealousy and commit instead to generosity and love\u2014all of these are sacred, lifelong tasks for which there are no shortcuts. The columns are a gift, and so too is the book. As Sugar herself bids in her column of the same name, I've written this now on the eve of her book\u2019s publication with one intent: to say thank you.\u201d \u2014Ilana Teitelbaum, The Huffington Post \u201cTypically an advice column might not be the first thing to come to mind when considering examples of fearless first-person writing. But Cheryl\u2019s Dear Sugar column is a major exception in that way. In the majority of her column entries, she boldly delves into her own life, to places where she\u2019s had to overcome obstacles similar to those her letter-writers have experienced. Her understanding and compassion are real and hard won, rooted in her own experiences. And so is her sometimes butt-kicking advice. \u2018If I was able to do this,\u2019 she seems to be saying, \u2018so can you, sweet pea. Now get off your ass and do it.\u2019 The stakes may have seemed lower when she was writing the column anonymously. But Cheryl says she always knew she\u2019d eventually reveal herself\u2014which she did in April. Now many of her best Dear Sugar columns have been gathered into Tiny Beautiful Things , a collection that goes on sale this week (and is available through The Rumpus). Her name is on it; the revelations, the fearless admissions are hers. And I\u2019m awed.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Sari Botton, The Rumpus \u201cSugar didn\u2019t pen a few plucky paragraphs about how to pick yourself up by your socks and move on from whatever horrors befell you\u2014in many cases Sugar\u2019s letters were heart-rending exhumations of her own past in search of parallels to the advice-seeker\u2019s situation. She didn\u2019t shy from plumbing her own failings, flaws, and troubles. But in the end, Sugar\u2019s columns are about heart and love. Not saccharine, treacly love that comes from greeting cards, but the gritty, painful, sometimes mundane work it takes to love yourself, warts and all. Tiny Beautiful Things isn\u2019t really a compilation of her advice columns. More, it\u2019s a series of essays about life in all its grimy, unpleasant heartache, and a plea to rise above it to love truthfully and deeply and well, despite all our handicaps. Sugar navigates the path through the treacherous human psyche as a shining beacon before us, flickering in the dark. . . .\u00a0 [She] gives her best, even when she\u2019s tired. . . . I\u2019m glad that the world is learning about all the love that Sugar has to give.\u201d \u2014Quenby Moone, The Nervous Breakdown \u201cStrong, smart and self-assured: those qualities are in full power in [ Tiny Beautiful Things ]. Strayed doesn\u2019t just give good advice. People write in with the most wrenching personal problems, and receive generous, seriously motivating inspiration to move on and do better. . . . Dear Sugar is a rare hideout from the prevailing meanness of the Internet. She calls her readers Sweet Peas, shares stunningly intimate stories about her life, and writes with true warmth and kindness. And it\u2019s not an act. . . . Strayed aims to help not just the people whose letters she answers, but the wider audience who reads the exchanges. Her responses are direct and personal, but peppered with universal messages that cut to the heart.\u201d \u2014Amy Goetzman, MinnPost \u201cWhy do we read memoirs? Some choose autobiographies to better understand the lives and histories of important men and women. Some might hope that the experiences and insights of a personal essay might unveil a small truth about the human condition, might teach us about ourselves. Some of us might just be busybodies, looking for a socially acceptable way to peek deeply into a stranger\u2019s life. If you fit into any of these categories, you must meet Dear Sugar, the ultimate advice columnist for lovers of memoirs. Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of her works, interspersed with Q&As from Sugar herself. The columns were written anonymously, but with an amount of personal detail that no advice column has ever seen before. In a gracious, sassy, poetic and maternal voice, Sugar shares her own raw personal accounts . . . She runs a highlighter over the breathtaking aspects of mundane tasks, from wedding planning to the day-to-day duties of raising small children. By the last page of the book, which will likely be a bit wrinkled with tear stains by the time you\u2019re through, you may know more about Sugar than you know about your closest friends.\u00a0. . .Though many of the letters she receives contain ugliness and woe, she weaves them together into a story that is unexpectedly beautiful and impossibly warm. There\u2019s no shortage of conversations on love and sex, but we words also go beyond that. . . . There\u2019s something worth quoting on almost every page. . . . Eloquent . . . Generous.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Kara Zuaro, Biogrophile \u201cIn this collection of her columns, Strayed proves herself to be an astute amateur psychologist, as well as a compassionate, thoughtful and occasionally tough counselor. As with all personal advice columns, the questions that readers pose to Sugar are at least as intriguing as the answers. Strayed . . . uses her own foibles and misdemeanors to show that \u2018we all suffer, we all fail, we all struggle and triumph and struggle again.\u2019\u201d \u2014Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal \u201cStrayed has a special talent for glimmering, golden turns of phrase that seem to hold all the promise and hope in the world\u2014they\u2019re Bible verses for a secular audience\u2014but these are not the sort of mottos that you\u2019ll find on, say, motivational posters on Pintrest. . . . Most remarkable has been Strayed\u2019s willingness to use her own story, to revisit her most hopeless, fumbling moments\u2014from drug use to infidelity\u2014in answering readers\u2019 questions. . . . The magic is in these unexpected connections, her ability to make the specific universal. She refers to letter writers as \u2018sweet pea\u2019 and \u2018honey bun,\u2019 but never lets them off the hook. No matter how tragic their predicament, she exhorts them to be their \u2018best, most gigantic self,\u2019 that \u2018every last one of us can do better than give up.\u2019 It is tough, smart, real love.\u201d \u2014Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon \u201cTo say that Cheryl Strayed is an Internet advice columnist does not do her justice. Tiny Beautiful Things is a gob-smacking high, a brilliant reinvention of the Miss Lonelyhearts genre. . . . This collection of poignant insights into the complexities of the human heart offers a form of radical empathy and inspired compassion from a fellow traveler\u2014one who not only feels the pain of others but leads them toward light and art.\u201d \u2014Elizabeth Taylor, The Chicago Tribune \u201cThe problem with advice columnists [was that] they were supposed to help you solve your problems, but they didn\u2019t reveal much about their own lives, so it was hard to understand why you should trust them. Cheryl Strayed changed all that with Dear Sugar, a deeply personal advice column that\u2019s earned a devoted following. Beautifully written . . . honest and forthright. . . \u00a0poignant and personal, unlike the string of clich\u00e9s other writers throw at readers. She proves real connection is still possible, even on the Internet, where everyone\u2019s shouting to be heard. She delivers tough love, very gently. There\u2019s a lesson in here for everyone, sweet peas. You just have to find yours. Grade: A\u201d \u2014Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly \u201cWhen I was younger, the Dear Ann and Dear Abby columns that ran in newspapers offered a fascinating look at other people's problems. Eventually, though, the advice coming from pseudonymous writers felt distanced and staid, especially compared to the next generation of advisers who staked out the alternative papers and web sites. . . . My current favorite, by far, is \u201cDear Sugar,\u201d written by Cheryl Strayed. . . . Tiny Beautiful Things collects Strayed\u2019s columns, and it perfectly captures why she has completely won me over. Strayed can be profane, but she offers sympathy, sound advice, gentleness and a surprising amount of confession.\u201d \u2014Vikas Turakhia, Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cA good psychoanalyst does two things: she listens, and she dissects. In Tiny Beautiful Things , Strayed does both adeptly. Sugar forces us to swallow sometimes painful realizations about what we want, who we are, and what we therefore must do\u2014or, if not that, the choices we must make. She also lays bare the impossibility of controlling what isn\u2019t ours to control. . . . The honesty is far more comforting than shallow promises would be. Sugar can handle what\u2019s real in us. . . . If she can handle our treacherous secrets without disintegrating, maybe others will accept us in our entirety, too. Maybe we can accept ourselves. . . . Sugar seems to have had more experiences than any human we\u2019ve ever met, like some sort of omniscient goddess. . . . These stories are not written for their own sake, but as a way to explain human complexity. The details of her past theft comes out as a means of empathizing with a writer ashamed of the same. Sugar describes her husband\u2019s infidelity to help a fianc\u00e9e with a stark, black-and-white view of marriage consider nuance. This is the type of meaning-making any personal essayist or memoirist should aim for, of course\u2014and, notably, Strayed is both\u2014but it\u2019s all the more explicit and obvious in an advice column. Strayed\u2019s story is, in its way, a mirror. One of Strayed\u2019s most vital messages\u2014which her revelations of past lapses are meant to show\u2014is that being a real, whole person means being imperfect. Sugar models this not only in her history, but in her letters, too. Once in a while, she falters. . . . Sugar is good enough, but not perfect. Which is exactly what she\u2019s been trying to tell us all along.\u201d \u2014Jessica Gross, The Millions \u201cMany of the pieces in Tiny Beautiful Things , which first appeared in the online literary magazine The Rumpus, have had robust first lives, circulated on the Internet by fans. In book form, the letters and Strayed\u2019s responses take on greater meaning as an extended epistolary essay on the human condition\u2014with its antsy spouses, frustrated parents and desperately indebted students\u2014and also as a companion autobiography to Wild . Sugar\u2019s technique is to share the thorniest, most indelible experiences from her life to help each letter writer work through his or her own, which makes Tiny Beautiful Things an odd, contradictory and moving invention: an anecdotal memoir\u2014that most narcissistic of genres\u2014whose every chapter is written lovingly and generously to someone else. . . . Sugar is sharp-witted, but she doesn\u2019t do funny. She doesn\u2019t do snarky. (This distinguishes her from, to state it conservatively, most of the Internet.) And Sugar doesn\u2019t coddle. She especially doesn\u2019t coddle writers. . . . Stillness pervades Strayed\u2019s Dear Sugar columns, which profit from all the advantages of the Internet\u2014its anonymous e-mail forms, endless terrain and capacity for comments and community building\u2014but provide refuge from its white noise. It\u2019s partly because of the emotional content of each letter and response, but also due to the inherent intimacy of the form. Direct address is as old as lyric poetry: it\u2019s just I and you \u2014and the rest of the world gets to listen in.\u201d \u2014Radhika Jones, Time Magazine \u201cStrayed, in this collection of advice (some previously unpublished) for readers of her \u2018Dear Sugar\u2019 column on therumpus.net, chooses thought-provoking questions from her readers and listens deeply to their emotional content. In casually intimate prose and with literary grace, she creates moments of wise, compassionate insight in often startlingly personal miniature memoirs, cradling gentle but practical guidance with enough humor to cement Strayed\u2019s presence as both a mentor and the most understanding of friends. Sugar can be tough and honest, but she\u2019s never mean: in Sugar\u2019s world, we all deserve love unconditionally, but also owe it to ourselves to be the best, most authentic selves we can be. For a regrounding in the beauty of what it means to be flawed and gorgeously human, for answers that feel real, Strayed\u2019s caring essays offer surprisingly rich comfort.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review)\u00a0\u201cThis beloved Internet advice columnist, using the pseudonym Sugar, revealed herself in early 2012 to be the acclaimed novelist and memoirist Strayed. First appearing on the Rumpus\u00a0in 2010, her column \u2018Dear Sugar\u2019 quickly attracted a large and devoted following with its cut-to-the-quick aphorisms like \u2018Write like a motherf*cker\u2019 and \u2018Be brave enough to break your own heart.\u2019 This collection gathers up the best of Sugar, whose trademark is deeply felt and frank responses grounded in her own personal experience; in many ways, it is a portrait of Strayed herself. She answers queries on subjects ranging from professional jealousy to leaving a loved partner to coping with the death of a child. VERDICT: Part advice, part personal essay, these pieces grapple with life\u2019s biggest questions. Beautifully written and genuinely wise, this book is full of heartache and love. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2014 Molly McArdle, Library Journal (starred review)\u201cStrayed offers insight into the world of online advice through her collection of letters sent to \u2018Dear Sugar,\u2019 her once-anonymous column for the online magazine The Rumpus . Sugar\u2019s Golden Rule\u2014\u2018Trust Yourself\u2019\u2014pushes the author and her readers to embrace themselves and not be afraid of asking life\u2019s complex questions. . . . Strayed\u2019s practical advice mixes with abundant personal anecdotes in which she illustrates to the addressee the reasoning behind her counsel. Admittedly not versed in psychology, her responses are sensitive and comprehensive, and her self-reflection projects understanding and sympathy. . . . The author\u2019s comforting yet stern writing style connects readers to each contributor\u2019s plight and the subsequent response to their cry for help. Appealing to Dear Sugar fans and self-help seekers alike, this \u2018collection of intimate exchanges between strangers\u2019 demonstrates that wisdom doesn\u2019t come only from age, but also from learning from the experiences of others. A realistic and poignant compilation of the intricacies of relationships.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cThese pieces are nothing short of dynamite, the kind of remarkable, revelatory storytelling that makes young people want to become writers in the first place. Over here at the Salon offices, we're reading the columns with boxes of tissue and raised fists of solidarity, shaking our heads with awe and amusement.\u201d \u2014Sarah Hepola, Salon \u201cSugar doesn't coddle her readers\u2014she believes them, and hears the stories inside the story they think they want to tell. She manages astonishing levels of empathy without dissolving into sentiment, and sees problems before the reader can. Sugar doesn't promise to make anyone feel good, only that she understands a question well enough to answer it.\u201d \u2014Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker critic\u201cPowerful and soulful, Tiny Beautiful Things is destined to become a classic of the form, the sort of book readers will carry around in purses and backpacks during difficult times as a token or talisman because of the radiant wisdom and depth within.\u201d \u2014Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake \u201c[Sugar is] turning the advice column on its head.\u201d \u2014Jessica Francis Kane, author of The Report \u201cSugar\u2019s columns are easily the most beautiful thing I\u2019ve read all year. They should be taught in schools and put on little slips of paper and dropped from airplanes, for all to read.\u201d \u2014Meakin Armstrong, Guernica editor\u201cDear Sugar will save your soul. I belong to the Church of Sugar.\u201d \u2014Samantha Dunn, author of Failing Paris \u201cCharming, idiosyncratic, luminous, profane. . . . [Sugar] is remaking a genre that has existed, in more or less the same form, since well before Nathanael West\u2019s Miss Lonelyhearts first put a face on the figure in 1933. . . . Her version of tough love ranges from hip-older-sister-loving to governess-stern. Sugar shines out amid the sea of fakeness.\u201d \u2014Ruth Franklin, The New Republic --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author CHERYL STRAYED is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and became an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a national best seller now the basis of the WBUR podcast Dear Sugar Radio, co-hosted with Steve Almond; and Torch, her debut novel. Her books have been translated into forty languages, and her essays and other writings have appeared in numerous publications. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From the INTRODUCTION by Steve Almond I Was Sugar Once : Lessons in Radical Empathy \u00a0 Long ago, before there was a Sugar, there was Stephen Elliott. He had this idea for a website, which sounds pretty awful, I admit, except that his idea was really to build an online community around literature, called The Rumpus . Being a writer himself, and therefore impoverished, Stephen prevailed upon his likewise impoverished writer friends to help. \u00a0 And we, his friends, all said yes, because we love Stephen and because (if I may speak for the group) we were all desperate for a noble-seeming distraction. My contribution was an advice column, which I suggested we call Dear Sugar Butt, after the endearment Stephen and I had taken to using in our email correspondence. I will not belabor the goofy homoeroticism that would lead to such an endearment. It will be enough to note that Dear Sugar Butt was shortened, mercifully, to Dear Sugar. \u00a0 Handing yourself a job as an advice columnist is a pretty arrogant thing to do, which is par for my particular course. But I justified it by supposing that I could create a different sort of advice column, both irreverent and brutally honest. The design flaw was that I conceived of Sugar as a persona, a woman with a troubled past and a slightly reckless tongue. \u00a0 And while there were moments when she felt real to me, when I could feel myself locking into the pain of my correspondents, more often I faked it, making do with wit where my heart failed me. After a year of dashing off columns, I quit. \u00a0 And that might have been the end of Sugar had I not, around this time, come across a nonfiction piece by Cheryl Strayed. I knew Cheryl as the author of a gorgeous and wrenching novel called Torch. But reading this essay, a searing recollection of infidelity and mourning, filled me with a tingling hunch. I wrote to ask if she wanted to take over as Sugar. \u00a0 It was an insane request. Like me, Cheryl had two small kids at home, a mountain of debt, and no regular academic gig. The last thing she needed was an online advice column for which she would be paid nothing. Of course, I did have an ace in the hole: Cheryl had written the one and only fan letter I\u2019d received as Sugar. \u00a0 *** \u00a0 The column that launched Sugar as a phenomenon was writ- ten in response to what would have been, for anyone else, a throwaway letter. Dear Sugar, wrote a presumably young man. WTF, WTF, WTF? I\u2019m asking this question as it applies to everything every day . Cheryl\u2019s reply began as follows: \u00a0 \u00a0 Dear WTF, \u00a0 My father\u2019s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn\u2019t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn\u2019t get the rhythm right and I didn\u2019t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn\u2019t want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat. \u00a0 \u00a0 It was an absolutely unprecedented moment. Advice columnists, after all, adhere to an unspoken code: focus on the letter writer, dispense the necessary bromides, make it all seem bearable. Disclosing your own sexual assault is not part of the code. \u00a0 But Cheryl wasn\u2019t just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isn\u2019t some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters\u2014every sin, every regret, every affliction. As proof, she offered an account of her own struggle to reckon with a cruelty she\u2019d absorbed before she was old enough even to understand it. Ask better questions, sweet pea, she concluded, with great gentleness. The fuck is your life. Answer it. \u00a0 Like a lot of folks, I read the piece with tears in my eyes\u2014 which is how one reads Sugar. This wasn\u2019t some pro forma kibitzer, sifting through a stack of modern anxieties. She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments. \u00a0 *** \u00a0 I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives\u2014those fountains of inconvenient feeling\u2014and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. \u00a0 We\u2019re hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we\u2019re falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won\u2019t stick. \u00a0 And this, I think, is why Sugar has become so important to so many people. Because she\u2019s offering something almost unheard of in our culture: radical empathy. People come to her in real pain and she ministers to them, by telling stories about her own life, the particular ways in which she\u2019s felt thwarted and lost, and how she got found again. She is able to transmute the raw material of the self-help aisle into genuine literature. \u00a0 I think here of the response she offered a man wrecked by his son\u2019s death, who asked her how he might become human again. \u201cThe strange and painful truth is that I\u2019m a better person because I lost my mom young,\u201d she wrote. \u201cWhen you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.\u201d \u00a0 In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it\u2019s a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue. \u00a0 *** --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cPenning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer\u2019s life into account but also Strayed\u2019s. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. . . . Moving. . . . compassionate.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Leigh Newman, Oprah.com \u201cA fascinating blend of memoir and self-help. Strayed is an eloquent storyteller, and her clear-eyed prose offers a bracing empathy absent from most self-help blather.\u201d \u2014Nora Krug, The Washington Post \u201cStrayed\u2019s worldview\u2014her empathy, her nonjudgment, her belief in the fundamental logic of people\u2019s emotions and experiences despite occasional evidence to the contrary\u2014begins to seep into readers\u2019 consciousness in such a way that they can apply her generosity of spirit to their own and, for a few hours at least, become better people. . . . The book\u2019s disclosures\u2014on the part of both the writer and her correspondents\u2014is ultimately courageous and engaging stuff.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Anna Holmes, New York Times Book Review \u201cWise and compassionate.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Gregory Cowles, New York Times Book Review \u201cInside the List\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIt seems inadequate to call \u2018Dear Sugar\u2019 an advice column, because it exists in a category all its own . . . Part memoir, part essay collection, the aptly titled Tiny Beautiful Things gathers together stunningly written pieces on everything from sex to love to the agonies of bereavement. Strayed offers insights as exquisitely phrased as they are powerful, confronting some of the biggest and most painful of life\u2019s questions. . . . . In her responses, Strayed shines a torch of insight and comfort into the darkness of these people\u2019s lives, cutting to the heart of what it means to love, to grieve and to suffer.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014Ilana Teitelbaum, Shelf Awareness \u201cWhat makes a great advice columnist? . . . Strayed has proved during her tenure at the website the Rumpus, where she has helmed the Dear Sugar column since 2010, that the only requirement is that you give great advice\u2014tender, frank, uplifting and unrelenting. Strayed\u2019s columns, now collected as Tiny Beautiful Things , advise people on such diverse struggles as miscarriage, infidelity, poverty and addiction, and it's really hard to think of anyone better at the\u00a0job. Strayed has succeeded largely because she shares personal, often heartbreaking stories from her own life in answering readers' questions. Her experiences are qualifications, in a sense, as Strayed has taken the wisdom she gained from personal tragedies, including her mother's early death and the breakup of her first marriage, and generously applied it to all manner of issues. . . . What runs through all the columns, which range from a few hundred to a few thousand words in length, is Strayed\u2019s gift at panning out from the problem in question. Often, the fuller picture that Strayed gives us illustrates what needs to happen for the letter-writers to change, to pull themselves out of their current predicament, to see things in a different way, to\u00a0act. . . . Here is Strayed\u2019s breathtaking ability to get to the core of her own failures and triumphs, which she often does through surprising and sharp imagery. . . . Strayed has covered much ground in these transformative pieces. In the end, Tiny Beautiful Things serves as a guide for anyone who is lost, and those who only think they might\u00a0be.\u201d \u2014Liz Colville, San Francisco Chronicle \u201cAs Sugar, Strayed addresses questions about love, family, addition, grief, abuse, afflictions, fears, friends, gossip, among other topics\u2014and in each of her answers, without fail, she meets the letter writers with a kind of startling compassion; what Steve Almond termed \u2018radical empathy.\u2019 Dear Sugar is an advice column like no other.\u201d \u2014Nika Knight, Full Stop \u201cIt is very rarely that I am a ridiculous fangirl about anything. It\u2019s so emotionally taxing, so inherently undignified, that I try not to fall into the trap. So it took me by surprise when, upon discovering Dear Sugar at the Rumpus, I gradually fell down the rabbit hole into ridiculous fangirlishness for the first time in years. [Strayed took me to] the edge of the dark wood, staring into the place where the most wrenching and lovely truths reside. A place to lose your heart and find it again. If there is a common thread that unites the columns, it\u2019s work. Sugar doesn\u2019t tolerate laziness: doing the work to reach one\u2019s full potential, to write that novel, to exorcise ghosts, to let go of resentments and jealousy and commit instead to generosity and love\u2014all of these are sacred, lifelong tasks for which there are no shortcuts. The columns are a gift, and so too is the book. As Sugar herself bids in her column of the same name, I've written this now on the eve of her book\u2019s publication with one intent: to say thank you.\u201d \u2014Ilana Teitelbaum, The Huffington Post \u201cTypically an advice column might not be the first thing to come to mind when considering examples of fearless first-person writing. But Cheryl\u2019s Dear Sugar column is a major exception in that way. In the majority of her column entries, she boldly delves into her own life, to places where she\u2019s had to overcome obstacles similar to those her letter-writers have experienced. Her understanding and compassion are real and hard won, rooted in her own experiences. And so is her sometimes butt-kicking advice. \u2018If I was able to do this,\u2019 she seems to be saying, \u2018so can you, sweet pea. Now get off your ass and do it.\u2019 The stakes may have seemed lower when she was writing the column anonymously. But Cheryl says she always knew she\u2019d eventually reveal herself\u2014which she did in April. Now many of her best Dear Sugar columns have been gathered into Tiny Beautiful Things , a collection that goes on sale this week (and is available through The Rumpus). Her name is on it; the revelations, the fearless admissions are hers. And I\u2019m awed.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Sari Botton, The Rumpus \u201cSugar didn\u2019t pen a few plucky paragraphs about how to pick yourself up by your socks and move on from whatever horrors befell you\u2014in many cases Sugar\u2019s letters were heart-rending exhumations of her own past in search of parallels to the advice-seeker\u2019s situation. She didn\u2019t shy from plumbing her own failings, flaws, and troubles. But in the end, Sugar\u2019s columns are about heart and love. Not saccharine, treacly love that comes from greeting cards, but the gritty, painful, sometimes mundane work it takes to love yourself, warts and all. Tiny Beautiful Things isn\u2019t really a compilation of her advice columns. More, it\u2019s a series of essays about life in all its grimy, unpleasant heartache, and a plea to rise above it to love truthfully and deeply and well, despite all our handicaps. Sugar navigates the path through the treacherous human psyche as a shining beacon before us, flickering in the dark. . . .\u00a0 [She] gives her best, even when she\u2019s tired. . . . I\u2019m glad that the world is learning about all the love that Sugar has to give.\u201d \u2014Quenby Moone, The Nervous Breakdown \u201cStrong, smart and self-assured: those qualities are in full power in [ Tiny Beautiful Things ]. Strayed doesn\u2019t just give good advice. People write in with the most wrenching personal problems, and receive generous, seriously motivating inspiration to move on and do better. . . . Dear Sugar is a rare hideout from the prevailing meanness of the Internet. She calls her readers Sweet Peas, shares stunningly intimate stories about her life, and writes with true warmth and kindness. And it\u2019s not an act. . . . Strayed aims to help not just the people whose letters she answers, but the wider audience who reads the exchanges. Her responses are direct and personal, but peppered with universal messages that cut to the heart.\u201d \u2014Amy Goetzman, MinnPost \u201cWhy do we read memoirs? Some choose autobiographies to better understand the lives and histories of important men and women. Some might hope that the experiences and insights of a personal essay might unveil a small truth about the human condition, might teach us about ourselves. Some of us might just be busybodies, looking for a socially acceptable way to peek deeply into a stranger\u2019s life. If you fit into any of these categories, you must meet Dear Sugar, the ultimate advice columnist for lovers of memoirs. Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of her works, interspersed with Q&As from Sugar herself. The columns were written anonymously, but with an amount of personal detail that no advice column has ever seen before. In a gracious, sassy, poetic and maternal voice, Sugar shares her own raw personal accounts . . . She runs a highlighter over the breathtaking aspects of mundane tasks, from wedding planning to the day-to-day duties of raising small children. By the last page of the book, which will likely be a bit wrinkled with tear stains by the time you\u2019re through, you may know more about Sugar than you know about your closest friends.\u00a0. . .Though many of the letters she receives contain ugliness and woe, she weaves them together into a story that is unexpectedly beautiful and impossibly warm. There\u2019s no shortage of conversations on love and sex, but we words also go beyond that. . . . There\u2019s something worth quoting on almost every page. . . . Eloquent . . . Generous.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Kara Zuaro, Biogrophile \u201cIn this collection of her columns, Strayed proves herself to be an astute amateur psychologist, as well as a compassionate, thoughtful and occasionally tough counselor. As with all personal advice columns, the questions that readers pose to Sugar are at least as intriguing as the answers. Strayed . . . uses her own foibles and misdemeanors to show that \u2018we all suffer, we all fail, we all struggle and triumph and struggle again.\u2019\u201d \u2014Cynthia Crossen, The Wall Street Journal \u201cStrayed has a special talent for glimmering, golden turns of phrase that seem to hold all the promise and hope in the world\u2014they\u2019re Bible verses for a secular audience\u2014but these are not the sort of mottos that you\u2019ll find on, say, motivational posters on Pintrest. . . . Most remarkable has been Strayed\u2019s willingness to use her own story, to revisit her most hopeless, fumbling moments\u2014from drug use to infidelity\u2014in answering readers\u2019 questions. . . . The magic is in these unexpected connections, her ability to make the specific universal. She refers to letter writers as \u2018sweet pea\u2019 and \u2018honey bun,\u2019 but never lets them off the hook. No matter how tragic their predicament, she exhorts them to be their \u2018best, most gigantic self,\u2019 that \u2018every last one of us can do better than give up.\u2019 It is tough, smart, real love.\u201d \u2014Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon \u201cTo say that Cheryl Strayed is an Internet advice columnist does not do her justice. Tiny Beautiful Things is a gob-smacking high, a brilliant reinvention of the Miss Lonelyhearts genre. . . . This collection of poignant insights into the complexities of the human heart offers a form of radical empathy and inspired compassion from a fellow traveler\u2014one who not only feels the pain of others but leads them toward light and art.\u201d \u2014Elizabeth Taylor, The Chicago Tribune \u201cThe problem with advice columnists [was that] they were supposed to help you solve your problems, but they didn\u2019t reveal much about their own lives, so it was hard to understand why you should trust them. Cheryl Strayed changed all that with Dear Sugar, a deeply personal advice column that\u2019s earned a devoted following. Beautifully written . . . honest and forthright. . . \u00a0poignant and personal, unlike the string of clich\u00e9s other writers throw at readers. She proves real connection is still possible, even on the Internet, where everyone\u2019s shouting to be heard. She delivers tough love, very gently. There\u2019s a lesson in here for everyone, sweet peas. You just have to find yours. Grade: A\u201d \u2014Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly \u201cWhen I was younger, the Dear Ann and Dear Abby columns that ran in newspapers offered a fascinating look at other people's problems. Eventually, though, the advice coming from pseudonymous writers felt distanced and staid, especially compared to the next generation of advisers who staked out the alternative papers and web sites. . . . My current favorite, by far, is \u201cDear Sugar,\u201d written by Cheryl Strayed. . . . Tiny Beautiful Things collects Strayed\u2019s columns, and it perfectly captures why she has completely won me over. Strayed can be profane, but she offers sympathy, sound advice, gentleness and a surprising amount of confession.\u201d \u2014Vikas Turakhia, Cleveland Plain Dealer \u201cA good psychoanalyst does two things: she listens, and she dissects. In Tiny Beautiful Things , Strayed does both adeptly. Sugar forces us to swallow sometimes painful realizations about what we want, who we are, and what we therefore must do\u2014or, if not that, the choices we must make. She also lays bare the impossibility of controlling what isn\u2019t ours to control. . . . The honesty is far more comforting than shallow promises would be. Sugar can handle what\u2019s real in us. . . . If she can handle our treacherous secrets without disintegrating, maybe others will accept us in our entirety, too. Maybe we can accept ourselves. . . . Sugar seems to have had more experiences than any human we\u2019ve ever met, like some sort of omniscient goddess. . . . These stories are not written for their own sake, but as a way to explain human complexity. The details of her past theft comes out as a means of empathizing with a writer ashamed of the same. Sugar describes her husband\u2019s infidelity to help a fianc\u00e9e with a stark, black-and-white view of marriage consider nuance. This is the type of meaning-making any personal essayist or memoirist should aim for, of course\u2014and, notably, Strayed is both\u2014but it\u2019s all the more explicit and obvious in an advice column. Strayed\u2019s story is, in its way, a mirror. One of Strayed\u2019s most vital messages\u2014which her revelations of past lapses are meant to show\u2014is that being a real, whole person means being imperfect. Sugar models this not only in her history, but in her letters, too. Once in a while, she falters. . . . Sugar is good enough, but not perfect. Which is exactly what she\u2019s been trying to tell us all along.\u201d \u2014Jessica Gross, The Millions \u201cMany of the pieces in Tiny Beautiful Things , which first appeared in the online literary magazine The Rumpus, have had robust first lives, circulated on the Internet by fans. In book form, the letters and Strayed\u2019s responses take on greater meaning as an extended epistolary essay on the human condition\u2014with its antsy spouses, frustrated parents and desperately indebted students\u2014and also as a companion autobiography to Wild . Sugar\u2019s technique is to share the thorniest, most indelible experiences from her life to help each letter writer work through his or her own, which makes Tiny Beautiful Things an odd, contradictory and moving invention: an anecdotal memoir\u2014that most narcissistic of genres\u2014whose every chapter is written lovingly and generously to someone else. . . . Sugar is sharp-witted, but she doesn\u2019t do funny. She doesn\u2019t do snarky. (This distinguishes her from, to state it conservatively, most of the Internet.) And Sugar doesn\u2019t coddle. She especially doesn\u2019t coddle writers. . . . Stillness pervades Strayed\u2019s Dear Sugar columns, which profit from all the advantages of the Internet\u2014its anonymous e-mail forms, endless terrain and capacity for comments and community building\u2014but provide refuge from its white noise. It\u2019s partly because of the emotional content of each letter and response, but also due to the inherent intimacy of the form. Direct address is as old as lyric poetry: it\u2019s just I and you \u2014and the rest of the world gets to listen in.\u201d \u2014Radhika Jones, Time Magazine \u201cStrayed, in this collection of advice (some previously unpublished) for readers of her \u2018Dear Sugar\u2019 column on therumpus.net, chooses thought-provoking questions from her readers and listens deeply to their emotional content. In casually intimate prose and with literary grace, she creates moments of wise, compassionate insight in often startlingly personal miniature memoirs, cradling gentle but practical guidance with enough humor to cement Strayed\u2019s presence as both a mentor and the most understanding of friends. Sugar can be tough and honest, but she\u2019s never mean: in Sugar\u2019s world, we all deserve love unconditionally, but also owe it to ourselves to be the best, most authentic selves we can be. For a regrounding in the beauty of what it means to be flawed and gorgeously human, for answers that feel real, Strayed\u2019s caring essays offer surprisingly rich comfort.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review)\u00a0\u201cThis beloved Internet advice columnist, using the pseudonym Sugar, revealed herself in early 2012 to be the acclaimed novelist and memoirist Strayed. First appearing on the Rumpus\u00a0in 2010, her column \u2018Dear Sugar\u2019 quickly attracted a large and devoted following with its cut-to-the-quick aphorisms like \u2018Write like a motherf*cker\u2019 and \u2018Be brave enough to break your own heart.\u2019 This collection gathers up the best of Sugar, whose trademark is deeply felt and frank responses grounded in her own personal experience; in many ways, it is a portrait of Strayed herself. She answers queries on subjects ranging from professional jealousy to leaving a loved partner to coping with the death of a child. VERDICT: Part advice, part personal essay, these pieces grapple with life\u2019s biggest questions. Beautifully written and genuinely wise, this book is full of heartache and love. Highly recommended.\u201d \u2014 Molly McArdle, Library Journal (starred review)\u201cStrayed offers insight into the world of online advice through her collection of letters sent to \u2018Dear Sugar,\u2019 her once-anonymous column for the online magazine The Rumpus . Sugar\u2019s Golden Rule\u2014\u2018Trust Yourself\u2019\u2014pushes the author and her readers to embrace themselves and not be afraid of asking life\u2019s complex questions. . . . Strayed\u2019s practical advice mixes with abundant personal anecdotes in which she illustrates to the addressee the reasoning behind her counsel. Admittedly not versed in psychology, her responses are sensitive and comprehensive, and her self-reflection projects understanding and sympathy. . . . The author\u2019s comforting yet stern writing style connects readers to each contributor\u2019s plight and the subsequent response to their cry for help. Appealing to Dear Sugar fans and self-help seekers alike, this \u2018collection of intimate exchanges between strangers\u2019 demonstrates that wisdom doesn\u2019t come only from age, but also from learning from the experiences of others. A realistic and poignant compilation of the intricacies of relationships.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cThese pieces are nothing short of dynamite, the kind of remarkable, revelatory storytelling that makes young people want to become writers in the first place. Over here at the Salon offices, we're reading the columns with boxes of tissue and raised fists of solidarity, shaking our heads with awe and amusement.\u201d \u2014Sarah Hepola, Salon \u201cSugar doesn't coddle her readers\u2014she believes them, and hears the stories inside the story they think they want to tell. She manages astonishing levels of empathy without dissolving into sentiment, and sees problems before the reader can. Sugar doesn't promise to make anyone feel good, only that she understands a question well enough to answer it.\u201d \u2014Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker critic\u201cPowerful and soulful, Tiny Beautiful Things is destined to become a classic of the form, the sort of book readers will carry around in purses and backpacks during difficult times as a token or talisman because of the radiant wisdom and depth within.\u201d \u2014Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake \u201c[Sugar is] turning the advice column on its head.\u201d \u2014Jessica Francis Kane, author of The Report \u201cSugar\u2019s columns are easily the most beautiful thing I\u2019ve read all year. They should be taught in schools and put on little slips of paper and dropped from airplanes, for all to read.\u201d \u2014Meakin Armstrong, Guernica editor\u201cDear Sugar will save your soul. I belong to the Church of Sugar.\u201d \u2014Samantha Dunn, author of Failing Paris \u201cCharming, idiosyncratic, luminous, profane. . . . [Sugar] is remaking a genre that has existed, in more or less the same form, since well before Nathanael West\u2019s Miss Lonelyhearts first put a face on the figure in 1933. . . . Her version of tough love ranges from hip-older-sister-loving to governess-stern. Sugar shines out amid the sea of fakeness.\u201d \u2014Ruth Franklin, The New Republic --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "0375830723", "title": "Tiger (The Five Ancestors, Book 1)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 5.14}, {"asin": "0996982604", "title": "The Fifth Sister: From Victim to Victor - Overcoming Child Abuse", "author": "Laura Landgraf", "description": "Review \"Candid prose anchors a gripping account of familial obligation and complicity.\" ~Kirkus Reviews \"Landgraf is a deeply perceptive, riveting storyteller.\" ~ Abuse and HumanTrafficking \"This lyrically compelling, emotionally harrowing view inside the world of in cest will hypnotize,horrify and hopefully compel you to take a stand.\" ~Ally Walker,Screenwriter, Producer, Actress (Profiler, Sons of Anarchy, TheProtector) \"Few understand thelife-long impact of childhood trauma as well as Landgraf, leaving herwell- positioned to be a spokesperson for the millions of adults whosuffer childhood sexual trauma.\" ~Bill Murray, Founder, NationalAssociation of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse \"Landgraf exposes the dark underbelly of religious zealotry and questions why\"men of faith\" are held up as paragons of virtue, when too often, theopposite is true.\" ~Julia Scheeres, NYT Bestselling Author \"A brave, marvelous, insightful work.\" ~Marc Klaas", "categories": ["Books", "Parenting & Relationships", "Family Relationships"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 20.0}], "target_asin": "0451234103"}
{"user_id": "AHPV4TLFRNIYGPCEWBK2SWTTTYBQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1501142542", "title": "Britt-Marie Was Here: A Novel", "author": "Henning Koch", "description": "Review \"Warm and satisfying.\" \u2015 People \u201cBackman has written another bestseller with his latest novel. While at first Britt-Marie seems intolerable and aggravating, readers are quickly endeared to her obsessive-compulsive ways and frank honesty. At first the writing style comes off sharp; however, readers quickly see that is how Britt-Marie processes the world and it too becomes something amicable. Heartfelt and truly stirring, Britt-Marie Was Here resonates long after the last page is read.\u201d \u2015 RT Magazine \u201cThe bestselling author of A MAN CALLED OVE returns with this heartwarming story about a woman rediscovering herself after personal crisis. Backman reveals Britt-Marie\u2019s need for order\u2026.with clear, tight descriptions. Insightful and touching, this is a sweet and inspiring story about truth and transformation. Fans of Backman\u2019s will find another winner in these pages.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Universal...Backman hits a nice note between overly sweet and hard-boiled fiction; excellent for book clubs.\" \u2015 Library Journal (starred review) \"Britt-Marie\u2019s metamorphosis from cocoon to butterfly seems all the more remarkable for the utterly discouraging environment in which it takes place.\" \u2015 Booklist \u201cA brilliant mix of belly-laughs, profound insight and captivating events delivered\u2026 with Backman's pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature.\" \u2015 Shelf Awareness PRAISE FOR A MAN CALLED OVE \u201cA charming debut\u2026You\u2019ll laugh, you\u2019ll cry, you\u2019ll feel new sympathy for the curmudgeons in your life. You\u2019ll also want to move to Scandinavia, where everything\u2019s cuter.\u201d \u2015 People \u201cEven the most serious reader of fiction needs light relief, and for that afternoon when all you want is charm, this is the perfect book.\" \u2015 San Francisco Chronicle \"A light hearted, deeply moving novel about a grumpy but loveable curmudgeon who finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door. This quirky debut is a thoughtful and charming exploration of the impact one life has on countless others\u2014and an absolute delight.\" \u2015 CBS Local \"An inspiring affirmation of love for life and acceptance of people for their essence and individual quirks. A Man Called Ove is a perfect selection for book clubs. It's well written and replete with universal concerns. It lacks violence and profanity, is life-affirming and relationship-driven. The book is bittersweet, tender, often wickedly humorous and almost certain to elicit tears. I contentedly wept my way through a box of tissues when I first read the novel and again when I savored it for a second time.\u201d \u2015 BookBrowse.com \" A Man Called Ove is exquisite. The lyrical language is the confetti thrown liberally throughout this celebration-of-life story, adding sparkle and color to an already spectacular party. Backman's characters feel so authentic that readers will likely find analogues living in their own neighborhoods.\" \u2015 Shelf Awareness (starred review) \"Readers seeking feel-good tales with a message will rave about the rantings of this solitary old man with a singular outlook. If there was an award for 'Most Charming Book of the Year,' this first novel by a Swedish blogger-turned-overnight-sensation would win hands down.\" \u2015 Booklist, Starred Review \u201cA funny crowd-pleaser that serves up laughs to accompany a thoughtful reflection on loss and love\u2026 The author writes with winning charm.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly, starred review \u201cThis charming debut novel by Backman should find a ready audience with English-language readers\u2026 hysterically funny\u2026 wry descriptions, excellent pacing\u2026 In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden,generous heart.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews PRAISE FOR MY GRANDMOTHER ASKED ME TO TELL YOU SHE'S SORRY \u201c[\u2026] Believable and fanciful. Backman\u2019s smooth storytelling infuses his characters with charm and wit. . . Engaging. . . A delightful story.\u201d \u2015 St. Louis Post-Dispatch \u201cEvery bit as churlish but lovable as Backman\u2019s cantankerous protagonist in his debut, A Man Called Ove (2014), precocious Elsa will easily work her way into the hearts of readers who like characters with spunk to spare. A delectable homage to the power of stories to comfort and heal, Backman\u2019s tender tale of the touching relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter is a tribute to the everlasting bonds of deep family ties. \u201d \u2015 Booklist (starred) \u201cFirmly in league with Roald Dahl and Neil Gaiman. A touching, sometimes funny, often wise portrait of grief.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \"In his second offering, Backman ( A Man Called Ove ) continues to write with the same whimsical charm and warm heart as in his debut.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"An eclectic cast of characters, fairy-tale wisdom, and a little mystery\u2026 one of our favorite novels of the year so far.\" \u2015 SFGate.com About the Author Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove , My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She\u2019s Sorry , Britt-Marie Was Here , Beartown , Us Against You , and Anxious People , as well as two novellas and one work of nonfiction. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Facebook and Twitter @BackmanLand and on Instagram @Backmansk.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0062654195", "title": "The Alice Network: A Reese's Book Club Pick", "author": "Kate Quinn", "description": "Review \u201c The Alice Network has history, suspense, romance and women kicking butt. I couldn\u2019t put it down.\u201d \u2014 NPR Books \u201cThis fast-paced story offers courageous heroines, villains you love to hate, and dramatic life-or-death stakes. A compelling blend of historical fiction, mystery, and women\u2019s fiction, Quinn\u2019s complex story and engaging characters have something to offer just about everyone.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cAmazing historical fiction... a must read!\u201d \u2014 Historical Novel Society \u201cKate Quinn announces herself as one of the best artists of the genre. The plotting is seamless, the pace breathtaking, and the prose is both vivid and laced with just the right amount of details. Fans of historical fiction, spy fiction and thrilling drama will love every moment.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201cLovingly crafted and brimming with details, readers are sure to be held in Quinn\u2019s grip watching as the characters evolve. Powerful reading you can\u2019t put down!\u201d \u2014 RT Book Reviews (top pick) \u201cKate Quinn delivers an enthralling tale filled with breath-taking narrative that will make the reader feel as if they\u2019re in the back of the roadster, riding along with the raucous Eve and courageous Charlie on their clandestine adventures. Suspenseful and engrossing, THE ALICE NETWORK is a must-read!\u201d \u2014 Heather Webb, Author of Rodin's Lover \u201cKate Quinn strums the chords of every human emotion with two storylines that race over continents and through decades to converge in one explosive ending.\u201d \u2014 Marci Jefferson, author of Enchantress of Paris \u201cThe Alice Network... perfectly balances a propulsive plot, faultlessly observed period detail, and a cast of characters so vividly drawn that I half expected to blink and see them standing in front of me. This is historical fiction at its best--thrilling, affecting, revelatory.\u201d \u2014 Jennifer Robson, international bestselling author of Moonlight Over Paris \u201cBoth funny and heartbreaking, this epic journey of two courageous women is an unforgettable tale of little-known wartime glory and sacrifice. Quinn knocks it out of the park with this spectacular book!\u201d \u2014 Stephanie Dray, author of America's First Daughter \u201cA powerful story filled with daring and intrigue, The Alice Network will hook readers from the first page and take them on an unforgettable journey.\u201d \u2014 Chanel Cleeton, author of Next Year in Havana \u201cLine for line, one of the best books I\u2019ve read in a long time. Loyal and brave, the women of THE ALICE NETWORK are brilliantly revealed by Kate Quinn\u2019s exquisite storytelling and prose. I loved every word! A must read for fans of WWI and WWII fiction.\u201d \u2014 Renee Rosen, author of Windy City Blues \u201cIn The Alice Network , the lives of two indomitable women intertwine in a plot crackling with suspense. We root for Charlie and Eve, and cheer when they triumph.\u201d \u2014 NPR.org From the Back Cover 1947 . In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She\u2019s also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie\u2019s parents banish her to Europe to have her \u201clittle problem\u201d taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister. 1915 . A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she\u2019s recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she\u2019s trained by the mesmerizing Lili, code name Alice, the \u201cqueen of spies,\u201d who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy\u2019s nose. Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. That is until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn\u2019t heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth . . . no matter where it leads. About the Author Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of Southern California, she attended Boston University, where she earned bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in classical voice. A lifelong history buff, she has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga and two books set in the Italian Renaissance before turning to the 20th century with The Alice Network, The Huntress , and The Rose Code . All have been translated into multiple languages. She and her husband now live in California with three black rescue dogs. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 10.31}, {"asin": "0812977181", "title": "The Whole Town's Talking: A Novel", "author": "Fannie Flagg", "description": "Review \u201c[A] witty multigenerational saga . . . [Fannie] Flagg\u2019s down-home wisdom, her affable humor and her long view of life offer a pleasant respite in nerve-jangling times.\u201d \u2014 People \u201c The Whole Town\u2019s Talking [is] Fannie Flagg at her best.\u201d \u2014 Florida Times Union \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing Fannie Flagg can do better than anybody else, it\u2019s tell a story, and she outdoes herself in The Whole Town\u2019s Talking . . . . Another brilliant novel\u2014equally on the level as her famous Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe .\u201d \u2014 The Newport Plain Talk \u201cTold with warmth, humor and remarkable characters, this touching novel is a tribute to the indomitable spirit of love.\u201d \u2014 The Columbus Dispatch \u201cDelightful.\u201d \u2014The Washington Post \u201cI could not put this book down and didn\u2019t want the tale to end. Fannie Flagg does it again; a great read you won\u2019t want to miss.\u201d \u2014 The Missourian \u201cIt\u2019s a sweeping, cinematic approach. . . . Flagg\u2019s gentle storytelling makes the novel an easy, comfortable read that will leave a reader thinking about life, love and loss\u201d \u2014Minneapolis Star Tribune \u201c[Fannie Flagg] creates a world familiar in its reality and its hopes, and she displays her storytelling skills, ones that are enhanced by her humanity, her optimism and her big heart. . . . The Whole Town\u2019s Talking [is] a story of life\u2019s peaks, valleys and ordinary days\u2014and a ringing affirmation of love, community and life itself.\u201d \u2014 Richmond Times-Dispatch \u201c The Whole Town\u2019s Talking is warm and inviting. Flagg\u2019s Elmwood Springs novels are comfort reads of the best kind, warm and engaging without flash or fuss.\u201d \u2014 Miami Herald \u201cFlagg\u2019s humor shines through as she chronicles their successes, disappointments, and even a mysterious murder or two. . . . The interwoven lives of these completely engaging characters twist and turn in unexpected ways, making this chronicle of a close-knit community a pleasure to read.\u201d \u2014 BookPage \u201c[A] charming tale.\u201d \u2014 Booklist Praise for Fannie Flagg \u201cA born storyteller.\u201d \u2014The New York Times Book Review About the Author Fannie Flagg \u2019s career started in the fifth grade when she wrote, directed, and starred in her first play, titled The Whoopee Girls, and she has not stopped since. At age nineteen she began writing and producing television specials, and later wrote for and appeared on Candid Camera . She then went on to distinguish herself as an actress and a writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the bestselling author of Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man; Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe; Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!; Standing in the Rainbow; A Redbird Christmas; Can\u2019t Wait to Get to Heaven; I Still Dream About You; The All-Girl Filling Station\u2019s Last Reunion; and The Whole Town\u2019s Talking . Flagg\u2019s script for the movie Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for an Academy Award and the Writers Guild of America Award and won the highly regarded Scripter Award for best screenplay of the year. Fannie Flagg is the winner of the Harper Lee Prize. She lives happily in California and Alabama. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Lordor Nordstrom1889Missouri, USAAt age twenty-eight, Lordor Nordstrom had left his home in Sweden for America, looking for land to buy. Months later, while crossing down through southern Missouri, he found a large tract of good, rich land with plenty of natural springs, just right for a dairy farm. After he had cleared an area for his farm, he placed an ad in the Swedish-American newspapers for young farmers to come and start a new community and soon others joined him, bringing their families and farm animals with them. By 1880, a small farming community had formed that other people in the area called Swede Town, in spite of the fact that two Germans and one Norwegian (who was suspected of being Finnish) now lived there.Today, Lordor Nordstrom stood on the top of a small hill looking over the long expanse of rolling green meadows and little white farmhouses below. It was so quiet and peaceful up here, nothing but the sound of birds and distant cowbells. He could see there was a most pleasant view from every angle. Exactly what he had been looking for.He would donate this land to the community and name it Still Meadows. Walking back down the hill, Lordor felt very pleased with himself. As the original settler, he felt a great responsibility to the settlers who had come after him. And he had just found the perfect spot for their final resting place in the upcoming years.In the following weeks, Lordor and all the local men cleared the land on the hill and began measuring and blocking out rows of burial plots. Each plot was given a number, written in both Swedish and English, so there would be no confusion. They built a nice wooden arch as an entrance that was carved with flowers and read still meadows cemetery, estab. 1889.After all the landscaping was complete, Lordor called a meeting out at his farm, and announced that since they were all first settlers, their plots would be free, first come, first served, which seemed to Lordor the only fair way to do it. In the future, any newcomers would be charged fifty cents a plot.The following Sunday, all the families packed up their wagons and went up the hill to stake their claim with small sticks. Some, like the Swensens, who hoped to start a large family, staked out an entire row of twenty or more plots to provide for the ones already here and those yet to come.Birdie Swensen was very happy with their choice. She was quite musical and liked hearing the birds and cowbells in the distance. She liked the view as well. She said to her husband, \u201cLook, Lars, you can see our farm and the windmill from here. It will be so nice for the children when they come to visit.\u201d Mr. and Mrs. Henry Knott wanted to look back at the cornfields.Although the flat area on the top of the hill was rather large, and they could have spread around, most people are creatures of habit. They all tended to pick out spots right next to their neighbors, much as they lived below, Lordor in the middle, under the big oak tree, and everyone else around him. Everybody, that is, except Old Man Hendersen, who marched way over to the other side and stuck his stick there. Someone once said that Eustus Hendersen liked his mules better than he did people, and he had agreed.\u201cMules are mean, but at least they don\u2019t talk your head off when you see them.\u201dLater, after everyone had chosen a plot, they sat down for a picnic lunch. Blueberries were in season, so the ladies had made pies. Mr. Lindquist played his fiddle, and Mrs. Knott played her accordion. All in all, it was a fun afternoon.Of course, at the time, none of them knew about all the strange and mysterious events that would take place on that hill. And even if you had told them, they wouldn\u2019t have believed you in a million years.Love and MarriageLordor guessed that preparing a place to spend eternity and trying to figure out how many plots to set aside for himself was what made him think about his future. At the ripe old age of thirty-seven, he was still one of the many bachelor farmers living in the area. He hadn\u2019t meant to be. He\u2019d just been busy trying to turn a no place into a someplace. There were five married ladies, who were always at him to find a nice woman and settle down, but finding a wife was not an easy thing to do.Lordor wasn\u2019t against the idea. A few years earlier, and at their insistence, he had tried to meet someone. That spring, he\u2019d had his hair cut by a real barber, purchased a brand-new pair of shoes out of a catalog, and traveled all the way over to the Swedish community of Lindsborg, Kansas. But when he got there, he found out that all the good women were already taken. So Lordor had come back home empty-handed with nothing but the same new shoes and a good haircut.Swede Town really was in dire need of more women. As it stood now, they couldn\u2019t even throw a decent square dance. When they did, all the men had to take turns wearing a white handkerchief tied around their arms to signify that they were now assuming the role of a female partner. And having to dance and hold hands with another grizzly, callused, hard-skinned farmer had a way of making the real women seem a lot more beautiful, softer, and much more delicate than they really were. Their lack of ladies was causing them to lose good workers as well. After dancing with five-foot-tall, three-feet-wide Nancy Knott, one young farmhand later told Lordor, \u201cWhen Mrs. Knott starts to look good to you, it\u2019s time to move on.\u201d And he did.Lordor figured if he was ever going to make another attempt at finding a nice lady, the time was now. He had a new contract to sell milk and cheese to the railroad workers, and his financial future was now secure enough to support a wife. Besides, he was lonely. He wanted someone to share the new house he had just built. But courting a lady properly was a time-consuming proposition, and at present, he didn\u2019t have enough of it. He was short on help, and his dairy farm required him to be there full-time.At the next barn raising, as everyone was sitting at a long wooden table having lunch, Lordor talked the situation over with his neighbors. Henry Knott, a bandy-legged little hog farmer seated down at the other end, called out, \u201cHey, Lordor . . . why don\u2019t you advertise for one of them mail-order brides? That way, she comes to you, and no work time\u2019s lost.\u201dAll the women jumped on that notion in a hurry. \u201cOh, Lordor,\u201d said Mrs. Eggstrom, \u201cthat\u2019s exactly what you should do.\u201dLordor pulled a skeptical face at the idea, but Mrs. Lindquist, waving a spoon at him, said, \u201cI know what you\u2019re thinking, Lordor, but there\u2019s no shame to it. A lot of men out west are doing it, and there must be plenty of nice Swedish girls out there looking to marry.\u201d\u201cShe\u2019s right,\u201d added Birdie Swensen, who had just placed another piece of fried chicken in front of him. \u201cAnd if the girl is interested, she sends you her photograph. That way, we can all get a look at her and help you decide.\u201dLordor still felt reluctant. He was a little bit shy around women anyway, and the idea of marrying a total stranger made him feel uneasy. But in the end, Mrs. Knott summed it up for him. \u201cYou\u2019re getting old, Lordor. Get to it!\u201d He guessed it wouldn\u2019t hurt anything to at least try. So a week later, a small ad appeared in a Swedish-American newspaper in Chicago.Swedish man of 37 years looking for Swedish lady for marriage.I have a house and cows.\u2014Lordor Nordstrom Swede Town, MissouriA Swedish Lady1889ChicagoKatrina Olsen, only five years from Sweden, was a domestic servant in a large household in Chicago. She had been helping clean the kitchen that morning and had noticed Lordor\u2019s ad in a newspaper. She carefully tore it out and put it in her apron pocket. That night, when she and her friend and coworker Anna Lee were upstairs in their room, Katrina showed her the ad.\u201cDo you think I should answer it?\u201dAnna Lee looked at the ad with some alarm. \u201cOh, Katrina . . . Missouri? We don\u2019t even know where that is. There could be wild Indians or bears even. And this Lordor Nordstrom might be mean and ugly.\u201dKatrina sighed. \u201cI know, but I don\u2019t want to be a servant all my life.\u201d\u201cNo, me either, but I don\u2019t see much difference in being a servant and being some old cow-farmer\u2019s wife. Besides, it\u2019s too much hard work with no pay. No, I\u2019d rather stay in the city and take my chances with the boys here.\u201dBeing a pretty girl, Katrina had gone out with a few Chicago boys, friends of Anna Lee\u2019s, but they\u2019d been too slick and fast-talking for her taste. And, somehow, the idea of working hard on your own land did not seem that daunting to her. But what Anna Lee had said about bears and wild Indians was a real concern. When they had been learning English, they had read all the popular American dime novels, like Trapper Bess and Mountain Kate, that told of all the many perils women faced living out in the wilderness.But the more Katrina thought about the ad, the more it intrigued her. She knew going all the way to Missouri would be a risky venture. She could be eaten by a mountain lion or worse. But the ad said the man had a house. When she had left Sweden, she had made certain promises, and she desperately wanted to keep them. So it might be worth taking a chance, but she had waited so long to respond, she was sure Mr. Nordstrom had found someone by now. Still, she guessed it couldn\u2019t hurt to write and see.Dear Sir,A 24-year-old Swedish lady of the Lutheran faith with skills of cooking, sewing, and gardening and a good nature is answering your advertisement. Enclosed is my photograph. If you are so inclined and not already taken, please send your photograph.Sincerely, Katrina OlsenIt had been weeks, and Lordor Nordstrom had not yet received one reply to his ad. A lot of girls had seen the ad, but most Swedish girls in Chicago were like Anna Lee. They had left farms in Sweden and had no desire to go back to one. Lordor had almost given up hope when Miss Olsen\u2019s reply arrived.The VerdictThe day the letter arrived, Lordor brought Miss Olsen\u2019s photograph over to the women as promised. They had all gathered in Mrs. Knott\u2019s kitchen for the occasion. After Lordor handed it over, he was told to wait outside so they could speak freely.Lordor wandered out to the barn and had a smoke with Mr. Knott, who had also been banned from the kitchen. He had no more than finished his smoke when the kitchen door flew open and Mrs. Knott called out, \u201cLordor, come on in. . . . Henry, you stay out there. I\u2019ll get your lunch in a minute.\u201d Mr. Knott nodded. He hoped it would be sausage and potatoes today. His wife wasn\u2019t much to look at, but oh, her steaming sauerkraut, her Wiener schnitzel, her piping-hot pot roast, creamed noodles, and apple dumplings.Lordor walked slowly up the stairs to receive his verdict. He took his hat off, stepped inside, and was told to have a seat while five ladies stared at him. He suddenly felt himself start to sweat under the pressure when Birdie Swensen, the gentlest of the five women, spoke.\u201cNow, Lordor . . . a girl can be pretty and fool a man, but she can\u2019t fool another woman. Yes, this girl is pretty, but for a wife, you want someone of good character as well.\u201dLordor cleared his throat. \u201cYes, I suppose so.\u201d\u201cTrust us, you do. And so, after careful study, we all agree. This girl has character.\u201d They all nodded as she continued. \u201cWe think you need to answer her letter right now, before somebody else grabs her.\u201dMrs. Lindquist jumped in. \u201cBesides, she\u2019s a Lutheran, Lordor. What else do you need to know?\u201dLordor was awfully glad to hear the ladies\u2019 opinion. He cared very much about what they thought, but in this case, he hadn\u2019t needed much prompting. The moment he had seen the girl\u2019s photograph, he had been smitten. She was Swedish all right, with her blond braids arranged so neatly across her head and wearing her high-necked white lace blouse with a cameo. And she was very pretty. But it was something else that had captured his attention right away. It was a look in her eye that certain immigrants recognized in one another. A look of hope and determination, almost as if she was gazing past him, far into the future. The day the photograph had arrived, he\u2019d stared at it for so long that when he closed his eyes that night, he could still see her face. He figured that must mean something, but he stopped himself from going too far. First, he needed to have his picture taken and give the girl a chance to get a good look at him.Oh, Lord. Just the thought of her seeing his photograph filled him with dread. Now he knew how that poor horse he\u2019d just bought must have felt when he had examined every inch of him and looked at all of his teeth before putting his money down. Tomorrow, he was going to give that horse some extra hay as a way of an apology.Katrina OlsenNovember 1865v, SwedenThe baby had come much too early. A woman named Ingrid Olsen had just given birth beside a lake next to the potato field where she worked. She guessed, by the weight of the potatoes, that the baby girl weighed no more than five pounds. A friend helped Ingrid wrap her up in a torn burlap sack.Ingrid had already lost two babies, but if by some miracle this baby should live, she would name her Katrina. She knew that winter was coming. And with so little food and a house with such poor heat, she did not hold out much hope.Ingrid looked down at the squirming little five pounds of blue-eyed life she held in her arms and cried for the child\u2019s future.In 1865, Sweden was a land with strict class divisions, with no middle ground. If you did not own land, you worked it for the ones who did, with no hope for a different future for you or your children. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 13.58}, {"asin": "0735225311", "title": "A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II", "author": "Sonia Purnell", "description": "Review Praise for A Woman of No Importance : \"[An] excellent biography... if Virginia Hall herself remains something of an enigma \u2014 a testament, perhaps, to the skills that allowed her to live in the shadows for so long \u2014 the extraordinary facts of her life are brought onto the page here with a well-judged balance of empathy and fine detail. This book is as riveting as any thriller, and as hard to put down\" -- The New York Times Book Review \u201c[A] compelling saga of a remarkable woman whose persistence was honed early on by her battles against low gender expectations and later on by her disability.\u201d \u2013 USA Today \"A\u00a0gripping take\u2026 a compelling biography of a masterful spy, and a reminder of what can be done with a few brave people \u2014 and a little resistance.\u201d -- NPR.org \u201cNever have I read anything like it. Every page is compelling and demands not just to be read, but absorbed. Every act reflects incredible bravery. This is what heroism looks like\u2026Sonia Purnell has ensured Virginia Hall\u2019s place in that great pantheon.\u201d --FOX News \"Electrifying\" \u2014Smithsonian.com \u201cA fitting and moving tribute to an amazing woman.\u201d \u2013 The Economist \" Reads like a detailed novel\u2026 Purnell\u2019s fascinating book supports her description of Hall\u2019s life as a \u2018Homeric tale of adventure, action, and seemingly unfathomable courage.\" \u2014 The Columbus Dispatch \"Sonia Purnell has written a riveting account of Hall\u2019s work as a ferociously courageous American spy\u2026 [she] writes with compelling energy and fine detail.\" \u2014 The Minneapolis Star-Tribune \u201cPurnell\u2019s writing is as precise and engaging as her research, and this book restores overdue attention to one of the world\u2019s great war heroes. It\u2019s a joy to read, and it will swell readers' hearts with pride.\u201d \u2014 Booklist, Starred Review \u201cA groundbreaking biography that reads like a spy thriller\u2026a suspenseful, heartbreaking and ultimately triumphant tale of heroism and sacrifice.\u201d \u2014BookPage, Starred Review \u201cPurnell vividly resurrects an underappreciated hero and delivers an enthralling story of wartime intrigue\u2026fans of WWII history and women\u2019s history will be riveted.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cA remarkable chronicle...this lively examination\u2026shows how, if Hall had been a man, dropping undercover in and out of occupied Vichy, Paris, and Lyon, setting up safe houses, and coordinating couriers for the Resistance, she would now be as famous as James Bond\u2026Meticulous research results in a significant biography of a trailblazer who now has a CIA building named after her.\u201d \u2013Kirkus \u201cImpressively researched and compellingly written, this brilliant biography puts Virginia Hall\u2212and her prosthetic leg, Cuthbert\u2212back where they belong : right in the heart of Resistance history.\u201d \u2014Clare Mulley, author of The Women Who Flew for Hitler: A True Story of Soaring Ambition and Searing Rivalry \u201cIn this astonishing, intriguing book, Sonia Purnell presents one of the most breathtaking stories yet told of female courage behind enemy lines. Its strength lies not only in Purnell\u2019s intimate and moving portrayal of Virginia\u2019s secret work, but also in the new light shed on the betrayal, bravery, and bungling of Churchill\u2019s Special Operations Executive for which Virginia worked.\u201d \u2014Sarah Helm, author of Ravensbr\u00fcck: Life and Death in Hitler\u2019s Concentration Camp for Women \u201cWhat a fascinating story! Sonia Purnell skillfully takes you deep into the covert operations Virginia Hall led in Nazi-occupied France. Readers will find this tale of her cunning and courage riveting.\u201d \u2014Douglas Waller, author of Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage About the Author Sonia Purnell is a biographer and journalist who has worked at The Economist, The Telegraph , and The Sunday Times . Her book Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill (published as First Lady in the UK) was chosen as a book of the year by The Telegraph and The Independent , and was a finalist for the Plutarch Award. Her first book, Just Boris , was longlisted for the Orwell prize. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prologue France was falling. Burned\u2011out cars, once strapped high with treasured possessions, were nosed crazily into ditches. Their beloved cargoes of dolls, clocks, and mirrors lay smashed around them and along mile upon mile of unfriendly road. Their owners, young and old, sprawled across the hot dust, were groaning or already silent. Yet the hordes just kept streaming past them, a never\u2011ending line of hunger and exhaustion too fearful to stop\u00a0for days on end. Ten million women, children, and old men were on the move, all flee\u2011 ing Hitler\u2019s tanks pouring across the border from the east and the north. Entire cities had uprooted themselves in a futile bid to escape the Nazi blitzkrieg that threatened to engulf them. The fevered talk was of German soldiers stripped to the waist in jubilation at the ease of their conquest. The air was thick with smoke and the stench of the dead. The babies had no milk, and the aged fell where they stood. The horses drawing overladen old farm carts sagged and snarled in their sweat\u2011drenched agony. The French heat wave of May 1940 was witness to this, the largest refugee exo\u2011 dus of all time. Day after day a solitary moving vehicle weaved its way through the crowd with a striking young woman at the wheel. Private Virginia Hall often ran low on fuel and medicines but still pressed on in her French army ambulance toward the advancing enemy. She persevered even when the German Stukas came screaming down to drop 110\u2011pound bombs onto the convoys all around her, torching the cars and cratering the roads. Even when fighter planes swept over the treetops to machine\u2011gun the ditches\u00a0where women and children were trying to take cover from the carnage. Even though French soldiers were deserting their units, abandoning their weapons, and running away, some in their tanks. Even when her left hip was shot with pain from continually pressing down on the clutch with her prosthetic foot.Now, at the age of thirty\u2011four, her mission marked a turning point after years of cruel rejection. For her own sake as much as for the casualties she was picking up from the battlefields and ferrying to the hospital, she could not fail again. There were many reasons why she was willingly jeopardizing her life far from home in aid of a foreign country, when millions of others were giving up. Perhaps foremost among them was that it had been so long since she had felt so thrillingly alive. Disgusted at the cowardice of the deserters, she could not understand why they would not continue the fight. But then she had so little to lose. The French still remembered sacrificing a third of their young menfolk to the Great War, and a nation of widows and orphans was in no mood for more bloodshed. Virginia, though, in\u2011 tended to go on to the end, wherever the battle took her. She was prepared to take whatever risks, face down any dangers. Total war against the Third Reich might perversely offer her one last hope of personal peace. \u00a0 Yet even this was as nothing compared with what was to come in a life that drew out into a Homeric tale of adventure, action, and seemingly unfathomable courage. Virginia Hall\u2019s service in the France of summer 1940 was merely an apprenticeship for a near suicide mission against the tyranny of the Nazis and their puppets in France. She helped to pioneer a daredevil role of espionage, sabotage, and subversion behind enemy lines in an era when women barely featured in the prism of heroism, when their part in combat was confined to the supportive and palliative. When they were just expected to look nice and act obedient and let the men do the heavy lifting. When disabled women\u2014or men\u2014were confined to staying at home and leading often narrow, unsatisfying lives. The fact that a young woman who had lost her leg in tragic circumstances broke through the tightest constrictions and overcame prejudice and even hostility to help the Allies win the Second World War is astonishing. That a female guerrilla leader of her stature remains so little known to this day is incredible. Yet that is perhaps how Virginia would have wanted it. She operated in the shadows, and that was where she was happiest. Even to her closest allies in France, she seemed to have no home or family or regiment, merely a burning desire to defeat the Nazis. They knew neither her real name nor her nationality, nor how she had arrived in their midst. Constantly chang\u2011 ing in looks and demeanor, surfacing without notice across whole swaths of France only to disappear again as suddenly, she remained an enigma throughout the war and in some ways after it too. Even now, tracing her story has involved three solid years of detective work, taking me from the National Archives in London, the Resistance files in Lyon, and the parachute drop zones in the Haute\u2011Loire, to the judicial dossiers of Paris and even the white marble corridors of CIA headquarters at Langley. My search led me through nine levels of security clearance and into the heart of today\u2019s world of American espionage. I have discussed the pressures of oper\u2011 ating in enemy territory with a former member of Britain\u2019s Special Forces and ex\u2011intelligence officers from both sides of the Atlantic. I have tracked down files that were missing, and discovered that others remain mysteri\u2011 ously lost or unaccounted for. I have spent days drawing diagrams match\u2011 ing dozens of code names with scores of her missions; months hunting for remaining extracts of those strange \u201cdisappeared\u201d papers; years digging out forgotten documents and memoirs. Of course, the best guerrilla leaders do not intend to keep future historians happy by keeping perfect records at five in the morning about their overnight missions, and those that do exist are often patchy or contradictory. Where possible, I have stuck to the version of events as told by the people closest to them. At times, however, it has been as if Virginia and I have been playing our own game of cat and mouse; as if from the grave she remains, as she used to put it, \u201cunwilling to talk\u201d about what she did. In her secret universe, when virtually the whole of Europe from the North Sea to the Russian frontier was under the Nazi heel, trust was an unaffordable luxury. Mystique was as vital as a concealable Colt pistol. And yet, in an era when the world again seems to be tilting toward division and extremism, her example of comradeship across borders in pursuit of a higher ideal stands out now more than ever. Nor have governments made it easy to fill in the gaps. Scores of relevant documents are still classified for another generation\u2014although I managed to have a number released to me for this book with the invaluable aid of two former intelligence officers. Still more went up in flames in a devastating fire at the French National Archives in the 1970s, leaving an unfillable hole in the official accounts. Whole batches of papers at the National Ar\u2011 chives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C., have apparently been mislaid or possibly misfiled, a handy list of them appar\u2011 ently overlooked in a move between two buildings. Only 15 percent of the original papers from Special Operations Executive\u2014the British secret ser\u2011 vice that Virginia worked for from 1941 to 1944\u2014survive. Yet for all these challenges and twists and turns down dark and hidden alleys, Virginia\u2019s story has never once disappointed: in fact, it has repeatedly turned out to be more extraordinary, its characters more vivid, its significance greater than I could have imagined. She helped to change espionage and the views of women in warfare forever\u2014and the course of the fighting in France. Virginia\u2019s enemies were more deadly, her conduct more daring than many a Hollywood blockbuster fantasy. And yet the swashbuckling tale is true, and Virginia a real\u2011life hero who kept going even when all seemed lost. The pitiless universe of deception and intrigue that she inhabited might have inspired Ian Fleming to create James Bond, yet she came closer to being the ultimate spy. Eventually every bit as ruthless and wily as the fictional Commander Bond, she also understood the need to blend in and keep her distance from friend and foe alike. Where Bond was known by name to every international baddie, she slipped through her enemies unseen. Where Bond drove a flashy Aston Martin, she traveled by train or tram or, despite her disability, on foot. Where Fleming\u2019s character seemed to rise seamlessly to the top, Virginia had to battle for every inch of recognition and authority. Her struggle made her the figure she became, one who survived, even thrived, in a clandestine life that broke many apparently far more suited to the job. No wonder today\u2019s chief of the British intelligence agency MI6, has revealed that he searches for recruits who do not shout loud and show off but who have had to \u201cfight to get on in life.\u201d Virginia was a human being with the f laws, fears, and insecurities of the rest of us\u2014perhaps even more\u2014but they helped her understand her enemies. Only once did her instincts let her down, with catastrophic consequences. For the most part, though, she conquered her demons and won the trust, admiration, and ultimately the gratitude of thousands in the process. To meet Virginia was clearly never to forget her. Until the moment she retired in the 1960s from her postwar career in the CIA, she was a woman ahead of her time who has much to say to us now. Controversy still rages about women fighting alongside men on the front line, but nearly eight decades ago Virginia was already commanding men deep in enemy territory. She experienced six years of the European war in a way that very few other Americans did. She gambled again and again with her own life, not out of a fervent nationalism for her own country, but out of love and respect for the freedoms of another. She blew up bridges and tunnels, and tricked, traded, and, like 007, had a license to kill. What she pursued was a very modern form of warfare based on propa\u2011 ganda, deceit, and the formation of an enemy within\u2014techniques now increasingly familiar to us all. But her goals were noble: she wanted to protect rather than destroy, to restore liberty rather than remove it. She neither pursued fame or glory nor was she really granted it. This is not a military account of the battle for France, nor an analysis of the shifting shapes of espionage or the evolving role of Special Forces, although, of course, they weave a rich and dramatic background to Virginia\u2019s tale. This book is rather an attempt to reveal how one woman really did help turn the tide of history. How adversity and rejection and suffering can sometimes turn, in the end, into resolve and ultimately triumph, even against the backdrop of a horrifying conflict that casts its long shadow over the way we live today. How women can step out of the construct of conven\u2011 tional femininity to defy all the stereotypes, if only they are given the chance. And how the desperate urgencies of war can, perversely, open up opportunities that normal life tragically keeps closed. Of course, Virginia, who served in British and American secret services, did not work alone. The supporting cast of doctors, prostitutes, farm\u2011 ers\u2019 wives, teachers, booksellers, and policemen have equally been forgotten but often paid dearly for their valor. Just as what they did for the cause was inspired in part by lofty romance and ideals, so also were they aware that failure or capture meant a lonely and grisly death. Some of the Third Reich\u2019s most venal and terrifying figures were obsessed by Virginia and her networks and strove tirelessly to eliminate her and the whole movement she helped to create. But when the hour of France\u2019s liberation came in 1944, the secret armies she equipped, trained, and sometimes directed defied expectations and helped bring about complete and final victory for the Allies. Even that, though, was not enough for her. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 11.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1984806734", "title": "Beach Read", "author": "Emily Henry", "description": "Review \u201cOnce I started Beach Read I legit did not put it down.\u201d \u2014 Betches One of... The New York Times Book Review's Summer Romance Reads Entertainment Weekly\u2019s Hottest Summer Reads of 2020 Oprah Magazine's Best Beach Reads of Summer\u00a02020 Betches\u2019 20 Books to Read in 2020 SheReads\u2019 Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020 Goodreads' Big Books of Spring Popsugar's 25 Exciting New Books Coming Out in May Bustle's Most Anticipated May Titles Shondaland's Five Books to Read in May TheSkimm's 11 Buzzy Books for Your Imaginary Beach Bag Good Morning America's 25 Novels You'll Want to Read this Summer The New York Post's Required Reading Good Housekeeping's 25 Best Beach Reads Huffington Post's Best Books to Read during QuarantineCNN's Perfect Summer ReadsLitHub's Ultimate Summer 2020 Reading List\u00a0BookRiot's 6 Captivating New Books \u201cReader, I swooned! Beach Read is a breath of fresh air. My heart ached for January, and Gus is to die for\u2014a steamy, smart and perceptive romance. I was engrossed!\u201d \u2014Josie Silver , #1 New York Times bestselling author of One Day in December \u201cThis is a touching and heartfelt book about love, betrayal, grief, failure, and learning how to love again. I adored going along on Gus and January\u2019s journey, and I closed this book with a satisfied sigh.\u201d\u2014 Jasmine\u00a0Guillory , New York Times Bestselling Author of The Proposal \u201cBeach Read is original, sparkling bright, and layered with feeling. Has trying to see the world through your long time crush/rival\u2019s eyes ever been this potent and poignant? If whipcrack banter and foggy sexual tension is your catnip, you\u2019ll adore this book.\u201d\u2014 Sally Thorne , USA Today bestselling author of The Hating Game and 99 Percent Mine\u201cBeach Read is exactly the witty, charming, and swoony novel we always want; it also happens to be the unexpected wallop of emotional wisdom and sly social commentary we need right now. I adored it.\u201d\u2014 Julia Whelan , author of My Oxford Year \u201c [It]\u00a0has everything the title promises\u2014a romping plot, family secrets, and the thrill of falling in love, all set on the sweeping shores of eastern Lake Michigan. I cannot wait to read what Henry writes next.\u201d\u2014 Amy E. Reichert , author The Coincidence of Coconut Cake and The Optimist\u2019s Guide to Letting Go \u201cDelightfully romantic and slyly poignant,\u00a0Beach Read\u00a0is brimming with crackling banter and engrossing prose. It has every flavor of booklover catnip: rivalry, creative struggle, family secrets, and the sweet head-over-heels tumble into love. Emily Henry's\u00a0Beach Read\u00a0is 2020's perfect\u00a0anywhere\u00a0read.\u201d\u2014 Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners \u201cIf you liked Sally Thorne\u2019s The Hating Game and Linda Holmes\u2019s Evvie Drake Starts Over , you will definitely be into this, which feels like their spawn. (No one asked me to say this, by the way. I\u2019m just high on that happy-sad feeling of finishing a book I enjoyed, that I wish wasn\u2019t over.) Well played.\u201d\u2014 Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan , bestselling authors of The Royal We \u201cReaders are sure to fall hard for this meta, heartfelt take on the romance genre.\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \u201cA heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cThis will still sweep readers off their feet. January\u2019s first-person narration is suitably poetic and effervescent, the small-town beach setting is charming, and the romance is achingly swoony.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cThat Henry can manage to both pack a fierce emotional wallop and spear literary posturing in one go is a testament to her immense skill.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly About the Author Emily Henry is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of People We Meet on Vacation and Beach Read .\u00a0She studied creative writing at Hope College, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. Find her on Instagram @emilyhenrywrites. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 9781984806734|excerptHenry / BEACH READ1The HouseI have a fatal flaw.I like to think we all do. Or at least that makes it easier for me when I\u2019m writing\u2014\u00adbuilding my heroines and heroes up around this one self-\u00adsabotaging trait, hinging everything that happens to them on a specific characteristic: the thing they learned to do to protect themselves and can\u2019t let go of, even when it stops serving them.Maybe, for example, you didn\u2019t have much control over your life as a kid. So, to avoid disappointment, you learned never to ask yourself what you truly wanted. And it worked for a long time. Only now, upon realizing you didn\u2019t get what you didn\u2019t know you wanted, you\u2019re barreling down the highway in a midlife-\u00adcrisis-\u00admobile with a suitcase full of cash and a man named Stan in your trunk.Maybe your fatal flaw is that you don\u2019t use turn signals.Or maybe, like me, you\u2019re a hopeless romantic. You just can\u2019t stop telling yourself the story. The one about your own life, complete with melodramatic soundtrack and golden light lancing through car windows.It started when I was twelve. My parents sat me down to tell me the news. Mom had gotten her first diagnosis\u2014\u00adsuspicious cells in her left breast\u2014\u00adand she told me not to worry so many times I suspected I\u2019d be grounded if she caught me at it. My mom was a do-\u00ader, a laugher, an optimist, not a worrier, but I could tell she was terrified, and so I was too, frozen on the couch, unsure how to say anything without making things worse.But then my bookish homebody of a father did something unexpected. He stood and grabbed our hands\u2014\u00adone of Mom\u2019s, one of mine\u2014\u00adand said, You know what we need to get these bad feelings out? We need to dance!Our suburb had no clubs, just a mediocre steak house with a Friday night cover band, but Mom lit up like he\u2019d just suggested taking a private jet to the Copacabana.She wore her buttery yellow dress and some hammered metal earrings that twinkled when she moved. Dad ordered twenty-\u00adyear-\u00adold Scotch for them and a Shirley Temple for me, and the three of us twirled and bobbed until we were dizzy, laughing, tripping all over. We laughed until we could barely stand, and my famously reserved father sang along to \u201cBrown Eyed Girl\u201d like the whole room wasn\u2019t watching us.And then, exhausted, we piled into the car and drove home through the quiet, Mom and Dad holding tight to each other\u2019s hands between the seats, and I tipped my head against the car window and, watching the streetlights flicker across the glass, thought, It\u2019s going to be okay. We will always be okay.And that was the moment I realized: when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three. Not just for my own benefit, but for Mom\u2019s, and for everyone else around me.There would be purpose. There would be beauty. There would be candlelight and Fleetwood Mac playing softly in the background.The point is, I started telling myself a beautiful story about my life, about fate and the way things work out, and by twenty-\u00adeight years old, my story was perfect.Perfect (cancer-\u00adfree) parents who called several times a week, tipsy on wine or each other\u2019s company. Perfect (spontaneous, multi\u00adlingual, six foot three) boyfriend who worked in the ER and knew how to make coq au vin. Perfect shabby chic apartment in Queens. Perfect job writing romantic novels\u2014\u00adinspired by perfect parents and perfect boyfriend\u2014\u00adfor Sandy Lowe Books.Perfect life.But it was just a story, and when one gaping plot hole appeared, the whole thing unraveled. That\u2019s how stories work.Now, at twenty-\u00adnine, I was miserable, broke, semi-\u00adhomeless, very single, and pulling up to a gorgeous lake house whose very existence nauseated me. Grandly romanticizing my life had stopped serving me, but my fatal flaw was still riding shotgun in my dinged-\u00adup Kia Soul, narrating things as they happened:January Andrews stared out the car window at the angry lake beating up on the dusky shore. She tried to convince herself that coming here hadn\u2019t been a mistake.It was definitely a mistake, but I had no better option. You didn\u2019t turn down free lodging when you were broke.I parked on the street and stared up at the oversized cottage\u2019s facade, its gleaming windows and fairy tale of a porch, the shaggy beach grass dancing in the warm breeze.I checked the address in my GPS against the handwritten one hanging from the house key. This was it, all right.For a minute, I stalled, like maybe a world-\u00adending asteroid would take me out before I was forced to go inside. Then I took a deep breath and got out, wrestling my overstuffed suitcase from the back seat along with the cardboard box full of gin handles.I pushed a fistful of dark hair out of my eyes to study the cornflower blue shingles and snow-\u00adwhite trim. Just pretend you\u2019re at an Airbnb.Immediately, an imaginary Airbnb listing ran through my head: Three-\u00adbedroom, three-\u00adbath lakeside cottage brimming with charm and proof your father was an asshole and your life has been a lie.I started up the steps cut into the grassy hillside, blood rushing through my ears like fire hoses and legs wobbling, anticipating the moment the hellmouth would open and the world would drop out from under me.That already happened. Last year. And it didn\u2019t kill you, so neither will\u00a0this.On the porch, every sensation in my body heightened. The tingling in my face, the twist in my stomach, the sweat prickling along my neck. I balanced the box of gin against my hip and slipped the key into the lock, a part of me hoping it would jam. That all this would turn out to be an elaborate practical joke Dad had set up for us before he died.Or, better yet, he wasn\u2019t actually dead. He\u2019d jump out from behind the bushes and scream, \u201cGotcha! You didn\u2019t really think I had a secret second life, did you? You couldn\u2019t possibly think I had a second house with some woman other than your mother?\u201dThe key turned effortlessly. The door swung inward.The house was silent.An ache went through me. The same one I\u2019d felt at least once a day since I got Mom\u2019s call about the stroke and heard her sob those words. He\u2019s gone, Janie.No Dad. Not here. Not anywhere. And then the second pain, the knife twisting: The father you knew never existed anyway.I\u2019d never really had him. Just like I\u2019d never really had my ex Jacques or his coq au vin.It was just a story I\u2019d been telling myself. From now on, it was the ugly truth or nothing. I steeled myself and stepped inside.My first thought was that the ugly truth wasn\u2019t super ugly. My dad\u2019s love nest had an open floor plan: a living room that spilled into a funky, blue-\u00adtiled kitchen and homey breakfast nook, the wall of windows just beyond overlooking a dark-\u00adstained deck.If Mom had owned this place, everything would\u2019ve been a mix of creamy, calming neutrals. The bohemian room I\u2019d stepped into would\u2019ve been more at home in Jacques\u2019s and my old place than my parents\u2019. I felt a little queasy imagining Dad here, among these things Mom never would\u2019ve picked out: the folksy hand-\u00adpainted breakfast table, the dark wooden bookshelves, the sunken couch covered in mismatched pillows.There was no sign of the version of him that I\u2019d known.My phone rang in my pocket and I set the box on the granite countertop to answer the call.\u201cHello?\u201d It came out weak and raspy.\u201cHow is it?\u201d the voice on the other end said immediately. \u201cIs there a sex dungeon?\u201d\u201cShadi?\u201d I guessed. I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder as I unscrewed the cap from one of my gin bottles, taking a swig to fortify myself.\u201cIt honestly worries me that I\u2019m the only person who might call you to ask that,\u201d Shadi answered.\u201cYou\u2019re the only person who even knows about the Love Shack,\u201d I pointed out.\u201cI am not the only one who knows about it,\u201d Shadi argued.Technically true. While I\u2019d found out about my father\u2019s secret lake house at his funeral last year, Mom had been aware much longer. \u201cFine,\u201d I said. \u201cYou\u2019re the only person I told about it. Anyway, give me a second. I just got here.\u201d\u201cLiterally?\u201d Shadi was breathing hard, which meant she was walking to a shift at the restaurant. Since we kept such different hours, most of our calls happened when she was on her way into work.\u201cMetaphorically,\u201d I said. \u201cLiterally, I\u2019ve been here for ten minutes, but I only just feel that I have arrived.\u201d\u201cSo wise,\u201d Shadi said. \u201cSo deep.\u201d\u201cShh,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m taking it all in.\u201d\u201cCheck for the sex dungeon!\u201d Shadi hurried to say, as if I were hanging up on her.I was not. I was simply holding the phone to my ear, holding my breath, holding my racing heart in my chest, as I scanned my father\u2019s second life.And there, just when I could convince myself Dad couldn\u2019t possibly have spent time here, I spotted something framed on the wall. A clipping of a New York Times Best Sellers list from three years ago, the same one he\u2019d positioned over the fireplace at home. There I was, at number fifteen, the bottom slot. And there, three slots above me\u2014\u00adin a sick twist of fate\u2014\u00adwas my college rival, Gus (though now he went by Augustus, because Serious Man) and his highbrow debut novel The Revelatories. It had stayed on the list for five weeks (not that I was counting (I was absolutely counting)).\u201cWell?\u201d Shadi prompted. \u201cWhat do you think?\u201dI turned and my eyes caught on the mandala tapestry hanging over the couch.\u201cI\u2019m led to wonder if Dad smoked weed.\u201d I spun toward the windows at the side of the house, which aligned almost perfectly with the neighbor\u2019s, a design flaw Mom would never have overlooked when house shopping.But this wasn\u2019t her house, and I could clearly see the floor-\u00adto-\u00adceiling bookshelves that lined the neighbor\u2019s study.\u201cOh, god\u2014\u00admaybe it\u2019s a grow house, not a love shack!\u201d Shadi sounded delighted. \u201cYou should\u2019ve read the letter, January. It\u2019s all been a misunderstanding. Your dad\u2019s leaving you the family business. That Woman was his business partner, not his mistress.\u201dHow bad was it that I wished she was right?Either way, I\u2019d fully intended to read the letter. I\u2019d just been waiting for the right time, hoping the worst of my anger would settle and those last words from Dad would be comforting. Instead, a full year had passed and the dread I felt at the thought of opening the envelope grew every day. It was so unfair, that he should get the last word and I\u2019d have no way to reply. To scream or cry or demand more answers. Once I\u2019d opened it, there\u2019d be no going back. That would be it. The final goodbye.So until further notice, the letter was living a happy, if solitary, life in the bottom of the gin box I\u2019d brought with me from Queens.\u201cIt\u2019s not a grow house,\u201d I told Shadi and slid open the back door to step onto the deck. \u201cUnless the weed\u2019s in the basement.\u201d\u201cNo way,\u201d Shadi argued. \u201cThat\u2019s where the sex dungeon is.\u201d\u201cLet\u2019s stop talking about my depressing life,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat\u2019s new with you?\u201d\u201cYou mean the Haunted Hat,\u201d Shadi said. If only she had fewer than four roommates in her shoebox apartment in Chicago, then maybe I\u2019d be staying with her now. Not that I was capable of getting anything done when I was with Shadi. And my financial situation was too dire not to get something done. I had to finish my next book in this rent-\u00adfree hell. Then maybe I could afford my own Jacques-\u00adfree place.\u201cIf the Haunted Hat is what you want to talk about,\u201d I said, \u201cthen yes. Spill.\u201d\u201cStill hasn\u2019t spoken to me.\u201d Shadi sighed wistfully. \u201cBut I can, like, sense him looking at me when we\u2019re both in the kitchen. Because we have a connection.\u201d\u201cAre you at all worried that your connection isn\u2019t with the guy who\u2019s wearing the antique porkpie hat, but perhaps with the ghost of the hat\u2019s original owner? What will you do if you realize you\u2019ve fallen in love with a ghost?\u201d\u201cUm.\u201d Shadi thought for a minute. \u201cI guess I\u2019d have to update my Tinder bio.\u201dA breeze rippled off the water at the bottom of the hill, ruffling my brown waves across my shoulders, and the setting sun shot golden spears of light over everything, so bright and hot I had to squint to see the wash of oranges and reds it cast across the beach. If this were just some house I\u2019d rented, it would be the perfect place to write the adorable love story I\u2019d been promising Sandy Lowe Books for months.Shadi, I realized, had been talking. More about the Haunted Hat. His name was Ricky, but we never called him that. We always spoke of Shadi\u2019s love life in code. There was the older man who ran the amazing seafood restaurant (the Fish Lord), and then there was some guy we\u2019d called Mark because he looked like some other, famous Mark, and now there was this new coworker, a bartender who wore a hat every day that Shadi loathed and yet could not \u00adresist.I snapped back into the conversation as Shadi was saying, \u201cFourth of July weekend? Can I visit then?\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s more than a month away.\u201d I wanted to argue that I wouldn\u2019t even be here by then, but I knew it wasn\u2019t true. It would take me at least all summer to write a book, empty the house, and sell both, so I could (hopefully) be catapulted back into relative comfort. Not in New York, but somewhere less expensive.I imagined Duluth was affordable. Mom would never visit me there, but we hadn\u2019t done much visiting this past year anyway, apart from my three-\u00adday trip home for Christmas. She\u2019d dragged me to four yoga classes, three crowded juice bars, and a Nutcracker performance starring some kid I didn\u2019t know, like if we were alone for even a second, the topic of Dad would arise and we\u2019d burst into flames.All my life, my friends had been jealous of my relationship with her. How often and freely (or so I thought) we talked, how much fun we had together. Now our relationship was the world\u2019s least competitive game of phone tag.I\u2019d gone from having two loving parents and a live-\u00adin boyfriend to basically just having Shadi, my much-\u00adtoo-\u00adlong-\u00addistance best friend. The one blessing of moving from New York to North Bear Shores, Michigan, was that I was closer to her place in Chicago.\u201cFourth of July\u2019s too far off,\u201d I complained. \u201cYou\u2019re only three hours away.\u201d\u201cYeah, and I don\u2019t know how to drive.\u201d\u201cThen you should probably give that license back,\u201d I said.\u201cBelieve me, I\u2019m waiting for it to expire. I\u2019m going to feel so free. I hate when people think I\u2019m able to drive just because, legally, I am.\u201dShadi was a terrible driver. She screamed whenever she turned left.\u201cBesides, you know how scheduling off is in the industry. I\u2019m lucky my boss said I could have Fourth of July. For all I know, he\u2019s expecting a blow job now.\u201d\u201cNo way. Blow jobs are for major holidays. What you\u2019ve got on your hands is a good old-\u00adfashioned foot job quid pro quo.\u201dI took another sip of gin, then turned from the end of the deck and nearly yelped. On the deck ten feet to the right of mine, the back of a head of curly brown hair peeked over a lawn chair. I silently prayed the man was asleep\u2014\u00adthat I wouldn\u2019t have to spend an entire summer next door to someone who\u2019d heard me shout good old-\u00adfashioned foot job.As if he\u2019d read my mind, he sat forward and grabbed the bottle of beer from his patio table, took a swig, and sat back.\u201cSo true. I won\u2019t even have to take my Crocs off,\u201d Shadi was saying. \u201cAnyway, I just got to work. But let me know if it\u2019s drugs or leather in the basement.\u201dI turned my back to the neighbor\u2019s deck. \u201cI\u2019m not going to check until you visit.\u201d\u201cRude,\u201d Shadi said.\u201cLeverage,\u201d I said. \u201cLove you.\u201d\u201cLove you more,\u201d she insisted and hung up.I turned to face the curly head, half waiting for him to acknowledge me, half debating whether I was obligated to introduce myself.I hadn\u2019t known any of my neighbors in New York well, but this was Michigan, and from Dad\u2019s stories about growing up in North Bear Shores, I fully expected to have to lend this man sugar at some point (note: must buy sugar).I cleared my throat and pasted on my attempt at a neighborly smile. The man sat forward for another swig of beer, and I called across the gap, \u201cSorry for disturbing you!\u201dHe waved one hand vaguely, then turned the page of whatever book was in his lap. \u201cWhat\u2019s disturbing about foot jobs as a form of currency?\u201d he drawled in a husky, bored voice.I grimaced as I searched for a reply\u2014\u00adany reply. Old January would have known what to say, but my mind was as blank as it was every time I opened Microsoft Word.Okay, so maybe I\u2019d become a bit of a hermit this past year. Maybe I wasn\u2019t entirely sure what I\u2019d spent the last year doing, since it wasn\u2019t visiting Mom and it wasn\u2019t writing, and it wasn\u2019t charming the socks off my neighbors.\u201cAnyway,\u201d I called, \u201cI\u2019m living here now.\u201dAs if he\u2019d read my thoughts, he gave a disinterested wave and grumbled, \u201cLet me know if you need any sugar.\u201d But he managed to make it sound more like, Never speak to me again unless you notice my house is on fire, and even then, listen for sirens first.So much for Midwestern hospitality. At least in New York, our neighbors had brought us cookies when we moved in. (They\u2019d been gluten-\u00adfree and laced with LSD, but it was the thought that counted.)\u201cOr if you need directions to the nearest Sexual Fetish Depot,\u201d the Grump added.Heat flared through my cheeks, a flush of embarrassment and anger. The words were out before I could reconsider: \u201cI\u2019ll just wait for your car to pull out and follow.\u201d He laughed, a surprised, rough sound, but still didn\u2019t deign to face me.\u201cLovely to meet you,\u201d I added sharply, and turned to hurry back through the sliding glass doors to the safety of the house, where I would quite possibly have to hide all summer.\u201cLiar,\u201d I heard him grumble before I snapped the door shut. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.39}, {"asin": "0879755725", "title": "Gospel Fictions", "author": "Randel Helms", "description": "About the Author Randel Helms is a writer, professor, biblical scholar, and specialist in the works of William Blake and\u00a0J.R.R. Tolkien. Helms was born in Alabama and was educated at the University of California Riverside. After leaving school, Helms began teaching at a number of universities around the United States. Many of his books are dedicated to debunking the Bible as fiction. He is the author of Gospel Fictions, Who Wrote the Gospels, and The Bible Against Itself.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Bible Study & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 24.99}, {"asin": "1118073533", "title": "The Ultimate Financial Plan: Balancing Your Money and Life", "author": "Jim Stovall", "description": "From the Inside Flap The Ultimate Financial Plan From Jim Stovall, author of the bestselling The Ultimate Gift and The Ultimate Life , and financial planning expert, Tim Maurer, comes the latest volume in the acclaimed Ultimate series. Like its predecessors, The Ultimate Financial Plan: Balancing Your Money and Life is sure to have a significant impact on the way we think about money. Examining the connection between actions, thoughts, and feelings when it comes to all things financial, the book makes a revolutionary argument: that the key to getting the most out of personal wealth comes from the contentment found in balancing the influence of money in our lives with personal values and goals. Financial tools\u2014like budgets, bank accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs, education savings plans, and real estate\u2014can play a major role in helping us generate the money we want, but real value comes from investments in our knowledge and understanding, which lead to purpose-filled careers, sleep-at-night security, artistic endeavors, creative philanthropy, fulfilled retirements, and meaningful legacies. In The Ultimate Financial Plan , Jim Stovall uncovers the Timeless Truths of personal finance while Tim Maurer directs you through Timely Applications, making this book an invaluable investment in your future. From the Back Cover The Ultimate Financial Plan From Jim Stovall, author of the bestselling The Ultimate Gift and The Ultimate Life , and financial planning expert, Tim Maurer, comes the latest volume in the acclaimed Ultimate series. Like its predecessors, The Ultimate Financial Plan: Balancing Your Money and Life is sure to have a significant impact on the way we think about money. Examining the connection between actions, thoughts, and feelings when it comes to all things financial, the book makes a revolutionary argument: that the key to getting the most out of personal wealth comes from the contentment found in balancing the influence of money in our lives with personal values and goals. Financial tools\u0097like budgets, bank accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs, education savings plans, and real estate\u0097can play a major role in helping us generate the money we want, but real value comes from investments in our knowledge and understanding, which lead to purpose-filled careers, sleep-at-night security, artistic endeavors, creative philanthropy, fulfilled retirements, and meaningful legacies. In The Ultimate Financial Plan , Jim Stovall uncovers the Timeless Truths of personal finance while Tim Maurer directs you through Timely Applications, making this book an invaluable investment in your future. About the Author Jim Stovall is among today's most sought-after motivational speakers. The author of fifteen books, including the bestselling The Ultimate Gift and The Ultimate Life , both of which have been made into major motion pictures by 20th Century Fox, he has been a champion Olympic weightlifter, a successful investment broker, and an entrepreneur. He is the cofounder and President of the Emmy Award\u0096winning Narrative Television Network, which makes movies and television accessible for America's thirteen million blind and visually impaired people and their families. In June 2000, Stovall was selected as the International Humanitarian of the Year. Tim Maurer is a financial planner, educator, and blogger. He is Vice President of the Financial Consulate, a Fee-Only \u00ae financial management firm in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He teaches financial planning at his alma mater, Towson University, and educates through his blog, TimMaurer.com. Maurer has been a frequent guest on CNBC and featured on ABC's Nightline . The co-host of Money, Riches & Wealth, a weekly Baltimore radio show, he has contributed to the Wall Street Journal , the New York Times , the Washington Post , and Money magazine, among other leading publications. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Personal Finance"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 20.99}, {"asin": "0130892793", "title": "Unfolding Case Studies: Experiencing the Realities of Clinical Nursing Practice", "author": null, "description": "From the Inside Flap Preface To the Student The purpose of this workbook is to help you practice the critical skills of problem solving and applying information to common situations you encounter in your practice of professional nursing. The role of the professional nurse has become exceedingly more complex, as nurses must care for clients in shorter time periods and in a variety of settings such as home, hospital, outpatient clinics, and rehabilitation facilities. No longer do nurses have extended periods of time to process information and plan care. As insurance plans dictate shorter stays and/or fewer visits, nurses must be able to analyze situations, plan interventions, and respond quickly to ever-changing situations. The \"Unfolding Cases Model\" (Glendon and Ulrich, 1997) will give you practice in the skills you will need in the workplace. You will be asked to analyze realistic cases that unfold sequentially and follow the typical progression of common conditions or disorders. All cases are interspersed with focused questions to be answered by groups of students using common cooperative learning strategies (see Table 1). By using the case as a study guide prior to class, you will have some time to explore these focused questions individually, prior to your group involvement. This prior preparation will increase the effectiveness of the group strategy. Your instructor will brief you about the strategy she or he wishes you to use, as well as the process of how to report your group's findings to the entire class. An important aspect of learning and using critical thinking is being able to examine the varied perspectives of others. This cooperative learning group strategy exposes you to the alternative ideas and ways of thinking of your peers, thus multiplying the learning potential of the case. At the end of each case you will be asked to complete a reflective writing assignment that will allow you to investigate your individual thoughts, feelings, and ideas related to nursing practice issues or situations (see Table 2). In nursing practice we are frequently exposed to situations that oppose our personal values and beliefs. These cases will give you an opportunity to explore these issues and help you identify the nursing role. Your instructor may collect the cases prior to class discussion to determine your level of preparation for discussion of the case. In any instance, prior individual preparation will benefit both you and your group as you process the case in class. This book is designed to help you adapt to the new ways your instructors will be teaching in the new millennium. Research has shown that students learn best when they are actively involved in the process of learning and are not passive recipients of the teacher's expertise. You will notice that your instructors are using the lecture method less often and are relying on newer interactive group strategies. This can be very disturbing to you as a student who is used to previous methods that required you to merely take notes on what the instructor presented and regurgitate the same information back to them on a test. Now, in this model, the instructor poses a case and asks you and your peers to process it. They won't be just giving you the right answers. Your first impulse might be to think your instructor is not doing anything and that you are teaching yourself. This is a common feeling, but it is far from the truth. The instructor is merely changing his or her role in the teaching and learning process from being the center of knowledge to being one of manipulating the environment so that students can be involved in and discover the connections of things in an active fashion. Being actively involved will increase your learning. In the traditional lecture method, students quickly learn that it is not really necessary to read or prepare much prior to class because the teacher will tell them in the lecture everything that is really important. This way of thinking is erroneous in that today's world is filled with volumes of ever-changing information and no one could possibly know everything. Therefore, the most important job of the teacher is to create focus and teach you how to think. Information will change, but the skill of problem solving and critical thinking will benefit you forever. That is the purpose of this \"Unfolding Case Model.\" (Glendon and Ulrich, 1997) In traditional methods, the majority of time you spend with the teacher is when she or he is presenting you with new information in a lecture. Until you have had the time to process that information, you are unaware of what you do not understand or what questions you have. It is when you are alone reviewing your notes and trying to process and apply information that you really need the teacher's help. In the new learning paradigm, students need to prepare individually by doing the reading assignments and/or looking at the case prior to class. Class time should be the time when the instructor helps students process information that they have already been exposed to through their own reading. The \"Unfolding Case\" method actualizes this line of thinking. In using this book, you need to read through the case before doing your reading assignment to help you emphasize the important content in the reading. As you read, jot down possible solutions to each of the focused questions. This~will help you as you interact with your peers to process the case in class. Your instructor will tell you which cooperative learning strategies to use and how to report your findings as a group. He or she may also use this same model at the end of a clinical for a post conference or as a clinical make-up assignment. As you complete the cases, it is our hope that you will work with your instructor and expand your ability to learn and grow as a professional. Sincerely, Kellie Glendon and Debbie Ulrich From the Back Cover Unfolding Case Studies: Experiencing the Realities of Clinical Nursing Practice Kellie J. Glendon MSN, RNC Kellie J. Glendon MSN, RNC Deborah L. Ulrich Ph.D, RN Deborah L. Ulrich Ph.D, RN This workbook contains a compilation of case studies that explore issues spanning across the nursing curriculum. It includes coverage of spirituality, family, community, and gerontology concerns. Students gain experience in prioritizing nursing problems, identifying appropriate teaching strategies, documenting nursing care, and critically analyzing common situations they will encounter in their professional nursing practice.FEATURES: Includes over 60 case studies covering all core nursing areas. Includes over 60 case studies covering all core nursing areas. Emphasizes critical thinking and problem solving by encouraging readers to analyze given situations, prioritize, and formulate interventions. Emphasizes critical thinking and problem solving by encouraging readers to analyze given situations, prioritize, and formulate interventions. Presents a case that typifies a common disorder or disease and follows the client as the situation \"unfolds\" across time, settings, and/or disease progression, enabling readers to experience the realities of nursing practice as clients' conditions change. Presents a case that typifies a common disorder or disease and follows the client as the situation \"unfolds\" across time, settings, and/or disease progression, enabling readers to experience the realities of nursing practice as clients' conditions change. Integrates concepts such as age, setting, role development, and ethical/legal issues. Integrates concepts such as age, setting, role development, and ethical/legal issues. Writing prompts at the end of each case encourage readers to reflect on the experience, think about different perspectives, or plan future learning needs. Writing prompts at the end of each case encourage readers to reflect on the experience, think about different perspectives, or plan future learning needs. About the Author KELLIE J. GLENDON, MSN, RNC is an experienced nurse educator, author and national speaker on innovative teaching in nursing curricula. Kellie is an Associate Professor of Nursing at Miami University and has been teaching students in the Associate Degree Program for the past 13 years. She was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award by the Greater Cincinnati Consortium of Colleges and Universities in 1998. Kellie continues to promote creative strategies to enhance critical thinking in nursing students. DEBORAH. L. ULRICH, PhD, RN is an experienced nurse educator who has influenced nurse educators through journal articles, national presentations, and a recent book on interactive group learning. Her strategies have challenged educators to experiment with new ways of teaching and learning. Debbie has been a nurse educator for the past 30 years in diverse educational settings. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Preface To the Student The purpose of this workbook is to help you practice the critical skills of problem solving and applying information to common situations you encounter in your practice of professional nursing. The role of the professional nurse has become exceedingly more complex, as nurses must care for clients in shorter time periods and in a variety of settings such as home, hospital, outpatient clinics, and rehabilitation facilities. No longer do nurses have extended periods of time to process information and plan care. As insurance plans dictate shorter stays and/or fewer visits, nurses must be able to analyze situations, plan interventions, and respond quickly to ever-changing situations. The \"Unfolding Cases Model\" (Glendon and Ulrich, 1997) will give you practice in the skills you will need in the workplace. You will be asked to analyze realistic cases that unfold sequentially and follow the typical progression of common conditions or disorders. All cases are interspersed with focused questions to be answered by groups of students using common cooperative learning strategies (see Table 1). By using the case as a study guide prior to class, you will have some time to explore these focused questions individually, prior to your group involvement. This prior preparation will increase the effectiveness of the group strategy. Your instructor will brief you about the strategy she or he wishes you to use, as well as the process of how to report your group's findings to the entire class. An important aspect of learning and using critical thinking is being able to examine the varied perspectives of others. This cooperative learning group strategy exposes you to the alternative ideas and ways of thinking of your peers, thus multiplying the learning potential of the case. At the end of each case you will be asked to complete a reflective writing assignment that will allow you to investigate your individual thoughts, feelings, and ideas related to nursing practice issues or situations (see Table 2). In nursing practice we are frequently exposed to situations that oppose our personal values and beliefs. These cases will give you an opportunity to explore these issues and help you identify the nursing role. Your instructor may collect the cases prior to class discussion to determine your level of preparation for discussion of the case. In any instance, prior individual preparation will benefit both you and your group as you process the case in class. This book is designed to help you adapt to the new ways your instructors will be teaching in the new millennium. Research has shown that students learn best when they are actively involved in the process of learning and are not passive recipients of the teacher's expertise. You will notice that your instructors are using the lecture method less often and are relying on newer interactive group strategies. This can be very disturbing to you as a student who is used to previous methods that required you to merely take notes on what the instructor presented and regurgitate the same information back to them on a test. Now, in this model, the instructor poses a case and asks you and your peers to process it. They won't be just giving you the right answers. Your first impulse might be to think your instructor is not doing anything and that you are teaching yourself. This is a common feeling, but it is far from the truth. The instructor is merely changing his or her role in the teaching and learning process from being the center of knowledge to being one of manipulating the environment so that students can be involved in and discover the connections of things in an active fashion. Being actively involved will increase your learning. In the traditional lecture method, students quickly learn that it is not really necessary to read or prepare much prior to class because the teacher will tell them in the lecture everything that is really important. This way of thinking is erroneous in that today's world is filled with volumes of ever-changing information and no one could possibly know everything. Therefore, the most important job of the teacher is to create focus and teach you how to think. Information will change, but the skill of problem solving and critical thinking will benefit you forever. That is the purpose of this \"Unfolding Case Model.\" (Glendon and Ulrich, 1997) In traditional methods, the majority of time you spend with the teacher is when she or he is presenting you with new information in a lecture. Until you have had the time to process that information, you are unaware of what you do not understand or what questions you have. It is when you are alone reviewing your notes and trying to process and apply information that you really need the teacher's help. In the new learning paradigm, students need to prepare individually by doing the reading assignments and/or looking at the case prior to class. Class time should be the time when the instructor helps students process information that they have already been exposed to through their own reading. The \"Unfolding Case\" method actualizes this line of thinking. In using this book, you need to read through the case before doing your reading assignment to help you emphasize the important content in the reading. As you read, jot down possible solutions to each of the focused questions. This~will help you as you interact with your peers to process the case in class. Your instructor will tell you which cooperative learning strategies to use and how to report your findings as a group. He or she may also use this same model at the end of a clinical for a post conference or as a clinical make-up assignment. As you complete the cases, it is our hope that you will work with your instructor and expand your ability to learn and grow as a professional. Sincerely,  Kellie Glendon and Debbie Ulrich Read more", "categories": ["Books", "New, Used & Rental Textbooks", "Medicine & Health Sciences"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 36.83}], "target_asin": "1984806734"}
{"user_id": "AEKYNICWT3YWR5A4F4EP5YMGPSJA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0316410713", "title": "The Silkworm (A Cormoran Strike Novel, 2)", "author": "Robert Galbraith", "description": "Review \"Cormoran Strike is back, and so is his resourceful sidekick, Robin Ellacott, a gumshoe team that's on its way to becoming as celebrated for its mystery-solving skills as Nick and Nora Charles of \"Thin Man\" fame, and Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander (a.k.a. the girl with the dragon tattoo).\"\u2015 Michiko Kakutani , The New York Times \"'The last line of The Silkworm , which will lift the hearts of readers who have come to love its deeply sympathetic characters, offers the prospect of more of that joy both for her and for us.\"\u2015 Charles Finch , USA Today (3.5/4 stars) \"Robert Galbraith... has written a second absorbing whodunit starring detective Corcmoran Strike to follow last year's stealth hit, The Cuckoo's Calling .... Astutely observed, well-paced... The Silkworm thoroughly engages as a crime novel.\"\u2015 Sue Corbett , People \"...why is \"likable\" the first word that comes to mind upon finishing The Silkworm ? Surely, that has something to do with Rowling's palpable pleasure in her newly chosen genre (the jig may be up with her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, but the bloom is still on her homicidal rose) and even more to do with her detective hero, who, at the risk of offending, is the second husband of every author's dreams.\"\u2015 Louis Bayard , The Washington Post The Silkworm is fast-paced and entertaining... Strike is heroic without intending to be and has a great back story. He's the illegitimate son of a rock star whose half-siblings grew up in privilege... And he's brooding, but not annoyingly so. Strike has all kinds of potential. It'd be a crime not to keep up with him.\"\u2015 Sherryl Connelly , Daily News \"Having just the better part of a day and a night making my way through the 455 pages of The Silkworm ... I must say, I don't mind at all... The murder mystery at the heart of The Silkworm is a genuine mystery with an altogether satisfying resolution.\" \u2015 Malcolm Jones , The Daily Beast PRAISE FOR THE CUCKOO'S CALLING :\"The master is back. . . [Rowling] returns to the strengths that made Harry Potter great--the beautiful sense of pacing, the deep but illusionless love for her characters--without sacrificing the expanded range of The Casual Vacancy .\" -- USA Today (3.5/4 stars)\"A gritty, absorbing tale.\" -- People \"Cleverly plotted... Rowling serves up a sushi platter of red herring, sprinkling clues along the way, before Strike draws a confession out of the killer in a climax straight out of Agatha Christie.\" -- Entertainment Weekly \"Highly entertaining [with] a team whose further adventures the reader cannot help eagerly awaiting.\" --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times \"[Rowling's] literary gift is on display in this work. She crafts an entertaining story [and] comes up with an ending that I'll admit I was surprised by. . . . A fun read, with a main character you can care about and one you'll want to see again in other adventures.\" -- The Washington Post About the Author Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series and The Casual Vacancy.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 18.0}, {"asin": "0316349933", "title": "Career of Evil (A Cormoran Strike Novel, 3)", "author": "Robert Galbraith", "description": "Review \" Career of Evil is the third--and best--novel in the engaging Cormoran Strike private detective series. . . . [Galbraith has] invented a serial killer for the ages, one who chills us from the book's grim but riveting opening. . . . This perfectly paced mystery is packed with surprises, all of which play out with flawless crime-fiction logic.\"\u2015 Jocelyn McClurg , USA Today (4/4 stars) \"Gripping . . . A step forward for the series . . . An absorbing book, pulpy, fast and satisfying.\"\u2015 Charles Finch , New York Times Book Review \"Pure pleasure. . . . That's what makes these novels so good: They are clever, tightly plotted mysteries with all of the most pleasurable elements of the genre (good guy, bad guy, clues, twists, murder!), but with stunning emotional and moral shading.\"\u2015 Annalisa Quinn , NPR \"Hugely entertaining . . . This gifted storyteller has taken full command of the new turf. . . . Career of Evil succeeds powerfully on its own terms.\"\u2015 Lloyd Sachs , Chicago Tribune \"Another triumph . . . Its darkness is mitigated by its sparkling protagonists.\"\u2015 Kim Hubbard , People \"Strike and Robin are just as magnetic as ever.\" \u2015 Michiko Kakutani , New York Times \"Sparklingly witty [and] unexpectedly moving\"\u2015 Moira Macdonald , Seattle Times \"Bloody good . . . The author's trademark plotting has lost none of its propulsive readability.\"\u2015 Daneet Steffens , Boston Globe \"Satisfying . . . Strike and Robin are as powerful a fictional pairing as any in recent memory. . . . Galbraith demonstrates a breezy command of the intricacies of both the central mystery and of the form itself.\"\u2015 Robert Wiersema , Toronto Star \"A refreshing change to the genre . . . Every bit as impressive as [ The Cuckoo's Calling ] . . . Let's hope the sardonic Cormoran Strike is here to stay.\"\u2015 Barry Forshaw , Independent [UK] \"An entertaining novel . . . The denouement is violent, unexpected and satisfying.\"\u2015 Marcel Berlins , The Times [UK] \"A deliriously clever plot\"\u2015 Christobel Kent , Guardian [UK] \"As readable and exciting as ever . . . Fans of the intrepid duo are in for some shocks.\"\u2015 Jake Kerridge , Telegraph [UK] About the Author Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling, bestselling author of the Harry Potter series and The Casual Vacancy . Career of Evil is the third book in the highly acclaimed Cormoran Strike crime fiction series. The Cuckoo's Calling was published in 2013 and The Silkworm in 2014.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 19.11}, {"asin": "0399163840", "title": "X (A Kinsey Millhone Novel)", "author": "Sue Grafton", "description": "Review Praise for X \u201cGrafton\u2019s endless resourcefulness in varying her pitches in this landmark series, graced by her trademark self-deprecating humor, is one of the seven wonders of the genre.\u201d\u2014 Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\u201cExcellent...pulse-pounding...Grafton has never been better.\u201d\u2014 Booklist (starred review)\u201cRatcheting up the heat as she heads toward the finish line of her alphabetically-framed series, Grafton has turned in a corker of a novel with X , upping her already high-level game.\u201d\u2014 The\u00a0Boston Globe \u201c X features a smashing ending that rivals that of her debut, A is for Alibi .\u201d\u2014 The Washington Post More Praise for Sue Grafton and the Alphabet Series \u201cI\u2019m going to miss Kinsey Millhone. Ever since the first of Sue Grafton\u2019s Alphabet mysteries, A Is For Alibi , came out in 1982, Kinsey has been a good friend and the very model of an independent woman, a gutsy Californian P.I. rocking a traditional man\u2019s job...it\u2019s Kinsey herself who keeps this series so warm and welcoming. She\u2019s smart, she\u2019s resourceful, and she\u2019s tough enough to be sensitive on the right occasions.\u201d\u2014 New York Times Book Review \u201cThe consistent quality and skillful innovations in this alphabet series justify all the praise these books have received over the past 35 years.\u201d\u2014 Wall Street Journal \u201cA\u00a0superb storyteller.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cGrafton is a writer of many strengths\u2014crisp characterizations, deft plotting, and eloquent dialogue among them\u2014and she has kept her long-running alphabet mystery series fresh and each new release more welcome than the last.\u201d\u2014 Louisville Courier-Journal \u201c[Grafton\u2019s]\u00a0ability to give equal weight to the story of the detective and the detective story sets her apart in the world of crime fiction.\u201d\u2014 Richmond Times-Dispatch About the Author #1 New York Times bestselling author Sue Grafton first introduced Kinsey Millhone in the Alphabet Series in 1982. Soon after, both writer and heroine became icons and international bestsellers. Ms. Grafton was a writer who consistently broke the bonds of genre while never writing the same book twice. Named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, her awards and honors included the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, the Ross Macdonald Literary Award, the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award from Britain's Crime Writers' Association, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic,\u00a0a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bouchercon, three Shamus Awards, and three Anthony Awards\u2014including the first two ever awarded. She passed away in December 2017. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. I never hear the word \"Nevada\" without thinking of Robert Dietz. This coming May, we would celebrate our sixth anniversary of barely ever seeing each other. Truly, in the time I'd known him, I don't think we'd been together two months at a stretch, and that was only once. But now I needed his Nevada smarts and I dialed his number in Carson City. Three rings and his machine picked up. I listened to his message, which was terse and to the point. I waited for the beep and said, \"Hey, Dietz. This is Kinsey. I need a favor from you. I'm looking for a woman named Susan Telford in Henderson, Nevada, and I wondered if you'd see what you can find out. There are thirty-three Telfords listed, and it doesn't make sense for me to tackle the job from Santa Teresa. Pete Wolinsky put her name on a list of six women who are all connected in one way or another to a man named Ned Lowe. Before Pete was killed, he went to some lengths to do background on Lowe, who seems like an all-around bad egg. If you have questions, call me back, and if you don't want to do the job, that's fine. Just let me know.\" I decided it was time to convert my investigation into report form. I was formulating a sense of the relationship between Ned Lowe and the six women whose names appeared on Pete's list, but so far the link existed only in my head. I'd inserted paper into my typewriter when the phone rang. \"Millhone Investigations.\" A gentleman with a powdery voice said, \"Miss Millhone, this is Stanley Munce, formerly with the Burning Oaks Police Department. Clara Doyle told me you'd spoken to her about a case I worked on some years ago. Is that correct?\" \"Yes, sir. Absolutely. Thank you so much for calling. I was asking about Lenore Redfern Lowe.\" \"That was my understanding. I'm afraid I don't have much to offer on the subject, but I will tell you what I can. I was the coroner's investigator at the time of that young girl's death. In order to complete a death certificate, the coroner has to determine the cause, mechanism, and manner of death. \"Simply put, cause of death is the reason the individual died, as would be the case with a heart attack or gunshot wound. The mechanism of death would be the actual changes that affect the victim's physiology, resulting in death. In death from a fatal stabbing, for instance, it might be extreme blood loss. \"The manner of death is how the death came about. Five of the six possibilities are natural, accidental, suicide, homicide, and undetermined. The sixth classification would be 'pending' if the matter's still under investigation, which is obviously not the case here. There was no question about her ingestion of Valium and alcohol. The generic diazepam is a central nervous system depressant, the effects of which can be intensified by alcohol. However, when the toxicology report came in, it appeared there wasn't a sufficient quantity of either to say with certainty death resulted from the combination of the two. \"What seemed questionable, at least in my mind, was the presence of petechiae, which are tiny broken blood vessels, like pinpricks, visible in the area of her eyes. Hard coughing or crying are common causes; sometimes the strain of childbirth or lifting weights. Petechiae can also be a sign of death by asphyxiation.\" \"You mean she might have been suffocated?\" \"Smothered, yes. There were no fractures of the larynx, hyoid bone, thyroid or cricoid cartilages, and no areas of bruising, which ruled out manual strangulation. Mrs. Lowe had been under doctor's care. With her history of mental problems, absent any other compelling evidence, Dr. Wilkinson\u2014the coroner\u2014felt a finding of suicide was appropriate. I put up what objections I could, but I have no formal medical training, and his experience and expertise prevailed. For my part, I was never fully persuaded.\" \"So there was never an investigation into the circumstances of her death?\" \"A cursory assessment, I'd say. Dr. Wilkinson was of the old school: high-handed and a bit of an autocrat. He was in charge, he made the judgment call, and he brooked no argument. I was putting my job at risk even to raise the few questions I did. \"I wish I could offer you more. It's bothered me for years but yours is the first question ever raised about that girl.\" Which was not quite the case, but Stanley Munce couldn't know that. There had been another question raised in the matter, and that was Pete's. I'd barely hung up when the phone rang again. It was Dietz. He skipped right over the greetings and the chitchat. \"What have you gotten yourself into?\" I felt like someone had thrown a bucket of water in my face. \"You obviously know more than I do, so you tell me.\" \"I can tell you who Susan Telford is. Everybody in this part of the state knows who she is. She's a fourteen-year-old white female who disappeared two years ago.\" I felt myself go still. \"What happened to her?\" \"She vanished. She might as well have gone up in smoke. The cops talked to everyone including vagrants and registered sex offenders.\" \"Nobody saw anything?\" \"Eventually her best friend spoke up. She was too damn scared at first, but she finally broke down and told her mother some guy approached Susan in the mall a couple of days before she disappeared. He was snapping Polaroids. He said he worked for a fashion magazine and asked if she's be interested in some freelance modeling\u2014\" \"Dietz.\" \"That was all crap, of course. The guy was obviously cruising for young girls and she was gullible enough to\u2014\" \"Dietz. I've heard this story, only in the version I was told, her name was Janet Macy and she lived in Tucson. I talked to her mother on the phone a week ago. She last saw her daughter in 1986. She thinks Janet went off to New York to launch her modeling career. Some photographer claimed he worked in the fashion industry and thought she showed promise. He was going to help her put together a portfolio. Not even sixteen and she went off with him like a damn fool.\" \"Shit.\" \"Her mother did file a missing person report, but the officer didn't think she had anything to worry about. All this time she's been telling herself stories about where the girl was and why she didn't write. \"Dietz. This is Ned Lowe. I know it. And he's still out there.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 11.4}, {"asin": "0316422738", "title": "Lethal White (A Cormoran Strike Novel, 4)", "author": "Robert Galbraith", "description": "Review \"Rowling's wizardry as a writer is on fulsome display in Lethal White ( 3.5/4 stars), a behemoth of a novel that flies by in a flash. This is a crime series deeply rooted in the real world, where brutality and ugliness are leavened by the oh-so-human flaws and virtues of Galbraith's irresistible hero and heroine.\"\u2015 USA Today \"At times you might feel as you did when reading the Harry Potter books, particularly later in the series, when they got longer and looser. You love the plot, and you love being in the company of the characters, and you admire the author's voice and insights and ingenuity, and you relish the chance to relax into a book without feeling rushed or puzzled or shortchanged.... Long live the fertile imagination and prodigious output of J.K. Rowling.\"\u2015 The New York Times \"If you love the intricate, character-driven mysteries written by Tana French and Kate Atkinson, then chances are good that you'll enjoy the ones by Robert Galbraith. . . . Robert Galbraith knows how to tell a story every bit as deftly as does J.K. Rowling. Cormoran Strike, who lost a leg in Afghanistan, may limp painfully through much of the book, but the tale being told never misses a step.\"\u2015 Joyce S\u00e1enz Harris , Dallas Morning News \"Even if the world is the seedy underbelly of contemporary London and not Magical Hogwarts, cracking the cover of a Galbraith novel is like stepping through a portal. You're immersed all at once.\"\u2015 Bustle \"Addictive, murderous fun.\"\u2015 Vox \"Compulsively readable.\"\u2015 People \"One of contemporary crime fiction's most delightful partnerships.\"\u2015 Seattle Times \"Rowling's emotionally intelligent portrayal of her protagonists never overwhelms the whodunit story line.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly, Starred Review \"Rowling deftly circumnavigates all of the tropes and constructs that have long since relegated the male-author-dominated thriller genre to a place of ridicule and sheer inanity.\"\u2015 Tablet Magazine About the Author Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling, bestselling author of the Harry Potter series and The Casual Vacancy. Lethal White is the fourth book in the highly acclaimed Cormoran Strike crime fiction series. The Cuckoo\u2019s Calling was published in 2013, The Silkworm in 2014, and Career of Evil in 2015.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 10.48}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1446306356", "title": "My Knitted Doll: Knitting patterns for 12 adorable dolls and over 50 garments and accessories", "author": "Louise Crowther", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "B01FQLZS1S", "title": "No Man's Land (John Puller Series Book 4)", "author": "David Baldacci", "description": "Review \"[A novel of] dramatic depth and intensity...an unforgettable read...Action-packed and thought-provoking.\"\u2015 Associated Press \"Bestseller Baldacci makes the implausible plausible in his riveting fourth thriller featuring U.S. Army criminal investigator John Puller...Baldacci maintains tension throughout and imbues his characters with enough humanity to make readers care what happens to them.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Be prepared for an action-packed ride... Baldacci once again partners [John Puller] with Veronica Knox, making for a lethal and legendary combination. Anticipation intensifies on each page.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews (4 1/2 stars--Top Pick!) \"This thriller, featuring U.S. Army criminal investigator John Puller, has a very plausible theme with a compelling and action-packed plot....[A] riveting and heart-wrenching story...NO MAN'S LAND is an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Readers will be hooked from page one.\"\u2015 Military Press \"David Baldacci is one of America's favorite mystery writers, and he has earned that adulation fair and square. He is constantly turning out one readable and enjoyable adventure after another. His latest novel NO MAN'S LAND is his fourth John Puller story and it is a good one. It is fast reading from the start as the pages grab the readers' interest and off they go.\"\u2015 Huffington Post \"This fast-paced ride will leave you guessing until the last page.\"\u2015 Virginia Living --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \"[A novel of] dramatic depth and intensity...an unforgettable read...Action-packed and thought-provoking.\"\u2015 Associated Press \"Bestseller Baldacci makes the implausible plausible in his riveting fourth thriller featuring U.S. Army criminal investigator John Puller...Baldacci maintains tension throughout and imbues his characters with enough humanity to make readers care what happens to them.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly \"Be prepared for an action-packed ride... Baldacci once again partners [John Puller] with Veronica Knox, making for a lethal and legendary combination. Anticipation intensifies on each page.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews (4 1/2 stars--Top Pick!) \"This thriller, featuring U.S. Army criminal investigator John Puller, has a very plausible theme with a compelling and action-packed plot....[A] riveting and heart-wrenching story...NO MAN'S LAND is an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Readers will be hooked from page one.\"\u2015 Military Press \"David Baldacci is one of America's favorite mystery writers, and he has earned that adulation fair and square. He is constantly turning out one readable and enjoyable adventure after another. His latest novel NO MAN'S LAND is his fourth John Puller story and it is a good one. It is fast reading from the start as the pages grab the readers' interest and off they go.\"\u2015 Huffington Post \"This fast-paced ride will leave you guessing until the last page.\"\u2015 Virginia Living --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author DAVID BALDACCI is a global #1 bestselling author, and one of the world's favorite storytellers. His books are published in over forty-five languages and in more than eighty countries, with 150 million copies sold worldwide. His works have been adapted for both feature film and television. David Baldacci is also the cofounder, along with his wife, of the Wish You Well Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy efforts across America. Still a resident of his native Virginia, he invites you to visit him at DavidBaldacci.com and his foundation at WishYouWellFoundation.org. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "B000R34YKC", "title": "Dune", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction", "Space Opera"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "1848190816", "title": "Shamanism and Spirituality in Therapeutic Practice: An Introduction", "author": "Christa Mackinnon", "description": "Review Mackinnon proves to be a skilled guide. Therapists of all orientations will find inspiration and food for thought in this fascinating book. -- Therapy Today Shamanism and Spirituality in Therapeutic Practice is incredibly well written, balancing being both highly valid academically while maintaining a style written to be understood and used by all... Shamanism and Spirituality in Therapeutic Practice is a remarkable book: filled with a wealth of facts, theories, insights, wisdom and practice; highly knowledgeable and informative; well researched, well balanced and very accessible. An outstanding book which is highly recommended.' Therapeutic Practice - Indie Shaman Magazine 'I won't keep you in suspense: this is a great book. If you're interested in taking a more holistic, spiritual approach to your coaching and/or therapeutic practice, I think you'll get a lot from it and find yourself referring back to it often... This is an excellent book which you should be able to quickly and easily apply in your integrative practice. Recommended! -- AICTPa highly effective repertoire of insights, psycho-spiritual approaches and therapeutic tools... Compelling reading for therapists, looking for profound insights and innovative methods of practice reaching beyond contemporary Western mind and body approaches. -- Embody MagazineA seminal book that sheds light on the importance and practicality of integrating shamanic and spiritual practices into modern psychotherapy . . .an enlightened contribution to a world where individual and collective purpose must interweave if we hope to create a tapestry of survival. -- John Perkins, New York Times bestselling authorA truly compelling, well researched, yet accessible book for therapeutic professionals conveying a wealth of knowledge, insights and practical applications. -- John Hempstead, Chair, British Society of Clinical HypnosisAn important and relevant book for the times we live in. It is a \"must read\" for therapeutic professionals who look for enlightening insights and innovative methods of psycho-spiritual practice that cater for the whole human psyche. -- Ursula James, Visiting Teaching Fellow, Oxford University Medical School, author of The Source: A Manual of Everyday MagicA very interesting book, thorough and clear, for therapists who work with esoteric and spiritual concepts and for those who are curious about the subject. Christa Mackinnon is an accomplished therapist and academic, who writes with conviction about a subject she is passionate about. -- Avy Joseph, Principal, The College of Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy, author of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Book Description Adapting indigenous traditions offers a highly effective repertoire of insights, psycho-spiritual approaches and therapeutic tools to use with clients From the Back Cover Increasing numbers of professionals in the fields of psychology and therapy are seeking to incorporate elements of spirituality into their therapeutic oeuvre, addressing not only mental and emotional issues, but also the soul. This book discloses how indigenous traditions can be adjusted to offer practitioners a highly effective repertoire of insights, psycho-spiritual approaches and therapeutic tools. The underlying concepts and world-views of indigenous and contemporary shamanism are explained and tied in with current developments in psychology and science. After clarifying altered states of perception, concepts of integrative wholeness of mind, body, soul and spirit and transformative shamanic 'healing' approaches, the book goes on to outline concrete contemporary tools and techniques that can be applied directly to work with clients. It presents research, examples and case studies throughout. This will be enlightening and compelling reading for psychologists, therapists, counselors and coaches looking for profound insights and innovative methods of practice that cater for the whole human psyche, reaching beyond contemporary Western mind and body approaches. About the Author Christa Mackinnon is the Founder and Director of Kamdaris Psychological Consultancy and Training and is an Honorary Fellow and Associated Lecturer at Peninsula Medical School, Universities of Exeter and Plymouth where she teaches special study units on trauma as well as clinical hypnosis. She is a social psychologist, family counsellor, clinical hypnotherapist and group facilitator with over 25 years of professional experience as a therapist as well as an international trainer and lecturer. Christa has spent time as an apprentice to shamans in South America and has received various trainings from spiritual and shamanic teachers in Asia, the USA and the UK, which led her to design and run training courses for therapeutic professionals combining western approaches with indigenous spiritual teachings. She lives in Devon, UK. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Psychology & Counseling"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 32.95}], "target_asin": "1446306356"}
{"user_id": "AEHXSAI3E33HUZ3I3TL5O2IFVXEA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1596981091", "title": "Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies", "author": "Michelle Malkin", "description": "From the Inside Flap The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it. Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption , Malkin reveals: * Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable \"czars\" than any other administration* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friendsIn Culture of Corruption , Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden. From the Back Cover Praise for Culture of Corruption \" Culture of Corruption , by my good friend and intrepid reporter Michelle Malkin, reveals all the sordid details the Obama Administration would rather you not know--the sleaze, corruption, and self-dealing of the Chicago Machine that lets no `crisis' go to waste. A powerful and necessary indictment of what `hope and change' really means.\" --Mark Levin, author of the New York Times bestsellers Liberty and Tyranny and Men in Black \"Dogged, fiercely independent, and with a brilliant eye for the telling detail, Michelle Malkin has now turned her formidable skills to the bright new dawn of the Obama era, and the ever widening gulf between the hopey-changey rhetoric and the murkier reality. Her riveting portrait of unsavory cronies parceling out the spoils of government is somewhat at odds with the impression you may have gained from the besotted Tiger Beat correspondents of the mainstream media. I will leave it to the reader to decide which view is more persuasive, but let's just say that, if more journalists were like Michelle Malkin, American newspapers might still have a future.\"--Mark Steyn, author of the New York Times bestseller America Alone About the Author The list of Regnery authors reads like a \"who's who\" of conservative thought, action, and history. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.16}, {"asin": "0964920506", "title": "Sharpening the Warriors Edge: The Psychology & Science of Training", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Bruce K. Siddle is an internationally recognized authority on use of force training and the effects of survival stress on combat performance. Siddle has trained thousands of criminal justice use of force instructors, as well as specialized units within the U.S. Department of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Secret Service, Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and Special Operations units within the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Individual Sports"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 34.95}, {"asin": "0996787402", "title": "Guns, Freedom & The American Dream: The Story of Tim Schmidt & The USCCA", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 8.51}, {"asin": "0613357663", "title": "Atlas Shrugged (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)", "author": "Ayn Rand", "description": "Review A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly. -- The New York Times About the Author Born February 2, 1905, Ayn Rand published her first novel, We the Living , in 1936. Anthem followed in 1938. It was with the publication of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) that she achieved her spectacular success. Ms. Rand\u0092s unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are put forth in three nonfiction books, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtue of Selfishness , and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal . They are all available in Signet editions, as is the magnificent statement of her artistic credo, The Romantic Manifesto .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "0920855032", "title": "IPT's Crane and Rigging Training Manual by Ronald G. Garby (Spiral-bound)", "author": "Ronald G. Garby", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 53.47}, {"asin": "0925279773", "title": "The Second Amendment", "author": "David Barton", "description": "About the Author David Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, an organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage. David is author of numerous best-selling works and a national award-winning historian who brings a fresh perspective to history.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "1632204983", "title": "The Endurance Handbook: How to Achieve Athletic Potential, Stay Healthy, and Get the Most Out of Your Body", "author": "Philip Maffetone", "description": "About the Author Philip Maffetone has been a private practitioner, health and athlete coach and consultant, published independent researcher, respected pioneer in the field of complementary sports medicine, and internationally recognized educator and author in the fields of nutrition, biofeedback, exercise physiology, and athletic training over the course of his forty- year career. Since 1977, he has used the term \u201c overfat\u201d and has recommended low-carbohydrate and healthy fat eating.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Exercise & Fitness"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 12.89}, {"asin": "1545614105", "title": "Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know", "author": "Gregory Wrightstone", "description": "Review Inconvenient Facts: Debunking Climate Alarmists Commonwealth Foundation 11/2/17Nov 2, 2017 Gordon Tomb Governments should focus on supporting economicprosperity to enable better adaption to climate changes instead ofcontrolling carbon footprints. Consider the contrast in hurricanerecoveries between Florida, where an electricity system strengthened bysound investments was quickly restored, and Puerto Rico, whose neglected equipment was practically wiped from the island.A mountain of evidence for this view is contained in \"Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know.\"\u00a0 Written by Gregory Wrightstone of Pittsburgh, the book puts climate change into a geologic context of billions of years -- a perspective derived fromthe author's 35 years as a geologist.Mr. Wrightstone's approach contrasts sharply to theclimate alarmist's use of snapshots of time -- whether a century or adecade or a single storm -- to justify discarding economic systems anddestroying people's lives to reduce global temperatures by fractions of a degree.\"I know that the brief hundred or so years of recordedtemperatures--and the even shorter time-frame since the first satellitewas launched--is just a blink of a geologic eye,\" says Mr. Wrightstone.\"It is too brief a period to evaluate the data adequately.\"Backed by voluminous studies, \"Inconvenient Facts\"assures that modern warming is neither unusual nor catastrophic. Of thelast 10,000 years since the last major ice age, 6,100 years were warmerthan today.\u00a0 Humans have thrivedin previous periods significantly warmer than our modern age, mostrecently in the 13th century when Vikings farmed Greenland and citrusgrew in England.Conversely, people have suffered during cold periodssuch as the Little Ice Age (1290-1850), which was marked by famine anddisease.While the Earth has experienced a steady decline incarbon dioxide levels for more than 500 million years, the book says,recent increases of the wrongly maligned gas is tied to a greening of25-50 percent of the Earth -- a positive, fertilizing effect of higherCO2 levels on plants.One apocalyptic myth after another -- from the purportedthreats of rising sea levels to vanishing polar bears -- is destroyed byMr. Wrightstone's collection of research. Rather than a world lurchinginto a man-made climate hell from which there is no return, the Earth'secosystems and humankind are thriving.Written for the non-scientist, the book has more than 90 illustrations and 60 \"inconvenient\" facts rendered to a sentence ortwo. It effectively debunks proposals for economically destructiveprograms to control the uncontrollable -- a perpetual cycle of glacialice and \"blessed warmth\" driven by eternal terrestrial and solar forces.\"(T)he first and most important conclusion is that thecorrect policy to address the non-problem of man-made global warming isto have the courage to do nothing,\" Mr. Wrightstone says.\u00a0 Nothing, we would add, but to allow humankind thefreedom to advance economically and technologically as it has done sowondrously since the onset of the Industrial Revolution.Sixty nails in climate alarmism's coffin By Jerry Shenk November 16, 2017 There are plenty of well-credentialed, objective, if little-publicized,climate skeptics, but few who are able to present their material inlayman's terms to an audience of curious, unschooled, but receptiveclimate truth-seekers.A new resource provides a point-by-point review and response to each ofthe climate industry's claims, citing the \"normalcy\" of much of their\"alarming\" data. \u00a0In an entertaining, easy-to-read, elegantly-written,meticulously-researched, well-documented and illustrated 143-page book(including citations) entitled \"Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know,\" geologist Gregory Wrightstone presents a clear picture of the climatealarmism that attracts cynical big-government advocates and grips muchof the scientific community, complicit media and the gullible among us.Wrightstone employs government sources, peer-reviewed publications and otherscholarly works to reassure readers that our Earth has become healthierand more prosperous because of rising carbon dioxide and temperaturelevels, rather than in spite of them.The book details sixty inconvenient facts.\u00a0Considering the climatealarmists' persistent clamor about \"scientific consensus.\" Arguably,Inconvenient Fact #31 should have appeared first: \"Science is notconsensus and consensus is not science.\" \u00a0Wrightstone's droll observation about the financial incentives driving manycareer-invested scientists to mislead or overstate the \"catastrophic\"potential of climate change, often without historical or even Some highlights: Only a trace gas, carbon dioxide isn't the primarygreenhouse gas; CO2's warming effect declines as its concentrationincreases; and CO2 is plant food, so more of it means moister soil,fewer droughts and forest fires, a greener Earth, more plant growth andmore food for humans and animals.Wrightstone also reveals anxiety over rising temperatures to be just anotherclimate alarm shibboleth. \u00a0Humans didn't cause 800,000 years ofconstant, normal, cyclical temperature changes, including the past10,000 years, 6,100 of which were warmer than today. \u00a0In fact, warminghas paused for nearly two decades despite marginal increases in CO2.Indeed, warmer climates are better than cold ones for humans and most animalspecies. World-wide, annually, there are far more cold-related thanheat-related deaths.\u00a0Moreover, in addition to a greener Earth, increased CO2 and higher temperatures together provide other shared benefits,including longer growing seasons, more crop cycles and greater humanfood security.Wrightstone's book serves to reinforce beliefs already held by most practical people: Climate does change -- that's indisputable -- but, rather than spending trillions to \"fix\" it, practical people would first examine observableevidence and, if persuaded, they would adapt -- just as prehistoric Homo sapiens did entering and exiting the last ice age.\u00a0Presented in a format that allows readers to decide, Wrightstone's book is wellworth the time to read.\u00a0\u00a0Most importantly, perhaps, it will, inunderstandable, usable terms, provide informed skeptics the informationthey need to resist the progressive alarmists who preach to us all. Jerry Shenk can be reached at jshenk2010@gmail.com americanthinker.com/blog/2017/11/sixty_nails_in_climate_alarmisms_coffin.html#ixzz4yhru1cUm The 'Inconvenient Facts' About Global Warming That Al Gore Does Not Want Us to KnowIn an era where the Democrats' braintrust, socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, areworking to remove beef from the menu to combat global warming, there's an\"Inconvenient App\" that makes you and me the smartest climate gurus at thedinner table.Derived from Gregory Wrightstone'sbook \"Inconvenient Facts: The Science Al Gore Doesn't Want You toKnow,\" this new app features 60 facts that seriously undermineclaims from collectivists that man-made global warming is destroying theplanet.Tap your Android or iPhone, andthere is a graphic showing that the current warming trend began 300 years ago, wellbefore Henry Ford introduced the Model T or Al Gore invented the internet.Touch a tab to access a briefanalysis, another tab for a video of Wrightstone's commentary, and a third fora list of references.It is amazing how much documented -and coherent -- information is packed into this tiny app, making the smartphonean utterly appropriate resource and you a smugly clever person.Now in its third printing, the bookhas led Wrightstone, a Pittsburgh-based geologist, to scores of television andradio shows and to presentations at colleges, conferences and communitymeetings.Backed by voluminous studies,\"Inconvenient Facts\" assures readers that modern warming is neither unusual norcatastrophic. Of the last 10,000 years since the last major ice age, 6,100years were warmer than today (Inconvenient Fact #20). Humans have thrived inprevious periods significantly warmer than our modern age, most recently in the13th century, when Vikings farmed Greenland and citrus grew in England.Conversely, people have sufferedduring cold periods such as the Little Ice Age (1290-1850), which was marked byfamine and disease.While the Earth has experienced asteady decline in carbon dioxide levels for more than 500 million years, thebook says, recent increases of the wrongly maligned gas is tied to a greeningof up to 50 percent of the Earth -- a positive, fertilizing effect of higher CO2levels on plants (Inconvenient Fact #37).One apocalyptic myth after another --from purported threats of rising sea levels to vanishing polar bears -- isdestroyed by Wrightstone's collection of research. Rather than a world lurchinginto a man-made climate hell from which there is no return, the Earth'secosystems and humankind are thriving.Written for the non-scientist, thebook and the app effectively debunk proposals for economically destructiveprograms to control the uncontrollable -- a perpetual cycle of glacial ice and\"blessed warmth\" driven by eternal terrestrial and solar forces.\"The first and most importantconclusion is that the correct policy to address the non-problem of man-madeglobal warming is to have the courage to do nothing,\" Wrightstone says.This message is sure to interruptthe agenda of Marxists attempting to use fear of the fantasy of man-made globalwarming to advance their dark designs.The message will also have thebenefit of promoting inevitable bouts of indigestion in the less informed amongus at the dinner table.First published at Polizette By Chris Salcedo | February 21, 2019lifezette.com/2019/02/the-inconvenient-facts-about-global-warming-that-al-gore-does-not-want-us-to-know/ Hammering Nails Into Man-Made Global Warming's Coffin I have a confession to make. I am a climate change skeptic and becoming more so seemingly by the day. It is not that I don't believe that the Earth has warmed over the last 150 or so years,the science clearly supports that contention. I am, however, skeptical of the notion that humans are now responsible for temperature changes and that increasing temperatures are leading to horrible climate-related consequences for the Earth and humanity. While I am certainly not a scientist nor an expert on climate change, I have consumed a large number of books from both sides of the issue and have an amply stocked bookshelf in my den on the subject. I find that most of books on climate are difficult for the non-scientist to read, much less digest. They tend to be overly technical for the layman, not well-illustrated and commonly overly-politicized.I discovered my now go-to climate change book \"Inconvenient Facts - the science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know\" quite by accident nearly six months ago and it is becoming dog-eared from my constant referencing of it. Geologist Gregory Wrightstone's debut book is eminently readable, understandable and very well-illustrated. With more than 90 color illustrations and 14 pages of references, the book treads a hard-to-manage balance between well-researched science and a fascinating read.Throughout the book, the author provides easily understandable graphics and analysis of his 60 \"inconvenient facts.\" These are facts, backed up by references to NASA, NOAA or peer-reviewed studies, that show in detail and clarity just how wrong much of what I thought that I knew is incorrect. Wrightstone opens the book with a perfectly apropos quote from H. L. Mencken who references the need for governments and institutions to create \"an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary\" in order to get its citizens to buy into otherwise harmful policies and regulations. The last half of his book is devoted to dispelling many of these climate \"hobgoblins\" which he calls \"climate apocalypse\" events.Using science and data, he systematically takes down notions of increasing tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves, drought and many more.Early in the book, prefacing a series of particularly damning \"inconvenient facts,\" Wrightstone writes that they will be \"part of the cumulative evidence that will eventually drive the final nails into the coffin of the catastrophic man-made warming theory.\" He comes back to this analogy of hammering nails into global warming's coffin throughout this seminal book. Now, Mr. Wrightstone has provided me with the hammer with which to drive the nails in the form of a smart phone app.I have often wished that I had thebook in hand when discussing the subject with colleagues and now, thankfully,the new app allows me to leave the book at home, but to bring the facts with me. The recently released ground-breaking smart phone app is based in his 60inconvenient facts. Each of the facts are presented within the app with a chart or illustration that clearly shows and documents the subject. Included are links to text explaining it, commonly a video created by the author and a link to the source of the data behind the graphic.Simply put, the app is amazing. The huge amount of information on my phone has given me the ability to speak more confidently to others concerning many aspects of climate change. The book is great, but the app is actually more powerful, in that I see that this can be a game-changer in the debate. I envision citizens that now can confront the notion of pending climate doom by empowering them with the knowledge in the palm of their hand.Written by Bryan Crabtree on February 25, 2019First published at ClashDaily.com clashdaily.com/2019/02/hammering-nails-into-man-made-global-warmings-coffin/ From the Author The genesis of this book was a desire to discover the truth about a link between man's activities and the warming trend that is evident. I trusted no one, so I did a deep dive into the base data and what I found shocked me to the core. In nearly every portion of climate science (which eventually turned into chapters), I found that what I was told by the media was contradicted by the science, facts and data. About the Author Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist with more than 35 years of experience researching and studying various aspects of the Earth's processes. He earned a bachelor's degree from Waynesburg University and a master's from West Virginia University, both in the field of geology. He has written and presented extensively on many aspects of geology including how paleogeography and paleoclimate control geologic processes. His findings have allowed him to speak at many venues around the world including Ireland, England, China and most recently India. Gregory is a strong proponent of the scientific process and believes that policy decisions should be driven by science, facts and data, not a political agenda. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 17.99}, {"asin": "1616080655", "title": "The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing", "author": "Philip Maffetone", "description": "Review \"Dr. Maffetone shares his lifetime of experience in helping athletes of all abilities become better.\" ----Dr. Tim Noakes, author of \"Lore of Running\"\"If you don't read Phil Maffetone, you're turning your back on one of the most powerful, probing minds in endurance sports. The brilliance of Maffetone's work is his re-discovery of the ancient understanding that the human engine doesn't need to be fueled on suffering, and that pain is only the penalty you pay for back-burnering your brain. The best advice you could give any athlete, no matter what their level, is to read Maffetone and start over.\" ----Christopher McDougall, author of \"Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe\"\"In the over-populated world of fitness and health books, what does this new one have to offer? The first thing that springs to mind is authority. Methodology is another element that sets the book apart. Because of its tailor-made approach, the book is good for beginners and for those who've read and seen it all, but who are still not performing their best.\" --Lava Magazine About the Author Philip Maffetone has been a private practitioner, health and athlete coach and consultant, published independent researcher, respected pioneer in the field of complementary sports medicine, and internationally recognized educator and author in the fields of nutrition, biofeedback, exercise physiology, and athletic training over the course of his forty-year career. Since 1977, he has used the term \u201coverfat\u201d and has recommended low-carbohydrate and healthy fat eating.", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Individual Sports"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1433672790", "title": "The Great American Awakening: Two Years that Changed America, Washington, and Me", "author": "Jim DeMint", "description": "About the Author Jim DeMint was elected senator of South Carolina in 2004 and then chairman of the Senate Steering Committee in 2006. For standing up against wasteful spending in Congress and saving Americans about $17 billion, Wall Street Journal editor Steve Moore called DeMint the \"taxpayers' greatest ally.\" DeMint was also ranked as the Senate's most conservative member by National Journal and as the # 1 senator voting for responsible tax and spending policies by the National Taxpayers Union. The senator and his wife, Debbie, have four grown children, are doting new grandparents, and live in Greenville, South Carolina.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 8.28}, {"asin": "B003F8NMHW", "title": "The Law and Cliches of Socialism By Frederic Bastiat ( 1801-1850 )", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "from 12.00"}, {"asin": "1934885533", "title": "How People Change", "author": "Timothy S. Lane", "description": "Review It's encouraging to know that, in God's hands, the winds of adversity that batter our lives are also agents of fruitful change in us. Paul Tripp and Tim Lane have done us all a favor by leading us down that path of change and teaching us how to embrace God's transforming work in our hearts. -- Carolyn Custis James , author of When Life and Beliefs Collide Change does not happen overnight for the Christian. It's a lifelong journey. Paul Tripp and Tim Lane masterfully guide us along the biblical path that points us to the cross and a lifestyle of faith and repentance. I recommend this book to all Christians who desire to grow in their relationship with God. -- Tremper Longman III , Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College. This book is applied theology. It's about heat, thorns, the cross, and fruit. It's about present grace. In sixteen short and well-illustrated chapters, the wonderful prospect of change for the good is held out for the reader. We are called to consider our circumstances and our responses to them, and beneath that to examine our hearts desires and to turn afresh to Christ's cross. -- Mark Dever , Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, D.C. About the Author Timothy S. Lane, M. Div., D. Min. is the President of the Institute for Pastoral Care (instituteforpastoralcare.com), and Paul David Tripp, M. Div., D. Min. is the President of Paul Tripp Ministries. They are both counselors, speakers and teachers in various seminaries. They both served as faculty members at the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation in Glenside, Pa. and lecturers in practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. Both men were pastors; Tim in Clemson, S.C. and Paul in Scranton, Pa. Tim and his wife, Barbara, are the parents of two daughters and two sons. Paul and his wife, Luella, are the parents of three sons and a daughter. Paul is the author of Age of Opportunity; War of Words; Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands; and Lost in the Middle. Both men write extensively on biblical counseling and lead church-based counseling training courses using the Transformation Series that they co-authored.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.91}, {"asin": "B000THGNYG", "title": "The Law & Cliches of Socialism", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 9.83}, {"asin": "1937715639", "title": "The Triathlete's Training Diary: Your Ultimate Tool for Faster, Stronger Racing, 2nd Ed.", "author": "Joe Friel", "description": "Review Praise for Coach Joe Friel and The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible \u201cJoe Friel is arguably the most experienced personal cycling coach in the U.S.\u201d \u2015 Bicycling magazine \u201cOne of the most trusted coaches in triathlon.\u201d \u2015 LAVA magazine \u201cJoe Friel is one of the world\u2019s foremost experts on endurance sports.\u201d \u2015 Outside magazine \u201cTo say that Joe Friel knows a thing or two about how to ride a bicycle and stay fast would be a severe understatement.\u201d \u2015 Road Bike Action \u201cJoe Friel\u2019s wealth of knowledge in triathlon is astounding and he has a wonderful way of sharing that knowledge with all athletes from beginners to elite professionals.\" \u2015Siri Lindley, elite triathlon coach and world champion triathlete \u201c25 years of active multisport coaching has proven that Joe Friel has an unprecedented understanding of endurance sports. As a multiple triathlon world champion, I would consider Joe as one of the leading figures in triathlon coaching today. Joe\u2019s professional approach and practical understanding of sports physiology has helped many endurance athletes of all abilities reach their full athletic potential.\u201d \u2015Simon Lessing, 5-time Triathlon World Champion \u201c The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible is a fantastic guide. You can't go wrong using the advice in this book.\u201d \u2015 Scott \u201cThe Terminator\u201d Molina \u201cJoe Friel has spent most of his life in devotion to the understanding and teaching of sport. Joe has managed to focus on the key components to athletic success while weeding out the noise. This book will play a substantial role in helping you take the next step as a triathlete.\u201d \u2015 Justin Daerr, professional triathlete \u201cAs a triathlon coach, 2004 Olympian, and former top-ranked triathlete in the world, I\u2019ve used The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible as one of my key references. Joe Friel\u2019s training books have made the once \u201ccrazy\u201d sport of triathlon accessible to the public while also guiding seasoned athletes to their full potential.\u201d \u2015 Barb Lindquist \" The Triathlete's Training Bible combines scientific research with the experience of a top endurance coach to provide the best training resource book available.\" \u2015Gale Bernhardt, 2004 Team USA Olympic Triathlon Head Coach \u201c The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible can help you train for any distance and is most useful to newbies and self-trained athletes who want traditional training advice.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal \u201cAs an athlete with the unique ability to race multiple Ironman races every season, I have always been trouble for any triathlon coach. To coach myself successfully, I needed a reliable and strong tool. I searched all sources carefully until I found the one\u2015 The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible by Joe Friel. Whatever my problem, there is always a solution in this book. This book makes my understanding of training, racing, and recovering more complete with every page.\u201d \u2015 Petr Vabrousek, professional triathlete \u201c The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible is an invaluable tool for every triathlete looking to improve.\u201d \u2015 Clas Bjorling, professional triathlete \" The Triathlete's Training Bible is a 'must read' for both athletes and coaches\u2026It captures the essence of multisport training by outlining both the science and the art of the sport in a detailed, yet practical format. It is one of the most valuable resources I have on my bookshelf.\" \u2015Libby Burrell, USA Triathlon National Program Director \u201cWhether you\u2019re a beginning triathlete or a seasoned pro, Joe Friel is the leading authority on triathlon training.\u201d \u2015Ryan Bolton, Ironman winner & 2000 USA Olympic Team \u201cJoe Friel is among the deans of triathlon coaching and the newest edition of The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible will be of great benefit to all triathletes interested in performance improvement.\u201c \u2015 George M. Dallam, Ph.D., former USA Triathlon National Teams Coach, co-author of Championship Triathlon Training \u201cJoe Friel is constantly enhancing his education in the sport. In his books, Joe uses the information of the athletes he personally trains, the coaches who confide in him, and the large amounts of research he digests from triathlon and other endurance sports.\u201d \u2015 Wes Hobson, former USA Triathlon National Team member and U.S. sprint triathlon champion \u201cIn his usual upbeat, reader-friendly style, Joe brings to bear a further understanding of the art and science of triathlon.\u201d \u2015 Steven Jonas, MD, author of Triathloning for Ordinary Mortals and co-author of Championship Triathlon Training \"Any author who includes the word bible in the title risks comparison to a very high standard. The original was divinely inspired, after all. Those with some tri experience who lack the time or the budget to hire a coach should find this book just what is needed to improve performance. Do I hear a chorus of hallelujah?\" \u2015 IMPACT Magazine \u201cFriel has combined scientific and technical information with his considerable experience as an athlete and coach of novices, elite amateurs and professionals, to create this very useful reference for triathletes of all types. It would be very surprising if you did not find something useful in The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible .\u201d \u2015 Triathlon Magazine Canada \u201cWith nearly three decades of coaching experience, Friel explains the science of training in a language you can understand in the newly released third edition of The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible , effectively giving you the tools to become your own coach.\u201d \u2015 AmateurEndurance.com From the Back Cover Whatever your goals as a triathlete, you need a place to record your workouts and the way your body responds to training from day to day. The Triathlete\u2019s Training Diary will help you make every workout count. Joe Friel, triathlon\u2019s most accomplished coach, guides you through the essential details of logging your progress toward your goals. If you are designing your own annual plan, Joe provides instruction for mapping out each training block and season. USE THIS DIARY TO: \u00b7 Monitor daily vital signs\u2015sleep, fatigue, stress, and soreness\u2015to protect against overtraining. \u00b7 Record every swim, bike, run, crosstraining, and strength workout, with space for multiple workouts each day. \u00b7 Plan a full calendar year of training and racing, and track weekly and monthly summaries. Joe Friel is an internationally recognized expert on endurance training with more than 30 years of personal coaching experience. He is the author of the best-selling books Fast After 50 , Your First Triathlon , and The Cyclist\u2019s Training Bible . He is a founding member of the USA Triathlon Coaches Association, holds a master\u2019s degree in exercise science, and is the cofounder of TrainingPeaks. About the Author Joe Friel is the most trusted endurance sports coach in the world. He is the best-selling author of The Triathlete\u2019s Training Bible , The Cyclist\u2019s Training Bible , Fast After 50 , Going Long , Your Best Triathlon , The Power Meter Handbook , and Your First Triathlon . His TrainingBible Coaching service is one of the most successful and respected in endurance sports. Joe has trained endurance athletes since 1980, including national champions, world championship contenders, and Olympic athletes in triathlon, duathlon, road cycling, and mountain biking. He is an elite-certified USA Triathlon and USA Cycling coach and holds a master\u2019s degree in exercise science. He conducts training and racing seminars around the world and provides consulting services for corporations in the fitness industry. He has also been active in business as the founder of Ultrafit, an association of coaching businesses; TrainingPeaks, a web-based software company; and TrainingBible Coaching. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Individual Sports"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.95}, {"asin": "1455584908", "title": "And the Good News Is...: Lessons and Advice from the Bright Side", "author": "Dana Perino", "description": "Review \"This book is a gem--modest and moving, clear and unpretentious. It gives the kind of practical and even ethical advice everyone starting out needs, but it's also funny and full of great stories. Dana is a true role model.\"\u2015 Peggy Noonan \"A lovely memoir, both charming and wise, studded with invaluable life lessons garnered on her fascinating journey to the highest levels of media and government. A wonderful read.\"\u2015 Charles Krauthammer \"Part autobiography, part memoir of a press secretary in the White House, part career and life guidance, and part appeal to civility, Dana Perino's AND THE GOOD NEWS IS... is all parts captivating.\"\u2015 Donna Brazile \"With this delightful blend of the political, personal, and professional, Dana Perino gives us a useful glimpse into one of the most remarkable workplaces in the world, the White House. Political junkies will revel in her insider tales but every reader will come away knowing more about the human dimension of working in the most powerful place on the planet.\"\u2015 Mike McCurry, former White House Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton \"Congrats to Dana Perino! It's a great read, BTW. Little House on the Prairie meets West Wing .\"\u2015 Chris Stirewalt, Digital Politics Editor, Fox News \"This book is perfect for anyone interested in politics, media or simply advice about taking courageous chances in life, love and work. Dana has written a book that is as accessible for those who are just starting out on their career path as for those who are long-time students of current events and history.\"\u2015 Julie Roginsky, Fox News Contributor \"The book is a study in character, and why surrounding one's self with people of good character (from Dana's husband, parents and grandparents to Tony Snow and George W. Bush) leads to a life well lived.\"\u2015 Doug Brunt, author of The Means and Ghosts of Manhattan \"If you want to be inspired by a successful woman who goes from ranching in the West, to the White House, to helping in Africa, to a fine marriage and a loving dog, you will find it in this book. You will also find the kind of honest advice about life, politics and the Presidency that makes you feel good. Now there's a rarity.\"\u2015 Marlin Fitzwater, former White House Press Secretary to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush \"A wonderful book. A book full of the love of life. And full of gratitude. This book is blessedly free of cynicism, irony, posing. It's straight. It's good. And obviously a total reflection of its author.\"\u2015 Jay Nordlinger, National Review About the Author Dana Perino is a Fox News Contributor and co-host of one of the most popular shows on cable television, The Five . Perino was the first Republican woman to serve as the White House Press Secretary and served for over seven years in the administration of George W. Bush, including at the Department of Justice after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Perino lives in Manhattan with her husband, Peter McMahon, and their dog, Jasper.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Arts & Literature"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.18}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0451147952", "title": "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", "author": "Ayn Rand", "description": "Review \u201cOne of the most revolutionary and powerful works on capitalism\u2014and on politics\u2014that has ever been published.\u201d\u2014Professor Leonard Peikoff, Barron\u2019s magazine About the Author Born February 2, 1905, Ayn Rand published her first novel, We the Living , in 1936. Anthem followed in 1938. It was with the publication of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) that she achieved her spectacular success. Rand\u2019s unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience. The fundamentals of her philosophy are put forth in three nonfiction books, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology , The Virtues of Selfishness , and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal . They are all available in Signet editions, as is the magnificent statement of her artistic credo, The Romantic Manifesto .", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "B001E0V112", "title": "The Way of Shadows (Night Angel Book 1)", "author": "Brent Weeks", "description": "Review I was mesmerized from start to finish. Unforgettable characters, a plot that kept me guessing, nonstop action, and the kind of in-depth storytelling that makes me admire a writer's work.-- \"Terry Brooks, New York Times bestselling author\" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. About the Author Brent Weeks was born and raised in Montana. He is the New York Times bestselling author of the Night Angel trilogy and the Lightbringer series, among others. Read by Paul Boehmer, Justine Eyre, Jim Meskimen, John Rubinstein, and Stefan Rudnicki --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Review \"What a terrific story! I was mesmerized from start to finish. Unforgettable characters, a plot that kept me guessing, non-stop action and the kind of in-depth storytelling that makes me admire a writer's work.\" --- Terry Brooks\"Kylar is a wonderful character - sympathetic and despicable, cowardly and courageous, honorable and unscrupulous...a breathtaking debut!\" --- Dave Duncan --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1546083308", "title": "Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency", "author": "David N. Bossie", "description": "Review \"Bossie and Lewandowski pull back the curtain on the 2016 campaign-a wild, fun, and historic ride.\"\u2015 Laura Ingraham \"These guys were in the room for the wildest presidential campaign in recent history. The stories are all here. Very entertaining and informative.\"\u2015 Mark Levin \"Hillary, do you want to know what really happened? Read this book! Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie take you deep inside the phenomenal Trump campaign. Let Trump Be Trump is written with true insight and understanding of America's greatest presidential candidate, and once you begin this story, I promise you will not put it down until you finish.\"\u2015 Sean Hannity \"Key leaders of the growing conservative movement, Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie helped make Trump president and tell Trump's winning story like no one else has-from the inside.\"\u2015 Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House \"... refreshingly punchy\"\u2015 Newsweek \"... paints a portrait of Mr. Trump that shows him as he is.\" \u2015 The New York Times \"... a cunning volume\" \u2015 Frank Bruni, The New York Times \"... classic inside dish\"\u2015 Politico \"(Lewandowski and Bossie) reveal juicy tidbits\" \u2015 New York Daily News \"... chutzpah on an epic scale\" \u2015 The Economist \"It's as close as we're likely to get to a \"What Happened\" from the winning side...written by the people who were in the room at the time and not filtered through leaks and second-hand anecdotes. That sets it apart from other books on 2016.\" \u2015 Townhall \"...a political book can't get much better than this.\"\u2015 American Spectator \"...the first book to have been published by Trump campaign insiders...gossipy tidbits, of which there are many.\" \u2015 New Republic \"...revealing passages of what it's like to work for Mr. Trump.\"\u2015 CBS News \"Far from being dismayed by Trump's rough edges, Lewandowski and Bossie celebrate them.\"\u2015 Times of London About the Author Corey R. Lewandowski is a senior advisor to President Trump's 2020 campaign. He is also president and CEO of Lewandowski Strategic Advisors, LLC. He previously served as the chief political advisor and campaign manager to Donald J. Trump for President. Prior to that, he was an executive for Americans for Prosperity. Lewandowski appears regularly on television and serves as an on-the-record spokesman to major print outlets. He is a contributor to the Hill newspaper and was recently named a visiting fellow at Harvard University. Corey previously served as a certified police officer with the state of New Hampshire, where he lives with his family. David N. Bossie is the national committeeman for the GOP in Maryland. He has served as president of Citizens United since 2001 and is a Fox News contributor. Beginning in August 2016, Bossie served as deputy campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President and then as deputy executive director of the Presidential Transition Team. In 2015, Bossie was ranked number two in Politico's top fifty most influential people in American politics. In 2016, he was elected Republican national committeeman from Maryland. David, proudly served as a volunteer firefighter for over fifteen years in Maryland where he lives with his wife, Susan and their four children, Isabella, Griffin, Lily and Maggie.", "categories": ["Books", "Politics & Social Sciences", "Politics & Government"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "B00CC19MS6", "title": "Chasing Justice (Piper Anderson Series Book 1)", "author": "Danielle Stewart", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0451147952"}
{"user_id": "AG4CID7AEGVZKG2C6OOHGCFKRZJA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1501108638", "title": "Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII", "author": "Gareth Russell", "description": "Review \u201c Young and Damned and Fair is a gripping account of a young woman's future destroyed by forces beyond her control.\u00a0 Gareth Russell moves effortlessly between Catherine Howard's private, inner world and the public life of the Henrician court, providing an unparalleled view into this tragic chapter of Tudor history. This is an important and timely book.\u201d -- Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire\"This fascinating and ultimately heartbreaking account of Henry VIII's doomed fifth wife brings to life the cruel, gossip-fueled, backstabbing world of the court in which Catherine Howard rose and fell. The uncommonly talented Gareth Russell has produced a masterly work of Tudor history that is engrossing, sympathetic, suspenseful, and illuminating.\" -- Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography\"This is a timely and powerful re-examination of Henry's fifth queen who was probably guilty of nothing more than failing to reveal she had been betrothed before her wedding to the king old enough to be her grandfather, and then falling in love with a young man after their marriage. \u00a0The \u00a0author has done some beautiful new research to indicate that Catherine was not as foolish as some historians have suggested, and that her death was managed and manipulated by her offended husband, purely for his own revenge. It's particularly strong on the detail of Catherine\u2019s short reign and the reaction of those who tried to defend her. I love it when historians take the\u00a0women who have been neglected by history seriously and study their lives rather than accepting stereotypes.\" -- Philippa Gregory, #1 New York Times bestselling author\"Securely rooted in the sources and mercifully devoid of sentiment, this is the most fully rounded, best written biography of Catherine Howard we have so far.\" -- Julia Fox, author of Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford\"A magnificent account of the rise and fall of Henry VIII's tragic fifth queen - compelling, thought-provoking and above all real. In Russell's meticulously researched narrative Catherine Howard and her household are brought to life as never\u00a0before.\" -- Adrian Tinniswood, author of The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars\"In Young and Damned and Fair Gareth Russell marries slick storytelling with a great wealth of learning about sixteenth-century personalities and politics. The result is a book that leads us deep into the nightmarish final years of Henry VIII's reign, wrenching open the intrigues of a poisonous court in a realm seething with discontent. At the heart of it all is the fragile, tragic figure of Catherine Howard, whose awful fate is almost unbearable to watch as it unfolds.\u00a0 This is authoritative Tudor history written with a novelist's lightness of touch. A terrific achievement.\" -- Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets and The Hollow Crown\"Scholarly yet highly readable...fresh and compelling...a stunning achievement...Catherine is given a makeover so complete that she is virtually unrecognizeable from the hopelessly naive girl of traditional history books.\" \u2015 The Sunday Times \"Russell's is an excellent account, putting the oft-ignored Catherine in her proper historical context....he is a scrupulous historian.\" \u2015 Daily Mail \"Bold...assured...A novelist turned historian, he veers with laudable theatricality between the claustrophobic and the panoramic, from intimate, febrile exchanges in noble and royal households to the public spectacle of courtly high diplomacy...Let us hope he fixes his sharp eye on the further, more opaque past--here is a historian unafraid of the dark, whether of depravity or documentation.\" \u2015 The Daily Telegraph \"With exemplary skill, Gareth Russell puts clear blue water between his and other, more romantically inspired treatments of Catherine Howard's story by using the workings of her household as a framework for his interpretation of her sixteen-month period as Henry's queen.\" \u2015 the Times Literary Supplement \"Russell's portrait effectively underscores the machinations of this volatile court, the treachery of sycophants, and the importance of the all-seeing servants. Dense with material and flavor of the epoch.\" \u2015 Kirkus Reviews \u201cRussell expertly tells a tale of jewels and dancing and thrilling trysts that sees Catherine move dizzily towards the block.\u201d \u2015 Literary Review \u201cHighly readable and peppered with engrossing stories, this book is also fascinating for its details about what was considered sexually moral in 16-century England. Biography lovers and those intrigued by the lives of the royals will welcome this tragic story of Henry VIII\u2019s fifth wife.\u201d \u2015 Library Journal \"A robust portrait of a complex individual...a painstakingly thorough and original revaluation of both Catherine and of the mad scramble by the members of her household to protect themselves rather than their queen.\" \u2015 Booklist \"To the vivid phrasing of a novelist he adds a forensic eye for fact and an encyclopedic knowledge of the personalities of the late Henrician court....Russell is a formidable new talent from whom big things can be expected, surely.\" \u2015 BBC History Magazine \"[A] fascinating new book...In revisiting Catherine Howard\u2019s story, Russell seeks to shift the emphasis from the personal to the professional, stressing how the households of queens and powerful noblewomen could become focal points for a level of power and influence earlier historians haven\u2019t always fully credited.\" \u2015 Open Letters Monthly \"Thorough in his research, convincing in his analysis, and eloquent in his telling of Catherine Howard\u2019s life story... exquisitely written. Gareth Russell\u2019s writing style simply stated rivals\u00a0that of Stacy Schiff and David McCullough....Beyond the outstanding historical content, this book provides a wonderful writing lesson in the art of biography composition....Write this down and take it to the bank. Gareth Russell is one \u201cbig bio\u201d away from joining the world\u2019s elite biographers composing in the English language today. \u2015 QueenAnneBoleyn.com About the Author Educated at Oxford University and Queen\u2019s University, Belfast, Gareth Russell is a historian, novelist, and playwright. He is the author of The Ship of Dreams , Young and Damned and Fair , The Emperors , and An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors .\u00a0He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 57.99}, {"asin": "8493746452", "title": "George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier & Diplomat", "author": "Claire Ridgway", "description": "Review \"In their new book Clare Cherry and Claire Ridgway takes you on a journey through George's life from beginning to rise through the court of Henry VIII to tragic end to help dispel the myths and work out who George Boleyn was...The authors have trawled through letters, documents and dispatches to give us the best understanding of who this man was.\" Michael Leaver , Tudor Crazy Book Club \"Through Cherry's and Ridgway's outstanding research, we now can gain a very comprehensive look at George Boleyn.\" Beth von Staats, QueenAnneBoleyn.com \"This biography is a true achievement, not only for the rigorous use of rarely seen or acknowledged contemporary documents, not only for the astonishing depth of research and authentic presentation of the career of George Boleyn, but for the fact that the authors do not become enthralled with their subject... George Boleyn can easily cut a rather romantic figure. What George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier & Diplomat does is not only present us with an illuminating study of a little known historical figure but also with a complex and believable portrait of a man.\" Olga Hughes, Crickhollow Books \"The blurb for the book promises a lot of information.\u00a0Happily, the blurb did not lie. There was a LOT of information about George Boleyn. Moreover, the information was well-researched and fair ... The book further impressed me because not only did Cherry and Ridgway show me a George Boleyn I had overlooked, they did so with such a relaxed writing style that I never felt I was being \"lectured\" about the topic...I can highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the Tudor world.\" Kyra Kramer, Blood Will Tell: A Medical Explanation of the Tyranny of Henry VIII About the Author Clare Cherry lives in Hampshire with her partner David. She works as a solicitor in Dorset, but has a passion for Tudor history and began researching the life of George Boleyn in 2006. She started corresponding with Claire Ridgway in late 2009, after meeting through The Anne Boleyn Files website, and the two Tudor enthusiasts became firm friends. Clare divides her time between the legal profession and researching Tudor history. Clare has written guest articles on George Boleyn for The Anne Boleyn Files, Nerdalicious.com.au, and author Susan Bordo's The Creation of Anne Boleyn website. Claire Ridgway is the author of the best-selling books ON THIS DAY IN TUDOR HISTORY, THE FALL OF ANNE BOLEYN: A COUNTDOWN, THE ANNE BOLEYN COLLECTION, and THE ANNE BOLEYN COLLECTION II, as well as INTERVIEWS WITH INDIE AUTHORS: TOP TIPS FROM SUCCESSFUL SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHORS. Claire was also involved in the English translation and editing of Edmond Bapst's 19th century French biography of George Boleyn and Henry Howard, now available as TWO GENTLEMAN POETS AT THE COURT OF HENRY VIII. Claire worked in education and freelance writing before creating The Anne Boleyn Files history website and becoming a full-time history researcher, blogger and author. The Anne Boleyn Files is known for its historical accuracy and Claire's mission to get to the truth behind Anne Boleyn's story. Her writing is easy-to-read and conversational, and readers often comment on how reading Claire's books is like having a coffee with her and chatting about history.", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.24}, {"asin": "098072192X", "title": "The Light in the Labyrinth: The Last Days of Anne Boleyn", "author": "Wendy J. Dunn", "description": "Review \" ...The Light in the Labyrinth is quite the read - no matter the age of the reader. And yes, thanks to Kate, a new voice has been added to the well-known haunting melody - a voice that mellows and matures as the story evolves and yet retains a touch of bittersweet innocence right to the bloody, inevitable end.\" -\u00a0Anna Belfrage for The Review. Read\u00a0full review here: thereviewgroup.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/anna-reviews-light-in-labyrinth.html\"It is exactly the type of novel that draws youth into a life-long love of history\". - QAB Book Review: queenanneboleyn.com/2014/10/12/qab-book-review-the-light-in-the-labyrinth-by-wendy-j-dunn/\"...I never felt like I was reading a teen read. Although it is a historical novel with a 16th century heroine, its themes will resonate with a teen audience - identity, self-discovery, family issues/step-parents, love, betrayal and loss - and any lover of historical fiction will enjoy revisiting Anne's fall from a different perspective\" ~\u00a0Claire Ridgway \"Author and Tudor history buff.In the capable hands of Dunn, Kate Carey springs to life as a young girl looking for excitement who comes to realize that many people are not what they seem and perhaps her old life was not so bad after all. ...This unique look at a shadowy figure in the tragedy of Anne Boleyn is well written and intriguing ~ Tamela McCann\u00a0for HNSAhistoricalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-light-in-the-labyrinth/ \"The\u00a0Light in the Labyrinth\u00a0gives the compelling\u00a0story\u00a0of\u00a0a teenager who witnesses the final days of Anne Boleyn, the tragic second wife of Henry VIII. Young adults will\u00a0be enthralled by the romance and political suspense\u00a0swirling around the court of the\u00a0notorious Henry VIII,\u00a0and\u00a0they will\u00a0fall in love\u00a0with\u00a0Queen Anne in\u00a0Dunn's\u00a0wonderful retelling of\u00a0her tragic story\"\u00a0 -\u00a0 Sandra Worth, author of\u00a0the Rose of York trilogy. From the Author My website:wendyjdunn.com/about/blog/entering-the-labyrinth/\u00a0*\u00a0wendyjdunn.com/anne-boleyn/anne-boleyn-in-the-tower-by-edouard-cibot/ About the Author Wendy J. Dunn is an Australian writer who has been obsessed by Anne Boleyn and Tudor History since she was ten-years-old. She is the author of two Tudor novels: Dear Heart, How Like You This?, the winner of the 2003 Glyph Fiction Award and 2004 runner up in the Eric Hoffer Award for Commercial Fiction, and The Light in the Labyrinth, her first young adult novel.While she continues to have a very close and spooky relationship with Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, serendipity of life now leaves her no longer wondering if she has been channeling Anne Boleyn and Sir Tom for years in her writing, but considering the possibility of ancestral memory. Her own family tree reveals the intriguing fact that her ancestors - possibly over three generations - had purchased land from both the Boleyn and Wyatt families to build up their own holdings. It seems very likely Wendy's ancestors knew the Wyatts and Boleyns personally.Born in Melbourne, Australia, Wendy is married and the mother of three sons and one daughter--named after a certain Tudor queen, surprisingly, not Anne.Wendy tutors at Swinburne University in their Master of Arts (Writing) program. She also works as a literature support teacher at a primary school.\u00a0For more information about Wendy J. Dunn, visit her website at wendyjdunn.com Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 23.0}, {"asin": "1445677105", "title": "Anna, Duchess of Cleves: The King's Beloved Sister", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Heather Darsie works as a licensed attorney in the US. As well as her legal qualifications she has a BA in German, which was of great value in her research in the archives of Germany, Switzerland and the Nether lands for this book. She is currently studying for her Master of Arts in Early Modern History. She runs MaidensAndManuscripts.com and regularly contributes to QueenAnneBoleyn.com and TudorDynasties.com. She has been researching The King's Beloved Sister for 6 years.", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Europe"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 17.13}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1250006295", "title": "The Queen's Dwarf: A Novel", "author": "Ella March Chase", "description": "Review \u201cEntertaining\u2026 a fascinating glimpse into 17th-century court life, rife with ladies in waiting who could be confidants or backstabbers; lush, wasteful banquets; and people like Jeffrey who are treated kindly but were essentially pets for royalty.\u201d \u2015 Publishers Weekly \u201cRich in detail and brimming with intriguing characters, Chase's novel will please fans of historical fiction.\u201d \u2015 Kirkus \u201cThere's a new queen of historical fiction in town and her name is Ella March Chase\u2026 Captivating, enthralling, and incredibly crafted, The Queen's Dwarf is the must-read historical novel of the year. You'll be hooked from page one. Jeffery and his fellow \"freaks\" are masterful characters and the intrigue, drama, and danger of the Stuart court breathe fire across the pages. Tudor fans, you're in luck. Chase's writing is entirely fresh and utterly engaging. Enjoy.\u201d \u2015 San Francisco Book Review \u201cA tour de force on many levels\u2026 Jeffrey became a living, breathing person to me. As the story is told in the first person, we become privy to Jeffrey's darkest inner monologues, his deepest wishes, his personal struggles. To his peers and the King and Queen, Jeffrey's physical size says nothing of his great humanity, his courage and his ability to love\u2026 A marvelous, engrossing and highly recommended read.\u201d \u2015 Historical Novel Society \u201cThere's an animating intelligence to the whole thing that feels at times almost magisterial. This is by a wide margin Ella March Chase's best novel.\u201d \u2015 Open Letters Monthly \u201cThe Queen\u2019s Dwarf is a feast for readers told by a masterful author.\u00a0Ella March Chase beautifully renders myriad\u00a0facets of life in seventeenth\u00a0century England: the sumptuous and the gritty, the magical and the terrifying.\u00a0The seemingly\u00a0fantastical\u2015yet historically accurate\u2015collection of characters will\u00a0tug at your heart.\u201d \u2015Tahsha Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of Behind the Shattered Glass \u201cEnthralling, unexpected, and mysterious, this vivid novel set in the rarely explored world of acrobats, mages, giants and dwarves who populated Queen Henrietta-Maria's court offers a fascinating tale of an unlikely hero and his companions' hunt for a royal assassin, even as an infamous love affair threatens to overturn the kingdom. The Queen's Dwarf proves that Ms. March-Chase has a very bright future in historical fiction!\u201d \u2015 C.W. Gortner, author of The Tudor Conspiracy \u201c The Queen's Dwarf is a beautiful tapestry, authentic history carefully woven together with a curiously engaging story. I love the in-depth look at a rarely written about queen, and the perfect blend of beautiful language and action that compels turning of page after page. Clever bits of irony threaded throughout and a cast of fresh characters, low and nobly born, make this a delightful pleasure read.\u201d \u2015 Sandra Byrd, bestselling author of Roses Have Thorns: A Novel of Elizabeth I \u201cMasterfully written, The Queen's Dwarf is hard to put down. This engrossing, atmospheric novel paints a vivid portrait of the early days of the reign of Charles the First, bringing a little-known period of English history to glorious life.\u201d \u2015 Kate Emerson, author of Royal Inheritance \u201cA tour de force. To take such an unlikely hero, to surround him with a cast of freaks and yet to create with them a story of intrigue, derring-do, humanity and romance is indeed an achievement for writer Ella March Chase.\u201d \u2015 Rhys Bowen, author of The Family Way \u201cThis book is a banquet--Sumptuous and delicious; I devoured every word, and still wanted more. Its pint-sized hero leapt straight into my heart.\u201d \u2015 Brandy Purdy, author of The Queen's Pleasure \u201cI loved this book; with its new look at English history told by a fresh viewpoint. Chase did a wonderful job of creating heartfelt characters, weaving actual historical figures with imaginary, all to make a novel that will have fans of historical fiction eagerly turning each page. I will be picking up this author's books with anticipation from this point on.\u201d \u2015 NightOwlReviews.com \u201cCombines the fascination of a Grimm's fairy tale with the heft of history\u2026 Penning a tale of royal intrigue from the perspective of a court fool offers a unique glimpse into the queen's inner circle\u2026 It is these unusual characters, these \u2018curiosities,' who breathe life into a tale of Stuart England.\u201d \u2015 CurledUp.com \u201c[Chase's] descriptions are vivid, sumptuous and well-detailed, and her characters are fully realized and easy to love and hate. The Queen's Dwarf is a wonderful historical novel in the vein of Margaret George and Philippa Gregory, and Ella March Chase is a gifted storyteller.\u201d \u2015 ReaderToReader.com \u201cChase's book offers vividly realistic details about daily court life, as well as insight into the intrigue and deception that was prevalent in the kingdom\u2026 If one is mesmerized by a distant time filled with plot twists and turns, this is a book worth picking up.\u201d \u2015 PortlandBookReview.com \u201cA winner\u2026 It's a truly unique novel full of interesting characters, intrigue and betrayal, woven around moments of magic and wonder, laughs and love.\u201d \u2015 letthemreadbooks.blogspot.com About the Author ELLA MARCH CHASE cannot remember a time she did not want to write historical fiction. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. She lives in a house filled with books and music and is lovingly herded by a loyal Shetland sheepdog named Oliver. Chase is the author of The Virgin Queen's Daughter and Three Maids for a Crown, a story of the Grey Sisters.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": null}, {"asin": "1933228016", "title": "A Greek Hupogrammon: A Beginner's Copybook for the Greek Alphabet with Pronunciations", "author": "Harvey Bluedorn", "description": "Review That Baby Block design is great! I always love covers that bridge from front to back. Very visually appealing design and good use of color. Also, the content looks very engaging! Looks like the Bluedorns will hit another homer with this one! Greek is another one of the subjects (like my own little program) that needs to be rediscovered by homeschoolers, as part of rebuilding the ruins. May God bless your efforts. --Jay Ryan at classicalastronomy.comDesigned to correspond with A Greek Alphabetarion, A Greek Hupogrammon: A Beginner's Copybook for the Greek Alphabet with Pronunciations is a self-instructional, consumable workbook for anyone age 8 to adult who is beginning studies in reading, writing, and speaking the Greek language. Pages include sections for copying letters of the Greek alphabet, vowel combinations, and simple phrases, as well as a variety of exercises in different formats with answers. The large type size makes all the exercises, pronunciation tips, and examples easy to read, follow, and copy. An excellent resource for novice students of Greek, whether used by itself or in conjunction with its sister volume. --Midwest Book ReviewIf you are planning on teaching your kids ancient Greek, this copybook will prove very useful. A Greek Hupogrammon is a consumable workbook that gives the beginning student generous practice in writing Ancient Greek words, marks, and sentences. Though designed to correspond with A Greek Alphabetarion (also by Harvey Bluedorn), the Hupogrammon is comprehensive enough to be used alone. However, the two books do compliment each other quite nicely, and the student would gain extra benefit by using them together. The alphabet exercises in the Hupogrammon begin with an example of a capital and lowercase Greek letter with a corresponding scripture. The student then finds the letter in the sampling, practices writing the letter in a given chart, and concludes the lesson with underlying English letters that have the same sound as the practiced Greek letter. Greek letters are reviewed through a matching exercise, where the Greek phonetic spelling is paired with its corresponding English word. Also included is a section devoted to writing out verses of scripture in Greek (the English translation is conveniently provided). The material layout is organized, and the bold large type makes this non-threatening and student friendly. This format works. The Hupogrammon is a very practical way to enhance your child s Greek lessons. Your kids will find this type of copy work fresh, fun and challenging. My 10-year-old son is breezing through this and retaining what he s learning without difficulty. Ancient Greek has suddenly become his favorite subject-I never saw that coming! --Kathy Davis at homeschoolbuzz.com About the Author Author Harvey Bluedorn and his wife Laurie started homeschooling their children in the late 70's and have given workshops on homeschooling and classical education for support groups and at conventions across the country. Their publishing company, Trivium Pursuit, produces books and curricula to help parents use classical education in their homeschool. Harvey Bluedorn has also authored A Greek Alphabetarion, Handy English Encoder Decoder, Homeschool Greek Volume I, Homeschool Greek Volume II (currently in beta version -- 2008), Ancient History from Primary Sources: A Literary Timeline, A Basic Exegetical and Expository Grammar of Biblical Greek, Vocabulary Bridges from English to Latin and Greek, Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style, and Stephanus 2000 in Unicode: The Traditional Greek Text with Full Diacritical Markings. The Bluedorns live in New Boston, Illinois.", "categories": ["Books", "Reference", "Words, Language & Grammar"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 17.76}, {"asin": "1580117872", "title": "Ultimate Guide: Wiring, 8th Updated Edition (Creative Homeowner) DIY Home Electrical Installations & Repairs from New Switches to Indoor & Outdoor Lighting with Step-by-Step Photos (Ultimate Guides)", "author": "Home Improvement", "description": "Review \" Ultimate Guide: Wiring is chock full of excellent photos, charts and illustrations that clearly outline the steps involved in each of the projects covered in the book... I find the detailed how-to wiring diagrams particularly useful. This is as close as you can get to someone standing over your shoulder and telling you what to do... Just about every project featured in this book can be tackled by the average home owner.\" --TOOLReviews Review \u201c Ultimate Guide: Wiring is chock full of excellent photos, charts and illustrations that clearly outline the steps involved in each of the projects covered in the book... I find the detailed how-to wiring diagrams particularly useful. This is as close as you can get to someone standing over your shoulder and telling you what to do... Just about every project featured in this book can be tackled by the average home owner.\u201d \u2015TOOLReviews Book Description Ultimate Guide to Wiring explains residential electrical systems in easy-to-understand terms. It shows how to work with electric wiring and repair, replace, and install typical electrical-system elements. From the Back Cover ULTIMATE GUIDEWIRING Save money by making all types of home electrical repairs and improvements with the help of this complete easy-to-follow guide. Replace faulty electrical switches and receptacles Replace faulty electrical switches and receptacles Install interior and exterior home lighting systems Install interior and exterior home lighting systems Learn about the materials and tools you need to work like a pro Learn about the materials and tools you need to work like a pro Upgrade your home's wiring for safety and convenience Upgrade your home's wiring for safety and convenience Detailed How-to Wiring Diagrams Add lighting systems, switches, and electrical receptacles. Learn how to work like a professional electrician. Install safe and long-lasting outdoor wiring systems. About the Author Consumers recognize Creative Homeowner as their leading and trusted source for the best information, inspiration, and instruction related to the house and home. Creative Homeowner is the preeminent publisher of books on all aspects of decorating and design; home repair and improvement; house plans; gardening and landscaping; and grilling. Creative Homeowner's books stand out from other publications with their complete and easy-to-follow instructions, up-to-date information, and extensive use of color photography. Among its best-selling titles are Ultimate Guide to Home Repair and Improvement, Updated Edition ; Ultimate Guide: Plumbing, 4th Updated Edition ; and Ultimate Guide: Wiring, 8th Updated Edition . Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Home Improvement & Design"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.96}, {"asin": "1665902949", "title": "Little Seed", "author": "Benson Shum", "description": "From School Library Journal Toddler-PreS\u2013An adorable talking seed travels with beautiful Mama Earth for the day to show love and appreciation for all living things, big and small. Bright, rich colors and flexible lines give graceful shape and movement to Little Seed's cheerful interactions with Earth's creatures, showing how caring for nature can lead to growth. VERDICT A delicate idea, borne on the wind, makes this a peaceful book to share at story hours. About the Author Benson Shum\u00a0is a children\u2019s book author and illustrator of picture books like Anzu the Great Kaiju and Jennifer Sattler\u2019s Go to Sheep. Benson is also an animator at the Walt Disney Animation Studios, where he was a part of such films as Frozen , Big Hero 6 , Zootopia , Moana , Frozen II , Raya and the Last Dragon , and Encanto . Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Benson now lives in sunny southern California.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 8.99}], "target_asin": "1250006295"}
{"user_id": "AHR5EQVFP5XKND6L4J5OKYQQY2QQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B002KNH738", "title": "A Bride Goes West", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1627790624", "title": "Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan (Bill O'Reilly's Killing Series)", "author": "Bill O'Reilly", "description": "Review \u201cAn enthralling, gripping account of the bloody battles, huge decisions, and historic personalities that culminated in the decision to drop the atomic bomb and brought the war in the Pacific to its climactic end. A masterful, meticulously researched work that captures the barbarity of the war waged by those who swore allegiance to the Japanese Emperor \u2013 and by those who crushed the military might of the Rising Sun.\u201d \u2013 General David H. Petraeus , commander of the surge in Iraq (2007-8) and coalition forces in Afghanistan (2010-2011) About the Author BILL O'REILLY is a trailblazing TV journalist who has experienced unprecedented success on cable news and in writing eighteen national number-one bestselling nonfiction books. There are more than eighteen million books in the Killing series in print. He lives on Long Island.MARTIN DUGARD is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history, among them the Killing series, Into Africa , and Taking Paris. He and his wife live in Southern California. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Killing the Rising Sun How America Vanquished World War II Japan By Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard Henry Holt and Company Copyright \u00a9 2016 Henry HoltAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-62779-062-8 CHAPTER 1 Peleliu, Caroline Islands Pacific Ocean September 15, 1944 0832 Hours Destruction is near for the empire. The morning heat is so unbearable that Corporal Lewis Kenneth Bausell, USMC, has trouble breathing. He is huddled inside an amphibious landing vehicle with a dozen other marines of the First Battalion, headed for the section of Japanese-held beach code-named Orange One. Even this early in the morning, the temperature hovers at 100 degrees. The Americans are sweating profusely as their armored craft brings them ever closer to the sand. But heat is not the only factor \u2014 some of the perspiration is from nerves. These marines understand that they may soon die or be maimed for life and few will ever know what happened to them. Unlike in the much more publicized war in Europe, where reporters like Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow are making names for themselves by covering every aspect of the fighting, there are few journalists or photographers hitting this remote beach today. The crucial upcoming battle against the Japanese will be waged in near anonymity. Peleliu is important because of its airstrip, a hard-surfaced field capable of launching long-range fighter-bombers. The island is just six miles long and two miles wide, but the terrain is exceptionally rugged, a film of thin soil laid atop coral and limestone. A thousand yards off the beach rise the jungle-covered Umurbrogol ridges, a series of low, jagged peaks forming the island's spine. The Japanese have long coveted tiny, remote Peleliu, first taking possession of the empty island in 1914. For two decades it remained basically unused, but with the war came renewed awareness of its tactical importance. Since this past summer, knowing that the Americans would soon attack, the Japanese have labored to transform Peleliu into a fortress. Most American marines could not care less about the history of Peleliu. Each man approaches the coming battle in his own way. Some smoke to calm their fears, some vomit onto the steel deck, and others worry about wetting their pants. But there is one belief that every man shares: no matter what happens when they hit the beach, surrendering to the enemy will not be an option. Lewis Bausell has been through this before. Only twenty years old, the apprentice bookbinder from Washington, DC, has an easy smile and a wide boxer's nose. His hair is cropped close to his skull. Bausell had a semester left at McKinley Technical High School when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He immediately dropped out of school and tried to enlist in the navy but was rejected. So instead, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. During his more than two years serving his country, Bausell has earned the respect of his peers, and although his rank is not yet official, just one month ago Bausell was selected for promotion to the rank of sergeant because of his heroic performance and leadership during invasions on Tulagi, Gavutu, Guadalcanal, and Cape Gloucester. Now, as the amtrac churns forward through the flat surf toward Peleliu, Bausell buckles the chin strap of his steel helmet. The landing craft stalls momentarily on the coral reef one hundred yards offshore, then continues churning toward the landing zone. Bausell is tempted to peer up and over the side to glimpse the battlefield, but he keeps his head down. Japanese snipers are known to target the curious. All at once, geysers of water erupt around the landing craft. Incoming Japanese 141-mm mortar rounds fill the air. Many find their mark, killing Bausell's fellow marines on other landing craft. The explosions and the roar of artillery are so loud that Bausell and his squadmates cannot hear one another without yelling. The smoke of battle has turned the blue morning sky black. On any other day, Peleliu is a tropical island paradise. Today it is a living hell. \"Hit the beach,\" yells a sergeant as the amtrac's steel treads reach the shore. Bausell vaults up and over the side, landing hard on the bone-white sand and coral. The staccato chatter of hidden Japanese machine guns forces Bausell to press his body flat against the earth. All around him, explosions bring flashes of light. The palm trees lining the beach are in flames. Crimson pools of American blood mingle with the yellow phosphorus of Japanese incendiary devices. \"All any man could do was sweat it out and pray for survival,\" one marine will later write of his first moments on Peleliu. \"It would have been sure suicide to stand up during that firestorm.\" Everything Bausell sees and hears gives the lie to what he and his fellow marines had been told about this tactically vital Japanese stronghold. In preparation for Operation Stalemate, the United States Navy bombarded Peleliu with ten days of aerial raids and two more days of naval shelling. It seemed impossible that anyone could have lived through such an intense barrage of napalm and artillery; \"we have run out of targets,\" a top naval officer complained. American intelligence supported this notion, suggesting that the enemy response would be minimal. The Marine Corps officer commanding the invasion, Major General William Rupertus, predicted a quick and easy battle \u2014 \"a hard fought 'quickie' that will last for four days, five days at most.\" But as Corporal Lewis Bausell and his squad can now attest, Peleliu will not be taken easily. Its defenders have had months to prepare. Mortar launchers and artillery are concealed behind the 2,200-yard beachfront, targeted to strike the precise spots at which the Americans now race ashore. In addition, the Japanese have constructed antitank barriers, laid hundreds of mines, and lined the beach with every coil of barbed wire in the Caroline Islands. \"Spider traps\" \u2014 machine-gun nests made of coconut-tree logs \u2014 are camouflaged so well that they are almost invisible in the swampy landscape where jungle meets the sand. Yet Japanese commander Colonel Kunio Nakagawa is a realist. He knows the Americans will eventually work their way ashore. The US force is huge. So the wily colonel is employing a strategy tried just once before in the war. Despite the horrific welcome the Americans are now receiving, it is not his goal to win this battle on the beaches. Just a fraction of his army now fights the marines, but thousands of other elite troops wait inland, in a network of five hundred hidden caves in the nearby Umurbrogol highlands. These fukkaku defenses will allow Nakagawa and his men to counter the Americans, \"bleeding them white\" by coming out of hiding to attack when the marines least expect it. The attacking Japanese soldiers' ability to swarm out of nowhere led top British general William Slim to refer to them as \"the most formidable fighting insect in history.\" The men of Nakagawa's Fourteenth Imperial Division embody that sentiment. Almost all are veteran warriors, hardened by years of battle. They have been living five stories underground, subsisting on a simple diet of rice and fish and enduring the beatings and harsh discipline from their officers that are typical of the Japanese army. \"You could be beaten for anything,\" one Japanese soldier later remembered. \"Being too short or being too tall, even because somebody didn't like the way you drank coffee. This was done to make each man respond instantly to orders, and it produced results. If you want soldiers who fight hard, they must train hard.\" These soldiers have been taught another crucial lesson: that the Japanese race is superior to all others, and that triumph over the inferior Americans is inevitable. That is a lie. But to soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army, it doesn't matter. Their strongest belief of all is in the samurai code of Bushido, which stipulates that surrender is a form of dishonor. \"The man who would not disgrace himself must be strong,\" reads a line from the Japanese army's Senjinkun, a pocket-size code of behavior issued to all servicemen. \"Do not survive in shame as a prisoner. Die, to ensure that you do not leave ignominy behind you.\" Therein lies the basis for Colonel Nakagawa's trap. There is no escape route for the Japanese, no evacuation plan. The forty-six-year-old Nakagawa, who was decorated nine times for his heroism during Japan's earlier war with China, has already informed his wife that he will never see her again. Soon, very soon, he will lure the unsuspecting Americans into the Umurbrogol highlands and slaughter them. But in turn, he and his men will also be slaughtered. Surrender is not an option. * * * Corporal Lewis Bausell rises up off the sand and sprints in a low crouch. His goal is the protective shelter of a small coral ridge a hundred yards inland. All around him as he runs, shouts of \"Get the hell off the beach!\" mingle with desperate pleas of \"Corpsman!\" Bausell has never seen such destruction. Two hundred marines will die today; hundreds more will be wounded. Terrified corporals and privates now watch the bodies of their brother marines torn apart as fire from Japanese heavy artillery crashes down. \"One figure seemed to fly to pieces,\" a marine will recall of a particularly grisly death. \"With terrible clarity I saw the head and one leg fly into the air.\" \"I saw a wounded Marine near me staggering,\" another American will remember. \"His face was half bloody pulp and the mangled shreds of what was left of an arm hung down like a stick ... he fell behind me, in a red puddle on the white sand.\" Every man here knows what the Japanese army does to prisoners of war. Rather than hold men captive, the Japanese murder them in the most heinous fashion. Veterans of previous battles with this enemy have seen the corpses of marines unlucky enough to be taken alive. Some had their bodies roped to a tree and used for live bayonet practice. Some had their heads, arms, and legs chopped off; scores of US Marines were emasculated with bayonets as they lay dying on the ground. \"It was kill or be killed,\" Marine Corps private Dan Lawler will later remember. \"The Japs didn't take prisoners so we didn't take prisoners either.\" Or, as Marine Corps colonel Lewis \"Chesty\" Puller ordered his men before the Peleliu invasion: \"You will take no prisoners. You will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that's it.\" * * * It seems an eternity, but it is only an hour before Corporal Bausell and a few of his fellow marines manage to get off the sand. Bausell's smile has been replaced by a tight-lipped glare. His instincts sharpened by his many previous landings, Bausell searches the tree line for signs of hidden enemy machine-gun emplacements targeting the invasion force. Suddenly, a burst of light gets Corporal Bausell's attention. The Japanese machine guns fire tracer bullets to help them zero in on a target, but these illuminated rounds can also help the marines pinpoint the shooter's precise location. Bausell sees a stream of tracers emerging from a small cave with a commanding view of the beach. The entrance is concealed by scrub plants and thick brush. Taking charge of the squad, he motions for his men to follow him toward the cave's location. Reaching the cave first, he fires into a small opening. Lieutenant Jack Kimble of Greenville, Mississippi, arrives with a two-man flamethrower team; a stream of fire is launched into the Japanese position in the hope of forcing the enemy to come out. Corporal Bausell, meanwhile, stands ready to shoot them as they emerge. The first Japanese to run screaming from the cave is carrying a grenade. He pulls the pin before Bausell can fire his M1 carbine. Not only does the explosion kill the Japanese soldier but shrapnel slices into several nearby marines. More flame is shot into the cave. Another Japanese soldier emerges. This time, Bausell shoots him dead. Yet another Japanese soldier runs out of the cave, choosing the sure death by rifle fire to being roasted alive. He too carries a grenade, hurling it at the Americans as Bausell raises his weapon. The grenade is launched before Bausell shoots; it lands near him and several other marines. The blast may kill them all. Without hesitation, Corporal Bausell throws his body onto the grenade. His torso rises off the ground as it explodes, smothering the blast. None of his fellow marines is hurt. \"Get that Jap,\" Bausell shouts. Somehow, he is still alive. The flamethrower team shoots off a burst of flame, turning the Japanese soldier into a human torch. Less than two hours after landing on Peleliu, Corporal Lewis Bausell is put on a stretcher and carried back down the beach. He is loaded aboard an amtrac, then ferried out to the hospital ship Bountiful, where he is immediately taken into surgery. But doctors cannot stop the bleeding. The Japanese grenade has sent deadly shards of metal deep into Bausell's internal organs. On September 18, 1944, three days after the invasion of Peleliu, Corporal Lewis Bausell dies. Unlike those of soldiers fighting on World War II's European front, his body will not be lowered into the ground and marked with a monument so that his family might someday visit. Instead, his corpse is wrapped in sailcloth, tethered to a spent artillery shell, and dropped at sea. Corporal Lewis Bausell is the first United States Marine at the Battle of Peleliu whose death will see him awarded America's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor, for actions above and beyond the call of duty in combat. He is not the last. CHAPTER 2 Leyte, Visayas Islands Philippines October 20, 1944 1300 Hours General Douglas MacArthur is grinning. \"As Ripley says, believe it or not, we're here,\" he boasts to his chief of staff. Seven hundred miles west of Peleliu, where marines are now mired in their fifth bloody week of combat, the sixty-four-year-old commander of American forces in the Pacific leans over the rail of the USS Nashville. He gazes into the distance at his beloved Philippines, which were invaded by more than a hundred thousand US Army troops under his command less than four hours ago. His counterpart in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, became famous for the D-Day invasion of France this past June. So MacArthur, well known for his ego, has chosen to call the date of this invasion \"A-Day,\" for \"Attack Day.\" As on Peleliu, intelligence reports predicting minimal enemy resistance have proven very wrong. The Japanese are putting up a fierce fight for the Philippines. Even miles out to sea, MacArthur can hear the chatter of automatic-weapons fire coming from groves of palm trees and see the billowing plumes of black smoke from the jungle. Just overhead, American fighter-bombers buzz toward entrenched enemy positions, keeping a sharp eye out for Japanese Zero fighter planes. Two years ago, after the fall of the Philippines to the Japanese, the most humiliating defeat of MacArthur's storied career, the general promised the world that he would one day come back in glory to retake the islands. Now, he is setting out to make good on that vow. Douglas MacArthur, who likes to refer to himself in the third person as simply \"MacArthur,\" is a shade over six feet tall, the son of a Medal of Honor\u2013winning general through whom he has a lifelong connection to the Philippines. Arthur MacArthur Jr. fought in the American Civil War as a teenager and, after the Spanish-American War, served as military governor of the Philippines. Douglas graduated at the top of his class at West Point, and to this day is as narrow-waisted and fit as on his commissioning day in 1903. MacArthur clambers down a ladder hanging over the Nashville 's side and into a waiting landing craft. As he does every day, the general wears a freshly pressed khaki uniform that bears no insignia or ribbons. He fastidiously maintains the creases on his shirtsleeves and trousers by changing clothes frequently, and has just donned a fresh uniform for the landing. In case the landing goes horribly wrong and MacArthur is at risk of being taken prisoner, a loaded derringer that once belonged to his father rests in his hip pocket. Sweat stains seep into the gold braid encircling MacArthur's weathered field marshal's cap; his dark brown eyes are shielded from the ocean's glare by wire-rimmed Ray-Ban sunglasses. Completing these trademark aspects of his appearance, all of which have made the general an iconic figure worldwide, is the unlit corncob pipe clenched firmly between his teeth. (Continues...) Excerpted from Killing the Rising Sun by Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard . Copyright \u00a9 2016 Henry Holt. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Military"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 11.93}, {"asin": "0062569031", "title": "Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission (Three Days Series)", "author": "Bret Baier", "description": "Review \u201cBret Baier has given history a great gift: a riveting account of Dwight Eisenhower\u2019s determination to call on his vast experience to prepare America for the perils of the new war--the cold war.\u201d \u2014 Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation \u201cCaptures the essence of Ike\u2019s leadership style. Through stories and the keen observations at the time, Baier makes Ike\u2019s world view and philosophy come to life. Three Days in January is a great read.\u201d \u2014 Susan Eisenhower, CEO and Chairman of The Eisenhower Group, Inc. and Chairman Emeritus at the Eisenhower Institute of Gettysburg College \u201cBret Baier\u2019s Three Days in January brilliantly illuminates the genius and intrigue behind Eisenhower\u2019s historic Farewell Address. Written with verve and deeply researched, Baier ably dissects fact from myth. A landmark achievement in U.S. presidential history.\u201d \u2014 Douglas Brinkley, author of Cronkite \u201cMagnificently rendered, Bret Baier\u2019s Three Days in January is destined to take its place as not only one of the masterworks on Eisenhower, but as one of the classics of presidential history. Impeccably researched, the book is nothing short of extraordinary. What a triumph!\u201d \u2014 JAY WINIK, New York Times best-selling author of April 1865 and 1944 \u201cBrilliantly captures the drama of January 1961. ... Three Days in January is the BEST book on Eisenhower to appear in a very long time.\u201d \u2014 DAVID EISENHOWER, Director, the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Public Service, and author of Eisenhower: At War , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History \u201cA valuable contribution to our appreciation of Ike, describing some of his most important qualities of character, wisdom, and leadership, which are so needed in the public figures of our own era.\u201d \u2014 MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, author of Presidential Courage \u201cSuperb. ... A quintessential American story of transcending dignity and success, of personal humility and enormous self-confidence, and unique achievements of which all Americans can be proud. ... Many have tried to assess Ike. Few succeed. Baier does.\u201d \u2014 U.S. Senator Pat Roberts, Washington Times \u201cBret Baier has written a great book about a great president ... and the lessons in leadership that \u2018Ike\u2019 offers to today\u2019s era of polarization and gridlock.\u201d \u2014 CLARENCE PAGE, Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist \u201cBrings new relevance to Eisenhower\u2019s parting message. ... A focused and timely study of Eisenhower\u2019s significant speech and the sticky transition to JFK\u2019s inherited new world.\u201d \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \u201cVital lessons for our time. ... Powerful and enlightening, Three Days in January sheds light on a little-known Eisenhower.\u201d \u2014 The Costco Connection From the Back Cover January 1961: President Eisenhower has three days to secure the nation\u2019s future before his young successor, John F. Kennedy, takes power\u2014a final mission by the legendary leader who planned D-Day and guided America through the darkening Cold War Bret Baier, the Chief Political Anchor for Fox News Channel and the Anchor and Executive Editor of Special Report with Bret Baier , illuminates the extraordinary yet underappreciated presidency of Dwight Eisenhower by taking readers into Ike\u2019s last days in power.Baier masterfully casts the period between Eisenhower\u2019s now-prophetic farewell address on the evening of January 17, 1961, and Kennedy\u2019s inauguration on the afternoon of January 20 as the closing act of one of modern America\u2019s greatest leaders\u2014during which Eisenhower urgently sought to prepare both the country and the next president for the challenges ahead. Those three days in January 1961, Baier shows, were the culmination of a lifetime of service that took Ike from rural Kansas to West Point, to the battlefields of World War II, and finally to the Oval Office. When he left the White House, Dwight Eisenhower had done more than perhaps any other modern American to set the nation, in his words, \u201con our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.\u201d On January 17, Eisenhower spoke to the nation in one of the most remarkable farewell speeches in U.S. history. Ike looked to the future, warning Americans against the dangers of elevating partisanship above national interest, excessive government budgets (particularly deficit spending), the expansion of the military-industrial complex, and the creeping political power of special interests. Seeking to ready a new generation for power, Eisenhower intensely advised the forty-three-year-old Kennedy before the inauguration. Baier also reveals how Eisenhower\u2019s two terms changed America forever for the better\u2014perhaps even saved the world from destruction\u2014and demonstrates how today Ike offers us the model of principled leadership that polls say is so missing in politics. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces during World War II, Eisenhower only reluctantly stepped into politics. As president, Ike successfully guided the country out of a dangerous war in Korea, peacefully through the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war with the Soviets, and into one of the greatest economic booms in world history. Five decades later, Baier\u2019s Three Days in January forever makes clear that Eisenhower, an often forgotten giant of U.S. history, still offers vital lessons for our own time and stands as a lasting example of political leadership at its most effective and honorable. About the Author Bret Baier is the chief political anchor for Fox News Channel and the anchor and executive editor of Special Report with Bret Baier . He previously served as Chief White House Correspondent for Fox News Channel and as the network\u2019s National Security Correspondent based at the Pentagon, reporting on military and national security affairs. A recipient of the National Press Foundation\u2019s Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, Baier is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Three Days at the Brink: FDR\u2019s Daring Gamble to Win WWII ; Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire ; Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower\u2019s Final Mission ; and Special Heart: A Journey of Faith, Hope, Courage and Love . He lives with his family in Washington, DC. Catherine Whitney has written or collaborated on more than twenty-five books, including Framing a Life: A Family Memoir with Geraldine Ferraro and Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice with the late Judge Harold J. Rothwax. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.2}, {"asin": "159474520X", "title": "Signing Their Rights Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the United States Constitution", "author": "Denise Kiernan", "description": "Review \"It's no secret that I love reading history and occasionally a book comes along that provides an unusual insight beyond the standard telling of a given event. Signing Their Rights Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the United States Constitution.\" -- Bookviews About the Author Denise Kiernan is a journalist, producer, and the New York Times best-selling author of the narrative nonfiction books, The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City . Joseph D\u2019Agnese is a journalist, author and ghostwriter who has written for both adults and children. With his wife, Denise Kiernan, he has authored several books on U.S. history, including Signing Their Lives Away , Signing Their Rights Away , and Stuff Every American Should Know . They live in North Carolina. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction Ask any person to name the single most important day in\u00a0United States history, and they\u2019re likely to answer July 4, 1776.\u00a0Every year, Americans celebrate the signing of the Declaration of\u00a0Independence by attending parades and watching fireworks. Most\u00a0believe that the patriots defeated the British, as though in a football\u00a0game, and then Americans lived happily ever after in blissful\u00a0democracy.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Nothing could be further from the truth.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0When the war ended in 1783, the United States was governed\u00a0by the Articles of Confederation. This fairly flimsy compact provided\u00a0for a one-house\u00a0Congress, one vote per state, and very little else. True, this Congress had a president, but he didn\u2019t derive his\u00a0power from the people, and he was an intentionally weak figurehead.\u00a0After all, the last thing the founding fathers wanted was\u00a0another king.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Within two years, the fledgling United States was on the verge\u00a0of political collapse. The federal government had no power to tax\u00a0people, goods, properties, or businesses. That may sound wonderful\u00a0until you stop to consider all the consequences: The federal\u00a0government had no revenue and issued no currency. There was no\u00a0money for raising troops, building ships, or engaging in other\u00a0activities vital to a nation\u2019s self-defense.\u00a0The country was vulnerable\u00a0to attack and domination by a host of foreign powers. At sea,\u00a0American vessels were pirated by foreign ships; their cargo and\u00a0passengers were frequently held for ransom. On land, British and\u00a0Spanish factions were arming Native Americans and encouraging\u00a0them to raid American settlements on the edges of the frontier.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0States took matters into their own hands. Nine states had their\u00a0own naval forces and pursued their own foreign policies. They\u00a0imposed taxes on goods from other states as though they were dealing\u00a0with foreign countries. There were no courts to decide\u00a0disagreements between states. Private banks were issuing their own\u00a0currency, but their notes were often distrusted and viewed as IOUs\u00a0that might never be repaid. Doing business with other states was\u00a0challenging if not impossible. Seesawing cycles of inflation and\u00a0deflation were destroying lives. Foreclosures skyrocketed, and banks\u00a0began seizing the homes of poor farmers with unpaid mortgages.\u00a0Many wealthy landowners feared a bloody class revolution\u2014or\u00a0an\u00a0all-out\u00a0civil war.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Clearly something had to be done or the nation wouldn\u2019t live\u00a0long enough to celebrate its eleventh birthday. Alexander Hamilton,\u00a0James Madison, and a host of other bigwigs proposed a \u201cgrand\u00a0convention\u201d at which delegates would gather to revise, debate, and\u00a0expand the Articles of Confederation. Seventy-four\u00a0delegates were\u00a0chosen by their respective states; only fifty-five\u00a0answered the call,\u00a0and many of those with skepticism. Patrick Henry, the famed Virginia\u00a0rebel, refused to attend, complaining that he \u201csmelt a rat.\u201d\u00a0Rhode Island sent no representatives at all.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In May of 1787, the willing participants journeyed to the very\u00a0same Philadelphia building where the Declaration of Independence\u00a0had been signed. True, these men had once banded together\u00a0to fight as brothers against a common enemy, but now they were\u00a0deeply distrustful of one another. Small states were suspicious of\u00a0large states. The nation was divided over slavery. Every delegate\u00a0arrived wanting something\u2014but few were willing to sacrifice anything.\u00a0In such a contentious environment, reaching compromise\u00a0would be tough. More than a dozen delegates quit and went home\u00a0before the convention\u2019s end.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The thirty-nine\u00a0who remained and signed the U.S. Constitution\u00a0are the focus of this book. Signing Their Rights Away introduces\u00a0you to the remarkable historical figures who jettisoned the limp\u00a0and lifeless Articles of Confederation for a robust and rigorous\u00a0document that provided the framework for an enduring system of\u00a0government (at more than 230 years old, the U.S. Constitution is\u00a0the oldest functioning constitution in the world).\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0In the end, these men prioritized the welfare of their country\u00a0over politics or personal advancement. They fought with great\u00a0conviction\u2014but they eventually came to understand that no single\u00a0delegate could walk away with all the marbles. They agreed to\u00a0compromise for the greater good. Yet, today, despite their heroic\u00a0labors, most of them have lapsed into obscurity.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0They deserve better\u2014if only because their stories are so interesting.\u00a0At least twenty-two of the signers served in the military\u2014as\u00a0soldiers, chaplains, administrative officers\u2014during the Revolutionary\u00a0War. Five were captured and imprisoned by the British.\u00a0Many lost homes, property, and loved ones to the war. Two died\u00a0in duels; one attempted suicide.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Most were educated, cosmopolitan gentlemen accustomed to a\u00a0life of wealth and privilege. Eighteen of the signers were trained in\u00a0law; the remainder were merchants, plantation owners, and\u00a0financiers. They represented the views, expectations, and entitlements\u00a0of the nation\u2019s elite. Such men had no problem ignoring the\u00a0rights of women and slaves when designing their compact for government.\u00a0Nor were they champions of free white men with meager\u00a0property. (One signer sought to restrict government service to men\u00a0with a net worth exceeding $100,000!) Having witnessed intimidation\u00a0and mob violence at the hands of enemies and patriots\u00a0alike, many of the signers didn\u2019t trust the American public. The\u00a0idea of granting power to all individuals was a fairly radical idea.\u00a0During debates, many signers repeatedly derided the notion that\u00a0Josiah Q. Public could serve wisely in the House and Senate, or,\u00a0heaven help us, the presidency.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0But in the end, enough members knew that this attitude did\u00a0not reflect the principles of the revolution they had just fought.\u00a0They were gutsy enough to give the \u201clittle guy\u201d a shot at power.\u00a0Anyone could be president, anyone could be senator\u2014even you.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0So the next time September 17 rolls around, eat a hot dog,\u00a0watch some fireworks, and celebrate Constitution Day\u2014that fateful\u00a0date in 1787 when thirty-nine\u00a0sweaty men dressed in stockings\u00a0signed their names to the United States Constitution. Remember\u00a0how they argued, hoped, feared, persevered, and, most important,\u00a0compromised to create a lasting document that still governs today.\u00a0July 4 may be remembered as the day the United States was born,\u00a0but September 17 marks the country\u2019s passage into adulthood,\u00a0laying the groundwork for two centuries of remarkable expansion\u00a0and spectacular achievements. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Leaders & Notable People"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 24.91}, {"asin": "1557091056", "title": "Constitution of the United States (Books of American Wisdom)", "author": "Founding Fathers", "description": "From the Inside Flap The complete text of the United States Constitution, including all of the amendments. This elegant edition is sure to be prized by Americans of all ages. From the Back Cover The complete text of the United States Constitution, including all of the amendments. This elegant edition is sure to be prized by Americans of all ages. About the Author Founding Fathers of the United States (also known as the Framers, Fathers of Our Country, or the Founders) are the political leaders who signed the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution, or otherwise participated in the American Revolution as leaders of the Patriots. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (Preamble) Read more", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "0349140251", "title": "The Churchill Secret KBO", "author": "Jonathan Smith", "description": "Review Delightful, funny, heart-warming\u2015 Mail on Sunday The Churchill Secret KBO will inevitably be compared with The King's Speech when the television adaptation airs in a few months, but it brings a uniquely personal and intimate tone to one of Britain's most famous lives, shining a subtle yet penetrating light on the pain of ageing and the maxim that Churchill lived by, and which gives this fine book its full title: Keep Buggering On\u2015 Melissa Katsoulis , The Times Told with elegance and wit\u2015 New Statesman Smith's ingenious novel guides the reader effortlessly through the corridors of power\u2015 Mail on Sunday About the Author Jonathan Smith is a novelist, writer, and teacher. An earlier novel, Summer in February , was made into a feature film starring Dan Stevens and Dominic Cooper.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 11.09}, {"asin": "0670861790", "title": "Prayers and Devotions: 365 Daily Meditations; from John Paul II", "author": "Pope JohnPaul II", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Personal Transformation"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 15.74}, {"asin": "1596142448", "title": "33 Days to Morning Glory: A Do-It-Yourself Retreat In Preparation for Marian Consecration", "author": "Michael E. Gaitley", "description": "About the Author Fr.Michael E. Gaitley, MIC, is director of Evangelization for the Marian Fathersof the Immaculate Conception and director of Formation for the MarianMissionaries of Divine Mercy. Fr. Michael is also the author of the bestsellingbooks 33 Days to Morning Glory,Consoling the Heart of Jesus ,and the new book 33 Days to Merciful Love . He lives and works onEden Hill in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of the National Shrine of TheDivine Mercy.", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Catholicism"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "0914053175", "title": "Betrayed by the Bench: How Judge-made Law Has Transformed America's Constitution, Courts and Culture", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Soccer"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 14.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B011MBNGH4", "title": "Betrayed by the Bench First edition by Stormer, John A. (2005) Hardcover", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 48.99}, {"asin": "194313815X", "title": "Cheikh Anta Diop And the New Light on African History", "author": "John Henrik Clarke", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "History & Criticism"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 7.95}, {"asin": "0765385503", "title": "Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, 1)", "author": "Seanan McGuire", "description": "From School Library Journal This new story from a veteran fantasy author offers writing that's full of imagery and evocative emotions and helps build suspense from the very first sentence. Behind the titular doorway lie alternate worlds, some magical, some dangerous, and some both. The children, mostly girls, who go through the doors become irrevocably changed, many of them becoming mature beyond their actual years. When they return to the real world, their families and friends no longer understand them. And some, like Nancy, want desperately to return to their alternate world, where they felt welcomed and loved. Eleanor West was once a young traveler to those worlds, and now she runs a home for these wayward children, helping them adjust to reality. Just as Nancy begins to make a place for herself, a puzzling and gruesome series of murders threaten the students and the home's very existence. The characters are well drawn, and their feelings about their impossible situation are believable. The alienation they experience and their struggles to find a way back will appeal to teens. When the murderer is revealed, the motivation will be understood by characters and readers alike. VERDICT Though short (this tale is more novella than novel), this clever inside out fantasy will intrigue fantasy fans and those who loved Ransom Riggs's Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.\u2014Gretchen Crowley, Alexandria City Public Libraries, VA Review \"A jewel of a book that deserves to be shelved with Lewis Carroll's and C. S. Lewis' classics, even as it carves its own precocious space between them.\" \u2015NPR\"One of the most extraordinary stories I've ever read.\" \u2015V. E. Schwab \"This is a gorgeous story: sometimes mean, sometimes angry, and always exciting\" \u2015Cory Doctorow for BoingBoing \"McGuire's lyrical prose makes this novella a rich experience.\" \u2015 Library Journal, starred review\"This amazing fantasy pierces the shimmering veil of childhood imagination by reminding adult readers that their own doorways still exist deep in the chambers of their all-too-human hearts.\" \u2015 Booklist, starred review\"This gothic charmer is a love letter to anyone who's ever felt out of place.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly \"This gothic novel is ideal for fantasy fans who have longed for a world of their own, as well as readers looking for books with diverse casts.\" \u2015 Bookish \u201c Girl Interrupted meets Grimm's Fairy Tales . Let it in and it will touch your heart and open your mind.\u201d \u2015 Geek Syndicate \"The broken doors are open, and you should come and enter. Every Heart a Doorway feels like home.\" \u2015B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog About the Author SEANAN McGUIRE is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, Alex and Locus Award-winning Wayward Children series, the October Daye series, the InCryptid series, and other works. She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls, horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 became the first person to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. In 2022 she managed the same feat, again! Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 9.89}, {"asin": "1891776207", "title": "Quilts Through the Seasons: A Quilt for Each Month of the Year", "author": "Eleanor Burns", "description": "About the Author Twenty nine years ago Eleanor Burns introduced her first Quilt in a Day book, cultivating a quiltmaking revolution. She presented her unique style, a diverse combination of cutting and sewing applications, creating new techniques altogether. Her concise step by step directions are easy to grasp, allowing the possibility for anyone to be successful at making a quilt. Eleanor Burns gave quiltmakers techniques that compacted months into merely a day, a quilt in a day, spreading her vibrant enthusiasm within everyone. She has motivated thousands of want-to-be quilters with needed confidence and assurance. Altogether, the impact of her influences opened the door to a renewal. Her efforts sowed the seeds that have grown into many techniques that are commonly used today. Since 1978 when she self-published her first book Make a Quilt in a Day: Log Cabin Pattern, she has authored over seventy five additional books. Throughout the world today, there are thousands of inst!ructors teaching her quiltmaking methods. Her first Quilt in a Day TV series began airing on PBS in 1990 and is still broadcast nationwide and abroad and now her shows can be seen on the world wide web on QNN and Quilters TV.", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Crafts & Hobbies"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 29.45}], "target_asin": "B011MBNGH4"}
{"user_id": "AFADQACB6RSZHWSX37SLT32V6N2Q", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "051515556X", "title": "Cat's Lair (A Leopard Novel)", "author": "Christine Feehan", "description": "Review Praise for Christine Feehan and her Leopard novels \u201cThe queen of paranormal romance...I love everything she does.\u201d\u2014J. R. Ward\u201c[A] dark and seductive paranormal romance series.\u201d\u2014HeroesandHeartbreakers.com\u201cHeart-stopping action. Crazy sexy time scenes. Tender emotions.\u201d\u2014Harlequin Junkie\u201cHot-blooded...intense and thrilling...You don\u2019t want to miss it!\u201d\u2014Joyfully Reviewed\u201cWith a Feehan novel you know you will get well-developed characters and...a dose of sizzling sexuality...an unbeatable mix.\u201d\u2014 RT Book Reviews About the Author Christine Feehan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Carpathian series, the GhostWalker series, the Leopard series, the Shadow Riders series, and the Sea Haven novels, including the Drake Sisters series and the Sisters of the Heart series. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. For My Readers Acknowledgments 1 CATARINA Benoit woke to screams. Terrible, frightening screams that echoed through her bedroom. Her heart pounded and sweat beaded on her body. Her long hair hung around her face in damp strands. She clapped a hand over her mouth to still the cries, her throat raw even as her eyes darted around the room. Searching. Always searching. She searched the high places first\u2014anywhere he could be crouched. Watching. Waiting to strike. She searched the windows. The glass was covered with bars, but she knew that wouldn\u2019t stop him if he found her. Nothing ever stopped him. He could get inside any house, any building. Anywhere. Rafe Cordeau, the thing of nightmares. She was safe. She had to be. She lived completely off the grid. Underground. She only came out at night. Her one exception to her night rule was her hour of running just before sunset. She worked in a quiet part of town, in a store no one would ever consider she would work in. Rafe would never figure it out, not in a million years. He couldn\u2019t find her this time. She\u2019d planned too carefully. She\u2019d even stolen enough money to get herself a start. Right out of his safe. The one no one could crack. She\u2019d done that. He wasn\u2019t going to get his hands on her again. Never again. She fell back against the pillows, drawing her knees into her chest, making herself into a small, protected ball, rocking gently to try to calm herself, to push the terror of the nightmare away. She could taste bile in her mouth. Drawing in great, deep breaths to try to control her wild heart, she felt something else, something inside unfurl and stretch. It terrified her too. There was something in her, biding its time, waiting for a chance to get out, and she feared it was a monster. She feared he\u2019d put it there, he\u2019d somehow made her like him. She knew she wouldn\u2019t go back to sleep. Every window was covered with heavy drapes to block out the sun, but still, she would never be able to go back to sleep. She forced her legs to straighten. That hurt. Every muscle was sore from the terrible coiling in her body. She knew from experience it would be like that all day, her body feeling as if someone had beat her up with a baseball bat. She sat up and scooted to the side of the bed, first, as she always did, feeling for the gun hidden beneath her pillow. The solid weight of it always made her feel better. She worked out, trained hard, even when she knew she still wouldn\u2019t have a chance against him if he found her. Even so, she lived her life. Held herself still. Kept to herself. Reduced his odds. She took a shower in the small cubicle. It was a rigged hose with a spray nozzle over the top of a tiny booth with a drain. It didn\u2019t matter. She was safe. She lived in a warehouse, not her car. Mostly the warehouse was empty, but her martial arts instructor owned the property and he\u2019d allowed her to rent the space when he realized she was living out of her car. He had barred the windows for her. She had put in the double locks herself. She had done everything necessary to make herself safe, but then she\u2019d made a vow. She would be happy every single second she was living free and alive. She wouldn\u2019t hide in the warehouse, shut away from the world, she would live . She\u2019d be smart and careful about it, but this time, she wouldn\u2019t be a mouse hiding. It hadn\u2019t done her much good the last time, and she wasted that little bit of freedom she\u2019d had. The price definitely hadn\u2019t been worth it then. She was going to make certain it was this time. Catarina pressed her fingers hard against her temples, unwilling to revisit the moment when he\u2019d last found her and his terrible punishment. Her entire body shuddered. She\u2019d paid dearly, but that had only made her all the more determined to escape permanently. She\u2019d been terrified and he thought that terror would work to his advantage. She let him think that, and then she\u2019d escaped again. Her life had really started with her martial arts instructor. Malcom Hardy was in his late sixties and from the moment she\u2019d entered his class, he\u2019d seemed to know something was wrong. He didn\u2019t exactly ask questions, but somehow he found out she was living out of her car and he casually mentioned his empty warehouse. That had been the start of their strange friendship. Catarina had never had a friendship with anyone before, and at first she was distrustful of his motives. It had taken Malcom months to gain her trust enough that she stayed and had a few words privately with him after each class. She hadn\u2019t told him her past, only that she was looking for a job and needed a safe home. She\u2019d used the word safe in the hopes that he would understand without an explanation\u2014and he had. When she\u2019d escaped, she hadn\u2019t taken tons of money from the safe because she didn\u2019t want Rafe to have more reason to come after her if by chance he\u2019d given up on her. That meant she didn\u2019t have a lot of money. It also meant, if he had given up on her, he\u2019d send his kill squad after her. Either way she wasn\u2019t safe and she needed to be very careful with her money. Malcom slowly won her over with his many simple kindnesses. He casually dropped by to put the bars on the windows when she\u2019d mentioned she was a little nervous. He\u2019d also been the one to find her the job after she told him what her dream job would be. Catarina loved her job. The coffee-house-slash-bookstore was old, the kind where poets and writers came and read their work every Friday. It was a throwback world that suited her. Books were everywhere, and people gathered to talk and read and show off their work. She liked that the place was a tribute to a bygone era and the regulars who occupied it were loyal and definitely different. She made certain never to stand out. She dressed in loose-fitting jeans. A loose-fitting shirt. Her hair had always grown thick and fast and got worse the more she cut it. She\u2019d given up on short hair so she pulled it back in a ponytail or braid and often wore hats. Since everyone who came to the coffee-house wore berets or felt hats, she wasn\u2019t out of place. Most wore sunglasses, even at night, as well, so she did that too, hiding her unusually colored cobalt eyes. The coffee-house stayed open nearly twenty-four hours, and she had the shift that ran from seven in the evening until three in the morning, when she closed the shop. They got a large influx of people looking to wind down from drinking, dancing and clubbing at the bars that closed at two. She wasn\u2019t fond of that particular crowd, but she\u2019d grown used to it. She spent an hour on working the heavy bag Malcom had hung for her and another hour doing sit-ups and crunches and push-ups. She dressed in baggy sweats and went running. That killed another hour and put her to sunset. Another shower and she headed for the coffee-house. She tried hard not to allow her heart to do a little stutter, wondering if the new instructor Malcom had hired would drop by again. She liked looking at him. He was a bonus at the dojo as well as the coffee-house. She\u2019d never found herself looking at a man before\u2014she\u2019d never dared to. But he was special. Everything about him was special. He\u2019d been at the dojo a month, and she\u2019d watched him with the same distrust she had for anyone new who came into her world. He was absolutely the most beautiful man she\u2019d ever seen in her life. He was brutal when he fought, and yet, at the same time, graceful and fluid. Sheer poetry. He was light on his feet, very fast, so smooth. He was always, always utterly calm. She couldn\u2019t imagine him ruffled over anything. He embodied the world of martial arts\u2014he lived that way\u2014not just in the dojo but out of it. Still, she kept her distance, even when he\u2019d noticed her in the dojo and smiled at her a time or two. She didn\u2019t smile back. She didn\u2019t encourage any kind of a relationship, nor did she want one. Not because she didn\u2019t ever talk to people, but because he made her feel something she\u2019d never felt before. But she liked looking at him. Maybe a little too much. She didn\u2019t have flights of erotic fantasy or dreams. Her body had never awakened, on fire, burning with need and hunger. Her breasts hadn\u2019t felt swollen and achy, desperate for a man\u2019s touch. Not until she laid eyes on Malcom\u2019s new instructor. Something moved in her. Something took over, and unexpectedly, at night, when she wasn\u2019t having nightmares, she had erotic dreams that burned through her body until she couldn\u2019t breathe. Abruptly they\u2019d leave her, and once they were gone her body would settle and she\u2019d be perfectly fine again. He was definitely someone she needed to stay away from, but looking at him was acceptable. He\u2019d sauntered into the coffee-house two weeks after starting with Malcom. She\u2019d noticed him immediately. How could she not? When he moved, the roped muscles of his body, even beneath his tight black shirt, did a delicious kind of rippling that drew every feminine eye in the place. Ridley Cromer. The name was as strange and unique as the man. Catarina stood outside the coffee-house just staring into the windows, feeling happy. She always made certain she acknowledged being happy. That was important. She woke up in the morning and always, always told herself she would be happy that day. \u201cHey, beautiful.\u201d She froze, the smile fading. The other thing strange about Ridley Cromer was the fact that she never heard him when he came near her. He didn\u2019t make a sound. She heard everyone. She always knew when someone was close to her. The reason why she excelled in martial arts was because she always anticipated her opponent\u2019s move. It was as if she had a kind of radar telling her where everyone was at all times within her space. Everyone but Ridley Cromer. She turned her head, holding her breath, her smile fading. Her eyes met Ridley\u2019s and the impact was so strong the air rushed from her lungs as if she\u2019d been punched. He had beautiful eyes. Intense. The way he looked at her was intense. Everything about him was intense. And Zen. Very Zen. She forced herself to nod out of politeness. She knew if she tried to speak she would squeak like a mouse and nothing else would emerge. Ridley Cromer was fine to look at. Daydream about. Even have night fantasies over, but there was no talking. No interaction. Not ever. If all the rest of the world of women were smart, they\u2019d adopt her steadfast rules with him. \u201cYou working tonight or just looking for company?\u201d His voice was low and sexy. Her pulse beat hard in her throat. She swallowed hard. She\u2019d never had a crush on anyone in her life, but he was standing right in front of her. Towering over her. His eyes smiled and his white teeth flashed. He should be locked up to preserve all women\u2019s virtues. She shook her head and reached for the door handle. He reached at the same time, his hand settling around hers as she grasped the knob. A shiver of absolute awareness slid down her spine. Curled in her belly. There was a sudden tingle in her breasts and she felt heat gathering in her very core. Not like her night fantasies, where her body burned up, but still\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. He didn\u2019t let go of her hand, and she couldn\u2019t remove hers from the doorknob. His touch was light. Gentle. She should have pulled her hand away but she was frozen to the spot. He stepped closer, so close she could feel the heat of his body seeping into hers. He was hot. He radiated heat. His breath was warm on the nape of her neck, and for the first time she wished she\u2019d left her hair down to protect herself. \u201cIt\u2019s Cat, right? Malcom calls you Cat. You\u2019re his favorite student. I\u2019ve never known him to have a favorite. I\u2019m Ridley Cromer.\u201d She closed her eyes briefly. Thunder roared in her ears. Her brain short-circuited. His voice was pitched so low that it seemed to slide beneath her skin and find its way directly into her bloodstream like some strange new drug. No one touched her. No one dared. He had broken that taboo. She didn\u2019t know how to feel about it. \u201cYou\u2019re quick. Very fast,\u201d he went on, as if she wasn\u2019t the rudest person in the world for not answering him. \u201cI couldn\u2019t help but watch you sparring the other day. You were wiping up the floor with men ranked much higher than you. Men with a lot more experience. It was a thing of beauty.\u201d A thing of beauty. She would hold that close to her and think about it when she was alone. A compliment. Coming from someone who clearly could best anyone in the dojo, probably including Malcom, it was very high praise. Still, she couldn\u2019t stand there being an absolute idiot. She finally found her wits and gave the door a desperate twist, flashing what she hoped was a careless smile of thanks over her shoulder at him. She yanked open the door, but found when she stepped back she stepped right into him. Right into him. His body was as hard as a rock. It was rather like smashing herself against an oak tree. His arms came around her automatically to steady her. The heat radiating from him nearly burned right through her clothes. To her absolute horror, she banged the door closed again as she threw herself forward and away from him. She nearly ran into the heavy glass, but his hands were suddenly at her waist, gently moving her away from the door. One moment she was heading for danger; the next he had literally lifted her and put her a foot away from the door. \u201cKitten, you\u2019d better let me get that.\u201d Color rushed up her neck into her face. To her everlasting mortification, she could hear male amusement in his voice. She was an idiot\u2014a tongue-tied idiot\u2014and he\u2019d think she was crazy. Still\u2014she gulped air\u2014that was for the best. He\u2019d just dismiss her, hopefully never look at her again. Not with those eyes. Those beautiful, antique gold eyes. Who had eyes that color? He pulled the door open and held it, waiting for her to go through. Thankfully she found her legs and moved past him, once again throwing a small, hopefully thankful smile at him over her shoulder. She walked stiffly to the counter and shoved her things beneath it on the other side. She was absolutely certain someone needed to file away books in the back where no one could see her. Someone else could make the coffee tonight and she\u2019d just go hide. \u201cCat, great, you\u2019re here.\u201d David Belmont, the owner of Poetry Slam, threw her an apron. \u201cGet to it, hon. Everyone\u2019s been complaining because apparently my coffee doesn\u2019t taste like yours. I\u2019ve watched you a million times and I do exactly the same thing, but it never comes out like yours.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t like making coffee, David,\u201d Catarina replied, and put on her apron. Which she found hilarious because he owned the coffee-house. The moment she was behind the coffee machine, David moved into position to take orders and money. Clearly there he was in his element, chatting up the customers, remembering their names, talking them into some of the bakery goods sold with the coffee. He even remembered the poetry or short stories they wrote. He was awesome with the customers, and she was awesome with the coffee. They made a great team. She didn\u2019t look up when anyone ordered. It was part of her strategy to keep in the background. The mouse in the coffee-house. Unfortunately, because she was great at making any type of coffee drink, the customers were aware of her. She was the reigning barista, and the customers had begun to fill the coffee-house nightly. She had worked hard to learn what she needed to in secret. She read, watched countless videos and committed coffee books to memory. Before that, she\u2019d had to learn to read. She was a little smug about it. Rafe would never, ever think to find her in a bookstore/coffee-house. Never. She was poor little illiterate Catarina. She kept her eyes on the espresso machine when she heard Ridley give his order in a soft, low tone that set a million butterflies winging in her stomach. She already knew exactly what he wanted, just as she did with most of the regulars. He hadn\u2019t been coming in all that long, but she was aware of every breath he took\u2014just as the other women were. She certainly remembered what he liked for coffee. She knew exactly where he sat without looking up. He always pulled out a book, usually on mediation or essays from a Zen master, while he drank his coffee. He savored coffee. She\u2019d watched him, sneaking looks of course, and he always had the same expression on his face. She knew she put it there. She might not be a conversationalist, but she made spectacular coffee. She forced herself to make fifteen more coffees before she looked up. Her gaze collided with his. All that beautiful, perfect, molten gold. She almost fell right into his eyes. She blushed. She knew she did. There was no stopping the color rising into her cheeks. He gave her a faint, sexy smile. She looked down without smiling back, concentrating on her work. One look and her stomach did a crazy roll. What was wrong with her? She didn\u2019t have physical reactions to men. It was just not okay. She couldn\u2019t ever be stupid enough to wish for a relationship. She\u2019d get someone killed that way. In any case, she\u2019d be too afraid. She didn\u2019t even know what a relationship was. But he was darned good to look at, she acknowledged with a secret smile. Darned good. The familiar rhythm of the coffee-house settled her nerves. The aroma of coffee and fresh baked goods swept her up into the easy atmosphere. Once the poetry slam started, darkness descended. There was usually little joy in the poems, but she enjoyed them all the same. Bernard Casey, a regular who was usually first up at the microphone, accepted his caramel macchiato from David, took one sip, and pushed his head over the counter the way he did each evening. \u201cHey, coffee woman. Heaven again.\u201d She shot him a smile. It was safe to smile at Bernard. He loved coffee, his poems and little else. \u201cHey coffee man, glad you think so.\u201d He only looked at her once a day, and that was when he gave her the nightly compliment. It was their standard greeting. Bernard waved and settled at his usual table right in front of the microphone, making certain he would be the first and last poet of the night. \u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2022 RIDLEY observed Catarina over the top of the book he no longer had any interest in. She was beautiful and she was scared. Very scared. She thought she\u2019d managed to downplay her looks, but a man would have to be blind not to see through her baggy clothes and attempts to tame her wild hair. Her sunglasses didn\u2019t hide the perfection of her skin, and when she took them off and looked at a man with her exotic cobalt blue eyes, the color a deep intense violet at times, ringed with those long dark lashes\u2014well\u2014the punch was low and it was just plain sinful. And then there was her mouth. Full lips like a cupid\u2019s bow. Turned up at the corners just slightly. Her lower lip could make a man go to his knees and fill his nights with erotic fantasies. When her lips parted and she gave a small, distracted smile, the one that meant she wasn\u2019t seeing you, any man worth his salt couldn\u2019t help but take on that challenge. When she smiled, like she\u2019d just done to Bernard, the strange poet who poured out his feelings for her through his poems, Ridley knew a man would kill for her. She was nothing at all like he expected her to be. He watched her at the dojo with Malcom during her lessons and training sessions. She was focused. Intelligent, which, when fighting, was important. She was quick, her reflexes good, and she moved with a fluid grace that took his breath away. He wasn\u2019t the only man in the dojo who stopped what he was doing to watch. He expected her to be a man-killer. She should have been. She had the face and the body. She had the voice. She had a soft drawl, barely there, the kind of drawl that reminded him of drifting down the bayou on a lazy summer night with the sky above him dark and a thousand stars shining overhead and a woman, naked in his arms. She should have had all the confidence in the world. She had confidence when she sparred with any man Malcom put her against, and so far she\u2019d wiped up the floor with them no matter their rank. She was that fast. She had confidence behind the espresso machines and she had every reason to. She had confidence when she walked home at three o\u2019clock in the morning and she shouldn\u2019t. But she didn\u2019t look at men. She didn\u2019t talk to them. There was no flirting. He\u2019d never seen her flirt with anyone. Not a man or a woman. She was definitely a puzzle, and one he wanted to solve. He\u2019d deliberately stepped up close to her, crowded her space, to see what she\u2019d do. She hadn\u2019t defended herself. She hadn\u2019t told him to get the hell away from her. She froze. Breathless. Terrified. She\u2019d confused the hell out of him, and that didn\u2019t happen very often. She\u2019d intrigued him, and that happened even less often. She\u2019d also done something insane to his body. He was a man always in control. Always. Control defined him. He was a man and lived his life as a man. He was tough and liked things his way, and he always got what he wanted. He was single-minded that way. Women, especially man-killers, didn\u2019t do a thing for him. But Catarina\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. The moment her soft body had come up against his, the moment he\u2019d touched bare skin, everything hot and wild and hungry in him responded. He wanted her. And he wanted her for himself. Exclusively. That had never happened before. He looked down at his arms, at the tattoos he\u2019d acquired so painstakingly over the years. He looked rough and mean. He knew that. It served him well to look that way. He deliberately wore his hair longer than most. He served notice to other men just who he was and what he was capable of. Men got the hell out of his way when he was after something. Especially a woman. Women were easy for him. He didn\u2019t have to work hard at all and that was okay, but it never lasted more than a night or two\u2014not for him anyway. But this woman\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. She\u2019d burn up in his arms, and it wouldn\u2019t be enough. He got that already just by looking at her. So did every other man who came near her. The difference was, most of them would step back and wait for a signal that was never going to come. That was definitely not the way to handle a woman like Catarina. A man had to take over and be decisive about it. Catarina felt the weight of Ridley\u2019s gaze on her. She knew he was watching her without even looking up. Her body responded just as if he was standing in front of her. For one moment she felt restless, achy, in need even. That something wild crouched inside of her stretched. Her skin itched. She couldn\u2019t breathe and her skull felt too tight. For one terrible moment, her skin went hot and that terrible burn began between her legs. She could barely breathe with the need and hunger. Horrified, she dragged off the apron and tossed it to David. \u201cI need a break, just a short one.\u201d Even here in her sanctuary, the one place she could go and be around others, her past tried hard to drag her down. She was aware of Ridley\u2019s attention settling on her instantly, alertly, but she didn\u2019t so much as glance at him. Her past was too close. Even from a thousand miles away, he was controlling her. She couldn\u2019t look at another man without something inside of her turning ugly. The book aisles were narrow, the stacks rising from floor to ceiling. She wound her way through them to the back door and pushed it open. The night air hit her face, cool and refreshing, enfolding her in its blanket of darkness. She drew in several deep breaths and stepped outside. The cool air felt good on her skin. She dragged the hat from her hair and sank down onto the steps leading to the back door. Strangely, she\u2019d always had great night vision, and this last month she\u2019d noticed it had gotten even better. She liked that she could see in the dark. She loved the night. There was an entirely different world going on at night and she was part of it. That made her part of something. And Rafe couldn\u2019t take that away from her. \u201cKitten?\u201d She had to stifle a scream as she twisted, nearly throwing herself off the stairs. Ridley stood behind her, in the doorway, his tall body solid, both terrifying and safe. He stepped next to her and closed the door, sinking down onto the step beside her. \u201cAre you all right? You went very pale in there.\u201d His voice could mesmerize. At least it was mesmerizing her. She nodded, because his eyes refused to leave her face, drifting over her intently. He frowned suddenly \u201cAre you afraid of me? All this time I just thought you were shy, but you\u2019re afraid of me.\u201d He made the last a statement. She looked away from him. Thankfully whatever was inside of her, threatening to burst free, had subsided along with the terrible need to feel Ridley\u2019s hands and mouth on her body. His fingers settled gently on her chin and he turned her face toward him. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t hurt you. You don\u2019t know me, but I would never harm a woman. I\u2019m not like that. I\u2019m new in town and you\u2019re at the dojo and make fantastic coffee, that\u2019s all. I wanted a little company. Just to talk to, Cat. That\u2019s all. End of story.\u201d It was impossible to look into his eyes and not believe him. Up close she could smell him, and he smelled nice. Very nice. Very masculine. His lashes were long and thick, framing his incredible golden eyes. His tattoos were just as intricate and intriguing as he was. They crawled up his arms, drawing attention to his amazing and very defined muscles. He was still looking at her and hadn\u2019t blinked once. His fingers remained firm but gentle on her chin. She\u2019d forgotten that she\u2019d been so mesmerized by his eyes. Catarina forced air into her lungs and smiled. Before she could speak he shook his head. \u201cI saw the genuine thing, Cat. You smiled at Bernard. You gave him the real smile, the high voltage one that can knock a man off his feet at two hundred yards. I don\u2019t want a pretend smile. Give me the real thing or don\u2019t smile at me at all. I\u2019m telling you again, I don\u2019t hurt women.\u201d His voice was pure velvet. She shivered, his tone smoothing over her skin. \u201cI\u2019m sorry. I\u2019m not afraid of you.\u201d A blatant lie. \u201cI just don\u2019t talk much.\u201d That was lame. More than lame. She was a total idiot, but maybe that would save her. Ridley\u2019s fingers slid from her chin. He didn\u2019t move, his thigh tight against hers on the narrow steps. \u201cUnfortunately for you, Kitten, I am very adept at knowing a lie when I hear one. I\u2019ve done my best to reassure you, but talk is cheap. I guess I\u2019ll just have to show you I\u2019m a nice guy.\u201d She was certain he was not. Oh, not like Rafe Cordeau. Not like that. But he was dangerous. She knew dangerous men, and this one sitting beside her was no domestic kitty cat. He was a tiger, all raw power and razor-sharp focus. But he wasn\u2019t bad dangerous. He was just plain scary dangerous. And a heartbreaker. She sighed, hating that she actually felt the loss of his fingers on her skin\u2014hating that every single cell in her body was aware of him. He was a good ten years older in years and experience. There were scars. There were the tats. There was the cool confidence and the lines in his face that only seemed to add to his masculine beauty. She knew what he saw when he looked at her. She\u2019d always looked young and she was barely twenty-one. He would consider her someone he had to look after, just as Malcom did. That was safe. She needed safe, especially around this man. \u201cMaybe I am a little afraid of you,\u201d she forced herself to admit. \u201cI\u2019ve seen you in the dojo and you\u2019re rather terrifying.\u201d That much was true, and if he really were as adept at reading lies then he\u2019d have to hear the sincerity in her voice. \u201cThat\u2019s a place of practice. This is a coffee-house. Unless you\u2019re going to stand up in front of that mic and read off some really bad poetry, I don\u2019t think you have a thing to worry about,\u201d he assured. There was a drawling amusement in his voice, one that made her want to laugh with him, but it was as sexy as all get-out, and she couldn\u2019t make a noise. Not a single sound for a few seconds. She cleared her throat. \u201cI\u2019m not good at talking to people.\u201d \u201cYou talk just fine to Malcom. In fact, you laugh when you\u2019re with him. It\u2019s the only time I\u2019ve seen you actually laugh.\u201d Her heart jumped. She tensed and knew he felt it. Still, as hard as she tried she couldn\u2019t relax. Had he been watching her? Why? What did that mean? She bit down on her lower lip, a little afraid that she was so paranoid even such a simple statement could make her want to run. \u201cMalcom isn\u2019t people.\u201d \u201cI know he\u2019s your friend,\u201d Ridley conceded. \u201cHe\u2019s very closed-mouth about you and protective.\u201d She turned her eyes on him. Fixed. Focused. Alert. \u201cWere you asking him questions about me?\u201d \u201cOf course I was. You\u2019re beautiful. Mysterious. A turn-on in the dojo. When you move, honestly, Kitten, I\u2019ve never seen anything like it. You\u2019re fast and fluid and hot as hell. You put James Marley down with one punch. One. You hit him exactly on his weak spot and dropped him like a ton of bricks. Your eyes are amazing, and so is your hair. You have the most beautiful face I\u2019ve ever seen. Are you telling me Malcom doesn\u2019t get asked about you regularly? Women like you don\u2019t walk the streets alone at night. That\u2019s just asking for trouble.\u201d Her breath slammed out of her lungs. \u201cYou followed me?\u201d That couldn\u2019t be. She would have known. \u201cEvery night that you lock up and walk back to the warehouse. Did you really think I\u2019d let a woman walk alone that time of night? Any woman? But especially a woman like you? No fuckin\u2019 way.\u201d Something in his eyes made her shiver. Hot. Angry. A flash, no more, and then quickly suppressed. He really didn\u2019t like her walking alone at night. He had been at the coffee-house every night the past two weeks until three A.M. But she hadn\u2019t seen him or heard him or even felt him following her. And that was bad. She couldn\u2019t afford to miss a tail. She had a sixth sense about that kind of thing, and yet he had followed her every single night. \u201cI can take care of myself.\u201d \u201cCat, even Malcom will tell you that you aren\u2019t being realistic. You\u2019re good, there\u2019s no question about it, but you\u2019re small. A man gets his hands on you and you\u2019re done. You\u2019re smart enough to know that. You can defend from a distance, but if he knows what he\u2019s doing he\u2019s going to get past that guard and tie you up. Why don\u2019t you drive your car? That would be much safer.\u201d She wasn\u2019t about to tell him gas cost the earth. He didn\u2019t need to know her personal finances, but she wasn\u2019t wasting precious gas when she could walk to and from work. It just wasn\u2019t that far. \u201cIt isn\u2019t any of your business,\u201d she said, and knew she sounded uptight and stiff. Well, she was uptight and stiff. And it wasn\u2019t any of his business. The same flash was there in his eyes. Hot. Angry. Pure steel. Her stomach did another flip. He was both scary and sexy at the same time, a combination she wanted no part of. \u201cI\u2019m making it my business, Kitten, whether you like it or not. After hours, half the men in here are drunk. Why do you think they\u2019re in here?\u201d \u201cI make a mean cup of coffee and word has gotten around. It sobers them up a little. Coming to Poetry Slam gives them some time to wind down.\u201d He made a sound in the back of his throat that alarmed her. A rumble. A growl. The sound found its way to her heart, kick-starting her into flight mode. \u201cYou can\u2019t possibly be that na\u00efve, woman. Just in the two weeks I\u2019ve been coming, the traffic between midnight and three has doubled. Mostly men. They come here because they\u2019re hoping to get lucky. They spend the entire time staring at you and trying to think of ways to get you in their beds. A few of them may have figured out that you walk home and they may make plans you aren\u2019t going to like and can\u2019t do anything about on your own.\u201d She jumped up fast, but he was faster, his long fingers settling around her wrist, shackling her to him. He stood too, towering over her. His fierce golden eyes stared down into her blue ones, just as intense as she remembered, more so even. His gaze cut right through her until she feared every secret she had was laid bare in front of him. \u201cDon\u2019t run from me. I\u2019m telling you the truth. Clearly you\u2019re living in a dream world when it comes to men and their intentions.\u201d She tilted her head to one side, forgetting to keep her attitude in check. \u201cWould you like to tell me what your intentions are?\u201d she challenged. His eyes changed and she knew immediately she\u2019d made a terrible mistake. His eyes went liquid gold, focused and unblinking, locked onto her, and this time there was interest. Real interest. Before she\u2019d been the one locked on to him, playing in her head with silly fantasies, but his motivation for following her had been actually watching out for her\u2014she could see that now, at least she thought she could. Until that moment. That second. She\u2019d put too much sass into her tone. There was no backtracking from that, not with the stark speculation in his eyes. She forced air through her burning lungs and tugged at her hand to try to get him to release her. His thumb slid over her wrist, right over her pounding pulse, a mere brush, but the stroke sent hot blood rushing through her veins. She wanted to look away, but there was no getting away from the piercing stare of his eyes. \u201cNow I\u2019m seeing you, Kitten. And you\u2019ve got a little bite to you.\u201d \u201cEnough to handle myself if someone decides to attack me on my way home.\u201d \u201cI disagree.\u201d \u201cThat doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d she said, and tugged at her hand again. His hold didn\u2019t loosen. He wasn\u2019t hurting her; in fact, the pad of his thumb sent waves of heat curling through her body as it continued to brush little strokes over her pulse. \u201cIt matters to me.\u201d \u201cIt isn\u2019t your business.\u201d Now he was back to scaring her. He couldn\u2019t follow her around. Especially not to her home. She was usually adept at spotting and shaking a tail. She practiced. He couldn\u2019t see her practicing. He\u2019d wonder what she was doing and why. She desperately tried to remember if she\u2019d done such a thing in the last two weeks. Usually, after working a full shift, she was exhausted and didn\u2019t take the extra time. \u201cI\u2019ve decided to make it my business.\u201d His voice was so low she could barely catch the sound, but the tone vibrated right through her body, disturbing her balance. She almost felt as if she was caught in a dream, waking up for the first time, suddenly aware of what real chemistry between a man and a woman was. She was certain she\u2019d been the only one to feel it, and even then, it was just an awareness, not in the least harmful\u2014like her silly daydreams of him. This was altogether different. Her awareness of him, her reaction, was so strong, almost feral, female reacting to a male on the hunt, wanting him, yet wanting to run. Maybe needing the chase to prove something to both of them. She saw the answering challenge in his eyes. It was impossible not to see. She shook her head and took two steps back, trying to put distance between them despite his fingers around her wrist. In spite of the fact that she couldn\u2019t look away from him. What was wrong with her? Her lack of control was frightening. She couldn\u2019t blow this. She didn\u2019t dare. \u201cI have no interest whatsoever in a relationship with anyone. I don\u2019t do one-night stands and I don\u2019t date. I don\u2019t want attention from you or any other man. I\u2019m asking you politely to let go of my wrist.\u201d She could barely get the words out. There was something, a part of her she\u2019d never known existed, a part of her that didn\u2019t want to walk away from this man. He was beautiful. Sexy. Intelligent. And Dangerous. Everything a woman might find attractive in a man. Everything she found attractive when she hadn\u2019t even known she could be attracted. He didn\u2019t release her right away. His amazing eyes searched hers for a long moment. His face softened, and the male challenge was gone from his hard features as if it had never been there. Instead, he looked gentle. Still holding her wrist with one hand, he retrieved her hat with the other and gave it to her. \u201cYou really are afraid of me, aren\u2019t you? I\u2019m not going to hurt you, Cat. No matter what you think, I won\u2019t do that to you.\u201d His voice was pure velvet, stroking over her skin, low and vibrant and all male, almost a purr. His eyes hypnotized her all over again. They hadn\u2019t blinked. Not once. She was watching to see. He was absolutely, entirely focused on her and her alone. Her belly did a slow roll and her breasts ached. Each separate spot where the pads of his fingers touched her bare skin felt as if he burned a brand right through her skin to her bones. She hated that she was so susceptible to his voice. To his eyes. She retreated back to the character that always served her so well. She let her eyelashes fall, and nodded as if she understood. She couldn\u2019t handle a man like Ridley. She knew that. She didn\u2019t dare chance becoming his friend. She wouldn\u2019t know what to do with him. He let her go. The moment she was free of his grip, she pulled her arm to her, pushing her wrist up against her body as if she could hold in the heat from his touch. She sent him one look from under her lashes and hurried past him back inside. 2 CATARINA looked at her watch for the hundredth time and then looked at David. He rolled his eyes. He held up his hands, fingers spread wide and grinned at her. \u201cLast call, everyone,\u201d David shouted. \u201cIf you want a coffee for the road, come get it now. We\u2019re closed in ten.\u201d She flashed him a small, tired smile. It had been a great night for Poetry Slam. Business was huge. Huge. The take was the most they\u2019d ever done. The tip jar was overflowing, which meant extra gas money. It had been a great night, but she was exhausted. She hadn\u2019t even been able to keep track of how many different variations of coffee she\u2019d made that night. She could do ten more minutes, but beyond that\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Three men swaggered up to the counter to give David their closing orders. She avoided looking at them. One of the three, a man his friends called Jase, had twice tried to engage her in conversation. She\u2019d given him a vague smile without meeting his eyes and stayed busy inventorying her various coffee beans both times. \u201cHey, Cat,\u201d Jase called out to her, overloud. She winced and forced herself not to glance toward the corner where Ridley continued to read his book. She was all too aware he hadn\u2019t missed both times Jase had tried to get her to converse. \u201cI can hear you, Jase,\u201d she answered, without looking up. \u201cWhat\u2019s it take?\u201d She made a mistake in pausing as she made his friend Marty his favorite latte. \u201cI\u2019m sorry?\u201d she said, frowning a little, trying to puzzle out when he meant. Ridley moved. He put down his book and stared hard at Jase. \u201cTo fuck you. Tell me what it takes. We\u2019re trying to figure that out and you\u2019re giving us nothing.\u201d The coffee-house went utterly silent. David froze. Catarina blinked and Ridley was behind Jase, one hand on his shoulder. He spun the man around and punched him in the face. He hadn\u2019t pulled back his arm for strength. It was a short punch, but Jase\u2019s head snapped back on his shoulders and his legs turned to rubber. The only thing holding him up was Ridley\u2019s hand on his shoulder. \u201cRidley,\u201d Catarina protested softly. \u201cDon\u2019t speak,\u201d Ridley snapped. \u201cJust get this place shut down.\u201d His eyes moved to each of Jase\u2019s friends. \u201cEither of you two got something you want to say before you leave? Because you\u2019re leaving right now.\u201d Both took one look at the hard, implacable lines in his face, the smoldering golden eyes, and they shook their heads. Ridley, still holding Jase up, gestured toward the door. Without a word they turned and went out, Ridley trailing them, dragging a rubber-legged Jase with him. He thrust the man at the other two and wasn\u2019t gentle about it. He shut the door decisively and turned and walked back to his table. Applause broke out. The spectators liked their coffee. Catarina glared at David, who was clapping along with the others. \u201cYou\u2019re not helping. Don\u2019t encourage him. He thinks I need protecting.\u201d \u201cYou do,\u201d David said. \u201cJase is trouble.\u201d \u201cI can take care of myself,\u201d she muttered, sending Ridley a look that should have fried him on the spot. Not only did he not appear to fry, he looked a little amused. She didn\u2019t draw attention to herself. Not ever. Thanks to Ridley the entire room was aware of her as more than the barista, a body behind the coffee machine. She sighed and started the cleaning process. The coffee-house shut down at three and emptied. This time Ridley didn\u2019t leave. He sat in the corner. She glanced up at him and scowled a couple of times, jerking her head toward him when David looked at her. \u201cHe\u2019s got to go, just like any other customer,\u201d she hissed. \u201cI can hear you just fine,\u201d Ridley said. \u201cI\u2019m walking home with you, so get used to it, Kitten. Just get your work done so we can get out of here.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t you have anything better to do?\u201d she demanded. \u201cNo.\u201d He didn\u2019t even look up. She shook her head, exasperated. Of course Jase would have to act like an ass in front of him and he\u2019d use that to prove his point. She could have handled Jase, no problem. She accepted her half of the tip money, shoving it into the pocket of her jeans. That much cash made her very happy. It was worth putting up with jerks like Jase until three in the morning to have extra money. She used every little bit she had to get extra lessons from Malcom. She\u2019d been practicing a lot with her gun. That required time at the local range as well as ammunition. It didn\u2019t come cheap. Ridley fell into step beside her. She shot him a look from under her lashes. \u201cYou really don\u2019t have to do this.\u201d \u201cIf you feel as if you owe me something, say thanks.\u201d \u201cI feel as if I\u2019d like to hit you over the head because clearly you aren\u2019t listening,\u201d she countered. It just burst out of her when she\u2019d promised no sass. No attitude. Just like earlier, his eyes immediately focused on her. He didn\u2019t slow down. Didn\u2019t miss a step, but suddenly his golden eyes were fixed on her with the same amused speculation. Total interest. And this time there was something else smoldering in his eyes. Something hot and sexy that sent a wave of fire rushing through her body, burning through her nerve endings and centering squarely between her legs like the hottest fireball imaginable. Her breath hitched in her lungs. She kept her eyes on the sidewalk, shocked. Embarrassed. Terrified. He brought out something wild in her. Something uninhibited. Something she wanted no part of. \u201cI\u2019m listening, woman. I\u2019ll always listen to anything you have to say. You\u2019re just talking a lot of crap right now so I\u2019m dismissing what you have to say as the crap it is. Jase and his friends could just as easily be waiting for you. You don\u2019t want them following you home, knowing where you live.\u201d \u201cI\u2019d know. I always know. I\u2019ve been followed before and I handled it.\u201d He stopped abruptly, his fingers settling around her wrist, dragging her to a halt. \u201cWhat the hell did you just say?\u201d he demanded. She blinked up at him. Major mistake revealing that piece of information. She should have kept that to herself. She licked her suddenly dry lips. Her heart pounded. She didn\u2019t know how to defuse his anger. In his quiet, cool way he was angry, and that was more terrifying than if he\u2019d yelled. It wasn\u2019t his business, but she wasn\u2019t going to tell him that. \u201cSomething you need to know about me, Kitten. I don\u2019t have a lot of patience. When I ask you something, I need you to answer. It isn\u2019t that damned difficult. Just tell me what happened and how you handled it.\u201d His gold eyes burned like a flame, boring through her body. She licked her lips again. His hand tightened. \u201cAnd stop that. That\u2019s going to get your ass in trouble. Just talk, Cat, say what I need to hear.\u201d She leveled a glare at him. \u201cYou are not in the least bit Zen, Ridley. Not even a little bit, and you have crushed one of my fantasies. I have to tell you, that\u2019s just plain sad because I could work with that for a very long time.\u201d He blinked. He never blinked. Never broke his stare. That was one of the first observations she\u2019d made about him, and he definitely blinked. Amusement crept right through all the sparkling anger. \u201cYou thought I was Zen?\u201d He began walking again, taking her with him, walking so close she could feel the heat of his body. He hadn\u2019t relinquished her wrist, rather his hand slid down her arm to take possession of her fingers. \u201cThe Zen master ,\u201d she said, \u201cWhich, by the way, was really cool, and now you\u2019ve blown that all to hell.\u201d \u201cSo you were having fantasies about me?\u201d The amusement definitely deepened. She sent him a look of sheer reprimand from under her long lashes. \u201cNewsflash for you, Ridley, every woman has fantasies about you. That\u2019s your gift. But the fact that you just blew one of the biggest parts of my daydreams about you took your hotness down a notch or two. Zen was very \u2018it\u2019 for me. You rocked that cool vibe.\u201d \u201cYou have fantasies and daydreams about me?\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t pretend you don\u2019t know you\u2019re freakin\u2019 hot. The way you look at women, there\u2019s not a doubt in my mind they\u2019re all over you, and you\u2019ve got that hound dog disdain.\u201d His eyebrow shot up. \u201cWoman. You cannot tell me I\u2019m the thing of fantasies in one breath and say I\u2019m a hound dog in the next.\u201d She gave him a serious look. \u201cThey aren\u2019t mutually exclusive. You are, right? A player? A hound dog? The kind of man who kicks a woman out of his bed right after sex and then loses her phone number?\u201d His eyes laughed at her. \u201cI don\u2019t take women to my bed, I\u2019m usually in their beds, and I get up and leave. They know the score or I wouldn\u2019t be in their beds in the first place.\u201d She nodded. \u201cYep. A player and a hound dog. And just so you know, telling you about my now completely blown fantasy does not mean I\u2019m giving you the go-ahead to make a move on me. Fantasy and reality are two very different things.\u201d \u201cI see.\u201d Catarina secretly hugged herself. She had forgotten it was fun talking to another person. She didn\u2019t allow herself that luxury, not ever anymore. Well, sometimes with Malcom, but not like this. Not just saying anything that came into her head. Watching Ridley\u2019s face lose the stone-carved effect and replacing it with laughter was fun. Just fun. She\u2019d forgotten what that was like. Or truthfully, she hadn\u2019t known about having fun in the first place. They rounded the corner of the second block and started down the third before she remembered he was holding her hand. Before she realized she hadn\u2019t taken a careful look around her to make certain no one was following. The smile inside slipped away. Vigilance was far more important than fun. She actually liked Ridley, even though she was certain he was too beautiful for any woman to ever keep. She didn\u2019t want to be responsible for anything happening to him. Catarina tried to slip her hand out of his, a subtle retreat, nothing overt that he would notice. He noticed. His hand tightened around hers and he looked down at her immediately. He had eyes that saw everything. He didn\u2019t fail to see her gaze scanning the rooftops and the fire escapes as they passed the buildings. \u201cWhat is it?\u201d His voice was low. Velvet. So soft and perfect she nearly closed her eyes against the mesmerizing sound. She was fairly certain he could growl, she\u2019d heard him do it once. Now, she thought he could probably purr as well. For some reason, the moment it came into her mind, her body reacted, going feminine on her. She decided it was him. Ridley just had a way with women and he was casting a spell. \u201cNothing.\u201d She was back to mumbling, her sense of fun fading along with her confidence. She felt vulnerable and exposed walking beside him. Alone she could stay in the shadows, close to the building if there were no openings, slipping back toward the street if she couldn\u2019t see directly into the alleyways and doorways. Ridley walked straight down the center of the sidewalk, head up, shoulders straight, and he looked like a man no one ever messed with. She was certain most men would take one look at him and scurry away. Rafe Cordeau was not that kind of man. He would walk right up to Ridley, staring him straight in the eye, and without a single word slit his throat. Or his belly. Her fault. She glanced at their linked hands. Rafe would kill him. There would be no discussion and no way to stop him. Her heart began to pound and she tasted fear in her mouth. \u201cI don\u2019t know you well enough to hold your hand and it makes me uncomfortable.\u201d It wasn\u2019t a lie, although she\u2019d enjoyed the moment with him, the moment of fun she\u2019d always remember. Still, she was uncomfortable holding hands because she liked it\u2014maybe a little too much. But she wasn\u2019t a woman who could ever walk openly down a street with a man and feel comfortable. And she wasn\u2019t na\u00efve enough not to realize Ridley Cromer was way out of her league, even if she didn\u2019t have hell following her around. Ridley\u2019s piercing gaze searched her face and then their surroundings. His eyes moved in a search pattern around them, the alleys, the streets, the alcoves and doorways. Only then did he look up toward the rooftops and fire escapes as she\u2019d done. \u201cYou\u2019re afraid, Kitten, but not of me. Whatever it is you\u2019re afraid of, know that when you\u2019re with me, you\u2019re perfectly safe.\u201d Supreme confidence. Ridley was a man who had been in dangerous situations, she could tell that. In some circumstances he was probably a very scary man, but no one was in Rafe\u2019s class. No one. She couldn\u2019t explain him to anyone, they\u2019d think she was insane. They\u2019d lock her up and make it easy for Rafe to come get her. What had she been thinking? She\u2019d let walking with a very attractive man override her good sense. Fun wasn\u2019t worth getting someone killed. She sent Ridley a quick look from under her lashes. It was there again. The expression that told her she\u2019d made a terrible mistake revealing this side of her. She\u2019d suppressed it for so long, it just came out, as unexpected to her as it was to him. \u201cI\u2019m used to being alone, that\u2019s all. I\u2019m careful. I don\u2019t want you to think I was flirting with you, I wasn\u2019t.\u201d And she hadn\u2019t been. She didn\u2019t even know how to flirt. She didn\u2019t look at men. She\u2019d made an art out of finding everywhere to look but at any man in the room with her. She\u2019d trained herself from the time she was eleven years old. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to try to flirt, Kitten.\u201d Ridley\u2019s voice was soft, gentle even. For some reason the way he spoke made her insides melt a little. Her body reacted to just the sound of his voice. She bit her bottom lip hard to try to counteract the effect. \u201cYou smile at a man, or look at him with your gorgeous eyes, and he\u2019s a goner. That\u2019s just the reality of it.\u201d She refused to wrap herself up in his compliment. She\u2019d never had compliments before. Not ever. Not personal. About her coffee maybe, but not like this. She couldn\u2019t remember anyone being so fun. She\u2019d had her first kindness from Malcom. Now she had her first best time with a man. She couldn\u2019t keep him, but she could have the memories, and when she was alone, then she\u2019d wrap herself up in his compliments and savor them. The warehouses loomed on the next block. They turned the corner and crossed the street, angling toward the center one. It looked old from the outside. Old and tired. A single light illuminated a heavy door. There were three cargo doors, all padlocked. Ridley scowled at them. \u201cYou didn\u2019t tell me about the time you were followed. I\u2019m still waiting to hear that story.\u201d She snuck a peek at his face from under her lashes. He was like a dog with a bone. She hadn\u2019t distracted him at all. She sighed. Loudly. \u201cSeriously, Ridley, it isn\u2019t important.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s bullshit, Cat, and you know it. You\u2019re scared of something. It\u2019s not all that hard to tell. You walk everywhere, which means you don\u2019t want to drive your car\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean that,\u201d she hissed. She stabbed at the number pad a little viciously, punching in the code to unlock the door. \u201cGas costs money.\u201d She was horrified that she blurted out the truth. It was just that he had such an edge to his voice, as if he knew all about her. She wasn\u2019t doing her best job of running him off and she knew it was because she was lonely and he made her feel alive. Okay, happy even. There, she\u2019d admitted it to herself. But it had to stop. She paused before she pushed open the door, her hand on the doorknob. \u201cThanks for walking me home. I can take it from here.\u201d She used her best dismissive voice. She\u2019d had a lot of practice using that particular tone, and it was one of her best weapons. It didn\u2019t even faze him. He kept moving, crowding her, pushing her inside. \u201cRidley. Seriously. You did the white knight thing. We\u2019re good.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re not good. What kind of man would let you walk into a warehouse without checking it out first to make certain you\u2019re safe?\u201d His hands settled on her waist and he picked her up, stepped inside and put her to the side of the door. \u201cYou stay right there.\u201d It was pitch-black inside, the way it always was. She had heavy drapes on all the windows to block out every bit of light so she could sleep during the day. That didn\u2019t seem to faze him, although he swore under his breath as he took a careful look around. \u201cLight switch?\u201d For some reason, she thought he had a super power and could see in the dark. Maybe it had been the slow, careful perusal of the empty space, but she just stood there, not breathing, waiting for something, her heart pounding and her mouth dry. \u201cKitten.\u201d He just said one word. But it was his voice. How he said it. The gentle, amused tone. She felt his voice slide in under her skin, slip into her bloodstream and rush straight like an arrow for her most feminine core. She hadn\u2019t expected it. Instantly there was heightened awareness. She smelled him. That faint masculine, almost wild smell, mountains and jungles and maybe a rain forest or two. He was so solid, all flowing muscle, his shoulders wide and his hips narrow. He moved with fluid grace, and heat radiated off of him, enveloping her. She stepped back from his sheer potency. His hand instantly went to her waist, slid to settle on her hip. \u201cCatarina, I\u2019m just going to make certain you\u2019re safe.\u201d Thank God he thought she was frozen with fear, not flooded with female hormones at the worst possible moment. She cleared her throat, trying to get past the unfamiliar hunger rising like a tidal wave. The itch under her skin was terrible. It came in a wave, rising and falling, and deep inside something she feared above all else gave a lazy stretch, making its presence known. She stepped back again and hit the wall, her breath coming in a long rush, but suddenly his touch was too hot, melting through her skin to brand her very bones. She felt something rise in him, wild and feral, trying to break free. The moment was fraught with danger. She didn\u2019t move or speak, terrified if she did, something would happen that could never be taken back. His fingers dug into her hip. Hard. Possessive. She felt the difference. The heat seared her. Scorched like a thousand flames. He went from being protective to predatory in one single moment. She felt the difference, felt the change sweep through him. A single sound escaped her throat. She heard it in the silence of the warehouse. Fear. Pure fear. Instantly his hand dropped from her hip and moved to the nape of her neck. His fingers curled there. Gentle. \u201cCat.\u201d His voice was pure indulgence. \u201cNothing is going to happen to you. Tell me where the light switch is.\u201d She was acting crazy. She was letting fear dictate, fear and imagination. She wasn\u2019t over her past. She would never be over it, and she\u2019d never be truly free. She took a breath, forcing air to move through her burning lungs. \u201cRight by the door as you walk in. Just about a foot above the door handle.\u201d He flicked the light on immediately and she found herself staring up into his eyes. They looked like gold to her. Ancient Florentine gold. His eyes glittered down at her. For a moment she saw speculation. The interest he\u2019d shown when she gave him attitude, but there was no aggression in them. Nothing in the least bit predatory. Just a man being kind to a woman who lived alone. A man taking charge. \u201cAre you all right?\u201d She nodded, feeling like a complete idiot. She knew danger and there was none radiating from this man at all. She bit her lip. \u201cI\u2019m sorry. I don\u2019t have men in my space.\u201d How lame was that? His hand slid her hat from her head and handed it to her. \u201cYou have a big space here, Kitten. Stay here and let me look around.\u201d His eyes didn\u2019t leave her face and she couldn\u2019t move, only nod slowly. His gaze drifted over her as if inspecting her carefully. Seeing her. Seeing too much. She had secrets to hide. Not little tiny secrets, huge ones. She couldn\u2019t afford a man like this around her. He took in too much. Saw past every guard. And for some reason she wasn\u2019t very good at keeping things under wraps around him. Abruptly he turned away and began to walk around the warehouse. Not walk\u2014he prowled. He moved like a great jungle cat, all flowing muscle, fluid and absolutely silent. He was a thing of beauty to watch. He moved with absolute confidence, and she doubted if he missed anything. His gaze searched the high places as well as the low. She could see he was systematically checking every concealed space and yet at the same time, seeing everything. There wasn\u2019t much to see. Mostly, the warehouse was empty. It was a single story, very long and very wide. What had been an office was now her bedroom. Malcom had begun work on renovating the warehouse some years ago and then stopped when he met his wife. She hadn\u2019t been so enamored with the idea of living in the warehouse district. He had thought it would be nice to have his apartment and dojo together so he\u2019d bought the building. He met his wife four months later. She was very happy it had taken Malcom four months to meet the woman he had fallen madly in love with. That meant he\u2019d worked on the warehouse. She had a makeshift bathroom and a really good bedroom space. Her kitchen area was the most finished of any room. She had a sink, counter, stove and small fridge. Malcom had started with a kitchen and bathroom, paying most attention to the fact that he liked to eat properly because he worked out so much. \u201cYou have a hose for a shower.\u201d Of course he would notice that. \u201cIt\u2019s still in the building phase,\u201d she admitted. Since he was talking now, she assumed there was no one ready to jump out and murder her. She trailed after him, moving quickly to catch up. He was in her bedroom, looking carefully around him. His gaze took in everything, the bed, the small safe on the floor beside the bed and her beat-up chair. She refused to be embarrassed. She\u2019d found the chair at a thrift store and it was comfortable. Ignoring him she went to the safe, opened it and shoved her tip money inside. The bedroom had three walls. The fourth was open to the warehouse floor. Straight ahead was her heavy bag hanging from the ceiling, a mat and a speed bag. She\u2019d spent precious dollars on her equipment but felt it was a necessary expenditure. \u201cNice workout area.\u201d She looked at him over her shoulder, trying not to look too proud. He took up her entire bedroom area. Before she thought it was a lot of space for a bedroom, now it seemed small. \u201cI like to work out.\u201d \u201cIt shows when you\u2019re in the dojo.\u201d He wandered out of her bedroom area and into the workout space, his hand moving over the heavy bag. A stroke with his open palm. Almost a caress. Her heart fluttered. They had one thing in common\u2014clearly he liked to work out as well. \u201cMalcom is a good instructor.\u201d He made it a statement. Catarina was uncertain how to respond. \u201cI think so. He certainly has helped me learn fast.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re a good student. I\u2019ve watched. He tells you something once and you\u2019ve got it. You listen and you don\u2019t get upset when he critiques you.\u201d \u201cI pay him a lot of money. I don\u2019t want him to tell me how good I am, I want him to tell me everything I\u2019m doing wrong so I can get better.\u201d \u201cUnusual,\u201d he commented, and moved around the heavy bag. His gaze took in her neatly shelved equipment, the gloves and the small weights. \u201cYou\u2019re really serious about learning.\u201d \u201cI wouldn\u2019t spend the money on it if I wasn\u2019t.\u201d \u201cWhy the gun?\u201d She stiffened. The gun was hidden beneath her pillow. He wasn\u2019t looking at her and his voice was casual, but she knew it wasn\u2019t a casual question. \u201cCat.\u201d Now he did look at her, one arm still circling the heavy bag. \u201cWhy the gun?\u201d She swallowed. Tried to shrug. \u201cWoman alone in large warehouse.\u201d \u201cCan you shoot?\u201d \u201cYes. I practice just like I do my self-defense.\u201d That much was honest. \u201cWhat are you afraid of?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not afraid,\u201d she denied, a blatant lie this time. \u201cI\u2019m careful.\u201d His eyes cut to her. Looked inside her. Saw too much. She looked away first. \u201cI\u2019m safe, Ridley. And I really do appreciate you taking the time to walk me home and check out the warehouse, but everything\u2019s okay now.\u201d He didn\u2019t move. Didn\u2019t take his eyes from her. She pressed her lips together. Even with the warehouse as large as it was, he took up space. \u201cYou have bars on your windows. You have a gun. You spend money you don\u2019t have on self-defense lessons, and Malcom told me you\u2019re working on weapons training as well. Knives, arnis sticks. Is someone threatening you?\u201d There was a hard edge to his voice. She spread her hands out in front of her. \u201cI don\u2019t know you.\u201d \u201cYou know me well enough. I\u2019m working with Malcom. I teach women self-defense. I don\u2019t like when they\u2019re threatened. Or if they\u2019re afraid.\u201d It was impossible not to hear the ring of truth in his voice. He was definitely the kind of man who would protect his woman by any means he needed. \u201cI\u2019m just\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. careful,\u201d she reiterated. \u201cAll right. We\u2019ll leave it at that, but your security system sucks. You need alarms and cameras on this place. The cargo doors, the windows, front door. Motion detectors. That\u2019s my field of expertise, and even with what you\u2019ve done, you\u2019re still vulnerable.\u201d She knew that. She could only do one thing at a time and she had to prioritize. She always divided her money carefully. Bills and paying back the money she\u2019d taken from Rafe\u2019s safe first and then the rest on security. \u201cI\u2019m getting there.\u201d \u201cYou need to get there faster.\u201d Again there was an edge to his voice. Impatience. She glanced up and her gaze collided with his. It was a mistake. The golden glitter was back and she actually felt the edge of his anger. She moistened suddenly dry lips with the tip of her tongue and his gaze dropped to her mouth and softened instantly. Her body reacted again, the strange electric awareness she felt in her breasts, up her thighs, in her belly and between her legs. It was instantaneous and powerful, so strong she couldn\u2019t move. Her breathing changed. She heard smooth go to ragged. Her lungs burned for air. His eyes went molten. Hungry. He took a step toward her. Catarina threw her hand up, stepping back, shaking her head. He stopped instantly, his fist closing around the chain suspending the heavy workout bag, knuckles going white. \u201cI\u2019m not used to having anyone around me for very long,\u201d she admitted in a low voice, hoping he would just understand and leave. \u201cI don\u2019t have great social skills. This is difficult for me.\u201d \u201cAre you afraid of me?\u201d She wanted to close her eyes against the smooth, velvet tone. She needed to block out the look on his face. Carved. Hungry. The hot flames in his eyes. His eyes. She felt as if a ravenous beast of prey had turned his attention fully on her, focused and deadly, and now that she had his attention, he wasn\u2019t going to ever be diverted. She swallowed the lie and went for a half-truth. \u201cMaybe. I don\u2019t know.\u201d She was terrified of him. She had no idea why he was there or how she\u2019d let him this far into her life. It wasn\u2019t like her. It went against every rule she had. It went against common sense. She\u2019d worked hard to get to a place where she could live free and enjoy her life, but at the same time make certain everyone around her was safe. This was not safe. Not by any stretch of the imagination. She had no idea how Ridley Cromer ended up in her warehouse, in her personal living space. He had to leave. Right now. His scent would be all over the warehouse. She didn\u2019t even like Malcom to visit, or work on anything because she knew he would leave behind his scent. Ridley\u2019s was much more aggressive\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and interested . She tried not to panic. \u201cI\u2019m going to design a security system for you,\u201d he said, and walked away from her, putting distance between them, studying the lofts that had been built to hold freight. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t take that many cameras. A few motion detectors. Nothing fancy.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m saving,\u201d she told him, trying not to sound as if she was choking. \u201cI didn\u2019t say anything about paying,\u201d he snapped. She winced. His voice was a lash. He really, really was a nut about a woman being safe. She took a breath and let it out. \u201cI know you didn\u2019t. You\u2019re being kind and I appreciate that, but I\u2019ll keep saving and eventually I\u2019ll be able to pay for a good security system.\u201d She was proud of the \u201cfirm\u201d in her voice. He turned his head and shot her a look of absolute impatience. \u201cWhat the hell kind of crap is that, Cat? You\u2019re living here now. You admitted to me you were followed once already. A woman looking like you, living alone in a warehouse in this district, is just plain nuts.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s my home and I happen to love it. And this area isn\u2019t that bad.\u201d \u201cThe coffee-house is situated on the edge of \u2018not bad.\u2019 This warehouse is in the \u2018bad.\u2019 We passed three bars. We passed a pawn shop and two tattoo parlors. A biker gang hangs out on the third block and they\u2019re rough as hell.\u201d She\u2019d seen them. She was very alert to potential problems and that was why she was careful to stay in the shadows and not walk down the center of the sidewalk where everyone could see her. He didn\u2019t get that. \u201cI\u2019m careful.\u201d He sighed. Ran a hand through his dark, thick hair. He had nice hair and when he messed it up like that it was even nicer. \u201cYour next day off is day after tomorrow. I\u2019ll be here in the morning to install your security system. You know how I like my coffee.\u201d She glared at him. \u201cHow would you know when my next day off is?\u201d He flashed her a grin. \u201cKitten. Come on. I pay attention. David has a big mouth and he was bemoaning the fact that half the patrons know when your day off is and they don\u2019t bother to show. Apparently they come for your coffee. I know when your day off is because I go to Poetry Slam for your coffee as well.\u201d \u201cYou do?\u201d Her heart started beating normally again. That made sense. \u201cI do. You make kick-ass coffee. I was hoping you might have a machine here.\u201d \u201cThose machines are thousands of dollars.\u201d \u201cStill, you make great coffee. You don\u2019t even have a small machine.\u201d \u201cBecause I\u2019m saving for a security system.\u201d \u201cI see. Well I\u2019m installing that day after tomorrow so you can use your funds for a small machine and give me my fix while I work.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re not paying for my security system.\u201d \u201cWhy not?\u201d \u201cBecause nothing in this world comes without a price tag.\u201d For a moment his golden eyes went glittery again and then they seemed to melt into masculine amusement. \u201cYou\u2019re right about that.\u201d She stiffened. \u201cMy price is your coffee, Kitten. Lots of it. And then, if I get finished, we can spar a little. I\u2019ve got a few moves that might help you.\u201d He turned and walked away from her toward the door without once looking back. She stood there with her mouth open. \u201cYou going to lock this door?\u201d He paused at the door, turning his head to stare at her over his shoulder, a small grin hovering around his mouth, lighting his eyes. \u201cIt locks automatically.\u201d He nodded and sauntered out. It took her a full three minutes before she was breathing correctly again. She had no idea what just happened or how she was supposed to feel about it, so she did what she always did, she lost herself in her regular routine. 3 THE buzz was persistent. Really persistent. Annoyingly so. Catarina groaned and rolled over, her hair falling around her face, spilling across the pillow and covering her eyes and nose. The stupid buzzer blasted through the warehouse, as if someone leaned on it. It wasn\u2019t designed to be musical. It was loud and sounded like an alarm. She put the pillow over her head and held it there in hopes of drowning out the noise, but apparently, whoever had owned the warehouse before Malcom had been totally deaf. \u201cAll right,\u201d she yelled, throwing the pillow and fighting her way out of the covers. She kicked several times, destroying her perfectly made-up bed, and sat up, sweeping back the mass of dark, wavy hair. It was everywhere. She looked around vaguely for a clip to tame the thick length, but the buzzer persisted, louder than ever. \u201cSeriously?\u201d she muttered, and leapt to her feet, stalking through the warehouse to the front door. She flung it open, scowling ominously with blurry vision. \u201cAre you crazy? It\u2019s like three o\u2019clock in the morning.\u201d Ridley stood there. Tall. Looking amazing. Refreshed and looking amazing. Seriously hot and amazing. \u201cYou. Are. Nuts.\u201d She tried to close the door in his face. He stuck his boot in the door. \u201cStep back, Kitten, I\u2019m coming in and I\u2019ve got my hands full.\u201d He pushed open the door, and she pushed back. He was stronger, so the door swung his way. She clenched her teeth and stepped back, allowing him entry. He was carrying boxes and bags, which meant his hands were tied up. \u201cCat, why are you looking at me like that?\u201d \u201cLike you don\u2019t have two of your weapons and I could kick you in the thigh very hard and give you a dead leg? Like that? And then do a sweep and take both your legs out from under you? Am I giving you that kind of look? And then roll your body right out my front door? Because I\u2019m contemplating how much of an effort that would be.\u201d His mouth twitched. She narrowed her eyes at him. \u201cOf course, because you\u2019re the most annoying man on earth, I\u2019d have to find the wire to cut that buzzer and stop it from ever working. You\u2019re the type that would just lay on it and wake a girl up when she just went to bed.\u201d \u201cI always say dream big if you\u2019re going to do it,\u201d he said, not in the least bit worried. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not three in the morning, baby, it\u2019s more like nine.\u201d He stared down at her from his lofty height, which only annoyed her more. \u201cYou walked me home again last night. You know when I got to bed. This is my three o\u2019clock in the morning.\u201d When he didn\u2019t turn and leave, she threw her hands in the air and then had to shove again at the wild mass of hair tumbling down to her waist. \u201cHas anyone ever told you that you\u2019re grumpy when you wake up?\u201d \u201cAs I don\u2019t wake up around anyone, no, they haven\u2019t.\u201d His eyes went pure gold, moving over her in the slow, intense way she was coming to recognize as his taking in everything. Her breath hitched in her lungs when he looked at her. Ridley couldn\u2019t take his eyes off Catarina. Her sweatpants rode low on her hips. Her tank molded to her breasts, and she wasn\u2019t thin. She had curves, and he liked a woman with curves. She hid them under baggy clothes, but they were there, a little too curvy by normal standards, but certainly not by his. She had a very small waist and a narrow rib cage, which only served to emphasize the curve of her hips and butt and her breasts. Her tank was just that little bit too short, baring her midriff, and she had unbelievable skin. She didn\u2019t wear makeup ever that he\u2019d seen. Maybe lip gloss once in a while, but right now her lips were bare, along with her feet. Her hair was wild. Bedroom wild. Sexy wild. And then on top of everything else she had those eyes. Large, framed with long thick black lashes, her eyes were unbelievable, and he wanted them staring straight into his when he was buried deep in her body. He wanted to see how those eyes changed when he gave her an orgasm. He swore to himself. She wasn\u2019t very old, not in years, but in her eyes, she was a million years old. That wasn\u2019t a green light, he knew that. She was terrified, absolutely terrified, and he detested that. No woman should ever have to live in fear. She was always in flight mode. He knew she was preparing herself to fight, but right now, all he\u2019d seen was her hiding herself away, her silence, baggy clothes and downcast eyes. That was Catarina in full flight. He wanted to help her, to find a way to let her live in daylight. Along with her looks and that smile of hers, she made him laugh. He couldn\u2019t remember laughing in a hell of a long time. And then she had that attitude. Looks, humor and attitude\u2014hell\u2014he was a goner. That made the situation a lot more dangerous. The last thing he needed was any chemistry between them. Hell. He was fucked. There were moments when the chemistry was off the charts. He couldn\u2019t lie to himself about that. He had to be careful with her. Sex wasn\u2019t going to help her situation, at least not now. \u201cMy God, Kitten, you\u2019re gorgeous. You\u2019re fucking beautiful.\u201d He couldn\u2019t help himself. He had to tell her, because she didn\u2019t know. He knew when women thought they were beautiful, and this one had no idea. Catarina\u2019s heart stuttered. Another compliment from Ridley, and it sounded genuine. She should have been just a little upset over the way he sounded, as if he was astonished, but no one had ever said anything like that to her before. Not ever. She blinked at him and all the attitude melted away. She didn\u2019t know what to say so she turned her back on him and walked toward her bedroom. \u201cWait.\u201d His voice was low. Sexy. She felt heat spreading. Looking over her shoulder at him, she raised an eyebrow, afraid to trust her voice. \u201cI brought coffee. I wasn\u2019t certain if you were up already, but I couldn\u2019t carry it and the boxes. Two cups sitting right outside your door.\u201d He didn\u2019t wait to see if she\u2019d get them, he just stalked through her living space and left her to it. Catarina took a deep breath. She had no idea how Ridley managed to get past her guard. No one ever did that, but he didn\u2019t even seem to notice she had barriers up at all. He didn\u2019t see her shields and she certainly wasn\u2019t invisible to him. \u201cDo you have any tools? I should have asked you that.\u201d She yanked open the door and there were two cups from Poetry Slam sitting right outside where he\u2019d said they would be. She brought them in, taking a sip of the one that was marked latte . Not as good as she made, but passable. She needed the caffeine if she was going to deal with Ridley Cromer. Last night he hadn\u2019t come inside, in fact if anything, he\u2019d seemed a little distracted. He hadn\u2019t mentioned the security system again, so she had hoped he would forget all about it. Evidently he hadn\u2019t. \u201cTools, Kitten.\u201d \u201cMalcom may have left a few lying around. He keeps most of his things in that corner over there.\u201d She waved her hand toward what she considered Malcom\u2019s mess. She didn\u2019t ever touch his things, so she didn\u2019t go near them, otherwise she\u2019d never be able to stop herself from straightening everything up. The bed was her goal\u2014to make it, not sleep in it. She caught his grin when he glanced into her bedroom and saw the covers all over the floor and partially off the bed. \u201cYou really wake up in a mood, don\u2019t you? I can\u2019t believe no one\u2019s ever mentioned it.\u201d She turned to face him. Throwing coffee would not only be childish, but stupid when she needed it. Besides, if she had to, she could always throw his cup at him. \u201cNo one ever sees me in the morning because I live alone.\u201d \u201cYou can\u2019t have lived alone your entire life, woman. Someone has to know you\u2019re a grump.\u201d Amusement crept into his tone. He sorted through the boxes without looking at her\u2014a good thing, because she stiffened and then froze, her heart pounding in her throat. This kind of thing was exactly why she didn\u2019t let anyone into her life. She tasted fear in her mouth. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "B00AFKISKO", "title": "The Art Forger: A Novel", "author": "B. A. Shapiro", "description": "About the Author B. A. Shapiro lives in Boston and teaches fiction writing at Northeastern University. Xe Sands has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art, including recordings of the Nightwalkers series from Jaquelyn Frank. She has received several honors, including AudioFile Earphones Awards and a coveted Audie Award, and she was named Favorite Debut Romance Narrator of 2011 in the Romance Audiobooks poll. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon.com Review Guest Essay by B.A. Shapiro, Author of The Art Forger I'm a cowardly writer. Some writers sit down and begin a novel without knowing where it will end, trusting the process to bring their story to a satisfying conclusion. But not me. I don't have the courage to begin a book until I know there's an end--and a middle too. I need an outline that allows me to believe my idea might be transformed into a successful novel. Some writers need a working title; I need a working plot. Which is why it takes me so damn long to get from that first glimmer of an idea to a complete manuscript. The Art Forger was no different. The first time I encountered art collector and museum founder Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1983, I fell in love. I wanted to hang out with her, walk lions down Boston streets with her, buy famous paintings, and do all kinds of outrageous things that would scandalize the stuffed shirts around us. But, alas, she died in 1924. I dismissed the idea of a \"Belle\" novel because she intimidated me--see, more cowardice--but I never forgot her. Then in 1990, she burst on the scene, or at least her namesake, Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, did, when two men dressed as police officers bound and gagged two guards and stole thirteen pieces of art, including Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee , Vermeer's The Concert , and works by Degas and Manet from the collection. Now, I thought, now I might just be able to make it work. But despite the media taking the theft international, suspects who ran the gamut from the Mafia to the Vatican, and the lack of any arrests, I just couldn't find my story. What could Belle possibly have to do with a heist seventy years after her death? How could I write a book about a robbery that hadn't been solved? What if it was solved before I was finished--or worse just after I'd completed it--and the real solution was nothing like mine? Cowardly writer that I am, I put the idea back in the drawer. Nineteen years later, the mystery of the Gardner heist still hadn't been solved, and Belle was still haunting me. I read half a dozen biographies and hundreds of letters, and I scoured the Internet. I was thinking I might do something like Irving Stone or Gore Vidal would, writers whose books I loved, and considered a fictionalized biography. But embracing the entirety of Isabella Gardner's action-packed life was too daunting--some things never change--so, once again, Belle was shelved. Around this time I began taking a series of art courses that toured galleries and museums with a well-known artist for a guide. She opened my eyes, not just to the wonder of what we were seeing, but to the complicated worlds of creating, collecting, curating, and selling works of art. I also developed a fascination with art theft and art forgery. Now, I thought, now I really might have my Belle book. So I wrote synopses, created plot charts, developed character sketches, then scratched it all and did it again. I was growing closer, but the pieces weren't all quite there; something was missing: I couldn't see the end. Simultaneously, I was struggling with writing and wondering if I should just give up the whole endeavor. One day, as I was ruminating on how difficult life was for anyone in the arts and feeling more than a bit sorry for myself, my missing link appeared in the form of a question: What would any of us be willing to do to secure our ambitions? Unknown artists, famous artists, collectors, brokers, and gallery owners? Me? Belle? So I expanded my cast of characters and gave each one a temptation their egos couldn't resist, including a struggling artist willing to make the ultimate Faustian bargain, and then I added them to the mix of art theft, art forgery, the Gardner Museum heist, and, of course, my buddy Belle. Suddenly, just like the Cowardly Lion, who became brave when he had his medal, I became brave when I had my plot. The Art Forger is the result. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review Boston Globe's Best Crime Books of 2012 2012 NetGalley Pick Kobo's Best Fiction Ebooks of 2012 \"Gripping.\" \u2014O, The Oprah Magazine \u201c[A] highly entertaining literary thriller about fine art and foolish choices.\u201d \u2014 Parade \"Precise and exciting . . . Readers seeking an engaging novel about artists and art scandals will find \"The Art Forger\" rewarding for its skillful balance of brisk plotting, significant emotional depth and a multi-layered narration rich with a sense of moral consequence.\" \u2014The Washington Post \"If Bridget Jones's Diary and The Da Vinci Code had a love child, this would be it.\" \u2014 Elle (Reader's Panel Reviewer) \u201c[Shapiro] has such interesting things to say about authenticity\u2014in both art and love\u2014that her novel becomes not just emotionally involving but addictive.\u201d \u2014Entertainment Weekly \"Ingeniously and skillfully plotted.\" \u2014 The Huffington Post \u201cWarning: Don\u2019t dig into this book if you have something to do . . . An addictive thriller.\u201d \u2014Redbook \u201cAn engaging tale about art, cupidity, and a Faustian bargain . . . Shapiro convincingly depicts the rarefied art world that lionizes a chosen few and ignores the talented, scrabbling outsiders on the fringe. Shapiro is adept, too, at showing the white-hot heat of an artist engaged in creating a painting. She knows art history, painting techniques, and how forgers have managed through the centuries to dupe buyers into paying for fakes . . . Inventive and entertaining.\u201d \u2014The Boston Globe ( Review ) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cA clever, twisty novel about art, authenticity, love, and betrayal. B. A. Shapiro knows about Degas, and she knows about art theft and forgery, and she also knows how to tell a gripping story.\u201d \u2014Tom Perrotta --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 11.99}, {"asin": "B00N0WHWQA", "title": "Name of the Devil: A Jessica Blackwood Novel", "author": "Andrew Mayne", "description": "About the Author Andrew Mayne is the star of A&E's magic reality show Don't Trust Andrew Mayne and has worked for David Copperfield, Penn & Teller, and David Blaine. With the support of Johnny Carson, Mayne founded a program using magic to teach critical thinking skills in public schools for the James Randi Educational Foundation. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. From the Inside Flap In this electrifying sequel to Angel Killer , magician-turned-FBI-agent Jessica Blackwood must channel her past to catch a killer consumed by a desire for revenge. When a church combusts in rural Appalachia, the bizarre trail of carnage suggests diabolical forces are at work. Charged with explaining the inexplicable, the FBI's Dr. Ailes and Agent Knoll once again turn to the ace up their sleeve: Agent Jessica Blackwood, a former prodigy from a family dynasty of illusionists. After playing a pivotal role in the capture of the Warlock, a seemingly supernatural serial killer, Jessica can no longer ignore the world, and the skills, she left behind. Her talent and experience endow her with a knack for knowing when things are not always as they appear to be, and she soon realizes this explosion is just the first of many crimes. As the death toll mounts, Jessica discovers the victims share a troubling secret with far-reaching implications that stretch from the hills of West Virginia to cartel-corrupted Mexico to the hallowed halls of the Vatican. Everyone involved in what happened on that horrible night so long ago has tried to bury it--except for one person, who believes that the past can be hidden, but never forgiven. Can Jessica draw on her unique understanding of the power and potential of deception to thwart a murderer determined to avenge the past? -- GirlLostInABook.com --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Review \u201cIn Mayne\u2019s exciting second Jessica Blackwood novel, the cunning FBI special agent applies her magician training to investigating a bizarre explosion\u2026. A fast-moving thriller in which illusions are weapons for both good and evil.\u201d ( Publishers Weekly )\u201cScience supersedes the supernatural in this action-packed follow-up.\u2026 With snappy prose and a smart protagonist, this is an adrenaline-fueled procedural with an unusual twist. Great reading.\u201d ( Booklist (starred review) )\u201cEntertainment at its finest! Magic and mystery blend together to showcase one heck of an intriguing plotline.\u2026 The sort of book you just can\u2019t put down and yet you regret once that last page is turned.\u201d ( Fresh Fiction )\u201cLooking for a dark page turner that will keep you guessing until the very end? Jessica Blackwood is your girl!\u201d ( WhyGirlsAreWeird.com )\u201cThese books are\u2026unable-to-put-downable. In this follow-up to the first book, there is a very different sort of mystery, but I enjoyed it just as much.\u201d ( BibliophiliaPlease.com )\u201cIf you really like thrillers that will keep you up late at night dying to know what happens next, then this is most definitely the series for you. I cannot get enough.\u201d ( GirlLostInABook.com )\u201cEach chapter ends like a punch to the gut. Andrew Mayne is a master at creating an interesting premise and characters.\u2026 Whip smart and electrifying.\u201d ( PriscillaAndHerBooks.com )\u201cMayne, the star of the A&E show Don\u2019t Trust Andrew Mayne , combines magic and mayhem in this delightful beginning to a new series\u2026. Readers will look forward to Jessica\u2019s future adventures.\u201d ( Publishers Weekly ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Back Cover In this electrifying sequel to Angel Killer , magician-turned-FBI-agent Jessica Blackwood must channel her past to catch a killer consumed by a desire for revenge. When a church combusts in rural Appalachia, the bizarre trail of carnage suggests diabolical forces are at work. Charged with explaining the inexplicable, the FBI's Dr. Ailes and Agent Knoll once again turn to the ace up their sleeve: Agent Jessica Blackwood, a former prodigy from a family dynasty of illusionists. After playing a pivotal role in the capture of the Warlock, a seemingly supernatural serial killer, Jessica can no longer ignore the world, and the skills, she left behind. Her talent and experience endow her with a knack for knowing when things are not always as they appear to be, and she soon realizes this explosion is just the first of many crimes. As the death toll mounts, Jessica discovers the victims share a troubling secret with far-reaching implications that stretch from the hills of West Virginia to cartel-corrupted Mexico to the hallowed halls of the Vatican. Everyone involved in what happened on that horrible night so long ago has tried to bury it\u2014except for one person, who believes that the past can be hidden, but never forgiven. Can Jessica draw on her unique understanding of the power and potential of deception to thwart a murderer determined to avenge the past? --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "B08X48G5VL", "title": "The Keeper of Happy Endings", "author": "Barbara Davis", "description": "Review \u201cHistorically sound with a thread of supernatural intrigue, this exploration of shared experiences, learned adaptations, and the power of trust is a book that fans of Catherine Ryan Hyde, Erica Bauermeister, and Lucinda Riley will fall in love with.\u201d \u2014 Booklist \u201cThis intriguing novel is magically woven together with sorrow, surprises, and happiness, just like the wedding gowns of \u2018The Dress Witch\u2019.\u201d \u2014Historical Novel Society \u201cDavis\u2019s tale of love and loss, expertly woven around the lives of two women who have nothing\u2014and yet everything\u2014in common, inspires hope that our own happy endings might be biding their time, ready to show up when and where we least expect them. The Keeper of Happy Endings is a perfect blending of romance and mystery with a sprinkling of magic\u2014heartwarming and satisfying. Don\u2019t miss it!\u201d \u2014Kerry Anne King, bestselling author of Whisper Me This and Everything You Are \u201cLike a wedding dress lovingly crafted, The Keeper of Happy Endings is stitched through with secrets, romance, and mystery sure to enchant\u2026and leave readers believing in the magic of second chances.\u201d \u2014Christine Nolfi, bestselling author of The Passing Storm From the Publisher I used to roll my eyes at the saying, \u201cEverything happens for a reason.\u201d It just seemed like a very easy, very convenient way to explain away things we don\u2019t understand\u2014especially the difficult things. That all changed when I read The Keeper of Happy Endings . In this enchanting novel, Barbara Davis expertly weaves a tale of two women seemingly brought together by coincidence. When the discovery of a vintage wedding dress and a bundle of letters causes their paths to cross, they have no idea how closely connected they are. From different generations and different continents, their stories echo one another: both have experienced great love and great loss, and both despair of repairing the damage done. Their meeting irrevocably alters their lives. Drawn together yet wary of more heartache, they slowly reveal their wounds. But what draws them close also has the power to tear them apart. If they refuse to open their hearts and believe in the power of destiny, they may miss a second chance at happiness and reuniting with the loves they lost. That\u2019s what the skeptic in me loves about this book. Barbara Davis deftly shows that things do happen for a reason, but it\u2019s up to us to stay open to the magic of possibility. \u2014Jodi Warshaw, Editor About the Author Barbara Davis is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Last of the Moon Girls , When Never Comes , Summer at Hideaway Key , The Wishing Tide , The Secrets She Carried , and Love, Alice . She spent more than a decade as an executive in the jewelry business before leaving the corporate world to pursue her lifelong passion for writing. A Jersey girl raised in the South, Barbara now lives in Rochester, New Hampshire, with her husband, Tom. She\u2019s currently working on her next book. Visit her at www.barbaradavis-author.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0545831962", "title": "The Width of the World (Vega Jane, Book 3) (3)", "author": "David Baldacci", "description": "Review Praise for Vega Jane Book One, The Finisher : \"This vividly described tale takes readers to an original fantasy world full of strange creatures, intriguing relationships, and long-lost secrets. Baldacci knows how to deliver thrills.\" -- Brandon Mull, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Fablehaven series\" The Finisher is an enchanting romp through a fantastical world worthy of Rowling or Brooks. Baldacci proves that his pen can engage youth as well as adults.\" -- Richard Paul Evans, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Michael Vey series\"Vega Jane has stolen my heart. I've read several novels in the last few years with female protagonists and none of them are as amazing as Vega. . . . . Her adventures must be continued. To not do so would be a crime. This is the female protagonist I want my daughters to read and emulate.\" -- SciFi Pulse\"What happens when an international best-selling crime novelist tries his hand at a youth fantasy? Well, in this case, success.\" -- Booklist , starred review\"Best known for his adult crime novels, Baldacci makes a detour into middle-grade with this wildly fanciful and darkly intriguing tale of a girl forced to fight for her life as she investigates the secrets of her tiny community.\" -- Publishers Weekly About the Author David Baldacci is a global #1 bestselling author. His books are published in over 45 languages and in more than 80 countries; over 110 million copies are in print. His works have been adapted for both feature film and television. He is also the cofounder, along with his wife, of the Wish You Well Foundation, which supports literacy efforts across America. David and his family live in Virginia.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 15.4}, {"asin": "0618424539", "title": "Houghton Mifflin Reading: Practice Book, Volumes 1 & 2 Grade 1", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 5.99}, {"asin": "1606048120", "title": "The Christian Athlete: Honoring God in Sports", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Miscellaneous"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": null}, {"asin": "0938657038", "title": "It's hard to kill a cowboy", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": "\u2014"}], "target_asin": "0545831962"}
{"user_id": "AGNCEHMYFU62LMJKDWIMHUGHOS7A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1608260070", "title": "Math-U-See Beta Instruction Pack", "author": "Steven P Demme", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Education & Teaching", "Schools & Teaching"], "average_rating": 3.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1593694571", "title": "Kit Story Collection (American Girl)", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": null}, {"asin": "1645260526", "title": "Blaze (Blaze Trilogy)", "author": "Hope Bolinger", "description": "Review \"Vivid. The perfect picture of the adolescent human condition that both entertains and empowers.\"\u00a0-A. R. Conti Fulwell, author of An Angel in the Distance \"Blaze peels back the curtains of our world's desires, and reveals the beasts lurking behind. Packed with relevant topics and worldview, the book draws readers into a white-knuckle adventure where anything can happen--and anything can go wrong. Hope Bolinger delivers a fiery page-turner perfect for students and pyromaniacs, and shows what happens when we're called into the lions' den.\"\u00a0- Caroline George, author of The Vestige \"When I heard that Hope Bolinger was writing a series of books taking the Daniel story and putting it into modern times, I knew it would be something special. And indeed, it is.Even though you know the Bible story, Blaze will keep you turning pages as you watch events unfold, as you cheer the faith of four brave students, and as you wait to see how Bolinger will tell the story next. Bolinger is creative, funny,and engaging. Blaze does not disappoint.\"-Linda Taylor, M.A., M.F.A.,assistant professor Professional Writing, Taylor University \"Bolinger has created a captivating academy world and engaging characters in Blaze. Readers will easily relate to the characters' struggles, and will find comfort in the humor and grace with which the characters navigate a never-ending slew of incredibly trying experiences.\u00a0- DelSheree Gladden, author of \"Invisible\"Hope Bolinger is a fresh new voice in young adult fiction. Teen readers won't be able to stop turning pages to find out what will happen to Daniel and his trio of friends in this witty, contemporary take on familiar Bible stories for a new generation. Blaze has something for everyone: adventure, relatable characters, themes of faith in difficult times, humor, and, of course, lots of fire. - Amy Green, author of the Amarias Adventures \"Blaze explores the classically icky elements of high school--mean girls, boys who bully, crappy cafeteria food, pressure to compete, insensitive teachers, midterm stress--and amps it all up a notch when students find themselves involuntarily enrolled in a boarding school from, well, hell. The story's protagonists, firm in their Christian faith, rise above and put a bold new spin on the concept of school spirit as a school principal attempts to place himself on an impossible pedestal. Author Hope Bolinger cleverly and stealthily superimposes her contemporary teen drama with symbolic content based on old-school values.\"--Kelly Anne White,author of The Legend of the Fairy Stones (Morgan James Publishing), The Bible Adventure Book of Scavenger Hunts (Healthy Learning), and other books for kids\u00a0\"We see the Book of Daniel unfold in a completely contemporary way, full of the same intrigue as the Bible story...yet young adult readers will be able to relate to the characters and the plot as it twists and turns in a story that keeps you turning the pages.\"- Michele Chynoweth, award-winning author of contemporary, biblically based novels The Faithful One, The Peace Maker, The Runaway Prophet and The Jealous Son. \"Bolinger's Blaze is a unique twist on the classic high school drama.\"\u00a0- Amalie Jahn, YA author of The Clay Lion Series and The Next to Last Mistake \"Debut author Hope Bolinger entertains the young and young-at-heart with her YA novel, Blaze. She introduces us to Danny Belte and his friends and their struggles and triumphs of life in high school. But this book is so much more. Blaze is a contemporary twist on stories from the book of Daniel in the Bible. The way Hope threads allegory throughout the modern high school setting is masterful. Above all,Blaze is a fun, and can't-put-it-down, delightful story.\"\u00a0- Jennifer Hallmark, author of Jessie's Hope\u00a0\" Blaze is a wonderful YA novel of the trials and tribulations of four different but likeable students navigating their way through a challenging school year . . .\u00a0(Danny's) voice, guiding the reader through the plot, is often funny and authentic.\"- Jim Doran, Reviewer at Tales of Fascination About the Author Hope Bolinger is a literary agent at C.Y.L.E. and a recentgraduate of Taylor University's professional writing program. More than 300 ofher works have been featured in various publications ranging from Writer'sDigest to Keys for Kids. She has worked for various publishing companies,magazines, newspapers, and literary agencies and has edited the work of authorssuch as Jerry B. Jenkins and Michelle Medlock Adams. Her column \"Hope'sHacks,\" tips and tricks to avoid writer's block, reaches 2,700+ readersweekly and is featured monthly on Cyle Young's blog, which receives 63,000+monthly hits. She is excited for her modern-day Daniel \"Blaze\" tocome out with IlluminateYA (an imprint of Lighthouse Publishing of theCarolinas). She enjoys all things theater, cats, and fire. You can find moreabout her at hopebolinger.com", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 16.99}, {"asin": "B087QRSXTR", "title": "DEN: If You Don't Want to Die, Don't Sleep with Lions (Blaze Trilogy Book 2)", "author": "Hope Bolinger", "description": "From the Author This book came out of a really difficult time. I won't go into all the details, but a number of events that happened far too close to home had inspired a great deal of the content. But with that being said, there's always hope and healing, even if it doesn't happen quite how we expect it to. Thank you to all the readers who have followed Danny on his journey, and I cannot wait for you to continue on it. About the Author Hope Bolinger is literary agent, freelance author and editor, YA novelist, and obsessed with anything to do with theater. Books include The Quiet and the Storm (Taylor University Press), Blaze (IlluminateYA), Den (IlluminateYA), Dear Hero (INtense Publications), and Dear Henchman (INtense Publications). She's also contributed to books that were published by Broadstreet Publishing and New Hope. When she isn't busy adding to her 600+ bylines, or showing up in her town square dressed as Red Riding Hood, she loves to connect with readers. Find her at hopebolinger.com or connect with her @hopebolinger --This text refers to the paperback edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 0.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "160826078X", "title": "Math-U-See Primer Introduction to Math Instruction Pack", "author": "Steven P Demme", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 3.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "0062292587", "title": "Frog and Toad Storybook Treasury: 4 Complete Stories in 1 Volume! (I Can Read Level 2)", "author": "Arnold Lobel", "description": "From the Back Cover Contains Four Frog and Toad Books! Come celebrate the power of friendship with all four of the beloved Frog and Toad stories\u2014now in one volume! Share the adventures of best friends Frog and Toad as they fly a kite, resist the temptation of cookies, and search for a lost button. No matter what kind of situation they find themselves in, one thing is certain: Frog and Toad will always be together. This reading collection includes: Frog and Toad Are FriendsFrog and Toad TogetherFrog and Toad All YearDays with Frog and Toad About the Author Arnold Lobel (1933\u20131987)\u00a0illustrated many wonderful children\u2019s books but is most beloved for his Frog\u00a0and Toad stories, including the first one, Frog and Toad Are Friends , published in 1970. The books have garnered much acclaim, including a Caldecott Honor for Frog and Toad Are Friends and a Newbery Honor for Frog and Toad Together . These were followed by Frog and Toad All Year and Days with Frog and Toad .", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 45.89}, {"asin": "1904550657", "title": "This Is The House That Jack Built (Classic Books With Holes)", "author": "Pam Adams", "description": "About the Author Pam Adams was born in 1919 in Swindon, Wiltshire. She was always drawing as a child so Swindon Art College was the natural place to begin her formal art training. In the 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s, following several years at the Central School of Art in London, she worked as a graphic artist for various advertising agencies in the city. When she returned to Swindon in the 70\u2019s she teamed up with Michael Twinn who had recently founded Child\u2019s Play. Her first book \u2018There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly\u2019, published in 1972, is still Child\u2019s Play best selling title. Her bright, clear colours, appealing shapes and attention to detail make her pictures instantly successful with children. Pam moved into writing with the \u2018Mrs Honey\u2019 series. Her attractive artwork, sense of humour and great versatility made her an invaluble member of the Child\u2019s Play team. Pam worked for Child\u2019s Play for nearly forty years, illustrating her final book, a prequel to \u2018There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly\u2019 in 2006. Sadly Pam passed away in 2010 at the age of 91.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 2.0}, {"asin": "1787125939", "title": "Python Machine Learning - Second Edition: Machine Learning and Deep Learning with Python, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow", "author": "Vahid Mirjalili", "description": "Review \"I bought the first version of this book, and now also the second. The new version is very comprehensive. If you are using Python - it's almost a reference. I also like the emphasis on neural networks (and TensorFlow) - which (in my view) is where the Python community is heading. I am also planning to use this book in my teaching at Oxford University. The data pre-processing sections are also good. I found the sequence flow slightly unusual - but for an expert level audience, it's not a major issue.\" --Ajit Jaokar, Data Science for IoT Course Creator and Lead Tutor at the University of Oxford / Principal Data Scientist About the Author Sebastian Raschka , author of the bestselling book, Python Machine Learning, has many years of experience with coding in Python, and he has given several seminars on the practical applications of data science, machine learning, and deep learning, including a machine learning tutorial at SciPy - the leading conference for scientific computing in Python. While Sebastian's academic research projects are mainly centered around problem-solving in computational biology, he loves to write and talk about data science, machine learning, and Python in general, and he is motivated to help people develop data-driven solutions without necessarily requiring a machine learning background. His work and contributions have recently been recognized by the departmental outstanding graduate student award 2016-2017, as well as the ACM Computing Reviews' Best of 2016 award. In his free time, Sebastian loves to contribute to open source projects, and the methods that he has implemented are now successfully used in machine learning competitions, such as Kaggle. Vahid Mirjalili obtained his PhD in mechanical engineering working on novel methods for large-scale, computational simulations of molecular structures. Currently, he is focusing his research efforts on applications of machine learning in various computer vision projects at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. Vahid picked Python as his number-one choice of programming language, and throughout his academic and research career he has gained tremendous experience with coding in Python. He taught Python programming to the engineering class at Michigan State University, which gave him a chance to help students understand different data structures and develop efficient code in Python. While Vahid's broad research interests focus on deep learning and computer vision applications, he is especially interested in leveraging deep learning techniques to extend privacy in biometric data such as face images so that information is not revealed beyond what users intend to reveal. Furthermore, he also collaborates with a team of engineers working on self-driving cars, where he designs neural network models for the fusion of multispectral images for pedestrian detection.", "categories": ["Books", "Computers & Technology", "Computer Science"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 20.1}], "target_asin": "160826078X"}
{"user_id": "AECALSHMJ5GGX3JPVFE3CAOQPQWQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1607180383", "title": "What's New at the Zoo? An Animal Adding Adventure (Arbordale Collection)", "author": "Joan C. Waites", "description": "Review Educational purpose takes the front seat here, but rests lightly enough on the rhymed text and animal pictures to remain more a game than a chore. --BooklistThis cheerful package of images and information delivers intellectual nourishment in the guise of a tasty treat for the eyes. It\u2019s a fun introduction to early math skills and basic animal facts. --School Library JournalThe solid math and informative backmatter make this a worthwhile addition to libraries and math programs. --Kirkus Reviews From the Back Cover Come along on an animal adding adventure. Add baby animals to the adults to see how many there are all together. And while you are at it, learn what some of the zoo animals eat or what the baby animals are called. Follow the lost red balloon as it soars through the zoo. At the end of the day, count up all the animals you have seen. The For Creative Minds educational section includes: How many animals do you see?, Tens make friends, Adding by columns, Fact families, Food for thought, Animal matching activity, and Animal classes. About the Author Suzanne Slade is the award-winning author of over 80 books for children including The Great Divide, Multiply on the Fly, What's the Difference?, What's New at the Zoo?, and Animals are Sleeping for Arbordale. Her works include picture books, biographies, as well as many non-fiction titles about animals, sports, and nature. One of her favorite parts of the writing process is researching and learning new things. Suzanne lives near Chicago with her husband, Mike, two children, and their tiny dog, Corduroy. She enjoys visiting schools in-person or during her live virtual author visits.  Joan Waites (What's the Difference? and What's New at the Zoo?) has been a freelance illustrator for the past 18 years. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from DeSales University in 1982. Employment followed for 15 years as a neo-natal intensive care nurse in Philadelphia and Washington DC, while she simultaneously returned to college to study illustration and launch her freelance career. In addition to What's the Difference? and What's New at the Zoo?, Joan has illustrated nearly 40 books for the educational and trade marketplace. She is also an adjunt faculty member of The Corcoran Museum School of Art and Design in Washington, DC, where she teaches various children's classes for the college's \"Aspiring Artists\" program. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Animals"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "0801483344", "title": "Weeds of the Northeast", "author": "Richard H. Uva", "description": "Review I highly recommend Weeds of the Northeas t if you ever happen to be in a masochistic mood and don't have a sharp stick handy with which to poke yourself in the eye. As I leafed through the pages, wincing at the depressingly clear color photographs, a horrible sense of familiarity set in. Ninety-nine percent of the weeds were in my garden. It was like looking at a family album of all your least favorite relatives. There was mean and scary Great-Aunt Margaret (Scotch thistle); passive-aggressive Cousin Isobel with the mustache (hairy bittercress); Uncle Ralph with the drinking problem and disgusting table manners (prostrate pigweed). Despite the feeling of nausea that gripped me, I was able to gather much useful information of a scientific sort. As Nietzsche said, that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger, and so I suppose my encounter with an army of unnaturally \u00fcber-weeds could be looked at as an exercise in character-building. \u2015 Horticulture Lavishly illustrated and exceptionally well-done.... Here is a model to be emulated for California and other weedy areas of the United States and Canada. \u2015 Taxon 47 The appeal of Weeds of the Northeast is broad, ranging from home gardeners to professional gold course managers to farmers. The book deserves a slot in the reference library. \u2015 American Reference Books Annual This detailed and user-friendly guide identifies nearly 300 weedy plant species commonly found from southeastern Canada south to Virginia and west to Wisconsin. Sharp color photographs illustrate each plant in seed, seedling, and mature stages. In addition, plants can be readily distinguished using an identification key based on vegetative characteristics such as leaf orientation, leaf shape, and presence or absence of hairs. A handy fold-out chart helps with identification of those tricky grasses. Weeds that can be identified easily by characteristics such as thorns or milky sap are listed in a series of 'shortcut' tables. \u2015 The American Gardener This impressive factual Weed Identification Manual, the first ever compiled of the Northeast, is thorough and well designed.... This is a distinctive book and reference guide on weeds, one that will be welcomed in a library, school, garden club, a gift for friends, and definitely a copy for yourself. \u2015 News of the Federated Garden Clubs of New York State Weeds of the Northeast is the first comprehensive weed identification manual available for the northeastern region of the U.S.... The manual will facilitate appropriate weed management strategies in horticultural or agronomic cropping systems and will also serve home gardeners, landscape managers, pest management specialists, and allergist. \u2015 Weed Technology Review This is a thorough and well-designed book that's been needed for a long time. The system of having both drawings and photographs accompanying the description of each plant will be of great help to amateur gardeners as well as to professional growers and horticulturists. The identification tables are also very useful. -- Elisabeth Sheldon, author of A Proper Garden", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Gardening & Landscape Design"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 19.98}, {"asin": "1607180812", "title": "What's the Difference? An Endangered Animal Subtraction Story (Arbordale Collection)", "author": "Suzanne Slade", "description": "Review Public and school libraries would find this a useful title for their collection, as would nature centers, museums, or the book lists of environmental, nature, or outdoor educators. --ALA Social Responsibility RoundtableYou will learn how many of these creatures became endangered, what is being done to protect and keep them safe, and in some cases, you'll find out if their numbers have increased. --Puget Sound Council for the Review of Children's MediaAs we read about what is being done to help endangered animals, we can be made to hope that no more species will be \u201csubtracted\u201d from the circle of life on earth. --Home School Book Review From the Inside Flap What\u0092s the Difference? weaves subtraction and endangered species education into rhyming, cross-curricular family fun. From the Back Cover In Suzanne Slade's latest book, What's the Difference?, you can celebrate the huge difference caring people make for endangered animals while you practice subtraction skills. In this sequel to her popular addition title, What's New at the Zoo?, Slade presents a new subtraction problem in each clever rhyming verse. The colorful watercolors include realistic animals set in lush spreads by illustrator, Joan Waites. So join in the celebration of our world's precious animals with this exciting title, and have fun practicing math skills along the way! The For Creative Minds educational section includes: Endangered Animal Vocabulary, Food Chains and Webs, Missing Links in Food Chains, Endangered Animals, and Fact Families. Additional teaching activities and interactive quizzes are available for free at the Sylvan Dell Publishing website. About the Author Suzanne Slade is the award-winning author of over 80 books for children including The Great Divide, Multiply on the Fly, What's the Difference?, What's New at the Zoo?, and Animals are Sleeping for Arbordale. Her works include picture books, biographies, as well as many non-fiction titles about animals, sports, and nature. One of her favorite parts of the writing process is researching and learning new things. Suzanne lives near Chicago with her husband, Mike, two children, and their tiny dog, Corduroy. She enjoys visiting schools in-person or during her live virtual author visits.  Joan Waites (What's the Difference? and What's New at the Zoo?) has been a freelance illustrator for the past 18 years. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from DeSales University in 1982. Employment followed for 15 years as a neo-natal intensive care nurse in Philadelphia and Washington DC, while she simultaneously returned to college to study illustration and launch her freelance career. In addition to What's the Difference? and What's New at the Zoo?, Joan has illustrated nearly 40 books for the educational and trade marketplace. She is also an adjunt faculty member of The Corcoran Museum School of Art and Design in Washington, DC, where she teaches various children's classes for the college's \"Aspiring Artists\" program. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 9.95}, {"asin": "1580896677", "title": "The Inventor's Secret: What Thomas Edison Told Henry Ford", "author": "Suzanne Slade", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 3\u20136\u2014Emphasizing the power of perseverance, this cheery picture book alternates between the lives of two inventors, beginning with Thomas Edison, who was 16 years Henry Ford's senior. Many of Edison's major inventions are touched on, and young Ford is portrayed as curious as to the secret of Edison's success. Ford continues to work on developing engines and designing cars and finally seizes the opportunity to meet Edison in person. The two go over Ford's designs, and Edison urges the younger man to \"keep at it!\" With that, Ford discovers that \"he'd known Thomas's secret all along!\"\u2014a realization illustrated with a light bulb over Ford's head. The rest of the story focuses on Ford's work on creating a car for all Americans, which resulted in the Model-T. Fanciful watercolor sketches depict Edison and Ford dreaming, inventing, and working, with a variety of expressions on their faces. The drawings are framed on the page, providing an old-fashioned feel. Inset images provide details and information on their inventions. The front and endpapers are filled with sketches of various light bulbs and gears in muted brown tones. The early lives and activities of these men are covered briefly. The factual text emphasizes how both started as dreamers who took action. Back matter includes a section on Edison and Ford's friendship, more material about the inventions, author and illustrator notes, and extensive source notes with citations for dialogue and other facts. VERDICT A suitable addition for those seeking biographies of inventors.\u2014Tamara Saarinen, Pierce County Library, WA Review What would a renowned, established inventor have to say to a hopeful young tinkerer?Slade precedes her description of a historical meeting with interwoven accounts: one of Thomas, a disaster-prone experimenter who parlays an early interest in gadgets and electricity into a pen that produces multiple copies, a phonograph, and hundreds of other popular innovations; the other of Henry, born 16 years later, whose yen to produce a practical, inexpensive motor car encounters obstacle after frustrating obstacle. At last, hoping for insight into Edison's success, Henry buttonholes the great inventor at an 1896 dinner. The two instantly fall into a technical discussion, climaxed by the excited Edison's \"Keep at it!\" . . . the author and illustrator close with fuller notes on major Edison-ian inventions, the development of the Model T, and particularly the lifelong friendship that the encounter kindled between these two giants of industrial technology. . . .- Kirkus Reviews \"What's his secret?\" That's the question dogging Henry Ford as he watches Thomas Edison's phonograph and incandescent bulb take off, while his own attempts to create steam and gas engines sputter. Slade shifts between the developing careers of both men until, while discussing engines with Edison at a dinner in 1896, Ford gets his answer: \"Keep at it!\" Edison shouts encouragingly. Reinhardt's mixed-media artwork includes several lighthearted moments (parallel scenes featuring Edison and Ford as children highlight the explosive results of early failed experiments). Extensive endnotes discuss Slade's and Reinhardt's processes and several of the inventions mentioned, along with a time line and source notes. It's a rewarding look at the importance of persistence, as well as the friendship that developed between these prominent inventors.\u00a0- Publishers Weekly Emphasizing the power of perseverance, this cheery picture book alternates between the lives of two inventors, beginning with Thomas Edison, who was 16 years Henry Ford\u2019s senior. Many of Edison\u2019s major inventions are touched on, and young Ford is portrayed as curious as to the secret of Edison\u2019s success. Ford continues to work on developing engines and designing cars and finally seizes the opportunity to meet Edison in person. The two go over Ford\u2019s designs, and Edison urges the younger man to \u201ckeep at it!\u201d With that, Ford discovers that \u201che\u2019d known Thomas\u2019s secret all along!\u201d\u2014a realization illustrated with a light bulb over Ford\u2019s head. The rest of the story focuses on Ford\u2019s work on creating a car for all Americans, which resulted in the Model-T. Fanciful watercolor sketches depict Edison and Ford dreaming, inventing, and working, with a variety of expressions on their faces. The drawings are framed on the page, providing an old-fashioned feel. Inset images provide details and information on their inventions. The front and endpapers are filled with sketches of various light bulbs and gears in muted brown tones. The early lives and activities of these men are covered briefly. The factual text emphasizes how both started as dreamers who took action. Back matter includes a section on Edison and Ford\u2019s friendship, more material about the inventions, author and illustrator notes, and extensive source notes with citations for dialogue and other facts. VERDICT A suitable addition for those seeking biographies of inventors.- School Library Journal This dual picture-book biography of how Thomas Edison inspired Henry Ford succeeds in showing the emotional side of the life of an inventor: success requires more than just one or two\u2014or even two dozen\u2014attempts. Reinhardt\u2019s soft, amiable watercolor, ink, and colored-pencil artwork provides a lot of visual detail about both Edison\u2019s and Ford\u2019s passions, while Slade\u2019s text explains each man\u2019s inspiration and the way his inventions fundamentally changed the world. Ample source notes and a comprehensive dual time line help explain some of Slade and Reinhardt\u2019s depictions of Ford and Edison, and photo-illustrated notes about each inventor\u2019s most memorable creations provide substantial information to get kids started on research projects. While there are abundant compilations for kids about inventions and inventors, Slade and Reinhardt keep the focus solidly on the human element of frustration, persistence, and the power of a mentor. It\u2019s an unusual angle and well executed, which makes it a good fit for STEM-oriented programs as well as storytimes about the benefit of good friendships.- Booklist About the Author Suzanne Slade loves finding out how things work. A mechanical engineer by degree, she once worked on Delta IV rockets and automotive brake systems. Now a full-time author, she has written more than one hundred children's books, including Friends for Freedom: The Story of Susan B. Anthony & Frederick Douglass and The House That George Built . Suzanne lives near Chicago, where she writes from home on her favorite invention--a laptop computer. Jennifer Black Reinhardt is fascinated by the stories behind old objects. While researching this book, she studied the Victorian clothing and furnishings in her collection of antique photographs--and fell in love with fancy borders. Jennifer is the illustrator of Rabbi Benjamin's Buttons and The Adventures of a South Pole Pig (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She could not have illustrated this book without the invention of the lightbulb. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Not so long ago the world was a little slower. A little simpler. And a whole lot quieter. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No airplanes roaring overhead. No cars rumbling down roads. No phones ringing in pockets. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then things began to change\u2014because of two curious boys, Thomas and Henry. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And one secret. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science, Nature & How It Works"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 15.69}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0887768156", "title": "Little Lions, Bull Baiters & Hunting Hounds: A History of Dog Breeds", "author": "Shelley Ann Jackson", "description": "From School Library Journal Grade 2\u20135\u2014Featuring more than breeds that are categorized as hunting, herding, working, or companion dogs, this attractive volume includes interesting and sometimes unusual facts about canines. The animals included cover a broad spectrum from well known and popular, such as the Labrador retriever and pug, to the less-familiar Canaan dog and Neapolitan mastiff. The painterly illustrations are often action-packed, showing, for example, Akitas in a confrontation with a bear, a dachshund down in a tunnel with a badger, and the Portuguese water dog working with fishermen. There is also a brief history of the origin of dogs and a succinct look at mixed breeds. Although there is not enough information for reports, this is a great browsing book. It gives an appreciation of the common traits and unique personalities and talents of \"man's best friend,\" accompanied by high-quality illustrations, that readers will enjoy looking at again and again.\u2014 Carol Schene, formerly at Taunton Public Schools, MA Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Lively painted action portraits of dogs, pictured mostly in outdoor and historical settings, animate this overview of modern canine breeds and their traditional functions. For each of 42 breeds (hunting, working, herding, or companion dogs), the authors\u00a0provide brief notes on distinctive physical characteristics, most common uses in the past, and general temperament. The text is as engaging as the pictures, chockablock with the sorts of facts that dog fanciers love to sink their teeth into: bloodhounds are prone to drooling; an Afghan Hound is \u201cone of the few dogs that notices birds and planes flying through the sky.\u201d The scenes of fighting and of bull-baiting are bloodless, but they may still be mildly disturbing to some. Closing with a look at mixed-breed dogs and the suggestion that they often make better, healthier pets than purebreds do, this will be an irresistible draw for both\u00a0browsers and for\u00a0children hoping to add a four-legged new family member. Grades 2-4. --John Peters Review \u201cIf you're curious about that unusual looking dog you saw, if you are thinking about getting a dog for the family, or it you are simply interested in the animal that so often shares our lives, this book will satisfy you\u2026.\u00a0This book, a first collaboration for the husband/wife team of professional illustrators, is richly illustrated with vibrant paintings that show the dogs in action in their historical setting or activity. The authors give mixed breeds a quick mention and offers to donate some proceeds from the book to animal welfare and rescue organizations.\u00a0An engaging read for all dog lovers.\u201d Highly Recommended\u2014 Canadian Review of Materials \u201c . . . an irresistible draw for both browsers and for children hoping to add a four-legged new family member.\u201d\u00a0\u2014 Booklist \u201c. . . this attractive volume includes interesting and sometimes unusual facts about canines. . .It gives an appreciate of the common traits and unique personalities and talents of \u2018man\u2019s best friend,\u2019 accompanied by high-quality illustrations, that readers will enjoy looking at again and again.\u201d \u2014 School Library Journal \u201c . . .a very thorough and more-than-beguiling disquisition (with illustrations) on the history of . . .dogs\u201d \u2014 The Globe and Mail About the Author Jeff Crosby and Shelley Ann Jackson are graduates of the prestigious MFA illustration program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. They live in Manhattan with their daughter, Harper, dachshund, Baron, and shih tzu, Millie. Jeff has illustrated six children\u2019s picture books. The duo\u2019s first book together, Little Lions, Bull Baiters & Hunting Hounds , received a nonfiction research grant from the Society of Children\u2019s Book Writers and Illustrators. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Crafts, Hobbies & Home", "Pets & Animal Care"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 19.95}, {"asin": "B077GSNV52", "title": "To Die in Vienna", "author": "Kevin Wignall", "description": "Review \u201cEchoes of The Third Man , as well as Hitchcock\u2026\u201d \u2014 Sunday Times \u201cThere is something rather special about this book. Freddie Makin isn\u2019t your ordinary hero and Kevin Wignall isn\u2019t your ordinary writer.\u201d \u2014 Bookanista About the Author Kevin Wignall is a British writer, born in Brussels in 1967. He spent many years as an army child in different parts of Europe and went on to study politics and international relations at Lancaster University. He became a full-time writer after the publication of his first book, People Die (2001). His other novels are Among the Dead (2002); Who is Conrad Hirst? (2007), shortlisted for the Edgar Award and the Barry Award; Dark Flag (2010); The Hunter\u2019s Prayer (2015, originally titled For the Dogs in the USA), which was made into a film directed by Jonathan Mostow and starring Sam Worthington and Odeya Rush; A Death in Sweden (2016); The Traitor\u2019s Story (2016); and A Fragile Thing (2017).", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1622177452", "title": "The Long Road Home", "author": "Carolyn M. Bowen", "description": "Review \u00b7\u00a0\"The action-packed plot of this novel delivers a powerful, long-lasting punch!\" Katherine Williams Blogger \u00b7\u00a0\"I found the book easy to read. It's\u00a0chick lit meets Agatha Christie, with a liberal dose of Southern charm.\" Read All AboutIt 101 \u00b7\u00a0 \"Bowen's plot is taut and twisty, and she gives plenty of red herrings for armchair sleuths. The Long Road Home is highly recommended.\" Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite \u00b7\"A Truly Suspenseful Ride\" Amazon Customer Bowen's characters are credible and well-defined, especially Kate, Jake, AJ, and Nap. Bowen's plot is taut and twisty, and she gives plenty of red herrings for armchair sleuths. The Long Road Home is highly recommended. 5 Stars - Reviewed by\u00a0Jack Magnus\u00a0for Readers' Favorite About the Author CAROLYN BOWEN is a mystery author who calls on her life escapades and an adventurous, imaginative spirit to inspire and entertain. Bowen uses travel as a muse to explore cultures and dialogue to bring her stories to life. Her writing credits include: Cross-Ties, a romantic adventure; The Long Road Home, a contemporary crime fiction mystery; The Sydney Jones Series Mystery Thrillers; Book 1: Primed For Revenge, Book 2: Chance, and Book 3: ONE.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 8.95}, {"asin": "1599331055", "title": "When God Walked the Earth", "author": "Rick Joyner", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Christian Books & Bibles", "Christian Living"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 14.99}], "target_asin": "0887768156"}
{"user_id": "AG7EQJJS4LQCV3EIO44CGJYQWUXA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "1416591060", "title": "Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History", "author": "S. C. Gwynne", "description": "Review \u201cTranscendent... Empire of the Summer Moon is nothing short of a revelation...will leave dust and blood on your jeans.\u201d\u2014 New York Times Book Review \"In Empire of the Summer Moon , Sam\u00a0Gwynne has given us a rich, vividly detailed rendering of an important era in our history and of two great men, Quanah Parker and Ranald Slidel Mackenzie, whose struggles did much to define it.\"\u2014Larry McMurtry About the Author S.C. Gwynne\u00a0is the author of Hymns of the Republic and the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He spent most of his career as a journalist, including stints with Time as bureau chief, national correspondent, and senior editor, and with Texas Monthly as executive editor. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. One A NEW KIND OF WAR CAVALRYMEN REMEMBER SUCH moments: dust swirling behind the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders\u2019 tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song rising on the wind: \u201cCome home, John! Don\u2019t stay long. Come home soon to your own chick-a-biddy!\u201d1 The date was October 3, 1871. Six hundred soldiers and twenty Tonkawa scouts had bivouacked on a lovely bend of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, in a rolling, scarred prairie of grama grass, scrub oak, sage, and chaparral, about one hundred fifty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. Now they were breaking camp, moving out in a long, snaking line through the high cutbanks and quicksand streams. Though they did not know it at the time\u2014the idea would have seemed preposterous\u2014the sounding of \u201cboots and saddle\u201d that morning marked the beginning of the end of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred fifty years of bloody combat that had begun almost with the first landing of the first ship on the first fatal shore in Virginia. The final destruction of the last of the hostile tribes would not take place for a few more years. Time would be yet required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources of food, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or kill them outright. For the moment the question was one of hard, unalloyed will. There had been brief spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. M. Chivington\u2019s and George Armstrong Custer\u2019s savage massacres of Cheyennes in 1864 and 1868 were examples. But in those days there was no real attempt to destroy the tribes on a larger scale, no stomach for it. That had changed, and on October 3, the change assumed the form of an order, barked out through the lines of command to the men of the Fourth Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to go forth and kill Comanches. It was the end of anything like tolerance, the beginning of the final solution. The white men were grunts, bluecoats, cavalry, and dragoons; mostly veterans of the War Between the States who now found themselves at the edge of the known universe, ascending to the turreted rock towers that gated the fabled Llano Estacado\u2014Coronado\u2019s term for it, meaning \u201cpalisaded plains\u201d of West Texas , a country populated exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the continent, where few U.S. soldiers had ever gone before. The llano was a place of extreme desolation, a vast, trackless, and featureless ocean of grass where white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst; a place where the imperial Spanish had once marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to find that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered. In 1864, Kit Carson had led a large force of federal troops from Santa Fe and attacked a Comanche band at a trading post called Adobe Walls, north of modern-day Amarillo. He had survived it, but had come within a whisker of watching his three companies of cavalry and infantry destroyed.2 The troops were now going back, because enough was enough, because President Grant\u2019s vaunted \u201cPeace Policy\u201d toward the remaining Indians, run by his gentle Quaker appointees, had failed utterly to bring peace, and finally because the exasperated general in chief of the army, William Tecumseh Sherman, had ordered it so. Sherman\u2019s chosen agent of destruction was a civil war hero named Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a difficult, moody, and implacable young man who had graduated first in his class from West Point in 1862 and had finished the Civil War, remarkably, as a brevet brigadier general. Because his hand was gruesomely disfigured from war wounds, the Indians called him No-Finger Chief, or Bad Hand. A complex destiny awaited him. Within four years he would prove himself the most brutally effective Indian fighter in American history. In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second. Just how bad things were in 1871 along this razor edge of civilization could be seen in the numbers of settlers who had abandoned their lands. The frontier, carried westward with so much sweat and blood and toil, was now rolling backward, retreating. Colonel Randolph Marcy, who accompanied Sherman on a western tour in the spring, and who had known the country intimately for decades, had been shocked to find that in many places there were fewer people than eighteen years before. \u201cIf the Indian marauders are not punished,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe whole country seems in a fair way of becoming totally depopulated.\u201d3 This phenomenon was not entirely unknown in the history of the New World. The Comanches had also stopped cold the northward advance of the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century\u2014an empire that had, up to that point, easily subdued and killed millions of Indians in Mexico and moved at will through the continent. Now, after more than a century of relentless westward movement, they were rolling back civilization\u2019s advance again, only on a much larger scale. Whole areas of the borderlands were simply emptying out, melting back eastward toward the safety of the forests. One county\u2014Wise\u2014had seen its population drop from 3,160 in the year 1860 to 1,450 in 1870. In some places the line of settlements had been driven back a hundred miles.4 If General Sherman wondered about the cause\u2014as he once did\u2014his tour with Marcy relieved him of his doubts. That spring they had narrowly missed being killed themselves by a party of raiding Indians. The Indians, mostly Kiowas, passed them over because of a shaman\u2019s superstitions and had instead attacked a nearby wagon train. What happened was typical of the savage, revenge-driven attacks by Comanches and Kiowas in Texas in the postwar years. What was not typical was Sherman\u2019s proximity and his own very personal and mortal sense that he might have been a victim, too. Because of that the raid became famous, known to history as the Salt Creek Massacre.5 Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does not begin to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie\u2019s subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. \u201cTheir fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths,\u201d wrote Carter, \u201cand their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.\u201d They had clearly been tortured, too. \u201cUpon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death\u2014\u2018burnt to a crisp.\u2019 \u201d6 Thus the settlers\u2019 headlong flight eastward, especially on the Texas frontier, where such raiding was at its worst. After so many long and successful wars of conquest and dominion, it seemed implausible that the westward rush of Anglo-European civilization would stall in the prairies of central Texas. No tribe had ever managed to resist for very long the surge of nascent American civilization with its harquebuses and blunderbusses and muskets and eventually lethal repeating weapons and its endless stocks of eager, land-greedy settlers, its elegant moral double standards and its complete disregard for native interests. Beginning with the subjection of the Atlantic coastal tribes (Pequots, Penobscots, Pamunkeys, Wampanoags, et al), hundreds of tribes and bands had either perished from the earth, been driven west into territories, or forcibly assimilated. This included the Iroquois and their enormous, warlike confederation that ruled the area of present-day New York; the once powerful Delawares, driven west into the lands of their enemies; the Iroquois, then yet farther west into even more murderous foes on the plains. The Shawnees of the Ohio Country had fought a desperate rearguard action starting in the 1750s. The great nations of the south\u2014Chicasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Choctaw\u2014saw their reservation lands expropriated in spite of a string of treaties; they were coerced westward into lands given them in yet more treaties that were violated before they were even signed; hounded along a trail of tears until they, too, landed in \u201cIndian Territory\u201d (present-day Oklahoma), a land controlled by Comanches, Kiowas, Araphoes, and Cheyennes. Even stranger was that the Comanches\u2019 stunning success was happening amid phenomenal technological and social changes in the west. In 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, linking the industrializing east with the developing west and rendering the old trails\u2014Oregon, Santa Fe, and tributaries\u2014instantly obsolete. With the rails came cattle, herded northward in epic drives to railheads by Texans who could make fast fortunes getting them to Chicago markets. With the rails, too, came buffalo hunters carrying deadly accurate .50-caliber Sharps rifles that could kill effectively at extreme range\u2014grim, violent, opportunistic men blessed now by both a market in the east for buffalo leather and the means of getting it there. In 1871 the buffalo still roamed the plains: Earlier that year a herd of four million had been spotted near the Arkansas River in present-day southern Kansas. The main body was fifty miles deep and twenty-five miles wide.7 But the slaughter had already begun. It would soon become the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in human history. In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881.8 All of these profound changes were under way as Mackenzie\u2019s Raiders departed their camps on the Clear Fork. The nation was booming; a railroad had finally stitched it together. There was only this one obstacle left: the warlike and unreconstructed Indian tribes who inhabited the physical wastes of the Great Plains. Of those, the most remote, primitive, and irredeemably hostile were a band of Comanches known as the Quahadis. Like all Plains Indians, they were nomadic. They hunted primarily the southernmost part of the high plains, a place known to the Spanish, who had been abjectly driven from it, as Comancheria. The Llano Estacado, located within Comancheria, was a dead-flat tableland larger than New England and rising, in its highest elevations, to more than five thousand feet. For Europeans, the land was like a bad hallucination. \u201cAlthough I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues,\u201d wrote Coronado in a letter to the king of Spain on October 20, 1541, \u201c[there were] no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea . . . there was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.\u201d9 The Canadian River formed its northern boundary. In the east was the precipitous Caprock Escarpment, a cliff rising somewhere between two hundred and one thousand feet that demarcates the high plains from the lower Permian Plains below, giving the Quahadis something that approximated a gigantic, nearly impregnable fortress. Unlike almost all of the other tribal bands on the plains, the Quahadis had always shunned contact with Anglos. They would not even trade with them, as a general principle, preferring the Mexican traders from Santa Fe, known as Comancheros . So aloof were they that in the numerous Indian ethnographies compiled from 1758 onward chronicling the various Comanche bands (there were as many as thirteen), they do not even show up until 1872.10 For this reason they had largely avoided the cholera plagues of 1816 and 1849 that had ravaged western tribes and had destroyed fully half of all Comanches. Virtually alone among all bands of all tribes in North America, they never signed a treaty. Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse\u2019s stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not do. Even other Comanches feared them. They were the richest of all plains bands in the currency by which Indians measured wealth\u2014horses\u2014and in the years after the Civil War managed a herd of some fifteen thousand. They also owned \u201cTexas cattle without number.\u201d11 On that clear autumn day in 1871, Mackenzie\u2019s troops were hunting Quahadis. Because they were nomadic, it was not possible to fix their location. One could know only their general ranges, their hunting grounds, perhaps old camp locations. They were known to hunt the Llano Estacado; they liked to camp in the depths of Palo Duro Canyon, the second-largest canyon in North America after the Grand Canyon; they often stayed near the head waters of the Pease River and McClellan\u2019s Creek; and in Blanco Canyon, all within a roughly hundred-mile ambit of present-day Amarillo in the upper Texas Panhandle. If you were pursuing them, as Mackenzie was, you had your Tonkawa scouts fan out far in advance of the column. The Tonks, as they were called, members of an occasionally cannibalistic Indian tribe that had nearly been exterminated by Comanches and whose remaining members lusted for vengeance, would look for signs, try to cut trails, then follow the trails to the lodges. Without them the army would never have had the shadow of a chance against these or any Indians on the open plains. By the afternoon of the second day, the Tonks had found a trail. They reported to Mackenzie that they were tracking a Quahadi band under the leadership of a brilliant young war chief named Quanah\u2014a Comanche word that meant \u201codor\u201d or \u201cfragrance.\u201d The idea was to find and destroy Quanah\u2019s village. Mackenzie had a certain advantage in that no white man had ever dared try such a thing before; not in the panhandle plains, not against the Quahadis. Mackenzie and his men did not know much about Quanah. No one did. Though there is an intimacy of information on the frontier\u2014opposing sides often had a surprisingly detailed understanding of one another, in spite of the enormous physical distances between them and the fact that they were trying to kill one another\u2014Quanah was simply too young for anyone to know much about him yet, where he had been, or what he had done. Though no one would be able to even estimate the date of his birth until many years later, it was mostly likely in 1848, making him twenty-three that year and eight years younger than Mackenzie, who was also so young that few people in Texas, Indian or white, knew much about him at the time. Both men achieved their fame only in the final, brutal Indian wars of the mid-1870s. Quanah was exceptionally young to be a chief. He was reputed to be ruthless, clever, and fearless in battle. But there was something else about Quanah, too. He was a half-breed, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman. People on the Texas frontier would soon learn this about him, partly because the fact was so exceptional. Comanche warriors had for centuries taken female captives\u2014Indian, French, English, Spanish, Mexican, and American\u2014and fathered children by them who were raised as Comanches. But there is no record of any prominent half-white Comanche war chief. By the time Mackenzie was hunting him in 1871, Quanah\u2019s mother had long been famous. She was the best known of all Indian captives of the era, discussed in drawing rooms in New York and London as \u201cthe white squaw\u201d because she had refused on repeated occasions to return to her people, thus challenging one of the most fundamental of the Eurocentric assumptions about Indian ways: that given the choice between the sophisticated, industrialized, Christian culture of Europe and the savage, bloody, and morally backward ways of the Indians, no sane person would ever choose the latter. Few, other than Quanah\u2019s mother, did. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was the daughter of one of early Texas\u2019s most prominent families, one that included Texas Ranger captains, politicians, and prominent Baptists who founded the state\u2019s first Protestant church. In 1836, at the age of nine, she had been kidnapped in a Comanche raid at Parker\u2019s Fort, ninety miles south of present Dallas. She soon forgot her mother tongue, learned Indian ways, and became a full member of the tribe. She married Peta Nocona, a prominent war chief, and had three children by him, of whom Quanah was the eldest. In 1860, when Quanah was twelve, Cynthia Ann was recaptured during an attack by Texas Rangers on her village, during which everyone but her and her infant daughter, Prairie Flower, were killed. Mackenzie and his soldiers most likely knew the story of Cynthia Ann Parker\u2014most everyone on the frontier did\u2014but they had no idea that her blood ran in Quanah\u2019s veins. They would not learn this until 1875. For now they knew only that he was the target of the largest anti-Indian expedition mounted since 1865, one of the largest ever undertaken. Mackenzie\u2019s Fourth Cavalry, which he would soon build into a grimly efficient mobile assault force, for the moment consisted largely of timeservers who were unprepared to encounter the likes of Quanah and his hardened plains warriors. The soldiers were operating well beyond the ranges of civilization, beyond anything like a trail they could follow or any landmarks they could possibly have recognized. They were dismayed to learn that their principal water sources were buffalo wallow holes that, according to Carter, were \u201cstagnant, warm, nauseating, odorous with smells, and covered with green slime that had to be pushed aside.\u201d12 Their inexperience was evident during their first night on the trail. Sometime around midnight, above the din of a West Texas windstorm, the men heard \u201ca tremendous tramping and an unmistakable snorting and bellowing.\u201d13 That sound, as they soon discovered, was made by stampeding buffalo. The soldiers had made the horrendous mistake of making camp between a large herd of buffalo and its water source. Panicked, the men emerged from their tents in darkness, screaming and waving blankets and trying desperately to turn the stampeding animals. They succeeded, but by the smallest of margins. \u201cThe immense herds of brown monsters were caromed off and they stampeded to our left at breakneck speed,\u201d wrote Carter, \u201crushing and jostling but flushing only the edge of one of our horse herds. . . . one could hardly repress a shudder of what might have been the result of this nocturnal visit, for although the horses were strongly \u2018lariated out,\u2019 \u2018staked,\u2019 or \u2018picketed,\u2019 nothing could have saved them from the terror which this headlong charge would have inevitably created, had we not heard them just in time to turn the leading herds.\u201d14 Miraculously spared the consequences of their own ignorance, the bluecoats rounded up the stray horses, broke camp at dawn, and spent the day riding westward over a rolling mesquite prairie pocked with prairie-dog towns. The latter were common in the Texas Panhandle and extremely dangerous to horses and mules. Think of enormous anthills populated by oversized rodents, stretching for miles. The troopers passed more herds of buffalo, vast and odorous, and rivers whose gypsum-infused water was impossible to drink. They passed curious-looking trading stations, abandoned now, consisting of caves built into the sides of cliffs and reinforced with poles that looked like prison bars. On the second day they ran into more trouble. Mackenzie ordered a night march, hoping to surprise the enemy in its camps. His men struggled through steep terrain, dense brush, ravines, and arroyos. After hours of what Carter described as \u201ctrials and tribulations and much hard talk verging on profanity\u201d and \u201cmany rather comical scenes,\u201d they fetched up bruised and battered in the dead end of a small canyon and had to wait until daybreak to find their way out. A few hours later they reached the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos, deep in Indian territory, in a broad, shallow thirty-mile-long valley that averaged fifteen hundred feet in width and was cut by smaller side canyons. The place was known as Blanco Canyon and was located just to the east of present-day Lubbock, one of the Quahadis\u2019 favorite campgrounds. Whatever surprise Mackenzie had hoped for was gone. On the third day the Tonkawa scouts realized they were being shadowed by a group of four Comanche warriors, who had been watching their every move, presumably including what must have seemed to them the comical blunders of the night march. The Tonks gave chase, but \u201cthe hostiles being better mounted soon distanced their pursuers and vanished into the hills.\u201d This was not surprising: In two hundred years of enmity, the Tonkawas had never been close to matching the horsemanship of the Comanches. They always lost. The result was that, while the cavalrymen and dragoons had no idea where the Comanches were camped, Quanah knew precisely what Mackenzie was doing and where he was. The next night Mackenzie compounded the error by allowing the men the indulgence of campfires, tantamount to painting a large arrow in the canyon pointing to their camp. Some of the companies blundered yet again by failing to place \u201csleeping parties\u201d among the horses. At around midnight, the regiment was awakened by a succession of unearthly, high-pitched yells. Those were followed by shots, and more yells, and suddenly the camp was alive with Comanches riding at full gallop. Exactly what the Indians were doing was soon apparent: Mingled with the screams and gunshots and general mayhem of the camp was another sound, only barely audible at first, then rising quickly to something like rolling thunder. The men quickly realized, to their horror, that it was the sound of stampeding horses. Their horses. Amid shouts of \u201cEvery man to his lariat!\u201d six hundred panicked horses tore loose through the camp, rearing, jumping, and plunging at full speed. Lariats snapped with the sound of pistol shots; iron picket pins that a few minutes before had been used to secure the horses now whirled and snapped about their necks like airborne sabres. Men tried to grab them and were thrown to the ground and dragged among the horses, their hands lacerated and bleeding. When it was all over, the soldiers discovered that Quanah and his warriors had made off with seventy of their best horses and mules, including Colonel Mackenzie\u2019s magnificent gray pacer. In west Texas in 1871, stealing someone\u2019s horse was often equivalent to a death sentence. It was an old Indian tactic, especially on the high plains, to simply steal white men\u2019s horses and leave them to die of thirst or starvation. Comanches had used it to lethal effect against the Spanish in the early eighteenth century. In any case, an unmounted army regular stood little chance against a mounted Comanche. This midnight raid was Quanah\u2019s calling card, a clear message that hunting him and his Comanche warriors in their homeland was going to be a difficult and treacherous business. Thus began what would become known to history as the Battle of Blanco Canyon, which was in turn the opening salvo in a bloody Indian war in the highlands of west Texas that would last four years and culminate in the final destruction of the Comanche nation. Blanco Canyon would also provide the U.S. Army with its first look at Quanah. Captain Carter, who would win the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in Blanco Canyon, offered this description of the young war chief in battle on the day after the midnight stampede: A large and powerfully built chief led the bunch, on a coal black racing pony. Leaning forward upon his mane, his heels nervously working in the animal\u2019s side, with six-shooter poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage, brutal joy. His face was smeared with black warpaint, which gave his features a satanic look. . . . A full-length headdress or war bonnet of eagle\u2019s feathers, spreading out as he rode, and descending from his forehead, over head and back, to his pony\u2019s tail, almost swept the ground. Large brass hoops were in his ears; he was naked to the waist, wearing simply leggings, moccasins and a breechclout. A necklace of beare\u2019s claws hung about his neck. . . . Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip him in the race. It was Quanah, principal warchief of the Qua-ha-das.15 Moments later, Quanah wheeled his horse in the direction of an unfortunate private named Seander Gregg and, as Carter and his men watched, blew Gregg\u2019s brains out. \u00a9 2010 S. C. Gwynne Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Biographies & Memoirs", "Community & Culture"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 15.37}, {"asin": "0307453596", "title": "The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home Flavor", "author": "Matt Lee", "description": "Amazon.com Review Product Description From two South Carolina-bred brothers comes the ground-breaking cookbook for new Southern cooking: The Lee Bros. Simple, Fresh, Southern. Matt and Ted Lee were raised on long-simmered greens, slow-smoked meats, and deep-fried everything. But after years of traveling as journalists and with farm fresh foods more available than ever, Matt and Ted have combined the old with the new, infusing family recipes with bright flavors. Using crisp produce, lighter cooking methods, and surprising combinations, these are recipes to make any night of the week. From The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern : Ginger Lemonade If we were musicians, we\u2019d write a torch song about ginger and lemon, a match made in heaven. And though we\u2019ve been drinking fresh lemonade as long as we can remember (Coca-Cola was taboo at 83 East Bay Street), we never thought to make a cold fresh-ginger lemonade until recently. Now we\u2019re making up for lost time. This drink is easy to make, super-refreshing, and happens to be a kick-ass mixer with bourbon and tequila, so those of you who are of age should mix up the Lemon Gingerita variation that follows. --Matt Lee and Ted Lee Ingredients 2 ounces fresh ginger, peeled, cut into thin disks (1/3 cup) 2 ounces fresh ginger, peeled, cut into thin disks (1/3 cup) 1/4 cup honey, or more to taste 1/4 cup honey, or more to taste 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt 3/4 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 4 large lemons) 3/4 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 4 large lemons) (Serves 8) Directions 1. Put the ginger in a medium heatproof bowl. Bring 2 cups cold water to a boil, then pour it into the bowl and stir to agitate the ginger. Slowly pour in the honey, stirring until it\u2019s dissolved in the concentrate. Add the salt, cover, and let steep for 10 minutes. 2. Strain the concentrate into a large pitcher (it will keep for 5 days, covered, in the refrigerator), reserving the ginger slices. Add 3 cups cold water and the lemon juice to the pitcher, and sweeten to taste with honey. Set the pitcher in the refrigerator to cool further; store the ginger slices in the refrigerator as well. (The lemonade and ginger slices will keep in the refrigerator for 5 days.) 3. Fill each highball or pint glass two-thirds of the way to the rim with ice, and pour the ginger lemonade over it. Garnish with a slice of the steeped ginger. Time: 10 minutes steeping, 5 minutes preparation Lemon Gingerita With a fine Microplane grater, zest one of the lemons you\u2019ll squeeze to make the Ginger Lemonade onto a plate; from another lemon, cut as many thumbnail-size pieces of lemon peel as the number of margaritas you plan to make. Prepare the ginger lemonade, and when it\u2019s ready to serve, for each margarita, take a piece of the lemon peel and rub it around the rim of the glass. Dip the rim in the grated lemon zest (it\u2019s okay if the lemon-zest rim is patchy; lemon zest is intense), fill the glass with ice, and top with 3 ounces Ginger Lemonade and 1 ounce silver tequila. Stir, and garnish with a slice of lemon peel and a slice of the steeped ginger. From Publishers Weekly The Lee brothers' second cookbook builds on the success of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by applying the principles of the current fashion for simplicity and speed in the kitchen to the revered down-home flavors of the South, which normally require far more extended cooking times and special ingredients. Readers who are nostalgic for the food of the South or have acquired a taste for it, but lack the time to recreate old-fashioned dishes, will be eager to try the brothers' new takes on old classics like chicken and dumplings, shrimp cocktail and ambrosia, which cut down on some of the usual preparation time without sacrificing flavor. They manage this partly through their judicious use of less traditional ingredients, such as curry powder in potato salad or chorizo in collard greens and partly through their emphasis on using top-notch fresh, in-season ingredients. Though the brothers got their start with a catalogue selling Southern pantry staples that are unusual elsewhere, these recipes rarely call for items that are not available in any well-stocked supermarket. The recipes are easy to follow and engagingly written, dotted with amusing anecdotes and historical asides that make the book a breezy read. Detailed shopping, preparation and garnishing notes throughout help ensure cooks' success following the Lee brothers in bringing Southern cooking into the 21st century. (Nov.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist The Lee Brothers have become leading exponents of contemporary southern cooking. Their new cookbook shows what great tastes can come from tweaking classic dishes from America\u2019s south. Instead of the usual brown-sugar glaze for sweet potatoes, the Lees add a whisper of cinnamon and a big dose of lemon juice for a citrus tang. They turn to Mexico for a bit of inspiration and roast potatoes with poblano peppers, keeping the dish southern with some strips of country ham. Ambitious cooks will want to make their simple recipe for fresh buttermilk cheese, a close cousin of ricotta, which they enhance with an assortment of herbs and spices to yield all sorts of variations. Desserts have always been an essential component of southern dining. The Lees produce a special treat from everyday rice pudding by perfuming it with Indian spices and freezing it in popsicle molds. --Mark Knoblauch Review The Lee Bros. are truly the best at interpreting the last remaining great regional American cuisine\u2014that of our southern states\u2014for the rest of us. \u00a0The magnificent collection of simple deliciousness makes me want to jump in the kitchen and get jiggy with a cold watermelon margarita.\u201dMario Batali\u00a0\u201cWith Simple Fresh Southern , the Lee Bros. give us a southern cuisine fit for the twenty-first century. Matt and Ted offer the home cook recipes that are lighter, more flavorful, and simpler to execute, while still holding tight to their southern soul.\u201dTom Colicchio\u00a0\u201cThese two boys are not only great cooks, I consider them the modern-day Lewis and Clark of southern cuisine.\u201dPaula Deen\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe charming Lee Bros. cook delicious, real food that\u2019s alive with flavor. How wonderful to be invited into their Southern kitchen!\u201d \u00a0 Alice Waters\u201cTo hell with hidebound and hardshell definitions of southern cookery. These recipes\u2014collard greens with chorizo, clams with sweet potatoes\u2014are honest, smart, and yes, modern.\u201dJohn T. Edge\u00a0\u00a0\u201c The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern has me eying stalwarts of the southern kitchen like field peas and sweet potatoes with renewed enthusiasm. The brothers\u2019 combine their ingenuity and quirky charm with clever techniques and a modern aesthetic to create an inspiring fresh take on southern cuisine.\u201dMartha Hall Foose\u00a0\u201cCan the words fresh and southern be in the same sentence when talking about food? You bet. This Lee Bros. book is good enough to eat.\u201dAmy Sedaris\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe southern savants of cooking, Matt and Ted Lee, have updated and simplified all of my favoirite recipes. Their peach tea juleps have found a permanent place on my cocktail party menu.\u201dKatie Lee Joel About the Author Matt Lee and Ted Lee , founders of The Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalogue, a mail-order source for Southern pantry staples, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. They are the authors of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, which won the James Beard Award for Cookbook of the Year in 2007, and The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern, which won the IACP award for Best American Cookbook in 2011. They are contributing editors for Travel + Leisure and contributors on Cooking Channel\u2019s Unique Eats. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Lemon-Glazed Sweet Potatoes Preparation time: 5 minutesCooking time: 50 minutes- 2 pounds sweet potatoes (about 3 medium potatoes) - 1 tablespoon unsalted butter - 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar - 1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (from about 3 lemons) - 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon - 1/8 teaspoon kosher saltHeat the oven to 325\u00b0F.Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into 1-inch-thick slices. Grease a 9-x-13-inch baking dish with the butter. Arrange the sweet potato disks in a single layer in the pan. Mix the brown sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, and salt in a small bowl, and pour the glaze mixture evenly over the potatoes.Cover the baking dish with aluminum foil, and bake until the potatoes are fork-tender, about 45 minutes. Remove the foil and cook for about 5 more minutes, until the glaze has thickened and become syrupy. Serve immediately. (The glazed sweet potatoes can be cooked in advance, stored in the refrigerator, and reheated in a warm oven.) Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1640121226", "title": "Galvanized: The Odyssey of a Reluctant Carolina Confederate", "author": "Michael K. Brantley", "description": "Review \" Galvanized is a thought-provoking work well suited to the contemplative general reader.\"\u2014Kathryn A. McKee, North Carolina Historical Review \u201c\u2018The Civil War is just as complicated now as the day it started.\u2019 . . . Brantley deftly combines military and social history, a gripping narrative of one private soldier, and his personal struggle to make sense of a savage, fratricidal war and the morally fraught heritage that continues to haunt the South.\u201d\u2014Philip Gerard, author of The Last Battleground and Cape Fear Rising Published On: 2019-09-19\u201cIn this meticulously researched account, Michael Brantley weaves the fascinating history of his great-great-grandfather with his own present-day search to understand the complex and tangled issues of culture, place, and identity that divided our country during the Civil War and continue to divide us now.\u201d\u2014Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change Published On: 2019-09-19\u201cMichael Brantley\u2019s Galvanized is a conscientious and sweeping hybrid narrative gathering together fragments of the author\u2019s personal history\u2014that of his great-great-grandfather\u2019s life in nineteenth-century North Carolina\u2014alongside elaborately researched accounts of the Civil War. When Brantley offers, \u2018These were the stories that had become interesting to me, the stories about real people, regular people,\u2019 he focuses our attention on the plural, people , and reminds us how interconnected our histories are and forever will be.\u201d\u2014Jon Pineda, author of Let\u2019s No One Get Hurt Published On: 2019-09-19\u201cAs the author\u2019s research reveals the journey of his great-great-grandfather across Nash County and battlefields of the Civil War, Michael K. Brantley discovers that exploring the past reveals the explored but changes the explorer. A worthy literary effort!\u201d\u2014Wade G. Dudley, author of Remembering North Carolina and Splintering the Wooden Wall Published On: 2019-09-19 About the Author Michael K. Brantley is the great-great-grandson of Wright Stephen Batchelor. He is an assistant professor of communications at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina, and a former newspaper editor. He has published creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in numerous publications, including the First Day , Dunes Review , Broad River Review , WordRiver , and Broadkill Review . He is the author of Memory Cards: Portraits from a Rural Journey .", "categories": ["Books", "History", "Americas"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 28.95}, {"asin": "1510622055", "title": "Basic Optical Engineering for Engineers and Scientists", "author": "Haiyin Sun", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science & Math", "Physics"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 78.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0316381101", "title": "Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South", "author": "Vivian Howard", "description": "Review One of the Best Cookbooks of 2016 --The New York Times , Bon Appetit, Amazon, Food & Wine, Saveur, People, USA Today, Garden & Gun, Eater, Cherry Bombe, Tasting Table, Nashville Scene, Epicurious, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Library Journal, Sun News, Star Chefs, Food Republic \"This is an epic work of art .... It is stunning. It is so beautiful. And what I love best about this book is the storytelling. It's such a vivid work.\"\u2015 Rachael Ray \"A comprehensive, thoughtful study of the food and culture of North Carolina's coastal plain.\"\u2015 The New York Times \"[Vivian's] warm banana pudding is a dream come true.\"\u2015 Bon Appetit \" The book reads like a memoir , with lengthy and lush descriptions of Howard's hometown thoughts...I was prepared to pick this book based on the story... alone.... Certifiably delicious. .. [and] Howard's voice is folksy and endearing, and I loved her stories about her family and the Piggly Wiggly-and I wanted very badly for her to be cooking instead of me.... Gorgeously photographed, with [an] encouraging, warm voice, and scores of enticing recipes .\"\u2015 Emma Straub , Food52 \" My favorite cookbook of the season --the one doomed to the most splatters--is Vivian Howard's Deep Run Roots ... Howard cooks with what can only be called wit... but also magnificent heart.... [It] will keep your soul fed for weeks .\"\u2015 Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun \"[One of] our favorite new cookbooks... Vivian Howard overdelivers on the comfort food of her Southern home with drippy, crunchy, tangy dishes for every season.\"\u2015 Food and Wine \"Chef and television star Vivian Howard can now add cookbook author to her impressive resume. Deep Run Roots focuses on her brand of Southern food and country cooking, both from her home and from her acclaimed Kinston, NC restaurant, Chef and the Farmer. These are compelling recipes, like fried yams paired with five-spice maple bacon and fried okra updated with a tempura batter. There are over 200 recipes and, remarkably, each has a photo .\"\u2015 Hillary Dixler , Eater \" The first lady of Carolina cooking .... Howard has been restoring Kinston's soul.\"\u2015 Saveur \"You won't find a fried chicken recipe anywhere in [ Deep Run Roots' ] 570 pages...Vivian has the opportunity to redefine the cuisine of her region.\" \u2015 Vice Munchies \"Sandwiched amid the fine culinary writing are many delicious recipes... Howard is happily unafraid to offer her readers shortcuts, such as already-shelled raw peanuts or Uncle Ben's rice.... For 10 years, [Vivian's] honesty and authenticity have been on display at her restaurants and on TV. Her new book shows them off, too.\"\u2015 The Washington Post \"In this outstanding debut... fans of Southern cooking will find plenty of catfish, corn cakes, cast-iron skillet dishes, and cooking-with-Grandma stories--but it's not all biscuits and gravy ... Going beyond the glories of grits, Howard's text is storytelling at its best , rich in mouthwatering detail and reminiscences... This tribute to her family roots is destined to become an enduring classic .\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly (starred review) \"It's rare that reminiscences and recipes mix holistically in one book. Remember, though, that . . . Howard hails from North Carolina, where a penchant for storytelling is in everyone's DNA. . . . A must-read compendium of wisdom .\"\u2015 Booklist (starred review) \"An intriguing story of reconnecting with family and rediscovering ingredients such as turnips, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peaches, and collards. Home cooks of all skill levels will devour Howard's recipes...whose appeal goes far beyond that of typical Southern fare. A standout collection of regional Southern foods, both simple and restaurant-worthy.\"\u2015 Library Journal \"The Southern chef and A Chef's Life star gives you a reason to love eastern North Carolina . More than 200 reasons, in fact, including fried yams with five-spice maple bacon candy and cucumber crab dip. Each recipe shows just how tuned in Howard is to Southern cuisine traditions, and her stories will leave you homesick--wherever you're from .\"\u2015 Tasting Table \"A love letter to [Vivian Howard's] culinary backyard.\"\u2015 Forbes \"Vivian Howard can write as well as she cooks... [with] endearing, revealing honesty... it's the writing in the book that should be the real star of the show-a book entirely written by a working chef, mother, and TV star all without the help of a ghost writer.\"\u2015 Charleston City Paper \"With a straight-forward, personal tone, it's hard not to come away charmed as well as enlightened.\"\u2015 The Charlotte News & Observer \"Howard likes to keep the focus on the farmers and the 'unsung heroes' of Southern food... [and] ties her food and her roots in North Carolina together.... Howard is looking toward new culinary horizons.\"\u2015 Lexington Herald-Leader \"She's been doing something right.... Howard's ability to make us identify with the person behind the chef's apron makes her vision of exploring the South one ingredient at a time a vital one.\"\u2015 Nashville Scene \"Lucky for us, [Vivian's] decided to share the experience of growing up in a Southern farm community via passed-down tales and crowd-pleasing recipes.\"\u2015 Modern Farmer \"In Deep Run Roots ... [Howard] introduces readers to the foods of her world, explaining butter beans and calling cheesy grit fritters the Southern brother to arancini while giving insight into the difference between turnip eaters and collard eaters. It's regional and Southern, with a thoughtful approach elevated by ingredients and technique.\"\u2015 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel \"[ Deep Run Roots ] is no ordinary cookbook.... The reader who finishes these chapters about foods will also have read Vivian Howard's memoir.\"\u2015 Richmond County Daily Journal \"There are more than 200 recipes and they appeal to anyone with an interest in cooking.\"\u2015 Savannah Morning News \"Clocking in at 576 pages, with 200 recipes organized by ingredients that define the region around her hometown of Deep Run, NC, Deep Run Roots is a deliciously ambitious volume that doubles as biography and cookbook... Howard gives us a feel for who she is.\"\u2015 Wendell Brock , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution \"A refreshing update of rural North Carolina's traditional foods.\"\u2015 Better Homes and Gardens \"There are recipes for every meal and occasion--for beginners to more experienced cooks--and plenty of practical tips... it's truly a year-round resource.\"\u2015 Try Small Things \"Readers will enjoy Howard's clever, warm writing as much as her recipes.\"\u2015 The Advocate \"Award-winning chef and PBS show host Vivian Howard's new cookbook is a deep dive into Southern food. Rather than publishing a few well-known recipes from this region and that, Howard focuses on the ingredients and techniques that have sustained her native North Carolina for generations. Get your hands on this hefty tome and prepare to see the Tar Heel State as never before.\"\u2015 Food Republic \"Vivian Howard offers a tome for cooking in the New South-a place where myriad cultures and a modern sensibility build on a rich culinary tradition.... This is big picture South.\"\u2015 Star Chefs \"Howard's book is a big, gorgeous example of an approach to food that gets to the heart of the recent love-fest for southern cooking. Farm to table is the real deal here, and Howard organized Deep Run Roots the way she determined the menu for her restaurant, Chef and the Farmer-by ingredient-in order to focus on what is fresh and local throughout the year.\"\u2015 Omnivoracious About the Author Vivian Howard is the chef and owner of the acclaimed Chef and the Farmer restaurant in Kinston, North Carolina, fifteen miles from her home of Deep Run. She trained under Wylie Dufresne and Sam Mason at WD-50 and was a member of the opening team at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spice Market in New York. The first woman since Julia Child to win a Peabody Award for a cooking program, she co-created and stars in the PBS series A Chef's Life .", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 22.12}, {"asin": "1887169318", "title": "Humble Bumbles Baby Journal", "author": "Amy Meyer Allen", "description": "About the Author Amy Meyer Allen has been drawing since she was old enough to hold a crayon. She has always been attracted to color and design. As a child she would line up her markers in the order of a rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Tim, and is the author and illustrator of What is It? and Are There Ants In Your Pants?\", as well as the creator of the Humble Bumbles line of products.", "categories": ["Books", "Parenting & Relationships", "Parenting"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 19.95}, {"asin": "0979247632", "title": "Vampire Royalty: Raven's Blood", "author": null, "description": "About the Author BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Valerie Hoffman is a psychotherapist who resides in Ormond Beach Florida. She was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Syracuse. Dr. Hoffman moved to Florida in 1983. Despite going blind at the age of nineteen due to retinal detachments, Dr. Hoffman pursued her education and attained her doctorate in 1997. She currently has a thriving private practice with two offices in Ormond and Daytona Beach. In addition to her private practice, Dr. Hoffman also is the Vice President of the National Board of Forensic Evaluators and serves on the interviewing committee to credential eligible candidates for certification as a forensic psychological evaluator. This author has written several programs for professionals in her field to receive continuing education credits. She has recently published a journal article based on forensic psychology. She is currently the president of the board of directors at the Center for the Visually Impaired. She also serves on the board of the Friends of the Library Access for the talking book library. She enjoys writing, cooking, singing in her chorus and traveling in her spare time. She is currently at work on the fourth sequel in the Vampire Royalty series.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 14.0}, {"asin": "0399226907", "title": "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", "author": "Eric Carle", "description": "Amazon.com Review \"In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.\" So begins Eric Carle's modern classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar . More than 12 million copies of this book have been sold in its original, full-sized edition, and the beloved tale of science and gluttony has been translated into 20 languages. This five-by-four-inch miniature edition is truly tiny, with tiny type, but it is a nice size for small hands to hold and flip through the pictures. Despite its diminished state, the book is complete in every detail, following the ravenous caterpillar's path as he eats his way through one apple (and the pages of the book itself) on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, three plums on Wednesday, and so on, through cherry pie and sausage--until he is really fat and has a stomachache. And no doubt you know what happens next! Kids love butterfly metamorphosis stories, and this popular favorite teaches counting and the days of the week, too. A fun gift package for caterpillar fans. (Baby to preschool) --Karin Snelson Eric Carle and Tomie dePaola: Author One-on-One Eric Carle is the creator, author, and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and many other children\u2019s books. Tomie dePaola is the author and illustrator of Strega Nona: Her Story and countless other books. They recently had a conversation about their careers as picture book authors. Tomie dePaola: When I was only four years old, I announced to my family in particular and to the world in general that I was going to become an artist, and write stories and draw pictures for books. I never swayed from that early declaration. I\u2019ve always been curious to know, what inspired you to become a creator and illustrator of picture books? Eric Carle: My career began as a graphic designer and for a number of years I worked as an art director for an advertising agency in New York. In the mid 1960's Bill Martin, Jr. saw an ad of a red lobster that I had designed and asked me to illustrate his Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Well, I was set on fire! I was so inspired by this book, and the opportunity to illustrate it changed my life. After that, I started to create my own books, both words and pictures, and really it was then that I had found my true course in life.   Now, I have a question for you, Tomie. How would you describe your artistic style, and has it changed over time? Tomie dePaola: My illustration style is heavily influenced by folk art--strong simple shapes, bold lines, color, color, color and a deceptive simplicity. My style began to develop early in art school, and through the years, it hasn\u2019t changed very much, but it has refined itself. How would you describe yours? Eric Carle: My aim with my work is to simplify and refine, be logical and harmonious. I like to use simple shapes, bright colors and a lot of white space. I write for the child inside of me. That is always where I begin. Tomie dePaola: I do, as well. The only audience I keep in mind is that four-year-old in me. People sometimes ask me what advice I would give to young artists. I always think of the wonderful advice I received from my twin cousins when they were in art school in the late '30s. They told me, \u201cPractice, practice, practice and don\u2019t copy.\u201d Eric Carle: I often tell people about the four magic letters: DO IT. I want to be encouraging but I can only offer the example of my own experience, which is just one approach. There are many wonderful artists to learn about, which is important. But you must use your own imagination. You have to just do it. Tomie dePaola: How do you feel knowing that a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar is sold every 30 seconds, somewhere in the world? Eric Carle: It is hard for me, maybe for others too, to grasp this concept. But I am truly honored that my story is enjoyed by so many and that it is now being shared by a generation of parents who grew up with my book. How about your Strega Nona . She is one of your most popular characters. Can you share how she came to be? Tomie dePaola: In the \u201870s when I was teaching at a college, we were required to attend faculty meetings. I always sat in the back with a yellow legal pad. Everyone thought I was taking notes. At one meeting a doodle appeared of a little lady with a big nose and a big chin. I named her Strega Nona, and the rest is history. Speaking of history, how will you be celebrating the third annual Very Hungry Caterpillar Day this year? Eric Carle: On The Very Hungry Caterpillar Day, March 20th, I will probably be at home with my wife, Bobbie (I am a bit of a hermit, actually). But I will be saying a little toast to the caterpillar for whom I have a special place in my heart. And speaking of holidays, isn\u2019t your favorite holiday Christmas. Do you have a special Christmas memory? Tomie dePaola: Christmas is my favorite holiday. My favorite Christmas was the one when I received tons and tons of art supplies: everything from an easel to paints, pads and pads of paper, and \u201chow to draw\u201d books. A Look Inside The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Board Book) (Click on Images to Enlarge) About the Author Eric Carle is acclaimed and beloved as the creator of brilliantly illustrated and innovatively designed picture books for very young children. His best-known work, The Very Hungry Caterpillar , has been translated into 70 languages and sold over 55 million copies. Carle illustrated more than seventy books, many best sellers, most of which he also wrote, and more than 170 million copies of his books have sold around the world. In 2003, Carle received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (now called the Children\u2019s Literature Legacy Award) for lifetime achievement in children's literature. In 2002, Eric and his wife, Barbara, cofounded The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (www.carlemuseum.org) in Amherst, Massachusetts, a 40,000-square-foot space dedicated to the celebration of picture books and picture book illustrations from around the world,\u00a0underscoring the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of picture books and their art form. Eric Carle passed away in May 2021 at the age of 91. His work remains an important influence on artists and illustrators at work today. www.eric-carle.com", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Early Learning"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 6.56}], "target_asin": "0316381101"}
{"user_id": "AHE7AGGE5QO6Q6735AC7I7PKE7VA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0393307387", "title": "The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations", "author": "Christopher Lasch", "description": "Review \u201cLasch took in a remarkable range of contemporary experience, making many observations that, if anything, ring more true today. . . . [Readers] may want to seek solace in Lasch\u2019s illuminations.\u201d - Lee Siegel, The New York Times \u201cNever has the case against narcissism been made with such an all-embracing sweep. . . . [Lasch] has brilliantly performed the first job of a social critic by prompting us to look at our reflection\u2015shorn of vanity.\u201d - Valerie Lloyd, Newsweek \u201cBrilliantly on target [and] idiosyncratically compelling.\u201d - Alan Wolfe, New Republic \u201cThis is the big intellectual book of the season, the one for everyone to feel guilty about not reading.\u201d - Henry Allen, Washington Post \u201cFormidable intellectual grasp and the kind of moral conviction rarely found in contemporary, value-neutral history and sociology. . . . Lasch is on to something quite real.\u201d - Time \u201cHis vigorous appraisal of contemporary American life is to be admired as much for the perspicacity of his observations as for the contancy of this argument and the scope of his supporting references. . . . Few write with his penetration, intelligence, and historical expertise.\u201d - Kirkus Reviews \u201cChristopher Lasch has gone to the heart of our culture. The insights into personality and its social context are stunning. This is a courageous, important book.\u201d - Michael Rogin, University of California, Berkeley \u201cCultural history at its best. . . . Provokes, startles, and keeps the reader arguing with himself as well as with the writer. . . . A book of fundamental importance.\u201d - Bruce Mazlish, Massachusetts Institute of Technology About the Author Christopher Lasch (1932\u20131994), professor of history at the University of Rochester, wrote, among many other works, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics and the best-selling Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Psychology & Counseling"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 21.79}, {"asin": "1416575995", "title": "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement", "author": "W. Keith Campbell", "description": "Review \"\"The Narcissism Epidemic\" is a must read, an essential antidote to a culture spinning out of control. Filled with facts, fascinating examples, and written in a highly readable style, Twenge and Campbell's outstanding book shows how narcissism has been on the rise and has taken over almost every part of our lives and how we can rescue our culture from ourselves. An outstanding accomplishment by two people who truly care about the debacle of self-worship. It should be read by anyone interested in the future of our country\" -- Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D., author of \"Anxiety Free: Unravel Your Fears Before They Unravel You\"\"A must-read for anyone who is a parent, a relationship partner, in the workforce, in school, or on the job market. Twenge and Campbell not only define narcissism but detail its antecedents, consequences, and underlying processes in a way that brings together so much of what one sees in modern western culture. Grounded in research and peppered with media and anecdotal stories, The Narcissism Epidemic offers practical, much-needed solutions to coping in the age of entitlement.\" -- Kathleen Vohs, Ph.D., University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professor, Editor of \"Self and Relationships: Connecting Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Processes\"\"An important and illuminating book. Drs. Twenge and Campbell expertly analyze many strands of American culture and reveal an alarming tapestry of psychocultural narcissism. They also offer sound strategies for slowing this epidemic.\" -- Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D., author of \"Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel\" and \"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids\"\"Filled with important, disturbing research detailing the alarming cultural spread of narcissism today -- a serious social problem to which many people are unwittingly contributing without realizing the disastrous consequences. The authors give sound advice and provide an important resource for anyone who cares about compassion, empathy, and emotional connection rather than ME, ME, ME!\" -- Karyl McBride, Ph.D., author of \"Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers \"\"Phenomenal...\"The Narcissism Epidemic\" clearly and succinctly identifies the dangerous disease and the catastrophic ways it threatens our society and future, and reveals urgently needed solutions at every level. The chapter on parenting alone makes this book priceless and should be compulsory reading.\" -- Patrick Wanis PhD, Celebrity Life Coach, Human Behavior & Relationship Expert, author of \"How to Find Happiness\"\"The evidence Twenge and Campbell have compiled is compelling and appalling.... Twenge and Campbell marshal statistics, polls, charts, studies and anecdotes to assemble a complete picture of the epidemic's current state of contagion, brought on by the Internet, reality television, a booming economy, easy credit and other developments over the past decade. The authors dismantle the prevailing myths that have made us inclined to tolerate and even encourage narcissism: that it's a function of high self-esteem, that it's a function of low self-esteem, that a little narcissism is healthy, that narcissists are in fact superior, that you have to love yourself to be able to love someone else.\" -- \"New York Times Style Magazine\"\"The other night, when I was reading Twenge and Campbell's excellent and timely new book, my husband was busy framing a fake \"Sports Illustrated\" cover, with a picture of our 7-year old over the caption, \"Player of the Year.\" \"The Narcissism Epidemic\" will hew close to the bone, rouse, and provoke many readers as it shines a spotlight on an important -- and highly costly -- trend in our lives. Rooted in hard data and illuminated with revealing anecdotes, stories, and solutions, \"The Narcissism Epidemic\" is both a pleasure and an education. But enough about this book. Let's talk about me.\" -- Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., author of \"The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want\"\"This insightful book shows us how the epidemic of narcissism touches almost all aspects of our lives. Twenge and Campbell's astute analysis and salient anecdotes powerfully map the problem and the high price we all pay. They expertly show us the kinds of actions we can take to free ourselves of the epidemic's ruthless grip and how the future wellbeing of humane society depends on our doing so.\" -- Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., Professor of Education at Wheelock College and co-author of \"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids\" About the Author Jean M. Twenge, PhD, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of more than a hundred scientific publications and several books based on her research, including Generations , iGen , and Generation Me . Her research has been covered in Time , The Atlantic, Newsweek , The New York Times , USA TODAY , and The Washington Post . She has also been featured on Today , Good Morning America , Fox and Friends , CBS This Morning , and NPR. She lives in San Diego with her husband and three daughters. W. Keith Campbell , Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia, is the author of more than 65 scientific journal articles and book chapters and the book, When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself: How to Deal with a One-way Relationship (Sourcebooks, 2005). He has published\u00a0more than 30 journal articles and chapters on narcissism, more than any other academic researcher. He is also a contributing author of the study on the rise in narcissism covered by the Associated Press. His research has appeared in USA Today, Newsweek, and The Washington Post, and he has been featured on Fox News\u2019 The Big Story and made numerous radio appearances. He holds a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA from San Diego State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Narcissism Epidemic Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Health, Fitness & Dieting", "Psychology & Counseling"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 10.99}, {"asin": "1479176087", "title": "Allowing Magnificence: Living the Expanded Version of Your Life", "author": "Susan Winter", "description": "About the Author Susan Winter (Older Women/Younger Men, New Horizon Press) is an evolutionary relationship expert and social futurist specializing in emerging models of human consciousness. Susan writes, speaks and coaches on today's innovative life choices and advanced thought systems. As a former national television anchor, she is regularly asked to present her insight on the many aspects of social evolution. Appearances include: THE OPRAH SHOW, THE TODAY SHOW, ABC/CBS/NBC EVENING NEWS, VH1, CNN, and MSNBC. Interviews include: COSMO (US/UK), HARPERS BAZAAR (US/UK/AUS), GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, THE NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, LONDON TIMES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, and NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Susan is the co-host of Love Online Radio heard on iTunes. All podcasts and articles can be found on: www.SusanWinter.net. In her off-duty life, Susan enjoys the novelty of being a fantasy action figure model. Her comic book and action figure characters include: Lady Death (Chaos Comics), Knockout (Vertigo/DC Comics) and The Matrix's Lady in Red. Living in Manhattan and Arizona, Susan divides her time between dynamic stimulation and creative solitude.", "categories": ["Books", "Self-Help", "Spiritual"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "0465092845", "title": "Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy", "author": "Irvin D. Yalom", "description": "Review \"The authors of the 6th edition of The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy do an excellent job of presenting the art and science of leading psychotherapy groups. The material is suitable for mental health professionals across disciplines who want to build their knowledge and expertise for leading psychotherapy groups. This is an essential resource for learning and enhancing group leadership skills for all types of groups.\"\u2015 Nina W. Brown, professor and eminent scholar, Old Dominion University \"Once again, Yalom and Leszcz have hit it out of the park. The breadth and depth of the research covered is truly impressive. However, it's the remarkably engaging writing style that seamlessly weaves these empirically informed group psychotherapy principles within an interpersonal framework that makes this book a one-of-a-kind classic. The instructive and compelling clinical examples support beginning therapists, while the contemporary group interventions invites the experienced group leader into new territory.\"\u2015 Gary Burlingame, professor and chair of psychology, Brigham Young University \"Reading this eagerly awaited 6th edition of what is truly a classic in the field is like returning home after a time away: the comforting feeling of revisiting familiar tried-and-true notions intermingled with the excitement of new discoveries and developments in the field. This volume, like its predecessors, speaks so clearly to the group therapist, novice, and expert alike, in experience-near, clinician-friendly language, making the group experience come alive in the mind. It represents the state of the art of group therapy today.\"\u2015 Les R. Greene, distinguished life fellow, American Group Psychotherapy Association \"This new edition affords us the treasured opportunity to benefit from the wisdom and expertise of the phenomenal partnership of Irv Yalom and Molyn Leszcz. This work retains the strengths of past editions in terms of invaluable clinical insights and case examples, but introduces new material that enhances this edition. In response to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they have included a chapter on online groups. I look forward to sharing this updated edition and valued resource that is informed by recent research findings with my students and colleagues!\"\u2015 Alexis D. Abernethy, professor of psychology, Fuller Seminary \"The partnership between Yalom and Leszcz brings new originality to a text that-like no other-has already shaped the field that it helped to spawn fifty years ago. Grounded in current scholarship, their further development of the interpersonal model-wide-ranging and comprehensive-gives this book renewed standing for therapists of all orientations-a lasting treasure for practitioners and teachers alike.\"\u2015 John Schlapobersky, author of from The Couch to The Circle: Group-Analytic Psychotherapy in Practice \"This book is a real classic. In view of an increasing acceptance of group psychotherapy within health systems of different countries, this recent edition is a truly essential help for clinicians and excellently bridges research results and clinical wisdom. It updates theory and practice issues of groups that meanwhile have supported generations of group psychotherapists.\"\u2015 Bernhard Strauss, University of Jena, Germany About the Author Irvin D. Yalom, MD , is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was the recipient of the 1974 Edward Strecker Award and the 1979 Foundations' Fund Prize in Psychiatry. He is the author of When Nietzsche Wept (winner of the 1993 Commonwealth Club gold medal for fiction); Love's Executioner , a memoir; Becoming Myself , a group therapy novel; The Schopenhauer Cure ; and the classic textbooks Inpatient Group Psychotherapy and Existential Psychotherapy , among many other books. He lives in Palo Alto, California. Molyn Leszcz, MD, FRCPC, CGP, DFAGPA , is professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He is an award-winning clinical educator. Dr. Leszcz is the president of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA) and a distinguished fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association. He is the coauthor of Psychotherapy Essentials to Go: Achieving Psychotherapy Effectiveness . He lives in Toronto, Canada.", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Medicine"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 23.15}, {"asin": "0393314030", "title": "The Freud Reader", "author": "Peter Gay", "description": "About the Author Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is one of the twentieth century's greatest minds and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. His many works include The Ego and the Id ; An Outline of Psycho-Analysis ; Inhibitions; Symptoms and Anxiety ; New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis ; Civilization and Its Discontent , and others. Peter Gay (1923\u20152015) was the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment , the best-selling Weimar Culture , and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time .", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Psychology"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 12.8}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "B0002D6D8S", "title": "The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation", "author": "Margaret S. Mahler", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Medical Books", "Psychology"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": "from 14.10"}, {"asin": "1456310038", "title": "Buy, Outfit, Sail: How To Inexpensively and Safely Buy, Outfit, and Sail a Small Vessel Around the World", "author": "Capn Fatty Goodlander", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Sports & Outdoors", "Water Sports"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 25.24}, {"asin": "0802123023", "title": "You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck: The Further Adventures of America's Everyman Outdoorsman", "author": "Bill Heavey", "description": "Review \"I had never heard of Bill Heavey until an editor asked me to review his latest collection of essays, most of which originally appeared in Field & Stream. Now, I can't imagine not reading his magazine columns, which are nominally about hunting and fishing, but are really about life. The title of his latest book alone is almost worth the price: \"You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck.\"\" -- The Advocate From the Inside Flap In two decades at Field & Stream, the nation's biggest outdoor magazine, Bill Heavey has become America's everyman outdoorsman.Why? Because he believes that \"hunting and fishing are too important and too much fun to be left to the experts.\" Because he believes that enthusiasm trumps skill. And because he was born with a skewed perspective and the inability to take anything--himself included--seriously.When he forgets his hat on a freezing winter hunt he improvises, cutting open the juice-stained plush golden retriever puppy his daughter left in the car and using that as head- gear. Trying to impress a lady, he flips his canoe and loses everything in the boat. When ants invade his home, he arms himself with a caulk gun and--over the course of an epic battle-- develops a grudging respect for his enemy.Heavey buys the ticket, takes the ride. And takes you along with him. He nearly freezes to death in 30-below cold after becoming lost while profiling a trapper in the Alaskan tundra. In Nicaragua, where he discovers an untapped tarpon paradise, he also finds beer that comes\"with a napkin over the mouth of the bottle and a straw poked through the napkin, the local version of bug armor.\" Throughout, he is alive both to the ridiculousness and poignancy of life.You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck collects more than sixty of Heavey's best stories from over two decades at Field & Stream, as well as work from the Washington Post and Washingtonian. Filled with Heavey's trademark wit and candor, You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck is a far-ranging and enlightening read, tracing a life lived outdoors through the good, the bad, and the downright hilarious. From the Back Cover \"Bill Heavey is the man who put the 'lure' in failure. He's my kind of fisherman,deer hunter, and wing shot. Which is to say the, um, very amateur kind. But who wants to hear about some braggart's cast and blast triumphs when you can hear about Bill catching a 14-inch largemouth bass on pink Shakespeare Ladies' Spincast Combo? Even I have never done that. At least not sober.\"--P. J. O'ROURKE\"I've read Bill Heavey's page since the earliest days of my career. He's one of my all-time favorite writers. He's funny, fearless, and always up for anything. If he could fish as well as he writes, I'd be in trouble. Fortunately, he can't.\"--KEVIN VANDAM, winningest professional bass angler of all time\"If you think of Bill Heavey as 'just' a humorist, you'll be selling him short, but it's his intelligent, unforced humor that hits you first and stays with you the longest.\"--JOHN GIERACH, author of At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman and All Fishermen Are Liars\"Bill Heavey isn't just one of my favorite writers, though he is. He's also one of my heroes, proof that you can make an adult living by being witty and insightful and by spending an awful lot of time outdoors. That's the dream, and it's chronicled in this book. Buy three copies.\"--TUCKER CARLSON\"The art of the story, a casualty of the era of Internet fixation, is a thing of beauty in Bill Heavey's voice.\"--SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE\"Bill Heavey is James Thurber in camouflage overalls, an unrelenting geyser of slapstick comedy and serrated wit. If he doesn't make you laugh, consult a coroner.\"--JONATHAN MILES, author of Dear American Airlines About the Author Bill Heavey is an editor at large for Field & Stream , where he has written since 1993. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Men\u2019s Journal, Outside , Washington Post , Los Angeles Times , and Best American Magazine Writing . Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck The Further Adventures of America's Everyman Outdoorsman By Bill Heavey Grove Atlantic, Inc. Copyright \u00a9 2014 Bill HeaveyAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8021-2302-2 Contents Introduction, Part I: Taking the Bait, 1988\u20131999, Partners, Fallback Flats, Shopping Is Fun, but Not for Men, Monster in a Box, The Girls of Summer, A Chip off the Old Root, Can I Tell You Something?, A Bowhunting Obsession, The Waiting, It's a Bass World After All, A Morning in the Blind, Alone with a Pretty Woman in a Small Room with a Big Mirror, Birth, Death, and Doves, Truce and Consequences, Part II: It's Always November Somewhere, 2000-2004, Worthy, American Scene: Rod and Reel Repair, Tree-Stand Day, Finally ... Uncle Danny, Suddenly, She Was Gone, Killing Time, Bubble Boy, A Sportsman's Life: Drum Roll, Spring Canoe Tricks, The Kid in the Photo, None Dare Call It Happiness, Snoop, Paradise Lost, Only So Many, As Good as It Gets, Camp Rules, All Alone in Tarpon Paradise, Good Cop, Bald Cop, Part III: Not Entirely Untrue Stories, 2005\u20132009, The 2005 Elmer Awards, On Track, Lost in the Woods, Stalking the Highlands, Daycare Fishing, Always on Call, The Wild Card, Good Grief, A Sinking Feeling, I've Been Caught, Unsinkable, Have Gun, Will Travel?, What I Believe, You Can't Touch This, Current Crazy, Clay-Bird Brain, How to Be the Man, Part IV: I Wouldn't Try That if I Were Me, 2010\u20132014, The Last Mountain Man, Handy Man, Salute to Turkeys, None for All, Lizard Lust, School's Out, My Late Season, Making the Cut, Casting a Spell, Caulk This Way, Rash Words, Unholy Mackerel, Son of a Gun, The Old Warrior, Acknowledgments, CHAPTER 1 PARTNERS \"Think they might be moving,\" says a voice on the phone. It's Greg. We last spoke four months ago, but he talks as if the conversation has been interrupted by someone burping instead of winter. Every spring when the sun reaches a certain angle and the water's edging up toward 60 degrees, Greg and I seem to find each other. It's been like this for six years now. \"I'm working a job nearby,\" he continues, not waiting for me to say hello. \"Primer's got to dry for at least five hours. I got the boat on the car, and if I pick you up in fifteen \u2014\" \"'Preciate all this advance notice, bud,\" I interrupt sarcastically. \"Why?\" he asks, his voice full of innocent surprise. \"You busy looking through GQ to see how many pleats your pants are gonna have this summer? Want me to call you back in July?\" I'm already smiling. These are ritual insults, our way of saying we missed each other over the season of antifreeze, catalog fishing, and despair. Greg is an artist and self-employed floor refinisher who drives what's left of a midseventies station wagon the size of Brazil. In his part of town, the guy at the corner store passes your donuts through a Plexiglas wall with 9 mm spiderwebs on it. I, on the other hand, labor with the tips of my fingers in an office with windows that can only be opened by throwing heavy furniture through them, and live in an area where espresso shops have suddenly begun to grow like shower mold. In a universe without fish, we would probably not be friends. As it is, there are times when we're almost telepathic. \"Think they're still deep?\" I ask casually. \"I'm thinking shallow. Find someplace the sun will have warmed some rocks near \u2014\" \"Like that riprap below the ferry where it \u2014\" \"Nope. Motor-accessible. That'll be a mob scene.\" He thinks for a moment. \"'Member where that carp hit on a red shad Slug-Go last \u2014\" \"Too open,\" I tell him. \"No structure. What about that skinny water up \u2014\" \"Okay,\" he agrees. \"Yeah.\" \"Make it twenty minutes,\" I tell him. \"I got three rods to string up. And, uh, Greg?\" \"What?\" he asks impatiently. \"Park up the street. I don't want any of my friends seeing me get into your car.\" I hang up before he can get a word in. The fact is, of course, we enjoy each other. Greg routinely and publicly tells me I'm spineless yuppie scum who has sold his soul for mammon. (He especially likes to do this in the dives we stop in for coffee on the way home.) I return the favor, explaining that he digs the starving artist act because it lets him simultaneously dress like a slob and feel superior to people like me who have full-time jobs. But that's just the surface noise. Here are the important things I know about Greg: He will be ten minutes late; he will park right out front; and his car will smell like it always does \u2014 a mixture of resins and solvents, unwashed dog (a 140-pound bloodhound with minimal saliva control), and Berkley PowerBaits (the car doubles as a tackle box). Out on the water, he is one of the best guys with a spinning rod I've ever seen. Because he's wiry to start with and because waltzing a 250-pound floor sander has given him wrists like twin boa constrictors, he can throw a 1/16-ounce rig thirty yards back into overhanging trees and never have the lure rise five feet off the water, the fishing equivalent of hitting a one-iron three hundred yards. He's an aggressive caster, and he loses more lures than I do. But when he's hot, he can throw from his off side around a tree and drop a plug into an opening the size of a shoe box as if that lure wasn't even considering landing anywhere else. Like all fishermen, we both have our odd proclivities. I, for example, am fond beyond all reason of the four-inch white grub. I'm comfortable with it, I believe in it, and I generally make the fish prove they don't want it before I take it off one of my three active rods. Greg, on the other hand, is just plain bent. He will throw any crankbait in the book, as long as it's a Countdown Sinking or Original Floating model Rapala in silver or gold. These, Greg maintains with the demented reasonableness of people who only shop on Mars because everything is always on sale there, are the only hard-bodied lures that look like real fish. And yet he routinely throws plastics in shades they won't sell to minors except in New York City. One favorite crawfish pattern \u2014 hazardous-waste-orange claws on an about-to-be-sick-fuchsia body \u2014 could only have been thought up by someone deep inside the penal system of one of those Scandinavian countries where everybody goes crazy six months a year due to light deprivation. All of this is especially galling because Greg catches more fish than I do. Actually, I can handle that part. (I'm five years younger and better-looking.) The real problem in the relationship is that he can fish whenever he wants and I can't. This has necessitated my developing a number of chronic-but-unspecified medical problems that flare up on short notice April through November and seem to be related to barometric pressure and water temperature. (I think people at work know I'm faking, but as any criminal prosecutor will tell you, knowing and proving are two different animals.) Greg and I once tried getting together socially, that is to say with our girlfriends. But I think we did it more because we felt we were supposed to than because we actually wanted to. The results were predictable: a dinner of lasagna and long silences that neither of us has ever mentioned again. Last year, however, I heard a local gallery was having a show of his work. He didn't invite me; I just decided to show up. One of the paintings was a memorial triptych for a friend who died when a drunk's car jumped a curb and drove through his windshield. It was painted on a piece of ancient wood he'd gotten off the front of a boarded-up store in his neighborhood and combined some strange images: a detailed calendar of the waxing and waning of the moon over several months; painstakingly rendered bits of the cotton plant shown as seedling, bud, flower, and withered stalk; a fireman's yellow boot and, off in a corner, a larger image of the full moon in whose shadows you finally saw the face of the dead man smiling faintly at you, his name, simon, scratched below. It's a haunting piece, unflinching, charged with the knowledge of how quickly what we take for granted passes into nothingness. It's too bleak for people who want something that matches the green sofa in the den and doesn't take up too much wall space. It's like one of those books people admire but don't read. And Greg knows this, of course. But it's like the way he is about Rapalas \u2014 he's just not the compromising sort. The critic in a major newspaper the next day lauded the show, praising its \"elegiac power\" and calling my fishing buddy \"a master of metaphor.\" I didn't say anything about all this to Greg. He'd seen me that night and nodded, but I'd left him, dressed in clothes only slightly more stylish than what he fishes in, surrounded by men in black silk shirts buttoned up to their necks and women who had gone to great pains to make themselves look as if they'd been freeze-dried, brought back to life, and then painted by undertakers. But the next time we went fishing, Greg uncharacteristically threw a large silver Rapala high into a sycamore, where it spun around a limb four times, sealing its fate. \"Damn,\" he said. \"Just threw five bucks up a tree.\" We looked at it for a moment, waiting as if it might fall. It didn't. \"Look at it this way,\" I finally said. \"At least you're a master of metaphor.\" He looked at me to see if I was consoling him on the loss of a lure, acknowledging his art, or simply pulling his chain. I think he realized it was all three about the same time I did. He smiled, then bit the line, laid his rod across the thwarts, and began to paddle. \"Running outta daylight,\" he announced. \"We got time for one more stop on the way back. The big eddy by the island or the bar off the point?\" \"Your pick,\" I told him. He pondered. \"The sandbar,\" he finally murmured almost to himself as I picked up my paddle and fell to under the failing light. \"I'm betting they're moving into the shallows to feed.\" CHAPTER 2 FALLBACK FLATS It's the place you can get to in under an hour, the place that gets pounded like a dead tree at a woodpecker convention, the place big fish avoid, the place where the waters are stocked with compromise. It's the place you go when time is short and the act of fishing is more important than the catching. In short, it's your fallback. My personal version is a scenic portion of a good-sized river fifteen minutes from my front door. I could draw you its features in my sleep: the two-foot ledge running diagonal to the current; chunky little islands in the middle where some resident Canadas have opened their own fertilizer farm; a line of celery grass off a sandbar that tapers into the current the way the last hairs of your eyebrow peter out into the skin on your temple. While I'd hardly ever been skunked here, neither had I ever unhooked a smallmouth over thirteen inches in the ten years I'd been visiting. Until last Friday, that is. It was one of those days they couldn't put enough numbers on your paycheck to make it worthwhile, when you feel like you might pour sugar in your boss's gas tank unless you get away to a place where the only thing tugging at you will be a fish. I couldn't slide out early enough to make it to Lunker City, a two-hour drive. So I did what big people do: I waited until 4:59 and hit the gas for Fallback Flats. The way I look at it, thirteen inches of fish is a hell of a lot more than zero inches, which is what you catch if you stay home. Traffic was worse than usual and I knew I'd be lucky to get an hour on the water. Redemption came just as the sun was becoming tangled in the trees and three night herons flapped silently overhead (why is it getting to be that you see more kinds of wild birds near cities than in the country?). I was massaging the rocky bottom just upstream of the ledge with a four-inch Scoundrel \"live\"-colored worm (call me crazy, but I was actually fishing a worm-colored worm) Texas-rigged on an 1/8-ounce slip sinker, when there came the most tentative of taps, the twitch of a sleeping baby's finger. I raised my rod tip and held my breath, not quite sure I'd felt what I thought I'd felt. When I felt a second bump, I set that hook like it was connected to the backside of an IRS auditor. The ball of adrenaline on the other end began stripping six-pound on a diving break for points north and east and I just held on. My spinning reel was making a sound like someone pulling masking tape off a roll, my arms were shaking, and I knew instantly this was not a catfish because although the fish stayed down, the line was cutting all through the water in a kind of fevered handwriting that could only spell \"smallmouth.\" I couldn't remember if this was the rod I hadn't changed line on for three months or the fresh one, and I didn't have time to check. But I made a bunch of promises about product loyalty to whoever's line this was, because I wanted this fish. He jumped once, fifteen yards out and as big as I'd imagined, then put on a final surge close to the boat when he saw what I looked like. But I kept pressure on him, and then it was over. He was dark and heavy, and as soon as I lifted him the hook fell from his mouth and thocked the deck of the canoe as if he'd been holding on to it out of pure courtesy. \"Oh, buddy, look at you,\" I said, as if greeting an infant. I held him down gently with one hand and measured with the other. When stretched full out, my hand measures exactly nine inches from thumb to little finger. The bass was all of that and an inch more and just over three pounds on my right-hand heft-ometer. He stared back with his wild orange eye and snapped his body, refusing to be friends. How many thousand empty casts had I made at this place to arrive at the one connecting me to this creature? I had the sensation of watching an odometer turn over, of it all beginning again. I lowered him back into the water, my thumb still in his mouth, and swished him back and forth a couple of times while he lay stunned. I don't think anybody had ever treated him in this manner before. He wasn't used to it. Suddenly, with a vicious swipe of his head, he was gone. I held my hand up. There was a little line of blood coming from where he'd nicked my thumb. I sucked it and smiled. The sun had gone for the night, leaving a soft molten glow on the underside of the farthest clouds. I was back the next morning before the crowds, armed with fresh line and high hopes that the river hadn't undergone a mood swing during the night. It hadn't. I hammered them. I got 'em on the Scoundrel, on a three-inch white grub, on a six-inch red shad Slug-Go with insert weights. They weren't in the eddies or more obvious still water, but holding in the tiniest pockets in relatively strong current about four feet deep. None were as big as the one from the night before, but by fallback standards they were trophies. I didn't keep strict count, but I bet there were five fish in the 14\u201316-inch range, including one brawler who got loose in the boat and fought his way forward until he wrapped himself up in my sweatshirt. I fished for several hours, concentrating so hard it was like being in a trance. When I finally took a break, everything around me seemed more vivid: the throbbing of a drowned limb caught in the current, the river's endless self-applause as it completed a little ladder of riffles, the ancient scalloped rocks that look like shoulder blades. You can fish for years, not thinking about anything but where your next cast will be, and then look up and see everything around you as if it had just been created. That's how it felt that day. I wasn't able to get back to that place for a week, and then I found about what I expected, which wasn't much. But it was okay. I'd had my moment of glory, the mystery had been restored. About a month later a friend called up and said he'd like to get out on the water. \"I don't have much time,\" he said almost apologetically, \"but we could hit that place nearby on the river if you're up for it.\" \"You think we're gonna catch anything there?\" I asked, not having decided whether I wanted to tell what had really happened. \"Well, prob'ly not,\" he admitted. \"I just want to get out. But we gotta get lucky there someday.\" \"Come on over,\" I told him. \"We'll give it a shot.\" CHAPTER 3 SHOPPING IS FUN, BUT NOT FOR MEN I have just made the biggest mistake of my life. I have agreed to go shopping with my current girlfriend. \"C'mon,\" she urged. \"We'll start small. A shirt and a pair of pants. You dress like you haven't bought any clothes in twenty years.\" Actually, it's only been ten years. It was at Sunny's Surplus, the one in Georgetown. I bought nine identical pairs of black socks. I understand that is also where Ralph Nader shops. We leave behind the world of sunlight and fresh air as we descend into the fifth circle of Mazza Gallerie in my Honda. Lose your ticket stub and you stay here until Jesus comes back. \"Where are we going?\" I ask as calmly as possible. \"Filene's,\" says my companion. \"You'll like it. It's cheap.\" We take the elevator up with a young women's professional gum-chewing team. All have on the kind of canvas coats men wear on dairy farms. \"Tourists?\" I whisper. \"No. Those are barn jackets. They're in.\" On the way to Filene's we pass stores that are anything but cheap. Places that sell only Belgian chocolate molded into shapes like a tennis racket or a woman's leg or a Mercedes hood ornament. Places that sell platinum fountain pens shaped like overstuffed sausages and endorsed by men who have walked on the moon. A store that sells only bonsai trees. There is a sign in the window: will hold your tree while you shop. Why bother? They could just pin it to your lapel. It's warm and airless in Filene's, which appears to operate without sales staff, just people who put merchandise back on hangers after it has been flung on the ground and trampled. Men, I am reminded as my brain begins to shut down, are basically hunters. We like to focus on a single thing to the exclusion of all else, stalk or run it to ground, and then kill it with spear or credit card. Then we go watch television. Women are gatherers. They have wide-angle vision and can actually look at hundreds of things simultaneously, imagining how they would taste or feel, what they could be combined with, and how often they would need to be dry-cleaned. What's more, women can do this for virtually unlimited amounts of time. My friend, I'm vaguely aware, is as charged as the Energizer Bunny, while I've got all the zip of a man on a chloroform binge. (Continues...) Excerpted from You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck by Bill Heavey . Copyright \u00a9 2014 Bill Heavey. Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Humor & Entertainment", "Humor"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 18.97}, {"asin": "1607746999", "title": "Donabe: Classic and Modern Japanese Clay Pot Cooking [A One-Pot Cookbook]", "author": "Kyle Connaughton", "description": "Review \u201cDonabe represents so much more than simply cooking food. It\u2019s the creation of an experience that is completely unique, one that brings together the people you love in a moment that not only will satisfy your appetite, but nourishes your soul. This book will feed your spirit for years to come.\u201d-Morgan Spurlock, Filmmaker, Foodie & Donabe Enthusiast About the Author NAOKO TAKEI MOORE is a Japanese home-cooking expert who teaches cooking classes in Los Angeles, California. Her company, toiro kitchen, sells donabe and Japanese artisan products, with a mission of promoting donabe in the U.S. Visit her blog Happy Donabe Life at naokomoore.com.\u00a0KYLE CONNAUGHTON began his culinary career in L.A.\u00a0with an apprenticeship at one of the oldest Japanese restaurants in the city and continued training in both pastry and savory at Spago Beverly Hills, The Dining Room at Ritz Carlton, Lucques, Hama Sushi, and A.O.C. This was followed by several years cooking in Japan for the famed chef Michel Bras and in numerous traditional Japanese cuisine restaurants. In 2006, Kyle joined Heston Blumenthal to become the Head Chef of Research and Development for the Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen. He is a contributor to the \"Modernist Cuisine\" series and a co-developer of the Culinary Science Bachelors Degree program for the Culinary Institute of America. Kyle is currently the owner-chef of\u00a0Single Thread Farm-Restaurant-Inn, a 3 Michelin-starred restaurant. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Advantages of Donabe Cooking Many people who use donabe say it makes food taste better. The secret is the material: clay. Donabe takes a much longer time to build heat and cool down than other cookware, such as stainless steel. This characteristic is the key to all the natural flavor donabe can draw out of straightforward ingredients. Because donabe builds heat slowly, it allows the flavors of a dish to build gradually. Donabe can help make your mushroom soup taste more savory and your rice taste sweeter. When a dish is higher in natural umami flavor, less seasoning and less fat are needed to complete the flavors. We like to say that donabe is a friendly cookware for health-conscious people. Once the heat has built within the donabe, you can lower the flame and it will maintain a steady and gentle heat distribution. The donabe also works like a cushion for that heat, taking the direct flame from the stove and evenly distributing it across the surface and to the food. During cooking, donabe\u2019s glaze promotes natural far-infrared radiation, which is the same effect that glowing charcoal gives to food. Donabe ware is known for its remarkable heat retention. It cools down slowly, so it stays warm on the table for a long time. This trait also makes it perfect for cooking with carryover heat. That\u2019s why donabe is ideal for slow-cooking. Donabe is an energy-efficient and eco-friendly cooking vessel because, once heated, it requires little energy to function. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Regional & International"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 25.99}], "target_asin": "B0002D6D8S"}
{"user_id": "AFUM3U574NBZPRKBT75SW2V2VVIQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0425208885", "title": "Lord Perfect (Carsington Family Series)", "author": "Loretta Chase", "description": "From Publishers Weekly In the crowded field of Regency romances, Chase's work ( The Lion's Daughter ) is distinguished by its ironic tone, witty writing and narrative drive; her latest is no exception. Benedict Carsington, the Viscount Rathbourne, has the reputation of a perfect gentleman, which in 1821 London society means controlled, haughty and above reproach. By contrast, Bathsheba Wingate is about as disreputable as a Wingate gets, having been born to the notorious DeLucey branch of the family, a \"completely untrustworthy\" bunch who have \"made themselves famous for their scandals.\" Widowed by a disinherited man, Bathsheba struggles to make ends meet and to provide every opportunity for her strong-willed daughter, Olivia\u2014who, much to her mother's dismay, absconds in search of buried treasure, accompanied by Benedict's nephew and informal ward. Drawn to each other from the moment they meet, Bathsheba and Benedict strive to suppress their desires as they chase the little rascals right into the pristine stronghold of the disapproving Wingates. Readers will relish the loosening of Benedict's perfect control and the endearing, dry humor with which he and Bathsheba confront their inevitable downfall\u2014as well as their satisfying redemption. (Mar.) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* Benedict Carsington, Viscount Rathbourne, is in perfect control of his life until he meets Bathsheba, one of the \"Dreadful DeLuceys.\" One encounter with the lovely widow, and he begins to wonder if his life is not so much perfect as boring. Benedict is certain that he can resist becoming involved with her, but he soon finds himself hiring Bathsheba to teach drawing to his nephew, Peregrine Dalmay. Then Bathsheba's impetuous daughter, Olivia, convinces Peregrine to join her quest to find the DeLucey family pirate treasure, forcing Benedict to become even more entangled with Bathsheba. As the two set off across England to retrieve the wayward young fortune hunters, Benedict is forced to admit that he is not as immune to the tart-tongued Bathsheba as he would like to think. With its splendidly original characters, exquisitely sensual romance, and wonderfully witty writing, the third of RITA Award-winning Chase's fabulous historical Regencies to feature the romantic comeuppance of one of the Carsington men is simply perfect. John Charles Copyright \u00a9 American Library Association. All rights reserved Review One of the finest and most delightful writers in romance. (Mary Jo Putney)Get ready for the biggest Sensation ever from \"One of the Finest Romance Writers of All Time\" About the Author Loretta Chase holds a B.A. from Clark University, where she majored in English and minored unofficially in visual art. Her past lives include part-time teaching at Clark and a Dickensian six-month experience as a meter maid. In the course of moonlighting as a corporate video scriptwriter, she fell under the spell of a producer who lured her into writing novels . . . and marrying him. The union has resulted in more than a dozen books and a number of awards, including the Romance Writers of America\u2019s RITA Award.\u00a0 You can talk to Loretta via her email address Author@LorettaChase.com, or visit her website at www.LorettaChase.com. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Dramas & Plays"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0451470478", "title": "Vipers Rule (A Skulls Creek Novel)", "author": "Stephanie Tyler", "description": "Review Praise for the novels of Stephanie Tyler \u201cA raw, sexy world.\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author Maya Banks\u201cKept me on the edge of my seat\u2026breathtaking danger, sizzling romance, and unexpected twists.\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author Alexandra Ivy Praise for Vipers Run \u201cTyler opens the throttle on this fast-moving biker-themed erotic romance.\u2026Tyler brings her polished style to this red-hot page-turner.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cThink Sons of Anarchy with a lot more romance. No one can write a gritty bad boy like Tyler, and here she pulls out all the stops. Readers will find a lot of steamy sex and a raw, dark edginess they\u2019ve never encountered before. An exciting beginning to a new series.\u201d\u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cAn exciting and very hot story\u2026a very hot, steamy romance\u2026filled with suspense, excitement, heated sexual scenes, a great couple, and a well-written story.\u201d\u2014 The Reading Cafe About the Author Stephanie Tyler is the New York Times bestselling author of the Skulls Creek, Section 8, and Eternal Wolf Clan series. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PRAISE FOR VIPERS RUN Also by Stephanie Tyler SIGNET ECLIPSE For my MC-loving readers\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Prologue Heavy metal music blasted through the speakers of the sweet, cherry red Ford Mustang as Tals took the ramp to the parkway in a swift motion and then really let her loose on the open road. It was nearly one in the morning. Maddie wouldn\u2019t notice the car was missing. She might see that the odometer was higher and her gas tank was almost empty, but he had a feeling she didn\u2019t notice things like that. She was surrounded by people who did things for her. He was mostly pissed she wouldn\u2019t let him in to be one of those people. But at sixteen, he knew he was too young to feel that strongly about any girl\u2014though that didn\u2019t stop him from knowing something about him and Maddie was just \u201cright.\u201d Obviously he was thinking about Maddie too much to notice the police car silently trailing him. He did notice when the lights flashed and the sirens wailed, and instinctively, he sped the hell up\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. but there was a cop waiting at the next mile marker, blocking the road. Fuck me. His heart was still racing hours later when Maddie came into the police station, alone. She made eye contact with him while he was handcuffed to the bench with a few drunk and disorderlies. He smirked. Because hey, she\u2019d definitely noticed him, and she\u2019d been working damned hard to pretend she hadn\u2019t. Long dark hair. Hazel eyes. A perfect body for the flowing hippie shirts she always wore with ripped-up jeans. It was summertime, and her flip-flops showed her toenails, which were painted with blue polish. She was so fucking perfect, it made him ache. It was worse when she looked at him, and she did look at him, all the time, when he was supposed to not notice. But it was the oldest story in the book\u2014bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks falls for rich girl who can\u2019t be with him. But she wanted to. And who said the story had to end badly? \u201cAre you pressing charges?\u201d one of the policemen asked Maddie, and she had the damned nerve to consider it. That was the flaw in his plan\u2014he\u2019d never figured she\u2019d make that move. Shit. She shook her head no, a tight expression on her face. She had to sign some papers, and she kept her back to him while she was at the desk. When she walked out, she didn\u2019t make eye contact. She hadn\u2019t sent in her grandmother\u2014or her father. It could\u2019ve been worse. Way worse. Not that getting arrested was ever good. Dad would be proud, though. \u201cChrist,\u201d he muttered out loud as he waited for his ride home. His one phone call had, of course, been to Tenn, who\u2019d been at work and unable to get any messages\u2014or leave the job\u2014until he was finished filming. So Tals had hung out outside the police station, sitting on another bench, watching the faces of the men and women who entered. Prisoners were brought around the back, so these people were here to see loved ones\u2014they had that frazzled look, because they were justifiably worried and had no clue what they\u2019d find beyond those doors. He was familiar with being on both sides, thanks to his father, who regularly put him, his mother and his brother through nights like this. Tals had managed to stay clean until now. That wasn\u2019t to say he hadn\u2019t done things to warrant being inside, but he\u2019d been really good about not getting caught. \u201cSeriously, Tals?\u201d Tals looked up at his brother. They were fraternal twins, although there was no denying they were brothers. Tenn was a little taller, and his eyes were brown instead of blue like Tals\u2019s were. But they had the same facial features that garnered plenty of attention. \u201cYeah, seriously.\u201d Tenn sighed and together they walked across the parking lot to their mom\u2019s car, an ancient station wagon that she was convinced was too unsafe to drive. She took cabs back and forth to work, and Tals was convinced she had no clue that he and Tenn drove the thing on a regular basis. She had no clue about a lot of things, but hell, talking about her was one of the few things that could get him and Tenn fighting. \u201cAnyway, thanks for coming to get me.\u201d \u201cNo problem.\u201d Tenn put the key in the ignition, and both said a silent prayer that the thing would start. After a tense few moments, it did, and they were headed through town, passing the exclusive community called Jessamine, where all the shit had started. \u201cBut all that over a girl?\u201d \u201cOver a car,\u201d Tals corrected. \u201cYou can bullshit a lot of people, Talon . Pretty much everyone but me.\u201d Tals stewed over that for a minute. \u201cShe\u2019s different, Tenn .\u201d It was Tenn\u2019s turn to correct him. \u201cShe\u2019s rich. She\u2019s trouble.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re not wrong,\u201d was all Tals could manage. \u201cDon\u2019t tell Preach.\u201d \u201cWhich part?\u201d \u201cAll of it.\u201d Chapter 1 Fifteen years later Axl Rose\u2019s screaming falsetto screeched through the speakers as Tals drove the rebuilt 1974 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am SD455 nose to nose with the equally hot-rodded 1968 Ford Mustang GT500KR. The cars were important, but the drivers were the real part of this race, and Tals had the lack of fear and love of speed that always gave him the advantage. Miles from home, in a stolen car in an illegal street race was the perfect end to the year. Smoke billowed from his exhaust as the car roared under him. His hands gripped the wheel so tightly he knew they\u2019d ache tomorrow, and the engine alternately purred and rumbled as he took the tight corners on this stretch of now-deserted road. He was never as free as he was during these moments. Treating the streets like a racetrack. These illegal street races were run on a dime, with an eye toward protecting its participants. He wasn\u2019t supposed to be racing like this. Or stealing cars for Havoc. But now that Cage was back as the MC\u2019s XO, the second in charge, Tals was freed up from some of the heavier MC responsibilities and had more free time on his hands. He was back to being enforcer of Vipers, something he excelled at. His rep preceded him, so not too many guys wanted to deal with him flexing his muscles. A bored Tals was a really bad thing. Especially for all the people set to lose major money tonight when he won. Which he would. The course laid out for the race would take no more than ten minutes\u2014ten minutes that would alternately feel like a lifetime and fly by, the last mile stretching straight out in front of him. Although he could never shake off his status as an MC member\u2014never wanted to, either, since he\u2019d fought damned hard for it\u2014tonight he wasn\u2019t Tals from Vipers MC, an enforcer, repo man or ex-Army. Tonight he was completely free. Tonight he was also winning the fucking race, which he accomplished with a heavy foot on the gas, a tight swerve into the final stretch and balls of steel to take on the residential street at 110 mph. His body still shook from the adrenaline when he eased the car to a stop about a hundred feet past the actual finish line. He took a few deep breaths, head back, eyes closed, trying to convince himself the car had stopped moving. It took about that long for the crowds to reach him. When he finally pushed out of the car, he found himself surrounded by the men and women who\u2019d parked their cars along the sides of the finish line\u2014at least forty cars and far more people, all feeling the vibe of the race and feeding off it. Music blasted, women danced on cars\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and it would all continue until the police got wind of it. Tals gave it twenty minutes and planned to be gone in fifteen. He headed to find Bear, pocketing his winnings along the way and handing the keys back to Mel, who\u2019d been the one to steal the car Tals had raced. \u201cGood job, man.\u201d Mel clapped him on the shoulder. \u201cAlways a blast. You taking her back home?\u201d Mel sighed. \u201cMaybe. I\u2019m going to take her for another ride myself before I do, but I knew she\u2019d like you better.\u201d Tals ran his hand along the nearest car\u2019s bumper. \u201cThey always do.\u201d \u201cThings good at home?\u201d Mel asked. Tals smiled. \u201cLiving the dream.\u201d Mel snorted. \u201cGive my best to Preacher\u2014don\u2019t tell him about the car.\u201d Tals had no intention of doing that, although he didn\u2019t doubt Preach would get wind of tonight\u2019s race. Guy had radar for this shit, especially where Tals was involved. Thankfully, though, things were back to normal at Vipers. And when things were this quiet, it meant more time for him to get into trouble, which was really the kind of shit he lived for. And that\u2019s why he hadn\u2019t been able to think of any better way to ring in the New Year than a fast car, fast cash and heading back to Vipers to share in the celebration. He finally found his fellow MC member\u2014and Bear was having a blast in that way only a red-blooded American male could\u2014without reservations. Unabashed, with no limits. Hell, Tals had been like that once. No, he\u2019d appeared to be like that, and probably most still saw him that way. Except for the MC members he was closest to. Preach, Cage, Rocco and Bear? They all saw through him like he was fucking paper. And although he\u2019d never discussed it with any of them, especially not Bear, the guy still knew. He took care of Tals as much as Tals took care of him. And Tals pretended not to notice\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and Bear seemed to prefer it that way. \u201cTals, you got a call from Sal,\u201d Bear told him, handing him his phone. Tals never wanted any distractions while he drove, but now, with his adrenaline roaring, a little repo would work out just fine. \u201cTime to go to work.\u201d But hell, work wasn\u2019t really work to him, and he had several jobs, most of which fell under the Vipers MC umbrella. Repo\u2019ing was one of them, although his main work for the club involved enforcing. Keeping order, imposing rules and justice. He liked that role a lot. \u201cNo one else will take this motherfucking job,\u201d Sal was grousing in his ear. \u201cYou know anything about that?\u201d \u201cNope,\u201d Tals said, not bothering to try for innocent\u2014didn\u2019t work, even when he was. \u201cI\u2019ll keep trying.\u201d \u201cFind her.\u201d \u201cHey, I\u2019m better than nothing.\u201d \u201cNot by much.\u201d Sal hung up in his ear, and Tals sighed. \u201cWhere\u2019re we going?\u201d Bear asked. Tals looked down at the money roll, then over at Mel. \u201cYou stay and have fun. I\u2019ll take this one\u2014an easy job.\u201d \u201cYou sure?\u201d Bear asked, even as he was allowing two women to pull him back into the street-side celebration. Tals grinned, shook his head. \u201cYeah, I\u2019m sure.\u201d *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0* The job was several hours outside his usual territory. He\u2019d initially been tagged for it when he was doing a difficult repo close by. Sal said taking Cathy\u2019s car would be an easy reward. There was nothing easy about taking a single mother\u2019s only mode of transportation. And so he\u2019d warned her, had initially walked away from the job, reporting to Sal that the address he had was bad. He\u2019d done that once more, buying her several months, but, like she\u2019d told him, she couldn\u2019t create money from air. \u201cWhere the fuck\u2019s your old man?\u201d he\u2019d asked, motioning to the three kids playing on the patch of grass outside the motel room. She\u2019d rolled her eyes. \u201cPrison. Again. Sometimes I think he likes it better in there than out here. You know how that goes.\u201d Yeah, Tals knew that all too well. It was easier for most of them on the inside. And even though he got it, this time he would need to take the car back\u2014she was too far behind in payments and he couldn\u2019t keep other guys off her ass forever. Tals could only threaten so many of them before one of them would ignore him. He\u2019d make them regret it, of course, but she\u2019d be stuck. He knocked on the door softly, because it was so late. And she opened it, in pajamas, her eyes tired. There\u2019d been no New Year\u2019s celebration for her. He gave her credit for opening the door for him. \u201cGotta take it this time, Cathy.\u201d Her eyes watered, but she refused to let the tears fall. \u201cYou bought me a lot of time. I can\u2019t be mad at you.\u201d But she was\u2014and he was on his way to becoming just another in a long line of men who\u2019d disappointed her. She reached to the chair next to the door and handed him the keys. \u201cI\u2019m sure you know where it\u2019s parked.\u201d \u201cShow me. And you\u2019ve got to empty it anyway.\u201d She sighed as she stepped out of the motel room, shutting the door behind her. \u201cI never leave anything in it, since I\u2019ve been waiting for this to happen.\u201d It was parked a few doors down. Tals looked it over, started it up easily and then got out. \u201cAre we all set?\u201d Cathy asked, eyeing the door to the room where the kids slept. \u201cOne more thing.\u201d He handed her a set of keys and an envelope. And then he pointed to the car he\u2019d released from the flatbed and parked right in front of her door. It was nothing special to look at, needed a paint job that Mel was supposed to do, but the engine purred like a baby. It was a good, strong car. \u201cTals, I can\u2019t afford\u2014\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s yours. First month\u2019s insurance is paid\u2014it\u2019s registered under your name.\u201d \u201cTals\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cFor the kids,\u201d he said roughly. \u201cDon\u2019t fuck it up.\u201d She smiled gently, then touched his cheek like a mother would. Like his mother used to. \u201cYou\u2019re a good boy, Tals. Now try to take your own advice.\u201d He couldn\u2019t help it\u2014he laughed. *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0* He had another three-hour ride back to Skulls Creek\u2014he\u2019d miss the party at the clubhouse, but hell, he didn\u2019t care. Every night could be a party for him, if he wanted it to be. But it was a new year, and things felt different. He wasn\u2019t really sure why. Maybe because Cage was back with Vipers, but nothing had changed within the South Carolina city itself. He dialed his brother\u2019s number now, then pulled the flatbed onto the highway as it rang. He and Tenn had grown up on what was most definitely the wrong side of the tracks in Skulls. But now there really wasn\u2019t a wrong side\u2014just an MC side. Skulls was thriving. There wasn\u2019t violence or squalor, in no small part due to Preacher taking over Vipers. Still, they worked hard to keep out of trouble, mainly in the form of drug-pushing MCs, and Tals knew most of the Skulls community didn\u2019t fully understand or appreciate the Vipers\u2019 role in that. Preach always said he didn\u2019t give a shit, but being treated like he was a criminal definitely got to him. Tals had been looked on as one for as long as he could remember, but he\u2019d also always gotten a lot of interest from the women of Skulls. And the Army. And Vipers. Havoc too. And Havoc allowed him to indulge in stealing and racing cars without bringing the law into Skulls or on Vipers. Vipers relied on vigilante justice. Old-fashioned, but very effective. \u201cHappy New Year, brother.\u201d Tenn\u2019s voice sounded muffled\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and slightly drunk. And Tenn rarely drank, so Tals wasn\u2019t sure if this was a good sign or not. \u201cYou out celebrating?\u201d \u201cI was. Then I caught a job.\u201d \u201cNever ends, right?\u201d Tenn went quiet, but there was obviously a party going on in the background. \u201cHow\u2019d you spend your night?\u201d \u201cThrew a party for the guys who weren\u2019t working,\u201d Tenn said. \u201cThey invited some friends\u2014it got bigger than I thought. Sometimes I forget how young these guys are.\u201d \u201cNot too young for you,\u201d Tals said. \u201cYeah.\u201d Tenn\u2019s voice had that far-off quality to it, but true to form, he shook himself out of it before he got too maudlin. \u201cLove you, bro. Be safe.\u201d \u201cLove you, Tenn\u2014be safe.\u201d It was the same every time. Just because they didn\u2019t live in the same house anymore didn\u2019t mean they weren\u2019t as close. It\u2019d been painful when Tenn moved away\u2014Tals swore he felt it physically. Having Cage gone for months had left Tals hanging in the wind, and even though Bear had been there to steady him, it hadn\u2019t been easy. No matter how much he tried to fill the space, it never worked. \u201cI\u2019ll change that this year.\u201d He wasn\u2019t sure how. Maybe he\u2019d give more women a chance\u2014fuck the one-night stands. Try to open his horizons and look for a real old lady. The whole one-night-stand shit hadn\u2019t ever been that easy for him\u2014the mechanics were, because orgasms were never bad, as was finding willing women. But if he added up all the one-night stands\u2014and fuck, that could take a long time\u2014he\u2019d realize something was missing. Hell, he didn\u2019t even have to add them up to know that. It was a space he\u2019d never filled, a hole in his heart that never healed. As much as he tried to wall it up, compartmentalize it, he could never separate it for long. New Year\u2019s Eve always made him think of Maddie\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. no matter what he did since then, what country he was in, whether he was partying, stone-cold sober, in the desert, fighting another MC member or stealing a car, Tals could no more not think about Maddie on New Year\u2019s Eve than he could stop breathing. Chapter 2 The battle cry of \u201cHappy New Year!\u201d echoed all around her, ringing through the air amid the clink of champagne glasses and cheers. Maddie held up her glass of champagne and forced a smile. Maddie Wells had done that so much tonight her face hurt, but at this point it was plastered on. Still was when her husband\u2014Hugh Montgomery\u2014sidled up to her and announced, \u201cMaddie, life of the party\u2014and the most gorgeous woman in the room, as usual.\u201d In actuality, she wasn\u2019t the life of the party, and Hugh always threw in the part about her looks. At this point, it rang hollow. She smiled at him, noted the attention they were receiving, aware of the flashbulbs popping in their faces. Hugh posed, the way he always did. She couldn\u2019t wait to kick her heels off and get out of this room, this building. She was far more comfortable behind the scenes. She never needed the credit. It wasn\u2019t about that. But lately she\u2019d begun to overshadow the work. Maybe she should\u2019ve expected it, since she married a man who owned the company where she\u2019d been climbing the ladder for ten years. But Hugh had been pulling her into the spotlight, no matter how much she protested. Tonight was another example. Suddenly, she was the subject of photographs and nonstop speculation. The more Hugh paraded her out to the press, so seemingly proud\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. the wider the chasm grew between them. She hadn\u2019t realized that it was irreparably broken, or at least had refused to admit it to herself until last month\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. She left a charity dinner hours early to meet him upstate\u2014eschewing the car he\u2019d sent for her in favor of a rental. It wasn\u2019t what she\u2019d pick for herself but rather a staid sedan, but she was in control and alone. Wind in her hair, singing, tank top and jeans\u2014she was in high school again. Not the happiest of times and yet, somehow, at her worst moments, she came back again and again to that time. Mistakes. Regrets. Recriminations. She opened the door, prepared to have a nice dinner with Hugh\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and ended up surprising him and his other woman. One of them, anyway. On paper they were the perfect couple, the up-and-coming marketing exec\u2014who did everything from picking the new lines to meeting with buyers\u2014falls in love with the CFO of the entire company. Obviously, real life had nothing on paper; real life trumped paper. In fact, real life was a tall, thin redheaded model who trampled over it with her stilettos. And a blonde who fit the same pattern. And, Maddie was sure, if she did some digging, she\u2019d find more\u2014all, of course, of the \u201cshe didn\u2019t mean anything to me\u201d variety, according to Hugh. Which was bullshit. \u201cIt meant something to me!\u201d she\u2019d told him quietly, and then she\u2019d taken off her ring calmly, surprising herself with her restraint. She\u2019d placed it on the small table between them. And then she\u2019d picked up a vase of flowers and thrown it at his head. When he managed to duck\u2014just in time\u2014she picked up anything else she could find and continued blindly throwing until she was tired and he\u2019d locked himself in his bathroom. Then she\u2019d packed, thrown what she could into large wheeled bags, emptied out her makeup and jewelry (only pieces she\u2019d bought herself) and then she\u2019d called for her own car. \u201cI don\u2019t want anything from you,\u201d she\u2019d told him before she\u2019d moved herself into a hotel. He stared at her oddly, the hurt in his voice apparent when he said, \u201cYou never did.\u201d You never did. God, that truth hit her right between the eyes. She had to take some of the blame for this failed relationship, and her part in it had her far more upset than his part. Which was, of course, a symptom of the larger problem surrounding their marriage. Maybe I\u2019m not meant to be married. Or in a relationship. Because she was very much married to her work\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. or at least, she had been, until she\u2019d started feeling restless and unfulfilled last year, in a way she hadn\u2019t been able to articulate or explain. It hung over her like a cloud, until it began to weigh her down. She\u2019d actually begun to call in sick to work, something she hadn\u2019t done in\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Something she hadn\u2019t ever done, not even when she had been sick. And that\u2019s when the rumors started. No matter how often she denied them to well-meaning friends, no matter how many times she and Hugh stepped out together over the past month in their just-for-show moments\u2014because he\u2019d asked her to stay in New York through the end of the season and this New Year\u2019s Eve Charity Ball the company hosted every year, and she\u2019d complied. She\u2019d put her wedding ring back on. She\u2019d even moved back into their penthouse, and he\u2019d moved into the guest bedroom, or else people would definitely talk. In the meantime, Hugh promised the divorce wouldn\u2019t be contentious. It would remain private, and they\u2019d issue a joint statement. He\u2019d had no idea she\u2019d already been planning on resigning. \u201cI\u2019ve done more than my share for charity,\u201d she murmured to Hugh now, pretended to brush his lapel when really, she was dropping her wedding ring in the pocket with his boutonniere. \u201cDon\u2019t call, don\u2019t write, unless it\u2019s through your lawyer.\u201d On the way out, Maddie passed by Lettie, a woman who, if not exactly a friend, was someone she\u2019d come up alongside in this company. She knew, better than anyone, that Maddie hadn\u2019t slept her way to the top. She was trustworthy. Maddie felt guilty for not telling her that, effective tonight, she was resigning from the company, but at the moment, Lettie\u2019s focus was firmly elsewhere. \u201cWho\u2019s that?\u201d Maddie couldn\u2019t help but ask, since Lettie had locked eyes with a handsome man decidedly underdressed for the occasion\u2014and looking damned good making that statement in a leather jacket and jeans. \u201cWho cares?\u201d Lettie murmured, not tearing her gaze from the man. He smiled at her, motioned to the balcony. In return, she nodded and began walking his way. Maddie pulled her back. \u201cYou can\u2019t be serious.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m very serious. And very single. Don\u2019t worry\u2014I\u2019ll keep it PG on the balcony. These corporate stiffs couldn\u2019t handle it.\u201d \u201cLast time I looked, you were corporate.\u201d \u201cThanks for not calling me a stiff.\u201d Lettie glanced at her, slightly flushed with alcohol. \u201cWhat\u2019s the problem? You never had a bad-boy phase?\u201d She said, \u201cNo,\u201d quickly. Too quickly, since her mind had already gone straight to Tals, as it had more than ever this past month, like she knew her fate was sealed and she was actively avoiding thinking about it until the very last moment. For them it had always been about fate. \u201cYou should never, ever play poker. I don\u2019t know how you made it so far in the corporate world, the way you let all your emotions show on your face.\u201d \u201cI do not,\u201d Maddie protested. In truth, she always had, but she\u2019d been better at it before last month. Now she found herself unable to care about the career\u2014the life\u2014she\u2019d so carefully built for herself. Around herself, like impenetrable walls. She\u2019d escaped the family gates, but she\u2019d gated herself in, just the same. Lettie seemed to have forgotten about her own bad boy and was now firmly focused on Maddie. \u201cAnd you\u2019re lying about the bad-boy phase.\u201d \u201cI never acted on it. Big difference.\u201d Another partial lie about that long-ago New Year\u2019s celebration. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the problem. You\u2019re with all these high-powered guys who\u2019re too selfish to care about anything in the bedroom but themselves,\u201d Lettie pointed out. Instead of reminding Lettie that she was married (and wasn\u2019t that the biggest irony, that she couldn\u2019t even get the words out any longer?), Maddie asked, \u201cAnd bad boys don\u2019t do that?\u2019 \u201cOh honey, no, they don\u2019t.\u201d She thought about Tals\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. the way the girls in school used to preen when he came around on his bike. The way she used to as well\u2014secretly, though. Because she wasn\u2019t going to give him the satisfaction. \u201cGo for it, Lettie. Have fun for both of us.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t have to tell me twice.\u201d Lettie made her way to the balcony, and Maddie watched her as the elevator doors closed, effectively cutting her off from the world that had been hers for ten years, and coveted by her for many before that. Her car was already waiting at the valet station. She\u2019d left instructions for it to be pulled around at 12:30 a.m. sharp. It was packed and ready, and she got in, ball gown and all, kicked her heels off and took off in her Mustang GT. She always bought Mustangs, and they were always some variation on cherry red, like the one Tals had stolen. She hadn\u2019t liked the color much when she\u2019d gotten it. After Tals had driven it, though, she swore something happened to the damned car. It was almost supercharged, like it remembered him and wanted to be driven the way he\u2019d driven it. Which was ridiculous. And didn\u2019t stop her thinking it every single time. And didn\u2019t stop her from buying this car again. Vintage model, though. Like that would make it so different. \u201cTime to turn the brain off, Maddie,\u201d she told herself out loud as she cranked the radio up and barreled onto the highway, the car revving, like it was telling her to get her shit together and enjoy the ride. She gripped the wheel with her buttery-soft leather fingerless racing gloves\u2014in bright red\u2014and she systematically unpinned her hair so it hung loosely, tumbling over her shoulders. It got warmer the farther south she drove, and she opened the windows at one point so her hair whipped around her shoulders as she pushed the speed limits. When she\u2019d first planned on quitting her job and moving out\u2014and on from Hugh\u2014she hadn\u2019t been sure of her destination. Not at first. But then \u201cStop Draggin\u2019 My Heart Around\u201d came on the radio when she was on the way to their house upstate after leaving the New Year\u2019s Eve party\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and she promptly turned the car around and headed to Jessamine\u2014aka Skulls Creek, South Carolina. If anyone had told her before now that she\u2019d be escaping back to her family home, she\u2019d have laughed. Now she couldn\u2019t think of a better place to go, although it was less about her family and more about the man the song reminded her of: Tals Garrity. You don\u2019t even know if he\u2019s still in Skulls Creek. No, that wasn\u2019t true at all. She did know. Grams had brought him up in their last few conversations, almost like she might\u2019ve predicted this would happen. Like she somehow knew that, no matter how hard she tried to not follow in her mother\u2019s footsteps, Maddie had some of that flightiness, that irresponsibility in her that she\u2019d fought so hard to banish. And maybe she did somehow know that her soon-to-be ex-husband was cheating on her. Because Maddie herself had no goddamned clue. Then again, she\u2019d been working so hard over the past years, it was a wonder she knew his name. So was her marriage everything she\u2019d thought it would be? Definitely not. Had she thought Hugh would cheat on her? Never. She knew he was in the company of young, beautiful women all the time, but for her, marriage was forever. She\u2019d told him that when he\u2019d proposed, and as a child of divorce himself, he\u2019d agreed. So much for that. She hadn\u2019t smiled like this in at least a month, starting with the day she\u2019d discovered her ex was sleeping around with everybody in his path. She wasn\u2019t sure if it would\u2019ve been better had it been one woman for an extended period of time instead of the constant stream of women, all younger than she\u2019d been when they\u2019d first met. She was five years older and wiser\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and obviously wilder, if taking off like this was any indication. And ten hours later, she was almost\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. home. Her childhood home. Right now she was homeless, almost a guest in her own life. She turned the radio up in response, a Stevie Nicks song coming on when she needed it most. She sang along with it, her voice a throaty rasp into the wind. She wasn\u2019t the best singer, but music had always brought her more comfort than anything. She was free, and it was New Year\u2019s. If that wasn\u2019t fate, she didn\u2019t know what was. Chapter 3 It was close to four in the morning and Tals was on the final stretch to Skulls Creek. As he rounded a sharp turn on the highway, he saw taillights in front of him\u2014taillights to a Ford Mustang GT he\u2019d always been partial to. When he saw the back tire rock, his hands tight- ened, because he knew what was about to happen, and he watched helplessly as the tire blew, making the car fishtail like crazy. It was lucky it happened on a quiet highway. Also lucky that whoever was behind the wheel knew how to handle the car, because it quickly stabilized, slowed and pulled to the side of the road. Tals followed, drove past the car slowly in order to pull ahead of it, in case it needed to be loaded onto the flatbed. He glanced at the disabled car as he went past. \u201cLookin\u2019 for Love\u201d came on the radio as he recognized the driver. He braked\u2014hard. Stared. Cursed his luck and wondered if the gods were up there laughing their asses off at him. Because talk about all the wrong places. Because Maddie Wells. Of all the women he could possibly run across\u2014and there could be a hell of a lot of them, and many of them would no doubt want to hit him with the tire iron, even though he\u2019d never made any of them promises\u2014why did it have to be the only one who\u2019d ever had his heart? She\u2019d had it, and he wasn\u2019t even sure she\u2019d realized it. What he did know was that she\u2019d never wanted it, and one-sided relationships were the worst. Especially those that had been going on in his head and were still painfully fresh memories in his mind some thirteen years later. He chalked it up to youth. Hormones. The fact that teenagers were dramatic as fuck. So what was his excuse now, when his heart was beating out of his chest and his dick had started to harden. I wonder if she smells the same\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. like citrus and gardenias? Like heaven ? He wasn\u2019t getting close enough to her\u2014or to heaven\u2014to find out. What got him out of the car was what usually did\u2014he had nothing to lose. Nothing he hadn\u2019t already lost. But before he could walk toward her, he noted the text from Bear, asking where he was. He texted back, 10 miles out from Skulls, on highway. Stopped to fix a flat for someone. Bear\u2019s response was immediate. Line of Heathens headed your way in about fifteen. Shit . I\u2019ll be done before that. Just what he needed\u2014his MC\u2019s biggest enemy running into him and Maddie on a dark, deserted road. Fuck fate. Fuck it hard. \u201cTals? Is that\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0?\u201d Maddie\u2019s voice sounded the same, that slightly raspy drawl that made her sound sexy, even as a teenager. It ran like lightning up his spine, and he forced himself to look in her direction, all the while hoping that what he\u2019d seen through the car window was an optical illusion\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. No dice\u2014she looked the same. No. She looked even better, and better still when she got out of the car and walked toward him. She\u2019d left a teenager and she was all woman now, softly curved, her skin glowing with health and what looked like very little makeup. She\u2019d never needed it. Her long dark hair was loose, and it was over one shoulder. She made no move to fuss with it. She looked good. Expensive, in a full-length black gown that seemed to glitter, her feet shoved into impossibly high heels that she walked in elegantly. And just like that, his New Year\u2019s went from great to gut-clenching. Although he couldn\u2019t deny that he was happy to see her, the way he\u2019d always been. Even though she\u2019d had him arrested more than once\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and almost sent him to prison for assault by keeping her mouth closed. Twice. Fuck. Just change her goddamned tire and end this. \u201cWhat are you doing here?\u201d he asked, his tone sounding more like a demand. \u201cVisiting my grandmother.\u201d \u201cAt five in the morning on New Year\u2019s Day?\u201d She nodded, then blurted out, \u201cI\u2019m getting a divorce.\u201d Small-town gossip was unavoidable, and soon everyone would be talking about this. Some would be happy to see Maddie cut down to size. Tals wasn\u2019t one of them. Hell, all she did was have a career and marry a rich guy. He didn\u2019t see a parallel between the two\u2014she\u2019d always worked hard, been serious. She\u2019d gotten out, and for that alone, a lot of her old Jessamine \u201cfriends\u201d would no doubt be particularly happy when they discovered she was being humiliated by her husband. She was married\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and now she was getting divorced. And she was standing in front of him, no wedding ring in sight. On New Year\u2019s Day. And no, he wasn\u2019t going to get any of his hopes up. She\u2019d be gone soon enough, and then he\u2019d shove this to the back of his mind with all the other old memories that hurt too much to deal with. *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0* As the famous saying went, there really were no coincidences. At least none worth ignoring, and there\u2019d never truly been a way for her to ignore Tals. Happening upon him was a regular occurrence growing up, but she\u2019d never taken it as a sign of anything beyond that\u2019s what happened in a relatively small city. After all, they\u2019d gone to the same high school\u2014it was inevitable they\u2019d cross paths. Although, not really. They lived on opposite ends of town. Hung out with separate crowds. He grew up within a motorcycle gang\u2014and then officially joined the Vipers MC. \u201cAre you okay, Maddie?\u201d he asked, concern in his low, rough voice. \u201cFine,\u201d she managed. \u201cA little shaken.\u201d But she was a good driver, and the roads were thankfully dry. \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened.\u201d God, he looked good. Even with only the side glow from the headlights, she could see that he\u2019d aged well, from bad boy to all man. He put the man in the leather jacket and jeans back at the charity ball to shame. His blond hair was mostly tucked under a bandanna, but she could see it was still curled around the back of his neck. He wore a tight-fitting dark thermal Henley, jeans, and black motorcycle boots, his Vipers cut no doubt lying on the seat next to him in the truck marked VIPERS TOWING. \u201cYou\u2019re staring, Maddie. You used to be a lot more subtle about it.\u201d Before she could get embarrassed, she shot back, \u201cYou never were.\u201d He gave her that wolfish half grin that had gotten sexier over time. \u201cWasn\u2019t trying to be.\u201d She\u2019d told him about the divorce because she had no doubt he\u2019d see the news reports, Then again, maybe he didn\u2019t check Page Six and the like. Maybe he didn\u2019t concern himself with the gossip, even if it pertained to local families. She\u2019d lived in New York for so long, been such a part of the social scene, that there was a certain amount of ego involved, where she\u2019d begun to feel like every day was a photo op, a chance to sell herself\u2014and her business, by extension. That was the name of the game today, and whether she liked it or not (for the record, she found it exhausting), that was the way the fashion business worked. She was an extension of the brands she curated. She hadn\u2019t realized she\u2019d been drowning until she\u2019d crossed the state line and drew what felt like her first deep breath in years. And now Tals was so close. Too close. And he certainly didn\u2019t seem happy to see her. If anything, there was an air of annoyance as he stalked by her and stared at her back tire while shaking his head. \u201cRidiculous. These tires are the most expensive pieces of shit.\u201d She almost laughed at that, but she didn\u2019t. Mainly because she was afraid it would come out as a sob. \u201cI can just call Triple A,\u201d she started, but he ignored her. He was moving fast, grabbing tools from his truck. And here she was, a helpless girl with a flat. And she hated being helpless. \u201cI\u2019m okay. I can\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t know how to change a tire.\u201d Tals\u2019s voice was a growl that covered her, part reassuring and part dangerous as anything. \u201cHow do you know?\u201d He gave her a sideways glance before grabbing the tire iron and began to take the flat off. \u201cCan you show me how to do this for myself?\u201d she asked. He took in her dress and her heels. \u201cYou\u2019ll get filthy.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll live.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t like to let women do heavy lifting when I\u2019m around.\u201d He moved past her and knelt on the ground in front of the tire. It was less sexist than protective, but it still rankled her and her reinvigorated quest for independence. \u201cYou won\u2019t always be here.\u201d He acknowledged that with a long look, starting at her legs and raking up her body. \u201cThat\u2019s a shame.\u201d She was ready to agree. Instead she kicked off her heels and crouched down next to him. He smelled so damned good. Clean. Masculine\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. very much like the adventures she sought. \u201cYou ready?\u201d he asked. \u201cMore than you know,\u201d she murmured. \u201cBack up before you get hurt,\u201d he told her, in probably the most fitting statement ever, before he took off the blown tire. In what seemed like minutes, he\u2019d put on the full-sized one Hugh had insisted she carry around in her trunk. Tals hauled the heavy tire like it weighed nothing, and when the new one was on, he put the blown one back in the trunk. He\u2019d moved all her bags out of the way\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and he hadn\u2019t commented on why she had so much with her for a visit. He simply put them all back, closed her trunk, then put his tools back in the truck. And started to get in, calling, \u201cYou\u2019re all set. Better get back on the road.\u201d \u201cTals, I\u2019d like to take you to dinner.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s no charge for this, Maddie.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not\u2014thank you\u2014but that\u2019s not why I\u2019d like to take you to dinner.\u201d She bit her bottom lip\u2014an old habit that she seemed to revert to only around him. Mainly because he stared at her lips every time she did it, and she liked him staring at her, the way he used to. \u201cMaybe tomorrow night?\u201d \u201cAre you seriously asking me out on a date?\u201d \u201cWhy\u2019s that so hard to believe?\u201d He snorted. His only answer to that being, \u201cI think you should head back to New York.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not going back there. Not for a while,\u201d she told him. \u201cI\u2019m staying in Skulls Creek.\u201d \u201cIn Jessamine,\u201d he corrected, like mentioning the split within the city borders would remind her of the split that kept them apart. \u201cToo much water under the bridge. Glad I was here to help with the tire.\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "United States"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 1.48}, {"asin": "0373779615", "title": "Holding Strong (An Ultimate Novel)", "author": "Lori Foster", "description": "Review \"A red-hot page-turner.\" --#1 New York Times bestselling author Kresley Cole on When You Dare\"Intense, edgy and hot. Lori Foster delivers everything you're looking for in a romance.\" -New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz on Hard to Handle\"A sexy, believable roller coaster of action and romance.\" -Kirkus Reviews on Run the Risk\"Foster rounds out her searing trilogy with a story that tilts toward the sizzling and sexy side of the genre.\" -RT Book Reviews on Savor the Danger\"The fast-paced thriller keeps these well-developed characters moving...Foster's series will continue to garner fans with this exciting installment.\" -Publishers Weekly on Trace of Fever\"Steamy, edgy, and taut.\" -Library Journal on When You Dare\"Bestseller Foster...has an amazing ability to capture a man's emotions and lust with sizzling sex scenes and meld it with a strong woman's point of view.\" -Publishers Weekly on A Perfect Storm\"Lori Foster delivers the goods.\" -Publishers WeeklyFoster's writing satisfies all appetites with plenty of searing sexual tension and page-turning action in this steamy, edgy, and surprisingly tender novel.\"-Publishers Weekly on Getting Rowdy\"Foster hits every note (or power chord) of the true alpha male hero...a compelling read from start to finish.\" --Publishers Weekly on Bare It All About the Author Lori Foster is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author with books from a variety of publishers, including Berkley/Jove, Kensington, St. Martin\u2019s, Harlequin and Silhouette. Lori has been a recipient of the prestigious RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award for Series Romantic Fantasy, and for Contemporary Romance. She\u2019s had top-selling books for Amazon, Waldenbooks and the BGI Group. For more about Lori, visit her Web site at www.lorifoster.com. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Watching her laugh, seeing her tease and flirt, burned his ass big-time. He loved when she laughed and teased with him \u2014not so much when it was with other guys.And therein lay the problem.He had a near-savage lust for her. When he looked at her, when he heard that carefree laugh, he felt dangerously close to losing it.Contemplating decisions and possible mistakes, Denver Lewis sipped his beer. He should look away from her but knew he wouldn't. She was all tits and ass and attitude in a petite frame, and God love the girl, she turned him on.He'd avoided her, refused to be drawn in by her tempting smiles, and all in all given her the cold shoulder since determining they wouldn't suit. He had no right to judge her for having fun elsewhere.But knowing and accepting that as true didn't talk him off the ledge. No, if anything it wound him tighter. Damn, she looked good. The shifting lights in the club played with her dark blond hair and the curves of her lush little body. His buddy Stack, another fighter, drew her into a fast dance. She didn't refuse. Ever.Cherry Peyton was always the life of the party.The loud music competed with the furious drumming of Denver's heart as he monitored her every move. The music's wild tempo kept her body from touching Stack's. They danced around each other and the rest of the crowd on the floor.Every guy there made note of her, seeing her once and then taking a longer look. Her happiness, her laugh and that killer bod all combined for one hell of an impact on the male libido.For over an hour, Denver watched her draw attention and smiles and, no doubt, sexual thoughts. He ignored other women who tried to get his attention, those who came up to him and propositioned him in modest and sometimes lewd ways.Yeah, he wanted to get laid.But he wanted Cherry, not anyone else.It pissed him off that he couldn't get her out of his head. He should have had her before decreeing theirs an acquaintance-only relationship, then maybe he could have some perspective when it came to seeing her with other men.Then again, maybe not\u2014because days after meeting her, he'd known sex wasn't the only thing he wanted. He'd already begun to think of her as his, even though he hadn't even kissed her yet.If only his territorial tendencies didn't clash so badly with her playful party-girl personality.Seeing her accept her third glass of wine, he finished off his beer and called it quits.At least on the alcohol.He stewed while watching her indulge in several dances with too many different guys\u2014never mind that they were all from their group, fighters that she, and he, knew well and trusted as friends. They'd all come down en masse to cheer on one of their own. Fighters from the rec center who sparred and coached together. Men he'd known forever.Men who had befriended Cherry when she'd become roommates with Merissa, another fighter's sister.She was well and truly enmeshed in his life, friends with his friends, a part of their inner group, and if he wasn't denying himself like a freaking masochist he'd be over there with them right now. She'd be laughing and joking with him. Dancing with him.Treating him like everyone else.That she was so well accepted in their circle made it even more impossible to stop thinking about her, because everywhere he went, he saw her.Finally, after a robust dance that had her laughing aloud, Cherry began to fade. She dropped into a chair at a table with three other fighters and a few women.Her gaze never once came his way\u2014almost as if she knew where he was and avoided making eye contact with him.Suited Denver fine. Mostly. Damn it. It wasn't easy, but he made himself look away.Tonight had been an eventful one. They'd all gotten to the local fight venue early, some to grab a bite before the event, others just to ensure they got the best seats. They all enjoyed watching Armie Jacobson fight.They'd enjoy it even more if Armie would accept the offers from the more elite, professional fight organization, the SBC, but for reasons of his own he dodged them, always insisting on sticking with the smaller, more local groups. It wasn't due to a lack of talent.Cannon Colter was a star with the SBC, and both Denver and Stack had recently signed with them. Since they each sparred with Armie, they knew firsthand that he was fast and deceptively strong, slick in a way that bespoke innate talent, something that couldn't be taught or learned but came naturally to a born athlete. Armie knew his shit.If he accepted a contract with the SBC, he'd more than hold his own. Denver believed he would dominate there, as well.But Armie blew them off every time.Speak of the devil\u2026 When Denver saw Armie approaching him, he put his elbows back on the bar, glad to finally have a distraction. \"How do you feel?\"\"Whaddya mean?\" Armie caught the bartender's eye and ordered a whiskey.The competition had been done tournament style so that competitors had to win to advance, and had to fight multiple times. That arrangement wasn't common anymore, and wasn't the way the SBC did things. But the smaller events did what they could to highlight the fighters and drum up excitement.Armie had knocked out his first guy, then submitted the next two\u2014each in the first round. In the second fight, he'd locked in an arm bar so tightly that the other fighter had immediately tapped rather than risk injury. For the third, he'd submitted with a rear naked choke. Each time, he made it look effortless. Hell, he'd walked away with nothing more than a small bruise on his cheekbone and some mat burn on one elbow. That was it. No other injuries. He'd barely broken a sweat. Armie destroyed other fighters with disgusting ease.Soon as the event had ended, most of the competitors and a lot of fans had converged on the nearby club for a promoted after-party. Armie, a fan favorite for the local organization, was sure to be the belle of the ball.\"You took that last guy apart. He was damn near knocked out when you decided on the arm bar.\"Armie tossed back the whiskey and asked for another. \"Yeah, he must've been new or something.\"More like Armie was that good, but Denver knew he wouldn't admit it. For whatever reason, Armie shrugged off all opportunities to further his fight career. Because of that, Denver warned him, \"Dean Connor was in the audience, scouting out the talent.\"Only for a second did Armie react, but he shook off the stillness in less than a heartbeat. \"Havoc was here?\"\"One and the same.\" Dean \"Havoc\" Connor was a legend in the sport, and one of the most revered fighters ever. A while back, he'd switched gears from competing to training. Now, with another well-known veteran, Simon Evans, he ran one of the most successful and sought-after camps\u2014the same camp where their buddy Cannon often trained.And Cannon had an upcoming title fight for light heavyweight, so clearly they were doing something right.Simon and Dean had the inside track with the SBC president and often recommended new recruits to bring under the SBC umbrella.Brows drawn, Armie scoffed. \"This gig wasn't exactly the upper echelon of talent. Why would Havoc waste his time with low-level competitions?\"Succinct, Denver told him, \"You.\" \"Bullshit.\"\"He took a ton of notes while watching you, and as soon as your fight ended he was on the phone making a call.\"Armie flexed a shoulder. \"He was probably here to see Cannon.\"\"He talked with Cannon. Merissa, too.\"Armie almost fell off his stool. \"What?\" And then, with a quelling glare, \"Why the hell would he talk to Rissy?\"\"She was cheering for you like crazy and I guess that got his attention.\" Denver shrugged. Cannon's sister often accompanied him to the fights. No big deal with that. \"Given she was with Cannon.\"\"Yeah, maybe.\" Armie tossed back the second whiskey and ordered up a third.Interesting. \"Havoc's still here, but Cannon already took off with Yvette and Merissa.\" Since Denver hadn't yet convinced himself to leave the club, he ordered a glass of lemon water. In two and a half months he'd have his second fight with the SBC, so he'd started watching his diet already. Not that he ever got too far off weight, and not that he couldn't lose fifteen or even twenty pounds easily enough. But overall, he liked to stay healthy. He considered it part of his job requirements.\"I knew Cannon was booking. We'd already talked.\"\"He didn't mention Havoc?\"\"No, and I'll give him hell for that later.\" Armie relaxed enough to manage a grin. \"Used to be, Cannon would have closed out the place with me. Now, with Yvette, he's always in a hurry to get her alone. The wedding can't happen fast enough for those two.\"\"A few weeks after his next fight,\" Denver said. If it was up to Yvette, they would have already been married because she didn't care about the fancy wedding.But Cannon considered the guys family and knew they'd want to celebrate with him, so they'd set up the wedding in a way that wouldn't conflict with anyone's competition schedule, most especially Cannon's. \"Looking forward to being best man?\"Armie snorted. \"You all expect me to balk at the sight of a tux, but what the hell, man, you'll be wearing the same monkeysuit.\"Watching Armie to gauge his reaction, Denver said, \"Mostly I expect you to balk at the idea of being in the wedding with Merissa.\"Looking past Denver, Armie narrowed his eyes. \"Who's that dude hitting on Cherry?\"Twisting around, he forgot all about harassing his friend\u2014which had probably been Armie's intent. But damn, he hadn't lied. Denver watched Cherry laughingly refuse an insistent guy bent on gaining her cooperation. The slow, thrumming music would have meant a different type of dance and Denver let out a breath when she didn't give in.Seeing her body to body with another man, this time someone he didn't know, would have made him nuts.Stack sat to one side of her, also watching the idiot who refused to take no for an answer.To her other side, Miles started to frown.Suddenly Cherry pushed back her chair and an ugly tension sank into Denver's chest\u2014until she grabbed up her purse and made a hasty getaway toward the restrooms.When the idiot started to follow, Miles blocked his way while Stack spoke close to his ear. Whatever he said made loverboy frown and search the bar.It wasn't until his gaze clashed with Denver's that he gave up and stalked away\u2014in the opposite direction that Cherry had gone.Smiles quirking, Stack and Miles both saluted Denver, then went back to their table and the other women there.He was wondering what Stack had said when Armie shoved him, and Denver almost dropped off his seat. Righting himself, he muttered, \"What the fuck?\" and shoved Armie back. But since Armie wasn't daydreaming as Denver had been, he barely budged.Snickering, Armie shook his head. \"Damn man, get it together or go after her.\"\"No need. Stack got rid of him.\"\"Yeah,\" Armie said, his tone mocking. \"Stack handled it.\"Sarcasm? \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\"We both know Stack just threatened that poor bozo with you.\"\"Me?\"\"Yeah, Predator, you.\" After emphasizing Denver's fight name, Armie sipped at his third drink. \"You have a nasty death stare and you know it. That chump probably felt your evil intent all the way down to his balls.\"\"You are so\u2014\" Just then, Denver spotted Havoc scanning the crowd before a group of fans stopped him. \"Think he's looking for you?\"Armie slunk lower in his seat. \"No.\"\"You are so hopeless.\"\"Know what's hopeless? This denial you have where Cherry Peyton is concerned. Give it up already.\"Denver glared at him. Why the hell did everyone want to butt into his private business? \"Why don't you at least talk to the SBC? Maybe\u2014\"\"Why don't you talk to Cherry?\" He tossed back his shot and asked for another. \"Better yet, don't talk. Take her straight to bed and work off some tension.\"Armie fought hard, played hard, but usually didn't drink hard. Denver eyed him. \"This isn't about Cherry and me.\"\"It's about you trying to avoid talking about you and Cherry.\" He grabbed a handful of peanuts while waiting for the next drink.Disgusted, Denver said, \"Are you going to turn around everything I say?\"\"Know what I'd like to turn around?\" Armie nodded at someone. \"That.\"When Denver looked up he saw a stacked redhead coming their way. Lips pursed, eyes big, expression coy.Definitely on the make.\"She looks ripe to ride doggy style, doncha think?\"At times Armie's brazen outspokenness bordered on obnoxious. Often, actually. But in this instance, with that girl's hips, Denver totally got his meaning and even had to grin in agreement.Seeing their humor, the lady narrowed her coal-lined eyes.Thank God it was Armie she'd zeroed in on. \"You know her?\" Denver asked.\"Nope. But give me a minute.\"The redhead stopped in front of Armie and touched a finger to his chest. \"You're Armie Jacobson.\"\"Guilty.\"\"So are the rumors true?\"\"Sure.\"Denver stifled a laugh; Armie hadn't even asked her what rumors she meant. But when it came to Armie, just about anything was possible.Bracing her hands on his thighs, she leaned in more, making sure to put her cleavage on display. \"I watched you fight.\"\"Yeah?\"\"You're a beast.\" With a little shiver, she added, \"I think that's sexy.\" Armie smiled.Denver lifted an eyebrow. He felt like a damn voyeur, but he wasn't about to budge. This was too entertaining.\"So\u2026\" Pretending modesty, she ducked her face while still watching him. \"Was it\u2026naughty of me to confront you like this?\"Armie stared her in the eyes while murmuring, \"Real naughty. And you know what I do with naughty girls?\"\"You\u2026you punish them?\"Denver almost choked, yet Armie didn't miss a beat.\"That's right.\" Armie's smile had the woman ready to swoon, especially when he added, \"Even if they're really, really good.\"On an indrawn breath she straightened, all but vibrating with excitement.\"You got a room anywhere close, honey?\"Breathless, face flushed and one hand splayed over her upper chest, she whispered, \"Right across the street.\" Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1420133845", "title": "Against the Sky (The Brodies of Alaska)", "author": "Kat Martin", "description": "About the Author Kat Martin is the New York Times bestselling author of over 60 books across multiple genres. Fifteen million copies are in print and she has been published in 21 foreign countries, including Japan, France, Argentina, Greece, China, and Spain. Her books have been nominated for the prestigious RITA award and won both the Lifetime Achievement and Reviewer\u2019s Choice Awards from RT Book Reviews .\u00a0Visit Kat at her website, www.katbooks.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 5.89}, {"asin": "0451467930", "title": "On the Run (Sugarland Blue Novel)", "author": "Jo Davis", "description": "Review Praise for the Sugarland Blue novels: \"With her descriptive storytelling and sharp banter, Davis's way with words will keep the reader hooked.\"\u2014 RT Book Reviews \"Scorching hot.\"\u2014 Publishers Weekly \"Romance suspense at its best...A wonderful series that has it all.\"\u2014The Reading Cafe\"If you like romance, action, and mysteries, then you will love this book.\"\u2014Once Upon a Twilight\"Jo writes stories that keep you hooked until the very last page and clamoring for the next book to release.\"\u2014Book Monster Reviews\"A smart, sexy, and fast-paced read.\"\u2014Fresh Fiction\u201cAmazing story and\u00a0I loved every bit of it. Four and a half stars!\u201d -- Night Owl Reviews Reviewer Top Pick About the Author Jo Davis is the author of the Sugarland Blue novels, including In His Sights , Sworn to Protect and Hot Pursuit , the popular Firefighters of Station Five series, including Ride the Fire , Line of Fire , and Hidden Fire , and the dark, sexy paranormal Alpha Pack series written as J.D. Tyler. She has also been a multiple finalist in the Colorado Romance Writers Award of Excellence, a finalist for the Bookseller's Best Award, has captured the HOLT Medallion Award of Merit, and has been a two-time nominee for the Australian Romance Readers Award in romantic suspense. She\u2019s had one book optioned for a major motion picture. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PRAISE FOR THE SURGARLAND BLUE NOVELS ALSO BY JO DAVIS SIGNET ECLIPSE Prologue The stench reached his consciousness first. Then the pain. All-over, racking agony that proved he wasn\u2019t dead yet, though he didn\u2019t have a clue how that could be. Awareness of being trapped came next. Buried. But not in the dirt. As he tried to move, various items surrounding him shifted and rolled away. With his fingertips he felt\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. cans. Paper. Slime. Old food? Cold knowledge gripped him, turned his blood to ice. After the bastards finished with me, they threw me in the garbage. Literally . Move, Salvatore. Move or you\u2019re dead. Using his hand, he sought the air. Pushed and clawed, twisting his body in the stinking refuse. The weight on top of him was heavy but not crushing. They\u2019d meant to hide his body, completely confident he wouldn\u2019t wake, or make it out even if he did. He tried not to think they might be right. At last, fresh air. But as he broke through the pile, the heap sloped downward sharply and he was tumbling sideways. For several feet he fell, jabbed and poked by sharp edges until he landed in the dirt at the bottom, the wind knocked out of him. Breathing was almost impossible, his lungs burning. He was hurt inside, and out. His eyes opened to slits, and he tried to peer into the darkness. All he could make out was a sea of garbage. No moon or stars. Worse, little hope. They\u2019d thrown him into the dump miles outside the city, where nobody in their right mind would venture. Don\u2019t give up. Drawing his legs under him, he pushed upward. His legs were like rubber, his strength almost nonexistent. He made it halfway to a standing position before crashing back to the ground with a hoarse cry. God, the pain. His entire body felt hot and cold by turns, and swollen like a balloon. Any second, he would split and spill onto the ground like the plastic bags all around him vomiting their guts. His skin and clothing were wet, too, from head to toe. He knew it wasn\u2019t all from the slime of the trash. Shaking, Tonio crawled forward on his belly, inch by inch. Time lost meaning. An hour or three might have passed, though he didn\u2019t think it had been so long\u2014he would already be dead. Wetness ran down his forehead, down the bridge of his nose. Gradually he grew cold. So cold he knew he\u2019d never get warm again. What was he doing? Too much blood loss. Confusion. He tried to remember, couldn\u2019t. Knew that was the beginning of the end. Anthony. I\u2019m Anthony Salvatore, and I\u2019m a cop. Have to get out of here, get help. Let them know\u2014what? Her name whispered through his mind like a promise. Or a nightmare. He didn\u2019t know which, and now he might never. Angel. Have to let Chris, somebody, know about Angel. Because if I fail\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Brother or not, Rab would kill her. He would show her no mercy, and she would end up here, in a grave next to Tonio. He couldn\u2019t let that happen. \u201cAngel.\u201d Her name was on his lips, her beautiful face in his mind and the memory of her warm, supple body close to his heart when his strength finally deserted him. He\u2019d wanted years to learn her secrets, her joys, and had been granted only weeks. It would have to be enough. \u201cBe smart, baby,\u201d he rasped. \u201cStay safe.\u201d Against his will, his eyes drifted shut. And Tonio surrendered to the darkness. 1 Five weeks earlier Detective Tonio Salvatore leaned against the bar in one of his favorite dives where the regulars only knew him by his first name, and sipped his whiskey, neat. They didn\u2019t know what he did for a living, either, and nobody ever asked. He figured that, if anything, they had him pegged for a dangerous thug of some sort, maybe into drugs or fencing stolen goods like three-quarters of the guys there. Dressed as he always was when he came here, in leathers, a tight black Metallica T-shirt, heavy boots, a five o\u2019clock shadow on his jaw and a bandanna around his short raven hair, it was a reasonable assumption. It didn\u2019t hurt that he was six-four and muscular, and looked mean even though he wasn\u2019t unless he had to be. Stroker\u2019s was a rough place with an even rougher clientele, but it suited him despite his job\u2014or maybe because of it. It was the perfect place to keep his finger on the pulse of Cheatham County\u2019s criminal activity without risking being seen and recognized in his nearby city of Sugarland, Tennessee. He wasn\u2019t here in any official capacity, though. He just wanted to relax, incognito. And maybe see some action that involved the weapon in the front of his leathers and not the one strapped to his ankle. Taking another sip of his Dewar\u2019s, he savored the smooth flavor and recalled the sweet little piece of work from last weekend. The blonde, what was her name? Trish? Tess? Didn\u2019t matter. She\u2019d been all over him from the minute she spied him at the bar, and it hadn\u2019t taken her long to maneuver her way between his legs as he sat on the stool, then proceed to check his tonsils with her tongue. His cock stirred as he remembered giving her a ride on his Harley to the motel down the road, his go-to for the one-night stands that provided him and his chosen partners with relief. No way was he taking any of them home. He wasn\u2019t stupid. The blonde had hugged him tightly from behind, pressed her breasts against his back, her hot crotch against his ass, and he\u2019d nearly wrecked trying to get them to the motel. Inside, they\u2019d been naked in seconds and he\u2019d been eating her out, enjoying the moaning and breathy little whimpers coming from her throat. She\u2019d dug her fingers into his short hair and held on for the ride as he\u2019d thrown her onto the bed, slid his cock deep, and fucked her so hard the headboard had cracked the plaster on the wall. Looking around, he hoped she\u2019d be back tonight. \u201cAnother round?\u201d the bartender asked. The guy\u2019s name was Rick, and he was as tough as anyone here. Had to be to work in a place like this. Tonio knew for a fact that the man kept a baseball bat behind the counter, and wouldn\u2019t hesitate to use it. \u201cSure,\u201d he answered. Fuck it, he was off duty tonight. Always made sure he never drank when he was on call, either, and he wasn\u2019t tonight. \u201cComin\u2019 up.\u201d His night improved when the little blonde with the perky bust and tight jeans strolled through the front door. He turned back to his drink, making sure not to clue her in that he\u2019d noticed her arrival. As he thought it might, pretty soon a warm body sidled close to him, and a woman\u2019s voice whispered in his ear, \u201cFancy meeting you here, Tonio.\u201d Small teeth nibbled at his ear lobe. \u201cBuy a girl a drink?\u201d \u201cYou bet.\u201d Damn, what was her name? \u201cHey, Tess,\u201d Rick said in greeting. \u201cWhat\u2019s your poison tonight, baby girl?\u201d Settling on the stood beside Tonio, she brought a long, manicured nail to her lips in thought. Then she grinned. \u201cHow about a Screaming Orgasm?\u201d Rick snorted, then smirked at Tonio. \u201cDon\u2019t think you need me for that one, but whatever the lady wants.\u201d While Rick mixed her drink, she swiveled to face Tonio. Leaning over enticingly, she showed every bit of the rosy nipples on display under her plunging blouse and eyed him like a cat ready to pounce on a mouse. They both knew she wouldn\u2019t have to work real hard to catch him. \u201cWatcha been up to, sexy?\u201d she asked. He shrugged. \u201cNot much. Messing with my bike, doing a little business to keep a roof over my head. The usual.\u201d All true, even if he\u2019d just strengthened her perception of him as a criminal. Why he was playing this game, he wasn\u2019t sure. But they were both enjoying it, so what was the harm? He might learn something interesting. \u201cWhat do you do to keep that roof over your head, hmm?\u201d She grabbed the drink Rick slid over, and took a healthy swallow. He\u2019d stepped into this willingly. But there was no question he had to develop a cover now. Besides Tess, Rick and a couple of other men were very interested in his answer and trying to pretend they weren\u2019t. Who knew, he might luck onto a case that would lead somewhere, eventually to arrests for drugs or something else. Sure, his captain would have his balls for going out on his own, but if it led to something big, he\u2019d forgive Tonio just as fast. \u201cI acquire things,\u201d he heard himself say. \u201cFor those who want them.\u201d She arched an eyebrow. \u201cWhat kinds of things?\u201d \u201cWhatever you want, for a fee.\u201d \u201cAnything?\u201d \u201cPretty much.\u201d Tess wasn\u2019t fazed. \u201cGood to know. I might be persuaded to pass that along.\u201d \u201cUp to you.\u201d Pulse kicking up a notch, he tossed back the rest of his drink, letting his demeanor say he didn\u2019t give a shit whether she did or not. But he\u2019d gotten a nibble that might lead to something bigger, and the game was on. The high was better than any drug. Almost better than sex. But not quite. After taking another drink, she slid a hand up the thigh of his leathers and brushed her fingers across his tightened crotch. \u201cI can provide something you want, too.\u201d His dick was throbbing in his pants. Hot. \u201cYeah?\u201d \u201cOh yeah.\u201d Leaning into his chest, she took his mouth and tangled her tongue with his. Her nipples grazed his chest and peaked to tiny eraser points, rubbing. Driving him crazy. \u201cWant to get out of here?\u201d he asked between heated kisses. \u201cSounds like a great idea,\u201d a woman\u2019s voice said. And it wasn\u2019t Tess\u2019s. Tonio and his hookup turned toward the woman who\u2019d stalked up to them without either of them noticing\u2014and Tonio\u2019s breath caught. The woman was several inches below Tonio\u2019s height, perhaps five-nine, long-limbed, with a killer body that looked like she\u2019d just stepped from the pages of a skin magazine. Long dark hair fell past her shoulders, almost all the way to her waist. Her eyes were large and green and her nose was a sharp blade above a lush mouth made for sucking cock. Full, ripe breasts pushed at the snug cotton shirt that had been cut with scissors or a knife to make the low V-neck, and made sleeveless as well. She wore tight jeans and black ankle boots with silver conchos studded around them. Encircling her right upper arm was a surprisingly feminine Celtic tattoo. His mouth watered. The look that would have come across as tacky on anyone else was stunning on her. Definitely centerfold material. \u201cWhat the fuck do you want, Angel?\u201d Tess was clearly less than pleased with the other woman\u2019s presence. \u201cAre you really that stupid?\u201d Angel stared at her, then shook her head. \u201cYou know this is Rab\u2019s territory. He\u2019s not going to be happy to find you here again, and he\u2019s not taking you back.\u201d What? Stuck in the middle of Tess trying to make another man jealous? Fuck. \u201cYou think I give a shit what that asshole brother of yours thinks or what makes him happy? Maybe it\u2019s you who doesn\u2019t want me here,\u201d Tess said smugly. \u201cHe hasn\u2019t said a thing to me.\u201d \u201cI happen to know that\u2019s because he hasn\u2019t seen you.\u201d Angel sighed. \u201cLook, I\u2019m telling you this for your own good. He\u2014crap, too late. Here he comes now.\u201d Angel really did look worried, Tonio had to admit. When Tess glanced toward the door, she did, too. Who was this Rab guy who had the women so nervous? Tonio followed their gazes and cursed inwardly. The man who held their attention was a frigging tank, maybe even an inch or so taller than Tonio himself. He was about thirty, bald, and wore his tats proudly as sleeves down both thick arms. Several pendants bounced against his broad chest, and he wore jeans that emphasized his muscular thighs. There wasn\u2019t an ounce of fat on his frame. Rab headed straight for their group, a steely expression on his face. Tonio slid from his stool and planted himself slightly in front of the women on pure instinct; this wasn\u2019t even his fight, for God\u2019s sake, and he wanted no part of their argument. \u201cBitch,\u201d the man growled, throwing his sister the barest glance before focusing on Tess. \u201cWhat the hell are you doing here?\u201d Tonio\u2019s back went up. He absolutely hated any man who addressed a woman as bitch . Only bottom feeders resorted to that kind of talk to make themselves seem like bigger men. \u201cWhat do you think?\u201d she purred slyly. Curling into Tonio\u2019s side, she wrapped an arm around his waist. \u201cI\u2019m here for a drink, same as you. A little company, too. No harm in that.\u201d \u201cThere is when you know goddamn well I don\u2019t want to see your face.\u201d His eyes were dark and cold, like black marbles. He hadn\u2019t acknowledged Tonio at all. \u201cFine,\u201d she said airily. \u201cI guess I won\u2019t introduce you to my friend Tonio here, who has a special talent.\u201d That icy gaze settled on Tonio for the first time, and inwardly he actually shuddered. That didn\u2019t happen often. There weren\u2019t many people who scared him, but there was something about this man he perceived as dangerous. Even deadly. Maybe it was because he was too still, too calm. As though watching and calculating. \u201cWhat talent might that be?\u201d Rab drawled, checking him out from head to toe, his disdain clear. \u201cAcquisitions,\u201d Tess said pointedly. And here we go . That caught the other man\u2019s interest. \u201cWhat\u2019s your specialty?\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t have one. Someone wants something, I get it.\u201d That was taking a risk, not specializing. It might sound too close to fishing on Tonio\u2019s part. Too suspect. Rab studied him for a long moment. Tonio held his gaze, not backing down. Never, ever volunteer more than you\u2019re asked. That\u2019s the first rule of being undercover . Eventually the other man spoke again. \u201cYou got a last name?\u201d \u201cReyes,\u201d he lied. \u201cYou got a number?\u201d Shit. He couldn\u2019t give out his real cell phone number\u2014he\u2019d have to get a burner, fast. And have an unpleasant conversation with Rainey first thing tomorrow. He was onto something here, he could feel it. The room had hushed, every single person there tense. Belatedly, Tonio noted the men, all dressed in similar fashion, who\u2019d risen to their feet and moved subtly behind Rab. None of them appeared to be the stereotypical bumbling backwoods yokels. They looked tough, and serious. He\u2019d bet most of them had done hard time. This man was no small-time player. \u201cI\u2019m around,\u201d was his only reply. Several men flexed their fists. Looked to Rab, who held them off with a slight flick of a hand. Jesus . He\u2019d escaped getting the mother-fuck beat out of him by the skin of his teeth, and all he\u2019d wanted was a cold drink and a hot woman. In that order. \u201cI expect you will be,\u201d Rab said, his warning unmistakable. \u201cSame time tomorrow night. Here. We\u2019ll talk.\u201d Dismissing Tonio, the man strode away, taking up residence at a table in a corner of the bar. The only vacant table in the place, which must be reserved for him. Angel stepped closer to Tonio and tilted her head toward the corner. \u201cYou\u2019ve got his attention,\u201d she said, sounding less than pleased. And still concerned. \u201cI hope you know what the hell you let in when you opened that door.\u201d \u201cInteresting way to talk about your own brother.\u201d A second of unease flickered in her jade eyes. She glanced around, and apparently decided Rab\u2019s men were no longer listening. \u201cMy advice? Don\u2019t come back. Ignore it at your own risk, and my conscience is clear.\u201d \u201cNoted.\u201d Angel, warning him off. He was even more intrigued than before\u2014and he knew he\u2019d be back. Angel turned her attention to Tess. \u201cAnd you? Don\u2019t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.\u201d \u201cFuck off, Angel.\u201d Angel glanced between them, a smile curving her lips. Without another word, she turned and walked away, joining a couple of women at a different table. Girlfriends of two of Rab\u2019s men, maybe. She didn\u2019t look Tonio\u2019s way again. \u201cCome on,\u201d Tess urged, voice irritated. \u201cLet\u2019s go.\u201d Taking her hand, Tonio led her outside to his motorcycle. His mind kept going back to the mysterious woman, Angel. Sister of the man he might be working undercover against, in order to expose any number of crimes. Certainly off-limits. And yet\u2014 No. There was no use going there. Against his back, the little blonde was warm and willing. His libido resurfaced with a vengeance and his cock woke once more. By the time he parked outside the motel, he was so damn hard he could hardly walk. He needed relief, and Tess was pretty. Great in bed, too. After obtaining his key, he dragged her inside and stripped off her top. Her breasts weren\u2019t that full, but they were creamy, the tight peaks pink and lickable. She was a bit skinny, but that hardly mattered as he watched her slip off her jeans and get naked. He stripped off his shirt and she attacked his belt with fervor, unzipping it to expose his aching erection. His shaft throbbed, almost deep purple with want. Then she sucked him into her mouth and began to work him over, and he went up in flames. \u201c Dios , yes,\u201d he hissed. \u201cLike that. Suck me.\u201d She did, as enthusiastic about it as she was last week. He watched his dick slide between her lips, wet and shiny, and couldn\u2019t help imagining a different woman doing him. One with long dark hair and plump lips. Groaning, he picked up the pace. When he was near the edge, he gently disengaged, chuckling at his lover\u2019s whimper of displeasure. Quickly he removed his boots, finished stripping his pants, retrieved a condom from his wallet, and gloved up. \u201cHow do you want it, honey?\u201d he asked, moving in close. He took her mouth in a heated kiss. \u201cEat me, then fuck the shit out of me,\u201d she demanded breathlessly. \u201cNot a problem.\u201d He winked, liking her giggle. Tess was rough around the edges, and knew some dangerous people. She was dangerous to him because of the company she kept. But she was cute, and in some ways, maybe more naive than one might guess. \u201cKneel by the bed and lean over the mattress,\u201d he ordered. She hurried to do as he said, and spread her legs wide. Crouching behind her on the carpet, he bent and spread her with his fingers. Then he gave her slit a slow lick, laughing when she squirmed, pushing back, wanting more. He wasn\u2019t a selfish lover. It was important to him that a woman enjoy herself to the fullest, and he set about making sure Tess was satisfied as well as himself. He lapped at her, tasting her essence and loving every second. \u201cDelicious,\u201d he murmured. She gasped. \u201cShit. Tonio\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d \u201cNeed my cock, honey?\u201d \u201cYes!\u201d \u201cSay it. Tell me what you want.\u201d He loved to hear the words. \u201cFuck me,\u201d she breathed. \u201cPlease.\u201d Needing no further encouragement, he lined up with her entrance and pushed inside. Her sheath was so hot and tight around him, he almost came like a sixteen-year-old on the first stroke. Holding deep, he calmed the fires a bit, and then began to pump. \u201cDios, bonita,\u201d he muttered. \u201cSuch a sweet pussy.\u201d Her reply was incoherent, just the way he liked. He fucked her slow and deep, at first. Gradually he picked up speed and soon he was shafting her hard. Her trills of pleasure echoed throughout the small room, driving him over the edge. His orgasm exploded and he emptied his release into the condom, filling it. She came down with him, channel spasming pleasantly around his cock. He fucked her a few more times to wring out every last bit of ecstasy for them both, then pulled out gently. After helping her up and onto the bed, he went to the bathroom and tossed the condom, then cleaned up. Then he took her a warm cloth, waiting as she used it, and tossed it into the bathroom. He reached for his shirt, fully intending to leave. \u201cCan\u2019t we have another round?\u201d He studied her, lying on the bed, naked. Inviting. Straight blond hair fell attractively around her face, and she pouted. \u201cSure, what the hell?\u201d Abandoning his shirt, he climbed into bed and under the covers. And he wondered if this was the first of a very long list of mistakes he was going to make in the imminent future. A short time later, he woke in the night with his hard cock rubbing the curve of her ass. With a groan, he reached between them, fingering her slit from behind. After that, there wasn\u2019t much thinking involved at all. *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0* \u201cYou fucking did what ?\u201d The shouted question froze every single person in the main station outside the conference room more effectively than a blast from a Taser. Captain Austin Rainey looked about two seconds from blowing a blood vessel in his brain as he slammed the door, cutting off the curious stares from the main squad room. \u201cI\u2019ve got a hunch, Cap,\u201d Tonio insisted in his own defense. \u201cThis Rab character, he\u2019s looking to take on somebody with acquisition skills. And trust me, these guys aren\u2019t buying antiques or fine art. If they\u2019re into anything legal, I\u2019ll eat my badge.\u201d \u201cYou might do that anyway when I shove it down your throat,\u201d Austin snapped. Tonio\u2019s partner on the force, Chris Ford, shot him a look that said I told you so . Tonio ignored him. \u201cCap, I\u2019m telling you, this group is dirty. They\u2019re\u2014\u201d \u201cI know .\u201d Tonio hesitated. \u201cWhat do you mean, you know?\u201d \u201cJust what I said, shithead.\u201d Austin swiped a hand down his face and glared at him. \u201cDo you have any idea what you\u2019ve done?\u201d \u201cUh-oh,\u201d Chris murmured. Dread seized Tonio\u2019s gut. \u201cNo. But I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll enlighten me.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019ve just stepped on an ongoing investigation into Robert \u2018Rab\u2019 Silva and his merry band of thieves, drug runners, and killers,\u201d Austin said pointedly. \u201cBy the City of Langdon PD.\u201d Tonio processed that, heart sinking. He\u2019d seriously fucked up. \u201cThey\u2019re outside Langdon\u2019s city limits! How was I supposed to know?\u201d \u201cOh, let me see? Maybe ask first? They\u2019re outside our city limits, too, but it just so happens they\u2019ve been wanting to take these guys down for a while. You just landed in the shit, and now I\u2019ve got to fix it.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Austin,\u201d he said quietly, meaning it. \u201cI just felt I\u2019d stumbled onto something and my instinct kicked in.\u201d \u201cWhich creates the question\u2014what the fuck are you doing hanging out in that dump, anyway?\u201d Tonio shrugged. His reasoning seemed so stupid now. \u201cI like going somewhere nobody knows me, fitting in with the crowd. Maybe even learning tidbits we can use. I\u2019ve done that before, when I was with the San Antonio PD. Sometimes it pans out.\u201d \u201cOkay, let me think.\u201d Austin was silent for a moment. \u201cThis might work to our advantage. Maybe Langdon could use a man on the inside, something they haven\u2019t been able to make happen. Could be they\u2019ll turn over the case altogether.\u201d Austin left the room without dismissing them, so they waited. In the meantime, Chris gave him shit. \u201cSmooth move, Ex-Lax,\u201d he said, snickering. \u201cMan, shut up. I\u2019m not in the mood.\u201d \u201cYou, like, never fuck up. But when you do, you really go for it.\u201d \u201cChris,\u201d he started, getting pissed. \u201cHey,\u201d his friend said, holding up a hand. \u201cI\u2019ve got your back, no matter what. You know that.\u201d His partner was so sincere Tonio\u2019s anger evaporated. \u201cThanks.\u201d About twenty minutes later, Austin walked back into the room and shut the door. \u201cThe chief at Langdon is seriously fucking pissed. But they let us take it, since they haven\u2019t been able to get an in with the group.\u201d \u201cYeah?\u201d Tonio said, brightening. \u201cYep. Time will tell how lucky a break it was.\u201d He studied Tonio thoughtfully. \u201cTell me exactly how this meeting came about. Leave nothing out.\u201d So he spared no detail. He wasn\u2019t embarrassed about hooking up with a woman. Hell, he was human. And it wasn\u2019t like he\u2019d intended to fuck the gang leader\u2019s ex\u2014it just happened that way. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t think much of women, either,\u201d Tonio mused. \u201cGoing by the way he talks to them.\u201d \u201cSpeaking of women, you still seeing this woman, Tess?\u201d Tonio shrugged. \u201cHadn\u2019t planned on it, especially. Why?\u201d One look at the captain\u2019s face, and Chris\u2019s, and he knew where this was going. \u201cOh, no way. Fuck that, I\u2019m not getting involved long-term with someone.\u201d \u201cYou said yourself she\u2019s the way in,\u201d Chris pointed out. \u201cShe knows the group, and more important, Rab.\u201d \u201cYeah, and he could kill me for touching her, even though they\u2019ve broken up.\u201d \u201cDid he seem like it was a problem?\u201d Austin asked. \u201cWell, no,\u201d Tonio admitted. \u201cBut\u2014\u201d Austin snorted. \u201cBut nothing. You started this, and now you\u2019ve got to keep your cover. Dumping her too soon will set off alarm bells we don\u2019t want clanging, you got that?\u201d \u201cYes, sir.\u201d Shit and fuck! \u201cGood. Besides, you can have your cake and eat it, too, in this case. Just don\u2019t blow this.\u201d Resignation settled over him. With acceptance of the situation, excitement about bringing down a big player began to fire his blood. \u201cShould I start tonight?\u201d \u201cMight as well, if you\u2019re ready.\u201d \u201cI am, Cap.\u201d \u201cGood. Chris, you\u2019ll have his back. Monitor behind the scenes, keep your partner safe.\u201d \u201cI will, Cap.\u201d \u201cOkay. Get going and report in once a day to me and Chris, nobody else.\u201d Austin left, and Tonio blew out a breath. And just like that, he was undercover working for one of the most dangerous men in the entire state, with an unwanted girlfriend in his bed. Tonio went to sleep that night, and dreamed of a woman with a Celtic tattoo and jade green eyes. 2 Angel paused in her work, leaned the handle of the mop against the bar, and wiped the sweat from her eyes. God, how she wished she could afford a regular cleaning service. But that sort of luxury would have to wait, like everything else on her wish lists of one day and maybe . Glancing around, she tamped down a surge of irritation that Andy, her head bartender, had booked out last night after closing, leaving her to take care of it. She released a sigh, knowing she couldn\u2019t blame him. Rab and his posse had hung around long after she locked the doors last night, something that was becoming an unwanted habit. Andy was terrified of the gang, but Rab most of all. And he should be. Eight months ago, her brother had been paroled. She hadn\u2019t known he was out until forty-eight hours later, when he\u2019d shown up on her doorstep begging for a place to crash. \u201cJust until I get on my feet, sis. I\u2019m a changed man, I swear.\u201d For all the mistakes he\u2019d made, he was family. The only family she had left, except their mother, whom she didn\u2019t talk to much. Less than two weeks after she allowed him to cross her threshold, his buddies had arrived\u2014the ones that weren\u2019t still locked up. That had been the beginning of the end of her hard-won freedom from their parents\u2019 legacy. She saw the past repeating itself now, in her brother. Rab hadn\u2019t been lying. He was a changed man\u2014changed for the worse. All their lives, he\u2019d been a first-class fuckup. An apple right off Dad\u2019s felonious tree, and their mother had been too afraid to stand up to either of them. Rab\u2019s slide into delinquency had started when they were kids, with petty shit like pinching candy from the grocery store. He was the kind of kid who liked hurting small animals, too. Just for laughs. By the time they were in high school, he\u2019d graduated to stealing cars for the hell of it. Then on to selling them. That proved to be so profitable he and his buddies branched out into other goods Angel didn\u2019t want to know about. But the cops got wind, and eventually busted them. Rab went to prison, as hardened and cynical as a man three times his age. If she\u2019d held out a shred of hope that his time inside had resulted in a productive, law-abiding citizen, that prayer had been smashed to bits the instant Rab and his dogs made themselves a fixture in her bar and in her life. They harassed and terrified her employees, drove out the good customers, and attracted birds of a feather. Like that new guy, Tonio. Their presence was becoming a big problem, because the stakes for her brother getting caught this time were much higher\u2014Angel could lose her business. Her freedom. Worst-case scenario, her life. She had to get rid of them. But how? Rab kept her in the dark about the dirty details of his dealings. The couple of times she\u2019d tried to press him for answers, he\u2019d told her in that cool, dangerous voice to mind her own fucking business and she\u2019d be a lot happier. So she had nothing solid to tell the cops, even if she dared. And getting help from the outside? She had no idea whom she could trust. Even cops could be dirty. Not that she knew of any on Rab\u2019s payroll, but still. The scuff of heavy boots on the concrete floor jerked her to the present, and she looked toward the door to see the object of her fears and frustrations bearing down on her. Straightening, she raised her chin and looked Rab dead in the eye. Never give him an inch. Never cower. \u201cYou\u2019re up early,\u201d she said, her tone direct. Unwavering. More often than not, it was the best way to handle him. \u201cDid the world explode? Is the sky falling?\u201d He blinked at her, then barked a laugh, the sound rusty. He wasn\u2019t a man who made that noise often. \u201cYou think you\u2019re funny, dontcha? Get me a beer.\u201d With that, he sat his ass on a barstool and gazed at her expectantly. She snorted. \u201cGet it yourself. Anyway, what about your drug testing? Fail that, and you\u2019re going back inside.\u201d Is it terrible of me to think that wouldn\u2019t be the worst thing to happen? \u201cNot gonna happen,\u201d he drawled, sliding off the stool. Walking around behind the bar, he grabbed a glass and drew a beer from the tap. \u201cI\u2019ve told you before, it\u2019s all about timing. I\u2019ll be clean when the next test rolls around.\u201d \u201cIf your timing was so impeccable, you wouldn\u2019t have been caught and put in prison in the first place.\u201d He stilled and set the glass on the polished counter, eyes narrowing. For a couple of seconds, she thought she\u2019d gone too far, but then his lips turned up. \u201cMy sister\u2019s got solid brass balls. I\u2019ve always admired that.\u201d \u201cThanks. I think.\u201d Rolling her eyes, she headed for the back to put away the mop and bucket. \u201cHey, it\u2019s a compliment,\u201d he called after her. After putting away the cleaning items, she leaned against the wall with a sigh. Rab was in an unusually good mood, but it wouldn\u2019t last. Never did. The man was a ticking bomb, waiting silently for his moment to detonate. Resigning herself to his presence, she walked back into the main area and busied herself behind the bar. Aware of him studying her, she did her best to ignore him until she couldn\u2019t stand the quiet any longer. \u201cWhat does bring you by before noon?\u201d she asked, checking the liquor stock. \u201cGot a meeting with the new recruit. Tonio.\u201d \u201cNow?\u201d \u201cSoon.\u201d She frowned. \u201cI thought that wasn\u2019t until tonight.\u201d \u201cI moved it up.\u201d He took a sip of his beer. \u201cHow\u2019d you get hold of him?\u201d \u201cHe called, left his number with Andy. Anyways, it\u2019s good to keep the men off guard. Plus, I want to feel him out when there\u2019s not a crowd distracting me.\u201d \u201cIf you decide to take him on, what\u2019ll you have him doing?\u201d She pretended not to be overly interested in his answer, but he still didn\u2019t bite. \u201cNot your concern,\u201d he said sharply. \u201cYou writing a book or something? You\u2019re always asking questions about my business.\u201d She glared at him. \u201cThat\u2019s because you\u2019re conducting your illegal business in my place of business, and you could get me shut down. Not to mention all of us thrown in the joint. Then where would we be?\u201d \u201cRelax. Nobody\u2019s going to blame you, especially if you don\u2019t know a thing. So stop asking and you\u2019ll be better off. I\u2019d hate to have to make you.\u201d He winked. Is he serious? Would he actually harm me? Forcing herself to remain calm, she tidied the glasses. \u201cSo, what about Tess? She\u2019s fucking the new guy, you know.\u201d \u201cSo? I don\u2019t give a shit what that dumb bitch is doing, or who.\u201d But his words had taken on a dangerous edge, belying the truth of them. There was something in his eyes, a nasty gleam she didn\u2019t like. \u201cShe stays away from me, we\u2019ll be fine.\u201d \u201cAnd you don\u2019t care that your new man is with her?\u201d \u201cShe\u2019s not a problem, for now. She becomes one, I\u2019ll deal with her. And I\u2019ll make sure Tonio understands this, too.\u201d How will you do that? Rab had never killed anyone\u2014that she knew of. Angel forced herself not to shiver. The door opened, and more footsteps sounded at the entrance. Angel swung her gaze toward the newcomer\u2014and her breath caught in her throat, same as it had last night. Tonio was a big man. All over. Well over six feet of pure muscle, a lot of which was emphasized by his snug black T-shirt. One with white letters spelling SLIPKNOT across his chest, and straining with the job. His torso was flat, and she could see the hint of a six-pack. Long legs were encased in worn jeans with a hole ripped out of one knee, and he wore black shit kickers on his large feet. God, what she could see of his body was a dream, and she wondered what he looked like naked. The very best of his features, however, were his sexy face and short black hair. Neat eyebrows arched over brown eyes so dark they almost blended in with his pupils. His nose was straight, not too big. His mouth was full and wide, his jaw strong and attractively peppered with stubble. He wore no bandanna today, leaving his hair free to feather back from his face. He was the most gorgeous man she\u2019d ever seen. And he was taken. As he approached, his gaze flicked to Angel. Before he returned his attention to Rab, she could\u2019ve sworn his eyes had warmed with male appreciation. If so, he quickly and wisely masked it. \u201cRab,\u201d he said, holding out his hand. Her brother hesitated before he shook it, and then Tonio gestured to Angel. \u201cI don\u2019t think we got a proper introduction last night.\u201d Rab nodded and spoke in a clipped tone. \u201cThis is my sister, Angel. Angel, Tonio Reyes.\u201d \u201cNice to meet you,\u201d she said. Belatedly, it occurred to her just how ironic those words were, coming from her mouth. When had it ever been nice to meet any of Rab\u2019s thugs? Hadn\u2019t she just despaired over how to get rid of them? \u201cYou, too.\u201d Again, there was a flash of heat in his gaze. She hadn\u2019t imagined it, then. Before she could come up with anything more to say, her brother steered the man away, into his usual booth in the corner. As she worked, she kept one ear open, but could only hear the faint murmur of their voices. An occasional word reached her, but no specifics. Since there was no way of getting closer without pissing Rab off, she eventually gave up and took refuge in her small office in the back. Perhaps she could lose herself in making the accounts balance. Anything to forget about salivating over the gorgeous man with the big dark fuck-me eyes. *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0* Tonio was painfully aware of Angel moving around the bar and dining room. Every step she took, that tight round butt swaying in her jeans. A certain part of him took notice, and he hoped the table concealed his interest. She wore her long dark hair loose again, and the strands brushed over the Celtic tattoo on her arm. To an unpracticed eye, she appeared busy. But he\u2019d gained enough experience over the years in watching people, observing body language, to know that she was tense. And aware of his gaze tracking her every move. She wasn\u2019t unaffected. With an effort, he forced his attention to Rab, who was eyeing him, expression stony. \u201cSo, tell me, what can I do for you?\u201d Rab paused. \u201cFirst, keep your eyes off my sister.\u201d \u201cShe\u2019s a beautiful woman,\u201d Tonio replied with a shrug. \u201cI\u2019m not blind.\u201d \u201cThe last man who messed with her walks with a cane and is adjusting to life without his spleen.\u201d A cold, glittering gaze let Tonio know he wasn\u2019t joking. \u201cI\u2019m with Tess, remember?\u201d \u201cThat slut\u2019s not the kind a guy stays with forever. Especially with a woman like Angel around to tempt him.\u201d Tonio bristled a bit. True, the two women were completely different, but that didn\u2019t make Tess a bad person. \u201cDid I come here to discuss business or are you going to waste my time?\u201d After a moment, Rab sat back in his chair and regarded him thoughtfully. \u201cYou said you acquire things but don\u2019t specialize. Give me some examples.\u201d \u201cI fill special orders. Cars, weapons, you name it. I get the merchandise from wherever it\u2019s located and deliver it to the buyer. Sometimes the stuff is boxed or crated and I don\u2019t know what\u2019s inside, but that\u2019s rare. I get paid either way, so I don\u2019t give a shit.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t know what you\u2019re taking? How does that work?\u201d \u201cOccasionally I\u2019m a middleman. Somebody wants merchandise taken from one place, such as a warehouse, and delivered somewhere else. I just grab the goods. I don\u2019t care what it is.\u201d \u201cBut most of the time you\u2019re the acquisitions guy?\u201d \u201cYeah. I prefer it that way, knowing what I\u2019m after and what the risk is.\u201d \u201cSo you specialize in cars. Weapons. What else?\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve run some weed. Coke. Even a few stolen paintings once.\u201d Settling into his role, he gave a laugh. \u201cDon\u2019t care for art myself, but whatever. Money\u2019s green no matter what the load.\u201d Rab nodded. \u201cAnything you won\u2019t do?\u201d Tonio weighed his next words carefully. \u201cTwo things. First, I won\u2019t take on human cargo. No trafficking illegals. That\u2019s some sick shit, man. I mean, stuff is just stuff , like the art. But people? Forget it.\u201d The other man took a draw of his beer. Set it down. \u201cI don\u2019t deal in selling people. Too messy, and I like my green to flow from less complicated sources. Besides, I like to play with my toys so much I sometimes break them. It\u2019s how I decompress.\u201d Tonio paused. \u201cWhaddya mean? Break them, how?\u201d \u201cNever mind that for now. What\u2019s the second thing?\u201d Cristo , what else was this crazy bastard into? Tonio let it go for the time being\u2014but he would definitely keep in mind what the man had said. \u201cI\u2019m not a hit man. You got that kind of issue, I\u2019m not the guy you call. I\u2019m in acquisitions and delivery.\u201d Another calculated risk, but Rab didn\u2019t seem bothered. \u201cBut I\u2019m willing to bet you\u2019re armed, even now.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m carrying,\u201d he confirmed. No reason to lie about that. \u201cI\u2019d be stupid not to protect myself if necessary, but I don\u2019t go around offing people for thrills.\u201d One corner of Rab\u2019s mouth kicked up. \u201cMe, neither. Hard as it might be to believe, I don\u2019t start that kind of trouble. But I don\u2019t mind finishing it, if I\u2019m forced to.\u201d \u201cGood to know.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m a businessman, like you. My goal is making money, the fastest, easiest ways possible. And socking it all away for a rainy day, like when the government finally falls completely fucking apart and takes the banks down with it.\u201d Sadly, Tonio couldn\u2019t totally disagree with that viewpoint. Just Rab\u2019s methods. \u201cHell to the fuckin\u2019 yeah,\u201d he said. Apparently that response pleased his new boss . Rab drained the rest of his beer, then said, \u201cYou get ten percent of the haul.\u201d \u201cWhen I take most of the risk?\u201d He snorted. \u201cTwenty.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re dreamin\u2019, man. No way. We all take risks.\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t set up this meeting, you did,\u201d Tonio pointed out, tapping the table with one finger. \u201cYou\u2019re looking for someone to take the heat off. An acquisitions man who knows what he\u2019s doing, and that\u2019s me. I think you\u2019ve got something in mind or I wouldn\u2019t be here right now.\u201d Rab stared at him for a long moment. \u201cFifteen. I have a big job in mind, but I want to assign you a few trial runs first. See how things go.\u201d \u201cSure. What do you have in mind?\u201d \u201cWhat types of vehicles do you have access to for hauling?\u201d \u201cAnything the job requires. Van, eighteen-wheeler, plane\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d Or I will, as soon as the department loans them to me. One more expense for Austin to get cleared, and won\u2019t he be happy? Shit. \u201cGood. We\u2019re gonna need a semi next Thursday night. I\u2019ll give you the deets once I have them firmed up.\u201d \u201cNo problem.\u201d Just then his phone buzzed\u2014the one he\u2019d acquired for the undercover job. Tess . U busy 2nite? He had reservations about giving her the number, because it meant a personal tie he didn\u2019t want. On the other hand, she\u2019d given him an \u201cin\u201d and made his presence in the group seem legit. \u201cSomething important?\u201d the other man asked casually. There was the hint of an edge in his tone, though. \u201cJust Tess.\u201d Pocketing the phone, he looked up. \u201cHer hanging around, that going to be a problem? Your sister seemed to think so, last night.\u201d Rab considered this for a few seconds. \u201cHadn\u2019t been for you, I would\u2019ve tossed her ass out. She can hang as long as she\u2019s with you. But keep the bitch out of my face. Got it?\u201d \u201cGot it.\u201d Asshole . He longed to punch the bastard in the mouth. How he kept the desire out of his expression was a mystery. Rab stood, signaling an end to their discussion. After giving Tonio a knuckle bump, he headed for the door. What Tonio really wanted to do was give him a knuckle bump in the face. \u201cGotta hit the men\u2019s room. See you,\u201d Tonio called. The other man gave a wave but didn\u2019t look back. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Women's Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "B01MYDK4ME", "title": "Wilde in Love: The Wildes of Lindow Castle", "author": "Eloisa James", "description": "Review Another bright, delightful read from a queen of historical romance. -- \"Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on Seven Minutes in Heaven\" Another irresistible liaison of lushly sensual romance and deliciously wicked wit. -- \"Booklist (starred review) on Seven Minutes in Heaven\" Eloisa James' writing is absolutely exquisite. -- \"Teresa Medeiros, New York Times bestselling author, on When Beauty Tamed the Beast\" Expertly developed characters will draw readers in, and the cliffhanger conclusion is full of promise for future installments. -- \"Publishers Weekly\" If Shakespeare had written an 18th-century romantic comedy, it might look something like this novel. -- \"Publishers Weekly on Desperate Duchesses\" This first in James' new Georgian-set series...is full of her signature style: witty repartee between a sensual hero and a smart, unconventional heroine...A charming, romantic, and unexpectedly funny start to a very promising new series. A must for James fans and a sure bet for everyone else. -- \"Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\" This laugh-out-loud love story has heart and emotional depth that readers crave and pure romance that has us sighing. -- \"RT Book Review (4 1/2 stars, Top Pick!)\" Written with plenty of wry wit, graced with a brilliantly crafted cast of characters, and imbued with just the right amount of luscious sensuality, Wilde in Love will hit the literary sweet spot of any romance reader. -- \"Booklist\" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author Eloisa James , a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, wrote her first novel after graduating from Harvard, but alas, it was rejected by every possible publisher. After she got an MPhil from Oxford, a PhD from Yale, and a job as a Shakespeare professor, she tried again, with much greater success. In 2013 she won a Rita Award for Best Romance Novella. She teaches Shakespeare in the English department at Fordham University in New York. She is the mother of two children and, in a particularly delicious irony for a romance writer, is married to a genuine Italian knight. Susan Duerden is an actress and an Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. Her reading of The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht earned her an AudioFile Best Voice Award and a Booklist Editors' Choice Award. She has won ten AudioFile Earphones Awards. Here career spans film, television, theater, voice-overs, and animation. She has played critically acclaimed and award-winning theatrical roles on London's West End and Off Broadway; acted in the features Lovewrecked and Flushed Away ; and held a recurring role on ABC's Lost . --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Back Cover Londres est en effervescence - du moins la gent f\u00e9minine. Lord Alaric, grand explorateur et auteur prolifique de romans \u00e9piques, rentre au pays apr\u00e8s bien des aventures. N'ayant pas la moindre id\u00e9e du succ\u00e8s ph\u00e9nom\u00e9nal rencontr\u00e9 par ses \u0153uvres, il est le premier surpris d'\u00eatre accueilli avec une telle ferveur, voire franchement agac\u00e9 par l'adulation que lui vouent ces dames. \u00c0 l'exception de Mlle Willa Ffynche, qui n'a que d\u00e9dain pour sa c\u00e9l\u00e9brit\u00e9 et ses histoires rocambolesques. Et, bien s\u00fbr, il n'y a rien de plus excitant qu'une femme qui se d\u00e9robe... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1455539090", "title": "Duke of Sin (Maiden Lane, 10)", "author": "Elizabeth Hoyt", "description": "Review \"4 1/2 Stars! Top Pick! Hoyt delivers a unique read on many levels: a love story, a tale of redemption and a plot teeming with emotional depth that takes readers' breaths away. Kudos to a master storyteller!\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews \"[T]his superbly executed historical romance is proof positive that this RITA Award-nominated author continues to write with undiminished force and flair. When it comes to incorporating a generous measure of dangerous intrigue and lush sensuality into a truly swoonworthy love story, Hoyt is unrivaled.\"\u2015 Booklist (starred review) on Dearest Rogue \"4 1/2 Stars! Hoyt takes an unlikely pair of characters and, through the magic of her storytelling, turns them into the perfect couple... [A] read to remember.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews on Dearest Rogue \"Hoyt's exquisitely nuanced characters, vividly detailed setting, and seemingly effortless and elegant writing provide the splendid material from which she fashions yet another ravishingly romantic love story.\"\u2015 Booklist (starred review) on Darling Beast \"4 1/2 Stars! Top Pick! Darling Beast is wondrous, magical and joyous -- a read to remember.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews \"Richly drawn characters fill the pages of this emotionally charged mix of mystery and romance.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly on Duke of Midnight \"4 1/2 Stars! Top Pick! There is enchantment in the Maiden Lane series, not just the fairy tales Hoyt infuses into the memorable romances, but the wonder of love combined with passion, unique plotlines and unforgettable characters.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews on Duke of Midnight \"I adore the Maiden Lane series, and this fifth book is a very welcome addition to the series . . . [It's] sexy and sweet all at the same time . . . This can be read as a standalone, but I adore each book in this series and encourage you to start from the beginning.\"\u2015 USA Today's Happy Ever After Blog on Lord of Darkness \" Lord of Darkness is classic Elizabeth Hoyt, meaning it's unique, engaging, and leaves readers on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next book . . . an incredible addition to the fantastic Maiden Lane series. I Joyfully Recommend Godric and Megs's tale, for it's an amazing, well-crafted story with an intriguing plot and a lovely, touching romance that I want to enjoy again and again and again . . . simply enchanting!\"\u2015 JoyfullyReviewed.com on Lord of Darkness About the Author Elizabeth Hoyt is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-three lush historical romances, including the Maiden Lane series. Publishers Weekly has called her writing \"mesmerizing\" and in 2018 she received the RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award for Historical Romance. She also pens deliciously fun contemporary romances under the name Julia Harper. Elizabeth lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with three untrained dogs, a garden in constant need of weeding, and the long-suffering Mr. Hoyt.  The winters in Minnesota have been known to be long and cold and Elizabeth is always thrilled to receive reader mail. You can write to her at PO Box 19495, Minneapolis, MN 55419 or email her at Elizabeth@ElizabethHoyt.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1455586366", "title": "Sweetest Scoundrel (Maiden Lane, 9)", "author": "Elizabeth Hoyt", "description": "Review \"[T]his superbly executed historical romance is proof positive that this RITA Award-nominated author continues to write with undiminished force and flair. When it comes to incorporating a generous measure of dangerous intrigue and lush sensuality into a truly swoonworthy love story, Hoyt is unrivaled.\"\u2015 Booklist (starred review) on Dearest Rogue \"4 1/2 Stars! Hoyt takes an unlikely pair of characters and, through the magic of her storytelling, turns them into the perfect couple... [A] read to remember.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews on Dearest Rogue \"Hoyt's exquisitely nuanced characters, vividly detailed setting, and seemingly effortless and elegant writing provide the splendid material from which she fashions yet another ravishingly romantic love story.\"\u2015 Booklist (starred review) on Darling Beast \"4 1/2 Stars! Top Pick! Darling Beast is wondrous, magical and joyous -- a read to remember.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews \"Richly drawn characters fill the pages of this emotionally charged mix of mystery and romance.\"\u2015 Publishers Weekly on Duke of Midnight \"4 1/2 Stars! Top Pick! There is enchantment in the Maiden Lane series, not just the fairy tales Hoyt infuses into the memorable romances, but the wonder of love combined with passion, unique plotlines and unforgettable characters.\"\u2015 RT Book Reviews on Duke of Midnight \"I adore the Maiden Lane series, and this fifth book is a very welcome addition to the series . . . [It's] sexy and sweet all at the same time . . . This can be read as a standalone, but I adore each book in this series and encourage you to start from the beginning.\"\u2015 USA Today's Happy Ever After Blog on Lord of Darkness \" Lord of Darkness is classic Elizabeth Hoyt, meaning it's unique, engaging, and leaves readers on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next book . . . an incredible addition to the fantastic Maiden Lane series. I Joyfully Recommend Godric and Megs's tale, for it's an amazing, well-crafted story with an intriguing plot and a lovely, touching romance that I want to enjoy again and again and again . . . simply enchanting!\"\u2015 JoyfullyReviewed.com on Lord of Darkness About the Author Elizabeth Hoyt is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-three lush historical romances, including the Maiden Lane series. Publishers Weekly has called her writing \"mesmerizing\" and in 2018 she received the RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award for Historical Romance. She also pens deliciously fun contemporary romances under the name Julia Harper. Elizabeth lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with three untrained dogs, a garden in constant need of weeding, and the long-suffering Mr. Hoyt.  The winters in Minnesota have been known to be long and cold and Elizabeth is always thrilled to receive reader mail. You can write to her at PO Box 19495, Minneapolis, MN 55419 or email her at Elizabeth@ElizabethHoyt.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1476786070", "title": "The Study of Seduction (2) (The Sinful Suitors)", "author": "Sabrina Jeffries", "description": "About the Author Sabrina Jeffries is the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of several Regency-set historical romance series, including the Royal Brotherhood, the School for Heiresses, the Hellions of Halstead Hall, the Duke\u2019s Men, and the Sinful Suitors. When she\u2019s not writing in a coffee-fueled haze, she\u2019s traveling with her husband, caring for her adult autistic son, or indulging in one of her passions: jigsaw puzzles, chocolate, music, and costume parties. With more than nine million books in print in twenty languages, the North Carolina author never regrets tossing aside a budding career in academics for the sheer joy of writing fun fiction and hopes that one day a book of hers will end up saving the world. She always dreams big. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Study of Seduction  One London April 1830 \u201cYou have lost your bloody mind.\u201d When every member in the reading room of St. George\u2019s Club turned to look at Edwin Barlow, Earl of Blakeborough, he realized how loudly he\u2019d spoken. The place was more crowded than usual, now that everyone was back in London and night was falling. Gentlemen wanted a few drinks before they plunged into the maelstrom that was the Season. With a quelling glance that sent the curious onlookers scrambling to mind their own business, Edwin returned his attention to Warren Corry, the Marquess of Knightford. \u201cThis plan of yours can\u2019t possibly work.\u201d \u201cOf course it can.\u201d Warren was Edwin\u2019s closest friend. Really, his only friend, aside from his sister\u2019s new husband, Jeremy Keane. Edwin didn\u2019t make friends easily, probably because he didn\u2019t suffer fools easily. And society was full of fools. That was precisely why Edwin, Keane, and Warren had started this club\u2014so they could separate the fools from the fine men. So they could protect the women in their lives from fortune hunters, gamblers, rakehells, and every other variety of scoundrel in London. In a matter of months, the club had swollen from three to thirty members, all good men eager to share information about which of their peers couldn\u2019t be trusted with women. Until now, Edwin hadn\u2019t realized that so many gentlemen\u2019s female relations needed protecting from sly and not-so-sly attempts on their virtue . . . and fortunes. Warren was clearly taking that mission very seriously. Perhaps too seriously. \u201cClarissa will never agree,\u201d Edwin said. \u201cShe has no choice.\u201d Edwin narrowed his gaze on Warren. \u201cYou actually believe you can convince your sharp-tongued cousin to let me squire her about town during the Season?\u201d \u201cOnly until I return. And why not?\u201d Warren said, though he took a long swig of brandy as if to fortify himself for the fight. \u201cIt isn\u2019t as if she hates you.\u201d \u201cNo, indeed,\u201d Edwin said sarcastically. \u201cShe only challenges my every remark, ignores my advice, and tweaks my nose incessantly. The last time I saw her, she called me the Blakeborough Bear and said I belonged in the Tower of London menagerie, where ordinary people could be spared my growls.\u201d Warren burst into laughter. When Edwin lifted an eyebrow at him, Warren\u2019s laugh petered out into a cough. \u201cSorry, old boy. But you have to admit that\u2019s amusing.\u201d \u201cNot nearly as amusing as it will be to watch you try to talk her into this,\u201d Edwin drawled as he settled back in his chair. Rather than giving Warren pause, that made the blasted idiot ask, \u201cDoes that mean you\u2019ll do it?\u201d \u201cThe point is moot. She\u2019s not going to agree.\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t be too sure. You mustn\u2019t take her pokes at you as anything more than her usual mischief-making. You let her exaggerations get under your skin, which only tempts her to plague you more. You should just ignore her when she starts her nonsense.\u201d Ignore Clarissa? Impossible. He\u2019d spent the past few years trying unsuccessfully to unwrap the mystery that was Lady Clarissa Lindsey. Her barbed wit fired his temper, her provocative smile inflamed him, and her shadowed eyes haunted his sleep. He could no more ignore her than he could ignore a rainbowed sunset . . . or a savage storm. For three months now, she\u2019d been isolated at Warren\u2019s hunting lodge, Hatton Hall, and Edwin had felt every second of her absence. That was why the idea of spending time with her sent his blood pumping. Not with anticipation. Certainly not. Couldn\u2019t be. \u201cWhat do you say, old boy?\u201d Warren held Edwin\u2019s gaze. \u201cI need you. She needs you.\u201d Edwin ignored the leap in his pulse. Clarissa didn\u2019t need anyone, least of all him. Thanks to the fortune left to her by her late father, the Earl of Margrave, she didn\u2019t have to marry for love or anything else. Apparently, the woman had some fool notion she was better off without a husband, given that she\u2019d reportedly refused dozens of marriage proposals since her debut years ago. But it wasn\u2019t her fortune that had men falling all over themselves trying to catch her eye. It was her quick wit and effervescent personality, her ability to draw a man in and put him off at the same time. It was her astonishing beauty. She was the fair-haired, green-eyed, porcelain-skinned darling of society, and she almost certainly knew it. Which was why he rather enjoyed the prospect of watching Warren attempt to convince her she should go about town with a gruff curmudgeon like himself. \u201cAssuming that she and I both agree to this insanity\u2014how long would I have her on my hands?\u201d \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t be more than a month. However long it takes me to deal with her brother in Portugal. I can\u2019t leave Niall stranded on the Continent with all the unrest there right now.\u201d \u201cI suppose she\u2019s already heard why you\u2019re going.\u201d \u201cActually, no. She doesn\u2019t even know about his letter yet, which was waiting for me when we arrived from Shropshire for the Season. I wanted to be sure you would agree to keep an eye on her before I told her. But once she learns that this involves Niall, she\u2019ll want me to take this trip, and she\u2019ll realize I won\u2019t do that unless I\u2019m sure she\u2019s safe.\u201d \u201cFrom this Durand fellow.\u201d After all, there was a reason for this charade Warren was proposing. Warren\u2019s jaw hardened. \u201cCount Geraud Durand, yes.\u201d Settling back into his chair, Edwin drummed his fingers on his thigh. \u201cIf I\u2019m to do this, you\u2019d better tell me everything you know about this Frenchman.\u201d \u201cHaven\u2019t you met him?\u201d Edwin lifted an eyebrow. \u201cOh, right. Not your circle of influence. But surely you\u2019ve heard of him.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s the French ambassador\u2019s lackey.\u201d \u201cIf he were a lackey, he wouldn\u2019t be a problem. He\u2019s the man\u2019s first secretary. And because the ambassador had to return to France right after Christmas, Durand is now running the embassy as the charge d\u2019affaires. The position gives him a great deal of power.\u201d \u201cThen what the devil does he want with Clarissa?\u201d \u201cA wife. He asked her to marry him in Bath some months ago.\u201d That stunned Edwin. Warren had initially described Durand as an admirer who\u2019d been plaguing her. Not that Edwin was surprised at anyone\u2019s desiring Clarissa to distraction. Most men did. But men in the field of diplomacy generally preferred wives who were . . . well . . . not inclined to speak their minds and flirt outrageously. \u201cShe turned him down,\u201d Warren went on. \u201cThat\u2019s why we had to return to London. Unfortunately, he followed us here. He seemed to have made it his mission to gain her, no matter what. He was at every public event we attended. Twice, he tried to accost her on the street.\u201d \u201cAccost her? Were those your words or Clarissa\u2019s? Because even you said she\u2019s prone to exaggeration.\u201d \u201cThis was no exaggeration.\u201d His lips thinned into a grim line. \u201cThe bastard frightened her enough that she started avoiding going out in public, and you know that\u2019s not like her. So after we spent Christmas at your brother-in-law\u2019s, I whisked her and her mother off to Shropshire where I knew he dared not follow, since by then he had to serve as charge d\u2019affaires here. I\u2019d hoped our absence would give his ardor time to cool.\u201d \u201cAnd has it?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know. We\u2019ve only just returned, so it\u2019s not as if I\u2019ve had time to assess the situation. But I\u2019m not taking any chances. She has to be protected while I\u2019m trying to sort out her brother\u2019s troubles.\u201d Edwin cast him a measuring glance. \u201cYou don\u2019t mean to bring Niall back to England, do you? They\u2019ll arrest him for murder as soon as he sets foot on En\u00adglish soil.\u201d \u201cI know. Damned fool, fighting a duel over some woman. He ought to have known better.\u201d Frustration furrowed Warren\u2019s brow. \u201cTo be honest, I have no idea what to do with him. But I must work out something. He can\u2019t continue abroad like this indefinitely. And I can\u2019t continue to manage my properties and his, even with Clarissa\u2019s help.\u201d Edwin snorted. \u201cClarissa helps?\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s more to her than you realize.\u201d Ah, but Edwin did realize it. Granted, he wouldn\u2019t have expected her to have any skill at estate management, but despite her outrageous manner, he sometimes glimpsed a seriousness in her that reminded him of his own. Or perhaps she merely had periodic bouts of dyspepsia. Hard to know with Clarissa. She was entirely unpredictable. Which was why she always threw him out of sorts. Warren waved over a servant and ordered another brandy. \u201cHonestly, accompanying her won\u2019t be as trying as you think. Don\u2019t you need to go out into society this Season anyway? Aren\u2019t you bent on marrying?\u201d \u201cYes.\u201d He was bent on siring an heir, anyway, which required wedding someone. Though God only knew who that might be. \u201cYou see? It\u2019s perfect. You have to go on the marriage mart. Clarissa wants to enjoy the Season, and I want her to find a husband. It\u2019s an ideal situation.\u201d \u201cIf you say so.\u201d How he could successfully court anyone with Clarissa hanging about was anyone\u2019s guess, but he supposed it might improve his stern reputation if he had a lighthearted woman on his arm at the usual balls. Assuming she would even agree to take his arm. That was by no means certain with Clarissa. \u201cYou were still recovering from the loss of Jane last Season, so this will be your first real attempt to secure a wife since Jane jilted you. Do you have any particular lady in mind?\u201d \u201cNo. I know what I want. But God only knows if I can find a who to go with it. I haven\u2019t made a serious search, because I had my hands full with Samuel and Yvette. And then there was the false start with Jane.\u201d Edwin sighed. \u201cBut I suppose I must begin looking.\u201d \u201cAnd what are your requirements for a wife? Other than that she be of breeding age, I suppose.\u201d Chafing at Knightford\u2019s astute perception that this endeavor was about finding a woman to bear him an heir, Edwin glanced out the window that overlooked Pall Mall. \u201cI would prefer a woman who\u2019s responsible and uncomplicated.\u201d \u201cLike your mother, you mean.\u201d He didn\u2019t answer, preferring not to lie. His mother hadn\u2019t been remotely uncomplicated, but no one knew that except Edwin and his brother Samuel. Not even their sister Yvette was aware of how complicated their mother had been . . . and what had made her so. Edwin had worked hard to spare Yvette that awful knowledge. \u201cI want a woman who\u2019s quiet and sensible,\u201d Edwin went on. \u201cIn other words, someone you can keep under your thumb. The way your father kept your mother under his thumb.\u201d A swell of painful memories made acid burn his throat. \u201cFather didn\u2019t keep her under his thumb; he ignored her.\u201d For reasons that Edwin unfortunately knew and had difficulty accepting. \u201cI will never do that to my wife.\u201d \u201cYou will if she\u2019s as dull as what you describe.\u201d Warren leaned back in his chair. \u201cWhen I get around to choosing a wife, I want a lively wench who will keep me well entertained.\u201d He winked. \u201cIf you know what I mean.\u201d Edwin rolled his eyes. \u201cRemind me again why we asked you to join St. George\u2019s? You\u2019re as bad as the men we\u2019re guarding our women against.\u201d \u201cAh, but I don\u2019t prey on innocents. Any woman who lands in my bed jumped there of her own accord. And I daresay that\u2019s true of any number of fellows here.\u201d It probably was. Even Edwin had taken a mistress in his twenties when the turmoil within his family had kept him too busy to look for a wife and his loneliness had grown too acute to endure. That hadn\u2019t, however, been very satisfying. Knowing that a woman was with you only for your rank and money was somehow more lonely than not having a woman at all. Although with Yvette married and out of the house, he\u2019d started to feel the disadvantages of a solitary life. So once more he\u2019d be looking for a wife, always an awkward experience. Women expected a man to gush about being in love, and he simply couldn\u2019t. Love was a fictional construct dreamed up by novelists. His parents\u2019 marriage had proved that. But it wasn\u2019t wise to tell a woman his philosophy. Unfortunately, neither could he lie about it. He wasn\u2019t like his scoundrel brother, who was presently serving a sentence of transportation for kidnapping. Edwin couldn\u2019t spin a clever yarn or hide an opinion beneath a facile compliment. Sadly, most women seemed to prefer facile compliments to blunt truths any day. For that matter, some men were like that. Hence, his dearth of friends and his difficulty finding a suitable wife. \u201cWhen will you broach this with Clarissa?\u201d Warren looked at his pocket watch. \u201cAt dinner, which should be in . . . oh . . . half an hour. I was hoping you\u2019d come.\u201d \u201cNow?\u201d \u201cWhy not? Might as well get it over with, eh? And I am leaving for Portugal in the morning.\u201d Devil take it. Edwin would have liked more time to prepare. He wasn\u2019t the spontaneous sort. \u201cPlanning to have us join forces against her, are you?\u201d \u201cThat wasn\u2019t my intention initially, no.\u201d Warren gulped some brandy. \u201cWhen we left Hatton Hall for London, I\u2019d hoped that by now Yvette and Keane would have returned from America, and they could simply take her under their wing. Yvette can talk Clarissa into just about anything.\u201d Edwin smiled. His sister could talk anyone into anything, even him. \u201cBut I gather they\u2019re still abroad,\u201d Warren said. \u201cIt may be a few more weeks before they return. Sorry.\u201d \u201cWell, it can\u2019t be helped. At least my aunt will be there to help persuade her.\u201d Edwin suppressed a snort. Lady Margrave, Clarissa\u2019s mother, was a flighty female who rarely offered sound advice, so Clarissa rarely heeded her. He doubted that this time would be any different. Warren surveyed the reading room. \u201cYou know, this place turned out quite cozy. It\u2019s not as sophisticated a setting as some clubs, but it\u2019s comfortable. You and Keane ought to be pleased with yourselves. Between Keane\u2019s artistic eye and your mechanical ingenuity, the place doesn\u2019t even look like a tavern anymore.\u201d \u201cWe had plenty of help with the practical aspects of d\u00e9cor from Yvette and her mother-in-law.\u201d \u201cThat explains the female touches,\u201d Warren said, \u201cwhich are refreshing. I mean, the dark woods and leather give it a nice masculine feel, but there\u2019s something to be said for decent draperies, too. The ones at White\u2019s are funereal.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m glad you approve.\u201d Warren\u2019s gaze snapped back to him. \u201cI\u2019m sorry I couldn\u2019t be around to help. And that I have to run off again.\u201d He rose. \u201cSo, are you coming or not?\u201d The casual words were belied by Warren\u2019s tight expression. They both knew that Edwin hadn\u2019t yet agreed to the plan. And why hadn\u2019t he? Because the thought of spending weeks in Clarissa\u2019s company put him on edge as nothing else could. But it didn\u2019t matter. Warren was his friend and wouldn\u2019t hesitate to help if the shoe was on the other foot. So neither would Edwin. He stood. \u201cI\u2019m coming.\u201d  As soon as the door to Clarissa\u2019s bedchamber closed behind the servant who\u2019d left a message for her mother, the aging widow turned to her daughter in a panic. \u201cI cannot believe your cousin did this!\u201d She leaned heavily on her cane. \u201cWarren knows better than to invite an eligible bachelor for dinner with no warning. What was he thinking?\u201d Clarissa raised an eyebrow at her mother\u2019s reflection in the looking glass. \u201cHe was thinking that it\u2019s just Edwin, whom we\u2019ve known for ages. And who has come to dine before.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know if pigeon pie is quite suitable enough for guests,\u201d Mama said, as if Clarissa hadn\u2019t spoken. \u201cOh, dear, and we are fresh out of Madeira! Edwin loves his Madeira, you know.\u201d \u201cMama\u2014\u201d \u201cAnd the pickled onions were entirely too sour the last time we ate them. I was hoping to use them up tonight, but if Edwin is coming\u2014\u201d \u201cMama, calm down! It\u2019s not as if we\u2019re expecting the Tsar of Russia.\u201d She smiled into the mirror. \u201cAlthough Edwin would make a fine tsar. All he\u2019d have to do is be his usual autocratic and dictatorial self.\u201d Thankfully, that observation broke her mother out of her fretting. \u201cAnd he would look quite the part, too, wouldn\u2019t he? All that black hair and that chiseled jaw.\u201d And broad shoulders and regal bearing and slate-gray eyes as coldly beautiful as a Russian night spangled with stars. Clarissa scowled at herself. She must be addled to be thinking of Edwin so poetically. Though he was sinfully handsome. In a sort of standoffish way. And she hadn\u2019t seen him in ages. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that. \u201cWhy, I can almost imagine him in an ermine cape and one of those tall, furry hats,\u201d Mama said. Clarissa laughed. \u201cEdwin would only wear such a pretentious thing to a coronation, and then only because he had to.\u201d His manner of dress was always correct, but terribly sober. Unlike hers. She examined her gown in the mirror and smiled. Edwin would probably look sternly upon this confection of lace and lavender bows. Secretly it wasn\u2019t her favorite, either\u2014a bit too fussy for her taste\u2014but she\u2019d expected to be dining only with Warren and Mama, and had just thrown on the first thing she\u2019d found in her closet. Oh, well. No time to change, and besides, she would never change her gown for him. Let Edwin give her one of his ruthlessly critical glances; she would not be cowed. Indeed, it was merely force of habit that had her pinching her cheeks until they glowed nicely pink. It was not because she wanted to look pretty for Edwin. No, indeed. \u201cYou know, my girl,\u201d Mama said, \u201cif you were a bit nicer to that man, you could probably have him wrapped about your finger in a matter of weeks.\u201d \u201cOh, I doubt that. Edwin is far too inflexible to be wrapped about anything. More\u2019s the pity.\u201d Cla\u00adrissa would dearly love to see the woman who could manage that. But it wouldn\u2019t be her. Edwin, of all people, would never accept her as she was, especially once he knew the full extent of her youthful mistakes. And her narrow escape from the obsessive attentions of Count Durand a few months ago had only made her more determined to avoid bending to any man\u2019s demands of what a wife should be. You can never escape me, my dearest Clarissa. A shudder swept her as she thrust the count\u2019s final words to the back of her mind. They were just the sort of dramatic nonsense men thought women wanted to hear. But to her knowledge, he hadn\u2019t hunted for her. He hadn\u2019t been loitering in the street outside Warren\u2019s town house once they arrived. No doubt he\u2019d moved on to another pretty woman. And if he hadn\u2019t? Then she would be firmer in her refusal this time. Years ago she\u2019d allowed a man to bully her, and it had shattered her life. Never again. Pasting a brilliant smile to her lips, she whirled to face her mother. \u201cShall we go down?\u201d \u201cNot yet, my angel. The servant said the gentlemen are already here, so we should keep them waiting. You must never let a man be too sure of you.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s Edwin, Mama,\u201d she said tightly. \u201cHe\u2019s sure of everything and everyone, no matter what I do.\u201d With her usual coaxing smile, she offered her arm to her mother. Mama had broken her hip in her early forties and it hadn\u2019t knitted properly, so navigating stairs was difficult for her. \u201cCome now, I know you\u2019re dying for a glass of wine. I certainly am.\u201d \u201cOh, all right.\u201d Leaning on Clarissa\u2019s arm, Mama let herself be led to the door. \u201cBut you must promise to give him a compliment first thing. Men like that.\u201d \u201cRight,\u201d Clarissa said noncommittally. \u201cAnd don\u2019t contradict him all the time. Men despise fractious women.\u201d \u201cUh-huh.\u201d \u201cAnd do not spout your witticisms incessantly. It\u2019s very mannish. Not to mention . . .\u201d As they made their slow way down the stairs, Clarissa let her mother drone on, only half listening to the usual recitation of little tricks designed to hook a man and reel him in. Those might have enabled her Cit of a mother to snag an earl, but they smacked of deception to Clarissa. If a man couldn\u2019t like her as she was, what was the point? Clarissa could barely hide her true opinions from Mama. How was she to do it with a husband? Not that she ever intended to have a husband. Granted, she wouldn\u2019t mind having children, but that required taking a man into her bed\u2014and the very thought made her hands grow clammy and her throat close up. No. Marriage was not for her. \u201c. . . and do be sure to save the biggest slice of cake for Edwin,\u201d Mama said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. \u201cNonsense. I\u2019m not saving anything for Edwin.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s only fair,\u201d drawled Edwin from somewhere in the shadows to the right of the staircase. \u201cI\u2019m not saving anything for you, either.\u201d Striving to hide her surprise, she halted as he came into the light. \u201cEdwin!\u201d Mama cried. \u201cMy dear boy!\u201d She held out her hand. Dutifully, he came forward to take it. \u201cYou\u2019re looking well, Lady Margrave.\u201d He bent to brush a kiss to Mama\u2019s cheek. No kiss for Clarissa, of course. He was too much the gentleman for that. \u201cYou\u2019re looking rather fine yourself,\u201d Mama chirped as she drew back to survey him. And Lord, but he was, in his tailcoat of dark-blue wool and his waistcoat and trousers of plain white poplin. Even his cravat was simply tied, which only accentuated the masculine lines of his jaw and sharp planes of his features, so starkly handsome. How had he managed to grow even more attractive in a mere three months? And why on earth was she gawking at him? This was Edwin, for pity\u2019s sake. It would swell his head even more if he knew what she was thinking. Instead, she teased him. \u201cDon\u2019t tell me\u2014you were so impatient for us to come down that you\u2019ve been pacing the foyer in anticipation.\u201d The idea was ludicrous, of course. Impatient wasn\u2019t even in Edwin\u2019s vocabulary. If ever a man believed that slow and steady won the race, it was he. And he clearly recognized the irony, for he flashed her one of his rare smiles. \u201cActually, I was fetching this from the library. Warren told me he was done with it.\u201d His eyes gleamed in the lamplight as he held out a book. \u201cOf course, if you wish to read it yourself . . .\u201d \u201cDoubtful,\u201d she said. \u201cAny book you loaned him has to be deadly dull.\u201d \u201cYou mean, because it lacks gallant highwaymen rescuing virtuous ladies.\u201d \u201cOr virtuous ladies rescuing gallant highwaymen. Either would be preferable to one of your dry tomes on . . . what? Chess? Engineering? Philosophy of the most boring sort?\u201d \u201cClarissa,\u201d Mama chided. But Edwin merely laughed, as she\u2019d hoped he would. She took great pride in the fact that she could sometimes make him laugh. No other woman seemed able to. No other woman dared try. \u201cMechanical engineering,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever did you guess?\u201d \u201cBecause I know you all too well, sir.\u201d He sobered, his gaze turning oddly intense even for him. \u201cDo you? I\u2019m not so sure.\u201d The words hung in the air a moment in frozen silence before that was shattered by her cousin\u2019s approach. \u201cI found another book you might enjoy, old boy,\u201d Warren said as he bent to kiss first his aunt, then Clarissa. \u201cIt\u2019s about automatons.\u201d She rolled her eyes as Warren handed it to Edwin. Of course, keen interest leapt in Edwin\u2019s face the moment he scanned the cover. The earl did love his automatons, to the point where he even made his own, though Clarissa had never been deemed worthy enough to actually see one. \u201cLooks intriguing, thanks. I\u2019ll get it back to you as soon as I\u2019m done.\u201d \u201cNo hurry.\u201d Warren shot her a veiled glance. \u201cAs you well know, I won\u2019t need it anytime soon.\u201d Whatever was that about? Before she could ponder it, Warren offered Mama his arm. \u201cCome, Aunt, let\u2019s get you off your feet while we have our wine before dinner. Don\u2019t want to tax your hip overmuch.\u201d \u201cThank you, my lad,\u201d she cooed, and let him lead her to the breakfast room. \u201cThat is ever so thoughtful of you! But then, you always were a dear. Why, I remember when . . .\u201d As Mama prattled on, Edwin was left to come behind with Clarissa. \u201cSo,\u201d he murmured, \u201cexactly what were you refusing to save for me?\u201d It took her a moment to remember that he\u2019d overheard her earlier. \u201cThe biggest slice of cake.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t like cake.\u201d \u201cI know. That\u2019s why I\u2019m not wasting it on you. You won\u2019t appreciate it, and you\u2019d probably eat it just to be polite.\u201d He slanted a serious glance at her. \u201cPerhaps I\u2019d give it to you, instead.\u201d \u201cI doubt that, but we\u2019ll never know, shall we?\u201d she said lightly. \u201cI\u2019m saving it for myself, regardless.\u201d \u201cSo I heard.\u201d \u201cBecause you were eavesdropping.\u201d Mischief seized her. \u201cHow rude of you.\u201d As they passed into the breakfast room, he shrugged. \u201cIf you don\u2019t want people hearing your pronouncements, you shouldn\u2019t talk at the volume of a dockworker.\u201d Mama paused while settling onto the settee. \u201cA dockworker! For shame, Edwin\u2014what a thing to say to a lady! Have you no pretty compliments to offer?\u201d When he stood blatantly unrepentant, Clarissa said, \u201cIf Edwin knew how to compliment ladies, Mama, he would be too popular in society to settle for having dinner with the mere likes of us.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s no settling involved, I assure you,\u201d he said irritably. She was congratulating herself on getting beneath his cool reserve again when Warren stepped in. \u201cPlay nice now, cousin. We need him.\u201d \u201cFor what?\u201d Clarissa asked. Instead of answering, Warren gestured to the settee. \u201cYou\u2019d better sit down. I\u2019ve got something to tell you and your mother.\u201d", "categories": ["Books", "Romance", "Historical"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "B0151VE6FW", "title": "Hot in Hellcat Canyon: A Hellcat Canyon Novel", "author": "Julie Anne Long", "description": "Review \u201cA star herself in the historical-romance world, Long makes a flawless transition into contemporary romance with a wonderfully sweet yet also intensely sexy love story that brilliantly showcases her deliciously sharp sense of humor and rare gift for creating realistically quirky, wonderfully engaging characters.\u201d ( Booklist (starred review) )\u201cBestseller Long [...] has a brilliant, quirky style that gives her first contemporary a delightful gleam. Her clever phrases make her small-town setting and characters seem fresh and new. [...] This laugh-out-loud treat is warmly emotional and richly satisfying.\u201d ( Publishers Weekly (starred review) )\u201cThis book is a treat to read. The author\u2019s love of wordplay is evident in the snappy dialogue [...] and it\u2019s damn sexy. Long\u2019s ability to create a love story that leaps off the page is as impressive [...] Let\u2019s hope she keeps cranking them out for a long time.\u201d ( Kirkus Reviews )\u201cJulie Anne Long\u2019s books are sexy and adorable!\u201d (New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jill Shalvis)\u201cJulie Anne long is a fantastic writer.\u201d (New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz)\u201cJulie Anne Long\u2019s writing glows with emotional intensity and strong, passionate characterization.\u201d (New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz)Funny, sexy, heartwarming, Long moves seamlessly into the contemporary market. (New York Times bestselling author Lori Wilde)Sizzlingly smart! Long\u2019s fresh new contemporary voice rocks! (NYT bestselling author Susan Andersen)\u201cThis is romantic fantasy at its purest [...] JT and Britt are clever and funny, and the book has all the hallmarks of Long\u2019s historical novels \u2015 charming secondary characters, delightful dialogue and a sigh-inducing ending.\u201d (Sarah MacLean for the Washington Post, Named one of the Best Romances of Early Summer) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author USA Today bestselling author and Rita\u00ae Award winner Julie Anne Long \u2019s books have been translated into eighteen languages, nominated for numerous awards, and have appeared on dozens of \u201cBest of\u201d lists. NPR named her Pennyroyal Green series as one of the Top 100 romance series of all time. She currently lives in Northern California. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 7.99}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0425148297", "title": "Naked in Death (In Death, Book 1)", "author": "J.D. Robb", "description": "Review Praise for Naked in Death \u201cTruly fine entertainment.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly \u201cFast-paced fun.\u201d\u2014 People \u201cSuperstar Nora Roberts dons a new pseudonym and proves why she is one of the world's most remarkable storytellers in this ground-breaking novel of life and death in the 21st century...Superbly suspenseful and strikingly original.\u201d\u2014 RT Book Reviews \u201cDanger, romance...a masterpiece of fine writing.\u201d\u2014Rendezvous \u201cEve, Roarke and the rest of the cast will enchant you, and the murder plots will enthrall you.\u201d\u2014 The State (Columbia, S.C.) More Praise for the In Death series \u201cRobb is a virtuoso.\u201d\u2014 Seattle Post-Intelligencer \u201cIt\u2019s Law & Order: SVU \u2014in the future.\u201d\u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cJ. D. Robb\u2019s In Death novels are can\u2019t-miss pleasures.\u201d\u2014#1 New York Times bestselling author Harlan Coben \u00a0 \u201cAnchored by terrific characters, sudden twists that spin the whole narrative on a dime, and a thrills-to-chills ration that will raise the neck hairs of even the most jaded reader, the J. D. Robb books are the epitome of great popular fiction.\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane About the Author J. D. Robb is the pseudonym for a #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels, including the bestselling In Death series. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. What\u2019s past is prologue. \u2014WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Violence is as American as cherry pie. \u2014RAP (HUBERT GEROLD) BROWN chapter one She woke in the dark. Through the slats on the window shades, the first murky hint of dawn slipped, slanting shadowy bars over the bed. It was like waking in a cell. For a moment she simply lay there, shuddering, imprisoned, while the dream faded. After ten years on the force, Eve still had dreams. Six hours before, she\u2019d killed a man, had watched death creep into his eyes. It wasn\u2019t the first time she\u2019d exercised maximum force, or dreamed. She\u2019d learned to accept the action and the consequences. But it was the child that haunted her. The child she hadn\u2019t been in time to save. The child whose screams had echoed in the dreams with her own. All the blood, Eve thought, scrubbing sweat from her face with her hands. Such a small little girl to have had so much blood in her. And she knew it was vital that she push it aside. Standard departmental procedure meant that she would spend the morning in Testing. Any officer whose discharge of weapon resulted in termination of life was required to undergo emotional and psychiatric clearance before resuming duty. Eve considered the tests a mild pain in the ass. She would beat them, as she\u2019d beaten them before. When she rose, the overheads went automatically to low setting, lighting her way into the bath. She winced once at her reflection. Her eyes were swollen from lack of sleep, her skin nearly as pale as the corpses she\u2019d delegated to the ME. Rather than dwell on it, she stepped into the shower, yawning. \u201cGive me one oh one degrees, full force,\u201d she said and shifted so that the shower spray hit her straight in the face. She let it steam, lathered listlessly while she played through the events of the night before. She wasn\u2019t due in Testing until nine, and would use the next three hours to settle and let the dream fade away completely. Small doubts and little regrets were often detected and could mean a second and more intense round with the machines and the owl-eyed technicians who ran them. Eve didn\u2019t intend to be off the streets longer than twenty-four hours. After pulling on a robe, she walked into the kitchen and programmed her AutoChef for coffee, black; toast, light. Through her window she could hear the heavy hum of air traffic carrying early commuters to offices, late ones home. She\u2019d chosen the apartment years before because it was in a heavy ground and air pattern, and she liked the noise and crowds. On another yawn, she glanced out the window, followed the rattling journey of an aging airbus hauling laborers not fortunate enough to work in the city or by home-links. She brought the New York Times up on her monitor and scanned the headlines while the faux caffeine bolstered her system. The AutoChef had burned her toast again, but she ate it anyway, with a vague thought of springing for a replacement unit. She was frowning over an article on a mass recall of droid cocker spaniels when her tele-link blipped. Eve shifted to communications and watched her commanding officer flash onto the screen. \u201cCommander.\u201d \u201cLieutenant.\u201d He gave her a brisk nod, noted the still wet hair and sleepy eyes. \u201cIncident at Twenty-seven West Broadway, eighteenth floor. You\u2019re primary.\u201d Eve lifted a brow. \u201cI\u2019m on Testing. Subject terminated at twenty-two thirty-five.\u201d \u201cWe have override,\u201d he said, without inflection. \u201cPick up your shield and weapon on the way to the incident. Code Five, lieutenant.\u201d \u201cYes, sir.\u201d His face flashed off even as she pushed back from the screen. Code Five meant she would report directly to her commander, and there would be no unsealed interdepartmental reports and no cooperation with the press. In essence, it meant she was on her own. Broadway was noisy and crowded, a party where rowdy guests never left. Street, pedestrian, and sky traffic were miserable, choking the air with bodies and vehicles. In her old days in uniform she remembered it as a hot spot for wrecks and crushed tourists who were too busy gaping at the show to get out of the way. Even at this hour there was steam rising from the stationary and portable food stands that offered everything from rice noodles to soydogs for the teeming crowds. She had to swerve to avoid an eager merchant on his smoking Glida-Grill, and took his flipped middle finger as a matter of course. Eve double-parked and, skirting a man who smelled worse than his bottle of brew, stepped onto the sidewalk. She scanned the building first, fifty floors of gleaming metal that knifed into the sky from a hilt of concrete. She was propositioned twice before she reached the door. Since this five-block area of Broadway was affectionately termed Prostitute\u2019s Walk, she wasn\u2019t surprised. She flashed her badge for the uniform guarding the entrance. \u201cLieutenant Dallas.\u201d \u201cYes, sir.\u201d He skimmed his official compu-seal over the door to keep out the curious, then led the way to the bank of elevators. \u201cEighteenth floor,\u201d he said when the doors swished shut behind them. \u201cFill me in, officer.\u201d Eve switched on her recorder and waited. \u201cI wasn\u2019t first on the scene, lieutenant. Whatever happened upstairs is being kept upstairs. There\u2019s a badge inside waiting for you. We have a Homicide, and a Code Five in number Eighteen-oh-three.\u201d \u201cWho called it in?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t have that information.\u201d He stayed where he was when the elevator opened. Eve stepped out and was alone in a narrow hallway. Security cameras tilted down at her and her feet were almost soundless on the worn nap of the carpet as she approached 1803. Ignoring the handplate, she announced herself, holding her badge up to eye level for the peep cam until the door opened. \u201cDallas.\u201d \u201cFeeney.\u201d She smiled, pleased to see a familiar face. Ryan Feeney was an old friend and former partner who\u2019d traded the street for a desk and a top level position in the Electronics Detection Division. \u201cSo, they\u2019re sending computer pluckers these days.\u201d \u201cThey wanted brass, and the best.\u201d His lips curved in his wide, rumpled face, but his eyes remained sober. He was a small, stubby man with small, stubby hands and rust colored hair. \u201cYou look beat.\u201d \u201cRough night.\u201d \u201cSo I heard.\u201d He offered her one of the sugared nuts from the bag he habitually carried, studying her, and measuring if she was up to what was waiting in the bedroom beyond. She was young for her rank, barely thirty, with wide brown eyes that had never had a chance to be naive. Her doe-brown hair was cropped short, for convenience rather than style, but suited her triangular face with its razor-edge cheekbones and slight dent in the chin. She was tall, rangy, with a tendency to look thin, but Feeney knew there were solid muscles beneath the leather jacket. More, there was a brain, and a heart. \u201cThis one\u2019s going to be touchy, Dallas.\u201d \u201cI picked that up already. Who\u2019s the victim?\u201d \u201cSharon DeBlass, granddaughter of Senator DeBlass.\u201d Neither meant anything to her. \u201cPolitics isn\u2019t my forte, Feeney.\u201d \u201cThe gentleman from Virginia, extreme right, old money. The granddaughter took a sharp left a few years back, moved to New York, and became a licensed companion.\u201d \u201cShe was a hooker.\u201d Dallas glanced around the apartment. It was furnished in obsessive modern\u2014glass and thin chrome, signed holograms on the walls, recessed bar in bold red. The wide mood screen behind the bar bled with mixing and merging shapes and colors in cool pastels. Neat as a virgin, Eve mused, and cold as a whore. \u201cNo surprise, given her choice of real estate.\u201d \u201cPolitics makes it delicate. Victim was twenty-four, Caucasian female. She bought it in bed.\u201d Eve only lifted a brow. \u201cSeems poetic, since she\u2019d been bought there. How\u2019d she die?\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s the next problem. I want you to see for yourself.\u201d As they crossed the room, each took out a slim container, sprayed their hands front and back to seal in oils and fingerprints. At the doorway, Eve sprayed the bottom of her boots to slicken them so that she would pick up no fibers, stray hairs, or skin. Eve was already wary. Under normal circumstances there would have been two other investigators on a homicide scene, with recorders for sound and pictures. Forensics would have been waiting with their usual snarly impatience to sweep the scene. The fact that only Feeney had been assigned with her meant that there were a lot of eggshells to be walked over. \u201cSecurity cameras in the lobby, elevator, and hallways,\u201d Eve commented. \u201cI\u2019ve already tagged the discs.\u201d Feeney opened the bedroom door and let her enter first. It wasn\u2019t pretty. Death rarely was a peaceful, religious experience to Eve\u2019s mind. It was the nasty end, indifferent to saint and sinner. But this was shocking, like a stage deliberately set to offend. The bed was huge, slicked with what appeared to be genuine satin sheets the color of ripe peaches. Small, soft focused spotlights were trained on its center where the naked woman was cupped in the gentle dip of the floating mattress. The mattress moved with obscenely graceful undulations to the rhythm of programmed music slipping through the headboard. She was beautiful still, a cameo face with a tumbling waterfall of flaming red hair, emerald eyes that stared glassily at the mirrored ceiling, long, milk white limbs that called to mind visions of Swan Lake as the motion of the bed gently rocked them. They weren\u2019t artistically arranged now, but spread lewdly so that the dead woman formed a final X dead center of the bed. There was a hole in her forehead, one in her chest, another horribly gaping between the open thighs. Blood had splattered on the glossy sheets, pooled, dripped, and stained. There were splashes of it on the lacquered walls, like lethal paintings scrawled by an evil child. So much blood was a rare thing, and she had seen much too much of it the night before to take the scene as calmly as she would have preferred. She had to swallow once, hard, and force herself to block out the image of a small child. \u201cYou got the scene on record?\u201d \u201cYep.\u201d \u201cThen turn that damn thing off.\u201d She let out a breath after Feeney located the controls that silenced the music. The bed flowed to stillness. \u201cThe wounds,\u201d Eve murmured, stepping closer to examine them. \u201cToo neat for a knife. Too messy for a laser.\u201d A flash came to her\u2014old training films, old videos, old viciousness. \u201cChrist, Feeney, these look like bullet wounds.\u201d Feeney reached into his pocket and drew out a sealed bag. \u201cWhoever did it left a souvenir.\u201d He passed the bag to Eve. \u201cAn antique like this has to go for eight, ten thousand for a legal collection, twice that on the black market.\u201d Fascinated, Eve turned the sealed revolver over in her hand. \u201cIt\u2019s heavy,\u201d she said half to herself. \u201cBulky.\u201d \u201cThirty-eight caliber,\u201d he told her. \u201cFirst one I\u2019ve seen outside of a museum. This one\u2019s a Smith & Wesson, Model Ten, blue steel.\u201d He looked at it with some affection. \u201cReal classic piece, used to be standard police issue up until the latter part of the twentieth. They stopped making them in about twenty-two, twenty-three, when the gun ban was passed.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re the history buff.\u201d Which explained why he was with her. \u201cLooks new.\u201d She sniffed through the bag, caught the scent of oil and burning. \u201cSomebody took good care of this. Steel fired into flesh,\u201d she mused as she passed the bag back to Feeney. \u201cUgly way to die, and the first I\u2019ve seen it in my ten years with the department.\u201d \u201cSecond for me. About fifteen years ago, Lower East Side, party got out of hand. Guy shot five people with a twenty-two before he realized it wasn\u2019t a toy. Hell of a mess.\u201d \u201cFun and games,\u201d Eve murmured. \u201cWe\u2019ll scan the collectors, see how many we can locate who own one like this. Somebody might have reported a robbery.\u201d \u201cMight have.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s more likely it came through the black market.\u201d Eve glanced back at the body. \u201cIf she\u2019s been in the business for a few years, she\u2019d have discs, records of her clients, her trick books.\u201d She frowned. \u201cWith Code Five, I\u2019ll have to do the door-to-door myself. Not a simple sex crime,\u201d she said with a sigh. \u201cWhoever did it set it up. The antique weapon, the wounds themselves, almost ruler straight down the body, the lights, the pose. Who called it in, Feeney?\u201d \u201cThe killer.\u201d He waited until her eyes came back to him. \u201cFrom right here. Called the station. See how the bedside unit\u2019s aimed at her face? That\u2019s what came in. Video, no audio.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s into showmanship.\u201d Eve let out a breath. \u201cClever bastard, arrogant, cocky. He had sex with her first. I\u2019d bet my badge on it. Then he gets up and does it.\u201d She lifted her arm, aiming, lowering it as she counted off, \u201cOne, two, three.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s cold,\u201d murmured Feeney. \u201cHe\u2019s cold. He smooths down the sheets after. See how neat they are? He arranges her, spreads her open so nobody can have any doubts as to how she made her living. He does it carefully, practically measuring, so that she\u2019s perfectly aligned. Center of the bed, arms and legs equally apart. Doesn\u2019t turn off the bed \u2019cause it\u2019s part of the show. He leaves the gun because he wants us to know right away he\u2019s no ordinary man. He\u2019s got an ego. He doesn\u2019t want to waste time letting the body be discovered eventually. He wants it now. That instant gratification.\u201d \u201cShe was licensed for men and women,\u201d Feeney pointed out, but Eve shook her head. \u201cIt\u2019s not a woman. A woman wouldn\u2019t have left her looking both beautiful and obscene. No, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a woman. Let\u2019s see what we can find. Have you gone into her computer yet?\u201d \u201cNo. It\u2019s your case, Dallas. I\u2019m only authorized to assist.\u201d \u201cSee if you can access her client files.\u201d Eve went to the dresser and began to carefully search drawers. Expensive taste, Eve reflected. There were several items of real silk, the kind no simulation could match. The bottle of scent on the dresser was exclusive, and smelled, after a quick sniff, like expensive sex. The contents of the drawers were meticulously ordered, lingerie folded precisely, sweaters arranged according to color and material. The closet was the same. Obviously the victim had a love affair with clothes and a taste for the best and took scrupulous care of what she owned. And she\u2019d died naked. \u201cKept good records,\u201d Feeney called out. \u201cIt\u2019s all here. Her client list, appointments\u2014including her required monthly health exam and her weekly trip to the beauty salon. She used the Trident Clinic for the first and Paradise for the second.\u201d \u201cBoth top of the line. I\u2019ve got a friend who saved for a year so she could have one day for the works at Paradise. Takes all kinds.\u201d \u201cMy wife\u2019s sister went for it for her twenty-fifth anniversary. Cost damn near as much as my kid\u2019s wedding. Hello, we\u2019ve got her personal address book.\u201d \u201cGood. Copy all of it, will you, Feeney?\u201d At his low whistle, she looked over her shoulder, glimpsed the small gold-edged palm computer in his hand. \u201cWhat?\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of high-powered names in here. Politics, entertainment, money, money, money. Interesting, our girl has Roarke\u2019s private number.\u201d \u201cRoarke who?\u201d \u201cJust Roarke, as far as I know. Big money there. Kind of guy that touches shit and turns it into gold bricks. You\u2019ve got to start reading more than the sports page, Dallas.\u201d \u201cHey, I read the headlines. Did you hear about the cocker spaniel recall?\u201d \u201cRoarke\u2019s always big news,\u201d Feeney said patiently. \u201cHe\u2019s got one of the finest art collections in the world. Arts and antiques,\u201d he continued, noting when Eve clicked in and turned to him. \u201cHe\u2019s a licensed gun collector. Rumor is he knows how to use them.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll pay him a visit.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019ll be lucky to get within a mile of him.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m feeling lucky.\u201d Eve crossed over to the body to slip her hands under the sheets. \u201cThe man\u2019s got powerful friends, Dallas. You can\u2019t afford to so much as whisper he\u2019s linked to this until you\u2019ve got something solid.\u201d \u201cFeeney, you know it\u2019s a mistake to tell me that.\u201d But even as she started to smile, her fingers brushed something between cold flesh and bloody sheets. \u201cThere\u2019s something under her.\u201d Carefully, Eve lifted the shoulder, eased her fingers over. \u201cPaper,\u201d she murmured. \u201cSealed.\u201d With her protected thumb, she wiped at a smear of blood until she could read the protected sheet. ONE OF SIX \u201cIt looks hand printed,\u201d she said to Feeney and held it out. \u201cOur boy\u2019s more than clever, more than arrogant. And he isn\u2019t finished.\u201d Eve spent the rest of the day doing what would normally have been assigned to drones. She interviewed the victim\u2019s neighbors personally, recording statements, impressions. She managed to grab a quick sandwich from the same Glida-Grill she\u2019d nearly smashed before, driving across town. After the night and the morning she\u2019d put in, she could hardly blame the receptionist at Paradise for looking at her as though she\u2019d recently scraped herself off the sidewalk. Waterfalls played musically among the flora in the reception area of the city\u2019s most exclusive salon. Tiny cups of real coffee and slim glasses of fizzling water or champagne were served to those lounging on the cushy chairs and settees. Headphones and discs of fashion magazines were complementary. The receptionist was magnificently breasted, a testament to the salon\u2019s figure sculpting techniques. She wore a snug, short outfit in the salon\u2019s trademark red, and an incredible coif of ebony hair coiled like snakes. Eve couldn\u2019t have been more delighted. \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d the woman said in a carefully modulated voice as empty of expression as a computer. \u201cWe serve by appointment only.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s okay.\u201d Eve smiled and was almost sorry to puncture the disdain. Almost. \u201cThis ought to get me one.\u201d She offered her badge. \u201cWho works on Sharon DeBlass?\u201d The receptionist\u2019s horrified eyes darted toward the waiting area. \u201cOur clients\u2019 needs are strictly confidential.\u201d \u201cI bet.\u201d Enjoying herself, Eve leaned companionably on the U-shaped counter. \u201cI can talk nice and quiet, like this, so we understand each other\u2014Denise?\u201d She flicked her gaze down to the discreet studded badge on the woman\u2019s breast. \u201cOr I can talk louder, so everyone understands. If you like the first idea better, you can take me to a nice quiet room where we won\u2019t disturb any of your clients, and you can send in Sharon DeBlass\u2019s operator. Or whatever term you use.\u201d \u201cConsultant,\u201d Denise said faintly. \u201cIf you\u2019ll follow me.\u201d \u201cMy pleasure.\u201d And it was. Outside of movies or videos, Eve had never seen anything so lush. The carpet was a red cushion your feet could sink blissfully into. Crystal drops hung from the ceiling and spun light. The air smelled of flowers and pampered flesh. She might not have been able to imagine herself there, spending hours having herself creamed, oiled, pummeled, and sculpted, but if she were going to waste such time on vanity, it would certainly have been interesting to do so under such civilized conditions. The receptionist showed her into a small room with a hologram of a summer meadow dominating one wall. The quiet sound of birdsong and breezes sweetened the air. \u201cIf you\u2019d just wait here.\u201d \u201cNo problem.\u201d Eve waited for the door to close then, with an indulgent sigh, she lowered herself into a deeply cushioned chair. The moment she was seated, the monitor beside her blipped on, and a friendly, indulgent face that could only be a droid\u2019s beamed smiles. \u201cGood afternoon. Welcome to Paradise. Your beauty needs and your comfort are our only priorities. Would you like some refreshment while you wait for your personal consultant?\u201d \u201cSure. Coffee, black, coffee.\u201d \u201cOf course. What sort would you prefer? Press C on your keyboard for the list of choices.\u201d Smothering a chuckle, Eve followed instructions. She spent the next two minutes pondering over her options, then narrowed it down to French Riviera or Caribbean Cream. The door opened again before she could decide. Resigned, she rose and faced an elaborately dressed scarecrow. Over his fuchsia shirt and plum colored slacks, he wore an open, trailing smock of Paradise red. His hair, flowing back from a painfully thin face echoed the hue of his slacks. He offered Eve a hand, squeezed gently, and stared at her out of soft doe eyes. \u201cI\u2019m terribly sorry, officer. I\u2019m baffled.\u201d \u201cI want information on Sharon DeBlass.\u201d Again, Eve took out her badge and offered it for inspection. \u201cYes, ah, Lieutenant Dallas. That was my understanding. You must know, of course, our client data is strictly confidential. Paradise has a reputation for discretion as well as excellence.\u201d \u201cAnd you must know, of course, that I can get a warrant, Mr.\u2014?\u201d \u201cOh, Sebastian. Simply Sebastian.\u201d He waved a thin hand, sparkling with rings. \u201cI\u2019m not questioning your authority, lieutenant. But if you could assist me, your motives for the inquiry?\u201d \u201cI\u2019m inquiring into the motives for the murder of DeBlass.\u201d She waited a beat, judged the shock that shot into his eyes and drained his face of color. \u201cOther than that, my data is strictly confidential.\u201d \u201cMurder. My dear God, our lovely Sharon is dead? There must be a mistake.\u201d He all but slid into a chair, letting his head fall back and his eyes close. When the monitor offered him refreshment, he waved a hand again. Light shot from his jeweled fingers. \u201cGod, yes. I need a brandy, darling. A snifter of Trevalli.\u201d Eve sat beside him, took out her recorder. \u201cTell me about Sharon.\u201d \u201cA marvelous creature. Physically stunning, of course, but it went deeper.\u201d His brandy came into the room on a silent automated cart. Sebastian plucked the snifter and took one deep swallow. \u201cShe had flawless taste, a generous heart, rapier wit.\u201d He turned the doe eyes on Eve again. \u201cI saw her only two days ago.\u201d \u201cProfessionally?\u201d \u201cShe had a standing weekly appointment, half day. Every other week was a full day.\u201d He whipped out a butter yellow scarf and dabbed at his eyes. \u201cSharon took care of herself, believed strongly in the presentation of self.\u201d \u201cIt would be an asset in her line of work.\u201d \u201cNaturally. She only worked to amuse herself. Money wasn\u2019t a particular need, with her family background. She enjoyed sex.\u201d \u201cWith you?\u201d His artistic face winced, the rosy lips pursing in what could have been a pout or pain. \u201cI was her consultant, her confidant, and her friend,\u201d Sebastian said stiffly and draped the scarf with casual flare over his left shoulder. \u201cIt would have been indiscreet and unprofessional for us to become sexual partners.\u201d \u201cSo you weren\u2019t attracted to her, sexually?\u201d \u201cIt was impossible for anyone not to be attracted to her sexually. She\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d He gestured grandly. \u201cExuded sex as others might exude an expensive perfume. My God.\u201d He took another shaky sip of brandy. \u201cIt\u2019s all past tense. I can\u2019t believe it. Dead. Murdered.\u201d His gaze shot back to Eve. \u201cYou said murdered.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d \u201cThat neighborhood she lived in,\u201d he said grimly. \u201cNo one could talk to her about moving to a more acceptable location. She enjoyed living on the edge and flaunting it all under her family\u2019s aristocratic noses.\u201d \u201cShe and her family were at odds?\u201d \u201cOh definitely. She enjoyed shocking them. She was such a free spirit, and they so\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. ordinary.\u201d He said it in a tone that indicated ordinary was more mortal a sin than murder itself. \u201cHer grandfather continues to introduce bills that would make prostitution illegal. As if the past century hasn\u2019t proven that such matters need to be regulated for health and crime security. He also stands against procreation regulation, gender adjustment, chemical balancing, and the gun ban.\u201d Eve\u2019s ears pricked. \u201cThe senator opposes the gun ban?\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s one of his pets. Sharon told me he owns a number of nasty antiques and spouts off regularly about that outdated right to bear arms business. If he had his way, we\u2019d all be back in the twentieth century, murdering each other right and left.\u201d \u201cMurder still happens,\u201d Eve murmured. \u201cDid she ever mention friends or clients who might have been dissatisfied or overly aggressive?\u201d \u201cSharon had dozens of friends. She drew people to her, like\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d He searched for a suitable metaphor, used the corner of the scarf again. \u201cLike an exotic and fragrant flower. And her clients, as far as I know, were all delighted with her. She screened them carefully. All of her sexual partners had to meet certain standards. Appearance, intellect, breeding, and proficiency. As I said, she enjoyed sex, in all of its many forms. She was\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. adventurous.\u201d That fit with the toys Eve had unearthed in the apartment. The velvet handcuffs and whips, the scented oils and hallucinogens. The offerings on the two sets of colinked virtual reality headphones had been a shock even to Eve\u2019s jaded system. \u201cWas she involved with anyone on a personal level?\u201d \u201cThere were men occasionally, but she lost interest quickly. Recently she\u2019d spoken about Roarke. She\u2019d met him at a party and was attracted. In fact, she was seeing him for dinner the very night she came in for her consultation. She\u2019d wanted something exotic because they were dining in Mexico.\u201d \u201cIn Mexico. That would have been the night before last.\u201d \u201cYes. She was just bubbling over about him. We did her hair in a gypsy look, gave her a bit more gold to the skin\u2014full body work. Rascal Red on the nails, and a charming little temp tattoo of a red-winged butterfly on the left buttock. Twenty-four-hour facial cosmetics so that she wouldn\u2019t smudge. She looked spectacular,\u201d he said, tearing up. \u201cAnd she kissed me and told me she just might be in love this time. \u2018Wish me luck, Sebastian.\u2019 She said that as she left. It was the last thing she ever said to me.\u201d chapter two No sperm. Eve swore over the autopsy report. If she\u2019d had sex with her killer, the victim\u2019s choice of birth control had killed the little soldiers on contact, eliminating all trace of them within thirty minutes after ejaculation. The extent of her injuries made the tests for sexual activity inconclusive. He\u2019d blown her apart either for symbolism or for his own protection. No sperm, no blood but for the victim\u2019s. No DNA. The forensic sweep of the murder site turned up no fingerprints\u2014none: not the victim\u2019s, not her weekly cleaning specialist, certainly not the murderer\u2019s. Every surface had been meticulously wiped, including the murder weapon. Most telling of all, in Eve\u2019s judgment, were the security discs. Once again, she slipped the elevator surveillance into her desk monitor. The discs were initialed. Gorham Complex. Elevator A. 2-12-2058. 06:00. Eve zipped through, watching the hours fly by. The elevator doors opened for the first time at noon. She slowed the speed, giving her unit a quick smack with the heel of her hand when the image bobbled, then studied the nervous little man who entered and asked for the fifth floor. A jumpy john, she decided, amused when he tugged at his collar and slipped a breath mint between his lips. Probably had a wife and two kids and a steady white-collar job that allowed him to slip away for an hour once a week for his nooner. He got off the elevator at five. Activity was light for several hours, the occasional prostitute riding down to the lobby, some returning with shopping bags and bored expressions. A few clients came and went. The action picked up about eight. Some residents went out, snazzily dressed for dinner, others came in to keep their appointments. At ten, an elegant-looking couple entered the car together. The woman allowed the man to open her fur coat, under which she wore nothing but stiletto heels and a tattoo of a rosebud with the stem starting at the crotch and the flower artistically teasing the left nipple. He fondled her, a technically illegal act in a secured area. When the elevator stopped on eighteen, the woman drew her coat together, and they exited, chatting about the play they\u2019d just seen. Eve made a note to interview the man the following day. It was he who was the victim\u2019s neighbor and associate. The glitch happened at precisely 12:05. The image shifted almost seamlessly, with only the faintest blip, and returned to surveillance at 02:46. Two hours and forty-one minutes lost. The hallway disc of the eighteenth floor was the same. Nearly three hours wiped. Eve picked up her cooling coffee as she thought it through. The man understood security, she mused, was familiar enough with the building to know where and how to doctor the discs. And he\u2019d taken his time, she thought. The autopsy put the victim\u2019s death at two A.M. He\u2019d spent nearly two hours with her before he\u2019d killed her, and nearly an hour more after she\u2019d been dead. Yet he hadn\u2019t left a trace. Clever boy. If Sharon DeBlass had recorded an appointment, personal or professional, for midnight, that, too, had been wiped. So he\u2019d known her intimately enough to be sure where she kept her files and how to access them. On a hunch, Eve leaned forward again. \u201cGorham Complex, Broadway, New York. Owner.\u201d Her eyes narrowed as the date flashed onto her screen. Gorham Complex, owned by Roarke Industries, headquarters 500 Fifth Avenue. Roarke, president and CEO. New York residence, 222 Central Park West. \u201cRoarke,\u201d Eve murmured. \u201cYou just keep turning up, don\u2019t you. Roarke?\u201d she repeated. \u201cAll data, view and print.\u201d Ignoring the incoming call on the \u2019link beside her, Eve sipped her coffee and read. Roarke\u2014no known given name\u2014born 10-06-2023, Dublin, Ireland. ID number 33492-ABR-50. Parents unknown. Marital status, single. President and CEO of Roarke Industries, established 2042. Main branches New York, Chicago, New Los Angeles, Dublin, London, Bonn, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Milan, Sydney. Off-planet branches, Station45, Bridgestone Colony, Vegas II, FreeStar One. Interests in real estate, import-export, shipping, entertainment, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, transportation. Estimated gross worth, three billion, eight hundred million. Busy boy, Eve thought, lifting a brow as a list of his companies clicked on-screen. \u201cEducation,\u201d she demanded. Unknown. \u201cCriminal record?\u201d No data. \u201cAccess Roarke, Dublin.\u201d No additional data. \u201cWell, shit. Mr. Mystery. Description and visual.\u201d Roarke. Black hair, blue eyes, 6 feet, 2 inches, 173 pounds. Eve grunted as the computer listed the description. She had to agree that in Roarke\u2019s case, a picture was worth a couple hundred words. His image stared back at her from the screen. He was almost ridiculously handsome: the narrow, aesthetic face; the slash of cheekbones; and sculpted mouth. Yes, his hair was black, but the computer didn\u2019t say it was thick and full and swept back from a strong forehead to fall inches above broad shoulders. His eyes were blue, but the word was much too simple for the intensity of color or the power in them. Even on an image, Eve could see this was a man who hunted down what or who he wanted, bagged it, used it, and didn\u2019t bother with frivolities such as trophies. And yes, she thought, this was a man who could kill if and when it suited him. He would do so coolly, methodically, and without breaking a sweat. Gathering up the hard data, she decided she\u2019d have a talk with Roarke. Very soon. By the time Eve left the station to head home, the sky was miserably spitting snow. She checked her pockets without hope and found she had indeed left her gloves in her apartment. Hatless, gloveless, with only her leather jacket as protection against the biting wind, she drove across town. She\u2019d meant to get her vehicle into repair. There just hadn\u2019t been time. But there was plenty of time to regret it now as she fought traffic and shivered, thanks to a faulty heating system. She swore if she got home without turning into a block of ice, she\u2019d make the appointment with the mechanic. But when she did arrive home, her primary thought was food. Even as she unlocked her door, she was dreaming about a hot bowl of soup, maybe a mound of chips, if she had any left, and coffee that didn\u2019t taste like someone had spilled sewage into the water system. She saw the package immediately, the slim square just inside the door. Her weapon was out and in her hand before she drew the next breath. Sweeping with weapon and eyes, she kicked the door shut behind her. She left the package where it was and moved from room to room until she was satisfied she was alone. After holstering her weapon, she peeled out of her jacket and tossed it aside. Bending, she picked up the sealed disc by the edges. There was no label, no message. Eve took it into the kitchen, tapping it carefully out of its seal, and slipped it into her computer. And forgot all about food. The video was top quality, as was the sound. She sat down slowly as the scene played on her monitor. Naked, Sharon DeBlass lounged on the lake-size bed, rustling satin sheets. She lifted a hand, skimming it through that glorious tumbled mane of russet hair as the bed\u2019s floating motion rocked her. \u201cWant me to do anything special, darling?\u201d She chuckled, rose up on her knees, cupped her own breasts. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you come back over here\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d Her tongue flicked out to wet her lips. \u201cWe\u2019ll do it all again.\u201d Her gaze lowered, and a little cat smile curved her lips. \u201cLooks like you\u2019re more than ready.\u201d She laughed again, shook back her hair. \u201cOh, we want to play a game.\u201d Still smiling, Sharon put her hands up. \u201cDon\u2019t hurt me.\u201d She whimpered, shivering even as her eyes glinted with excitement. \u201cI\u2019ll do anything you want. Anything. Come on over here and force me. I want you to.\u201d Lowering her hands, she began to stroke herself. \u201cHold that big bad gun on me while you rape me. I want you to. I want you to\u2014\u201d The explosion had Eve jolting. Her stomach twisted as she saw the woman fly backward like a broken doll, the blood spurting out of her forehead. The second shot wasn\u2019t such a shock, but Eve had to force herself to keep her eyes on the screen. After the final report there was silence, but for the quiet music, the fractured breathing. The killer\u2019s breathing. The camera moved in, panned the body in grisly detail. Then, through the magic of video, DeBlass was as Eve had first seen her, spread-eagled in a perfect x over bloody sheets. The image ended with a graphic overlay. ONE OF SIX It was easier to watch it through the second time. Or so Eve told herself. This time she noticed a slight bobble of the camera after the first shot, a quick, quiet gasp. She ran it back again, listening to each word, studying each movement, hoping for some clue. But he was too clever for that. And they both knew it. He\u2019d wanted her to see just how good he was. Just how cold. And he wanted her to know that he knew just where to find her. Whenever he chose. Furious that her hands weren\u2019t quite steady, she rose. Rather than the coffee she\u2019d intended, Eve took out a bottle of wine from the small cold cell, poured half a glass. She drank it down quickly, promised herself the other half shortly, then punched in the code for her commander. It was the commander\u2019s wife who answered, and from the glittering drops at her ears and the perfect coiffure, Eve calculated that she\u2019d interrupted one of the woman\u2019s famous dinner parties. \u201cLieutenant Dallas, Mrs. Whitney. I\u2019m sorry to interrupt your evening, but I need to speak to the commander.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re entertaining, lieutenant.\u201d \u201cYes, ma\u2019am. I apologize.\u201d Fucking politics, Eve thought as she forced a smile. \u201cIt\u2019s urgent.\u201d \u201cIsn\u2019t it always?\u201d The machine hummed on hold, mercifully without hideous background music or updated news reports, for a full three minutes before the commander came on. \u201cDallas.\u201d \u201cCommander, I need to send you something over a coded line.\u201d \u201cIt better be urgent, Dallas. My wife\u2019s going to make me pay for this.\u201d \u201cYes, sir.\u201d Cops, she thought as she prepared to send the image to his monitor, should stay single. She waited, folding her restless hands on the table. As the images played again, she watched again, ignoring the clenching in her gut. When it was over, Whitney came back on-screen. His eyes were grim. \u201cWhere did you get this?\u201d \u201cHe sent it to me. A disc was here, in my apartment, when I got back from the station.\u201d Her voice was flat and careful. \u201cHe knows who I am, where I am, and what I\u2019m doing.\u201d Whitney was silent for a moment. \u201cMy office, oh seven hundred. Bring the disc, lieutenant.\u201d \u201cYes, sir.\u201d When the transmission ended, she did the two things her instincts dictated. She made herself a copy of the disc, and she poured another glass of wine. She woke at three, shuddering, clammy, fighting for the breath to scream. Whimpers sounded in her throat as she croaked out an order for lights. Dreams were always more frightening in the dark. Trembling, she lay back. This one had been worse, much worse, than any she\u2019d experienced before. She\u2019d killed the man. What choice had she had? He\u2019d been too buzzed on chemicals to be stunned. Christ, she\u2019d tried, but he\u2019d just keep coming, and coming, and coming, with that wild look in his eyes and the already bloodied knife in his hand. The little girl had already been dead. There was nothing Eve could have done to stop it. Please God, don\u2019t let there have been anything that could have been done. The little body hacked to pieces, the frenzied man with the dripping knife. Then the look in his eyes when she\u2019d fired on full, and the life had slipped out of them. But that hadn\u2019t been all. Not this time. This time he\u2019d kept coming. And she\u2019d been naked, kneeling in a pool of satin. The knife had become a gun, held by the man whose face she\u2019d studied hours before. The man called Roarke. He\u2019d smiled, and she\u2019d wanted him. Her body had tingled with terror and sexual desperation even as he\u2019d shot her. Head, heart, and loins. And somewhere through it all, the little girl, the poor little girl, had been screaming for help. Too tired to fight it, Eve simply rolled over, pressed her face into her pillow and wept. \u201cLieutenant.\u201d At precisely seven A.M., Commander Whitney gestured Eve toward a chair in his office. Despite the fact, or perhaps due to the fact that he\u2019d been riding a desk for twelve years, he had sharp eyes. He could see that she\u2019d slept badly and had worked to disguise the signs of a disturbed night. In silence, he held out a hand. She\u2019d put the disc and its cover into an evidence bag. Whitney glanced at it, then laid it in the center of his desk. \u201cAccording to protocol, I\u2019m obliged to ask you if you want to be relieved from this case.\u201d He waited a beat. \u201cWe\u2019ll pretend I did.\u201d \u201cYes, sir.\u201d \u201cIs your residence secure, Dallas?\u201d \u201cI thought so.\u201d She took hard copy out of her briefcase. \u201cI reviewed the security discs after I contacted you. There\u2019s a ten minute time lapse. As you\u2019ll see in my report, he has the capability of undermining security, a knowledge of videos, editing, and, of course, antique weapons.\u201d Whitney took her report, set it aside. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t narrow the field overmuch.\u201d \u201cNo, sir. I have several more people I need to interview. With this perpetrator, electronic investigation isn\u2019t primary, though Captain Feeney\u2019s help is invaluable. This guy covers his tracks. We have no physical evidence other than the weapon he chose to leave at the scene. Feeney hadn\u2019t been able to trace it through normal channels. We have to assume it was black market. I\u2019ve started on her trick books and her personal appointments, but she wasn\u2019t the retiring kind. It\u2019s going to take time.\u201d \u201cTime\u2019s part of the problem. One of six, lieutenant. What does that say to you?\u201d \u201cThat he has five more in mind, and wants us to know it. He enjoys his work and wants to be the focus of our attention.\u201d She took a careful breath. \u201cThere\u2019s not enough for a full psychiatric profile. We can\u2019t say how long he\u2019ll be satisfied by the thrill of this murder, when he\u2019ll need his next fix. It could be today. It could be a year from now. We can\u2019t bank on him being careless.\u201d Whitney merely nodded. \u201cAre you having problems with the rightful termination?\u201d The knife slicked with blood. The small ruined body at her feet. \u201cNothing I can\u2019t handle.\u201d \u201cBe sure of it, Dallas. I don\u2019t need an officer on a sensitive case like this who\u2019s worried whether she should or shouldn\u2019t use her weapon.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sure of it.\u201d She was the best he had, and he couldn\u2019t afford to doubt her. \u201cAre you up to playing politics?\u201d His lips curved thinly. \u201cSenator DeBlass is on his way over. He flew into New York last night.\u201d \u201cDiplomacy isn\u2019t my strong suit.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m aware of that. But you\u2019re going to work on it. He wants to talk to the investigating officer, and he went over my head to arrange it. Orders came down from the chief. You\u2019re to give the senator your full cooperation.\u201d \u201cThis is a Code Five investigation,\u201d Eve said stiffly. \u201cI don\u2019t care if orders came down from God Almighty, I\u2019m not giving confidential data to a civilian.\u201d Whitney\u2019s smile widened. He had a good, ordinary face, probably the one he was born with. But when he smiled and meant it, the flash of white teeth against the cocoa colored skin turned the plain features into the special. \u201cI didn\u2019t hear that. And you didn\u2019t hear me tell you to give him no more than the obvious facts. What you do hear me tell you, Lieutenant Dallas, is that the gentleman from Virginia is a pompous, arrogant asshole. Unfortunately, the asshole has power. So watch your step.\u201d \u201cYes, sir.\u201d He glanced at his watch, then slipped the file and disc into his safe drawer. \u201cYou\u2019ve got time for a cup of coffee\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and, lieutenant,\u201d he added as she rose. \u201cIf you\u2019re having trouble sleeping, take your authorized sedative. I want my officers sharp.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m sharp enough.\u201d Senator Gerald DeBlass was undoubtedly pompous. He was unquestionably arrogant. After one full minute in his company, Eve agreed that he was undeniably an asshole. He was a compact, bull of a man, perhaps six feet, two hundred and twenty. His crop of white hair was cut sharp and thin as a razor so that his head seemed huge and bullet sleek. His eyes were nearly black, as were the heavy brows over them. They were large, like his nose, his mouth. His hands were enormous, and when he clasped Eve\u2019s briefly on introduction, she noted they were smooth and soft as a baby\u2019s. He brought his adjutant with him. Derrick Rockman was a whiplike man in his early forties. Though he was nearly six-five, Eve gave DeBlass twenty pounds on him. Neat, tidy, his pin-striped suit and slate blue tie showed not a crease. His face was solemn, attractively even featured, his movements restrained and controlled as he assisted the more flamboyant senator out of his cashmere overcoat. \u201cWhat the hell have you done to find the monster who killed my granddaughter?\u201d DeBlass demanded. \u201cEverything possible, senator.\u201d Commander Whitney remained standing. Though he offered DeBlass a seat, the man prowled the room, as he was given to prowl the New Senate Gallery in East Washington. \u201cYou\u2019ve had twenty-four hours and more,\u201d DeBlass shot back, his voice deep and booming. \u201cIt\u2019s my understanding you\u2019ve assigned only two officers to the investigation.\u201d \u201cFor security purposes, yes. Two of my best officers,\u201d the commander added. \u201cLieutenant Dallas heads the investigation and reports solely to me.\u201d DeBlass turned those hard black eyes on Eve. \u201cWhat progress have you made?\u201d \u201cWe identified the weapon, ascertained the time of death. We\u2019re gathering evidence and interviewing residents of Ms. DeBlass\u2019s building, and tracking the names in her personal and business logs. I\u2019m working to reconstruct the last twenty-four hours of her life.\u201d \u201cIt should be obvious, even to the slowest mind, that she was murdered by one of her clients.\u201d He said the word in a hiss. \u201cThere was no appointment listed for several hours prior to her death. Her last client has an alibi for the critical hour.\u201d \u201cBreak it,\u201d DeBlass demanded. \u201cA man who would pay for sexual favors would have no compunction about murder.\u201d Though Eve failed to see the correlation, she remembered her job and nodded. \u201cI\u2019m working on it, senator.\u201d \u201cI want copies of her appointment books.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s not possible, senator,\u201d Whitney said mildly. \u201cAll evidence of a capital crime is confidential.\u201d DeBlass merely snorted and gestured toward Rockman. \u201cCommander.\u201d Rockman reached in his left breast pocket and drew out a sheet of paper affixed with a holographic seal. \u201cThis document from your chief of police authorizes the senator access to any and all evidence and investigative data on Ms. DeBlass\u2019s murder.\u201d Whitney barely glanced at the document before setting it aside. He\u2019d always considered politics a coward\u2019s game, and hated that he was forced to play it. \u201cI\u2019ll speak to the chief personally. If the authorization holds, we\u2019ll have copies to you by this afternoon.\u201d Dismissing Rockman, he looked back at DeBlass. \u201cThe confidentiality of evidence is a major tool in the investigative process. If you insist on this, you risk undermining the case.\u201d \u201cThe case, as you put it, commander, was my flesh and blood.\u201d \u201cAnd as such, I\u2019d hope your first priority would be assisting us to bring her killer to justice.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve served justice for more than fifty years. I want that information by noon.\u201d He picked up his coat, tossed it over one beefy arm. \u201cIf I\u2019m not satisfied that you\u2019re doing everything in your power to find this maniac, I\u2019ll see that you\u2019re removed from this office.\u201d He turned toward Eve. \u201cAnd that the next thing you investigate, lieutenant, will be sticky fingered teenagers at a shop-com.\u201d After he stormed out, Rockman used his quiet, solemn eyes to apologize. \u201cYou must forgive the senator. He\u2019s overwrought. However much strain there was between him and his granddaughter, she was family. Nothing is more vital to the senator than his family. Her death, this kind of violent, senseless death, is devastating to him.\u201d \u201cRight,\u201d Eve muttered. \u201cHe looked all choked up.\u201d Rockman smiled; he managed to look amused and sorrowful at once. \u201cProud men often disguise their grief behind aggression. We have every confidence in your abilities and your tenacity, lieutenant. Commander,\u201d he nodded. \u201cWe\u2019ll expect the data this afternoon. Thank you for your time.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s a smooth one,\u201d Eve muttered when Rockman shut the door quietly behind him. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to cave, commander.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll give them what I have to.\u201d His voice was sharp and edged with suppressed fury. \u201cNow, go get me more.\u201d Police work was too often drudgery. After five hours of staring at her monitor as she ran makes on the names in DeBlass\u2019s books, Eve was more exhausted than she would have been after a marathon race. Even with Feeney taking a portion of the names with his skill and superior equipment, there were too many for such a small investigative unit to handle quickly. Sharon had been a very popular girl. Feeling discretion would gain her more than aggression, Eve contacted the clients by \u2019link and explained herself. Those who balked at the idea of an interview were cheerfully invited to come into Cop Central, charged with obstruction of justice. By midafternoon she had spoken personally with the first dozen on the client list, and took a detour back to the Gorham. DeBlass\u2019s neighbor, the elegant man from the elevator, was Charles Monroe. Eve found him in, and entertaining a client. Slickly handsome in a black silk robe, and smelling seductively of sex, Charles smiled engagingly. \u201cI\u2019m terribly sorry, lieutenant. My three o\u2019clock appointment has another fifteen minutes.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll wait.\u201d Without invitation, Eve stepped inside. Unlike DeBlass\u2019s apartment, this one ran to deep, cushy chairs in leather and thick carpets. \u201cAh\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d Obviously amused, Charles glanced behind him, where a door was discreetly closed at the end of a short hallway. \u201cPrivacy and confidentiality are, you understand, vital to my profession. My client is apt to be disconcerted if she discovers the police on my doorstep.\u201d \u201cNo problem. Got a kitchen?\u201d He let out a weighty sigh. \u201cSure. Right through that doorway. Make yourself at home. I won\u2019t be long.\u201d \u201cTake your time.\u201d Eve strolled off to the kitchen. In contrast to the elaborate living area, this was spartan. It seemed Charles spent little time eating in. Still, he had a full-size friggie unit rather than a cold cell, and she found the treasure of a Pepsi chilling. Satisfied for the moment, she sat down to enjoy it while Charles finished off his three o\u2019clock. Soon enough, she heard the murmur of voices, a man\u2019s, a woman\u2019s, a light laugh. Moments later, he came in, the same easy smile on his face. \u201cSorry to keep you waiting.\u201d \u201cNo problem. Are you expecting anyone else?\u201d \u201cNot until later this evening.\u201d He took out a Pepsi for himself, broke the freshness seal from the tube, and poured it into a tall glass. He rolled the tube into a ball and popped it into the recycler. \u201cDinner, the opera, and a romantic rendezvous.\u201d \u201cYou like that stuff? Opera?\u201d she asked when he flashed a grin. \u201cHate it. Can you think of anything more tedious than some big-chested woman screaming in German half the night?\u201d Eve thought it over. \u201cNope.\u201d \u201cBut there you are. Tastes vary.\u201d His smile faded as he joined her at the little nook under the kitchen window. \u201cI heard about Sharon on the news this morning. I\u2019ve been expecting someone to come by. It\u2019s horrible. I can\u2019t believe she\u2019s dead.\u201d \u201cYou knew her well?\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve been neighbors more than three years\u2014and occasionally we worked together. Now and again, one of our clients would request a trio, and we\u2019d share the business.\u201d \u201cAnd when it wasn\u2019t business, did you still share?\u201d Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Mystery"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "B0B92HPKM9", "title": "Zero To Hero Crypto Guide:", "author": "Jeff J Hunter", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Finance"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 10.97}, {"asin": "0757002900", "title": "Soft Foods for Easier Eating Cookbook: Easy-to-Follow Recipes for People Who Have Chewing and Swallowing Problems", "author": "Sandra L. Woodruff", "description": "From Publishers Weekly When patients have difficulty eating due to illness, surgery, an injury or medical treatments like chemotherapy, they're often advised (or forced) to alter their diets. Those patients are likely to welcome this primer and recipe collection from dieticians Woodruff (an RD) and Leah Gilbert-Henderson (a PhD). Gilbert-Henderson didn't just talk the talk, but committed herself to months on a pureed diet, informing her work with valuable perspective on the difficulty and monotony of a soft-foods diet. Since restrictions vary from patient to patient, the authors approach the subject with multiple needs and appetites in mind. Recipes range from the expected (smoothies, custards, scrambled eggs) to more involved, flavorful fare like Baked French Toast, Sweet Potato Soup with Cilantro Pesto, and Burgers with Barbecue Sauce. In addition to simple instructions, each recipe offers nutritional information and ways to increase or decrease calories and to remix dependable standbys. Packed with tips and tricks from those who've been there, this is a vital work that opens a vista of flavors to those whose options are severely limited. Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review \"[ Soft Foods for Easier Eating Cookbook ] is a vital work that opens a vista of flavors to those whose options are severely limited.\" \u2015 Publishers Weekly About the Author Sandra Woodruff, MS, RD, LD/N, has a master\u2019s of science in food and nutrition from Florida State University. She specializes in diet-related health problems, and is the best-selling author of many health-related cookbooks, including Soft Foods for Easier Eating Cookbook. Leah Gilbert-Henderson, PhD, received her doctorate in nutrition science from the University of Tennessee. After moving to Tallahassee, Florida, Leah became a full-time clinical dietitian at a subacute hospital and long-term care facility. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. If you or a loved one has recently been told that myou must follow an easy-to-chew, soft, or smooth diet, we know that you are going through a difficult time. Whether the problem is long-term or only temporary, it will require change and the ability to learn and accept a new way of eating. This book was written to help you through this challenging period and to convince you that chewing or swallowing difficulties do not mean the end of good-tasting food, nor do they mean hours of slaving in the kitchen. Easy-to eat dishes can also be easy to prepare and easy to enjoy. This book will show you how it\u2019s done.You will be amazed by the variety of tastes and visual delights that can be created while keeping it smooth. Hospitals frequently make pur\u00e9ed diets by simply putting whatever they are cooking for their main course into a food processor. They may add a little liquid and thickener, but otherwise, they are simply blending a food that we don\u2019t normally eat in pur\u00e9ed form. Because the results are not very appetizing, people often refuse these foods even when chewing or swallowing problems make a special diet necessary. But if you avoid foods that are easily eaten and digested, you may be unable to maintain a healthy weight and give your body the best chance of healing.There is an alternative. You can compensate for the variety you lose in texture by emphasizing a range of tastes and colors. Throughout the world, countless dishes featured in gourmet restaurants are not only soft or smooth in texture, but also rich in both taste and visual appeal. This book will show you simple ways to create delicious and appetizing foods so you can more fully enjoy eating.Part One of this book highlights basic strategies for living with dysphagia, or difficulty in swallowing, as well as other problems that require a mechanically altered diet. You will learn about the conditions that can benefit from a soft or smooth diet, and you will find tips for dealing with added difficulties such as nausea, diminished appetite, and altered taste. You will then learn how to stock your pantry and equip your kitchen so that you can make soft and smooth foods with ease\u2015and, when necessary, at a moment\u2019s notice. Part One also includes special sections on pur\u00e9eing and thickening, simple techniques that you may need to master not only as you follow the recipes in this book, but also as you convert family favorites into easy-to-eat dishes. Finally, you\u2019ll find guidelines that will help you keep your diet healthy as you meet your special needs.Part Two puts principles into practice with over 150 delicious soft and smooth recipes that cater to a wide range of tastes and dietary needs. From smashing smoothies and sumptuous soups to hearty entr\u00e9es and sensational sides, you will discover how to prepare healthful and appealing meals. In addition to offering simple step-by-step instructions, each recipe provides comprehensive nutritional information, including diabetic exchanges, and specifies whether the dish is suitable for easy-to-chew, soft, or smooth/pur\u00e9ed diets. In many cases, tips have been included to help you boost or decrease calories, cut fat, or otherwise modify the recipe so that it is right for you in every way.We realize that putting together meals can be a challenge to someone who\u2019s new to easy-to-chew, soft, and smooth diets. That\u2019s why, in addition to the recipes, we include several days of menus that will help you create satisfying and nutritionally balanced meals by joining home-cooked dishes with ready-toeat foods. Also included is a list of manufacturers that can provide you with nutritional supplements, special ingredients such as thickeners, and prepared meals that are suitable for even the smoothest of diets. A list of helpful organizations is offered as well, enabling you to find further information about health, diet, and more.An easy-to-swallow diet does not have to mean a decline in the quality of life. Rather, it can signal the beginning of new cooking adventures. We wish you health, happiness, and many satisfying meals to come. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. If you or a loved one has recently been told that myou must follow an easy-to-chew, soft, or smooth diet, we know that you are going through a difficult time. Whether the problem is long-term or only temporary, it will require change and the ability to learn and accept a new way of eating. This book was written to help you through this challenging period and to convince you that chewing or swallowing difficulties do not mean the end of good-tasting food, nor do they mean hours of slaving in the kitchen. Easy-to eat dishes can also be easy to prepare and easy to enjoy. This book will show you how it\u2019s done.You will be amazed by the variety of tastes and visual delights that can be created while keeping it smooth. Hospitals frequently make pur\u00e9ed diets by simply putting whatever they are cooking for their main course into a food processor. They may add a little liquid and thickener, but otherwise, they are simply blending a food that we don\u2019t normally eat in pur\u00e9ed form. Because the results are not very appetizing, people often refuse these foods even when chewing or swallowing problems make a special diet necessary. But if you avoid foods that are easily eaten and digested, you may be unable to maintain a healthy weight and give your body the best chance of healing.There is an alternative. You can compensate for the variety you lose in texture by emphasizing a range of tastes and colors. Throughout the world, countless dishes featured in gourmet restaurants are not only soft or smooth in texture, but also rich in both taste and visual appeal. This book will show you simple ways to create delicious and appetizing foods so you can more fully enjoy eating.Part One of this book highlights basic strategies for living with dysphagia, or difficulty in swallowing, as well as other problems that require a mechanically altered diet. You will learn about the conditions that can benefit from a soft or smooth diet, and you will find tips for dealing with added difficulties such as nausea, diminished appetite, and altered taste. You will then learn how to stock your pantry and equip your kitchen so that you can make soft and smooth foods with ease\u2015and, when necessary, at a moment\u2019s notice. Part One also includes special sections on pur\u00e9eing and thickening, simple techniques that you may need to master not only as you follow the recipes in this book, but also as you convert family favorites into easy-to-eat dishes. Finally, you\u2019ll find guidelines that will help you keep your diet healthy as you meet your special needs.Part Two puts principles into practice with over 150 delicious soft and smooth recipes that cater to a wide range of tastes and dietary needs. From smashing smoothies and sumptuous soups to hearty entr\u00e9es and sensational sides, you will discover how to prepare healthful and appealing meals. In addition to offering simple step-by-step instructions, each recipe provides comprehensive nutritional information, including diabetic exchanges, and specifies whether the dish is suitable for easy-to-chew, soft, or smooth/pur\u00e9ed diets. In many cases, tips have been included to help you boost or decrease calories, cut fat, or otherwise modify the recipe so that it is right for you in every way.We realize that putting together meals can be a challenge to someone who\u2019s new to easy-to-chew, soft, and smooth diets. That\u2019s why, in addition to the recipes, we include several days of menus that will help you create satisfying and nutritionally balanced meals by joining home-cooked dishes with ready-toeat foods. Also included is a list of manufacturers that can provide you with nutritional supplements, special ingredients such as thickeners, and prepared meals that are suitable for even the smoothest of diets. A list of helpful organizations is offered as well, enabling you to find further information about health, diet, and more.An easy-to-swallow diet does not have to mean a decline in the quality of life. Rather, it can signal the beginning of new cooking adventures. We wish you health, happiness, and many satisfying meals to come. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Cookbooks, Food & Wine", "Cooking Education & Reference"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 18.95}, {"asin": "0310751020", "title": "The Berenstain Bears, The Very First Christmas (Berenstain Bears/Living Lights: A Faith Story)", "author": "Jan Berenstain", "description": "About the Author Stan and Jan Berenstain introduced the first Berenstain Bears books in 1962. Mike Berenstain grew up watching his parents work together to write about and draw these lovable bears. Eventually he started drawing and writing about them too. Though Stan died in 2005 and Jan in 2012, Mike continues to create the delightful Bear adventures from his studio in Pennsylvania, in an area that looks much like the sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country. Stan and Jan Berenstain introduced the first Berenstain Bears books in 1962. Mike Berenstain grew up watching his parents work together to write about and draw these lovable bears. Eventually he started drawing and writing about them too. Though Stan died in 2005 and Jan in 2012, Mike continues to create the delightful Bear adventures from his studio in Pennsylvania, in an area that looks much like the sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 4.99}], "target_asin": "0425148297"}
{"user_id": "AH5TNFZLDCV5BGEQBQLSCJ72HRMQ", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0786935847", "title": "The City of Towers (Eberron: The Dreaming Dark, Book 1)", "author": "Keith Baker", "description": "About the Author KEITH BAKER is a freelance writer and game designer. In 2003 his proposal for the world of Eberron was selected as the finalist in the Wizards of the Coast fantasy setting search. Baker lives in Colorado.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 39.89}, {"asin": "0765332965", "title": "The Dinosaur Lords: A Novel", "author": "Victor Mil\u00e1n", "description": "Review \"Mil\u00e1n (War in Tethyr) takes the arresting idea of knights on dinosaurs and expands it into the beginning of a complex and sweeping epic...\u00a0 Readers who pick this up for the gimmick will relish it for the able storytelling.\" - Publishers Weekly \"Suffice to say, I'm already desperate for a second volume, and this one hasn't even officially hit the shelves yet! It doesn't matter whether your tastes run more towards epic, heroic, or military fantasy, so long as you have a healthy admiration for dinosaurs, you'll be completely enthralled by The Dinosaur Lords.\" - Bob Milne, Beauty in Ruins \"[I]f you've never read about a charging line of knights mounted on the backs of duckbilled dinosaurs that can honk so loudly their enemies' lungs collapse, you haven't read a good dino war story.\" - Colin O'Boyle, Geek Smash \"What sticks out the most for me is the excitement. People are excited about this book. Other authors are excited about this book.... The Dinosaur Lords could be the start of one of fantasy's greatest new series.\" Sam Wildman (preview), NERDOPHILES From the Author Almost 12 years to the day before the release date for The Dinosaur Lords, I set out to write the most entertaining novel my passion and then nearly three decades of experience as a professional writer would enable me to.I believe I succeeded. You judge.I can safely say, if you love the cover - as I do, of course - you'll most likely enjoy the book as well.Welcome to Paradise, El Mundo de los Dinosaurios. From the Back Cover \"Politics and panache, style and sex - and more terrible lizards than you can shake a saber at. It's a rich and sprawling read that hooks you at the first page and keeps you guessing, gasping, and cheering all the way to the last.\" - Cherie Priest \"A good read with attractive characters, enough action even for me - and dinosaurs!\" - David Drake \" The Dinosaur Lords has lords, ladies, castles, swords, eldritch Gods, not-quite-zombies, a not-quite-earth, pirates, jungles, and ... dinosaurs! It also has a complete set of varied characters who engage with their heroism and commonplace faults, and a driving plot that fascinates as we learn more about this world that isn't but should have been. And there are dinosaurs. Knights riding dinosaurs. Prepare to be entertained!\" - S. M. Stirling About the Author The Dinosaur Lords is the start of a sprawling epic fantasy series by VICTOR MIL\u00c0N, best known for his award winning novel Cybernetic Samurai . In previous worlds he's been a cowboy and Albuquerque's most popular all-night prog-rock DJ. He's never outgrown his childhood love of dinosaurs\u2026and hopes you didn't either. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 7.48}, {"asin": "0425268799", "title": "Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)", "author": "Mark Lawrence", "description": "Review Praise for Mark Lawrence and The Red Queen\u2019s War \u201cMark Lawrence is the best thing to happen to fantasy in recent years.\u201d\u2014 New York Times bestselling author\u00a0Peter V. Brett\u201cLawrence\u2019s epic fantasy is a great summer read, full of humor, revenge, and perils that this warrior-and-coward duo must evade in order [to] save their kingdoms and themselves.\u201d\u2014 The Washington Post \u201cExciting action and quick-witted dialog make it a fantastic summer page-turner.\u201d\u2014 Library Journal (starred review) \u201cJalan Kendeth is a fine addition to this Loki-like roster of tricksters, knaves, and cowards: heroes and antiheroes we love to hate and hate to love...Mark Lawrence\u2019s growing army of fans will relish this rollicking new adventure and look forward to the next one.\u201d\u2014The Daily Mail\u201cAs richly told as the earlier trilogy: The author makes this place, a post-cataclysm earth of the far future, feel as real as any place you\u2019ve ever visited. For fans of the Broken Empire series and readers who enjoy a good, epic-sized fantasy story (readers of, say, George R. R. Martin), this is a must-read.\u201d\u2014 Booklist \u201cShrewd Jalan and honorable Snorri make a marvelous team, lightening a very dark story with wry humor. The brisk adventure and black magic will leave readers eager for the next chapter in the series.\u201d\u2014 Publishers Weekly About the Author Mark Lawrence is a research scientist working on artificial intelligence. He is a dual national with both British and American citizenship, and has held secret-level clearance with both governments. At one point, he was qualified to say, \u201cThis isn\u2019t rocket science\u2014oh wait, it actually is.\u201d He is the author of the Broken Empire trilogy ( Prince of Thorns , King of Thorns , and Emperor of Thorns ), the Red Queen\u2019s War trilogy ( Prince of Fools , The Liar\u2019s Key , and The Wheel of Osheim ) and the Book of the Ancestor series ( Red Sister ).", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "0786928735", "title": "Monster Manual II (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.0 Fantasy Roleplaying Supplement)", "author": "Skip Williams", "description": "About the Author Jeff Grubb is an award-winning game designer whose recent credits include the D&D accessory Manual of the Planes and the three Ice Age Cycle novels, set in the Magic: The Gathering (r) world. He lives in Washington State. Rich Redman has written the Dark-Matter (tm) Arms & Equipment Guide and the D&D guidebook Defenders of the Faith . He lives in Washington State. Steve Winter has worked on numerous products as editor, designer, developer, and manager. He lives in Washington State. Ed Bonny has had many articles published in Dragon (r) magazine, including his well-received AD&D (r) Planescape (r) and Skills & Powers articles. He lives in New Jersey.", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Performing Arts"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": null}, {"asin": "0756407915", "title": "The Wise Man's Fear (Kingkiller Chronicle)", "author": "Patrick Rothfuss", "description": "Review Praise for The Kingkiller Chronicle \u201c The best epic fantasy I read last year. ... He\u2019s bloody good, this Rothfuss guy.\u201d \u2014George R. R. Martin, New York Times -bestselling author of A Song of Ice and Fire\u00a0\u201cRothfuss has real talent, and his tale of Kvothe is deep and intricate and wondrous .\u201d \u2014Terry Brooks, New York Times -bestselling author of Shannara\u00a0\"It is a rare and great pleasure to find a fantasist writing...with true music in the words .\" \u2014Ursula K. LeGuin, award-winning author of Earthsea\u00a0\"The characters are real and the magic is true .\u201d \u2014Robin Hobb, New York Times -bestselling author of Assassin\u2019s Apprentice \" Masterful .... There is a beauty to Pat's writing that defies description.\" \u2014Brandon Sanderson, New York Times -bestselling author of Mistborn \u201c [Makes] you think he's inventing the genre , instead of reinventing it.\u201d \u2014Lev Grossman, New York Times -bestselling author of The Magicians \u201cThis is a magnificent book .\u201d \u2014Anne McCaffrey, award-winning author of the Dragonriders of Pern\u00a0\u201c The great new fantasy writer we've been waiting for , and this is an astonishing book.\" \u2014Orson Scott Card, New York Times -bestselling author of Ender\u2019s Game \u201cIt's not the fantasy trappings (as wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things , about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss.\u201d \u2014Tad Williams, New York Times -bestselling author of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn\u00a0\u201cAn extremely immersive story set in a flawlessly constructed world and told extremely well.\u201d \u2014Jo Walton, award-winning author of Among Others \u201cHail Patrick Rothfuss! A new giant is striding the land .\u201d \u2014Robert J. Sawyer, award-winning author of Wake \u201c Fans of the epic high fantasies of George R.R. Martin or J.R.R. Tolkien will definitely want to check out Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind .\u201d \u2014NPR\u00a0\u201c Shelve The Name of the Wind beside The Lord of the Rings ...and look forward to the day when it's mentioned in the same breath, perhaps as first among equals.\u201d \u2014The A.V. Club\u00a0\u201cRothfuss (who has already been compared to the likes of Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, and George R. R. Martin) is poised to be crowned the new king of epic fantasy .\u201d \u2014Barnes & Noble\u00a0\u201cI was reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, and J. R. R. Tolkien , but never felt that Rothfuss was imitating anyone.\u201d \u2014 The London Times \u201cThis fast-moving, vivid, and unpretentious debut roots its coming-of-age fantasy in convincing mythology.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cThis breathtakingly epic story is heartrending in its intimacy and masterful in its narrative essence .\u201d \u2014 Publishers Weekly (starred)\u00a0\u201cReminiscent in scope of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series...this masterpiece of storytelling will appeal to lovers of fantasy on a grand scale.\u201d \u2014 Library Journal (starred) About the Author Patrick Rothfuss is the bestselling author of The Kingkiller Chronicle. His first novel, The Name of the Wind , won the Quill Award and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Its sequel, The Wise Man\u2019s Fear , debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller chart and won the David Gemmell Legend Award. His novels have appeared on NPR\u2019s Top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Books list and Locus \u2019 Best 21st Century Fantasy Novels list. Pat lives in Wisconsin, where he brews mead, builds box forts with his children, and runs Worldbuilders, a book-centered charity that has raised more than six million dollars for Heifer International. He can be found at patrickrothfuss.com and on Twitter at @patrickrothfuss.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 7.39}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0345504968", "title": "The Passage: A Novel (Book One of The Passage Trilogy)", "author": "Justin Cronin", "description": "Amazon.com Review Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2010 : You don't have to be a fan of vampire fiction to be enthralled by The Passage , Justin Cronin 's blazing new novel. Cronin is a remarkable storyteller (just ask adoring fans of his award-winning Mary and O'Neil ), whose gorgeous writing brings depth and vitality to this ambitious epic about a virus that nearly destroys the world, and a six-year-old girl who holds the key to bringing it back. The Passage takes readers on a journey from the early days of the virus to the aftermath of the destruction, where packs of hungry infected scour the razed, charred cities looking for food, and the survivors eke out a bleak, brutal existence shadowed by fear. Cronin doesn't shy away from identifying his \"virals\" as vampires. But, these are not sexy, angsty vampires (you won\u2019t be seeing \"Team Babcock\" t-shirts any time soon), and they are not old-school, evil Nosferatus, either. These are a creation all Cronin's own--hairless, insectile, glow-in-the-dark mutations who are inextricably linked to their makers and the one girl who could destroy them all. A huge departure from Cronin's first two novels, The Passage is a grand mashup of literary and supernatural, a stunning beginning to a trilogy that is sure to dazzle readers of both genres. -- Daphne Durham Dan Chaon Reviews The Passage Dan Chaon is the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me , which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post , Chicago Tribune , San Francisco Chronicle , The Christian Science Monitor , and Entertainment Weekly , among other publications. Chaon lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College. Read his review of The Passage : There is a particular kind of reading experience--the feeling you get when you can\u2019t wait to find out what happens next, you can\u2019t turn the pages fast enough, and yet at the same time you are so engaged in the world of the story and the characters, you don\u2019t want it to end. It\u2019s a rare and complex feeling--that plot urgency pulling you forward, that yearning for more holding you back. We say that we are swept up, that we are taken away. Perhaps this effect is one of the true magic tricks that literature can offer to us, and yet it doesn\u2019t happen very often. Mostly, I think, we remember this experience from a few of the beloved books of our childhood. About three-quarters of the way through The Passage , I found myself in the grip of that peculiar and intense readerly emotion. One part of my brain couldn\u2019t wait to get to the next big revelation, and I found myself wanting to leapfrog from paragraph to paragraph, hurtling toward each looming climax. Meanwhile, another part of my brain was watching the dwindling final pages with dread, knowing that things would be over soon, and wishing to linger with each sentence and character a little while longer. Finishing The Passage for the first time, I didn\u2019t bother to put it on a shelf, because I knew I would be flipping back through its pages again the next day. Rereading. Considering. Certain kinds of books draw us into the lives of their characters, into their inner thoughts, to the extent that we seem to know them, as well as we know real people. Readers of Justin Cronin\u2019s earlier books, Mary and O\u2019Neil and The Summer Guest , will recognize him as an extraordinarily insightful chronicler of the ways in which people maneuver through the past, and through loss, grief and love. Though The Passage is a different sort of book, Cronin hasn\u2019t lost his skill for creating deeply moving character portraits. Throughout, in moments both large and small, readers will find the kind of complicated and heartfelt relationships that Cronin has made his specialty. Though the cast of characters is large, they are never mere pawns. The individual lives are brought to us with a vivid tenderness, and at the center of the story is not only vampires and gun battles but also quite simply a quiet meditation on the love of a man for his adopted daughter. As a fan of Cronin\u2019s earlier work, I found it exciting to see him developing these thoughtful character studies in an entirely different context. There are also certain kinds of books expand outwards beyond the borders of their covers. They make us wish for encyclopedias and maps, genealogies and indexes, appendixes that detail the adventures of the minor characters we loved but only briefly glimpsed. The Passage is that kind of book, too. There is a dense web of mythology and mystery that roots itself into your brain--even as you are turning the pages as quickly as you can. Complex secrets and untold stories peer out from the edges of the plot in a way that fires the imagination, so that the world of the novel seems to extend outwards, a whole universe--parts of which we glimpse in great detail--and yet we long to know even more. I hope it won\u2019t be saying too much to say that there are actually two universes in this novel, one overlapping the other: there is the world before the virus, and the world after, and one of the pleasures of the book is the way that those two worlds play off one another, each one twisting off into a garden of forking and intertwined paths. I think, for example, of the scientist Jonas Lear, and his journey to a fabled site in the jungles of Bolivia where clouds of bats descend upon his team of researchers; or the little girl, Amy, whose trip to the zoo sets the animals into a frenzy--\"They know what I am,\" she says; or one of the men in Dr. Lear\u2019s experiment, Subject Zero, monitored in his cell as he hangs \"like some kind of giant insect in the shadows.\" These characters and images weave their way through the story in different forms, recurring like icons, and there are threads to be connected, and threads we cannot quite connect--yet. And I hope that there will be some questions that will not be solved at all, that will just exist, as the universe of The Passage takes on a strange, uncanny life of its own. It takes two different kinds of books to work a reader up into that hypnotic, swept away feeling. The author needs to create both a deep intimacy with the characters, and an expansive, strange-but-familiar universe that we can be immersed in. The Passage is one of those rare books that has both these elements. I envy those readers who are about to experience it for the first time. Danielle Trussoni Reviews The Passage Danielle Trussoni is the author of Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir , which was the recipient of the 2006 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a BookSense pick, and one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of 2006. Her first novel Angelology will be published in 30 countries. Read her review of The Passage : Justin Cronin\u2019s The Passage is a dark morality tale of just how frightening things can become when humanity transgresses the laws of nature. The author of two previous novels, Cronin, in his third book, imagines the catastrophic possibilities of a vampiric bat virus unleashed upon the world. Discovered by the U.S. Military in South America, the virus is transported to a laboratory in the Colorado mountains where it is engineered to create a more invincible soldier. The virus\u2019 potential benefits are profound: it has the power to make human beings immortal and indestructible. Yet, like Prometheus\u2019 theft of fire from the Gods, knowledge and technological advancement are gained at great price: After the introduction of the virus into the human blood pool, it becomes clear that there will be hell to pay. The guinea pigs of the NOAH experiment, twelve men condemned to die on death row, become a superhuman race of vampire-like creatures called Virals. Soon, the population of the earth is either dead or infected, their minds controlled telepathically by the Virals. As most of human civilization has been wiped out by the Virals, the few surviving humans create settlements and live off the land with a fortitude the pilgrims would have admired. Only Amy, an abandoned little girl who becomes a mystical antidote to the creatures\u2019 powers, will be able to save the world. The Passage is no quick read, but a sweeping dystopian epic that will utterly transport one to another world, a place both haunting and horrifying to contemplate. Cronin weaves together multiple story lines that build into a journey spanning one hundred years and nearly 800 pages. While vampire lore lurks in the background--the Virals nick necks in order to infect humans, are immortal and virtually indestructible, and do most of their hunting at night--Cronin is more interested in creating an apocalyptic vision along the lines of Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road . Taking place in a futuristic America where New Orleans is a military zone, Jenna Bush is the Governor of Texas and citizens are under surveillance, The Passage offers a gruesome and twisted version of reality, a terrifying dream world in which our very worst nightmares come true. Ultimately, like the best fiction, The Passage explores what it means to be human in the face of overwhelming adversity. The thrill comes with the knowledge that Amy and the Virals must face off in a grand battle for the fate of humanity. Questions for Justin Cronin Q: What is The Passage ? A: A passage is, of course, a journey, and the novel is made up of journeys. But the notion of a journey in the novel, and indeed in the whole trilogy, is also metaphoric. A passage is a transition from one state or condition to another. The world itself makes such a transition in the book. So do all the characters\u2014as characters in a novel must. The title is also a reference to the soul\u2019s passage from life to death, and whatever lies in that unknown realm. Time and time again I\u2019ve heard it, and in my own life, witnessed it: people at the end of life want to go home. It is a literal longing, I think, to leave this world while in a place of meaning, among familiar things and faces. But it is also a celestial longing. Q: You are a PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of literary fiction. Does The Passage represent a departure for you? A: I think it\u2019d be a little silly of me not to acknowledge that The Passage is, in a number of ways, overtly different from my other books. But rather than calling it a \u2018departure,\u2019 I\u2019d prefer to describe it as a progression or evolution. First of all, the themes that engage me as a person and a writer are all still present. Love, sacrifice, friendship, loyalty, courage. The bonds between people, parents and children especially. The pull of history, and the power of place, of landscape, to shape experience. And I don\u2019t think the writing itself is different at all. How could it be? You write how you write. Q: The Passage takes place all across America--from Philadelphia to Houston to southern California. What prompted you to choose these specific locations? A: Many of the major locations in the novel are, in fact, places I have lived. Except for a long stint in Philadelphia, and now Houston, my life has been a bit nomadic. I was raised in the Northeast, but after college, I ping-ponged all over the country for a while. In some ways, shaking off my strictly Northeastern point of view has been the central project of my adult life. This gave me not only a sense of the sheer immensity of the continent, but also the great diversity of its textures, both geographical and cultural, and I wanted the book to capture this feeling of vastness, especially when the narrative jumps forward a hundred years and the continent has become depopulated. One of the most striking impressions of my travels across the country is how empty a lot of it is. You can pull off the road in Kansas or Nevada or Utah or Texas and stand in the quiet with only the wind for company and it seems as if civilization has already ended, that you\u2019re all alone on the planet. It\u2019s a wonderful and a terrifying feeling at the same time, and while I was writing the book, I decided I would travel every mile my characters did, in order to capture not only the details of place, but the feeling of place. The writer Charles Baxter once said (more or less) that you know you\u2019ve come to the end of a story when you\u2019ve found a way to get your characters back to where they started. The end of The Passage is meant to create another beginning, and the space for book two to unfold. Q: Your daughter was the spark that set your writing of The Passage in motion. What else drove you to delve into such an epic undertaking? A: The other force at work was something more personal and writerly. One of the reasons that the story of The Passage had such a magnetic effect on me was that I felt myself reclaiming the impulses that led me to become a writer in the first place. Like my daughter, I was a big reader as a kid. I lived in the country, with no other kids around, and spent most of my childhood either with my nose in a book or wandering around the woods with my head in some imagined narrative or another. It was much later, of course, that I formally became a student of literature, and decided that writing was something I wanted to do professionally. But the groundwork was all laid back then, reading with a flashlight under the covers. Q: Did you have the narrative completely mapped out before you started, or did certain developments take you by surprise? A: I had it mostly mapped out, but the book is in charge. I split and recombined some characters (mostly secondary ones.) I tend to think in terms of general narrative goals; the details work themselves out as you go, just so long as you remember the destination. And to that extent, the book followed the map I made with my daughter quite closely. Q: When will we get to read the next book? A: Two years (fingers wishfully crossed). From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Fans of vampire fiction who are bored by the endless hordes of sensitive, misunderstood Byronesque bloodsuckers will revel in Cronin's engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the gruesome reality behind the wish-fulfillment fantasies. When a secret project to create a super-soldier backfires, a virus leads to a plague of vampiric revenants that wipes out most of the population. One of the few bands of survivors is the Colony, a FEMA-established island of safety bunkered behind massive banks of lights that repel the virals, or dracs\u2014but a small group realizes that the aging technological defenses will soon fail. When members of the Colony find a young girl, Amy, living outside their enclave, they realize that Amy shares the virals' agelessness, but not the virals' mindless hunger, and they embark on a search to find answers to her condition. PEN/Hemingway Award\u2013winner Cronin ( The Summer Guest ) uses a number of tropes that may be overly familiar to genre fans, but he manages to engage the reader with a sweeping epic style. The first of a proposed trilogy, it's already under development by director Ripley Scott and the subject of much publicity buzz (Retail Nation, Mar. 15). (June) Copyright \u00a9 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine What's not to like? was the general consensus among reviewers, who found Cronin's massive tome excessively entertaining. In a startling departure from his earlier work, Cronin has crafted an apocalyptic thrill ride filled with fantastic action sequences and brilliant characterizations. And the writing is memorable as well; the Onion AV Club noted that, \"[w]hole sections of The Passage could be plucked out of the book and inserted into a Best New Horror anthology.\" Ultimately, The Passage is certain to keep readers enthralled and excited for the next installment--an amazing feat, considering the novel's length. From Booklist In this apocalyptic epic that begins in a gloomy near-future, gasoline is $13 a gallon; New Orleans has become an uninhabitable, toxic swamp after a series of devastating hurricanes; the U.S. is steadily losing the war on terror; and the future of humanity hinges on the actions of a young girl. Six-year-old Amy Harper Bellafonte, abandoned to the care of Memphis nuns by her prostitute mother, and her protector, disillusioned FBI agent Brad Wolgast, are at the epicenter of a battle to preserve the human species after a government military experiment to create a \u201csuper-soldier\u201d goes awry. Using an exotic virus found deep in the South American jungle, scientists have discovered that it has the ability to bestow vast strength and instantaneous healing abilities on humans, with one serious side effect: it turns its victims into bloodthirsty (literally) monsters. This door-stopper of a novel is such an homage to Stephen King\u2019s The Stand (in length as well as plot), along with Firestarter and even Salem\u2019s Lot, that it required some fact-checking to ascertain it was not written under a new King pseudonym. Expect a lot of interest in this title, as the publisher intends a massive publicity blitz, including national advertising, online promotions (including a special Web site and sweepstakes), and an author tour. --Michael Gannon Review \u201c[A] blockbuster.\u201d \u2014 The New York Times Book Review \u201cMythic storytelling.\u201d \u2014 San Francisco Chronicle \u201cMagnificent . . . Cronin has taken his literary gifts, and he has weaponized them. . . . The Passage can stand proudly next to Stephen King\u2019s apocalyptic masterpiece The Stand, but a closer match would be Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road: a story about human beings trying to generate new hope in a world from which all hope has long since been burnt.\u201d \u2014 Time \u201cThe type of big, engrossing read that will have you leaving the lights on late into the night.\u201d \u2014 The Dallas Morning News \u201cAddictive.\u201d \u2014 Men\u2019s Journal \u201cCronin\u2019s unguessable plot and appealing characters will seize your heart and mind.\u201d \u2014 Parade \u201cCronin has given us what could be the best book of the summer. Don\u2019t wait to dive into The Passage .\u201d \u2014 USA Today \u201cGreat storytelling . . . vital, tender, and compelling.\u201d \u2014 O: The Oprah Magazine \u201cCronin gets it just right; the combination of attentive realism and doomsday stakes makes for a mesmerizing experience.\u201d \u2014 Salon \u201cMagnificently unnerving . . . A The Stand -meets- The Road journey.\u201d \u2014 Entertainment Weekly \u201cImagine Michael Crichton crossbreeding Stephen King\u2019s The Stand and Salem\u2019s Lot in that lab on Jurassic Park, with rich infusions of Robert McCammon\u2019s Swan Song, Battlestar Galactica and even Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road .\u201d \u2014 The Washington Post About the Author Justin Cronin is the New York Times bestselling author of The Passage, The Twelve, The City of Mirrors, Mary and O\u2019Neil (which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize), and The Summer Guest . Other honors for his writing include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers\u2019 Award. A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. one Before she became the Girl from Nowhere\u2014the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years\u2014she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte. The day Amy was born, her mother, Jeanette, was nineteen years old. Jeanette named her baby Amy for her own mother, who\u2019d died when Jeanette was little, and gave her the middle name Harper for Harper Lee, the lady who\u2019d written To Kill a Mockingbird, Jeanette\u2019s favorite book\u2014truth be told, the only book she\u2019d made it all the way through in high school. She might have named her Scout, after the little girl in the story, because she wanted her little girl to grow up like that, tough and funny and wise, in a way that she, Jeanette, had never managed to be. But Scout was a name for a boy, and she didn\u2019t want her daughter to have to go around her whole life explaining something like that. Amy\u2019s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man, she thought, really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days, and then went on his way. When she told her father what had happened, he said he wanted to go looking for him, make him live up to his responsibilities. But what Jeanette knew and didn\u2019t say was that Bill Reynolds was married, a married man; he had a family in Lincoln, all the way clean over in Nebraska. He\u2019d even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, Bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man was that had done this to her, she didn\u2019t say. She didn\u2019t even tell him the man\u2019s name. And the truth was, she didn\u2019t mind any of it, not really: not the being pregnant, which was easy right until the end, nor the delivery itself, which was bad but fast, nor, especially, having a baby, her little Amy. To tell Jeanette he\u2019d decided to forgive her, her father had done up her brother\u2019s old bedroom as a nursery, carried down the old baby crib from the attic, the one Jeanette herself had slept in, years ago; he\u2019d gone with Jeanette, in the last months before Amy came, to the Walmart to pick out some things she\u2019d need, like pajamas and a little plastic tub and a wind-up mobile to hang over the crib. He\u2019d read a book that said that babies needed things like that, things to look at so their little brains would turn on and begin to work properly. From the start Jeanette always thought of the baby as \u201cher,\u201d because in her heart she wanted a girl, but she knew that wasn\u2019t the sort of thing you should say to anyone, not even to yourself. She\u2019d had a scan at the hospital over in Cedar Falls and asked the woman, a lady in a flowered smock who was running the little plastic paddle over Jeanette\u2019s stomach, if she could tell which it was; but the woman laughed, looking at the pictures on the TV of Jeanette\u2019s baby, sleeping away inside her, and said, Hon, this baby\u2019s shy. Sometimes you can tell and others you can\u2019t, and this is one of those times. So Jeanette didn\u2019t know, which she decided was fine with her, and after she and her father had emptied out her brother\u2019s room and taken down his old pennants and posters\u2014Jose Canseco, a music group called Killer Picnic, the Bud Girls\u2014and seen how faded and banged up the walls were, they painted it a color the label on the can called \u201cDreamtime,\u201d which somehow was both pink and blue at once\u2014good whatever the baby turned out to be. Her father hung a wallpaper border along the edge of the ceiling, a repeating pattern of ducks splashing in a puddle, and cleaned up an old maple rocking chair he\u2019d found at the auction hall, so that when Jeanette brought the baby home, she\u2019d have a place to sit and hold her. The baby came in summer, the girl she\u2019d wanted and named Amy Harper Bellafonte; there seemed no point in using the name Reynolds, the last name of a man Jeanette guessed she\u2019d never see again and, now that Amy was here, no longer wanted to. And Bellafonte: you couldn\u2019t do better than a name like that. It meant \u201cbeautiful fountain,\u201d and that\u2019s what Amy was. Jeanette fed and rocked and changed her, and when Amy cried in the middle of the night because she was wet or hungry or didn\u2019t like the dark, Jeanette stumbled down the hall to her room, no matter what the hour was or how tired she felt from working at the Box, to pick her up and tell her she was there, she would always be there, you cry and I\u2019ll come running, that\u2019s a deal between us, you and me, forever and ever, my little Amy Harper Bellafonte. And she would hold and rock her until dawn began to pale the window shades and she could hear birds singing in the branches of the trees outside. Then Amy was three and Jeanette was alone. Her father had died, a heart attack they told her, or else a stroke. It wasn\u2019t the kind of thing anyone needed to check. Whatever it was, it hit him early one winter morning as he was walking to his truck to drive to work at the elevator; he had just enough time to put down his coffee on the fender before he fell over and died, never spilling a drop. She still had her job at the Box, but the money wasn\u2019t enough now, not for Amy or any of it, and her brother, in the Navy somewhere, didn\u2019t answer her letters. God invented Iowa, he always said, so people could leave it and never come back. She wondered what she would do. Then one day a man came into the diner. It was Bill Reynolds. He was different, somehow, and the change was no good. The Bill Reynolds she remembered\u2014and she had to admit she still thought of him from time to time, about little things mostly, like the way his sandy hair flopped over his forehead when he talked, or how he blew over his coffee before he sipped it, even when it wasn\u2019t hot anymore\u2014there was something about him, a kind of warm light from inside that you wanted to be near. It reminded her of those little plastic sticks that you snapped so the liquid inside made them glow. This was the same man, but the glow was gone. He looked older, thinner. She saw he hadn\u2019t shaved or combed his hair, which was greasy and standing all whichaway, and he wasn\u2019t wearing a pressed polo like before but just an ordinary work shirt like the ones her father had worn, untucked and stained under the arms. He looked like he\u2019d spent all night out in the weather, or in a car somewhere. He caught her eye at the door and she followed him to a booth in back. \u2014 What are you doing here? \u2014 I left her, he said, and as he looked at where she stood, she smelled beer on his breath, and sweat, and dirty clothes. I\u2019ve gone and done it, Jeanette. I left my wife. I\u2019m a free man. \u2014 You drove all this way to tell me that? \u2014 I\u2019ve thought about you. He cleared his throat. A lot. I\u2019ve thought about us. \u2014 What us? There ain\u2019t no us. You can\u2019t come in like you\u2019re doing and say you\u2019ve been thinking about us. He sat up straight. \u2014Well, I\u2019m doing it. I\u2019m doing it right now. \u2014It\u2019s busy in here, can\u2019t you see that? I can\u2019t be talking to you like this. You\u2019ll have to order something. \u2014Fine, he answered, but he didn\u2019t look at the menu on the wall, just kept his eyes on her. I\u2019ll have a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger and a Coke. As she wrote down the order and the words swam in her vision, she realized she had started to cry. She felt like she hadn\u2019t slept in a month, a year. The weight of exhaustion was held up only by the thinnest sliver of her will. There was a time when she\u2019d wanted to do something with her life\u2014cut hair, maybe, get her certificate, open a little shop, move to a real city, like Chicago or Des Moines, rent an apartment, have friends. She\u2019d always held in her mind a picture of herself sitting in a restaurant, a coffee shop but nice; it was fall, and cold outside, and she was alone at a small table by the window, reading a book. On her table was a steaming mug of tea. She would look up to the window to see the people on the street of the city she was in, hustling to and fro in their heavy coats and hats, and see her own face there, too, reflected in the window, hovering over the image of all the people outside. But as she stood there, these ideas seemed like they belonged to a different person entirely. Now there was Amy, sick half the time with a cold or a stomach thing she\u2019d gotten at the ratty day care where she spent the days while Jeanette was working at the Box, and her father dead just like that, so fast it was as if he\u2019d fallen through a trapdoor on the surface of the earth, and Bill Reynolds sitting at the table like he\u2019d just stepped out for a second, not four years. \u2014 Why are you doing this to me? He held her eyes with his own a long moment and touched the top of her hand.\u2014 Meet me later. Please. He ended up living in the house with her and Amy. She couldn\u2019t say if she had invited him to do this or if it had just somehow happened. Either way, she was instantly sorry. This Bill Reynolds: who was he really? He\u2019d left his wife and boys, Bobby and Billy in their baseball suits, all of it behind in Nebraska. The Pontiac was gone, and he had no job either; that had ended, too. The economy the way it was, he explained, nobody was buying a goddamn thing. He said he had a plan, but the only plan that she could see seemed to be him sitting in the house doing nothing for Amy or even cleaning up the breakfast dishes, while she worked all day at the Box. He hit her the first time after he\u2019d been living there three months; he was drunk, and once he did it, he burst out crying and said, over and over, how sorry he was. He was on his knees, blubbering, like she\u2019d done something to him. She had to understand, he was saying, how hard it all was, all the changes in his life, it was more than a man, any man, could take. He loved her, he was sorry, nothing like that would happen again, ever. He swore it. Not to her and not to Amy. And in the end, she heard herself saying she was sorry too. He\u2019d hit her over money; when winter came, and she didn\u2019t have enough money in her checking account to pay the heating oil man, he hit her again. \u2014 Goddamnit, woman. Can\u2019t you see I\u2019m in a situation here? She was on the kitchen floor, holding the side of her head. He\u2019d hit her hard enough to lift her off her feet. Funny, now that she was down there she saw how dirty the floor was, filthy and stained, with clumps of dust and who-knew-what all rowed against the base of the cabinets where you couldn\u2019t usually see. Half her mind was noticing this while the other half said, You aren\u2019t thinking straight, Jeanette; Bill hit you and knocked a wire loose, so now you\u2019re worrying over the dust. Something funny was happening with the way the world sounded, too. Amy was watching television upstairs, on the little set in her room, but Jeanette could hear it like it was playing inside her head, Barney the purple dinosaur and a song about brushing your teeth; and then from far away, she heard the sound of the oil truck pulling away, its engine grinding as it turned out of the drive and headed down the county road. \u2014 It ain\u2019t your house, she said. \u2014 You\u2019re right about that. Bill took a bottle of Old Crow from over the sink and poured some in a jelly jar, though it was only ten o\u2019clock in the morning. He sat at the table but didn\u2019t cross his legs like he meant to get comfortable. Ain\u2019t my oil, either. Jeanette rolled over and tried to stand but couldn\u2019t. She watched him drink for a minute. \u2014 Get out. He laughed, shaking his head, and took a sip of whiskey. \u2014 That\u2019s funny, he said. You telling me that from the floor like you are. \u2014 I mean what I say. Get out. Amy came into the room. She was holding the stuffed bunny she still carried everywhere, and wearing a pair of overalls, the good ones Jeanette had bought her at the outlet mall, the OshKosh B\u2019Gosh, with the strawberries embroidered on the bib. One of the straps had come undone and was flopping at her waist. Jeanette realized Amy must have done this herself, because she had to go to the bathroom. \u2014 You\u2019re on the floor, Mama. \u2014 I\u2019m okay, honey. She got to her feet to show her. Her left ear was ringing a little, like in a cartoon, birds flying around her head. She saw there was a little blood, too, on her hand; she didn\u2019t know where this had come from. She picked Amy up and did her best to smile. See? Mama just took a spill, that\u2019s all. You need to go, honey? You need to use the potty? \u2014Look at you, Bill was saying. Will you look at yourself? He shook his head again and drank. You stupid twat. She probably ain\u2019t even mine. \u2014 Mama, the girl said and pointed, you cut yourself. Your nose is cut. And whether it was what she\u2019d heard or the blood, the little girl began to cry. \u2014 See what you done? Bill said, and to Amy, Come on now. Ain\u2019t no big thing, sometimes folks argue, that\u2019s just how it is. \u2014 I\u2019m telling you again, just leave. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 14.99}, {"asin": "B07YR8BBZ5", "title": "WILD HUNT: a vampire novella", "author": "Nancy Kilpatrick", "description": "Review \"I enjoyed every drop. \"Wild Hunt\" is a stand-out tale. Honestly, I would pay much more than I did for that story.\" Lydia Peever, reviewer PostScripts nightface.ca \"Nancy Kilpatrick writes with intelligence and depth, her stories both innovative and captivating. What I find most impressive in her tales is how brilliant and emotionally driven they are.\" Moonlight (aka Amanda), reviewer Vampires.com \"Vampires from Nancy Kilpatrick's imagination become some of the most wickedly unique I have ever read.\" Sam Reeves review samreevesblog.blogspot.com --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": null}, {"asin": "1525809784", "title": "The Wives: A Novel", "author": "Tarryn Fisher", "description": "Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of January 2020: There\u2019s a virtual reality Harry Potter-themed ride at Universal Studios that simulates a Quidditch match. You strap in, and start flying through the air, only to swing wildly to the right, stop short, dip, and then lurch 180 degrees to the left. Reading The Wives felt like being back on that ride. Thursday is a nurse in a busy Seattle hospital, slowly getting back in the swing of things after a miscarriage leaves her without her longed-for baby and infertile to boot. Her husband Seth is there for support but only one day a week. The rest of his week is spent commuting to and from Portland where his other two wives live. Presumably. Thursday\u2019s never met either of his other wives; all she knows is that one of them is pregnant, about to give Seth the one thing that Thursday no longer can. When she finds a scrap of information about one of the other wives\u2014enough to identify her and locate her\u2014the opening to the rabbit hole beckons, and Thursday is about to fall into it. Yes, the premise is about as preposterous as taking part in a Quidditch match, so if you\u2019ve made it this far, ignore that fact and consider yourself strapped in and ready for a soapy, bumpy, twisty, exhilarating ride, set at a breakneck pace. Enjoy. \u2014Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Book Review Review \"You'll have whiplash until the very end. The Wives will leave the most sure footed reader uneasy until the last word is read.\" -Colleen Hoover, New York Times bestselling author of Verity\"I couldn't put it down... Nail-biting, heart-clenchingly good from the start, with characters that you both root and cringe for. I loved every word. Six stars.\" -Alessandra Torre, New York Times bestselling author of The Ghostwriter\"Fisher smoothly inserts moments of self-doubt, longing, paranoia, and triumph into her unsettling narrative as she draws the reader into Thursday's conflicted and increasingly complicated life. Suspense fans will be rewarded.\"--Publishers Weekly\"Fisher is a slick writer who keeps a tight rein on her lightning-fast plot, and the lengths that her feisty narrator goes to in order to reclaim her life make for salaciously satisfying reading...Fisher is a writer to watch.\"--Kirkus\"An intriguing plot takes some sharp twists in the search for the elusive truth in this fast-reading domestic thriller.\"--Booklist\"Fans of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will revel in The Wives... Fisher's story, like the score of a film, builds to an emotional and psychological crescendo that will keep readers on their toes until its final page. -- USA Today \"Fisher draws us in with a topic few of us are familiar with-polygamy. However, she keeps us turning the page by having us share the mind of a sympathetic character. It's a compelling story of self-loathing, revenge, and denial that will keep readers up at night with the lights on and their devices off.\"--BookTrib\"A gripping ride that will keep readers guessing, The Wives... delivers heart-pounding suspense.\"-- Shelf Awareness \"This is a true psychological thriller...[a] shocking ending.\"-- Suspense Magazine About the Author Tarryn Fisher is the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of nine novels. Born a sun hater, she currently makes her home in Seattle, Washington, with her children, husband, and psychotic husky. She loves connecting with her readers on Instagram. Excerpt. \u00a9 Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Wives By Tarryn Fisher Harlequin Enterprises Limited Copyright \u00a9 2019 Tarryn FisherAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-5258-0978-1 CHAPTER 1 He comes over on Thursday of every week. That's my day, I'm Thursday. It's a hopeful day, lost in the middle of the more important days; not the beginning or the end, but a stop. An appetizer to the weekend. Sometimes I wonder about the other days and if they wonder about me. That's how women are, right? Always wondering about each other \u2014 curiosity and spite curdling together in little emotional puddles. Little good that does; if you wonder too hard, you'll get everything wrong. I set the table for two. I'm a little buzzed as I lay out the silverware, pausing to consider the etiquette of what goes where. I run my tongue along my teeth and shake my head. I'm being silly; it's just me and Seth tonight \u2014 an at-home date. Not that there's anything else, we don't do regular dates very often at the risk of being seen. Imagine that ... not wanting to be seen with your husband. Or your husband not wanting to be seen with you. The vodka I sipped earlier has warmed me, made my limbs loose and careless. I almost knock over the vase of f lowers as I place a fork next to a plate: a bouquet of the palest pink roses. I chose them for their sexual innuendo because when you're in a position like mine, being on top of your sexual game is of the utmost importance. Look at these delicate, pink petals. Do they make you think of my clit? \u2014 Good! To the right of the vaginal flowers sit two white candles in silver candlestick holders. My mother once told me that under the flickering light of a candle f lame, a woman can almost look ten years younger. My mother cared about those things. Every six weeks a doctor slid a needle into her forehead, pumping thirty cc's of Botox into her dermis. She had a subscription to every glossy fashion magazine you could name and collected books on how to keep your husband. No one tries that hard to keep their husband unless they've already lost him. I used to think her shallow back when my ideals were untainted by reality. I had big plans to be anything but my mother: to be loved, to be successful, to make beautiful children. But the truth is that the heart's desire is a mere current against the tide of nurture and nature. You can spend your whole life swimming against it and eventually you'll get tired and the current of genes and upbringing will pull you under. I became a lot like her and a little bit like me. I roll the wheel of the lighter with my thumb and hold the f lame above the wick. The lighter is a Zippo, the worn remnants of a Union Jack f lag on the casing. The flickering tongue reminds me of my brief stint with smoking. To look cool, mostly \u2014 I never inhaled, but I lived to see that glowing cherry at my fingertips. My parents bought the candleholders for me as a housewarming gift after I saw them in a Tiffany's catalog. I found them to be predictably classy. When you're newly married, you see a pair of candlestick holders and imagine a lifetime of roast dinners that will go along with them. Dinners much like the one we're having tonight. My life is almost perfect. I glance out the bay window as I fold the napkins, the view of the park spread out beneath me. It's grey outside, typical of Seattle. The view of the park is why I chose this particular unit instead of the much larger, nicer unit overlooking Elliott Bay. While most people would have chosen the view of the water, I prefer a view of people's lives. A silver-haired couple sits on a bench, staring out at the pathway where cyclists and joggers pass every few minutes. They're not touching, though their heads move in unison whenever someone goes by. I wonder if that will be Seth and me one day, and then my cheeks warm as I think of the others. Imagining what the future holds proves difficult when factoring in two other women who share your husband. I set out the bottle of Pinot Grigio that I chose from the market earlier today. The label is boring, not something that catches the eye, but the austere looking man who sold it to me had described its taste in great detail, rubbing his fingers together as he spoke. I can't recall what he'd said, even though it was only a few hours ago. I'd been distracted, focused on the task of collecting ingredients. Cooking, my mother taught me, is the only good way to be a wife. Standing back, I examine my work. Overall, it's an impressive table, but I am queen of presentation, after all. Everything is just right, the way he likes it, and thus, the way I like it. It's not that I don't have a personality; it's just that everything I am is reserved for him. As it should be. At six o'clock sharp, I hear the key turn in the lock and then the whistle of the door opening. I hear the click as it closes, and his keys hitting the table in the entryway. Seth is never late, and when you live a life as complicated as his, order is important. I smooth down the hair I so painstakingly curled and step from the kitchen into the hallway to greet him. He's looking down at the mail in his hand, raindrops clinging to the tips of his hair. \"You got the mail! Thank you.\" I'm embarrassed by the enthusiasm in my voice. It's just the mail, for God's sake. He sets the pile down on the little marble table in the entryway, next to his keys, and smiles. There is a tilt in my belly, heat, and a flurry of excitement. I step into the breadth of him, inhaling his scent, and burying my face in his neck. It's a nice neck, tan and wide. It holds up a very good head of hair and a face that is traditionally handsome with the tiniest bit of roguish scruff. I nestle into him. Five days is a long time to go without the man you love. In my youth, I considered love a burden. How could you get anything done when you had to consider someone else every second of the day? When I met Seth, that all went out the window. I became my mother: doting, yielding, spread-eagle emotionally and sexually. It both thrilled and revolted me. \"I missed you,\" I tell him. I kiss the underside of his chin, then the tender spot beneath his ear, and then stand on my tiptoes to reach his mouth. I am thirsty for his attention and my kiss is aggressive and deep. He moans from the back of his throat, and his briefcase drops to the floor with a thud. He wraps his arms around me. \"That was a nice hello,\" he says. Two of his fingers play the knobs of my spine like a saxophone. He massages them gently until I squirm closer. \"I'd give you a better one, but dinner is ready.\" His eyes become smoky, and I silently thrill. I turned him on in under two minutes. I want to say beat that, but to whom? Something uncoils in my stomach, a ribbon unrolling, unrolling. I try to catch it before it goes too far. Why do I always have to think of them? The key to making this work is not thinking of them. \"What did you make?\" He unravels the scarf from his neck and loops it around mine, pulling me close and kissing me once more. His voice is warm against my cold trance, and I push my feelings aside, determined not to ruin our night together. \"Smells good.\" I smile and sashay into the dining room \u2014 a little hip to go with his dinner. I pause in the doorway to note his reaction to the table. \"You make everything beautiful.\" He reaches for me, his strong, tanned hands tracked with veins, but I dance away, teasing. Behind him, the window is rinsed with rain. I glance over his shoulder \u2014 the couple on the bench are gone. What did they go home to? Chinese takeout ... canned soup ...? I move on to the kitchen, making sure Seth's eyes are on me. Experience has taught me that you can drag a man's eyes if you move the right way. \"A rack of lamb,\" I call over my shoulder. \"Couscous ...\" He plucks the bottle of wine from the table, holding it by the neck and tilting it down to study the label. \"This is a good wine.\" Seth is not supposed to drink wine; he doesn't with the others. Religious reasons. He makes an exception for me and I chalk it up to another one of my small victories. I have lured him into deep red, Merlots and crisp Chardonnays. We've kissed, and laughed, and fucked drunk. Only with me; he hasn't done that with them. Silly, I know. I chose this life and it's not about competing, it's about providing, but one can't help but keep a tally when other women are involved. When I return from the kitchen with dinner clutched between two dishtowels, he has poured the wine and is staring out the window while he sips. Beneath the twelfth-floor window, the city hums her nightly rhythm. A busy street cuts a path in front of the park. To the right of the park and just out of view is the Sound, dotted with sailboats and ferries in the summer, and masked with fog in the winter. From our bedroom window, you can see it \u2014 a wide expanse of standing water and falling water. The perfect Seattle view. \"I don't care about dinner,\" he says. \"I want you now.\" His voice is commanding; Seth leaves little room for questions. It's a trait that has served him well in all areas of his life. I set the platters on the table, my appetite for one thing gone and replaced by another. I watch as he blows out the candles, never taking his eyes from me, and then I walk to the bedroom, reaching around and unzipping my dress as I go. I do it slowly so he can watch, peeling off the layer of silk. I feel him behind me: the large presence, the warmth, the anticipation of what's to come. My perfect dinner cools on the table, the fat of the lamb congealing around the edges of the serving dish in oranges and creams as I slip out of the dress and bend at the waist, letting my hands sink into the bed. I'm wrist-deep in the down comforter when his fingers graze my hips and hook in the elastic waist of my panties. He pulls them down and when they flutter around my ankles, I kick free of them. The tink of metal and then the zzzweeep of his belt. He doesn't undress \u2014 there's just the muted sound of his pants falling to his ankles. After, I warm our dinner in the microwave, wrapped in my robe. There is a throbbing between my legs, a trickle of semen on my thigh; I am sore in the best possible way. I carry his plate to where he is lying shirtless on the couch, one arm thrown over his head \u2014 an image of exhaustion. I cannot remove the grin from my lips, though I try. It's a break in my usual facade, this grinning like a schoolgirl. \"You're beautiful,\" he says when he sees me. His voice is gruff like it always is post-sex. \"You felt so good.\" He reaches up to rub my thigh as he takes his plate. \"Let's talk about that vacation we're taking. Where do you want to go?\" This is the essence of postcoital conversation with Seth: he likes to talk about the future after he comes. Do I remember? Of course I remember. I rearrange my face so that it looks surprised. He's been promising a vacation for a year. Just the two of us. My heart beats faster. I've been waiting for this. I didn't want to push it since he's been so busy, but here it is \u2014 my year. I've imagined all the places we can go. I've narrowed it down to a beach. White sands and lapis lazuli water, long walks along the water's edge holding hands in public. In public. \"I was thinking somewhere warm,\" I say. I don't make eye contact \u2014 I don't want him to see how eager I am to have him to myself. I am needy, and jealous, and petty. I let my robe fall open as I bend to set his wine on the coffee table. He reaches inside and cups my breast like I knew he would. He is predictable in some ways. \"Turks and Caicos?\" he suggests. \"Trinidad?\" Yes and yes! Lowering myself into the armchair that faces the sofa, I cross my legs so that my robe slips open and reveals my thigh. \"You choose,\" I say. \"You've been more places than I have.\" I know he likes that, to make the decisions. And what do I care where we go? So long as I get him for a week, uninterrupted, unshared. For that week, he will be only mine. A fantasy. Now comes the time I both dread and live for. \"Seth, tell me about your week.\" He sets his plate down and rubs the tips of his fingers together. They are glistening from the grease of the meat. I want to go over and put his fingers in my mouth, suck them clean. \"Monday is sick, the baby ...\" \"Oh no,\" I say. \"She's still in her first trimester, so it will be that way for a few more weeks.\" He nods, a small smile playing on his lips. \"She's very excited, despite the sickness. I bought her one of those baby name books. She highlights the names she likes and then we look through them when I see her.\" I feel a spike of jealousy and push it aside immediately. This is the highlight of my week, hearing about the others. I don't want to ruin it with petty feelings. \"That's so exciting,\" I say. \"Does she want a boy or a girl?\" He laughs as he walks over to the kitchen to set his plate in the sink. I hear the water running and then the lid of the trash can as he throws his paper towel away. \"She wants a boy. With dark hair, like mine. But I think whatever we have will have blond hair, like hers.\" I picture Monday in my mind \u2014 long, pin-straight blond hair, a surfer's tan. She's lean and muscular with perfect white teeth. She laughs a lot \u2014 mostly at the things he says \u2014 and is youthfully in love. He told me once that she is twenty-five but looks like a college girl. Normally, I'd judge a man for that, the clich\u00e9 way men want younger women, but it isn't true of him. Seth likes the connection. \"You'll let me know as soon as you know what you're having?\" \"It's a ways off, but yes.\" He smiles, the corner of his mouth moving up. \"We have a doctor's appointment next week. I'll have to head straight over on Monday morning.\" He winks at me and I am not skilled enough to hide my f lush. My legs are crossed and my foot bounces up and down as warmth fills my belly. He has the same effect on me as he had on the first day we met. \"Can I make you a drink?\" I ask, standing up. I walk over to the bar and hit play on the stereo. Of course he wants a drink, he always wants a drink on the evenings when we're together. He told me that he secretly keeps a bottle of scotch at the office now, and I mentally gloat at my bad influence. Tom Waits begins to sing and I reach for the decanter of vodka. I used to ask about Tuesday, but Seth is more hesitant to talk about her. I've always chalked it up to her being in a position of authority as first wife. The first wife, the first woman he loved. It's daunting in a way to know I'm only his second choice. I've consoled myself with that fact that I am Seth's legal wife, that even though they're still together, he had to divorce her to marry me. I don't like Tuesday. She's selfish; her career takes the most dominant role in her life \u2014 the space I reserve for Seth. And while I disapprove, I can't entirely blame her, either. He's gone five days of the week. We have one rotating day that we take turns with, but it's our job to fill the week with things that aren't him: stupid things for me \u2014 pottery making, romance novels, and Netflix; but for Tuesday, it's her career. I root around in the pocket of my robe, searching for my ChapStick. We have entire lives out-side of our marriage. It's the only way to stay sane. Pizza for dinner again? I used to ask. He'd admitted to me once that Tuesday was a takeout-ordering girl rather than a cooking girl. Always so judgmental about other people's cooking skills, he'd tease. I set up two glasses and fill them with ice. I can hear Seth moving behind me, getting up from the couch. The soda bottle hisses as I twist off the cap and top off the glasses. Before I'm finished making our drinks, he's behind me, kissing my neck. I dip my head to the side to give him better access. He takes his drink from me and walks over to the window while I sit. I look over from my spot on the couch, my glass sweaty against my palm. Seth lowers himself next to me on the couch, setting his drink on the coffee table. He reaches to rub my neck while he laughs. His eyes are dancing, flirtatious. I fell in love with those eyes and the way they always seemed to be laughing. I lift one corner of my mouth in a smile and lean back into him, enjoying the solid feel of his body against my back. His fingers trail up and down my arm. What's left to discuss? I want to make sure I'm familiar with all areas of his life. \"The business ...?\" \"Alex ...\" he pauses. I watch as he runs the pad of his thumb across his bottom lip, a habit I'm endeared to. What has he done now? \"I caught him in another lie,\" he says. (Continues...) Excerpted from The Wives by Tarryn Fisher . Copyright \u00a9 2019 Tarryn Fisher. Excerpted by permission of Harlequin Enterprises Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.0, "price": 9.39}, {"asin": "B07Y8HQ783", "title": "Memories of Tomorrow (Nameless: Season One Book 6)", "author": "Dean Koontz", "description": "About the Author Dean Koontz is the author of seventy-nine New York Times bestsellers, fourteen of which rose to #1. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, a figure that increases by more than seventeen million copies per year, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 0.0}], "target_asin": "0345504968"}
{"user_id": "AFK7PCXDRUQUIOEB2Z4TVCWMP26A", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "0071777148", "title": "Handbook of Nondestructive Evaluation, Second Edition", "author": "Charles Hellier", "description": "From the Publisher Charles J. Hellier founded and was former President of Hellier Technical Training and Consulting. After the acquisition of his Company 1998, he remained as President then General Manager until his retirement in 2003. He continued as consultant with the company until retiring again in 2011. He has been active in the Technology of Nondestructive Testing and related Quality and Inspection fields since 1957, and is currently a principal of The Summit Group, LLC a company providing management and technical seminars and consulting services. Michael Shakinovsky is an ASNT certificate holder in ultrasonics, radiography, magnetic particle, and penetrant testing. He has specialized in nondestructive testing for more than 40 years. Mr. Shakinovsky is currently the Corporate NDT Level III for Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation. About the Author Charles J. Hellier founded and was former President of Hellier Technical Training and Consulting. After the acquisition of his Company 1998, he remained as President then General Manager until his retirement in 2003. He continued as consultant with the company until retiring again in 2011. He has been active in the Technology of Nondestructive Testing and related Quality and Inspection fields since 1957, and is currently a principal of The Summit Group, LLC a company providing management and technical seminars and consulting services. Michael Shakinovsky is an ASNT certificate holder in ultrasonics, radiography, magnetic particle, and penetrant testing. He has specialized in nondestructive testing for more than 40 years. Mr. Shakinovsky is currently the Corporate NDT Level III for Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation.", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Engineering"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 97.13}, {"asin": "1622319869", "title": "Reskilling America: Learning to Labor in the 21st Century", "author": null, "description": "About the Author Callie Beaulieu has been an actress for several decades. Classically trained, she is predominantly a theater actress, and her work has been seen around the country. Callie recently returned to the US after spending nearly a decade living in the Caribbean. She is a proud member of Actors Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA.", "categories": ["Books", "Business & Money", "Economics"], "average_rating": 3.8, "price": 29.99}, {"asin": "0870069225", "title": "Metallurgy Fundamentals", "author": "Daniel A. Brandt", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Engineering"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 89.01}, {"asin": "087170188X", "title": "Metals Handbook: Desk", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Engineering & Transportation", "Engineering"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 90.0}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "0071436731", "title": "Pressure Vessels : ASME Code Simplified", "author": "J. Phillip Ellenberger", "description": "From the Publisher J. Phillip Ellenberger, P.E., is Vice President of Engineering at WFI International, Inc., Houston, Texas, a design and manufacturing firm specializing in machined branch connections; and a life member of ASME, for which he serves on several codes and standards committees. Mr. Ellenberger is active with the B16 F & C subcommittees, the B31.3 design task group, and the B31 mechanical design and fabrication committee. He is also the MSS Chairman of the Coordinating Committee and Committee 113, and is member of WG 10 SC67. He has taught piping stress analysis at the University of Houston, and numerous professional seminars on B31.3 and related topics. From the Inside Flap \"A useful addition to any ASME Code shop...This volume does what the title promises...well-written and eminently readable.\" -- Welding Design and Fabrication [on previous edition] Get Up to Speed with the ASME Code Revised and updated, this classic engineering tool simplifies the tasks of understanding and applying the complex ASME Code for fabricating, purchasing, testing, and inspecting pressure vessels. Clearly explaining changes in B31.3, this Eighth Edition makes it easier to achieve Code compliance on any pressure-vessel-related project, to obtain ASME Code certification, and to meet performance goals in the most cost-effective way possible. Pressure Vessels explains the value of Code standards, shows you how the Code applies to each component, and clarifies requirements that may be confusing. This valuable text also features tables for caluclating allowable internal pressures. You'll learn how to comply with ASME standards for: * Safety procedures for design and maintenance * Inspection and quality control * Welding * Nondestructive testing * Fabrication and installation * Pressure vessels in nuclear power plants Filled with helpful solutions to typical problems, the new edition of this handy working tool will give you the expertise you need to deal with all the changes in requirements for pressure vessels. From the Back Cover Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product. \"A useful addition to any ASME Code shop...This volume does what the title promises...well-written and eminently readable.\" -- Welding Design and Fabrication [on previous edition] Get Up to Speed with the ASME Code Revised and updated, this classic engineering tool simplifies the tasks of understanding and applying the complex ASME Code for fabricating, purchasing, testing, and inspecting pressure vessels. Clearly explaining changes in B31.3, this Eighth Edition makes it easier to achieve Code compliance on any pressure-vessel-related project, to obtain ASME Code certification, and to meet performance goals in the most cost-effective way possible. Pressure Vessels explains the value of Code standards, shows you how the Code applies to each component, and clarifies requirements that may be confusing. This valuable text also features tables for caluclating allowable internal pressures. You'll learn how to comply with ASME standards for:* Safety procedures for design and maintenance* Inspection and quality control* Welding* Nondestructive testing* Fabrication and installation* Pressure vessels in nuclear power plants Filled with helpful solutions to typical problems, the new edition of this handy working tool will give you the expertise you need to deal with all the changes in requirements for pressure vessels. About the Author J. Phillip Ellenberger, P.E., is Vice President of Engineering at WFI International, Inc., Houston, Texas, a design and manufacturing firm specializing in machined branch connections; and a life member of ASME, for which he serves on several codes and standards committees. Mr. Ellenberger is active with the B16 F & C subcommittees, the B31.3 design task group, and the B31 mechanical design and fabrication committee. He is also the MSS Chairman of the Coordinating Committee and Committee 113, and is member of WG 10 SC67. He has taught piping stress analysis at the University of Houston, and numerous professional seminars on B31.3 and related topics. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Arts & Photography", "Architecture"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 98.12}, {"asin": "0871403730", "title": "The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times", "author": "Christopher De Bellaigue", "description": "Review \"Elegantly written\u2026\u2019The Islamic Enlightenment\u2019 introduces us to a fascinating gallery of individuals who would grapple with reform and modernization in theory and practice\u2026In tracking the sinews of enlightenment through the last two centuries of Islamic thinking, this brilliant and lively history deserves nothing but praise.\" \u2015 New York Times Book Review \"Excellent\u2026Mr. de Bellaigue, the finest Orientalist of his generation, does the world a great service by charting the attainments of the region\u2019s long 19th century\u2026.Focusing on Iran, Turkey and Egypt, \u2018the three intellectual and political centres of the Middle East,\u2019 Mr. de Bellaigue tells a story that is at once new, fascinating and extraordinarily important.\" \u2015 Bartle Bull, Wall Street Journal \"A stylishly written, surprisingly moving chronicle of intellectual and political flourishing in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran \u2015 \u2018the brain of Islam\u2019 \u2015 in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.\" \u2015 Harper's \"Deeply researched . . . . Beginning with Napoleon\u2019s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and ending with the late 20th century, De Bellaigue shows how the cultural struggles between modernity and tradition unfolded in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran. . . .De Bellaigue is a knowledgeable guide through huge sweeps of cultural history\" \u2015 Nick Romeo, Christian Science Monitor \"The book reads at times like a thriller\u2015it is a tale of reform and reaction, innovation and betrayal, a struggle, as the author would put it, between faith and reason. . . . With such divisive views elevated to state policy, a book that examines the Islamic world\u2019s liberalization process\u2015at least until the French and the English carved up the Middle East after 1918\u2015is welcome.\" \u2015 Francis Ghiles, Arab Weekly \"A highly original and informative survey of the clashes between Islam and modernity in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran in the last two hundred years. Brilliant!\" \u2015 Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name Is Red \"An eye-opening, well-written and very timely book, which can help us understand better the complex relationship between the Muslim world and modernity. While both Islamic extremists and Western bigots find it convenient to stress the incompatibility of Islam and modernity, Christopher de Bellaigue shows that Islam is whatever Muslims make of it, and that at least some Muslims have made of it something very modern.\" \u2015 Yuval Harari, author of Homo Deus \"That there has been an Islamic Enlightenment at all will come as news to many. De Bellaigue\u2019s account of the \u2018very broad church\u2019 of Islam in the modern world is splendid and timely.\" \u2015 Anthony Gottlieb,\u00a0author of The Dream of Enlightenment \"Christopher de Bellaigue has long been one of our most resourceful and stimulating interpreters of realities veiled by fear and prejudice. In The Islamic Enlightenment , he cuts through the complacent opposition of Islam-versus-modernity to reveal a fascinating world: one in which complex human beings constantly change, improvise, and adjust under the pressures of history. It is the best sort of book for our disordered days: timely, urgent, and illuminating.\" \u2015 Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire \"A brilliantly learned and entertaining study of a topic that is of far more than merely antiquarian interest: the encounter between the Islamic world and the post-Enlightenment West.\" \u2015 Tom Holland, author of In the Shadow of the Sword \"In this expansive historical account and commentary, de Bellaigue recounts Islam's ''painful encounter with modernity'' through the history of Turkey, Egypt, and Iran. . . . This is a text that demands attention for its splendid prose, command of an entire treasury of history, and ability to undermine the misplaced patronization of Middle Eastern Muslim nations over the last 300 years.\" \u2015 Publisher's Weekly \"Timely, thoughtful, and provocative.\" \u2015 Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads About the Author Christopher de Bellaigue has worked as a journalist in south Asia and the Middle East, writing for the Economist , the Guardian , and the New York Review of Books . He is the award-winning author of four books, has made several BBC television and radio documentaries, and has been a visiting fellow at the universities of Harvard and Oxford. He lives in London.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Islam"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 15.5}, {"asin": "0979066115", "title": "Too Tall Alice", "author": "Barbara Worton", "description": "About the Author Barbara Worton has been published in national literary, consumer and business publications. Her story, London Calling was published in Memories Of John Lennon, Harper Collins. If I'm Talking, Why Aren't You Listening?, a play she co-wrote with Linda Dini Jenkins has been staged in New York City; Rutherford, NJ and Boston, MA.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.1, "price": 5.98}, {"asin": "B005JUPVFA", "title": "Gridlock: A Ryan Lock & Ty Johnson Crime Thriller", "author": "Sean Black", "description": "Review 'Leaner and meaner with every book, Gridlock is as cool and sharp as a knife' -\u00a0Meg Gardiner,\u00a0New York Times Bestselling Author of The Nightmare Thief 'The pace of Lee Child and the heart of Harlan Coben' -\u00a0Joseph Finder,\u00a0New York Times Bestselling Author of Buried Secrets 'This series is ace. There are deservedly strong Lee Child comparisons as the author is a Brit (Scottish), his novels US-based, his character appealing, and his publisher the same. This is his third.' - Sarah Broadhurst, The Bookseller'Black's star just keeps on rising.' -\u00a0Evening Telegraph About the Author Winner of the 2018 International Thriller Writers Award for the eighth Ryan Lock novel, Second Chance, Sean was educated at Oxford University, England, and Columbia University in New York. Two of his previous novels, The Edge of Alone, and Post, were also previously nominated for the ITW award.The Ryan Lock series has been published in French, German, Italian, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 4.99}], "target_asin": "0071436731"}
{"user_id": "AGPWNBGERORIDM7ZJG5ATYQ6RBTA", "purchased_books": [{"asin": "B016APIB90", "title": "Jem and the Holograms #9", "author": "Kelly Thompson", "description": "", "categories": [], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": 3.95}, {"asin": "1982126019", "title": "Harbinger (5) (Elfhome)", "author": "Wen Spencer", "description": "About the Author John W. Campbell Award Winner Wen\u00a0Spencer resides in paradise in Hilo, Hawaii, with two volcanoes overlooking her home. According to Spencer, she lives with \u201cmy Dalai\u00a0Lama-like husband, my autistic teenage son, and two cats (one of which is recovering from mental ilnness)\u2014all of which makes for very odd home life at times.\u201d Spencer's love of Japanese anime and manga\u00a0flavors her writing. Her novel Tinker won the 2003 Sapphire Award for Best Science Fiction Romance and was a finalist for the Romantic\u00a0Times Reviewer\u2019s\u00a0Choice Award for Fantasy Novel. Her Wolf Who Rules was a top Pick by Romantic Times and given their top rating of four and a half stars. Other Baen\u00a0books include Endless Blue and Eight Million Gods. The Elfhome series includes Tinker, Wolf\u00a0Who Rules, Elfhome, Wood Sprites, Project Elfhome, and Harbinger .", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Action & Adventure"], "average_rating": 4.4, "price": 16.69}, {"asin": "1949980227", "title": "OWARIMONOGATARI, Part 3: End Tale", "author": "Ishin Nishio", "description": "About the Author There are few authors in Japan who have reached the heights of success as NisiOisin. Born in 1981, Nisio dropped out of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, to pursue a career in story-telling. Initially he had ambitions to be a comic artist, but when he realized his art was not up to snuff, he began to focus on his writing, eventually winning the 23rd Mephisto Prize, for Decapitation recognizing his talents as a mystery writer, at the age of 20. Since his debut in 2002 Nisio has penned more than 50 novels and a number of comics. And he has quickly become one of Japan's top selling author's in recent memory with more than 5 million units sold since 2009. In 2014, as in 2012, he was the top selling author in Japan (outselling Haruki Murakami by more than half a million units).Nishio's works often cover themes of youth, but are framed in genres that are familiar to the masses. His works tend to mix mystery with comedy and touches or romance and/or the supernatural. He is a modern author in every sense, sometimes even experiementing with the Japanese language itself. Many of his works have been adapted into animated television series and films. His best known works are the Monogatari series and Katanagatari.", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Genre Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.9, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "1936383055", "title": "The Kobold Wizard's Dildo of Enlightenment +2 (an Adventure for 3-6 Players, Levels 2-5", "author": "Carlton Mellick III", "description": "From the Inside Flap Praise for Carlton Mellick III \"Carlton Mellick III has the craziest book titles... and the kinkiest fans!\" - CHRISTOPHER MOORE \"If you like satires which are highly imaginative, subversive, gory, funny as hell and completely surreal CM3 may be your literary messiah.\" - RICARDO GONZALEZ DEL VALLE \"Mellick is smarter than the dumbness he tries to coat his writing in; you feel like you're reading a comic or watching MTV - but underneath there is something deeper and smarter than the cartoonish presentation before your eyes.\" - EUCHIRD \"Easily the craziest, weirdest, strangest, funniest, most obscene writer in America.\" - GOTHIC MAGAZINE \"Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.\" - CORY DOCTOROW , author of Little Brother From the Back Cover If anyone out there is reading this, I need your help. I am trapped within a really terrible Dungeons and Dragons campaign and I can't find my way out. My player is a horny 14 year old loser who won't stop forcing me to have sex with slutty elf chicks instead of going on quests. The dungeon master has severe attention deficit disorder and skips large sections of description when it comes to the world I live within. Please find my character sheet and bring it to a better dungeon master, preferably a benevolent one with a vivid imagination who actually knows what he's doing. Please, I beg of you to deliver me from this nightmare, before all of my hit points run out . . . --Polo Pipefingers, level 3 Halfling Fighter", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "Humor & Satire"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": null}, {"asin": "1912325314", "title": "Diary of an Evil Overlord", "author": "Lorna Reid", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Literature & Fiction", "British & Irish"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "B08CN4L4WR", "title": "I HATE Your Prophecy (Dark Lords Live!)", "author": "Jeff Mach", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Gaming"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 13.77}, {"asin": "1719440271", "title": "Please Don't Tell My Parents You Believe Her", "author": "Richard Roberts", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.5, "price": null}, {"asin": "1695679512", "title": "Suicide Pact", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Romance"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 15.0}, {"asin": "1511947586", "title": "Furries: A Guide to Anthropomorphism", "author": null, "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Reference"], "average_rating": 3.4, "price": 8.99}, {"asin": "1302901761", "title": "The Unbelievable Gwenpool 1: Believe It", "author": "Christopher Hastings", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 35.0}, {"asin": "1466259264", "title": "Outted", "author": "Clayton Overstreet", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "LGBTQ+ Books", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 12.99}, {"asin": "1620100185", "title": "Courtney Crumrin Vol. 6: The Final Spell (6)", "author": "Ted Naifeh", "description": "About the Author Ted Naifeh first appeared in the independent comics scene in 1999 as the artist for Gloomcookie, the goth romance comic he co-created with Serena Valentino for SLG Publishing. After a successful run, Ted decided to strike out on his own, writing and drawing Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, a spooky children\u2019s fantasy series about a grumpy little girl and her adventures with her Warlock uncle. Nominated for an Eisner Award for best limited series, Courtney Crumrin\u2019s success paved the way for Polly and the Pirates, another children\u2019s book, this time about a prim and proper girl kidnapped by pirates convinced she was the daughter of their long-lost queen. Over the next few years, Ted wrote four volumes of Courtney Crumrin, plus a spin off book about her uncle. He also co-created How Loathsome with Tristan Crane, and illustrated two volumes of the videogame tie-in comic Death Junior with screenwriter Gary Whitta. More recently, he illustrated The Good Neighbors, a three volume graphic novel series written by New York Times best-selling author Holly Black, published by Scholastic. In 2011, Ted wrote the sequel to Polly and the Pirates, and illustrated several Batman short stories for DC Comics. In 2012, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Courtney Crumrin, he wrote and illustrated the final two volumes of the series. Currently, you can find Ted everywhere: from the pages of Batman \u201866 to his newest original series for adults, Night\u2019s Dominion. Ted lives in San Francisco, because he likes dreary weather.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 24.99}, {"asin": "1476736715", "title": "Wood Sprites (4) (Elfhome)", "author": "Wen Spencer", "description": "About the Author John W. Campbell Award Winner Wen Spencer resides in paradise in Hilo, Hawaii with two volcanoes overlooking her home. Spencer says that she often wakes up and exclaims \"Oh my god, I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific!\" According to Spencer, she lives with \"my Dali Llama-like husband, my autistic teenage son, and two cats (one of which is recovering from mental illness). All of which makes for very odd home life at times.\" Spencer's love of Japanese anime and manga flavors her writing. Her novel Tinker won the 2003 Sapphire Award for Best Science Fiction Romance and was a finalist for the Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Fantasy Novel. Her Wolf Who Rules was a Top Pick by Romantic Times and given their top rating of four and a half stars. Other Baen books include space opera thriller Endless Blue and Elfhome, third entry in the Tinker series.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": null}, {"asin": "1953034845", "title": "Shadows of Hyperion (Grand Central Arena series)", "author": "Ryk E. Spoor", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Science Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": "\u2014"}, {"asin": "1603095136", "title": "Doughnuts and Doom", "author": "Balazs Lorinczi", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 8 Up\u2014City witch Margot Grapes is struggling with passing her spell exam at the witch hub. Her magic never cooperates, and examiner Katie Banks seems invested in her failure. Dejected, Margot takes herself and Stanley, her good-natured snake familiar, to grab her favorite chocolate doughnuts. Elena the caf\u00e9 cashier clashes immediately with Margot, who reacts poorly upon hearing the doughnuts have sold out. Heated words and an accidental curse are exchanged, leading to Elena getting electrocuted at her band's show later that night. The girls reconcile, sparking a series of attempts to reverse the curse while nurturing a blossoming romantic connection and evading Katie's evil plans to bar Margot from the magic world. This slice-of-life graphic novel is strongest when focusing on its main characters' romance. Other elements of the plot seem thin, including the strangely intense antagonist whose motivations and plans are never rectified. Characters tend to speak in monologue, providing exposition but slowing the pace of a relatively low-stakes narrative. The muted blue monochrome palette, with charming pink accents emphasizing moments of magic and emotion, is visually appealing but saps dynamism from a story that needs it. Readers will enjoy the creative paneling that showcases Margot's airborne adventures on her broom, Stanley's endearing antics, and the excited thrum of the girls' climactic musical performance. Most main characters are cued as white. VERDICT A pleasant, additional purchase to round out YA graphic novel collections.\u2014Ashleigh Williams Review A GLAAD Media Award Nominee!Selected for the TLA Maverick Graphic Novel 2023 Reading List! \"Sweet and sapphic in every way, Doughnuts and Doom is everything my gay, witchy, baked-good-loving heart could ever want.\" \u2014 Sam Maggs, author of Tell No Tales: Pirates of the Southern Seas \"This fast-paced enemies-to-lovers romance, filled with magic, music, and pastries, is an upbeat confection.\" \u2014 Publishers Weekly \"Lorinczi\u2019s whimsical illustration style and pastel blue-and-pink color scheme give this adventure a light and cozy feel... a quick and sweet supernatural romance.\" \u2014 Kirkus Reviews \"A charming, lighthearted romantic comedy with supernatural flair.\" \u2014 Foreword Reviews \"Readers will enjoy the creative paneling that showcases Margot\u2019s airborne adventures on her broom, Stanley\u2019s endearing antics, and the excited thrum of the girls\u2019 climactic musical performance...A pleasant, additional purchase to round out YA graphic novel collections.\" \u2014 School Library Journal Review \"Sweet and sapphic in every way, Doughnuts and Doom is everything my gay, witchy, baked-good-loving heart could ever want.\" \u2014 Sam Maggs, author of Tell No Tales: Pirates of the Southern Seas About the Author Balazs Lorinczi is an illustrator and graphic novelist with some animation and filmmaking background. He grew up in Hungary but now lives in Dundee, Scotland. Read more", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.3, "price": 13.59}, {"asin": "163789998X", "title": "Please Don't Tell My Parents I Work for a Supervillain", "author": "Richard Roberts", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 18.99}, {"asin": "1638585261", "title": "Citrus Plus Vol. 4", "author": "Saburouta", "description": "About the Author Saburouta is a Japanese artist best known as the author and artist of Citrus .", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 13.99}, {"asin": "1779501269", "title": "I Am Not Starfire", "author": "Mariko Tamaki", "description": "From School Library Journal Gr 7 Up\u2014Short, chubby, white high school student Mandy feels like the opposite of her mom, Starfire, a superhero from the planet Tamaran who frequently graces magazine covers; Mandy's powers consist of making it through the school day, alongside her best friend Lincoln, the son of Vietnamese immigrants. When deadpan, goth Mandy is paired with her crush, popular Claire, for a project, she wonders if Claire might return her feelings\u2014or if she's only being friendly to meet Starfire in person. But Mandy's problems enter the life-and-death realm when her mother's sister arrives, intent on wiping out any rivals to her power. Tamaki uses a superhero fantasy tale to tell a universal story of growing up and finding one's identity. Lincoln and Mandy face similar challenges; they're both the children of immigrants, technically. Yoshitani keeps the visual narrative lively with creative use of perspective and color; scenes from Mandy's childhood are framed in pink, while important characters are associated with signature colors (Lincoln's teal-framed glasses, Claire's orange fingernails and barrettes). One bold double-page spread appears ripped down the middle, with Mandy and her mother on opposing sides, heightening the conflict. VERDICT Filled with coming-of-age themes such as first crushes (and kisses), identity building, and fear of failure, this comic deserves a place on every teen graphic novel shelf alongside contemporary classics like Noelle Stevenson's Nimona.\u2014Jenny Arch, Lilly Lib., Florence, MA About the Author Mariko Tamaki is an award-winning Canadian writer living in Oakland, California. Tamaki is the winner of the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Writer, her graphic novels have received Ignatz, Eisner, Printz and Caldecott Honors. She is the co-creator, with Jillian Tamaki, of This One Summer , and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me , with Rosemary Valero-O'Connell. Her growing slate of critically acclaimed comics includes Adventure Time , She-Hulk , Lumberjanes , X-23 , Supergirl: Being Super , Wonder Woman , and Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass (with Steve Pugh).Yoshi Yoshitani is a California-based artist whose vibrant illustrations draw on inspiration from across the globe, with a particular focus on multicultural identity. Past clients include Disney, DC Comics, Valiant, Image, Dreamworks, and Netflix. Yoshi spends time researching world mythologies, listening to audiobooks, creating fashion inspiration boards, and attending comics conventions and art expos across the country.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 3.9, "price": 9.99}, {"asin": "1439134588", "title": "Monster Hunter Alpha (3)", "author": "Larry Correia", "description": "About the Author Larry Correia is the creator of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-selling Monster Hunter International series, with first entry Monster Hunter International, as well as urban fantasy hard-boiled adventure saga The Grimnoir Chronicles, with first entry Hard Magic, and epic fantasy series The Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, with first entry Son of the Black Sword. He is an avid gun user and advocate who shot on a competitive level for many years. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a military contract accountant, and a small business accountant and manager. Correia lives in Utah with his wife and family.", "categories": ["Books", "Science Fiction & Fantasy", "Fantasy"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 7.99}, {"asin": "1684156068", "title": "Wicked Things", "author": "John Allison", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": null}, {"asin": "0802728499", "title": "Dark Lord: The Early Years", "author": "Jamie Thomson", "description": "About the Author Originally from a world beyond our own, DIRK LLOYD lives in the town of Whiteshields, England, where he spends most of his time trying to get back home to his Iron Tower in the Darklands. Some of his achievements include: building the Iron Tower of Despair, raising vast armies of Orcs and Goblins, the casting of mighty spells and enchantments (including the spell that forced JAMIE THOMSON to submit to his will and record his life story), and excelling in English, science, and math classes in school.", "categories": ["Books", "Teen & Young Adult", "Literature & Fiction"], "average_rating": 4.2, "price": 17.51}], "candidate_options": [{"asin": "1302901214", "title": "Deadpool: Dracula's Gauntlet", "author": "Gerry Duggan", "description": "", "categories": ["Books", "Comics & Graphic Novels", "Graphic Novels"], "average_rating": 4.7, "price": 29.0}, {"asin": "0525472479", "title": "I Love My Mommy Because...", "author": "Ashley Wolff", "description": "About the Author Laurel Porter-Gaylord is an artist as well as an author.Ashley Wolff is the creator and illustrator of many popular picture books.", "categories": ["Books", "Children's Books", "Growing Up & Facts of Life"], "average_rating": 4.8, "price": 6.99}, {"asin": "B093GWDR1L", "title": "Zero In (Nameless: Season Two Book 6)", "author": "Dean Koontz", "description": "About the Author Dean Koontz is the author of seventy-nine New York Times bestsellers, fourteen of which rose to #1. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, a figure that increases by more than seventeen million copies per year, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California.", "categories": ["Books", "Mystery, Thriller & Suspense", "Thrillers & Suspense"], "average_rating": 4.6, "price": 0.0}, {"asin": "1460962184", "title": "Assembling the Pieces: Supercharging Unitarian Universalist Social Action Committees", "author": "Gary D. Nissenbaum", "description": "About the Author Gary D. Nissenbaum was the Chair of the Social Action Committee of The Unitarian Church in Summit from 2005 through 2012. In 2012, Mr. Nissenbaum received the Winifred Latimer Norman Award from the Unitarian Universalist District of Metropolitan New York \"for extraordinary commitment and service in the area of social and\u00a0racial\u00a0justice.\" Also in 2012, the Unitarian Church in Summit received the Congregational Giving Award from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee \"in honor of exceptionally generous support\" of UUSC projects in the developing world. \u00a0In 2010, the Unitarian Church in Summit received the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's Social Action Award. It was the first year such an award was given. That same year, it was also one of only two large congregations to receive the Unitarian Universalist Association's Breakthrough Congregation Award. Mr. Nissenbaum is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and serves as a cooperating attorney for that organization. He has published numerous articles on civil liberties issues for New Jersey Lawyer Magazine and is a frequent speaker on that topic to community groups, youth organizations and colleges. Mr. Nissenbaum is the managing principal of the Nissenbaum Law Group, a commercial law firm with offices in New Jersey, New York, Texas and Pennsylvania. He is a former Chairman of the District XII Attorney Ethics Committee (Union County) and a current member of the New Jersey, New York, Texas and District of Columbia Bars. He is also a published novelist and a Tai Chi Chuan instructor. Mr. Nissenbaum can be reached by email at gdn@gdnlaw.com.", "categories": ["Books", "Religion & Spirituality", "Other Religions, Practices & Sacred Texts"], "average_rating": 5.0, "price": 20.0}], "target_asin": "1302901214"}